Tag: isms

tashabilities:

hylianears:

micdotcom:

Canadian music festival takes huge step against Native appropriation

Follow micdotcom 

From their announcement:

For various reasons, Bass Coast Festival is banning feathered war bonnets, or anything resembling them, onsite. Our security team will be enforcing this policy.

We understand why people are attracted to war bonnets. They have a magnificent aesthetic. But their spiritual, cultural and aesthetic significance cannot be separated.

Bass Coast Festival takes place on indigenous land and we respect the dignity of aboriginal people. We have consulted with aboriginal people in British Columbia on this issue and we feel our policy aligns with their views and wishes regarding the subject. Their opinion is what matters to us.

Niiiiiiice

This is cultural bias in effect. General (generally white) audiences never question why characters are white and blond. If a character could be white, that’s usually justification enough. Whiteness as default becomes logical and comfortable. Only non-whiteness requires an explanation.

Indeed, if a character is not white, some people will cry out that their racial identity is the product of political agenda-driven tampering. If a character is white, the same people will comfortably assume that he or she came out of the box like that.

It should be noted that we’re not even talking about the broad US census category of “white”, which covers people whose families hail from Europe, North Africa or the Middle East — including many people with tan, olive or ruddy skin.

In comics, whiteness is predominantly represented by the pale pink complexions of Northern Europeans — the color once problematically referred to as “Flesh” on Crayola crayons, until Crayola changed it to “Peach” in 1962. Real world white comes in many shades, but in comics all white people seem to trend towards hex color #FFCFAB. (Individual colorists may of course bring more nuance to their work, but how many white superheroes can you name who are consistently portrayed with bronze or olive-toned skin?)

Superhero comics don’t actually favor whiteness; they favor a subset of whiteness that borders on Aryan idealism. We ought to regard that as uncomfortably fetishistic, because it’s an aesthetic that the industry has chosen.

All fiction is manufactured. Authors make their worlds and choose what goes in them. It is always possible to contrive a fictional justification for a character looking whichever way the author wants, up to and including finding a way to make a white person the hero in a story about, say, feudal Japan, or ancient Egypt, or Persia during the Islamic Golden Age. A white hero is not the most likely scenario, but it’s always a possible scenario, so in that way it always becomes justified.

The decision to cast Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch has been called out by message board posters as evidence of an agenda at work — but white heroes in these non-white settings are rarely called out as similar evidence of an agenda. It’s all artifice, it’s all contrived. Fiction exists in service to an author’s design. All fiction serves an agenda, whether it’s articulated or not.

Andrew Wheeler, “Radioactive Blackness And Anglo-Saxon Aliens: Achieving Superhero Diversity Through Race-Changing” (via fyeahlilbit3point0)

maghrabiyya:

darvinasafo:

WITH RESPECT TO THE BROWN FAMILY WE SHOULD REMOVE PICTURES OF MICHAEL BROWN SLAIN IN THE STREET.

#respect

as far as I know I haven’t shared any of the pictures of Michael’s body, but I’m reblogging this for my followers who have.

thisisnotblackhistorymonth:

lightspeedsound:

psl:

cali-cocaine:

I wonder…

pretty tired of people equating a lot of the names Black Americans give their kids, with being ghetto or ratchet. And really, it all seems to be targeted at Black girls and women. All of those names have roots spanning across various parts of Africa, Asia, and the Arab nations.

Since I obviously have to school the Original Poster, and the 90+ people who liked and reblogged this before me (including the person I’m reblogging this from); get out ya pens n notepads, kids..class is in session:

Laquisha is merely one of a handful of derivatives of the name LAKEISHA.

La – being just a prefix

Keisha – being the root name (and spelling) of Queisha. Ergo the name La-Queisha/Quisha

It’s a peculiar name overall, in that it bears multiple origins; African (Bangi/Bobangi and Swahili), Arabic, and Hebrew.

• In Bangi, Queisha means – ‘favourite’

• In Swahili, Lakeisha means – ‘favourite one’

• In Hebrew, Queisha is most likely the variant of KEZIA, meaning – ‘cassia tree’ CASSIA is the generic name for a variety of trees and shrubs, one of which produces cinnamon. So Queisha is often interpreted as meaning ‘cinnamon’, too.

Further still, it being Hebrew, affords it some Biblical roots. Kezia/Keziah was the name given to Job’s second daughter, who was born after his sufferings (Job 42:14). Interestingly, her name has been seen to symbolise female equality; since Job’s three daughters shared equally with their brothers, in their father’s inheritance (Job 42:15). This was against the custom of things back then. Women did not receive an inheritance, nor could widows claim their deceased husband’s assets. In short, Keziah and her two sisters represented freedom and equality for women, in a time when such a thing was unheard of.

• And in Arabic, Lakeisha means – ‘alive’ or ‘she who lives’

so before you dummies look down on us for our names, keep in mind that their roots date back further than where majority of your great-great-great grandparents can trace their lineage.

We are not jokes. We are not cognitively deficient. And we are certainly not here to appease your ridiculous standards and expectations for what a child’s name ‘should’ be. We are not ghetto, and our names are not rachet. Our names have meaning, and they have soul.

Perhaps next time you feel to make a joke at the expense of our culture, just keep in mind that you’re a lowkey racist for playing on racial stereotypes..and we ain’t really smiling bout’ that.

*bell rings*

Notice how Black ppl are villified for “ghetto” and “ratchett” names but like meanwhile white ppl are all like “let’s replace all the “c’s” with “k’s” and add “lee” to the end of everything” and everybody’s like “awww so cute!”

I literally had this same argument just yesterday, even the end part about the white girl name suffixes, room fell silent, THEY DON’T WANT NONE.

“Illegals just mooch off the government, healthcare, and don’t pay taxes! They’re bad for our economy!”

politicalsexkitten: