#girlhelp

the past is dead the future died before it could be born and me i feel also not so good

HEADS UP TAPES OF GOSPEL OF THE CLAW WILL BE AVAILABLE 4/26, ONLY 35 COPIES

“And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!

In the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America and especially before Black audiences the response often is: "Why hasn't anyone told us about this before? Why hasn't anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn't anyone told us this before?"

Just as we say "never again" with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say "never again" with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Boycott G4S! Support BDS!

Palestine will be free!”

—“Ferguson Reminds Us of the Importance of a Global Context” (2014, PDF), Angela Davis interviewed by Frank Barat.

CHAPPELL ROAN | makeup by @donni.davy

"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice."

Edward W. Said, Orientalism.

The thing I’ve realized about self deprecation recently is that if someone is stuck in a hole and you want to help them get out it’s generally a bad idea to throw rocks at them and for years I was both the person stuck in the hole and one of the people throwing rocks

Like you feel bad about yourself? Okay. How is insulting yourself repeatedly helping with that exactly? Find a ladder.

i do think there is a degree to which certain kinds of Instagram activists have convinced themselves that traumatising themselves in solidarity is a useful form of activism. "I'm having nightmares and crying so much I want to be sick because of all these videos of dying children but I can't look away while people are getting hurt" I mean don't you think you'd be able to help more if you weren't having nightmares and crying all the time?? don't you think this is a one-way trip to burnout? don't you think maybe increasing the amount of trauma going around is counterproductive? I dunno bro there's something to be said for bearing witness but there comes a point where you gotta look hard at yourself and go "am I helping, or am I just making myself suffer so I don't feel guilty for not suffering while somebody else is experiencing bad shit"

I say "there is no such thing as a thought crime" a lot on my blog. Well, the other side of the coin is there is also no such thing as thought heroics, thought charity or thought activism.

I remember an interview with Rachel Maddow where someone asked her if she felt doing her TV show was activism, and she said absolutely not. She had worked as an activist focused on getting better conditions and treatment for HIV positive people in prison earlier in her career and was very clear on the fact that taking in information, aggregating it, and sharing it with others is NOT activism.

When asked for an example of what she did consider to be activism, she talked about how they were once trying to improve the situation for people with HIV in a specific prison, so they were trying to figure out how to persuade the guy running the prison to meet with them. So they found out where his wife went to church, and who the pastor was, and then they figured out where he golfed, and that there was another member of that country club who was a lawyer that one of them had gone to law school with, so they asked the lawyer to golf with the pastor and talk him into doing a sermon on treating all people with dignity, with an emphasis on treating people with HIV fairly, and to talk about the issues at the prison with the wife of the guy who ran the prison, and they ended up getting that meeting and convincing the guy to take the necessary steps to improve conditions for people with HIV in his prison.

She emphasized that they had a concrete goal, and they developed a strategy made up of concrete steps that they could take and had a shot of working, and then took those concrete steps to reach it. That’s activism. Scrolling online is not and never will be activism.

Conflating taking in information online from unvetted sources with righteous activism and focusing on that instead of taking concrete steps to improve the world is probably a pretty good recipe for ending up as a fringe conspiracy theorist who is scared of 5G and chemtrails.

turn up that fucking hurdy gurdy

as a tme trans person there's really nothing you can say, no words of solidarity or anger shown over transmisogyny, that will stop some of these guys from still occasionally coming to you with this chauvinist brotalk conspiratorial tone, constantly offering you the opportunity to "hold people accountable" or to take an exciting new venture in masculine gender affirmation by exercising your very own right to gendered violence enacted against the most vulnerable women in your community. there's very few better examples of the way that your positionality to transmisogyny as a tme person always always always privileges you over transfems than the fact that in the perceived absence of transfems, other tme people will still talk to you about them the way cis men trade misogynistic quips in a locker room. we have a sub-bare-minimum obligation to recognize that positionality, but more importantly to deny these people the cordiality that they expect, to ignore vague implications that we might "also be implicated" in not condemning (we aren't actually implicated or shitcanned the way women are by these guys, we never are, they'll just block you and any collateral heat you catch as a tme person will fade within days), to stick up for women in our community whether or not we know them, and to make transmisogynists (even those with "terfs DNI!!!" in bio) feel as unwelcome in our spaces as possible

season one, episode one deadloch

google search how to stop experiencing anticipatory grief when this world has taken so much from me already

and is your shame helpful? is it inspiring goodness and change? or is it keeping you frozen in time unable to move on and be everything you have expanded to be?

What I need for White Americans (ppl in general really, but I'm talking to the U.S.) to understand about Americans of Color is that You don't know Us, but We know YOU.

We've spent generations upon generations of our entire lives learning YOUR social norms, forced to assimilate to YOUR idea of society. We live and learn entirely separate cultures, but we also learn from birth what it means to have to cater to Whiteness in America. It's why I can name so many famous movies with white casts, but most white people didn't even know where "Bye Felicia" came from. It's why I was raised to professionally Code Switch from childhood, but grown white people struggle to even grasp the basics of the grammar of AAVE. It's why people who speak different languages think they have to give up their own mother tongue just to function in this country.

It's why you all are so uncomfortable with the idea of people of color questioning and rejecting what seems "normal" to you- and to be honest, I actually think older white generations are better at admitting this than younger ones. It's because what you know as normal is usually not "normal"- it's White. Whiteness is just as loud as any other presentation of race in this country, you just don't see it that way because everyone else has been forced to maintain your comfort. The entire system is built around it, and you don't even know it.

It's why it frustrates white Americans of some marginalization- queer, disabled, neurodivergent- because you do not have access to the "norm" as it is shown to you. But that frustration- literally everyone of color (who shares those identities btw) lives under that understanding.

Idk, I didn't really have a direction. I just think it's wild how so many conversations require this... Constant Verbal Leveling of the Playing Field simply because Whiteness blinds white people to what things ACTUALLY look like out here.

Yes, it's okay for white people to reblog. You are the target audience to consider these things.