Dancing in the Rain

We can't give any singular, definitive rule or answer as to how to proceed, and can only give suggestions for where to start. Hopefully this will give you a point to start asking more questions and seeking out more answers and insights from there. Our system membership is a mix fictives, original characters, and non-fictives: a significant amount of us are Black. As an additional note/disclaimer, we don't have any factives, so we lack that experience.

When it comes to Black non-fictives (and factives, where applicable) I heavily advocate for learning about the cultures and identities they might belong to. Vocabulary, accents, and languages, dialects, or pidgins are large portions of human cultural identity and are not monolithic. They vary across distance, age and time. Code-switching, assimilation, and masking are other things to examine in that realm. There are plenty of other cultural aspects that deserve attention as well: food, music, clothing, art, literature, etc. Mrs. CBC's blog here has resources for starting to learn, a good amount of her lessons can be applied in contexts other than character creation. Do research. Where possible, ask community members, support community events where you can learn more. Respectfully practice cultural appreciation and cultural humility. Other things to potentially explore are intersectional identities and those cultures. Blackness and: queer-ness, trans-ness, disabilities, migration, religion, etc. Learning may help with recognizing biases and held stereotypes. Blackness is not a monolith anywhere in the world.

When it comes to Black fictives (and original characters, where applicable) there are also many lines of thinking to explore and question. What I tend to think about, including in regards to other system's fictives or OCs are: Is a fictional character Black or do they look Black? Is their Black identity reflected within the source media? If so, how? How are they treated in the media's fandom? Note that character design alone can reveal a lot. And, many times there are Black characters in realistic fictional media who were cast/designed with a «colorblind» lens, meaning that those characters might lack depicted experiences related to Blackness. In a world full of white defaultism, this can go unnoticed. These could be considered with regard to any headmates/alters Many real-world Black experiences may not always translate to characters in fantasy or science fiction media where you can see (though it is worth examining if such experiences are depicted in minor/background/other species in the same stories. Is there cultural colorism or species-ism? Dehumanization? Colonialization, genocide, slavery, etc.?) but there still may be implications. (Another example of this might be hair: how might styles/appearances for different hair textures be represented/reflected in the media's cultures). People in our life often equate a combination/triad of appearance, culture, AND experience as what constitutes their own Blackness. These considerations might be made when answering questions like the ones listed earlier, especially «is a character Black or do they look Black?» m

Hope this all helps as a starting place to examine, learn, and ask more questions.

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/

>have safe search off by default

>need a screencap of BOTW Link swimming in his underwear

>search for “BOTW Link swimming in underwear”

>can’t find the pic, decide I need a broader search

>instead search for “BOTW Link naked”

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.