Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
And that number has risen. More recent statistics from the State Department report that almost a million Americans are currently residing in Mexico and, of those, 934,698 are there illegally. That’s an almost 40% increase in just two years.
Lower cost of living. Excellent medical care (including dental) at a fraction of what it costs in the US, better climate.
And nearly all illegal immigrants in Canada are Americans - and many of them don’t even realize that they’re illegal immigrants, they just “haven’t gotten around to the paperwork”.
There are cities just like this one all over the world. Bustling metropolises full of people of all colours, all creeds, and all species. Faeries nest in the eaves of human buildings. Orcs run the sanitation crews. Goblins are everywhere - but since when weren’t Goblins everywhere? They’re clever and cunning and when allowed to learn, they will. The streets are full of steam and the latests counterculture is taking over an area of the tall buildings, and some of Central Park.
This is the Age of Man, of invention and rockets to the moon, and it is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. At least, it is if you’re part of the Summer of Love.
Young Orcs have flocked to it. Because they can achieve love and understanding despite the race riots and segregation. Despite struggling and struggling against their multiracial oppressors. Despite any claims that slavery was ‘a hundred years ago’. It wasn’t. Some Elves speak out. A species with long lives and longer memories can be a ball in other’s courts. If they’re on the other side.
This is the way the world works, they were told. We are One, and everyone else is Other. But you will not learn about Other, oh no. They are too brutal. Too savage. When old One explorers found Other, they were eating people. Brutal cannibals. They only know savagery. That’s enough about Them. Time to explore the long and glorious history of Us.
When One found the Other, they were naked. They were almost animals. They didn’t speak proper words like the One did. They didn’t know real civilisation like the One did. One took the Other in. Gave them work. Showed them new fontiers. Helped them find new opportunities and new lands and they had the gall to be angry about that. Why, before the One came along, the Other didn’t even have one language to complain in. How dare they.
But the wheel turns. Those who were beneath the One rise, despite the numerous obstacles in their way. Others who are smart, who invent, who make, who create, who change the world are treated as statistical anomalies. Outliers. They are very smart, for an Other. They’re very well spoken, for an Other. They’re articulate. And then more and more Others rise up through the efforts of the first, and it’s suddenly too many of Them coming in where Us belong. Taking Our jobs. Ruining Our neighbourhoods. Lowering the tone of the place.
Why is this even a problem? If you need more citizens, take in more immigrants or refugees. It’s not like America has a shortage of either wanting to come in. If you can’t make your own citizens, imported is fine.
How Millenials are killing the baby industry
“If you can’t make your own citizens, imported is fine.”
I don’t mean to kill the joke, because that really is funny, but I also want everyone to know that the panic behind birth decline in the USA is a dog whistle white nationalist one. Part of the game plan for Christian fundamentalists and white nationalists is to outpopulate minorities of color, which leads right into their specific kind of sexism where they freak out that white women have alternatives to marrying straight white men and devoting themselves full-time to popping out kids. And their racism is partially related to trying to make the consequences for black and other non-white mothers steep, deter that demographic from growing.
Historical Nazis had “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”, and modern white supremacists have things like quiverfull. They want to take planned parenthood offline, and they appeal to white men by promising a reproductive family or at least access to sex with white women should their ideology win out.
But the unbridled greed of capitalist markets has kind of unintentionally screwed that interest. The economy hasn’t recovered, and that might serve racists by making things doubly hard for PoC who don’t own wealth, but the amount of wealth that middle-class and working-class white citizens own is shrinking. Many ‘innovations’ aren’t doing anything to promote stability and confidence spending money but instead profiteer off insecurity and inability to invest in services + goods long-term. So even white people aren’t having babies. The panic of an overt racist at that fact might be really profound but because so much of our society is built to assume white households perpetuating wealth is the center of our way of life, there’s also a background, low level anxiety that is felt by a wider public.
“I’m not stupid, I’m not expendable, and I’m not going.” Originally Kerr Avon Blake’s 7. Write your own. – @knitnan
She expected resistance. She expected hostility. Even in the face of clear and present adversity. What she hadn’t expected was absolute and raw hostility.
“Mr President, I’m here to help you.”
He made words come out of that ugly sneer on his face. “Go back to Iraq, you filthy Muslim! What the hell are you doing out of the seraglio anyway?”
Vuvuzelas aka stadium horns plus a group of children ages 5 to 8. – Anon Guest
The big house in the neighbourhood had finally sold. Not to a dot-com temporary millionaire or some other fancy individual, but to a business of sorts. A foster home.
Biff didn’t like it. As their immediate neighbour, he got to see a lot of what was going on over the maximum-legal-tall fence. And he was offended by most of it.
Hardly any of the kids had any kind of promise. They were all the criminal element, or something was wrong with them. Or they were the troubled sort who were bound to be serial killers.
Although network executives wanted to work with Issa Rae and tap into her dedicated fan base, they didn’t respect her mission to create programming that centers complex Black characters.
‘‘They wanted to make it as broad as possible, broadly niche, but I was like: No, that’s not what this is about,’’ she explained.
Even HBO, the network Rae is working with to develop the pilot for “Insecure,” was leery of allowing the Stanford grad to form a team that was extremely diverse.
HBO approved the script for ‘‘Insecure’’ in the fall of 2013. Rae was excited to hire a support staff of other nonwhite writers and producers who would be intimately familiar with the milieu inhabited by her characters. She had a wish list of people she liked — primarily young women of color — but she soon found out HBO had little interest in hiring them. Generally, an HBO spokeswoman said, the network wants people who have experience.
I wish this didn’t exclude black women, as if we aren’t being murdered in our homes & in the street…as if the loss of our loved ones is somehow completely removed from what’s going on…as if women aren’t out here trying to hold onto the dreams, hopes, & lives as they’re being stolen as well.
I could not agree more and I’m so sorry. Black women do not get the respect and recognition they so deserve:
“Without qualification or deflection, we must address the very real fact that perpetuation of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy depends on the state-sanctioned murder, mass incarceration, and vilification of Black men. Power and dominance is typically contextualized within the construct of cisgender masculinity, leaving the brutalization of Black women, even when it mirrors that of Black men, as an afterthought.
It is understandable, though not acceptable, that Black women often find ourselves on the fringes of these conversations. Even when we are front and center it is usually to prove our fidelity to Black men and their unique struggles. Very seldom is the violence inflicted upon Black, female bodies by law enforcement positioned as pivotal to justice movements; rather our lived experiences as victims of the state tend to be peripheral and anecdotal.
This invisibilizing of Black women is systemic. That uncomfortable truth is evident in President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative that leaves sisters out in the cold and equally clear in the vitriol hurled at those of us who insist that the institutionalized needs of Black women must be addressed in tandem with the needs of Black men.
It becomes even more clear when Black people becomes Black men by default.
In at least one article, which blatantly cherry-picked names from “Operation Ghetto Storm,” a comprehensive report created by researcher Arlene Eisen and published by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a list was compiled of 20 victims of police murder and not one woman was listed.
According to Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University, this kind of gender-exclusive narrative is all too common. “Prevailing narratives around Black violability and anti-Black racial violence pivot around Black men and boys,” said Dr. Lindsey. “Both historically and contemporarily, when many people working towards racial justice around the issue of racial violence, the presumptive victim is a Black male. From lynching to police brutality, the presumed victim is a Black male. Therefore, Black women and girls are viewed as exceptional victims as opposed to perpetual victims of anti-Black racial violence. Our narratives around racial violence, unfortunately, have yet to evolve into ones that are gender inclusive. Black Victim=Black Male.”
Yes, we must have justice for John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. But we cannot forget about Yvette Smith, Eleanor Bumpurs, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tarika Wilson, and so many others whose stories hover on the edges of obscurity.
Police departments across the country serve as enforcement for White supremacy and the criminalization of Blackness is not reserved for Black men. This is not so much a call for intraracial, gender reciprocity as it is a call of nuanced racial awareness. We must be aware of the ways in which we legitimize that only Black men’s pain matters. We, especially those of us with platforms, must be purposeful in speaking the names of Black women who have been victims of police brutality. We must be cognizant of the devaluation of Black women’s lives and how internalized patriarchy informs our own prioritization of the Black male victim.
My love and my rage remain in Ferguson and Los Angeles and Staten Island and Beavercreek, Ohio, as we fight this full frontal assault against Black men. But we must all do our part to amplify the stories of Black women whose lives have been taken, then swiftly forgotten.” LINK
