From To Be an Immigrant in Trump’s America: A Theory on Animals:
But among young Latinx immigrants, after the Trump comments went viral, there was some radical reclaiming of the word “animal” that piqued my interest. In particular, there was a video of a fifth-grade girl whose father was deported and who gave an impassioned speech in which she said, “The president says Mexican immigrants are animals. We are not animals! But if I was, I’d be a black panther, fighting against racism and inequality!” The crowd roared.
Among young Latinx immigrants, after the Trump comments went viral, there was some radical reclaiming of the word “animal” that piqued my interest. Trump didn’t name a species in particular, either in his speech or in the alarming White House missive, because no one species of animal has been used as a slur towards undocumented immigrants. He said “animals.” And for “animals” to be understood by everyone as an insult, it means we have agreed as a society that animals are not only inferior to us, but that we have a certain ability to cause them pain, that it is our natural right—to starve them, slaughter them, rape them, brand them. One morning, after reading about one of Trump’s executive orders, I turned to my partner and said, “This is a man who has never loved an animal.”
Did the Internet community peak at bookmarks? Asked in a different and perhaps more complete way: just as technologies like RSS and email in their purest forms are hard to beat even as technology marches forward, what better technology exists to keep track of information on the ever-expanding Internet than bookmarks? Taken a step further, what better way to share the bookmarked information than a site of your own? As such, I‘ve been reading, which is why I write now.
Working in and having a passion for libraries, I am struck by the fact that the way bookmarks work in the physical world is not directly analogous to bookmarks in the digital world. Bookmarks in the digital world are instead like dog-eared pages or highlighted passages; if you think of the Internet as a single tome, that is. In any case, anything that moves you to deface a book should probably be shared or become immortalized in some other way than just a reference for a future version of yourself.