481 years after her death, Anne Boleyn remains a complicated figure in history and one worth revisiting for a number of reasons. This book did a really excellent job of making her a fully complex person without either making her a saint or a sinner. She was ambitious, cruel, brilliant and unjustly murdered for the sake of another man’s vanity and lust.
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#anneboleyn #alisonweir #thetudors #historymajor #godsavethequeen
I don’t know who Megan Kelly is but I wanna piss her off
dis bitch
“Verifiable fact” 😭😂
I’d PISS ON HER tbh
btw Saint Nicholas, whom Santa Claus is based on, was a black guy
and we don’t know exactly what jesus looked like, but here’s an artistic reconstruction of an average 20-something male from his ethnic group at the time
DOES THIS LOOK FUCKING WHITE TO YOU
I want this post everywhere
jesus was represented more or less accurately as an ethnically jewish arab man up until the reign of pope alexander vi, in the late 15th century. since he was viciously persecuting roman jews during this time, alexander wanted to make them less sympathetic to the public, and did so in part by ordering that portrayals of jesus be based off of his son, cesare borgia.
the reason “jesus is white” is because someone purposefully attempted to alter the perception of history to benefit his goal of persecuting a targeted ethnic group.
Probably time for this year’s rb.
Getting a start on 2018’s blog post. Best to start off on the right foot.
Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.
We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls.
Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left.
This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left.
And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left.
And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right.
Until these are the bowls.
Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other.
This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl.
This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference.
This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.
The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss.
This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world.
I mean, imagine your party guests arrive
Oh my god they are adorable!
And they see their bowls
But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.
I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?
But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat.
And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant.
And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.
*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*
Because given recent events, THIS CLEARLY FUCKING NEEDS TO BE SAID AGAIN.
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