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(via blackamazon)
White People Like to Discover Things →
The common thread to all of these conversations is that while everybody is very concerned that people understand they have “history” and aren’t ” that Kind” of gentrifier, and have basic knowledge of where they are( and I do mean basic), they seem to fail to connect linear time, and the same sense of importance to the history of the neighborhood as they do their feelings and slow realizations, not to mention the straight up it seems in ability to master a basic GOOGLE search.
The Brooklyn Rail piece mentions the fact that people were 70 years remove from the Civil War and part of the great migration.
Translation : These are people WHOSE RECENT FAMILY HISTORY involves slavery, the massive move out of the South to escape large scale discrimination, lived through said neighborhoods being flooded with crack and benign neglect only to be displaced by people who need wireless internet in cafes.
love
i feel so thankful to have blackamazon in my life, even if most of our interactions take place thousands of miles away. she is love and light, always, in every hotel room/internet forum/chat/conference space/whatever. i have learned so much from her - especially around holding critique, conflict, and commitment simultaneously. when i think of “radical woman of color” her face is the first to come to mind. -stacey
This is a story about Blackamazon being there for me at a very bad time, a time when I felt trapped by obligation, by location, by circumstances (“by LIFE” my inner tween interjects melodramatically, but let’s ignore her).
It was late and I was alone in a room that was not really mine with nothing but a crappy secondhand netbook to occupy me.
I got on chat and BA was there via her phone, struggling to navigate the messed-up (as ever) trains to get home. Just getting to talk to her was more than I could have hoped for.
Then she sent me a link to the above, and the chat went ridiculous silly. I was stuffing my face into a pillow not to laugh too loudly—I was in one of those places where you don’t dare laugh, not like that, and yet it is in those places that laughter is what I always seem to need most.
And then thank God BA’s train finally came, because otherwise I’m sure Al’s ears were about to start burning.
I need to listen to something new. I need to find a new way of looking at these things of writing these words, that serves not the desire for attention , but the love and concern I feel for these things.
I ain't pretty →
Pretty for me has always been something about what I had lacking and what I could consume to be acceptable.
In terms of my hair , my natural hair is beautiful it is show stopping , but straight hair is pretty. Pretty
Pretty as in closer to white more tameable, more feminine,
Pretty as in product of acceptable consumption , pretty as in made of the things that indicate you cna afford or a re lucky enough to have naturally this mark of prestige.
That you can wrap and blow dry and get that touch up.
Pretty is about a form of protection, that is afforded you in separation from ugly girls.
Pretty is something you can have and pretty is something that can be taken away.
When we are told about pretty it is not to actually define any aesthetic value , but to tell us what will be protected.
That protection is expressed not because of anything special about pretty but more so about what pretty is not.
Lust requires you be desirous and feral and there in your pursuit of PLEASURE not a partner, so not only does it include everybody and whatever path to orgasm and combinatorial matrix they choose to pursue or not pursue, it also means life.
Lets live life
Poultry and returns →
I had a very cool teacher talk about differences in cultures. Guilt versus shame was a big one.
Guilt was self reflexive and passive . Guilty was a way to make transgressions about you so that you se t the limits of when you were feeling forgiven.
I came up in a shame culture and while it has many issues I always loved my teachers analysis about it and I agreed. Shaming is powerful and is used against us so often I think itshould be used for us
Fuck guilt feel some shame.
You bring shame , your action ( or non action) your relations to the world cause shame. You go and ” bring shame on the family”
Consequently you go out and you get honor. You bring that to the family.
You have to DO something for shame . Shame is a burden not a feeling .
Shame you work through not overture. You don’t get absolved of shame.
Guilt is lonely and dark, shame shines a spotlight on your inadequacies and makes you adress them
I HAVE HAD IT WITH GUILT
So what am I saying?
Fuck guilt feel shame.
Everytime I need to wonder about the safety of a woman for speaking her mind
Everytime I watch a women struggle in poverty
Everytime someone has to worry about their life for the fact they want love freely
Everytime I type some thing like this in hopes they stumble across it and feel stronger. OR I stutter over my keyboard in hopes of typing something alittle more eloquent than YEAH! *hugs*
Fuck Guilt feel shameEvery single damn moment we have power to help and don’t because it wasn’t easy
Fuck guilt feel some damn shame
Mackin and Identity Politics →
This is why Identity politics is important. Every woman that stands up and says “Fuck your A or your F scale it doesnt apply” makes it alittle weaker. Every person that makes it through life more concerned with love and change and being themselves than affirming the worlds loosest collected stereotypes makes it harder to maintain a system that uses it.
That also means it extends beyond the end of your own interest. By saying what you are you say what you are not. This to me is where people start getting the evil on. If I believe that I am to complex for simple classifications then I appreciate the same for you or I should,it also means I accept that you will the ramifications of taking that stance. Now I Have made my post on sex positive feminism and I will get at that later, but for women of color this is why it’s important.
Women of color make a large alliance that fights for SO MUCH. By even saying that we kind of assume multiple disparate struggles and consciousnesses as important to us. So in what has turned into a sort of mash note to brownfemipower and fabulosamujer( don’t go) I think there is NOTHING that could be more interesting and important than you blogging about being Chicana and what it mean’s to you. The discussions need to be muddled considerably. It is not jsut the decentering of WHITENESS that needs to happen but all categories . They need to be kicked around broadened and opened by their self identifiers . Whiteness depends on a rigidity that identity politics kicks repeatedly . Making the politics a process rather than a result throws the whole thing down. The power needs to be removed from the hiearchial structure of naming and into the fluid process of being and moving and working.
It needs to swirl and spill but most importantly move,
