Wandering Aimlessly @transitioninglives - Tumblr Blog

Gay culture is Boy A trying to talk to you and you hit it off for a while but then after a month he responds less and less. By the end of the month Boy A posts a pretty cryptic picture on his social media with Boy B but no tag. You don’t really think much of it and decide they’re probably just friends.

After dealing with the initial sting Boy C comes along, tries to talk to you, but you’re not really interested because you’re still recovering from Boy A. You do a bit of research on Boy C and you find out that he used to date Boy B. You find Boy B’s social media and find out that Boy A and Boy B are fucking and it all makes sense!

Gay culture is putting 2 and 2 together from little to no information and finding out way more than you were looking for and in the end your feelings are hurt.

crimescenehoe

Damn, Are any of us doing okay?

alexander

I feel ugly af

dimedog

“I wish I had the time to do that.”

- me, a person who definitely has the time to do that but also has terrible time management skills and most likely to just spend 4 hours getting absolutely nothing accomplished instead of the hundred other things I could and should be doing

mossandrock

I feel personally attacked by the accuracy of this post.

thegoodvybe

badlydrawneverything

7hcancervenus-deactivated202309

tfw you think about something you did when you were younger and you realise it was a Symptom

Paranoia be like

Brain: SOMETHING IS HAPPEN

Me: Okay, what?

Brain: SOMETHING

sparklecorpse-deactivated201906

lets play a fun game called ‘is this paranoid thinking or can i actually trust my instincts’

poetrygogh

brickwallofsarcasm

Fuck whoever fucked me up so bad that I convinced myself I’m not even worth anyone’s time

marcinthelotus

K so I’m not done.

This is the year 2017 and I’m still having to yell about how ridiculous Maya extinction myths are and tell people we are ‘Maya’ not ‘Mayan’. I’m not saying shame shame if anyone reads this and didn’t know. I’m so angry concerning how slowly these issues are being picked up by educational institutions, at how often I have to bring these things up to higher education professors.

We are a massive massive group of peoples. One of the largest Indigenous groups in the Americas. Wikipedia cites 7 million or so of us total but honestly that’s way off because that’s about how many Maya folks there are in Guatemala alone.

We’re not dead. The Maya did not ‘mysteriously disappear’. We did not ‘fall’. We did not fade into obscurity. We’ve led revolts and rebellions against colonial powers for hundreds of years. We’ve had a big hand in shaping legislative definitions and protections for Indigenous Peoples in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

We haven’t lost our cultures. We’re constantly threatened and experience a lot of violence and have our resources stolen but we are still very much alive and our cultures have persisted.

And don’t even try me with the whole “Oh well we mean your CIVILIZATION disappeared, not you.” The structure of our societies and layout of our network changed and decentralized in many areas. That didn’t make us turn invisible. That didn’t make us not still be large in numbers with a relationship with our lands and lose influence in the areas we live. We still held power in large cities way after what people like to cite as “the fall of the Maya Civilization” (around 600-900 A.D. when we still had cities that we held power of until nearly 1700 when the last was “conquered” by Spain.)

Which brings me to the next issue. Being “conquered” or having a colonial government installed does not erase Indigenous societies or civilizations. That’s an extremely eurocentric way of thinking. We didn’t suddenly turn into Spaniards. We still had massive amounts of towns and villages with leaders. We still had our cultures, our trade, our networks, our influence, while Spain focused on putting up flags in our cities.

So yeah. All your history books have you all convinced that an extremely large group of people, with a greater population than more than half of the countries in Europe, all died out 1100 years ago.

Now try to imagine what kind of shit Indigenous Peoples with much less numbers and much lower access to resources go through.

badtrait

in the mood to be kissed.. like all the time

dynastylnoire

Today in racist businesses taking advantage of gentrification in East Liberty: a hip hop themed fried chicken joint: http://verysmartbrothas.com/welcome-to-pittsburgh-where-white-people-open-90s-style-hip-hop-fried-chicken-spots-in-the-gentrified-hood/ @verysmartbros Damon Young digs right into the outrageous whiteness of it all.

#racism #gentrification #eastofliberty #eastofliberty #getoutmovie #pittsburgh (at East Liberty, Pennsylvania)

bushidoblack-deactivated2017110

Pause

So why didn’t we decide to do an upscale chicken spot for ourselves? And if we did, why don’t we just support that, drive their business up, give their business amazing yelp reviews, do articles on that business, and then drive the white gentrification out of the neighborhood at its own game?

I’m tired of the victim paradigm “oh look what the white man done did to us today junebug, they done opened up a 90s chicken spot in our neighborhood”

Instead of saying that, try saying “oh? So that’s how they wanna play? Okay bet. Let’s create a better version, and support that instead. Then let’s go and take business from them, and then when their forced to close down, let’s buy that space too so now we have TWO locations instead of one.”

Proactive thinking vs. The Victim mentality

dynastylnoire

I was going to say something smart but I really need your ignorant ass to consider why black people in a gentrified area could not make a business work.

Google that my nigga. My part of town has refused to renew leases for the black businesses in the area. Businesses including black owned restaurants in East Liberty were priced out.

My friends and I cannot afford to live here anymore because rent is twice what it was. Black schools were demolished for Google and million dollar apartment complexes.

So I have to move about a half hour from the only black school left where my daughter attends and walks to. Thank God i can drive and have a car, a lot of my friends don’t and are screwed.

So I mean this when I say Fuck you and your respectability politics from the bottom of my heart. Redlining is still happening and they don’t want us here anymore.

al-b-damned

And if it’s anything like Chicago, they just aren’t giving black people business licenses. You submit the app, get rejected, then have to wait another year before you can reapply. You’ll get rejected for dumbest shit and often times, without a fair reason.

Also, I co-sign the fuck you. You can’t play victim if YOU ARE the victim.

chelebelleslair

Ownership. Who owns the land!?!? Not who is leasing it but who is the leasor!?!?!? Throughout America this is happening and Black Americans better get hip. Land costs money. If you are not willing to pay for the land and keep the taxes paid than yes you will be squeezed out. These dudes are probably not leasing the building but have bought it and now they are establishing a business [ripping off Black folks ideas/styles/concepts]. Sorry. Once again the game is chess and we are playing checkers. There is more than enough blame to go around. Owneship + Money = Power

dynastylnoire

So are you going to write the checks for us to get the land? Do you know what red lining is and how it was put in place to insure we don’t get loans for money or the ability to obtain land ?

queen-kevlarr-heartt

Once you own the land do you have ANY IDEA how difficult it is to pull a permit to change the zoning of land you bought? To pull a permit to put in so much as an extra bathroom? Have you ever spent 8 hours at your local building department to be denied a permit because your documents weren’t in order? You forgot to cross a t and you can get denied. And having to wait months for your next appointment realizing that you do not have an operable business that entire time? Do you understand how difficult and arduous the process of buying land and building COMMERCIAL property is? For anyone let alone a BLACK land owner? How much money are you losing each month on that land, not having your business run because inspectors continue to not pass your building. Do you realize the high turnover of land ownership in urban areas is partially because of this?. Get the entire fuck outta here acting like it’s that easy I work around this type of shit day in and day out. I don’t live in Pittsburgh but the discrimination in the building departments around the Bay Area are alive and well and I can imagine it’s the same if not worse out in east liberty

karnythia

I’m going to point out something else from Chicago, let’s say you own the land, you put your business on it & it is thriving. All someone has to do is come in a with a big development & bribe the right people and suddenly your land & your business are gone. Replaced by a highway or whatever else is in the “public interest” because eminent domain laws are where folks here get got when tax hikes & whatever else don’t work to force you out. A whole lot of the Black middle class on the West side of Chicago was forced out that way so neighborhoods like Englewood would decline to the point where they are now. And funnily enough those businesses are now being replaced with major chains like Whole Foods & McDonald’s because those areas became food deserts while the places that were there were being choked out by transit cuts & developers.

shostabr0vich

I agree that gentrification is pretty fucked up. But there’s always a course of action. There’s always *something* to do. This post is nothing but illuminating the problem. While that’s good, what are we supposed to do with that? Be mad and then do nothing? Part of fighting systemic racism has to be actually taking action. You’re not going to get rid of unfair hurdles just by saying they’re unfair. You have to actively work and encourage others to work at dismantling them.

dynastylnoire

You are assuming that people are not fighting or trying to change this. Which is insulting by itself.