Imagine being a kid in school. Your teacher comes up with an idea for class picture. Every student will draw pictures of their friends.
Everyone starts drawing enthusiasticly, and can’t wait to see what they look like in the drawings. When pictures are ready you notice that popular students have more pictures than rest, but nobody has done a drawing of you. The teacher notices that too, and asks if someone would do your picture. To your horror the class clown takes the job, and comes up with a caricature of you. Others are laughing, but you’re not. You feel awful. The teacher notices that. and asks again someone to do a drawing of you. One of the ‘good students’ starts drawing, but the result is forced. It’s just a drawing of a generic child wearing a shirt of same color as you a wearing. There’s no spirit, no soul in it. You start sensing that the class is geting frustrated with you. They want to be done with this. You ask quietly the teacher if you could do a drawing yourself.
After school your classmates confront you. Why did you have to make such a big deal out of it? The first picture was funny. The second picture was just fine! The drawing you did yourself wasn’t right, do you think you are that good-looking? There were other kids who got only one or two pictures of themselves. Who are you to demand special treatment? Maybe there would have been a picture of you if you weren’t such annoying baby, nobody likes you anyway, and nobody’s going to if you keep on being like that, you don’t deserve a drawing!
This could be story of bullying, but it’s also about how I see portraying LGBTQ+-people and PoC in mainstream entertainment.
Thanks to Fandoms and Feminism for inspiration!
This is a great metaphor.
This is the most accurate fucking post I’ve ever seen in my life oh my god.
full offense but when white ppl say developed countries, they really mean white or imperialist countries, and when they say developing countries they really just mean countries that suffered from centuries of colonization
fun game for the whole family: replace the phrase “developing nations” with “overexploited former colonial states” in conversations about global politics, and observe the reactions of you get
In all seriousness though, I’ve heard that saying “third world countries” was also incorrect and problematic. Is there a better, proper term?
So let’s have a brief history lesson
During the Cold War, an American political scientist wanted to label the sides in the war in order to define exactly who the communists were
Because America always has to be fucking number one, America and its “democratic” allies were considered the “first world” in this system
The Soviet Union and its allies were the “second world”
And everyone else who chose not the participate in that shitty pissing match became the “third world”
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the second world no longer really existed, creating a dichotomy between the remaining first world and third world
Third world is a term that encompasses constituents that were pretty arbitrarily designated as such but the juxtaposition of the “third world” against the “first world” created this notion that, developmentally, the third world is the polar opposite of the first world. Where the first world is seen as progressive and advanced the third world is seen as backwards and underdeveloped, when we know that’s not necessarily the case. This dichotomy is based in racism, which is why many people don’t like the term
Now on to your question. Because I’m a piece of shit who likes to challenge the privileged constantly, I refer to the “third world” as “previously colonised countries” and watch people flounder when they realise that’s actually a more accurate term
But really, I don’t see why people can’t just refer to the country they mean by its own name. Calling all these previously colonised countries “third world” merely homogenises their varied experiences and histories and contributes to the unfair juxtaposition between the first and third worlds. There’s literally no reason to use the term “third world countries” (as opposed to just stating the country you mean) unless you want to reinforce the racism that permeates the term
Mycroft initiates kissing to distract himself from Greg’s absolutely horrid movie choices.