This

gotta be the equivalent to this

digital image, 2014

BAIL FUNDS FOR PROTESTERS

ATLANTA

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HOUSTON

BROOKLYN

please reblog if you have links for bail funds in other cities or other resources!

A night America should never forget. Our people are hurting, they have been for hundreds of years, and yet we continue to value property over lives. Minneapolis said with a clear voice last night that enough is enough. George Floyd is dead, you can rebuild stores and replace merchandise, but you cannot bring back a life. Martin Luther King Jr. said that a riot is the language of the unheard, well are you listening now America? Why does fire and pepper spray get your attention but innocent black people slaughtered by police get nothing more than a pause and then return to normal? We can't return to normal because normal means continuing to terrorize communities of colour and that is unacceptable. No justice, no peace should be common sense so let's not act shocked by these pictures, instead let's see the pain being expressed and do something about it.

married..all of them

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

Rihanna Says Tell Your Friends Of Other Races To “Pull Up” For Black Issues

No guys, I need to stop and talk about something in this movie and how fucking revolutionary it was; something that I haven’t seen in a movie before or since.

This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.

Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.

We need a million more movies like this to counter the metric shit ton of movies that directly counter this message.

 #sometimes the family you start with isn’t a good one #but you can find your own #family is not absolute #blood is not absolute

not to mention, Miss Honey is an abuse survivor herself (and in the book, she’s only 23 years old)

they both got out. they both became each other’s happy ending.

I’m living this life with my god daughter 😳

Tshepo Majoro.

Keep going!

Also, click the image! It’s transparent!

LOUDER

Residential schools, Indian schools, Stolen generations, Lost children of Francoism, Germanization, q.v.

[image description: a tweet by @jessewente that says, “colonial states separate children from parents because they know it works. it destroys and traumatizes for generations. it’s an attack on the future as well as the present. it’s not a partisan issue, it’s a colonial one.” end id]

residue.

i give myself five days to forget you. on the first day i rust. on the second i wilt. on the third day i sit with friends but i think about your tongue. i clean my room on the fourth day. i clean my body on the fourth day. i try to replace your scent on the fourth day.  the fifth day, i adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate. a wedding singer dressed in borrowed gold. the midas of cheap metal. tinsel in the middle of summer. crevice glitter, two days after the party. i glow the way unwanted things do, a neon sign that reads; come, i still taste like someone else’s mouth.

19-year-old Prince photographed by Robert Whitman, 1977.