Ta-Nehisi on Minnesota, and Culture War as war www.vanityfair.com/news/story/t...

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

I have a friend who’s needing some help navigating the medical system in Northern Italy, so if anyone has advice, contacts or suggestions for organizations that can help travelers in need, please connect!

I’m one person and no expert, but I think it’d be weird to not see Mexican Americans, who live in a place that was Mexico less than two centuries ago, repping Mexico’s flag and embracing/honoring their ancestry when engaged in active resistance of their government targeting them for their ethnicity.

Aw dang. Sending love to @novenacarmel.bsky.social and her family, may he rest in Power!

Love it

The purpose of public protest is to make the violence of the state visible for the whole world to see. What’s happening in LA is the same violence that’s happening to immigrants across the US, but visible bc folks are protesting. Let’s support each others’ protests!

Please stop shaming people on social media for not “putting their bodies on the line.” Not everyone can protest. And protest isn’t the only way to bend the arc of the universe toward justice. It’s takes a lot of people working in a lot of different ways working together. Build the solidarities.

I’m normally a Cardinals fan but picked the Mariners for my AL team. Damn if they’re not edging out my NL faves with this 😭🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Still putting the As in #LGBTQIAP*. Happy Pride Month, fam. We got each other. #🖤🩶🤍💜 #🏳️‍🌈#🏳️‍⚧️

Furious. Grief-full anger at this administration’s move to pull Harvard’s ability to register international students. There’s no step of my entire academic journey where international students haven’t played a huge role in helping me learn, as a student or professor. This can’t stand.

I try not to be an utter Pooh-pooper about AI, but it bugs me that this is something people think AI is good for. Especially scholars. What is the point of our work if not to develop the ideas and insights we generate out of our experiences/contexts/relationships with each other and what’s divine?

My partner is a member of an internationally known amateur choir and their seasonal show is coming up. A joy of my life is getting to quietly sit nearby and listen to him rehearse his part, and watching as he sings along with a practice track as he walks around the apartment.

Sending kindness and soft spaces to rest for: —folks whose moms were abusive —folks who have difficult relationships with moms or mother figures —folks who nurture and mother in ways that don’t reflect the mainstream image —trans, nonbinary, agender, and aroace parents whose mothering gets ignored.

Assigning characteristics to people based on where they were born or are from as opposed to (or alongside) the actions they have taken and the roads they have traveled is very much a hallmark of imperialism, especially the US kind. I’m more up for info like this.

This also!

The US inability to think of itself through a lens of diaspora is clearly on display with this “ The Pope is American” fervor. Yes, he was born here, then became a naturalized citizen of Peru. He is also Peruvian.

I used some TTRPG mechanics to teach a workshop on social location and intersectionality and it was definitely a rough draft but super fun. The game loosened up what is usually a tender subject and primed great discussion and questions. Definitely something to build on.

There is so much that a PhD does not prepare you to do as faculty. Advising around this scenario was definitely not a topic. How are you journeying with your advisees who are on F1 visas on how they navigate their dangers? About any support your school might provide?

How I arrived on Bluesky

I hate the advice, “Make time to write.” My life and time is so intertwined with others, I can’t just “make time.” I have to enlist their support, or engage in mutual support, to create space to write. This isn’t about my discipline to write every day, it’s about my openness to let them care for me.

Joy. Sent a note to my co-workers that I have an article due at the end of the month so I am blocking off mornings to write until I’m done. Every one of them responded with “You go, we got you!.” ❤️ Also: if you’re waiting on an email from me, please be patient this week! Afternoons are email time.

✨🏳️‍🌈✨🐑✨🥚✨🐰✨🏳️‍🌈✨

I think a lot abt how white cis straight men are described as “rational,” or not led by their feelings, and how often they define “oppression” as “I felt shame because i say are lesser than me wouldn’t validate my opinion” rather than, you know, the gov’t’s systemic destruction of their communities.

#Caturday is Movie Day.

There’s a saying that goes something like “The nail that sticks out get hammered down,” and it’s typically interpreted in individualist cultures to push conformity. But the communitarian interpretation is this: Solidarity protects us and makes us stronger.

I know now that the “the pope arranged for Catholics to eat fish on Fridays to support fishing workers’” thing is a myth, but I wish more of the religious rituals I was taught as a kid/young adult had emphasized sacrifice as a practice of solidarity instead of as a practice of impossible purity.

A film that takes place where you’re from.

Someone produce either the Plague of Kaiju Frog or Untitled Frog Game movie or game and take my money.

This is white forgiveness: you truly have achieved whiteness when you are protected from bearing the consequences of breaking the law. It’s in fact your god-given expectation to be exempted from the law. Example: every time you get a warning for a traffic violation instead of a ticket or death.

I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life researching shame and can confidently say that this is what shame is for. Not about controlling people’s sex lives, but about letting us know when we’ve done harm and that another way to live with one another is possible. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

“Who counts as people?” is also the central concern of theology. Or more broadly these days, “Whose lives matter to us bc they matter to the divine?”

I emailed IslamAAR listserve with this same offer. Feel free to reach out if this would be helpful.

This is the way. I”m extending the same invitation across the aisle on the AAR side. If you don’t feel traveling or you can’t come for health or finances, hit me up. I’ll read your paper or let’s see if we can get a network of readers going. We gotta help each other. Thanks @vox-magica.bsky.social!

As terrible as the news these posts are referencing is: I always felt very isolated as someone who lost a parent as a kid. People are weird about it and it’s not something you get to talk about much. It’s something of a relief to see I’m not as alone as I always felt. Nice to meet you, fam.

I was also one of those kids. My dad died at 33 after serving in the US Navy for over a decade. Between social security and VA survivor benefits, my mom was able to raise us. You’d think that’s exactly the kind of story the part of family values would like, something that keeps families together.

Augh, I wanted to get a 2-in-1 shampoo for busy mornings and all they store had was unnecessarily gendered shampoo labeled “thick and strong” which I thought was a description of what it would help your hair become, but no, apparently it’s the smell. My head smells like body spray 😭

@booker.senate.gov breaking a record set by a segregationist, in a time when the US government is actively invisibilizing the accomplishments by Black people and other minoritized people, matters. We break records and barriers every day and the this administration can’t hide that forever.

I’ve told my students not to count on the institution, and in fact to never fully trust them. Because I know this is what will happen every time. We strategize about the support networks they have outside of school. I strategize with staff and faculty about our networks, too. Community matters.

At a conference and couldn’t stick around for the mentoring session so I went to the airport early. Ended up hanging out with a scholar I admire who gave me the best mentoring session ever over beer and wine at an airport restaurant. All mentoring sessions should work this way.

Let’s learn how to navigate the gap between shame = an emotional response to fucking up that drives you to do better, and shame = an emotional response to people exiling you from compassion and care. Too much of the latter has killed the former. And the former is needed for a loving community.

This is what shame is for in a society, to penalize behaviors that are harmful to a society w/o violence. But it only works when the liars care about being shamed by their compatriots, or can’t destroy their shamers. The Right has worked for decades to politically ensure their freedom from shame.

There are 3 areas where religious and spiritual communities can respond: Journeying with folks as they learn where to draw that line, being in solidarity with them behind that line, and compassionately helping heal the moral injury they will experience when they can’t hold that line. Needed.

And so setting up people up who complain or advocate for their right to survive to be targeted as enemies, and therefore, expendable and left to die, whose deaths are neither a crime nor worthy of grief.

For folks who don’t know, ethnic studies programs like African American/Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies and the like come directly from civil right era campus activism. Attempts to disempower such programs should be framed as attacks on civil rights same as much else rn.

Every time I get a white or white-adjacent student who says “All this talk of racism makes me feel bad,” I ask, “Why are you empathizing with the white supremacists? If they make you feel ashamed, go call them out or in. You don’t have to go along with it.” 💯 this is a white/adjacent problem to fix.

Playing #Avowed and just finished Marius’s quest and well … 😭. Well done @obsidian.net . Trauma is a hard thing to portray accurately and you did it complexity & with tenderness & compassion. Y’all did good.

Sharing this for the faith-in-action crowd, especially the Christian pastor-organizers: Getting arrested is not sacramental. Keeping your community safe and using many strategies for liberation is.