May 2012
April 2012
“Recent studies on literacy reveal that black males are fast becoming one of the most illiterate groups in our society. Many incarcerated black males live most of their adult lives in prisons. In past times, prison has been a location where many black males discovered books and reading for the first time in their lives. Conservative forces in our nation want to deny all prisoners access to books, claiming that reading is a luxury and not a right. Depriving prisoners of the right to read is deemed deserved punishment. That anyone should wish to deny access to literacy in our nation threatens the future or democracy.”
—
bell hooks, in her book “Teaching Critical Reading” (via bowfolk)
this is some serious shit because i come from a background where my father was not only able to expand his literacy but go to college through prison. this was a key to him becoming socially mobile. before 9/11 when cori checks were everywhere and you can’t do shit if you’ve been convicted of a felony. it is clear that when given these tools, many people can make the most of them. so they are trying desperately to take it away (see the latest attack on what books prisoners can read and the attempts to remove all libraries save legal books, which are legally required)
“Social justice is about destroying systematic marginalisation and privilege. Wishing to live in a more just, more equal world is simply not the same thing as wishing to live in a “nicer” world. I am not suggesting niceness is bad or that we should not behave in a nice way towards others if we want to! I also do not equate niceness with cooperation or collaboration with others. Here’s all I am saying: the conflation of ethical or just conduct (goodness), and polite conduct (niceness) is a big problem.”
—» The Revolution Will Not Be Polite: The Issue of Nice versus Good Social Justice League (via lookoutsideyourself)
“So if you – the oppressed – hurt someone’s feelings, you’re just like the oppressor, right? Wrong. Oppression is not about hurt feelings. It is about the rights and opportunities that are not afforded to you because you belong to a certain group of people. When you use a racist slur you imply that non-whiteness is a bad thing, and thus publicly reinforce a system that denies POC the rights and opportunities of white people. Calling a white person a racist fuckhead doesn’t do any of that. Yes, it’s not very nice. And how effective it is as a tactic is definitely up for debate (that’s a whole other blog post). But it’s not oppression.”
—» The Revolution Will Not Be Polite: The Issue of Nice versus Good Social Justice League (via lookoutsideyourself)
“To prevent Africans and Native Americans from uniting Europeans played skillfully on racial differences and ethnic rivalries. They kept the pot of animosity boiling. Whites turned Indians into slavehunter and slaveowners, and Africans into “Indian-fighters.” Light-skinned Africans were pitted against dark-skinned, free against enslaved, Black Indians against “pure” Africans or “pure” Indians.”
—William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, p. 13 (via a-lostbird)
“It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition - austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are ‘always with us.’ What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to a faintness before the end of the shift. The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick day or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans - as a state of emergency.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (via infinitelyawkwords)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (via infinitelyawkwords)
“And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.”
—“The Forty-Year Itch: What Mad Men Shows About American Pop Culture” (via downlookingup:sylvysparrow)
I'm not saying Game of Thrones is necessarily race exclusionary
…I’m just saying that there’s no reason that every fucking TV show set in a fantasy land has to have a whiter-than-white race composition.
It’s a fucking fantasy land. Do why can’t you have a couple actual non-extra characters who are people of color?
Preach.
Read the books. It gets better.
