social justice warrior
If you think that representation doesn’t matter, that’s probably because you’re already represented.
I did a thing
WAY too accurate
I get each and every one of these arguments on a daily basis, and sometimes I just have to laugh to keep from crying.
LMAO
DISCRIMINATION AGAINST NERDS IS JUST LIKE RACISM
I THINK I HEARD THAT ONE THIS WEEK…………………….
next time i get into one of these. I’m going to pull out this bingo card and start playing.
LETS JUST AGREE TO DISAGREE…
It’s easy to do that one when your “opinion” isn’t hurting you.
This is how this shit works:
- When a person of color says that they hate white people, they hate white people as an institution (aka white supremacy/hegemony)
- When a woman says that they hate men, they hate men as an institution (aka male dominance/patriarchy)
- When a queer person says that they hate straight people, they hate straight people as an institution (aka heteronormativity)
- When a trans* person says that they hate cisgender people, they hate cisgender people as an institution (aka gender essentialism/rigid gender roles)
SO WHEN ANY OF THESE PEOPLE SAY THAT THEY HATE ANY OF THESE GROUPS, DON’T RESPOND WITH “NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE/MEN/STRAIGHT/CIS PEOPLE ARE LIKE THAT”. WE KNOW THAT. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU PERSONALLY. IT’S ABOUT INSTITUTIONS AND THE WAYS IN WHICH THEY, AS INSTITUTIONS, OPPRESS US. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
why isn’t there a STRAIGHT pride parade?? why isn’t there WHITE history month? why isn’t there an international MEN’S day!? why isn’t there a hospital for WELL people?? why isn’t there a soup kitchen for RICH people??!?
When we call out some of the things you say or do, its not because we hate you, its because we like you and we want you to be even better. And honestly, accepting where you are getting complacent and pretending that you have nothing to learn and no where to grow, That doesn’t help me or any LGBTQ person I know. If you’re going to be an ally you are going to have to be willing to do that, you have to be willing to listen to us if we say “hey this is not cool, this is not okay” . It’s not because we are attacking you or think you are a bad person, we want you to be a better person, we know you are a good person, we know your heart is in the right place, we want you to wake your mind up…..
“
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- Eshu’s Playground That wasn’t even the most beautiful part of the video….it gets deeper … If there were any misquotes I deeply apologize. (via swanloves) *blush* I said that? (via eshusplayground) Though sometimes I really just don’t like the person tbqh. (via sanityscraps) |
Dear Liberal Allies – what your college courses on oppression didn’t tell you
I’m not angry or upset about anything in particular at the moment, but I thought I’d take a little time to write something out that had been bugging me about allies. It’s certainly not all-encompassing or totally comprehensive, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about in terms of being a good ally and a good neighbor, especially here on Tumblr.
Before you step in to help us out, I’d just like to clarify a couple things.
You and I, we may have taken the same seminars and maybe even read the same Audre Lorde excerpts or Ronald Takaki books, but know this: we learned very different things in very different ways
For students of color, for gay students, for trans* students, for the children of immigrants and refugees, these classes aren’t always about learning new concepts when it pertains to us. It’s more about learning the names of things we already knew fairly intimately. Do you understand that? You learned it another way. You went in, you got this set of key words and a list of definitions. Your learning was, in all likelihood, “Here is this word. This is what this word means.”
For you, it was “Xenophobia: a strong fear or dislike of people from other countries.”
For us, it was “Xenophobia: the time that boy in my kindergarten class spat on me because I couldn’t speak English yet. Or when I saw that clerk yell at my mom in the grocery store because her English wasn’t clear enough. Or when USCIS had us confirm our American citizenship with the same set of papers seven times over the course of sixteen years because they wanted to confirm that we were, in fact, actual American citizens.”
For you, it was, “Racism: unfair treatment of people who belong to another race; violent behavior towards them.”
For us, it was, “Racism: that one time I saw that manager tell that sales girl to follow my dad around at Kohl’s. Or that one time my neighbor’s kid got shot by the police and they tried to cover it up by convincing everyone he was in a gang because he was Hmong, but we knew he wasn’t. Or that one time my dad told me I shouldn’t rollerblade to the library because I’m not white and it’s not safe for me.”
For you, it was, “Homophobia: a strong dislike or fear of homosexual people.”
For us, it was, “Homophobia: that time in the sixth grade when Ryan shoved me against a glass door and banged my face in it while yelling, ‘faggot!’ at me until the teacher stopped him. Or when my Catholic high school’s president told me that, though he loved me as a child of God, he still believed I was sinful when I suggested that we start a GSA.”
For you, it was: “Classism: prejudice or discrimination based on social class.”
For us, it was: “Classism: that one time when my best friend came over to hang out in high school and her parents didn’t want her to come over again because they didn’t like our neighborhood. Or that one time when my friends had no idea what food stamps looked like and I was too embarrassed to explain what they were.”
So while you were learning that these academically-framed phenomena were real problems, we were just getting little figurative nametags for awful things that we already knew. Your weekly vocabulary list was, to us, just a hollow shadow of our lived experiences.
So my point is this:
If you didn’t live an experience, then step aside. Because we knew this stuff before our professors told us what to call it. We learned it from the bottom up, you learned it from the top down, and that’s not even a metaphor.
When you step out of class, you get to be like, “Oh, awesome. I am learning how to be a good ally and a better human being. This will help me.” For us, it’s more like, “Ah, so that’s what they’re calling it nowadays. When exactly did they say change was going to come for us?”
So in practice, here’s what all this theory looks like: you don’t always have to speak. I mean, certainly, you should totally call someone out on their oppressive bullshit. But if you identify as male, you don’t get to tell people what is best for women as though you have that authority. If you’re white, you shouldn’t be trying to “uplift” people of color by the grace of your intellect or your words. Nobody’s looking to be ‘rescued’ or ‘pulled up from out of their unfortunate circumstances’ as you may be tempted to believe.
All anybody’s looking for in an ally is someone who knows that “empowerment” means taking a step aside in a place where you know you have privilege. And if it is, for example, a PoC-to-PoC conversation, a woman-to-woman conversation, a queer-to-queer conversation, etc. about this stuff, and that isn’t who you are, you don’t need to be chiming in.
Just take our word for it, let us talk, and let us vent. We’d like you to give us room, and if you have to be helpful, then help make room for us by giving up some of your proverbial social girth.
Because the bottom line is that our academia has made a commodity of our lived experiences as teaching moments for you. And if you think your academic knowledge is more valid than our lived experiences, then you’re definitely not part of the solution.
Much love.
If you speak in an angry way about what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people, what does he call it? Emotionalism. Pick up on that. Here the man has got a rope around his neck and because he screams, you know, the cracker that’s putting the rope around his neck accuses him of being emotional. You’re supposed to have the rope around your neck and holler politely, you know. You’re supposed to watch your diction, not shout and wake other people up— this is how you’re supposed to holler. You’re supposed to be respectable and responsible when you holler against what they’re doing to you. And you’ve got a lot of Afro-Americans who fall for that. They say, “No, you can’t do it like that, you’ve got to be responsible, you’ve got to be respectable.” And you’ll always be a slave as long as you’re trying to be responsible and respectable in the eyesight of your master; you’ll remain a slave. When you’re in the eyesight of your master, you’ve got to let him know you’re irresponsible and you’ll blow his irresponsible head off.
And again you’ve got another trap that he maneuvers you into. If you begin to talk about what he did to you, he’ll say that’s hate, you’re teaching hate. Pick up on that. He won’t say he didn’t do it, because he can’t. But he’ll accuse you of teaching hate just because you begin to spell out what he did to you. Which is an intellectual trap—because he knows we don’t want to be accused of hate.
And the average Black American who has been real brain-washed, he never wants to be accused of being emotional. Watch them, watch the real bourgeois Black Americans. He never wants to show any sign of emotion. He won’t even tap his feet. You can have some of that real soul music, and he’ll sit there, you know, like it doesn’t move him.
And then you go a step farther, they get you again on this violence. They have another trap wherein they make it look criminal if any of us, who has a rope around his neck or one is being put around his neck—if you do anything to stop the man from putting that rope around your neck, that’s violence. And again this bourgeois Negro, who’s trying to be polite and respectable and all, he never wants to be identified with violence. So he lets them do anything to him, and he sits there submitting to it nonviolently, just so he can keep his image of responsibility. He dies with a responsible image, he dies with a polite image, but he dies. The man who is irresponsible and impolite, he keeps his life. That responsible Negro, he’ll die every day, but if the irresponsible one dies he takes some of those with him who were trying to make him die.
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Malcolm X The traps of racism. Source: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/malconafamhist.html (via disciplesofmalcolm) This shit is real familiar, isn’t it? So for all the white people who wanna roll up on me and other folk who they have deemed “SJ bloggers” and try and attack out humanity like we have no clue what tactics they’re using…please realize this: Malcom X done seent yo ass before you were even born. And if you don’t think this is basic knowledge to us, think again. (via thinkspeakstress) |
*THIS*
People are going to point out problematic stuff. The correct response is not to whine and complain and tell them to stop “ruining” everything.
Truth.
The closest I ever got to a Disney movie starring characters that look like me and theoretically don’t cause some sort of disconnect is The Jungle Book which was based on a story written by a big dumb racist and is all about some idiot kid raised by animals and it doesn’t really require a big stretch to see my issues with that
The closest that black people ever got stars a girl who spends well over 75% of the movie as a frog
It’s fun as a kid to be able to place yourselves in the shoes of the protagonist but when you’re not white, the ethnocentric nature of the world effectively others you and you spend the rest of your life struggling with that dichotomy
You grew up not having to think about that so when you do see it you’ll exclaim “keep your social justice bullshit out of my Disney” and other moronic and fallacious catchphrases
The truth is you guys have gotten well over half a century of animated stories to relate to and honestly, not even being confrontational, it’d be nice to see some change there
