Link Roundup (3/1)

The scientists championing their indigenous ancestors’ discoveries | BBC News
The article features Karlie Noon and Ocean Mercer, indigenous scientists who draw upon ancentral knowledge and oral history of various indigenous communities around the world for their research and show how “every culture has a science.”

When Whisper Networks Let Us Down | The Verge
The article talks about the “whisper networks” that exist around sexual assault survivors — a community of bystanders who know the truth and are bound to secrecy for the sake of protecting the survivors but also by extension, end up shielding the perpetrator. The article poses questions about what role bystanders should play beyond just supporting and believing the survivor.

Like whisper networks, my reporting exists in and because of a vacuum of justice. And in the Morgan Marquis-Boire story, it’s hard to point the finger at any one community or one institution or even one country. If an institutional failure occurred, the institution was just people. It is hard to believe that my previous story could have achieved anything for the better when it could have only existed because of pervasive moral failure across multiple continents.

If I have to offer one takeaway from all of this, it’s something close to apostasy in the era of #MeToo — namely, justice should not be defined by what victims want. The women in my story only wanted to be believed; justice is a world where they are allowed to want more.

Muslims of South Korea | AlJazeera
A photo essay featuring Muslims of South Korea–not only immigrants from the Middle East but also ethnic Koreans who have converted to Islam. There is a couple Muslim communities in Seoul and its outskirts, but this is the first article that I’ve seen that talks about the community in depth.

Freshwater | NPR
NPR conducts a short interview with the author of Freshwater Akwaeke Emezi. Freshwater is their debut novel, a story of Ada, a young woman born in Nigeria who comes to America for college and struggles with the multiple selves that exist inside her. The book approaches mental health issues from the perspective of Igbo spirituality.

I think everyone’s centered in their own reality, you know. I think part of the thing that’s a problem, really, in the world today is this inability to acknowledge multiple realities, and this insistence that there has to be one dominant reality, and everything that falls outside that reality is false and untrue. And that’s how colonialism worked in great part — people came in and enforced a reality and said, “Well, if you believe in anything else, if you believe in your indigenous deities, if you believe in these spiritual entities, then you’re ignorant and you’re backwards, and it’s only because you haven’t been educated by the West.” And you know, there’s this [thought that] everything that is outside the dominant reality becomes something that’s pathological. And with my work, I’m not really interested in trying to convince anyone to shift their center, I’m just refusing to shift mine.

The Trance of Unworthiness | Personal Blog
The blog post itself is not very important, but I was more interested in the excerpt it has from Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach. A friend of mine recently recorded this meditation (with her own voice!) and sent me a recording. Having the questions be posed out directly, out loud makes them lose their hold over my life–and I feel like I am taking the necessary steps towards my own freedom.

Make Me Feel by Janelle Monáe
No description necessary. My life goal is now to collect all the gifs from this entire video and figure out where I can purchase a pair of those see-through rose embroidered pants.