I keep forgetting to post this. I did work on my novel during November’s National Novel Writing Month this past year. I finished between Christmas and New Year’s at about 65,000 words and submitted it to a potential publisher who was interested in reading the whole thing. Yay!
The first and last time I officially participated in NaNoWriMo was in 2009.
but I could never with a clear conscious say that my life, as a human being, is more important than the life of a hummingbird’s or even an ant’s. Why do we, as human beings, think and are made to believe that we are so much more gotdamned precious than everybody and everything else?
I’ve seen ‘white people treat animals better than they treat Black people/POC’ come across my dashboard on tumblr on multiple occasions. I know it’s true, I’m not arguing against that and I think its fucked up. But I wonder: Do the POC who say that believe that animals should be treated horrifically in order that they, as humans, be treated better?
I understand that Black people have been treated and still are not treated any better than mules and dogs that whites and their own people don’t like, worse even. But why do we have to have a one-up over somebody, anything, in order to feel justice? Why does our right to freedom and humane treatment somehow justify cruelty towards animals?
Did you know there’s a study that suggests that there are Americans who believe that one American life is worth more than tens of fifties of hundreds of Afghan and Iraqi lives?
Where are we going to draw the line at whose life is more valuable?
For most people who aren’t racist, xenophobic assholes, that line is between humanity and animals.
I was very pacifist as a child and this is that pacifism showing.
Anybody who has been following me on tumblr long enough might know that I love cats. Cats are a part of my family.
When I was in the 12th grade, I was required for my biology course to engage in the skinning and dissection of a cat. Many Black people hate and loathe cats, to the point of violence, I know this from experience. I think, if I remember correctly, I got a ‘D’ in that class; it was huge chunk of our grade and I could only do so much and then go home and look my cats in the eye, but hey I passed and went to college.
At the time, I wondered what kinds of lives the cats had had, why they had to have pregnant cat for one group in the class, how the cats died and how they got on the dissection in front of me and why. In my head, none of the answers were pretty and it sickened and poisoned me to listen to students and the teacher–Ms. Mason, who hated cats–take a twisted pleasure in cutting the bodies of the animals up, peelings away fur, skin, and muscle.
I am a omnivore, I get much of my food from the slaughter and grotesque treatments of millions of animals a year. I’m not proud of it, I feel it’s poisoning me spiritually, if not bodily, every bite I eat. I believe some people should be punished by pain of death, meaning capital punishment. I’ve tried to take my own life and still think my existence in this world is a mistake. But it doesn’t change what I believe in–the sanctity and preciousness of life, that includes animals, and I don’t believe humans should make them to suffer anymore than we make each other to suffer.
Where do we draw the line at what life is valuable and what role does anthropocentrism play in the answer?
evermore pensive,
Queenly
I’m just not okay with everything to do my upbringing being attached to how identical my family structure was to the Cosby’s or some normative middleclass family model of one dad, one mom, two kids, one dog, and a house. I think it undermines how far I’ve come, raised by a single mother in a world that dictates to us that a male and female parent are necessary and normal.
I am bastard child, so what?
I understand that for some wimmin, growing up without a father figure is a big deal. They attribute fatherlessness to:
I think that this yet another messed-up hand dealt to us by Black heteropatriarchy in Black communities. In trying to uplift Black men, a lot of people believe that subjugating Black women to Black men is the answer because they view the natural order as Black men being in charge. Its sexism and internalized oppression at work as we have been taught to conform to white hegemonic, heteronormative, heterosexist standards of social relations and community-building.
I’m not saying that women don’t need examples of and experiences with Black men who are decent humyn beings. I’m saying I am not defined by my fatherlessness.
Yes, my mother and father were never married. Yes, my father never lived with us. Yes, my father was not involved in my life. Yes, he took the paternity test. Yes, my father has more children. Yes, he’s poor, and he hardly ever paid child support. I don’t care about his reasons and I don’t think his behavior and absence should reflect on me. As a child, I never really wondered where he was and I scarcely thought about him. A parent was taking care of me, that was all that mattered.
I try to imagine what my life would’ve been like if my father had been in it. The only thing I can see is my young, female, Black self being indoctrinated into a culture that teaches me to play the kinds of games that Black men like to play. I don’t think he’s a bad person, but I don’t see what he could have offered me anyway.
I met him when I was either sixteen or eighteen. The last time he said he saw me and my twin is when I was three. I consider my father to be kinda “my friend who happens to be my father”. The last time I talked to him, I ended up hanging on the phone on him because he tried to lecture me about adulthood.
I became an adult without him and it made me angry when he tried to impose himself into my life as anything other than a friend because he’s lucky to have even that type of relationship with me.
But, anyway, that’s just me.
Point again: I grew up without a father figure. Don’t try to construe me or mind fuck me into thinking I have problems that I don’t have because it justifies and validates your ideas about women’s lives, how they’re supposed to work, and how her life should revolve around her father or fatherlessness.
really,
Queen
This is for the girl (and Beverly Diehl from previous conversations) who e-mailed me this morning trying to derail a conversation about racism in Japan.
“You’re seeing problems that don’t exist”
“You probably just misunderstood”
Image borrowed from a tumblr blog.
