Just strip yourself of every shred of personality, individual desire, and imperfection as judged by random dudes who probably feel entitled to sex in reward for them being nice (and don't be Asian), and the dream can be yours! Keep reachin' for those stars, truckasaurus.
Just strip yourself of every shred of personality, individual desire, and imperfection as judged by random dudes who probably feel entitled to sex in reward for them being nice (and don't be Asian), and the dream can be yours! Keep reachin' for those stars, truckasaurus.
Not only stealing them and presenting them as their own, but stealing them from cultures that they have and still do treat pretty horribly. The reason dressing up as Sexy Pocahontas for Halloween is wrong isn't just that it's taking someone else's culture and then using it to play dress-up, it's that it's taking someone else's culture after spending hundreds of years systematically stripping their culture from them, denying them rights, and treating them to racism and brutal violence, and then using it to play dress-up. It's a culture not being okay for the people who are born to it, and thus oppressing and stigmatizing it, but that same culture being fun and awesome for white people to slip into like it's a funny hat so they can take a picture and then go back to their lives where they suffer none of the actual damage and prejudice that people who can't take off their culture suffer.
I'm just glad that I, as a woman, know what NOT to be if I want to snag a man (as is my only function in life), and that is: old(er than 30), mildly self-actualized, or Asian outside a fetish website. Thanks, men! Thanks MenKind.co.uk! You really make it so easy.
I'm really enjoying the idea of the Leo's Ladies Book Club, where they read things like Ulysses and The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, and then sigh and regretfully mark their places, remove their glasses, change into super high and uncomfortable shoes and shake out their ponytails when Leo says they're on.
Sometimes, when I'm really sad and a little drunk, I consider tracking down my high school crush to demand that he finally return my copy of The Neverending Story with the really cool cover, because the one I got to replace it after he never gave it back is just not the same.
Aaaand one more. We had Girl Scout Olympics every year when I was a kid and they were on the track at the local community college. There was a low fence between the field and the track, with only two gates, one at either end. I decided I didn't want to walk all the way down to a gate, so I climbed up the fence, sat on the top, and tried to hop down on the other side. Except the back hem of my shorts caught on the fence, so I just hung there with my feet in the air, kicking and struggling, until my shorts ripped and dumped me on the ground. The rip was several inches high and I was wearing hot pink zebra-print underwear. I had to run track events with one hand in my back pocket in a vain attempt not to flash everyone.
My senior year of high school, I was out with a group of friends including the guy I was desperately in love with. Everyone else left and it would be just the two of us as I drove him home. So of course I accidentally walked knee-first into my bumper and racked myself across the hood of my car, feet off the ground and everything. Then he fake-casually mentioned he had a girlfriend. Good night!
I once scored a goal in soccer with a headshot, but the only reason I scored was because I was looking up for the ball and forgot to turn my head back down, so it smacked me in the face and then casually rolled into the goal when the goalie fell down laughing at me.
Thanks, KajusX, and yes, I hesitate sometimes too because it's like an instant "HALT" button on polite discourse and instead turns into endless "you don't know me, how dare you call me racist" circle jerking. It's maddening.
And hotspur, "racist" only carries a ton of accusation with it because white people generally do not like and react with defensiveness and hostility to the suggestion that they've benefited from anything other than their own hard work. Personal experience doesn't mean much in discussions of things that are racist because racism ISN'T personal. Prejudice is personal. Racism is institutionalized inequity. We are all subject to that, and act it out in individual ways, but that does not make it an individual action. And yes, when our individual actions shore up the system of institutionalized inequity, those actions are racist.
I understand why you have trouble with it and with what you feel is jargon, but those terms mean something, and when the conversation becomes more about making people comfortable with the discussion of racism rather than about the racism itself, that's both a problem and also an effect of that institutionalized system of inequity, that you get to mold the conversation to suit you, and if it's not, the conversation isn't had.
I have trouble being all that sympathetic to the griping of a group that has systematically excluded people and currently expends huge amounts of energy antagonizing and acting hostile towards people who they don't deem legit enough. I don't know that I agree that there's real pain in downtrodden (white male) nerds that isn't also experienced (if not experienced far more harshly) by many other actually marginalized groups that nerds haven't been especially welcoming towards.
Or maybe it's more that we as a nation need to stop having such a kneejerk response to the word "racism" as if it's accusing someone of being individually awful and hateful towards non-white people, rather than a symptom of a national inequity based on hundreds of years of oppression. The vast majority of discussions on racism these days circle around how awful it is to say someone is racist or has done or said something racist, rather than around actual racism. They're centered on proving something is racist as if in a court of law, and considering all interpretations, and avoiding deeming something racist as much as possible.
"Racist" isn't always a personal evaluation. In fact, I'd say it's MOSTLY not a personal evaluation. It's both a product and a by-product of an inherently imbalanced system that works in incredibly subtle and insidious ways to maintain centuries-old power structures. If you do not "see racism" in something, the vast majority of the time it's because you do not HAVE to see racism in it, because you are the default race, you unknowingly benefit from the maintenance of those power structures, and you've never been in a position where you have to notice them. Someone pointing that out to you is not an insult or a horrible accusation, it is the truth. And forcing someone to prove their lack of privilege to you because you've never had to notice it before is a huge part of your privilege.
Well, but if it didn't point out at least SOMETHING about Jamaican-ness to SOMEONE'S eyes, it wouldn't have been made. Some people wouldn't think it's funny and defend it. And considering that it trades explicitly on a picture of Jamaica and Jamaicans that was fostered deliberately to make it so white Americans weren't afraid to go there and spend their money, it's certainly indicating something about non-Jamaicans.
This is presenting being Jamaican as a) something simplistic and inaccurate, b) a way to chill out and be happy, as if there are no issues or problems with being Jamaican in America, and having a distinct accent and being publicly perceived as something of a caricature, which is primarily restricted to black Jamaicans, no matter how much we want to hand-wave about "not all Jamaicans are black!" and c) as a costume or performance routine. And it's one thing for Jamaica and Jamaicans to do that, but it's quite another for a bunch of in-all-likelihood white, well-off executives to do it so they can sell their cars to people.
There are about a thousand ways to indicate that the car can make someone relaxed and happy and fresh from vacation without trading on anyone else's ethnic or racial identity, and it's the fact that THIS was used instead of any of those other things that makes it racist. If you call someone a racial slur in the heat of the moment, even though you don't typically display any racist sentiment otherwise, a) that doesn't make the slur any less racist, and b) it's worth shining a light on just why that was your instinct, with the wealth of non-racial or ethnic epithets available to you in this fine, expressive language of ours.
That's my life motto, get up early every other day (but never today, because today isn't any OTHER day - get up early tomorrow, get up early yesterday, but never get up early today).
I contacted the guy at Skylight about the book club, by the way! Not sure if I'll be able to slam through Ada, or Ardor, but I'll definitely do the next one!
You were sittin' there,
all red and white and true.
But I really should have known
you'd make me only blue.
I fell for your all your schemes and lies,
you hid them from my sight,
while you were living a double life
in Europe as Coke Light.
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