listen… i’m a lesbian and i know full well what oppression based on love is like… but i wish white gay folks wouldn’t act like sexuality is the only reason anyone’s ever felt that
there are people in my family who’ve been disowned because they married someone of a different colour to them… i’m mixed race and the very concept of my existence would’ve been illegal in the us when my parents were born. the supreme court only ruled against discrimination of mixed-race marriages in 1967! that’s barely 50 years ago. homophobia is an awful thing to experience and i know that from first hand experience but i’m begging you to remember that gay people aren’t the only ones being killed for who they love. please remember the struggles faced by Black and brown people when you talk about oppression. please have some solidarity with your nonwhite friends (especially your nonwhite gay friends!) when you talk about dismantling the systems that keep us alone and isolated. please remember the horrible history that is anti-miscegenation laws when you talk about equal marriage rights, because they aren’t just for white gay people.
Queer men can be notoriously racist when it comes to their dating “preferences.” “No Asians” or “No Blacks” are disturbingly common sentiments in dating app profiles, even today.
The gay and queer community may have a rat’s nest of hang ups when it comes to our self-esteem, our relationship with masculinity, and how we treat each other as human beings, but it sometimes can feel like our relationship with race is the thorniest of all.
That makes dating much trickier for queer people of color.
Will fandom ever run out of ways to call healthy interracial ships wrong in some way, whether comparing it to incest by calling them siblings, calling it abusive/toxic, or twisting the creators’ words to insist it’s an obsession a character needs to get over?
VIDEO SHOWS HOW DANCING IN PUBLIC IN THE POLICE STATE IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH
Brendan Carter was on his way to see his sick uncle last week when he was detained by multiple security officers in the public RTS bus station in Rochester, subsequently assaulted by police and arrested — all over his dancing.
According to Carter, he was waiting for the bus to visit his uncle who is in the hospital. Apparently overcome by emotion, Carter said he put his headphones in and started dancing to avoid crying. This dancing got the attention of DHS employees and security officers at the station.
Carter had a bus pass and was breaking no law when the officers approached him. As he explained, when he was told to leave for no reason and the officers put hands on him, Carter became angry. However, as seen on the video, he never once became violent.
He was immediately accused of being drunk (which is not a crime, even if he was) and he was told to leave. A scene ensued after the initial confrontation as Carter refused to leave because all he wanted to do was get on the bus to visit his uncle.
Rochester police were quickly dispatched and the already tense situation would only explode from this point.
After he agreed to leave, Carter began walking out of the station. However, the officer was on an apparent mission to intensify the already-delicate situation.
When the officer arrives, instead of talking to the young man to get his side of the story, or letting him leave like he was doing, he immediately escalates to violence by grabbing Carter and then presenting his taser.
Within seconds, Carter is tasered, physically assaulted, slammed to the ground and arrested.
The entire scene was captured on video by NY Black Panther chapter member Daryl Appleberry. Had Appleberry not been there, this scene could have gotten far worse. Perhaps that is why we hear the RTS security officer’s radio go off, “Annie, get this guy out of there with the camera behind you. Get him out of there!”
Carter was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and trespassing. He was in a public space.
Higher math being a requirement to graduate high school is fucking insane and has pretty much no parallel in any other subject. Science, history, english, ect. all focus on giving you general knowledge on a wide variety of topics, but no, you’d better be able to do this advanced calculus formula that’s useful in only one (1) specific situation if you want that diploma. It would be like if 1/5th of your graduation exam depended on you being able to recite detailed facts about the biology of New World frogs entirely from memory.
Wait where is this Earth 2 where high schools are requiring advanced calculus?
Also wait what- calc formula? Calculus is mostly just learning integration rules. That’s like saying “division formula”
I think this is one of those situations where, because all of us, at some point, went to high school, it’s easy to think that we all have an understanding of “what high school is like”, when we really have just a deep but narrow understanding of what our personal high school experience was like, heavily filtered through things like geography, race, class, etc.
In the real world, the lack of access to advanced math coursework is a pressing civil rights issue and has a serious impact on everything from the (standardized testing) achievement gap to the continued under-representation of black and latinx people (especially women!) in STEM fields.
The links above are two short Atlantic articles, but the articles quote from the Office of Civil Rights at the Dept of Education’s report on the topic….however, the link is dead because that article was from June 2016 and the Office of Civil Rights at the Dept of Ed no longer exists.
I also absolutely reject the idea that because a lot of people struggle with math the solution is to teach less math and let more kids!! (kids!!) take fucking wood shop as their math credit instead of investing in better math instruction. Anyone is capable of mastering high school math and the belief that some people are just “not math people” or “not college material” is so toxic….if for no other reason than because of how smoothly our society is able to assign the quality of “not a math person” to the people we already have stereotyped as less smart or labelled as less worthy of access to power.
So between the white woman who called the cops on a black family having a BBQ in a park, the white man threatening to call ICE in nyc on Latina women for speaking Spanish, and a white woman literally yelling for the cops while screaming “gun!” on a black man for making a u turn in their neighborhood should educate us all that white people are realizing that institutional racism is real but they are using it for their own white supremacist social benefit.
They are calling for the authorities knowing that the cops will take their side and will either arrest or murder people of color for simply being seen or heard.
I know we’re all terrified by America right now, but you need to know what is happening in Britain, there’s so much shit going on, but here’s some of the highlights:
The UN have condemned the British government for “grave” failures regarding disabled people’s rights. [x]
There are over half a million people using food banks, because they cannot afford to eat. [x]
The benefits system is declaring people fit to work, ignoring the opinions of their doctors, and refusing them money unless they spend 35 hours a week actively looking for work. These include people with severe disabilities, mental health issues, and people who are literally dying. In fact, around eighty people a month die within six weeks of being declared fit to work by this system. [x]
16.7% of the population is living in poverty, with a further 30% at serious risk of slipping into poverty [x]
Children are suffering from such severe malnutrition they’re having to be treated for rickets. [x]
It’s currently estimated that 1 in 200 people in the UK are homeless. [x]
This is just a tiny snapshot, and I won’t even go into the NHS crisis, because that deserves it’s own massive post.
We’re now deporting people who’ve lived and worked here for decades. We invited a load of commonwealth citizens over, starting in 1948, with the arrival of HMS Windrush, and they became known as the Windrush Generation, but though they were given indefinite leave to remain we didn’t give out any damned paperwork until after 1971 so we’re kicking them out now that they’re old and not paying taxes, despite the fact that most of them came over as children, and that they made lives here, and worked to support this goddamned racist backwater of a country for decades. [x]
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