eveewing:

“I think of too many of my white graduate students at Harvard who somehow feel perfectly comfortable calling me by my first name, but feel reluctant to refer to my white male colleagues– even those junior to me– in the same way. And I think about how my black students almost always refer to me as ‘Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot’ even when I have known them a long time and urge them to be less formal. The title indicates their respect for me, but also their own feelings of self-respect, that part of them that gets mirrored in my eyes. And besides, if their mothers or grandmothers heard them call me by my first name, they would be embarrassed; they would think that they had not raised their children right. So I completely understand when one of them says to me (n response to my request that he call me Sara after we have worked together for years), ‘I’m sorry, that is not in my repertoire, Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot.’

 
These private daily encounters with white and black students are punctuated by public moments– too numerous to recall– when the humiliation of being called by my first name seems to demand an explicit response; when I feel I must react to the assault not only for my own self-protection, but also in order to teach a lesson on respectful behavior. I regard these public encounters as ‘teachable moments.’ I make a choice to respond to them; a choice that I know will both help to shield me and render me more vulnerable.

A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference at the University of Chicago, a meeting for social scientists and their graduate students about race, class, gender, and school achievement. The other speaker was Professor James Coleman, a distinguished sociologist, a white man several years my senior who was well known and highly regarded for his large-scale statistical studies on educational achievement. Both of us came to the conference well prepared and eager to convey our work to fellow scholars. The language of the occasion was full of the current rhetoric of our disciplines; focused, serious, sometimes esoteric and opaque. I say all this to indicate that there was nothing playful or casual about either of our presentations. Neither of us said anything that suggested informality or frivolity. 

When we had finished speaking, the moderator opened the floor for questions, and several hands shot up in the air. The first to speak was a middle-aged white man who identified himself as an advanced graduate student finishing his training at another prestigious university. He began, ‘I would like to address my question to both Professor Coleman and Sara…’ I could feel my heart racing, then my mind go blank. In fact, I could not even hear his question after he delivered the opening phrase. I saw there having a conversation with myself, feeling the same rage that my parents must have felt sixty years earlier in Jackson, Mississippi. How can this be? How can this guy call him ‘Professor’ and me ‘Sara’? And he has no clue about what he has done, how he has injured me. I’m not even sure that the others in the audience have heard what he just said; whether they’ve recognized the asymmetry, the assault. Somehow, I must have indicated to Jim Coleman (we were friends and colleagues) that I wanted to respond first. He must have seen the panic in my eyes and my shivering body. I heard my voice say very slowly, very clearly, ‘Because of the strange way you addressed both of us, “Professor Coleman and Sara,” I am not able to respond to your question. As a matter of fact,’ I say, leaning into the microphone, holding onto it for dear life, ‘I couldn’t even hear your question.’ The room was absolutely still. I was not sure that there were any people out there who had any idea how I was feeling, any idea that I was on fire. But my voice must have conveyed my pain, even if the cause was obscure to them. ‘Would you please repeat your question?’ I asked the man, who had by now slid halfway down his seat, and whose face revealed a mixture of pain and defiance. ‘And this time, would you ask it in a way that I will be able to hear it.’ …My ancestors were speaking, reminding me of my responsibility to teach this lesson of respect; reminding me that I deserved to be respected.”

- Prof. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration, Chapter 2

battlships:

linamishima:

00queer:

valteuil:

00queer:

00queer:

it’s been 0 (zero) days since someone last reblogged one of my posts and tagged it #q slur

im not joking when i say i insta-block people for doing this btw. i have had enough of that shit. recognize it as a queerphobic microaggresson and stop doing it or stay the fuck away from my queer ass

how is it a “queerphobic microaggression” to tag words that have frequently been levelled against LGBT people and have the potential to trigger them

we’ve been over this a million times but i will give you a very quick tl;dr

its queerphobic because no other reclaimed slur is treated the same way that queer is treated. like as an example, there are no people pushing for any posts with the word gay in it to be tagged as “#g slur”, yet it is a word that is used just as much like a slur as queer is.

and i have personally been attacked by being called “gay” far more than queer. but i dont ask people to tag their identity as a slur. because i recognize that it would be homophobic to do so.

yet somehow, it is totally okay to shit all over queer people, and if you’re called out on the queerphobic behaviour you call it “”””queerphobia”””” in quotationmarks to invalidate it. nice. /sarcasm

if people need the word blocked, they can blacklist the word itself. either by xkit or tumblr saviour or similar. they can blacklist “queer” and check “don’t show why post was blacklisted” and boom. no queer posts on their dash. no need to reduce queer people’s identities to a slur with a queerphobic tag.

and there are other browser extensions that are not tumblr-exclusive that can replace one word with another - for example they can replace “queer” with something that isn’t triggering. and if they installed something like that, they wouldn’t even need to blacklist any posts. because to them, the word queer would not be shown.

what i’m saying is that the tag is not necessary to help people protect themselves. all it does is cause harm to queer people by telling us that our identity is a dirty slur and nothing more.

And let’s be honest about this. The groups that most commonly self-identify as queer are:

Trans people

Bi people

Ace people

LGBT people of colour (disclaimer: this is working off things I’ve seen others write, rather than personal experience. PoC community input very much desired!)

For all these groups there are VERY good reasons to prefer to use the word queer, especially given the tragic levels of biphobia, transphobia and racism in many LGBT communities, and the near total erasure of asexual/aromantic/otherwise ace people.

To brand all usage of queer as a harmful slur and only ever a harmful slur is to explicitly discriminate against the above groups.

Can we also talk about how people then tell bi/pan/ace/etc. that we can’t use the word “gay” as an umbrella term because we don’t solely experience same-gender attraction?

amonqthieves:

rninyoonqi:

aperfectexampleofsarcasm:

new cool meme: find out what each of ur names mean and then shove them together

im white enchantress woman who works with stone

Im the flat-chested son of Jens

i’m the crown that surrounds an angelic messenger of unknown origin

weavemama:

weavemama:

all jokes aside, I really hope you all have a great last month of this god forsaken year. this has been one of the hardest years socially, politically, and emotionally…we deserve at least one good month

except for trump supporters of course, they can choke