Race in High Fantasy

A lot has been said about this subject, and I’m not ambitious enough to even give a proper tour of the topic at the moment.  Of course some shit has been said or done that is various degrees of messed up, and some shit has been done that is very cool.  I bring it up because I have ambitions to make a high fantasy ttrpg, so I need to give it at least some thought.

Race & Racism in High Fantasy

Realism.  Physically diverging appearances within a species are a result of genetic isolation, drift, etc.  Shared ancestry with a lil fork in it.  This suggests that any types of elves and dwarves and orcs should have the same apply to them, in a world where humans have those qualities.  But for long-lived species with half or less the length of a human generation, wouldn’t that process move slower than it does for us?  Also, wouldn’t the existence of black elves suggest strong convergence with humans in a given area?  Melanin has obvious enough geographic selection going on, what about eye shape?

Much like the race-blind casting going on in some stage productions these days, major video games striving to sell the public what it wants have found the path of least resistance is to offer human-like racial variety in all the fantasy creatures with no explanation given.  Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dragon Age 4 had a lady dwarf and elf respectively, with racial features of real life East Asian people.

Nice to just say fuck it and play nice with a broader pool of customers, but it does sit a little odd for me with no explanation given.  I can see why they wouldn’t bother.  Racial discourse is so fraught and complicated almost any reason could bring controversy.  Better value to just roll with it.  But I’m not an international business conglomerate growing IP and maximizing profits.  If I’m canceled, it’s lower stakes.  I can just get off the internet and enjoy more personal time.  So I think about it…

Sun in the south makes people get darker skinned, some less obvious factor out east makes people to the east get interesting lookin’ eyes, and something out west makes people lose pigment and go ruddy pink with weird noses.  People in between grade into each other, appearance-wise.  Explained more than the video games did, good enough for me.

What about immortals like elves who might have hundred+ year generations?  What about nymphs who can be born by spontaneous generation?  Ehh, maybe the elves mutate faster between generations?  Maybe the nymphs just look like the local humans for reasons?  I dunno.  Would it be better to have the fantasy races have fantasy racial variations like they did with the moon/sun elf biz in older Forgotten Realms products?  I don’t think so, because the point is for a black person to not be made to feel weird for wanting their elf to look like a black person.

The difference between this and the non-explained approach of BG3 and DA4 is your character’s looks do say something about where their ancestors are from, instead of being totally random.  Feels more realistic to me.  If you have opinions on how those video games handled it or what I’m writing on this part of the article, I’m probably only interested if you’re noticeably non-white IRL.  I’ll take your word for it, not asking for a picture, just saying it’s trivially easy to get honky opinions – why, this article for example.  🤡 honk honk.

Monster Races.  Ah, the dark skinned powers of darkness, brutish and muscular, out to pillage the fair-skinned noble people of inherent goodness.  The sheisty secretive cabal of big-nosed swarthy wizards with strange beliefs who are the power behind the throne.  The nomads who look human enough to walk among you and steal your children.  Fantasy is coming from a white place innit.

There are many who say the tainted origins of this stuff mean there is no good way to use them – the kind of SJWs who would boycott Wicked and Spirit Halloween stores.  Innocent child of folly that I am, I love wacky out of control monster people who are up to no good, and don’t think those images influenced me the way they were intended by the anti-semites who originated them, scaring their children racist for centuries.  At the same time, saying “everybody who looks like this acts like that” is bad business, and I don’t truck with it.  I’ll navigate my own honkey path here, hope it’s not too problematic.

So, like, goblins as silly faerie creatures, no rossetti->rowling scheming bankers.  Orcs as big buff barbarians but no more evil than humans who are big buff barbarians.  The barbarian thing raises the issue of cultural stereotypes that don’t hinge on race.  I give that a nod here to say, yeah, like races, avoid saying all the people over here act like that / do that.

Unlike D&D, I’m not hobbled by needing an alignment system.  It’s so baked into that game it wouldn’t be easy to extricate, and that ties it back to its history when orcs were an entry in the Monster Manual that said “Alignment: Chaotic Evil.”  In trying to excise the racism from that in new products, they came up with a vision of orcs that was just bizarre.  No Warhammer waaargh in them at all.

Now were Warhammer‘s orks also a racistic stereotype of barbarian marauder?  Yes, but humans in those games also spent all their time choppin’ heads, so it felt a bit more even-handed.  They were really popular to play.  Outsider view on the UK, I feel like wargamers from lower class backgrounds, in a place with a much more blatant class system than we have in the US, may have identified with the violent punk-rock / metal take on the green guys.  Orks winning the board against humans or elves is like sticking it to the aristocrats, right?

So ungluing the cultural archetype from the race, showing more variety, but keeping a place in the world for players who want to waaargh, that’s how I’d like to do.

Colorism.  The very concept of black magic as evil?  Not great.  On the other hand, what’s a fantasy game without hexing diablos riding thru the night like the demons in Fantasia?  Just gotta try to shake off the stank of this stuff.  Again, I’m far from the scholar the subject of colorism deserves, google that shit if you are unfamiliar.  It’s an aspect of racism that isn’t always strictly drawn on racial lines.  People with darker skin are treated more poorly, to the point they are victimized by a skin-lightening cosmetic industry in some places.  Ill.

Anyway, here’s how I handled dökkálfar/ljósálfar in this other post:

Light Elves.  In an unknown eon, the law of Heaven and chaos of Hell infected the shining host, sowing division.  While high elf rulers remained more or less the same, their subjects divided between light and dark elves.  Light elves can be dark skinned in the south, even very dark skinned, but have some particulars in common.  They tend to live exclusively in settlements, sometimes full cities, and have a society with some sense of law and obedience to hierarchy.  They have skin tones in the local human range, and hair that ranges to lighter, less natural colors.  Light colored eyes?

Dark Elves.  Dark elves have something of the chaos of hell, most notably on their skin, where they have a great variety of hues – all of them unnatural for humankind, whether light or dark.  Their faces are much more expressive than light elves, sometimes lined from big smiles or wacky eyebrow moves, despite their eternal youth.  Some live in settlements but many are nomadic, and they mostly prefer the most rustic places, far from big cities.  Despite the influence of Hell, few would enter into pacts with or worship beings from there.  Mostly their hexing magic takes agnostic forms.

So you can have a light elf much darker than a light-colored dark elf, etc.  Most of these fantasy races don’t have that kind of color-based division built in, like orks is green, any shade.  As far as depictions in the game’s art, just making a point of having the prettiest gentlest people sometimes be the darkest.  If 99% of media 5ever must have dark-skinned people be brutes or bad attitudes whenever they are allowed depiction, people like me gotta counter that when we can.

I’m not drawing any grand conclusions or advancing a big thesis, just considering, at least briefly, how I’ll handle these issues in a game.  Have at thee.

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Waiting for the Murk

That trillionaire fuck been in the news again for (possibly) the biggest evil he’s committed since ending usaid condemned millions to death:  using his xitter to incite and inflame neo-nazi violence.  Reminded me of when I speculated on what might get him assassinated.

This is a strong contender.  Remember when that old Irish gal went all the way to shitaly to take a shot little benny musso?  Rest in power, Violet.  Anyhow, apartheid junior, by some metrics, has more power to make the world a worse place than the original fascist did.

I know there’s a small vocal faction in FtB comments who are die-hard that speech inciting evil should never itself be considered evil, by whatever definitions and terms they prefer.  Like they regard my position here equivalent to accusing the fash of thought crimes.

While racists are burning immigrants out of their homes in northern Ireland, while my nuke-happy nation is in the hands of neo-nazis, don’t bring that ignorant idealistic shit in my comments.  Thanks.

Meanwhile, violets are being sown.  I’d love to see a bumper crop.  edit to add: and you can call that a thought crime.  👶🤙

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Al Jolson

I can think of non-KKK reasons why a person might feel motivated to delete any reference to blackface from Al Jolson’s wikipedia page.  If you’re USian, I bet you can picture the guy.  Not a racist bone in his body™, just got a lot of joy from that man’s body of work and can’t stand to see that one thing overshadow his legacy.  Right?  But still, KKK reasons outweigh the non-KKK by a damn sight (ironic because yes, he was jewish).  This has made his wikipedia page* a long-running battleground.

For a time the page made no mention of blackface, and now that it does, that’s footnoted to hell with “this was totally fine,” “no it wasn’t,” “yes it was,” “no it wasn’t,” in the wikipedia-rules-acceptable version of quotes and references to what other people have said (citation needed).  The end result of all of this:  The Number One Historic Guy Associated with Blackface has a wikipedia page longer than Napoleon Bonaparte, which mostly consists of hagiography.

Not that the big little emperor deserves shit, but he might be slightly more notable than the minstrel act, right?  Wikipedia’s struggles to define the limits of “notability” have had some odd results.  A massively influential musician might be a red link while every boy in every soccer team since the dawn of time is listed.  This odd result, I’d argue, is more embarrassing than most.

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*I wanted to get a snapshot of where it’s at right now on the wayback machine but the most current one on there has nothing but apologia in the blackface section.  By the time you read this article, will all the “this kinda sucks” notes have been deleted again?  As white people, I feel a lil uncomfortable when people throw hate at us in a broad and unqualified way, but this wikipedia page kinda makes me wanna smash the delete all white people button.

Where’s the Concentration Camp?

As many people as ICE is abducting right now, where are they being sent?  Because as diverse as Minneapolis is, even a lightning speed deportation can’t happen fast enough to dozens of nations around the world.  Tons of Somalians in the US were born here.  They don’t even have citizenship in Somalia.

If there isn’t a concentration camp, they probably have a dozen or more spread around the city in warehouses and railroad cars and shit.  I have read the white people they arrest are beaten and abused but released in an average of 48 hours to make room for caging those with darker skin tones.

I’ve read Walz is not seeking reelection because of nazi death threats.  If I didn’t have a family depending on me, man, I don’t know what the fuck I’d do, but … so easy to imagine making that blood flow.  Death to all nazis now, regardless of what labels they’ve chosen for themselves, what flag they’re flying.  Eat shit and die, motherfuckers, please.

Anyway, on the antidoomerism policy, it does continue to be true that 99.9% of us will not become victims of this political violence, and life under fascism can suck but it can still be a life, with whatever moments of joy that can hold.  Let nobody who is frightened of these fucking monsters allow that fear to harm them in any way.

Long live the fighters in Minneapolis, LA, Chicago, Portland, wherever the jackboot treads.  May your enemies die face down in their own blood and piss.  No justice no peace.

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The Lowest White Person

I recently had an injudicious rant about racism, chiefly that against latinx immigrants in the united snakes, and the very day after I composed that, I ran into a living example of the old LBJ quote “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”  OK, not the entire quote, just the phrase “the lowest white man.”

At the same bus stop where I once met a friendly narcoleptic dude, on another hot shitty day, there were two random things of note.  On the bench, a very well-groomed man was reading a tablet.  I took him for Middle Eastern but he could have been from anywhere medium-toned, as far as I can tell.  The other thing of note, a girly purple backpack sitting in the street, where the bus would be pulling in.

When you see an unattended bag, you might reflect on post 9-11 warnings about explosives.  It did cross my mind; was a bomber sitting in a car with tinted windows nearby, waiting for a crowded bus to pull into view before hitting the remote control switch?  Not likely.  I decided it was randomly dropped there by a drunk or high homeless woman.

Coming down the hill from the overpass, I saw two white people approaching.  The lady could have been conventionally attractive at that distance – thin, tan, whatever.  But a healthy person would have no reason to be in the neighborhood of that overpass.  I knew they were unhoused.

They reached the bus stop and she went straight for the backpack, adding it to the bags she was already hauling.  Up close, she was hard-lined, had a few witch warts, and had the expression of a pit bull that had eaten too many babies and was now bored with the experience.  She had pissed her pants, the wet area centered on the crotch was the size of a dinner plate.  This made enough of an impression I didn’t clock as many details in the man she was with.  He also had too much sun on his skin and was hauling a backpack or two.

They made their way to an empty stretch of parking lot nearby, to rifle through their stuff and make sketchy plans, then hobbled back to the bus stop.  I was listening to my headphones, but lifted them just long enough to fit the N95 over my face – the bus was arriving soon.  In that one little moment, I heard the lady say a racist slur against Mexicans I haven’t heard in years.

Man, I do not thank Satan often enough that I have the privilege of not being around nazis every day.  Thanks, Satan.

Was she referring to the well-groomed guy?  Some other random people she had encountered in her miserable day?  Didn’t matter to me.  I was just thinking, this slang term is based on a sense of disgust, yes?  How can a person living at the outer limits of what normies find disgusting devote her hard-won life energies to feeling disgust for anyone else?  Does that shit help?  Personally, the more I become disgusting to normies, the more convinced I am that disgust is not a value I want to base my own perceptions and judgments upon.

Lady, I get that every day of your life is hateful and desperate.  Everything you own is stolen by your fellow homeless people about as often as you steal everything another homeless person owns from them.  Pleasures are thin on the ground and largely poisonous; pains are constant.  Nobody loves you; I’m sure you don’t love yourself.  But still.  I wish you didn’t let that own your mind, change the way you treat others.  Shit’s a fucken mess.

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Kein Mensch ist Illegal

It’s easy when an issue is outside your direct experience to see it more broadly, to feel its impact less personally.  I dunno, these words are excuses for the fact that while I was always on the better side of the issue of immigration, I wasn’t passionate about it.  Recent events have changed that, which is good.  Of course, it feels bad.

My husband had a boyfriend once who was racist against Mexicans, and when that came out, my dude didn’t even process it at first.  How can you hate those guys with the oompa music and straw cowboy hats?  What did they do to you, rat-faced little creep?  I had a friend who emerged from the methed-out trailer park to become an itinerant goth queen, very cool, but one time she likewise exposed a racism against Mexicans that shocked me.  I imagine she has moved and improved since then.  Unlike my husband’s shitbird ex, my goth friend had decent values in the broad sense, was amenable to change.  And I did understand what was happening to call it out when I saw it, so she had a learning opportunity.

Now where are we?  I’m on the phone at my day job, full time talking to the breadth of amuriKKKa about the difficulties of obtaining and maintaining benefits of various social programs.  I had a front row seat to the effects of rethuglican propaganda, as late 2023 through the whole of 2024, there was a significant increase in the number of fools randomly blaming “the illegals” for the barriers they were experiencing.  Motherfuckers, those barriers were set in place by racists like you, who are convinced with zero evidence that there are a zillion little brown people getting buckets of welfare cash.  You are literally voting to make life harder for yourselves.  They did, and now my rate of fucked-up tragic phone calls where I can’t do anything to help a person has increased, because of this shit.  Cause and effect.

I’ve carefully come close to saying exactly that a few times, and the response from xenophobes is a surly nuh-uh, or silence, or whatever.  Doesn’t matter.  What’s really making them mad is that we can’t explicitly make a whites only pass for welfare programs.  When the revolution comes (if shit comes to that) I will shoot these people in the face.

The mobilization of the genocide machine has begun.  Of course it’s starting with immigrants.  Saw a comment at Mano’s that “people will die because of this situation.”  I regret to inform you they are certainly dying already, and had been under Biden and Obama as well.  It’s just going to get worse now.

Talk about “the illegals” has never been about the rule of law, or protecting your people, or whatever they imagined.  It’s the seed of mass murder.  Zero tolerance for that talk wherever you encounter it.  Fuck the motherfuckers.

Let us stay furious, block the bastards, be as proactive as we can be, protect those who need protection, and not sleep on a single instance of this ongoing horror.  I say that but I know it’s already too late for a full account of the fallen.  So many of those ghosts will never be named.

No more ghosts, no more genocide.  Fuck the USA.

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How Racist Were These Candies?

You’re a baby, then you’re a kid, then you’re a teenager.  My kid years were mostly in Seattle, especially toward the end, and there was a window of time when we started to go places without adult supervision back then.  This was unusual for us.  Our parents always told us to stay indoors when we were alone.  If my father got back to find the door unlocked, he would say the same refrain, “Well, you’re all raped and murdered.”

But his ass left town to try and sober up from the drugs and alcohol, leaving our mom alone with us, and slouching on her responsibilities as much as she could get away with.  It led to some really bad situations, but at least when we got out and started roving Beacon Hill, none of us did get raped or murdered.  I’m not sure how we had some pocket change to work with, but we had some pocket change, and used it to buy candies in the one to twenty-five cent range.  If I recall this right, individually wrapped atomic fireballs, jawbreakers, and now&laters would run one to five cents, later a dime.  Laffy taffies more like a dime, and a tiny box of candies would be a quarter.

Those boxes were cool.  Cute designs that probably remained unchanged between the 1960s and 1980s, a half-handful of candy versus those single bites you’d get for a nickel.  There were boston baked beans, cinnamon imperials, jawbreakers (smaller than the individually sold ones), lemonheads, alexander the grape, and cherry clan.

Those last three were all made on the same idea.  Sweet and sour, waxy color shell around a chewy white core.  Of course, they had artificial lemon grape and cherry flavor and the corresponding colors.  Let’s see what those cute little boxes looked like, shall we?

The fight against racism is a long and winding road, and sometimes it seems like the work will never, ever end.  The way things unfold is sometimes surprising.  As I reflect, it feels really weird this particular flavor of racism lasted so long.  A few decades ago, people were calling attention to the trope of Asian girls in cartoons always having a stripe of dyed hair, like, what’s this shit about?  Seems like small potatoes compared to things that were happening a decade before that.

Remember the big advertising push from the Dick Tracy movie in 1990?  How merch and tie-ins were omnipresent in a nearly unprecedented way?  They were aiming for a repeat of what Batman had achieved the year before, but failed big.  I don’t know if it was part of that campaign or just some local programmers trying to capitalize on that hype, but a 1960s era Dick Tracy cartoon started rerunning on my local channel 13, KCPQ.  I’m not sure what was wrong with my young brain, but I watched that shit.

By that shit, I mean this shit:

That show featured Dick Tracy sitting behind a desk calling henchcops on an anachronistic wrist video phone.  His henchcops, who did all the work for him, were racist stereotypes, like Joe Jitsu up there.  Maybe because they were good guys and always won, the fact they were racist cartoons didn’t register the same way it did when Bugs Bunny was clowning on a racist stereotype of a black person.  Maybe I was just racist?  I don’t remember being like that, but so very many people are blind to their own shit.

I was a teenager by then, fourteen!

Again, I’m just thinking about how cool and progressive we all felt about ourselves in 1990.  Jim Crow was in a history book, vanquished by saintly MLK.  And yet, here this was, on TV, in front of my young eyeballs.  It ain’t funny.  I wonder if some Rupert Murdoch affiliate is going to bring the show back for a third go now…

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Surreal Products and Services

to not run out of birds i’ve seen, i’m going to include dreamposting in my every-other-day posts.  to that end…

had a dream last night that was racist against southeast asian people.  you may recall i’ve had dreams that are racist against the irish, which you’d be hard-pressed to make genuinely hurtful in the usa, so “white” as they’ve become.

the level of acceptance for people from thailand, laos, kampuchea, vietnam, it’s not that good yet, so i’m not even going to say what happened in the dream.  my dream southeast asians were smart conventionally attractive professional people with fully americanized accents, but stereotypes happened nonetheless.

in this den of my own unconscious villainy, there was a snack bar with goods on offer – mostly sweets, like big cookies.  one thing available for purchase was a frozen pepsi with adds like pomegranate arils.  i eagerly made the purchase but the dream conspired to keep me from tasting my prize, didn’t seem to want to put in the work of imagining the taste and texture.

but hey, i can make this thing for myself!  it’s been years since i’ve frozen a cola intentionally, but i recall how.  basically you can’t leave it unattended.  you have to come back frequently to break up the ice and mix it in.

if you don’t slip up and get big chonks of ice, this will automagically have a texture somewhat like a slurpee, which i can’t say for some other water concoctions.  might be from the sugar breaking the crystals into smaller bits.

before that i should pre-peel the pomegranate.  i am fussy about this because i like intact arils that pop in your mouth.  i notch the rind’s surface and pull it apart, float the pieces in a bowl of water as i extract the arils.  i’m usually doing this in a chair with inadequate side tables, so i use a disposable garbage bag of some kind for rind and a zippered sandwich bag for the arils.  in the end the water doesn’t have much in it and i pour that down the sink, trash the rind, and keep the bag of arils in the refrigerator.

i like to eat them from a small ramekin or cup plain or with cool whip.  for this recipe, i’d mix them into the frozen pepsi.  i’d like to add more stuff too but the dream provided no other details.  maybe tapioca pearls like in bubble tea, but what else might be good?  cinnamon imperials?  chocolate chips?  i dunno.  suggestions are welcome…

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Are Black People Smarter?

Little bit of a land mine here, but I’m feeling insouciant today, so bear with me…  I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of Americans from all walks of life, and surely my impressions of that experience are tainted by biases.  Racists annoy the fuck out of me and are foolish as all hell; people who live on the receiving end of systemic racism have my sympathy.  I also relate a lot more to poor people than to the middle class.  So are my perceptions accurate?

There are standardized tests for “IQ” other cognitive faculties, and these have problems galore – not the least of which was their origin as a method for justifying racism.  I’m not even gonna bother with links; this shit is common knowledge among those nominally acquainted with the subject and with no delusions about their genetic superiority motivating the shit out of their reasoning.

But on a practical level, numbers aside, some people are just more thoughtful than others.  I characterize this as being willing to take new information on board, genuinely try to understand new things they encounter, and able to learn.

Ability to learn is a funny thing, because as we grow out of childhood, many of us handicap ourselves on purpose.  You mean I’m never gonna need this information again?  Fuck it, I chuck it, will re-learn as-needed.  I can feel that I did this to myself sometime around age 20.  While circumstance has pushed me into trying harder, I still allow myself the luxury of not learning shit, whenever I can.  There are people who either didn’t limit themselves in the first place, or are just more wise in how they apply that limitation, more able to get back into learning mode.

Willingness to try to understand new things is obviously a useful trait to have, but we don’t need it most of the time.  Our lives can be pretty damn simple in most ways, most of the time.  Whatever else is difficult about them, it isn’t the complexity of the problems in front of us.  It can get rusty, same as what I described in previous paragraph.  But I feel like this is a little different from that issue…  That’s about memorizing a new fact, this is about understanding why that fact is so – understanding a process.

The thing the reflexively ignorant don’t get is that understanding the process makes remembering the facts easier.  Like, remembering dates in history is rote, easy to lose.  Understanding what happened in sequence – what led to what – can make the simpler facts, like dates, easier to remember.

This is practical intelligence, not fancy logic or math or knowing big words.  A small child can be thoughtful, an adult can be thoughtless, and vice versa.  By this metric, I’ve spent a vast, unspeakable amount of time talking with thoughtless people, and less speaking with the thoughtful.  Of course, the average person is somewhere in between, but still shades toward the foolish side.

If I’m talking to an 89 year old who is still very sharp, it’s usually an upper class person with an ocean of privilege behind them, who worked in academia, finance, law, etc, on the pointy end of it.  That’s gonna shade white, tho not exclusively.  But stepping back from those rarities to look at people who are still very competent, who can look at a situation involving new information and deal with it, not shut down and get angry or cry about it?

Feels like the median black person is more intelligent than the median white people, in practical ways – which are the only ways that really matter.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with somebody that has advanced knowledge but can’t be fucked to understand anything outside that domain.  I want somebody that can be exposed to new information and understand it enough to have something to say about it.  That’s just conversation, but it’s indicative of the approach to other kinds of information as well.

It’s like white people feel more entitled to not have to think about things, to put that onto other people, and have anything they need sorted out for them with zero thought involved.  Black people are used to a society that is low key hostile to them getting their needs met in every way, cradle to the grave, so they need to be able to understand the shit that comes their way.

I might be remembering the thoughtless white people at outsized rates because of the biases I mentioned above, but also because they make a much more acrid stink about having their right to not have to think impinged upon.  I might be remembering black people who figured out some tangled bullshit at outsized rates because my unconscious bias is to assume them less intelligent, and it comes as a surprise when it should not.  I know there’s no way I haven’t absorbed that poison on a cellular level.

But I dunno.  Maybe black people are just better than us.

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Note:  If my comments are half as foolish as this post itself was, I’m gonna have to shut ’em down.  It could get offensive in a hurry.  For that matter, what I wrote could be pretty offensive to a reasonable person, and they don’t deserve to get upset because I thought it would be funny to upset unreasonable people, right?  In which case, sorry, and let’s just move along tomorrow.  I’ll leave this post up as a monument to my folly.

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A Dang Shame

Sure liked The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a wee child.  Beautiful man voice theme song, talkin about those beautiful boys that never meant no harm.  They just wanna fly their pretty orange car over random rivers, pursued by unscary little comic relief policemans.  One of them had a floppy-eared dog.  Sometimes there was a pretty lady there.  When stuff got too wild, beardy uncle would settle it down.  If I remember all that right.

I loved the shape of a muscle car, the perfect combination of boxy and curvy, the dark grill reminiscent of the intakes on jet engines, the feeling of power and possibility.  They stopped making cars shaped like that and I always wished they’d bring them back.

Well, around pandemic time, they actually did.  Muscle cars exist again, happy day!  But I’m not four years old anymore, don’t live in a world where fast driving never kills or disfigures people, don’t live in a world where gratuitous fossil fuel use is a harmless lark.

And just everything about that piece of shit tv show has aged equally well.  It put a shiny sexy funtimes gloss on the worst shit imaginable, just the worst crimes in human history.  Hundreds of years of monstrous evil defended to the dying breath under that fucking orange flag.  The way the flag’s renewed popularity in the 20th century had always been a banner for the proud perpetuation of dehumanization and oppression, of lionizing the villains of history that Hitler himself was inspired by.

General Lee, fuck your memory and fuck the people who tried to sing it sweetly to tiny children.  Fuck whatever ancestors of mine that put our surname on generations of their rape victims, their human “property.”  Fuck ameriKKKa for clinging to the idea of our virtue on the blood-drenched soil of this land, echoes of absolute horror in every ruined plot and parking lot from sea to polluted sea.

Unrelated, fuck street racers, who care so little about the lives of others they endanger them every day for cheap thrills.  Rest in pieces you criminal fuckers.  May all your buddies mangle only their own flesh, may they fly past the innocent and burst into flames alone.

Shame shame shame, a little song of shame.  Then I return to idle fancies and daydreams in my usual way.  A floppy-eared dog hanging his head out an unproblematic car, flying merrily through a consequence-free world.

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had a dream the other night i was some gal’s gay best friend, so i had an excuse for not knowing how to drive, hey, same excuse i have irl, except i have no hetero bff here.

anyway, we went to a little movie theater where you reserved your seat by taking a slice of cake, the colors of which corresponded to the movie you wanted to see.  but the only slices remaining were the white ones with rainbow splotches, corresponding to the cg smurf threequel, so we took no cake and watched nothing.

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