Melanin Soda @melaninsoda - Tumblr Blog

coalitionzine-deactivated201704

We sat down with the founder of The Coalition Zine, a WOC-oriented Tumblr-turned-zine-turned-website, and a necessary addition to the heavily whitewashed world of zines. #feature #thecoalition #video

Is representation dead?

I no longer care about being represented from/by white people. But no matter how I feel about it, it is still very important, and it does make a difference because it does make an impact when you see someone who looks like you in mainstream media. I’m just not interested in mainstream media anymore.

And by mainstream media you mean…?

Like TV, movies—even some of “the underground” is mainstream now. All of that shit you see on Instagram, Twitter, [and] Tumblr is mainstream now. When you’re just scrolling through the internet, it kind of has an influence on you. From 2010 to 2014, that was like my life: I liked all this cool shit but I couldn’t dabble in it. It was all white women. And I didn’t see how much it was [impacting] my mentality until recently when I was like, oh, I really do feel like shit because I don’t see myself in these spaces.

midnight-charm

fuckyouinthegarden

maarnayeri-blog

The least helpful thing to do right now is create a gendered discourse that specifically disenfranchises or entirely erases black women from conversations about state sanctioned oppression.

It is black women who are summarily disappeared in jails. Who also face the daunting threat of being at the other end of that bullet. Who get body slammed and dragged around streets and classes. It is black women who are forced into further economic destitution when their male partners are executed. It is black women who cook, raise, nurture and play the largest part in sustaining familial structures. It is black women who become the spokespersons for their dead loved ones. Who lead the marches. Who organize activism. Who accept those collect calls and sparse trips to their disproportionately locked up loved ones, if its not them who is behind bars. Who bear the intersection of misogyny and anti black racism.

This is not and never has been just about “our boys and men”. The amount of labor, compassion and commitment that goes into sustaining this community is largely the sacrifice of black women. Never forget that.

blackfilm

The Fits is an independent film directed, produced and co-written by Anna Rose Holmer with the editor Saela Davis, and additional producer Lisa Kjerulff. This movie tells the story of an 11-year-old black girl named Toni played by Royalty Hightower. The Fits follows the many facets of life that the main character, and other young girls in the film go

theijeoma-deactivated20180827

I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.

Muhammad Ali (via theijeoma)

Rest in paradise, Champ!

(via theijeoma)

wetheurban

Black Men With Flowers, Lynette Luna

In society, black men have often had to become hyper masculine to deal with the intense pressures projected onto them by society. When we look into the general opinion of black men, we think of them as very hard, calloused, and tough. We do not allow them to be projected in ways of weakness, or softness. I photographed a black male with flowers to show a side that is often ignored by society. That these men can be soft, sensitive, and delicate. I blended a black man with the delicacy of flowers and the femininity of bright colors. - Lynette Luna

Instagram.com/WeTheUrban

Keep reading

poovellamkettuppar

Is it possible that the most hyped pop performer of our era could be avant-garde? We talk about the avant-garde as though it can only spring from the mind of a lone, starving artist, and we say that the opposite of the craftsman’s approach goes into the creation of a pop album. But Lemonade feels like an avant-garde document. It’s impressionistic, it builds on filmic history, fuses documentary with fiction, and uses polyphonic voices to tell a broad story. In his 2014 book Freedom Time, the Yale English professor Anthony Reed details the long, unsteady history between blackness and ideas of the avant-garde. He contends that, in general, the work of black artists is burdened with the expectation to be literal, political, and representative, whereas white artists have the freedom to break away from such constrictions altogether. Even after Lemonade, Beyoncé’s most experimental project, large audiences immediately searched for statements that the album made about her real life, seeking out living analogues for “Becky with the good hair” among Jay Z’s rumored mistresses. There’s a special anxiety of influence that comes along with being a young creative of color who wants to make strange works of art.

Beyoncé With The Good Art (via dirtypunjab)

the-monae

Black Girl Magic

durgapolashi

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

Alice Walker, LIVING BY THE WORD

Ma vie matérialisée en quelques mots.

(via manufactoriel)

kdrez

simhanada

Ghanian photographer Philip Kwame Apagya

superselected

Watch This. Young Black Women Explore the Struggles and Complexities of African-European Identity.

theijeoma-deactivated20180827

let the world auction the gun used to kill Trayvon. let the coward filled lynch mob auction it. I will protect your blackness. let them point and stare at your blackness, I will write of galaxies in your hair, in your skin and how you swallow stars. let the entire continent bleach, I will glorify your blackness. let them erase you, not accept you, push you against the wall. I will write you into history. Let no one be fooled, let them try to break you, you will always swim; breaking the shore in half, you will arrive whole.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo, i will protect your blackness (via theijeoma)

theijeoma-deactivated20180827

For black girls who have to pretend to be strong yet go home breaking down in the middle of the night, trying to breathe. Trying to breathe. For black girls battling depression. For those who feel so alone in a world telling them the disease is for whites alone. Please, live. For black girls who are imperfect, insecure and trying to fit into a world that stifles their voice. For black girls still learning to glow. For black girls trying to fit into a world so afraid of their beauty they sell them cream to lighten their skin. For their black skin. For black girls who smile when they see themselves represented.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo,

For days that feel heavy and days that feel light for days that feel beautiful and days that break you

(via theijeoma)

Sure, I'm carefree but...