i'm shy

Shane has to deal with chirps about his race all the time. Chirps about his marked lack of body hair compared to his peers, his pretty face, the fact that his mom is so hands on (thinking of one particular phrase here). Shane is constantly feminized because he’s Asian, and it doesn’t help that he’s such a goody two shoes - I mean, fuck, Holly’s kill count is 1 because he’s so committed to his fucking girlfriend. And I think he can get away with that because of his skill. I think his quirks in the name of keeping up his performance saves him a lot of the time, but it wouldn’t protect him from everything. It can’t. Hockey has a very bro-y herd mentality and if you don’t gel with the team you’re out. Which means he has to gel, and at that level that means being one of the boys.

So, while Shane isn’t necessarily hazed as consistently and violently as the rest of the rookies, I think he is hazed, and it is fucked up. And it fucks him up specifically, because he’s starting to heavily suspect (read: in his heart he knows) that he likes guys. And yeah, he doesn’t have to drink dick beer (he would die before allowing himself to show weakness in front of these guys he doesn’t care he can’t lose), but he feels violated and terrified the whole time he’s doing pushups, because what if the rest of them can tell? What if there’s something about him that gives himself away? It’s not just his career that’ll be ruined (before it even starts). He’s 16, there are guys in the room that are fucking 20. They’re men. If they find out what the fuck’ll they do to him? And I mean, it’s tough for Shane to tell when something is and is not considered gay when it comes to this shit so he stays out of it all, but what the fuck will they make him do if they think he’ll like it?

Link:

Fabian is working at a drug store until he makes his big break. There is, presumably, no such thing as a moderately successful musician in this world or any mid-level careers for people with musical training. (He plays violin - you're telling me he can't get studio work? Or work weddings?) Kip sells smoothies and works catering jobs. Kyle is a bartender.

Harris, Thee social media manager of a pro sports team who travels with that team twice a year, claims he makes less per year than some of the players make in a day. The absolute maximum salary for an NHL player in 2020 was $16.3M, but I haven't seen anyone suggest Ilya would be making that much with Ottawa - that would be a terrible deal for the team, since that's 20% of their salary cap for the whole team. Certainly they don't have more than one player making that. Ilya is probably making 10, maybe 12M, which would put Harris's salary below $32k. In 2020. That's crazyinsane. That should be a good paying job!!

And then everyone else? Everyone else in this series is a millionaire. But!! The millionaires do not live or act like millionaires in any meaningful way. Ilya has a car collection, sure, but he has to sell it?? To move to Ottawa?? No he fucking doesn't, he just signed a $10M contract that probably had a signing bonus. Are you stoned? Are we all very stoned? Do we not have basic math skills.

i've been thinking a lot about the whole hudson williams inflammatory photo situation, about whether i want to post anything into the internet abyss, about what i can even contribute to this matter. i've decided i'm going to dump some of my thoughts because this whole thing feels a lot less like run-of-the-mill internet discourse and more like a huge, racially-motivated internet defamation campaign.

it’s disappointing to see people demand accountability from a cyberstalked celebrity for something that may very well have been racial humiliation, coercion, and/or targeting when he was a minor. and just to be clear, the symbols in the photo are absolutely offensive. i’m not disputing that. however, a huge part of the issue for me is how few people seem interested in context & how quickly a decontextualized image has been treated as definitive proof of intent, agency, and endorsement.

i’m going to try to share this without doxxing myself. i’m white. i grew up in a very white suburban neighborhood and attended a predominantly white public high school. the racist bullying in my school was so bad that a major news network made an entire documentary about it. i share the below having spent a lot of time reflecting on my own complacency as a white person & through conversations i’ve had (and still have -- the trauma fucking lingers) with long-term friends who experienced racially-motivated hate daily in our school. i know my school is not unique, which is a large part of the reason why i've decided to share this.

(i’m about to share examples, so if you don’t want to read, i've noted below where the examples end. if you're white, please sit with the discomfort & continue reading.)

in my high school, it was commonplace for students of color -- especially melanated students of color -- to be hazed, degraded, and publicly humiliated. racist harassment and acts of racial terror were normalized, and assimilation to whiteness was expected in order to maintain the school’s (and broader community's) racial hierarchy. for many students of color, belonging was conditional. social acceptance usually required minimizing experiences of racism, laughing along with racist jokes, distancing themselves from other students of color, tolerating humiliation and abuse, proving they were “not like the other [students of color],” etc.

the reward for “playing along” was limited and precarious social inclusion. the punishment was exclusion and ostracization by students and parents alike. for many of my friends and peers, assimilation to whiteness was not a desired choice -- it was survival. people of color are often taught that they must endure racism, degradation, and humiliation to gain access to spaces that white people inhabit by default.

the same weekend my school hosted its annual “diversity night,” a white jewish student drew a sw*stika on a Brown student at a party and posted it on instagram. the Brown student was suspended for three days, and the white student -- whose parents defended him like they were in court -- got away scot-free. my friends of color have repeatedly shared that they felt gaslit by our school, which proudly hosted diversity initiatives, multicultural events, and anti-bullying campaigns, yet did little to hold individual students/friend groups accountable for racist harm. instead, the students who were held accountable were often the very students of color who fell victim to this racist harm.

(examples over)

i feel like a lot of people engaging in the hudson discourse are failing to recognize how often racial humiliation functions as a social ritual that reinforces white supremacy. we now have access to a photo of a teenager who was one of the only people of color in a predominantly white social environment, surrounded by white peers, with hateful symbols drawn on his face. maybe he made terrible decisions. maybe he should have objected. maybe he felt like he couldn’t. the point is, we don't know the context. why are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that an asian teenager in a predominantly white social environment may have been the target of racial humiliation, coercion, or abuse?

i also can't help but think about the model minority myth. asian folks are often expected to navigate racism in ways that are legible to white audiences -- be respectable, agreeable, non-confrontational, respond "correctly," etc. yet racism ofc doesn't always look like open hostility, and survival doesn't always look like resistance. sometimes it looks like silence. or laughing along. or enduring humiliation because the social consequences of refusing are worse. like i said above, for many people of color, assimilation is a strategy for survival. the speed with which folks have dismissed those possibilities says a lot about how narrowly many people understand racism, victimhood, and accountability when asian people are involved.

what's clear is that people have spent months digging through his entire historical internet presence, combing through the private social media accounts of people he knew as a teenager, excavating photos that were never meant for public consumption, and distributing them online to maximize outrage. say what you will about the celebrity as a surveilled public commodity -- that's not the point i'm trying to make here. people are digging through this guy’s life with the explicit goal of finding material that can be used against him, flattening every possible interpretation of the shared image into the one that causes the maximum amount of harm. we act as though the existence of a photograph tells us everything we need to know about the circumstances under which it was taken.

a lot of people seem less interested in understanding context/what happened than they are in destroying him. and (coming from a queer jew) a lot of people are suddenly very eager to weaponize antisemitism and homophobia as "gotchas" when they've never previously demonstrated any meaningful concern for either.

I see people saying “He needs to address the hurt he’s caused” but what did Hudson do specifically?

Someone drew a disgusting and hateful symbol on him. Then someone took a picture and posted it.

He didn’t draw it. He didn’t post the pic. The TMZ statement said he didn’t know what was being drawn on him.

So, where is he at fault in this situation? What exactly should he be apologizing for? Or what does he “need to be held accountable for”- being around terrible people as a teenager?