blake kathryn
wallacepolsom
untitled
Misplaced Lens Cap
gracie abrams
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Cosimo Galluzzi
Cosmic Funnies
KIROKAZE
taylor price
JVL
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
roma★
d e v o n
trying on a metaphor
cherry valley forever
tannertan36
Mike Driver
hello vonnie
Discoholic 🪩
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@kuh-pow
Watch: In a powerful Congresional speech, Sandra Bland’s mother called people who think they’re woke “the walking dead” because of how little we still know
The speech included a rousing call to action before the newly formed Congressional Caucus On Black Women & Girls. And her words were incredibly resonant, even if you think you know the whole story.
Gifs: Josh Begley
WATCH THE VIDEO
fucking hell, plz share this
LITANIES TO MY HEAVENLY BROWN BODY (cont'd):
BLESSED ARE THE SISSIES
BLESSED ARE THE BOI DYKES
BLESSED ARE THE PEOPLE OF COLOR MY BELOVED KITH AND KIN
BLESSED ARE THE TRANS
BLESSED ARE THE HIGH FEMMES
BLESSED ARE THE SEX WORKERS
BLESSED ARE THE AUTHENTIC
BLESSED ARE THE DIS-IDENTIFIERS
BLESSED ARE THE GENDER ILLUSIONISTS
BLESSED ARE THE NON-NORMATIVE
BLESSED ARE THE GENDERQUEERS
BLESSED ARE THE KINKSTERS
BLESSED ARE THE DISABLED
BLESSED ARE THE HOT FAT GIRLS
BLESSED ARE THE WEIRDO-QUEERS
BLESSED IS THE SPECTRUM
BLESSED IS CONSENT
BLESSED IS RESPECT
BLESSED ARE THE BELOVED WHO I DIDN’T DESCRIBE, I COULDN’T DESCRIBE, WILL LEARN TO DESCRIBE AND RESPECT AND LOVE
AMEN
ASHE <3
untitled (3) 4.3.2016
BOUNDARIES.
The name of the game, kid
Don’t build them up too high, kid
Don’t build them too low, kid
Without building yourself up first
Head high, eyes forward, backbone of fucking steel
Remember, you are Black gold, Black magic, Black brilliance
You need not be onyx all of the time
Softer edges and you will still shine
Just remember, reciprocity is key
And lean into the ones that make you feel free
The ones that make you feel heard & seen & whole
And help you hold up those boundaries
And hold you when you are tired
And treat you like fire
untitled (2) 4.3.2016
I just don’t think of you.
But am I supposed to?
If you don’t make my eyes flutter,
My heart thump louder & harder,
My smile so big my cheeks ache??
I can’t build a monument for you in my mind
When sweet breezes turn to hurricanes
Blowing away everything in their path
Except sweet memories & daydreams of truer loves
Sunset in Santa Cruz #nofilter
Leftover fruit salad from raw dinner feast w/ friends. Going into smoothie number 2 riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight now :) #rawvegan #raw #hclf #vegan #blackvegan #811
SUPER ripe #bananas headed to the freezer shortly--nicecream tmrw! #blackvegan #vegan #801010
Breakfast smoothie! Bananas, kale, chia seeds, water. #811 #801010 #raw #rawvegan # vegan # health #blackvegan ##POCvegan
“But they’re looting and burning down stores”: Debunking the Logic of Oppression in Ferguson | AmericaWakieWakie
"This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy."
— Marcus Garvey
Ferguson protesters pulled nearly two city blocks back from police as they demonstrated in song last night. They held their empty hands high, an action symbolic of the “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” chant which has come to embody the circumstances of Mike Brown’s unarmed death at the hands of Ferguson, MO police. Yet, despite the peacefulness of the crowd, in an episode of déjà vu reminiscent of the crackdown on the ‘60s Civil Rights Movement, Ferguson police closed-in on protesters in military fashion, firing tear gas and rubber bullets at unarmed civilians.
Indiscriminate violence against black communities has long been the norm for police departments across the U.S. In the wake of Mike Brown’s death, many people (read mostly white people) have consistently defended the actions of Ferguson police (and police in general).
The latest iteration of this defense has come on the heels of a burned-down gas station and reports of alleged looting. On Tuesday I received an anonymous message saying “They burned down a gas station, stop crying racism.” I received another today which read, “Those people shouldn’t be in the middle of the road doing anything. Imagine how many of them have guns. Look up how they are looting and robbing.”
This line of reasoning ignores totally the slaying of Mike Brown and the antagonisms of a militarized police presence at a community protest (mind you, Ferguson, MO is over 60% black while its police force is 95% white). It is victim blaming which says inanimate objects ought to become the center of discussion and outrage surrounding the death of a living, breathing, vibrant human being, and that never should we mention the white supremacist institution which murdered him or the cop(s) who pulled the trigger.
Context Always Matters
“Individuals do not create rebellions; conditions do.”
— Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown)
A while back I tweeted that the most powerful weapon to destroy a people’s resistance is to erase their history. For the phenomenon that is victim blaming, this is absolutely essential. If people (read mostly white people) can erase an oppressed population’s history, they effectively erase the oppression they themselves committed and make invisible the power they obtain from it.
“Looting” rhetoric is a method of erasing the previous violence and oppression visited upon Ferguson’s black community, specifically the killing of Mike Brown, but also even before it. This rhetoric conveniently rejects greater sociopolitical, economic, and historical context for the sake of bolstering itself and in doing so it can dismiss the continuation of white supremacy in contemporary institutions (like police departments).
St. Louis County, home to St. Louis and Ferguson, hardly has a good civil rights record. White supremacy has a long, strong history there.
“In May [1917], three thousand white men gathered in downtown East St. Louis and attacks on blacks began. With mobs destroying buildings and beating people, the Illinois governor called in the National Guard to prevent further rioting. Although rumors circulated about organized retribution attacks from African Americans, conditions eased somewhat for a few weeks.
On July 2, a car occupied by white males drove through a black area of the city and fired several shots into a standing group. An hour later, a car containing four people, including a journalist and two police officers, Detective Sergeant Samuel Coppedge and Detective Frank Wadley, was passing through the same area. Black residents, possibly assuming they were the original suspects, opened fire on their car, killing one officer instantly and mortally wounding another.
Later that day, thousands of white spectators who assembled to view the detectives’ bloodstained automobile marched into the black section of town and started rioting [joined by the Guardsman called to stop it]. After cutting the water hoses of the fire department, the rioters burned entire sections of the city and shot inhabitants as they escaped the flames. Claiming that “Southern Negros deserve[d] a genuine lynching,” they lynched several blacks.”
— Wikipedia
In the aftermath conservative estimates put between 40-150 black Americans dead and nearly 6,000 homeless.
These events are telling. Throughout them we see the black community responding to white initiated violence, yet because whites held power, black people suffered. Recent events in Ferguson reflect the same relationship: Violence is wielded by the powerful while any retaliation by the oppressed is systematically and brutally repressed.
Ultimately, the role of “looting” rhetoric removes the context of these power dynamics, its history, and allows for a game of moral equivalence to be played — one where to white people property damage is just as bad, if not more heinous than killing a young man. Considering that for the majority of U.S. history black people literally have been treated like property, it is unsurprising this reasoning is so pervasive.
It’s Institutional Racism, Stupid
“As an officer of the law, I am committed to administering justice swiftly and even-handedly, regardless of whether the suspect has dark skin or really dark skin.”
— Fictional Police Officer Vincent Turner, as quoted in the Onion
America’s justice system is racist. There is no other way to put it. From its racist policing built on profiling, to its war on drugs which dis-proportionally incarcerates black (and brown) people, to its sentencing laws that increase in severity if you are black, to the fact that a black man is killed by cops or vigilantes every 28 hours. It’s murderous and racist to its core. So when “the law” is the instrument of oppression, this leaves little recourse for communities like Ferguson.
But the logic of oppression will always place the onus for civility on the victims of oppression, never itself. In Ferguson this means restricting protesters to a few normalized avenues of addressing their grievances, which almost always are prescribed and deemed reasonable and legitimate by the very same racist legal system which kills black youth. Even then, if black Americans effectively exercise their legal rights, this too is met with brutal repression.
Such has been the historical example of gun ownership and self-defense in the black American community:
“[On] May 2, 1967, 30 fully armed members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and their supporters were in the California State Capitol at Sacramento, California, protesting the infamous Mulford Act. The bill on its face was aimed at banning a U.S. citizen’s right to carry loaded weapons in public, so long as the weapons were “registered, not concealed, and not pointed in a threatening manner.”
In actuality the Mulford Act – or “the Panther Bill,” as it was tagged by the media – was designed to end the BPP Police Patrols that were organized against police brutality in the Afrikan community; as it was the Panther Party’s belief that “armed citizen patrols and the arming of the citizenry as guaranteed by the Constitution were the most effective deterrents to excessive use of police force.”
The alarmed and instantaneous reaction to the fully armed BPP in Sacramento further confirmed this, and then Gov. Ronald Reagan’s signing of the bill into law catapulted the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense into national prominence.
Three months prior to this, in March 1967, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had begun an “internal security” investigation of Huey Newton, prompting then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to announce, on Sept. 8, 1968, that the BPP was considered to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” At the time, the Black Panther Party was barely known outside of Oakland, Calif.”
—Bay View National Black Newspaper
In the following years the Hoover Administration meticulously and ruthlessly initiated campaigns to delegitimize and eviscerate the Black Panthers.
Here, yet again, we see the black community responding to white initiated violence, in particular the Black Panther declaration to halt police brutality in their neighborhoods. And, you guessed it, yet again, because whites held power, black people suffered.
Next time you see somebody trying to equivocate a burned-down gas station or a little looting with the violence perpetrated against black bodies, with Mike Brown’s death, stop them. Check them. Reframe the conversation again. Make them talk about the robbing of memories from marriage, kids, grandchildren, an infinite number of moments never lived because those years were fleeced from a young man with fire, gunpowder, and bullets.
Force them to talk about the theft of a system that denies Mike Brown’s family, and countless others, any effective recourse, let alone justice. Don’t be fooled into thinking a gas station burned somehow levels the field of brutality and injustice levied against the black community. Don’t play that game, because that’s what it is to them: A game where they can say “I’m right and you’re wrong,” a game that ignores the reality that they’re alive and black boys like Mike Brown are dead.
OMAR ABREGO 8/2/14 #policebrutality #ferguson #mikebrown
Black Feminist Film School – Summer Session
Black Feminist Film School Summer Session is the answer to a prayer whispered by those who believe another world is possible as long as we can imagine it. It is an answer, a vision, a liberation. Black Feminist Film...
An AMAZING display of solidarity from Atlanta, New York, DC, Philly, London and back to Nigeria. Men, women and children showed up in their Gele’s (headwraps) for rallies and protests today in an effort to push for more coverage and aid in finding the abducted Nigerian girls. #BringBackOurGirls
(These photos are not mine, they are photos from the twitter. Please feel free to tag anyone you may know that is in these pics)
African Women Artists #16: Otobong Nkanga
Otobong Nkanga is a Nigerian artist who creates works based on extensive research in diverse media. Her drawings, installations, photographs, videos and sculptures examine ideas around land and the value connected to its resources.
She often utilises body and voice in order to articulate her own reactions to existing structures and their implications. She finds inspiration for this in observing social and topographic changes in her surroundings and the influences that arise from these. As a human trace that testifies of ways of living and environmental issues, architecture and landscape act as a sounding board for narration and “the performative”.
In many of her works Nkanga reflects metonymically on the use and cultural value of natural resources, exploring how meaning and function are relative within cultures and revealing different roles and histories for the same products, particularly within the context of the artist’s autobiography and memories. Biography via
This month, we’re highlighting African women artists who are pushing boundaries in the art scene. Follow the series as we highlight one African woman artist everyday this month.
Also featured: Wangechi Mutu, Lalla Essaydi, Zanele Muholi, Aida Muluneh,Sokari Douglas Camp CBE, Nathalie Mba Bikoro, Mary Sibande, Gazbia Sirry, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jane Alexander, Julie Mehretu, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Ghada Amer, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Zina Saro-Wiwa
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Vegan cookbooks written by People of Color
Sistah Vegan
The Inspired Vegan
By Any Greens Necessary
Viva Vegan!
Better Than Vegan
The Indian Vegan Kitchen
Dead Prez has been the most inspirational Hip Hop group in my life. I first heard their album “Lets get Free” when I was in middle school, and it introduced me to ideas of healthy living, questioni…
THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF HEALTH 1. Clean, fresh air 2. Pure water 3. Foods for which we are biologically designed 4. Sufficient sleep 5. Rest and relaxation 6. Vigorous activity 7. Emotional poise and stability 8. Sunshine and natural light 9. Comfortable temperature 10. Peace, harmony, serenity, and tranquility 11. Human touch 12. Thought, cognition, and meditation 13. Friendships and companionship 14. Gregariousness (social relationships, community) 15. Love and appreciation 16. Play and recreation 17. Pleasant environment 18. Amusement and entertainment 19. Sense of humor, mirth and merriment 20. Security of life and its means 21. Inspiration, motivation, purpose, and commitment 22. Creative, useful work (pursuit of interest) 23. Self-control and self-mastery 24. Individual sovereignty 25. Expression of reproductive instincts 26. Satisfaction of the aesthetic senses 27. Self-confidence 28. Positive self image 29. Internal and external cleanliness 30. Smiles 31. Music and all other arts 32. Biophilia (love of nature)
The 80/10/10 Diet, Dr. Douglas N. Graham (via fruitbatkristina)
City of Angels
By Petra Collins and Arvida Byström.
I love Arvida’s work.
