[micdotcom]

Watch: Poet Rachel Wiley continues “And ain’t that just like white feminism, always …”

[bardbardbardbardbard]

Lort she a straight up dragon, spitting fire and shit

[llewellynrayz]

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.

I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.

And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting

And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster

And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself.

And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.

And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men.

And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.

That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

I know this is a really heavy post but if you read it and you appreciated it, I’d appreciate it in return if you reblogged it. This is really important to me and I want people to read it and understand it. Thank you.

[refinery29]

Watch: In a powerful Congresional speech, Sandra Bland’s mother called people who think they’re woke “the walking dead” because of how little we still know

The speech included a rousing call to action before the newly formed Congressional Caucus On Black Women & Girls. See every single time Bland’s mother spoke truth to power before she dropped the mic.

Gifs: Josh Begley

WATCH THE VIDEO

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[rowanshrub]

walking through Walgreens and just feeling disappointed and a lil horrified.

[jollysunflora]

#why are hets like this#i know why but i hate them

[complicatedmerary]

You know what? I’m not even going to bother censoring any names, this is the kind of shit that needs to be exposed. Skai Jackson is merely fourteen years old and grown men and women think they can harass her like this? And don’t give that bull that it doesn’t matter because she has money or dresses well, she is a CHILD, no adult should be focused on a little girl in such way.

If you think this is funny or justify it, I hope you never have children or go near them.

[kengriffey-jr-deactivated202102]

What the fuck

[brutereason]

I find it fascinating that people who choose not to have children are generally assumed to feel really strongly about not having children (or even to feel really strongly against children, anyone’s children, in general). I am probably not going to have children, not because I REALLY REALLY HATE the idea of having children, but because I don’t really really love it. Out of all the major decisions I will make in my life, this one is the only irreversible one. I can sell a house, quit a job, divorce a spouse, whatever. I cannot unhave a child. I cannot opt out of being a parent once I become a parent. I can’t even take a step back for the sake of self-care or whatever, or else my child will suffer.

So for me, having children is fuck yes or not at all. The default will be to remain childfree. Having children should be an opt-in decision, not an opt-out one. Until/unless I develop really strong feelings about wanting to have children, I won’t have them, even if that means I never end up having them at all.

[stephrc79]

Screengrabbing this and putting it up on FB for all of my obnoxious family members who keep trying to ‘convince me otherwise’

[kholly12]

When my best friend’s clock was ticking I told her, until it is a giddy and unequivocal yes, the answer is no. You can change from no to yes eventually if you want to, but you can’t change from yes to no. I’ve been telling my nephew the same thing recently. Why in the world people will pressure others to have children when they’re unsure is unfathomable to me.

[lasmaracuyas]

[comatose-blue]

Menerva Tau

[micdotcom]

[thabougieone]

BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL!

[lasmaracuyas]

the ‘revelations’ when ppl find out how capitalism works.

[npr]

With Bernie Sanders lopping hundreds of staffers from his campaign this week, it’s easy to forget he has outraised and outspent Hillary Clinton every month this year. And not by just a little.

Sanders described his campaign as the “underdog” early on, but it certainly hasn’t been the case the past three months. Federal Election Commission reports for January, February and March of 2016 show Sanders outspending Clinton by more than 50 percent, $121.6 million to $80.2 million.

We know where those additional Bernie dollars came from: legions of small donors. The Campaign Finance Institute calculated that in February, the Sanders campaign raised 56 percent of his money from donors contributing $200 or less and 12 percent from donors giving 1,000 or more. Corresponding numbers for Clinton are 21 and 64 percent.

Sanders Campaign Has Spent 50 Percent More Than Clinton In 2016

Photo credit: J Pat Carter/Getty Images

[buttonpoetry]

[buttonpoetry]

Crystal Valentine - “And the News Reporter Says Jesus Is White”. Support the artist, check out the full poem here.

[picodeputa]

[okayilubuhbye-deactivated201611]

WELL

[coastal-midwesterner]

Politics of ethics & vulnerability… My messy notes… Let’s talk soon @bfacebplace

[bfacebplace]

YES PLEASE

[clothesandbuttons-blog]

This is amazing.

[cssndralicia]

”Some of the farmworkers who make it possible for U.S. consumers to have berries for breakfast are paid about $6 a day. Those farmworkers include children toiling for 12 hours a day at 85 percent the amount of money that adults get paid. Many farmworkers do not get lunch and rest breaks and are subjected to terrible housing conditions.

Hoping to rectify these issues, farmworkers in the United States and in Mexico have been on a three-year-long fight to get Driscolls — the world’s largest berry distributor — to recognize their unions so that they could have better working and living conditions.

Ramon Torres, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant, is one of the people leading the fight to unionize. As the president of the independent farmworker union Families United for Justice (FUJ), he has been picking berries since he was 18 years old. His most recent employer was the Washington state-based Sakuma Bros. Farms, which supplies its products through the Driscoll’s label. Through the years, Torres has seen and experienced many hardships, like wage theft, lack of rest breaks, and cramped housing conditions. By law, his employer has to provide housing for migrant farmworkers like Torres. But the cabins often hold three times as many people as they should.

About 1,500 miles away at another Driscolls-operated farm in San Quintin, Mexico that’s packaged through the BerryMex label, Gloria Gracida Martinez, a former farmworker and the spokesperson for their farmworker-led union La Alianza, has seen similar instances of poor working conditions crop up.

Driscoll’s partnership with BerryMex and MoraMex yielded 25 million flats of strawberries to the U.S. in 2014, The Nation reported. But for all that the companies have monetized in Mexico’s $550 million annual berry harvest revenue, Mexican farmworkers aren’t seeing a comparable increase in their working and living conditions.

Instead, Gracida Martinez recounted the stories of farmworkers who have had to deal with wage theft, children as young as 12 being put to work, and people who were shot and beaten for trying to form a union.” http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2016/04/01/3764433/driscolls-boycott/ #BoycottDriscolls

[lasmaracuyas]

A World Without Prisons: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba

When we started talking about putting this issue together I knew immediately that I wanted to interview Mariame Kaba. Seeing her tweet from @prisonculture over the last several years has left me co…

I very specifically mean very different things when I use restorative versus transformative justice. Often restorative justice is very much grounded in individual relationships between individual people, and solving individual conflicts in a way that would not rely on punishment but still afford people the accountability that they want and need as it relates to feeling as though their harms were heard, and acknowledged, and addressed. Restorative justice is very much at the individual level.

And when you talk about transformative justice, at least for myself, what I’m talking about is that individual relationships occur within larger constructs, and there are larger forces that impact our lives, which structure our relationships and our institutions. And so, you have to also fight in a collective way against those forces of oppression. So while you’re addressing interpersonal conflicts and while you’re trying to make sure that people in communities know each other, have relationships with each other, have some tools to be able to address the issues that come, the harm that people cause. While that’s important, you also need to talk about making sure people have living wages so that they have a way to live and aren’t having to rely on the illegal or underground economies that are already criminalized to be able to make a living, but that they actually have the ability to take care of their needs. And it’s not just a living wage— it might also be that we need to be fighting for guaranteed jobs, or in some cases people like to talk about a basic income.

We also need to be really honest about anti-blackness and anti-black racism and racism in general, and make sure that we’re uprooting that form of oppression. We also need to be thinking about how we uproot gender-based oppression. We have to be really intentional about how we deal with disability-related forms of oppression. So you have to be fighting these macro-level forces and where you do that is by doing organizing that builds power among people, and that power that we build we then can be used to push for the changes that we want to see at the macro-level, the systemic level. So transformative justice says that, yes, we’ve got to have these individual-level projects and individual-level attempts to address interpersonal harm, but that we’ll never be able to solve those personal harms without also doing the macro work, because these things are reinforcing of each other. Because you can’t think about gun violence in a city like Chicago— which is a form of interpersonal violence— you can’t separate that from the structural reasons this is happening in particular communities and why it happens less in other communities. So transformative justice asks you to marry macro level organizing and analysis of oppression, to doing the work that you need to be doing on the ground on an individual level.