the idea that “privileged people should speak out on behalf of oppressed people” and the idea that “it’s not the oppressed person’s job to educate” are both good ideas in their contexts.
if you take them out of context and try to scale them up outside of a single conversation into precepts of larger-scale discourse, they IMMEDIATELY become tools of white supremacy and get misused to justify privileged people talking over oppressed people.
I want to expand on this a little more, too – left it short and sweet because I’m too prone to walls of text, but I feel like this deserves a second pass:
Basically, establishing the idea that it is *only ever* the responsibility of people who are privileged in a specific discourse to speak out about oppression leads to the following situation. I have seen it primarily in racism discourse and now in antisemitism discourse, but it’s really all over the bloody place.
1) Someone not in an oppressed group circulates a thing that they made up, or nicked out of context from an off-the-cuff rant by some person in that oppressed group, without checking any kind of group consensus, because that thing is punchy and angery and gets attention. And it’s about ~protecting the weak~ so arguing looks bad.
2) Nobody bothers to run it past the group being spoken of (because that would be “expecting someone to educate you”) or check it against even the cheat sheet versions of decades of existing critical theory by that group (because that would be “work”).
3) Several thousand reblogs later, the echo chamber of privilege has generated a Fact! Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up to analysis. If there are like two or three approving reblogs from people in the group you’re talking about, and a few dozen disputing it? Well, clearly the dozens of folks are just internalizing prejudice, because of course the person who started it knows better than them, poor dears, and they can Prove It, now that they’ve got an endorsement from the handful of affected people who agree with them.
… And then folks start getting policed and yelled at by activists from out of their lane, for practicing their own cultural traditions or talking about their own life experiences or making their own stories and analyses.
The dominant narrative is a steamroller. People in a position of dominance, who decide to blithely attach shit to it without fact checking, have basically just discovered a new, exciting and socially approved way to steamroll minorities.
The system rewards punching down; it rewards talking over people that we’ve been trained to think are lesser. Unpicking this is *hard work*; flowing with the current is not.
Don’t be that person, is what I’m saying. Don’t confuse what’s satisfying with what’s right.
They exist in Haiti. Thats how my great great great grandfather died.
Wait hold on someone explain this to me I’m so lost lol
The belief is Haiti is that certain women can live under water and will lived there for years… These women are extremely beautiful and men being men can’t stay away from a good looking women are seduce and then dragged under water and are never to be seen again… My great grandmother was one of these women… One day her mother sent her to go get water from the river and she never came back 10 years later they see her come up the road in all white with beautiful jewelry all around her body sing up a storm.. When her family asked her where she was she told them she was under water… thats the story my grandma always use to tell me growing up
rick astley came back and now his music has a weird religious bent to it
like, i think i’m underselling the weird religious bent angle
please watch that video, i know the internet has conditioned us to assume anything even remotely related to rick astley will be a rickroll but it isn’t and it’s like 100x more bizarre than you’re expecting
idea: selina kyle as a reverse archeologist. she steals from museums and private collections and returns things to the shrines and graves where they belong. she brings a clay jaguar to monte alban and now she can talk to cats. the whip is because she’s indiana jones. batman makes half-assed attempts to stop her but it’s not like she’s wrong so like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ he’s got violent crimes to deal with, what does he care if she’s stealing back smuggled relics from rich assholes. he met that guy at a party once and he was a huge asshole so fuck him. steal his toupee, too. it’s probably endangered. ‘oh no catwoman is escaping and there’s nothing we can do. robin sit back down. there’s nothing we can do. she’s taking that statue back to egypt and we have no possible recourse against this terrible nonviolent crime with a single dick victim. i am definitely really mad about this. i’ll fight her later, when you’re sleeping or at a friend’s house or something. you’ll understand when you’re older.’
so far this post has been reblogged by one single dude who was super offended by the idea of putting relics back where they came from, and a legitimately shocking number of hype archaeology majors who aspire to working primarily in repatriation.
Am I the only one that’s a just a tiny bit pissed off that this is still an issue?
The Original Series wasn’t even in the general VICINITY of fucking around yo
How many shows these days would do this, and do it this way? These days, it would be all, “Ohh, we have to be sensitive and show the nuances of each side” and try not to make either side seem wrong. It wouldn’t be clearly spelled out, “pro-choice is right, if you’re against it you’re the bad guys.”
Jim Kirk is not here for your anti-birth-control, anti-choice, pro-death-penalty BS
James Tiberius Kirk was written and portrayed as a feminist and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Yep. That episode is exactly what you think it is: pro-birth control, pro-population control, pro-choice, and pro-women’s right to choose. And yes, Kirk, the supposed playboy of the spaceways, is in favor of all of the above.
It was written and aired in 1969.
It probably couldn’t air today.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
Also LMAO at all the sad whiny geek boys who are like “I miss the GOOD OLD DAYS of SCI-FI when it wasn’t all about SOCIAL ISSUES and instead it was just about MEN HAVING FUN IN SPACE. Like Star Trek! Star Trek wouldn’t put up with all this SOCIAL JUSTICE FEMINISM IN SCI FI bullshit!” And meanwhile I’m just over here like “…did you actually watch the show?”
It’s also important to bear in mind that the Original Series had a predominantly female fanbase, and during its initial run, was widely mocked and dismissed by mainstream (i.e., male) science fiction fans as being fake sci-fi for girls. It’s difficult to overstate the influence women had on the franchise in its early days; most of the early Star Trek conventions were organised by and for women, and indeed, those same organisers were primarily responsible for the massive letter-writing campaign that prevented the show from being cancelled after the 1968 season. Without that campaign, the episode pictured in this post would never have been made.
The popular image of James Kirk as a sleazy womaniser is part of a conscious effort to erase that history and render the franchise’s roots palatable to the misogynistic geekboys of the modern SF/F fandom.
And a gentle reminder that TOS was a Desilu production, which its board of directors voted to cancel after the second pilot due to cost concerns, a vote that Chairman Lucille Ball overruled. There is no Star Trek without Lucille Ball.
Basically you have women to thank for Star Trek. Go suck on that, JJ Abrams.
Bringing this back because I recently saw a post from a dudebro complaining about how Star Trek has become all “PC and has an agenda” unlike in the “good old days”
so here is a clip from the “good old days” of Star Trek not having an agenda.
so i just sent this to my brother who thinks he’s ‘all that’ about star trek and i’m just grinning at how annoyed he’s gonna be with it bc i keep sending him snippets of the reblogs ahahaha
just moving along like everyone else 