Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is
Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is
Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and
hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my
last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody
ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I
could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian
accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without
missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and
Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
I’ve worked with many exchange programs on campuses, and they still “encourage” Chinese students to choose English names for their stay in the US. I’ve adopted a rule for myself, I won’t address them with their English name until they’ve told me to stop trying their real name on at least three different occasions. My family is largely immigrant, and while we’ve never had this problem, I don’t think anyone should have to change who they are when them find a new home, even a temporary one. So far, only two exchange student actually wanted to keep their English name, and one of them, Alice, had had Alice for a nickname since she was little.
Don’t know if it’s okay to add this here, but I used to work with a Chinese woman who had changed her name to Angelina for the sake of ease. When she first told me that was what she’d had to do, I asked her for her real name and if she minded me calling her that. She looked so frikkin happy, and it only took about two minutes for me to say it right. It’s not that people can’t pronounce these names, it’s that they won’t. It’s lazy and it’s rude.
It’s also RACIST.
Say ‘racist’.
They pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger just fine.
Twitter deleted her thread. Reblog to save it. #Love it!
Deleted a thread detailing American History?… Of course they did. After all, it’s only, ever, ‘History’ if it paints a shiny, heroic, picture (blacks need not apply). Everything else hits the editing room floor because… -What IS this weeks excuse anyway?
‘Offensive Language’?… Nope. ‘Offensive Graphics’?… Uh-uh. ‘Hate Speech’?… None of that EITHER. ‘Reverse Racism’?… If Unicorns are real.
WAIT! I KNOW!!… How about White Supremacy?!?!… Yeah, that’s it.
Y'all remember to sit up straight when that flags waving an the National Anthem starts playing, K?
Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
Fox host says Colin Kaepernick should stop protesting because he has two white parents.
On Monday, Fox host Brian Kilmeade took the criticism against Colin Kaepernick to a new, bigoted level, suggesting the quarterback should be grateful for his life in the United States because he was fortunate enough to be raised by two white parents.
Kaepernick’s parentage does not erase his experience as a biracial American — and Kaepernick himself has addressed the issue of his adopted family and racial identity before. Maybe Kilmeade should hear the story about Kaepernick being profiled while on vacation with his family.
Pretoria Girls High School students are fighting back against a racist dress code.
When Pretoria Girls High School in Pretoria, South Africa, put restrictions on how women could wear their hair, they probably didn’t expect this response. But the students are not taking these covert racial tactics lightly.
Boys and girls alike, including 13-year-old Zulaikha, are taking a stand with protests, demonstrations and a petition with more than 18,000 signatures. But it’s not just the dress code they’re fighting, students also claim the school restricts their language.
So Jewish girls, Islamic girls and hispanic girls get made fun of for having thick eyebrows their entire life, but when a white girl draws on eyebrows to look thicker it’s, “#eyebrows on fleek!”?
So black and Latina girls get made fun of for having big lips their entire life, but when a white girl draws on to look really big it’s, “gorgeouss and inspiring”?
So black girls get made fun of for having braids or dreadlocks their entire life, but when a white girl does it’s, “just a style and they can do what they want with their hair”?
So Islamic girls get made fun of for wearing bindis/henna/hijabs, but when a white girl does it’s, “totes coachella”?
So Native American people get mocked for their ancestors wearing headdresses or feathers, but when a white girl does it’s, “artsy and cute”?
Does anybody else notice a pattern??
We need to call the Leslie Jones hack what it is: an act of sexual violence, a hate crime in the form of revenge porn.
Revenge porn, which is criminalized in at least 34 states, is the publication of explicit material featuring someone who did not consent to having their likeness shared.
It’s crucial not to trivialize this attack as if it were a celebrity scandal. Jones doesn’t have any “leaked nudes,” as most headlines are saying. She is not a DJ who accidentally posted a new track before the album dropped. Her private photos are stolen property.
As a single black woman in the public eye, Jones’ sexuality was already highly scrutinized. In wielding intimate photos as a weapon against her, hackers undermined Jones’ bodily autonomy.
Furthermore, it’s important to recognize the racial dimensions of this crime. The Telegraph reported the hackers uploaded a video of Harambe, the internet-famous gorilla, onto Jones’ website — a blatantly racist symbol that attempted to mock and dehumanize Jones’ black body.
Jones is not the first celebrity to be the victim of hacking and revenge porn, but few have been victimized quite like this.
for real. reading the history of the laws (the many laws) written to keep blacks away from anything empowering is quite dizzying and housing discrimination was a big one. laws keeping and taking land from blacks go way back (for example) and as society progressed, it morphed to fit the times. nowadays it’s housing discrimination and it’s rampant.
Shonda Rhimes needs to make a show for Black kids and let him star.
How ironic. I was just talking about this.
This shit is serious. Gentrification is an issue. Housing discrimination is real.
True stories: -A Black family moving into a suburban neighborhood actually would lower the prices of homes. Because all the White people would try to move out as soon as possible. -If the new suburb was next to a non-White neighborhood, a fence could be put up “for safety” to instantly raise property values. -Have you heard the term redline/-ing? It refers to the practice of corporations color coding a region and not investing in or refusing service to those from certain (red) areas. These were usually poor Black neighborhoods. This included refusing those in redlined areas access to jobs, loans, medical care, etc. -Many older developments that were predominately home to poor PoC were destroyed with the promise of a new development or a suburb. This almost never happened and left the country with a shortage of affordable housing that still exists today. -“Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. More than 98% went to whites. Of the 350,000 new homes built with federal support in northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than 100 went to African Americans.” http://newsreel.org/guides/race/whiteadv.htm
White people whose family has owned homes since the mid 20th century: The financial success and safety of our families and ourselves is completely based on racism. Never forget that.
This needs more notes. People need to know just how this society made it a point at every turn to hold (and still hold today) Black people down for the benefit of whites.
A huge part of white wealth was created through real estate. A sector that Black people were systematically kept out of. A sector now where Black people are still preyed upon.
White real estate agents also took advantage of racist white homeowners with a practice called blockbusting, where they would encourage them to sell their homes at a loss with just the hint or promise that a black family (or sometimes Jewish or nonblack PoC family, depending on the region) was going to move in.
There were also footnotes on the actual deeds for many houses in white neighborhoods, stipulating that the house was never allowed to be sold or rented to a nonwhite occupant (Jewish people were nearly always considered nonwhite for these purposes). Called restrictive covenants, these were demanded and upheld by white homeowners associations, often with the real threat of violence.
Racist housing discrimination is as American as apple pie at a baseball game.
and this brings us to the current situation where the supreme court is going to take a look at the “Disparate Impact” rule of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. What disparate impact rule does is keep people from trying to discriminate against protected groups in America though subtle means. In our society, racism is very subtle especially when it’s corporate. So instead of putting out a sign that says “whites only” in front of building, a landlord can simply refuse to entertain people with a “Black” sounding name. In doing so they can say that their screening process has nothing to do with race but yet their process negatively impacts Black people and under this rule would be considered illegal. Another example would be banks deciding to issue loans at a higher interest rate to people in a certain part of town and claiming that doing so has nothing to do with race when in fact they are well aware that said part of town is populated by mostly Black people. So again, not blatant, quite subtle but under the disparate impact rule illegal. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the legality of this rule and, given their history of gutting civil right protections, could very well strike it down. If that happens, the flood gates of housing discrimination will be wide open and Black people, above all, are going to get hammered.
The case the Supreme Court will here is actually a great example of the subtle racial discrimination and racist practices the rule was made to fight. A Texas state agency awards low-income-housing tax credits to certain developers; a high percentage of this housing winds up being occupied by minorities. The agency, without giving a legitimate reason, granted the tax credits disproportionately to developers who own properties in impoverished, minority-majority neighborhoods. A fair housing group sued, insisting that the agency’s practices had the effect of keeping minorities trapped in minority communities while helping white communities keep minorities out. Simple. A subtle action was taken that had huge negative affect on minorities because where you live is everything in this country. From access to public transportation, healthy foods, clean air, emergency services, well resourced schools, playgrounds, cleanliness and etc are all affect by where you live and if an action is creating a circumstance that keeps a group of people locked in areas where those elements are below average, there’s a problem. Racism and discrimination in this country is subtle as fuck but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and shouldn’t be fought. What the SCOTUS is going to do is anyone’s guess but I’m not optimistic. We could very well be looking at a long period where Blacks (as well as other minority groups) are going to be preyed upon more viciously than we’ve seen in a very long time.
There’s a bunch of re-blogs of this without the caption, smfh. DO NOT REMOVE THE TEXT ABOVE!! THERE IS VITAL INFORMATION HERE!!!
