All Cats Are Gay

I am afraid of taking up space

I feel exposed

I feel unsafe

I don’t feel heard

I feel rejected

I feel like I’m coming out of my skin

I feel the need to escape [my body, this room, this situation]

I don’t want to be here right now

I am experiencing overwhelming shame

I am afraid of not meeting people’s standards

I feel grief/shame that x aspect of my body is stigmatized

I keep hearing other people’s judgments of my body in my head

My judgments of my body are so loud right now

My eating disorder is being so cruel

I’m afraid of my hunger

I feel out of control

I feel that I’ve failed to do the “right” behaviors

I am feeling unable to trust my body

I feel grief, anger, etc.

I need to cry, yell, etc.

I’m afraid I’m unlovable 

I fear that I’m “bad” and my body must be “bad” too

Representation matters.

me listening to the same music now:

A set of data uncovered by University of California-Berkeley professor reveals southern white women played a heavier role in the enslavement of Africans than previously thought.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, an associate professor of history at the university, combed through data from the 1850 and 1860 census and revealed that white women made up around 40% of slaveowners.

The findings helped Jones-Rogers compile her book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.”

On her department page, Jones-Rogers describes the February 2019 release as “a regional study that draws upon formerly enslaved people’s testimony to dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery.”

In the book, Jones-Rogers explained that white women’s involvement in slavery comes from family, as their slave-owning parents “typically gave their daughters more enslaved people than land.”

“What this means is that their very identities as white southern women are tied to the actual or the possible ownership of other people,” she said according to History.com.

Her book also notes that owning enslaved Africans served as white women’s primary source of wealth. Plus, owning a large number of enslaved people reportedly made women better marriage material.

Once wed, white women were said to have fought and frequently won the right to continue to have ownership over their enslaved Africans, not handing over ownership to their husbands.

The search engine functions to hide both slave ownership and enslaved people from the eyes of contemporary genealogists. At this moment, an Ancestry search for the notoriously cruel James Henry Hammond, reveals a wealthy planter worth $70,000 in the 1860 census’s population schedule. But because a basic search no longer provides results from the corresponding slave schedule, which details the ages and sexes of the over 300 people he owned, the means by which he accumulated his wealth is hidden from view. Even if a casual observer did suspect a family history of slave ownership and had the inclination to then search the slave schedules themselves, they found the schedules no longer searchable by name on Ancestry.com. As difficult as it already is to trace African American genealogy, this new programing made it all the more challenging to trace Black families from the margins of historical documents.

These changes insulate the more than three million subscribers to Ancestry.com from being exposed to the extent to which slavery shaped American society. This contributes to a larger problem regarding Americans’ knowledge about slavery. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a report detailing how little Americans understand slavery. The City Council of Charleston, SC, only barely passed a largely symbolic resolution apologizing for slavery. Despite being the port of entry for around forty percent of enslaved Africans transported into the United States during the trans-Atlantic slave trade some city councilmembers refused to apologize “for something they did not take a part in” ignoring the way that inherited wealth and racial privilege from the antebellum period continue to create racial inequality today.

With calls for reparations increasingly in the news, inaccurate belief’s about hereditary ties to slavery become all the more relevant to contemporary discourse. Claims that “my family didn’t own slaves” are common among white Americans, and are often used to argue that whites should not be asked to sacrifice anything to make amends for the past sins of the country. In the face of this resistance to addressing contemporary inequality, Ancestry.com could choose to be a powerful tool that forces users to confront their own personal ties to slavery.

Japanese Beggar, 1904, Vasily Vereshchagin

Medium: oil,canvas

“Malaysia plans to send non-recyclable plastic back to the countries that sent it to there, said its environment minister on Tuesday.

“Developed countries must be responsible in what they send out,” Yeo Bee Yin, Malaysia’s minister of energy, technology, science, climate change and environment told Reuters. She added that some of the waste sent to Malaysia was in contravention of the Basel Convention, an international treaty drafted to regulate the export of waste to developing countries.

To be clear: this has been a problem for a long time and it’s only getting worse, and the waste is primarily coming from the US, UK, the EU, and Australia. This is white supremacy at work on a global scale.

Quote from the above Greenpeace article on this issue:

“Malaysia is the new dumping site for plastic ‘recycling’ from more than 19 countries, including the US, UK and Australia, according to new research released today by Greenpeace Malaysia. “The Recycling Myth” report uncovered blatant regulation violations in the disposal of this waste, including dumping and open-air burning, and illegal practises contributing to environmental pollution and harmful health impacts for Malaysians.

“The Malaysian plastic recycling industry is overwhelmed by the influx and cannot accommodate the waste in a way that is sustainable and acceptable by the government’s own standards. Our investigation found evidence of harmful plastic waste processing being carried out in Klang, on the western outskirts of the capital Kuala Lumpur, and Jenjarom to the south,” said Heng Kiah Chun, Public Engagement Campaigner at Greenpeace Malaysia.

Since China banned plastic waste imports in January 2018, countries in Southeast Asia – particularly Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia – have accepted an increased amount of plastic waste.[2] Between January and July 2018 alone, Malaysia imported 754,000 metric tonnes of plastic — the weight of approximately 100,000 large elephants. The waste came from countries like the United States, Japan, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.”