Hey can u tell me how to make money making historically incorrect posts and profiting??? Id really love to know.

medievalpoc:

Hmmmmmkay.

First of all, I get that this is supposed to be an
inflammatory message, but I also see from your blog that you’re 17, and
I’m in my mid-thirties (and INTJ, if you’re curious). If you were hoping
to start a fight, it’s not really a fair one. Perhaps if I was younger
and had fewer dependents, one could consider this “profitable”, but
considering that I’m not only multiply disabled myself, but that my
partner became physically disabled and unable to work in 2014, and I also seem to have acquired an additional minor dependent last year, I’m not even keeping my head above water.

I
don’t really talk about it since it is irrelevant, but I am currently
living in poverty. Although the medievalpoc tumblr page has literally
millions of hits, I do not choose to put ads here because I find it
ethically distasteful, and instead have a Patreon page and a donation button,
with the idea that those who can offer to support this content can help
keep it available for those who cannot. It’s basically the same idea
behind having a funding institution supporting academic work by an
individual, except it’s all of you instead of a college or
university. The money from the Patreon and donation allows me to do
this, instead of getting a full-time academic job which wouldn’t leave
me with the time or ability to continue MPoC, because food, electricity,
and internet costs money but a full time academic job costs time and
energy. All of it that I currently have, for sure.

As for
“how” one creates something like MPoC, well, I’ve written several
articles and answered many questions on exactly how to create and curate
your own collection, and several people have in fact done so.
Everyone has different perspectives and backgrounds, and that is
something I consider an invaluable asset, not a detriment, to
educational endeavors.

I mean, I suppose you could
start at community college because you’ve been on your own due to
personal circumstances since 16, and spend more than ten years working
on and off as a retail cashier, doing janitorial work, biomedical
janitorial, and industrial maintenance whilst managing to take
intermittent classes part time, go through three interstate (1000+ mile)
moves and college transfers while bleeding credits across the country.
You could end up taking 18 credits of Honors Interdisciplinary History
of Western Civilization as an undergrad because you qualify for that
program despite being unable to afford it, going to full-time classes
and 35 hours/week of menial work and still be faced with homelessness,
take out massive loans just to be able to pay your rent and still end up
having to move out of state again to avoid being on the street.

You
could do all of this while treating and maintaining a laundry list of
comorbid disabling conditions, and have one of your best memories be a
visit to a massive museum, remembering the breathtaking room full of
Rubens instead of the physical problems that required carrying a pillow
around with you the whole time to sit and rest every 15 minutes.

You
could end up with a a degree and a drawer full of academic medals, now
that you’ve finally gotten close to where you wanted to be, where you
worked so hard you almost killed yourself to be, sick with the
realization that if you’re to progress to your ultimate goal, you will
be expected; no, required, to perpetuate the same racism,
ableism, classism, sexism, and violence that you’ve been fighting so
hard against since you began your journey. You might realize you’ve been
told so many times that you don’t exist by people in authority,
you’re trying to remember when you started to agree. To figure out when
you became a theoretical idea to yourself. That if you want to squeeze
through that last door into the ivory tower, you have to leave
everything you are, and everything you came from behind because who you
are is Outside, and you want In.

You might suddenly understand
that all of the things you wanted so badly, that you had been
conditioned to value so highly you’d do anything to achieve them, were
really the same tools of violence that had made it so unnecessarily
difficult, nearly impossible, to get ahead, or merely break even. That
no matter what you achieved, and hoo boy, was it a lot, you’d never
escape the onus of being one of Those People, the ones that “we should
do something about”, the ones We (in the room) talk about when They (the
ones outside it) can’t hear us. You can either buy into this system and
support it in order to justify your hard work, or you can face your
truth and do what you think is right, no matter what.

So
instead, you might make a diagonal move, become staff instead of
faculty, because too many of the latter view students as obstacles to
learning, as adversaries to be overcome with intimidation and bluster.
Because the entire system of what is learned, what is required, and who
decides these things is beyond corrupt, and maybe this is a better way
to actually help people with the skills you’ve acquired. Spend a few
years fighting, working, and advocating for students in the Disability
Services Office, the larger part of which involves creating accessible
files of entire undergraduate curricula, including textbooks by the
dozen, for disabled students just trying to get where they want to go.

Watch every single history professor skip the same chapters of World
History, US History, six weeks on WW2, the entirety of pre-colonial everything “cut for time”, every
time. The same cropped paintings of white men; women and people of
color omitted from books, handouts, PowerPoints, and lecture notes.
Anything non-European is disposable, and anything European and non-white
is “irrelevant” and “anomalous”. No one takes the history classes that
aren’t required, so they stop being offered. Skip the same two chapters
of “Meanwhile, in Not-Europe” every semester. “Don’t bother processing
those chapters, we won’t be needing them. We’re not covering that this
year.”

From this position, continue the activist work and public speaking you’ve been doing since you were a student, since before
you were a student. Take the opportunities to speak at educational
seminars for professors, only five of which show up, because it’s not
“required” by that college’s inclusion/accessibility policy.

Burn
out from being surrounded by people who seem to hate the students
they’re supposed to be helping. Watch the people you supervise in your
department get let go one by one, two semesters of no new work-studies
to hand-scan the books so you’re doing it yourself, page by page, hour
after hour, trying to keep up with the workload. Email professors who
think sending in a 500-page textbook for processing the day before the
midterm is “ADA compliance”.

Get invited into someone’s
office to be told that your department is “unnecessary”, according to
the new college President. Much less necessary than the new stadium.
You’re being laid off. Be told this a month before your partner of five
years is going under for spinal surgery, which you don’t know will turn
out to be permanently disabling.

Go home. Open your computer,
go to the space where for the past year and a half you’ve been sharing
and agitating on behalf of everything these professors keep leaving out
of their classes. The skipped textbook chapters. The uncropped images.
Bringing the marginal back to the center and shouting from the rooftops,
hoping that someone will hear, that anyone will care. Making
connections directly to those affected by this whitewashed history,
making connections with critical theory and SFF and popular culture,
with media and its crimes, its endless white spaces.

Think:
you’re more than qualified for a similar position at another
institution…if they weren’t mostly on hiring freezes. Think: You could
always work for…Pearson. Fucking Pearson. Think: you could try
and get funding for this research from an institution, apply for
grants…which would then control the content, restrict access, charge
$50-90 to rent a digital copy of a chapbook for 48 hours, control what
you can and cannot say about what you find. Kiss your free time and
energy to fight back goodbye, and see if you can find someone to take
care of your partner for you while you search for and make a good
impression at a new job helping half truths find unwilling ears.

Think:
Or. You could keep this in the hands of those who need it, and who it
belongs to, really. What if the people who love this content, who use it
to enhance their classrooms and curricula, who show these works to
their families, who create stories and lectures and media in a new way
for a different audience with this information…what if they could also
fund it? What if those who could support it financially could
also keep it accessible for those who don’t have the means? And what if
this plan might allow you time to take care of your bedridden partner
while buying time to figure out what to do?

All in all though,
I don’t recommend this path, but it was the one I took. It’s much less
headache and much more “profitable” to start a page full of photos of
kittens and cover it in ads. For one thing, you don’t really get many
messages like the one you’ve sent me, and for another, it’s unlikely
you’ll endure truly bizarre smear campaigns or having to make four
separate police reports for stalking and harassment.

That being
said, I know many people who expect that I should be marketing this
concept, or doing more with it, or writing a book, or in general
expanding this into something… more “profitable”. But at this time and
in this position, I don’t have the means, I lack certain abilities, and
I don’t know the “right people”. My mother’s been pushing at me about
“the book” for quite a while (since she’s probably reading this, I’ll
just try saying “soon? I hope?”) but it’s hard enough to create this
much content across four sites, and be this disabled, and meet my
personal obligations, AND write a book, AND survive when it’s this much
of a struggle.

So, you’re perfectly free to verify the
“historical correctness” of anything I post on your own time and go on
at length about it; in fact, I encourage it. The more you search, the
more you’ll learn. But if you’re looking for “profit”, I humbly suggest
you do something else.