Kdotfann - Black Beauty

Things black girls are tired of. We are tired of yo shit.  My lil funky comic© Kadejah H. 2013

Amazing twists!

ahhh!

I totally agree because since I started playing the game I observed the same thing.

racism in fashion app games

ok so i’ve been playing this fashion game called “covet fashion” which started off being SUPER fun. 

u basically build ur closet up by completing missions, jet setting off to other countries, and attending events. 

here’s the problem: u submit ur outfits to be judged by the masses of OTHER ppl who also play the game. their votes determine ur score—whether u pass and score more swag for ur closet or fail and have to try again.

but after the first three missions i was having a REALLY hard time. i would put together outfits that met the mission requirements but i couldn’t ever seem to get a high enough score to move forward and/or build up my closet. i would look at the top scoring outfits for the contest i entered and couldn’t understand why my outfits kept failing when those winning looks weren’t even that special.

and then it hit me.

EVERY time i submitted an outfit my model had the darkest skin. ALWAYS. and why not? my model was an extension of myself and i have darker skin so i wanted my model to have the same. the top scoring looks always featured white models or models of color with lighter skin. when i would go to vote on looks i noticed that whenever a darker skinned model was up against a lighter skin one REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY HAD ON THEY ALWAYS LOST.

what i was thinking seemed legit but i HAD to be sure. so i put together a few more looks but i used much lighter skin tones and ALL OF A SUDDEN all these levels i couldn’t pass before i was passing with flying colors. i shit u not—i would win even when i put on shitty fucking outfits. 

so i got curious about the low star reviews of the app and SURE ENOUGH there were few reviewers that had actually noticed the SAME THING! they pointed out the obvious racial bias and asked the app makers to come up with some other way to score outfits that wasn’t entirely user generated and ITA.

cause i was REALLY enjoying the game and i kept getting so frustrated when i couldnt win thinking i was the one who was doing something wrong when it had nothing to do with me at all. i mean shit— i kno i cant even enjoy the simplest shit thanks to racism but this is some BULLSHIT. i felt sincerely distressed because i wanted to win but the idea of having to pick lighter skinned models when i didnt want to just to do so didnt sit well with me so i ended up just deleting the app.

aint that some shit?

Whoa. For the first time ever, a Victoria’s Secret model walked the runway with natural hair. Rather than bending to VS’s traditional beauty standards, 23-year-old Angolan model Maria Borges rocked the runway sans wig, weave or even extensions. For Borges, it was a history-making in a personal way.

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Me

November 15th 1998: Stokely Carmichael dies

On this day in 1998, civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael died aged 57. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1941, Carmichael moved to the United States when he was eleven. An intelligent youth, Carmichael was admitted to the prestigious Bronx High School, where the majority of his classmates were wealthy white teenagers. Acutely aware of the racial injustices of American society, Carmichael joined the Civil Rights Movement upon seeing footage of a sit-in on television. After graduating high school in 1960, Carmichael studied philosophy at Howard University in Washington D.C., but still participated in freedom rides; he was jailed for 49 days in Jackson, Mississippi for entering a ‘whites only’ bus stop. In 1964, he joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and became an effective field organiser charged with registering black voters in the Deep South. While working in Lowndes County, Alabama, Carmichael founded his own political party, choosing a black panther as its logo. Despite initially adhering to Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent philosophy, Carmichael became frustrated with the slow progress of the movement, and upon becoming national chairman of SNCC in May 1966 rejected the group’s white members. In October, Carmichael made the speech for which he is best remembered - his defiant ‘Black Power’ address at University of California, Berkeley. The phrase quickly became a rallying cry for younger, more radical activists who advocated black separatism instead of the nonviolent doctrine of racial integration. This new approach was exemplified by the Blank Panther party, which Carmichael became the leader of in 1967, arguing for black nationalism and pan-Africanism. It was in the pursuit of this latter cause that Carmichael spent the rest of his life in Conakry, Guinea, changing his name to Kwame Toure. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1985, and died in 1998.

“We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”

The Stellar Buddy System

Our Sun has an entourage of planets, moons, and smaller objects to keep it company as it traverses the galaxy. But it’s still lonely compared to many of the other stars out there, which often come in pairs. These cosmic couples, called binary stars, are very important in astronomy because they can easily reveal things that are much harder to learn from stars that are on their own. And some of them could even host habitable planets!

The birth of a stellar duo

New stars emerge from swirling clouds of gas and dust that are peppered throughout the galaxy. Scientists still aren’t sure about all the details, but turbulence deep within these clouds may give rise to knots that are denser than their surroundings. The knots have stronger gravity, so they can pull in more material and the cloud may begin to collapse.

The material at the center heats up. Known as a protostar, it is this hot core that will one day become a star. Sometimes these spinning clouds of collapsing gas and dust may break up into two, three, or even more blobs that eventually become stars. That would explain why the majority of the stars in the Milky Way are born with at least one sibling.

Seeing stars

We can’t always tell if we’re looking at binary stars using just our eyes. They’re often so close together in the sky that we see them as a single star. For example, Sirius, the brightest star we can see at night, is actually a binary system (see if you can spot both stars in the photo above). But no one knew that until the 1800s.

Precise observations showed that Sirius was swaying back and forth like it was at a middle school dance. In 1862, astronomer Alvan Graham Clark used a telescope to see that Sirius is actually two stars that orbit each other.

But even through our most powerful telescopes, some binary systems still masquerade as a single star. Fortunately there are a couple of tricks we can use to spot these pairs too.

Since binary stars orbit each other, there’s a chance that we’ll see some stars moving toward and away from us as they go around each other. We just need to have an edge-on view of their orbits. Astronomers can detect this movement because it changes the color of the star’s light – a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect.

Stars we can find this way are called spectroscopic binaries because we have to look at their spectra, which are basically charts or graphs that show the intensity of light being emitted over a range of energies. We can spot these star pairs because light travels in waves. When a star moves toward us, the waves of its light arrive closer together, which makes its light bluer. When a star moves away, the waves are lengthened, reddening its light.

Sometimes we can see binary stars when one of the stars moves in front of the other. Astronomers find these systems, called eclipsing binaries, by measuring the amount of light coming from stars over time. We receive less light than usual when the stars pass in front of each other, because the one in front will block some of the farther star’s light.

Sibling rivalry

Twin stars don’t always get along with each other – their relationship may be explosive! Type Ia supernovae happen in some binary systems in which a white dwarf – the small, hot core left over when a Sun-like star runs out of fuel and ejects its outer layers – is stealing material away from its companion star. This results in a runaway reaction that ultimately detonates the thieving star. The same type of explosion may also happen when two white dwarfs spiral toward each other and collide. Yikes!

Scientists know how to determine how bright these explosions should truly be at their peak, making Type Ia supernovae so-called standard candles. That means astronomers can determine how far away they are by seeing how bright they look from Earth. The farther they are, the dimmer they appear. Astronomers can also look at the wavelengths of light coming from the supernovae to find out how fast the dying stars are moving away from us.

Studying these supernovae led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the skies for these exploding stars when it launches in the mid-2020s to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.

Spilling stellar secrets

Astronomers like finding binary systems because it’s a lot easier to learn more about stars that are in pairs than ones that are on their own. That’s because the stars affect each other in ways we can measure. For example, by paying attention to how the stars orbit each other, we can determine how massive they are. Since heavier stars burn hotter and use up their fuel more quickly than lighter ones, knowing a star’s mass reveals other interesting things too.

By studying how the light changes in eclipsing binaries when the stars cross in front of each other, we can learn even more! We can figure out their sizes, masses, how fast they’re each spinning, how hot they are, and even how far away they are. All of that helps us understand more about the universe.

Tatooine worlds

Thanks to observatories such as our Kepler Space Telescope, we know that worlds like Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine in “Star Wars” exist in real life. And if a planet orbits at the right distance from the two stars, it could even be habitable (and stay that way for a long time).

In 2019, our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found a planet, known as TOI-1338 b, orbiting a pair of stars. These worlds are tricker to find than planets with only one host star, but TESS is expected to find several more!

Want to learn more about the relationships between stellar couples? Check out this Tumblr post: https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/190824389279/cosmic-couples-and-devastating-breakups

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