Mixed Race Politics

Opinions and ideas by and for mixed people. {Check out our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter!}

[spytv]

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, Untitled (Lovers), 2015, acrylic on PVC panel, 60 x 48 x 3 inches (152.4 x 121.9 x 7.6 cm)

[airoe]

why is broccoli seen as this universally hated vegetable. broccoli is delicious

[undergravity-deactivated2025051]

bc suburban families all over the world literally just steam/microwave their vegetables and serve them plain to their kids. No wonder kids hate vegetables. They’re taught that veggies are supposed to taste bad. but imagine: veggies with spices. Veggies in curry. veggies that are broiled, soaked, sautéed. aghhhh veggies are so good

[theeeprotagonist]

Veggies of color (VOC)

[selfportraitsofcolor]

Jennifer Mien Mien Lin, b. 1983, Taiwan, raised Canada Self-portrait as a Plant US (2015) [Source]

The artist’s website says:

Jennifer Mien Mien Lin is an internationally exhibited photographer residing in New York City.

As a young adult, education became the key to understanding both her own development as a unique individual; a female, Asian immigrant in North America. She became increasingly aware of the devastating negative consequences that sexist, repressive societies can have on girls.

Born in Taipei and spent her childhood and adolescence in a traditional Taiwanese family. Taiwanese cultural values follow the Confucian preference for sons, particularly of the first-born. As the youngest, and female, child in the family, she was often neglected, and de-prioritized. It was not until her attendance at university that she was able to escape this glaring gender inequality.

Her early photography focused on the female body. Her photographs revealed an aesthetic fascination with the navigation of the female body through foreign environments and the visual relationships that are forged between space and body. Her work has been largely defined by a sense of female displacement: a contemporaneous condition of not belonging anywhere completely.

As an artist of multiple nationalities, Lin taps into her own pluralism, using it to strengthen her position as an “émigré flâneur”, a watcher who observes the accelerated world with discernment and empathy.

[sandylamu]

Tanzania

[creativenomad]

Ten Somali Artists & Entertainers To Watch In 2015

Somali growth, innovation and artistry is, for the most part, only championed by other Somalis, which is why hashtags like #SomaliDiversity and #EastAfricanFeminism have gained a lot of traction in the last few months. Whether or not it’s publicized, Somalis outside of Somalia are a diaspora to be reckoned with: they’re artists, thought leaders, entertainers and writers; they’re a generation of people— from the United States to England— defying convention and representing Somalis in positive and meaningful ways. While their last names may be similar, these Somalis are only loosely connected. They represent hope, resilience and prosperity. They’re continuing the legacy of diasporic greatness in the arts and entertainment, a legacy that counts Nuruddin Farah, Iman, K’naan and Kinsi Abdulleh among its ranks. Browse through them on their feature in Okay Africa. 

[egelantier]

kazuaki horitomo’s tattooed cats.

[your-naked-magic-oh-dear-lord]

Cattooist.

[selfportraitsofcolor]

Zanele Muholi, b. 1972 Self Portrait from Somnyama Ngonyama  South Africa (2015) [Source]

In contrast to her life-long project of documenting members of the black LGBTI community of South Africa, for this body of work, Muholi turns the camera on herself.

As she presents black and white self-portraits taken while travelling in South Africa, America and Europe, Somnyama Ngonyama (meaning ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’) confronts the politics of race and pigment in the photographic archive, while commenting on specific events in South Africa’s political history, such as the Marikana massacre.

The series references black and white portraiture and fashion photography, with Muholi dressed in different outfits as she takes on various personas. She writes:

“Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, I have portrayed myself in highly stylised fashion using the performative and expressive language of theatre. The black face and its details become the focal point, forcing the viewer to question their desire to gaze at images of my black figure.

“By exaggerating the darkness of my skin tone, I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other” – Zanele Muholi, 2015

[darkskyn-blog]

[ab-ll-ether]

[thechanelmuse]

Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease

[selfportraitsofcolor]

Eugene Soh Saturn Devouring His Naan Singapore (2014) [Source]

[wocinsolidarity]

8 Steps Toward Building Indispensability (Instead of Disposability) Culture

In social justice communities and in call-out culture, we often treat people like they’re disposable when they mess up. What if we tried this instead? by Kai Cheng Thom

So when I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.

Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.

All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.

Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.

Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society.

Just as my father once held open the door to our house and demanded that I leave because he didn’t know how to reconcile his love for me with my gender identity, we denounced each other and burned bridges because we didn’t know how reconcile our social ideals with the fact that our loved ones don’t always live up to them.

I believe that sometimes we did this hypocritically – that we created the so-called call-out culture (a culture of toxic confrontation and shaming people for oppressive behavior that is more about the performance of righteousness than the actual pursuit of justice) in part so that we could focus on the failings of others and avoid examining the complicity with oppression, the capacity to abuse, that exists within us all.

And I believe we did it in part because sometimes it’s impossible to imagine any other way: We live in a disposability culture – a society based on consumption, fear, and destruction – where we’re taught that the only way to respond when people hurt us is to hurt them back or get rid of them.

[nouralogical]

Installations by Anish Kapoor

[wordswilling]

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

Octavia E. Butler, “Furor Scribendi” in Bloodchild and Other Stories (via wordswilling)

[blkqueerdo]

you cannot know how well people’s bodies remember their ancestors

wild seed, Octavia Butler (via blkqueerdo)

[huntingtonlibrary]

Science fiction writer Octavia Butler died 10 years ago today at the age of 58 and left her papers to The Huntington. We’re celebrating her today by sharing a variety of items from her collection throughout the day.

Pictured here are some of Butler’s handwritten notes on writing and what it means to be a writer.

Learn more about Butler and her archive at http://huntington.org/octaviabutler/, and to find out about “Radio Imagination,” an amazing yearlong Octavia Butler project that Los Angeles arts organization Clockshop (@clockshopla​) is putting on, head to http://clockshop.org/project/radio-imagination/

images: Handwritten notes by Octavia E. Butler, ca. 1980. Octavia E. Butler papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Pages of handwritten notes from one of Octavia E. Butler’s commonplace books, undated. Octavia E. Butler papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Page of handwritten notes on inside cover of one of Octavia E. Butler’s commonplace books, 1987. Octavia E. Butler papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

[thingstolovefor]

The reimagined famous paintings put POC in prominent roles where they’d otherwise be servants, prostitutes or slaves. #Love it!