readingsonreadingsonreadings

miles tokunow likes reading about social justice,  emerging technology, community organizing, musics and liberatory education.

[whatmilesreads]

“We’re not against change, but we are against displacement”

How Uptown Artists Are Using Café Bustelo to Combat Gentrification

[whatmilesreads]

Everything has hands, a mouth, everything reaches / across time and tissue.

Angel Nafis by Angel Nafis

[protoslacker]

Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right — not simply because “this affects us all.”

Kelly Hayes at Yes! Magazine. Remember This When You Talk About Standing Rock (via protoslacker)

[whatmilesreads]

Be careful near white people. The warning between the lines isn’t hard to spot, either: Be careful because your sexuality, to them, is hazardous.

WESLEY MORRIS | Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality

[whatmilesreads]

Being interpreted as a Black woman and unable to escape that interpretation, I have no access to whiteness even if I wanted it. Born to a white mother and a Black father, I am a Black woman. I look at my grandmother and wonder 'who is that white woman wearing my face?'

Marissa Jenae Johnson | RACE IS ABOUT INTERPRETATION, NOT IDENTITY.

[whatmilesreads]

Let’s create a cacophony of sound to represent our intention. To hold these women up. To bring them into the light

Kimberlé Crenshaw

[azspot]

Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there? We must shift from means, including the technologies that underpin our everyday actions, to ends, including the many kinds of social beneficence and improvement that technology can offer. Our increasingly unequal and fearful world would be grateful.

Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters more (via azspot)

[whatmilesreads]

“It’s putting more emphasis on not being a repository, but a place of active learning,” says Barbara Stripling, president of the American Library Association. “More and more, it’s not enough to just have the facts, to just gather information. You really need to be able to understand it and apply it in the way that you want.”

Books out, 3D printers in for reinvented US libraries

[whatmilesreads]

there is a fairer way to identify gifted children, and that placing each school’s gifted and achieving students in advanced classes can shrink, rather than expand, racial and ethnic differences in achievement. Universal screening, with a standardized process that does not rely on teachers and parents, can reveal talented, disadvantaged children who would otherwise go undiscovered.

Why Talented Black and Hispanic Students Can Go Undiscovered | SUSAN DYNARSKI

[whatmilesreads]

The group, called Columbia Prison Divest, launched protests and meetings with administrators, arguing it was wrong for the elite school to invest in a "racist, violent system." "The private prison model is hinged on maximizing incarceration to generate profit -- they're incentivized by convicting, sentencing, and keeping people in prison for longer and longer times," Dunni Oduyemi, a 20-year-old organizer, told CNN.

Columbia becomes first U.S. university to divest from prisons | Wilfred Chan, CNN

[whatmilesreads]

We need to set up the same learning environments for our teachers as we wish for our youth. It is vitally important to allow teachers to experiment and relive the feeling of being learners alongside their students, lessen the distance between what it means to be a teacher and a learner, and create multi-developmental learning groups within administration, faculty and student body. In addition, though it’s favorable to make high-end tools like 3D printers accessible to all, it’s disadvantageous to see tools as an answer. Being a maker is a mindset, not a tool.

Making a Platform for Empowerment

By David Wells

[davevaleza]

Illustration for an article in The Stranger, “How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated”   (article link)

[theblackamericanprincess-blog]

Public education is inherently radical. I was lucky enough to work this year with a collective of staff, teachers and tutors, many of whom were of color, who have lived in our area for generations, and passed through the school system in which they now educate. I have learned profoundly from their wisdom and expertise, especially the many ways they find to balance their own lives and families with a true and longterm dedication to their students and school. The greatest challenge they face is in creating curricula and classroom communities which have the capacity to support, engage and give voice to a student population bursting with disparities and contradictions. Inventing traditions, devising projects and coming up with daily activities which don’t only teach but let students explore their own knowledge is an enormous and perpetual undertaking, and I see teachers do it every day for wealthy, homeless, immigrant, disabled, poor, white, brown and queer students in equal measure. Creating classrooms in which these many experiences don’t merely interact, but learn to work together, trust each other, and teach one another is a constant struggle, and miraculous when it actually happens. Watching experienced teachers accomplish this, even in the occasional fraction of a moment, has encouraged me to continue pursuing education.

Taking Inventory: The End of a Year Teaching at My Old Elementary School

-rad fag

(via theblackamericanprincess)

[whatmilesreads]

We’ve got to fight for the non-violence education and knowledge we deserve.

We Need A Decolonized, Not A "Diverse", Education | Zoé Samudzi

[whatmilesreads]

Once, many years ago in Ditmas Park, a tall man stood too close to me as I was locking the door to my car. He was easily my father’s age, and he wanted to know: was I a boy or a girl? “None of your business,” I told him. But he kept asking me, over and over, and his voice was angry, like I’d done something to him. I walked away from him, saying “fuck off” over my shoulder at a volume that I hoped was quiet enough to be safe, loud enough to risk being heard.

Even Lumberjacks Deserve Lotion: Gender in the Locker Room | Naomi Gordon-Loebl

[ablackwomansurvivingrape]

Yet they labeled black women matriarchs—a title that in no way accurately described the social status of black women in America. No matriarchy has ever existed in the United States. At the very time sociologists proclaimed the existence of a matriarchal order in the black family structure, black women represented one of the largest socially and economically deprived groups in America whose status in no way resembled that of a matriarch. Political activist Angela Davis writes of the label matriarch: The designation of the black woman as a matriarch is a cruel misnomer because it ignores the profound traumas the black woman must have experienced when she had to surrender her child-bearing to alien and predatory economic interest. The term matriarch implies the existence of a social order in which women exercise social and political power, a state which in no way resembles the condition of black women or all women in American society. The decisions that determine the way in which black women must live their lives are made by others, usually white men. If sociologists are to casually label black women matriarchs, they should also label female children playing house and acting out the role of mother matriarchs. For in both instances, no real effective power exists that allows the females in question to control their own destiny.

Bell Hooks Ain’t I a Woman (via ablackwomansurvivingrape)

[brutereason]

Kondo says that we can appreciate the objects we used to love deeply just by saying goodbye to them. But for families that have experienced giving their dearest possessions up unwillingly, “putting things in order” is never going to be as simple as throwing things away. Everything they manage to hold onto matters deeply. Everything is confirmation they survived.

For the Children of Refugees, Marie Kondo’s ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’ Reveals the Privilege of Clutter - The Atlantic

This article is so meaningful to me and articulates something I was trying to express earlier about this kind of decluttering philosophy. tl;dr whatever floats your boat, but it’s worthwhile to learn about the experiences of people who aren’t able to do that.

(via thaxted)

I feel like this dovetails with many of the reasons I find the tiny house “movement” condescending

(via note-a-bear)