"Keeping things the way they are because that’s just how you’re familiar with them is problematic, due to most everyone in comic fiction being a white, cis-gendered guy. It’s not an overtly racist distinction you’re making, which is why you seem to feel you’ve come to it without prejudicial racial bias (“similar conclusions can be reached by different arguments”), but it actually IS racist by way of exclusion. “Don’t do something directly racist, but also just keep things how they’ve always been” is racist [and heteronormative, and sexist, and cis-sexist, and so on] because “how things have always been” are white, cis-gendered, and male. Therefore, you prefer things to stay white, cis-gendered, and male. The world has changed, but you want these characters to persist as vestiges of an outdated, slanted view of society." — Comics, casting, and race (via monkeyknifefight)
(Source: jhenne-bean, via monkeyknifefight)
"Most girls are stupid"
In last week’s Game of Thrones, Arya told Tywin Lannister that “most girls are stupid.” When we heard that line, were we supposed to think, “This is why Arya is awesome”? After watching The Prince of Winterfell, I can’t help but think that the answer is “yes.” While the books series presents a huge range of dynamic and well-developed female characters, the show writers seem determined to edit the story so that all normal women seem weak and worthy of disdain. Girls, like Arya, who fight to throw off femininity and become “one of the boys,” are the only ones who are really strong or worthy of respect.
Although some of the show’s changes to the story have been positive and potentially even improve on the novel, many edits in the last few episodes have reduced the series’ selection of varied, challenging female characters into cliches and walking confirmation of the idea that “most women suck.”
(via monkeyknifefight)
i wonder what george zimmerman had in his system when he shot that child.
OH WAIT WE’LL NEVER KNOW BECAUSE THE COPS WERE TOO BUSY DRUG TESTING THE DEAD PERSON AND NOT THE MAN WHO FUCKING SHOT HIM
#if you smoke weed it’s cool for somebody to murder you pass it on
(via oldcharethcutestory)
"People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse." —
Boom.
(via plays-with-squirrels)
(Source: mehreenkasana, via squintyoureyes)
Self-Defense and the Criminalization of Survival
It was just announced that CeCe McDonald, who was being charged with two counts of second-degree murder in an incident of self-defense, has just taken a plea-deal—second degree manslaughter with a recommended 41 month sentence. CeCe McDonald’s sentencing hearing will be in a month.
But Ms. McDonald isn’t the first young Black trans woman to be thrown in jail and aggressively prosecuted for surviving a violent attack on her life. Unfortunately, without real systematic change, she isn’t likely to be the last either.
It should be no secret that young trans women of color (TWOC) are being murdered at alarming rates. This is a social problem largely ignored by most people, including the media, the service/nonprofit sector and government. But this is something people in the affected communities can’t afford to ignore.
But attacks on the lives of TWOC don’t go without resistance, and when TWOC resist sometimes their attackers end up dead. This was the case with Ms. McDonald, but it was also the case last year with Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman currently serving a four-year sentence for “manslaughter” for stabbing her boyfriend in self-defense when he beat her with a baseball bat.
Jackson, a Detroit native, moved to the California Bay Area where she became an advocate for young TWOC. She was a Program Specialist from TLISH (Transgender Ladies Initiating Sisterhood), a transgender youth program where she spent her time counseling young women about housing, government assistance, and employment.
If Ms. McDonald and Ms. Jackson weren’t Black trans women it is likely that their cases might not have ended up differently. By being criminalized for their survival, these two women share something in common with many other women of color, including the New Jersey 4, a group of Black lesbian women who were attacked in the New York City’s West Village and later aggressively prosecuted for defending themselves. The attacker fully recovered, but the women were forced to serve time.
It’s a sad irony that we promote self-defense classes as a way of combating violence against women, yet many of the women of color, trans and cis alike, are currently imprisoned precisely because they fought back against violence in their homes and in the streets.
Too often trans and queer women of color survive violence in their homes and on the streets only to have the police, courts and prison-industrial complex come after them for having the audacity to survive in a world where, as Audre Lorde said in her poem “A Litany For Survival,” they “were never meant to survive.”
(via squintyoureyes)
just a twinge of cosmic angst
k, 20s, canadian. here you'll find a lot of emotional instability towards doctor who, tones of awesome ladies (fictional or otherwise) with other fandoms popping up here and there. idk what text posts are.
sometimes i make graphics and gifs
