you see me rolling up, pops, you step aside

brofisting:

fuckyeahfeminists:

Just got this in an email

In just a few hours, new policies will take effect at Google, endangering your privacy.

Tech publication Gizmodo reports, “things you could do in relative anonymity today [like your web searches], will be explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number come March 1st.” And this applies retro-actively if you don’t act today.

You can protect yourself in just 1 minute! Click here for a step-by-step guide to protecting your privacy from Google’s changes.

sharing with my followers because your privacy matters! They had searches from 2008…even showed which pages of which Google Books I viewed and when…spooky.

Remember to do this, yo!

beautifulbrwn:

“On Saturday, February 18, 2012, the Frederick Douglass Foundation of New York presented the first Spirit of Freedom award to Jada Williams, a 13-year old city of Rochester student.  Miss Williams wrote an essay on her impressions of Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography the Narrative of the Life.  This was part of an essay contest, but her essay was never entered.  It offended her teachers so much that, after harassment from teachers and school administrators at School #3, Miss Williams was forced to leave the school.

We at the Frederick Douglass Foundation honored her because her essay actually demonstrates that she understood the autobiography, even though it might seem a bit esoteric to most 13-year olds.  In her essay, she quotes part of the scene where Douglass’ slave master catches his wife teaching then slave Frederick to read.  During a speech about how he would be useless as a slave if he were able to read, Mr. Auld, the slave master, castigated his wife.

Miss Williams quoted Douglass quoting Mr. Auld:  “If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.”

Miss Williams personalized this to her own situation.  She reflected on how the “white teachers” do not have enough control of the classroom to successfully teach the minority students in Rochester.  While she herself is more literate than most, due to her own perseverance and diligence, she sees the fact that so many of the other “so-called ‘unteachable’” students aren’t learning to read as a form of modern-day slavery.  Their illiteracy holds them back in society.

Her call to action was then in her summary: “A grand price was paid in order for us to be where we are today; but in my mind we should be a lot further, so again I encourage the white teachers to instruct and I encourage my people to not just be a student, but become a learner.”

This offended her English teacher so much that the teacher copied the essay for other teachers and for the Principal. After that, Miss Williams’ mother and father started receiving phone calls from numerous teachers, all claiming that their daughter is “angry.”  Miss Williams, mostly a straight-A student, started receiving very low grades, and she was kicked out of class for laughing and threatened with in-school suspension.

There were several meetings with teachers and administrators, but all failed to answer Miss Williams’ mother’s questions. The teachers refused to show her the tests and work that she had supposedly performed so poorly on.  Instead, the teachers and administrators branded her a problem.

Unable to take anymore of the persecution, they pulled her from School #3.  Wanting to try another school, they were quickly informed that that school was filled and told to try “this school.”  During her first day at this new school, she witnessed four fights, and other students asked her if she was put here because she fights too much.

Long story short, they took an exceptional student, with the radical idea that kids should learn to read, and put her in a school of throwaway students who are even more unmanageable than the average student in her previous school.  To protect their daughter, her parents have had to remove her from school, and her mother has had to quit her job so she can take care of Miss Williams.

To date, the administrators of School #3 have refused to release her records, even though she no longer attends the school, and they have repeatedly given her mother the run around.  We at the Frederick Douglass Foundation have contacted school administrators in regards to this situation and have also been told to hit the pavement.

That’s what we intend to do.  If this school will sacrifice the welfare of an above-average student whose essay, that they asked her to write, they find offensive, we intend to make everyone aware of this monstrous injustice.  The school has a job, and it is not doing it.  We would like as many folks as possible to call the Principal of School #3 and complain about this injustice.  Her name is Miss Connie Wehner, and she can be reached at (585) 454-3525.  This treatment of Jada Williams cannot stand.

See Video of Jada reading her Essay Here
Read Related Blog posts Here, Here and Here”

A better article about what’s going on here.

puertoricanjane:

WHAT IF THEY DON’T GENDERSWAP MARY IN ELEMENTARY

AND THEN THEIR ROMANCE PLAYS OUT AND IT’S ALL SOFT AND SWEET AND ROMANTIC

AND THEN COMES THE MOMENT WHERE LUCY LIU!WATSON AND THE LADY PLAYING MARY KISS

AND I CLAW AT MY EYES AND CLUTCH AT MY HEART

BECAUSE I WANT TO GO TO THERE

SO

INCREDIBLY

BAD

BECAUSE LUCY LIU

LUCY LIUUUUUUUUUUU 

skywarrior108:

Gay male characters:

• Kurt Hummel
• Sandy Ryerson
• Hiram Berry
• Leroy Berry
• Blaine Anderson
• Dave Karofsky
• Jeremiah
• Sebastian Smythe
• Chandler

Gay female characters:

• Santana Lopez

Bisexual characters:

• Brittany Pierce

Pings my gaydar really hard but Glee doesn’t have the balls to “go there” because they already have “too many lesbians”:

• Quinn Fabray

This show is ridiculously sexist, and this is just another example of it. There are a million and one things Glee needs to fix (and probably won’t at this point), but this particular issue is a glaring problem in my eyes.

lovewallace:

nowisgreater:

latxcvi:

glamaphonic:

1) There are endless, ENDLESS things that could go wrong with a CBS drama about Sherlock Holmes with Lucy Liu as Rule 63 Dr. Watson. From all the things that usually plague female characters and, especially, WoC characters in western entertainment to the show just being plain shitty.

2) None of these things is how now there won’t be pandering queer subtext. Literally none of them. Not a single one of them.

3) And I, personally, refuse to worry about any of these things until we know more than the fact that Joan Watson exists and is played by Lucy Liu.

4) Holmes and Watson should, indeed, very probably be the same gender and as such I am completely open to complaints about the egregious casting mistake that has been made here, and I am totally down with all campaigns to recast Holmes as Indira Varma or someone else but mostly Indira Varma.

5) Casting a WoC as Watson is not an “attempt” to be more progressive than all the White Dude Watson/White Dude Holmes adaptations brimming with never, ever, ever, ever to be fulfilled queer subtext. It just straight up is more progressive.

6) The show not starring two white dudes does not actually preclude it from having queer subtext or, GASP, actual queer content. Contrary to what fandom would have you believe, queerness does, in fact, still exist even when it is not solely concerning two white dudes.

7) There is a chance that homophobia motivated the decision to make Dr. Watson a woman so that the show could easily avoid having to deal with homoerotic subtext common to Sherlock and other narratives primarily focused on male homosocial relationships. However, given the widespread willingness to shamelessly tease queerness with regard to such relationships, the success this tactic has met with in terms of drawing and establishing dedicated audiences, and the fact that major networks don’t actually, here in reality, go out of their way to make iconic dude characters into ladies (and non-white ladies at that) so as to up the lady to dude ratio in their shows, I sincerely doubt it.

8) Even if said decision was made for homophobic reasons the end result is still markedly less homophobic than the show/creators/network constantly pandering and then screaming BUT NO HOMO.

9) Because no one involved in this is even fucking PRETENDING that Watson and Holmes would have actually been gay had Bland White Dude X been cast as Watson, they did not actually remove a queer couple and replace it with a straight one.

10) So stop concerntrolling. And also shut up.

Allllll of this.  (For #4, I would also take Gina Torres.  Just sayin’.)

I said it in the tags of another post but I’ll go ahead and put it in the text of this one:  Elementary/Sherlock fandom - or at least the segments of you that are concern trolling about this? There’s something really, really gross about claiming that an alleged desire for actual LGBT representation is underpinning the hand-wringing re: “Oh, no!  A girl!Watson?” when what’s really going on is fretfulness that something might get in the way of a potential slashy subtext.  Slashy subtext =/= actual queer representation.  Queer representation would be actual queer text.  If you (general, concern trolling Elementary/Sherlock fandom ‘you’) just want your slashy subtext to be unimpeded, say so.  That’s a hell of a lot less disingenuous than pretending that your outrage that CBS didn’t cast White Male Actor #2 as Watson has anything to do with actual social justice.

More smart people saying smart people things!

I hate to break it to you but if you are in the least bit familiar with pop culture, you know that it’s incredibly unlikely that they are going to have any queer content AND that they are going to refrain from a Joan/Sherlock romantic plotline. Given PREDICTABLE TV/MOVIE/BOOK PLOTLINE #1 it is still really upsetting to me that mainstream media finds it fucking impossible to have Watson and Holmes in a recognized, textual relationship unless they turn them into a straight couple. In that sense, it is just not progressive to genderswap the character. Making an iconic character female? Yes. Making her not white? Yes, particularly since the original Sherlock Holmes is so racist. I am not acting as though a queer couple has been taken away from me and I would appreciate it if people on this website didn’t automatically dub any interpretation of events other than their own as “trolling” especially when you clearly don’t understand the problem in the first place. Subtext pisses me off. All attempts to aaagh no avoid homoromantic things at all costs!!! piss me off and making Watson female so Sherlock/Watson can happen is one of them. Don’t pretend that wasn’t a motivating factor in genderswapping the character.

Obvious solution: make both characters female and queer.

I would appreciate it if you didn’t make offensive assumptions about how I don’t understand what the problem is when I sure as fuck do. I am well aware that queer content is highly unlikely and it’s also highly unlikely, frankly, that Elementary won’t just be generally a terrible show on numerous levels both social justice related and otherwise. My point was that there is certainly, as people were putting forth, not going to be LESS actual queer content now than there would have been and there is no more barrier to its existence than there would have been otherwise.

My post was explicitly about people who were proclaiming that this casting was somehow a step down from pandering no homo subtext about two white dudes. The very first thing I do is acknowledge that there are many, many, many other problems to be chosen from in this situation, but that the problem is not as tons and tons and tons of people presented it thus evoking my post in the first place: that Watson is no longer a white dude like in all other adaptations and thus there cannot be homoerotic subtext.

And that was the assertion to which I was directly responding.

mankey23:

theres nothing like buying a new book when you have 8183920188281 other books to read