Moniquilliloquies.

hogswatch:

the thing is that in truth young girls dont need ‘role models,’ they need people they can identify with 

its a huge difference

(Source: cornhat)

robotsquid:

So, having just finished my latest fantasy book series, I went looking for something else to read.  Normally I don’t really have any one parameter that I started with, I usually go on Amazon and look at reviews and lists and stuff until I land on something that looks fun.

I thought this time, well, why don’t I do something totally different?  I’m going to search the internet for titles of fantasy books that have non-white protagonists.  That’d be AWESOME because for as long as I have been reading sci-fi and fantasy books (namely my entire life) I have never read a fantasy book with a protagonist that wasn’t white!  So I’m like, I wanna see what kinds of books are out there with a POC protagonist.

I actually found a lot of cool resources!  A lot of these authors I’d never heard of before, but looking at reviews and stuff a lot of these people are like all Hugo-nominated and stuff.  Like, kind of a big deal.  I’ve found several titles already that I’m really interested in, but I thought I would drop off a couple of links here in case anybody was interested in reading these books or looking up these authors.

Recommended Reading:  People of Color in Fantasy Literature

POC Authors and Protagonists in Science Fiction & Fantasy

POC in Fantasy/Sci-Fi Novels

Diversity Roll Call Roundup:  POC in Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Popular Fantasy With POC Protagonist Books

I think that’s good for a start.  I’ve only just started digging into this so if you guys have any specific book/author recommendations for me I’d love to hear about them!

sassybroad:

people preaching universality in human experience

(aka but we’re all just humans!!)

are probably white/cisgender/straight

nethilia:

tigerhazard:

inkstrangle:

So let’s talk about race in Homestuck.

Andrew Hussie has said in the past that he believes the Homestuck kids can be read as any race, and that he intended to write them that way. He’s said this, and I believe him! I don’t think Hussie of all people would lie about his ~artistic intentions~, least of all as vehemently as he did during the initial tumblr furor over the “aracial” comments.

So Hussie envisioned the kids as aracial, or at least he didn’t conceive of them as or strongly associate them with any particular race. And yet, scattered throughout Homestuck are (or were) numerous indications to the contrary: descriptions of the kids as “pink-skinned,” a now-altered pesterlog where John refers to Bro as “a nerdy white guy who is a rapper,” the curious problem of heirs to a baking empire. You add all these little instances up, and they seem to point to one conclusion—that Hussie did not, in fact, imagine the kids as some nebulous “any race.” He had an image of them, a particular appearance, a particular race, and in all likelihood that race was white.

Now, I just said I didn’t think he was lying! And I don’t, in fact, think he was lying—I think all of what I have just written above is true. In other words,

1. When Andrew Hussie sits back and thinks about the entire comic, in aggregate, and his vision for it, he can honestly say, “Yeah, I didn’t intend the kids to be any particular race. They can look however you want.”
2. That regardless, whenever he had to call those kids’ faces to mind, to come up with a funny reference or an alien observation, the face he called up was always, always, white.

Why is that?

I’ll tell you a story: I wrote a lot, as a kid and a teenager. I liked to make up stories, and I liked to imagine myself in those stories; most of my old work stars girls my age or a little older—heavily aspirational stuff. I wrote about headstrong girls who went on adventures; and witty, irreverent girls who did wild things; and serious girls who solved the world’s problems. And—very occasionally, those girls were literally me, but if they weren’t? They were invariably white. I imagined them as such. I described them as such.

In other words, I wrote about girls, because I was a girl; and I wrote about white people, even though I am not, myself, white.

There are a lot of PoC who will tell you this same story.

Why is that?

I have seen a lot of criticism of self-conscious diversity, “insincere” diversity, “diversity for diversity’s sake,” both in this fandom and elsewhere. It’s great if you just happen to come up with black or Asian or Native characters, these people believe, but if you have to think about it? If you deliberately choose to write or rewrite your stories to be diverse, or draw a character lineup with an eye toward not making it too white? Well, that’s just weird. That’s wrong, in fact.You’re trying too hard—you should just tell your stories, draw the characters, as you naturally envision them. Why would you do anything else?

The problem with this line of thinking is that what we “naturally envision” is often not natural at all: it is a reflection of a world which has been fed to us by an advertising industry that is frequently racist, by popular media which regularly erases or sidelines entire classes of people. The books and magazines we read, the TV shows and movies we watch, overwhelmingly tell the stories of white people. And so, when we go to tell our own stories, with our own characters, we invariably imagine them as white. Even, sometimes, when we don’t mean it.

We have locked ourselves into a poisonous cycle. White in, white out.

And that cycle will continue to perpetuate until we stop putting only white in! People like me will only begin to see ourselves in the stories we love when people start including us in those stories. People, individual people, a lot of individual people, will have to change. The things they write will have to change.

And yes, often that change is a deliberate choice—not to suddenly start portraying characters “the way you saw them all along,” but to rethink the way you saw them in the first place. To come back to your main character and consider, well, what if she were black?; to look at your old drawings and wonder whether they all really have to be white. To begin defining a new “natural” for yourself, one which more accurately reflects the world that is actually around you.

Why is that a bad thing?

What is the problem with “diversity for diversity’s sake”? Isn’t diversity an inherent good?

To close out: I don’t care if you don’t want to “be the change” in this specific manner, at this specific time. I really, truly do not give a fuck. It doesn’t affect my opinion of you. But when you turn around and sneer at people who are trying, who are undertaking the long and often difficult process of changing the way they were programmed to think, who are doing their level best to reflect the diversity of the world in the things they create, large and small—well.

Yeah, I am going to judge you for that. I think that’s gross as fuck.

THANK you

I don’t even give two fucks about homestuck but good post is good

sourcedumal:

frankethor:

I would like to think this is obvious, but in case it isn’t

I, as a POC, am not a get out of “racism or call out” free card, nor am I a reference for your interactions with other people.

To be clear, do not name drop me to other POC to vouch for your safety as a “good” white person.

I swear to all that is holy, if I find out a white person, or a man for that matter, used me as their fucking ‘get out of racism/sexism call out free’ person, all hell will be let loose and you will NEVER associate yourself with me again.

(Source: frank-e-fighting-words)

catmisandrist:

When allies say, “Appreciate me or I’ll leave you!” they are not being allies. When allies say, “You’re lucky to have me,” they are not being allies. When allies say, “You wouldn’t be anywhere without me,” they are not being allies.

They are being bullies. In fact, they are being emotionally abusive.

I’d rather be completely alone than stuck with allies who tell me I’m “lucky” that they’re tolerating me and my perversion. I’d rather be alone than have to put up with a barrage of casually homophobic remarks - which can be just as damaging as outright homophobia.

(Source: mscoolcat)

supportivecoloredfriend:

If anyone gives you the whole “If you want shit to change in media become a director or writer and change it” bullshit 

Show them this

Heres a little quote, 

“In this day and age, it’s quite disappointing that so many shows failed to hire even a single woman or minority director during the course of an entire season — even shows whose cast and crew is notably diverse, Barclay noted. “And, ‘We just don’t know anybody’ doesn’t cut it anymore — the pool of talented and experienced women and minority directors grows every year, and too many of these qualified, capable directors are still overlooked.”

This is from the Directors Guild of America basically saying that there a DROVES AND DROVES of women, women of color, men of color all different types of brown people, WHO ARE TALENTED AND EXPERIENCED who do NOT get hired. 

Don’t want to believe the LA Times? It’s right there. From the horses mouth.

So please. When people give you that 

• Go make some media if you don’t feel represented
• There probably aren’t that many POC making media
•  They want to find the best people and they just so happened to be white

TELL THEM TO READ THIS AND GO FUCK THEMSELVES. 

(Source: )

girljanitor:

girljanitor:

I post on an illegal school policy that affects schoolchildren that could be white

12,817 notes

I post on an illegal school policy that affects schoolchildren who are black and disabled

> 70 notes

Furthermore

I post on an dubiously legal school policy that affects DISABLED children with photo of white child

620 notes

I post on a blatantly illegal policy and affects DISABLED children accompanied by a photo of a black child

(see above)

thesavagesalad:

Sociology Books

lati-negros:

sociolab:

All of the books are in MOBI or AZW format for Kindle.  If you want to convert the files to PDF or ePub I recommend Calibre or online-converter.  If you have any problems with downloads or formatting please let me know and I will fix it asap.

• Myths of Gender by Anne Fausto-Sterling  [X]
• The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild  [X]
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich  [X]
• Feminism Is For Everybody by bell hooks  [X]
• The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills  [X]
• Dude, You’re A Fag by C.J. Pascoe  [X]
• Sociology and Modern Social Problems by Charles A. Ellwood  [X]
• The Goffman Reader by Charles Lemert  [X]
• The Cambridge Companion To Simone de Beauvoir by Claudia Card  [X]
• Genders by David Glover  [X]
• Cultural Geography by David Sibley  [X]
• Critical Theory After Habermas by Dieter Freunlieb  [X]
• Punishment For Sale by Donna Delman  [X]
• Everything Is Obvious by Duncan J. Watts  [X]
• Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch by Dwight A. McBride  [X]
• Encyclopedia of Sociology by Edgar F. Borgatta  [X]
• Bodily Citations by Ellen Armour  [X]
• Suicide by Emile Durkheim  [X]
• The Rules of the Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim  [X]
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser  [X]
• Handbook of Social Theory by George Ritzer [X]
• The Blackwell Companion To Major Classical Social Theorists by George Ritzer  [X]
• Between XX and XY by Gerald N. Callahan  [X]
• How To Observe Morals and Manners by Harriet Martineau  [X]
• Habermas and Contemporary Society by John F. Sitton  [X]
• Critical Pedagogy For Social Justice by John Smyth  [X]
• The Power of Labeling by Joy Moncrieffe  [X]
• Gendered Lives by Julia T. Wood  [X]
• Gender Trouble by Judith Butler  [X]
• Undoing Gender by Judith Butler  [X]
• The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson  [X]
• The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield  [X]
• Essentials of Social Research by Linda Kalof  [X]
• Food Politics by Marion Nestle  [X]
• The Digital Divide by Mark Bauerlein  [X]
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber  [X]
• Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry  [X]
• Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom  [X]
• August Comte by Mike Gane  [X]
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf  [X]
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire  [X]
• The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo  [X]
• The Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies by Pierre Bourdieu  [X]
• Drift by Rachel Maddow  [X]
• The Marx & Engels Reader by Robert C. Tucker  [X]
• Let Them Eat Junk by Robert Albritton  [X]
• Consumer Culture by Roberta Sassatelli  [X]
• The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu by Simon Susen  [X]
• Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh  [X]
• Quiet by Susan Cain  [X]
• From Marriage To the Market by Susan Thistle  [X]
• The Cambridge Companion to Marx by Terrell Carver  [X]
• Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen  [X]
• White Like Me by Tim Wise  [X]
• Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness by Toure  [X]
• Building A Housewife’s Paradise by Tracey Deutsch  [X]
• The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore  [X]

Books to read for leisure or if you’re trying to figure what you should study/major in

feministhistorian:

hugginangryfeminist:

deadasdisco:

From ars technica:

Google has also added some new security functionality to Chrome. Every time that the user downloads a file, the browser will compare it against a whiltelist of known-good files and publishers. If the file isn’t in the whitelist, its URL will be transmitted to Google’s servers, which will perform an automatic analysis and attempt to guess if the file is malicious based on various factors like the trustworthiness of its source. If the file is deemed a potential risk, the user will receive a warning.

Google says that data collected by the browser for the malware detection feature is only used to flag malicious files and isn’t used for any other purpose. The company will retain the IP address of the user and other metadata for a period of two weeks, at which point all of the data except the URL of the file will be purged from Google’s databases.

Users who are concerned about the privacy implications of this functionality can prevent the browser from relaying this information to Google by disabling the phishing and malware protection features in the browser’s preferences. You can refer to the official Chromium blog for additional details about the malware detection feature.

this would explain the error message i keep getting. thanks for the info :)

guess I’ll be using firefox to download shit from now on.

(Source: henleyatlas)