corona—graminea replied to your post: fun:

Philosophically, I think there is hardly any time when you can just NOT talk about right/wrong. Because even making that decision you have to take right and wrong into account.

this reminds me that last week we were discussing boys don’t cry and the fact that the filmmaker(s) erased one of the people who was murdered along with Brandon Teena, the boyfriend of the woman whose house he was hiding at, who was a Black man and an amputee. the professor brings up “what does this do to the movie when this character is removed when it would have been relatively simple to have him around?”

and everyone starts in on race, but not in a critical “it is clear the director wanted this story to be white and able-bodied because our society teaches that to add in more intersections of oppression would have been much too confusing, even if this character would have only been a side part, so he was erased entirely from one of the only popular tellings of this story”

in a “well the director didn’t want to talk about race it would have made things to complicated for everyone to understand, we don’t want race and disability mucking up our nice white story and CONFUSING us!!”

and I was like, “um, taking out a black man DOES ABSOLUTELY make a statement on race. in fact, just having a totally fictional movie that is populated only by white people makes a statement on race. whiteness is not actually the default state occupied by humans,” trying to engage some critical thinking

instead a white women’s studies major positively YELLED at me about “THAT WASN’T THE STATEMENT THE DIRECTOR WAS TRYING TO MAKE”

this class is BEYOND tiring and could honestly be extremely triggering for anyone who isn’t a white straight cis able-bodied etc etc person, most of the vocal students are White *F*eminists and other White Ladies and it is… yeah.

slightly replied to your post: slightly replied to your photo: the fall……

damn. I bought the DVD because it was cheap and I’d heard good things so I guess I’ll still watch it for the good things, but. Damn!

yeah and I mean, I am tired and a white girl and my race analysis may not be perfect on this but I was watching it and I hadn’t seen it in about three years and I was astonished that the first time I watched it I was so clueless as to just how gross some of this stuff was

I mean

the Black character wears like an animal skin loincloth and a horned helmet for most (all) of the movie

it’s sad when a movie should be great but instead the writer includes a bunch of people of color and cultural stuff from POC to make things look artsy and exotic and cool~~~ and you are like, damnit, this is why we can’t have nice things. because racism.

slightly replied to your photo: the fall…  rampantly orientalist &racist. but also…

oh man this is the first I’ve heard about racism and I was worried from the cover that there would be racism. But I assumed there wasn’t because nobody had mentioned it. WHY DO I EVER TRUST THE INTERNET?

ya I mean it’s all SUPER orientalist obviously, in a “this story is set in India but by India I mean sandy deserts and pretty buildings and an evil spanish governor and a pretty white lady who wears traditional east asian-esque dress” way, and there is one Indian character, whose wife is referred to as a “squaw” repeatedly and who is said to live in a “wigwam” (despite being obviously a desi/south asian Indian character — I assume this was done with some self-awareness on the part of the writer, like that Roy is really sort of sheltered and depressed and white and makes no distinctions around what “Indian” means in his head, but it’s never addressed and I mean, it’s still really kind of awful, squaw, ugh), and there is one Black character who is a former slave and does not seem to ever speak (he may have a couple lines that are not incoherent shouting), and there is another character who as far as I can tell is a white actor covered in mud with a dreadlocks wig who is a “mystic”/primitive type thing who just chants and doesn’t speak english and does magic and is the definition of a Magical Negro character except… played by a muddy white guy

basically the only characters who speak are white

it’s pretty rough

this has been a very late night, tipsy critical race analysis of The Fall

slightly replied to your post: how do you get rid of outdated textbooks?

depends on how outdated? the only use I can think of for ones where the text is useless (and not funny, like some REALLY old textbooks can be) is as collage background paper :/

slightly replied to your post: okay

ebay and amazon used are the best ways to get rid of textbooks people might use. People will buy older editions if they can’t afford/don’t want to splash out on the newer one.

ugh

I just like, reeeeally, don’t want to go through all the effort of selling shit on amazon and mailing it to people etc etc. I just want to wave my hands and have all these crappy books be gone. doesn’t help that a lot of them are pretty beat up.