I do get that this post was made in 2021 when the vibes were obviously quite different, but it was reblogged on to my dash recently so - I hope that now that Percival Everett’s James has sold a bunch of copies and won the Pulitzer Prize, we can put to bed the oversimplified notion that “Huckleberry Finn ( / Uncle Tom’s Cabin / yes even much later book To Kill a Mockingbird) is only ‘racist’ because it’s ‘about racism!’” YA authors who think a gazillion classics are too “problematic” to bother with, and kids should read their overly didactic garbage to “learn about racism” instead, are being stupid about this, sure. But this idea of “the left bans books from classrooms too!” started re: efforts by minority parents to get their children's schools to assign different books when discussing racism in their literature classes (which so many schools relegate to one book or one unit, which is itself an issue) than those three - books by white authors where black characters' stories are of minor importance relative to a white person's journey to antiracism, and where the black characters are simplistic stereotypes - and never have that addressed. We can all get that black people's understanding of the racism they face is sophisticated enough that they're not kneejerk reacting to the use of slurs and assuming "oh this historical book using slurs in dialogue that were common among white people at the time - must be racist!" right? Because that was the incredibly-condescending attitude among a lot of "anti book banning" white people for so long, and because you do have stupid non-black "progressives" reducing the racism to slurs as these YA authors are, that gets treated as the only reason that someone objects to the way those three novels are treated as the Pinnacle of Antiracist Literature. Which they quite simply are not, given that, for starters, there are numerous books about it by black authors!!!

But there is another problem at work here, the constant swings of the pendulum to one extreme or another with how we regard "problematic" people in the past - which one reblogger there criticizes, but even they still are buying into some oversimplified notions of this topic. They almost get there, but not quite. I've said many times that the issue is that every era has its progressives and conseratives and we should look at those people in context rather than just assuming that someone was a product of their time and completely absolving them of blame (I've made this point a gazillion times about Richard Wagner or the film Birth of a Nation that they were not just "products of their time" but Wagner's antisemitism was noxious enough to be seen as a fault of his by many people when he was alive and Birth of a Nation had a massive boycott organized by the NAACP!) OR harsly condemning them all for failing to live up to modern standards. But that even with that, there were gradients of progressive and conservative, and a lot of the way that white "anti-racist" authors get talked about later only takes into account how white people were discussing them at the time. They ignore that black people have long found stories that were ostensibly about their oppression but marginalized their actual voices reductive, and black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass commented on how many (not all) white abolitionists still saw black people in condescending ways that are reflected in books like these. It isn't "imposing a modern standard" to say that part of the discussion we should have about Huckleberry Finn is that, yes, as the last post in that chain says, it's a story about a white character coming to an antiracist consciousness - but why is that always the story in these books that get assigned in class and lauded by white people? (Though even then, not always - most advanced high school curricula in the U.S. now assign at least some works by Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and other celebrated black American authors, but I digress.) Why are the stories of black Americans suffering through racism of minor importance? That's one of the brilliant things about James, about how it flips the story in a way that exposes a lot of its issues - including the way that Huckleberry's story can only go so far in what it communicates about racism simply because of the privileges Huckleberry has that and Jim doesn't and therefore the experiences they each will have with it - in a way that is deeply in dialogue with the history of racism in American media and how even "well-meaning" white "progressives" have furthered that through stories like Huckleberry Finn. It gets you to think about that that isn't moralistically condemning Mark Twain for not being a true anti-racist by modern standards, but also exposes the ways in which his choice of central character and story and indulging in certain tropes was a vision of "anti-racism" that the black people most affected by racism have always found somewhat limited, have always meant we are only seeing pieces of the full story.

In short: if you think the options are either "Huckleberry Finn is unforgivably racist garbage and contemporary YA novels are always more 'valuable' ways to 'teach teens about racism' than books from the past" OR "it is a progressive book and the only reason you'd not see it that way is because you're overreacting to the use of slurs and imposing modern social justice onto it" then we are still reducing the conversation around historical anti-racism to one extreme or another. The reality is more complicated, there are a lot of reasons beyond "'overreacting' to slurs"* why minority parents might take issue with these books used to "teach antiracism" especially in districts where most student are non-white, and the conversation in any classroom should center the perspectives of black Americans in talking about antiblack American racism from both today and past periods or it's going to be incomplete.

(*as a sidenote to this - I remember in a convo about To Kill a Mockingbird I had years ago online, a black person pointing out that even though they understand why you'd want to represent historical white people's racist speech in fiction, it meant one of their main memories of studying the book in school was white students and white teachers repeatedly using the n-word and having a "socially acceptable" way to do so because they were "discussing the book," and how that felt to be a black person in that classroom while that was going on. I think it's really easy for people who aren't targets of these slurs to downplay the experience of hearing them in a classroom, uttered by "nice" white people who "aren't being racist, just discussing the book!" but clearly still getting a thrill of having an "excuse" to say a forbidden word. As a gay person, I've seen the similar glee that straight people get when they have an "excuse" to use something like "dyke" or "faggot" in my presence, and those words don't have nearly the level of baggage that the n-word does. No, black people aren't objecting to these books purely because they use historically-accurate slurs - are you kidding me? - but the way that white people act about getting to discuss books with those slurs needs to be a part of the conversation!)

— “The Snake Fight Portion of Your Thesis Defense” by Luke Burns (via inevitablerecursion)

fun fact! did you know that the word "greige" describes a color that's greyish-beige, but it isn't a portmanteau of grey and beige? it actually comes from the middle french word for raw silk & its color, grège!

i totally thought the word was invented to mock trendy faux wood vinyl flooring

Hunh, fascinating

you stole dog blood

In defence of vermin

you can't even say "get a job" to people anymore because the market is so bad they'll be like ive applied to 400 jobs over the past 6 months

my mom can still say it to me anyway

naughty little file, your file size is too large to email. mommy's going to have to compress you~

hey, that dogs whole job is to point at birds, and it is indeed pointing at a bird

What more do you want?

Just absolutely vibrating with excitement because careful breeding and training snipped out the “and now you grab it and shake it to death” part of the predation loop, so the dog is waiting for the human do do The Next Part (???) and then be rewarded.

Something something too often I have to defend someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous.

"Bats and Brugmansia", Erica Peebus.

There are two schools of thought on the locked tomb series; there are the people who took tazmuir at her word when she said gideon had a longsword and drew it as such; then there are the people who know what a longsword is and know that the thing gideon swings is at the bare minimum a fucking claymore.

gentle reminder for those that belong to the former school of thought

It's standard practice on the Ninth for luggage trunks to be capable of fitting one adult skeleton

All the other houses at the spaceport: "Surely the Ninth can't be as morbid and terrifying as they all say..."

Gid just casually walking down the ramp with an actual casket as her luggage: "'Sup nerds."

So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”

7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.

Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.

The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.

Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.

what did we do to deserve portal 2. that shit was so good and for what

we got to have this! we got to have a valve game set in the half life universe, and its an enemies-to-lovers-to-enemies-again sci fi comedy story about a homicidal ai created to run tests forever and the test subject she catches feelings for!! how is this game real!!!

happy birthday to the only video game ever

people still clown in the notes of this post so reminder that glados was gonna take you on a date and accuse you of cheating. shes not chells mom