A Story of Coincidence and Chance

Her lips were red, her looks were free, 
Her locks were yellow as gold: 
Her skin was as white as leprosy, 
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, 
Who thicks man’s blood with cold. 

— “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

I’m sure we’ll continue to talk amongst ourselves about how to handle the current crisis. Cis people don’t get to lead that conversation. We don’t care what you think. We’re more concerned with what you do, or more often, what you don’t do.

– eastsidekate at Shakesville

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Cornel West reminds us that justice is what love looks like in public.

- Laverne Cox

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.

[...]

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.

While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.

– Nelson Mandela’s speech in support of “Make Poverty History”

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Because being an asshole is not an opinion, it’s just being an asshole.

– Mary Robinette Kowal

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Here’s Scrabble’s dirty little secret: the game is really about maximizing points and space to yield the highest return. Someone who has memorized all the acceptable two-letter words in the formalized dictionary will do much better than someone who knows how to use ‘paletot’ in a sentence. You can forget about neologisms like “eponysterical” or archaic remnants found only in the OED. Scrabble rewards efficiency, memorization and fortune, while remaining ambivalent to creativity, imagination and verve. Maximize property value, minimize artistic expression.

It’s about capitalism, basically.

– Michael Stewart, “Scrabble’s dirty secret”, rabble.ca

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.

— Alice Walker

"I love WL's [white liberals], love 'em to death. They're on our side," he had told me some days ago, defining the term. "But WL's think all the world's problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don't believe that."

— Paul Farmer, as quoted in Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains

Yes, I heard about RaceFail '09 some time after the event, and rather regret not having been there while it was going on. The category of Political Correctness is so nebulous that it's rarely very helpful, particularly because it is often used disgracefully as a stick with which to beat anti-racists or progressives. In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity—which doesn't mean the same thing as tiptoeing —but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our "intent"—we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that's how our world works, so how could you avoid it?

So I'd suggest that one should be open-eyed about the facts that the categories with which we think and write and read, are not innocent, and that we should do our best not to use them to replicate the worst aspects of the cultural bumf that put them in our heads in the first place. Does that mean being politically correct? If that is deemed to mean being conscious of and careful about the political ramifications of our writing, then surely that's the only decent way to proceed.

— "10 Questions with China Miéville"

Via silentq

If the individual remains engaged, he or she can turn the discomfort into action. Once they have an awareness of the cycle of racism, many people are angered by it and want to interrupt it. Often action comes in the form of educating others -- pointing out the stereotypes as they watch television, interrupting the racial jokes, writing letters to the editor, sharing articles with friends and family. Like new converts, people experiencing disintegration can be quite zealous in their efforts. A White woman in her forties who participated in an antiracist professional development course for educators described herself at this stage:

What it was like for me when I was taking the course [one year ago] and just afterwards, hell, because this dissonance stuff doesn't feel all that great. And trying to put it in a perspective and figure out what to do with it is very hard... I was on the band wagon so I'm not going to be quiet about it. So there was dissonance everywhere. Personally, I remember going home for Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving [while taking the course], back to our families... and turning to my brother-in-law and saying, "I really don't want you to say that in front of me -- I don't want to hear that joke -- I am not interested." ... At every turn it seemed like there, I was responsible for saying something... My husband, who I think is a very good, a very liberal person, but who really hasn't been through [this], saying "You know I think you're taking yourself too seriously here and where is your sense of humour? You have lost your sense of humour." And my saying, "It isn't funny; you don't understand, it just isn't funny to me." Not that he would ever tell a racial joke, but there were these things that would come up and he would just sort of look back and say, "I don't understand where you're coming from now." So there was a lot of dissonance... I don't think anybody was too comfortable with me for a while.

My college students have similar experiences with family members and friends. Though they want to step off the cycle of racism, the message from the surrounding White community seems to be, "Get back on!"

— Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?"