April 2012
23 posts
2 tags
“You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.”
—Malcolm X
7 tags
AT THE CLOSE OF MY FRESHMAN YEAR I’VE REALIZED JUST HOW MUCH WE’RE CONDITIONED TO CONSUME; AND ADDITIONALLY, HOW CONDITIONED WE ARE TO WANT TO CONSUME, AND TO SEE CONSUMPTION AS THE IDEAL, DESIRABLE, AND PREFERRED DEFAULT STATE. I AT FIRST THOUGHT OF THIS WHEN THINKING ABOUT MY COLLEGE’S CORE CURRICULUM, BUT THAT SEEMED TOO EASY; THOSE COURSES, WHILE FORCE-FEEDING BY DEFINITION,...
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“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.”
—James Baldwin
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THERE’S SOMETHING VERY WEIRD ABOUT THE WAY BLACK BODIES ARE COMMODIFIED. I THINK IT IS HAS TO DO SOMETHING WITH THE NOTION OF ‘COOL.’ IN MY AFRICAN-AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHIC CULTURE CLASS WE DISCUSSED THE WAY IN WHICH THIS HAPPENS WITH BARACK OBAMA BEING DEPICTED AS THE ‘COOL,’ DOWN TO EARTH PRESIDENT WHO APPEALS TO A YOUNGER DEMOGRAPHIC. THE COTERMINOUS EVOLUTION OF...
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Language and Race/Ethnicity
“A superficial examination of Roget’s Thesaurus of the English Language reveals the following facts; the word WHITENESS has 134 synonyms; 44 of which are favorable and pleasing to contemplate, i.e. purity, cleanness, immaculateness, bright, shining, ivory, fair, blonde, stainless, clean, clear, chaste, unblemished, unsullied, innocent, honorable, upright,...
3 tags
“The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.”
—James Baldwin, “On Language, Race, and the Black Writer”
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I LITERALLY CAN NOT BEAR TO LOOK AT MY SELF 5 MONTHS, 1 YEAR, 5 YEARS AGO. IT MAKES ME UNUSUALLY UNCOMFORTABLE, IN WAYS NOT MUCH ELSE DOES. MAYBE IT’S MY PROPENSITY FOR SELF-EFFACEMENT, BUT THEN AGAIN I RUN A POPULAR BLOG THAT -IS- ABOUT MYSELF; MAYBE I SOCIALLY FLOAT, AND LOOKING BACK ON PAST CROWDS MEANS ADMITTING TO AN ASSOCIATIVE IDENTITY I’M NOT QUITE COMFORTABLE WITH; OR...
2 tags
“For speaking either truth or comfort
I have no more tongue than a wound.”
—W. S. Merwin, from “The Nails”
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“I see Obama as Sisyphus in the first four years, and nobody would speak about the size of the rock, or the elevation of the hill. All you hear people talk about is what he didn’t do. To come from what he has asked to take over and do in the time, to behave as an American, to put up with those, who were, in my estimation, acting very un-American to get rid of those people, it took longer than...
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“For years I’d longed to be alone in the middle of fields and forests, silent, without need of words. Knowing how ecstatic I can be simply lying on a hillside in the sun, I realized I will probably be happiest - anticipating all of my possible incarnations - as a blade of grass.”
—Alice Walker, Preface to Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987.
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“Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the...
6 tags
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"From Emmitt Till to Trayvon Martin: How Black... →
“Why have black women so often stood at the forefront of such protests? Behind this history may be the lingering legacies of the sassy Sapphire and the mouthy Mammy. These stereotypes, historically used to justify our oppression, cast us as angry, loud, pushy and overassertive. Part of the work of black feminism has been to reclaim these negative attributes and reframe them as positive...
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Every candidate endorsed by God has lost to Mitt... →
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SELFHOOD KINDA SUCKS AND GOD MAY BE KINDA COOL TO...
[TW for discussions of sexual violence]
Ovid was one of the first poets to radicalize and institute this challenge to corporality and de-emphasizing the self. At the beginning of his Metamorphoses, Ovid describes “the whole of nature” depicted within “a single face, which men have called Chaos: a crude, unstructured mass, nothing but weight without motion, a general conglomeration of matter...
3 tags
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom...
6 tags
“I don’t see myself as a black woman artist, but I am an artist who is a black woman. There are moments when I feel political injustice, and I express these feelings in my art. And I have other moments when I’m not angry, when I’m thinking about my family, about my daughter or my lover or God. Or I’m trying to work out the logistics in my own personal life. I...
4 tags
“Capitalism did not arise by a set of natural laws which stem from human nature: it was spread by the organised violence of the elite. The concept of private property of land and means of production might seem now like the natural state of things, however we should remember it is a man-made concept enforced by conquest. Similarly, the existence of a class of people with nothing to sell but their...
