there's no such thing as dusk in the city

Anyway here are my favorite notes

Exhibit A: The very feminist take that people socially/medically/legally classed as female aren’t oppressed on the basis of being socially/medically/legally classed as female.

Exhibit B: Seeing a non-sexual image of a trans man and immediately thinking about him bottoming. Because sexually objectifying random people for no reason is, again, very feminist. 🙄

Someone says something like:

"Trans women are often viewed by society as being predatory men and this stereotype is incredibly harmful to trans women"

This is reasonable and true, it is backed by the material realities and experiences of trans women.

But what if someone responded with:

"Remove the word "trans" from this sentence and it sounds incredibly stupid! Women (cis women) aren't viewed by society as predators! Any trans woman who says she's been viewed as a predator for being a woman must not understand how the world works!"

We can agree that this is a ridiculous argument that ignores the reality of being a trans women in favor of projecting a cis-hetero-patriarchal view of gender onto trans women, while invalidating those who don't fit that framework.

The way that Black people's faces are so often used for memes and treated as inherently more funny and emotive than non-Black people, and if you think about it long enough you realize this is a remnant of a long-standing culture of Black people only being represented in western media via minstrel shows of white people doing blackface and doing comedy acts that openly mock and stereotype Black people. The way that in order to get recognition and make a living in entertainment, Black people also had to participate in this minstrelsy act of reinforcing the negative stereotypes about themselves, and this type of stereotype reinforcing excuse for comedy can be found even today.

The way that people will mis-use AAVE slang in order to sound funny and make jokes, which covertly communicates they think a certain way about the people who predominantly use that terminology aka how they see Black people. Because a lot of the jokes that misuse AAVE are also classist by nature, treating AAVE and American Southern accents as sounding less intelligent.

The way I see the latest trends of misusing and misappropriating the current trendy AAVE slang and how every time a term from AAVE goes viral the meaning of that term gets twisted and warped and watered down by the non-black people using that word because they assume it's just a funny internet meme. Seeing that happen a lot lately with the term 'Unc' where people are throwing the term around to mean a stupid and/or elderly person and giving it far more negative connotation than it originally had.

See what they did to Woke. How racists took that term and turned it into a bad thing, used it as the butt of their jokes, characterized things that are 'woke' as 'liberal bullshit' they love to hate.

Woke was originally about being aware of the antiblackness and racism in the world around you. Woke has and always will be about being aware of the injustices around you. Can y'all quit using it like a stand in for the N word you wanna say so badly.

I think far too many people have completely forgotten or never learned that making racist jokes and saying the N word are examples of OVERT anti-blackness and racism, absolutely not excusable or justifiable, there is no plausible deniability.

Using the N word has been an overt display of antiblackness and white supremacy for DECADES

Loudly tapping the sign that says 'using the N word if you're not Black is not acceptable and hasn't ever been acceptable because it has always been meant as a word to harm Black people.'

Also tapping the sign that says 'calling Black people monkeys or any other kind of animal or degrading thing is inherently racist and shows that you see Black people as lesser'

Who alway got in trouble? Me.

They would call my mother and she always came in and lectures my teachers and threatened to sue for making her miss work and treating me poorly.

She always taught my brothers to respect women. The only fights my brothers ever got in was defending women from someone else.

So naturally, I end up in the principal’s office, refusing to apologize. 

“He shouldn’t have put his hands on me and I wouldn’t have hit him!” That’s the only thing I was saying.

These people had the unfortunate luck of catching my dad at home, instead of my mom. So he comes fucking sauntering in there, like he’s Clint fucking Eastwood in some western movie and looks at me. 

“Melissa, did you punch him?” 

“Yes.” I said. 

“Why?” 

“Because he snapped my bra strap.” 

And he turns his squinty eyed glare to the principal and says, “You’re telling me my daughter is in trouble because that squirrely looking kid put his hands on her and she chose to defend herself? That’s what you are saying to me.” 

“Well, sir-” The man kind of stuttered because my dad is kind of intimidating in the quiet sort of way that kind of whispers in the back of your mind that this person could be dangerous. “Melissa did make it physical.” 

“No. That kid put his hands on my daughter. Are you saying my daughter cannot defend herself when some boy decides to put hands on her? Is that what you are teaching my girl?” 

The nuns there were like, so rad. 

It was a party organized for the end of the school year, and I was helping in the kitchen to prepare stuff with a nun and a bunch of little girls. There was one of the girls’ little brother who was there. 

There was a little girl who was carrying a bowl of tomato sauce and was going outside, but the boy was just in front of her and he slammed the door in her face. She dropped the bowl on the floor and got all messy. 

So what happened? 

The nun went outside, took the boy by the arm, and gave him an epic speech going around the lines of: “Would you treat the Virgin Mary like that, young man?” “Nnnnno…” “Then treat every girl like she’s the Virgin Mary.” Not only the boy had to apologize to the little girl, but he also had to clean up and he was put on kitchen duty for the rest of the day. 

Then another day, in catechism class (I was a in a girls’ school, mind you), the nun was there telling us: “If a guy touches you in a way you don’t like, punch him in the face. It’s not a sin against charity. On the contrary, you’re being charitable by showing him he’s sinning by impurity and you’ll save him from going to hell.” 

So I was at my desk during class looking like this: 

₊˚｡ ❆¹²²¹🏒

° ❀ ⋆ .ೃ

࿔* :･ да, sounds very in. ˚ ༘

⋆｡˚

I wish. ⌗ 𝄞 ⨾ 𓍢ִִ໋໋