aloofshahbanou:

thestolencaryatid:

Farah’s post just reminded me of how fucking annoyed I get when people ask me and all the Greeks I know “what we are” since “we don’t look Greek” and upon asking “what Greek looks like” people balk and just exude these baffled expressions like “shit I don’t know” so we don’t know what Greeks look like we don’t know because we’re told if we’re too white we don’t look Greek if we’re too brown we don’t look Greek if we’re too this or that or the other we don’t look Greek. Every single member of my entire family is perceived as a different ethnicity by non-Greeks (sorry but it’s not only white people who are presumptuous). “Oh, you must be mixed” or “oh well you were occupied by Turks for a while” 

Like, this myth that we were once blonde blue eyed light skinned Aryans, i.e. Germans, needs to be dispelled. The Ottomans didn’t turn an entire population brown. Most of what you know about Greek culture and history is probably refracted through the German enlightenment. I suggest people start reading and stop playing ‘guess your ethnicity’.

“no… what are you REALLY???????”

also lol Evie I was just telling my friend Navneet that I have encountered people who’ve actually said to me, upon learning that I am both Irooni and Greek, “oh my God, your life is like ‘300.’” I want to die Evie

unapologetically-yellow:

Another perk of living in rural Yunnan, specifically 保山: the farmlands near the 怒江are in tropical climate, and teachers with 老家 there sell litchi honey and coffee honey. 

Those both sound so good. ;___;

[Image description: a screenshot of an anonymous message sent to @angryasiangirlsunited that says, “I told my grade 10 English teacher today that Miss Saigon isn’t a love story. I told her that it isn’t about the Vietnam War, about the war that tore my mother apart. I told her it’s just a wet dream of Vietnam by two Frenchmen. I looked her in the eye and told her ‘Colonialism isn’t a love story’. She just waved me off and said ‘Those are separate issues that aren’t a part of it. It’s still a love story.’ I really should’ve expected that from a whitey who loves The Help.”]

iwasyourteacher:

A lot of comments will be about the racist, misogynistic, imperialist, white privilege issues associated with this (both the English teacher and Miss Saigon), but there’s another problematic aspect to this and that’s the education part.

This is not an example of good teaching practice.  This English teacher represents everything education is not: education is about helping students find their voice, not silencing them; it’s about creating discussion and dialogue that incites intellectual and moral growth, not about shutting out discourses you don’t agree with just because it doesn’t fit your framework. And that’s just the beginning.

Fuck this English teacher.

And, Miss Saigon ISN’T a love story.

And, fuck the help.

(via angryasiangirlsunited)

Ethnicity in Nigeria

Why people should not even think of using the word “tribe”.

(via cosmicyoruba)

I’ve always hated this word.

(via zorascreation)

ya the word tribe is a no

(via l-angston)

(Source: thefemaletyrant, via inthenameofyeezusipray)

[Image description: a series of photos depicting young people, mostly women, menstruating while going about their daily activities: changing their tampon, checking their cell phone, lying in a bath, kissing a partner, sitting and reading at a coffee shop, waiting at a bus stop, and running.]

homoarigato:

maxatan:

qbutch:

missmatie:

peanuhbutta:

This is realllllllllly weird lmao

This is really NORMAL.
Except we never see it-so it is terrifying and uncomfortable when it happens.
(Mostly because people would laugh or be unkind)

I own a sex shop. Once a woman bled on our chair during an interview. She was horrified and felt ashamed because it was in some way unprofessional. We weren’t bothered. We said ‘what better place to work on being ok with your body than at a feminist sex shop?’
Bleeding is normal and dealing with it is one of the most pervasive ways women are complicit in their silence.

Some men bleed too. How would you react to that? For many men who are Trans the act of bleeding is a security threat.

Fuck off with your lolz.

Reblogging again for above commentary ^^^^^

very cool

commentary

(Source: cycleofmisery)

[Image description: a photo of Asian and Asian American women, one Asian/Asian American man, and one white woman. Three of the Asian/Asian American women are in wheelchairs, and one is sitting down. Most of the group is smiling at the camera.]

18mr:

May is Mental Health Month and the statistics from the Office of Minority Health should be a concern for the AAPI community.  For example: the percent of Asian American students grades 9-12 who attempted suicide is almost 2x that of non-Hispanic whites (CDC: 2009).

Including myself, four members* of APIDC (Asians and Pacific Islanders with Disabilities of California), a non-profit advocacy group, conducted an online survey earlier this year of AAPIs with mental illness for a presentation at a national health disparities conference looking at the intersections of race, ethnicity and disability.

We knew there are a lot of mental health issues among AAPI communities, and wanted to get a firmer grasp of what’s going on with actual people living with mental illness; and their own sense of what’s missing and needed.  The survey included a number of topics such as: usage of mental healthcare services, barriers to care based on mental illness or disability, attitudes toward mental illness from one’s AAPI community and recommendations for the mental health field on how to serve AAPIs better.

My training is in qualitative methods, which basically means I love to talk to people and learn first-hand what they experience.  In my opinion, talking to people is the first step in any process — whether it’s in a new relationship, to design a program, or create a new policy.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was hopeful for some recommendations that would be useful for healthcare providers and AAPI community advocates.

Key Findings: Even with only twenty participants, I was struck by how often cultural attitudes were cited as major barriers to respondents’ ability and desire to seek help (over 50%). Many participants also said negative cultural attitudes within their AAPI community toward mental illness had an impact on their sense of self and social relationships.  Those attitudes also contributed to delayed care.

Quotes from Survey Participants: While we can’t say our findings are true for all AAPIs with mental illness, I believe the following quotes from our participants illustrate some common challenges and struggles many AAPIs can relate to, for example cultural attitudes held by family and their community:

…for me it has been negative. My family would say that I do not love them or is being a good daughter…They turn it around on my internal worth and how I’m affecting them. I am isolated from the rest of my community because I do not feel as though I fit in. It’s a vicious cycle.

My parents don’t really have vocabulary in Vietnamese to apply to mental illness. Either you’re crazy or you’re not. If you’re ‘depressed’ in English, the closest equivalent my parents have is ‘not being grown-up and dealing with life’ in Vietnamese. 

 In turn, these attitudes impact many participants’ ability and desire to seek help:

I kept it hidden for so long that finally I had reached my ultimate bottom by trying to commit suicide.  I had struggled with my depression and suicidal ideation for so long by myself that I didn’t know what else to do to manage it…           

I kept it a secret for years. When I told them, I was already getting help and doing much better, yet still my mom treated me like I was making it up or exaggerating the difficulties…Years later, she…still treats me like I am weak and more fragile. It hurts that she doesn’t see my strength or courage in seeking help.     

 All the comments weren’t so bleak.  In fact, some participants talked about how culturally competent mental health providers with an understanding of AAPI cultures helped them with their treatment: 

My counselor is also Asian American and she focuses on the cultural nuances of Asian American identity on mental health in our community. I feel like she’s been invaluably helpful and helps me understand how much of our history ties into personal relationships with our family members.

My therapist is sensitive to cultural issues. She understands that I cannot just ignore and let go of my family as my culture focus on family cohesion and cultural dynamics. She helps me find the balance on how to deal with family.

Looking Forward: From this small survey, we learned that AAPIs with mental illness face unique issues that need to be understood and better served by mental health providers, the mental health system, AAPI advocacy groups, community-based mental health organizations, plus all AAPI communities and families.

While there are barriers and challenges facing AAPIs with mental illness, several participants had positive experiences with providers who are trained to understand AAPI cultures or who are also AAPIs. My colleagues and I proposed the following recommendations based on our findings:

• Recruit and retain a diverse, bilingual mental health workforce
• Invest in mental health infrastructure for community outreach to AAPI communities
• Increase spending on educational and accommodation materials in AAPI languages
• Increase research on the needs of AAPIs with mental illness

What else do you think AAPIs can and should do to raise awareness about mental illness in our communities and beyond?

18MR Guest Blogger ALICE WONG, disabled /Asian-American/news junkie/ night owl/advocate/researcher, can be found on Twitter @SFdirewolf

Interested in writing a guest blog? Get in touch!

(via gaobibaituo)

[Image description: a picture of Chansey and Koffing morphed into a new Pokemon called Chanfing. It has a round body the color of cotton candy and a happy expression on its face, and is expelling pink smoke.]

gogoatz:

ealsopart:

AHHH HELP IT’S TOO CUTE TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH KOFFING

ARE YOU SAYING KOFFING IS NOT CUTE

(via righteouspussypower)

David Wong

This quote is in an article about superhero movies, but it applies to so many things.

(via thecharles)

(via homoarigato)

paperpigasus:

DC Desi Summer 2013
Friday, August 16th to Sunday, August 18th
University of Maryland – College Park (near Washington, DC)
For more information and to apply: http://dcdesisummer.weebly.com/apply.html 
First priority deadline:  May 31st
 
**For young South Asian Americans age 15-21**
(Desi refers to people with origins in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and the Maldives, but the diaspora spreads from Fiji to Trinidad, from Kenya to the Persian Gulf, from South Africa to Guyana and Suriname, from Southall in Britain to Washington, DC and many places in between)
$20 (This fee covers all weekend meals, but participants arrange for transportation and housing.) 
Limited participation and transportation scholarships are available.  Free local housing can be arranged for out-of-town participants. 
 
DC Desi Summer (DCDS) is a weekend-long youth leadership and empowerment program. Spearheaded by the volunteer DCDS Collective, DC Desi Summer provides a radical and inclusive space for youth of South Asian heritage to examine key social justice issues and take action! Community activists, advocates, and academics will facilitate workshops and activities that focus on topics, such as sexism, racism, capitalism, and the nuts and bolts of organizing for justice.      

(via le-kif-kif)

aloofshahbanou:

I listen to music on youtube at work and I just saw one of those fucking obnoxious ads for “Athenos: Made the Greek Way” (LOL KRAFT FOODS, INCORPORATED, LOL) and the ways in which these commercials pathologize elderly Greek women in the form of Crazy-Mean-and-Shrouded Yiayia™ really infuriate me because everyone and their goddamn brother is taught to lump Greeks into this bullshit Western European category — “Greeks are white bro!!1111 Like Italians, you know!!!111 They’re like Italians!11111 They live by the ocean ‘n shit???!!111111666 They’re European, bro!!!11111666 They’re ethnic white Europeans!!1111111666”*** — but then we are fucking inundated with images that Orientalize Greeks, thereby marking the ways they speak, their behaviors, their corporealities as Other. (This simultaneous denial and acknowledgement of Greeks’ subjugated positionality is imo very parallel to the Euro-American treatment of MENA folks who are conveniently deemed “white” on paper yet punished for their Brownness in their day-to-day lives.) This isn’t necessarily my field of expertise and I would strongly recommend visiting Evelyn’s extraordinary blog for more information on why Greece is more Middle Eastern than you would ever fucking think, but I do have a lot of lived experiences as someone who is part Greek and I just want to say that we all have some fucking major unlearning to do.

***Greece didn’t even join the European Union until 1981. Does Christos look “white” to you?

orangelemonart:

yeezytaughtme:

1. love yourself like kanye loves himself
2. believe in yourself like kanye believes in himself 
3. know you’re the shit like kanye knows he’s the shit

This is actually really great because Kanye West has fought depression and suicide this sort of confidence worked for him and wow Kanye West. Anyone who is depressed, believe you are the Kanye Best.

And if it’s hard to feel good about yourself, that’s okay too.

(via inthenameofyeezusipray)

barwaaqo:

i think maybe it’s something we share, us immigrants, us children of immigrants, those of us thrown into diaspora, scattered across countries and continents with names we still struggle to pronounce, further from the heartland than our parents ever dreamed we’d end up. we spend so much time in airports, picking people up, dropping people off. there is always someone leaving, someone coming back, and it exhausts me- this perpetual meeting and parting of ways. we miss the births of nieces and nephews, we miss funerals, we are condemned to celebrate and mourn without each other. when ladan was born we slaughtered a goat and shared it with strangers. i saw farah when she was two years old, and again at her wedding. we cry when our mamas leave, when we leave them, our time together is measured piecemeal, it is always too short, it is never enough, we milk these precious moments for all that they’re worth. we stand in lines at airports, bear suitcases that hold gifts as offerings, it’s a condolence, always an apology. you say i’m sorry i was gone for so long. always someone, maybe your niece who is four tugging on the hem of your coat asking when you’ll be back again. soon you tell her, you kiss her on the forehead and you know soon is never soon enough. you hug your aunt and tell her you love her. on the plane you watch the city and all those you love grow smaller, distance blooms wide and unforgiving in your mouth. both here and there, neither here nor there, call it the immigrant’s burden, this weight, this persistent longing we carry on our backs. always someone asking you to stay, i can’t, you say, every single time.

(Source: nomadmanifesto, via swampkhaleesi)

Baby Boy: The Sociocultural Effects of Prolonged Male Adolescence

Check on It: The Gendered Dynamics of Male Spectatorship in Urban Public Spaces

Crazy in Love: The Diagnosis and Treatment of “Female Hysteria” During the Late Nineteenth Century

Naughty Girl: Disidentification and the Performance of Female Sexual Promiscuity

Cater 2 U: Female Subservience and the Reinforcement of Hegemonic Gendered Power Structures

Get Me Bodied: A Radical Critique of the Sex/Gender Binary

Freakum Dress: The Role of Consumerism in the Construction and Assertion of Female Sexuality

Videophone: Social Networking Technology and the Deconstruction of the Dominant Gaze

Run the World (Girls): Historical Perspectives on Global Female Leadership

Bills Bills Bills: The Dual-Income Model and the Reshaping of the Domestic Sphere

Soldier: The Hypermasculinization of U.S. Military Culture

Independent Women: Girl I Didn’t Know You Could Get Down (to Business in the Public Sphere and Still Be Expected to Perform Domestic Labor During the “Second Shift”) Like That

(via defiantlycurious)

jadedcattybrownbitch:

And while we’re on the subject…

This whole thing with automatically jumping to assumptions about someone reblogging something that was made/wrote by someone who did/wrote gross shit in the past has got to stop.

This is a fucking huge website with a lot of people using it, and a lot of them don’t keep up with particular users and what they do and say. It’s fine to point something out to them if you feel it’s necessary, and it’s also fine to have boundaries for yourself and say you won’t follow anyone who reblogs from a gross, abusive blogger you want to stay far away from (like I have to now).

But people leaping down people’s throats for reblogging something someone wrote/drew/whatever, immediately assuming people are okay with the problematic shit the person did in the past that they probably didn’t even know about is just being an asshole and purposely looking for an excuse to cause drama and fighting.

I saw this one blog telling people to back off when they were jumped on for reblogging a person they didn’t know did problematic shit in the past (namely blackface). Apparently, they didn’t know about the blackface and reblogged something else from them (that was not blackface), and then the people running that blog were accused of reblogging and promoting blackface.

And then people said that their understandable and fair enough “we’re sorry for that, but can you please back off of our blog? we didn’t know.” reaction was a “fauxpology” and “passive-aggressive.”

Do you fucking dipshits even know what “passive-aggressive” is anymore? What the hell are you doing?

A lot of people on this site need to get a fucking grip on themselves. You’re fucking arrogant, egotistical bullies who don’t even know what the fuck they’re saying anymore.

(via gaobibaituo)

gaobibaituo:

lostintrafficlights:

phenomenon-intervention:

When Does Plastic Surgery Become Racial Transformation?

generasian:

This extensive Buzzfeed article investigates the troubling story of Leo Jiang, a man who has spent years and tens of thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgeries designed to mask his “ethnic” Chinese features. While the phenomenon of plastic surgery is an increasingly common one, Jiang’s deliberate attempts at “de-racialization” and obvious psychological issues confound the conversation on beauty, race, and the choice to go under the knife.

Jiang explains his reasoning for undergoing such extensive facial reconstruction, and his childhood trauma being teased as a Chinese “other” growing up in the UK:

“I believed that my ugliness was in part due to my ethnic features. My father thinks I’m ridiculous for building a complex system of beliefs based on that shallow stimulus. He says, ‘You’ve gone and done this, so you must be very proud of it, but initially it was some stupid kids opening their mouths to you.’”

But Jiang’s attempts to “Westernize” his own features cannot speak for the decisions of many South Korean men and women to opt for the colloquially-termed “double eyelid surgery,” which some have called an overt reflection of the East’s fetishization of Western beauty standards. Such a reading may be a simplistic imposition of our own Western understanding of race and beauty into a very different societal context. NYU’s Sharon Lee explains:

“Race does not enter the consciousness [in Asia] in the same way it does here. It’s easy to pathologize a whole country of people. This notion that Korean women want to become white becomes a really easy answer. That’s not to say that race isn’t important, but when we stop there we’re overlooking much larger structural and historical phenomenons. No Korean woman says, ‘I want to look white.’”

Jiang’s provocative journey and its implications for the larger conversation on cosmetic surgery’s increased ubiquity is explored further here.

This poster’s comment on the Buzzfeed article sums up everything I want to say on the issue, forever:

Victoria Le - Brown University:

What a repugnant article, soaking in unquestioned bias, condescension, and racial privilege.

While it was very nice of you to even include opinions from the defenders of these procedures, it’s clear that you’re completely uninterested in weighing the merits of their arguments or even extending to them real compassion or more than the vaguest and most pitying curiosity for their rationale.

You quote Jiang saying that “Whatever I do, I can’t become white,” yet you still feel comfortable diagnosing him with the need to “pass” and to “become this new [implied: whiter] person.” I’m not saying that racial insecurity has nothing to do with certain Asians’ decision to tuck their eyelids or reshape their noses, but you seem unwilling to entertain any other possibilities. Like here: “Protestations of doctors like Cheung aside, the procedure’s history belies its original intended purpose.” A) That sentence is stupid. No crap the procedure’s history belies its original purpose - its original purpose is its history. B) People do things for all sorts of reasons that can have nothing to do with their original intended purposes: get tattoos, keep kosher, wear blue jeans.

And it’s one thing to have a firm opinion about an issue, another to let your biases interfere with your sense of journalism. You describe the risks of blepharoplasty and jaw-narrowing surgery without explicitly acknowledging that non-racialized cosmetic procedures pose the same risks.

It’s especially sad because there’s so much about this issue you could have discussed in greater depth: the generational gap between proponents and opponents of surgical enhancement, the effect of globalization on various cultures, the changing cultural landscape of major Asian cities, how class influences people’s decisions about their bodies and appearance, how traditional Western and Eastern ideals of beauty intersect to create the kinds of body modification you see in Asian countries, etc.

Instead we get:

“Bei was undergoing jaw narrowing surgery - a slightly, but only slightly, nuanced version of taking an angle grinder to your lower jawbone” - I love that sneering “only slightly,” as if something like a facelift (remove and reattach your face!) isn’t a similarly intense procedure. Or as if grinding down the jawbone isn’t also done as a part of non-cosmetic surgery.

“I ask if [Jiang’s] lost the perspective that this is a medical procedure, and things can go wrong. Again, it doesn’t seem to properly sink in” - Again, I love the condescension.

“She was white and had dyed-blonde hair - her own, decidedly less invasive attempt at physical reinvention” - When white people change their appearance, it’s fine and not at all symptomatic of a deeper racial sickness.

“After we part, he’ll walk to a private dance class for which he’s paying $80 an hour…. A few weeks later he’ll wake at 5 a.m. for voice and drama lessons to learn how to act confidently in social situations” - How bizarre and snidely insinuating. It’s true that there is a specifically Asian market for lessons in confidence, but you might as well mention how Western stereotypes and pressure to conform feed that market.

“where two pretty parents are surrounded by ugly kids” - Yes, “pretty” and “ugly.” Not the more journalistic “who have undergone cosmetic surgery” or “who have not undergone cosmetic surgery.” I get that the ad itself is invoking a social bias, but could you try not to use language that perpetuates the kinds of attitudes that drive people to seek out cosmetic surgery in the first place?

“It’s all a way to muddle the real emotion behind the actions - 16 years ago some dumb people made some dumb comments and it’s still dominating his life” - Spoken like someone who’s never been the victim of persistent and culturally encompassing racial prejudice (yes, yes, you’re only agreeing with Jiang’s father, but you have even less of a basis to infer anything about Jiang’s psychology).

I’m Asian. I haven’t had any of these procedures done, but my mom has (an eyelid tuck), and as far as I can tell, she’s happy with her surgery and content with herself in general. If there was a racial component to her decision, she never mentioned it.

But racial prejudice is more than just a few isolated incidents. It’s not just that a kid in school can call you a chink or a gook or make squinty eyes to mock you. It’s that there are almost no Asian actors or actresses in Western-made film or TV; it’s that the Asian (more likely half-Asian) performers who do appear tend to conform to Western beauty standards; it’s that stereotypes about Asian impotence and submissiveness are tied to height, penis size, and jaw strength; it’s that eye makeup is designed for Western features; it’s that you can get passed over for jobs or relationships because of your appearance; it’s that people look at the before and after pictures for these surgeries and think the “after” picture is the beautiful one.

When will we finally get sick of hearing white people like the author of this article ridicule racial pathologies among people of color - pathologies which white people helped to create, or at least benefit from without question? If you really cared about Asian self-esteem, you’d worry more about what Western culture is doing to help or hurt Asians, instead of just blaming the victim.

That comment. 

You don’t give a shit about us. You really don’t. You pretend to feel sorry for us. And then you turn your back and casually affirm yourself as the more ~beautiful~ one, among backhanded comments about preserving our natural beauty. 

You don’t really give a shit about dismantling harmful beauty structures. You don’t give a shit about our sufferings or the shit that you did to us. You don’t give a shit about our skin, our eyes, our jaw, our cheekbones, our hair and our bodies. 

You just want to feel good. 

when will these people get bored with harping on the subject that “omg all Asian people wanna do is look white” as though there weren’t other cultural factors at play? how many of these bullshit “journalists” have published articles like these in the last couple of months, and how many of them said something OTHER than the same five bullshit points? NONE! 

they can all go fuck themselves I am so fucking sick of hearing “you just want to be white” 

if I just wanted to be white I’d wear salmon polos and eat bland food