Tag: important

The depth of isolation in the ghetto is also evident in black speech patterns, which have evolved steadily away from Standard American English. Because of their intense social isolation, many ghetto residents have come to speak a language that is increasingly remote from that spoken by American whites. Black street speech, or more formally, Black English Vernacular, has its roots in the West Indian creole and Scots-Irish dialects of the eighteenth century. As linguists have shown, it is by no means a “degenerate,” or “illogical” version of Standard American English; rather, it constitutes a complex, rich, and expressive language in its own right, with a consistent grammar, pronunciation, and lexicon all its own.

Douglas Massey and Nancy A. Denton, Chapter 6: “The Perpetuation of the Underclass,” p. 162 (American apartheid: segregation and the making of the underclass)

As linguists have shown, it is by no means a “degenerate,” or “illogical” version of Standard American English; rather, it constitutes a complex, rich, and expressive language in its own right, with a consistent grammar, pronunciation, and lexicon all its own.

(via deux-zero-deux)

Source: jillyaintfromphilly

felitomkinson:

i know we all like to Joke & Bond over how depressed we are and make jokes about existential dread bc we really are absolutely fucking depressed and there’s certain comfort and humor in knowing we’re not alone but. god i wish none of us were sad. living like this isn’t fun at all and i hope it gets easier and softer for all of you

sergle:

hey! ducks are adorable and everybody likes feeding them, but bread causes a number of environmental and health problems that could easily be avoided. instead of bread, consider feeding duckies:

  • frozen peas or corn that’s been defrosted!
  • romaine lettuce (torn into small pieces)
  • bird feed of any kind
  • rice (cooked or uncooked!)
  • uncooked oats
  • grapes cut in half
  • earthworms
Source: sergle

spacexualkids:

achilles is so often called gay by the community and straight by society even though he fell in love with men and women. freddie mercury is known as the most famous gay man even though he self identified as bisexual. channing tatum is constantly called straight even though he’s dated men and women. evan rachel wood and angelina jolie and drew barrymore–all self identified bi women constantly called straight.

sappho wrote love poems for both men and women and yalls response to the idea that she might have been bi is “there was no concept of bi/gay back then!! let’s focus on the fact that she was sapphic!!” to the point where her name has become synonymous with gay and she’s called a lesbian icon and y’all only seem to have issues with “concepts” and labels when the concept/label is BI. why am i not surprised?

‘Bipolar’ and Violence

therapidcyclist:

🔸When there is a tragedy, a shooting, a documented case of emotional abuse, domestic violence or intimidation, and the term bipolar is attached, please look very, very carefully about who is applying this term and how speculatively.

🔹Upsettingly the majority of ‘bipolar’ use in mainstream conversation is still only as a character descriptor and not as the clinically diagnosed chronic illness.

🔸An undiagnosed individual is not *being* bipolar because of unexplained erratic or scary behaviour that you want to categorise. It is an infamously difficult condition to diagnose.

🔹If you are not a specialist psychiatrist who has been in contact with this abusive/criminal individual for an extensive period of time please pay mind to the very real people you are helping to demonize by doing this.

🔸If you feel it is appropriate to casually attach bipolar to violent atrocities, or even just undesirable behaviour you encounter in your own lifetime, take a moment to consider how this damages the thousands of kind, loving people quietly living with a highly stigmatized genetic illness.

🔹For many people a bipolar diagnosis can feel like being handed a life sentence as a poorly disguised monster.

🔸Our Google searches spit back shoddily analysed serial killers.

🔹Mental illness is always a terrifying enough shadow to live with, but imagine living with it knowing other people might feel the same fear about you.

🔹Please don’t make us synonymous with murder. Please don’t make us synonymous with violence.

🔸We are the sisters and friends and sons and colleagues too afraid to tell you that we are the people with bipolar disorder.

🔹And we are not killers.

🔸Please fact check.

^^^ this is SO important!!! I do not have bipolar disorder but have had friends diagnosed with it and am currently dating someone who is. There’s a lot of internalized self-hatred/fear that’s come from these sensationalized depictions.

kiyokospeaks:

saphire-dance:

not-your-cute-little-asian-girl:

The language that we use to talk about Japanese American Internment is so unacceptable to me. Read any article/textbook, and it makes it all sound so minor. The specific wording is so interesting: it’s ‘evacuation,’ not ‘forced imprisonment.’ It’s ‘Japanese,’ not ‘Japanese American,’ bc it’s so much easier to erase history and forget that the majority of these people had never even been to Japan and were born US citizens (not that it would have been justified even if they weren’t, but this was just used as another tool to dehumanize and distance us). We learn they were given ‘accommodations’ in camps, but not how they were subject to extreme temperatures with inadequate protection in stables and roofless stalls filled with manure, or how people were shot on the spot if they were even suspected of trying to escape, or for disobeying orders. Some were shot just so the military guards could show their control. We learn that the JAs were eventually freed and allowed to return to society, but not how anti-Japanese sentiment was so strong that most could not return to where they had lived before, and that many returned to find any property and belongings had been looted or even steamrolled by the government. Those who returned were beaten or even lynched. We don’t learn about home raids, or asset freezing, or deaths as a result of illness from communal living an no health care.
My history teacher even tried to tell us EO9066 was issued for THE SAFETY of the Japanese Americans, as they’d have been lynched by the public otherwise. Roosevelt himself even said this! In school we barely learn anything at all about internment, even though I live in an area w a high concentration of JAs.
Also notice how little detail we receive about camps in school. Did you know, at the time that this was happening, the camps were called concentration camps by the government? And that people were sent by the trainload in cattle cars? Sound familiar? Of course, I don’t mean to compare the histories of Jewish Germans and JAs, but this country has made a very conscious effort to hide and erase so much history of the camps because of associations that might be made, so we can more easily brush it off as merely a small blemish in history, barely worth mentioning.
Probably the most enraging thing to me, though, is that the JAs who were interned are routinely talked about as if they just calmly and submissively, docilely, ACCEPTED what was happening to them, and that they were peaceful and ~zen~ about the whole thing once in the camps. Read the true accounts of internees and you’ll discover the truth: people were enraged. People fought. Round-ups could turn violent. Internment was not calmly accepted and quietly endured. To quote a poem from Poston camp, “We’re trapped like rats in a wired cage/To fret and fume with impotent rage.”
So of course you get all these people suggesting we need something like registration and  internment camps for Muslim Americans and Syrian refugees today. No one’s learned from history because no one was really taught it in the first place. And that is fucking unacceptable.

x

Honestly I think the only reason I ever heard different was that there was an Internment camp right near where we lived with a museum that in no way shied from the truth.

Ok normally I wouldn’t comment on posts like this but this is something I’m really passionate about.

My Mom is Japanese. Almost everyone on her side of the family was put into the camps.

Even years after they were finally released, Papa told my Mom and her sisters that they were American first and Japanese second, and out of fear, never taught them to read or speak Japanese.

My mom’s family suffered from the anti Japanese sentiment, despite living in an area with a high concentration of Japanese Americans.

When we learn about World War II in school, they barely mention the internment camps. They mention them once in passing, but we never hear about it again. We learn about the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking, we learn about the brutality of other countries which is very important, but schools gloss over Japanese American Internment.

This is so dangerous because it implies that America was exempt from this brutality, that we committed no war crimes.

Americans are let believe that our country has a history of justice and equality, when our society rests upon a foundation of the bones of the people whose land we invaded, built from the suffering of slaves and fortified by xenophobic sentiment. America is not innocent, America is not exempt.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America, but we need to take responsibility for what we have done, and educate youth on America’s cruelty, showing that we are not above the atrocities that occurred worldwide.

To hide parts of American history that put America in a bad light is dangerous propaganda, and adds fuel to the dangerous vein of nationalism that states our country can do no wrong.