uncomfortably cold and paranoid

My mom (72) recently downsized and moved close enough to me that checking on her in person regularly is not really out of my way, but when I was obvious about it she wouldn’t let me “stop-by” because she was, “fine”.

- ask for something they can actually help you with. Elders have skills. Mending? Advice about knitting, gardening, home repair, nevermind professional training?

-ask about their experiences. “I was reading about xyz event the other day & I would love to know what that time was like for you. Can we chat about it over tea?” Goes double for family history for relatives.

-“Someone gave me this [or, I ended up with extra] & I don’t need/want it, but I bet you have a use for it. Can I bring it over? I would hate for it to go to waste.”

I just need to make this absolutely clear. Not only is this idea absurd on the face of it, there is no theoretical basis for this at all. It spits in the face of everything we base our understanding of oppression, transphobia, and misogyny on, and is especially a direct attack on the ideas of intersectionality.

My question is, as a white fan, I don't really know when it's my place to speak up about whitewashing? Usually, I reblog/retweet/share posts written by other Black fans, but the fandom I'm in is from a very niche anime and is incredibly small, barely any popular at all in the West at large. The Black character is drawn so much paler than he is in the anime and it bothers me a lot. I want to avoid coming off as a white saviour, though, especially because I'm white while the artists who whitewash him are largely East Asian. I have always stopped supporting the artists who do whitwash him but I don't know if it's my place to call anyone out

It's always your place to speak up about whitewashing 👍🏾

To be clear- if you are informed enough, that is. If you don't know or aren't confident about what you're talking about, that's one thing. But whitewashing is probably the easiest form of fandom racism to point out. We can literally see when a character isn't as dark as they are in canon, or when their hair texture has been thinned, or their nose changed. We can TELL that the guy you drew is NOT the guy we're supposed to be seeing. I have a lesson about this in my pinned post!

Also, being a white savior is not "I'm speaking up when I see racism". That's not what that word means. Being a white savior is when you talk OVER Black people and people of color, as if you know more and better than them about their own experiences. It's treating us like we're children, like we're less intelligent, that we NEED you and your "wisdom". But both you and an East Asian artist are capable of antiblackness. Neither of you are the group in question. You don't have to be racist or condescending to them, but it is not racism or white saviorism to say "hey, this is whitewashing and that's not cool". Especially if there's no one else in the space saying anything, likely because they're afraid of rocking the boat.

watched the backrooms movie & went “how can i make this about me”.

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:

Silver Palace, Fremont & 1st, Las Vegas – March 14, 1962.