Social and Political Activism

Elexus Jionde faces barrage of harassment after tweeting about 9/11 and black history

Jionde’s tweetstorm on black history prompted a largely positive response. However, it also triggered an onslaught of harassment, including racist comments and death threats.

“I’ve received death threats, racist jokes, and a lot of tweets regarding my future children having cancer. That [first] tweet has since gone viral, and without the 40+ tweets accompanying it, there are people in my mentions telling me that I’m a disgrace to my race and country for saying 9/11 only killed white people, when that isn’t what I said at all.”

Jionde believes that her thread being disabled was “no accident,” and she has accused Twitter of deliberately removing the thread.

“I believe Twitter deliberately unconnected the thread to deprive people of context. Some will say that it was some sort of system glitch or whatever, but I personally believe they disabled my thread because someone in the office was offended over the first tweet.”

Twitter outrightly denies this, suggesting that the problem could be the result of a bug. 

as proved by the fact that when you say explorer, you think of a bunch of white guys walking the world and discovering it ~exotic wonders~ even though Zheng He travelled through Asia, to the Middle East, and even East Africa. But you’d likely never heard of him before.

Same reason you never heard of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveller who, as early as the 10th century, went to the Volga area for diplomatic reasons. He wrote about it, much as Marco Polo would do later for his own travels, and is one of our sources on what viking were like (and by all accounts, he wrote about them more accurately than western scholars of the same period did)

Oh, or Ibn Battuta who travelled throughout Africa long before europeans did, and even went to Europe himself.

And that’s just some example of Muslim medieval travel writers

not only that, but it seems like they can’t even spell Budweiser correctly. 

smalltownboytm:

If black people stepping on the American flag offends you more than black people dying in the streets, you need to reevaluate your priorities.

If black people symbolically saying “fuck you” to every man and women who has died in uniform, doesn’t offend you, you need to leave this country.

I do not appreciate AT ALL you fucking civilian assholes using my service to shit on minorities. I don’t give a fuck about the flag. That is not why I was fighting! I joined up, like most service members, to go to college, and I deployed because the Army was like “Guess where you’re going! Afghanistan!” Patriotism didn’t matter a lot for me, and I never felt like I was “defending” the flag–what, are these poor as fuck Afghani sustenance farmers going to bomb America? (No. No they are not.)

You know what would really help me, as a vet? Not people pretending they care about me by using my service as a way to justify their racist beliefs. I know for a fact that you don’t actually give a shit about me, always-a-lighthouse. You don’t give a shit about my fucked up knee, my poverty, how it took me three years to learn how to be a civilian, two years to get a handle on the blinding rage I felt about literally everything, how I’m still in therapy to deal with the way the Army fucked me up. None of that matters to you because all you want is a convenient excuse to justify your racism. If you actually gave a fuck about me you’d fight to get the VA better funding or expand the GI bill so it actually covers all four years of undergrad. But you don’t. I’m not a person to you, I’m an idea, and even then, only as long as it suits you. As soon as I’m not a convenient way to blame people, I cease to exist. No wonder so many of us feel like we only matter as long as we’re fighting!

Also, I don’t think you understand how protest works. Symbolism is vitally important. When someone walks on the flag, what they’re saying is “This flag, which promises liberty and justice for all, is denying me liberty and justice. In this land of freedom, I am not free. This flag serves people who do not look like me and do not care about me, and I will not rest until all people are equal under this flag.” That’s powerful symbolism.

Don’t like it? A) Fuck you. B) They wouldn’t be desecrating the flag if there was any other way to get what they need. When you deny people justice and equality, then make it impossible for them to get it through conventional means, you guarantee that they up the ante until they find something that works. Do you not understand how people think? You aren’t going to stop the protest over people being murdered by acting like those lives are less valuable than the fucking flag. The flag doesn’t care! It’s an inanimate object! Why the fuck would you care more about a piece of cloth than human lives?!

smalltownboytm:

If black people stepping on the American flag offends you more than black people dying in the streets, you need to reevaluate your priorities.

If black people symbolically saying “fuck you” to every man and women who has died in uniform, doesn’t offend you, you need to leave this country.

I do not appreciate AT ALL you fucking civilian assholes using my service to shit on minorities. I don’t give a fuck about the flag. That is not why I was fighting! I joined up, like most service members, to go to college, and I deployed because the Army was like “Guess where you’re going! Afghanistan!” Patriotism didn’t matter a lot for me, and I never felt like I was “defending” the flag–what, are these poor as fuck Afghani sustenance farmers going to bomb America? (No. No they are not.)

You know what would really help me, as a vet? Not people pretending they care about me by using my service as a way to justify their racist beliefs. I know for a fact that you don’t actually give a shit about me, always-a-lighthouse. You don’t give a shit about my fucked up knee, my poverty, how it took me three years to learn how to be a civilian, two years to get a handle on the blinding rage I felt about literally everything, how I’m still in therapy to deal with the way the Army fucked me up. None of that matters to you because all you want is a convenient excuse to justify your racism. If you actually gave a fuck about me you’d fight to get the VA better funding or expand the GI bill so it actually covers all four years of undergrad. But you don’t. I’m not a person to you, I’m an idea, and even then, only as long as it suits you. As soon as I’m not a convenient way to blame people, I cease to exist. No wonder so many of us feel like we only matter as long as we’re fighting!

Also, I don’t think you understand how protest works. Symbolism is vitally important. When someone walks on the flag, what they’re saying is “This flag, which promises liberty and justice for all, is denying me liberty and justice. In this land of freedom, I am not free. This flag serves people who do not look like me and do not care about me, and I will not rest until all people are equal under this flag.” That’s powerful symbolism.

Don’t like it? A) Fuck you. B) They wouldn’t be desecrating the flag if there was any other way to get what they need. When you deny people justice and equality, then make it impossible for them to get it through conventional means, you guarantee that they up the ante until they find something that works. Do you not understand how people think? You aren’t going to stop the protest over people being murdered by acting like those lives are less valuable than the fucking flag. The flag doesn’t care! It’s an inanimate object! Why the fuck would you care more about a piece of cloth than human lives?!

I told him I was flattered but had a long term, serious girlfriend, who I loved very much.

To which he responded, still pleasant and with polite interest,  ”She’s a lucky woman. How long have you been together?”

not-a-queen-but-a-khaleesi said:What would be an eloquent way of explaining how saying things like that is transphobic? I need to not be offensive, and ready to provide proof if I’m going to say anything at all so I was hoping you’d have some advice.

I’m sorry that’s happening. 

I don’t think you need to provide “proof” for why these things are transphobic; they just are. You can try to explain why they’re transphobic, though. 

Misgendering someone is transphobic and disrespectful because it is denying them their identity.