Tag: racism

misshersheykyss:

sapphiredoves:

So now not only is Leslie Jones being slutshamed on the World Wide Web for having nude photos in her possession, but her body is being treated as though it was never something to celebrate. What’s wrong with it? Too much melanin for your eyes to handle? She too dark to be desirable? When Jennifer Lawrence’s nudes got leaked, y’all threw a party! Y’all praised the iCloud gods y’all were blessed to see such a thing while simultaneously running to her defense and preaching about how it’s not right to judge or shame her for having naked photos of herself because “she’s a gorgeous, famous actress, why wouldn’t she?”

But when Leslie Jones is hacked and her nude photos are leaked, you question why she would ever want to keep photographic evidence of her body, like its some kind of dirty thing the world should never have to come across or you say if she never took the photos in the first place, she wouldn’t have this problem. Funny how Jennifer Lawrence and the tons of other White female celebs who had their nudes leaked weren’t met with the same unforgiving rhetoric and logic. If she bleached her skin* or tracked a mile of Brazilian hair to her scalp, would you suddenly defend her? Because she chose to look nothing like White consumer America, suddenly she asked for it. Looks like Black women always ask for it in this country, even when we never got to open our mouths. Even when we are begging to be left in one piece somehow we are still asking to be ostracized in front of the general public just by existing.

Leslie Jones has NOTHING to apologize for.
Leslie Jones has NOTHING to be ashamed of.
Leslie Jones is BEAUTIFUL.
Leslie Jones is unapologetically BLACK and America hates her for it.

White Feminism has made it well known that if you are not making yourself palatable for White consumption, or disowning your Blackness altogether, they will not fight for you, they will not say your name with the same urgency as their own or another White one, or at all.

Say that! 👏🏾

This and back to the other point: her life has been attacked – I can only imagine what those WOC without her success and fame go through.  This is the ugliness of human nature. Stand up to it.  Knock it down when it shows its face.  Love and kindness are the strongest weapons we have.  

What happened to Leslie Jones – and how many other women like her – are acts of terrorism.  Empowered racists seeking to destroy lives.  Do not lose sight of that.  

bamonbrigade1:

My favorite thing right now is that everyone who doesn’t want Zendaya (a black girl) to be Mary Jane is sighting her hair as the problem because MJ is a redhead but like,

I didn’t

hear ya’ll

complaining

then,

so why 

now?

These must be the same nitwits who keep quiet when a POC character is white-washed.  

Whoops, sorry, I mean racists. 

We had conversations for a long time about Ricky’s character, Lincoln. It was a great character. Jason felt for a very long time that he had written that character into a box,” Pedowitz explained. “We felt differently. There was a long discussion about this. At some point, Jason found he had a great way for Ricky’s character to be written out so that Marie’s [Avgeropoulos] character could go forward in some way shape or form. Ricky’s comments about number of lines and all that – Ricky was a great performer for us, but it’s the showrunner’s right to decide how many lines an actor gets per episode.

Mark Pedowitz (CW president) | thewrap (via the100-news)

I want to laugh. ‘Jason found a great way’ – let’s tell it like it is… to kill off another minority character in order to further the story of a white character (read: totally offensive, but we don’t acknowledge that).

I like that they actually count lines for an actor, too.  

Oh, wait…Jason ‘felt’ he had written that character ‘into a box?’  And he didn’t notice all the other corners he had written his show into?  

After watching Suicide Squad (and the emptiness that followed), so, so aware how desperately we need change in the film/tv industry, like 150 years ago.  The tough guys with manpain, the creepy stalker/thug all the little boys idolise, the tragic anti-hero who has no trouble beating women, but finds redemption – it is so dull and overdone and needs a ticket on a train to the nowhere it came from. Suicide Squad might have given itself a few points with Will Smith and Viola Davis in the leads (and they were the best things in it), and a character like Diablo, but there was no missing how white everything else was (including the audiences, no doubt).   

We need to see women, POC, queer characters, black characters – all with agency and ability wrecking havoc on these screens. Queer baiting needs to end and real queer content on the screen needs to be embraced, bright and bold. The weakness of the white (straight) (mostly) male hero/anti-hero standard has to be written out. Enough. The racism is so blatant. Write it out.  The sexism is blatant. Write it out.  The peoples of this world are so diverse and we stick with telling the same old stories.  

Next time the hype train pulls up to your platform, forget the ticket, don’t get on board.  Wait for a better train.  

Content creators: build a better train.  

How to write fic for Black characters: a guide for non-Black fans

eshusplayground:

eshusplayground:

eshusplayground:

  1. Don’t characterize a Black character as sassy or thuggish, especially when the character in question is can be described in literally ten thousand other ways..
  2. Don’t describe Black characters as chocolate, coffee, or any sort of food item.
  3. Don’t highlight the race of Black characters (ie, “the dark man” or “the brown woman”) if you don’t highlight the race of white characters.
  4. Think very carefully about that antebellum slavery or Jim Crow AU fic as a backdrop for your romance.
  5. If you’re not fluent with AAVE, don’t use it to try to look cool or edgy. You look corny as hell.
  6. Don’t use Black characters as a prop for the non-Black characters you’re actually interested in.
  7. Keep “unpopular opinions” about racism, Black Lives Matter, and other issues pertinent to Black folks out the mouths of Black characters. We know what the fuck you’re doing with that and need to stop.
  8. Don’t assume a Black character likes or hates a certain food, music, or piece of pop culture.
  9. You can make a Black character’s race pertinent without doing it like this.
  10. Be extremely careful about insinuating that one or more of a Black character’s physical features are dirty, unclean, or ugly.

Feel free to add more.

Adding more…

  1. Be wary of making Black characters seem animalistic, uncivilized, or subhuman in comparison to white characters. Watch out for: comparing us to monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees, apes, and other animals.
  2. Words like Negroid, colored/colured, Negro, and the n-word do not belong in the mouths of contemporary characters you want to portray as sympathetic.
  3. Not all Black people are African American.
  4. Africa is not a country but the second-largest continent on earth with some 54 different countries with thousands of ethnic groups and 1,500 to 3,000 languages and dialects.
  5. Resist the urge to make a Black character seem uneducated and ignorant compared to white characters.
  6. Capitalizing Black shows that you recognize that the word unifying people of African descent, particularly the diaspora, should be described using a proper noun.
  7. Please, say “Black people,” not “blacks.”
  8. Give Black characters the same psychological and moral complexity as white men are given by default.
  9. Make sure that you don’t write a Black character as happily subservient to a white character.
  10. Understand and show that you understand that Black characters don’t exist to be the caretakers of white characters.

And more…

  1. Do your own homework instead of expecting, asking, or demanding Black fans to do it.
  2. Before approaching that Black person you admire so much for being so articulate about race issues (this is sarcasm) to beta read your work: 1) make sure it’s something they’ve expressed interest in doing, and 2) you offer something in return for their time and expertise.
  3. Be prepared for fans to have issues with what you came up with and open to suggestions.
  4. Having only one Black character in a story that takes place in a huge city, country, or galaxy looks weird. Really, really weird. Scary weird.
  5. Don’t use a Black character’s death to motivate a white character.
  6. Portray Black characters with complex and multifaceted identities. We are more than just Black. We are also women, LGBT, Jewish, disabled, neurodivergent, immigrants, etc.
  7. There is a huge chasm between hypersexual and desexualized.
  8. Remember: what’s progressive for a white character is not necessarily progressive for a Black one.

Being a bigot and spouting bigotry is not illegal.  It is protected under the rights of free speech.  Even preaching bigotry is usually protected speech.  However.  

Targeted harassment is NOT free speech. 

Banning someone who supports and engages in the negation of other human lives isn’t an offense to freedom, it affirms it.

Freedom of speech does not include the right to terrorise other humans, to bully, to create an unsafe environment, to silence others.

Those who endorse a hateful style, who gather followers to engage in such fashion are no protectors of freedom, they would deny us all.

We can’t allow the rise to power of those who seek control using the endorsement of hate as a righteous cause.

Targeted harassment is NOT free speech.

Terrorism isn’t free speech, either.

Fighting back against targeted harassment is not reverse harassment. 

stellasgibson:

Leslie Jones is facing an onslaught of racist harassment on Twitter and nobody is doing anything about it. Please follow her and support her and report the people she is asking you to report. 

Twitter needs to get real on this: this isn’t just harassment. It is meant to destroy people’s peace of mind, to feel unsafe.  

If people physically attacked Leslie Jones in the manner she was attacked tonight on Twitter, with the same language, the same posturing: what would you call it?  I think we’re past mere ‘harassment.’  It’s sickening.  What is it?  Is it a kind of terrorism? 

Poussey Washington

brownwlw:

I didn’t go to bed till 4:30 am last night, because I was crying. Poussey was the first and only representation I have ever seen of myself.

A black lesbian and they decide to fucking kill her.

But not only that, but to build up her relationship with Soso, to make her happy seconds before.

Having flashbacks for the fucking cop that killed her. Make us pity HIM and feel sorry for HIM because it was an accident.

She was my representation and you killing her off to “educate” fucking white people is fucking disgraceful.

Like the words of me and my people aren’t enough that you have to kill a fucking 90/100lb black girl in the same way of Eric Garner to make white/straight people think “hmm maybe black and/or gay people are being killed hmm”

And so soon after the Pulse shootings too. Not even a week later. They couldn’t had moved the release date?

I’m not going to watch the last episode. I know what happens. They leave her body on the ground. Can’t even treat em with respect in death.

They go around killing us on TV then turn around and kill us in real life. And you know what. I’m fucking done with it. And I’m fucking scared

I feel terrible that you’re scared.  This shouldn’t be happening.  This really needs more conversation, needs to be treated no differently than what happened with Lexa, et al. 

It’s even more frustrating considering so many people speaking out on this are getting the same BS Clexa fans got after Lexa’s death.  ‘It’s just television’ ‘It’s just a character’ ‘It’s just fiction’ ‘yay the bitch is dead.’   

So much fucking ignorance and so few willing to learn.  

timemachineyeah:

This is a jar full of major characters 

image

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

image

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

image

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

image

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

image

image

image

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

image

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

image

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

image

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

image

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*

Great illustration here (and I agree, most definitely works for LGBTQ characters as well).