Please Dont Scroll

Please don’t scroll

Hi, my name is Tina and sadly I’m in need of help.

I am currently an international student, I was able to do this because half of my family is helping me pay my tuition and I also got a scholarship due to my good academic results. Sadly, this means that sometimes money is really tight and we don’t have much to do in case of an emergency.

My dad just called and let me know that my grandfather was admitted into intensive care at the hospital back home, I love my family dearly and I only would like to be there for him, and we don’t know if he will be able to make it.

Tickets are really expensive, especially those that are bought last minute, and my parents don’t have the means to help me get me back.

If you could please donate or reblog this post so I can buy a ticket back, it would mean the world to me.

Thanks a lot for reading.

How it feels when others don’t believe your disability

This is a jar full of major characters 

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*

hey by the way dont follow me if ur an antivaxxer or call autistic people brain damaged or the r-slur :)

Remember when Trump said autism is an epidemic caused by vaccines that ruins beautiful children?

Remember when Trump mocked a disabled reporter on live-television by mimicking his hand movement and pretending to be mentally challenged?

Remember when Trump lit the White House up in blue lights to support Autism Speaks, the organization that demonizes autistic people and spends the majority of their money on prenatal autism screenings (AKA eugenics)?

Remember when Trump wanted to save money by shutting down Meals On Wheels, an organization that brings food to disabled and elderly people that can’t go outside?

Remember when Trump blamed all non-ISIS related shootings on the mentally ill?

Trump understandably gets a lot of crap for being racist, homophobic and sexist, but we need to acknowledge his blatant ableism too. This man is seriously harmful to us.