Thoughts of Jessica

yuur-guardian-angel:

Things Harry Potter Actors say

(Source: kitten-burrito)

lexyeevee:

whatwhiteswillneverknow:

FBI Uniform Crime Report Hate Crime Statistics, 2011

hold up i have two problems with this argument

(and i do mean “argument”, i.e. i am not commenting on whether i agree or disagree with the conclusion)

1. the hypothesis is given as “hate crimes against white people are not racism”, but the conclusion is about frequency. what do you think “racism” means, then? is it not racism if it happens less often?

   the social justice answer is of course “yes”, because SJ defines racism as an institutional problem, whereas the word colloquially applies just as well on an individual level. but without emphasizing the distinction, arguing numbers doesn’t mean anything.

   also it strikes me as rude to suggest that someone’s experience doesn’t matter just because that experience is uncommon. speaking of which…

2. the focus on the black and white dots misses a severe statistical problem here: the Indian and Asian/Pacific areas are even smaller than the white areas. does that mean those groups do not experience racism, or also deserve a stock photo of a crying person?

   of course not, because they represent relatively tiny slices of the entire population. 0.8%, in fact. but they are the target of 1.9% of racially-motivated crimes. so they are earning 2½ times the racial scorn than they should, if it were evenly distributed.

   that is, you have not taken into account that the sizes of the populations are not equal. the percentages of racially-motivated crimes targeted towards each particular race are, on their own, completely meaningless. what you actually want is a relative count of how many people of a particular race were the target of such crimes. going off 2010 US demographics (close enough) and your numbers cited here, and counting hispanic people as white or black as i assume the FBI also did, that gives me the following, in incidents per one million people:

   • 67.4 – black
   • 23.8 – native american/alaskan
   • 21.1 – multiracial
   • 11.5 – asian, pacific islander
   • 2.66 – white

   that paints a much more accurate picture. it also makes your point far more effectively: an asian person is more than four times as likely to experience a racial crime as a white person. a black person, twenty-five times.

   note that i phrased this deliberated as “a person is X likely to experience”, because that’s what matters. you can’t talk about proportions here, because they are meaningless. consider: “i wear polka-dot socks half the time”. what does that tell you about how i feel about those socks? you don’t know without more information. what if i own only one pair of polka-dot socks and twenty pairs of striped socks? what if i own nothing but polka-dot socks?

   (i really don’t like seeing bad math used to make a point, even when the point is ultimately correct. it trains people to believe bad math in the future—because hey, the conclusion was right, so the math must be right too!—which makes it much easier to convince people of something that’s false. and the multiple mentions of “mathematically exact” in these images make it all the worse.)

fandom-mused-fandom-games:

For my Tumblr Flag/Fandom Games project

See the other fandoms here

Poster made by mewshuji

writingsforwinter:

Rebloggable by request.

kennedyclintonkat:

i did a thing

this obviously isn’t exhaustive - these aren’t all the reasons why these women are feminists, and it’s certainly not all the feminists in pop culture at the moment

if i forgot anyone please put them in the reblogs

notaloneintheuniverse:

rainbowrowell:

Jon Stewart vs. People Who Don’t Understand How Birth Control works

There will never come a day where I will not reblog this.