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#of a jewish trauma spike

spacelazarwolf · 8 months

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if you know any jews who work at organizations or synagogues, especially those in leadership positions, consider reaching out to them and see if there's anything they need. after things like this happen, there is always a spike in antisemitism, and the responsibility for managing that often falls to jewish organizations and synagogues. we also have to manage increased risk of harm for those of us who work in the building, and rabbis in particular are going to be responsible for helping congregants - some of whom are likely to experience antisemitic incidents in the coming weeks, or are dealing with the death of a loved one - manage their emotions and trauma, which can be an incredibly overwhelming job. community support is incredibly important right now.

#jewish #jumblr #ip

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frankfontainecalloutpost · 3 months

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Shabbat shalom, here is my rabbi's thought of the week destined to every Jewish student out there suffering from the increased antisemitism in campus.

A Letter to Jewish Students at Universities and Colleges

16 February 2024

Dear Students,

I don’t know if this letter will reach you. Maybe your parents or grandparents will send it on to you, or someone will post it on social media. You might glance at it briefly and see that it is expressly addressed to you, wherever you happen to be. A letter long overdue, but necessary at a time of unprecedented and painful polarisation and turbulence on campus at universities and colleges.

I have spoken to some of you face to face or on Zoom over the past few months since October 7. I know that this is a desperately harrowing and bewildering time, and many of you are searching for companionship and someone to talk to, not only about what is happening in this war between Israel and Hamas, but what is taking place here in the UK – this terrific spike in thoughtless, ignorant and hurtful anti-Jewish incidents and words.

I don’t know how affected you are by the reverberations of the conflict in the Middle East. Your focus may be on your studies, on the daily assignments that must be in by certain deadlines. You may have your own personal preoccupations with family or relationships, with other worldly concerns such as what we are doing to the environment, or the growing gap between rich and poor.

But I am deeply struck by the reports I have heard and read about concerning what is happening at universities – in the lecture theatre, on campus and on social media, in particular.

What does it feel like for someone Jewish to walk past a group of demonstrators holding banners with the words ‘Zionists off our campus’ or ’Stop the Genocide against Palestine’? How do you react when you hear the words of protesters shouting, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’? How does it feel when close friends suddenly start to question your loyalties and to blame you for the war in Gaza? How do you respond to the accusation that the bombing of Gaza is the expression of Western imperialism by Jews?

Perhaps you are keeping a low profile, tucking your Magen David underneath your clothes, refusing to share with fellow students or friends your Jewish identity. You may be nervous about ‘coming out’ as Jewish with the huge increase of anti-Jewish incidents on campus and on the streets. And this is understandable – it may be too scary to confront the slogans carried and proclaimed by protesters week after week through city centres.

I wonder if you are someone who wants to – or needs to – speak to friends and fellow students about family or friends in Israel and the terrible trauma of October 7? And why shouldn’t you? A first-year student at [...], a member of the [this shul], said that she was labelled a ‘brainwashed Zionist’ by fellow classmates after she had spoken about friends who had narrowly escaped from the music festival in Israel. The language used against her on social media was so full of hatred that it drove her out of her classes.

Such conduct is unspeakable, as are the death and rape threats against the Jewish chaplain and his wife in [city] who have been forced to go into hiding with their two very young children.

Where is civility? Where is kindness? Where is understanding and intelligent listening and conversation? Where is humility and empathy?

It is a long time since I was at university. Being Jewish wasn’t always comfortable. Students who had never encountered a Jewish person brought their curiosity, but also their prejudices about Judaism, about Jewish history and identity. Few people spoke about the Shoah thirty years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Few books had been published, compared with the plethora on the subject today. There were none of the scores of films and documentaries that emerged in the late nineties and in the years that followed. History stopped with the Russian Revolution.

We have learnt so much more and know so much more. So why are we still so ignorant about each other? Why can’t we learn from history?

We don’t have the answers to the intractable conflict in the Middle East. But we do know that the only way forward is for Israelis and Palestinians to be helped towards a peaceful solution – through political and not military means. We can model that conversation with those out in the streets or on campus by helping them learn something about what it means to be Jewish in today’s world. It takes courage, but done gently and patiently, we can engage in those challenging relationships.

I wish you success in your studies and strength as we navigate this difficult time together.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi [...]

#israel #judaism #jewish #jumblr #frumblr #this is the tag for my text posts #i was worried about posting this and being harassed on the internet and this be used against me but #well #you know

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paperstorm · 7 months

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i know you said you didn’t want to talk about this and you can delete this ask when you get it but speaking into the void here

i personally as an arab never expected ronen to give a both sides are bad let peace prevail kind of statement (im aware that is what he is posting now and has reiterated that palestinians aren’t responsible for hamas i haven’t ignored that)

fully acknowledge that this is painful for him given his personal family history and just the generational trauma jewish people have lived through and antisemitism raging in the states for the past few years and spiking drastically since the bombing started

so him sticking by israel no matter how much of a bitter taste it leaves in my mouth lmao i understand why but what genuinely hurt was him reposting videos from violently islamophobic and racist right wingers like nathan*el buzolic calling it “palestinian propaganda” and who dont care about jews or israel but in his eyes brown arabs are the devil and need to be gone (ronen could very well not know what that man stands for but doesn’t change that its who he’ll be associated with henceforth cuz everyone knows and noticed)

celebrating biden sending weapons to israel knowing full well who exactly its being used against and pushing the “human shield” bullshit to justify it all makes it hard to digest seeing babies pulled out of rubble and dying and never not once admitting that collective punishment isn’t right or mass starvation isn’t right

i dont think anybody is ignoring his sentiment of wanting peace between communities but compared to what he’s been pushing it makes it harder to acknowledge when the most hes said about palestinians is “oh life will be lost on both sides no can do” and not voicing support for a ceasefire and doubling down against people trying to kindly show him a more nuanced view and flat out blocking people

i’ve long since stopped caring about celebrities and their political opinions cuz they need woke points but since we’re all a part of the same fandom i guess its making rounds more

(and also a general thing, the fact that antisemitism and islamophobic hate crimes are spiking should push politicians to call for a ceasefire instead of doubling down on their money making tactics from defence contracts and stocks cuz as long as people see videos of palestinian parents losing their children and vice versa and weeping in the streets and IDF soldiers in uniform eating mcdonalds in a full face of makeup and acrylics its just going to keep getting worse cuz the disparity is getting more obvious)

It's not that I don't want to talk about it, it's that every time I do like clockwork about 30-45 minutes later the death threats and 'kys' anons roll in and that isn't easy to deal with. But I do think these things are massively important and I do want to talk about them.

And I agree with all of this. It feels so silly sometimes to care about him or what he's saying when there are babies buried under rubble from genocidal bombs dropped purposely on apartment buildings and bakeries and hospitals and funded by American taxpayers like ... he's a random C list celebrity and we aren't the victims here by any stretch of the imagination. But it still hurts. It seems to me like he is extremely misinformed. Uninformed, ignorant, uneducated, whatever adjective you want to use. If he's bought into the human shields propaganda then he's bought into all of it, and the US/Israeli propaganda machine is one of the strongest the world has ever seen (I mean you have a state indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of children and you have the whole Western world terrified to say "hey maybe don't do that", it would be impressive if it wasn't so horrible) so he isn't the only one who's fallen for it but it's ... sad. I dont' know, it's just sad. All of that and all of what you said is context for his response to this, but context doesn't make it hurt less. It sucks that we're going to have to do the heartbreaking work of separating him from TK in order to keep loving our show and not feel like we're de-facto supporting genocide. We're not the victims in this, especially those of us who are white and not Arab and not Jewish and are far less likely to face any consequences here, but it still sucks. I don't have any answers but I'm there with everyone who feels let down by him right now.

#911ls asks #palestine #israel

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witchern · 7 months

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i realize i'm about to kick a hornet's nest by posting this on tumblr dot com, aka the website that's chronically allergic to nuance, but the thing that's been grinding my gears all week is the fact that y'all won't let jews in the diaspora sit with our feelings. like, at all.

shock, fear, and grief are all powerful emotions. they can freeze even the strongest of us in place. i can only speak for myself, but i've been frozen at a steady 'fear' for most of the week, with the occasional spikes into 'grief.' i've never seen my dad cry, but he cried this week. my jersey-raised, black belt, tough-as-shit dad cried. because he was scared.

but some of you won't give us the time and space to feel. you see us mourning and accuse us of "grieving for colonizers" without giving a fucking thought to the possibility that the graphic images of dead jews MAY IN FACT touch upon some generational trauma and old fears.

can you give us a second to catch our breath? can you give us time to collect ourselves? can you give us time to check in with the rest of our community? what are you hoping to achieve by antagonizing us when we're struggling with our own emotions? many in our community are hurt and scared and all you can think about is dunking on us online for internet points. does that make you feel like you did something useful? is your life so unsatisfying that mocking jews for mourning dead jews is entertainment for you?

all i can say now is if you're reading this and you're part of a vulnerable community, i hope that, during difficult times, you're given the grace that the jewish community was not this week.

#*t #i was gonna let this be rebloggable but. i don't need the attention it would bring.#just had to get this off my chest and let it sit here.

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ao3feed-spuffy · 2 years

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the world moves on (and i without you)

by taxicab12

She had her hair parted in zigzags.

Or, five ways that Willow and Tara never met and one way that they did

Words: 5669, Chapters: 1/6, Language: English

Fandoms: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/F

Characters: Willow Rosenberg, Tara Maclay, Buffy Summers, Spike (BtVS), Xander Harris, Dawn Summers, Anya Jenkins, Rupert Giles, Cordelia Chase

Relationships: Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg, Spike/Buffy Summers, Xander Harris/Anya Jenkins, Xander Harris & Willow Rosenberg & Buffy Summers, Tara Maclay & Spike, Spike & Dawn Summers

Additional Tags: 5+1, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Canon Jewish Character, Willow finally starts to deal with her grief and trauma around Tara, this fic contains jane austen quotes incompetent henchmen and dragons, all of these tags are fully accurate I swear

source https://archiveofourown.org/works/40820295

#ao3feed #ao3feed-spuffy #spuffy #buffy x spike

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gray-ace-space · 2 years

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tag system

for some reason tumblr won't let me add new links to this, so the tags added recently are not clickable, sorry.

general categories

og post - posts posted by this blog or my main

positivity

information

community

history

art

aes (aesthetic)

merch

humor

insp (inspiration)

aphobia - aphobia is discussed or argued with, but not directly present

internalized aphobia

grayphobia - same principle

anti exclus

amatonormativity

relationships

video

psa

signal boost

asks

submissions

poll

heart to heart - a specific series of posts i make exploring my own feelings about my gray asexuality and experiences with it (heads up for possible negativity)

this acespec thinks x is hot

glitter text

acespec identities

gray ace

ace

acespec - blanket tag for all acespec identities minus gray ace

demi ace

aceflux

aego

aspec

ace men

ace women

alloace

aroace

non sam

acemid

oriented aroace

angled aroace

caed

lith / akoi

fray

cupio

recipro

quoi

spike

orchid

ena

bellus

ficto

myr

volo

apres

idem

sequence

auto

placio

nebula

haze

icula (see also: sex favorable / sex indifferent)

demiaego

graydemi / demigray

aegoaceflux / aegoflux

graycupio / cupiogray

sex favorable

sex repulsed / apothi

sex averse

sex indifferent

sex ambivalent

other lgbtq identities

sexuality

gay

lesbian

pan

ply (polysexual)

omni (omnisexual)

mspec

abro (considered aspec also)

wlw / sapphic

mlm

nblw / wlnb

nblm / mlnb

nblnb

mspec lesbian + bi lesbian

mspec gay + bi gay

bambi lesbian

gender

trans

nonbinary

genderqueer

agender

multigender

genderfluid

genderfae

genderfaun

genderflux

girlflux

boyflux

bigender

trigender

polygender

pangender

demigirl

demiboy

demigender

maverique

neutrois

androgyne

arospec

aro

gray aro

demiro

aroflux

arospec

alloaro

aromid

other

queer

questioning

intersex

polyam

queerplatonic

two spirit

lesboy

turigirl

varioriented

stone

intersectionality

poc

black

indigenous

latine

asian

jewish

desi

muslim

disability

neurodivergent

autistic

bpd

ocd

adhd

trauma

kink

consent

sex work

body positivity

health

dates and events

pride month (june)

wrath month / disability pride month (july)

aro week (week after VD)

international women's day (march 8)

trans visibility day (march 31)

lesbian visibility week (april 26 and surrounding week)

agender pride day (may 19)

pan visibility day (may 24)

mspec lesbian week (may 26 and surrounding week)

international lesbian day (oct 8)

trans awareness week (week before nov 20)

trans day of remembrance / tdor (nov 20)

pan week (december 6-12)

(no separate tags for acespec events bc it is ace day every day here)

fandom things

alastor (from hazbin hotel, i posted enough about him that he merited his own tag)

good omens

steven universe

ddlc (doki doki literature club - yuri is acespec i will die on this hill)

barbie

mlp (my little pony)

content warnings - blacklist as needed

tw aphobia - aphobia directly present and sometimes quite intense

tw grayphobia - same principle

tw transphobia

tw nbphobia

tw terfs

tw homophobia

tw biphobia

tw intersexism / tw perisexism

tw misogyny

tw fatphobia

tw abuse

tw conversion therapy

tw sexual harassment

tw sexual assault

tw medical abuse

tw violence

tw guns

tw drugs

tw suicide mention

tw self harm

tw religion

tw christianity

tw periods

tw discourse

tw negativity

tw insects

tw body horror

tw blood

tw periods

tw nazis

tw genocide

tw cults

long post

gifs

flashing

eyestrain

nsfw

languages

spanish

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pearl-kite · 2 years

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First and last art of fav OC(s)

@impossible-rat-babies and @dorkousloris both tagged me for this, for which I shower them both in appreciation <3

I think I'm going to tag @fooltofancy, @mihqorio, @spike-spiegel-is-jewish and @ardellian because I am curious but there is absolutely no obligation at all, as always o3o;;;

Looking back, I apparently only drew Akos and Gale this year, which is perfectly fine but makes me feel a bit neglectful of other characters. They got sketches but never anything finished.

Akos - 2006-2021

Oh goodness, you wouldn't even recognize him. Akos was originally a side character for my second nanowrimo attempt, a main character's little brother, and oof did I come up with all sorts of trauma for him. He did actually have white hair in the beginning but dyed it black, and if you look through years of art it grows out until it's only the last year or two that there's no black in it, so it's almost like he's actually all grown up.

I'd say they grow up so fast but it's been 15 fuckin years. Love him. I've also mellowed out on all of the angst I threw at him. Mostly. Then I went and tossed him into IF like Greenwarden and Northern Passage so he still gets to deal with shit :3

Gale - 2007-2021

God what is going on with those proportions. Ran everyone though a taffy puller I guess. Also when I was only just dipping my toes into digital, so there's a lot of growth there thankfully. Gale exists in a weird limbo where they've changed a lot but they're also somehow exactly the same. I don't get it, but I love them <3

#really though thanks for the tags <3 #it... is almost painful to look at those old ones #but hey 15 years is a long time to get better right #does make me realize that I used to actually draw full bodies what happened to that #oh right I'm not stuck in lectures at college any more #last year I redrew that Gale pic but as it's not the most recent it doesn't get to go here #hmm still really like how that new Akos one turned out and it's been a few months what do I need to do to be that happy about the next one?

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bitegore · 2 years

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re: trauma from fiction,

I could maybe come up with 3 cases in which fiction actually fucks me up for a while

1: any work dealing with unreality or dreamlike settings is horribly unpleasant to look into, as it reminds me of my brushes with psychosis and makes me doubt things. not trauma, as the issue stems ultimately from preexisting things, and I can still look away long before the damage is done (which unfortunately means I can't play Pathologic 2 and Knock-knock until I'm in a better place)

2: anything from our school's literature class, as my teacher was verbally abusive and reading what she taught makes my anxiety spike. not trauma, work itself doesn't even do anything because it's my teacher who keeps ruining my attempts at re-reading Hero of Our Time

3: a long and painfully descriptive piece about illegal abortions in ussr, read by me at the ripe old age of 13 which had descriptions of deaths induced by abortion methods and details about what led to them. it was horrible, I kept having to stop, yet I still made the choice to continue. not trauma, as it really isn't anywhere near the forefront of my mind, but I'm pro-choice now

tl;dr from what I can see, you can always just stop reading the moment you see something upsetting. a more plausible source of trauma would be it opening existing wounds or the circumstances around it. and considering that this post was provoked by discourse around Maus, that's sure as fuck not what people mean. god damn it. if Maus is upsetting, isn't it a good thing, considering the subject matter?

Honestly, i'd rather people not be traumatized by descriptions and depictions of the Holocaust. At the end of the day, trauma is a very unuseful response to historical atrocities, especially ones that people are interested in repeating on different groups nowadays. What i want is for people to be very, very angry that it happened, and dedicated to keeping it from happening again.

If people are traumatized about depictions of the holocaust, how are they going to be able to engage with news stories about genocides worldwide? Are they going to be able to do something about it? the answer here isn't necessarily "no", but engaging with stuff even tangential to one's trauma is much harder on the person doing it than just like engaging with something painful and angering but which isn't checking the trauma boxes, I guess.

Someone else pointed out that secondhand trauma is a thing, though, so I am gonna walk it back a little bit and say that it's... possible for some people to be traumatized by descriptions/depictions of things that happened in real life. I just don't think that people reading Maus are going to be traumatized by that.

....also this is just a personal experience but I didn't feel like Maus was that, uh... not sure how to put it. It was heavy and it was detailed, but it wasn't so heavy or so detailed that I even had to put it down, and I grew up in an American Jewish household with the whole legacy of the holocaust hanging over my head, you know? I've read other accounts on the subject that I literally couldn't finish. Maus was not one. I'm not trying to put Maus down, but like, if you're gonna claim to be traumatized about depictions of the holocaust i feel like it's kind of insulting to the actual legacy of the holocaust to say it about the version with cartoon mice and not, like, something with photographs of emaciated corpses or piles of confiscated shoes in glossy paper on every ten pages, you know?

#red replies #aro-spectre

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butchfeygela · 3 years

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Ahhh so I'm actually kind of really nervous to send this!! But do you have any advice for a prospective convert to Judaism? I'll be moving soon & I'll actually have access to a Jewish community (currently living in a v rural area). I've been wanting to pursue this for going on 4 yrs now, but my anxiety is really spiking & I'm sure it's just my brain panicking but. I would just really appreciate it if you could offer any advice for me or could offer any courage for reaching out to a rabbi. Thank you so much for your time & I hope you have a beautiful day! 💚

okay so i am enthically jewish but bc of assimilation and generattional trauma was baptized catholic and raised w virtually no religion and very recently reached out to a rabbi to start the process of converting officially after also being nervous about doing jt for a bit!

what i did was research the differences between conservative and reform judaism and their conversion. Then i looked up synagogues in the area, read through their websites to get a feel for their communities and what they stand for, who their rabbi is and what some of their beliefs are (i specifically looked at their thoughts on lgbt jews and interfaith relationships since my gf is happily catholic and also how actively the synagogue seems to be in pushing zionist propoganda (take wht you can get on that one cuz a lot are not great))

once i found one in my area i liked and felt comfortable with, i emailed their head rabbi explaining my feelings about converting and why i wanted to and asked him where we go from here. it definitely was scary for me to bc of how badly i want this as well, but rabbis and jewish communities are often excuted about prospective converts and want to talk with you about your feelings and will often work with you to come up with a kinda syllabus/game plan/time frame for conversion, most last around a year for a full cycle of the jewish year

My rabbi said its often more about the finding community than the actual book learning but regardless, mazel on starting your journey! i believe in you and feel free to message me any other more specific questions

#nikanie #anon #judaism tag

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urmomsstuntdouble · 3 years

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Congrats on 100, can you do a Headcanon on Imperial!Russia?

ahh sorry this took me so long! i’ve been a little busy and i had to do some research, so that’s why. im not the most familiar with this period of history or russia as a character, but i hope it’s not so bad!

The first thing that I thought of when I got this ask was what effects does imperialism have on the empire in hetalia? Imperialism isn’t very heavily explored in canon, although it is portrayed as being a somewhat negative thing- Both for the empire and the other nations they interact with. I think imperialism in hetalia causes a lot of trauma for everyone involved, although it would be worse for the empire if they are a contiguous land empire, like Russia. All the adjustments that come from ethnic Russians moving into new territory (forcibly or not), and of the Russification of central Asia and Siberia were painful. as it resulted in a lot of conflicts between the Russians and the indigenous peoples of those lands, who were now tasked with assimilating. Assimilation is of course painful for those who are forced to go through it, but also for the nations who are being assimilated to anyway (I sort of talked about this before regarding America, if you’d like deeper thoughts, because it’s kind of complex and i dont want to just make this post be about what imperialism does to a bitch)

Religion was deeply important to him, and often caused a lot of emotional distress, specifically where Lithuania (who i hc as being Jewish) is concerned. The golden age of the Russian empire featured a lot of very antisemitic laws- Specifically under Catherine the Great, who’s often credited with being like. The woman who modernized/westernized Russia. Anyway, i think his relationship with Lithuania was really difficult for him to deal with, because Lithuania couldn’t just be okay with the treatment of their people (and religion), and that made it hard for them to be okay being around Russia. However, Russia considered them to be close friends, which was just sort of painful for both parties. (side note a fic that i think really encapsulates the dynamic between russia and lithuania during the russian empire would be this fic by @still-intrepid)

Though not all of Russia’s trauma stems from the empire years, it contributed pretty heavily and the longevity of the empire, followed immediately by WW1, a communist revolution, and the Soviet Union meant that he never really had time to process a lot of the things that happened to him/a lot of his issues that originated during the Russian Empire.

I think one of these issues is that he is Russia, and represents all Russians, and could possibly be used as a tool by possible insurgents to be like. Their figurehead or whatever. The government was naturally untrusting of him, which is part of why he’s so friendly to everyone he meets. He can’t come across as unsympathetic to a person he’s interacting with, lest they assume bad about him and send him to Siberia or something along those lines.

This was when his drinking started to become a problem, mostly in the form of spiked tea.

Though he really likes vodka as a drink tea is just as near and dear to his heart

The Napoleonic Wars were really traumatic for him because of all the slash and burning done by Russian troops. Though he fought in those wars, he was really not a fan of how they had to burn all those villages and crops down.

Samovar is a good word. Ivan loves samovars.

I think this period would also be a time when Ivan had a big growth spurt- I think he’s around 2 meters tall, but a lot of that didn’t come until the 18th and 19th centuries, because that’s when Russia really emerged onto the world stage and became the enormous (3rd largest empire in world history, 2nd largest land empire) country that it is today.

Ivan’s weight today is more evenly split between muscle and fat, but during the empire, I think he had much less fat on his body, and was a bit muscular but not as much as what he has today. This is both because of the conquest of new lands and absolute rule, as well as that around 95% of the population was made of starving peasants, which. I think is enough to make Ivan a bit skinny, but not skin and bones, as he still had to do a lot of manual labor.

He made a lot of enemies during this period, and yeah the Baltics were some of them, but there were even more enemies to be made in Central Asia during the Great Game. Most of the stan countries (but Afghanistan and Kazakhstan in particular) still hold resentment for this.

During the Russo-Japanese War, there was a lot of pressure on Russia to win- people were beginning to lose faith in the monarchy, and it was sort of seen as a war that Russia needed to win in order to keep the peasants from hating the government- like a military victory they needed in order to unify the country. When Japan won, Ivan was subjected to a lot of hatred both from his bosses and his people, each believing that he was on the other’s side

idk if you consider the Soviet Union to be part of Russian imperialism (I personally would argue that it was but idk if everyone thinks that or if that’s what you mean when you say imperial russia) so i’m not really going to touch on that but if you want soviet headcanons i have vague machinations

ok i think that’s it? honestly i kind of struggled with this because i don’t have the best grasp on Russia’s character, although I do think he’s very interesting. i hope that all this was neat, and once again I’m sorry for how long it took me to write!

writing requests

#im sorry i feel like this isnt very good?#theres definitely a lot of good russia content out there but i havent really gone looking for it #anywhays #hope it didnt suck lol #hetalia #hws #hws russia #imperial!russia #hws hc #writing requests #ask #anon #ceros posting

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zombiesun · 4 years

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☕️ cartoon suns and also your spirituality

I was making a post about how I wanted red liberty spikes and as I was typing that post I realized if you added orange and yellow in an ombre then it would look like a cartoon sun and it just revolutionized me. I don't have that hairstyle (yet) but I thought the turn of phrase "cartoon sun" was cute and then I started feeling an affinity for cartoon suns and have kind of phased them into my aesthetic. I also inherited my sister's sun shaped wall hanging "Charlie" so it feels fated. I also identify heavily with the idea of a "sun" person I love warmth, love, and lazy days napping in the grass. It's everything I want to personify as an individual.

***

My spirituality and my personal definition of it has changed a lot this year so I hope this answer comes across concisely. I think to fully explain it though, I have to mention that my religious background is a very toxic evangelical cult. I never identified as a Christian (I had very early dreams of hell/separation from g-d which I/my family took to mean that I was spiritually fucked but eventually was revealed that I just would be working for a very different patron) My mother is Jewish but had to convert to Christianity before my father would marry her and even though she does find her faith fulfilling I was never able to experience my heritage. I felt like religion and the g-d had personally wronged me and I was a very "if you ever see me and g-d at a Denny's parking lot I'm ripping his throat out and making him watch" for years.

I experimented with Judaism and was considering joining a synagogue as a way with reconnecting with my roots but everything changed when I started going to therapy. I was healing emotional wounds and a lot of my limiting beliefs/trauma dissolving showed me parts of me that I hadn't explored. I know "empath" isn't a credible term right now but one of my earliest, defining spiritual moments was when I was around 8-9 and my mother informed me that I had the gift of “insight” and would be able to feel people’s emotions/speak into people’s souls in a way that would never be reciprocated/leave me feeling resentful in every intimate relationship. She was right and a lot of my childhood/teenager years was spent in abusive/co-dependent relationships that drained me of my energy and left me feeling resentful and profoundly unloved because I knew things about other people but no one seemed capable of putting that same energy into me.

As I was unpacking this in therapy, I started reclaiming that part of me in a way that I hadn’t been able to before. I started getting into tarot and the spiritual community and the fact that you could ask for signs/items to prove the universe's interest in you. I asked for a deck of tarot cards because I didn't want to buy my own and soon after we had a deck donated to the thrift store I was working at that I bought for three bucks. I started asking for more things, a new place to rent, an altar (I found mine within a tree struck down by lightning) weed (I cannot stress how much weed I have manifested during this pandemic) food, people returning into my life, etc. After a few of those things worked/I started seeing daily synchronicities in my life I started studying more and experimenting with craft. I went from being someone who hoped for oblivion at best to believing that everything is connected, everything is cyclical, nothing is coincidence, and we hold the pulse of our own lives.

I don't really have a label for these beliefs, and I'm still developing my path and direction in regards to who I want to work with and what I want to work toward. It That being said, it is the only faith in my life that has consistently given me proof and examples of its existence. I think as of now my core beliefs would be something like: this is not my first time living, everything in my life is meant to be, and if I will it then it will be.

#mailbox #I have been so excited to respond to this one but I haven't had the energy #that's a long and vague description of my spirituality #no one has actually asked me that directly? so it was strange formatting an answer #thank u again <3 #4est-nymph #interview #vin the witch

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blackfreethinkers · 4 years

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A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

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jewish-privilege · 5 years

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The storm over Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s latest comments — in which she said she got a “calming feeling” when thinking of the sacrifices Palestinians made in the creation of a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust — have led to a slew of history lessons about the creation of Israel.

You can read here about the century-plus-long effort to create a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, and here about the violence with which the Jews were met from Palestinians when they did arrive, by the thousands, after facing systematic slaughter in Europe.

That’s a far cry from where the debate over the meaning of Tlaib’s comments on Yahoo’s Skullduggery podcast started, after she said, “There’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out,” and that “just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post–the Holocaust, post–the tragedy, and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time.”

People like Reps. Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney seized on her use of the phrase “calming feeling” to cry anti-Semitism while blatantly misrepresenting her feelings about the Holocaust, which she called a “horror” and “tragedy.” But the debate is still wrong, and missing the point.

This entire episode — and the fact that this is at least the fourth time we're having this exact kind of ugly and fruitless discourse in the last six months — puts on display how willing operators of American politics in 2019 are to leave out the actual perspectives of people involved.

The lived experience of Palestinians — including the trauma of families who lived through the founding of Israel — has been largely absent from the debates on the endless Israeli–Palestinian conflict inside the corridors of power in the US. And now that it is present, people seem surprised to learn that Palestinian Americans actually have a different view. Meanwhile, non-Jewish commentators have chosen now to become the arbiters of what anti-Semitism entails. While there are times when allyship is valuable, removing Jewish voices from the center of the conversation around anti-Semitism does the exact opposite — it is disempowering, it is marginalizing, and it is dangerous.

Tlaib — the second Palestinian American member of Congress and the first woman — spoke in the most general of terms about trying to find some sort of unifying message in what Jews experienced after the Holocaust and what her family went through as the state of Israel took shape. Yes, she said that “all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post–the Holocaust, post–the tragedy, and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time,” but she also said moments later that Palestinians provided that haven “in a way that took their human dignity away, right, and it was forced on them.” If Tlaib is guilty of something, it’s oversimplifying a narrative in order to spread a, perhaps unwittingly empty, message of empathy, divorced from the entrenched politics that have governed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict both there, and in the US, for decades.

Seeing people try to squeeze Tlaib into the parameters of an absolutist, Twitter-driven debate about what is “right” or “wrong” to say about the Middle East is yet another feature of our contemporary political conversation that everything has to be simple. This dynamic showed up, in miniature and far from the life-and-death stakes of the West Bank, when the art world grappled with the firings of a host of women curators who had been brought in to make the art world less male: They were hired, celebrated, and promptly fired after they didn’t just stand there and be women, but actually tried to implement their visions.

For too long, messengers with no personal stake in the debate have been globbing onto — or sparking — scandals purely for their own gain, political or otherwise. This was the case when Meghan McCain called out Congress’s other Muslim woman representative, Ilhan Omar, in the wake of the deadly Poway synagogue shooting. Jews around this country are terrified at the increase in anti-Semitic attacks — two synagogue shootings in the span of six months harks to a degree of violence our parents and grandparents warned us about, but that we never thought we would see. We were not thinking about Omar’s tweets (problematic as some have been!) in that moment.

The same happened with Tlaib’s comments, which were eventually picked up by President Donald Trump, who yet again flung the anti-Semitism charge around with abandon. Those launching the accusations of anti-Semitism — mainly Republican practicing Christians (which, good for them!) — do not speak for Jews at large, more than 75% of whom voted Democrat in the midterms. It is wonderful — and important, and life-affirming — to have allies, particularly as anti-Semitic violence spikes throughout the country. But failing to include Jewish voices from the center of that conversation does the exact opposite. Those making the most outlandish rhetorical attacks do not suffer the worst of the backlash. Jews do.

What’s been lost in all the discussion on Tlaib’s comments is something that will probably have more of an effect in the long run. She spoke to it on the podcast, and later to Seth Meyers, where she described how she took her experience learning from the black people she grew up with in Detroit and learned how to speak on the Palestinian cause. “They constantly told me about the pain of oppression. They taught me about the history of segregation and feeling less than and dehumanized because they were black in America. And a lot of that — that lens — I bring to this issue, that’s how I talk about it,” she told Meyers. “The fact that we are dehumanizing a whole community ... it’s truly not going to lead to peace and equality and justice. And you have to, when you look at this issue, come from a place of values. People want to go ahead and jump and choose sides, not come from a place of values, because by the end you will choose the right side of history when you do that.”

Framing things that way is increasingly resonating with many young Americans who have grown up in an era with a lively social justice debate at home. Those who care about Israel’s future would be better off taking that into account, rather than shutting down the voices newly represented in US politics, and overpowering those with longer histories of representation.

Tlaib, her words, and how they’re being used in an escalating fight over who is or isn’t anti-Semitic show that something in American politics is changing. We just need to quickly figure out how best to think and talk about them.

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gayrefrain · 5 years

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i’m watching BlacKKKlansman and I can’t get over how nuanced Spike Lee treats the white people in this movie. There are heroes (Flip, Trapp etc) but they’re not treated as Special or Saviors. They’re just decent. And Flip’s struggle as a Jewish man being part of the plan to invade the KKK is given great treatment, but the story never strays from Ron’s. A white director absolutely would have made this Flip’s story.

And the way it treats the Klansmen is also fascinating because they’re complex but still unforgivably racist. Felix and Connie are the best example, because we see them be a sweet couple but their moments are heavily soaked in them bashing people of color. We don’t get a scene where the audience explores the “trauma” that lead them to be the way they are. They’re just racist, and it’s not excused.

#blackkklansman #spike lee #adam driver #John David Washington #i'm white so please tell me if I'm wrong

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voriiduraki · 4 years

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Name: Boris Ivanovich

Known Aliases: Mischa Sirotovsky (real name), Boris the Innocent, The Scholar, the Sovietnik

Birthday day: December 30th

Gender: Cis male

Age: 62 (as of 2017)

Height: 6’7”

Weight: 328 lbs

Hair color: Silver (was light brown)

Eye color: Grey

Nationality: Ukrainian

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Family: Father - Eliezer Sirotovsky, Mother - Ana Sirotovsky, Brother - Danylo Sirotovsky, Uncle - Matviy Sirotovsky, Aunt -Yelyzaveta Sirotovsky, Cousin - Zlata Sirotovsky, Grandfather - Sirotovsky, Grandmother - Sirotovsky, Uncle - Bodashka Miroshnik, Aunt - Maryshka Miroshnik, Cousin - T. Miroshnik, Cousin - S. Miroshnik, Cousin - G. Miroshnik, Grandfather - Yakov Miroshnik, Grandmother - Rakhila Miroshnik

Appearance: Boris is very wide and very tall and built like a strong man with a bit of a gut. His eyes are steel grey and he has a short, groomed, silver-grey beard.

His short, silver hair is cut close on the sides with a noticeable, raised scar on the back of his head. As most bratva has numerous tattoos depicting his accomplishments and failures. Boris has always looked a lot older than he really is and looks closer to seventy than sixty. He has a preference for earth tone turtleneck sweaters and dark trousers. On more important business he'll wear a suit.

Personality: Boris was always friendly and a bit emotional and had a strong love of learning. After his wrongful imprisonment he became a more hardened man that was unafraid to kill if his life depended on it. There wasn't much he was afraid of when he was young. He is very loyal as a person and strongly believes in friendship and takes debts seriously.

His personality drastically changed after taking a bullet to the back of his head. His emotions are a lot stronger and unhinged. Boris tends to get overtly upset or happy and will laugh or cry to fit these strong emotions even if it's over something minor. He also has an intense phobia of receiving cuts and open wounds that could possibly get infected. Though he can no longer feel pain it still sends him into a panic.

✭ JJBA Verse Info ✭

Stand: Iron Maiden

Stand appearance: Iron Maiden looks to be a small figure of a child or adolescent girl that is made from crude, jagged metal with no distinct facial features. The back of it's head appears missing or blown out to reveal the hollow interior of the stand. Several sharp, curved metal shards protruding from its back in what resembles wings or ribs.

Stand ability: It can create metallic, thorn like spires on any surface that can impale and rip things apart. It is heavily tied to his emotions and requires precision. After sustaining a nearly fatal head injury that caused trauma to his brain, his stand acts according to whatever emotion is overwhelming him at the moment and for this reason he has to limit its use and exercise self control.

-----------------------------------

Early life: Boris was born as Mischa Sirotovsky in a Ukrainian village in 1953. His village was a small, tight knit Ashkenazi Jewish community that was a mining town. Though Mischa had no younger siblings his mother often volunteered to watch the village children while the parents worked and he happily helped her while his father and older brother worked in the coal mines. He was a stand user from birth and believed his stand to be a spirit of sorts. Initially he ignored it until a strange phenomenon of curved, metal spikes appeared. Afraid to tell anyone he just kept it to himself.

Mischa always had a love of learning and showed interest in reading from a young age. When the children were at his home he would read to them and teach then a new word or fact he had learned. It was then he knew he wanted to pursue knowledge and become a teacher in the bigger cities. At eighteen, when he came of age to work in the mines Mischa informed his family and friends of his decision. They supported him and gave him their blessings.

Not long after leaving his village Mischa was robbed of all his possessions including his internal passport. When he went to report the crime he was mistaken for a wanted criminal and taken into custody. Without any papers he had no way to prove himself and was transported to a Russia then held in prison awaiting his trial. While in prison he met Dmitri Volkov, the only person who showed him any mercy while in prison. He immediately imprinted on him, following around and trying to stay near him to Dmitri's dismay. But after Mischa saved him from an attack on his life which led him to solitary confinement he was sought out by Dmitri to be his associate and friend and help him start his own organization and, ideally, escape. Four years they managed to bust out of prison with several other men that served in their young organization. Since escaping Mischa has gone by the name of the man he was accused of being.

The now Boris spent many years as Obschak, in charge of the security branch and head of all the captains in the organization until he was shot in the back of the head during a deal gone wrong with a Hungarian gang after their move to America. The bullet lodged itself in the back of his head damaging part of his brain that allowed him to feel pain thus deadening the sense. This absence of sensory feedback made his brain react more to emotional stimuli, often in extremes. Shortly after his near death experience Boris nearly died from an infected wound failing to have it checked out. This made his mind make the association of open wounds and cuts mean he should react with fear and anxiety. He is prone to panic attacks if he draws blood or gets a large gash. Being far too unhinged for field work he was made Sovietnik, in charge of money and bookkeeping, for Dmitri refused to get rid of his oldest friend and oldest asset.

Organization Rank: Sovietnik/Right hand of Dmitri

Random Facts:

※ Boris taught both of Dmitri's sons how to read and write in both Russian and English.

�� His nephew Ghost favors him and often attends synagogue with him.

※ Boris rarely goes by his old name but on occasion when Dmitri wants to discuss a personal matter, will address him by that name.

※ He was afraid of stand before learning of what it truly was in prison with the help of Dmitri.

※ He knows six languages fluently.

※ Despite everything he still has a passion for teaching. He loves it. He tends to give lectures no one asked for.

※ Before he left his village he discussed his stand ability with someone who he respected and looked up to. They knew of what he was talking about being secretly a stand user themself. They told Mischa to never use his stand out of malevolence and cruelty. He has only ever used it for self defense or to protect his comrades when in the field.

※ Boris starting aging prematurely and always looked much older than he really was.

※He has a pet cat that is an orange Norwegian forest cat/Mainecoon mix named Jacob Ivanovich.

#//a scholar at heart: boris ivanovich #//boris ivanovich #//character bio

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