(crossposted from my personal blog)

I know that pointing out RoF Fail is a little like kicking a puppy, but you know how it is when Nick Mamatas sends you a link clearly meant to induce blog-worthy rage — you just have to accommodate him.

So, LJ user torrain was reading the latest issue of Realms of Fantasy and didn’t get far before the facepalm reached epic proportions. Inside the magazine’s movie review of The Last Airbender ze found this awesomeness:

However, The Last Airbender has already caught flak for “whitewashing,” meaning, the casting of white actors (or actors who appear to be white) to play non-white characters, especially when those characters are heroic. It’s a hot-button issue that dredges up memories of images like Al Jolsen wearing black-face makeup. Of course, there are two sides to this coin. On one hand, whitewashing can feel insulting, disrespectful, and disappointing to movie-goers. Many may label it as politically incorrect. On the other hand, anyone who has run a casting call will tell you that when you find the right person for the role, something magical happens. Time seems to stop, and you feel as if the character comes to life right in front of your eyes. The character is no longer ink on paper; the character begins to live and breathe. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the individual human being reading for the part. Adding to the mix is the fact that some roles written for white people have been won by actors of color, and some roles written for men have been played by women. In other words, whitewashing isn’t a one-way street. It’s a difficult situation that places filmmakers between the goal of finding magic and not offending audiences. At the end of the day, most directors simply want to tell a good story.

There’s a lot of obvious fail going on here, and it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with this notion that “something magical happens” when the right person comes along for the role, even if that person is white and the character is not. Even if this was ever true somewhere in the world, it’s not true in this movie. Let’s quote Roger Ebert talking about the casting, specifically:

Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they’re all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It’s a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad. I don’t say they’re untalented, I say they’ve been poorly served by  Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing.

Entertainment Weekly:

The trouble with The Last Airbender is that Aang, as a character, is a saintly abstraction (Noah Ringer plays him with a sensitive pout that grows cloying), and he’s surrounded by generic young actors who are like place holders for real stars.

Variety:

Shyamalan has worked wonders with child actors before, but Ringer is no Haley Joel Osment, delivering some fancy footwork but zero charisma in the pic’s key role. Most dialogue scenes are framed in tight Sergio Leone-style closeup, emphasizing the actors’ wooden nature. At that proximity, we notice that Rathbone never blinks; nor can he be counted on to deliver any of the comic relief of his animated counterpart.

I could go on. The issue here is not that M. Night just happened to find these amazing kids to play these roles who just happened to be white. This is what he or the producers or the studio set out to do from the beginning because, even though millions of people love the cartoon and its clearly Asian characters, they felt that audiences just can’t handle brown and yellow people as the heroes. As the evil villains, sure. But protagonists must be white, right?

Whitewashing, no matter how much you pretty it up with the magical casting feeling of amazingness, is still just damn wrong.

The second half of that paragraph, which you probably didn’t even read because the first part was so rage-inducing with its faily wrongness, I shall paste again, because it also needs addressing:

Adding to the mix is the fact that some roles written for white people have been won by actors of color, and some roles written for men have been played by women. In other words, whitewashing isn’t a one-way street. It’s a difficult situation that places filmmakers between the goal of finding magic and not offending audiences. At the end of the day, most directors simply want to tell a good story.

Jesus. Okay, deep breath. First of all, the conceit of having women play roles written for men is usually about deconstruction more than it’s about some magical audition process or someone being “right” for a role. And I can’t come up with any examples of people of color playing roles “written for white people” unless you’re talking about classical theater or something. Maybe they mean Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? But again, when POC play, uh “white” roles, that actually has a different weight and purpose behind it than whitewashing. The power differentials there are NOT equal. Are POC overrepresented in Hollywood movies and American television? No. Are white people? Yes. So when whitewashing occurs, do you know who it hurts and disrespects and diminishes? POC.

The fact that this Realms columnist doesn’t understand any of this is already major fail. The fact that his or her editor doesn’t understand any of this is even bigger fail. And it’s leading many people to question why they would even bother to save such a magazine from its impending cancellation when all they have to look forward to is a bunch of racefail in the non-fiction section.

I’m just going to bottom line it for you: Whitewashing is never okay no matter what. If you don’t agree, then you’re really too far gone to exist in polite and cultured society and perhaps you should do us all a favor and go back to the cave you most certainly crawled out of.

Is that too harsh?

Realms of Fantasy Columnist Condones Whitewashing When “Magic” Is Involved -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

The Linkmistress would like to interrupt her regular linkspams to bring you an actual blog. With words. As usual, civility is requested and will be enforced. Iron fist, velvet glove etc.

crossposted. The following critique is based on the media I have consumed and the experiences I have had. Feel free to rec media in which the things I am complaining about have been fixed. Except that Pullman fellow. I tried. I tried. But.

Pharyngula is linked to my old blog, and thus, when I go over there, I sometimes check his feed. I say sometimes, because the writer thereof is like many white middleclass atheists in that FAIL! on race issues, and the difference in scale between religions affected by the past how many hundreds of years of colonialism and Christianity is constant and unremitting (and the comment section is WORSE.) This post however Letting go of gods is a reason for joy…like being free of prison, sparked an annoyed rant that I had been turning over in my mind for a very long time.

I am an atheist. A black atheist at that. And I am HAPPY AND FULFILLED ABOUT THIS. I do NOT run around wistfully gazing after religious people, feeling sad that I am missing out on the experience of faith. Nor do I run around feeling nihilistic and angry at the world because there is no God and therefore LIFE ON EARTH HAS NO MEANING !!!!!!!!!!!!! And I sure as hell do not run about committing crimes and hurting people left, right and center because God isn’t in my life. I have ethics. And morals even. And NO that it NOT because God is in my life and I don’t know it, WHAT!!! Hell I formed my ideas of ethics and morals in direct opposition to some of the things in the Christian Bible (fer instance, the idea of a god sending his people to go kill people and take their possessions reminds me of European colonialism and is WRONG WRONG WRONG in my ethical universe. Women are intelligent and sensible and should therefore have been in on the equal human rights from the beginning of time, no excuses. In fact, in my ethical universe, strict instructions about the equality of EVERYONE from transpeople to disabled people to poc to people with alternate sexualities to people in different classes to anyone who has a mix of these identities, plus anyone else who might have been left out of this list would be MY FIRST FREAKING COMMANDMENT. And that’s just the beginning.)

I am SICK AND TIRED of encountering those tropes in most of the tv, movies and books which even deign to acknowledge the fact that people who don’t believe in gods exist in the first place. Almost every black movie and tv show or book mentions God somewhere. If a character does not believe in God, the person is taught a firm lesson, which is usually accompanied by humiliation of some sort, so as to bring them back into line (praise ye the Lord!!) For white characters in tv shows, more latitude is given in that there are atheist characters, but we end up with people like House, or atheists who are made to accept that the fact that someone has faith makes them a better person. (I think I have seen that dynamic in Bones but I may be wrong. Anyone watch the show and can clarify?) Which. It doesn’t. It makes you a different person. Good for you. But my lack of faith is just as good as your abundance of it and gives you no moral cookies over me, kthx.

So. I want proudly atheist characters who are happy about it in my media. Minorities of every kind, even. Because we exist. And our stories deserve to be respectfully told.

The myth of atheists being “less” than religious people -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Adviser for Americans arrested in Haiti suspected of Child Trafficking in El Salvador. So am I supposed to believe they just happened to find someone connected to human trafficking and hired him? Don’t answer that. In other “I hate the world” news this shit right here? Prime example of what happens when groups get so focused on their pet interest that they throw all logic and common sense out the window. The reality is that abortions are not happening because Planned Parenthood exists. Long before Margaret Sanger was a notion in her mother’s eye women had ways to end a pregnancy. And they did so (and still do so) for a lot of reasons having nothing to do with race, though as with everything else racism does play a part in the underpinnings of some of those reasons.

First up, there’s the purely financial aspect of things. We live in a country that begrudges people a living wage and health insurance. For some reason these are viewed as things you have to earn, and if you don’t manage to secure them then it’s all your fault for not using those magical boostraps. Never mind pesky details like limited educational opportunities, a sagging job market, and the overall lack of boots or straps that plague much of our population. Attitudes toward public assistance are ugly and filled with all sort of ridiculous myths about recipients. Especially recipients of color. That Welfare Queen schtick is alive and well along with an idea that more money = better parents. Not true.

Then there’s the reality that not every relationship that produces a child is a safe healthy long term one. That’s not exclusive to any race, but the reality is that a WOC in an abusive situation is going to have an even harder time getting help. And more kids can make it harder to leave. And of course there’s the simply reality that not every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy for a whole other host of reasons. But hey, why let facts get in the way when you can fin all new ways to pretend that WOC don’t love their children. After all, if they breed them but can’t feed them then the answer is to steal save them right? Right. Oh wait, I was supposed to be outraged at the idea of abortion wasn’t I? Sorry, I reserve that emotion for stupid manipulative ad campaigns that ignore reality.

Evaluating the Outrageous -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I’ve been struggling with writing this post for some time now. On the one hand there are things I feel need to be said about the treatment of Caster Semenya (especially in light of the news that she has been placed under a suicide watch), on the other hand I don’t want to add to the ridiculous, offensive, dehumanizing treatment that she’s been receiving to date. There is this sick undercurrent to the coverage reminiscent of the treatment of Saartjie Baartman (better known as the Hottentot Venus) particularly with the framing of the discussions of her body. There has been a rush to compare Caster to “real” women with pundits pointing to the size of her breasts, her shoulders, even the shape of her jaw as “proof that she is a he and should be disqualified” because somehow there’s a specific concrete metric for “normal” femininity.

And if you’re deemed to be outside the range of “normal” all the basic rules we were taught as children about polite behavior and common courtesy fly out the window. If the press coverage is any indication many people feel entitled to poke and prod and discuss her body like she’s specifically on display to satisfy their curiosity. After all it’s not like she’s human or anything, what with her having the temerity to (maybe) be born intersexed. Instead she’s a freak with no feelings, no right to privacy, and above all no right to her own body. Right? If you’re staring at your screen right now and contemplating asking if I have lost my everloving mind? I totally understand that reaction. Because it’s how I’ve felt every single time I’ve read an article about Caster’s “condition” or seen someone expounding at length on her body without once pausing to consider that her humanity is being questioned along with her gender. Looking at the descriptions of the treatment of Sara Baartman I’m sure a modern reaction would include an acknowledgment that the way Sara was treated was abominable.

Of course it was abominable and shameful and disgusting. So is what’s happening right now to Caster. And it’s not just about the treatment of Caster Semenya. Yesterday I got into a long protracted discussion about someone wanting trans people to explain the workings of their sexual organs so that they could include a sex scene in a story they were writing. And I explained over and over again that no one should feel entitled to such intimate information, especially to satisfy what amounted to prurient curiosity. And all the basic arguments from the bingo card were laid out (including my favorite “Well how else are people supposed to know if they don’t ask?”) because apparently for a lot of people it has never occurred to them that they don’t have a right to someone else’s body or to their experience. It has literally never occurred to them that people who are not like them have boundaries. Because they’re curious about the “freaks” and their curiosity trumps any delusions of humanity or equality.

Between the misogyny and the racism and the privilege and the sheer entitlement on display this is one of those areas where intersectionality cuts to the bone and then beyond. Being human isn’t about fitting into a box designed by someone else. It’s not something other people get to define for you. And if you think that the way Caster has been treated makes sense because she’s a public figure, or you think you have a right to treat people like an exhibit to satisfy your interest in their experience? You’re directly using your privilege (whatever it may be) to oppress someone. This idea that examining and inspecting and discussing someone else’s body is acceptable behavior because they are “different” is so reprehensible. But, it is also an idea that permeates our culture. That’s the point of tabloids and gossip and fatphobia and every other ‘ism I can think of right now. That’s why a friend just posted about having to tell someone repeatedly that they were not going to be allowed to touch her hair only to be met with questions about why she was refusing. As though she owed this person access to her body.

Curiously enough I think we can all agree that we expect our boundaries to be respected. That we expect people to have some sense of manners and decorum and not stare or point or generally treat us poorly. So then, why are we as a culture so comfortable deciding that the Other (as defined by us) is supposed to accept our intrusion? What is this idea that that they should explain their experience to the world at large? It’s always framed in terms of normal and different, but other than being a member of the majority what gives us the right to define normal? The oppression inherent in turning the public’s gaze to someone and demanding that they explain themselves is often waved away as just a part of life. Because somehow the public’s desire to know has become the public’s right to know. And the idea that knowledge is power has been turned on its head to give the “normal” the power over those that they deem to be Other. It’s unacceptable behavior no matter how you frame it and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

Race, Gender, and the Oppressive Public Gaze… -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

…about all this “birther” crap, in which fine upstanding folk who are legitimate natural-born citizens of this fine country (the US of A, because we’re all from it or want to be from it, of course) incessantly and illogically question the fact that our president is also legitimately natural-born…

…is that they’re not crazy. They’re just fucking racists.

I mean, it’s obvious with the Republicans. They’re just using this shit (and other shit) to blow smoke over their attempt to scuttle single-payer healthcare. But all these individual teabagging crackpots who jump up at rallies and rant about Obama being from Kenya? They’re not really crackpots. They’re just the same old garden-variety racists we’ve always had, using “he’s not a citizen” as a euphemism for “he’s not completely white OMFG he’s got 50% black cooties straight outta Africa and I bet the White House smells funny now somebody go get a roooope!!!”

See, although African Americans are generally better-off than other racial groups in this one respect — we don’t get the “But where are you really from?” schtick quite as often as Asians and Latinos/as — there’s still quite a bit of feeling out there that we aren’t really Americans. Yeah, even though we built the place. Even though most of the people saying this aren’t really (Native) Americans either, if that’s how they want to play it. It all just comes down to one very simple fact: that “American”, in the minds of these people, equals one thing — white.

So it really doesn’t matter how much proof gets shown to confirm that Obama is too, really, truly, an American. The birthers aren’t going to buy it. Because the only proof these people will accept is a 100% European American genetic makeup, or 99.44% with the incriminating .66 hidden acceptably far back in the family tree. That worked for McCain — don’t see the “birthers” going after him, do you? But since that ain’t gonna happen in Obama’s case, they’re never going to shut up.

We don’t need a new term for the birthers. They’re just the usual plain, boring old racists wearing new clothes and chanting new slogans, because they’ve figured out that slurs and hate speech just don’t have the same cachet these days. But underneath the new trappings, they’re the same old shit. So can we please stop paying so much attention to them and get back to healthcare?

The Thing Not Being Said -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

About a week ago I read a review for the new Sam Raimi horror flick Drag Me To Hell. The description offered went something like:

Christine Brown is  a loan officer at a bank. When she refuses to give an old Gypsy woman an extention on her loan, the woman curses her to be dragged to hell.

My immediate thought was: Gypsy curses? Really, Sam Raimi? Really? This is the best you could come up with? I hate you.

Nick Mamatas explains it all here much better than I could because he actually saw the movie. The bottom line is: that’s some seriously fucked up prejudice and stereotypes that should not be acceptable at all. AT ALL. It’s like the dark side to the whole Magical Negro thing — Magical VooDoo/Witch Doctor/Evil Gypsy Person who will curse you with their evil, heathen magic if you do something like steal their jewelry, deny them their loan, kill their daughters, or just look at them the wrong way.

This is not okay. It’s just not. Do people who write this shit even get that Gypsies are real people? Do they think they’re some sort of made-up folktale people who only exist for our amusement? If so, what the fuck is wrong with those people?

Movie makers, TV creators, fiction writers: stop with the Gypsy curses, already. It is: NOT Okay.

Dear Hollywood, Gypsy Curses? NOT Okay. -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Heard about this through the Carl Brandon mailing list:

While the facts surrounding the kidnapping and rescue of the Maersk Alabama Captain Richard Phillips have been widely reported, less well-known is that ship which saved him was commanded by a black woman, Rear Admiral Michelle Howard.

Howard received the assignment of leading the U.S. Navy’s counter-piracy task force just three days before the Maersk Alabama was attacked by Somalia pirates.

“It’s probably one of the most exciting missions the Navy has been on in for a long while,” Howard told the Navy Times.

Did you know the Maersk captain was rescued by a black woman? I didn’t either.

On the one hand, I’m almost glad this wasn’t publicized; I could almost believe this means Howard wasn’t regarded as special or unusual by the media covering the Maersk incident. That’s what we want, after all — not to be depicted as a race of thugs and hoochiemamas that occasionally spawns a Morgan Freeman-like Messiah figure that will save all us from tsunamis terrorists the recession. We are ordinary people, with the same range of characters and behaviors as anybody else — good and bad. But I highly doubt Howard was overlooked by the mainstream media because she was “too ordinary”. I think Captain Phillips fit the image in the producers’/reporters’/editors’ heads of what heroism should look like: white, male, one brave man surrounded by black savages. And I think Admiral Howard defied that image, being black and female and in charge of a diverse team of competent people, so they discarded her. I think we still exist as nothing more than a collection of stereotypes and inaccurate assumptions in the eyes of most Americans — unfortunately including ourselves. We’re not ordinary enough to have ordinary heroes, not yet. Not according to them.

But fortunately, there is the blogosphere.

So. Admiral Howard’s a hero. Pass it on.

Ordinary Heroes -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

That said, I haven’t said much about this before today because my feelings pretty much match Ta-Nehisi Coates’: meh. Maybe it helps to provide some “local context” here, because I think a lot of people don’t get what most New Yorkers do: the Post is crap. It’s a step above the National Enquirer in terms of quality, and that’s only because it doesn’t talk about aliens and its inanity has a focus — which is to be the voice of the substantial contingent of conservatives in this famously liberal city. It’s the paper version of Fox News, which isn’t surprising because it’s owned by the same guy. And because of this, I do not believe for one moment that the editor who approved that cartoon didn’t know exactly how it would be received. I think the Post is getting exactly what it wanted here.

Think about it. These are hard times for the Republicans right now. They’re struggling to find a way to reformat themselves in the wake of the backhand slap they received on November 4th. While the party’s leaders flounder in search of a vision/purpose/direction, however, the party’s ideologues don’t have this problem; they’re still repeating the same message they’ve been parroting for the past 20+ years. But with the leadership gone silent, the ideologues’ broken record is suddenly much more audible than it has been for the past couple of (campaign) years. Which is why we’ve heard so much lately from Rush “Crackhead” Limbaugh. He hasn’t been in rehab all this time, as I had naively assumed; he’s just popular again, largely because many Republican voters are desperate to hear someone, anyone, speak up for their side.

Likewise Fox News and, now, the Post. These media entities are jockeying for control of the party’s soul, in hopes of pushing back the darkness — pun intended — that might, just might, cause the Republican party to reform into something a little more representative of America and less representative of the angry white men who’ve been the party’s guiding light. So naturally we can expect some blatant appeals to the paradigms that have proven so effective for this group in the past. They’re gambling that this “back to basics” strategy will work. And it might. Despite all the slightly creepy “post-racial” camaraderie we’ve been seeing in the nation since Election Day, most of us know full well that racism isn’t dead and that a substantial percentage of the 46% who voted against Obama did so because they hate black people (even the ones who are half white). How does one rally this group in the wake of a national defeat, and let them know that somebody in Republican Land still loves them? This cartoon is one rallying cry. Expect more.

That said, I’m not certain this strategy will still work the way that Rush and the gang think. Sure, there are plenty of folks out there who will respond positively to this appeal to their baser nature. But there are also a lot of Republicans who are taking a hard look at themselves right now, and asking some hard questions about the tried-and-true ways of doing things. Already we’re seeing signs of an unheard-of revolt by some Post staffers in the wake of this cartoon. The Republican base might be OK with it, but the base is still the minority within the party, and it’s growing smaller as time passes. The rest of the Republicans, I’m guessing, are starting to read the writing on the wall: the old ways of doing things have got to change.

Before they do, though, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more dead monkeys.

The New York Post cartoon: this is my unsurprised face. -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

But that didn’t account for the vehemence I’ve been seeing in the media and elsewhere about Suleman. Sure, some of it is clearly rooted in the revelation that the state will be paying for these kids’ care, and the creepy possibility that she may have blown some of that state-provided money on plastic surgery to look like Angelina Jolie. But there’s far worse examples out there of unhealthily large families, narcissistic parents, and exploitation of public resources. Why’s this one got people so riled?

Then I read this analysis of the situation, which I think does a good job of explaining the outrage.

The great storm of public fury that has been kicked up by these octuplets is more than an annoyance at the water cooler. It is a vivid demonstration of the price that our country pays every day for the comforting moral clarity of the “right to life,” a fragile construct that has always been partly about not letting pregnant women “escape responsibility” for their actions. If a mother’s life goes to hell because she can’t afford to raise a child, well, she should have thought of that when she let herself get knocked up. The child becomes a sort of righteous punishment, not a person — and, in similar fashion, those “outraged” by Suleman’s story clearly hope that she (and, inevitably, her children) will have a rough time of it. It is the worship of motherhood, and the hatred of mothers.

This analysis feels intuitively on-track to me. But I think it’s missing two additional layers of meaning.

First, I think this is not just the worship of motherhood, but worship of ideal motherhood — ideal only if it’s within the strictures of traditional marriage and patriarchial religion, and therefore controlled one way or another by men. Uncontrolled (or female-controlled, which is the same thing in some of these people’s eyes) motherhood is never desirable. Most media outlets are reporting that the father of Suleman’s children has been caught by surprise by this, and is “a bit overwhelmed”. I think the anti-abortion movement will hold up Suleman not as a heroine, but as a cautionary tale: men, control your womenfolk, or they’ll have babies as they see fit, and see what happens then?

Second, it didn’t escape my notice, when I saw clips of her on TV, that Suleman is a bit on the brown side. And I could be wrong about this, but her name seems like a derivation of a common Arabic name, Suleiman — common enough that I, a garden-variety American with about as much knowledge of Arabic culture as I have of nuclear physics, recognized it as such. I could be totally spinning in the wind here; she might be Swedish for all I know. But I can’t help wondering how much of the rage I’m seeing — not merely outrage, but murderous incandescent fury — is because the Welfare Queen specter has been raised in Americans’ minds, perhaps conflated in some weird-ass way with The Arab Threat and maybe even The Brown Conspiracy To Outbreed White People? (Suleman’s fertility doctor appears to be Indian, see. We’re all in on it!)

You remember the Welfare Queen, don’t you? Ronald Reagan created her to get elected 20 years ago, as columnist Paul Krugman notes:

As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”

Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

So even though the vast majority of welfare recipients in the US are rural whites forced into poverty by the destruction of America’s industrial economy, the association of welfare with greedy, lazy, urban brown women has become indelible in the American subconscious. And even though the pendulum seems to have swung back since Reagan’s time, and we’re now in a vaguely liberal phase, my suspicion is that this linkage still exists, hair-triggered in our national zeitgeist, ready to fire at the first sign of dusky skin and fertile ovaries. That Suleman may be of Arab ethnicity — the zeitgeist’s latest boogeywoman — just compounds the issue. Now instead of black wombs destroying America for selfish gain, we’ve got Arab wombs destroying America in order to imitate and replace white women. It’s like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers without the giant beanpods.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Suleman’s case trotted out again in about 18 months, when the Republicans start campaigning for the midterm elections. After all, if Reagan’s Cadillac-driving mystery woman could be so effective, how much more effective the collagen-injecting octuplet mom, who at least has a name?

Return of the revenge of the daughter of the Welfare Queen -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Um. Yeahno. What they said.

Oh, and don’t read the comments at TMZ. We PoC need to watch our stress levels. No, seriously, don’t.

That Wholesome Disney Image -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman