Changing perceptions by Helen Zughaib
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
One Nice Bug Per Day

if i look back, i am lost
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

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Product Placement
ojovivo
trying on a metaphor
dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
YOU ARE THE REASON

Andulka

⁂

PR's Tumblrdome
AnasAbdin

oozey mess
almost home

★
seen from United States
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seen from Brazil

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seen from United States

seen from Spain
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@kathandkim
Changing perceptions by Helen Zughaib
The ad was in a women’s magazine and if I remember correctly, was for a perfume. It featured a white woman lying in bed with a black man. The man’s shirtless back was to the viewer, making only his taut, muscular form and powerful-looking arms and shoulders visible. He was faceless, unidentified. The woman looked sultrily at us from over his mysterious form, satisfaction writ large over her features. She had partaken of whatever delights this man had to offer and was smugly, luxuriantly basking in the afterglow. The ad copy was, “Take a walk on the wild side.” My teacher used the ad as an example of how marketers can use certain words and images to convey large amounts of information subtly and effectively. A white woman having sex with a black man? How risqué. The implication: be a little like that woman. Spray on that perfume and feel like the kind of girl who has sex with faceless, muscular black men in ritzy hotel rooms because it’s an adventure, a thrill, a risk, something illicitly pleasurable. These are the semiotics of race. This is why columnists will trip over themselves not to call Lupita Nyong’o or Angela Basset “beautiful”, choosing instead to use terms that call to mind a kind of savage, animalistic magnetism: fierce, striking, edgy, eye-catching. Words like “pretty” and “beautiful” and “cute” are for white women whose bodies and sexualities are not seen as wild, animal, or untamed. Black men are hulking, threatening, thuggish; white men are charming, sexy heartthrobs with hearts of gold. Brown women are exotic, with their “honey-coloured” skin and their “mystical”, “enchanting” beauty, unlike their white counterparts, who are held up as not only ideal, but knowable and safe. White people are beautiful; non-white people are dangerous.
“The Semiotics of Race, or: Walks on the Wild Side”
by Aaminah Khan (via Black Girl Dangerous)
a classic
Broadcaster Kyle Sandilands says ‘get over it, it’s 200 years ago’, but it’s everything that has happened since that is the real problem
The past is always relevant and so much of what is happening today directly stems from this continent’s extremely violent, colonial post (not that colonialism isn’t still a problem today though).
Yamaguchi Sayoko 山口 小夜子 (1949-2007) for Shiseido 資生堂 - Design by Serge Lutens - Japan - 1980s
An original framed fashion illustration by Velwyn depicting a key look from the Yohji Yamamoto S/S16 collection. Commissioned for SHOWstudio’s A Beautiful Darkness project with Veuve Clicquot, curated by Nick Knight and Ellie Grace Cumming.
https://shop.showstudio.com/products/yohji-yamamoto?taxon_id=412
Nivia Gonzalez, La Paloma Blanca
People argued a lot about “separating the art from the artist” when Woody Allen’s molestation of his daughter became impossible to ignore. However, here’s the thing: almost all of Woody Allen’s work is about a thinly guised version of him. A lot of it is about some old weird creep having a sexual relationship with a younger, beautiful woman under a clear imbalance of power. How the hell am I supposed to separate the art from the artist? I have no desire to see Woody Allen make a movie about a professor entering a relationship with his student. I have no desire to hear R. Kelly sing about sex. It’s disgusting. It’s them describing their loathesome crimes through art.
The Art is Not The Artist: On Holding Abusers Accountable & Enjoying Problematic Media | store brand soda (via brandx)
Friend: so there's this guy I like (:
Me: I hate men but go on
oscar isaac is routinely snubbed by the academy. things they really should have nominated him for but didn’t:
drive (2011 - supporting, plays carey mulligan’s recently out of prison husband, aka, the most compelling part of the damned film)
inside llewyn davis (2013 - lead, plays a floundering folk musician in 60s New York during one horrible week in his life)
a most violent year (2014 - lead, plays a latino business man trying to hold his oil company together in the face of theft, fraud etc.)
ex machina (2015 - supporting, plays a charismatic but terrible genius who invents AI)
like honestly, if michael fassbender or eddie redmayne or even bradley cooper had played any of these parts, they would have most certainly got the nomination.
some man: damn what man hurt you?
me:
Katsuhiro Kobayashi. Japan Architect 6 Spring 1992: 207
Victor Pivovarov (Russian, born 1937)
Fried potatoes, 2006
Oil on canvas, 75х105 cm
Nivia Gonzalez, Gemelos (details)
We once had things in common Now the only thing we share is the refrigerator Ice cold, baby, I told you, I’m ice cold
There Is No Universal Sign Language
(By Frances Stead Sellers)
Carolyn McCaskill remembers exactly when she discovered that she couldn’t understand white people. It was 1968, she was 15 years old, and she and nine other deaf black students had just enrolled in an integrated school for the deaf in Talledega, Ala.
When the teacher got up to address the class, McCaskill was lost.
“I was dumbfounded,” McCaskill recalls through an interpreter. “I was like, ‘What in the world is going on?’ ”
The teacher’s quicksilver hand movements looked little like the sign language McCaskill had grown up using at home with her two deaf siblings and had practiced at the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind, just a few miles away. It wasn’t a simple matter of people at the new school using unfamiliar vocabularly; they made hand movements for everyday words that looked foreign to McCaskill and her fellow black students.
So, McCaskill says, “I put my signs aside.” She learned entirely new signs for such common nouns as “shoe” and “school.” She began to communicate words such as “why” and “don’t know” with one hand instead of two as she and her black friends had always done. She copied the white students who lowered their hands to make the signs for “what for” and “know” closer to their chins than to their foreheads. And she imitated the way white students mouthed words at the same time as they made manual signs for them.
Whenever she went home, McCaskill carefully switched back to her old way of communicating.
What intrigues McCaskill and other experts in deaf culture today is the degree to which distinct signing systems — one for whites and another for blacks — evolved and continue to coexist, even at Gallaudet University, where black and white students study and socialize together and where McCaskill is now a professor of deaf studies.
Several years ago, with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, McCaskill and three fellow researchers began to investigate the distinctive structure and grammar of Black American Sign Language, or Black ASL, in much the way that linguists have studied spoken African American English (known by linguists as AAE or, more popularly, as Ebonics). Their study, which assembled and analyzed data from filmed conversations and interviews with 96 subjects in six states, is the first formal attempt to describe Black ASL and resulted in the publication last year of “The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL.” What the researchers have found is a rich signing system that reflects both a history of segregation and the ongoing influence of spoken black English.
The book and its accompanying DVD emphasize that Black ASL is not just a slang form of signing. Instead, think of the two signing systems as comparable to American and British English: similar but with differences that follow regular patterns and a lot of variation in individual usage. In fact, says Ceil Lucas, one of McCaskill’s co-authors and a professor of linguistics at Gallaudet, Black ASL could be considered the purer of the two forms, closer in some ways to the system that Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet promulgated when he founded the first U.S. school for the deaf — known at the time as the American Asylum for Deaf Mutes — in Hartford, Conn., in 1817.
Mercedes Hunter, a hearing African American student in the department of interpretation at Gallaudet, describes the signing she and her fellow students use as a form of self-expression. “We include our culture in our signing,” says Hunter, who was a reseach assistant for the project, “our own unique flavor.”
“We make our signs bigger, with more body language” she adds, alluding to what the researchers refer to as Black ASL’s larger “signing space.”
When she tries to explain how Black ASL fits into the world of deaf communication, Lucas sets out by dispelling a common misconception about signing.
Many people think sign language is a single, universal language, which would mean that deaf people anywhere in the world could communicate freely with one another.
Another widely held but erroneous belief is that sign languages are direct visual translations of spoken languages, which would mean that American signers could communicate fairly freely with British or Australian ones but would have a hard time understanding an Argentinian or Armenian’s signs.
Neither is true, explains J. Archer Miller, a Baltimore-based lawyer who specializes in disability rights and has many deaf clients. There are numerous signing systems, and American Sign Language is based on the French system that Gallaudet and his teacher, Laurent Clerc, imported to America in the early 19th century.
“I find it easier to understand a French signer” than a British or Australian one, Miller says, “because of the shared history of the American and French systems.”
In fact, experts say, ASL is about 60 percent the same as French, and unintelligible to users of British sign language.
Within signing systems, just as within spoken languages, there are cultural and regional variants, and Miller explains that he can sometimes be stumped by a user’s idiosyncracies. He remembers in Philadelphia coming across an unfamiliar sign for “hospital” (usually depicted by making a cross on the shoulder, but in this case with a sign in front of the signer’s forehead).
What’s more, Miller says, signing changes over time: The sign for “telephone,” for example, is commonly made by spreading your thumb and pinkie and holding them up to your ear and mouth. An older sign was to put one fist to your ear and the other in front of your mouth to look like an old-fashioned candlestick phone.
So it’s hardly surprising, Miller says, that Americans’ segregated pasts led to the development of different signing traditions — and that contemporary cultural differences continue to influence the signing that black and white Americans use.
(read the full WashingtonPost article »here)