What it says on the tin

I just finished The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates and this quote stopped me dead in my tracks:

Hey. Gentiles. Listen up for a sec.

When September and October are nearing and you’re planning an event: google “Rosh Hashanah *year*” and *Yom Kippur *year*” and then, and I cannot stress this enough, don’t plan your event on those days. In fact, don’t plan any events starting sundown the night before. Those are the three most important days of the Jewish calendar, and, once again, I cannot stress enough how much this little bit of forethought and kindness will make every Jew you know cry tears of joy.

i am so fucking tired of how normalized racism is in fandom spaces

i saw it when people were defending a black character being named "flint coal"

i saw it when people defending a company that was genuinely filled with behind-the-scenes racism

i saw it when people were seeing dark skinned characters as more aggressive than their light skinned peers

but apparently im "overreacting" and "seeing things that arent there" so i should just keep my mouth shut and take it

What always gets me about learning about settler colonialism is how once you learn about it you cannot unsee the violence to the land itself. My home state was previously nearly 100% wetlands, apart of the wider Ohio river valley whose biodiversity supported such large populations of hundreds of different species that many contemporary source from settlers describe it as like the garden of Eden.

The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.

Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.

This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.

It's like learning about commodity fetishism and suddenly seeing hundreds of strangers in the products that surround you. Once you learn how the land was destroyed for profit you'll never look at the miles of fields or the cracks in the concrete of buildings built on wetlands or the stench of now obsolete canals built solely for a once boat-dependent economy with no care for the environment the same.

lol

wonder what that's about

damn this is bad bad

people who use "cat person" and "dog person" as though they are describing two opposing sides in a war are very tiresome to talk to for me. and the same for anyone who assumes a personal preference Must Necessarily be a statement of supremacy. TIRESOME!

people who do this really do not enjoy when I bring up that our ideas of "what dogs are like" and "what cats are like" are socially and culturally influenced. "dogs are big and stupid and dirty and slobbery and too friendly" this is not how dogs are viewed in many places, did u know? this is largely a stereotype in the places where dogs like retrievers are the most common type of dog to own, like the US. in many places this is not the case, and in those places the stereotypical dog is often characterized very differently.

MANY SUCH CASES I FEAR

Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.

Fun fact, that was literally what inspired me to make this post!

Because Tumblr is very English speaking and some ppl like France a little too much I just want to remind you of a few things:

- France abolished the Code Noir 2 months ago. That law project that said hey you can enslave, mutilate, kill, cross breed, etc. black people at will bc they're not people they're property ? Yeah. Abolished 2 months ago. We are in July 2026.

- the last human zoo closed its doors in 1994 in France due to social pressure. Not bc they were running out of business, no. Ppl still visited that place until it closed its doors. No, it was bc (black) French people were fed up. That human zoo was specialized in displaying black (presumed Congolese) people in fake huts in enclosures, for white entertainment.

- now while this might no longer be the case, when I was growing up, I went to a French school (as in. It was an international French School w the French flag n all) and the way we were taught French geography was that France has the biggest and largest access to the sea in the world. And they'd show us a map of France and its colonies around the world. It's all occupied indigenous lands. I don't know if they still teach that. I hope not. But they absolutely did until I graduated high school in 2017. Again, I write this on July 21st 2026, for the record.

Anyways that's all I have for now. Y'all don't hate France enough. Y'all need to hate France more.

OP, I hope you don’t mind if I add some sources. I assumed that the ‘zoo’ would be a hangover from colonial times, but it actually opened in the same year it was closed- 1994. According to the wiki article, the ‘performers’ were Ivorians under the purview of cote’d ivoire while I’m France, and the whole thing was meant to drum up tourism to the country. They were paid below minimum wage. There’s no word on what happened to them, only that they were ‘ordered out of the country.’ The manager also stole their passports to prevent ‘illegal immigration’.

i think it would do a lot of people good to remember that Mormons are white supremacists, no nuance, no debate, no arguing how they've gotten "more diverse", their whole belief system is fundamentally rooted in white supremacist ideals

Hey so, they officially did away with the whole "being black means you were less faithful to Jesus in the pre-earth life" thing, which hey, great, but it's still in their chief holy book that dark skin was a curse God placed on native americans so that "good people" would know not to associate with them except to try and convert them (and certainly not to have kids with them, because that meant literally passing a curse on to your children.) Also, a central tenant of their belief system is that they (the mormons) understand the culture and religion of both native americans and jews better than they (the aforementioned ethnic groups) do.

So when we say "Mormons are white supremacists," we don't mean that your statistically average Mormon is more likely to ascribe to white supremacy than the average non-Mormon. We mean that white supremacy is baked in to the foundations of the religion. That Mormonism is a white supremacist organization. That those who practice it, at best, are not bothered by that fact enough to leave

Now, I grew up Mormon. Untill I was 25 I was what was called a Peter Priesthood, which is a Mormon who's so Mormon the other Mormons make fun of him for it. So I have a lot of sympathy for individuals manipulated by the Mormon church's cult tactics into sticking to that belief system. I get it, I get how powerful all that stuff is from first hand experience.

But the fact that I sympathize does not change the fact that members are socially and financially supporting an organization that espouses mysoginy, white supremacy, classism, and queerphobia, among other things.

Additionally to add onto it, the “Dark skin is a curse of sin and when you get to heaven it washes clean off you like dirt and you’re a white person now.” Mormons or LDS will either deny this, play this down or say it’s a bathing of the “spiritual skin” but? Really? Spiritual skin?????

It gets even worse when you consider how missionary work is heavily pushed onto smaller nations.

In France if you suffer from hair loss as a teenage girl and cannot afford a real hair wig the school will try and force you to go to class bald. The school will make you buy a chemotherapy turban, you will buy two different so that the school can choose which one they prefer and you will prove that they are chemotherapy turban and not hijab but once you wear it they will change their mind and say it looks too much like a hijab and insist on you going bald or buying a real hair wig that you cannot afford.

If your doctor makes multiple documents confirming that you suffer from alopecia because of stress and the medicine you have to take for your epilepsy and that wearing a bonnet or something is recommended for your mental health as you’re not ready to go out bald in high school as a teenage girl, instead of admitting they are wrong the school will accuse the doctor of lying and report him to the Ordre des Médecins (equivalent of the General Medical council). Your doctor will find himself asking you for a document stating that you are not Muslim in order to defend himself and prove that no he wasn’t colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.

Source

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In France if you are a North African nurse at a public hospital and wear a fabric surgical cap they will try to make you remove it because apparently it’s a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when you’ll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming you’re Muslim for a surgical cap on your head they will change their angle and claim that you should wear nothing on your hair because you wear the same surgical cap in multiple bedroom which is unhygienic apparently (which is a bullshit argument cause you wear the same scrub/uniform in different bedrooms as well). They will go as far as claiming that disposable scrub caps (you know the thin papery ones?) are not okay to wear in a hospital even if you change it regularly. And then they will fire you for a lack of hygiene because you wear a surgical cap.

Source

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All of that will be done in the name of secularism and women’s right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.

The teenage girl’s story is also not just about racism and Islamophobia it’s also about ableism as the girl is convinced that the real reason the school is trying to push her out is because she had an epilepsy crisis in class and nobody knew what to do and the school nurse was absent. It could have ended badly had her best friend not known what to do to help. Apparently it was bad enough to cancel class for the rest of the day and the teacher was shocked to the point of ending on sick leave.

oh and don't forget that many parts of France mandate by law how much skin women must show in swimsuits, which they claim is about not getting street dirt in public pools but which is disproportionately enforced on Muslim or even just Middle Eastern/North African women

(and of course is also some forced nudity misogynistic bullshit in general, to boot)

If you're trying to figure out whether a behavior stinks of cultural appropriation or not, it's also worth keeping in mind if respect is paid to members of the originating culture only so long as they are safely far away. How the diaspora part of a culture feels about seeing pieces of their culture in someone else's hands often diverges dramatically from the way people of that culture feel when they were born in raised in that culture's place of origin. The only Japanese-Canadian kid in a rural white part of Ontario who grew up getting mocked because her mom packed sushi in her lunch is probably not going to feel the same way about white people wearing kimonos for fun as the owner of a traditional kimono store in Tochigi who's keeping the store's doors open with tourist money. You do have to listen to the people of the affected culture—but you also can't just find the person with the most convenient opinion and use them as a shield when they approve or a weapon when they don't.

Oh my god, yes. IMO, I would say this: a big part of the hurt feelings behind cultural appropriation is that people who historically have been bullied for being different tend to have a lot of hangups when they see their bullies (or people like them) suddenly fawning over the things they felt they were bullied over. In a way, it's somewhat a trauma reaction. This is a lot more likely to happen among diaspora groups where they are a minority in their region than in places where their group is common, even dominant.

I am Chinese American from an area where half the population is Chinese American. I've had other Chinese Americans from areas where their family were the only Asian Americans around for miles tell me that they felt I was microaggressing against them when commenting that the way they illustrated hair in characters seemed pretty anime-esque. That's not something I am sensitive to at all, but they were, just because their experiences growing up were different than mine.

These things are complicated. If I had to give advice, it's that you should avoid making people feel othered when you can. Don't make fun of the food people eat. Don't buy things that have meaning in people's religions for casual decoration. Avoid putting on clothing/regalia that symbolizes a specific honor you don't have. Don't make information up about how they do things in other cultures just for advertising purposes or to make something seem cool. Outside of that, you just have to play it by ear.

Learning something new everyday! Even as a primate keeper I had no idea "orang" was an offensive term when referring to orangutans. Moving forward we will no longer refer to orangutans this way and we hope you will stop using "orang" too!

"By using the diminutive “orang,” to native speakers, you are at best saying something that just sounds plain weird, but at worst saying something that implies a lack of respect not just for their language but for their cultural beliefs.

Orangutan does translate as “person of the forest,” with orang meaning “person” and (h)utan meaning “forest.” But the word orang by itself is also a classifier in the native language. Chopping the word orangutan in half does not result in two halves that necessarily mean what they meant when they were together

Linguistic incorrectness aside, the use of “orang” to describe an orangutan is offensive to native-language speakers because you are spontaneously elevating a non-human to human status. Not only is this factually wrong – orangutans are not humans – but it is also culturally insensitive and runs in defiance of Islamic and animistic beliefs common throughout most of the area.

By using the diminutive “orang,” to native speakers, you are at best saying something that just sounds plain weird, but at worst saying something that implies a lack of respect not just for their language but for their cultural beliefs."

Now would be a good time for everyone to understand how the US dollar hegemony works, and how oil was leveraged to turn the dollar into a weapon. Here, it goes like this:

1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

This is why shifting to renewables has been such a struggle in the west, this is why the planet is warming, this is why the US is engaged in endless wars, this is why most of the world is poor, this is why millions have died. This is imperialism and it must be dismantled.

This is true, but there's another aspect to it:

If I have an ancient kingdom, I need my army to keep my subjects loyal through violence, but soldiers need supplying, and arranging for all the services they need, anywhere they go, is nontrivial.

But, if you require taxes to be paid in your coins and the only way to get them is through business with your army, then, effectively, everyone in your kingdom is clamoring to create or participant in markets for provisioning your army, directly or indirectly. (Lest they not pay their taxes and be killed by those same soldiers, of course)

While the US-dominated global economic order is more complex than this, obviously, the overall pattern is still the same. Many goods and services (oil, transport, SWIFT, and afaik also IPv4 addresses (another legacy technology like oil - moving away from it to IPv6 is extremely necessary but affects the third world more than the first...)) all require dollars. So if you want to have modern medical equipment, internet, transportation, or anything else obviously necessary for a country in the 21st century, you need to be producing something that western consumers want in some form.

The whole world is clamoring to create or participate in markets for goods and services for the US, directly or indirectly. (Lest they starve or be killed by the military of that same country, of course)

Another point about US Treasury bonds: they are the only truly "stable" financial instrument, and the reason why should now be obvious - they can only fail if the US empire, which encompasses the whole world economy, fails.

In fact this debt, rather than being a source of vulnerability for the US (as foreign debt is for other countries, just look at IMF loans and look up "structural adjustments"), it's a source of strength. While treasuries do pay the holder the principal plus interest, the fact is that for most foreign governments it is actually the opposite in practice - a form of tribute paid to the US as the imperial leader.

The Federal Reserve, the US central bank, can give loans to the US government by creating US dollars and using them to buy Treasury bonds (which remember, are pieces of debt) from the US government.

But other central banks don't have good places to safely store their mandatory reserves of dollars besides US treasuries (also for other "hard" currencies like the Euro, but this still keeps value going towards the imperial core and away from the periphery), and so:

And that furthermore, because these interest payments aren't particularly large, and with the effect of inflation, can represent losses for their central bank and thus host country, another form of tribute paid to the US.

There's actually a term for this kind of governmental profit. Seigniorage refers to the profit governments make when they create money: if it costs 0.80 currency units to make a bill worth 50.00 currency units, then this produces a net profit of 49.20 currency units.

For the US, it is imposing this on the whole world. It can create treasury bonds essentially for free, but buyers have to give up real US dollars for them, dollars they had to get through manufacturing shoes or cars or whatever.

If we consider again a historical example: there is a king, and he conquers neighboring regions, and then demands that they pay tribute, taxes, etc., to cover the costs of the army he uses to ensure their continued subjugation, we would say that this is an imperial relation.

Then we have the United States, which has constructed a world order where it is at the center, and that money flows from the rest of the world to itself, and it uses these funds to pay for its influence campaigns and coups and a massive military which bombs and kills and invades... yet it insists that it is not an empire but merely the "leader of the free world".