Author: chris

There is nothing wrong with wanting attention. It doesn’t make you selfish. It doesn’t make you desperate or pathetic or weak. It makes you human. We all want to be noticed. We all need to feel seen and heard and valued. And we all deserve to have those needs met. You are no exception. You deserve to take up space. You deserve to be acknowledged and loved and cared for. You deserve to shine. Don’t let anyone, including yourself, convince you otherwise.

I know that what we’re doing flies in the face of the Kickstarter Amanda-Palmer-Start-a-Revolution thing, which is fine for her, but I’m not super-comfortable with the idea of Ziggy Stardust shaking his cup for scraps. I’m not saying offering things for free or pay-what-you-can is wrong. I’m saying my personal feeling is that my album’s not a dime. It’s not a buck. I made it as well as I could, and it costs 10 bucks, or go fuck yourself.

The bigger issue with Miley Cyrus is her complete obliviousness to the differences in public reaction when it comes to herself versus black people. When Miley Cyrus plays at ratchet, we get three reactions: fangirls/fangays spooing all over themselves telling the internet how much they love her, non-fans giving deep eyerolls and moving on to the next, and middle-aged white people making vague statements about how they’re “concerned” about her state of mind. The reaction she does not get is that if she were shot by a neighborhood watchman, then she deserved it because she flips the bird and does drugs and glamorizes hoodrat behavior.

That’s my problem. My problem is black kids like Trayvon Martin play at being ratchet everyday and the rest of America looks at them like they’re all budding criminals. The defense in that case put Trayvon Martin’s character on trial, by wanting us to infer that he was headed down the wrong path to prison anyway. Because of a few Myspace photos and a toxicology report, we should be glad we got that thug off the streets. They turned him into a thug for doing the exact same things that Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber do, the exact same things that millions of little white kids do in their gated communities, driving around in Daddy’s SUV listening to old-school NWA and rolling spliffs and bragging about it on social media.

That is what white privilege looks like. If you are a white apologist who continuously doubts that white privilege exists, ask yourself if Miley Cyrus or any other 20-year-old white girl would be put on trial posthumously if someone shot her for walking around in a hoodie. That is the definition of white privilege.

…for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble… grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.