#notanightlight

Aw, thank you! 

Rules: Post a GIF that represents you, but it can’t be from a fandom mentioned in your header/bio; then tag some people thank for thet tag. I was tagged by @panpervinca

How I often feel

fic rec! 14K of gen fun-ness

Summary: Crowley deeply regretted agreeing to go to Anathema’s cookout.  He was irritated, uncomfortable, at wit’s end, and to add insult to injury... he had no idea why.  You’d think after more than 6000 years, Crowley would have already been through every indignity a demonic snake could face!  Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

Comments: This is simply a fun read, Crowley’s being grumpy and the Them being written wonderfuly as a cast of well-meaning, but kinda ridculous group of kids.

please keep in mind that it’s been literal months since I have written anything but my original story, so i’m a little out of practice. anyways, here’s some angst.

“Shit,” Dick murmurs through his motorcycle helmet, even thoughbreathing is already starting to get hard. “Shit. Shit. Fuck.”

He’s jumping off his bike before he even fully stops, ripping off hishelmet and throwing it to the Cave floor. His fingers are shaking, but thatdoesn’t stop him from clawing at the seams of his torn uniform. Everything’sgetting blurry, and he’s dizzy.

“Bruce!” Dick wheezes out. Prays he’s loud enough. He doesn’t think so.He tries again just as he finally gets his gloves off. “Bruce!”

Bruce is there in less time than it takes for Dick to fall to his assand start working at a boot. The trembling’s getting worse, and Bruce is kindof just a black blur with a head. It’d be funny if this was any other situation.He gets Dick’s other boot off much faster than Dick can, pushing away Dick’s shakingfingers to start on the one Dick had been working on.

Dick goes for his escrima sticks instead, and they clatter to theground.

“What happened?” Bruce asks, his voice low. Dick starts shovingfrantically at his uniform, can’t get it off fast enough. He’s not breathingright, though, and he’s not really in his right mind. He’s too desperate to gethis uniform off, and Bruce has to ask again, “Dick. You need to calm down andtell me what happened.”

Whoa, I agree that these are some of the nations most talked about when talking about Europe. But what do you mean, “American white people” by it? That totally depends on the part of the USA (assuming you just mean the USA) you’re talking about. The white people from the states in the area my mother came from are predominantly Swedish and Norwegian. The white people in the area I grew up in were mostly Irish, Polish, Slovakian, Czech, German, and Italian. That is massively oversimplified.

Well, that’s the thing. “White people” is a totally made-up oversimplified category.  But being made up doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Whiteness is literally what happens when you take distinct European ethnicities and feed them all into a sociological meatgrinder.

Here is the actual explanation of this photograph, taken without exaggeration or embellishment directly from its item description by The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation:

Melting Pot Ceremony at Ford English School, July 4, 1917 

Graduates of Ford's English School wearing their "native dress" descend into a large pot labeled "The American Melting Pot." After going through a virtual smelting process, the immigrant's identity was boiled away, leaving a new citizen to emerge from the pot wearing American clothes and waving American flags. In an attempt to address the need to integrate growing numbers of foreign workers at Ford's Highland Park Plant, the company established the Ford English School in 1914. The school focused on training immigrants in the English language and providing civics lessons necessary to become US citizens. Ford's English School provided basic citizenship and language training for so many immigrants, that the US Naturalization Service counted graduation from the Ford English School as meeting most of the requirements needed to take the citizenship exam. 

Whiteness as a culture, a force, an identity, is fundamentally based on the erasure of all other differences between white people. The degree to which someone can be considered “white” is, in many ways, the degree to which they have been assimilated into whiteness, which is not just about skin or hair colour.

So, to link back to the thing being discussed originally: Becoming American, or becoming white, for men, has meant leaving ethnic dress behind and putting on suits in muted colours. It has meant learning to carry themselves with a certain body language, to restrain their emotions in a certain way, to limit their body language, their expressiveness, their interest in arts or culture. This is why different groups--Irish, Russian, Armenian, Italian, Greek, or Latino--have been variously classified as “white” and “not white” over time, without actually changing that much physically; it’s about how much they’re perceived to have assimilated.

When American media wants to depict a light-skinned man as “foreign”, how do they mark him as foreign aside from giving him an accent? They make him too expressive, or too emotive; he makes too much physical contact, or his clothing is too nice or too colourful, or he cares about dance or music more than the American characters. 

That is not to say American men, or white men, don’t do things counter to the masculine stereotype. They do! Of course they do! And I applaud them for it! But they get socially punished for breaking out of their gendered roles. 

A lot of my thoughts about masculinity lately were prompted by watching a performance by a professional Ukrainian dance company, whose men do get to wear colours and be bold and flamboyant and powerful and aesthetically focused. I’ve know boys who were part of the company’s dance school, and I used to be amazed at the difference between them as your average softspoken Canadian nice white boy in English, and confident, self-possessed, brilliant performers when they talked about dance or spoke Ukrainian. It was the difference between an identity kept out of the meatgrinder of whiteness (Canadian authorities resisted Ukrainian immigrants for a long time, dubious that they would ever successfully assimilate into general Anglo whiteness) and the white identities they assimilated into to fit into society.

Looks yummy!