You Might Think I'm Crazy But I'm Serious
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WALKING WHILE BLACK IN NEW YORK Welcome to New York, where New York Police are being required to disrupt and potentially end the lives of black men before they even start; if they don’t end physically, they definitely are ending systematically.
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There Needs To Be More Balance: Kendrick Lamar Asks for Darker-Skinned Female Lead for Video I am so glad that Kendrick Lamar spoke about this.
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Just spot the number of fails you see here.
Jezebel posted this article about sixteen year old Ondria Hardin was featured in this editorial entitled African Queen for some magazine. I don’t even care. It’s disheartening to see black models obviously being passed over for a white model only to be bronzed to death to look black. You mean to tell me that of all of the beautiful black women in the world, none of them, not one would have been right for this spread? Not. One.
Bullshit.
The racism present in the modeling industry is disgusting and I don’t know how many people continue subject themselves to it. It is painfully clear that black woman’s aesthetic (or any WOC, for that matter) is rarely, if ever appreciated and represented in a larger, more worldly context. And I wouldn’t be surprised to find the same experience for MOC as well. I would never. Should I ever have a child, they would never, ever step foot into a casting.
Certainly not living at least.
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The GIF Set does her no justice.
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“By filling out this Self Identification Record, you are helping us to comply with government record keeping, reporting and other legal requirements. This data will be kept in a Confidential File separate from the Application for Employment, and will only be used for periodic government reporting.”
You forgot the part where it said, ‘Oh, and we’re keeping your black ass out of this company. Thanks, but no thanks.’
I think it would be such a better practice if that was saved for the actual face-to-face interview. When applying, my race shouldn’t matter; my credentials should. But of course, this is America, where nothing matters more than the color of your skin, especially when it’s said it doesn’t matter at all.
Oy.
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“…see it’s easy for cats to kill other cats; it’s just the dogs that they got trouble with… if you kick let someone kick you five times, he’s going to kick you five times. If you let him kick you three times. If you let him kick you two times, he’ll kick you two times. If you let him kick you once, he’ll kick you once. But if you break off the motherfucking feet, there will be no more kicking going on kid.” — From The Fugees’ Outro, off of their album The Score -
"A study released in 2006 by Duke University on attitudes on race in Durham, N.C., a city with one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the country, found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos — 78 percent — felt they had the most in common with whites, while 53 percent of them felt they had the least in common with blacks. So it would make sense for those respondents to act with the same assumptions about blacks that they perceive are held by native whites. In fact the Latino respondents, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites. Nearly 60 percent reported feeling that few or almost no blacks were hard-working or could be trusted, while only 10 percent of whites held that view." A Native Cast Society by Isabel Wilkerson for The New York Times. Interesting and non-surprising read to say the least.
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We live in a ___________ society. Hint: It’s dam sure is not a post-racial one.
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“Schools have classes called “women’s studies,” and “African-American literature” because the standard for existence set by white men has yet to be rescinded in this age. “Normal” history is the history of a certain class of white people, from the perspective of men. All the other histories are precisely that: other.” — Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. (via ratsandcandy666)(via anotsosadsong)
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A Recession for White Americans, A Depression for Black and Latino Americans
Essentially, all of the economic gains made by people of color since the Civil Rights Movement have been erased in a few years by the Long Recession. Whites experienced a net wealth loss of 16 percent from 2005 to 2009, while blacks lost about half of their wealth (53 percent) and Latinos lost two-thirds of their wealth.
Media outlets reporting on the Pew study point to housing loss as the primary culprit, since the net worth of blacks and Latinos is heavily reliant on home ownership, while whites are more likely to have retirement accounts and stock.
Rampant–and racist–fraud in the home loan industry was a primary contributor to the collapse, with 61 percent of sub-prime loan holders actually qualifying for prime loans that would have been easier to maintain. Blacks and Latinos were especially targeted for sub-prime loans, a practice called “reverse redlining.” Wells Fargo loan officer-turned-whistle blower Elizabeth Jacobson admitted that her company specifically went after African Americans for sub-prime loans through “wealth building” conferences hosted in black churches.
The employment gap between whites and blacks is also a contributor to the wealth gap. While white American are suffering through the Long Recession with 7.9 percent unemployment, blacks are experiencing Great Depression-like figures of 16.1 percent unemployment. This figure jumps to 31.4 percent for blacks ages 16 to 24, and black Americans have consistently had the higher rate of unemployment compared to white Americans since 2007.
Not surprisingly, the employment gap, too, has racist origins. The Center for American Progress analyzed unemployment data from the last three recessions and found that black unemployment starts earlier, rises faster and lingers longer. Explanations include the concentration of black workers in the stumbling manufacturing sector, the cutting of public sector jobs–and racial discrimination. This last finding is no shock given that employers are more likely to call back a white job applicant with a criminal record than a similarly qualified black man without a record.
The role of racism in poverty is important to keep in mind at a time Washington politicians are manufacturing crises that will slash the entitlement programs that 1 in 6 Americans rely on. It’s ironic that we’re cutting safety nets for the poor just as we’re experiencing the highest poverty rate since 1960, with blacks and Latinos three times as likely to live in poverty. Public policy is supposed to knock down racial and other non-meritorious barriers to pursuing life, liberty, and happiness, not jack them higher.
But white privilege doesn’t exist and racism is long gone, right post-racial America?
yes. reblogging for obvious lack of white privilege.
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“A large part of erasure is women being written out of history. There were so many amazing women hip hop artists – Yo Yo, Monie Love, MC Lyte, Roxane Shante, Queen Latifah, Salt-n-Pepa, just like real people with real message, singing about real things. It definitely had style and flair and sexuality, but there was a lot more to it as well. And at the same time with Public Enemy – there was so much cool and engaged hip hop. It was something that really inspired me and my friends in riot grrls. But women have just been brushed under the rug. […] I think [the move away from politics in music] is backlash. People in power don’t like to feel like they are out of control. In the early 90s there was so much energy, a kind of rebel spirit in all of these things. But mass culture in the end has to control it, defang it, declaw it, and spit it back out as a product. So in the end it’s just a fad. […] So you think you’re political, but it’s just a fad. And suddenly we’re post. Post-feminist. Post-racial. Like anything has really changed. Things have gotten better, but there’s still racism, classism, sexism – women are still ending up in ditches. Dead women are still the opening on TV shows.” — Allison Wolfe, in Race, Riot Grrl, the Black Rock Movement, and Nirvana: The Teen Espirit Revisited Overflow | Racialicious (via riverwaltz)(via riverwaltz)
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"The last African-American valedictorian in McGehee School District was in 1989. Wimberly says the school discourages black students from taking honors and advanced placement classes, "by telling them, among other things, that the work was too hard." HOW THE FUCK DO YOU JUSTIFY THIS SHIT?!
Like, this really sickens me to my core; the fact that this girl had the highest GPA and was not allowed to be the valedictorian as she should have been is a fucking mess.
Although it isn’t exactly the same, I remember an incident my senior year in high school where I was basically told I was incapable of the work that I produced. It was my physics class; I was working on a lab write-up. When I asked him to read over my lab write-up, the first thing he asked me was if I wrote it by myself. I thought that was a weird question to ask; I was like, “Yeah. Who else would have wrote it?” He told me, to my face:
“I don’t think you wrote this.”
I was FURIOUS. I worked hard on that; prior to I was struggling a bit. My word choices were too elevated; the words were too big. The words he referred to, however, were vocabulary relevant to the lab; even when He event went so far as to get the head of the science department to prove his point; while she said it didn’t exactly seem like I wrote it, she told my teacher that you can’t just assume that. They were both white. And when it was all said and done, I was beyond embarrassed. And, if you don’t remember from my post about high school, it was one of the many times I felt completely defeated and worthless as a student.
I just don’t understand how you strip a person of their potential, their ability, their merit. Just because it doesn’t seem right. Because your feeble ass mind cannot grasp the thought of someone black having a good work ethic, excelling and going above and beyond and coming out on top. I can’t understand that.
I probably never will.
