Single-Starling

Anarcha Westcott was a young Black girl enslaved in Alabama. After a traumatic childbirth, she developed vaginal and rectal fistulas, a condition that left her in constant pain and shame.

Instead of receiving care, she was experimented on over 30 times by Dr. J. Marion Sims, who operated on her without anesthesia. He used her body to develop a surgery that would later be used to treat white women, with pain relief, dignity, and consent.

Anarcha didn’t agree to any of it. She wasn’t a patient. She was a victim of medical violence.

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

Behold, the digital artchery glove!

….but Wait…

…….!!!

That reminds me, I was reading this theory textbook, and deadass the FIRST 100% genuine thought that popped into my mind was:

Yeah, the way Goncharov subverts racial stereotypes by depicting the russian family as passionate and warm and the italian family as cold and calculating, is a very good example of how themes of race are handled in the film.