http://www.101destinations.com/images/Nefertiti_berlin.jpg

http://access.nscpcdn.com/gallery/i/w/wnew_nefertiti/nefertiti1.jpg

I see Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the faces of brothers on the street.

http://i.thisislondon.co.uk/i/pix/2007/07/tutankhamun_243×324.jpg

It makes me feel like because Egypt was an empire, they want to remove all historical blackness from it.

I know people will say “but the culture” this, or “the population” that, but if we go by that Miami would be part of Cuba, and Long Island part of Italy, rather than American cities rich with Cuban, and Italian culture respectively.

I know so off topic, but yeah T2- Rise of the Sambots sucked.

I guess the folks on the board were never told that “you people” and variations thereof, is not the thing to say to people of color. Apparently, they never read the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Uh, I really hope that you didn’t take offense that I was in complete agreement with what you said!

The fact that people generally think you’re overreacting if you talk about it (or even worse, think you “deserve” that sort of treatment) makes me very angry.

Canadians serving in the British military are rare. We have our own Armed Forces; individual Canadians may choose to immigrate and serve in other countries’ forces as they wish (the French Foreign Legion is another example.) Please do not confuse Canada’s ties to the same head of state as the UK with continuing political or military colonization. That is inaccurate - and offensive.

@Jadey

I share some of your frustrations with this map. I look at it and see both unexamined colonialism deployed as a playful thing (inappropriate IMO) and then the entire geography of Canada (although with the same political boundaries) divided, without the building of Canada and the reason for those political boundaries acknowledged at all. So I guess I am torn between two competing frustrations with the map, one, that the problematic parts of the building of Canada are not acknowledged, and two, the erasure of Canada and Canadian history as a distinct entity. It’s definitely a lazy map.

The guy was so private, and frankly I don’t think we will ever understand exactly what he was thinking or feeling during his life, since we have no reliable narrators. Obviously he had a traumatic childhood, and an eccentric adulthood, but other than that we know jack-all about why he did what he did to himself.

The one thing that IS clear is that he DID have vitiligo, and especially for someone that seemed to already have issues with their appearance (thanks Joe, you sociopathic fuck), I can only imagine how discovering you were slowly changing color would feel. From what I’ve heard from others who suffer from the same condition, for some it is easier to attempt to rid themselves of all pigmentation than to try and use makeup to keep themselves the same shade they were originally. All the testimony from vitiligo sufferers that I have encountered seem to express sympathy and understanding for Michael (and note that vitiligo is not just a disease that affects black folks - another thing I didn’t know before). I won’t comment on the plastic surgery or any of the other odd behaviors he showed over the years, but I think people should at least accept that the skin thing wasn’t just “oh hey, I think I’ll turn myself white!”

If there are 2 things I’ve learned from his death, it’s that no matter how embarrassing it is, coming clean about something is probably better than whatever the public will assume, and that people will believe any crazy shit about a famous person, and even when disproven they will cling to it like a dog drooling on your best shoes. (Granted, I already knew the second one thanks to last year’s election. good lord)

Great points. I guess people forget the history of the Brits in South Africa, the home of the first concentration camps where they locked up white Afrikaners.

If they’d locked up white women and children and let tens of thousands of them die why would anyone think they’d spare brown American Indians from a similar or worse fate?

It makes no sense.

You have to wonder why. I think he had body dysmorphia and he had some image that he kept trying to create in his own face.

Or, possibly, he had a routine plastic surgery go terribly wrong, and he just needed more and more surgeries to try to fix it, and then fix those.

In most cultures, boys are used to pass on a name or a bloodline. Most white/black Americans have been in the US for a while and have alternate male bloodlines. “I have all girls, but my brother’s sons will be Martins and the family name lives on!” Since many immigrants have to leave behind their families, they might be invested in making sure they have a male heir to preserve their bloodline and culture.

That was actually a big concern of my ex-boyfriend’s Vietnamese family. They wanted him to have a boy so that the family name would exist in the US. Generalizing that experience to all Asians, however, might be a little reaching.

Maybe it is better if parents who would resent a girl do’t have one. I know some very angry girls.

hmmm angry girls… sounds like me and my two younger sisters… my mother is now stuck with her one and only son who is unemployed, doesn’t help with housework or even talk to her… she waits on him hand and foot because he’s a male while all us girls have moved out of home because she was basically driving us three girls mental with her demands of our virginity/purity, marriage, religious faith etc.

HOWEVER. I can’t even begin to broach the topic of slavery, something that has been mentioned several times in these comments. But I do want to add that this made me upset, too, I jut don’t have anything useful to say. I mean, other than the obvious: fewer people would have suffered/died, of course, and that’s a lot better than more. But, as if abolishing slavery at an earlier date would have altered history from then up until now so much, that the Black/African American community would suffer fewer inequities? Yeah, no. And I bet fewer Black people would suffer from intergenerational trauma, huh? Because that’d, like, give them a head-start on that healing process. (Not that they wouldn’t be dealing with anything else along the way to the 21st century…) Yeah, no.
I don’t differentiate between Spanish conquistadors, the British crown, French explorers or (white) American soldiers. To put it lightly: they all had a hand in this shit.

I also want to add that I do think that what steampunks of color are doing is interesting. (I am coming at this from an angle of a punk ex-pat.) Many aspects of these sub-and-counter-cultures are very healthy for people of color to either reclaim (punk, which was NEVER a “white thing”) and immerse themselves in (steampunk, something I don’t know enough about to comment on too specifically, but always found fascinating). It was useful when I was younger, punk and d.i.y. ethics were what utilized to confront my own oppressions. It was also a form of escapism for me, during times when I needed it the most: battling racism, depression, homophobia, displacement, sexism and dispossession. I’m sure it is the same with steampunk, for steampunks of color. It is definitely not something I’d ever have the energy, the patience, the resources or even the state of mind to immerse myself in (steampunk) or re-visit (any counter-culture), but I admire those who can and do. (Not to mention, I am a fan of science fiction, fantasy and aviator goggles. Hah.) I appreciate other ideas of an alternate history, but people need to be mindful of *where* these unworn paths would have lead and also not integrate Anglophilia into certain spaces.

[/long ass comment]

And yes, I call bullshit that preference for boys is something only found in “other” cultures. I have seen plenty of it even among my feminist friends and colleagues.