When Ur Chasing Some Guy That Snuck Into Ur Castle But U

Stop normalizing the grind and start normalizing whatever this is

A reminder to everyone posting about the violence in Jerusalem and across Israel and Palestine...

It is not helpful to post one-sided, nuance-free content.  You are no less or no more woke when you include Islamophobic, antisemitic, racist, or downright horrific tropes in your posts that will not end the Occupation, will not end this brutal civil war, you will make no one feel any more or less safe, and will not make our world a better place.  Nuanced compassion will help you, and help us.

If you want to begin to understand the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as a non-Palestinian, as a non-Jew, as an non-Israeli, take a step back.  Take a deep breath, and…

…imagine you are a Palestinian father living in an occupied refugee camp outside of Bethlehem who cannot get to his work without going through a security barrier..Imagine the humiliating feeling.  Imagine you are an Israeli child living in Sderot, having to rush inside frequently due to frequent barrages of rockets aimed at your home.  Imagine that you are a young Palestinian teen living in the United States, unable to return to your grandparent’s birthplace of Lydda due to their forced evacuation in 1948.  Imagine you are an ultra orthodox Jewish woman living in a settlement in Gush Etzion, told that if you moved there you would live a more fruitful life - and constantly scared of her Palestinian neighbors.  Imagine you are a little boy living in the Gaza Strip or in Ramalah, taught to be scared of Jews and Israelis, due to frequent visits from the IDF.  Imagine that you are a young Yeshiva boy living in a settlement, scared to be kidnapped by Palestinians - a fear justified by the recent kidnapping and murder of three Jewish residents of the West Bank.  Imagine that you are a Palestinian olive tree farmer, and discovering that your trees have been cut down by settlers.  Imagine that you are a Jewish settler living in the West Bank who actively makes deep connections with her Palestinian neighbors, forging peace-building initiatives between Jews and Palestinian that you can only do as a resident of the West Bank.  Imagine that you are her partner, a Christian Palestinian man who works hard with her to combat hatred and bigotry.

Imagine you’re a queer Arab Israeli living outside of Tel Aviv… an Israeli teen activist against the occupation… an American Jew who cries when their family in Israel is bombarded by rockets… a young Palestinian man in Greece who has made a life outside of Palestine … a young Christian child living in Jerusalem under a barrage of rockets… a Palestinian teen who is so fed up by years of Occupation that tries to stab an IDF solider at a gate outside of the Old City of Jerusalem…. a young Bedouin child heartbroken to grow up around violence and fear… a Palestinian educator with Israeli friends trying to teach their class tolerance… a rabbi living in Tel Aviv trying to teach their congregation tolerance… 

The biggest problem with non-Palestinian (both in Palestine, and in the diaspora), non-Israeli, and non-Jewish discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is that those not directly involved, fail to see this conflict from the perspective of those directly involved.

Do the work.  And don’t hurt us along the way.

For anyone who doesn't know what's going on in Canada right now (which, let's be real, is probably everyone who's not in Canada):

This week, a mass grave was discovered at a former Indian Residential School, in Kamloops, BC. The grave contained the bodies of 215 Indigenous children.

For people outside of North America, residential schools were places that Indigenous children were sent to, to have their language and culture stripped away from them. They were literally stolen from their families, and scattered across Canada, to ensure that they would be surrounded by children who didn't speak their language. They were given Christian names and forced to speak English. They were horrendously abused, and the survivors have been traumatized.

Hundreds of children never returned. The assumption has always been that they died. This has now been confirmed.

The school in Kamloops closed in 1978. They are now trying to identify bodies to inform family members. The last residential school closed in the 1990s. There is growing demand to search all of them, but the government hasn't responded to that, as of yet. Ottawa JUST gave in to pressure to fly the Canada flag at half mast. They weren't even going to do that.

This is the reality if anti-Indigenous racism in Canada. The residential schools may be closed, but that hasn't stopped the abduction of Indigenous children, let alone the hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

today I bring an edit 

Me posting on tumblr:

Does anyone know how @/stix-n-bread is doing? I haven't seen anything from them in half a year and I'd like to know it they're okay..

The journal entry that Bruce deliberately skipped during narration

ive seen a few other posts about this that didnt get a lot of notes because i know it makes nonblacks uncomfortable (😐) but you people need to start examining why so many of your reaction pics and gifs and memes are of black people being expressive or literally just existing because its not a coincidence. it directly correlates to how black people are seen as overemotional and overreactive, the sassy black woman and the angry black man stereotypes and so on. like you really need to ask yourselves why such a large portion of the most used reaction memes this year are images of black celebrities like wendy williams and oprah and why non sequitur memes including dababys face seem to be so inherently funny to everyone, and if you are contributing to this problem.

this video explains it well:

"White people and nonblack folks using black memes and GIFs to express their emotional labor on black bodies contributes to what American literary critic Sienne Ngai calls 'the animatedness of black folks', A.K.A. seeing black people as hyperbolically emotional and expressive, particularly black women and [q word] black men."

in the video khadija also talks about how this relates to blackface and minstrelsy and about the appropriation (and butchering) of aave in online spaces, and cites these articles on the subject of digital blackface that i also recommend:

Teen Vogue

We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in GIFs

Are you part of the problem?

escholarship.org

Digital Blackface: How 21st Century Internet Language Reinforces Racism

Author(s): Erinn, Wong | Advisor(s): Acevedo Butcher, Carmen