Also I Think A Lot Of Young People On The Left Are Growing Up Without Understanding "you Can And Will

Being poor is dangerous. Being POC while poor? Even more dangerous.

NO.1

The question, ‘‘Is being poor dangerous’, an easy question to answer for those who suffer from being poor. Yes, it is highly dangerous, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. People usually move to cities in the U.S, and cities are segregated. Each person, family, etc. has a different background, therefore they have a different connection with others unlike themselves. That means different habitus’ and different inequalities, for those who are not rich.

NO.2

This all has to do with the economic structure, between poor, middle class and rich. Segregation is everywhere, and in cities, it is an intermix of ethnicity, citizenship, indigeneity, and class, and when they are intertwined, they create systems of labor, respect and suffering. The physical differences in the conditions of life, especially barbaric. Throughout the hierarchy of suffering, the opportunities decrease and the social hardships increase as you go down the ladder, and depending on what race you are, the more dangerous, psychologically strenuous and physically stressful it can be. Everyone is structurally vulnerable, and each person can participate in what is called the Gray Zone.

NO.3

Primo Levi defines it as the knowledge of the corrupt system but trying to survive within it, whether you’re at the top or at the bottom, and when you are at the bottom, the system is designed to make people remain there. For Mexican workers who choose to make the difficult journey to work in the strawberry fields in Southern California, they are kept segregated by race, class, and citizenship, they have limited opportunities to afford the basic needs we use every single day, either access to affordable healthcare or able to get a decent paying job. Collective bad faith, or as Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls it, is the self deception to help you feel okay about the work you do in the moral gray zone. One example would be the strange concept of naturalization, like black deaths at the hands of police officers. A more basic definition would be seeing an oppressed people and saying that they like being oppressed, making you feel better about the injustice. Since we see it go on for so long, the moral injustice, we normalize it, or that it just part of ‘the game’. The game is to thrive, survive, and suffer in the social world, where you are both dominated and dominant. We justify it because they are different, and say it is normal.

NO.4

‘‘For decades, experts have agreed that racial disparities in health spring from pervasive social and institutional forces. The scientific literature has linked higher rates of death and disease in African Americans to such ‘social determinants’ as residential segregation, environmental waste, joblessness, unsafe housing, targeted marketing of alcohol and cigarettes, and other inequalities; Racism, other researchers suggests, acts as a classic chronic stressor, setting off the same physiological train wreck as job strain or martial conflict: higher blood pressure, elevated heart rate, increases in the stress hormone cortisol, suppressed immunity. Chronic stress is also known to encourage unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking and eating too much, that themselves raise the risk of disease.’’ From How Racism Hurts—Literally.

I'm a grad student y'all! I'm so happy.

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

The ancient world was full of textile masterpieces we can only imagine… but most of them have rotted away. So few of them have come down to us in these days that we think of metal and stone as the primary mediums for the oldest artworks. But there were tapestries and fabric work that would have rivaled the finest wrought gold and iron and the first cave paintings.

Eugenics, and how it leads to gender

NO.1

What is eugenics? Better yet, what was the eugenics movement about? Wikipedia states that ‘'it’s a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.’’

NO.2

The concept was created by Plato, where he suggested the concept of selective breeding; but the term was invented by a cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, who launched the movement to ‘improve the human race, or at least, to halt its perceived decline. His ideas spread quickly, and by the 1920s eugenics movements existed all over the world. Eugenics, a movement for social betterment clothed in the mantle of modern science, claimed the allegiance of most genetic scientists and drew supporters from the political right, left, and center. The movement was embraced by Hitler and the rise of Nazism, which thankfully lost most of its power at the fall of the Third Reich in Europe and America, but some of its ideas still linger in the States. Like the notion of gender and marriage; strictly speaking, of white heterosexual couples.

NO.3

In the 1920’s eugenicist, Paul Popenoe brought marriage counseling to the U.S, where he sought to protect ‘family values’ since there was widespread concern over the declining white birth rates and created the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR) where they popularized pseudoscientific sexual differences to the masses. Back then, everything in pop culture had little trails leading back to eugenics, including in schools, taught to their children, plastered as ads to their buildings, like pamphlets and books, all on advocating for the white female students to produce more children. Popenoe argued that the ‘male-female difference transcended all other human differences and was the ‘greatest that can exist between the two normal human beings.’ He felt that was this sex binary was essential to the survival of the family, nation, and western civilization, and therefore must be protected from the decadence of modern society.

NO.4

Post-war eugenicists were threatened by the higher education women which they felt decreased ‘natural birthrates and called for traditional marriage with defined sex-gender roles arguing that ‘men and women were made for marriage, biologically and psychologically.’ Patricia Hill Collins explains in her book, “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation that ‘‘stationed in the center of ‘family values’ debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and bloody ties, ideal families consist of heterosexual couples that produce their own biological family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, this monolithic family type articulates with governmental structures. Because family constitutes a fundamental principle of social organization, the significance of the traditional family ideal transcends ideology. In the United States, understandings of social institutions and social policies are often constructed through family rhetoric. Families constitute primary sites of belonging to various groups: to the family as an assumed biological entity; to geographically identifiable, racially segregated neighborhoods conceptualized as imagined families; to so-called racial families codified in science and law, and to the U.S nation-state conceptualized as a national family.’’

If you are talking about the human tragedy and climate disaster impacting Hawai’i ONLY in relation to tourism or your (postponed) vacation plans . . . therein lies the problem.

Hawai'i is not an "eat, pray, love" trip nor is she a cultural theme park.

Hawai’i is a collection of communities with deep indigenous roots and ancestral identities (many queer + colorful) that American + European colonizers once attempted to eradicate.

In the present day, empire-builders and colorblind colonizers are attempting to gentrify and commodify these ancestral spaces, not to benefit the indigenous, diaspora, and immigrant folks (folx) who steward and preserve those waterways and lands, but to protect the interests and properties of billionaires on vacation

Afronaut Note: This is not a discussion about policing language or shaming folks in your neighborhood who are sharing vacation pictures or lamenting their travel plans. This is about expanding our horizons to center decolonized, ancestral, and communal spaces. Imagine if after the Japanese tsunami (2011) or Hurricane Katrina (2005), people shared vacation pictures and complained about having to cancel their graduation trips.

Original post from @seedingsovereignty

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"Our culture has to be the core of our mana." Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask (1949 – 2021)⁠

A leader of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement & a fearless leader.⁠

Her memory is needed during these times. ⁠

Support the People of Hawai’i

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The History of Riots

Riots. Small or massive, can induce major anxiety especially if you’re introverted like me. Riots are usually caused by people getting infuriated, by things like politics, economy, or for the end to tyranny and oppression. You see it when people rise up against their government, like the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the American Revolution. More recently, the race riots of 1965 were a violent and historical recording of how damaging people can act when things start to change, or where there is simply no change. That is the crux of riots.

‘‘What determines a country’s political institutions, and in particular, the extent to which they are democratic? An important set of explanations has focused on the idea that conflict, or the possibility of conflict, induces leaders to promote institutional change? Tilly (1990), Besley and Persson (2008, 2009), and Dincesco and Prado (2012) argue that conflict, and in particular wars between countries, created the setting for Western European nations to build institutions that would enable the enforcement of contracts and collection of taxes. Conflict also plays an important role in Acemoglu and Robinsons’ (2000, 2001, 2006) theory of democratization; they emphasize how the threat of conflict, in the form of a revolution, induces autocrats to make democratic concessions in an attempt to defuse that threat. In their theory, revolution is more likely in times of economic hardship, so negative economic shocked pen a ‘‘window of opportunity’’ that can lead to a peaceful transition towards democracy.’’

Riots are a backlash against the government, explosive and in you’re face. Riots transform regular people into citizens who want to show off their freedom, by expressing the rights that they have. Rioting certainly doesn’t start out that way. It starts off as protesting against either a corporation, a government, society itself, or a certain person. Unfortunately, anger starts to lead the way within the protest and drives violence as a way to get even more attention. ‘‘The main difficulty in testing whether conflict opens a ‘‘window of opportunity’’ is that riots are rarely exogenous: there might be problems of reverse causality because the expectation of political change might itself lead to riots, and there might be unobservable omitted variables that cause both riots and political change.’’