Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: A Few Annotated Thoughts

It's not fun to talk about the horrible, shameful things in our past and present.  But if we don't talk about them, we "forget," or maybe we never know.  And we need to talk about them.  Because we as human beings have tremendous power to hurt each other, both individually and in the aggregate of the many tiny injustices that we may not notice, or recognize as hurtful, if we're not the ones being hurt.  We need to know the horrible things in the past and the present to guard against them.  We need to hear from those we've hurt, so that we can STOP doing those things.

If you know and live the culture of the southern U.S.:

• do older African Americans call you Sir/Ma'am regardless of whether they're older than you?
• do you call older African Americans Sir/Ma'am the way you would older white women and men?

Think about it.


Here's some reading.  I've tried to bring in mostly sources written by African Americans. 

What Ruby Bridges Can Teach Us About Desegregation, from The Graffiti Wall.  Do you know who Ruby Bridges is?  I didn't.  My elementary school had ~1 African American child per class of 25 children when I was there.

Black Lives Matter.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  (P.S., y'all: white police officer is NOT the most dangerous job:  https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf)

Black Skeptics website.  I like to check in here occasionally.

Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglas.  Still relevant, still powerful.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: a few classes in my elementary school read this.  Never my class.  (We read about a thoughtless white boy who deliberately stirred up a bees' nest and then died from an allergic reaction to the stings.   Aesop's Fables are still better.)

The Enduring Solidarity of White Racism.

White police and doctors unlawfully arrest and detain an African American woman for...not being properly cowed and submissive and driving a nice car?

Trigger warning for violent images: The lynching of Jesse Washington.  Not the only lynching.  Not the only state and town in the U.S.A. that participated in lynching.  And we white people by and large TURN AWAY AND PRETEND THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN.  WE PRETEND WE DON'T SEE THIS SUFFERING.  WE PRETEND WE'RE NOT GUILTY.

And at this point I start crying so I'm going to stop here for today.      

Enthusiastic Consent for Everyone, Real Life Edition

Recently someone asked me if they could give me a hug.  They ASKED me.  They asked ME.  And they waited to hear my answer before making a single move towards me.  It was amazing and wonderful.

More of that for everyone, please. 

Enthusiastic Consent for Everyone, Jade Empire Style

The computer game Jade Empire has several possible romance paths.  Having played two so far, I want to note that

• A hetero romance video sequence for the deciding-we-like-and-trust-each-other-enough-for-fun-sexytimes*-and-heck-we-may-all-die-in-battle-tomorrow moment finishes with a kiss: the theatrically classic, one-person-bent-over backwards-kiss:
  

• But a lesbian romance fades to black before we actually get to the kiss.  So, good for the programmers to include this romance option, but...what happened?  Threatened by our freedom-to think-as-they-think-loving American censors, or just not brave enough to keep going?  

I am happy to report that the good people of the internet have totally got this one, and there is a fix: http://www.nexusmods.com/jadeempire/mods/4/?

I am sad that policing number and gender of persons involved is still more important socially than enthusiastic consent by all involved, birth control, disease protection, bodily autonomy, trust, or respect.


*Link goes to Scarleteen, an inclusive and comprehensive sex education site.  Possibly not safe for work.    

In Which I Assert That Yes, We Do Have the Right to Say Whether We Know Better Than Our Ancestors

Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned.

Most morality, thought Mma Ramotswe, was about doing the right thing because it had been identified as such by a long process of acceptance and observance.  You simply could not create your own morality because your experience would never be enough to do so.  What gives you the right to say that you know better than your ancestors?  Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it.  That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak.

                                        -Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls, p. 75

Sorry, book, but I will not silently swallow such fallacious assertions for the sake of the story.  I am going to examine these assertions.  I will even dare to question them.