...

....nowhere without raphi!! (⁠⸝⁠⸝⁠⸝⁠´⁠꒳⁠`⁠⸝⁠⸝⁠⸝)♡

And this was meant to be a BAD thing. A problem. But if you actually believed that a massive population of low-literacy adults were buying books, becoming obsessed with them, and discussing them at length… wouldn’t that be a great thing? That’s how one moves from low literacy to high literacy: by practicing reading

There are a LOT of people who are only just getting into reading as adults. I know this can be hard to wrap your head around if you've always been a reader, but you have to accept it is an increasingly common experience. Many of these people are victims of the literacy crisis because nobody ever bothered to TEACH them how to read in the first place. Count yourself lucky if you had parents and/or teachers who cared enough to make sure you learned.

Especially when I see myself and other more vocal users of color get harassed daily, and have to always be on guard with their social media, and no one cares because everyone prioritizes white voices here and spend no time with the rest of us via an actual, unspoken segregation of this app. But somehow we don't know what racism and harassment looks like.

So when you say "hey, this person's opinion was not an okay thing to say/their actions were not okay due to racism and I am not coddling that", you get hit with a bunch of people who believe that having "More White Voices must mean True and that Your People Did Not Experience what y'all did... Because the white people around me said it went this way! You're just Mean!!!"

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

guys..... I'm re-entering my klance era...... and I redrew this old comic to start us off <3

more thoughts under the cut ⬇️