Punk Nerd

a collection of ideas on power, identity, and liberation

[radqueernerd]

“In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it effects them personally. Here then is a lesson in safe logic.” —Phil Ochs, introducing “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”

[radqueernerd]

Our humanity is worth a little discomfort, it's actually worth a lot of discomfort.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

[radqueernerd]

In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left. The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.

bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom” (x)

[radqueernerd]

This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group. They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. They are damaging to both people of color and to white people. Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture.

[radqueernerd]

Poor vs. low-income: Does it matter which word we use?

Who is poor? Who is low-income? It’s a question our team and others who report on issues of poverty grapple with a lot. My news editor and I did a quick

Curzan says there are actually three definitions for the word poor. It can mean:

People who don’t have enough resources to meet their needs.

Bad or shoddy quality

Pitiable, as in 'oh you poor soul.'

"Even if you don’t mean to pull up those connotations," she explains, "when you say the word poor, the way our brains work, all those meanings get activated. And I think there are people who say that doesn’t feel good or fair."

She says the term low-income, on the other hand, allows us to separate out the issue of income from the people themselves. In other words: there's no judgment.

[radqueernerd]

[brutereason]

Yesterday I responded to a comment by @insanitybytes22, in which she suggested things wives and mothers can do to help men as an olive branch instead of blaming men for every marital breakdown. I appreciated her saying so. But I remember my wife often saying how exhausting it was for her to have to tell me what to do all the time. It’s why the sexiest thing a man can say to his partner is “I got this,” and then take care of whatever needs taken care of. I always reasoned: “If you just tell me what you want me to do, I’ll gladly do it.” But she didn’t want to be my mother. She wanted to be my partner, and she wanted me to apply all of my intelligence and learning capabilities to the logistics of managing our lives and household. She wanted me to figure out all of the things that need done, and devise my own method of task management. I wish I could remember what seemed so unreasonable to me about that at the time.

She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink | Must Be This Tall To Ride (via brutereason)

[thesociologicalcinema]

Men and Boys! The Revolution Begins in the Sink! Only when men take full responsibility for their share of the cooking, the cleaning and the washing up… Only then can they join with women, and together build a new world!!!

[radqueernerd]

[radqueernerd]

The ease of not being aware of privilege is an aspect of privilege itself, what some call “the luxury of obliviousness.”… as James Baldwin put it, “To be white in America means not having to think about it.” We could say the same thing about maleness or any other basis for privilege. So strong is the sense of entitlement behind this luxury that males, whites, and others can feel put upon in the face of even the mildest invitation to pay attention to issues of privilege. “We shouldn’t have to look at this stuff,” they seem to say. “It isn’t fair.”

Allan Johnson, Privilege, Oppression, and Difference

[radqueernerd]

We have been taught not to see these patterns, to see racism in disparate pieces as if it makes no sense. But seeing the three as interrelated and dependent strands, like the strands of a braid, allows us to see the fullness of White supremacy in all of its manifestations. This working paper is intended to reveal some of the patterns woven over the frame of White supremacy, colonialism and apartheid.

[zestoftheday]

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

(1962. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 43

(via zestoftheday)

[zestoftheday]

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic (via zestoftheday)