"Depression doesn’t make you sad all the time"

"When I’m having a depressive episode, I’m not walking around in tattered black clothes, weeping and wailing. I go out with friends. I crack jokes (especially sardonic ones). I keep working, and have friendly chats with the people I work with. I often manage to feed and clothe myself, I read books. Above all, I experience moments of happiness: a flash of delight as I’m walking on the beach with a friend and the sun is perfect and the breeze is just right; a surge somewhere deep inside when I’m surrounded by beautiful trees and it’s raining and I feel my heart swelling to encompass the whole world; a warm, friendly, affectionate sensation at the touch of a friend, a hug at the end of an evening or a hand placed over mine as we lean forward to see something better.

Yet I feel a strange conflicting pressure. On the one hand, I feel like I need to engage in a sort of relentless performative sadness to be taken seriously, for people to understand that I really am depressed and that each day – each moment of each day – is a struggle for me, that even when I am happy, I am still fighting the monster. I feel like I need to darken everything around me, to stop communicating with the world, to stop publishing anything, to just stop. Because that way I will appear suitably, certifiably sad, and thus, depressed – and then maybe people will recognise that I’m depressed and perhaps they’ll even offer support and assistance. The jokes die in my throat, the smile never reaches my lips, I don’t share that moment of happiness on the beach by turning to my friend and expressing joy...

On the other, I feel an extreme pressure to perform just the opposite, because sad depressed people are boring and no fun, as I am continually reminded every time I speak openly about depression or express feelings of sadness and frustration. I’m caught in a trap where if I don’t perform sadness, I’m not really depressed, but if I express sadness at all to any degree, I’m annoying and boring and should stop being so self-centred. Thus I’m effectively pushed into fronting, putting a face on it even when I am depressed and deeply sad – when I feel like I am choking on my own misery, I put up a cheeky Tweet. When I hate myself and I want to die, I post a link to something fun, or I write up something silly to run somewhere – even though as I write it, I am drawn deeper and deeper into my unhappiness."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/03/depression-doesnt-make-you-sad-all-the-time

Exhaysting. Exhausting.

FB: "many depressed people in the midst of an episode don’t actually spend it fainting dramatically on the couch and talking about how miserable they are. Some are high-functioning (bolstered by the need to put a face on it), others are into morbid jokes, others try to reach out for help (isn’t that what we’re “supposed” to do?) from friends and try to make their depression less scary. Depression isn’t an all-or-nothing deal"

"How Race Is Conjured"

"For most people, race is the obvious starting point for discussions of racism. You invert that assumption in Racecraft, arguing that race has no biological basis and therefore can’t be the starting point for any reasonable discussion. You created the word “racecraft” to identify how — when those practices are repeated widely and persevere for decades and centuries — racist practice produces a general belief in race...

Racecraft shares characteristics with witchcraft, two in particular. First, there’s no rational causality. We often speak as if black skin causes segregation or shootings. Second, there’s (witting or unwitting) reliance on circular argument. For example, blood serves as a metaphor of race but is often taken as a feature of race, even by scientifically trained people. So we find explanations meant to be scientific that end up using logic has to deny causality...

What we do in America is to explain inequality by saying there are certain characteristics of people who come out on the wrong end of things.

Since we can’t talk about inequality in America, or at least until very recently we could not, the explanation becomes something inherent in black and Hispanic people...

There is an important difference between identity and identification... Most Afro Americans don’t have any control over identification. Their identity, how they define themselves, how they perceive themselves, can be overruled by that identification. That’s what happens when we see Afro-American police officers killed by their comrades by mistake. Their identity as a police officer is overruled instantly and fatally because the identification takes precedence."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/karen-barbara-fields-racecraft-dolezal-racism/

mmmmm. I need to reflect on this for a while.

It's sort of a little shift and sort of a big shift in thinking and framing. And it feels really important and useful and revealing. And a little empowering; returning some ownership to identity<--identification by giving us a better look at how it is constructed.

(credit to MC)

Related: Scientific racism one

"The Infuriating History of White Women Voting Against Women’s Rights"

"As the exit polls plainly show, the majority of white women don't consider themselves sisters with the non-white, class-separated, LGBTQ female voters; instead, many of these women identify more closely with white men. In an article in the Nation, Joan Walsh argues that Clinton's loss can come down a multitude of reasons: that she didn't paint herself as the "economic change agent" that white working-class women wanted, that she was too "dreamy" and not "punchy" enough, and that ultimately, many white women either hold racist views or tacitly support them.

Clinging to the idea of gender as a discrete, unifying factor actively erases other—often far more salient—social realities. "The truth is that there is a gender gap," Seltzer writes in Sex as a Political Variable. "Women do differ from men in their views on the issues and in their voting behavior...[but] focusing narrowly on the gender gap and being obsessed with differences between women and men can obscure the deeper divisions within the US electorate that the gender gap reflects.""

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/the-infuriating-history-of-white-women-voting-against-womens-rights?utm_source=vicefbus

These two paragraphs are the most useful part of this article;

"5 Lessons Traveling to Africa Taught Me About Being Black in America"

"Black America, we have so much to actually learn about Africa -- and yes, it does matter.

For far too long, our perceptions have been negatively impacted by white dominated narratives that have plagued our grade school text books and public discourse about the Motherland. The separation between our people across the diaspora is not just geographic, but philosophic. And while both sides can assess blame on boasting superiority against the other -- Black America's constant dismissal of the continent in our identity makes us the bigger culprit...
it re-teaches me that my legacy didn't start when my ancestors entered the West from slave ships (that's only the second half of my identity), but that there was an enriched culture before America -- and that was in Africa."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ernest-owens/5-lessons-traveling-to-af_b_6065146.html

"Stop Glamorizing the Hood, Please"

"Hood shit is not a thumbnail.Or a cool meme for water cooler gossip. Bodies get caught in winds regularly. People really die here, but people also have babies and fall in love and do things in-between the birth and the casket, but still. There are too many pictures. They’ll rename your ghetto to make it pretty, but it was pretty before the Barclays, and SoBro, or before the hipsters came and named turkey sandwiches and ice creams after blocks; the same blocks where boys buried other boys and poured liquor until the bottle broke in their hands, either from the grip or the ghosts.

It is not a literary trope when I tell you these tales are not lifted from Homicideor some other book written by White hands to paint Black lives. It becomes zoo-like; the romanticizing of a culture and a people and a community. They love glamorizing hood shit. They being whoever doesn’t understand the mechanics of the politics involved. There is governance here. There are rules, spoken and unspoken."

https://thsppl.com/stop-glamorizing-the-hood-please-a7cd2365a1cc

This is beautiful prose

"The Loss"

"Fact No 2: Of persons with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) who have a lower-extremity amputation, up to 55 percent require amputation of the second leg within two or three years.

Fact No. 3: In the US, black Americans are up to four times as likely as other racial groups to lose a leg—or three times, controlling for the disproportionate diabetes rates among them.

Fact No. 4: If diabetes and PAD continue to rise at the rate they have been for the last several decades, in just a few years, PAD—not trauma—will be the overwhelming reason for amputation. By then, our usual associations with amputees—with reckless boxcar hoppers, laurelled para-athletes, uniformed heroes (Lt. Dan, father and son Skywalker, etc.), and malformed children overcoming the odds—will need to be somatically adjusted, more or less, to the image of Brunson.

Amputation due to trauma is misfortune, but due to PAD is blameworthy negligence, because, as Metzler, Brunson’s surgeon, explains...

primary care or misinformation among patients, and because it typically results in amputation only when providers fail to intervene at the right time with the right resources, Metzler, like many others in his field, considers this number to be the quintessential measure of how flawed health care is today—“the canary in the coal mine if you will,” agrees Philip Goodney, a vascular surgeon based out of Lebanon, NH."

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-loss

"NY Times Portrays Islam More Negatively Than Cancer, Major Study Finds"

"“When we went into it we didn’t think it would be surprising if Islam was one of the most negatively portrayed topics in the NYT,” says co-author Usaid Siddiqui. “What did really surprise us was that compared with something as inherently negative as cancer, Islam still tends to be more negative.”

Islam was portrayed negatively in 57 percent of headlines during the period of analysis, with cancer and cocaine being evaluated at 34 and 47 percent respectively. Islam was portrayed positively in less than half the headlines as cancer...

The report references its findings as proof that bias against Muslims is not limited to conservatives, noting that, “While the liberal media has been more nuanced in its portrayal, it has ultimately adhered to the same convention that portrays Muslims as the 'other.'... 

Headlines regarding Islam and Muslims are just one part of the problem, however, as there are countless articles discussing Islam/Muslims in a negative manner without using either term in the headline."

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/ny-times-portrays-islam-more-negatively-cancer-major-study-finds