Tag: racism

fandomsandfeminism:

nearly-headless-horseman:

fandomsandfeminism:

Part of my roadtrip tool me to Atlanta. And, the Civil Rights Center was amazing. Very powerful. They have this one exhibit where you sit at a lunch counter and close your eyes and put on headphones. And It plays sounds like you are at a sit in and people are yelling. And it times how long you can sit there for. I think i lasted almost a minute before i was almost crying.

It…made its point.

And most of those people were being physically assaulted too

That’s a brilliant exhibit

If you make it long enough, the chair actually shakes a little, along with the sound of someone hitting the chair with a bat. It was super intense. (It included a trigger warning for obvious reasons.)

uptownfunkybutt:

“Peace, peace. Thank you, Debra, thank you, BET. Thank you Nate Parker, Harry (Belafonte), and Debbie Allen for participating in that. Before we get into it, I just wanna say…you know, I brought my parents out tonight. I just wanna thank them for being here, for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career. That uh, they make sure I learn what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also to thank my amazing wife for changing my life.

Now, this award…this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country, the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. Alright?

It’s kind of basic mathematics. The more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now this is also in particular for the black women, in particular, who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.

Now, what we have been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow managed to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s gonna happen is we are gonna have equal rights and justice in our own country, or we will restructure their function and ours.

Now…I got more, y’all. Yesterday would’ve been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday. So I don’t want to hear anymore about how ‘far we’ve come’ when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12 year old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich.

Tell Rekia Boyd how much better it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt.

Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t gonna stop this, alright? Now dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies. And now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies?

There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s no tax they haven’t levied against us and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. “But see, she would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so…free.“

Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter. You know what though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. And let’s get a couple things straight, a little sidenote:

The freedom of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job. Alright? Stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interests in equal rights for black people, do not make suggestions for those that do. Sit down.

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo. And we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment, like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them. Gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.

The thing is though, just because we’re magic doesn’t meant we’re not real. Thank you.”

All rights reserved to BET and Viacom. Video originally taken from here

agentasshole:

rtamerica:

Muslim groups fundraise to restore black churches, ‘support victims of arson’

Muslim organizations have raised $23,000 to help rebuild eight
historically black churches that have burned down since the deadly
attack on a prayer group in South Carolina. Three fires are believed to
be arson, while the rest are under investigation.

 The groups ‒ including Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, the Arab
 American Association of New York and Ummah Wide ‒ encouraged
 Muslims to reach out during their holy month of Ramadan. They
 touted the connections between Muslim and African-American
 communities in the US, saying the groups are “profoundly
 integrated in many ways, in our overlapping identities and in our
 relationship to this great and complicated country.”

Just gonna leave this right here.

zanabism:

gothlolilunatic:

zanabism:

being called “racist” isn’t an insult or something mean that people are saying to you because they want to bring you down. if you’re being called racist you shouldn’t be brushing it off because you “can’t see the haters” you should be assessing your behaviour, your language, and mindset for signs of prejudice, discrimination, and sympathy/support for unfair and violent treatment towards racially persecuted people in your country 

Ok, but sometimes people do label others as racist when they haven’t done anything actually racist. Not everyone who calls you racist is right to do so.

being called “racist” isn’t an insult or something mean that people are saying to you because they want to bring you down. if you’re being called racist you shouldn’t be brushing it off because you “can’t see the haters” you should be assessing your behaviour, your language, and mindset for signs of prejudice, discrimination, and sympathy/support for unfair and violent treatment towards racially persecuted people in your country 

hennyproud:

Nina Simone performing “Mississippi Goddam”, c. 1965 [x]

Nina Simone wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in 1964 as a response to the death of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church which killed four African American girls in Alabama. Both events took place in 1963.

“Mississippi Goddam” would go on to cement Simone’s place in the Civil Right’s Movement of the 1960s and the song itself would go on to become one of the most well-known protest songs of the 1960s as well.

Fifty years later, the song is still relevant, especially with the recent massacre at the historical AME church in Charleston, South Carolina and the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and countless other African Americans. All you have to do is change “Mississippi” to “South Carolina”, “Charleston”, “Ferguson”, “Florida”, “Cleveland”, “Baltimore”, or “New York City” and you have a song that fits the frustration among African Americans today.

The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything.

Scott Wood (X)

he motherfucking dropped the truth.

(via ugh)

Someone calling a white person ‘wonder bread’ isn’t racist. It’s rude, but it’s not racist. Wonder bread as an offensive term has no weight, no meaning. It’s just something to push your buttons. Using the N-word is racist – it has meaning and weight and brings up a past that should’ve never happened. The comparison between rude and racist is like squares and rectangles – every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Every racist comment you hear is rude, but not every rude comment you hear is racist.

from an in-class debate about white supremacy (via seehowtame)