I JUST HAD TO CLOSE MY EYES FOR A SECOND AND LIKE……..DIGEST THIS WHA T THE HELL
You know why
clowns actually originated in egypt to entertain royalty- they wore weird masks and imitated gods. there were also clowns in ancient china, greece, and italy. it wasn’t “black face and then switched to white face” like i saw in the notes– the clown white paint was invented in 1801.
the big, red nose is associated with alcoholism/being drunk (heavy alcohol usage can lead to severe rosacea and swelling of the nose), because drunkards in ye olde times were seen as fun for the whole family. the overlined lips create an exaggerated smile). curly or big hair was seen as whimsical and fun, as was a lack of hair (if you look up ‘vintage clowns’, you’ll see their hair is puffed out to the sides or upwards. nowadays, people probably wear afros because they’re cheap, and don’t involve lots of styling.
i am passionate about clowns
They are a terrifying breed of monster, and must be eradicated from the face of the earth, but it’s relieving to know they weren’t born from a place of racial prejudice.
BOTH…BOTH OF THESE REALITIES CAN EXIST AT THE SAME TIME.
Yes, all the things above about clown styles NOT being derived from racism are true.
HOWEVER, a very generic and popular “clown” appearance can be drawn very very easily to minstrel shows and the way in which lips and hair were styled to impersonate black people. (or make a caricature of them, as it were)
While the clowns you’ve pulled up as reference are wearing styles not necessarily linked to racism, that doesn’t mean clowning and minstrel shows didn’t ever rub elbows and feed into each other. They 100% did.
Are clowns AS A WHOLE unquestionably racist? No. Do some clowning styles have roots in anti-black racism? Yes.
Both of these things can be true at the same time, I’m sorry to break it to you.
Ice cream trucks aren’t inherently racist but guess what? Ice cream trucks still play the instrumental of the song N***** Love A Watermelon so………..there’s still a very lasting overlay from minstrel shows even in something as simple as ice cream truck jingles.
You have to face that racism, especially anti-black racism, seeps into EVERYTHING of our everyday reality. Because that’s what racism DOES. You can’t just brush it off because things can also have roots in stuff other than racism. Because racism is everywhere. All the time. Always.
kayvsworld: eustassya: kayvsworld: guys…….guys…………a character being Not White or being coded as Not White does not mean you can’t cosplay them! just don’t…fuckign………paint yourself brown????? don’t……………………….paint yourself brown to cosplay a poc the bar is so fucking low my dudes you can cosplay a character without trying to make yourself look like a different race… Continue reading
Gabrielle Union isn’t about to sit down and let Hollywood’s elite disrespect Black excellence. The star delivered an important message during her Tuesday appearance on The View, calling out Michael Keaton for what she characterized as a “non-apology” after he lumped Black-cast films Hidden Figures and Fences together into one movie.
you’re telling me we can keep Star Trek and Star Wars correct in our heads, but Hidden Figures and Fences is too hard?
They can tell the difference between these men
but not between this cast
and this one?
they know the difference between all these cop shows, but can’t tell the difference between a movie about Black female mathematicians, engineers, and programmers launching a man into space in the heart of Jim Crow… and movie about a Black trash man’s existential crisis and how it impacts his family? REALLY?
eveewing: “I think of too many of my white graduate students at Harvard who somehow feel perfectly comfortable calling me by my first name, but feel reluctant to refer to my white male colleagues– even those junior to me– in the same way. And I think about how my black students almost always refer to… Continue reading
Surya Bonaly, world renowned French skater whose trademark move is her backflip, where she only lands on one blade in order to keep the move legal. She’s amazing!
Yoooooo
it always amuses me when I remember the ice skating community banned this phenomanal move because a black person literally had raised the bar and white people were too bitter to do better so they banned a move that would add progress to the sport.
and then she raised the bar again
someone make this into a movie. fuck it, i’ll do it
ok ok so every time this post shows up on my dash, i get a little miffed because it presents this narrative that isn’t consistent with reality. it misrepresents surya’s career. first, there seems to be this implication that the isu banned the backflip because surya was the first skater to perform the backflip, and they didn’t like that because she’s black.
i mean, surya did not pioneer the backflip. she herself stated that her coach suggested that she start doing backflips on ice because of a skater named norbert schramm who was performing them in europe at the time. scott cramer pulled off 10,032 backflips over the course of his career, and he retired seven years before surya even began competing. surya is THE FIRST AND ONLY skater in history to perform a backflip and land on one skate in competition, but the most important part of it wasn’t the feat itself but WHY SHE DID IT.
and ok, the first person to successfully do a backflip on ice was skippy baxter in an ice show in the 1940s. there has only been one legal backflip performed in actual competition by terry kubicka in 1976. immediately after he pulled it off, the isu banned the move from competitions. please note that yes, terry kubicka was a white male figure skater. and for context, surya was born in 1973. i sincerely doubt that the isu was banning the backflip because of a THREE-YEAR-OLD.
the isu had very good non-racism related reasons for banning the backflip because well, figure skating is fucking hard. i think we frequently underestimate just how difficult it is because of how easy they make it look. i mean top figure skaters are still working on consistently landing quad jumps in competition. it’s so easy to flub a jump and get injured, and it’s super common for skaters to spend huge chunks of the off season not training because they’ve injured themselves.
SO DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA JUST HOW FUCKING DANGEROUS IT WOULD BE IF BACKFLIPS WERE ALLOWED IN COMPETITIVE SKATING???? if you mess this move up, you’re not just going to break an ankle or fuck up your muscles, you’d break your neck on the ice. you could FUCKING DIE. and this is by no means the first or last move to get banned by the isu for being too dangerous. (the one that comes to mind is the head banger death spiral because seriously what a name).
the reason why this is just so upsetting to me is because i feel like you guys are really simplifying surya’s narrative. yes, surya was a FUCKING BADASS. LIKE HER FIRST SEASON IN SENIOR COMPETITIONS, SHE LANDED A BACKFLIP DURING PRACTICE RIGHT IN FRONT OF MIDORI ITO, THE FAVORITE FOR THE 1992 OLYMPICS. IN THE SAME COMPETITION, SHE BECAME THE ONLY WOMAN TO EVER ATTEMPT A QUAD TOE LOOP IN COMPETITION, and the first time anyone had even successfully pulled that off was a mere three years earlier.
and yes, surya had to deal with A LOT of racism. because of her skin color and her build and her athleticism and her style, she didn’t fit into the “ice princess”. they pegged her as a rebel, and they treated her as such. the judges were constantly nitpicking her skating style and criticizing her artistry because she wasn’t this light and graceful skater that they thought female figure skaters should be. (black ballerinas suffer from the same plight). she was constantly pushing the boundaries, but she consistently got lower scores than her white counterparts. and despite that, she was A THREE-TIME WORLD SILVER MEDALIST, A FIVE-TIME EUROPEAN CHAMPION, AND A NINE-TIME FRENCH NATIONAL CHAMPION.
in the 1994 world championships, surya’s final score tied for first place with yuka sato’s. it came down to a tiebreaker vote, and the judges picked yuka because she fit in better with the ice princess image. surya knew why she the judges didnt pick her. during the awards ceremony, she refused to step onto the medals podium and took off the silver medal. she was crying, and the crowd was booing at her.
the 1998 olympics was going to be surya’s last hurrah. she knew that the 97-98 season would be her last. when the judges gave her a low score on her short program for surprise surprise racist reasons, she knew that there was no way that she could win.
so surya decided to make a point.
she hadn’t planned to do this from the start because she knew that the move was illegal and doing it could get her disqualified, but after seeing her short program score, surya basically on the spot decided to replace the triple in her free skate with the backflip landing on one skate. she hadn’t been training for this move specifically, she just pulled it off right then and there on the olympic stage. and while the backflip was banned for being too dangerous, another reason for it to be banned was because the skater would land on both skates, and jumps are always landed with one skate.
surya pulling off this banned move was basically her last FUCK YOU to the judges because they’d been screwing her over since the start of her career. she was challenging them by making a previously illegal move technically legal. the judges didn’t disqualify her, but they didn’t accept the move as legal either, and they deducted points from her score, so surya placed 10th overall. BUT THAT DIDNT MATTER. when surya finished her program, she turned her back on the judges (a huge no-no because it is highly disrespectful) because she didn’t care about their opinion at this point. SHE’D MADE HISTORY. their decision wouldn’t change that.
There’s actually a RadioLab episode about her and she gives multiple interviews; it’s a really interesting and incredible ep and great to hear her story firsthand.
There’s one inaccuracy in this post though–she didn’t just perform the backflip on a whim, or even initially as a fuck-you to the judges. She was going to skate her planned routine, but had recently been injured and was in so much pain that she was barely able to walk, let alone skate. But she insisted on skating since she knew it would be her last olympics, and partway through her routine realized that she was in way too much pain to finish it as planned because landing the moves she had planned would stress her injury too much–but the backflip wouldn’t. So instead of executing multiple difficult, but legal moves, she executed one that wasn’t considered even possible.
frederick-the-great: stirringwind: dilettante-perpetuel: stirringwind: I guess I’ve seen it all now. Up is down on tumblr. Tumblr is a grotesque trainwreck when discussing WW2 precisely because the crimes enacted by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan don’t at all fall neatly into the US racial paradigm where “white” = oppressor and “POC” = oppressed dichotomy. Yet people… Continue reading
As I’ve worked to dismantle my own internalized racism and the ways that I privilege whiteness, I’ve learned to resist being ‘othered’ through the use of language. So when someone says, ‘Oh, they did that to you because you’re black,’ I quickly correct them with, ‘No, they did that because they are bigots.’ This often shocks people. I can see the panic in their eyes. Sometimes, their eyes dart about. If there are lot of people, they may get quiet.
Sometimes, someone will try to lessen the blow of my words with some clever deflection. I then come back with, ‘No. They are bigots.’ I name the problem. Trayvon and Michael’s blackness wasn’t the problem. The problem was the negative perceptions of that blackness and what spaces that blackness was ‘allowed’ to occupy. These perceptions are supported, funded, and reinforced by institutionalized racism. Matthew Shepard wasn’t murdered because he was gay. Sakia Gunn wasn’t murdered because she was a lesbian. Matthew and Sakia were murdered by people who made a choice to exercise their bigotry within a culture that deemed Matthew and Sakia ‘others.’
Monsters' Queen 