Tis the Season

1. We can’t tell the future; we don’t know what lies ahead. All we can ever do is try to figure out a plan.

2. Your friends and your parents don’t know the future either. Your life is YOURS to live – don’t let them plan your life for you.

3. Enjoy what’s happening now; hang out, and do things with your friends. At least that is reality – so make the most of “now”.

4. Uncertainty and change are a big – normal – part of life. So, learn to become comfortable with “not knowing right now.”

5. Procrastination, although common, can really stop you from succeeding. Just take a step and act – regardless of the way you feel.

6. You need to learn to focus – and ignore all the distractions – for, otherwise, you’ll never really progress or succeed.

1. It’s OK to be wrong.

2. It’s Ok to try again … and again … and again.

3. Don’t be afraid to speak up.

4. Don’t be afraid to enforce your boundaries.

5. Some people really aren’t worth the effort; in the end it’s better to let them go.

That white supremacist groups are able to appeal to all these classes of white people who are marginalized on some axis is proof of white supremacy - even though these specific groups of white people may face some type of marginalization and even violence, they still align with their race because it affords them a facade of power. And look, this has been the case for hundreds of years. Poor Irish immigrants in the south (USA), who were quite literally seen as the dregs of Southern society, were not only still regarded better than black people, but they themselves celebrated that at least they weren’t grouped with black people. Unions and labor organizations routinely discriminated against black people, against East Asian immigrants, and against Jewish people - in fact, many of them were created to combat the onset of immigrant labor. Plenty of white feminist and white LGBT activists contribute their time to racist and imperialist causes and organizations to “empower” themselves. Similarly, if you’re going to tell me that I should excuse racist white neurodivergent people because “they don’t have the same handle on objective reality and are susceptible to being racist because of that”, not only are you inadvertently exposing your own ableism, but you’re also telling me that neurodivergent people of color don’t matter and that people of color should be “fine” with violence if it’s coming from a white neurodivergent person. 

wrt to the working-class cishet poc, their cishet status doesn’t really grant them grand material benefits at the end of the day. they’re still oppressed by the state and denied access to material goods. like, cathy cohen talked about this in her pivotal essay in which she criticized queer theory for this exact dichotomy (queer vs cishet) in her essay “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens”. 

whereas even if a white person is a woman and also lgbt, their race is a huge shield against certain forms of material violence that cishet men of color face despite being cishet or male. 

oppression is continuous and sustained and it’s determined by labor relations/class relations. if there is no class or race in your analysis then it is faulty. 

we have to analyze these things through a materialist lens. so for example, a white lgbt woman may be oppressed because she is denied access to material goods either because she’s a woman (so being denied employment bc she doesn’t wear makeup, for instance) or because she’s lgbt (so being denied housing, for instance). but is she susceptible to sustained poverty, or environmental/biological racism, or urban racism, or biometric surveillance, or state violence? probably not. class has to factor into this. 

a working class cishet poc who may appear neurotypical and able-bodied (i say appear bc it’s necessary to chart the physical and mental effects of poverty onto a person and that doesn’t become immediately apparent) is not less oppressed or more privileged because they have “three” or “four” privileges (cis, het, able-bodied, neurotypical). let’s say they live in flint, michigan. they are targeted by an onslaught of environmental racism that has trickled down into the very cells of their body. so in addition to living in abject poverty, which the state ignores and even exacerbates, the environmental racism that characterized the flint water crisis affects them physically and psychologically on a daily basis. this prevents them from working, from providing for their children, from saving and investing. they have low assets and disposable income. their income probably decreases because of outrageous healthcare costs and their difficulty working due to health problems. 

their supposed “neurotypical” status or their cishet status neither shield them from this violence nor gain them any benefits. on the contrary, a white lgbt woman living in a middle-class town may have “fewer” privileged identities (if you’re using the identity politics privilege chart) but her life isn’t impacted by environmental racism or police brutality or class violence, and so she can navigate her material reality with far greater ease. of course she can still be exposed to the violence of misogyny and homophobia, but that violence is quite unlikely to come from that working-class cishet poc in flint, michigan. 

we can an apply a similar analysis to the dakota access pipeline and how that is an example of the settler colonial state oppressing indigenous people. it doesn’t matter if the indigenous person in question is straight or not - their people are universally targeted by environmental racism and state violence. 

so when like you guys call cishet poc “heteronormative” or cishet moc “patriarchal” it makes no sense bc they aren’t oppressing you and if they are enacting homophobic or patriarchal violence it’s probably and primarily against women or LGBT people in THEIR community, not against white women or white LGBT people. 

sure they can be homophobic or misogynistic. but if we’re going to analyze something such as “straight” privilege or “male” privilege in their context, we’d have to compare it against lgbt poc and women of color, not against the lgbt community or women at large. and that’s when you see like cishet moc being privileged against lgbt woc. 

Rumi (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

Anne Lamott, one of the most magnificent writers of our time, talks to Salon about the hard-earned wisdom on life collected in her superb new book, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, much of which explores the uncomfortable, vital art of letting yourself be seen. 

Also see Lamott on how we keep ourselves small by people-pleasing.

(via explore-blog)

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine (via teenager90s)