Paul Ryan says his tax plan will be great for the poorest and most vulnerable people in America, and he tweeted a hypothetical to help you understand how that works: “Meet Cindy: a single mom, making $30,000 per year, who hopes to one day get beyond living paycheck to paycheck. With a $700 increase in her tax refund each year under our tax bill, Cindy can start saving for her future.”
If Cindy is a single mom in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, where cruel austerity and attacks on trade unions and workers’ rights have caused a massive collapse in the state’s prosperity (while neighboring Minnesota is booming, thanks to redistributive policies), then she’s entitled to a $7.50 minimum wage. But as a single mother, she’d need to earn $23.62/h and get 40 hours’ a week worth of work to make a bare living wage.
But assume that Cindy decides to bank Paul Ryan’s $700 a year, instead of using it to avoid having to visit food pantries and turn off the furnace on cold nights (and never touch a cent for medical emergencies, childcare or debt repayment). In ten years, Cindy has amassed $7000.
Paul Ryan, who is worth $6.4 million, thinks that $58/month for starving Cindy and her malnourished child will make more of a difference than a living wage, or universal health care, or a state pension so that Cindy can have a few minutes to look for a better job, rather than tending to her aging mother’s bedsores.
There’s a documentary called 400 years without a comb and the documents how Black people specially Black women had to deal with slavery and subsequently not being able to take care of their hair the way that they knew at home because they were taken and they weren’t able to take any tools with them because slavery. It talks about how Eurocentric beauty standards were pushed up on black women because they’ve never seen hair like ours before and subsequently that shit is carried to this day.
I think about that documentary every time I buy a wig every time I buy a weave and everytime someone criticizes black women for doing so buying a wig buying a weave for straightening their hair whatever would have you. It is absolutely infuriating to me that people do not have the cultural and historical context when it comes to Black women and our hair before they feel the need to criticize us for what we do to make sure that our hair is healthy and that it’s presentable in the way that we wanted to be presented because we know if our hair isn’t a certain way then we’re going to have an issue.
It’s not our issues it’s shit that’s projected onto it is things that we have no fucking control over but everybody always has such extensive comments to say about our hair. how we should keep it and how we should wash it and if we should go natural or if we have the right type of natural hair (the hierarchy in natural hair is another issue entirely but it’s exhausting too) and it’s like shut the fuck up. Because at the end of the day you don’t have to deal with this shit you don’t have to deal with people making assumptions about you your hygiene your sense of self hell even your socioeconomic status based solely on your hair. It’s annoying because nobody wants to talk about how ostracized Black women are for the hair that grows out of their heads, but they so QUICK to tease, or comment, or to mock.
So it’s like yes we going to wear a weave and we’re going to wear a wig and we’re going to wear braids. I’m going to wear whatever the fuck else that we need to so that we don’t have issues and that we don’t get accosted by managers or accosted by school teachers or principals or expelled or fired or told to cut our hair because it’s not proper when it’s what grows out of our head. Nobody wants to talk about this when they criticize weaves and wigs and extensions and everything that we’ve developed in order to navigate through this system that envies us and maligns us at the same damn time. When you are able to find a better solution you let me know until then shut the fuck up.
👏👏👏👏👏 what I’ve been saying. I thought about it and realized the criticism of black women and what we choose to do to our bodies and our features is really just misogynoir masked as concern and “wokeness”. You think the way we manipulate our hair or bleach our skin or get plastic surgery really affects how these people sleep at night? No. You think they really are coming from a good and loving place when they tell us to “Just wear your hair, you hate yourself haha!”? No. They just want someone to make fun off and beat down and marginalize. That’s really all they’re looking for. Because when they are dishing their criticism and attacks somehow they never have any historical analysis to align with their arguments. And especially with black men, somehow it just all ends up being evidence for why they despise black women: “See? This is why *insert whatever non black race here* women are the best to me. At least they wear their own hair!”
From imdb: ”During the filming of some scenes for The Princess Bride, the weather became markedly cold for Robin Wright Penn. Andre the Giant helped her by placing one of his hands over her head; his hands were so large that one would entirely cover the top of her head, keeping her warm.”
All of the behind the scenes stories about Andre the Giant were adorable like this, Apparently Wallace Shawn is deathly afraid of heights, so he was freaking out while they were doing the scene scaling the cliff and Andre was like “it is okay, I’ll keep you safe.” there’s a behind the scenes thing on the DVD and everyone is choked up and misty eyed when they talk about working with him.
Andre the Giant was a radiant human being.
I’m so glad he gets to go down in history as everyones favorite giant. What a legacy!
To start with, it’s called ‘Thug Kitchen’. “Thug” is shorthand for black male; regardless of how strictly you might try to adhere to respectability politics (i.e. cultivating an image for yourself that lets white people know you’re not like those black people), if you’re black and male you’re still seen as a thug who’s guilty of something a la Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, etc. (Here’s an article about the racist use of the word “thug” throughout the Trayvon Martin trial.)
On no planet can these white yuppies use the word “thug” without racial implications or realistically deny that those implications are intentional. There’s a reason why they were anonymous until the release of their cookbook.
Second, it’s not just swear words, they use African American Vernacular English (AAVE, or “ebonics”) and make the conscious decision to infuse it with vulgar language, which is, by the way, racist since AAVE is not innately vulgar. That’s just their interpretation of what it means to be a “thug”. AAVE is a dialect like any other, using it does not reflect any aspect of your personhood, your intelligence, your class, your education, etc, all it means is that you grew up Black in America, or that your language is influenced by Black people you grew up with.
“All up in”, “Ain’t nobody got time for that”, etc are examples of AAVE. If you read an interview with these people you’ll notice they don’t speak in AAVE naturally (some non-black folks grow up with AAVE; that is not the case here). They’re just white people who swear a lot. They could have created their corny brand around that vulgarity alone but the addition of AAVE and the “thug” archetype are exploitative and RACIST. The language they’re using is the joke. When black people make jokes that involve AAVE, the language is just the mode of delivery. Everything about this is a mockery and it’s embarrassing, I hope the realization that these people are making money off this minstrel show inspires a serious backlash.
Lady Jace Of The Fae 
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