diamondphobic

0/700

0/20,000

Her CashApp

As she glared at me, her face became contorted with anger, suffused with blood, and her breathing grew rapid. For a moment, I was stunned into silence, because nothing had prepared me for her reaction. After all, freedom of speech and academic freedom are sacred in this country. I was also a bit surprised that a white academic whose discussions and syllabus had events no interest or expertise in the matter should lecture me, and experienced African American medical writer, about health communication with African Americans.

She proceeded to inform me that there had been no medical research utilizing African Americans before the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, certainly not in the antebellum past, and when I asked her how she knew this, she countered, "Can you prove that there was?" When I responded simply "Yes," she disgorged a clumsy inquisition, unleashing a barrage of questions that showed she knew nothing about the subject at hand. I responded that my work was well researched and that she had raised an interesting question:

Was it indeed my work that would make African Americans wary of health care and medical research? Or had the work of those whose abused I proposed to chronicle already achieved this? The answer was all too obvious… Black Americans did not need me or anyone else to inculcate a fear of medicine. Medical history and practices had long since done so.”

if you'd rather buy a plushie - here's the shop he and his wife run!

Unusual names

Likes yellow/orange clothing

Warriors that defend Earth from evil

Strong sense of justice

Guns

Orphans

Canonically fantastic cooks (probably cuz they’re orphans and had to learn to cook for themselves)

Befriends a lil creature that can shapeshift, and they are essentially their lil siblings that they greatly cherish

Seen as the older sibling figure of their group

Original lore dump person

Would like to be surrounded by family and friends (probably cuz again, orphans)

Clowned by their respective fandoms for being “cocky” during a major fight that fans claim was the cause of their demise. Nothing in either original source materials implies that was ever the case

Despite their deaths being treated as the tragedies they were, fans overly meme, again, to mock them for their supposed overconfidence

Their deaths may have greatly traumatized their teammates

They could have done more to emphasize that for sure, but when you see how they style it, you can't say this is straight hair. Literally no other character's hair looks like this

The only times the studios lean HEAVY on giving her straight wavy hair is when they straight up whitewash her. They try to make it appear "big" cuz the animators I guess figured Aisha's hair back then looked bigger than the other girls', not understanding it's cuz they were afros. That's why her hair was so volumous.

It was probably more recognizable in her concepts. Regardless, it's executing the same idea - she actually has Black hair when compared to the other girls

are you defending (in this instance) Irish Catholics as a proxy to give yourself grace, to lump yourself in with "the good ones?"

what you're actually doing is absolving yourself of action and self-reflection. that discomfort you feel about white people perpetrating racism is asking you to do something to bring your actions into alignment with your values. instead, you're discarding this feeling by doing some feel-good mental gymnastics to ensure that there is a narrative that gives you an escape hatch, an assurance that there are good white people in the world (ones with whom you identify).

instead, let your discomfort guide you to do something real because if you're not actively standing up against fascism and its children, you're laying down to get stepped on. here are some real things to do:

donate to support the people who have been attacked, displaced and traumatized in racist attacks in Belfast:

don't have money to spare? find local organizers, join them, triage immediate needs in your community, then play the long game to move the Overton Window towards inclusive values. i do not want to hear any wailing about how nothing you do matters, no one will do anything, etcetera, etcetera; these are more mental gymnastics that allow you to give yourself permission to to do nothing

don't have time, money, or energy to spare? go to your local library and pick up a book to educate yourself and build empathy:

no access to a library? do the internal work and pick apart your own internal biases about race (i'll give a starter question for reflection: why did you feel compelled to respond to a post about violence against Black people and immigrant communities by centering white people?)

The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

I was being facetious with the trick part lol but you know the joke "I might be racist, but you're mean and that's worse?" It's the root of that. We discussed it back when we read White Fragility. You can see it in Trump, Elon Musk, and your average Tumblr racist:

They really, REALLY want to be liked. Not just liked, no that's not the right word, but validated.

Think about it this way. Racism is the status quo; the default, right? Part of maintaining that default is through normalization, and that includes the solidarity necessary to reinforce that (DiAngelo called it white solidarity).

So, if being covertly racist is the status quo, then that means you will be socially rewarded for being so. When you get rewarded, people are nice, friendly, relatable, they keke and haha right alongside you. But when you confront someone's racism, you're not socially rewarding them anymore- the spigot of validation has been paused! Instead of taking it as a valid critique, you are seen as socially punishing a person. You're being MEAN, because the validation I got from everyone else's also-racism was NICE!

That's why when you confront racism, you HAVE to stand firm on it. You cannot feed into the desire for the validation of their behavior. That's what makes a lot of people snap. The blowup is meant to stop you, to force you back into compliance! The only one being punished really is you for bringing it up.

And hell, if not socially validating a bigot is punishment... 😐 Why would that be... A bad thing? We're not hitting you with rocks, we're just saying we don't fuck with you and your behavior. (But that's also a part of really all of the books we've read in #cbc book club so far; that antiracism is seen as violence.)

i really don't have the words for how things have escalated to outright race riots in the last few weeks. just to collect a few of the stories the bbc is reporting in their live thread:

Families led to safety through flames (Dan Johnson) Homes were targeted and burned. Families had to be led to safety through the flames - rescued by emergency services risking their lives in the most dangerous situation. It’s what the authorities feared all day. What they warned against and pleaded not to see. The condemnation came quickly and was widespread. It wasn’t just homes, cars were also torched by young masked man in these predominantly unionist streets but the target here was immigrants and the message to entirely innocent families was: "You’re not welcome". In the north of the city, more people were forced to flee including an African family who’ve lived here for 20 years.

People being put out 'because they're black' - pastor A pastor who has been helping those in houses targeted in tonight's violence says people were being put out of their homes "because they're black". Pastor Jack McKee was at the scene where multiple houses were on fire around the Crumlin Road in north Belfast - he says some members of his church "who have been with us for 20 years" were "getting put out of their home, had their house attacked, windows smashed, houses beside them burned". "They're good Christian people and they're getting put out just because they're black," he says. "I'm doing my best to help them, it's as simple as that." [...]

Masked men shouting 'foreigners out' (Kelly Bonner) Last night on the Lower Newtownards Road in Belfast hundreds of masked men walked down the street carrying bottles, bricks and masonry. They set bins on fire and shouted "foreigners out". As they walked street to street, they were banging on doors, kicking doors down and breaking windows. Masked man set cars alight and at one point I witnessed them trying to burn a car until a woman came out of her home and told them it belonged to a "local and not a foreigner" and they stopped. A young family had to be moved from their home by police. The scenes of this young family fleeing their home were really quite shocking.