Ruby Bridges was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
This movie made me cry, I was so heart broken by how Ruby Bridges was treated! She was only 6, but was so strong. She is a very brave girl and she did not care what the white folks called her.
People are simply disgusting to minimize people by skin color!
Ruby you might not think you’re a hero… But to other people you are! You are A HERO and you are A PERSON WHO MADE AMERICA CHANGE!
this is white culture, this is their history, this is their legacy…being enraged at a damn baby just because she’s black.
she’s still alive by the way
Ruby Bridges in 2010
“As Bridges describes it, “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.“ Former United States Deputy Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we’re all very very proud of her.“
U.S. Marshals escorted Bridges to and from school
As soon as Bridges entered the school, white parents pulled their own children out; all the teachers refused to teach while a black child was enrolled. Only one person agreed to teach Ruby and that was Barbara Henry, from Boston, Massachusetts, and for over a year Henry taught her alone, “as if she were teaching a whole class.”
Every morning, as Bridges walked to school, one woman would threaten to poison her; because of this, the U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower, who were overseeing her safety, allowed Ruby to eat only the food that she brought from home.
Another woman at the school put a black baby doll in a wooden coffin and protested with it outside the school, a sight that Bridges Hall has said “scared me more than the nasty things people screamed at us.” At her mother’s suggestion, Bridges began to pray on the way to school, which she found provided protection from the comments yelled at her on the daily walks.”
THIS SHIT WAS ONLY 58 YEARS AGO. PEOPLE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THIS RACIST TERRORISM AND ACTS LIKE IT ARE STILL ALIVE, AND THEIR KIDS ARE IN THEIR 40′S AND 50′S.
DON’T LET RACISM APOLOGISTS GET AWAY WITH “WHY ARE YOU LIVING IN THE PAST,” BULLSHIT ARGUMENTS. WE ARE LITERALLY STILL DEALING WITH THE FAMILIES THAT FORMED HATE MOBS OVER BLACK CHILDREN ATTENDING SCHOOL WITH WHITE KIDS.
This was her then:
This is literally how she looks in 2017.
She’s literally not even old.
Some of those people in that crowd are VOTING this year. Their children raised by them are voting this year. And they want to Make America Great Again.
Doctor Who has received significant viewer and critical acclaim for an episode, featuring Rosa Parks (Vinette Robinson) that tackled racism and discrimination.
The storyline also did not attempt to influence the event, or in any way inspire Rosa for her actions that day.
Rather, they helped protect the circumstances so that the event did happen.
Not only did the episode highlight racist attitudes in the past, they also highlighted how racism continues today. Ryan (Toisin Cole) talked about being stopped by police and Yaz (Mandip Gill) opened up about being the abuse she has experienced as a Muslim.
They also contextualised Rosa Parks’ story, highlighting the future difficulties she faced and the continued fight for civil rights.
Notably, this was also the first episode in Doctor Who history to have been written by a person of colour.
It was also pointed out that the episode was aired on the same day as a black woman was racially abused and was made to move on an Ryanair flight.
And at the end of the episode, The Doctor highlighted that Rosa Parks not only changed the world but the “universe,” pointing out an asteroid that has been named after her.
“I’m laying there, scared enough, not wanting this done, telling her I didn’t want it done. All of a sudden I smell something burning. If I could’ve moved my legs I probably would’ve kicked her.”- Brenda Pelletier on being sterilized against her will
Brenda Pelletier checked in to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon five years ago to give birth to her baby girl. She left, with her tubes tied. The tubal ligation procedure happened, she says, after she was pressured into it by hospital staff, while she was in a vulnerable state.
And as a Métis woman, Brenda Pelletier’s experience appears not to be an isolated case.
At least three other aboriginal women have come forward to say that they too were pressured to be sterilized at the Saskatoon hospital in recent years.
Ok but this is true!!! I was 19 years old when i went into the hospital to give birth to my first child and while i was laying in bed reading and signing consent forms i came across one that woukd give them.permission to tie my tubes. The nurse kept telling me i didnt have to read them all that they were all about my stay in the hospital and intake forms and when i began to read that particular form the nurse came to me laughed nervously and said well we put that in there just in case you wanted to get your rubes tied. I then asked if they always gave them to woman giving birth she said no, the doctor had asked for thematic be put in there “just in case” I didnt want any future children. The nurse then went on to ask me about my future and if i was really sure i wanted to have more children or not. Until my mom came intimate room to check up on me and the nurse then took all the papers from me and left. For the rest of my delivery the nurses refused to give me medication for the pain or an epidural saying it was too early for that and it might stop my labour. I honestly think they withheld pain medication and the epidural to show me how hard child birth can be. Afterwards when they were releasing me the nurse asked me again if i was sure i didnt want to get ny tubes tied. Which i said no to. She then went on and explained thaf if i did i woukd just have to make an appointment with my doctor and i would be in and out in no time at all. That is my experience with the Canadian healthcare system and being a native woman. It is wrong that anyone would try and force something like that on a 19 year old. Please share. Let it be known what is happening to native woman. We have rights just like any other woman and shouldn’t be pushed into suxh decision at such a young age.
Hey white folks with uteruses who do not want or should not have kids,
you know how you’re outraged about how hard it is to get a Doctor to agree to sterilize you even to save your life?
Guess what else they do? Double your outrage.
This is so common there’s even a book just about Saskatchewan on the topic: An Act of Genocide, by Karen Stote. And this isn’t just a contemporary thing, Canada had a lengthy eugenics legal history, particularly in Western Canada, which targeted Indigenous people, Jews, Ukrainians, and developmentally disabled people. Learn more at http://eugenicsarchive.ca/ including how institutions of eugenic sterilization collaborated with Indian Residential Schools and Indian Hospitals, and how these institutions all sexually and emotionally and physically abused their patients as well as non-consentually sterilizing them.
One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.
There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”
My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”
To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”
Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.
This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?
By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.
After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”
Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.
When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.
(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)
My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.
For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy – an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn.
Fatphobia
Is
Real
and it kills
This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.
My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight?
She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.
Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.”
I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.
We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.
Wtf…
A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight.
Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time.
The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems.
By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25.
She’d had the tumour for over five years.
The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause.
They killed her.
Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.
I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:
1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).
You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.
She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.
And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!
2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.
Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.
My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:
SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.
She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:
If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.
It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.
Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:
FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!
Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!
i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.
Nothing as bad as this, but when I was about 11 I was struggling with my body image and I kept trying to tell myself it was all in my head and then one day my doctor said I was fat and it really stuck with me because I thought if a doctor says it it must be true
my son has always been really skinny because he takes a medicine that suppresses his appetite. he’s 15 and a half now, and my grandmother keeps harping on how he’s gained wait. he’s 5′9″ and 138. he is, if you trust the bmi charts, smack dab in the middle of healthy for his height and weight. but he has a little flab around his belly, and he has some teeny moobs.
BECAUSE HE IS 15 AND ABOUT TO HIT MAJOR GROWTH SPURTS.
i get all over her, he does too, because she comments and just refuses to shut the fuck up about it. stop shaming kids about their weight, period. even if they’re unhealthily fat, there is a reason for it, and that reason isn’t always in their control. you can do irreparable damage to them being cruel about their weight.
Also I encourage you to look up more on early child dieting in relation to obesity later in life because I’ve known people (including my mom) who were forced on a diet when they were a very young kid because they were “too fat” and it changed her metabolism to the point where her body thought she was starving so it changed to physically hold weight MORE SO than it would have had she not dieted (neither of her parents were obese but it physically changed her).
There’s also been studies on additives in our food being linked to increased weight, and also studies that people are overweight due to financial stress and work stress etc. There’s also been studies which link some people’s weight to sexual assault and how the body reacts to that kind of stressful attack.
I’d also look up and see if your doctors offices have lowered their height charts because ours did in the children;s section. The adult height measure told me I was 5 feet but the kid’s office said I was 4’10". A few inches of height differences tacked onto how they calculate BMI literally can push you from appearing “healthy” to appearing “severely obese” and I think they do this to sell weight-loss programs/drugs.
Doctors offices often partner with the pharmaceutical companies. Why would they cure you if they can sell you drugs that don’t help and make you pay more money? Just be aware this does happen.
So the moral of the story- weight does not equal health, and starving children for your ideal of beauty is fucked up. Don’t starve your kids. It has severely long-lasting effects and is just downright inhumane.
honestly does it ever strike y’all how a lot of misogyny isn’t even “i hate women, they need to die” misogyny, but just a normalized belief in women’s innate inferiority? men don’t even have to explicitly state they think women are inferior, they let us know in their everyday words. like how “you cry/throw/act like a girl” has become an accepted way of saying “you are exhibiting weak behavior. do better.” and how casually men call women bitches and whores but there are literally no male equivalents of those slurs. if a man is called a “bitch” it means he’s imitating a woman, which is bad, and a man being called a “whore” is always referred to as a “man whore” because the word literally has been used in a way that makes women its main target.
for fuck’s sake, for a long time in american culture we used go call tank tops “wife beaters”. so much of misogyny is casual. like women are just living our lives with a deep understanding that men think we’re below them and always will be because our very existence is turned into insults to encourage men to “act like men”.
“I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men’s. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman. There is no woman’s hair style that can be called standard, that says nothing about her. The range of women’s hair styles is staggering, but a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her for many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some. Women must choose between attractive shoes and comfortable shoes. When our group made an unexpected trek, the woman who wore flat, laced shoes arrived first. Last to arrive was the woman in spike heels, shoes in hand and a handful of men around her. If a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message – an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been. There are thousands of cosmetic products from which women can choose and myriad ways of applying them. Yet no makeup at all is anything but unmarked. Some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them. Women can’t even fill out a form without telling stories about themselves. Most forms give four titles to choose from. “Mr.” carries no meaning other than that the respondent is male. But a woman who checks “Mrs.” or “Miss” communicates not only whether she has been married but also whether she has conservative tastes in forms of address – and probably other conservative values as well. Checking “Ms.” declines to let on about marriage (checking “Mr.” declines nothing since nothing was asked), but it also marks her as either liberated or rebellious, depending on the observer’s attitudes and assumptions. I sometimes try to duck these variously marked choices by giving my title as “Dr.” – and in so doing risk marking myself as either uppity (hence sarcastic responses like “Excuse me!”) or an overachiever (hence reactions of congratulatory surprise like “Good for you!”). All married women’s surnames are marked. If a woman takes her husband’s name, she announces to the world that she is married and has traditional values. To some it will indicate that she is less herself, more identified by her husband’s identity. If she does not take her husband’s name, this too is marked, seen as worthy of comment: she has done something; she has “kept her own name.” A man is never said to have “kept his own name” because it never occurs to anyone that he might have given it up. For him using his own name is unmarked. A married woman who wants to have her cake and eat it too may use her surname plus his, with or without a hyphen. But this too announces her marital status and often results in a tongue-tying string. In a list (Harvey O’Donovan, Jonathan Feldman, Stephanie Woodbury McGillicutty), the woman’s multiple name stands out. It is marked.”
We live in a society which not only facilitates the abuse and assault of women but which also demands that they “prove it” by giving the intimate details of their trauma to courtrooms full of strangers (in some cases televised for the entire world)? That’s no kind of due process, it’s barbarity
And knowing what we do about trauma and the brain/body, and retraumatization, the fact that the process is still set up this way tells us that at best the justice system is indifferent to women’s emotional and physical health, and at worst it’s designed to punish them for telling the truth about men
Guys ask why women are so pissed off. Even guys with wives and daughters. Jackson Katz, a prominent social researcher, illustrates why. He’s done it with hundreds of audiences:
“I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on the other.
Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? At first there is a kind of awkward silence as the men try to figure out if they’ve been asked a trick question. The silence gives way to a smattering of nervous laughter. Occasionally, a young a guy will raise his hand and say, ‘I stay out of prison.’ This is typically followed by another moment of laughter, before someone finally raises his hand and soberly states, ‘Nothing. I don’t think about it.’
Then I ask the women the same question. What steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? Women throughout the audience immediately start raising their hands. As the men sit in stunned silence, the women recount safety precautions they take as part of their daily routine.
Hold my keys as a potential weapon. Look in the back seat of the car before getting in. Carry a cell phone. Don’t go jogging at night. Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don’t put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured. Own a big dog. Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have an unlisted phone number. Have a man’s voice on my answering machine. Park in well-lit areas. Don’t use parking garages. Don’t get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men. Vary my route home from work. Watch what I wear. Don’t use highway rest areas. Use a home alarm system. Don’t wear headphones when jogging. Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime. Don’t take a first-floor apartment. Go out in groups. Own a firearm. Meet men on first dates in public places. Make sure to have a car or cab fare. Don’t make eye contact with men on the street. Make assertive eye contact with men on the street.”
― Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help
(The first man to minor in women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in cultural studies and education from UCLA.)
Shout out to all my straight sisters I’m so sorry 😞
Jesus, leave his ass.
We learn fast to be very kind and attentive, tho.
My mom, who got her degree in Marriage and Family Counseling when she was 60, says studies show that women will sometimes sometimes leave a long term relationship to live on their own for a while before seeking a new relationship, but men will almost never leave a long term relationship without having a new relationship either in progress or just beginning. They don’t want to give up the caretaker they have without another one on deck or in the wings.
This is so sad
This isnt cute or quirky. This means hes a fucking hopeless user
Please date a man who actually acts like an adult.
Ok I lived with my ex for 2 years and he literally wouldn’t be able to get his own food if I wasn’t at home, I’d get home from work and he’d be angry at me for “making him starve”
My current partner has lived on his own for 8 years and the absolute most I have to help him with is maybe sending him $20 so he can make a bill payment on time
It made me realise for 2-4 years I wasn’t a girlfriend I was a fucking mother
Men who have been independent are capable of reverting if given the slightest excuse. When we married, my ex husband was 10 years older than me and had lived on his own for 8ish years. Yet (and I allowed this until I finally got fed up and took us to counseling) I did 80% of the cooking, because I was better at it. Same with the cleaning, shopping, social planning, etc.
After I left, in the first six months I got texts or calls asking me to please tell him:
The online banking password (dude, I left you, you should really change that)
Where I ordered his special-wecial organic underwear
Where the good cutting board was (my dad gave it to us at our wedding, genius, I took it with me along with the rest of the stuff from my family)
What brand butter we bought
What brand of local kielbasa we bought
Who his doctor was
What RMV office had the shortest lines
Where the old tax returns were (in the fucking box labeled tax returns)
The phone number for his best friend
I shit you not.
Then he had a heart attack (mild) and none of his family or friends were around to take him to the hospital. But instead of calling 911, he called me, who by then lived 45 minutes away. He lived 5 minutes from an EMS dispatch location. He called me, despite the fact that he didn’t believe me 8 months prior when I was feeling suicidal and I had to call a cab to go alone to check myself into the hospital for a 72-hour hold. I told him to call 911, hung up on him when he whined about “making a fuss”, called 911, called his siblings and then texted them “your brother is having a heart attack, I called 911 for him, come home,” and washed my hands of it.
Emotionally vacant men who won’t do household labor or emotional labor are not Nazis, but they aren’t good people, either, and you don’t have to put up with their shit.
wupacing 
