Sleep-speaker

So something weird happened the other day. I was in Toys R Us (as you are when you're bored and have nowhere else to go), with a friend. And his girlfriend texted him and said could he look out for a present she could give to a kid she knows who's in hospital, since we were there anyway, and she loves Disney stuff, and Jasmine is her favourite Princess. Armed with this knowledge we headed to the Disney Princess aisle. Now, I know that Toys R Us is not the Disney Store, but they have a whole specifically branded aisle, and what I found really disturbed me.

There was no Jasmine doll. I was a little disappointed, but basically figured, okay, fine, for whatever reason there's no Jasmines today, and started looking around the rest of the aisle.

There were dolls for Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, Ariel and Rapunzel. There were no dolls, and strictly speaking she's not an Official Disney Princess (because Pixar), but there was merchandise available for Brave in the form of Merida costumes and plushie bears.

There was no merchandise of any kind for Jasmine, Tiana, Pocahontas or Mulan.

When I went home, I looked up the official Disney Princess line-up and confirmed my suspicions. There were dolls available for EVERY white Disney Princess.

Not a single one of the Disney Princesses from other ethnicities was represented at all (nor were any other characters of colour.)

That's like...the 40% of the Princess Line-up who aren't white were nowhere to be found, but the 60% who were white had perfect attendance. That's not fucking subtle. I wish I'd had a camera, I would have taken a picture.

I dunno, man, the more I think about it, the more...pissed off I get. Like, the fact that Disney has an Official List of these Princesses should be a way to make sure this doesn't happen, not that it does anyway. And it's such a clean split.

Anyway, I emailed Toys R Us about it. If they reply, I'll update to let people know what they said.

I was...honestly shocked, which is probably naive of me, but something about the brazen shamelessness of it all was super disturbing. Or like, not even shamelessness, just...fucking epic ignorance. Like the person doing the ordering or sorting out the line-up probably didn't even think for a split second about what was going on there, cus everyone knows thinking about race makes you a racist.

RAGE.

Today, my Ma called up the Council to sort out voting and stuff since she has very recently become a british citizen and now holds dual US/UK citizenship. The woman she spoke to told her she needed a british passport or she couldn't vote. My mother was really, really sure this was not true as long as she had evidence of her citizenship (in this case a certificate of naturalisation). She asked three times and was told, incorrectly, three times, that she needed a passport. She finally asked to speak to the supervisor and was finally told that, okay, her certificate of naturalisation was actually acceptable instead of a passport.

She said, politely, that she understood it was an unusual situation but she thought perhaps it would be good if something could be done to make sure that the wrong information wasn't passed on again to someone else since they'd be unlikely to be as tenacious as her in asking for someone to check.

She wasn't really expecting a great response, or even for anything to really be done after she hung up, but what she absolutely was not expecting was for the supervisor to say, "It's because we get a lot of Pakistanis and Somalis getting shirty when we tell them they're not qualified." o_O

My mom said she didn't see how giving these people wrong information would help the situation and then hung up. She's going to make a complaint about it.

Because...seriously. SERIOUSLY? It's like...admitted policy to lie to immigrant communities about their ability to exercise their civic duties should they be entitled to them? I understand that people can get shirty when they don't hear what they want; call centres are stressful, but if they get shirty when you're lying to them for blatantly racist reasons, I'm not sure how you have anyone to blame but yourself.

Sure, a lot of the people calling up might genuinely not be entitled to vote, but if they're not, it's not like they can fake the documents they do need any easier than they can fake a british passport.

The only possible reason I can come up with that this is accepted behaviour in this office is an assumption that anyone calling from these communities is either not entitled to vote, or not entitled to information. It's a lazy, racist time-saving tactic and I dread to think how many british citizens have been disenfranchised by it. A single one is too many.

GRR.

(Also, I know, I'm still being LJcraptacular at, you know, posting and stuff. Still working on it... Still waiting for twelvecolonies to post the results of the vidding challenge so I can actually post my vid. If it's not done by the end November I'll post it anyway because dammit, it's been two months since I posted a vid and that's Not On.)

I haven't felt moved to write about Heroes this week, though I did enjoy it. Instead I'm going to tackle the few episodes of the Sarah Jane Adventures I've seen. Mild spoilers through the third episode follow!

( Suddenly, the Slitheen are Scary! )

( The Trouble with Tennant! )

( Sarah Jane & Friendship with Kids! )

( Sarah Jane & Friendship with Clyde! )

Take care y'all! :)

In other news I am knee-deep in Knights of the Old Republic II on XBoX. It's...well it's weird. I think it's breaking my brain. I can't decide if it's attrocious or horribly underrated. I'm leaning towards the former. It's like someone told the world's most epic, mythic, INCREDIBLE story to an idiot who thinks being cool is all about cliches and twin-customised-duel-wielding katanas and making angsty statements and being emo, and then that person made a video game.