And where is it you want to go? 
I want to be less embarrassed by who I am but not aspire to be someone different.

(via avania)

hyvhuynh:

Die Slowly

He who becomes the slave of habit,
who follows the same routes every day, 
who never changes pace, 
who does not risk and change the color of his clothes, 
who does not speak and does not experience,
dies slowly.

He or she who shuns passion,
who prefers black on white, 
dotting ones “it’s” rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer, 
that turn a yawn into a smile, 
that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,
dies slowly.

He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy, 
who is unhappy at work, 
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty, 
to thus follow a dream, 
those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives, 
die slowly.

He who does not travel, who does not read, 
who does not listen to music, 
who does not find grace in himself, 
she who does not find grace in herself, 
dies slowly.

He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem, 
who does not allow himself to be helped, 
who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops, 
dies slowly.

He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn’t know, he or she who don’t reply when they are asked something they do know,
die slowly.

Let’s try and avoid death in small doses, 
reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.

Only a burning patience will lead
to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

-Pablo Neruda

(Dedicated to Ollie @salsabeela)

(via ji-ah)

incendie:

People are people.

People are neither above nor below other people. They share an equal need for food, water, and shelter and a natural propensity for love and reason. Differences in appearance or personality should not be a major factor in discernment or segregation between individuals. Whatever differences such people exhibit, he or she should be entitled to equal treatment and respect. 

If one is gifted with a pleasant appearance or a certain talent, they should be thankful, not pretentious. He or she is neither better nor more special than others—just lucky.

(via bird-ghosts)

(Source: quotes-ftw, via lived)

(via onherway)

(Source: praisetothebrave, via lived)

ethiopienne:

fuckyeahslampoems:

hhallmarks:

Preach it.

This is why I am pro-choice. This is why I am a feminist. This is what I stand for.

Culturally diversified biracial girl with

a small diamond nose ring and a pretty smile
poses besides the words
“Women Deserve Better”.

and I almost let her non-threatening grin
begin to infiltrate my psyche
until I read the unlikely small print
at the bottom of the ad:
Sponsored by the US Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
and the Knights of Columbus

On a bus
in a city
with a population of 553,000,
4 teenage mothers on the bus with me,
1 Latina woman with 3 children under 3
and no signs of a daddy. 

One sixteen year old black girl
standing in 22-degree weather
with only a sweater
a book bag
and a bassinette,
with an infant that ain’t even four weeks yet
tell me that Yes ….
Women do deserve better.

Women deserve better
than public transportation rhetoric
from the same people who
won’t give that teenage mother
a ride to the next transit.
Won’t let you talk to their kids about safer sex
Have never had to listen as the door SLAMS
behind the man who adamantly says,
“That shit” ain’t his
leaving her to wonder how she’ll raise this kid.

Women deserve better
than the 300 dollars TANF and AFC
will provide that family of three
or the 6 dollar an hour job at KFC
with no benefits for her new baby
or the college degree she may never see
because you can’t have infants at the university

Women deserve better
than lip service paid for by politicians
who have no alternatives to abortion
though I am sure
right this moment one of their seventeen year old daughters
is sitting in a clinic lobby
sobbing quietly and anonymously
praying parents don’t find out
or will be waiting for mom to pick her up because research shows
that out-of-wedlock childbirth doesn’t look good on political polls and
Daddy ain’t having that.

Women deserve better
than backwards governmental policies
that don’t want to pay
for welfare for kids
or health care for kids
or child care for kids
Don’t want to pay living wages to working mothers,
Don’t want to make men who only want to be last night’s lovers
responsible for the semen they lay.

Flat out don’t want to pay for SHIT
but want to control the woman who’s having it.
Acting outraged at abortion.
Well I’m outraged
that they want us to believe
that they believe
that women deserve better.

The Vatican won’t prosecute pedophile priests
But I decide I’m not ready for motherhood
and it’s condemnation for me
These are the same people who won’t support
national condom distribution to prevent teenage pregnancy.
But women deserve better.

Women deserve better
than back-alley surgeries
that leave our wombs barren and empty.
Deserve better
than organizations bearing the name
of land-stealing racist rapists
funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains
with no money to give these women
while balding middle-aged white men
tell us what to do with our bodies
while they wage wars and kill other people’s babies

So maybe women deserve better
than propaganda and lies
to get into office
Propaganda and lies
to get into panties
to get out of court
to get out of paying child support

Get the fuck out of our decisions
and give us back our voice
Women do deserve better
Women deserve choice

Sonya Renee - What Women Deserve

I will never not reblog this.

(via thiscouldbeacity)

yarr-metis:

“Our house was small, and when you grow up with domestic violence in a confined space you learn to gauge, very precisely, the temperature of situations. I knew exactly when the shouting was done and a hand was about to be raised – I also knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn. Curiously, I never felt fear for myself and he never struck me, an odd moral imposition that would not allow him to strike a child. The situation was barely tolerable: I witnessed terrible things, which I knew were wrong, but there was nowhere to go for help. Worse, there were those who condoned the abuse. I heard police or ambulancemen, standing in our house, say, “She must have provoked him,” or, “Mrs Stewart, it takes two to make a fight.” They had no idea. The truth is my mother did nothing to deserve the violence she endured. She did not provoke my father, and even if she had, violence is an unacceptable way of dealing with conflict. Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.”

Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence

(via whatyoucanovercome)

thegoddamazon:

• Lived in a country where the color of skin excludes you from moving up to the upper echelons of your career choice.
• When someone can call you a racial slur and when you react back, you get expelled and they get a minor warning.
• When your teacher purposely skips an entire unit on your continent’s history claiming that it’s not necessary to learn.
• When your friends use racist jokes in an ironic way in an effort to show you how “they aren’t racist”.
• When you have been hired by a group of people to entertain them because of where you are from, and they treat you like animals in a zoo.
• When descendants of your race have had their identities so erased and eradicated that they can’t find their roots on a simple geneology search on Ancestors.com — they have to spend thousands of dollars to reconnect.
• When you are portrayed only one way in the media and therefore, when you do not fit that image, you are deemed either “a credit to your race” or “different”.
• When people can dress up as any anonymous person of your race and call it a fucking costume.
• Flipped through hundreds of fashion magazines and count on one hand the representations of your race.
• When a police officer can burst into a part in your dorm, break into a bathroom while you’re sitting on a toilet, and hold you at gunpoint. (Yes, this happened to me).
• When you are made to believe that your skin color makes you unattractive on a global level, and therefore, you must chemically change it, your eye color, and hair color/texture, in order to feel more accepted in a society that was built on telling members of your race that you are barely a second-class citizen.
• When every time a discussion about race comes up in class, everyone looks to you as a representative a your entire race, simply because you’re the only one in there.
• When a teacher of the race-in-power can accuse you in plagiarism on a handwritten in-class essay simply because someone of your race isn’t expected to have good diction.
• When in order to learn about your continent’s history, you have to take that class separately as an elective, or force your teacher to discuss the unit on it.

Privileged people will demand facts. Statistics. Your stories about oppression? Your experiences? They are not enough to convince privileged people that what you have experienced is real. After all, you are not a white man. Your experiences don’t automatically gain the “normal and natural” status. Your experiences may not be credible at all. They have no reason to believe your stories, because again, as white men, they don’t and can’t share them. Nevermind that all they have is anecdotal evidence, their personal experience to back up their beliefs. They are white. And male. And many other normal, natural things that make their opinions and experiences normal and natural…and yours kind of aberrant and not trust-worthy.—Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics

I’m not going to sit here and let someone tell me that we live in a post-racial anything just because we have a president who is black (and you all only claim he’s black when POC talk about racism and how it’s still alive and well, but he’s biracial when POC try to claim his as black).

I’m not going to sit here and let someone who is so privileged because of their skin color tell me that “not talking about it will eventually make it a nonissue”. You don’t think some of us have tried to function in a society without calling attention to our race, only to realize that because of the scaffolding of racism and white supremacy this country was built on that attention would be called to our race, whether we wanted it or not?

I am part of Manga African Dance—a non-profit organization that works to preserve indigenous African culture through dance, fashion, and education. Do you think, when our group gets hired to perform somewhere that I don’t get hit with racism?

Just this summer, I was in Alabama doing a performance at the Jacksonville Public Library. I actually had a white man sneer in my face when I was teaching about dances of the Disapora and how most dances and traditions done in America can be traced back to West Africa, where the Slave Trade was thickest.

Just this afternoon, I had to perform at the Congressman John Lewis’ Annual Multicultural Festival, and I had black college students come up to me and thank me for pointing out the missing links between Africans and their Black American and Afro-Caribbean/Brazilian descendants.

How many of you can go to Ancestry.Com and do a simple search of people who are related to you all the way back to their country of origin without spending more than a handful of dollars?

Blacks in America have to spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars to trace their ancestry by blood (not name) to see where in Africa they may have come from. They have to spend thousands of dollars to fly back to a continent their ancestors were unwillingly stolen from just to get some sense of connection.

So, when we live in a society where it’s okay to simply erase an entire race’s ancestral history from before slavery, and expect them to be okay with it; when you think just ignoring the misrepresentation of our race and culture in the media—the lampooning and caricaturizing of our very genetic make-up—just because it’s not offensive to you? I don’t care what you have to say. You can’t tell someone what is or isn’t offensive to their own race. When I see white kids getting Blackfaced and throwing on afro wigs and basically dressing up as a Black person as their Halloween costume, do you have any idea how disrespectful that is? How would you feel if someone dressed up as you for Halloween? So no, I won’t ignore racism, prejudice, or any other form of oppression. And when people tell me to? I only have one thing to say:

I haven’t been to your Tumblr in I can’t even remember how long, but I love your writing and your fearlessness for exposing the truth.

serenehelene:

daniellemertina:

thegoddamazon:

Look, I’m going to explain this as clearly as possible.

The exercise was to teach white people/white passing people about the daily racism that POC face by putting them in a position to be discriminated against constantly. This was the point of the “A Class Divided” exercise.

Now, these students were all required to sign waivers saying that they would undergo high emotional stress from the exercise. They signed knowing that they were going into a situation that would stress them out.

As the exercise continues, after barely thirty minutes of being discriminated against, two white women have burst into tears, one of which stormed out and never came back. Elliot goes on to make the point that when people of color are in these situations where they’re fed up…WE DON’T HAVE THE OPTION TO STORM OUT AND NEVER COME BACK. For most of us, leaving could mean the difference between having a job or keeping a job and continuously facing racism/sexism/homophobia. Since the discrimination this exercise is dealing with race, I’m going to focus on that. For most of us, leaving could mean federal prison—I’m in the military, one of the biggest cesspools for all kinds of discrimination in human history. I face sexism and racism everyday, and you know what? After 23 years of facing racism and sexism, you learn to swallow the poison.

Read More

This is the exercise that @thegoddamazon mentioned in the original post, in case anyone is curious.

karnythia:

I know people will claim that labels like White Woman’s Tears are misogynistic or whatever, but there is a phenomenon that is unique to middle class white women in discussions of race, wherein the moment the conversation gets hard they make it all about them, their feelings, and their tears. And it is so Scarlett O’Hara of them to expect Mammy to drop everything and dry the eyes of weepy white women.They will shed these tears & detail their hurts & then look at the faces of the POC around them expectantly. Because of course we are supposed to feel sympathy, empathy, something like kindness and compassion for them.

And in the beginning? We do. We hug it out & think we are talking it out. But after a while…after a while we notice that the conversation is always about their pain. Never about how we’re hurt. We see that our tears go unnoticed or even unshed because there is no safe place for us to cry them. And we get tired of drying the eyes of white women who claim to care & be so hurt & so sorry, but who never do anything about the pain that they are inflicting on us. So we stop rushing to dry their eyes, and our faces go flat, and we refuse to play the same games anymore. But they don’t stop crying.

No, they cry harder and more often. They are shocked & appalled when they discover Mammy isn’t real & the black woman they’re crying to, doesn’t give a fuck about their tears. And then the conversation is all about how mean we are to them. Never mind the part where they just disrupted an entire conversation (or series of conversations) to center it on their needs because they couldn’t do the work of confronting reality. We’re supposed to make their feelings a priority, and they can’t even see how racist that expectation is, much less how harmful their behavior is to everyone around them. So, they get mad or defensive, and they play the martyr. Newsflash, you’re not a victim. You’re an asshole & your willingness to wield tears as a weapon is just a symptom of the problem.

To add on to that, and certainly not to derail: Is there such a thing as “Asian Woman’s Tears”? I’ve noticed that Asian Americans seem as if we don’t have much say in the dialogue surrounding racism in the US, which is partly because of how we’re supposed to be the model minority and keep quiet while working hard. This is addressed in Pat K. Chew’s article, titled “Asian Americans: The ‘Reticent’ Minority and Their Paradoxes,” which I reblogged here. I think it’s both interesting and necessary to discuss whether “Asian Woman’s Tears” exists, and if it does or doesn’t, the reasons behind it.

(via of-praxis)

illicit-priestly-activities:

pro-choiceorfuckoff:

The girl had no legal access to abortion in Pennsylvania, where her parents must consent.  This is the direct consequence of anti-choice zealots: taking away what dignity, respect, and alternatives left were left to a 13 year old who is being controlled, manipulated, and raped by someone more than twice her age.  Way to go “pro-lifers”, what an awesome accomplishment: empowering rapists like Michael Lisk over 13 year old girls, leading her to desperately jab herself with a pencil.

What happens when safe abortions are illegal.

“this girl needed a safety net, and she did not have one.”

She did not have one.

This is what anti-choicers are pushing for. This is what happens when people are desperate, and when the making of their own choices are criminalized. This was someone who was already likely felling like she was unable to talk to the people that were supposed to be looking after her, being a rape victim and all the social stigma and baggage that can come with that. And this scared fucking little kid had the option to birth another kid and deal with the shame that would undeniably get heaped on her for the rest of her life, or try what she did in a last ditch effort to hold on to what little semblance of a normal life she could. Take a long hard fucking look “pro-lifers”. This is exactly what happens when the policies you’re pushing for are put in place - people fucking die. End.

(Source: pro-abortionorfuckoff, via of-praxis)

of-praxis:

Asian Americans are a “reticent” minority group.  Compared to the other major ethnic groups in this country, for instance, Asian Americans are less politically organized and vocal.  Their  reticence, combined with other cultural factors, has made it difficult for all Americans—whites, Asian Americans and other minority groups—to understand who Asian Americans are.

 Instead, Americans have pieced together images of Asian Americans as a successfully assimilated minority group which has fulfilled the Asian immigrant’s dream of the “Golden Mountains.”  While retaining vestiges of their cultural identity and ancestry, they are considered economically and socially assimilated. Although there may have been isolated incidents of discrimination in the past, society believes that Asian Americans today generally do not experience discrimination.  If there is a flaw in this perceived success story, it is Americans’ difficult-to-articulate but uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Asian Americans are becoming too successful.

This simple image of Asian Americans is replete with “paradoxes”—the reality is much more complicated and much less positive. As Part I of this Article reveals, the belief that Asian Americans have suffered discrimination only in past isolated instances and do not currently experience discrimination is contradicted by the facts. Society’s image of the model minority that has achieved economic success and social equality is inconsistent with the plight of many Asian Americans and contrary to other images and stereotyping of Asian Americans. Broad assumptions that Asian Americans are well-integrated into all the professions is an overgeneralization.

via Pat K Chew, Asian Americans: The “Reticent” Minority and their Paradoxes

(Source: scholarship.law.wm.edu)

(via lived)