Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.

Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite.

The kind of institutionalisation that I and my brothers and sisters experienced as children doesn't prepare you for life, it just prepares you for more institutionalisation. A lot of the kids from homes ended up as prison inmates and this included my own brothers.
- Tjalaminu Mia in Speaking from the Heart p.217

Indigenous women from rural areas who were forcibly removed from their birth families are three times more likely to experience violence than other indigenous mothers, a new report reveals.

It's the first report of its kind to examine the lasting effects of forcible removal on indigenous mums of the stolen generations.

...

"Here are mums that have been taken away as children themselves and possibly, they've never been provided with interventions saying `violence isn't acceptable' or that `what you've been through is incredibly traumatic.'"

• that i didn't sleep very well (not your fault, sheebaface)
• that i'm overwhelmed by projects and deadlines and clients who don't do things when i tell them to
• that i didn't bring any chocolate to work

It seems from this article that, if you are in a situation where you can care for your child some, but not all, of the time, you don’t receive a whole lot of respite support. Your care may also reduce the likelihood that your child will be placed in a permanent supported residential position (which may not be what every person with a disability aspires to, or hir carer, but I’m sure many people do).

The solution? ‘Abandon’ your child by leaving them permanently in the care of DOCS and relinquishing all parental rights.

Yeah. Good one.

This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue. While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss Singapore slipped up and showed her real linguistic roots, she is suddenly a shame of the nation!

Here's the deal, the next time someone says "It's not like I'm a Nazi wanting to exterminate the Jews / It's not like I'm a KKK member / It's not like I'm __ insert whatever extreme hate group they want to use to benchmark their own isms__"; the next time someone says something like that? I suggest your reply be this.

"Yeah, it's not like an abusive spouse is a serial murderer; it's not like a violent cop is Josef Mengele; it's not like a school yard bully is someone who abuses and kills dogs!"

Cause what they're doing is another form of Oppression Olympics. Only the competitors are the actual oppressors. And they believe they or whomever they're defending didn't even get the bronze; so why are you even saying anything? So it's a good idea, to at least state publicly what the fuck it is they're doing with their twisted logic.

I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available. And they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

'Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,' Master said. 'I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.'