with their crooked stares

For the interested, jujuberry136 has good thoughts about those Season 6 Criminal Minds casting spoilers. Well, more like good rants. But I found them very articulate and thought-provoking and I agree with everything she said.

In her extremely excellent link round-up on the recent unfunny business, amazonziti said something in this thread (which is also an excellent example of derailment) that really impressed me, and I felt compelled to share it here.

This incident is nothing like the first of its kind. These things tend to follow a pattern. A white person is racist -- usually unintentionally, but always hurtfully. A person of color points this out. The white person tries to shrug off personal responsibility. The person of color doesn't like that. And then all the bystanders take the white person's side -- certainly she was racist, but think about how she feels!

The idea that a white perpetrator of racism deserves as much empathy and consideration from me as a PoC victim of racism is absolutely preposterous, especially because there is never just one person of color who is harmed by an incident of racism. My attention and energy and feeling belong to the people who have been hurt, not the person who did the hurting and now wants comforting for how badly they feel.

The idea that I, as a person of color, am obliged to respond to hurtful, shocking, angering incidents of racism with patience and politeness is also preposterous. And offensive. All this sympathy you have for this racist white person who didn't mean to hurt anybody is sympathy wasted. What I hear you saying is that the hurt a person experiences as a consequence of being called out as racist is equivalent to, or trumps, the hurt a person experiences as a victim of racism.

I, as an anti-racist person of color, am not in fact obliged to spend my life making racist white people feel better about themselves. Nor am I obliged to guide them gently and inoffensively through a sanitized education on racism, anti-racism and white privilege. If you would like to spend your time doing this, rather than crying at me about how hard it is to be privileged, white and racist, you are more than welcome. I myself will be putting my energy into making people of color feel better about themselves, and making the internet safer for them.

Please take your tone argument and leave.

( cut because I added more, but I wanted that to be visible )

Leo with short whiskers

I'm still very sad about losing my ratties. It hasn't been a week yet. I'm sad that I didn't have a good camera while they were alive, that I only have two short clips I took with my cell phone, only a few stills that I hadn't deleted. I wish I had footage of me hand-wrestling with Leo, or cuddling with Bartleby, or the two of them playing and snuggling and arguing with each other.

Leo loved to explore. His whiskers are short in this clip because not long before I recorded it he had been exploring on my dresser and stuck his face in a lit candle jar before I could stop him. His whiskers singed off but he wasn't otherwise hurt. He didn't even squeak in surprise, just pulled his head out and went back to running around and stealing my scrunchies. And Leo was my squeaker, much more vocal than Bartleby, always making a fuss when I grabbed him when he'd rather be running around, when I pinned him down and mussed up his fur, when I playfully pretended to take back a treat I offered him. Leo was a very independent little fellow and he was indignant every time his right to explore was curtailed.

I miss them both so much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8RUbL4Nbdg