disabled swag

experiencing consequences for legitimately bad behavior often feels absolutely terrible. even worse than being punished for something you didn't do, in my experience! if you allow your emotions to dictate whether you think you have been mistreated, you're going to treat the people YOU mistreat like they have harmed you unforgivably.

Nigerian Pride 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇬

Originally, I went in worried the opposite would happen. Growing up, I've been taught that Nigeria, the country, is homophobic. (I was born in America.) But over time, I learned that there's tons of other queer Nigerians; some are out, and some are in the closet 😭.

I'm also not used to this much attention, lol

Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.

Y'all have seen this post, right?

Some of yall may have heard some of the shit that has been going on right now. I'm gonna give a quick run down of some of the stuff that has been happening. Note, this is not all, and it may never be all as much as I will try to update this.

(I am going to try and compile and briefly explain these as much as I can. There may be misinformation. Please inform me if I got something wrong.)

(This will also be updated with additional information and new topics added.)

1) Racist Chinese Dolls.

There are these dolls in China that are being called "Natasha" baby dolls. These dolls are not only very obvious caricatures of black people, but they are being advertised as a "stress relief" in which the people who buy these abuse it in various ways.

This links to a video of a compilation of the various "uses" of the doll. There are more in the replies of the tweet. (Another link to the same tweet just incase)

2) The Mocking, Abuse, and Dehumanization of Black Children.

Apart from the aforementioned doll, there are apparently people going around mocking, abusing, and dehumanizing black children.

Some people have compared black children to the doll.

Others have been going into African countries and have found ways to mock, abuse, and dehumanize black children for clout.

(Source 1 + Full Video) (Source 2)

There are more videos surfacing.

3) Black people are going missing.

Black people, especially children and teens have recently been going missing at an alarming rate. Some of these same people are turning up dead, deaths being ruled as "suicides."

While it generally unknown why many of these people are going missing, many suspect that their disappearances, deaths, and even lack of coverage is rooted in anti-blackness.

The following is a list of black people that have been reported missing as of recently. Please note that this is not a complete list (it may never be completed due to the fact that many of these disappearances will still occur as time passes) this may contain inaccurate information. Please inform me if that is the case.

By the time you see this, some of these people may have already been found either alive or deceased. This post will be updated overtime.

It is also heavily encouraged that you reblog this with more links to recent cases of missing black people if you are aware of any that aren’t included on this list.

Alexis Shaver

Payton Diver

Nasir Tacuma

Ka’Laya Cooper

Makaila Monae Adam

Moriah Kerre Smith

Uchechi Chijindum Nkemdirim

Victeria Uriah Spear

Rilen Wade (Found. Is Safe)

Happy queer pride month !!!

Anyways! HERE'S YOUR HANDY GUIDE TO WHAT CAN COUNT AS EYESTRAIN! I'm pulling this straight from the Artfight rules page about what needs to be labeled and filtered as eyestrain because it's VERY helpful and VERY accurate! I also know not everybody has an AF account and might not always have access to this handy guide, and this is an important resource; That's why I'm sharing it here! (under the cut)

PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! THIS IS ABOUT THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF OTHERS!!!

like straight up im pretty sure if you asked people on campus they would have a “ghost story” of their experience seeing a terrifying ghost but in reality it was just me like, getting some mail or working at night. its interesting how peoples brains in my experience jump to “holy fuck a ghost” and start screaming as being the most logical interpretation of seeing me instead of “hey maybe its a muslim woman”.

I had work today, here’s what I look like often when I go to work, sleeved black jilbab, black niqab, closed toed shoes, exam gloves, headphones.

And here’s also a picture of me, now just at a distance walking down the hallway

And a lot of people’s initial gut reactions to seeing me is fear (including screaming or backing away/turning around) and thinking I’m something scary or  a ghost or monster, because I guess their more familiar and ready to believe in ghosts than realize I’m just like. A regular person. In that photo I’m literally just walking and listening to music while working as a custodian.

And like, you might say “well thats an understandable reaction, its not good but its not hurting anyone”. Straight up, in my 3 years living and working on campus, I haven’t made a single friend, no one talks to me because they’re so put off or frightened by my niqab. And each photo of me here is a photo of an exact recreation of what I was doing prior to hatecrimes I’ve experienced. Standing? Suspicious and scary. Walking by myself? Suspicious and scary. Cleaning tables? Suspicious and scary, worthy of confrontation and considering calling the police.

I’ve gotten messages and tags along the lines of “I might be startled/scared at first but when I realize you’re just a person I would talk and befriend you!” which is very sweet, honestly, and many many steps ahead of how most people treat me. However, part of the post is about that, about how when people see me their immediate reaction is fear and not seeing me as a human being.

Like I said in the inital post, people’s main association with someone looking like me is horror (shadow demons, wraiths, ghosts), all black figures in media are spooky or evil otherworldly monsters. Most people’s only other exposure is islamaphobic news that again frames someone who looks like me as a scary oppressed other. When people talk about hijab bans or “burka bans” the image that has been pushed is people that look like me. There’s no big mainstream media with someone who looks like me, hell Momtaz from We Are Lady Parts is the first niqabi I’ve seen in the main cast of any media. Otherwise the only exposure to someone that looks like me is horror at best and Islamaphobic politics at worst.

The main issue that makes day to day life in America hell for me is that when people look at me, even if its just for a few seconds, they don’t see me as human. Whether people jump to thinking I’m an actual ghost, a spooky decoration (I’ve quite literally been mistaken for being part of a Halloween display), or see me as a caricature of oppression, or a terrorist, or a criminal (tons of people think I’m dressed in all black to avoid being noticed while I commit a crime, and plenty of people think my niqab makes it so I can get away with crimes) the one common thread is people do not recognize my humanity.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

That thing with Abigail Adams and lace did not happen. I went looking. I scoured JSTOR and my university library collections. I asked my friends who are into textile history. I read a book full of all the Adamses’ collected letters to each other. No reference to lacemaking ever came up anywhere. (In fact, there’s a letter in which she asks John Adams to send her cloth and handkercheifs from Europe that she could sell for a profit back home to make money for what appears to be her own family/household; here’s another with a similar request from 1780. Funding the war is not mentioned.) Here’s a record of Martha Jefferson buying lace in 1778, so she probably wasn’t making it! Here’s a letter from John Adams in 1778 suggesting sumptuary laws to stop people from wearing too much ribbon and lace, because mostly it was coming from England and he didn’t want American money going to England! Here’s a 1780 record of a conflict over profits of selling French fabric and lace in America, something that didn’t stop and was still very profitable. These are the kind of things that come up when you search for Revolutionary War era primary source references to “lace.” You can look at them yourself. Massive quantities of American lacemaking by Revolutionary women to fund the Rev War just did not happen.

The pins thing, meanwhile, is because pins were imported from England, and were being jacked up in price massively—and probably refer to dress pins for securing clothing, not needlework or lacemaking.