Homo

Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨

believing you're above coexisting with others, creating socially and legally permissible violence, humiliating others as a bonding rite, the underlying 'logic' of racism is fascist and genocidal girl that's the problem

Mind you, nobody ever has a problem when someone says they’re going to eat at a Chinese/Mexican/Indian etc. restaurant. To everyone, that is normal and not an aberration but centering Blackness in any context immediately gets everybody tight; or hesitant, limited enthusiasm. 😐

Book: White Fragility

Chapters:

CH10: White Fragility and the Rules of Engagement

CH11: White Women's Tears

CH12: Where Do We Go From Here?

How are we feeling so far?

Did we learn anything?

Share with the class!

Imma be so real with y'all. I am ready to be done with this book 😅 I'm tired of people proving the points every week. I mean, just horrid folks. This week had atrocious behavior 🤣😭

As we learned, calling out racism and antiblackness can result in white wrath something unreasonable. And yes, you can be a person of color participating in that wrath (it won't protect you in the long run). I have noticed it before in other movements, but it's not uncommon for people to pit people of color against one another and swear it's for good... And it's not.

It's "not nice" to say someone's behavior is racist, not nice to point out, but no one cares that it's not nice to BE violent via racism. Only that it's not nice to respond to it, whether with kindness or anger. Because the first rule: never bring it up 👍🏾

It can be caused by being upset about it, it can be caused by simply being proud of being Black (which, unlike being proud to be white (the default), is an aberration from the status quo).

If anything, this week proved the point that antiracism is going to be HARD. People are going to hate you, they're going to be angry at you, they're going to push back. That violence that upholds the world around you, that you've never noticed? You'll see it IMMEDIATELY if you challenge it. That fear you feel, just from that temporary interaction? Is what it feels like to be a person of color, and particularly a Black person, all the time. And if that's something that sickens you- and it should- you should understand more of why it's so important to call it out.

To quote Malcolm X,

"The progress is healing the wound that's below, that the blow made. And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less pull, heal the wound...

They won't even admit the knife is there."

(only for the tutorial and first two missions. PLAY THE GAME!!)

I know for a fact the one-star Steam grifters heard the opening music and were more offended than they already were 🤣 DON'T LET THE RACIST LOSERS WIN! Leave good reviews!!

The music!! It's just getting me, it is. I love it.

It's certainly got a lot of atmosphere!

It looks smoother on PC than on TV (we ported it to the tv for comforts sake), but not bad. Very stylized. I wasn't pressed.

Voice acting is a joy, loving the accents, loving that Black Africans and places IN Africa are central to the plot. Senegal, Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya, and more.

Big sister coming through for little brother as the intro, classic.

The tutorial is really simple. Good for beginners, assuming you've ever played a game before.

Nomali- the Lady MC- is "All Africa Free Running Champion"- you are in good parkour hands 👍🏾

You can take easier or harder routes through the platforms, but you will get through it. You can try multiple ways, if you want! Just gotta plan it! It'll even show you some of the Whole platform.

It's a very pretty game! Very vibrant. People have been taught to imagine places in Africa as dirt huts, poverty, and misery (and we know why) and not a place full of life and culture. I like how this counteracts that mentality. And Afrofuturism!!!

We meet Feng (Chinese), Etienne (French), Annie (Afrikaner) showing that other people do interact and are still present! It's just not about you. I've been wondering if Ndedi is Afro-Chinese, but I'm sure I'll find out with time.

I love that their elder and leader is "Koko" Grace, which in Maa (Maasai) means Grandmother.

LOVING all the hair styles!!

I love that it tells you about the places that we are taking the items back for. For example, the first item is to take the Silver Buffalo back for the kingdom of Dahomey (dow-oh-mee), and it tells you where it is (modern day Benin), and different details about its colonization (French) and its value. AS WELL as where you're going to retrieve it (i.e. who currently has it).

It's not even just the African artifacts! The game will tell you about artifacts globally that were commandeered by Western museums. There has been an Indian artifact, and there was a Brazilian and Haitian one in the demo. So EVERYBODY gets a little representation, artifact wise!

YOU CAN STEAL MORE THAN OME ARTIFACT AT ONCE! Depending on your skill level. And it'll tell you about the person, their country, and a history fact. This is an educational game! It's really my favorite part, that you get to learn about the items we're taking back. I can absolutely tell why the "we hate Woke™ colored people" crowd would try to review-bomb this game.

I wouldn't call it an "easy" game. It's still a puzzle game! Take your time!

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg: