Yes-hey-buddy - No Longer Active

Happy Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month!

I was a brown kid raised among other brown kids in South East Asia and yet, every single time I wrote a story in class or I came up with an idea for a play, I used traditional white European names and all my characters were white. So were those of the other kids. Even with no white people around us, the default race in anything fictional was white.

Every single book I read was white. Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl all wrote books about white kids. The Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, the Meg Cabot novels. All the cartoons, all the early 2000s Disney channel shows, all the made for TV movies. Everything features straight, white children and all anyone wanted to do was to emulate them. When there was some representation of other races, it was secondary, tertiary characters. Or white passing actors. To think that our own stories aren’t worth it unless we acted white enough.

I didn’t want to be Shanti in the jungle or Jasmine in the Taj Mahal or the weird kid in the background everyone made fun of for being an “other”.I wanted to be Hermione and Annabeth and Nancy Drew. I would pretend my name wasn’t my full long Indian name but Keira, or Kara, or Katie and insert myself into the fantasies of my childhood. Even in my own head, I didn’t think I was good enough to be myself. I grew older and called myself Keer when I moved to the UK to compensate and shorten it for white people to pronounce better (why? racism.)

It took me a long time to accept that my story was worth telling, that my skin colour and heritage and religion were not inferior both in real life and on the page. It took me an even longer time to realize that I deserved to see people like me on the screen and the page in a way that doesn’t burden the character to be an ambassador for my entire race but she just exists, like I do. I still am shocked that I can’t even name one single Asian leading character from any of my childhood novels - Asian! The continent with 60% of all humans!

I want the default race to be non existent. I want a class of children to think up a story and not have 90% of them come up with straight white characters. White is not the default. Representation matters.

Waait why does the granddad look like Mr. Johnson (aka the local bigot?) 😭

so i’ve seen this photo of (apparently) Barbara’s parents (from this post). And i couldn’t help

Break the stigma

This exact holiday combo post can only happen once every 33 years.

li don’t really care about Harry Styles but i think it’d be really funny if he started balding like. in the next 3 weeks.

claire walking up to talk to jim at auditions like two minutes after getting his name wrong

Lol hey guys

if you are in high school and you follow me idc if you learn nothing else from me, but learn this: do not join the fucking military. they will promise you all sorts of things in exchange for joining their muder-system for a few years. do not listen to them. you won’t find a sense of purpose, you won’t find an adventure, you might not even get the money they promise you for college. if you survive, you’ll come back with blood on your hands, feeling just as aimless as before except knowing you’re a killer. the government will drop you like hot potatoes the second you are not useful to them, and you will be on your own with nothing but some ptsd and a more intimate understanding of the phrase “blood for oil.”