werpiper:

ghettablasta:

For more than two years, Clarise Coleman faithfully attended every track practice and every cross-country meet for her son, Chase.

A few weeks ago, Chase, who is a nearly nonverbal autistic child, was running in a meet in Rochester, New York, with his team from Corcoran High School - was assaulted by a stranger in the middle of a race.

Coleman was waiting for him at a part of the course where runners would come down a hill but he didn’t appear and she went looking for him. She was shouting his name and then she started to meet people who pointed in the direction of her son. One of them said:

“I see a grown man, who is quite tall and fairly heavy … exit the vehicle and give this young man a shove that puts him back 10 feet and flat on his butt. Like, just shoved him across the road. The kid didn’t seem to be doing anything but standing there, obviously had nothing in his hands and weighed all of 130 pounds. This guy was easily twice that.”

This tall white guy was a 57-year-old man named Martin MacDonald who told the police that the reason he attacked the Black kid was he thought Chase was going to mug his wife and take her purse.

“My son is a minor. [MacDonald is] a grown man,” Coleman said she told police. “He put his hands on my son. Of course I want to press charges.”

However the police was deaf and on Oct. 21, Rochester City Court Judge Caroline Morrison sent a letter to the Colemans that shocked them: 

She had denied their warrant application, and MacDonald would not be charged for second-degree harassment.

Now the autistic Black boy refused to go to practices and skipped running in his last meet of the season. He turned his running uniform in to his coach, who gently encouraged him to change his mind. Chase refused.

“We just keep telling him, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. Chase is good. There are mean people and there are nice people and this person was just a mean person,’ ” Coleman said. “We just keep apologizing to him that happened. Especially me. I kept apologizing to him that I couldn’t keep him safe.” 

The attack deeply traumatized him and he lost one of the few things that gave him a sense of pride and belonging.

Please, make a shout out to this outrageous accident! The white man still didn’t receive any punishment for ruining life of the Black boy. THIS IS HELL!

#StayWoke #BlackChildrenMatter #WhitePrivilege

this is the saddest :(

fleetwoodmac-andcheese:

scribblings-of-a-madcap:

thefuzzhead:

aspacelobster:

goddammitstacey:

I’ll be the first to admit I thoroughly enjoy all the “holy shit, Australia” posts that circulate around here but I feel like there’s a very important caveat when it comes to the discussion of swooping season that no one seems to mention.

For those not aware, swooping season is when the magpies start to nest and turn into mini dive-bombers comprised of talons, feathers and spite. It’s not fun. I bled heavily after a particularly vicious swoop when I was a kid, and I’m definitely not the only one.

But here’s the thing: swooping is not an innate behaviour. It’s a learned one. I realised this the moment I moved out of home and began my decade long (entirely unintentional) habit of moving to a different suburb every two years. 

I’ve met a lot of wildlife, walking everywhere as I do. And I’ve met a lot of magpies - hella intelligent creatures that are probably thinking “what the fuck is this chick doing” every time I say hi to them as I walk past.

When I first moved out of home, I automatically started taking notes on areas I saw magpies in preparation for swooping season. It was just the done thing. It wasn’t until September came and went and the magpies in my area continued their quizzical but otherwise completely non-aggressive behaviour that it started to twig with me.

The next few years of moving around solidified my suspicions.

Anytime I lived close to a school or in an area with a high concentration of families with young kids, the magpies would swoop. Any suburb (usually inner city) with a high concentration of childless households and/or share-houses: no swooping to be seen.

And it’s any goddamn wonder.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve yelled at kids for messing with wildlife. I grew up in the outer suburbs, so there was no shortage of mini-assholes with an empathy shortage. Australian kids will poke anything they can reach with a stick, and throw rocks at everything else. Including birds nests.

Magpies are intelligent as hell, and they remember shit for GENERATIONS. Some human-shaped fucker throwing rocks at them and their nests? That’s something that’d stick.

So anytime you read one of those “lol the birds try to kill us here” posts, remember: it’s not the birds that started that shit - it was the asshole humans.

country magpies don’t swoop

@enthusispastic

Adding on to the fact that magpies are super intelligent:

In primary school there were these really huge gum trees in which a family of magpies took up residence one year. 

(an important thing to note is that I grew up in the country with A LOT of magpies -that were basically like relatives for the amount of time they spent on the veranda- and never encountered any swooping)

So one morning walking in to school I noticed that all the kids ahead of me were giving the really huge gum trees a wide berth, with other kids shouting warnings from the buildings. Being an airy-headed little kid, I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were actually saying, so I just kept walking straight under the trees.

Nothing happened.

I got to the buildings and asked why everyone was making a big fuss about the trees, and one of my friends just pointed back the way I came and said “the birds!”

And sure enough, any of the other kids that tried to walk under the trees got immediately swooped and chased to what the magpies thought was a good distance from their nests.

Magpies not only remember humans that are mean to them, but they recognise humans that have been given the seal of approval by other magpies.

For the last 40+ years there’s been a rapidly growing family of magpies at my grandparents house.

The lady next door would feed them every morning and they would do that beautiful warble. After she died my grandad started feeding them. Everyday.

They come to the same place everyday and wait for him, he used to take my sister and I as kids to help him feed the magpies and it was honestly a highlight of our visits. He still does it with our younger cousins.

They’ve never swooped anyone in the family, they scare off cats that try and get in my grandmas garden and they sing for my grandparents everyday.

Last year my grandad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He sometimes forgets what he’s doing and what he was saying and repeats conversations over and over.

Sometimes he’s late to feed the magpies, and they wait. It’s kinda like they know. They’ll come right up to the house and gently tap on the window to remind him, and he’s so happy to see them and feed them.

Magpies are beautiful birds, and anyone that thinks otherwise is probably a dick to them.