ladyyoda reblogged
set a calendar alert RIGHT NOW. this is the work we need to do moving into 2018. we need to be READY.
ladyyoda reblogged
So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.
I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.
It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.
White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of “assault,” which could be anything from rape to not taking off one’s hat, to “reckless eyeballing.”
This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father’s memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.
This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.
I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents’ vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.
This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.
If you didn’t get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.
The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he didn’t do it alone.
(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of nonviolent resistance, and taught the practices of nonviolent resistance.)
So what did they do?
They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.
If we do it all together, we’ll be okay.
They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.
And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn’t that bad.
Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?
These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.
That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.
Please let this sink in. It wasn’t marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.
Reblogging this so I can come back to it in the spring when I teach the Civil Rights Movement to my 5th graders.
(via copperoranges)
Reblogging this for all the non-black people who like to quote MLK like he’s theirs.
(via heathenist)
I think I’ve reblogged this before, but I’m doing it again. Even growing up on the South Side of Chicago, going through a public school in which most of the students were black, and in which Martin Luther King was a celebrated hero who got his own honors and assemblies every year, even then I was never taught this.
(via pentag0nal)
Politicalprof: a must read.
(via politicalprof)
A must read, indeed.
(via pol102)
Source: m.dailykos.com
ladyyoda reblogged
How to NOT dispose of your Christmas tree, courtesy of grandpa
So, since Y’all liked the last bit of family holiday insanity, I think you’ll enjoy a story from dad’s side of the family. Also, it’s vaguely timely in that this is the time of year people start to do dumb shit with Christmas trees in order to avoid dump fees.
The year is still 1956, because Grandpa is a stickler for taking the tree down before New Year’s Eve, mostly because Grandpa is also the Monterey County Commissioner, and responsible for holding the New Year’s Office Party at his place. You know, a responsible adult who has to make nuanced, careful policy decisions, the kind of guy that turns his taxes in before February.
The kind of guy who decides he can burn his Christmas tree in the fireplace instead of taking it to the dump.
There is no good reason for grandpa to NOT take the tree there- Monterey is on the California Coast and has an average temperature of 50 degrees in December. It will snow in hell before it snows in Monterey. And this was the 50′s! Dump fees didn’t exist yet! It’s easy, free, and very unlikely to set your house on fire!
But no, Grandpa, an other wise sober and sensible man, decided instead to take this highly desiccated and moderately explosive tree and actually shove it up the chimney, before setting it alight.
Dad distinctly recalls his ears popping as the barometric pressure in the room dropped, as the conflagration drew air up into the chimney with enough force to take one of the curtains with it. Grandpa is standing there in front of the fireplace like an idiot, presumably slightly deafened by the jet-engine-like ROAR coming from the fireplace.
Dad, having at least two working survival instincts, ran outside to see if spark were landing on the roof and if he needed to call 911. There were not sparks landing on the roof, becuase whatever flaming bits of tree were left were being blown into the stratosphere by the jet of flame erupting out of the chimney like the worlds biggest butane torch. The ground shook, from the force of the tree combusting in such a confined fashion. The earth was probably moved slightly out of orbit.
Fortunately, once the tree died down, it did not take the house with it, and they were all left with shattered nerves and a structurally unsound chimney.
“Well that was a hell of a thing.” Said grandpa, still standing in front of the fireplace. He turned, slowly, looking moderately shell-shocked towards his sobbing daughters and Dad, who was too awed for any reasonable sense of panic.
“Don’t tell your mother, and we can all have ice cream.”
theimaginatorifunny
HAHAHAHAHAHA
the-last-hair-bender
Oh my actual God. That is the most aging story.
ladyyoda reblogged
every time i listen to “you’re a mean one mr. grinch” i can’t help but sit there and think “what did the grinch do to hurt you?” because dude just stands there for 2 minutes and 58 seconds and drags the grinch into the dirt
he stole christmas, kayla! stop with your #notallgrinches propaganda!
you know what if someone told me i was a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce i’d probably be bitter enough to steal christmas too
ladyyoda reblogged
ladyyoda reblogged
hey you guys wanna see something really cishetero
rockplush
happy holidays
ladyyoda reblogged
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
ladyyoda reblogged
trashlordbarbie-deactivated2018
please never forget that on this sunday the 20th of september, in the year of our lord 2015, we learned that british prime minister david cameron fucked a dead pig
ladyyoda reblogged
Happy Birthday, Hermione Granger. It has been an honor growing up with you.
So, somehow I didn’t know Hermione and I share a birthday HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BOTH OF US!!
ladyyoda reblogged
so i was on buzzfeed when this article came up about great american responses
and
i
am
in
fucking
tears
like these are so accurate
too
accurate
and
not
even
an
exaggeration
about
how
we see ourselves
booker-real-dewitt
America has 365…I laughed to hard!
therealfeedback
Go back to Canada, Iowa.
thedepthcharger
This is the best post ever.
YASSSS
Weak allies who don’t speak German. Enough said.
I still laugh at this post. Every single time.
iamjustdone
‘merica
‘Murica
pennsylvaniarepublican
The weak allies post had me dying. These are great!
friendly-neighborhood-patriarch
Yesss
ladyyoda reblogged
“It’s interesting, I think the most important moment for me in ‘Yorktown’… I don’t know if people have noticed this, but the ending of ‘Battle of Yorktown’ is the first time the American forces ever put guns in their hands, so to go through the whole show with no guns, and then the moment they win—they have guns in their hands, and they immediately put them down… The moment of putting them down is actually one of my favorite moments in the show. That’s America to me. That’s the American Revolution. That’s our America today. It’s not taking up arms; it’s wanting to put them down so that things can be right. I think that our decision to take out the guns today followed into that. I said to the cast, ‘When you put your not-gun gun to the floor today, that should be the whole show.’” – Andy Blankenbuehler, Hamilton choreographer
ladyyoda reblogged
This is beautiful. Rest in peace, Adam West. A beacon of light in the dark knight.
ladyyoda reblogged
‘Batman is an easy target for anger. He can seem cold, uncaring, and always assumes the worst. And he’s so stubborn. He doesn’t listen. He has a knack for looking into your soul and knowing exactly what you are capable of. And then he exploits it.. all while planning a contingency against it. 'Just in case’. Basically he’s a nightmare. But he’s also the guy you want on your side when it all goes sideways. Not just because he has a plan for everything, but because if he’s on your side.. Then you know you’re on the side of right. He’s got an unimpeachable moral code that he won’t betray. Ever. Batman isn’t just the hero Gotham needs.. He’s the whole damn world’s safety net. Without Batman, we don’t stand a chance.’
- Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Three #21(2015)
For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
Happy Star Wars Day!
ladyyoda reblogged
In their many years of dating, Selina has said plenty of things that left a lasting impression on Bruce. Some of those things are:
“You don’t deserve me”
“Let me take care of you just this once”
“You…me…Alfred…our boys…we are a family now”
“Is that pity I see on your face? Don’t you dare feel sorry for what happened to me growing up. Everything that happened to me made me the woman you see today. I’m not one of those weak women, Bruce. Because of what happened I am stronger than I ever was”
“I don’t submit to anyone; especially a man”
“No, Mr. Wayne. I’m not a cheap hooker you can buy with fancy things. If you want me, you are going to have to take me on a date. And it better be a date you put effort into”
“Don’t you think for a second that you own me. You don’t get to tell me what to do”
“Catwoman doesn’t exist to give Batman a boner. She exists because there are people out there who need a hero that knows their pain. I don’t steal from anyone. I steal from those who can stand to lose. Because most of these so-called “rich guys” don’t care about the people suffering in East End. They don’t care about sex trafficking, rape, drug wars, or gangs where I’m from. Batman included”
“You have no idea what kind of trouble you’re getting yourself into being around me”
“I don’t always agree with you. But I do know that you love these boys, Dick included. You can pretend like you don’t, but you two are so much alike until it’s ridiculous. Yeah, I do believe you brought him from one circus to another. However, because of this vigilante life, you gave him a purpose. You gave him hope, love, and a new family. Because of Batman, Robin, Nightwing…he was able to move on from his past. Don’t punish him because you didn’t”