yellow dress

I am Chloe, and I am a bunch of words.
I am an intersectional feminist, a secular humanist, an atheist, pro-choice, left-wing, sex+, a mental health and disabilities advocate, a skeptic and a freethinker.
I am a black belt, an artist, a gamer, a tea-drinker and a cat-lover.
I love yellow, the Simpsons, Harry Potter, manga/anime, kinkiness, P!nk, costumes, quotes and gaming.
I also run a tumblr solely for funny stuff, steampunkbanana (linked below).

"Students who considered themselves socialists were not so much interested in the poor as they were desirous of leading the poor, of being their guides and saviors. It was just this paternalism toward the poor that the vision of solidarity I had learned in religious settings was meant to challenge. From a spiritual perspective, the poor were there to guide and lead the rest of us by example if not by outright action and testimony. As a student I read Marx, Gramsci, and a host of other male thinkers on the subject of class. These works provided theoretical paradigms but rarely offered tools for confronting the complexity of class in daily life. […] [W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it."

— bell hooks, where we stand: Class Matters (via deeannmarie)

"To make a mess that another person will have to deal with—the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack—is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms."

—

Barbara Ehrenreich, “Made to Order”

Relevant to an argument I just had on Twitter about “disruptive” protest at Walmart in supposed solidarity with the Black Friday strikes. Picket, protest, march and rally all you want, hold a sit-in, but please, before you do things like deliberately create a mess in the store or leave a full cart in the checkout line, consider who’s going to have to clean up the mess that you make. It’s not going to be Rob Walton or any of the other multibillionaires. It won’t even be the assistant manager. It’ll be the same low-wage worker who maybe wanted to go on strike but wasn’t quite convinced, or who was threatened by their boss, who’s working an extra-long shift on the worst shopping day of the year.

Solidarity doesn’t mean you decide for yourself what is best for the workers. It means showing up in the ways they need and want you to and letting them decide how to build worker power.

(via champagnecandy)

casual-isms:

Casual classism is the phrase “white trash.” Not that white people don’t have white privilege, but 99% of the people using the phrase don’t even think about the fact that they’re calling people “trash” because they’re poor.

Also the fact that by adding the descriptor “white”, one is implying that all other “trash” are PoC.

Being Poor

debatenerd:

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is living next to the freeway.

Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

Being poor is off-brand toys.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is a lumpy futon bed.

Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

By John Scalzi

This is so poignant, it brings tears to my eyes.

planetsconverse:

Earth’s richest 1,000 individuals now control as much wealth as the poorest 2.5 billion people on the planet. This super elite uses its vast wealth to control the media, influence politicians, and bend laws to their favor.

Read that again.

1,000 on this planet own as much wealth as the poorest 2,500,000,000 people.

On average, that’s 1 person owning as much as every 2,500,000 people within that poorest 2.5 billion.

0.000014% of the world’s population owns as much wealth as the *bottom* 36% of the world’s population.

… I can’t.

(Source: thepoliticalfreakshow)

saneoldsameold:

I keep thinking about how clear the connection between classism and racism is, and wondering why people don’t understand that poor is often equated with brown and THAT is what makes being poor bad.

And if you don’t believe that just think about the classist words we use at brown people and then think about the term ‘white trash’.

‘White’ is there as a modifier for ‘trash’ because ‘trashy’ people are assumed to be brown until proven otherwise.

(Source: writingrhythmandretail)

"The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That’s impossible. Capitalism works only if the vast majority of the population are kept poor enough to never quit working, are kept poor enough to accept distasteful jobs society cannot function without. If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers? It follows that the poorer the general population is made, the greater the worth of the money held by the wealthy, in terms of the lives which may be bought and sold with it."

— Michael Rivero (via tigersmilk, fucknobigbrother)

tookmyskull:

psychozombieatheist:

anirishginger:

We need to hear more stories like this in the news:

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, “like what’s going on here?” Diaz says. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Diaz replied: “If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me … hey, you’re more than welcome.

“You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help,” Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

“The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi,” Diaz says. “The kid was like, ‘You know everybody here. Do you own this place?’”

“No, I just eat here a lot,” Diaz says he told the teen. “He says, ‘But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’”

Diaz replied, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”

“Yea, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way,” the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. “He just had almost a sad face,” Diaz says.

The teen couldn’t answer Diaz — or he didn’t want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, “Look, I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill ‘cause you have my money and I can’t pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”

The teen “didn’t even think about it” and returned the wallet, Diaz says. “I gave him $20 … I figure maybe it’ll help him. I don’t know.”

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen’s knife — “and he gave it to me.”

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, “You’re the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch.”

“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”

Hear Julio’s NPR story here. http://m.npr.org/story/89164759?url=/2008/03/28/89164759/a-victim-treats-his-mugger-right

There should be more stories like this.

This is so lovely.

(Source: girlthrualookingglass)

"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

—

Mother Teresa (via standingfast)

Oh yeah, because Mother Teresa was such an upstanding individual and has so much compassion for the living. You do know that the vast majority of the money she received while rubbing elbows with the world’s millionaires was dirty money, right? And when asked to return the money because it was proven to be swindled, she did not? Oh, and her “hospitals” set up to “help the sick” were really nothing more than human warehouses, just places to put the sick with the luxury of a mat on the floor to lie on and await death, never being diagnosed, malnourished and usually surrounded by countless other sick people, their only caretakers untrained Nuns and Brothers. Yeah, that sounds really nice, especially considering that humble Mother Teresa got excellent, top-notch quality care from highly trained medical professionals using state-of-the-art technology to help her when she got sick, huh?

I mean yeah, she called abortion a “destroyer of peace,” but she also said “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” This was probably shortly after she guilted them into giving up what little they could give, and then turning around and giving it to the fat, wealthy, luxurious Church.

Oh, and then the real icing on the cake for you Catholics—you do know about her diaries, right? The ones riddled with doubt? To quote, “I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist. People think my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew,” she wrote, “Heaven means nothing.”

So before you decide to go a-quoting your beloved, ill-beatified saint, you might want to take a peak at her personal track record when it came to both your faith and her actual reverence for human life—and remember, children are poor and it is “beautiful” for them to suffer, and were in those disgusting excuses for hospitals, too.

(via thisgingersnapsback)

(Source: bitsandpiecesofwhoiam)

canisfamiliaris:

The 1% on the Shoulders of the 99%

Korean sculptor and installation artist Do Ho Suh created this awesome installation, entitled Floor, that might not look like much until you get good and close to it. Glass plates rest on thousands of multicolored miniature plastic figures who are crowded together with their heads and arms turned skyward. Together, they support the weight of the individual visitor who steps onto the floor.

Currently showing at Lehmann Maupin’s pop-up gallery at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) until February 11th, Floor is a wonderfully thought-provoking installation.

[via archiemcphee :: My Modern Metropolis]

"Every year, 9 million children die before their fifth birthday. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a one-in-thirty chance of dying while giving birth - in the developed world, the chance is one in 5,600. There are at least twenty-five countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average person is expected to live no more than thirty-five years. In India alone, more than 50 million school-going children cannot read a very simple text.
This is the kind of paragraph that might make you want to shut this book and, ideally, forget about this whole business of world poverty. The problem seems too big, too intractable. Our goal with this book is to persuade you not to."

— Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

theoutcaste:

I love this picture. It shows two walks of life in one image almost like heaven and hell. When I look at this picture the first word that comes to mind is money. Money is the weirdest object on earth. It seems like once you develop a love for money all your human emotions alter towards money. People feel sad, crazy, angry, guilty, hungry, hatred, or affection, because of money. In fact money is the only inanimate object on earth that triggers human emotions. Money is really just paper but such a huge part of human life. Money develops this dogma in people where they feel like they always need more and more it never stops. You can never settle, we watch game shows all the time who really walks away with the money, Human greed craves more and more. Money is one of the strangest paradox’s in life. People can go their whole lives without even questioning money, it’s a instinct we are basically born with now without even knowing what it is.

MARGINALIZED & ALIENATING: Victim-blaming

notafraidofruins:

Figure A: “You’re poor? You’re just lazy. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps!”

Figure B: “You need an abortion? Don’t have sex! Retroactively!”

Figure C: “You were raped? Maybe you shouldn’t have been wearing such a short skirt, huh?”

Figure D: “You got sick or hurt and can’t afford health care? Maybe you shouldn’t have done that. Also, see Figure A.”

If you make people hate themselves for things outside of their control you barely have to do anything to keep them in line. Feel free to add more.

(Source: notafraidofruins)

To “pro-lifers”…

pdrennan:

“Let me tell you some things. I used to investigate child abuse and neglect. I can tell you how to stop the vast majority of abortion in the world. First, make knowledge and access to contraception widely available. Start teaching kids before they hit puberty. Teach them about domestic violence and coercion, and teach them not to coerce and rape. Create a strong, loving community where women and girls feel safe and supported in times of need. Because guess what? They aren’t. You know what happens to babies born under such circumstances? They get hurt, unnecessarily. They get sick, unnecessarily. They get removed from parents who love them but who are unprepared for the burden of a child. Resources? Honey, we try. There aren’t enough resources anywhere. There are waiting lists, and promises, and maybes. If the government itself can’t hook people up, what makes you think an impoverished single mom can handle it? Abolish poverty. Do you have any idea how much childcare costs? Daycare can cost as much or more than monthly rent. They may be inadequately staffed. Getting a private nanny is a nice idea, but they don’t come cheap either. Relatives? Do they own a car? Does the bus run at the right times? Do they have jobs of their own they need to work just to keep the lights on? Are they going to stick around until you get off you convenience store shift at 4 AM? Do they have criminal histories that will make them unsuitable as caregivers when CPS pokes around? You gonna pay for that? Who’s going to pay for that? End rape. I know your type errs on the side of blaming the woman, but I’ve seen little girls who’ve barely gotten their periods pregnant because somebody thought raping preteens was an awesome idea. You want to put a child through that? Or someone with a mental or physical inability for whom pregnancy would be frightening, painful or even life-threatening? I’ve seen nonverbal kids who had their feet sliced up by caregivers for no fucking reason at all, you think sexual abuse doesn’t happen either? You say there’s lots of couples who want to adopt. Kiddo, what they want to adopt are healthy white babies, preferably untainted by the wombs and genetics of women with alcohol or drug dependencies. I’ve seen the kids they don’t want, who almost no one wants. You people focus only on the happy pink babies, the gigglers, the ones who grow and grow with no trouble. Those are not the kids who linger in foster care. Those are certainly not the older kids and teenagers who age out of foster care and then are thrown out in the streets, usually with an array of medical and mental health issues. Are they too old to count? And yeah, I’ve seen the babies, little hand-sized things barely clinging to life. There’s no glory, no wonder there. There is no wonder in a pregnant woman with five dollars to her name, so deep in depression you wonder if she’ll be alive in a week. Therapy costs money. Medicine costs money. Food, clothes, electricity cost money. Government assistance is a pittance; poverty drives women and girls into situations where they are forced to rely on people who abuse them to survive. (I’ve been up in more hospitals than I can count.) >In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom $50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician. I ain’t never seen them sitting up for hours with an autistic child who screams and rages so his mother can get some sleep while she rests up from working 14-hour days. I don’t see them fixing leaks in rundown houses or playing with a kid while the police prepare to interview her about her sexual abuse. They’re not paying for the funerals of babies and children who died after birth, when they truly do become independent organisms. And the crazy thing is they think they’ve already done their job, because the child was born! Aphids give birth, girl. It’s no miracle. You want to speak for the weak? Get off your high horse and get your hands dirty helping the poor, the isolated, the ill and mentally ill women and mothers and their children who already breathe the dirty air. You are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for children. You don’t have a flea’s comprehension of injustice. You are not doing shit for life until you get in there and fight that darkness. Until you understand that abortion is salvation in a world like ours. Does that sound too hard? Do you really think suffering post-birth is more permissible, less worthy of outrage? “Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.”

—

desliz (via quoilecanard)

take that, fuck faces

(Source: speakfortheweak)