lost on the road of life

Just like I said. Illegal adoption.

https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1010399759088193536

Completely unfit parents can get their children back like it’s nothing and this poor woman who loves her child and just wants him with her again cannot? How is this not human trafficking/kidnapping? 

Also:

The judge said the biological mother had no rights to even see her child, according to the mother’s lawyer.

I tend to favor a branching structure of teaching. Conversations act a bit like building blocks: seemingly heading in new directions, but still connected to what came before it. Last week my students were discussing inspiration porn, which led to the influence of viral content more broadly, which led to memes, which led to the latest memes, which landed us in a conversation about Marie Kondo.

“Does it spark joy?” came a voice in the back, just a hint of derision in the tone. I’m not even sure anyone else caught it, focused as they were (or at least, pretending to be focused) on the lecture I was giving. Looking back, I can see that it was a missed opportunity. I mean sure, I mentioned the recent, racist backlash against Kondo, but it didn’t become the focal point of the conversation in the way that it perhaps should have. I had too much else to say about arguments and ideology’s connection to humor, the persuasively fast-paced world of our online spaces, and the importance of allowing minority groups to speak for themselves. This semester’s class is a class on disability, not racism. I moved on, despite the fact that intersectionality is a Thing That Exists and I now regret that choice.

Let me remedy that here.

So let’s be real. If a man had come up with “sparks joy” or, more likely, a white woman? We’d be seeing it all over Etsy and the only criticism leveled its way would have come with a healthy dose of fond indulgence. You all just don’t like a Japanese woman telling you what to do.

Prior to Marie Kondo’s Netflix series (and mainstream “exposure”), her books were very popular, especially with a certain subset of (predominantly white) upper-middle class women.  For years, there were numerous positive articles and thinkpieces written on her KonMari method.   She was perceived as nonthreatening so long as she remained a vague concept, a quaint and exotic flavour of housekeeping.

It’s extremely telling that the backlash against Marie Kondo coincides not just with increased visibility, but specifically her visibility as an ethnically-Asian woman speaking for herself, without compromising on her identity or choice of language.

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34 year old me’s brain: remember when you were in 2nd grade and you told your teacher that her nose had the same shape as your grandma’s