“Spine Corset” by Shaun Leane for Alexander McQueen, SS ‘98.
How do you approach unrequited effort in friendship?
I don’t really measure effort in friendships. There is the connection and there is the life it fits into which is often busy and overwhelming. I don’t befriend people who I feel are subtly mean or have anything but pure love towards me, so with that as the foundation I never think about effort in that way because I trust that the intention is always pure. When the trust cracks, I distance myself, no hard feelings.
As a word and concept, "terrorism" has acquired an extraordinary status in American public discourse. It has displaced Communism as public enemy number one, although there are frequent efforts to tie the two together. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric and argument that are frightening in their capacity for mobilizing opinion, gaining legitimacy and provoking various sorts of murderous action. And it has imported and canonized an ideology with origins in a distant conflict, which serves the purpose here of institutionalizing the denial and avoidance of history. In short, the elevation of terrorism to the status of a national security threat (though more Americans drown in their bathtubs, are struck by lightning or die in traffic accidents) has deflected careful scrutiny of the government's domestic and foreign policies. Whether the deflection will be longstanding or temporary remains to be seen, but given the almost unconditional assent of the media, intellectuals and policy-makers to the terrorist vogue, the prospects for a return to a semblance of sanity are not encouraging. - Edward Said
Former water treatment works, Seoul Forest
Racism would be easier if white people thought we were human like them, but they think their experiences are deeper than ours, and we're crude beasts, so know better. I still can't believe a white Polish person who literally struggles speaking English had the arrogance to tell me what Black women experience. I tell them that a Black woman was kicked out of women's toilets because she's a gender non-conforming lesbian and the experience of misgendering isn't a core part of the Black female experience so insisting it is isnt accurate and these prick points to a fucking meme. My Black ass words meant that little
People on social media just love to lie and not engage with history to the point this white Polish person who can not speak English well tells me I don't understand. You people are far too comfortable mentioning us because we're objects and not people. For years I keep saying the way people bring up Black women and (white) trans women stinks of racial entitlement and not solidarity and people are purposefully misinterpreting Black history to paint the dehumanisation of Black people as a gender issue identitical to trans people when it was a racial caste system where white people debated if Black people could feel pain, learn, had souls or if it was possible to impregnate mixed race Black people because they saw them like infertile mules.
When H&M had that campaign that included a white trans woman that used to be on here and a female body builder and I found out a female body builder who's Black was being harassed. All I saw were people gloating she's being harassed and not the skinny white trans woman. No care or sympathy for this woman. It's then I knew Black women are fodder for these people and don't actually care about how Black women experience stuff.
We've come to a point where you need to tell white lefty people everything that happens to us isn't because we're Black. White people don't own other human experiences and oppression. The fact Serena Williams gets harassed for how she looks and her sister Venus doesn't its clear as day it's not simply because she's Black and dark skin and you're not engaging with why people love to attack her but we're not going to do that because insisting Black women get misgendered for being Black women and no other reasons like being butch or muscular helps suburbanite white transpeople feel less ugly and that's the most important thing in the world. Who fucking cares why anything happens to Black women or what happened during chattel slavery, we can make shit up as long as we threw the Black women a bone and say they're oppressed even if you talk about it inaccurately on purpose
I'll always bring up the fit white trans women threw when Black women told them not to use Say her name. Everything we do is for them, and we don't get to have anything about our own experiences. That's what solidarity is. How does it benefit other people and you can never criticise them because it makes them feel bad and can't come up with their own shit
People like talking about the racism from different groups of oppressed white people and skip over the deep levels of entitlement from white trans people cause they bring up the Blacks as a shield.