DAS SPACESHIP

DAS SPACESHIP

[homesteadseattle]

50+ new rugs online! (before you ask, the persian gabbeh story rug is our baby NFS

[thecolorblockcurator]

Glass Bell, Bodil Jane

[thecolorblockcurator]

Birds of a Feather, 2010,  Betye Saar

[freethehippies-deactivated20160]

[soulcoral-deactivated20191122]

[cultuursnuiven]

Focus on the good 🌙🌴

[mariafernandatesoro]

https://instagram.com/p/BUsmfDpg9mi/

[bungalowclassic]

[your-daily-baby-sloth]

three-toed/two-toed bonding session 

[sojinails]

Rib Long Sleeve Crew Neck Top $30.00

[jessicamaccormackrmack]

[sirheisenberg]

[sodamountain]

[anjleeparmar]

[gradientlair]

So there’s this thing that I’ve always known about, that @Karynthia, @Blackamazon, @so_treu @weseerace and @bad_dominicana discuss often, about how terms, ideas and scholarship that Black women create are not associated with their originators or even with any Black women at all (and not even speaking of just plagiarism; I mean erasure). Or worse, they’re used against Black women. Or even worse, people actively fight the terms’ existences especially within mainstream feminism.

Womanism. Intersectionality. Matrix of domination. Misogynoir. Four of the many concepts that are fought tooth and nail to not exist (especially the latter since it’s newest). Subject to the scrutiny of imperialist White supremacist capitalist patriarchy (this is bell hooks’ combined term) and how it shapes epistemology. Eventually once accepted, then they are disconnected from its originators often for the purpose of silencing other Black women. There’s people who use the terms and ideas to push their agenda (agendas that usually exclude Black women) yet none of the originators are anywhere on their sites. No tags. Not mentioned in conversation or teaching. Nowhere. And even when they discuss modern issues in feminism, they refuse to name Black women currently doing the work. They gladly name any White woman they’re referring to. 

This is not about Black women wanting “White approval” as utterly boring and predictable Whites and some Black men (who also try to silence Black women with other Black women’s words) will suggest, a notion I already deconstructed in the past. It’s about a long history of taking and erasure. Taking. Erasure. This has a history as certain aspects of Black progressive politics are regularly appropriated and then used by Whites to shame or exclude Black people. 

Anytime I mention Black women’s work, all of a sudden it becomes “unethical” or “greedy” to credit our work or idea spreading and education is deemed “impossible” if our names, contributions, ideas and praxis are mentioned. I am fascinated by multi-degreed, multiple column-writing White feminists who can’t figure out who coined “intersectionality” or what it actually means. This is willful ignorance shaped by a need to erase Black women’s work/relevance in feminism on the surface and marginalizes Black women, in general. 

[jayaprada]

Gentrification Billboards for MoCADA’s exhibition The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks. Brooklyn, New York  (2010)

"The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the “housing of the poor.” Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the labourers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the dwellings of the working-people. “Improvements” of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks, warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places." —Karl Marx, Das Kapital vol 1

"Gentrification contradicts this foundation of assumptions. It involves a socalled filtering in the opposite direction and seems to contradict the notion that preference for space per se is what guides the process of residential development. This means either that this assumption should be dropped from the theory or that "external factors" and income constraints were so altered as to render the preference for more space impractical and inoperable. Gentrification is thereby rendered a chance, extraordinary event, the accidental outcome of a unique mix of exogenous factors. But gentrification is not extraordinary in reality; it is extraordinary only to the theory which assumes it impossible from the start. The experience of gentrification illustrates well the limitations of neo-classical urban theory since in order to explain the process, the theory must be abandoned, and a superficial explanation based on ad hoc external factors must be adopted. But a list of factors do not make an explanation. The theory claims to explain suburbanization but cannot at all explain the historical continuity from suburbanization to gentrification and inner city redevelopment."—Neil Smith, Gentrification and Uneven Development, Economic Geography, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 139-155

[blackcontemporaryart]

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

[alexcollages]

Mellow Gold on Flickr.

(Handmade Paper Collage)