hegemony

I understand the connections between the violence that leads to police shootings and the violence that leads people to starve themselves. I know with complete certainty that diet culture is a manifestation of the state’s expectation of assimilation and of social control, both of which are manifestations of institutional violence.

Names are important because they reflect unique cultures, histories, religions, and lineages. Taking someone’s given name and changing it is one of the many ways that people (namely people of color) are whitewashed. The anglicization of “foreign” names — the practice of taking names and turning them into something English — is a slow and sinister form of identity erasure.