Fighting For The World I Was Made In

poc isn’t an adjective - i’m not a “people of colour blogger”, i’m a blogger of colour

don’t say poc if you mean a specific group of people. black lives matter isn’t about all poc. it’s about black people

you don’t need to tell us about every instance of racism you see. if someone’s said something racist about us & we weren’t there, sure, we probably do want to know. but if it’s along the lines of “can you believe this person was racist”? yeah. we can. we don’t need you to remind us

if you have a friend of colour, please don’t expect them to give you the rundown on every racialised issue you see. i’m black. that doesn’t mean i’m automatically an expert on how the modern beauty industry is influenced by india’s colonial history. i don’t speak for all poc - ask someone who’s affected by it

remember that talking about race is tiring. wanting to be more aware of it is great, but discussing exactly how white supremacy affects our lives is frankly depressing. please respect that we don’t always want to do that

if you ever say you’ve “got an [ethnicity] friend” so you can’t be racist to try and sidestep being genuinely called out for racism, i’m stealing your friend. you’re tokenising & they deserve better

poc aren’t a monolith & individual ethnicities can trivialise the racism they don’t face. just because you’ve heard a brown person say the n word or a black person be anti-asian doesn’t mean it’s suddenly okay

talking about our relationship with whiteness ≠ “making everything about race” & anyone who says that from now on owes me £150

don’t just take my word for it - read their own.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network is a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. … We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. … The call for Black lives to matter is a rallying cry for ALL Black lives striving for liberation.

(source)

Y’all please reblog because this is fucking terrifying. It’s yet another attempt to sabotage any attempt at the poor receiving any kind of health care. God forbid you ever get fired and can’t declare yourself permanently disabled. 

Make no mistake: people WILL DIE from this. 

There’s a reason why they’re doing this. Why they’re trying to bury the ADA. The ACA. Food stamps. Every social program.

They want to hoard even more money for the rich, for the military industrial complex, for themselves. And they’ll literally kill sick and poor people for that goal. Because we’re nothing to them. We’re not worth a damn thing. If we die? If we go bankrupt? Homeless? Starve? They don’t care. It’s a benefit for their desires to be richer if we’re dead.

My clients are all disabled, in some way or another. They all have a serious physical disability, chronic illness, or psychiatric diagnosis that prevents them from working. They are also all homeless. And every single one is on Medicaid. 

And, I bet many of you didn’t know, but dictating who gets access to certain kinds of housing (specifically housing for people with serious mental illness- permanent housing) is in part determined by how high your Medicaid usage is. 

So, where does this shit leave us? Well, first off, it leaves my clients without any kind of insurance. All of them need medication, all of them go to the doctor and/or hospital frequently. All of them rely on Medicaid. So add a work requirement to Medicaid, and where does that leave people who are physically and mentally incapable of working? Yeah. In the fucking dust. 

Now, take away their Medicaid, and their chances of getting into permanent housing drop, too. So not only do they not have the means to get their medications and see their doctors and go to the hospital when they fucking NEED TO, now they no longer qualify for most of the housing that I am trying to get them into. So, they end up back on the street or in dangerous, overcrowded shelters with NO medication, NO doctors, NO hospitals, and almost no fucking chance of getting into housing because they have no Medicaid because they apparently need to work to have Medicaid and they CANNOT. FUCKING. WORK. 

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

Is

Real

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

We are smart enough to know hot things should be hot.

She was hideously injured by hideous irresponsibility, it was an absolutely legitimate lawsuit and the warning on the cups basically allows McDonalds to claim no responsibility even if it happens again. Every other company followed suit to cover their asses.

obligatory mention that the media smear campaign to twist teh facts on this case and get public opinion against the victim was deliberate and fueled by the right wing tort reform movement

it was seized upon to limit the rights of consumers to hold giant corporations accountable for wrongdoing

She was uninsured and sued McDonald’s Restaurants for the cost of her past and projected future medical care, an estimated $20,000. The corporation offered a settlement of $800, a number so obviously ridiculous that I’m not even going to dignify it with any further explanation.

The settlement number most often quoted is not the amount that the corporation actually paid; the jury in the first trial suggested a payment equal to a day or two of coffee revenues for McDonald’s, which at the time totaled more than $1 million per diem. The judge reduced the required payout to around $640,000 in both compensatory and punitive damages, and the case was later settled out of court for less than $600,000.

Keep in mind that at the time, McDonald’s already had over 700 cases of complaints about coffee-related burns on file, but continued to sell coffee heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (around 90 degrees Celsius) as a means of boosting sales (their selling point was that one could buy the coffee, drive to a second location such as work or home, and still have a piping hot beverage). This in spite of the fact that most restaurants serve coffee between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 71 degrees Celsius), and many coffee experts agree that such high temperatures are desirable only during the brewing process itself.

Sailor Moon Cat  //  Strawberry Letter

Embroidered Strawberry  //  Cute Bear

Happy Face  //  Cartoon Universe

Cartoon Fox  //  Cartoon Cat

Animal Print  //  Giraffe Print

He was obnoxious to begin with, it is true, but if he moves forward in this wooing as a respectful dude, he will text her something nice like it was fun to meet her or maybe ask her on a date.  Mom will text him back and there will be a bit of confusion before he realizes what happened.  He’ll be a bit chagrined and mom will probably feel bad enough for him being rejected to make him cookies or something.

HOWEVER

If he starts in with that fuckboy shit (asking for sex right out the gate, dick picks, asking for nudes, etc.), he will learn the ultimate lesson. 

In short, he is only fucked if he fucks himself.

He was obnoxious to begin with, it is true, but if he moves forward in this wooing as a respectful dude, he will text her something nice like it was fun to meet her or maybe ask her on a date.  Mom will text him back and there will be a bit of confusion before he realizes what happened.  He’ll be a bit chagrined and mom will probably feel bad enough for him being rejected to make him cookies or something.

HOWEVER

If he starts in with that fuckboy shit (asking for sex right out the gate, dick picks, asking for nudes, etc.), he will learn the ultimate lesson. 

In short, he is only fucked if he fucks himself.