Freckled Lili

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

“Black people existed”, the whole concept of blackness is so new, mentioning it is anachronistic.

And the whole “north africa” argument. North africans were considered white until 2 years ago when the US decided Arabs are not white anymore. Stop it with your fake “inclusion” as if people only exist when they step onto your continent. Write your damn fic in africa. Write about actual african characters, and actual asian characters, they don’t have to step in america/europe to exist.

People who believe that north africans and indians are interchangeable cause “both brown” are telling us to “celebrate the inclusivity”. We are already in our media, we didn’t stop existing cause western media didn’t have “people of color” or whatever other ridiculous term you want to throw at 80% of the frickin globe population.

————

If it’s fantasy explain how this reality is different from the one we’re living in. If it’s “historical” then have it make sense in the historical context. You can’t just have characters “happen to be an ethnicity from a different continent”. That shit was not the norm. Some places in africa still freak out if they see a white person, most chinese people haven’t seen a black person, and you think 18th century Europe was “open”?

Anyway, history exists, read on it or decide to go with a whole different reality and it would be nice to see why in that reality Africa wasn’t plundered by europe and why europeans in that reality considered them equal, or whatever the race situation is in that fictional work. Whatever else you’re doing is a cop out and dumb.

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I’m gonna stop here cause that whole is so ridiculous.

Octavia E Butler wrote about a time traveling black woman who found herself a century ago and guess what, she was taken as a slave. Cause that’s the fuckin context of history.

Ok stopping now.

-Have you heard of travel. Are you aware that humans of every race and ethnicity occasionally do this for reasons other than enslavement. Trade. Curiosity. Clout. All the same reasons people travel today.

-Are you judging actual history by the words of people writing (or translating from antiquity) during the most overtly white supremacist era of global history? When there were tremendous incentives to further racist propaganda and terrifying disincentives to write the truth? Why do you believe what those historians say vs modern historians who have DNA and modern research techniques and peer review systems?

-There were so many Black people in England during the Elizabethan era that she tried to deport them. She failed because there were too many.

-Do you think all those people just showed up in Europe during the 1600s and were never there before.

-Do you think the Moors ruled much of Europe for 700 years without fucking any white people, including royalty.

-Are you aware that the Moors (aka Northern Africans) and Subsaharan Africans, like many people who inhabit the same continent, traded with and fucked each other for reasons other than enslavement. You know, having existed since the beginning of human history and all. Don't you racists think that one drop of Black blood makes you Black? What do you call people with a lot more than one drop?

-Did you know Black people come in different skin colors, including pale/white?

-Have you heard of Mansa Musa, Alessandro di Medici, Pope Victor, ancient Rome's policy of sending soldiers from one continent to another, Crusaders bringing their African spouses or children back to Europe, or just... anything that actually happened.

-Have you ever visited a medieval art museum like the Cloisters? Don't answer that, I know you haven't, because of the dumb shit you just said.

-No one in Africa freaks out when they see white people! Jesus Fucking Christ! Books exist! TV and the internet exist! Oral historians like griots have been proven accurate by modern research! A "primitive" lifestyle does not automatically mean ignorant of the world, any more than your technological lifestyle automatically conveys intelligence or erudition! There are fucking Maasai herdsmen who understand more of history than you, clearly!

-Has it ever occurred to you that some people, who aren't as racist and thoughtless as you, are capable of imagining Black people AND dragons at the same time? And that none of us are or should be constrained to writing about purely the places of our origins because diasporas, travel, trade, and imagination exist? And that plenty of us ARE writing about Black characters in Africa, too?

-Octavia E. Butler ALSO wrote about Black people living before and during the slave era as free people, you benighted waste of my time! Did you only manage to read one of her books? Did you just skim it? DID YOU THINK IT WAS HISTORICAL

...deep breath. Yeah, okay.

before the vows