chinese hanfu by 逸仚居传统服饰

mei yue by see min ng

hey not to be a killjoy but can y’all spread the carrd about what’s going on in Poland

obvious warning for homophobia, transphobia, etc. in the link above.

I was born there. I have countless of LGBT friends there, and the fact that this is happening in the year 2020 is inhumane and terrifying. 

If you’re Polish, vote in the upcoming election. If you’re not polish, please spread the carrd around.

I am not an ideology. Nie jestem ideologią. 

Meet Wiktor, Michał, Dominik, Milo and Kacper.

Wiktor was almost 15 years old when he threw himself under the train. He was transgender.

Michał was 29 years old when he hanged himself on a tree. He was working as a model. He was gay.

Dominik was 14 years old when he hanged himself on his shoelaces. He was gay.

Milo was 23 years old when she jumped off a bridge. She was an activist. She was transgender.

Kacper was 14 years old when he hanged himself in his house. He wasn’t even sure if he was gay yet.

All of them were bullied in school. Some of them were assaulted, insulted, attacked on street. Some of them were denied psychological help they needed. Some of them were denied medical treatment.

All of them died because of institutional and personal homo- and transphobia here in Poland.

I will think about those five people - one of them I knew in person. I will think about them when I go vote today. And when I vote, I will think about countless children who might lose their lives in the future because of politicians who find themselves a new public enemy - “LGBT ideology”.

None of them was “an ideology”.

We are not an ideology, I am not an ideology either. Nie jestem ideologią.

from me as a polish actvist i want to say more about situation in Poland because i feel that more people should know.

from begging:

(12.06.2020) in tv program one of the guest member of Sejm Jacek Żalek from „Agreement” party which allied with the ruling party of Poland said that „[LGBT+ people] are not people, this is an ideology” Katarzyna Kolenda- Zaleska, the journalist hosting the tv program decided to throw him out from her program.

(13.06.2020) Andrzej Duda the president of Poland gave a speech to his electorate in which he compare „LGBT ideology” to neobolshevism” and once again said „this is an ideology”

people went mad. rightly

(15.06.2020) this is Helena Biedroń. she is a mother to Robert Biedroń (the first openly gay member of the Sejm, leader of the „Spring” party, one of the three leaders of The Left, candidate to President, MEP) she read the letter from polish lgbt people parents to president. one of the quotes from her moving speech:

„I came here from afar, but i have something important to say to you Mr. [President]. I can’t stay quiet when my child is hurt.”

(bless this lady she deserved the world)

(17.06.2020) Andrzej Duda invited Helena and Robert Biedroń and Bart Staszewski (polish LGBT activist) to a meeting. only Bart Staszewski showing up in President Palace. after the meeting he wrote this on his twitter account:

Helena and Robert Biedroń didn’t show up because they claim that president did not want to debate with them but he invited them so he could had a photo with them to manipulate that he atleast tried.

this is the end of mine post but this shit is still on. and you know what? i feel threatened. as a Pole, as a activist, as a LGBT+ person, as a human.

one last word from me. VOTE

[if you see mistakes in mine text then please inform me about this, i will editing in the loop]

I’d like to add that we lost the presidential elections, in case the international readers of this post didn’t know it yet. It will most likely lead to the implementation of the so called “Family Card” which will, among other things listed in the carrd itself, prohibit “spreading lgbt propaganda in public institutions” which will surelyfurther repress lgbt people and activists. Małgorzata Szutowicz was accused of “active participation in events taking place on 27th of june 2020 in Warsaw’s Wilcza street” which means: she allegedly took part in destroying cars driving in our capital, which are covered with homophobic lies (“homosexuals are 20 times more likely to be pedophiles, 91% of children rised by lesbians are molested” etc.) and people in them yelling similar propaganda with megaphones. She also allegedly pushed a man who was recording the whole situation injuring his wrist and back. The homophobic cars are technically illegal in poland since october 2019 based on a decision of the court (Sąd Okręgowy w Gdańsku), however nobody actually does anything about them and the police ignores the reports of them driving around our cities (so much for “we’re all equal in the eyes of law lmao”), including Warsaw, and accusations of slander from lgbt activists towards the people responsible for the propaganda campaign have been largely ignored. It’s a very hard time for the polish lgbt community and we’d appreciate spreading information about what’s going on in our country.

And to my polish LGBT friends- Grupa Stonewall offers free psychological support for LGBT people affected by the current situation.

Yo Biden just announced an infrastructure devolopment/clean energy/environmental justice plan and it's honesty pretty fucking amazing and much more ambitious than I ever would have expected from him, goddamn. He's trying to Eisenhower/New Deal our way out of the economic collapse.

Some notable points addressed by this plan:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-14/biden-to-call-for-2-trillion-in-clean-energy-spending

💖🌹

I just want them to be happy 

hello, please sign and spread this petition to save the usps. it is a crucial government service and its collapse would mean an incredible increase in the amount it costs to send mail, aa well as cutting off thousands of more remote routes that private companies like ups and fedex do not deliver to. this is an immense injustice not only for the common person but for small artists who rely on affordable shipping to run their small businesses and would be devstating for many of them.

Please sign THIS PETITION specifically, because it is a white house affiliated petition that REQUIRES a response if it hits 100k in 30 days. right now it has less than 10% of what it needs after 2 days of being active.

PLEASE ALSO BE SURE TO CONFIRM YOUR SIGNATURE IN THE EMAIL CONFIRMATION SENT AFTER YOU SIGN!!

Please signal boost and sign!!!!!

A I U

"Hope is a waking dream"

- Aristotle

here is a document of antiracist resources for white people that is not too overwhelming and is organized by where you are in your journey of becoming antiracist

!!!IMPORTANT FOR BLACK US VOTERS!!!

I saw this on Facebook and went to check my registration status, sure it was fine because I voted recently, but I put in the info and it said I’m not registered

PLEASE, especially if you’re a Black voter, check your registration status at vote.org

Know your status

Does your last name sound anything like Lopez, Martinez, or Rodriguez? Mine does. When I saw this post I checked my voter registration status online with my state. Despite registering just three months ago, I was no longer registered to vote, and I did not receive my ballot. If you live in a mail-in voting state and you didn’t get your ballot, contact your county election official/county clerk for a replacement.

Make sure you check with your state’s voting site as well. I just had the shit scared out of me because that website said I was registered, but when I checked my state’s site (and made sure I had the right county selected) it said I was registered.

It’s worth checking your state’s site every few months anyway (especially when any election is coming up).

Texas is definitely purging voters. They’re also making it harder to re-register if they purged you. I hate that this is true, but POC will need to check and check frequently to stay registered in Texas.

College students, too. In the 2014 election, I had to vote in San Marcos, and I can’t tell you how many Texas State students were turned away because they didn’t cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s on getting their registration transferred and current.

i use a site called TurboVote run by a nonprofit that sends me reminders based on where im registered to vote before every election. it sends me an email to remind me to check my registration, to apply for absentee ballots, etc. it’s helpful so that you can check if you’ve been purged regularly (and participate in the local races that never get any publicity); https://turbovote.org/

chinese fashion by 芳华记汉服文化工作室

Read this:

“I want to tell a story about an invisible elephant.

Once upon a time, when I was in graduate school at UCSB, the department of religious studies held a symposium on diasporic religious communities in the United States. Our working definition for religious diaspora that day was, “religious groups from elsewhere now residing as large, cohesive communities in the US.” It was a round table symposium, so any current scholar at the UC who wanted to speak could have a seat at the table. A hunch based on hundreds of years of solid evidence compelled me to show up, in my Badass Academic Indigenous Warrior Auntie finery.

There were around 15-20 scholars at the table, and the audience was maybe fifty people. There was one Black scholar at the table, and two Latinx scholars, one of whom was one of my dissertation advisors. The other was a visiting scholar from Florida, who spoke about the diasporic Santería community in Miami. But everyone else at the table were white scholars, all progressively liberal in their politics, many of whom were my friends. Since there was no pre-written agenda, I listened until everyone else had presented. I learned a tremendous amount about the Jewish diaspora in the US, and about the Yoruba/Orisha/Voudou, Tibetan Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu communities, and even about a small enclave of Zoroastrians.

As they went on, I realized my hunch had been correct, and I listened to them ignore the elephant, invisible and silent, at that table.

So I decided to help her speak the hell up. “Hello, my name is Julie Cordero. I’m working on my PhD in Ethnobotany, Native American Religious Traditions, and history of global medical traditions. I’d like to talk about the European Catholic and Protestant Christian religious diaspora in the United States, as these are the traditions that have had by far the greatest impact on both the converted and non-converted indigenous inhabitants of this land.”

Total silence. And then several “hot damns” from students and colleagues in the audience. I looked around the table at all the confused white faces. My Latinx advisor slapped his hand on the table and said, “Right!!?? Let’s talk about that, colleagues.”

The Black scholar, who was sitting next to me, started softly laughing. As I went on, detailing the myriad denominations of this European Christian Diaspora, including the Catholic diocese in which I’d been raised and educated, and the brutal and genocidal Catholic and Protestant boarding schools that had horribly traumatized generations of First Nations children, and especially as I touched on how Christians had twisted the message of Christ to try and force people stolen from Africa to accept that their biblically-ordained role was to serve the White Race, her laughs grew more and more bitter.

The Religious Studies department chair, who’d given a brilliant talk on the interplay between Jewish and Muslim communities in Michigan, stopped me at one point, and said, “Julie, I see the point you are so eloquently making, but you’re discussing American religions, not religious diasporic communities.” I referred to the definition of diaspora we had discussed at the start of the discussion, and then said, “No, Clark. If I were here to discuss religions that were not from elsewhere, I’d be discussing the Choctaw Green Corn ceremony, the Karuk Brush Dance, the Big Head ceremonial complex in Northern California, the Lakota Sun Dance, or the Chumash and Tongva Chingichnich ritual complex.”

It got a bit heated for a few moments, as several scholars-without-a-damn-clue tried to argue that we were here to discuss CURRENT religious traditions, not ancient.

Well. I’ll let you use your imagination as to the response from the POC present, which was vigorously backed by the three young First Nations students who were present in the audience (all of whom practice their CURRENT ceremonial traditions). It got the kind of ugly that only happens with people whose self-perception is that they, as liberal scholars of world cultures with lots of POC friends and colleagues, couldn’t possibly be racist.

Our Black colleague stood and left without a word. I very nearly did. But I stayed because of my Auntie role to the Native students in the audience.

I looked around at that circle of hostile faces, and waited for one single white scholar to see how unbelievably racist was this discursive erasure of entire peoples - including my people, on whose homeland UCSB is situated.

Finally, a friend spoke up. “If we are going to adhere to the definition of diaspora outlined here, she is technically correct.”

And then my dear friend, a white scholar of Buddhism: “In Buddhist tradition, the Second Form of Ignorance is the superimposition of that which is false over that which is true. In this case, all of us white scholars are assuming that every people but white Americans are ‘other,’ and that we have no culture, when the underlying fact is that our culture is so dominant that we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking it’s the neutral state of human culture against which all others are foreign. Even the Black people our ancestors abducted and enslaved we treat as somehow more foreign than ourselves. And, most absurdly, the peoples who are indigenous to this land are told that we belong here more than they do.”

People stared at their hands and doodled. The audience was dead quiet.

And you know what happened then? The elephant was no longer invisible, and my colleagues and I were able to have a conversation based on the truths about colonialism and diaspora. We were THEN able to name and discuss the distinctions between colonial settlements and immigrant settlements, and how colonial religious projects have sought to overtake, control, and own land, people, and resources, while immigrant and especially refugee diasporic communities simply seek a home free from persecution.

As we continue this national discussion, it is absolutely key to never, ever let that elephant be invisible or silent. You are on Native Land. Black descendants of human beings abducted from their African homelands are not immigrants. European cultures are just human cultures, among many. And the assignation of moral, cultural, racial superiority of European world views over all non-Euro human cultures is a profound delusion, one that continues to threaten and exterminate all people who oppose it, and even nature itself.

I hope that this story has comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.”

- Julie Cordero-Lamb, herbalist & ethnobotanist from the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation

https://instagram.com/kimmoondog?igshid=nn0acdopwyma

did the war change you

[[This is Isaiah Hine’s high school presentation on white fragility. You’re not going to get a simpler explanation, in my opinion, so if you’re white you should really read this. Below are Isaiah’s notes on each slide.]]

—

What is White Fragility?

Robin DiAngelo is a professor at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy.

I’m sure you’ve all seen these ‘defensive moves’ in action before. “I didn’t mean anything by it” “I wasn’t trying to be offensive” “I have a black friend” “Not all white people”

People are often more worried about being called a racist than actually doing something racist. In America white people often don’t even have to consider race. They often think of themselves as “raceless” white is conditioned to be the norm and everyone else is considered “raced” or “colored”. White fragility allows white people to govern when and how race is discussed. White people expect to be educated on racism, and in a nice way.

—

Why Is It A Bad Thing?

White people never learn as a result and are allowed to continue saying and doing racist things. White people prefer to hear these things from other white people but because other white people don’t know enough about racism, they cycle continues. When people of color do things like the BLACKLIVESMATTER movement, many white peoples responses were “all lives matter” this is white fragility. Proclaiming that black lives matter does not inherently mean that other lives don’t. This statement is made because society continually shows us that black lives don’t matter in america and these are the lives that need the affirming. We already know that white lives matter, it doesn’t need to be stated. White people are very used to being the center of things and when they aren’t it makes them uncomfortable.

—

Why Does This Happen?

Most people don’t fully grasp the idea of systemic racism and that we live in a racist society that perpetuates racist ideas. We are socialized into white supremacy.