So this is actively debunked every few years. It's not the soul food, it is the racism & lack of health care & the stress of poverty. Correlation is not causation.

https://twitter.com/Blavity/status/1049317560011968513

A. An actual soul food meal is 2/3 vegetables. Meat was expensive and was often used more as seasoning than as a main ingredient. B. Quality of ingredients matters (hi, let's talk not just about food deserts, but the subpar food sold in low income areas)

Black folklore permeates our cultural norms. And he had access, likely would have been assigned at least some in English classes. There's an argument to be made about academic privilege, but an actor with a career in Hollywood that stretches back 20 years ain't it.

https://twitter.com/DanaVivianWhite/status/1048251725675712512

Black American folklore has been on summer reading lists since the 80's. It shows up on Banned Book lists (see the regular fights about Beloved), and is in picture books. That's before we get into anything related to hoodoo & family traditions that granny told you about as a kid

So, the diocese changed the rules this summer, but they have no mandate from anyone to demand natural hair. Natural colors maybe. This was a policy written to exclude Black students. And in a place with a robust public school system it wouldn't matter.
wafb.com/story/38929771… But this isn't a town with a robust public school system. The ratings on the middle schools are...not great. Her parents were literally sending her to what is probably one of the best options available. The school knows that they have a disproportionate amount of power.

So hey can we talk again about being visible online as a woman in media and ways you can insulate yourself from things like this? Because a lot of folks are awful & unfortunately many platforms fail to be worth a damn so you have to find solutions for yourself.

https://twitter.com/nytimesarts/status/1031884222661844993

I just DM'd someone who made an announcement yesterday to ask if anyone had explained how to scrub their personal info. Because congrats but also there's this problem that happens right afterward that many people will politely pretend isn't as predictable as sunrise.

I mean, when Black women told you that Twitter's business model relies on keeping people who will tweet for hours on the platform regardless of their behavior what did you think we meant? Twitter needs harassers, kooks and so on to keep the metrics up.

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1028088817121742849

Case in point, some of you remember the guy I have tweeted about in the past who made a patreon to get paid to stalk & harass women & called it performance art. Fun fact, he spent up to 23 hours a day online. On twitter sending & deleting threats. He would camp out in mentions

I keep seeing people insist that Beyonce's ancestor story is wrong & hi let's take a detour to manumission laws & how often people had to buy loved ones & own them for a period of time before they could legally free them. Little known aspect of history but it exists. Okay so manumission started in the US in the 17th century (yes, basically as soon as there was slavery there were paths out of it), and initially in Virginia it was a straight forward process. Enslaved people could by their way or be granted freedom for a variety of reasons.

All of this right here. All. And what's wild to me is that the unpaid internship model doesn't even lead to job security. So what's the damned point?

https://twitter.com/DavidDTSS/status/1015297727134040064

I'll most likely never have a newsroom job (don't stress, I have yet to apply for one, and likely never will, it's not my bag)but listen, the first time the jig soared for me on the unpaid internship model was right out of college. I got paid & bylines as a freelancer.

Here's the thing, I have been online since 1993 & in some harassment heavy communities on & offline since 2005 or so? I don't expect any platform to be a safe space. I do expect platforms to use basic safety protocols invented when the internet was young & dinosaurs roamed What does that look like when I walk into a meeting? Muting, blocking, less porous API that allows harassment & doxing & piling on to occur. Not giving status symbols to people & groups who espouse hate. Understanding the impact of those status symbols on casual users.

I just want white women to pour all their outraged "I was told by Applecare, BBQ'ing without a permit, selling water without a permit, breathing while near whiteness" energy into combating the efforts to revert to a time before women could get credit in their own names. Because here is the thing about the 50's nostalgia that marks this authoritarian outburst, they aren't just nostalgic for a (perceived) white society. They are specifically romanticizing a relatively brief period when women didn't have any power in the home or the workplace

I keep seeing these conversations about Pink not having sex with her husband for a year accompanied by "Might as well break up" & hi, let me welcome you to long term relationships & illness or injury or distance because of work. Lots of reasons not to have sex & still be in love I've been with the husbeast for 17 years. Reasons we have had sex droughts include injury, surgery, babies, different states...that doesn't mean we don't go back to having sex eventually. We do & it's great. But the months are that 2nd trimester abruption & subsequent surgery?

I would take the "But what about collateral damage" comments more seriously if anyone was focused on the people targeted by the bigots. Do you know how many of us who write about race & gender have had employers contacted? Gotten threats? We got told "It's just the internet" Like, people are jumping into my mentions to compare someone yelling at Schlossberg for being a loud racist to a lynching. Do you know what happened in a lynching? People were tortured and killed. Not yelled at, tortured and killed.

I love how y'all are pretending that Black women nerds don't exist. And that we aren't criticizing these shitty misogynistic narratives from the front row because we were in the same schools & at the same parties. Hi, hello my nickname was Books. I was 12 in the 8th grade & had hair like a flock of seagulls. And I still had a nerdy Black boyfriend. Can you guess why? Because we both used our words & talked to each other. We had spirited arguments about Thundercats vs GI Joe.

I finally read that "redistribution of sex" thing & I just don't think some of you realize that even in sci fi books that ends in murder Like yes, bad dehumanizing idea that endangers women. Absolutely. But also? (history pants on) women respond to oppression with violence too. The fact that women are more likely to poison you than to shoot you doesn't make them less dangerous.

I have been trying to stay out of the discussion of slavery on the timeline because I know most people don't know the actual history & I get mean when I have my history pants on. Historians have worked too hard to make history accessible for so many to ignore facts But fine books are harder to weed through. Shall we do some links to articles? Because well researched comprehensive articles on these topics exist. Slave revolts? Here you go. nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-an…

I've been trying to figure out how to talk about this Ben Carson proposal without calling him names & well...still not there yet. Y'all keep encouraging me & you don't understand how much I want to drag that man to hell & leave him there. Tripling the minimum rent, a 5% increase for others (hi, hello, rent is really supposed to be 25% of your income so 30% was already high) & not a fucking heart in him

So fun fact, a few years ago I shared a stalker with a few other women. He crowd funded his behavior & called it performance art with fear as a goal. Multiple jurisdictions involved because shared stalker. The cop that took it seriously? A woman who he also ended up stalking. I say fun fact, but really I have kids & didn't need that shit. It wasn't my first time being stalked, but what made it worse was the gleeful fanbase that enjoyed his reports of his...art. I refused to talk about it in public because it only fed his ego & made him do more.

So I was going to leave this Universal Fan Con mess alone. But if you had cash flow problems as an event why were you giving so much away? Groupon has pulled the event but they sold tickets there. They gave hotel rooms & flights away like candy. None of this makes any sense. I always side eyed this event & my reasons to avoid it were partially personal & partially math based (chaired a fan con, the math here was always bad) but basic math says if your coffers are empty then you need full price tickets to sell.

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People keep saying they are sad they won't get to meet me because Universal Fan Con is canceled & I say again I have nothing to do with anything affiliated with BGN. Never have. Never will. I keep having to draw that line & my beef is personal but not the way you think. I have been in sci fi & comic fandom all my life. Been involved online since 2003 or so. Been involved as a pro since 2009. I am a nerdy Black girl, but I was never here for BGN. Because (and I already got at @JamieBroadnax for this years ago) I don't like the way she does things

*hops on bandwagon to talk about this as someone who turned tweets into a career* Okay so first read all of this advice. Got it? Good. Now let's talk a sec about roads to success & how you don't have to follow what anyone else is doing.

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I'm 41 years old. I have the kind of career path that makes career counselors sit down & take a drink. And stare at my resume & ask me quietly, plaintively if I ever bothered to think about long term goals or if I just spun the dial & leaped. (Door #2 is the answer mostly)

Literally went to dinner with a high school friend who had a different story of stalking & abuse about the same guy I had a story about & neither of us dated him. This is an ongoing problem with discussions of IPV. People insist there must be reasons that victims are isolated beyond "That's what the abuser wants" & meanwhile abusers get to practice their tactics over & over unchecked.

This is called an ambulance. It already exists. WHY IS TECH SO FUCKING DETERMINED NOT TO ADVANCE A DAMNED THING?

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And because I know someone is going to claim that it isn't always an ambulance I would like to introduce you to paratransit services that already exist to transport people to & from medical appointments. Uber is repackaging shit that already exists.