#post elections

[a-meh]

[projectchampionz]

Today And Beyond: Determining The Most Appropriate Forum For Ensuring Justice For Perpetrators And Victims Of Nigeria’s Post Elections Violence Of 2007: A Critique

Today And Beyond: Determining The Most Appropriate Forum For Ensuring Justice For Perpetrators And Victims Of Nigeria’s Post Elections Violence Of 2007: A Critique

RESEARCH PROJECT TOPIC ON TODAY AND BEYOND: DETERMINING THE MOST APPROPRIATE FORUM FOR ENSURING JUSTICE FOR PERPETRATORS AND VICTIMS OF NIGERIA’S POST ELECTIONS VIOLENCE OF 2007: A CRITIQUE

TABLE CONTENTS

Title Page———i

Certification——–ii

Dedication———iii

Acknowledgement——-iv

Abstract ———vi

Table of Content——–vii

  Chapter One

1.0 Introduction ——-1

1.1 Statement of Problem——4

1.2 Purpose of the…

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[wellesleyunderground]

Reading to Heal by Kate McCahill ‘06 (@katekristiina)

On an unseasonably warm November morning, I drive to my dentist’s appointment. At the office, the assistant leads me back to the little half-room, invites me to sit in the chair. “The doctor will be here any second,” she says sweetly. A moment later, he’s at my side. “How are things?” he asks, his voice coffee-bright. His face is so open, so friendly, that I reply honestly: “Everything’s fine,” I say, “except for the election, of course.”

Because we’re in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and our county voted blue, I figure the nice dentist will commiserate. Instead, though, he looks at me kindly, sets his hand on my forearm, and says, “Now, don’t worry. We still have to wait and see what he does.”

“No,” I say, smiling right back. “I’m not going to wait and see what he does.” And the dentist smiles again, a contest by now, and eases my chair back so I’m lying down. He says, “Don’t you worry now. He’s already backing down on a lot of what he said.”

I decide not to reply, though as the dentist is working on Molar 29, I consider potential retorts. As a straight white man, it makes sense that you have nothing to fear. You’re the one demographic Donald Trump doesn’t hate.

Or, How is it a good thing that our President-elect backs down on the promises he makes?

Or, Don’t tell me to calm down, dude, and my internal voice is a simmer.

Meanwhile, the drill drones away, and a trickle of drool slips from my mouth onto my neck. Grinning doggedly, the dentist works on.

So I do what books have always taught me to do: I send myself somewhere else. I go to the pages of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Mermaid Chair, a volume I wrestled from the depths of the library’s stacks. It’s an easy, lusty book, and I go to it now. I’m falling into the Deep South, travelling by ferry to a barrier island, salt and clay and bird shit on the wind, and beneath those things something richly ineffable, a night-blooming flower with a scent like a siren’s song. The election and the dentist fade away, and finally I’m gone.

The book is an escape route and a balm.

*

I didn’t stay up to watch the election, and I didn’t check the numbers before I went to bed. I decided that if I just didn’t look, everything would be okay, and I’d wake the next day to the good news we’d all been expecting.

But by three a.m., I was awake, and my body knew. My stomach was a tense knot; my palms sweated beneath our down blanket.  I forced myself to lie in bed for another hour, but all the while, the dreaded outcome churned, the dark certainty beneath the hope. I came downstairs to a dark, quiet house, and while my partner slept, I checked my phone: one text, one missed call, no voicemails at all. My brother’s text message read: “Oh this is so bad I think it’s over.”

Then, I knew I didn’t have to check the headlines. Instead, I brewed a cup of tea and went to the couch and wondered what would happen next. I felt oddly fragmented, holding within me a combination of nausea and disbelief, paranoia and the pervading sense that this was not real, not normal, just a dream. Dazed, I sipped tea and petted the cat and looked around for something to do to stave off the reality of the day.    

There were a few New Yorkers from recent weeks, which I couldn’t bear to read. In the pre-election issue, the editors had devoted The Talk of the Town to Hillary’s expansive, impressive career. The thought of reading those words now made me sick. I ignored the iPad, too, dreading my Facebook’s dismal newsfeed, which would, in the days and weeks to come, reveal the dozens of friends who gave up their careers, their relationships, and their homes to campaign for Hillary – as well as the dozens more who are grieving for other reasons: because they are women, because they are Muslim, because they are black, because they believe in climate change.

Instead, on that bleak and empty morning, I reached for Tinkers, Paul Harding’s evocative novel I borrowed months ago while visiting my aunt in Boston. She’d raved about it at dinner, and afterwards, I’d found it on the shelf in the guest bedroom and slipped it into my purse – the chronic compulsions of a book lover. I’d tried to start Tinkers a couple of times, but had always failed – something about the book’s dreamy vagaries turned me off. But on the morning after Trump won the election, I opened the little book, unassuming with a muted white cover adorned only by the barest outline of a horizon, snow-swept.

This time, Tinkers did its work, transporting me from our adobe living room to another person’s home, an old man’s dying days, a rugged life. I invited someone else’s problems in, sat by someone else’s deathbed. In Tinkers, no mention was made of the President. No one had ever even heard of Donald Trump. I read that whole little book in one sitting, turning the final page to the sound of my partner’s waking, his feet creaking on the floorboards above my head. As he ran the water, I closed Tinkers and remembered again the truth, the reality of this day, but it felt a little less sharp somehow, a little farther away than it had several hours ago. My partner came downstairs, and I told him the news; he laughed, sure I was joking.

“What really happened?” he asked, and I envied him in that moment, his cheerful not-knowing-yet.  

*

At my teaching job that first day after the election, I cried in front of my college-level class. The day before, we’d discussed the fears and hopes we all had. In a northern New Mexico classroom, many of the students expressed concern—their family members, friends, or they themselves are illegally living in the United States. What would they do if Donald Trump won?

“Don’t worry,” I’d told them, stupidly. “He’ll never win,” I said.

Now, I was eating my words.

We sat, numbly, in our usual semi-circle, and I found I could hardly say a word without weeping. So instead, I suggested that we open our books. The Circuit, Francisco Jimenez’s collection of stories about migrant life, is the prescribed text for this class, which is designed for those learning English as their second language. My students are twenty, twenty-two years old, but they’re stumbling through a book meant for sixth graders. The words tumble out, falling foreign from their mouths, “tractor” and “shed” and “shack” being spoken for the very first time.

As they read aloud, the election fades into our periphery. We are thrust, instead, into the world of a migrant family illegally living in California: they pick grapes in Fresno, cotton in Corcoran, and strawberries in Santa Maria, all the while La Migra just a shout away. Each chapter closes with blunt sadness: the family must move on, the beloved parrot is dead, and in the end, the narrator, just a fifth-grader getting to know his teacher, is discovered by La Migra in the middle of the afternoon, and hauled away.

We close the book and look around at each other. My students, all Mexicans and Guatemalans, dress neatly. The girls style their hair and wear makeup. The two guys put gel in their hair and wear shirts with collars, laptop bags slung over their shoulders. We talk for a moment about Jimenez’s stories, which linger with us, the words still warm in our mouths: La Migra, La Migra, and that incessant knock on the door.

Meanwhile, afternoon sunlight falls in through the big window onto the floor. Outside, someone starts up a leaf blower, and a few people laugh as they walk down the hall. The room feels uncannily peaceful, as if the election never happened at all. Instead, we’re thinking of the stories, La Migra, a family always on the run. Tattered clothes, no money for food, no money for Christmas.

We run out of words and sit glumly, the book still open in our hands. “Well,” says Luis finally, the cleverest of the bunch, “maybe life isn’t the worst, after all.” The rest of us laugh nervously.  

As they’re packing up their things to go, I say, “Take care of yourselves, now.”

“You too, teacher,” they tell me, though we all know that I – white, a citizen, legally employed – am not the one who needs to be afraid.

*

I fight with my partner at home. He isn’t as upset as I am about the election, and he doesn’t cry. He’s not freaking out that abortion rights could be at risk. He tells me to try and calm down, to not take it so personally, to not bear the weight of Trump’s victory on my shoulders. For a few nights in a row, we go to bed angry, and I wake at three, at four, unable to fall back asleep, unwilling to reach for him. I remember the things that he said, and feel angry that he doesn’t care more. I slip from the sheets, cross the cold room, descend dark stairs, feed the cat.

Then I go to the couch, turn on the light, open my book. This time, it’s The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman’s gripping novel about one child’s rocky destiny. Outside, coyotes cackle, and the week-long argument with my partner finally ebbs. I’m transported, in those early-morning hours, to a far-flung, treeless island. I’m the child, cradled in her mother’s arms; I’m the dead man they discovered in the boat; I’m the husband, desperate to please his wife, who found the dead man there. The book is taut with secrets, and I sink into their web: a mystery child, a clue, a lie. A little girl ripped away. The tragedies read sharp and fresh, blood-singed, and my problems don’t matter anymore. Here, Trump never won at all.

*

Days become weeks, and now it’s been over a month since Donald Trump won the election. I spoke to a friend on the phone the other day, and for the first fifteen minutes of the call, we couldn’t talk about anything but Hillary’s defeat. My friend was in New York, at the Javitz Center, when Hillary gave her elegant concession speech.

Finally, though, the call bleeds into other topics – love, rent, and, finally, books. This friend, a talent agent in Brooklyn, managed to score a review copy of How to Murder Your Life, by Cat Marnell. “I really feel like I’ve made it,” my friend gushed, “when I can call up Cat Marnell’s editor and get a review copy – for free!” She stayed up all night with How to Murder Your Life; as we chat, I order a copy on Amazon. We talk about All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews’ book on suicide and sisterhood. “Brilliant,” my friend sputters, and I hear her lighter snap, her sharp inhale. “Brilliant,” I agree, liking the idea of my friend smoking vigorously, standing on Brooklyn’s wind-whipped streets, talking books.

After we hang up, I reach for a novel: The Mermaid Chair, my latest healing tome. I love the way Kidd writes, thrusting me into a smoldering world of women’s desires, friendships, and dreams. The book, which spans months and years, is about a woman’s return to herself, before any man came along and defined her.

In Kidd’s shifting waters, seaweed shimmers beneath the surface, and ghosts from the slave graveyard keen in the night. I fall into this place: silty water, sweaty skin, lust in my own heart. Novels, I decide, give you something no other medium can: they mirror your grief, your sorrow, and your desperation, delivering joy and beauty alongside. They show you the arc of a life: birth and death, loss and recovery, trouble and redemption. The scope of our existence, the novel proves, will always eclipse the cruel triumph a single man.

When, hours later, my partner comes home and asks about dinner, I look up at him, blinking, as if awoken from a dream – one in which Donald Trump never won, never ran for President at all, and women were the only ones in charge.

---

Kate McCahill lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is a member of the English faculty at the Santa Fe Community College. She is faculty advisor for the Santa Fe Literary Review and holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The Santa Fe Writers Project will release her first book, a travel memoir called Patagonian Road, in 2017.

[blacknerdproblems]

In response to the staggering election results in which many members of marginalized communities experienced how disconnected they were from their fellow citizens as the country elected bigotry and hatred; Black Nerd Problems put out the call to hear how people were coping. Here is a collection of short essays on what we’re doing, just to get by.

Threat:

Pahole Sookkasikon

A queer man of color, the son of immigrants, and an optimist

 Regarding the recent election, Junot Díaz recently penned in an open letter, “let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy.” On the real though, it’s never been fucking easy – especially for folks of color, queer communities, women, and others attuned to ideas of intersectionality. We’ve always had to fight. We’ve always had to fight. To stay focused. Breathe. Wash the tears out of our eyes… Breathe. Wash the tears out of our eyes. Pretend to forget while still remembering the spit and the dirt thrown in our faces. You know, fucking live. We’ve had to live with targets on our backs and walk out the door every day, reminding ourselves “that melanin though.” [sigh.]

Since the election, I have had to have conversations with many of my white friends, students, colleagues, and professors about Trump’s ascension to presidency and what it means to be a queer person of color in this “new world.” I’ve had to seemingly deflect or humble my anger to appropriately articulate why folks of color can’t “relax” through this term as well as defend why the personal is always fucking political – and vice versa. I have had white people in my life call me “overly sensitive” while throwing statistics and charts my way, lamenting on how poverty is the real issue at hand and most of the violence against POC are directly from other POC. One of these people is my best friend. He’s white.

[Photo of Author from Protests in Hawaii. November, 2016]

As a queer person of color living in this “new normal,” I ask: where do we—the diasporic, people of color, queer, women, trans, immigrant, and others—belong in this new world?

Read on here. [x]

[pakistanimemez]

To all my poc friends that come from all sorts of religions and background; I want to let you guys know that you need to remain strong we are all in this together and have each others backs. I am especially worried for the hijabis, sikh men than wear the turban, the lgbtq community (esp if you’re a minority), the people with think accents and broken English, the undocumented, and nearly everyone that is not white. Trump’s supporters think they are able to open hate and parade their prejudice views without fearing the consequences. Honestly Trump’s supporters believe that they can get away with their horrendous actions. Children are being bullied, hijabs are being pulled off, people are scared FOR THEIR SAFTY! Never has it come to a point when a large portion of the population actually fears that they’ll get deported back to their country. This election was pure madness. Now since Trump will become our next president one of the MANY important institutions he will be defunding is the education program. As he destroys the education system less people will have access to a proper education, less people won’t be able to afford college. Without education these citizens are not provided with enough knowledge to actually think about what happens if certain people/parties get elected. These poor and unfortunate class of Americans just vote for the issues that are presented in media, and the media instills so much hate that some citizens actually believe that minorities are a real threat. I feel bad for these people for not being as privileged as others are...If only they were properly educated then they could have known better... THIS LACK OF EDUCATION IS THE PRIME REASON WHY TRUMP RECEIVED SO MANY VOTES! I could go on abIout the other aspects in our country that might suffer (CLIMATE CHANGE, PLANNED PARENTHOOD, LGBTQ RIGHTS, WOMEN’S RIGHTS, & MINORITY RIGHTS) but i’m just going to stop.

I have a large desi and muslim following, and I want to remind you guys once again that we are all united against this giant tangerine looking kutta. You guys we need keep our head up high and protect EVERYONE that’s facing discrimination. Its our duty. So if any of you need someone to talk to I am here for ALL OF YOU :’)

#makeamericabrownagain

[noley-blog]

Election season is over...

but politics live in me...

The republican party fails to acknowledge this new era of a more diverse voting population. The political strategies before were to appeal to at least 51% of America's population which consists of the upper middle class and the elites. That doesn't cut it anymore. Why? Because my generation has realized it's power in numbers and when it comes to money and the affordability of an education, you bet that we're gonna fight back for the same opportunity and our rights. My generation deserves a fighting chance at an accessible, affordable and quality education, just like generations before us. Today's women are not meek and mild and will not stand to have a patriarchal society dictate to us how our bodies are to be utilized. It is a woman's choice to do what she sees fit for HER own body. No imposition of religion or tradition can ever have jurisdiction over what happens to her body unless she allows it to. Nothing irritates me more is when a male mistreats a female as if she is incapable of making her own decisions. As for universal healthcare, Britain and Canada are happily enjoying that. Not because it's a privilege to be healthy-- IT IS A RIGHT and it affects EVERYONE. Obamacare does cost a lot of money, but I believe it to be in the right direction. 

Lesson to learn: don't underestimate the power of demographics and if Republicans ever intend to hold office again, then they need to refigure their strategy in appeal to the "47%". 

I still can't believe he said that, and continues to have that mentality...