persnickety poet type

when you have got the blues, the littlest things get to you.

I could have finished the bar application today except that I need literally one thing that cannot be got until Monday.  Even though I know it’s stupid, it seems to have cast a pall over my whole weekend that I can’t check it off the list of unfucked and take it off the schedule.  Even though it won’t be overdue if it waits until Monday.  Even if Monday is the more convenient day to do all the printing and addenda-ing and notarizing and mailing that has to get done for this thing to get off my plate.  In my head it is The Biggest Deal that it is not done, which just makes the blues worse.  I need to make plans for tomorrow to accomplish something else so I just don’t obsess about it all day long.

for sale, one case of the blues, roughly used.  I hate being mentally ill.

alexandraerin:

hellhoundstooth:

just ‘cause i ship something, doesn’t mean i necessarily want it to happen in canon. i can’t trust them to do it right.

Now I’m imagining a murder mystery where it’s a fan who killed a showrunner or writer who was going to make their ship canon, robbing it of all the glorious UST and spoiling all the potential…

AE, you could write this as a short story and it would be amazeballs.

polerin:

Thinking about Alex, the girl who is being stripped from her mother because she’s trans, and realize that it happens more with families of color.

How many black children are in the foster care system because racially biased standards deem their parents unfit?

How many families broken up because they are undocumented immigrants?

The mother who got years of jail time when a drunk driver hit her son while they were crossing the road, taken away from her other kids.

How many kids don’t know their parents because of the prison industrial complex?

—and as pointed out by @deluxvivens—

go check out info abt incarceration of ndn women, esp mothers, in OK …

or native children placed in foster care in sd even if they have family that will take them

hamburgerjack:

Because Trayvon wasn’t a person.

Was he?

Black people aren’t people to the Zimmerman family.

Thanks for clearing that shit up

Ass bag.

hamburgerjack:

Because Trayvon wasn’t a person.

Was he?

Black people aren’t people to the Zimmerman family.

Thanks for clearing that shit up

Ass bag.

polerin:

• David Duke was trying to hold a “respectable” white supremacist convention in Memphis.  Only after a huge local outcry did the hotel boot him.
• There’s a huge statue of N.B. Forrest alongside our interstate that (iirc) the state helped clear the view for, and a bust of that same asshole right next to the doors of our State Legislature.
• There is confederate imagery all over the place, and openly white supremacist rhetoric on our talk radio.
• Xenophobes have pushed “English Only” metro amendments.
• Our STATE DEMOCRATS have introduced a bill that would prohibit schools who employ more than a bare fraction of immigrants from being charted
• This just after running a gubernatorial candidate who says openly that mosques (actually just an Islamic community center) shouldn’t be allowed in residential areas because it would bring down housing values.

I could go on and on and on and on, and I’m sure I don’t even known a quarter of the fuckitude that has gone on in the past few years.

It is not random chance that would lead white supremacists to hold a get together here.  White Tennessee may see itself as Aristocratic South (and it does, trust me) but that just means that we are stuffy, wanna-be-high-class racists.

canering:

alexandraerin:

I woke up this morning and saw some stuff on my dash about Rick Santorum saying the n-word on camera. Went to Google News to see if I could find out what it was about. Nothing there. Figured, “Oh, well, I guess it just happened and no one’s covered it yet.”

Scrolled through dash some more, found out that it happened on Tuesday. Today’s Friday.

Oh.

Yeah, and the very few articles that did cover it are bloggers or opinion pieces. 

I’m not remotely surprised. I called this right at the beginning. If Santorum could get away with saying he meant blah people instead of black people, then a slip like this would be easy to bury. Even though any reasonable and discerning person knows what word he was about to say, it looks like most white people are willing to bend over backwards to give Santorum the benefit of the doubt. Even when they admit Santorum has racist ideology and he regularly uses racist rhetoric and coding, they still think he’s “above” using that slur. Why? Because he looks “wholesome”? The guy is hateful as fuck, and there’s no dorky smile or sweater vest that can disguise how evil he is. And why is using a racial slur somehow worse than having racist politics?

Campaign response:

“Oh, come on!” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley told Raw Story when asked for comment. “Give me a break. That’s unbelievable. What does it say about those that are running with this story that that’s where their mind goes. You know, I’m not going to dignify that with [a response].”

Classic: 1) colorblindness 2) turning the racist accusation back onto the accuser and making it their problem 3) “reverse racism!” 4) ensures they don’t even need to come up with an explanation for Santorum’s word choice because the whole thing is beneath them.

missmodela:

“man we totally raped the other team”

“i wish girls these days would have more self respect”

“i’m not racist my best friend is black”

icecreamsocialistslut:

polerin:

maevele:

polerin:

… with all the additional risk of abuse and sexual assault that comes with that, but I’m supposed to care about a pageant.

I guess an argument could be made that if our culture saw trans women as legitimate enough to be in pageants, then we’d also see this little girl’s gender as legitimate enough not to lock her away?   I’m not making that argument, mind you.  

Yeah I know, but I’d rather fight for recognition of our lives and the legitimacy of our identities while actually fixing stuff.  I really do understand the meta-narrative issues that are involved in this story.  It’s stuff I’ve talked about for awhile… but I feel like it’s coming at the expense of people’s lives.

Yeah, like I said, I ain’t making that argument.   I’m way more worried about the 11 year old girl. 

lebanesepoppyseed:

The thing about the word “Nigger” that we’re coming to realize with Rick Santorum’s telling slip-of-tongue is how it truly operates.

Nigger is not, like people commonly believe, just a rude way of referring to a black person. It isn’t simply a bastardization of the Spanish “Negro”.

It is a leveler. An oral devastation of sorts. A place-putting, a head-bower.

I truly realized the power of “Nigger” when a friend of mine took me to her friend’s house where she lived with husband and his two buddies. They were skinheads who were obviously not happy with my being there.

One of them was watching “Hitch”, featuring Will Smith. Will Smith, for those who don’t know, is an enormously successful and rich black Hollywood actor whose career spans decades. This skinhead more than likely didn’t past high school and lived in a trailer park, playing video games, getting high, and shooting BB guns at beer cans all day. When asked about what he was watching by someone else in the house, he said “The movie with that nigger Will Smith.”

With that, they switched stations. The skinhead was no longer a lower-class white male with little education and bleak prospects. Will Smith ceased to be an accomplished prosperous man with the world as his oyster. Will Smith was just a nigger, and the skinhead could laugh and spit on that, easily.

When I got home I hid in my closet and cried. Cried not because it hurt my feelings but because no matter what I did, how hard I worked, how far I went, I was always going to just be a “Nigger” to some. An uppity bitch leaving her station.

That is the true nature of anti-black racism in this country. Even one of the men who lynched Emmett Till said himself that he had “no problem with niggers”, he wasn’t a bully. He just liked them “in their place”. In our place, under your boot, quiet and castrated and cowed, right whitey? President Obama was a nigger who stepped out of his place, and Rick Santorum was more than eager to remind him of this sin.

hamburgerjack:

sonofbaldwin:

They can’t stop, won’t stop trampling on your rights and murdering you.

WHITE PLAINS — A White Plains man whose father was shot and killed by police in November met with Westchester County District Attorney Jane DiFiore on Thursday afternoon and was assured that a complete investigation was being conducted and that all evidence gathered will be presented to a grand jury.

Kenneth Chamberlain Jr. has called for city cops involved in the incident to be criminally prosecuted and said that the officer who shot his father should face a second-degree murder charge.

After his meeting with DiFiore, he criticized police for not releasing the name of the officer who fired the fatal shots and city officials for not speaking publicly about his father’s death.

DiFiore “did say to me that she will put all the evidence before a grand jury and will make sure that it’s a full and fair investigation,” Chamberlain said. “My major concern is why have they not released the name of the officer…. The DA said they can’t, but I’m wondering why the police won’t. This raises my concerns. It’s only fair that the people know who that person is.”

Chamberlain also said he’s upset that Mayor Tom Roach “has not spoken to my family about the death of my father. No public officials have said anything about this.”

Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., 68, was killed Nov. 19 at his 135 S. Lexington Ave. apartment by officers who responded after family members said his medical alert device accidentally went off. The family said Chamberlain told police he was OK and that there was no emergency and the medical alert company called to cancel the alarm, but cops insisted that Chamberlain let them in to make sure everything was all right.

Chamberlain refused, and a standoff ensued, with a number of officers, including a hostage negotiator, trying to convince the Marine veteran and retired Westchester County correction officer to open his door.

At that point, police and the family give strikingly different versions of what happened.

After the shooting, Public Safety Commissioner David Chong said Chamberlain was emotionally disturbed and screaming, and that when police began breaking down his door he tried to attack them with a hatchet. Once the door opened, he said, Chamberlain came at the officers with a butcher knife, ignoring repeated orders to drop it and stop. He said Chamberlain kept coming despite being shot with a stun gun and beanbags. He was shot twice in the chest when he was about to stab one of the officers, Chong said, and died two hours later.

In February the District Attorney’s Office played audio and video recordings taken from a stun gun used by one of the officers and a hallway security camera to Kenneth Chamberlain Jr. and his lawyers. Audio came from the medical alert device which was connected to the elder Chamberlain’s telephone. Afterward, Chamberlain Jr. and his attorneys said police could be heard shouting racial slurs and cursing at Chamberlain Sr., who was black. They said the video showed that, when the door was opened, Chamberlain Sr. was standing 6 to 8 feet back, wearing only his boxer shorts, with his hands at his sides. They said he was not holding any weapons and that as soon as the door opened police shot him with the stun gun, with no provocation.

Chamberlain’s lawyers, Mayo Bartlett and Randolph McLaughlin, who have announced their intention to file a civil lawsuit against the city, have repeatedly asked for an independent probe of the incident. On Wednesday, they presented DiFiore with a petition, signed by almost 800 people from across the country, calling for all of the video and audio to be presented to a grand jury.

The petition states that people “need to know there is fairness in the criminal justice system” and that the community is seeking “reassurance that, no matter what the verdict, the process has been open, honest and just.”

After Thursday’s meeting, Bartlett said DiFiore “promised us a full and fair investigation, which is what we were looking for.”

“At this point, we believe she will do what she said she would,” McLaughlin said.

When all of the evidence is presented to a grand jury, Bartlett said, “we’re confident that there will be an indictment and criminal charges.”

DiFiore’s office confirmed that the meeting occurred, but had no comment.

Chong also would not comment. The mayor could not be reached.

You see?

YOU SEE WHY WE DON’T TRUST THE POLICE!

kyssthis16:

karnythia:

accio-afros:

baddominicana:

-such and such industry is racist

-no it isnt. there are 5 POC working vs 98796876 white ones. dont deny those 5 peoples efforts. stop making everything about race.

k. but u rong doe.

gtfoh w your deluded white logic.

This reminds me of things I wanted to talk about that happened yesterday…

We were talking about people’s environment growing up in my “Roots of Racism” class. So the lovely people in my class all shared their Lifetime stories about how they all remember when the first black family moved into their respective all white neighborhoods.

Sample of this discourse: “Um, I grew up in a predominately white town, but my family was very neutral. i remember when the first black family moved across the street in 2005 yadda, yadda,yadda…”

First of all, ignoring the obvious problems with actively noticing the mere presence of black people, all of them pissed me off with their, “Oh, buy my family was so accepting, and didn’t care!”  

Okay then boo… thats why you felt the need to record the exact moment when the black family moved in, right? 

Because you were so “open to new cultures”. 

So 15 (non-minority) people proceeded to all share about how they all remembered when the first black family moved in and how they were all so happy for about the new “diversity”.

Diversity?  

ONE black family, that you’re town made a HUGE deal about when they moved in is not DIVERSITY. Maybe tokenism, but in no way diversity. 

And sharing your story to class and patting both yourself and your town on the back for coming from such an ‘understanding’, ‘colorblind’ upbringing doesn’t take away your white privilege, it only reinforces it.   

sit down please

 

Then I raised my hand.

“Um actually, growing up we didn’t actually keep track of white people moving in and out of our town because it happened all the time, and we actually had common respect for people so we did not count their presence like circus animals to make ourselves feel better.”   

Welp…

Bloop Bloop.

lightspeedsound:

“It is well documented that conscious and unconscious race bias, even rank discrimination based on race, remain alive in our land, impeding realization of our highest values and ideals. As to public education, data for the years 2000-2001 show that 71.6% of African-American Children and 76.3% of Hispanic children attended a school in which minorities made up a majority of the student population. And schools in predominantly minority communities lag far behind others measured by the educational resources available to them. 

However strong the public’s desire for improved education systems may be, it remains the current reality that many minority students encounter markedly inadequate and unequal educational opportunities….”

—Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan Law School case that affirmed their (very, very mild) affirmative action policy.

FUCK YEAH JUDICIAL LEADERS WHO GET IT.

mountainousmoundymarmalade:

—-

paradiseasha:

swagandpassion:

“About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended today after walking out of classes to protest a lack of consistent teachers, the removal of the principal and a host of other administrative problems at the all-boys school. The students were chanting “We want education!” Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school’s future. This year, as recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym due to a lack of teachers, parents said. Worries escalated after district offices moved into part of the building in January and the school was not listed as an application school for next year’s directory. In addition, the school’s founding principal, Sean Vann, was reassigned on Wednesday after a three-month sick leave.”

—

Dozens of Douglass Academy high schoolers suspended after protesting lack of teachers | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

second time in a year that black students in detroit demanding an education were criminalized. students have also been criminalized in previous years for organizing walk outs on may day, being required to work as janitors and school shut downs.

there are repercussions for privatizing schools. is there any way to hold them accountable to student’s education? there’s a reason privitazation of schools began in communities of color.

school to prison pipelines are profitable. what an easy way to get students entered into the pipeline. what a great way to make good jobs a little less competitive for the white suburb communities.

school is a major space where youth of color are criminalized. if you’re looking for ways to organize right now in support of our youth, remember this. and stand with them when they organize around education (cuz they’re doing it across the US!).

say NO to criminalization through education!

(via mountainousmoundymarmalade)

There is a lack of teachers. At the beginning of the year, there was 60 students in one spanish, like legit. And Even now I’ve have 3 different physics teachers. And We’re so far behind we are moving double time. And the fact that I go to what is said one of the top three high schools in Detroit is sad. If we can’t keep a steady teacher, I can only imagine what’s going on in other schools. I feel like after c/o 2012 leaves my school it’s going to make another decline, and that’s sad. I need DPS and Detroit Schools period to get it together/

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

polerin:

karnythia:

masteradept:

curiouslycool:

Wow… I can’t even. Just. Wow.

That hurts.

what the holy fuck? Seriously Anonymous, get your shit together.

I’m glad they stopped anything from being emailed to his parents, but deleting the account bugs me. If it was my baby I’d want those emails so I could read his words & remember him.

But guys, anonymous isn’t racist at all and they are different people from the whole time they started on /b/ and everything is ok because they are taking down evil people and blah blah blah.

Said it before and I’ll say it again.  FUCK ANONYMOUS.

BOOM

stfuconfederates:

love-gets-better-in-time:

There is a school that is currently BANNING the Day of Silence and the use of any LGBTQ words in announcements. In case you were wondering, this is indeed illegal.

Stop this by singing the petition here!

Sign and reblog the shit out of this, please.

notime4yourshit:

blackamazon:

You know what really REALLy ticks me off about the white apologists of Trayvon’s case?

The fact that we don’t know 100% doesn’t mean shit.

Even if it all goes down the way folks protesting are asking….

Zimmerman’s fate would be decided by a jury of HIS peers after a lengthy trial and fully investigated evidentiary hearing.

Let that sit.

These people are dragging this 17 year old boy’s name through the mud, and nit picking his PHOTOS

( which like many a young black child DOESN’T LOOK THAT DAMN DIFFERENT FROM 12-17 and his parents don’t have that many because like most teenagers they don;t wanna take pictures FOR THE ANNOYING PARENTS not to mention in more recent pics including one I’m thinking Tracy Martin probably reps at every day of him kissing his eldest son where he is STILL A BABY FACED TEEN just taller you heartless no followup BASTARDS)

these heartless jerks are trying to prevent a TRIAL

let’s get that upfront.

The whinging at the media coverage is about avoiding a trial

And the fact that what they read as the will of black people getting any attention through agitation

Meanwile the media gets it’s frenzy with no CREDIT to the black people who started this 

His parents

which lemme tell  you this 100%

if they could trade all of this “attention” for that baby being a 1/2 step quicker in getting to his back door and safe

This is not even a question for them

but please explain how we are overreacting and looking to argue about how some folks think using him as a political prop is justifiable

When folks gotta march, get kicked out of congress . and weep daily for A TRIAL 

Let the church say amen.

alexandraerin:

madgastronomer:

kat8cha:

CA Republicans Sue Hispanic Dem Candidate For Being Too Inspirational

sarahlee310:

A law firm with ties to the California GOP is deeply bothered to see Mexican-American Jose Hernandez’s name on the ballot for U.S. Congress (that is not the joke yet, but we could probably just stop there, ha ha) because he has listed himself as “astronaut” on the line for his occupation. Hernandez, the son of migrant Mexican laborers, is a recently retired astronaut, a fact the law firm pointed out in a lawsuit filed last week. This means that Hernandez is CHEATING, by describing himself according to his career accomplishments over the span of more than say, the last week. May the Republicans suggest a more rule-abiding generalized occupational description such as “Brown person” instead?

Seriously?

What a fun trend this could be, minorities having to go to court for permission to publicly associate with their life’s work! There’s some job creation for you: Hernandez says on his Facebook page that it will cost $20,000 to hire lawyers to defeat the lawsuit.

His website.

Please note-

Denham’s campaign is not publicly affiliated with the legal challenge, though campaign records show the law firm has previously done legal work for the Denham campaign committee. A campaign spokesman could not be reached Friday.

“astronaut is not a title one carries for life.”

“astronaut is not a title one carries for life.”

Excuse me, asshole lawyer but you are fucking wrong.

I… know nothing about this guy’s politics. I don’t live in the area. I don’t know if he’d be a good elect or not. But damn I’m considering donating to his campaign just because of this.

What in the fucking fuck?

I have a cousin who’s a retired astronaut. Been retired since, oh, the 90s sometime, I think. Pretty sure she still gets to list “astronaut” on her damn resume. Of course, she’s white.

Headline from this February: “50 years later, astronaut John Glenn recounts his historic mission in space.”

ramou:

Or I’m tainted by the racial rage of the past few weeks, which have proven to be the toughest, most racially charged, and angry weeks of my life. 

But I am very unconvinced that Santorum calling Obama a nigger means much of anything. Are we surprised? Does anyone really think that this is the first time he’s done this? Or just the first time in public?

Not everyone is like us. Not everyone is outraged by a White man calling a Black man a nigger. Most Black folks have been called niggers or darkies or brownies or had watermelon jokes thrown in their general direction. Go ask your Black friends. 

Someone, somewhere, is calling Obama a nigger right now, just as they did yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and tomorrow and the day after that. 

And as much as I wish we lived in a world in which acts of racism were radical and a privileged White politician calling the President of the United States of America a nigger was outrageous, we don’t. And it’s not. 

se-smith:

I see a lot of people valorising Adrienne Rich in the wake of her death, ignoring her contributions to hateful second wave attitudes about trans people, specifically trans women. Rich contributed directly to texts that continue to be used by trans-exclusionary radfems (TERFs) to deny personhood and humanity to trans women. She was part of a movement that concerts to keep trans women out of feminist and women’s spaces, and that perpetuates a lot of vile slander about trans women; I’m choosing not to use the kind of language they use here because I want trans women to read this without being triggered. 

These second-wave attitudes are still very much present in modern feminist thought, as can be seen by the fact that exclusion of and hatred for trans women continues to be a problem in feminist spaces. This is not a ‘thing that happened in the past’ or a ‘product of her times’ problem. This is a feminism problem. 

As a transgender person, I’m deeply troubled and upset by the attitude that it’s okay to sweep Rich’s sins under the carpet in the interest of focusing on her poetry, which was, yes, amazing. And, yes, had a huge impact on many readers. And I know that trans women are hurting even more than I am right now because it’s yet another reminder for them that ‘their issues’ don’t matter, and that it’s acceptable to celebrate ‘feminist heroes’ who wanted them to die. 

Rich did contribute immeasurably to feminist thought and dialogue in the US, and it’s okay to admit that not all of those contributions were good. Really, I promise. Someone who produced amazing art can still have horrific attitudes. And we can talk about that, although it’s really unfortunate that this wasn’t talked about before she died.

And a part of me wonders if some of this resistance to admitting that Rich was not quite the unblemished icon people want to make her out to be is not just from a general disregard of trans women, but also from a place of fear about admitting ignorance. 

Because I will freely admit to you: Until her death, I knew Rich as an amazingly talented poet who had a profound personal impact on me. Only in the aftermath did I learn about her other contributions, and I was horrified. And ashamed that I didn’t know these things. And frustrated about the fact that so many ‘icons’ have legacies like this that are rarely discussed outside of closed spaces because the community in general is so hostile to any kind of critical evaluation of people who are leading movements or shaping the way movements think and respond to political issues. 

I think some of us cover our shame by maintaining our ignorant front because we don’t want to admit that information new to us has arisen, and we don’t want to adjust our responses accordingly. Admitting that we were wrong or not fully informed is hard. 

It’s okay to say you loved Adrienne Rich’s poetry. It’s also okay to admit that that’s the only thing you knew about her until you were made aware of her other activities in the political sphere. What’s not okay is to made aware, and to deliberately choose to continue acting as though Rich didn’t leave a terribly damaging and hateful legacy along with her art. 

Unless, of course, you agree that transmisogyny is an ‘important feminist legacy’ and you support Rich’s political ideas. In which case, as you were. 

alexandraerin:

This isn’t going to be the most articulate thing I’ve ever written because I’m not at my most coherent right now.

People who defend polite bigotry from aggressive call-outs under the guise of encouraging positivity and discouraging negativity because there’s too much negativity in the world or because they think positive approaches are more helpful… they really have no idea how much negativity they themselves are spreading, how their cheery defense of bigotry affects those who are affected by that bigotry.

If you can cheerfully leave people shaking wrecks through your casual inhumanity and chide them for being so negative, you are not a positive force in the world even if you never say a single “rude” word.

polerin:

I fully support Jenna Talackova’s inclusion in the pageant, and I understand why it is important in breaking down the idea that trans women aren’t “really women” and all that.

That being said.

Pardon me while I am less than overwhelmed when a super skinny, blond, conventionally (to cis and straight man standards) attractive woman is having issues competing in a beauty pageant while trans women of color are dying, while we still have medical gatekeepers demanding that we meet those impossible measures while denying us access to the medical assistance that we need.  When trans kids, again primarily of color, are being forced onto the street.

Why is it that trans women only get help when they meet the straight, white, cis, etc conventions for “pretty”?  Why don’t we deserve love, help, and care simply because we are people?