You’d think we would’ve gotten used
to it by now since all we ever seem
to do is turn breath and blood
into memory. But we always want
what is not ours, making time for
hunger, even after the realization
that Oh, shit, we’ve been here before,
why are we still shaking?
How did we stand still, breathe
and bleed for the slaughter
we weren’t meant for?
- R. Zamora Linmark, “The Idea”
17 Audre Lorde, “Lessons from the 60s”
16
Pacquiao hasn’t responded to Mayweather’s tweet because he’s too busy doing regular things, like
-not beating the shit out of his love interest and threatening to kill her in front of his children
-not threatening to beat his children also
-not beating women at a nightclub
-not making a racist video using anti-poc caricatures in a fucked-up attempt to denigrate his opponent
-not attempting to pick up the slack by making a subsequent apology video that is just as ignorant
-being polite to people who interview him since he’s aware it’s a huge privilege to get paid shitloads of money for doing nothing other than beating the shit out of someone else when other people are bending over with back pains to sew shoes for less than minimum wage
(okay, so it’s not verified that he’s actually aware, but still, pacquiao is classy. well, classier)
-endorsing a bunch of shit like an athlete on their down-time is supposed to
-not exploiting his status as a lionized being to delay justified punishment for being a terrible, terrible person
-doing his best to use his status in a positive way in a sort-of-admirable-but-mostly-amusing attempt to salvage a crumbling nation versus popping up in the news repeatedly as a testament to how his nation (and society in general) is crumbling
-running on a treadmill versus running his mouth
-learning from the agonizing climax of his last battle versus reveling in the cheapness of his victory
-being a good global citizen versus being a bitch-assfigures, america would invest millions in a sport where powerful white people set up opportunities for poc to beat the shit out of each other
Great points, A!
If there was nothing unusual about the levels of devotion the Smiths inspired in me – countless young men and women all across the world, then as now, treated the band as a lifeline or lighthouse – what in retrospect seems odd is the conviction I had as a teenager that they were uniquely Asian. There had been Asians in British pop music before them, not least Bid of the Monochrome Set and Freddie Mercury (aka the Gujarati Farrokh Bulsara), but for me no one had ever come as close as Morrissey, the child of Irish Catholics, to expressing a poetics of second-generation migration.
These days it’s hard to open a paper without some slightly whipped-up controversy about Morrissey being a racist, but back in the mid-1980s his lyrics and persona mapped out a structure of feeling that spoke to my own floundering selfhood. He sang about shame and unlovability: I had bloodied myself as a 12-year-old using a kitchen knife to scrape away what I saw as the tainting brownness of my skin – a browness that made me only half a person, half the Englishman I wanted to be. He sang about loneliness and isolation: I was rarely invited to the homes of schoolfriends, and certainly never invited them to my mine, for fear that they would snigger at the photographs of turbaned relatives that lined its walls. He sang about weakness: the mantra from my parents was that we were vulnerable because of our religion and had to act as meekly as possible so as not to become targets for thugs and bully boys.
Many of my cousins who lived in Southall and Coventry, places with larger Asian communities, sometimes felt the same emotions. Like me they weren’t into bhangra, so they turned instead to reggae or hip hop, barricade music they associated with street toughness and self-respecting masculinity. Perhaps because I was growing up in a whiter corner of England, or perhaps just for aesthetic reasons, I was drawn to music that was less about collective pride than about individual abjection, music that created theatrical extroversion out of bedroom-bound introversion. I instinctively preferred weakness to strength, treble to bass …
Sukhdev Sandhu | Morrissey and me: how an ordinary Asian fell in love with the Smiths | Music | The Guardian via millionsmillions
I grew up in a much different context, but feel so much of this, like this. I wish I had never heard about Morrissey’s racist rants. I really did love the Smiths.
26 This truly might be the best spoof video I’ve ever seen. Battlestar Galactica as an RPG. Spoiler warning, but really, the show’s been over for a while so get over it.
2 Here is a story about two photos taken around the same time at a pivotal moment in Philippine history.
The first photo, taken by internationally renowned photojournalist and Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, was published in Aperture magazine (issue 108, Fall 1987). She spent five months in early 1986 in the Philippines documenting the last days of the Marcos dictatorship. The photo, taken during an anti-Marcos rally, looks down upon a mass of brown people raising the “L” (for Laban) signs with their hands. In the upper left, a huge effigy of Cory Aquino stands above the mass with a sign reading “Cory Power is People Power.” Brown and yellow, brown and yellow: the vivid colors scream hope, the contrast captures the political polarization of the moment. This is the kind of photo that good photojournalists always take of a big crowd.
The second photo was never published. It was taken by Uncle Dado Saturay, a former health worker and amateur photographer in the anti-Marcos movement before moving to Seattle in the late 80s. It was salvaged from a box of hundreds of slides that sat in the Filipino Workers Action Center in Seattle for a few years and was almost thrown away in 2006 when the center shut down. I’ve been slowly digitizing this big ass box of slides since. Here, the photographer is not aiming down at a crowd, but aiming upward from it. His gaze is fixed on a small group of people posed in a performance with their arms raised upward to the left. One holds a sickle. They stand in front of red banners with lots of long words. Unlike Meiselas’s photo, the colors are drab and faded. The word DRUG takes up more space than anything else. This is not a hopeful image, but a defiant one. It foreshadows the history that would soon follow after the colors from the first photo faded.
And just inside the far right edge of the frame of the second photo stands Susan Meiselas, camera in hand, looking away at something else.
(via sapagitan)
Consistent? Yes. Consistently right? No.
If you’re against weekends, an 8-hour-work-day, child labor laws, the right to strike, the right to organize, health and safety laws, anti-discrimination laws, minimum wage, and any other victory the working class has made in this country since its inception, then by all means vote for Ron Paul. And if you want a preview of what Paul is proposing, just take a trip to any third world country and witness the conditions unregulated capitalism makes for people and the environment.
Newsletters aside, you may not think that Paul is a racist from his speeches, but he is a white supremacist in the sense that his ideal America is one of prevailing institutional racism - where the dominance of white culture is preserved through the subjugation of working class people of color.
Paul’s notion that “property rights” must not be infringed upon by the government harkens back to a time when people of color were property themselves. Slavery, segregation, and discrimination were all acceptable under the veil of state’s rights. The right to keep minorities in their place without interference from the federal government is why Paul gets open endorsements from white supremacist groups.
Ron Paul’s understanding of history comes from a very privileged place. It is no coincidence that his promise to “restore” America to its former glory resonates with white males and not people of color. That former glory was built on the backs of people who were denied equal protection under a government that lived by Paul’s Libertarian ideology. America’s wealth was created through empire and exploitation, not through the work of rich white men who romanticized freedom as they raped their slaves.
Great response.
9 From the article:
African American girls and young women have become the fastest growing population of incarcerated young people in the country. Efforts to stop mass incarceration focused on black girls are almost nonexistant in government policy, the media, foundations and academia.
Recently, the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Law School took the bold and necessary step of organizing a day-and-a-half free event titled, “African American Girls and Young Women and Juvenile Justice System: A Call to Action.”
The beauty of this conference was the focus on black girls and the passionate energy to create a path for action among the participants.
Academics and activists, among them formerly incarcerated African American girls and young women, gathered together from across the divides of class, age, race and place to talk about what we know about these young people, their interaction with the criminal justice system—and what we are going to do about it.
Sociologist Nikki Jones of UC Santa Barbara, and Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii opened up the conference with a look at the statistics.
“No”, said Jones, “Black girls are not committing more crimes, even though they are being incarcerated in record numbers.”
“I’ve been studying this for decades,” said Chesney-Lind. She added, “We have never seen these kind of numbers before. National policies like zero tolerance are responsible for the school to prison pipeline. And a dual justice system that treats white girls differently from black girls is disproportionately impacting African American girls.”
She continued, “In 2008, we knew the arrest rate in California was 49 out of every 1,000 for black girls, 8.9 per 1,000 for white girls and 14.9 per 1,000 for Latinas.”
The cause of the over criminalization of African American young women is best understood by looking back through the lens of American history and the ideological construction of black criminality…Click the link to read more!
Again, in case it’s not clear that prison is NO JOKE.
(via so-treu)
78 Ugh, ugh, no NO why?! I know the webisodes haven’t even started yet, but I am pre-judging this project anyway. I don’t care how cute/uplifting/queer-friendly/fun you want to make the scenario, the reality of Filipino men and women (bakla, straight, tibo, whatever) being forced to dance in a prison that many of them have languished in for years while waiting for trial and sentencing is not okay.
The CPDRC began this program— the one that produced the infamous “prison Thriller video”— as part of a larger Christian-based “rehabilitation project.” Though marketed as fun for prisoners, in reality it was used, in part, as a front to siphon money from the state (the warden is siblings with Cebu’s governor); additionally, it has completely covered for the massive corruption of the Philippine penal system and government itself. In a country where non-violent activists are “disappeared” and gunned down in broad daylight; where more money is spent on building up sex tourism for former GIs to enjoy Filipina women and children than on proper education and sustainable domestic industry; and when the president himself is co-owner of one of the largest haciendas in the country where peasants have been murdered for daring to struggle for land rights and living wages, the “dancing prisoners” of the CPDRC are mere bread and circuses, a way for us abroad to laugh about, and wash our hands clean of, the human rights abuses rampant in the Philippines and other such former(?) colonies.
I’ve been sitting on my MA thesis for a few years— a chapter of which is devoted to a critique of the original prison YouTube videos— having been burned out and exhausted by viewing over and over again these sites of pain. But as the years have gone on, and as people (even queer/activist/sympathetic Filipino Americans and Filipino Canadians) have continued to make light of these videos, I remember why I need to continue this work. It isn’t cute when Glee makes the presence of queer youth in the show a cop-out for its otherwise racist, sexist, and ableist politics; it’s even less cute when FIlipino Americans/Canadians aspiring to their “own” version of Glee try to make friendship between bakla men somehow liberationist and radical when they are in a prison that they shouldn’t be in the first place! Can we at least consider that fact, please?!
2 CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Happiness isn’t a state you acquire by
luck. It takes hard work and relentless concentration. You have to rise up
and rebel against the nonstop flood of trivial chaos and meaningless
events you’re invited to wallow in. You have to overcome the hard-core
cultural conditioning that tempts you to assume that suffering is normal
and the world is a hostile place. It’s really quite unnatural to train yourself
to be peaceful and mindful; it’s essentially a great rebellion against an
unacknowledged taboo. Here’s the good news: 2012 will be an excellent
time for you to do this work.
—-
Yes. Gonna make this year golden!
2 CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):
Suzan-Lori Parks is a celebrated American playwright who has won both a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. During the time between November 2002 and November 2003, she wrote a new short play every day — a total of 365 plays in 365 days. I think you could be almost as prolific as that in 2012, Capricorn. Whatever your specialty is, I believe you will be filled with originality about how to express it. You’re also likely to have the stamina and persistence and, yes, even the discipline necessary to pull it off.
- Thanks, Astrobarry (whose book is the TRUTH, btw)!
I guess I should already know this though, since i submitted a monster draft of my first dissertation chapter to my advisor yesterday! But it’s always nice to hear it from someone else.
3 
