Hay una banda sonora especial para la matanza moderna. La mayoría no son envenenando a la gente en un sueño permanente. Cuando un asesino moderno con un arma moderna asesina a 50 personas y hiere a 53 más, hay un sonido que sigue el carillón del último casquillo cuando cae al piso. Mucho tiempo después de los gritos y llantos y sirenas se colocan por otro lado, hay otro sonido, nos dicen.
racism
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He Came For Me
CN: 11 June 2016 Orlando murders.
There’s a special soundtrack to a modern massacre. Most of them aren’t poisoning people into too-long sleep. When a modern killer with a modern gun murders 50 people and injures 53 more, there’s a sound that follows the last shell casing’s floor-bound chime. Long after the shrieking and crying and sirens are diverted elsewhere, there’s another sound, they say.
An Inclusive Humanist Manifesto
Humanism is shorthand. It’s a start, a summary, and a statement. In a world of ideologies that refuse to recognize my humanity or that assert that it has no value, it is a bold and clear assertion:
I matter.
I matter, because I am a person.
Lilacs, Kiełbasa, and Why New Jersey Deserves Better
“Well, I give up. What’s the catch?”
“Oh, no catch. Although we are technically in New Jersey.”
The way American television talks about New Jersey, one would think the apocalypse already happened, but only there. The air is semisolid industrial waste and the beaches are made of finely ground syringes. The people are ruder than the rudest New York stereotype, bizarrely puffed-up Italian-American caricatures, elitist Princeton heirs, and immigrants from all over Asia and Latin America, somehow all at once, with only racism letting anyone have something other than the most impossibly overwrought “New Jersey accent.” It’s treated as New York’s leavings and the USA’s armpit, in media as obnoxiously cliché as How I Met Your Mother and as original and usually-compassionate as Steven Universe.
None of that is the New Jersey I remember from the eleven years I lived there.
Continue reading “Lilacs, Kiełbasa, and Why New Jersey Deserves Better”
Stop Comparing Rachel Dolezal to Me
Tortured analogies between transgender people and people who pretend at a different racial background than their own are so banal that they feature in South Park’s warpath against people like me. They have been made by every professional transantagonist at some point to declare people like me as invalid as Dolezal’s claim to blackness, and by Dolezal’s defenders to claim that recognizing the offensive absurdity of her blackface routine is the same as denying the legitimacy of trans genders.
I’m not even pretending at a neutral introduction. This analogy is sickening on multiple levels, and I am tired of it.
No Honor amongst Family
Outside viewers might find the idea of pan-PoC spaces confusing. Surely, the experiences of people of South Asian, aboriginal Australian, Korean, Caribbean, African, and African-American descent are far too distinct to function in a single environment meant to recognize and validate them all. To a point, this is an accurate observation, and there is much that is not shared between East Asian, Amerindian, and Arab racialization, not to mention how most racialized groups are still at least a step higher on colonizers’ racial hierarchy than people of African descent. But there is also a great deal we all have in common. Some forms of racialization are nigh-universal, including fetishizing exoticism and making fun of our food before it becomes “trendy.” There are also, perhaps more importantly, things that members of virtually all immigrant or otherwise marginalized communities have to deal with from each other, which outsiders often struggle to understand.
Immigrant communities are clannish. Between racism and homesickness, they collect in particular neighborhoods and avoid entanglements with the white majority in particular and with members of other ethnic groups in general. They become preoccupied with maintaining culture in the face of others’ hegemony. They receive their children’s inevitable non-member partners, who don’t speak their language, place social values in the same order, or reminisce fondly about the same food, with suspicion and resentment until they somehow “prove” their worth. Some take this further and develop a siege mentality, in which any display of weakness, vulnerability, or information about how the community operates that outsiders can see is beyond the pale. Especially in communities that already prioritize appearance and internal competition, this is an easy trait to develop.
It’s also a pattern that could not more easily conceal and enable abusive behavior than if it were designed specifically for that purpose.
Orcs for Justice
For those who don’t know, Dungeons and Dragons is, crudely, the tabletop board-game version of games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, and I’ve played it for many years. The enjoyment I derive from this game is so thorough, through the several editions that I’ve played, that I’ve written my own campaign setting. Those who know what that phrase means know that this was no small undertaking, and the world’s current, approximately finished state is the culmination of a decade of effort and countless revisions.
Baby Problem Steps: Porn Edition
CN: Discussion of masturbation and pornography. Links whose destinations you don’t recognize are definitely NSFW.
I wrote recently about how I recognize the importance of the media that made me the atheist I am today even as I acknowledge its glaring flaws, because it filled the particular void I had. I meant that discussion to be a lead-in for this one, but it took on a life of its own.
Hija de Caguas y La Habana
In observance of Mother Language Day and because its topic makes this appropriate, the rest of this post is in my native Spanish.
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He pensado mucho de mis raíces. Soy una criatura de combinación, hecha de muchas piezas, cosida difícilmente junta. Soy americana, boricua, cubana, y en unos meses, canadiense. Nací en una ciudad, de padres ciudadanos y campesinas, quienes llegaron a madurez en New Jersey después de niñeces en las islas del Mar Caribe, inmigrantes sin inglés.
Viví en New Jersey, rodeada de las culturas italiana-americana, boricua-americana, e irlandés-americana. Viví también en Miami, en el medio de la cultura cubana-americana y la mezcla de cosas raras y únicas que es el sur de la Florida. Vivo ahora en Canadá, en donde tengo que construir cosas familiares de partes salvadoreñas, jamaicanas, y polacas.
No sé si jamás veré los lugares de mi pasado.
Años van a pasar antes que podrá volar a New Jersey para ver la calle donde viví. Mis padres me dijeron que la casa ya no parece como acuerdo, que las rosas ya no crecen en el patio y la mata de acebo hace años se murió. Quizás es mejor que no lo veo. Hay carboneros por acá, y casi nadie que quiero ver por allá.
Mi familia no quiere bregar con la idea que yo soy la persona que soy. Cada vez en cuando me llaman, pero no ha sido similar que antes. Ahora se oye la tristeza o el coraje en sus voces cada vez que oyen la mía, como que están hablando con una fantasma de una memoria. Lo que oigo es literalmente nostalgia: dolor en sentir que algo se perdió y no se consigue más. Ya no me piden a llamarlos. Mi familia en Miami es, por su cuenta, mucho más pequeña ahora, consistiendo de la minoría de mis relaciones que no me han repudiado y amigos que han quedado cerca. Si vuelo a Miami otra vez, tendré que solicitar amigos para albergarme, porque jamás podré sentirme seguro en la casa de mis padres. Hay recuerdos queridos por allá, y cultura familiar, y comida que me hace llorar. Quiero regresar, eventualmente.
Nunca he visto a Cuba ni a Puerto Rico personalmente. Quizás algún día tendremos dinero suficiente para visitar a las islas que me dieron las culturas de mis padres, para que yo pueda ver así cerca de donde vengo.
Nunca he tenido una relación especialmente cariñosa a mis raíces culturales. La cultura hispánica todavía da apoyo a sentimientos homofóbicas, anti-transgéneras, anti-ateas, y de varias otras formas opuestas a lo que yo vivo. El machismo hispano es famoso, severo, asqueroso, y vergonzoso, y no quiero ningún parte en preservarlo para las generaciones futuras. Las generaciones futuras merecen mejor que eso. Hay mucho para criticar en nuestra historia, especialmente ahora que el poder de la Iglesia Católica sobre las sociedades hispánicas se está debilitando. Fue posible, con mi distancia y mi expulsión de la compañía hispanohablante, que yo rechazara el resto. Fue posible, con esa ruptura, que rechazara mi raza también.
Ni quería ni pude. Aunque podría ser blanca en un contexto específicamente latinoamericano, no soy blanca por acá. Traigo detrás de mi cienes y cienes de años de revolución y resistencia, yuca y maíz, sol y arena. Detrás de me tengo los atentos finales de Hatuey y Agüeybaná de conseguir un archipiélago Taíno fuera de control español. Detrás también tengo los esclavos africanos quienes nos dieron las delicias de nuestra cocina: sancocho, tostones, mofongo. En ser rechazada de la cocina de mis padres y prevenida a quedarme conectada a mis raíces de esa manera, tuve desaire recargada a conocer de dónde vine.
Hewing the Heuristic
I know someone who regularly visits the strangest, most extreme corners of the Internet, to experience a kind of macabre bemusement. They flit from Canadian Association for Equality to A Voice for Men to Return of Kings; they follow trails that start at Fox News and end at Stormfront or r/coontown; they learn about Gamergate by letting Vivian James lead them from TotalBiscuit deep into the places where the movement-that-wasn’t bleeds into these and other right-wing hate groups.
It’s an interesting and rather informative approach. For people with the stomach to view and cogitate over that level of violence-fomenting hatred, there probably isn’t a better way to see the clear links between the more extreme versions and the ones that more pointedly bring themselves mainstream attention. It’s a way to remind oneself that the quieter, front-facing versions are direct gateways into deeper wells of horror, and that the worse versions of all these things are worse as a matter of degree, not kind.
The thing is, this kind of searching also leads one into the weird, anti-scientific, decidedly baffling underbelly of many other movements as well, including movements that are utterly benign.