7:50 am

sapphrikah: mel0di: furrowedbrow: I had this on VHS and me and...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:29:07 -0400

mel0di: furrowedbrow:

I had this on VHS and me and my sisters which watch it EVERY DAY. I LOVE Crooklyn.

purpleturtlezflrs: magicandnonsense: rewind-button-girl: Anyti...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:26:36 -0400

magicandnonsense:

rewind-button-girl:

Anytime someone questions my support for President Obama I’m just going to pull up my Tumblr and show them this.

There are no words.

Thats… Thats beatiful.

Wordington!

"First you’re taught to fear a phantom, a man in black, a man with a knife, a man who’ll pounce in..."

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:59:08 -0500

“First you’re taught to fear a phantom, a man in black, a man with a knife, a man who’ll pounce in dark alleys. Well-intentioned women—mothers, aunts, teachers—will train you to protect yourself: Don’t wear your hair in a ponytail; it’s easier to grab. Hold your keys in one hand; hold your pepper spray in the other. Avoid dark alleys. When you reach young adulthood, the lessons change. They acquire an undertone of disgust: Don’t drink so much. Don’t wear such short skirts. You’re sending mixed signals; you’re putting yourself at risk. If you follow the advice and it never happens—if you end up one of the three out of four—you can convince yourself that safety is a product of your own making, a reflection of inherent goodness. But if you’re paying attention, you realize something doesn’t add up. Because it keeps happening: to your sisters; to your friends; to little girls and grown women you’ll never meet, in places like Cleveland, Texas; Steubenville, Ohio; New Delhi. Good people, bad people, neutral. It keeps happening in TV shows and novels and movies—they open on the missing girl, the dead girl, the raped girl. If you’re paying attention, you begin to realize that it isn’t happening. It is being done. And you are not safe. You have never been safe. You were born with a bulls-eye on your back. All you have ever been is lucky.”

- The Female Gaze: SO MUCH PRETTY by Cara Hoffman - review Cara Hoffman’s really amazing, really important novel So Much Pretty at The Female Gaze this month. (via cocothinkshefancy)

This gave me chills. DId it give you chills? It gave me chills.

(via feminishblog)

crackerhell: blackamazon: illicit-pentagram: Oxford...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 20:23:28 -0500

crackerhell:

blackamazon:

illicit-pentagram:

Oxford University students on why we need feminism

I want to point out that we have four male presenting people

and

NOT

A

SINGLE

person

as a

VISUALLY IDENTIFIABLE PERSON OF COLOR .

and we’re talking about one dude enjoying his strap on and fiction

at one of the premiere university’s in the world

in a country that had riots because folks who don’t look like them are having problems surviving and getting educations

oh boy i sure love cracker feminism

tons of men

no WoC

WHELP! Guess that means that women of color don’t need feminism! Thanks white people!

Need to update my blog and say hi to new followers

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:30:33 -0500

Drop something in my ask box! I don’t bite and I’m ready to add some new blogs to my dash so introduce yourself!

No surprise that the top ten is dominated by skinny white women -_- Let's shake it up!

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:36:52 -0500

I’ve entered e.l.f.’s “Beauty at all Ages” competition, and have come to the realization that all ages doesn’t exactly mean all races and sizes. The top ten of the competition is dominated by skinny white women, results which are symptomatic of the racism, and anti-fat prejudices perpetuated in this euro-centric, patriarchal world that we live in.

I entered not because I want to be a model, but because I think that it is important that women of color, and women of a larger body type are represented in these spaces. (Also the trip I might win was definitely an incentive, Lord knows I need it!)

When castings for models to represent a brand happens it is usually decided behind closed doors, and results in the same types of women being represented. However, in this particular instance there is a chance for someone outside of the archetypal model to win. Even if you don’t end up voting for me, at least scroll through the contestants and give some other woman a real shot.

So please vote for me!

tranqualizer: anarcho-queer: Submitted by: sydlow Thanks...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:30:16 -0500

tranqualizer:

anarcho-queer:

Submitted by: sydlow

Thanks sydlow! I just sent this flier to organizers and they love it.

Justice for Reynaldo Cuevas

Reynaldo Cuevas was shot and killed by an NYPD officer on September 7th, 2012, after escaping from an armed robbery at the bodega he worked at. He was dragged 25 feet away by police and left to bleed for 20 minutes as witnesses yelled at them, informing police that he was an employee of the store. A few days later the community held a vigil for Reynaldo and marched with his family to the 42nd precinct to demand justice. Since then, the Cuevas family has held a candlelight vigil every Saturday at the corner of the block here he was killed. Less than two months later, on October 27th, the NYPD rammed into the dirt bike Reynaldo’s cousin and friend were riding, killing one and paralyzing the other. A witness from the scene says the NYPD rammed into the dirt bike purposely.

We need to let the NYPD know, they cannot get away with this. We will not give up. We are stronger.

More information on facebook, search for “Justice for Reynaldo Cuevas”

This is absolutely sickening. There is a war on brown bodies being waged in my streets.

I have never seen a smoother, more even-toned arm pit in my...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:27:54 -0500

I have never seen a smoother, more even-toned arm pit in my entire life :O

isali3: weary-spine: themagicmelodicmask: kumikoala: lascocks...

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 06:46:36 -0500

isali3:

weary-spine:

themagicmelodicmask:

kumikoala:

lascocks:

east-idegengar:

I can’t pick my favourite

these are things i would write

Number #5 killed me

These sound like things I would write. I love books with quirky first-person narration.

I can’t decide which one’s my favorite omfg

#9’s actually pretty clever, i find. XD

but, oh god, #3… XD

Up at 6:44am, working on editing my poetry portfolio for grad school apps. This post makes procrastinating SOOOOO worth it!

I for one happen to think that #11 has such emotional pull!

ethiopienne: black feminist theory with an ill ass...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:30:24 -0500

ethiopienne:

black feminist theory with an ill ass hook

courtesy of lil’ kim back when she had her original black woman face

Word to this.

On another note, it really saddens me to see the way that Kim once celebrated herself shamelessly, only to then disfigure her body to fit more neatly into the Eurocentric standard of beauty. The pressures black women are constantly put under is insanely unique and disgusting. To be both Black and woman is to be constantly engaged in a struggle to assert your humanity, to (re)claim and define yourself. There is not a day that goes by that I do not hurt for myself and for my sisters.

Dez Duron…. you, sir, can have ALL THE BABIES!

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:39:52 -0500

Dez Duron…. you, sir, can have ALL THE BABIES!

Say what you want but this song still makes me tear up…

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:30:59 -0500

Say what you want but this song still makes me tear up…

knowledgeequalsblackpower: Never forget. Motherfuck this...

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:17:46 -0500

knowledgeequalsblackpower:

Never forget.

Motherfuck this colonial ass “holiday”

Marlon Brando’s smile (Part I) SO MUCH CREAM IN MY PANTS RIGHT...

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:15:13 -0500

Marlon Brando’s smile (Part I)

SO MUCH CREAM IN MY PANTS RIGHT NOW!

Finding some time to respond to my asks

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:23:03 -0500

Just letting you all know I haven’t died. I’ve just been super busy. Expect to see more posts soon!

how did you meet people in manchester so quickly? or did you know some people prior to going there? also..why don't you update??! :D

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:22:08 -0500

Well first and foremost I met a few of my closest friends during the international students orientation. They were all American. And I did know some people who lived in Leeds (like 45 minutes from Manchester) from an international poetry slam I was a part of in ‘08.

But in terms of actual English friends: I met a group of them when I joined the University of Manchester’s ACS (which was a Caribbean student group).

My very greatest friends who I would go back to Manchester to see in a heartbeat if I had the money I met when I stopped being so scared about going out alone and just went to a bar by myself.

My biggest regret is not losing my inhibitions sooner and just going out, putting myself out there and meeting people.

As far as updating goes things have been absolutely crazy for me lately. Senior year in college. Writing my thesis. Applying to grad school. Fighting racism. The whole SHABANG.

But I’ll try and keep posting as soon as is humanly possible.

howtobeterrell: Destiny’s Child - I’m Through With...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:54:42 -0500

howtobeterrell:

Destiny’s Child - I’m Through With Love

Michelle stole this entire show from BEyonce

Although Michelle was always playing the background her parts were always the variation in the song and more times than not the best part! WERK!

This is my school. These are my peers, my friends. This cannot...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:29:00 -0500

This is my school. These are my peers, my friends.

This cannot be swept under the rug and kept silent. Now in my senior year at Simon’s Rock I refuse to let the campus I have grown to love and call home be destroyed by such hate and violence.

These people need to be held accountable. Noah Steadman needs to be held accountable. Those voices in my community who defended him and called our feelings irrational and unfounded need to be held accountable. The students who EVEN TODAY are more concerned with the school getting bad press, than with the safety of our students need to be held accountable. People need to know about this. FOREVER REBLOG!

I know this is long but please take the time to read it. ~A.M.

punkkidcatholic:

White Supremacy is alive, well, and endangering the lives of my classmates.

There’s this kid you probably haven’t heard of: Noah Steadman. There’s no reason you should have heard of him until now, but now I am asking you to remember his name and to spread it to everyone you can. Noah Steadman is a self-proclaimed White Supremacist who moderates 4chon (basically 4chan for people who were kicked off 4chan for being too racist). Over the course of a couple of months he has been threatening the wellbeing of the students of Bard College at Simon’s Rock; now he has put the college’s staff, faculty and students in concrete danger, having been threatened with, among others, corrective rape, shooting, and bombing. Read the statement below, written by a friend of mine, for a detailed description of what has happened, and remember: Noah Steadman is a White Supremacist and a danger to our community.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this letter to draw attention to a situation at my college, Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, that is and has been threatening the physical and emotional security of myself and my fellow classmates. It takes some time to tell this story; please bear with me. This is a desperate call for coverage, assistance, and dialogue.

We begin on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, when an unknown person or group drew multiple swastikas on the wall of a common area in a dormitory. This elicited an email from the administration condemning the graffiti and requesting information as to the perpetrator. To the best of my knowledge, this is all we know—any action taken by the administration after this point would be confidential information.

Shortly thereafter, a student (Noah Steadman) circulated a flier on campus questioning the relevance of Diversity Day, a yearly Teach-In initiated several years ago by students during which students and faculty hold workshops on issues of diversity, oppression, and identity. The “Diversity Day Challenge” was to name five benefits of Diversity “besides ethnic food and music.”

Admittedly, this might initially seem, to an external observer (and it did to many people on campus), a fairly benign piece of agitation. For many of us, however, this flier generated immediate outrage. If you are not acquainted with our school, Simon’s Rock is an early college (with both an A.A. and B.A. program, accredited through Bard College) that accepts students who have not yet earned their high school diplomas. We are an extremely small liberal arts institution, largely isolated from the surrounding area. I remember that when I applied, the Princeton Review had ranked us as the #1 gay-friendly college in America. We are a small and intimate community of people who, by and large, were discontented with the educational opportunities offered to us, namely the often terrifying and prison-like environments of American public and private secondary education. Both Bard and Simon’s Rock pride themselves on combating inequality and oppression through educational methods; Bard’s prison education initiative is one notable example. Simon’s Rock provides extensive scholarship to students of color, international students, and Diversity Day is but one example of the institutional and pedagogical commitment to fighting inequality that made many students, until recently, proud to anticipate calling this school our alma mater.

A substantial portion of the student body, and I proudly count myself among them, experienced indignation and outrage at the distribution of this flier. The demeaning and marginalizing wording of the flier had apparent connections to the language and ideology of the reactionary right-wing. To us, the denial of minority students’ identities, cultures, histories, sufferings and struggles was clearly explicit, not implicit, in the document. It represented the perpetuation of hundreds of years of racial, gender, and sexual oppression. We saw the violence of that question, especially considering it’s author, a cisgendered, able-bodied white male. We understood that it was a very real threat to the integrity and security of the school community.

Determined to rise above the taunting tone of Noah’s challenge (“you could win a Macbook Air!”), the existing coalition of identity-based student groups on campus made photocopies of the document and cut them into strings of snowflakes, human figures holding hands, and the like, putting them up in a collective student space. Within hours, a document was posted next to them declaring Noah’s first-amendment right to free speech, decrying student outrage against him as hate speech, and asking people in support of Noah’s right to express himself to sign their names. The threat we initially (and correctly) sensed being leveled against our community continued unabated.

I fully appreciate that, at this point, many a reader would be experiencing the same reaction that the anonymous poster of this statement did: if Simon’s Rock is committed to diversity, how is it just to criticize one student’s opinion, which surely he is entitled to? weren’t people overreacting? how is any of this a threat to student safety? granting the offensiveness of Noah’s challenge, doesn’t it still legitimate him to call further attention to it? These are the sort of misconceptions, understandable but by no means acceptable, which have brought us to the point we are at today.

Today, violence is being explicitly threatened by white supremacists targeted at our school property, administration, and the student body. Maps of campus, images of students, and personal information has been circulated accompanying frenzied battle cries for the sake of the “white race.” Let me ask you, who is in danger here? I have extremely good reason to believe that Noah Steadman is currently contacting white supremacist activist organizations to bring further attention to this situation. As I write this, students on campus and at home for Thanksgiving break are wondering if their lives are in danger, or if we are going to get a call or an email informing us that acts of violence have been committed towards our classmates or teachers. And in reality, we have been living in this state of fear with little respite for more than two months.

In light of our concerns, students were told to suppress their worry; someone else was taking care of campus safety, namely the college’s Anti-Harassment and Anti-Discrimination Committee which adjudicates claims between members of the college which breach the college’s policies on discrimination, harassment, and diversity. For a while, then, Noah was nowhere to be found on campus and we were able to breath a sigh of at least partial relief. Rather abruptly, however, Noah appeared back on campus, and many students were left confused. The feelings of threat and fear returned with a vengeance. In response, a group of students wrote up a document addressing the school’s attitudes and actions around identity based oppression and held a demonstration expressing their disapproval with an institution that colludes with the bloodstained legacy of patriarchal violence.

A student made video documenting the protest was posted on youtube. Shortly after being posted, a barrage of explicitly hostile and violent comments were posted in response to the video. (“Gas these socialists. Hitler was right. WHITE POWER” is just one representative example of the flavor of comments). In addition to the youtube comments, an online forum was discovered where the details of Noah’s actions and our community’s responses to them were being discussed by Noah and others. These comments expressed White Nationalist sentiments of praise and admiration for Noah and vehement hatred for the “Marxists, faggots, and dykes.” Violent threats (bombs, shooting, rape) were made, specific students’ images and information shared.

We refuse to passively accept the continuation of a violent history of systemic inequality which attempts to control our interpretations of freedom, inequality, and being. Moreover, we assert our agency to create a society that allows us to participate in speech that is genuinely free.The attitude I described above, the attitude of conciliatory apologetics, free speech, tolerance, and civility, is precisely what myself and my classmates are fighting against. It assumes that words and feelings are expressed in a historical void of objective universalism, that all speakers enter conversations on equal footing, and that words have no substance other than the ideas and concrete objects they signify. What students like myself have been arguing for the last two months is that when a person coming from a place of innumerable privileges publicly questions diversity on our campus, they are bringing the full weight of systemic oppression and violence hundreds of years old to bear on each and every other student. We have been arguing that Noah’s ability and “right” to express his opinions is in direct confrontation with the very existence of every Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, Indigenous, Gay, Lesbian, Female, Transgendered, Disabled, Queer, Jewish, Muslim, non-White, non-Christian, non-Male, non-Heterosexual, non-Cisgendered, person in our community. And for some reason, utterly incomprehensible to myself, people still don’t get why we have been saying this. Perhaps the literal threat of harm, written out, will prove galvanizing enough.

We feel it is urgent that stories such as this one reach the general public especially in light of pervasive sentiments that trivialize identity based oppression, and ideas that attempt to demonstrate that we live in a colorblind, post-race society. These are not issues of the past; they characterize the immediate present, and without necessary attention will intensify into our future. As is clearly exhibited by our story, race hatred and identity based violence thrives both on the internet and in our material lives. We have a duty to uncover it and deny it the legitimacy it attempts to claim. Please spread this story. It is crucial that people be made aware of the threats made against us and the severity of this situation before groups such as FIRE and American Renaissance (who we know Noah has personally contacted) get involved.

Here is a link to a dropbox containing screenshots of several threads Noah started on an image forum, in which you will find numerous threats of violence and countless affirmations of white supremacy, including Noah’s own account of his meeting with the school and the map of campus he posted with bulls-eyes indicating the locations of the 1992 shooting at Simon’s Rock, as well as the International Center. One further thread, which I do not believe is contained in the screenshots, can be found here.

This is my school. These are my peers, my friends.

This cannot be swept under the rug and kept silent. Now in my senior year at Simon’s Rock I refuse to let the campus I have grown to love and call home be destroyed by such hate and violence.

So I’m sitting on a rock, trying to clear my head, being contemplative and listening to sad...

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:04:47 -0400

So I’m sitting on a rock, trying to clear my head, being contemplative and listening to sad music when this rude ass bug had the ABSOLUTE NERVE to fly DIRECTLY into my ear! It scared the ever-living shit out of me and now I think I’ve attempted to dig the memory of that bug out so passionately that I am convinced (regardless of the fact that I can’t see or feel anything) that I am bleeding from my ears and will soon die from blood loss and trauma. In short, if that were to happen I love most of you and hate only a select few… and please don’t choose a busted ass photo to eulogize me! lol For real though!

Any of my followers from (or ever been to) Montreal?

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 21:29:00 -0400

I’m planning a trip there for my October break and would love to know all the do’s and dont’s about restaurants, clubs, bars, markets… the whole nine! Any advice?