tbh all i do is reblogging random shit and complain about my beautiful life. Hurricane Katrina, 21y. Perú. Français/English/Español, STOP CALLING ME A LADY thx bye
Me Gritaron Negra! by Victoria Santa Cruz, Afro-Peruvian choreographer, composer and activist.
Discovered Cruz and this poem after running into a video of a 5 year old girl from my beloved Esmeraldas, Ecuador named Aisha Yakira performing the poem on her own.
So powerful. Here’s the link to Aisha Yakira’s version as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7K9NWL2Pwc
Enjoy! We will be posting more legendary figures in Afro Latinidad this month in honor of BHM.
milennial culture is sending a horrible post to your friend who is sitting 10 feet away from you in the same room, and waiting 2 seconds before hearing a dismayed “….no!”
What I mean: Modern country music, especially songs sung by modern male country artists, revolves around similar themes of toxic masculinity and nationalism. The recurrent lyrics referencing guns, trucks, beer and girls in short shorts are uncreative and not entertaining in the least. However, older country artists and folk rock bands such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Johnny Cash have stronger, more diverse themes and often carry an overt anti-war message. I hate the fact that what was once an interesting and powerful genre of music has now been claimed by gun-toting conservative bearded dudes, and it hurts my heart to say I hate country music when there are so many country artists that I very much enjoy, but cannot state the fact that I enjoy country music without being associated with the aforementioned group.
Thunderbird Strike is the latest from Indigenous developer Elizabeth LaPensée.
In Thunderbird Strike, a new side-scrolling game that launches at the ImagineNATIVEfestival this week in Toronto, players can control a thunderbird—a symbol in several Indigenous cultures—that destroys as much of the oil industry’s machinery and pipelines as it possibly can. And it’s so satisfying.
The game was created by Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish games developer, and assistant professor of media and information at Michigan State University. She told me in an interview that she wanted to create a game where Indigenous players could reclaim some agency around oil pipelines, even if through a video game.
“Especially when we’re talking in the context of pipelines, and the oil industry, there are some wins we can have. But ultimately protectors will be pushed out and the processes are going to move forward. It’s happening with mining and it’s happening with pipelines,” LaPensée told me over the phone.
The creator of this game is getting attacked and defamed by oil lobbyists and racists
(and let’s be honest, the venn diagram circle of “oil lobbyists” is just a small circle in the larger circle of “racists”) and could really use support and advocacy:
tweets via @nativeapprops on twitter. Here’s the link to that “Framing Indigenous resistance as terrorism” piece, and here’s the game’s creator’s twitter.
For only $100, you can empower a woman in India. This manageable amount, according to the website of the organization India Partners, will provide a woman with her own sewing machine, allowing her to take the very first step on the march to empowerment. Or you can send a chicken. Poultry farming, according to Melinda Gates, empowers women in developing countries by allowing them to “express their dignity and seize control.” If chickens are not your empowerment tool of choice, Heifer International will, for $390, deliver an “enterpriser basket” to a woman in Africa. It includes rabbits, juvenile fish and silkworms.
The assumption behind all of these donations is the same: Women’s empowerment is an economic issue, one that can be separated from politics. It follows, then, that it can be resolved by a benevolent Western donor who provides sewing machines or chickens, and thus delivers the women of India (or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever in what’s known as the “global south”) from their lives of disempowered want.
[…]
In handing out chickens or sewing machines, Western feminists and development organizations can point to the non-Western women they have “empowered.” The non-Western subjects of their efforts can be shown off at conferences and featured on websites. Development professionals can point to training sessions, workshops and spreadsheets laden with “deliverables” as evidence of another successful empowerment project.
In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.
Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s poultry farming projects. Bill Gates has insisted that because chickens are small animals kept close to the home, they are particularly suited to “empowering” women. But researchers haven’t found that giving out chickens leads to any long-term economic gains — much less emancipation or equality for half the population.
[…]
On the global stage, a return to this original model of empowerment requires a moratorium on reducing non-Western women to the circumstances of their victimhood — the rape survivor, the war widow, the child bride. The idea that development goals and agendas should be apolitical must be discarded.
The concept of women’s empowerment needs an immediate and urgent rescue from the clutches of the would-be saviors in the development industry. At the heart of women’s empowerment lies the demand for a more robust global sisterhood, one in which no women are relegated to passivity and silence, their choices limited to sewing machines and chickens.
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