Interesting research findings

Should I read Settlers or The Invention of The White Race first?

I want to join the Black community group at work but one of the future events is about black folks in the military and it turned me off. Maybe I should join anyway to bring the revolutionary energy that’s needed.

yall plz send me good energy… just got a call for a prospective music teaching job i applied to a whileee ago out of state that is more than 3x the pay of my old one!! this could be what i need to get out of this place again and for good this time. they hit me with the “we’ll hit you back in a couple of weeks” at the end and i h8 not knowing exactly when to expect a response (especially cuz i sounded hella awkward on the phone) but i’m using this as an opportunity to continue cultivating my practice of non-attachment. if it is it is, and if it isn’t it isn’t

Hello my friends

I’m eastern european who sadly ended up in the ukkk, so I’m posting here to say hello. I’m very aware that I don’t really experience racism like a lot of my comrades here, so I won’t take up too much space mouthing off, unless I’ve got something to share in the replies or need to scream about some xenophobic bullshit, hope that’s cool.

Sending love to all my em poc comrades

One thing I didn’t really notice until I read a random blog about translating and subtitling Korean dramas in English and my native language is that our naming conventions are way different than in English.

This happens with other languages of course but didn’t really realise it for the one I actually speak.

For example, the infamous example is gender neutral pronouns and no grammatical gender. Maybe even having no last names and only personal names + patronymic names. Some do have family names but depends on familial origin (often arab ancestry).

But the one I didn’t realise is how referring to yourself by your first name (ie. Referring to yourself in third person in English) is very normal and even encouraged because traditionally people have multiple names and people often only go by one of the names they are given.

And if not by first name, you either refer to yourself by your title, or your position within the family. Ie. Your dad will say “Dad thinks you should xyz” instead of “I think you should xyz”•

It sounds absolutely awkward in English but it feels very normal in my native language.

We also have names for each sibling (ie. Eldest sibling will be called “Along”, you either prefix “kak” or “abang” (“sister” or “brother”) and remove the initial a. In my family we use the gender neutral name. There’s a unique name for up to the 5-8th sibling, in which case it can repeat for more and another alternative prefix is used, but not everyone follows it.

Nicknames are also a big thing. Family can either call you by a nickname which is usually some form of your personal name, or by the “sibling name”. Sometimes sibling name + nickname for clarification. Other people outside family can use your nickname aswell.

Typing this all out also made me realise it’s really hard to explain and understand unless you actually speak a language that has that same level of complexity.

I passed the ELDT

which basically means I have satisfied the minimum FMCSA requirement to start the commercial skills test.

I also backed up a bus three times today and didn’t hit any cones or encroach the boundary lines!

Spent today in bed, which i bad because i had things i was supposed to do

I “acquired” a ton of E-books on game development from a friends thumbdrive. I hope to crank up my development skills and abilities over the next several months. Not sure what it is but I have noticed my focus and attenion really locked in. In such a way I feel like this time it will be different than my previous attempts at learning this stuff. I wanna game developer and keep it “black black and blackety black yo” in doing so. Even if it’s just a hobby thing I really want to be a game designer, and a black one at that.

The whites will write a news article calling you a murderer even before thinking of holding up a rifle.

Today i survived on 2 hours of sleep

but i also ate chinese food which was very good

I feel like a lot of online queer spaces are absolutely overrun with white libs who don’t think that they have the capacity to be racist, despite… constantly being very ignorant and offensive. Really, really weird bubbles. Has anyone else experienced this?? 😭

Am I the only person who finds it a little weird when white people start calling other white people cracker (half this site)? Like we can’t even be racist to white people without them stealing that too smh

I AM ONCE AGAIN ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO JOIN EMPOCHA THE ELEMENT HEXBEAR EM POC CHAT ROOM. COME CHAT!!!

My long term relationship that we both thought was for life is imploding right now, and it’s not even because of anything new and recent, it’s because we finally figured out some unhealthy dynamics got set years ago when we were in worse situations in life and dealing with crises and now that we’re looking at it it’s just unbearable. A lot is my fault, some is their’s, but in another way it’s neither of our faults, it’s just an unavoidable tragedy. It’s so depressing to confront how we both were utterly set up to fail in this (or any) relationship by the combined forces of capitalism, systemic racism, and systemic patriarchy. I don’t want this to sound like a cop-out, I don’t want to say “oh my difficulties with emotions and relationships are not my fault because the systems did this to me and I bear no blame,” I can see clearly (now, when it’s too late to prevent them) the mistakes I made. But it’s incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking that when they were happening I couldn’t have done anything else because of how I was malformed by all the trauma of living in the belly of a racist, murderous empire surrounded by toxic hateful racist monsters. At every step of the way we’ve been trying our very best (I’ve been doing therapy for years, and they tried but they just couldn’t find a therapist who wasn’t a capitalist radfem shitlib that would gaslight them and do more harm than good), but at every step for years and years and years the traumas carved into us from early childhood through adulthood sabotaged our efforts. They ask, “why did you do X horrible thing when we needed you to do Z?” and when I examine it it’s genuinely just because of how the racist fabric of America destroyed my family and destroyed me to the point that X was all I was capable of doing in those times of stress. I didn’t get to have a safe environment in which to grow up healthily – I had a fucking nightmare forced upon me when I was just a little kid and it broke me, just more subtly than it broke my other family members. But it broke me nonetheless. I ask them “why did you do Y when we needed you to do Z?” and when they examine it it’s because of how abuse at the hands of the toxic patriarchical fabric of America starting from a very young age carved such deep liabilities and weaknesses into them that they couldn’t be healthier. And then our traumas intersected in bad ways. If just one of us hadn’t had our fatal weaknesses, we could have maybe helped the other. But with both of us having them, our attempts to help each other actually led us to fall into unhealthy dynamics instead and now the traumatic memories of those dynamics make it – I think – impossible to move forward and heal together.

Even with this understanding, even with these big breakthroughs, it may be too late. I think it very likely is even though we desperately want it to not be too late. They said “I don’t want us to have to split up. It would be a horrible tragedy. It should be a simple choice: We love each other and didn’t mean to do harm, now that we understand what went wrong and how the systems did this to us it should be obvious that we just stay together and fix things together. The reason it’s not simple for me is that everything’s been so traumatic I don’t know if it’s possible, healthy, or even ethical for us to try to stay together and fix things together.”
And I get that, I really do. It’s not a cop-out, it’s true. So much traumatic shit has happened that I can’t humanely and ethically ask them to stay. Asking is pointless anyway – they already want to stay and make it better, it’s just a question of whether that’s even possible or healthy for them to try to do, or if too much harm has been done. It’s not a decision to be made, it’s a yes/no fact that has to be uncovered and then whatever that fact is, we’ll have to deal with it even if we hate it.

I envy white people here, at least the ones with semi-healthy families (unlike my poor, traumatized partner). For all that there’s something so fucked up and fundamentally wrong with many of those white folks, they seem happier. They have their own traumas to be sure, but they don’t have the trauma that comes from being nonwhite in this KKK society and right now, looking at how that racial trauma has destroyed my life, I envy them for not having been brutalized that way.