@glory2thegirl - Tumblr Blog

Pat Cleveland as the Madonna, Thierry Mugler, Paris 1984.

Created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during it’s flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

gaypeopletwitter

sleepallsummer

archeologists: are you wearing the- 500-year-old skeleton found in the london river: the chanel boots? yeah i am

nowhites

i’d hate to be a high schooler in this day and age. i see young ass girls on youtube doing “grwm freshman year” full beat 28 inch wigs and its like……. when i was in high school you’d be lucky if we didnt show up in our pajamas. maybe a lil mascara here n there. idk i just feel bad that there’s so much sexual pressure on these younger girls because of social media

paularekiyah

Social Media is harming society on the low and a lot of people are not seeing that.

westafricanbaby

A lot of people are not seeing it AT ALL. The worst part is that some people find ways to masquerade certain harmful behaviors as “feminism” or “autonomy”. People are literally repackaging the effects of misogyny as feminism and that makes it harder for people to see the problems.

Excessive freedom comes with responsibility and too much of anything is bad. A LOT of these kids are not even mature enough to handle that responsibility or know the effects of the things they are doing, the effects on their self worth, the effects on their mental health, the pressure to keep up with the most superficial social media trends etc… the “everything goes, no criticism” culture we have now won’t even allow people have the important conversations that need to be had surrounding this topic.

yayolilith

Megan Fox (“Passion Play” 2010)

manufactoriel

Carnival, Trinidad and Tobago (1975) by Nick Dewolf

1010ll

by muakatemur http://ift.tt/1LMAIk6

evilrashida

Alice McCall Resort 2020 💖

evilrashida

SISTERS!

afronerdism

In response to my initial post about recentering the conversation around cultural appropriation, one of the things white people keep saying is some variation of “culture needs to be shared [across communities] or else it won’t survive.” This is not only a completely false statement, it’s also deeply rooted in racism.

The reason that so many communities of color have found holding on to our cultural heritage so difficult is because of colonization and forced assimilation, not because we didn’t share it with white people.

The reason you think that in order for survival we need to share our culture with you is based on the idea that once you have pushed us to extinction, you’ll still have our culture to study. But allow me to propose the radical idea that if the people die, so should our culture. We are the soul of everything sacred within our communities. If you kill us, then saving bastardized versions of our cultures means nothing.

Additionally, white people seem to be confused about what cultural sharing actually looks like. Cultural sharing is when you are invited into a cultural space to share in our joy and then leave you those traditions when you leave that space.

An example of Cultural sharing is Beyoncé’s baechella performance. You were invited to share in the awe and majesty of historically black tradtions like stepping and strolling and dancing. You can buy a T-shirt to commemorate the occasion, but you are not invited to start trying to stroll and step yourself. These are deeply significant aspects of black collegiate life born of resiliency to systematic persecution and racism. You trying to approximate them would be disrespectful.

The same goes for Native American or Asian traditional celebrations. Go, eat, dance, laugh, buy something, then go home and put that something on your shelf or wall and leave the culture alone.

Now please go reread my initial post and try to understand that I wa saying that we should recenter the conversation around solution oriented narratives instead of just using it to shame other white people for progressive brownie points. Those people should be shamed and it’s like y’all missed the point entirely.

afronerdism

If you reblogged my other post, please reblog this one so people can get it.

afronerdism

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

afronerdism

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

Edit:

White People, this is not me saying that we should allow y’all to just culturally appropriate our cultures. This is me saying that I need white allies to know why it’s bad beyond just “that’s racist” it is racist. But we need y’all to know why and to be able to work towards solutions. Why is that not clear here.? I don’t like y’all.