All of my real friends are first or second gen so I feel like we should be able to relate but they’re also all solidly middle class at worst and I’m just. What’s it like not to be poor? How do I get the American Dream of a $60k - $100k income. Can I steal it.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
[gallery]
favorite characters: Emma Frost
"I am diamond, Ms. Pryde. I am, by definition, my own best friend."
A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer Algebra II; a third of these schools do not offer chemistry. Fewer than half of American Indian and Native-Alaskan high school students have access to the full range of math and science courses in their high school
a quarter of ~7 year old girls have already tried dieting and all you sociopaths have to say for yourselves is “b-b-but men have it just as hard!”
If we do not know how to take care of ourselves and to love ourselves, we cannot take care of the people we love. Loving oneself is the foundation for loving another person.
Thích Nhất Hạnh (via vulturechow)
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Oh rascal children of Gaza. You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window. You who filled every morning with rush and chaos. You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony. Come back, and scream as you want and break all the vases. Steal all the flowers. Come back. Just come back.
Khaled Juma, Palestinian poet from Gaza (via vulturechow)
Name: estrella
Nickname: stella, essie,
Birthday: may 28
Gender: female
Sexuality: not straight
Height: 5’2
Time zone: est
What time and date is it there: 9:40 PM 8/30
Average hours of sleep I get each night: 5 hours weekdays to prob 8 on weekend
OTPs: hhahahahaahahahhahahahahaha (whispers) sasusaku forever
The last thing I Googled was: "srunchie hairbands"
First word that comes to mind: blue
What I last said to a family member: "bye mama i love you"
One place that makes me happy and why: barcelona on the cusp of fall
How many blankets I sleep under: 1 blanket
Favourite beverage: alcohol
The last movie I watched in the cinema was: guardians of the galaxy lmao
Three things I can’t live without: overpriced make up products, cookies, alcohol
A piece of advice for all my followers: don’t date sociopaths
You have to listen to this song: distant sun by crowded house LMAO
My blog(s): this
[gallery]
The True Trayvon Martin
- He didn’t eat pork bc his father didn’t. Once his uncle fixed pork chops; they smelled so good,he called them “beef chops” & ate 1. #Trayvon
- He was passionate about aviation. #Trayvon
- When he volunteered at a soup kitchen for. The first time, he was astounded by the US hunger crisis. #Trayvon
- He loved his little cousins birthday parties. Even as a teen, he wasn’t too cool for Chuck E. Cheese. #Trayvon
- He was modest about saving his father from dying in a house fire. His father called him his best friend bc of it. #Trayvon
- Hoodies made *him* feel safe. Like so many teens (and adults), he wore them as a protective shell, a security garment. #Trayvon
- He called his dad, “My ol’ boy.” Lord, how he loved his dad. #Trayvon
- When folks wanted to tease him, they said, “Boy, you too skinny to take a breath.” And he’d just smile. #Trayvon
- If he wanted to hang out with his cousins and they had chores, he helped so they could finish faster. #Trayvon
- His uncle said they never had to ask him to do something twice. #Trayvon
- At 17, he was still into BMX bikes. He could cat-walk wheelie. #Trayvon
- The tattoo on his wrist read, “Sybrina.” #Trayvon
- The tattoo on his chest read, “Cora” — his grandmother’s name. #Trayvon
- I’m going to stop here. But just claim one of these memories I tweeted. Carry part of this boy with you, write him on your heart. #Trayvon
- Write the beautiful details of all the black children you meet on your heart. That’s where they’ll be safest. #Trayvon
- I feel like this stuff is important. #Trayvon
All facts about Trayvon are from this Esquire article.
I will never forget Trayvon. Never.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Your body was the only body that never taught my body how to fear. I loved you for it. And love you still. The brush of your shoulder against mine. My head on your chest. My hand on your back. The touches that could not keep me human, but kept me sane.
The years without you. I wasn’t anchored except for one or two times a year on a familiar shore. I watched you, receding. You waved a hand. I drew away. The earth seemed to fall away from beneath my feet. I would not understand until a lifetime had passed.
I never wanted this part of my life to touch you. Not you. You, who were the last good thing, and the only one I believed would stay. You, who remembered me as I was meant to be: another girl, in another time. Her hair, her smile, the strong bones of her face, all kept alive in your memory although the lines of her were erased long ago by a dark clot of blood.
For that memory, for the fact that you hold it even now, I will forgive you anything.
Remember during the Bush era when liberals were huge anti-war activists and demonized Bush for destabilizing Iraq and invading Afghanistan, whereas Republicans didn’t bat an eye to the piling bodies and minimal progress in these regions? Now that Obama’s president, conservatives are using the same anti-war tactics to push Obama out of office, whereas liberals have become warmongers and apologists for drone strikes.
It’s always comforting to know that the violent death of poor brown people is nothing more than a political prop for this joke of a bipartisanship.
Republicans and Democrats.. same snakes, different names.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy | PolicyMic
The news: A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn’t a democracy any more. And they’ve found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.
An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military.
For their study, Gilens and Page compiled data from roughly 1,800 different policy initiatives in the years between 1981 and 2002. They then compared those policy changes with the expressed opinion of the United State public. Comparing the preferences of the average American at the 50th percentile of income to what those Americans at the 90th percentile preferred, as well as the opinions of major lobbying or business groups, the researchers found out that the government followed the directives set forth by the latter two much more often.
It’s beyond alarming. As Gilens and Page write, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” In other words, their statistics say your opinion literally does not matter.
That might explain why mandatory background checks on gun sales supported by 83% to 91% of Americans aren’t in place, or why Congress has taken no action on greenhouse gas emissions even when such legislation is supported by the vast majority of citizens.
This problem has been steadily escalating for four decades. While there are some limitations to their data set, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez constructed income statistics based on IRS data that go back to 1913. They found that the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is much bigger than you would think…
has love been blood-written
has marrow yet
been poured for it
a person peeled
the skin from their back or ribs
has expression of this
been offered in flesh
cut from the cheeks
has blood extracted
its colour still red
uncoagulated
been scooped from the arteries
poured into a milk vessel
have two people offered it
one to the other
as they would fresh milk
have they shared it happilytime-separated in spirit
in body as by a thorn fence
sworn to each other
one morning have two
after first soaking rain
the damp mist dense
in an unpeopled place
where apart from the trees
nothing stirred
become aware
of each other’s rustledid that true meeting
seem a vision to them
brought by love’s plight
or its mirage
from time to time
as if suddenly waking
out of a dream
did their speech
desiring utterance
pass from a mouth
if just a howl
did words elude them
was the situation soured by thisdid spots of ceaseless rain
emotion’s tears
spill from their eyes
did it soak their clothes
did they sweat compassiondisoriented with but
a stutter of movement
they were stuck
each time a word
no link with others
lacking substance
limped out alone
was it ten days later
their tongue and palate
found strength for it
but they are born for success
of equal standing
parted for so long
did they greet one another
exchanging stories
did each for their part
pass on the trials
sustained through their love
did they read the message
exchange their newslove was a food store
which when it was heated
with charcoal and fire
the glowing embers
of emotions stirred
did they fill a large pot
time after time
drag the enclosure’s
night-time gate
each one with tender eyes
seeing nothing harmed the other
did they listen thus
for a whole yeardid the talking end
did they then spend
half a day
in this silent way
as the daylight fell
from their staring gaze
their inflamed thoughts
did they pass that night
like the camel herders
in nocturnal endurance
of cold and dark
difficulties bringing illnessdid the dawn then glow
and the sun call out
approaching each other
not crossing the boundary
of mores and modesty
longing for a balm
with a mere forearm
between them did they stand
bodies held straight
opposite each other
avoiding the step
of moving closer
resisting the play-touch
the youthful way
the taste glimpsed
in the distance
did they just behold each other
through their eyesthey stood on the spot
each one gazing
standing upright
did it last a thousand nightsthe legs of the termite
emerged from the earth
breaking the surface skin
did it peel their bodies
consume the flesh
did it wound the veins
pass to the nerves
persisting
to the very inside of the bonethe bad news
it places in you
that you look on with fear
is the trials and your death
did they welcome it
with their whole body and a smilethere’s a flower which blooms
after morning’s compassion
has refreshed it with dew
it brings forth a red liquid
for the mouth to sip
its stamen and stigma
entwine like a rope
was it this they exchanged
offering as a legacy
did they present it to taste
as the last earthly food of love
did they place at the other’s ear
the word which was missingthe termite gathered up
sand and detritus
forming clay diligently
rendering and plastering
did it transform those two
did a building arise
did it mould from them
a structure of wonder
a lofty termite mound
famed for its thickness and strengthroaming in the sun-heat
of daytime did people
in the dry season grazing lands
rest in its shade
then move away in the evening
unaware of the reality
of the story that deep inside
this shady backbone support
two souls await the outcome of truthif self sacrifice is not made
the breath of life not exchanged
if one does not wait
for an enduring legacy
the building of a house upright
children and earthly sustenance
then the kisses and intentions
are nothing but superficial
a poison sipped to satisfaction
in that one same moment
like hyenas snatching
a girl of good repute
as they hide themselves
in the higlo tree
to pounce out quickly
each man is expectant
for what will fall to him
a hyena and his grave hole
the honour he has trampled
the modesty he has snatched
the lying illusion
this does society harmdid he strive for the highest level
of fulfillment of love
that closest to honour
or is something still missing
Maxamed Ibraahim Warsame ‘Hadraawi’, Has Love been blood-written
translated by Martin Orwin
(via dubgallu)
Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.
Persona (1966) dir. by Ingmar Bergman (via vulturechow)
Here is the handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope, this mouthful
of dirt, this poetry.
Margaret Atwood, “Mushrooms”, from Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written (via vulturechow)
I’ll give you one thing, you’ve always set my life into (mostly) forward motion.
It’s been 12 hours since you texted me, 30 minutes since I saw it. In that time I’ve reached out to reconcile with two estranged friends out of sheer fear.
But you’re also the reason I had to work myself out of a panic attack at 7 am, so points lost there.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Palestinian philosopher Edward Said, when remembering Pakistani philosopher Eqbal Ahmad, did so with such love and grace that every single time I have read those words, I have found myself transported to those conversations Said notes – with Darwish, or Faiz or Paley.
This week’s reading recommendation list is brought to you by yours truly.
- Surveillance Capitalism Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age [x]
- The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House [x]
- Taming the Shrew? Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics [x]
- Islam and Politics [x]
- A short film on Franz Kafka [x]
- The Corporate Stranglehold on Education [x]
- Lifestyle Consumerist Politics (ha!) [x]
- The Color of Violence Against Women [x]
- Zarb-e-Azb and the Left: On Imperialism’s Materiality [x]
- Aid In Reverse: How Poor Countries Develop Rich Countries [x]
You can browse through more reading lists by viewing our TQ entries on Tanqeed’s main website.
Image: Constantin Brâncuși, Sleeping Muse, 1910.
Aug. 27 1:35 pm
- Mike Brown’s mom laid flowers where he was shot and police let a dog pee on the memorial site
- “Stand Up Against Racism" demonstration outside US Embassy in London
- Police claim to have no records of arrests of journalists
- Illinois school bans discussions of Mike Brown’s death
- Gov. Nixon introduces new Public Safety Director
- Push for police to wear body cameras continues
- Jon Stewart on Ferguson
Aug. 26 11:55 am
- NY Times defends “no angel" article
- Hillary Clinton ignored 2 reporters’ questions about Ferguson
- Ferguson City Council meeting postponed, searching for larger venue. Meanwhile, comment cards will be distributed.
- Alleged audio of the shooting of Mike Brown released
- National Guard has left Ferguson
Dozens of police departments suspended for losing US military-grade weaponry
Close to 200 state and local police departments in the United States have been suspended for losing military-level equipment transferred to them by the Pentagon, a new investigation found.
According to the media outlet Fusion, its independent investigation into the Pentagon’s “1033 program,” which equips state and local police departments across the US with excess military equipment, turned up an alarming trend: Not only did many law enforcement agencies fail to comply with the program’s guidelines, they routinely lost dangerous weaponry.
Already, the investigation has found that police departments in Arizona, California, Mississippi, Missouri, Georgia, and others have lost or cannot account for various types of weapons. This list includes M14 and M16 assault rifles, .45-caliber pistols, shotguns, and even vehicles.
Don’t ask who you are or who I am
and why what is, is.
Let the professors sort it out,
it’s their job.
Place the scale on the kitchen table
and let reality weigh itself.
Put your coat on.
Turn the light off in the hallway.
Close the door.
Let the dead embalm the dead.Here we walk now.
The one wearing white rubber boots
is you.
The one wearing black rubber boots
is me.
And the rain falling on both of us
is the rain.
Werner Aspenström, ”You and I and the World” (via heteroglossia)
[gallery]
Alfred Stevens. (1823-1906).
1. A Stormy Night (1892)
2. Lighthouse at Dusk (Year unknown)
3. Moonlit Seascape (1892)
On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (via coffeewithajla)
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
!!!SIGNAL BOOST!!! Captain Marleigh helps the ambitious youth of Scotland pursue their entrepreneurial dreams in the Virginia Colonies
Young men looking for a better future simply draw up a contract of indenture, agreeing to volunteer (full-time) for three years, which they then give to Captain Marleigh in exchange for a trip to the Americas! Once they reach the new world, the Captain sells the indenture to a local tobacco farmer, and the youth is off to work! It’s just that simple. :-)
People in Ferguson Still Need Help!
This website contains a wealth of useful information on ways to help the people in Ferguson, how you can organize and participate locally, and helps to spread the word and keep the message strong.
Lying is the best and often also the most ethical way to get a job.
For $150, this guy bought a fake résumé & callable references in an industry he’s never worked in. And got hired:For a small fee, CareerExcuse.com promises to not only craft an elaborate lie based on your exact job specifications but to see it through for as long as necessary. The site will provide a live HR operator and staged supervisor, along with building and hosting a virtual company website—complete with a local phone number and toll-free fax. CareerExcuse will even go so far as to make the fake business show up on Google Maps.
William Schmidt started the site in 2009, after being let go from his job in a round of layoffs during the lowest depths of the recession.
“While we were all unemployed, a couple of my former coworkers asked me to act as their reference for job interviews,” Schmidt recalled. “I did it for free for my friends, but then I realized that this is some there’s a pretty big demand for. It was something I could take to the public.”
He was right. Within the first 24 hours of launching the CareerExcuse site, Schmidt had already received multiple order for his services. He’s quick to brush off ethical concerns, citing horror stories from his clients about being mistreated by their former employers (and thus being unable to acquire a reference) and noting that it becomes more difficult to land a job the longer someone’s been unemployed.
Employment is a racket. So is college.
May May (x)
I’m not even mad about this and no one should be. Sometimes all you really need to get a job is that one little lie that no one ever has to know about.
(via jean-luc-gohard)
Monday, August 25, 2014
Brown folks who act like they don’t have to unlearn anti-blackness are disgusting. If you grew up in America, you grew up in an anti-black society, no ifs ands or buts. But y’all stay slinging around the n word and acting like you have the right because we get called sandn*ggers, and instead of standing in solidarity and helping out black people, you’re the first to push them down and demonize them in order to climb up on their backs and reach a little higher. Keep lapping up those white supremacist myths: Allah will give you your reward.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Guil: You lost. Well then—one of the Greeks, perhaps? You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorrori, uxori, and it goes without saying—
Ros: Saucy—
Guil: —Suicidal—hm? Maidens aspiring to godheads—
Ros: And vice versa—
Guil: Your kind of thing, is it?
Player: Well, no, I can’t say it is, really. We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.
Guil: Well, I’ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.
Player: They’re hardly divisible, sir—well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.
Tom Stoppard — from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (via crematedadolescent)
Invisible things, rooted in cold,
and growing toward this light
that vanishes
into each thing
it illumines. Nothing ends. The hour
returns to the beginning
of the hour in which we breathed: as if
there were nothing. As if I could see
nothing
that is not what it is.At the limit of summer
and its warmth: blue sky, purple hill.
The distance that survives.
A house, built of air, and the flux
of the air in the air.Like these stones
that crumble back into earth.
Like the sound of my voice
in your mouth.
Paul Auster, “Autobiography of the Eye,” Disappearances: Selected Poems (via heteroglossia)
The conflict between Shias and Sunnis is political and making it apolitical is negating it in its entirety. Saying that the conflict is with regards to spiritual beliefs is reducing the historical nature of this conflict into nothing but quarrel among scholars and philosophers, which in and of itself is not at all bad or negative. But it is not a matter of theology or abstract spirituality that developed the conflict. It was politics, and the only way this conflict will be resolved and the sects could be reduced to just Muslims is if we are brutally honest about the past, about our history. People by the thousands have been killed, genocides have taken place, the concept of takfir was a death sentence.. If you think this isn’t political you need to come back down to earth. If you think that conflicts like this arise from differences like whether ‘God emanates or creates’ or whether the imams were infallible or not, or whether praying with your hands crossed is bidaah or not, you are delusional.
Ferguson officer relieved of duty after ‘black little perverts’ video surfaces
August 23, 2014A police officer involved in the protests over Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, has been relieved of his duty after video surfaced of him describing black people as “little perverts” and Barack Obama as an illegal immigrant.
Dan Page – who was seen live on CNN earlier this week threatening to arrest the network’s anchor Don Lemon – was recorded in April giving a speech in which he railed against Muslims and gay people, saying: “I’m into diversity – I kill everybody.”
Page is the second St Louis county officer to have been stood down in controversial circumstances surrounding the Ferguson protests. Lieutenant Ray Albers was suspended on Wednesday after video emerged of him pointing his assault weapon at protestors and threatening to kill them.
In his speech, Page, who claims to have been a sergeant major in the US army and a Vietnam war veteran, sharply criticized laws intended to protect minorities from racially-motivated hatred and to help increase ethnic diversity.
Citing the US declaration of independence’s statement that “all men are created equal,” he said: “That does not mean affirmative action. It means we’re all equal … God does not respect persons so we have no business passing hate crime laws.”
“This here”, he added, brandishing a copy of the Bible, “is the foundation for this”, meaning the declaration of independence. “You can’t separate them. I don’t know what them black little perverts don’t understand down there.”
Page made his remarks during an address earlier this year to a St Louis branch of the Oathkeepers, an association of former and serving military personnel, police officers and first responders. The group says that its members “pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic’.”
At one point during a slideshow of his past travels, Page displayed a photograph of himself in Kenya. “I said I wanna go find where that illegal alien claiming to be my president, my undocumented president, lives at.” He has previously said in interviews that he retired from the army because of Obama.
Page also told the audience in his speech: “If you take a stand against sodomy or abortion you’re a terrorist, ladies and gentlemen … In the military right now we have open sodomy, people holding hands, people swapping spit together. Sick. It’s pitiful.”
Later in his remarks, Page told a questioner in the audience: “Policemen are very cynical. I know I am. I don’t trust anybody. I hate everybody. I hate y’all, too. I hate everybody. I’m into diversity – I kill everybody. I don’t care.”
someone on metafilter figured out that the ferguson PD is running the support darren wilson gofundme
Just read through ALL of this…these people are INCREDIBLY organized and have collected almost every piece of information out - and they are asking some amazing questions.
Friday, August 22, 2014
I don’t care if Mike Brown was going to college soon. This should not matter. We should not have to prove Mike Brown was worthy of living. We should not have to account for the ways in which he is suitably respectable. We should not have to prove that his body did not deserve to be riddled with bullets. His community should not have to silence their anger so they won’t be accused of rioting, so they won’t become targets too.
the “you live with your parents” insult is really flaccid because a metric shitton of cultures don’t see “leave the house forever” as some grandiose moment of liberation that’s so important to the development of a person that it has to happen as fast as possible. until i came to the USA i didn’t know a single person who was pressured by their parents to leave the house because they’re “too old to stay there” or whatever. in puerto rico it is really common to stay with your parents until they and you are both stable enough that you can leave. whaddaya know, there are cultures that don’t place a stigma on being poor or wanting to care for your family or needing your family to care for you for some other reason.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
People are giving Wilson money to thank him for killing an unarmed black teenager. Please report this to GoFundMe, as it violates their Terms of Service and they get 5% of the tens of thousands of dollars being donated. Click to report.
This is my message, in case you want to copy and paste:
Your Terms of Service prohibit “items that promote… hate, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime.” Take a look at the comments that come with the donations on this page and tell me that doesn’t violate your terms. “Support Officer Wilson” is a thin veil for people rewarding Wilson for killing a black kid.
Capitalism, by its nature, cannot resolve the peasant question: the only prospect it can offer are a planet full of slums and billions of ‘too many’ human beings… I thus conclude that capitalism has entered into its phase of declining senility: the logic of the system is no longer able to ensure the simple survival of humanity. Capitalism is becoming barbaric and leads directly to genocide.
Samir Amin (via exposedover)
The globalized “liberal” economic order requires permanent war—military interventions endlessly succeeding one another—as the only means to submit the peoples of the periphery to its demands.
Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus (via lehaaz)
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Reading is the “becoming aware of a scream.” The first word is always a word of mourning, and “the point of any pen is that of a cry”: the cry of unanswerable questions; the scream of two lovers whose words are scattered like ashes by the horrors of Auschwitz; the frightened voices of men and women separated from an absent, silent, withdrawn God; the lamentations of exiled words searching endlessly to recover a lost homeland. For Jabès, “all the shadows in the world are screams.”
+
In the beginning was not the word, but death. It is the pre-text that the word strives to translate and fashion into a text. Death in the form of the void, the nothing, the desert and as an experience of absence, lack, exile, effacement, erasure, and silence takes up residence in the text. The place of the book is a place of loss. To write, Jabès observes, “is to accept, or better yet, to seek a permanent confrontation with death.” Never is writing a victory over nothingness; to the contrary, it is “an exploiting of nothingness through the word.”
Richard Stamelman, “The Graven Silence of Writing,” From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader (via heteroglossia)
What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—-then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
White Teeth, Zadie Smith. (via christiandinoor)
I am never going to escape G. She is an iron vise around my neck and I hold her there myself. She is the most exquisite form of self punishment.
My father, my rapist: those two are forces of nature. They were inflicted upon me. They can be rationalized away, understood to an extent, excused. I can repeat the words I am not at fault and they will ring true, even if I don’t believe myself.
But G. I knew. The emotional abuse, the manipulation, the lies, the humiliation. I knew from the very start and I stayed for two and a half years and I hated every minute of it and I loved being destroyed because it was exactly what I deserved and exactly what I wanted. And still want.
God help me, I still want.
I am so tired of alienating and growing distant from all the people I love. I am so tired of losing all my closest friends (and isn’t it pathetic that my relationships are so fleeting and transitory that someone I met last summer falls under that heading), no matter how they try to reach out and keep hold of me, because I am warped on a fundamental level and incapable of human relationships, human contact.
How could I be when even on my best days I don’t feel human in the slightest?
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
Notes From A Native Son, James Baldwin (via vulturechow)
Like a small café on the street of strangers—
that’s love… its doors open to all.
Like a café that expands and
contracts with the weather:
if it pours with rain its customers increase,
if the weather’s fine, they are few and weary…
I am here, stranger, sitting in the corner.
[…]
It is raining now.
It is raining more than ever,
and you do not come in.
Mahmoud Darwish, “Like a Small Cafe, That’s Love” in Almond Blossoms and Beyond. Interlink Books, 2009 (transl. by Mohammad Shaheen)
Monday, August 18, 2014
I don’t trust people who don’t have any sort of reaction to whatever is going in Ferguson/what has been happening in Palestine for the past couple of months/Pakistan/Afghanistan/etc. etc. like there is one thing to be a political commentator and write articles etc. you need to know your stuff but it’s another thing to just simply show your sympathy/support.
You can have a brown president or a black president but the structural violence of the United States will not change. So you can drop your obsession with representation because the top brass of the country, no matter how brown or black, has its own class interests and will do anything and everything in power to secure those allegiances. You’re all idiots.
White people praising Humans of New York for ‘humanizing’ the people of the Middle East… what the fuck did you think they were before? Terrorists? Savages? Extremists? Subhumans? It needed to take a white guy with a camera for you all to realize that our people are humans with lives that your fucking government destroyed.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Saturday, August 16, 2014
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. […] Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
Friday, August 15, 2014
The food is ready. I wake the kids and bring them in. We all sit around five dishes: white cheese, hummus, orange jam, yellow cheese, and olives. Darkness eats with us. Fear and anxiety eat with us. The unknown eats with us. The F-16 eats with us. The drone, and its operator somewhere out in Israel, eat with us.
Atef Abu Saif, The Children Have Barely Slept (via vulturechow)
America was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of the Native American and the enslavement of the African American. The tendency of official America is to memorialize other peoples’ crimes and to forget its own - to seek a high moral ground as a pretext to ignore real issues.
Mahmood Mamdani (via vulturechow)
Thursday, August 14, 2014
somehow white people manage to make this about themselves
fuckin “uvu I am a tiny scared being afraid of the wordl and I don’t kno hoe to hlp *sad drawing*” like COME ON in the amount of time it took you to draw and post 3 apprehensive shark drawings, you could have looked up posts on how to help (from the safety of your computer chair, even)
but noooooo keep making this about yourself and your sad baby feels while black people are getting murdered, you matter more.
The believer only acquires true rest when he meets Allah, although rest may also be obtained by these four things: silence, by which you recognize the state of your heart and your self in your relations with your Creator; retreat, by which you are rescued from the evils of the age, outwardly and inwardly; hunger, which kills fleshly appetites and temptation; and wakefulness, which illuminates your heart, purifies your nature and cleanses your spirit.
Imam Sadiq (as) describing ‘rest’, Lantern of the Path (via gharq)
the thing i hate most about people who preach ‘non-violence’ and ‘peace’ is that they never preach to those in power, you’ll never hear any of them demanding the police stop killing black people, to stop destroying their neighborhoods, and to put their weapons down, and that’s because these people are not against violence, they are only against resistance.
Why does it matter what race the people are? Shouldn't the only thing that matters is people are dying by the hands of the police and nothing is being done about it? Why does everything have to be about race?
Reread your own message. Who is dying by the hands of the police? Black people.. on purpose.. Black people are intentionally being killed by the police… Not “people”.. because this is happening at an institutional level in which specifically Black people are purposefully being killed, arrested and dehumanized by the police because they are Black. It’s really fucking simple, actually. There’s a pattern— that’s why race matters. We— Black people— are all as en entire race in fucking danger that’s why race matters. Because it ISN’T just happening to “people”… it’s happening to Black people BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK. It’s not a coincidence.
Why would it not matter that one group of people is intentionally being killed..? They’re being killed by the police BECAUSE THEY ARE BLACK.. LITERALLY. Why would it not be about race if Black people are specifically being targeted to be killed like why wouldn’t that be important… Why do you not want to involve race? Tell me if you see a pattern that would help you understand why it’s about race
- A black fashion student says he was brutally attacked by a gang of Hasidic men who shouted anti-gay slurs at him while he was walking through Williamsburg after a night of partying, the Daily News has learned.
Black female professor reprimanded for pointing out existence of structural racism to white male students | The Raw Story
- Eric Garner is choked and killed by the police in public on camera because of racial profiling
- Black man blew a 0.00 on breathalyzer test and is arrested for DUI
Babysitter Robs 4 Year Old, Blames a Black Man, Black Neighbor Falsely Arrested
- ACU students say hate crime highlights racism on campus By Jennifer Kendall
- 93-year-old activist: NC voting restrictions worse now than during the Jim Crow era
- Man Arrested After Drinking Iced Tea In Public Must Take Deal Or Go To Trial
- Javier Payne, a 14-year-old black boy from the Bronx who was attacked by the NYPD last weekend as he was walking home from a hookah shop in his neighborhood.
- Police Commissioner Calls Obama N-word and Refuses to Apologize
This 5th grader says a cop pulled a gun on him while he and his friends were building a tree fort in a wooded area behind their home in Henry County, Ga.
Racist pub landlord tells TV chef Lorraine Pascale ‘n*****s aren’t welcome’ but she’s OK because his wife ‘likes her cakes’
- Man dies defending daughter during alleged hate crime
This 15-Year-Old Was Suspended For Doing Something White Kids Do All the Time
Black Guy Breaks Into A Car Social Experiment
- West Virginia man kills new black neighbors without warning
Debt Collectors Are More Likely To Go After Black People
Unarmed Black Man Shot At By NYPD Has Been Charged With Assault Because Bullets Hit Bystanders
Three black students waiting for bus arrested after cops order them to ‘disperse’ | The Raw Story
BREAKING NEWS! African American Postman Shot and Killed, Apparently Mistaken For ‘Prowler’
Selling While Black: Racism Revealed in Online Shopping Study
[tw:hate crimes tw:racism]Hate crimes charges after students fasten bike lock around black roommate’s neck and call him ‘Three-fifths’ | The Raw Story
African-American man says NYPD made him rap before freeing him
Black Detroit woman shot to death while seeking help in white neighborhood after car crash
Barneys busted student for being black: suit
Woman Says She Called 911 for an Ambulance for Her Fiancé, Cops Came and Shot Him Instead
Top 6 Countries That Grew Filthy Rich From Enslaving Black People - Atlanta Black Star
White people literally can not associate positive words with Black faces because of racism
- More white people use drugs but Black people are sent to jail for drugs at 10 times the rate that white people are
- Black people who “sound Black” earn less money than those who don’t because of associations with stereotypes. Black people who “sound Black” are less likely to get called back for jobs
- Black children grow up literally associating being Black with being bad and ugly
- White people when tested shot more unarmed Black subjects than armed and unarmed white subjects
- Hate crimes increase after Boston tragedy
- Moroccan High School Student is linked to Boston tragedy for being Brown
- NYPD Commissioner wants Black and Latino men to fear him after the police targeted literally 90 percent Black and Latino men in New York and humiliating them by frisking them in public under the assumption that they had weapons. Studies found that white men were the ones who overwhelmingly had weapons while Black and Latino men didn’t
- White people blaming and convicting Black men for crimes they never committed and everyone believing them because of racism
- Stop and Frisk, ruled unconstitutional was practiced by New York police disproportionately and unfairly affecting 90% Black and Latino men because of racism
- Here are some of the numbers on hate crimes against People of Color and btw, Neo Naziism is increasing!
- Every 28 Hours an African American is Extrajudicially Murdered in the U.S.
- Black people 3 times more likely to be arrested for Marijuana
- Black people receive much harsher sentencing than white people for the same crimes do I need to go on?
- Deaf Black man is stabbed out of internalized racism when his sign language is mistaken for a GANG SIGN
- Oops! Chicago police raids the wrong house, holds an 11 month old at gunpoint to raise their hand, kills their dog all because of racism and assuming it was a crackhouse! Oopsies
- Let’s take it overseas! Black people in England and Wales are 7 times more likely to be stopped by police than white people. Asian people are twice as likely
- White kids think it’s totally okay and normal to photograph themselves lynching a Black baby doll like an effigy
- Here’s a graph of the statistic that approx every 28 hours an African American is extrajudicially executed in the US
- NYPD profiling and targeting LGBT*Q People of Color
- Black students (especially boys and children with disabilities) face more and harsher punishments in public schools and are being pushed out of schools into the criminal justice system.
- Black male incarceration has jumped 500% from 1986 to 2004
- Albany police: SWAT literally uses a poor Black neighborhood to train in because they say it’s ‘realistic’
- The audio recording from a young man of color of a NYPD stop and frisking him based solely how he looks calling him a “FUCKING MUTT”
- Incarceration rates by ethnicity
- African-American man says NYPD made him rap before freeing him
- Black Detroit woman shot to death while seeking help in white neighborhood after car crash
- Woman Says She Called 911 for an Ambulance for Her Fiancé, Cops Came and Shot Him Instead
- A Black man holding a wallet is more likely to be shot by the police than a White man holding a gun.
- Students of color At University of Texas Attacked By An Epidemic Of ‘Bleach Bombs’
- Racism Linked to Adult-Onset Asthma in Black Women
- Black firefighter waves to white police man and is handcuffed and on the ground
Grand Jury Decides Not to Charge Officer Who Fatally Shot Unarmed Youth in Bronx
Oprah is told she can’t afford to shop in a store based on how she looks
- Disparities in the workforce exist as Black women and Latino men work more than white women and white men but the racial wage gap still exists
Black police chief stopped and frisked by police officers
Florida police shoot unarmed Black man outside of his own house
Every 28 hours a Black unarmed man is murdered by a vigalante, remember?
- Oakland: Study finds racial bias in boys’ arrests targeting guess who? Black young men, of course!
- How is it that 58% of prisoners are Black and Latino if 70% of crime committed here is done by white people?
- Forty Percent of White Americans Are Lying About Their ‘Black Friend’
- When whites were presented with an argument against the death penalty or three strikes that emphasized the racial bias of the policy, they became more (not less) supportive of capital punishment and three strikes laws.
- African-Americans More Likely To Receive Lower-Quality Kidneys, Study Finds
- Famous actor Brandon T. Jackson is called racial slurs on his flight and told “I don’t care if you’re Obama’s son” then questioned by the police and restricted from flying and left alone to look for a hotel himself for being the victim of racism on US Airways
- Rob Brown, famous star of Treme is racially profiled and arrested at Macy’s for purchasing a watch with his own money and his own credit card and accused of fraud
- Kayla Philips tries to purchase a bag at Barney’s and is also accused of fraud at Barney’s because they didn’t believe she could afford it
- I mean have you heard about Mike Brown who is a teen that was gunned down for “walking in the street” and lied on by the police about “stealing” from a shop that says he didn’t steal from there and they didn’t call the police at all?
- Have you been keeping up with Ferguson and who’s being shot at for peacefully protesting?
- White people literally care so little about Black life that they think “if i was gunned down” hashtag is a joke… they think Black people being killed by the police is funny and a joke. Nothing is sacred.
- Unarmed black man, Ezell Ford, killed by LAPD hmm I wonder if racism played a part
- Ferguson police refer to protesting crowd as “animals” and enact violence with wooden bullets and tear gas against them
- A Black innocent bystander happens to be the one to be attacked and arrested by a mallcop during a protest
- Racist bus driver caught on tape using racist slurs to Black kids and family
- Renisha McBride is the victim of gun violence and yet is put on trial for her own death instead of the guilty killer as ‘drunk woman’
- Black man is shot dead by police in Walmart ‘after he picked up a toy gun’ — interesting that white people are toting real rifles around Target with no problem
- Police beat a Black teenage girl for “breaking curfew” on what planet would that deserve any physical consequence
- Family of Black man killed by officer at Red Arrow Park says he was shot 15 times
- How is it that a Black man blows 0.00 on the breathalyzer and is still arrested
- Keep in mind that white people are still painting their skin brown and black to commit crimes so that innocent Black men are blamed while their identity is protected
- Babysitter Robs 4 Year Old, Blames a Black Man, Black Neighbor Falsely Arrested
- Chief Russell Mills to the LA Times after shooting and killing black 89-year-old great grandfather Shawn Monroe at a barbecue unprovoked says “If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names. I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested” Today, he walks free with no charges, despite numerous witnesses and his own admission that he enjoys terrorizing black people.
- There are hate crimes happening on ACU campus against Black people in which people are ticketing Black people’s cars with “Black people don’t own nice cars” etc.
- Black Man Arrested After Drinking Iced Tea In Public Must Take Deal Or Go To Trial
- Black Mother Of Special Needs Son Arrested After Entering His School To Console Him.. How does that make sense?
- Javier Payne is a 14-year-old black boy from the Bronx who was attacked by the NYPD last weekend as he was walking home from a hookah shop in his neighborhood.
- Police Commissioner Calls Obama N-word and Refuses to Apologize. Being the president or ivy league educated or raised by white people does not encourage racists to stop being racist
- Racist pub landlord tells TV chef Lorraine Pascale ‘n*****s aren’t welcome’ but she’s OK because his wife ‘likes her cakes’
- NYPD beat Muslim teens, rip off hijabs
- More social experiments where Black people seen breaking into cars are treated exactly how you’d expect and white people are offered help
- Black 8-Year-Old Shot by White Neighbor Struggles to Recover in Texas. Eight years old. Shot by white neighbor. Take it in.
- NIH study reveals black scientists are systematically underfunded wow not shocking to anyone though
- West Virginia white man kills new black neighbors without warning
- Debt Collectors Are More Likely To Go After Black People
- Unarmed Brooklyn Black Man Charged With Felonious Assault For Two Women Shot By NYPD. How does it make sense that the NYPD has bad aim and a man they were shooting at is blamed for it?
- Black female professor reprimanded for pointing out existence of structural racism to white male students
- Three black students waiting for bus arrested after cops order them to ‘disperse’
- Selling While Black: Racism Revealed in Online Shopping Study
- African American Postman Shot and Killed, Apparently Mistaken For ‘Prowler’
- Hate crimes charges after students fasten bike lock around black roommate’s neck and call him ‘Three-fifths’
- Innocent Teenager, Never Convicted, Spends 3 Years in Jail Before Charges Dropped
- African-American man says NYPD made him rap before freeing him like this is a funny silly game for them
- Cervical cancer vaccine misses minority women, study finds
- The shutdown left Native american children in the cross hairs and who cared ….Where was the national outcry?
- Woman Says She Called 911 for an Ambulance for Her Fiancé, Cops Came and Shot Him Instead. Guess his race just guess
- Here’s a vine where you can see a Black person walking leisurely as a white police officer chases them and so they move off to the side and then seemingly confused, surrender by sitting down and they’re still pushed for literally no reason
- Let’s spot some patterns in the ‘police brutality’ tag over the last 2 years
It is about race, I’m not “making it about race”. Why don’t you want it to be about race when it already is…?
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