The Kai Life

paradoxesforeveryone:

Scroll to bottom for updated information Women, let me tell you something that your friends and many guys will not. Your tattoos are ugly. We do not like them. We respect you less for them. We thin…

Anyone feel like ripping their hair out, but lacking motivation? Check this out!

Here’s a local tattoo story:

An elderly woman walked into a tattoo shop downtown one day, and politely asked if there was time to do a small rose on her arm.  After signing the necessary paperwork, she was greeted by a much-tattooed artist who took her to one of the chairs to prepare her arm.

After having a brief conversation, he sat up straight and said, “I have to ask. Why a rose, and why now?”

The elderly woman briefly smiled with her eyes closed.  When she opened them, she looked him in the eye and said, “Because I want something beautiful, and something I chose myself.”

She then removed her cardigan sweater, showing him the numbers tattooed on her forearm.  She was a Holocaust survivor.

Fuck this asswipe and his condescending opinions.  He knows nothing.

This question is usually a means of asking someone about their gender marker, and is most often asked out of curiosity.  Generally speaking, it’s not an appropriate question unless you work for a s…

It’s not very often that I’m asked about what pronouns I use.  Having been on hormones for almost five years, my features are nearly indistinguishable from cisgender men, so most people automatical…

MAAB bodies (bodies that produce high levels of testosterone and low levels of estrogen) and FAAB bodies (bodies that produce high levels of estrogen and lower levels of testosterone) are assigned …

Family reactions to coming out as transgender vary from one extreme to the other.  Some families are very open, accepting, and supportive.  Others go so far as to disown and kick out their transgen…

pollums:

So let me explain this theory for those of you who haven’t heard it before already.

The Great Gatsby is a story of a man that makes his fortune bootlegging and throws countless magnificent parties all in hopes of attracting the attention of his old flame Daisy.

But it’s really a story about insurmountable class barriers. Daisy will never be with Gatsby, no matter how much she claims to love him. No matter how hard Gatsby tries, he will always be stuck on West Egg, only able to admire the ‘green light’ of upper class american romanticism from afar. 

Themes of insurmountable class barriers permeate the entire novel right from some of the famous opening lines:

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

And so here’s the theory: 

Jay Gatsby was black, passing for white (“High yellow”)

Lower class vs upper class. Old money vs new money. East Egg vs West Egg. White vs black. Don’t believe me? 

• Early in the novel, Daisy’s beau Tom goes on a full fledged rant about the oncoming threat of the rise of the black race in society
• Another reference to race is made when Nick and Gatsby pass by a limo driven by a white chauffeur with “three modish negroes”
• Numerous references are made to Gatsby’s notably dark skintone in comparison to Daisy’s lighter skintone
• “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t— at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t— drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”

Not only was the insurmountable barrier between him and Daisy one of class and upbringing, but also one of race.

What we take for granted as Gatsby’s whiteness is actually a omission of detail rather than a specific indicator that he was white.

From the article Was Gatsby Black?

Thompson adds, “When I ask people what basis there is for Gatsby being white, I get silence. I have asked students, colleagues. They don’t know. They cannot give me any evidence to back up the speculation. And why haven’t people made this argument so far?”

Of course as with any theory or reading of a classic text, there’s room for disagreement:

Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli has one answer. “Because it’s mishigas! If Fitzgerald wanted to write about blacks, it wouldn’t have taken 75 years to figure it out. If that’s what Fitzgerald wanted, he would have made it perfectly clear in April 1925. Great works of literature are not fodder for guessing games. This kind of thing is bad for literature, bad for Fitzgerald, bad for ‘The Great Gatsby’ and bad for students who get exposed to this kind of guessing game.”

But why shouldn’t we play a guessing game with it? We don’t have Fitzgerald around to verify any of these details so why not have a bit of fun with the text? It’s a very modern reading of the text and it makes it not only more relatable but more heartbreaking.

Everyone has their own reasons why they can’t be with their own Daisy.

Why shouldn’t Gatsby be black? And why can’t he really be with Daisy?

In this discussion about whether or not Beethoven was black, the point is made:

Another tight question along these lines: Was Jay Gatsby black? Again, it’s probably not literally the case (as Fitzgerald intended it) –- but what’s much more interesting is everyone’s utter inability to take it seriously as a legitimate reading of the text, which it is.

Also, great works of literature are full of symbolism and subtext, so why the hell not?  Gatsby as a black or even mixed race person is totes legit.