irresistible-revolution:

my late night thots no one asked for are that richard and amsha bashir truly loved julian and did what they did out of a deeply fearful, anxious love born from living in a technotopia where people who get to do the coolest things have to be super smart and brainy in a very narrowly defined way. furthermore the fact that they wanted to enhance his genes speaks to a deep sense of shame and self-hate within both of them (and we can speculate how this shows up but, for one thing, it’s clear there’s a class difference between amsha and richard and that richard is constantly trying to measure up to his perceived lack and hurting people in the process) that deserves more nuancing in fic, especially when we consider how the “eugenics wars” were concentrated in the global south and therefore most likely impacted the regions richard and amsha hailed from. 

and finally, if we factor in richard’s inferiority complex about his class and race and masculinity with amsha’s pained grace and regretful acquiescence we can see why julian dons a mantle of snobbery and hauteur in order to project self-assuredness (like richard) while keenly aware that he’s wrong/imperfect/guilty (like amsha), and how all of that is also tangled up with the shame he feels about not being good enough without his augmentations, while also resenting the fact that his parents both gifted and cursed him with these talents.

tldr; the bashir family story is often contextualized through ableism and parental homo/transphobia but, imho, only fully makes sense with an intersecting racial and class framework. ableism and homophobia can’t be decoupled from race (the history of european race science is the easiest example of how race was long used as a shorthand for intellectual deficiency) and, in the case of these three characters, what we see unfold onscreen is just as much a story of immigrant/model minority transgenerational trauma as it is a story of how ableism and homophobia damages parent/child relationships. richard and amsha are also, in their own way, responding to ableism, is what i’m suggesting. and their love for julian is always shot through with their own self-loathing and anxieties around failing societal expectations. 

irresistible-revolution:

bakasara:

irresistible-revolution:

it’s like…not to be that person but it’s suspicious, alarming and depressing how throughout the show julian’s character is almost never allowed connection to other characters of color or his own racial heritage in a meaningful, sustained way, and the one time we get to see an indelible connection to brownness - i.e him being the son of two brown people - the ensuing storyline immediately hastens to douse that connection in mistrust and criminality such that we’re encouraged to think julian’s only link to brownness is one that’s maybe better repudiated entirely and idk i just. can’t vibe with it.

interestingly one of the more recent episodes I watched in the rewatch is Far Beyond The Stars and I feel like the issue you bring up and FBTS are two sides of the same coin.

without at all dismissing the merits of fbts when it comes to the writing of Sisko/Benny, it was so frustrating to see Julius/Julian entirely cut out of the conversation in the Racism Episode About Racism. This was a context where the writers would be reminded of Julian’s brownness as they navigated the writing of the episode, and when faced with the opportunity/pressure to engage with it, their response in the face of something they couldn’t reduce to pre-existing discrete categories they were familiar with was complete avoidance.

I felt like Julius projected so much discomfort from the writers in terms of placing him within a discourse of racism and of racial representation in fiction. In the episode he’s often left without a contribution to make to the ensemble scenes, and he feels tacked onto the group of in-story writers (as in Kay, Macklin, Herbert, etc.). Among that group of six, the narrative space Julius occupies is the only narrative space that isn’t put in any express relation to racism and racial representation. He is the only character of those six to be completely excluded from naming/discussing racism+racial representation explicitly (even Macklin/Miles gets commentary about his own relationship to racism and racial representation in fiction, even though he doesn’t make the comment himself). The most we get to signal that Julius has stakes in the conversation is one comment about representation in general/of other categories (namely women, and it’s a negative comment that is never challenged), a suggestion that Benny open his own publishing company, and some mounting irritation towards the end when Douglas fires Benny - the difference with everyone else in the group being, again, that unlike the others none of it is put in explicit relationship with racism.

Because the writing is perfectly capable of making Julian’s britishness salient to the character (and often does so through a western conception of heroic imagery, e.g. bond, battle reenactments) but typically refuses to make his brownness salient at all, by the time DBIP comes around there is no celebration of his brownness to contextualize what happens in the episode. Hiding behind “colorblind” writing makes it so that the one time his brownness is brought up, it’s in relation to familial abuse and crime, and Julian is given no other chance to show a positive connection and intimacy with his brownness as you say. Similarly, hiding behind “colorblind” writing actually means he is written as white throughout the show, e.g. OMB, and eventually that fallacy becomes an excuse to avoid engaging with his relationship to race, white supremacy and media representation in the “issue episode” that focuses explicitly on these themes. To the paradoxical effect that he is singularly excluded from the conversation altogether while the other black characters and the white characters are allowed and granted poignant commentary.

yes! all this. also, i say that bashir is “brown” (even though the actor’s half sudanese and his sudanese family are black, which would technically make him black too, though i’m not sure siddig identifies that way or has felt like he can) precisely because this is how “brownness” usually shows up in the western cultural imaginary: either as racially unmarked, vague exoticism that provides a buffer between blackness and whiteness, or criminality/danger/threat - i would say for most of the show bashir is in the former category while the augment storyline places him firmly in the latter EXCEPT the writers aren’t interested in unpacking how “a brown man cheated his way into starfleet by being inhumanly smarter than all these regular folks” aligns perfectly with anti-affirmative action narratives and xenophobic discourses about brown people in STEM. siddig has stated in interviews that they were trying to make him the next spock/data/seven of nine - well, none of those characters are brown and so their bodies don’t signify the same way bashir’s does onscreen.

another, earlier episode where this happens is “Past Tense” (which i liked, because we get so few sisko x bashir episodes - another way the writers’ racial bias shows up) where bashir is absolutely confounded by earth’s history of violent classism. now i get that part of what makes the episode work is the older sisko informing younger bashir about “history.” but why wouldn’t bashir be familiar with, say, britain’s thatcher era? brown people in britain have faced and continue to face violent racial repression. why wouldn’t bashir, who has two brown parents, not have any context or framework for any of this? (i did like that they didn’t give bashir a white parent because there’s a lot of interesting and complex history of brown people in africa, but again - just because siddig said he didn’t truly feel arab until after 9/11…why doesn’t bashir have any awareness of racial history?)

i’ve mentioned it before but i do think bashir wanting to be “raceless” would have been an interesting facet of his character that even ties into his augmentation, and again - the pre established lore is there! the “eugenics wars” were concentrated in the global south, particularly parts of africa, asia and the middle east. it would have been astonishingly simple to connect bashir’s desire for colorblindness to his and his parents’ shameful, dangerous connection to that particular racialized history - a history that’s a huge part of trek, and that’s even briefly invoked in the same episode where they reveal bashir as an augment!

FBTS was a huge missed opportunity when it came to exploring bashir as someone who’s specifically racialized, although i appreciate what the episode did accomplish wrt to blackness and afro-futurism. i think that episode should’ve been a two parter though, which would have given them more time to flesh out the different characters. i also know that avery brooks was an older, experienced actor who made specific requests and choices around how sisko’s blackness would signify, in a way that i’m not sure the younger, less experienced siddig was empowered or self-actualized enough to do at the time (though i find his disdain for the augment storyline, specifically the attempts to make bashir into the next data, super interesting and perhaps an early manifestation of his own frustration with the writers’ racial blind spots?)

anyway, there’s a lot more than can be unpacked in a single tumblr post. i’ll just end by linking this excellent, excellent essay by british-somali poet momtaza mehri on the vexed histories and modernities of blackness in the arab world, specifically this quote which seems on point for bashir’s chaarcter: “The difficult pleasures of incoherence cannot be reconciled with until they are articulated.”

bogleech:

dimetrodone:

People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves 

Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

• Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.
• “Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.
• “Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.
• “Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.
• Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.
• People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.
• No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.
• Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.
• Some of us did, however, cross-breed with Neandethal man. It is exclusively non-African races, such as white people, who still carry hybrid human/Neanderthal genes. Whoops, sorry “white purity” skinheads, you’re actually mixed with a whole other species.

iwriteaboutfeminism:

Moderator: “On a personal front, what racial blind spots do you have?”

Bernie Sanders: “Well, let me just very briefly tell you a story. When I was in one of my first years in Congress, I went to a meeting downtown in Washington DC and I went there with another Congressman, an African American Congressman. And then we kind separated during the meeting and I saw him out later on and he was sitting there waiting, and I said, ‘Well, let’s go out and get a cab. How come you didn’t go out a get a cab?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t get cabs in Washington DC.’ This was about 20 years ago. Because he was humiliated by the fact that cab drivers would go past him because he was black. I couldn’t believe it.[…] I’ll tell you another story. I was with some young people active in the Black Lives Matter movement. Young lady comes up to me and she says ‘You don’t understand what police do in certain black communities. You don’t understand the degree to which we are terrorized. And I’m not just talking about the terrible shootings that we’ve seen, which have got to end, and we’ve got to hold police officers accountable. I’m talking about everyday activities where police officers are bullying people.’ So, to answer your question…when you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or you get dragged out of a car. And I believe that as a nation in the year 2016, we must be firm in making it clear we will end institutional racism and reform a broken criminal justice system.”

chekhovandowl:

maffypop:

katniss-everbeans:

lordbape:

Stop saying Caucasian to mean white lol besides the fact that it’s literally not correct to use them synonymously, it’s 2016. just say white. It’s not offensive, Caucasian is not the “more appropriate ‘pc’ way of saying white” and it’s not what you actually mean to say. Say white in 2016

I’m in a master’s program at an HBCU and SO many people were using Caucasian in place of white in their papers that my policy professor sent out a mass email including a map of the Caucasus region and a full explanation of how to correctly use the term Caucasian.

can someone explain the difference? as a white person I do not ever think about my own race

The term Caucasian comes from the Caucasus mountains!

As you can see, it’s sitting nice and tight between the Black and Caspian sea, and it’s chalk-full of all kinds of countries which contain people that are not the same as European white people, although in some countries they might benefit from passing white. 

Anyway, the people that live here are actually people that have a cultural and ethnic identity - Hellenic, Armenian, Iranian. For example, Ossetian people

Or people from the region of Crimea, which some people might recognize from recent political coverage. 

So, you might be asking “well, why do we say Caucasian when we really mean West-european descendants?”

There’s an answer! This was an old carryover from the taxonomy if the Olden Days when the races were divided into “Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid” races. We have since stepped away from this classification in anthropological studies, but the Caucasian term remains in use for some frustrating reason.

The issue, however, is that it’s simply not logical to use it for yourself unless you are literally a descendant of one of the caucasus peoples. If you’re European, and want to emphasize that point, say European! Heck, you can even say “Nordic” if you are particularly proud of that part of your heritage and you happen to come from a Nordic country, or “Slavic” if you happen to come from a Slavic country.