Racism: America’s Forbidden Topic 

Table of Contents

Introduction

As we observe the Martin Luther King Jr. Day national holiday this Monday, we are reminded of his unwavering clarity regarding the American condition. In his speech, "The Other America," King insisted that,

"there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country. Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation."

In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture he stated,

"there is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually... This is the problem of racism."

If he would have said these words today he would be called a racist.

Racism remains America’s most polarizing reality. It fundamentally defines the daily existence of one part of the population while instantly triggering a defensive reaction in another. Beyond social tension, it remains a potent political tool—a catalyst used to mobilize voting bases and a galvanizer to push specific legislation.

Yet, in America, bringing up racism is like pointing out a structural crack in the foundation while the landlord is desperately trying to show you the new curtains. The moment a Black person mentions racism, they can be immediately branded as racists just for uttering the word or dismissed as race-baiters. If they dare to bring up slavery, the conversation is derailed by a rehearsed script of "whataboutisms"—claims that the Irish were slaves too, reminders of the Arab slave trade, or the argument that white soldiers died for their freedom.

These aren't just arguments; they are defensive shields designed to protect a "forbidden" truth. The truth is that America isn't a country that happens to have a racism problem; it is a country built on a blueprint of white genetic anxiety and structural control. From the Electoral College to the 13th Amendment’s hidden trap door, the "whiteness" that American policy was built to protect was a manufactured cage—and until we address the root that laid the first brick, we are just repainting a house that was never meant for us to live in.

The Root: The Fear of White Annihilation

To understand why this topic is "forbidden," we must look at the psychological root. Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, in her brilliant work The Isis Papers, zeroed in on what I believe is the core cause of the system: the fear of white genetic annihilation.

While skin color is a complex biological blend of many genes, the power structure designed the category of whiteness to be intentionally exclusive and genetically fragile. By adopting the "One-Drop Rule," they ensured that whiteness was "recessive" by law, even if not by simple biology—meaning it could be "lost" through a single non-white ancestor.

This created a permanent state of genetic anxiety. Dr. Welsing argued that because white people are a global minority, the entire system of "White Supremacy" was engineered as a defensive behavioral system—a reaction to the biological reality that their specific physical traits are easily masked or "blended" in a diverse world.

We see this same management strategy mirrored globally. For instance, in South Africa, the architects of Apartheid—who studied American Jim Crow laws—refined the "one-drop rule" into a multi-tiered system of White, Coloured, Indian, and Black. They realized that a binary "Black vs. White" system would eventually lead to the numerical problem they feared. By creating these buffer categories, such as "Coloured," they protected the minority power structure through the same structural oppression used in America.

The irony is that the power structure created the very problem it now fears. By placing so much emphasis on "whiteness" as a supreme and exclusive category, they created a standard that is easily "diluted". If Western civilization hadn't invented the concept of race to justify slavery and colonization, there would be no reason to fear its eradication today.

Dismantling the Smoke Screen

When we bring these facts to light, to silence us, the "whataboutism" script begins. Let’s address them:

The Blueprint: Policy as a Tool of Control

Racism is woven into the very fabric of our institutions; it isn't a bug, it's a feature.

The Price of the Pedestal: Why the Majority Needs a New Foundation

Ironically, the demographic most sensitive to the mere mention of racism is often the same demographic that champions an "America First" agenda. If they truly believed in putting America first, they would have to recognize the profound damage that racism is causing this nation. Truly prioritizing America means being willing to let go of the idea that "whiteness" is the most important metric of value and instead asking what is actually best for the health, economy, and future of the entire country.

The Competence Myth

A major barrier for many in the white community is the programmed belief that "whiteness" is synonymous with American success—a false narrative that no other group has contributed to the fabric of this country. This creates a deep-seated distrust that any other group could successfully lead or maintain the nation.

We must get the point across that competence has nothing to do with color. It has never been "just white people." Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous people have been a backbone of American innovation, labor, and brilliance since its inception. To believe otherwise is to ignore the stolen patents, the built-from-scratch cities, and the cultural wealth that has been extracted for centuries. The fear that the country will fail without white supremacy is based on a lie that Black people have contributed nothing, when in reality, America would not exist without the contributions of all ethnicities.

1. The "Divide and Conquer" Tax

The "white" category prevents poor and middle-class people from realizing they have more in common with each other than with the elite. This tactic is used to convince white voters to oppose programs like universal healthcare because they are told those programs will "help the wrong people". As a result, poor white Americans suffer from lower life expectancy and higher debt—all to protect a "status" that doesn't pay the mortgage.

2. The Economic Drain

Racism is a massive inefficiency. A 2020 report by Citigroup estimated that discrimination against Black Americans has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion over the last 20 years. When you suppress the talent and spending power of a significant portion of the population, you stunt the growth of the entire country.

3. The Fragility of Fear

Living in a state of constant, subconscious fear of "annihilation" is psychologically damaging. Tearing down the foundation of whiteness offers freedom from the burden of supremacy.

4. The Global Market Reality

As the Global Majority takes its place in the world economy, a nation that clings to an internal apartheid system will become a pariah. To remain viable, America must function as a true multi-racial democracy.

The Reconstruction: How Do We Tear It Down?

"Tearing it down" means de-authorizing the systems that rely on those old blueprints and replacing them with systems designed for human equity. When we refuse to do this, we are just repainting a house that was never meant for us to live in.

Final Thought: The Courage to Build

Most people stay in a decaying house because they are afraid of being homeless. But we aren't homeless; we are the builders. We have the collective labor, the intellect, and a historic opportunity to finally align our reality with our highest ideals. Tearing down this "forbidden" foundation isn't an act of hate toward any group; it is an act of self-love and national survival. It is the only way to build a house where ethnicity is recognized for its cultural importance, but the useless fiction of race is finally left behind. By de-authorizing a system that uses "whiteness" as a cage for the many to protect the few, we create a structure where no American has to live in a defensive crouch. This is an invitation to every citizen—including those who have long been told that their value depends on a pedestal of supremacy—to trade the fragility of fear for the security of a house where everyone can finally breathe.

Glossary & Bibliography

Glossary

Bibliography

Source: Racism: America’s Forbidden Topic 

Types of Editing: For New (Overwhelmed) Independent Authors

Congratulations! Your hard work has resulted in a manuscript, and you’re ready to share it with the world. You probably fall into one of two camps right now.

Either way, take a breath and celebrate your hard work so far. This is a huge accomplishment! There are lots of steps to go, but they’re not as difficult as you may be fearing. Second things second (the first was celebrating)—getting the necessary information so your upcoming decisions are informed.

You might associate the word “editing” with the phrase “kill your darlings,” or maybe you dread the price tag on a professional edit. You’re not alone. Many writers balk at editing and choose to either edit their work themselves or pay a bare minimum to their cousin’s nephew.

The good news is, editing is not for ripping your writing into pieces against your will, nor is it for draining your wallet. A good editor will cooperate with you to make your manuscript the best it can be while preserving your vision, and there are many ways to make the process more affordable.

There are many stages of editing. After evaluating the types of edits and your current manuscript, you will be better suited to choose what’s right for you.

Self-editing comes before everything else. For readers to understand your story, some basic housekeeping needs to be done first. At minimum, make sure your spelling is (mostly) correct, you’ve used punctuation (including quotation marks around dialogue), everything is split into paragraphs (you need a new one every time someone new speaks!), and you’re consistently in past or present tense from the same character’s point of view. You’re not trying to cross every T, just making sure the writing is good enough that it doesn’t hinder the story.

An alpha reader is not an editor, but someone who reads your story very early in the writing process. They’re your first audience and will give you big-picture feedback on whether the story makes sense, if the characters are believable, and if anything is confusing. This is like story validation—your alpha reader will help you understand whether you’re telling the story you meant to tell and whether readers will enjoy it.

Also called story critique, manuscript assessment, and editorial assessment, an evaluation is a multi-page report on major story elements like your plot, pacing, structuring, characters, dialogue, and more. It doesn’t include in-document changes, but is a separate developmental-level document to help you figure out what needs to be changed.

A beta reader is not an editor, but represents an average reader who will tell you what they think worked and what didn’t. Much like an alpha reader, they’ll give big-picture feedback, but slightly more zoomed in. Where an alpha read assumes the story is going to change significantly, beta reading focuses on plot holes (etc.) that are still large-scale issues but won’t override the whole manuscript.

A developmental edit suggests changes in the structure and narrative of a manuscript. Your editor will look for genre conventions, story logic, organization and restructuring, character arcs, and emotional payoff. Changes will be made in-line for scene-level edits, as well as a chapter-by-chapter report that addresses pacing and flow, as well as plot and character development.

After the story is complete and solid, a line editor will help make sure your writing is effective, sharp, and clear. Your editor will work with word choice and syntax, tone, consistency, and reorganize phrases to make your manuscript smoother and more consistent. Where previous stages have made sure the story is engaging, line editing makes sure the writing is engaging.

Copy editing works to perfect your language technically. In this stage, errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation will be corrected, along with stylistic consistency and tense usage. If you’ve used written numbers in some places and spelled them out in others, your copy editor will fix it.

After all other editing, proofreaders focus on technicalities such as sentence fragments, comma splices, typos, and all other word-by-word edits that have thus far slipped through the cracks.

Whew! That seems like a lot, but not every manuscript needs every type of editing, and many editors offer multiple services in a single package. For example, copy and line editing are commonly done in the same pass. In the coming articles, we’ll be addressing some of the most frequently asked editing questions from new (overwhelmed) independent authors.

~Allison of Sigmon Editorial

From idea to ISBN, Sigmon Editorial's got your back.

Friendly reminder that your frist couple of drafts are not meant to be perfect. The best way to explain this is by looking at writing the same way a skyscraper/house construction would look like.

The First Draft = This is the internal frame, metal beams and so on. This is what gives your story structure and represents the backbone of the book/novel/etc. you are working towards.

The Second Draft = this is when the overall outside frame starts to appear and the baseline shape begins to take shape here you generally see the outline of the structure. In a building, is when you start seeing floors being put up one by one and the shape starts to form as it goes up.

The Third Draft = here is where the walls start going up, room divisions take shape. Insulation is being put up and you still have some rooms that are not yet finished. You have not put a single item of furniture yet. The roof is either started or halfway done.

The Fourth Draft (and Probably beyond) = This is when you now see that all the drywall is done. Roof is finished and all you need to do is remove the drywall stickers. Here you also start moving to the final stages of improving the story. This process can take shape in many ways. It could include further edits, rewrites and more drafts.

The Final Draft = this is when you already have the house finished. Or the building is done. All you need to do now is furnish it. Maybe switch some rooms around. Polish the floors, sweep the carpets. Clean the windows. Throw out the trash. Make it look spiffy. Here all you do is move a few words. Go over final edits, mainly small things like punctuation that got missed, or changing a sentence here and there.

I would like to say that you don’t have to follow this to the letter. You may have rewritten your book/story twenty times and probably only reached Second Draft status. Or you rewrite it only twice and you’re already on Third Draft. Only you (and your editor, if you go that route) will be able to tell you how far along you are. Just because I put it up like that doesn’t mean is always like that.

This post is mostly made to tell you to not worry about your story being perfect the first go-around. It just needs to work and be out there. Once you get it out of your head, everything else starts to make sense.

Stick around for more tips, tricks, rants and other stuff I may come up with. And follow for more if my content is helping you with you with your writing. Shoot me a DM if you want to chat or whatever. And if you want, at least check out my book, The City of Laohz: Kannon on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (online).

Just got a chatgpt ad where the use case was "can't decide a new years resolution". I can't think of anything more sad than needing a robot to tell you what your own ambitions are. Loser shit.

20 Ways Characters Show Vulnerability Without Admitting It

Showing vulnerability is risky: it's weakness, it's fear, it's revealing one's flaws.

Showing vulnerability is a core part of driving the plot or character development, whether they're building relationships or force them to make choices they wouldn't normally do.

Exposing your character's doubts and insecurities shows the reader that your character is real and has depth.

Here are 20 ways you can create tension by showing vulnerability in your characters through actions:

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.

Good news: cancelled as of this morning.

Writing Tips Masterlist

20 ways characters show emotions/feelings without admitting it🧡

Writing Angst 🖤

Writing Romance 💜

Motivate Yourself to Write💙

Cheat Sheets💚

Writing & Dialogue Advice ❤️

I'll be updating this every week or so! If there's anything you want to request I write about, please feel free to ask❤️

quirks/traits to give your characters to make them feel more realistic

♡ neat/clean person-- they are constantly washing their hands and cleaning the area around them. hate getting anything on their hands, clothes, shoes, car, etc etc.

♡ hobby addict-- they are constantly looking at and for little things that relate to their hobbies, sometimes even getting sidetracked. for ex: touching fabrics while talking to you, "one second" before speed walking to look at some yarn/books/shoes/etc etc.

♡ takes forever to finish drinks-- literally always carrying around a watered-down drink they are still working on. adds ice after a while instead of just putting that poor drink out of its misery

♡ alternatively-- drink fiend. doesn't use a straw because they'll sip too fast. CEO of "are you gonna finish that?" and "I'll drink it if you don't like it".

♡ collects something a bit uncommon-- the bottlecaps from every soda/water they drink, little things that are the exact shade of their favorite color, lost earrings (they disinfect them, don't worry), perfect leaves, miniatures of random things (that they then place on the life-sized versions), 'ugly' things (they feel bad that nobody else likes them), etc etc

♡ runs their hands over different textures. if they touch one that they hate, they will quickly touch one they like 'to balance it out'

♡ dislikes certain numbers (ex: odd numbers. or even specific numbers, like 4 or 9) and so they go out of their way to avoid those

♡ can't stop buying something specific even though they already have a lot of them (ex: pens, lip glosses, mugs, etc etc) because they just love them so much

♡ only drinks coffee/tea if it is piping hot. will rather chug it than warm it up because 'it ruins the taste'

♡ alternatively-- does not care if a hot drink goes completely cold, they will still drink it. 'Iced coffee is a thing too, you know"

♡ talks during movies/shows because they like to analyze everything and point out stuff they notice in the background. probably pauses to be polite (if they can)

♡ changes their style with the seasons. example: once summer starts, they exclusively wear dresses.

i have more but that is it for now ♡

Deltarune tomorrow

*scrolling tumblr* hmmm. i agree with the sentiment of this post, but the phrasing feels off to me. it doesn’t really have that Reblog factor, you know? *scrolls* oh good, a post that just says “i jerk off till my penis scrweam” . i better reblog this

super simple low-effort ao3 summary methods that are 1000% better and 1000% less annoying than just saying you suck at summaries:

#it’s okay if you even have to spoil a little bit of the early plot twists#set the lure; cast the net [x]

I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable

oh shit i almost missed it!

they're so bugs

Good news! Elementary schoolers of the modern day still believe this is part of vanilla minecraft. I have borne firsthand witness to these discussions.

the folkloric gate to heaven requires journeying to hell to get its building material

yo what's the handle of the fancy calligraphy guy can we get them over here that's a line

@theshitpostcalligrapher

oh good i needed a warmup piece

#listen i dont mean to be that guy but#you can make glowstone by using glowstone dust#and witches drop glowstone dust#no hell needed

buddy not to be a ridiculous nerd about it but you realize that seeking out dark magic users to kill them and pry potion ingredients out of their dead, cold hands isn't exactly non-hellish behavior? maybe the journey to hell is internal idk your playstyle