archived blog

Hi I am archiving this blog. Find me @silent-hills !

— Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin; ‘Dusk in the Park’ tr. by Shirley Kumove (via decreation)

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects

ahsgdjhsagladgksadghsadgjsadgkhasdkghsag 

yes

I have no one to impress, the trees have already made their decisions about me. Who else is there to please?

🌾support black people in cottagecore🌾

Aweng Ade-Chuol makeup and styling by Raoúl Alejandre.

Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing. Read it again.

there's two types of conspiracy theories in american culture:

damn bitch you live laugh love like this?

gabbeh no 1 & 2

do not repost or reuse my art

it would take 2.3 million years for Jeff Bezos to earn his $183.3b net worth working 24 hours a day at New Mexico’s $9/hr minimum wage.

That’s 11.5 times longer than the human race has existed.

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.

I don’t usually engage with posts like this (for a variety of reasons) and I almost didn’t engage with this one, but this actually articulates something 1, I didn’t know and 2, couldn’t articulate.  

This is essentially why I fucking hate the “cultural appropriation” narrative.  Culture only survives and thrives when it’s shared, and being called racist for sharing in someone else’s culture (while also being expected to share my own) is stupid, unhelpful, and wrong.  

I didn’t actually know that originally this whole subject was about racist double standards.  That explains a lot.

I get so frustrated by the response (white) people have had to this post and wonder if it’s just me who failed to articulate something or y’all just reading into the wrong throng but,

the idea that culture only survives if it’s shared with outsiders is a lie. Culture survives and thrives within communities when those communities aren’t constantly faced with colonization and forced into assimilation. The thing about cultural sharing is that you have to be invited to join in or else it’s not sharing, it’s stealing and misappropriation.

Cultural sharing looks like native Americans letting outsiders come to their celebrations and allowing you to enjoy an share in their traditions. You must then leave those traditions when you leave that space. You shouldnt start wearing native garb and hosting your own pow wows. Buy some memorabilia, put it on your mantel, and then leave it alone.

Cultural sharing looks like black People inviting you to a step show. You share in our enjoyment and then you leave. You leave those traditions when you leave that space. You don’t go home and try to teach your own sorority a step or a stroll in some new box braids.

These things belong to us. We don’t want and shouldn’t have them taken from us. So I’m not at all saying that white people shouldnt be criticized for cultural appropriation. I just want to shift our focus back to solution oriented discussion

“the idea that culture only survives if it’s shared with outsiders is a lie. Culture survives and thrives within communities when those communities aren’t constantly faced with colonization and forced into assimilation. The thing about cultural sharing is that you have to be invited to join in or else it’s not sharing, it’s stealing and misappropriation.”

THIS CANNOT BE STRESSED ENOUGH

this entire year feeIs Iike a haIIucination

Housing Is A Human Right, Martha Rosler Times Square, New York, 1989