I Love Star Wars To Death But Nothing Broke My Heart More Than Seeing A North African Coded Muslim Character

A friend and I were out with our kids when another family’s two-year-old came up. She began hugging my friend’s 18-month-old, following her around and smiling at her. My friend’s little girl looked like she wasn’t so sure she liked this, and at that moment the other little girl’s mom came up and got down on her little girl’s level to talk to her.

“Honey, can you listen to me for a moment? I’m glad you’ve found a new friend, but you need to make sure to look at her face to see if she likes it when you hug her. And if she doesn’t like it, you need to give her space. Okay?”

Two years old, and already her mother was teaching her about consent.

My daughter Sally likes to color on herself with markers. I tell her it’s her body, so it’s her choice. Sometimes she writes her name, sometimes she draws flowers or patterns. The other day I heard her talking to her brother, a marker in her hand.

“Bobby, do you mind if I color on your leg?”

Bobby smiled and moved himself closer to his sister. She began drawing a pattern on his leg with a marker while he watched, fascinated. Later, she began coloring on the sole of his foot. After each stoke, he pulled his foot back, laughing. I looked over to see what was causing the commotion, and Sally turned to me.

“He doesn’t mind if I do this,” she explained, “he is only moving his foot because it tickles. He thinks its funny.” And she was right. Already Bobby had extended his foot to her again, smiling as he did so.

What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.

Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others’ consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected—even by their parents and other relatives.

And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?

Okay can we talk about how this is exactly what Storm should look like ? Wakanda is a fictional place of course, but it’s supposed to be in East Africa, near South Sudan and Uganda. The Nilotic people there have the most melanin and I’m upset that Hollywood continues to cast light skin women to play Storm.

Storm #Cosplay  by Anok Yai    

Get the comics here

[SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest / support ]

So I wanted to set the record straight because this has been such a nightmare. A few days ago I reached out to tumblr user Ladynepthyss after seeing she had made a post about hot girl summer again.  My intention wasn’t to be mean to her or rude to her, but to validate her feelings and her experiences, and talk to her about why people were upset.

Through our conversation she claimed that she wanted to learn, and as I result I sat there and educated her. It seemed like she actually was paying attention to what I was saying. 

Since I attempted to be kind to her, I have been lied about and she has been stalking my blog, and not only that, has targeted other black bloggers. 

I think what devastates me about this is that I saw her hurting, and as someone who’s been in her shoes, I extend my kindness to her, and she literally spit it in my face. That’s just honestly heart breaking. I’ve done nothing unkind or mean to her, yet she’s used this as an oppurtunity to attack my character. 

It gets under my skin because I validated her and listented to her as a black woman, and as a result she has spread lies about me. 

And if you are reading this Ophelia, I’m sorry that my kindness offended you. I’m sorry that me taking the steps to work with you and validate you have offended you. I’m sorry i ever tried to be kind to you. 

I thought I did see myself in you, but I don’t stab people in the back. 

That said, if you are coming here due to one of her various callouts: 

Keep reading

I wanna be the type of girl that has cuticle butter on her nightstand. She declutters daily because she doesn’t mindlessly hoard materials. She saved up twenty dollars a week and bought a maribou robe last month just to spoil herself. Her toiletries are from Etsy. She makes her bed in the morning and saunters from room to room in fluffy slippers. Her hair sits high and her inhibitions sit low. She draws her own baths and does her own pedicure. She watches Netflix from the tub, and ends every night with green tea. She may not go out, but she never feels she’s missing out on anything. She gives herself time.

how to be less racist

im exhausted from blocking u and sending ur dumbass posts to my friends to talk shit so here’s a tutorial on how not to be a demon. ur welcome white devil

broke: speaking for us

woke: boosting our voices

broke: #im white tag

woke: putting that you’re white in your about page where we can always see it instead of tagging the bi monthly post you rb about racism with this

broke: uwu please let me know if i do something racist

woke: taking responsibility for yourself, monitoring your own actions, being receptive of criticism even if it’s not delivered to you in a nice way

broke: distancing yourself from your whiteness by making white people jokes and talking mad shit abt other white people

woke: understanding that you are not somehow less white than other white people bc you aren’t a cishet able bodied nt man

broke: getting mad when we make jokes abt hating white people

woke: understanding that you don’t get to monitor how we express our anger abt the trauma we’ve experienced at white people’s hands

broke: arguing with us about what is or isn’t racism

woke: understanding that you have never actually experienced racism, staying in your lane, actually listening to us

broke: making racism abt you and your feelings

woke: understanding your experiences with and perspective on racism are dumb and don’t matter, focusing on people of color instead

broke: constantly asking your friends of color to roast people for you

woke: not dragging us into all your messes, handling your own beef, understanding we’re probably tired of ur shit, learning to roast people yourself

broke: reblogging posts abt racism with #let me know if this is ok to rb

woke: not rbing posts if you think rbing it would be overstepping boundaries, contacting op to ask if you can rb their post, developing critical thinking skills

broke: “yeah i dont do this” or “omg i didnt realize that was Bad and i was actively hurting people by doing it” on posts abt racism

woke: reading and comprehending them, reblogging them silently and without commentary, not trying to get brownie points at all times

broke: answering asks from other white demons consoling you after you get called out for racism

woke: blocking those racist bitches, not feeding into the idea that any poc who calls you out is a monster, acknowledging that you fucked up, apologizing, not doing whatever you did again

broke: thanking me for teaching you how to treat poc like people

woke: realizing you should be embarrassed i had to tell you this shit

This reminds me when book of life was rejected by Disney but as soon as it was successful they created Coco >:l

also :re that last post about white people at disney creating latin american movies. they literally steal the stories from latin american people. i wouldn’t be surprised if encanto was actually made by a colombian person but disney stole the rights to it.

something similar happened with coco. where coco was inspired off of a town and the story of an old woman, and disney didn’t give them a dime.

#what i really like about Helga are her proportions 

#she’s thin but muscular and has some curves

#but she’s also tall which is unusual for an animated woman 

#and her eyes don’t take up half her face 

#and she has broad shoulders which i like

Thank you, creators of Atlantis.

This may be THEE ashiest tweet I have ever gazed upon.

A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

Urgent abortion need

Thank you for reading this. I am usually not this vulnerable in public but I need all the help i can get at this point. I recently went to the hospital because I had crazy stomach pains and a very high fever, only to find out I’m 7 weeks pregnant. I am not at the right position to have a baby right now due to so many health and financial reasons. Recently GA is passing a law on abortion bans too and i am VERY VERY desperate. I have looked into funding websites and they wont pay for the whole procedure. Please please, if anyone is willing to donate whatever they have, it will mean the entire world to me. I have exhausted options, please help. I have created a crowdfund and here is the link: https://www.gofundme.com/1nmcix72pc?utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_na+share-sheet&rcid=8482648e200948b78e401f570b1d018c

gofundme.com

Click here to support Urgent Need organized by Veronica B.

Hi friends. Recently, i was in hospital for heavy stomach cramps and a high fever, only to find out im 7 weeks pregnant. I cannot afford to

@abortstigma @abortionassistanceblog @genderqueerpositivity