From Skittles to Stereos

We've all rolled up at a red light or in a parking lot next to someone who seems to have a blatant disregard for his or her long-term ability to hear. We've all rolled our eyes and muttered under our breaths, asking if it's really necessary for that person's music to be loud enough to make our cars vibrate. We've all written it off as a momentary frustration in the course of our days, and maybe sped a little to get away from the jerk with the loud music before the next red light.

Michael Dunn is not like most of us. When Michael Dunn thought that Jordan Davis and his friends were playing their music too loudly when both parties were stopped at a gas station, his solution to this problem was to confront them. He approached the car that contained Davis and his friends, and an argument ensued. Dunn felt "threatened" during this argument, which, remember, came about after he went out of his way to approach and confront these boys, and decided to rectify his feeling threatened by pulling out a gun and firing 8 or 9 shots into the teens' SUV, collecting his girlfriend from inside the gas station, and driving off. When he was later apprehended by police in his home, he claimed that he "didn't think he'd hurt anybody" and had just been "trying to scare them off."

1) Warning shots AREN'T A THING. This isn't the Wild West. You aren't a police officer. 2) Even if warning shots were a thing, I believe that by definition, to be a warning shot, you must not be shooting horizontally at a target in front of you. 3) 8 or 9 shots "to scare them off"? Fired INTO THEIR CAR?!? This is actually the worst defense story I have ever heard concocted. This man murdered a 17 year old black boy in cold blood at a gas station in front of three of his friends because their music was too loud. He walked away from his car with a gun in his pocket to confront a car full of minors about loud music and riddled one with bullets because HE felt threatened. 

Maybe this is a horrible thing to say, but I want this to be a bigger deal than Trayvon Martin's death. Both are absolute tragedies. Both exemplify why so-called "Stand Your Ground" laws have got to go. I firmly believe that George Zimmerman's decision to leave his house to chase Trayvon in his car and then hunt him on foot to confront him completely and totally eradicates any right he had to defend himself using deadly force, but no one knows what actually happened in their scuffle after George cornered Trayvon. There is a tiny tiny speck of reasonable doubt. There is NONE in this case. How could Jordan threaten Dunn's life FROM INSIDE HIS CAR?! No sane person in the world can tell me that emptying one's clip into someone else's car is an appropriate means by which to "scare someone off." You just can't. Dunn started this confrontation and ended Jordan Davis's life long before it escalated into anything physical breaking out between the two parties. He has shown a bone-chilling level of disregard for this young black man's life and property. 

It doesn't lend itself to photos and protests as easily, but Twitter says to turn the music up for Jordan. But beware--like wearing a hoodie makes you suspicious, playing loud music can evidently be construed as justifying homicide. I hope the mass media picks up on this. If not, the country might as well be saying, "Oh well, sorry, we can only rally behind the unjust killing of one dark-skinned boy in a 365-day period. Y'all will just have to wait. Don't worry, we know it'll happen again soon."  

Blackademic tattoo perfection

Reblogged from come correct

I firmly believe that all bathrooms should be like this:

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

Beauty

Reblogged from 18° 15' N, 77° 30' W

"When feminists can see the problem with all-male panels but can't see the problem with all-White television programmes, then it's worth questioning who they're really fighting for."

--Reni Eddo-Lodge

(via Lavender Labia)

#everybodywannabeaniggabutdon'tnobodywannabeanigga

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

James Baldwin straight killin the game.

Photo

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

One of my housemates is from Connecticut and upon multiple occasions tells various renditions of the story about how she didn't learn racism was still "a thing" until college. She also evidently thinks we're cool enough to have conversations about reparations and affirmative action. She also only cleans up after herself once in a blue moon, which I think is not unrelated to the fact that she had a stay at home mother. 

This is how I want to react to her alllllllll the time.

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can call all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us  temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.  And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

--Audre Lorde

(via Sister Outsider) 

Photo

Reblogged from come correct

KS and I had a conversation about this a few months ago.

Reblogged from come correct

Not everyone grows up having a role model in the traditional sense. I think that's especially relevant for people of color with backgrounds and ambitions that society would say are at odds with one another. I think it's also especially relevant for people of our generation, for as Shirley T said during our welcoming exercises, most of us will grow up to have jobs that don't exist yet. Whatever slices of me you want to put under the microscope, I am a person who has to forge her own path. There wasn't anyone I could look at IRL as a kid and say, 'I want to be like her when I grow up.


In elementary school, during handwriting class, I remember that writing a letter to your role model was an oft-repeated exercise. It was always a struggle for me. The first time, I wrote my letter to my future self, telling her that she inspired me to work really hard and do well in school and at home. My teacher made me rewrite my letter, saying that I hadn't understood the exercise. I tried to argue with her that thinking about wanting to be successful in the future is what motivated me to do well, which is how she had described who we should think of as our role model, but she was unmoved. I wrote my letter to my mom instead. The next year, I tried writing my letter to Tia from Sister, Sister, but my teacher again said that didn't count, and instead I wrote to my dad. I alternated between them until this was no longer a thing we did, but it never felt right.

Why is it a problem that I latched onto persons who were mostly theoretical as models upon which to base my life? I think that Tia, Moesha, and all of the women of the Huxtable household are perfectly good roles for a young black girl to model herself on. I may not have had their family structure or their means as I was growing up, but I could tell as I sat riveted to episode after episode that their quality of life was what I wanted for my future. At the same time, I think it is a bad and perhaps quite dangerous thing to tell a child that their motivation is illegitimate if it comes from within. We live in a quite different time now, where a little black boy can look at the President of the United States and reasonably think, 'Maybe that could be me someday.' I only had the Huxtables, Tia and Tamara, and Moesha. But I never wanted to be President. I wanted to do well in school and manage my relationships effectively and go to college and lead a comfortable life, and that model for me was a future reality made of lots of bits of fantasy. 

And look where I am now.

Art.

Reblogged from 18° 15’ N, 77° 30’ W

My class today

Me: So when you see the 4 year old boy pull the little girl's hair...

Students: He likes her!

Me: Now they are around 11 or 12 and he grabs her arm and wrestles her to the ground even though she calls him a jerk and yells at him to leave her alone.

Students: That is just how boys are.

Me: Now they are 18 and he grabs her arm and--

Students: Oh, that's not okay.

Me: Really? How would he know? How would she know? How would you know? You just told me that for the first 17 years of these children's lives that you thought it was cute, sweet, and natural for a boy to grab a girl and be rough with her.

Students: Oh.

Me: Oh, is right.

(via Lavender Labia)

If it remains a mark of our oppression that as black people we cannot be dedicated to truth in our lives without putting ourselves at risk, then it is a mark of our resistance, our commitment to liberation, when we claim the right to speak the truth of our reality anyway.

--bell hooks

(via In Community and Resistance)

I'm thankful that no one in my immediate family is underemployed.

Because shit is rough out here for so many people this Thanksgiving.

Reblogged from LivingLovingListeningLearning

On the capitalism of friendship

"Whereas closed romantic relationships are mutual slavery, in friendship a free capitalism reigns. Favors are exchanged for favors. Secrets are exchanged for secrets. Balance must be guarded tightly, lest suspicion arise. Your time and resources limit the amount of friendship you may buy from the market of human relations; you may only have a few deep relations or several more superficial ones. If you become closer with somebody in particular, other relations immediately suffer. Most of the time, there is someone more important for you than you are for her, and vice versa.

"Often friendship relations are hierarchical--you have a best friend, second best friend, and so on. Different social hierarchies also penetrate these relations...Friendship is a continuous battlefield, where you must earn your place...You must earn your friends every day, and you may lose your social status overnight...With time, these relations become more stable, but low-intensity warfare does not mean peace...Loneliness means that you have been defeated in the war of human relations. You have put too much of yourself in one or two main relationships that failed...

"...We who desire the end of capitalism often fail to see how deeply its model of action is embedded into human society. There is no fundamental difference between that and an exchange that involves money and barter. If friendship and love is about barter as well, what hope is there to get rid of capitalism?"

--Antti R., Letters IV

(via come correct)

Relevant to my life for two separate points:

A) Because EY and I always tease JA about being a bad friendship investment. (She's not. She's just electronic-forms-of-communication-challenged.)

B) Because there are a couple of friendships in my life that I feel...off-balance in right now, like one side or the other is giving or taking too much, like we're struggling to find a middle ground at which to happily meet. There are other relationships I want to do more to cultivate into a fullness they're currently lacking. Yeah, friendship is probably capitalism, but if we're not getting out what we're putting in, then capitalism is hurting us as much here as it does anywhere else.

Basically my body type.

And I love it.

Reblogged from Free Bird

 

"Fyi, for me, 'ho tapes' are the internal voice that black women hear when they are debating whether or not to engage in a sexual act. Often times, the politics of respectability play a role, and I theorize that often our 'ho tapes' stop us from experiencing pleasure, or they allow us to center the pleasure of another while making our own secondary."

 --MDotWrites, of New Model Minority

(via come correct) 

So I think Idris Elba is the top of the list...

Reblogged from Afro Art Chick

"Students of color are allowed to enter the classroom but never on an equal footing. When they walk in, they are subject to the same racial stereotypes and expectations that exist in the larger society. Students of color do not have the advantage of walking into a classroom as individuals; they walk in as black, brown, or red persons with all the connotations such racialization raises in the classroom. They do not walk into a classroom where the curriculum embraces their histories. They walk into a classroom where their histories and cultures are distorted, where they feel confused about their own identities, vulnerabilities, and oppressions. There is no level of liberal reforms that can alter these experiences for students of color without directly challenging the larger systems in society."

--Margaret Zamudio, Caskey Russell, Francisco Rios & Jacquelyn Bridgeman,

Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology

(via Tudo Bom(b)) 

...I'm just gonna leave this here

Reblogged from  Free Bird

Never not reblog

(reblogged from La Bella Vita)

On that note

A ten-minute film about families involving one or more trans parents. 

(via come correct)

Trans>gender

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

When I first saw this article, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. At first I was like oh-my-lack-of-a-god mainstream progressiveness, Joe Biden, if I wanted kids, I'd want yours. Or something equally full of endorphins and wonder and joy. Fuck yeah transgender rights being recognized as a leitimate and important issue that affects more than the ver slim percentage of our country that identifies with a gender that does not traditionally correspond to the sex to which they were born. Fuck yeah that recognition coming at the hands of our kick-ass Vice President. Just fuck yeah.

But then I took a step back and said, wait a minute, THE issue of our time? THE ISSUE? What about the war on women as the issue of our time? Mass incarceration/the war on drugs? What about quality education? Affirmative action? Closing the wealth gap between the rich and the poor? Immigration? I felt like I could go on and on listing issues that seemed...bigger than trans discrimination. Not bigger as in more important (because no one should ever play oppression olympics), but bigger as in more visible and affecting significantly larger portions of the population. Granted, it's silly to call anything THE issue because that makes all other issues invisible, marks the as insignificant...but if I had to pick an issue to be THE issue, I didn't think it would be trans discrimination.

I brought this point up to SO (aka the girl formerly known as Choosing Pancakes), asking don't we need gender equality before we can touch trans equality with a ten foot pole? As I thought and typed it, this statement seemed like fact to me, so I was surprised when she disagreed. SO quite literally flipped the script, saying that in her opinion, we need trans equality before we can have gender equality.

I had to lean back in my chair and think about that one. I was going to write it off as being a chicken-or-egg scenario, but then I caught myself and remembered that trans identities are inherently bigger and more complicated than gender identities. Trans is the intersection of socially constructed gender and biological sex--focusing on trans equality would force us to consciously and actively recognize the legitimacy of the separateness of those categories, which can only help the fight for gender equality. In celebrating fluidity, growth, change, and self-acceptance, the trans movement benefits us all. We can't achieve gender parity until we recognize the unlimitations of gender. Trans>gender. And Joe Biden is still a BAMF.    

"No one wants to be the person who is made fun of for caring too much about something, who treats in earnest a situation that everyone else considers absurd. Even in personal relationships, feeling too heavily invested while simultaneously understanding that the other person couldn’t be more detached is one of the most profound feelings of embarrassment we can experience. Because it isn’t simply the embarrassment of making a mistake or a poor choice, it’s a shame over the kind of human being you are and how you see the world around you. To be shamed for your sincerity is to be reminded that you are dependent on something which is not dependent on you — that you are, once again, vulnerable."

--Chelsea Fagan 

(via Lavender Labia)

#rememberwhenMittRomneywasrelevant?

Reblogged from La Bella Vita

""I taste her and realize I have been starving."

--Jodi Picoult

Every time I go to the National Portrait Gallery

I am captivated by this bronze bust of Booker T Washington.

Photo taken by me!

For dramatic effect (at least, dramatic for those of us who get more caught up in drama from a century ago than in today's celebrity gossip), the museum places this bust and a portrait of Frederick Douglass on opposite sides of a small wall, spatially articulating their radically divergent viewpoints and envisioned directions. As much as I prefer Douglass's philosophy (though I've learned to at least see where Washington was coming from), I have to say that his portrait is little match for this bust. Sitting on a pedestal that makes him over 6 feet tall, the bust is as imposing as I imagine the man must have been. His eyes are too high to look back at me, and I can't help but feel slighted. Given the sad state of urban and rural public education these days, I am of the firm belief that you could bring Douglass and Washington into the present day and their arguments would change significantly. Bearing that in mind, I can't help but stand firmly rooted there for a number of minutes, measuring myself up to this man, wondering what he might think of me.  

Reason #9374093742987 the war on women isn't over:

Reblogged from Riots not Diets

#nevernotreblog

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

"Bullying" is a euphemism.

"If we actually started calling bullying what it is and address it as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fat phobia, and classism, it would actually give children a better way to deal with the very same power dynamics they will face as adults, while also giving adults more responsibility to challenge the intolerance that is rooted within our society overall."

--Amanda Levitt, of Fat Body Politics

(via come correct) 

All of the claps.

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

"If the guy doesn’t want to fuck a fat chick, don’t fuck a fat chick! It’s not about being able to look past anything. It’s not ‘Oh, wow, this girl’s so confident that I’m able to forget about her fat belly and focus on her other features.’ No. If a guy wants to fuck me, he has to love that I jiggle. If he wants my body, he wants my whole body, okay. If he’s not squeezing every bit of me he can get the fuck out of my bed."

(via Tudo Bom(b))

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

And for everyone who has said anything positive about Romney's concession...

"He wanted it to be 'different,' and he’s praying for you, America. That is not 'gracious.' What it is instead is a pretty typical Romney, a man who would arrogantly refuse to entertain the notion of defeat and then grind in his heels and refuse to accept it for as long as possible. A man who would pout that his wife would have made a kickass first lady, who thanks men for their tireless work and “wives” for picking up the slack. That was your glimpse, Tuesday night, of what your President Romney would have looked like. And maybe it doesn’t sound gracious to say so, but thank God that’s the last look we’ll have."

 --Mary Elizabeth Williams

(via La Bella Vita)

#rememberwhenMittRomneywasrelevant?

All of that being said,

I will never not reblog this:

“I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.

I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harrassed and gay-bashed and deported.

I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy.

I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”

--Zoe Leonard, 1992

(via Black Girl Dangerous) 

#4moreyears

Reblogged from Serenity in Perspective

As the numbers first started coming in on Tuesday night, I'll admit that I was scared. I groaned every time a state in the South was called for Romney, trying to placate myself with constant reminders that they'd already called Texas and we were still waiting for California/The West Coast as a solid entity. I pulled at my hair and curled up on the couch, unwillingly envisioning life under the Romney-Ryan regime. I was afraid that we'd lost America again, that robber barons had somehow become vintage and cool again. 

As the night wore on, my tension dissolved into laughter, laughter and joy as Obama-Biden proceeded to take every single battleground state. Laughter and joy as we re-won the White House by over a hundred electoral college points (side-eye at Florida taking 48 hours to come in). Laughter and joy because y'all had me shook, America. It still really worries me that 58.6 million of you thought that Romney was better suited than Barack Obama to take care of this country, but that's not something we need to worry about right now. (#rememberwhenMittRomneywasrelevant?) 

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

As the night wore into the next day, my laughter and joy swelled into pride. I am so proud of us, America. It was one thing to fall in love with rhetoric of hope and change and a face the color of which seemed to usher in a new era of American leadership in 2008. Obama's 2008 campaign tugged at your heartstrings, I know. We were history in the making. Voting for Obama in 2008 was easy. Voting for Obama in 2012 was a little bit harder for a lot of us, I know. It is another thing entirely to re-elect a president whose rhetoric of hope and change rang a little more hollow than many of us would like, even if the circumstances surrounding that hollowness were out of his (or anyone's) control. It is another thing entirely to say we're not totally pleased with the way the last four years have gone, but we know that our best chance of success lies in you. It is easy to fall in love. It's hard to stay. 

I'm proud of America for giving Barack Obama four more years to carry out his dreams. I am proud of Maine, Maryland, and Washington for voting to allow same-sex marriages in their states (although I fundamentally disbelieve in the validity of the majority voting for the rights of the minority because civil rights should not be left up to public opinion), and I am proud of Minnesota for refusing to ban same-sex marriage. I am proud of New Hampshire for electing our nation's first all-female delegation. I am proud of the country as a whole for electing the most women to ever serve in the Senate, and I am proud of Wisconsin for openly lesbian senator-elect Tammy Baldwin, of Hawaii for Asian female senator-elect Mazie Hirono and for Hindu-American combat veteran representative-elect Tulsi Gabbard, and of Illinois for disabled veteran female representative-elect Tammy Duckworth. I am proud of LA for Jackie Lacey, the county's first Black District Attorney. I am proud that Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin, Richard “Rape Is Something That God Intended To Happen” Mourdock, Allen “We Are Not Going To Have Our Men Become Subservient” West, Joe “Abortion Is Never Necessary to Save the Mother’s Life” Walsh, Roger "Some Girls, They Rape So Easy" Rivard, Tom "Having a Baby Out of Wedlock is Similar to Rape" Smith, and John "On the Rape Thing...How Does More Violence Onto A Woman's Body [i.e. Abortion] Make It Better?" Koster were all soundly defeated. I am proud that it seems that America stepped up and realized that women matter and healthcare matters and equal opportunity matters and the ACTUAL middle class (i.e. not people who make $249,999 a year) matters. I'm proud that America remembered who and what it is made of. 

But don't get it twisted--don't mistake my elation for satisfaction. We still have a helluva lot of work to do before this country lives up to the words and ideas it was founded upon. This post is just to thank all of you for keeping us moving in the right direction. 

Just Glamorous

A spread in Vogue Italia

 

Reblogged from Natural Belle

Colin Powell has been impressing me recently.

"Well, he's not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the right answer is, 'Well, what if he is?'. Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in America? ... Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he could be president?"

--Colin Powell

(via Tudo Bom(b))

Post-Racial Fucking America, People.

Reblogged from Free Bird

Filed under things that will never make sense to me

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

*cross-filed under Things I Can't Believe Still Happened in My Lifetime and Things Future Generations will Judge us For 

I have evidently met and even explained Quad-rules beirut to a bisexual soldier who is against the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I regret having shared such sacred knowledge with him.  

"Prison is the only form of public housing the government has truly invested in."

--Marc Lumont Hill, Columbia University Professor

(via Tudo Bom(b))

Relevant to what I'm reading right now.

Have I mentioned that I find Solange preferable to Beyonce in every imaginable way?

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

I'm noticing elevated levels of fascination with light-skinned brothas right now.

Reblogged from Currently Obsessed With...

I very much remember a time when this was an accurate representation of my Ivy League life

Reblogged from Post Secret

And then Quad happened, and all was well.

I wanna play in his hair...

Reblogged from Fuck Yeah Curls Curls Curls

"You're a fucking hypocrite. You want the internet to be free, but you don’t want the rest of us to be free on it. You want YOUR version of freedom. Well, guess what? Brutsch hasn’t been banned from the entire internet. He can still use the internet and be as shitty as he ever was. No one is stopping him. He hasn’t been silenced. You know what he’s getting? He’s getting the full free speech experience, not the distorted one you and your clown-ass compatriots have made up in your head. Free speech means that people get to speak back, to engage you, to confront you, to force you to defend your ideas, and to hold you accountable via discourse. You want to stifle a free press. Love it or hate it, Brutsch made himself a public figure and a figure in whom people had an interest. When the Amanda Todd story came to public awareness, there was even more interest in people who do things like sexually exploit and humiliate teens online. Women and girls who don’t show their breasts to people were also targets of people like Brutsch. We have an interest in knowing just who are these people who take upskirt photos of us when we’re going about our day. You want to cut off the right of people to have access to information via our free press. Why do you hate that aspect of free speech? Adrian did what people who do investigative journalism do: he investigated. He gave Brutsch a chance to defend himself, to tell his side of the story. George Orwell said it best: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is just public relations.” Guess what? We’re not going to let you whiners turn our free press into a PR campaign for the exploitation of others. You can champion it if you want, but other people have a right to hear the other side and express their opinion."

— Commenter on “Reddit Troll Michael Brutsch Defends Himself on CNN”  

(via Lavender Labia)

Art

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

I'm really impressed with the way Obama has handled Sandy.

I don't think any president is ever really prepared for a natural disaster to ravage the country, but Obama has handled Sandy with nothing but speed and grace. 

I'm sure that none of us need a refresher on the atrocious nature in which the Bush administration refused to deal with Katrina, but just in case, let us not forget that it took Bush four days to allocate any relief funding, four days in which people were stranded on the roofs of their homes without food, water, shelter, or medical attention, if they were lucky enough to still need such basic amenities. Let us not forget that during those four days, Bush was vacationing in Texas and then he flew over Katrina in Air Force One on his way back to DC, presumably so he could see the damage everyone was making such a fuss about for himself. Let us not forget that Dick Cheney literally tore power crews away from restoring power at two hospitals in New Orleans to make sure that the pipeline that carries gas from Texas to the Northeast wasn't interfered with--a wonderful display of federal priorities, if you ask me. Let us not forget that then-Secretary-of-State Condoleezza Rice went to see Spamalot on Broadway the night Katrina hit and spent the majority of the following day shopping in Manhattan. Let us not forget the one time I agreed with any public statement Kanye West made.

Character isn't created during moments of crisis--it is revealed. The things that actually matter and don't matter to our leaders become painfully clear. And I don't know about you, but I want to be secure in knowing that the people who are on the ground being affected by a crisis are at the top of our leaders' priority lists.

Enter Barack Obama. Enter "Superstorm Sandy," as she has come to be known, in the final days of his campaigning, another hurricane that hit this country worse than we were expecting. Cut to Barack personally calling Cory Booker, mayor of Newark and one of my favorite politicians in the history of ever, at 12:30 in the morning to talk with him about the crisis when the entire city of Newark lost power.

Cut to Barack jumping in on a conference call with energy executives on Tuesday to remind them that "restoring power to the millions of Americans who lost electricity during Sandy is a top priority." Cut to Barack putting aside the party line and teaming up with Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie to do on-the-ground touring of the destruction in New Jersey, of him holding distraught victims of the storm in his arms.

I've heard there are people in New York criticizing Obama for how long it's taking for Manhattan to get back together, but I think New York as a city--especially Manhattan--has enough resources to get itself back together. I'm glad to see Obama in middle-of-nowhere small-town New Jersey where people are expected to be without power for weeks. What does him calling Booker or talking to the energy execs really do, some critics ask. Well, I can tell you what it does for me, someone lucky enough to be in the path of the storm but not really damaged by it--ironic as this may be, it gives me hope. It makes me feel safe. There is literally no way you can argue right now that Obama doesn't care about regular people living their everyday regular lives in everyday regular places. We matter to this man. We don't matter to the party that is criticizing him for responding too early, as if help has a strict timeline that starts with wait-and-see.

My vote for Obama-Biden is already in the mail. Today is the last day for early voting most places around the country, so I suggest you put your shoes on, grab your ID/voter registration card, and get thee to the polls. Regular everyday people are counting on you.

Basically...

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

No person with a uterus should vote GOP.

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

I have no consistent feelings about stand-up.

Sometimes I try to watch stand up and these comedians are making a living by stereotyping, humiliating, and dehumanizing various groups I currently belong to or have belonged to in the past, like Black people, women, poor people, LGBT people, people-whose-bodies-don't-resemble-sticks, etc. 

But then sometimes I watch shit like this and am falling all over myself to give virtual standing ovations (while simultaneously cringing a little bit about the disabled-persons-shade he throws).

 Reblogged from La Belle Vita

'Cause when you white, the sky's the limit. When you black, the limit's the sky!

Brooklyn has the coolest stuff.

Seriously, a sex museum, that really cool festival over the summer, and now this. I really need to visit KS sometime soon...

Part of CLITERACY, 100 Natural Laws by Sophia Wallace, 2012, installation view at Dumbo Art Center, Brooklyn, NY

Style Crush