7:50 am

Alexis Marie. Natural. Brooklyn. Poet. Actress. Artist. Black. Woman. Writer. Human.

super-eklectic1: Please help my talented and beautiful friend, Alexis Marie by supporting her kickstarter project, “Black Girl Abroad.” You can certainly give by making a donation, but getting the word out about this project, joining the Facebook page, and telling your friends, family, or coworkers is equally important! Alexis is a 19 year-old junior trying to go to Manchester, England to do research on race relations and the lived experiences of African American women abroad (ultimately for her undergraduate thesis: Black Girl Abroad).  Here is her description of the project: I am creating a collection of short stories tentatively entitled “Black Girl Abroad”. The creation of this project will allow me to utilize both of my concentrations: creative writing and African-American studies. The characters for each of the short stories will grow out of my observations and interactions while studying abroad at the University of Manchester. I will be taking courses on creative writing as well as African-American studies; this will enable me to see how other people around the world learn about and interpret the lives and experiences of African American people. I will also be observing race relations outside of the classroom as I engage in city life and interview/interact with the people around me.  submitted by http://maskofmaterials.tumblr.com/ I endorse this fully!!  That’s me! Please support my art and my studies, even the smallest donation helps or even a reblog :) Love, Alexis

super-eklectic1:

Please help my talented and beautiful friend, Alexis Marie by supporting her kickstarter project, “Black Girl Abroad.”

You can certainly give by making a donation, but getting the word out about this project, joining the Facebook page, and telling your friends, family, or coworkers is equally important!

Alexis is a 19 year-old junior trying to go to Manchester, England to do research on race relations and the lived experiences of African American women abroad (ultimately for her undergraduate thesis: Black Girl Abroad). 

Here is her description of the project:

I am creating a collection of short stories tentatively entitled “Black Girl Abroad”. The creation of this project will allow me to utilize both of my concentrations: creative writing and African-American studies. The characters for each of the short stories will grow out of my observations and interactions while studying abroad at the University of Manchester. I will be taking courses on creative writing as well as African-American studies; this will enable me to see how other people around the world learn about and interpret the lives and experiences of African American people. I will also be observing race relations outside of the classroom as I engage in city life and interview/interact with the people around me.

 submitted by http://maskofmaterials.tumblr.com/

I endorse this fully!! 

That’s me! Please support my art and my studies, even the smallest donation helps or even a reblog :) Love, Alexis

I SAW PAINFULLY ATTRACTIVE MAN FROM THE LIBRARY AGAIN! (Why I find it hard to approach white men)

And this time (unlike the last)… not to toot my own horn, ya know, but I do believe I was looking quite fine myself today. Unfortunately, I did absolutely nothing about it. Just let him walk right by :(

Since I didn’t get a photo this time either, I’ll just go ahead and describe him to you: He’s white, about 6’2”, the oddest, kinda creepy, most electrifying shade of blue eyes (and I’m normally not into blue eyes… like at all… so the fact that I’m attracted to his means something), medium build and just my brand of sexy (plus he was in the library so that’s an added bonus. I love intelligent people!)

Now any friend of mine can tell you I have absolutely no problem with walking up to random strangers (man, woman, child, all points on the gender spectrum and animal) and telling them I think they’re gorgeous, hot, sexy, beautiful… whatever the case may be. But when it comes to a gorgeous person I may actually be attracted to and want to get to know, it’s a completely different story. I’ve been thinking a lot about why that might be and I’ve come up with a few reasons, but the one that struck me most, as it pertains to this specific encounter (being that he was white), was this:

As a Black woman, there is rarely ever a time when I am not conscious of my Blackness. As a Black woman who has encountered so much hate, hostility, and rejection from white men my entire life, there is rarely ever a moment when I am not consciously thinking of, and attempting to figure out whether my Blackness is a deal breaker for him.


This is not an England thing. This has not only been my experience since I began studying here. As a matter of fact, to the contrary, save for the experiences I’ve already blogged about, I’ve actually felt more comfortable around and desired by white men here.

In all actuality, my hypersensitivity towards white men really started to develop in my college years; while on a campus with literally, less than a dozen Black men, and scores of white men who openly expressed their distaste for Black women. At one point, the argument was even suggested that they (white men on campus) did not want to date Black women, not because of us, as people, per say, but because they would not want to taint or destroy their culture. I won’t even go into the fucked-up-ness of that right now.

But I say all of this to say, I could not approach painfully attractive white man sitting across from me in the library, because I can never know whether he will want to hug me or hang me.


Although my last blog post focused mostly around the anxiety I felt due to my less than put together physical appearance, the part I left out was the first thought that crossed my mind: not how does my hair look? Is this outfit ok? But, how does my skin look? to him.

Some will try to critique this and say that it is my fault. That I think too much about race. That I put race into everything. That maybe, race is always what’s on my mind and it probably never even occurs to these men to think twice about my skin. And that may be true; but that, is what white privilege is! You never have to be aware of your race, your whiteness. It is not something you have been forced to, or in some cases, NEED to keep at the forefront of your mind.

I am constantly aware of my Blackness, not because I am ashamed in any way, but because I have been forced to… and, in some cases, it could mean my safety. My intuition, my ability or attempt to interpret someone’s reaction to my Blackness could mean something as small as not having to feel the pain of a rejected romantic advance, or something as large as avoiding becoming the victim of a hate crime.

When it comes to the prospect of a romantic encounter with a white man, I must always first consider whether my Blackness is a factor for him. What roles exoticism and fetishism may, or may not play. Whether or not he is even open to the idea of engaging with a Black woman. But most of all, whether it is safe for me, in all my Black glory, to advance.

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. 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!

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.

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!