Average Lazarus Defender

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general. 

Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.

DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).

Talking about research and learning... don't make your burn survivor characters evil. Burn survivors are normal people and don't deserve to be constantly portrayed in such a way.

1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

This is true, but there's another aspect to it:

If I have an ancient kingdom, I need my army to keep my subjects loyal through violence, but soldiers need supplying, and arranging for all the services they need, anywhere they go, is nontrivial.

But, if you require taxes to be paid in your coins and the only way to get them is through business with your army, then, effectively, everyone in your kingdom is clamoring to create or participant in markets for provisioning your army, directly or indirectly. (Lest they not pay their taxes and be killed by those same soldiers, of course)

While the US-dominated global economic order is more complex than this, obviously, the overall pattern is still the same. Many goods and services (oil, transport, SWIFT, and afaik also IPv4 addresses (another legacy technology like oil - moving away from it to IPv6 is extremely necessary but affects the third world more than the first...)) all require dollars. So if you want to have modern medical equipment, internet, transportation, or anything else obviously necessary for a country in the 21st century, you need to be producing something that western consumers want in some form.

The whole world is clamoring to create or participate in markets for goods and services for the US, directly or indirectly. (Lest they starve or be killed by the military of that same country, of course)

Another point about US Treasury bonds: they are the only truly "stable" financial instrument, and the reason why should now be obvious - they can only fail if the US empire, which encompasses the whole world economy, fails.

In fact this debt, rather than being a source of vulnerability for the US (as foreign debt is for other countries, just look at IMF loans and look up "structural adjustments"), it's a source of strength. While treasuries do pay the holder the principal plus interest, the fact is that for most foreign governments it is actually the opposite in practice - a form of tribute paid to the US as the imperial leader.

The Federal Reserve, the US central bank, can give loans to the US government by creating US dollars and using them to buy Treasury bonds (which remember, are pieces of debt) from the US government.

But other central banks don't have good places to safely store their mandatory reserves of dollars besides US treasuries (also for other "hard" currencies like the Euro, but this still keeps value going towards the imperial core and away from the periphery), and so:

To the extent that these Treasury IOUs are being built into the world's monetary base they will not have to be repaid, but are to be rolled over indefinitely. This feature is the essence of America's free financial ride, a tax imposed at the entire globe's expense.

And that furthermore, because these interest payments aren't particularly large, and with the effect of inflation, can represent losses for their central bank and thus host country, another form of tribute paid to the US.

There's actually a term for this kind of governmental profit. Seigniorage refers to the profit governments make when they create money: if it costs 0.80 currency units to make a bill worth 50.00 currency units, then this produces a net profit of 49.20 currency units.

For the US, it is imposing this on the whole world. It can create treasury bonds essentially for free, but buyers have to give up real US dollars for them, dollars they had to get through manufacturing shoes or cars or whatever.

If we consider again a historical example: there is a king, and he conquers neighboring regions, and then demands that they pay tribute, taxes, etc., to cover the costs of the army he uses to ensure their continued subjugation, we would say that this is an imperial relation.

@buckleybeat @barelyapersonatall @vampyrboy27

"For years Black parents believed that getting our children into better schools and neighborhoods was the surest path to opportunity. But now many of us are wondering: what does it cost to be the only Black child in the room?

Look, our kids being in predominantly white spaces can open doors. There’s no question about that. But we must understand that there is an underside to those opportunities. The question many parents should be asking isn’t just what our children gain from these spaces, but also what they might lose if we aren’t intentional about keeping them grounded in their own culture.

Let’s face facts. When we talk about raising Black kids in predominantly white spaces, we usually focus on academics and future opportunities. What we also need to discuss is what constantly being “the only one” does to a child’s sense of identity.

Research shows us that Black children as young as 10 are viewed as older and less innocent than white children. (10! They are only babies.) That means many of our kids learn early that they have to think about how they’re perceived in ways their classmates who need sunblock 3000 to go outside in the summer never do. They become experts at managing how the present themselves to others before they are even old enough to understand why.

But there is another, greater danger. And it’s something much quieter that you might not know is happening before it’s too late."

Article HERE

Hello nonblack peers! I've created this post to outline what you should and shouldn't do while interacting with this blog, as it is geared towards a Black userbase. Of course, i do not mind nonblack users following me or interacting with my posts, thats honestly unavoidable, but i wanted to lay out what exactly id prefer you do as a nonblack user interacting with a Black focused space, as we are not really the majority here.

If you dislike that this is a space focused on Blackness you do not have to be here. Please know i am not afraid to step in or call things out should i see them. This post will be pinned in polls and my pinned post from now on.

✅️ Fine, go ahead

Reblog posts.

Vote, comment, on Black characters characters vs polls.

Send in Black ocs\characters for design polls and characters vs polls.

Interact with design and representation polls

If you are a nonblack artist who draws Black characters well, and you have drawing advice for another nonblack user, i do not mind you giving tips or resources, but PLEASE dont overstep and act like you know more\better than Black artists.

❌️ Please don't do

Give your opinion as a nonblack person about Black representation: look i think its great if you can recognize good or bad representation in a piece of media, but please dont reblog or comment with how you personally feel the given Black representation is within the media we dicuss, its just not your place to say. Unfortunately, this is tumblr, I'll have to deal with it regardless but I'd like to minimize my comment sections becoming full of the voices of predominantly nonblack users. I don't mind you asking questions and generally interacting with them, but please be respectful and mindful of what you say.

Do not comment on posts about how x character "isn't Black" for lack of being human, completely unnecessary.

I will not be adding poll options for "see results" or "nonblack", please don't ask this. You will have to be patient and wait for the poll to end.

Do NOT tag posts containing the n word said by Black users from my blog with #cw slur or something, like please.

My blog, comment sections, asks, dms, or reblog tags are NOT CONFESSIONALS. Please don't dump about your racist past, family members or friends, how you used to say racial slurs, self deprecate\tear yourself down, put me and other black users on pedestals or pat yourself on the back for being "antiracist", i don't want to see that, WE dont want to see that, its not necessary or appropriate.

Please dont tag or comment about how white you are, just reblog the post or say something normal, its not funny.

reblog this post if your account is a trans safe space or owned by a trans person!

Hear ye hear ye, commissions are open once again! Now you too can have your character(s) in my style and be the coolest cat around.