Category: Uncategorized

vegetarianvampireduck:

snapdragondyke:

boggycreekll:

boggycreekll:

I have never seen an advertising campaign more evil, more insidious than the one for the army currently airing in the UK

“This is belonging”

We’re introduced to a group of earnest young men. they’re white, they’re black. they drink tea. they play practical jokes. they quote popular TV shows. they talk about sports. they face their fears. it’s loving and domestic and all too easy to overlook the guns and camo and helicopters blaring overhead.

make no mistake, these adverts are aimed at the young and disenfranchised. poor people, people of colour, people who have been bullied and abused by society and made to feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Join the army, they’re told, and you can have the love and acceptance you crave but have always been denied. Elsewhere, you might get called racial slurs. you might get called a pansy or a fairy, but not here. You belong with us.

For example: Islamophobia is rampant in the UK. here we have an advert of a Muslim soldier praying while his squadron, armed to the teeth, sits in silence. the message is clear – while the rest of society may despise you, here, you will be respected. this is belonging.

here’s one called ‘expressing my emotions’, featuring a white man in his 40s – practically the posterchild for the UK’s current mental health crisis.

you don’t have to worry about bottling up your feelings in the army. after all, this is belonging.

here’s another one called ‘can I be gay in the army?’. we’re told: “I was really worried about whether I’d be accepted, but within days, I was more than confident in being who I was.” Clearly homophobia is a thing of the past in the army. don’t worry. this is belonging.

and it works. while the response to these adverts from an unfortunately vocal number of people is basically “fuck you, we’re racist and proud of it!” there are young people being taken in by this. I have met gay children, trans children who are determined to join the army because, after being rejected by their parents and peers, they’re now being told “here you will be accepted. here you will be loved.”

fuck that. don’t be groomed; don’t let the vulnerable and desperate people in your life be groomed. we need to fight the root causes of these problems in our society and stamp them out so that wielding a gun and cowering in some blown-out building in a country you helped destroy is no longer seen as some sort of salvation. fight racism. fight homophobia and transphobia. fight the stigmatisation of mental illness. fight the system that prioritises the rich and leaves the rest of us to rot.

don’t be taken in by something that offers easy answers, chews you up and spits you out, destroyed, guilty, with PTSD and nowhere to go. where do you belong when you can’t fight any more? where do you belong when you can no longer be used?

you are not immune to propaganda

Plus they started airing these just around the time of exam results days, purposely targeting young people who are worried about failing/have failed their exams and are scared about their future. It’s fucking disgusting

persephinae:

star-anise:

fragilise:

pinkcheesegreenghost:

its so funny to me that european whites love to dance so much?

but american whites dont???

was there some type of religious resistance to dancing?

@star-anise

Those willing to poke gentle fun at American Baptists say: “No dancing, because it might lead to sex. And no sex, because it might lead to dancing.” So yes, there actually was religious resistance to dancing, which has persisted beyond all belief. Not to mention the suppression of various types of folk dancing as European immigrants were assimilated into bland whiteness and encouraged to do “non-ethnic” dances like square dancing.

I’m a Canadian white and it’s also my observation that the British colonists especially brought the notion that civility, culture, class, professionalism, and correct behaviour were all undergirded by the ability to sit still, stand straight, and maintain an unemotional facade no matter what. “Stiff upper lip” and all that. Acceptable forms of dance among Whiteness are often formal, complicated, and difficult to pick up without paid instruction. White people often make the mistake, even when writing about our own culture from a couple hundred years back, of thinking that dance is ONLY a mating ritual–you don’t dance for sadness, or joy, or anger, or fun. It’s not an accident that anti-colonial resistance by Indigenous groups, people of colour, and non-English white people, have in many cases used dance as an avenue of resistance and identity. Nor is it an accident that moral panics have often been over white people enjoying “ethnic” forms of dance and music like jazz, swing, hip-hop, or rap.

By denying people dance, rhythm, and movement, colonizers denied them a powerful kind of literal medicine, a form of resilience that could have allowed them to heal enough to defy colonial rule. But it’s no accident that the intrinsic motions of colonialism–dictating what people wear, where they live, who educates their children, what they eat, what language they speak, what music they can make, and how they can dance–are those that contribute most directly to PTSD and widespread mental health and addiction problems.

When mental health professionals work to heal trauma, there’s a growing understanding that rhythm, music, and dance are all deeply powerful tools of healing and resilience. Our bodies are primed to thrive on rhythm, beginning with the heartbeat of the person gestating with, moving to being rocked as a baby. It’s why the stereotypical shellshocked person rocks back and forth. It’s a primal self-soothing mechanism. And that’s why we’re increasingly doing not just breathing exercises, but encouraging drumming, clapping rhythms, and basic dance. It’s why I’m starting to ask my clients to share songs that are important with me. It’s something that white settlers have literally been trained for years to think of as not just unimportant, but dangerous and alien.

i think not only that, but it also ties into erasure of culture and ethniticies to become “white”.

my mom’s grandparents came directly from Sicily, they erased a lot of their culture to become white in the 50s when they were not viewed as white (wop, guido, greasy/dirty italian, etc).  As a consequence, my Mom, her brother, me, my brother and my cousin do not speak any Italian/Sicilian and are practically divorced from that culture – only retaining the bare minimums through recipes and handed down memories (good and bad).

my Dad’s side is Scots-Irish, my grandfather was 1 of 16 kids, my great grandfather was 1 of 18.  none are connected to that culture.  I’m the only one that i know of that even listens to trad music or try to connect to that.

whiteness, especially in America, likes to colonize and erase ethnicities and put them in their place.  Classism also contributes to that, since only poor people don’t have access to upper class white culture, which in turn dictates back the allowed norms.

language, culture, music, dance is killed in that process