t.s. fixe

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The unfounded fear that young children will somehow become “impure” if they learn about a dirty subject like sex is deeply rooted in American culture. Our society assumes that human sexuality is dark, dangerous, and shameful — something we need to protect teens from, rather than teach them about. Teens consistently learn that it’s not okay to talk about sex because it’s supposed to be totally off-limits to them, constrained to the bounds of a traditional marriage. But this attitude has led to disastrous consequences: damaging women and LGBT Americans’ sense of sexual self-worth, fueling the STD epidemic, and creating a moral environment where rape culture has flourished.

— “Kindergartners Shouldn’t Be Taught Sex Ed” — And Other Myths Endangering America’s Youth

4,060 notes (7:22)

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Students who considered themselves socialists were not so much interested in the poor as they were desirous of leading the poor, of being their guides and saviors. It was just this paternalism toward the poor that the vision of solidarity I had learned in religious settings was meant to challenge. From a spiritual perspective, the poor were there to guide and lead the rest of us by example if not by outright action and testimony. As a student I read Marx, Gramsci, and a host of other male thinkers on the subject of class. These works provided theoretical paradigms but rarely offered tools for confronting the complexity of class in daily life. […] [W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it.

— bell hooks, where we stand: Class Matters

961 notes (6:27)

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You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.

—

- Junot Diaz (via Tatiana Richards)

oh my goodness this is beautifully relevant. humongously sad and inspiring at the same time, too

(via fuatino)

13,978 notes (2:20)

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[…] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men.

—

Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches”

Truth. A flawed understanding and application of ‘honor’ can be highly misogynistic against women who have been abused during war(s). (via mehreenkasana)

also why “what if it happened to YOUR sister?” is bullshit because it re-focuses the attention on men and their feelings and their pain.

(via warcrimenancydrew)

1,193 notes (12:53)

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I am the determined foe of the capitalist system, which denies the workers the rights of human beings. I consider it fundamentally wrong, radically unjust and cruel. It inflicts purposeless misery upon millions of my fellow men and women. It must, therefore, be changed, it must be destroyed, and a better, saner, kinder social order established. Competition must give place to cooperation. ‘Each for all’ is a far more stimulating and effective doctrine than ‘each for himself.’… Oh, no, it is not human nature that we have to change. Our task is not so difficult as that. All that is necessary to make this world a more comfortable abode for man is to abolish the capitalist system.

— Helen Keller, 1913

906 notes (7:30)

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Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

—

Arundhati Roy, War Talk (h/t Eman)

This is everything.
This is everything this is everything this is everything we mean when we say friendship is political and storytelling and listening and teaching are political. Reclaiming space little by little through small acts of creativity and love in order to spark resistance

(via gole-yas)

1,022 notes (9:00)

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snubbs:

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages” -Angela Y. Davis

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bakerstreetbabes:

tiger-moran:

From The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade by M. J. Trow

Book series wherein Lestrade is a highly competent policeman and Holmes is a raving lunatic. Many good times ensue.

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Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You’re a perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that. Unconditional self acceptance is the core of a peaceful mind.

— St. Francis de Sales (1567–1622), Patron Saint of Journalists

680 notes (12:00)

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The “honor crime” has a history in the UN. It emerged as a potent cultural-legal category in the 1990s to become a popular international cause for feminists and progressive men. After all, who could be “for” familial violence? But violence against women is never as simple as the seductive category of the honor crime would have us believe. Violence is dense and multifaceted. It is economic, political, military, and sexual. Most of all, violence against women in the name of honor has a history. The category of the honor crime highlights violence in certain contexts while obscuring it in others. It locates the cause in barbaric cultures and enduring tradition, out of time but in particular places. The history of the laws that enable this category and the fact that they are derived from the Napoleonic Code is once again forgotten in lieu of an easier answer: traditions and cultures of violence.

— Lila Abu-Lughod and Maya Mikdashi on “Tradition and the Anti-Politics Machine”

149 notes (3:00)

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All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved — that “femaleness” is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good enough to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside.

— bell hooks in Communion: Female Search for Love

11,786 notes (3:04)

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While transphobia certainly exists in both subtle and overt ways, this lack of debate has contributed to an assumption that the political elements that are at the heart of transphobia do not affect men and women of color who are not trans-identified and who may even be transphobic. It seems that some transgender proponents assume that it is only the trans body that is under scrutiny or fails to live up to appropriate (read white) norms of gender and sexuality. It is true that there is a particular fixation to determine the genitalia of people whose gender expression is not easily “readable” and that such a fixation is bound to a desire to sexually interrogate and physically and socially discipline the trans body. Yet this fixation with genitalia and with the sexual “nature” of the body and the violence associated with such preoccupations are not limited to trans bodies. They affect anyone whose body is not white, regardless of the person’s gender, sexuality, or politics regarding either. While many of us, as women of color who identify as women, will be identified by the state and individuals as women, we need to confront the fact that the non-white body is never fully free from serving as gendered and sexualized spectacle. That is, all of our bodies are subject to scrutiny, exotification, appraisal, intrusion, and violence. The same goes for men of color who identify as men, regardless of how much they want to ignore how vulnerable they are to gendered and sexualized violence perpetrated by men and women. In other words, simply being non-white in the world means that our bodies are subject to a violent white gaze (which non-whites may adopt) that determines how our bodies are ranked, interacted with, taken in, or punished.

The possibility of transgender politics, then, is not simply to reaffirm the “real” gender existing within the body. Such a reaffirmation neglects the reality that all non-white bodies, to varying degrees, are struggling to define what makes our bodies and our internal sense of self “real” in a world in which whiteness serves as the ultimate standard for gender and sexual normalcy and blackness as deviance. This struggle often leads to a variety of problematic behaviors among non-whites, including attempts to secure physical whiteness (and move away from being associated with physical blackness) through bodily alteration, appeals to patriarchy, masculinity, and homophobia in an effort to “reform” or “rehabilitate” bodies from being perceived as deviant, or, in the case of some trans people, the use of tropes of blackness to show they are “fucking with gender” (and in turn, reaffirming the idea of blackness as deviance). Rather the possibility of transgender politics lies in its potential critique of bodily fixation, gender divisions, heterosexuality, and modernist aspirations that informs our lived experiences with and activist challenges to white supremacy and anti-blackness. Such an approach would serve a less solipsistic agenda and rather work to push vital and urgent conversations about racialized gender and sexual violence that happens to, and between non-whites, trans and non-trans.

—

The trouble with transgender politics | Bandung 1955

So. This was posted in 2008. And I know Riley has made this point several times. And, hey, looks like in almost 5 years the white trans community *still* isn’t listening, by and large. to poc.

also nicely wrapped up in super academicy jargon. for those people who require their truth dressed up like this.

(via biyuti)

ha i was totally gonna post this yesterday before my browser crashed and i forgot about it. but no, seriously, read it.

(via so-treu)

234 notes (1:30)

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Prison relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

—

Angela Davis

Some statistics/facts concerning the prison industrial complex:

More than two million people out of a world total of nine million now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. In the late 1960s there were close to 200,000 people in prison in the United States.
The U.S. population in general is less than 5% of the world’s total, whereas more than 20% of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.
In 2002, there were 157,979 people incarcerated in the state of California alone, including approximately 20,000 people whom the state holds for immigration violations.
In 1990, a study of U.S. prison populations was published which concluded that 1 in 4 black men between the ages of 21-29 were in prison and jail and on parole or probation. Five years later, a second study revealed that this percentage had soared to almost 1 in 3. More than 1 in 10 Latino men of the same age were in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. The second study also revealed that the group experiencing the greatest increase was black women, whose imprisonment increased by 78%.

(via eastafrodite)

3,818 notes (4:31)

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snubbs:

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages” -Angela Y. Davis

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