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Kendra, regular version @kendrawcandraw.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Kevin Buist @kevinbuist.com ⋅ 2d
Ferric Fang @fangferric.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Paul Lê @paulle.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com ⋅ 3d
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Joyce: “Hey, Past Me, check it! I’m not racist anymore!”
Every black person ever: *ALL the side-eye*
Well…. less.
It’s something.
As a mostly white-ish girl who went to high school with almost no African-American students, even one who grew up in a very left-wing household and was taught not to be racist – there was a certain personal thrill once I hit college and actually had African-American friends. It wasn’t about ‘proving’ anything or even the exoticism of it – it was finally being able to practice what had previously only been theoretical.
Now, I also wasn’t stupid enough to say anything like that aloud, particularly not when hanging out with a group, but I will admit that my 19-year-old self felt a certain smug accomplishment about it.
So, while I snicker at Joyce’s faux pass, and the well-deserved side-eye it evoked, I also understand it. It is very human to find accomplishment in the mundane.
You can only get better in small steps, and I applaud Joyce for trying even when she steps in metaphorical dogshit on occasion. Keep trying, Joyce. You’ll reach “basic humanity” eventually.
Joyce from several months ago also gives herself the side eye: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/perfectest/
Some real backsliding here between Joyce, Sarah and Walky but Joyce’s is definitely stepping the farthest back.
woof that strip did not… oof… so many other things you could warn past you about joyce….
Oh wow, I did actually call it yesterday when I said that she was in their class but they never noticed her.
No, she was taking the same Calculus course but a different class/time slot.
Hrm, I guess I read ‘different section’ as in ‘different area of the room, you never saw me’.
Unless it’s a typo and that was supposed to be ‘session’.
“Section” means a different time block. It’s a weird bit of jargon.
It depends on your school I think— at my college we had a huge lecture (300 students) and then smaller discussion sections led by TAs. So you could have the same lecture but a different discussion section.
Yeah that sounds about right, though I had the feeling this was a lecture unless all three of the originals happened to be in the same group.
Section is just jargon I never picked up. A US thing?
Yes, Nono! Think of section as an instance of a given course in a given term.
Any given course (Geology 101) can have multiple sections each term.
Most courses only vary the section for a different meeting time/pattern, but like some have said, you might have multiple sections in the same room.
Combined graduate and undergraduate courses (Geography 345/445) are two sections of different courses in the same room. Often the only difference is workload. Then there are cross-listed (Anthology/Sociology) courses, etc. ad nauseum
Canada too.
300 students in a lecture might not be as huge as you think. My first-year Economics lectures at ANU had 650 students in them. First-year maths at UNSW left the impression of being even bigger than that, but I never got an enrolment figure.
Some schools pair the lecture with the discussion (sometimes using the name “recitation” and you get eleventy-billion “sections” that all share the same time/room for the lecture, and some will have you sign up a lecture class, a recitation class and (in engineering or sciences) a lab class.
I’ve seen both ways done at different schools here in the US.
Section is a fairly common term for different timeslots in the same class in American Universities. No idea what the etymology of using it as a term for timeslot is.
In this case we know the same professor teaches the class at different times, since Dina was in one of those other sections – she got Walky’s doodled on notes accidentally returned to her in an early strip.
Nope! Section is right. It means exactly what Schpoonman said with the addition that sometimes it can be the same time slot but a different classroom and professor.
Depends. Stanford, late 1980’s, I’m pretty sure “section” meant who your TA was, and we’d have said “different class” if it was the same course number at a different time.
I recalls some college lectures I watched on Youtube where the professor would say “You’ll discuss this more in Section” meaning with your TA in a smaller group.
I’m super confused about this thread but then I was lucky enough to have only taken like one auditorium class in college (it went about as well as you’d expect)
Joyce thats the sort of thought that should really stay in your head
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahah Joyce is just so delightfully dipshitty sometimes.
In six more months, she’ll be wishing she could travel back to this moment and shut herself up.
this is most people’s lives.
I want to go back 6 minutes and shut myself up half the time
I’d spend the rest of my life searching back in times for occasions where I needed to shut up.
Personally, I’d settle for an edit function for my latest comments.
And 3 levels of undo.
That’s why my preferred superpower is Undo
yeah, careful – I’ve seen at least three works of (science) fiction that suggest the end result of this is anything from making yourself completely unmemorable (because you end up never doing anything that might get you noticed, for good or ill) to losing all free will and ability to take risks/act on less than complete information, compulsively save-scumming even the most trivial decisions, like Two Face and his coin.
Of course, the moral of such cautionary tales has an element of “be happy with what you’ve got, even with regrets, because what you think you want would only be worse”, but I do find the logic persuasive.
JESUS CHRIST JOYCE
LMFAO, that’s hilarious.
Lucy even has an iconic smile like Joyce. A pleasant half circle.
Joyce maybe just not say anything.
For the rest of the semester.
yikes-aroonie
It’s so nice that white girls can see themselves accurately represented in media these days *sage nod*
Biggest laugh all week. Ow, that hurts. Well deserved…
Glad they’re still letting her exist with them lmao
Oh, uaw, so progressive!
Maybe YOU should be the one running for congress, Joyce!
I’m sure Becky would run your campaign for free!
Well I said come over baby
We got chicken in the corn
Who’s corn? What corn?–My corn!–Jerry Lee Lewis
Joyce is definitely the Pee-Wee Herman of this Black Pack, except not as cool.
Lets hope Joyce’s career doesn’t end like Pee-Wee’s then.
Considering how repressed she is, it might.
Oh, Joyce, someday you’ll learn to keep that kind of statement on the inside.
Or hopefully not think it to begin with.
I was gonna make a comment about Lucy trying too hard to get her way into this friend group but Joyce kinda took the wind out of that sail. i have a couple of white friends I wonder if knowing me is really that big a deal to them?
Well, from personal experience, I’d wager they spend a lot of time doing social calculus instead of socializing with you, because they aren’t sure what’s a line you can relate on vs. a line that is offensive in ways they maybe don’t comprehend.
And if so, then, unlike Joyce, they don’t ask you to help them solve that problem by surprising you with their assumptions – unless they really haven’t learned better.
I still struggle a bit with the math, myself z but mostly because I’m never sure how much folks want me in their business to begin with, regardless of if I share an identity with them.
Among my Black friends there are two who back in single days were treasured by many white people as a sign of coolness and not being racist. They were too nice to call it out or shun people, but I know it dragged sometimes. And that was in a church setting that was mostly white, so, it seems similar.
Might depend on how long they’ve known you, Sirksome.
One since college and one since middle school. Although frankly I only have like 3 or 4 people I would consider real friends at this point. Nothing like the social group Joyce has built up or has been shown in DoA. The whole walking together as a group to class thing was never really something I did in college. It was more like a high school thing. So Joyce’s whole perspective on being surrounded by minority friends is kind of a fantasy to begin with. Like who has four friends to walk to class with let alone four black ones? Or for that matter a whole social network of like 20 people you know intimately and are regularly involved in their lives?
University of Houston was a local commuter school for me, so it wasn’t a walk together to morning class thing. The dormies may have done so. More of a go to out to eat together thing for me. And I had three different social networks of a dozenish each and to a greater or lesser extent we were involved in each others lives. There was the Science Fiction group, the chess group, and for the lack of a better term, the scientific occult group. There were also isolated students I knew from classes we shared. Then I worked for the Student Opportunity Service tutoring mostly smart black kids that hadn’t had the advantage of a high school that offered trig and intro-calc. Some of them became friends as did some of the professors that liked to talk about the non-teaching stuff they were working on. But after college, it was the Science Fiction friends that stuck.
Much later, in grad school, the department was more of a closed community. Also a lot more diverse with many nationalities, though I was partially accustomed to this from working in the oil industry, the mix was quite different. I probably formed many stereotypes based on inadequate samples. But mostly people are people or I’m mostly oblivious or some combination of the two.
But yeah, socializing on campus, whether walking to a common destination or in the reading areas of the library stacks were a big part of my college experience.
That was closer to my experience, though I wasn’t a commuter student. I had plenty of friends on campus, even a few in my own dorm, but I didn’t have a group of friends in the dorm who were also in my classes, so while we’d occasionally wind up walking together if we were heading in roughly the same direction at the same time, there wasn’t any kind of regular thing like this.
Sirksome, it probably depends how many other black friends they have. If I went from zero to four, I’d think it was a big deal, too.
Jeez, Joyce!
well that problem of niches solved itself fast…
See, Sarah? It didn’t take her long to find her niche at all!
Aaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaah
*wheeze*
Oh god, Joyce.
That was a cringy statement, Joyce.
my vision went blurry at Joyce in the last panel. I think I blacked out.
“…Four different black people…”
Wait, was Joyce expecting to be walking to class with four of the same black person? Like clones?
Well, Sal and Walky are sorta like clones but that’s beside the point.
They’re not identical twins, so the only way in which they’re like clones is the fact that they share a birthday.
Lol glad I’m not the only one.
Four Jacobs in her dreams I guess?
Might reflect that before college she sort of assumed that all members of an ethnic group were essentially the same, or fell into a few standard types.
One effect of knowing people in [group] is finding out that they are just as variable as anyone else.
….
See, THIS is why Joyce needs to buckle down and make a deal with Roz.
I know Roz’s style of engagement is like a sand blaster only with slivers of broken glass instead of sand, but at least she’d eventually spell this stuff out to Joyce rather than just rolling her eyes and biting her tongue. Joyce is willing and ready to improve, but she still doesn’t know what improving entails, and no one else is prepared to sit her down and have that talk with her.
Joyce is still in that stage where every step away from her upbringing feels like such a monumental step that it has to be acknowledged, because it’s to exciting and thrilling.
It’ll phase out eventually, like how Becky might eventually stop loudly proclaiming that she’s a lesbian.
Wait, Becky’s a lesbian? She could’ve said.
You’d think.
She’s been pretty circumspect about it.
Roz doesn’t seem like the kind of person who wants people to do better, she seems to like it more to just be mad at people NOT doing better.
She certainly gets more out of being holier-than-thou, but I do think deep down she wishes the world were a better place.
I lost what little Roz sympathy I had when she was happier about a progressive candidate than sympathetic to the fact that multiple assaults were made on her fellow dorm mates.
Always check the people’s motivations. Are they more interested in lifting people up or tearing them down? A lot of evil shit happened because people claimed the former but actually believed the latter.
You know if she was there, Roz would just start in on a self-righteous tirade about it. Then Sal and/or Sarah would tell her to shut up, then Roz would tell them to shut up and carry on being offended on their behalf.
There are some thoughts you just don’t give voice too.
Or at least don’t give voice to them when other people are around to hear you.
And then step 2, you try to unlearn the reasons that made you think a thought you can’t say aloud in front of your friends.
Joyce is acting out.
This is what I pointed out yesterday about Joyce being the token white girl now.
Dibs on being the comment section’s token slightly eccentric geezer-nerd.
Gonna be a half empty comment section if you do that
That pretty much IS the comment section.
Fair points.
Love is a battlefield…
Life is a mine field,
Or maybe Love is a warm puppy. Hard to say.
2020 is a dumpster fire.
Don’t speak ill of dumpster fires. At this rate, we’ll be huddled around one next year.
Oh, crap! I hadn’t thought of that! I thought it would be better just having an altruist in the fancy white house.
Better yes. Expecting an altruist may be a bit of a stretch.
God… That’s such a big YIKES, all I could do was laugh.
I still think Lucy should re-claim the alpha sweetie niche. Movie night is up!
Joyce, sweety
Don’t
Just don’t
Those greenhouses! They’re awesome! If you’re in Bloomington and Jordan Hall is still open, check them out! Especially in the winter, it’s great to look out at the snow while sitting under a banana tree in near-tropical climate. The single biggest thing I missed about Bloomington when I was in Boston.
I remember them in one other arc, maybe three or four strips at most?
For the work Willis put into them I’d just have a month of characters walking back and forth in front.
look it’s not called jordan hall anymore
Lucy definitely didn’t have any ulterior motive for taking her math class at the same time as Walky or anything.
It might have been a calculated move. If not, that’s a plus, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Yikes indeed
Correction: three different black people and one who is, in his own words, “generically beige”. (While saying his sister is black, in the same sentence, of course.)
But seriously, it took a second reading to see that it was Sal giving the Yikes, not Sarah. Hopefully that makes it more likely to sink in, given Joyce’s idolizing/possibly-repressed-crushing-on her, rather than Joyce writing it off as “Sarah being Sarah”.
Joyce has largely weaned off the Sal worship for the most part after they had a talk about it.
Yeah it bothers me sometimes as a biracial person that you cant just call yourself biracial and people will just except that. I mean I dont mind people calling me black but I get enough shit from other black people to know that they really dont consider me to be black.
I hope by now that Walky realizes all the myriad ways that comment was such a problem.
I just assumed that, being mixed race, it is up to him, not those around him, to decide what he self identifies as. No? I mean, it is what I do.
Honestly you americans are weird with how laser focused you guys are on race and skin color of all things, I never had to think of what I was before I started talking to americans regularily, I was just a person. Fuck’s sake.
That’s what 400 years of slavery and segregation will get you.
You think that there’s not something really weird about him saying that his twin is black but he’s not?
His mom is racist, and he’s internalized that.
Yup. That one line, mostly glossed over at the time, was our first clue about the internal racism in that family.
Maybe I’m naive but this seems out of character for Joyce at this point. Considering how often she hangs out with everybody there (and dubbing Sarah her big sister early in the first semester) I don’t get why she’d suddenly decide to say that
Mike and Billie were present through most of the first semester.
Billie was partly Asian (I think) and Mike was something else.
Probably whatever you don’t want him to be.
Billie uses the term Hapa so I’m assuming she’s glad asian herself.
That and ruth’s grandpa got all racist at her
I dunno. When you’re raised in a setting like Joyce was (I can, at least partially, relate), there are a lot of intrusive thoughts that happen for YEARS after your deprogramming. Most of us learn to keep it to ourselves, but that’s both A) not Joyce’s style and B) not good comedy.
Sarah’s comment seems pretty rude too, and Joyce doesn’t look happy about it.
So, Joyce suffering from ‘pressure of speech’ confirmed. I wonder if she mentally kicked herself or whether her social awareness is at the point where she’s got the sneaking suspicion that she said something wrong but she’s not sure how?
The latter, I think.
Had to look it up, and found that no, this was not “pressure of speech”. There is nothing to imply joyce said it quickly, and less that it was said quickly due to mania.
I think this is more like a compulsion to speak, if in fact she felt the need to say it at all vs. just blurted out her thoughts.
Thank you for sharing the term, today I learned.
But as almost always, there is the literal meaning and then the expressive figurative meaning it suggests.
Sweet Jesus. It’s 8 year old me and my Romani neighbours all over again.
Joyce is the sweetest idiot.
CRINGE
Joyce…….just…..no….just….no…..
Replace “I’m so progressive” with “it’s so nice to be around a variety of people from a bunch of different backgrounds, with different experiences and perspectives from mine, and I feel like a richer person for getting to know you all, and while I know it’s not the same what with the lack of hundreds of years of oppression and all but I think all white people should spend some time being the minority in a group as it may challege some of their preconceptions”?
Still possibly an over-focus on skin colour given that these are all people able to afford to go to college (and even though Sarah’s on a scholarship she doesn’t appear to have a job, so she’s not poor poor, just not able to afford to blow her scholarship terms), of a similar age, etc so they still aren’t the most diverse of groups. I mean, Walky and Sal have had vastly different experiences growing up but objectively their skin colour or tickbox ethnic background really aren’t the reason why (or financial, or educational to a point)…
That thing where Joyce has a lot she could learn from them all, and their lived experiences as PoC are only one facet of that, but at the same time it’s not their responsibility to teach her…
I congratulate myself on being so advanced and tolerant that I can associate with all you lesser people in the comment section.
Did I say that out loud?
I don’t know, you tell us. But you certainly wrote it out loud.
It’s hard to tell, what with it not being all caps and multiple exclamation marks.
Seriously though, the problem with what Joyce said is that the subtext is more or less the same as what I said, except of course in my version it isn’t very sub.
Oh noooooo
The Walkerton twins act kind of strange after the timeskip. They are… milder?
Something happened, something that we’ll hear about eventually. It probably also explains why Sal stopped murdering the curls out of her hair, and why she no longer has a motorcycle.
Even if she does still have it, winter and sport bikes don’t really mesh.
What she needs is a KLR 650 with studded tires. You can ride on solid ice with those things. They’re cheap, plentiful, and they just. Won’t. Die.
Walky has gone through two short term but intense romantic relationships that were ill-fated and likely the trauma of whatever happened with Billie. Sal has dealt with the changes in her relationship with Marcy and come to terms with Archer and Amber, the two people most responsible for the hole in her hand and the wrench in her life. And both have had a recent intense dose of family and their mother in particular. So a little subdued is understandable.
It’s interesting Joyce came back from family unsubdued. But then, in all versions, Joyce bounces rather than permanently breaks.
And he was kidnapped and his roommate died.
Well, yes. But the roommate was Mike.
Hey, archive hunters, check the backgrounds of the old comics for evidence of Joyce time travel.
What is this, Homestuck?
Were there changes in campus that are reflected in the current strips but weren’t there before?
Else, what are you talking about?
I too do not know what you are talking about. Please continue.
Hahahaha, yikes!
Four different black people? Were you thinking back then that you might one day be walking with four of the same black person?
Joyce was very optimistic about her cloning initiatives in an alternate universe.
The identical black quadruplets that all have the same name that she ordered haven’t arrived yet. Just you wait. Mason, Mason, Mason and Mason will turn up one day and be impossible to tell apart.
Joyce sweetie you remember when your mother made you wince when she talked about having Sarah for a friend gave her joy because she could tell the neighbours you weren’t racist?
Yeah.
Yep.
The brain comes up with a lot of rubbish when you are uncomfortable.
I suppose it’s overthinking to think Joyce deliberately did something cringeworthy to lighten the mood?
Joyce what the f
Yep. She’s soooooo progressive!
She is certainly progressing. It doesn’t really matter where you are at the moment if you are moving in the right direction.
True!
THIS is the essence of the ‘at-school’ experience.
Reminds me of my old college roommate. She’d been around black people but rarely and it showed haha. It honestly made me laugh, but I would do my best to actually educate her on what was appropriate to say and what wasn’t.
Oh please don’t suddenly remember your last name is Brown and say you’re five brown people walking together…
Oh please yes, do it!
There’s definitely a very yikes-y read to this, which is what I thought at first and how everyone else seems to have read it, but is it possible that Joyce is making fun of herself here rather than genuinely believing that she’s so progressive?
Considering Sal and Walky’s reactions, I don’t think so.
Thing is she’s not wrong. She’s miles away from being right, but she’s not wrong, for where she came from this is a huge step forward, there are just so many more steps she needs to take.
Honestly, this kind of shit is why I’ve stopped trying to make white people understand black folk, here in the aftermath of 2016. At some point, there inevitably comes the part where they get way too comfortable in their “knowledge” and completely unaware of their ignorance. Some get to the other side of it, but too many think they cool and can live there now. And I’m done bringing people to this point. I’m done being “your black friend” who’s cool with your bullshit. I ain’t your n**ro passport.
Anyway, I love Joyce and I know Willis ain’t writing a garbage character. I look forward to her looking back on this and wincing even harder.
What if (asks the long-dead college-age me) I’m just looking to engage you as a friend/colleague/fellow student/fellow human and am not looking for passport to anywhere or anything?
Far too often, it’s not that simple. Even when you think it is, there’s an undercurrent.
We live in a country that’s still very segregated by race. Which is often hard for white people to see and nearly impossible for black people to miss.
Yikes ahoy!
I sometimes forget their black, either I just see “Sal” or “Sarah” or I just see cute animeish looking characters. They are clearly more chibi than if they were drawn realistically.
I never understood this “let’s get a group together so we can walk somewhere” thing. I could never handle more than one walking companion, and that from a carefully trimmed set of possibilities, and then only if it was a chance encounter, and then only if I absolutely had to.
Oh bless her heart. Oh honey.
Joyce NO.
We DO NOT have TOKEN friends.