later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.

"why do you accuse me of using AAVE to sound more aggressive?"

If you can't see that this REAL LIFE EXAMPLE is how you sound when you decide to cushion your aggression with "sounding Black" (whether you know that or not), I don't know what to tell you. This is the world we live in. A world where a Black congresswoman can have all the degrees and all the experience to lead as part of government, and racists will still call her "ghetto". "Low IQ". "Unqualified".

i desperately need to know more about these people

Dia al-Azzawi (Iraq, born 1939) - We Are Not Seen, But Corpses: The Massacre of Sabra and Shatila (1982, art 1983)

September 16th 2025

When this news broke my dad told me and my siblings, all of us who are US Citizens, born and raised in the US, that we have to carry some form of official documentation on us, especially because we live in a city that has been heavily targeted by the Trump administration for being a sanctuary city. My grandmother was staying with us and even though she is my non-latine grandmother, and she's a US citizen, my dad and aunt made the decision to have my dad drive her back home to New Jersey because she has an accent and her documents are back home.

As someone who is latine and south asian, I need you to know that this will not just affect latine people! My non-latine cousin was pulled over by ice about two weeks ago just for being brown! However this will disproportionately affect latine people. Just today ICE was seen on the street by my home and my work! One of my duties at work is to make sure that ICE does not come into our elementary school because we're a predominantly latine school. I HAVE TO MAKE SURE ICE DOES NOT KIDNAP 5 YEAR OLDS. That is the reality of the situation.

I want it to be known that I have been scared before because I'm living as a person of color in the United States. I have been scared before because of being a south asian born post 9/11. I have been scared before being a latina growing up during the Dreamer movement, despite being a citizen. However, before this week I have never been scared enough to feel the need to carry documentation proving I am a citizen of the damn country I was born in! Now I feel that scared though. Especially because a few months ago, for the first time in my life, someone assumed I didn't speak English. Another person of color assumed I didn't speak English and shit talked me in the CVS aisle because they assumed I didn't speak English. And then a week ago I also got mistaken for not speaking English when I went to the doctor's office and chatted with the receptionist in Spanish and then was handed Spanish paperwork to fill out.

Anyways, the point is the fact that I have seen maybe two? three? posts about this on here is upsetting and immensely telling. Speak up. Talk about the fact that this is happening because it will not stop with targeting latines. It will become worse. It already is because the government is going to punish immigrants for "making light of" charlie kirk's death. Not for celebrating, or joking, for making light of.

1) “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people — that’s a fact.”

2) “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘boy, I hope he is qualified.’”

3) “George Floyd was a ‘scumbag.’”

4) "[MLK was] just a man ... a very flawed one at that ... a mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s."

5) "The 'Great Replacement' is not a theory, it's a reality."

6) "If I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman... I wonder, is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because [of] affirmative action?"

7) Leaders "won't do what is necessary, which is arresting Black criminals."

8) "Black crime is a major issue in our country."

9) "What is the real problem exactly? The real problem is that Black fathers abandon the women that they impregnate."

10) "The problem is Blacks that kill themselves a lot — kill each other in inner cities."

11) "Black crime is a huge problem no one wants to talk about. It's not racism."

12) Black Lives Matter wants to "fan the flames of a race war in our country... This is an outright threat. A full frontal domestic terrorism in our country."

13) "A BLM-incorporated leader drove through the holiday parade" (re: Waukesha).

14) The alleged Waukesha attacker was a "Black supremacist terrorist."

15) Juneteenth "threatens the fabric of our country."

16) "Juneteenth should not be a federal holiday."

17) "We should not be like... "you're acting like a Trayvon'.... 'you're a Shaniqua.""

18) “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”.

19) The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a "huge mistake"

20) MLK Jr was "an awful person"

Now he wants to know why all the trans girls in Seattle are so angry, act so traumatized. “It’s not like you’re a bunch of child soldiers. Your parents weren’t killed in front of you.” He asserts that even when something nice happens, like a free drink, trans girls get triggered. Like everything is a wound, everything is trauma. He starts talking about this trans girl he met a few months ago; how all she did was bitch about AFABS and encourage cis scum to die. He wanted to be her friend, but she called trans guys Aidens, and did things like pick up all her meals drive-through, because she was convinced people inside would stare at her or misgender her. He describes the house this girl lives in—a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking each other to biblical levels of drama over the soundtrack of Skyrim on PS3, all the while telling each other how shitty the world was away from each other, until they so confused micro-aggressions for deep violence that they walked around with knives in their boots and canisters of mace dangling from their purses—and I exhale with frustration when I realize exactly which girl he’s talking about. 

Two feelings rise. I don’t want to be categorized with Lexi. I want to be appealing to my crush. So I tell him I’m not like that. I’m not angry all the time, much less armed. But internally, I’m thinking, of course trans girls all love and fuck each other. Who else will? When I first learned the term brick for those square never-will-be-passable trans women, it was auxiliary to an explanation for another term, masonry: as in brick-on-brick love— only bricks get stuck to other bricks. 

Except what do you do with the meanness of the word masonry itself—it was other trans women, the only ones that bricks could supposedly trust, who came up with that hilariously cruel slang. Brick-on-brick betrayal. But we have to understand each other well to be so cruel. 

Most of the cruelty I’ve experienced has been inadvertant, the kind that comes from getting trampled so often that inevitablely someone steps somewhere sensitive. My first boyfriend after Sidney was a married man who fell in love with me accidentally. He could not see past his own bafflement at his attraction to see me well enough for anything like intentional cruelty. We met in hotels or he came to my studio apartment after work, and his cruelty, like his love, came accidentally. Once, he took me for a weekend in a fancy hotel in Portland—the Nines—where the Los Angeles Lakers were staying. When I came out of the shower, buoyed on a carpet of steam spilling into a hotel room designed in a modern style—no door, only a frosted glass divider between tiled bathroom and lush bedroom—I stood naked with my back to him, combing my hair and heard him murmur, “You’re so beautiful, I feel sick.” I looked at myself, then his reflection in the mirror and saw it was true. I was beautiful and it hurt him. I doubt he ever complimented his wife that way. His wife did not possess the kind of beauty that triggered a desire that made him disgusted with himself. My kind of beauty does not trace a path to stable relationships, a dining room set from Crate and Barrel, a Thanksgiving turkey with his folks. He had no conception of what to do with my beauty other than choke on it. 

My friends who date women have it just as bad. Once in a queer bar, I heard a cute woman in a leather motorcycle jacket joke about her gold star status—she’d never once touched a penis. My friend Zoe had been drinking G & Ts for an hour before that, working up the nerve to ask this woman out. I found Zoe fifteen minutes later, outside the bar, soaked from hiding in someone’s dew-covered hedge on 15th, where she had cried softly in frustration. 

“Yeah, that’s transphobia,” my crush agrees, “but not trauma.” He glances at my now finished drink, and I take it as a rebuke. Go pay for the next one of those. The more I try to explain, to list the tiny grievances that added up to an intolerable day in my life, the more I sound unhinged. A man hissed at me on the bus. A bunch of teenagers loudly discussed whether I was really a guy. A girl I only knew on the Internet left a suicide note. The cashier at Whole Foods smirkingly called me “bro.” The TV at the nail salon, playing soundlessly, featured some nonsensical ghoul that I realized, with a shock, was someone’s idea of a trans woman, someone’s idea of me. The guy at the local corner store revealed that he knew where I lived and shrugged when I asked how: everyone around here knows about you. And now, I get irritated at one thing: a free drink, and I sound crazy complaining about that, right? Some total loony acting traumatized ‘cause a bartender tried to be kind. 

My crush sighs and pulls out an ace. He knows people that have actually been raped, have actually been beaten—hell, half of the trans dudes he knows have been, and they aren’t paralyzed with anger, convinced they’re constantly persecuted. We’re talking real Trauma, not someone whispering about them on the bus, much less the burden of free drinks. To which I know I can probably come up with some of my own friends’ real Trauma, but I’m too affronted, so I just shriek: THE WHOLE WORLD MONITORS AND MOCKS MY EVERY WAKING MOMENT! 

Needless to say, he and I do not hook up. He leaves me to my free drinks and my tinfoil rage hat. 

When he’s gone, I miss Lexi for the first time.

This imaginary ignores the justification of Native American displacement by white homesteaders, the enslavement of African-Americans, the masses of underpaid Asian immigrants who worked California’s first factory farms, and the mostly Mexican farm laborers who harvest the majority of food grown in the USA today. Therefore, it is quite possible that the romantic notions of yeoman farmers and rural culture do not resonate with many people of color whose collective history recalls the racism and classism of America’s agricultural past and present. [...]

The invisibility of farmworkers within the prominent alternative agriculture discourse prevents the movement from addressing structural forces that shape agricultural possibilities. For example, the white farm imaginary leads those seeking food system reform to assume that market farmers hire only relatives, making regulation of employment practices seem unnecessary. [...]

Customers draw upon the complimentary community imaginary to depict themselves, as well as their friends and neighbors, as ethically motivated supporters of struggling family farmers. Many managers, vendors and customers unwittingly draw upon the community imaginary to justify or obscure the structural barriers that prevent the participation of low-income people and people of color [...]

[Alice] Waters compared the Berkeley Farmers Market to the street markets in Provence that initially inspired her California-French Cuisine. Similarly, Marie Sarita Gayt´an’s (2004) study of northern Californian Slow Food convivia found that the group puts rural European food culture on a pedestal, rendering it discursively exclusive to people of color and the urban working class. In their allusions to European culinary and agricultural superiority, these institutions serve to strengthen the notion that alternative agriculture and food, both generally and in North Berkeley, is the province of whites.

These images have not only moved peoples and governments but have awakened the conscience of humanity that refused to remain silent in the face of this injustice.

This is an urgent warning: silence now means complicity, and staying quiet in the face of this injustice will make us witnesses to an unforgettable tragedy. We must act immediately to save what remains of life and hope.