One of the most important things you can teach your kids is when and how to say no to authority figures.
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stop worrying about keeping your books perfect. cracked spines? so good. dog-eared pages? even better. pages that are yellowing and falling out? fucking beautiful. underlined passages and notes written in the margins???? THE BEST. well loved books have so much character and charm. mint-condition books aren’t the ones that warm your heart to see in a used bookstore.
I’ve decided I’m done being embarrassed of dumb shit I did 5+ years ago. That’s backstory, now. It’s Lore
Trying to explain a felony charge to a prospective employer
getting over your hatred for pink is self-care
I love that we’ve all had this shared journey of falling in love with pink and realizing that it’s ok to like pink
This was wonderfully hilarious
Working video link: https://youtu.be/5WTkJHHF4B4
this is like the ideal job
This is just an average preschool.
I want to see this from the perspective of the non-horror-movie new kid.
i think an important thing for people to understand, especially with the rise of gatekeeping in the community, is that labels are for personal use
and like, human sexuality and gender is complicated! most people don’t fit perfectly into their assigned box! but they still have the right to call themselves what makes them happiest!
attracted to like 98% women, 2% men, but still consider yourself bisexual? you’re right to do so, you’re still attracted to multiple genders!
attracted to 98% women, 2% men, but still wanna call yourself a lesbian? that’s a valid choice, you feel way more attracted to girls and that’s fine!
aro/ace but you had a crush one time? a lot of us do! you’re still aro/ace and don’t have to choose a different label if you don’t want to!
aspec somewhere but can’t figure out where you fall because sexuality is confusing? i get that, dude, you’ll figure it out! you don’t have to find the perfect label right now if you don’t want to, just focus on being yourself!
trans but sometimes feel like your assigned gender? that’s okay! you don’t have to re-question your identity if you don’t want to, you know what gender you are, self doubt and sometimes feeling different don’t get to say you’re not!
genderfluid but spend most of your time as one gender? that’s fine! the fluid part is still an important part of you, it deserves to be recognised!
not inconvenienced by your assigned gender, but feel like the whole concept is bullshit and would rather go by they/them pronouns? that’s fair, it is a bit bullshit, go you!!
anyone else i haven’t mentioned who experiences this? same goes for you too! i love who you are and i hope you can also love being who you are, and it doesn’t matter if you fit someone’s definition of that or not. we are a community built on being different, on standing up for ourselves in the face of people telling us who we are is wrong. it’s not wrong, and all of your labels, however many you want, be it 10 or 0, they’re important to you, and no one gets to take that away from you
The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.
To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.
The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.
White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.
So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”
At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.
White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.
TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.
