Despite evidence that punitive punishment is ineffective and damaging— at worst, pushing vulnerable children out of school into the carceral system and, at best, driving student resentment and a breakdown of the teacher-student relationship— we still enact them in the forms of detention, suspension, expulsion, and in extreme cases, practices that replicate our carceral system by introducing police, surveillance, fines and probation into schools. However, if you consider our current system of punitive discipline in schools as a continuation of European colonialism, we can begin to pick apart the origins and evolution of how our schools are increasingly operating as an extension of the penal system through hundreds of years of intentionally oppressive design.
Can Fonts Be Racist? (Yes, They Can)
Any text that is printed or digitally displayed has been deliberately chosen to look that way. Through repeated associations, racist messaging with a certain typeface in the past means that that typeface now carries that racist overtone even if the words bearing that typeface aren’t racist.
White Emptiness
This is a very, very vague idea as I’ve only started thinking about this topic and researching it this past week and I’m still having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around it but I might have to write a paper on it for a sociology class so I'm just going to post it... Continue Reading →
[Reblog] The Market of Humiliating Black Women
https://youtu.be/yZtPMJKBD80 This is the intersection of being black and being a woman. This is how they come together to further oppress black women in a way that most people don't even realize. Black women have to deal with the treatment of being black and being a woman. Within the community, we've seen how black women... Continue Reading →
White History Month #1
There is a good number of Americans who believe that we are more racially integrated than ever before and that segregation is a problem of the past. This is simply not true. This is a mini-series or as I call them, ramblings. Since some people want a white history month so bad during Black History... Continue Reading →
Subtle Biased Traits
Hello, it's been a while. Today, I want to talk a little about some of the experiences I've recently had with what may be covert racism and also my own reckoning with my biases. We all know about how instances of hate crimes towards Asian-Americans spiked during COVID and it's not hard to figure out... Continue Reading →
[Repost] 13th: From Slave to Criminal With One Amendment
https://youtu.be/krfcq5pF8u8 Excerpts: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people...We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing... Continue Reading →
There's always this nebulous cloud of unease whenever I get invited to a discussion of race and privilege with a white person. At best, they could listen to what's being said and try to understand but at worst, it will devolve into a he said she said where everything is taken as a personal attack or a joke. This article puts that feeling into more definite terms.
Error 404: White Allies Not Found
Whitewashing: A Distortion (An Introduction)
Whitewash:a: to gloss over or cover up (such as vices or crimes)b: to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of dataThis is the definition provided by Merriam-Webster and is the most suitable definition for this article. White-washing is not a racially charged term despite its recent re-introduction with respect to... Continue Reading →
December 2018 Quote of the Month
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
-Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)
4-Part Analysis of Invisible Man (Part 3)
[Synthesis with “Caged Bird” by Mary Angelou] I thought this poem was very representative of the IM’s internal dissonance in what he’s doing and in what he’s feeling. This something that we see throughout the book but in these hundred pages, we also see him assume another identity; one of a public speaker for the... Continue Reading →
July 2018 Quote of the Month
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
-Thomas Jefferson
[Poem] Bound
An extension of the June Quote of the Month. Xiao Mei lives to see the dawn of the day. The hues of brisk yellow match her skin like Chardonnay. “Be a doctor or lawyer,” both of her parents say. “It’s not like artists make money anyway.” Michael is Michael because Mwenye was too hard to... Continue Reading →
The Real Reason Why The Da Vinci Code is a Universal Bestseller
Some critics say Dan Brown took advantage of the social and political turmoil after 9/11 and sold his books when the American public needed for everything to make sense. As one critic puts it, “When bad things happen, Brown reassures us, it is probably because of the machinations of a 1,000-year-old secret society which is quietly running the world, though often in conflict with another hidden organisation.” However, what I want to argue against isn’t about Brown’s lack of literary common sense but how he has managed to seduce the American public into pushing the book to become the second-most popular in modern literature by taking advantage of human nature.