Gail Simone depicted Singapore in Birds of Prey as a crime-riddled, totalitarian state inhabited by decadent drug lords. That’s not as bad as Marvel’s Principality of Madripoor, a parallel Singapore of authoritarianism and corruption eventually salvated by neo-colonial occupation; but that’s still better than in The Authority, where the fictional PRC destroyed the fictional Singapore in a secret nuclear attack.

Another interesting relationship between Singapore and superheroes: Ng Chin Han played the villainous Hong Kong accountant Lau in The Dark Knight.

[...] I want to see a Singaporean superhero genre that can amply offer critique on issues like race and gender politics in Singapore without relying on orientalist tropes or orientalised narratives of Asian political authority. [...] Asian political systems are either failed states or dictatorships, because the Orientals cannot be trusted to govern themselves. – A sign of how deeply we have internalised this discourse is evident in even homegrown criticism of the political system. I trust we can analyse and critique without resorting to such imagery, such portrayals.

Singaporean superheroes? I’ve been dreaming of this for years. If we postcolonials could take steampunk – with its intrinsic Victoriana – and subvert it, can we do the same for the superhero genre?

The 1st thing to hit me, is how mocking this is to transgendered individuals, that their situation is seen as so damn 'science fiction', somehow, that something as mocking as 'Trans Ethnic' can be set up as part of any kind of conversation. 'So, you think you're not the gender you physically appear to be / were assigned at birth? Ha! I top you. I don't think I'm the ethnicity 'assigned' to me at birth/ that I appear as. And none of this having a damn thing to do with the modification of birth certificates so that NDN people could pass as non-native for a chance at a better life. None of this gets into black who passed as white, to try and life a better, safer life within a white supremacist state. None of this gets into trans racial adoptees and their personal conflicts of identity and how they feel vs how they're treated.

[...]

Cultural appropriation seems to exist, because in order to be white and in order to be USian, various peoples several decades ago decided to put aside their cultural and ethnic heritage in order to fit in. The less you showed some distinct aspect of your identity the more it supposedly meant you were leaving it behind to embrace your new Usian life.

So goodbye, traditions, language, clothing, manners, foods, songs and stories. And now here we are, a couple generations later, with a set of people who want something to belong to, but even in this day and age of Ancestry.com (for white folk) they're not going back to research what they gave up. And I don't know if it's because the attitudes to give it up and leave it behind are still strong, if sub and unconscious. They're instead reaching towards those peoples who've fought and struggled and suffered to hold on to anything at all. And reaching towards peoples whose suffering and oppression has formed a new culture and new identity within this 'new land'. So I suppose it's not surprising so many people want to be Native American - because how much more 'belonging' to this new land could one be? Or that they want to be 'Black' which is an identity that was created on these shores (well these and other places of colonialist import of slaves).

But history and struggle, accomplishment and identity, folklore, stories and song, foods, clothing and culture are not something you can buy in a store.

[...] But whoa. Looking at the terms 'Trans Ethnic', however, makes me feel as if minority/non dominant/colonized culture and societies are somehow as mythical and unreal as fairies, dragons, and spiritual wolves and bears - because ANYONE can decide that's who and what they are and decide to pick it up and somehow 'live by it'. And while you cannot disrespect fairies and dragons, and disrespecting wolves or bears gets you murdered and dead - disrespecting non dominant ethnicities happens, is real, is hurtful and painful and dehumanizing and devaluing.

If your inner self is a water dragon, well, whatever. That's your thing. If your inner self is black? Fuck you. There have always been assholes (particularly teenagers), dressing in certain clothes, copying certain slang, listening to certain music and claiming they were down with __insert ethnic minority here__. New age dressing it up as 'Trans Ethnicism' doesn't change the asshole badge.

[...]

I said I'd talk about Trans Ablism / Trans Disablism, and I will. Disability has a culture, it has many in fact. Deaf culture, isn't blind culture, isn't the myriad wheelchair cultures, isn't invisible disability culture, isn't chronic illness culture, isn't ... the list goes on. Those cultures too? Came out of struggle and strife, dedication, hard work and more. They were created to sustain the myriad peoples who're involved in them. They have their dark ass times, their deprivations and horrors, their triumphs, their moments of weeping for joy and of pain. There are institutions, schools, lock aways, slurs, words, language, music, dance, art, etc, and yes they were all created - some of them only a couple hundred years old. But they? Are REAL. You don't get to go shopping for them either.

Cause this shopping people are doing, has nothing to do with learning the history of anything, it's just another type of entitlement. It's grubby grabby hands. It's trying to fill some lack and hole with someone else's inheritance. It's grabbing someone else's sandwich cause they dealt with the jeers and kept their food, and you threw yours aside.

I should mention:

Haruka is in a qipao because a Chinese friend specifically asked they be put in one. We’ve been thinking about changing it for a while reagardless of that.

Edits are actually free. That’s why the initial cost of the images is so high. You did not want to see these characters in the edits that weren’t shown.

Any people complaining about how the characters aren’t trans* enough can get themselves to a damn stadium.

[...]

It’s amazing. People know we aren’t a major company, but they expect much more from us than they do any major company. They talk shit about how they reblogged something…uh, we aren’t on tumblr ALL DAY. There is no way we could see every reblog. That’s why we ask people to send EMAIL.

You reblog something on a massive site that only leaves the last 15-20 reblogs on a page and expect us to spend all day searching for critique instead of actually working on the things people claim we’re not working on?

Jesus fuck, we’re not heaven, we’re not god, and we’re NOT omniscient. SEND A DAMN EMAIL. Everyone’s who sent an email with critique has gotten a response, along with severe thanks for actually giving us something we can be sure to read. Reblogging and complaining we didn’t see it is essentially being angry with us for not doing exactly what we shouldn’t be doing…not working on the fucking game and spending all day digging around tumblr for things to reply to. Y’all ain’t new to tumblr. You know this shit gets mad busted and makes things disappear, and yet you expect us to magically…control things we can’t possibly control. Right. Gotcha.

About the “anti-white we don’t let white people on the team” shit. Uh. The PoC writer thing we put up is because at that point in time, MOST of the writing team was white. And we wanted to balance it out. Once again, people talking shit when they have no fucking clue.

As far as “OMG AAA GAME ON SUCH A TINY BUDGET!!!” We’re aiming high. Perhaps not AAA-level, but we’re aiming as high as we can. The POINT of this project is to aim high. Because there’s nothing like this at a high level.

laurus_nobilis

I don't like this expression "First World problems." It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion's technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don't wake up with "poor African" pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is--quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

“Son niñas que nos trajeron el tinto y el jugo, nosotros nunca nos imaginamos que hubiera gente que vería la foto de otra manera. No entiendo. ¿Indignante es trabajar? ¿Indignante es servir tintos?”, indicó Rosa Haluf de Castro, madre de Zarzur y quien también aparece en la revista.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ’’

the_future_modernes

Another thing elves like to do is that they have a low birthrate, are fiercely jealous of humans for being able to drop litters, and when humans get too many they will sail away to the west, weeping tears of severe butthurt all the way in their pearly swan-boats. You ever heard a particular breed of white folks lamenting how awful it is that all the black people and the Chinese and Hispanics are spawning like bunnies, and that white people are increasingly an endangered species? You ever seen a white family get spooked when their neighborhood becomes just a little colorful, so they move to an all-white suburban area where they can continue to send their kids to school full of other middle-class white kids, attend parent meetings where they’ll never ever be threatened by the sight of someone who isn’t the hue of frog bellies?

Ah.

So, what we have are essentially white supremacists, except in fantasy their racism is directed at white humans and white dwarves, rendering any deconstruction or criticism of elves’ attitude ultimately pointless.

But sometimes the table is turned. Elves are subjected to racism. Which brings us to an altogether different, but no less asinine, kind of fail.

Elves: A Vehicle for Appropriating POC Experiences

Let’s talk about Lynn Flewelling. For context, Alec is an elf and Yhakobin is a Plenimaran.

[...]

What are Plenimarans? They’re like this: dark-skinned, scimitar-wielding, woman-oppressing. Plenimaran women are veiled, require chaperons when going out, and are expected to commit suicide to preserve their husbands’ honor. Throughout Flewelling’s books Plenimarans and Zengati (also brown-skinned) are every single one of them evil: they deal in necromancy, slavery, and most of all they deal in enslaving elves. Alec, during his experience in a Plenimaran household, is subjected to beatings, being kept in chains, threatened with gelding, used as a breeding apparatus; he witnesses other elves being castrated, worked to death, raped, and brutally flogged. Elves are shipped en masse, in chains, cramped into small cabins across the sea to be sold to Plenimarans.

Sounds familiar? I’m sure you will be shocked, just shocked, to learn that Flewelling’s elves are white too!

Infographic: Casualties From The War On Terror, 9/11, And The Invasion of Iraq

The stats breakdown are as follows:

September 11th Victims: 0.28%

American Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq: 0.55%

Afghan Civilian Casualties: 4.39%

Iraqi Civilian Casualties: 94.78%

As the urban background suggests, this fear extended beyond individual safety to social unrest. In a 1969 essay titled “The Protest Psychosis,” after which Metzl’s book is named, psychiatrists postulated that the growing racial disharmony in the US at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, reflected a new manifestation of psychotic behaviors and delusions afflicting America’s black lower class. Accordingly, “paranoid delusions that one is being constantly victimized” drew some men to fixate on misguided ventures to overthrow the establishment. Luckily, pharmaceutical companies proposed that chemical interventions could directly pacify the masculinzed, black threat depicted in advertisements like the above. “Assaultive and belligerent?” it asks. “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”

We don’t have the scientific background to vet this research properly, but let’s just say we’re more than a bit skeptical. Others have done so, though, including Marianne Kirby.

Kanazawa is no stranger to controversy. Last year, he published a study claiming that liberals and athiests were smarter than conservatives and believers. And yet P.Z. Myers, an avowed “godless liberal,” called him the “great idiot of social science,” according to a story in AlterNet.

We’ve tried to contact Psychology Today and Kanazawa for comment, and will update with anything we hear back.

As he prepared to take the penalty which gave him his second goal, a banana was apparently tossed by a spectator onto the playing surface.

However the SFA said it 'refutes claims from Neymar that he was the victim of racist jeers.'

Scotland fans had, however, been booing Neymar 'for perceived unsporting behaviour,' it said.

The SFA added: 'Scotland supporters are known for impeccable behaviour.'

Police match commander Mark Sheeran said: 'The Scottish fans' behaviour was first class. There were no issues at all inside the stadium.'

ew_younerd

Yes, Ntarangwi has conducted an anthropological study of American anthropology! An important undertaking. He has studied textbooks, ethnographies, coursework, professional meetings, and feedback from colleagues and mentors. He “reverses the gaze", he stresses: Whereas Western anthropologists often study non-Western cultures, he studies “the Western culture of anthropology".

He is especially interested in “the cultural and racial biases that shape anthropological study in general".

In the preface and introduction he writes:

If anthropology truly begins at home as Malinowski states, how come, as I had thus far observed, anthropology tended to focus on the “exotic"? How come only a small percentage of fieldwork and scholarship by Western anthropologists focused on their own cultures, and when they did it was among individuals and communities on the peripheries, their own “exotics” such as those in extreme poverty, in gangs, ad others outside mainstream culture? (…)

This book is a personal journey into the heart of anthropology; representing my own pathways as an African student entering American higher education in the early 1990s that I knew very little about. It is a story about my initial entry into an American academic space very different from my own experience in Kenya, where we followed a British system of education.

It is also a story hemmed within a specific discourse and views about anthropology that can be best represented by remarks from fellow graduate students who wondered what i was doing in a “racist” discipline. (…) Troubled by this label, I consciously embarked on a journey to find more about the discipline.