A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.

Something that I don't think anyone raised is the difference between being squicked because of something happening to a fictional character and being squicked because of something happening to a real person. I find the latter enormously worse than the former, and I'm much less likely to be squicked by a fictional character's misfortunes if they're depicted in a cartoony, unrealistic way.

So his intention was to play this scene of assault, with no warning, in the public space of a classroom. Now, this is a class that also teaches Irreversible and Demonlover and other films that involve pretty graphic scenes of rape and assault, but I think there's a difference between being told to watch Irreversible on your own at home, and coming into class, sitting around with a bunch of half-strangers, and being surprised by an out-of-context rape scene.

One thing that I really like about fandom is that we're different from the publishing world, from the academic world, from the world of boyfans even, in that we try really hard to take into consideration the needs and squicks and concerns of the reader.

Professional publishing is about getting people to buy books, and professional publishing is about the rights of the author - so, in the first place, we're often lied to about what a novel will contain, and even when we're not, we're not warned, because the rights of the author to surprise the reader - the rights of his inviolable artistic vision - are more important than the rights of the reader to tailor her reading to her own desires.

Linguistic violence is never so manifest as in all the corrections, momentary or long-lasting, to which dominated speakers, in a desperate effort towards correction, consciously or unconsciously subject the stigmatized aspects of their pronunciation, their vocabulary (with all the forms of euphemism) and their syntax; or in the confusion which makes them `lose their means', rendering them incapable of `finding their words', as if they had been suddenly dispossessed of their own language.(bolding mine)This is exactly what happens to Snape.

According to Bourdieu (from the same source as the quote above):Quote:Symbolic domination really begins when the misrecognition (méconnaissance) implied by recognition (reconnaissance) leads those who are dominated to apply the dominant criteria of evaluation to their own practices(bolding mine)Snape succumbs.

Severus was being ABUSED. TORTURED, for crying out loud. Severus broke. And Severus later tried to make amends, only to be kicked while he was down. It is just amazing to me that so many people cannot or will not see that this matters in the moral calculus. And it is a perfect example of why we need to stop viewing this scene solely through the filter of "racism" and all the connotations and baggage that holds for each of us: The prejudice against Severus, based on class, appearance, House affiliation, and so on, exhibited in this scene is just as morally and ethically objectionable as the prejudice against Lily based on her circumstances of birth.I refuse to blame the young man for breaking under torture.

To see Lily alone as right and Severus alone as wrong is to miss the bigger picture of multiple bigotries that interweave and permeate the social and relational dynamics at Hogwarts and in the larger wizarding world--and in our own. Racism, sexism, classism, status-ism, affluence-ism, beauty-ism: It's all connected.

  Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed?  He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals

Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.

Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.