I guess it’s an individual thing, similar to Jewish or Armenian people.
I’d really appreciate it if non-Romani people stopped debating our race.
Like, yea, on an *individual* basis, some Romani people consider themselves White, but most Romani people do not. Most Romani people do not look White, and are most certainly not treated as White in Europe, or the Americas.
I don’t know where people are getting this idea that the majority of Romani people are White-passing or light-skinned because that has absolutely no basis in fact.
I get that race is a construct, but that is no excuse for trying to define our race for us. Trying to claim that Romani people in any way benefit from Whiteness erases our entire history of slavery, genocide, and oppression based on the fact that we are not White. It also completely erases our own ancestry, which has roots in South Asia for f*ck’s sake.
Also, White people do not currently nor have they ever considered us White, which is how Whiteness is defined.
There is this gross and almost evil trend of non-members of a group arguing over the race of a minority group.
It happened to the Sami, to Jewish people (esp. Us evil racist ~White~ jews) and Romani. Imagine that, nobody on this website knew of Sami or Romani and these people think that have the right to argue what race they are.
This, is something that we, gaje, need to stop doing. We need to start recognizing Romani and stop with awful stereotyping and excluding from anti-racial protests and social justice.
Also, for clarification note, Armenians are not White and no White person considers them White unless the Armenian person is like a generation American. Don’t lump Armenians in with their oppressors.
Considering OP is an extremely disgusting racist …
OP is definitely racist and reblogs from right-libertarians and fascists all the time because OP is a piece of shit
TMK OP is also Jewish – a disgusting shame of a person and a shame upon Israel.
Here is the thing any Romani, Sami, Jewish, or Armenian individual(s) can buy into the idea that they are white, but the reality that as a whole none of those groups are White.
The thing is that it’s not just unabashed racists doing this. There are a lot of people in Tumblr SJ circles who have repeated this very same line, especially about Romani and Jewish people.
“Roma are White passing in the US” and “White Jews” are commonly used as a means to both silence Romani and Jewish persons, and excuse anti-Romani and anti-Semitic rhetoric by people who claim to be avidly against racism.
On an individual level, Romani people might claim that they are White and many mixed Romani/White persons are more comfortable with that label. However, as an ethnic group, Romani people are not White. In regards to Romani people, specifically, most are by no means White passing. Most Romani people are very much brown.
I am light skinned and Romani. I am one of the lightest people in my family, aside from my mother. On an individual level, yea, we benefit from that, but when we talk about the whole of our ethnicity.. we do not at all benefit from Whiteness. Romani people, as a people, have zero institutional or economic power over anyone.
We are a stateless nation that suffers from extreme oppression, segregation, and poverty regardless of where we live. “Gypsies” are loathed the world over, regardless of our skin color.
And, we’re not even getting into how conditional passing is for light skinned Romani persons, either. It’s not as if light skinned Romani people, even in the US, can just go about our lives as though we are White. It’s not as though people simply left their prejudices in Europe, or Turkey, or Armenia, or Iran, or Brazil.
I am in no way suggesting that light skinned Roma do not have privileges, but we spend our entire lives walking on glass. We are still othered and face xenophobia in a way that White people do not. For Romani people, “looking White” does not simply grant you access to Whiteness. Being *read* as Romani, as a Gypsy, most often has f*ck all to do with skin color.
fun fact, this is actually the one species i’ve gotten to see a bisected specimen of! our herbarium’s small isoetes collection had a few sent up from Peru in the 50s, and they’d been cut in the middle and pressed open to show the anatomy. i actually ended up using the digitization setup to take some Really High Def pictures of them (we are FAAARRR from having all of the stuff in my uni’s herbarium digitized. they just got done with the microfungi, i dont even think they’ve even started on the angiosperms, forget the Strange Lads in the lycophyte lockers….but then again funding is hard to come by for herbariums and all that). anyway, behold:
look at those leaf traces!!!
i love this specimen in particular because you can really see how their roots are actually fucked up leaves. like its one of those things where you don’t really think about it until you actually take a close look, and then you’re like ‘oh, yeah, that’s definitely Not How Normal Plants Look’. compare:
she…..she just made some tubes huh…..really just Did That and gave one some chlorophyll….
through the roots. as in this genus gets all their CO2 from the soil and it gives me an existential crisis every time i think about it
In no time the friends were sauntering into the local bank to get a loan for their new business, “wearing jeans, smelling of herbs, and armed with Tupperware containers of Mo’s 36 and Sleepytime blends.” They called their company Celestial Seasonings, after co-founder Lucinda Ziesing’s flowername.
But there might be another reason they named it “celestial.” Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders, were avid believers in a new-age bible called The Urantia Book, which followers call “an epochal revelation authored solely by celestial beings.” The book touches upon everything from mind control to a eugenics plot to eliminate the “inferior races” of our great nation.
Sun kissed skin, metallic eye liner, light beach waves, gold tinted highlighter, canary yellow French tips, gold statement necklaces that reflect in the light, sun motif rings and studs, gold draped fabric, Tom Ford soleil blanc shimmering body oil 🔅
Those tags where people write essays. I’m obsessed with those. They’re downright amazing linguistically!
I even proposed to do a research experiment on phrases, the juncture of syntax and semantics, and tumblr tags for my Computational Corpus Linguistics course. The teacher approved the project, but I ended up discarding it for a later time because of how difficult and involved the task would have been. There were too many problems to work out in the experiment and I realized I didn’t have enough time to do what I want.
The tags are intriguing for multiple reasons. They frankly make me run around like a chicken with his head cut off – except happier.
Syntax and Cognitive Science The tags show some very interesting things about phrasal structure. People divide up long sentences in tags during pauses. It’s unique “punctuation” and it says a lot for how people chunk thoughts, process them, and organize longer statements. It’s interesting where you see punctuation added or deleted; it helps you see cognitively how people are processing phrases.
Semantics The tags are full of very interesting expression techniques. One of the problems of written language has been that it lacks body language, which constitutes over half of our expression in conversation. It means that written language can be very easily misinterpreted for intent (think of how many texts get misinterpreted). But tumblrites and other social media savvy people have compensated and made written language HUGELY expressive. You see it in the tags. You see people use unique punctuation effects like deleting spaces, intentionally misspelling words, adding capitalization, and much more. There are emoticons, keyboard smashes, explosions of exclamation marks, and so many beautiful ways of expressing emotion. And people use lots of words in fascinating ways to get their thoughts across. It’s endless.
Diachronic Linguistics Historical linguistics is really cool. It’s about language change. Internet speech in tumblr has the latest, newest words and word units out there. You see so much beautiful language change happening. It’s how “Rickrolled” became a verb and “smol” grew its own set of recognized connotations. Word meanings change, take on new meanings, are filled with so much amazing sociolinguistic context. Abbreviations are made for fandom content. Abbreviations eventually become treated like real words, and then they take on new suffixes and become verbs and adjectives and nouns (”I lol’ed”). There are certain phonotactic paradigms English speakers subconsciously follow for creating new shipping names; I’ve even seen a linguistics paper on that topic. People are able to understand new terms they’ve never seen before; I’ve never heard of “Ruffheat,” but if someone said that to me, I’d know right away they’re talking about a Ruffnut x Heather ship. If someone told me “Hiccaang,” somehow I’d be able to figure out they’re talking about some Aang x Hiccup crack ship. We can just do that automatically because we’ve built our own compounding systems! And not only do we do that, but language changes SO FREAKISHLY RAPIDLY on tumblr it’s constant excitement.
Sociolinguistics Language varies based upon different groups we are a part of, and tumblr is full of many communities. Fandom communities, the science side of tumblr, the social justice community, and more are all out there. Each group has its own diction, vocabulary, and more. It’s also amazing how this collides with the fact that tumblr is global; the conversations arising aren’t just from native English speakers, but individuals whose first language might be Malay, Khmer, German, Korean, Japanese, or Finnish.
So yeah. And where you see all this amazingness the most is in the tags.
Believe me, I tag browse a lot because the content there is GOLD. Pure GOLD.
Someday I do hope to take my tumblr experiences and conduct a legitimate linguistics research study. It can teach us a lot about contemporary English, internet English, and how it’s used around the globe linguistically.
Because I saw this country simply shrug its shoulders and not demand reform when our elected officials did nothing after 20 innocent first-graders were murdered in their classroom a week-and-a-half before Christmas at Sandy Hook, I’ve believed that we’ll never see meaningful changes. If that couldn’t move elected officials to act and didn’t move Americans to elect different officials who would act, I just couldn’t imagine what would.
However, I am inspired to see the students who survived this latest shooting quickly stand up and take matters into their own hands. I’m not surprised that the Florida legislature basically ignored the hopes of these young people, but I’m hopeful that these kids will use their activism to keep fighting and make those legislators pay at the polls because these students are also their future constituents. I hope that this generation of students across the country reach out to each other, use their mastery of social media, and be the effective activists on this issue that my generation has failed to be. I hope that they are determined and focused enough to achieve what the generations before them were too selfish to see through. They continue to be targets while trying to get an education because Americans before them don’t want to not be able to “hunt” with assault weapons. At BEST that is selfish. And, at this point, it’s downright criminal. But what I’ve seen from these kids over the past few days has given me hope, and that’s far more than I’ve felt after the dozens of other mass shootings that have happened (and quickly been forgotten about if they weren’t ignored in the first place) over the past few years.
This reminds me of a party I went to last year. I was standing with some friends, chatting, and someone said something that indirectly implied that sexism exists. Some trivial recounting of the basic facts of daily life for most women. Something so mild, so uncontroversial, so mundane that I don’t even remember what it was.
Suddenly, this man standing on the outskirts of our conversational circle piped up with “actually, I think men are more discriminated against than women these days.”
All conversation died.
I turned to look at him and he had this smug, insufferable grin on his face, relishing this moment, expecting us to waste our time and energy refuting this ridiculous thing he had just said.
The Devil’s Advocate was among us.
And, in my mind, I saw the next 15+ minutes playing out. The parade of facts and statistics in a vain attempt to defend ourselves, our gender, and to prove that misogyny is real. The glib, snide denials from some shithead who is getting off on our pain and frustration. The Gish Gallop of bullshit that would take a whole evening to properly dismantle. It was depressing and overwhelming. I hated it. I had to kill it before it began.
So I looked him dead in the eye and I said “OK,“ shrugged, and just walked away.
Nothing I have ever said to another human being has ever been so crushing. As I walked away, I watched the smug grin vanish and confusion and anxiety set in. The rest of the group turned their backs to him and carried on as if he had never spoken – as if he was invisible. He was still staring at me when I walked over to another friend and told her what he had said. I pointed him out for her and made direct eye contact with him while we both laughed.
tl;dr: Don’t feed the troll. Let it perish, cold and hungry, in the wasteland of your indifference. It is weak and you are strong. Live your best life.
“Hi, I’m looking for a book with adventure, but no graphic violence.”
“I’m interested in a thriller that doesn’t have any rape scenes.”
“I want a gay main character but I don’t want it to be a coming-out story. And no anti-gay violence.”
“Oh, no, murder’s fine, but no animal cruelty.”
All separate reader’s advisory questions that I’ve answered, and successfully. I don’t know why any of these people asked for those specific parameters, and I didn’t ask, because it’s not my fucking business. And it’s no one else’s business, either–up to and including the government.
Librarians don’t make you reveal your trauma in order to justify what you read or write. You may be confusing us with, uh… *checks notes* …fandom.
We are literally trained not to ask. Any halfway decent reference professor nails it into you. Even if it would help you answer a question, you never ask a patron why they need something.
Do you have a database listing all those factors? Sounds daunting to remember if not.
I mean, yes we do have some (see if your library has access to Novelist which is a great database to find your next read), but I’ve also been doing this job for over a decade. It’s not like I memorized a list on my first day. I started with a general gist based on what I’d read and then expanded each time I got a question that I had to go hunting around for an answer. Also, my some of my colleagues have been in libraries even longer and I listened and learned from them both formally and from listening to how they answered patrons.
There’s also whole genres that try to dedicate themselves to being ‘cozy’ reads.When someone comes in for a recommendation for a mystery, I ask them how much gore they want (note, I’m not asking why that is or if this is even a general feeling for them, just what they’re in the mood for a that moment) and if they want little to no blood, then there’s an entire genre of cozy mysteries waiting for them. Ditto with romance with little to no sex.
I also make it a point (and in my state am required to keep my certification) to go to continuing ed classes to learn more. At least once a year or so I go to something reader’s advisory focused.
Being a librarian is a career like any other. Some people are bad at it, some people are amazing, most want to do their best. We train and if we can’t remember, find tools that help us.
rip tumblr 