I love that last GIF of Ru because her face is like, “Heffa, I could have you sweeping my patio in about five minutes for trying to be cute… just try me, sweetness.”
MHM. Phi Phi, you ova.
(Source: fuckyeahrupaulsdragrace)
At least not in most people’s definitions.
Not because I believe in captialism or assimillation. But because I don’t have the privilege to be able to reject these systems and still survive.
Most of the ‘radical’ queers I know don’t work (or work for very little/radical orgs). Most of them I know have college educations that were paid for by their parents. Most of them I know police who is and who isn’t radical with no regard to privilege and power.
All very not radical ideas, if you ask me.
So I am very uncomfortable defining myself in that way. Maybe it is just my experience that lends myself to not IDing this way.
Has anyone felt similarly? Or want to say what being a radical queer means to them?
I identify as a radical queer exactly because of the ridiculousness I’ve felt from some radical queer communities. I want to counteract the unchecked privilege and power and challenge the idea that you have to leave the system to be a true radical queer. I’ve been privileged to have jobs I love, though most are not especially “radical” in nature (all non-profits, but none with strong critiques of capitalism for sure considering some have worked with the likes of Goldman Sachs).
I’m so over radical communities that are not committed to building true alternatives to the systems that oppress us but instead just protest and tell people to leave the system.
I’m committed to building safe space for queer and trans* people in the food justice movement, especially around sustainable agriculture which is why I get the fun job of working with farmers in the city greenmarkets as my authentic queer self and challenging them whenever they say or do oppressive shit (of any kind: even if you love my lil gay self, if you say some racist shit I’m gonna call you out).
I have a college education paid in small part by my parents which afforded me the ability to hold the paid work I enjoy, but I do still have a mountain of school debt so I ain’t working for free.
Being a radical queer means practicing radical inclusion. That means you don’t shut out someone or something because it doesn’t live up to your expectations. Work with what you got or you aren’t going anywhere.
Oh, and radical queer communities have GOT to stop with the crazy white privilege and racism. It drives me nuts and makes those spaces completely unsafe for a large percentage of people I love in my life (and makes NYC seem like the only place in the US where you can find radical queer POC spaces).
someone who gets….that they will never get it.
‘tis the key to owning white privilege, me thinks.
Love this.
please read this (by clicking ‘read more’) if you’ve got the time. it’s definitely worth it and definitely good to hear things articulated that i tend to think in my head but don’t articulate often (oh hey there privilege).
hooray. the state i live in now allows same sex marriage.
but i (and many other people, both queer and not) still struggle to pay bills, find a living wage job, afford an education, have equal access to healthcare, food, and shelter. we still get harassed. beaten up. killed. and all we get is access to an institution filled with racism, violence, and sexism.
so, yes, celebrate the tiny sort of but not really victory. but don’t forget that most of us queer people aren’t exactly feeling it.
Wah Do Dem trailer
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU KIDDING ME
My brain is screaming.furious.livid that this shit got made.
Fuck tourists. Fuck hipster white folks coming to my fucking country and using it as a backdrop for their bullshit. Fuck this awful movie. I don’t give a shit how many awards it’s won or will win, and it doesn’t matter that Jamaicans are in this movie. (Getting a check for a problematic project is not the same as endorsing all the values of the project, dig?) I am seriously resentful of bored-ass white yankee fucks treating my homeland as an exotic, dangerous, weird site for their shitty enlightenment narratives.
Reblogged for the commentary.
Here’s what you need to realise about anti-racism: It’s not about you. It’s not about your feelings as a white person. What you just said is that you’ll entertain the idea of listening to POC talk about ways they’ve been fucked over by whiteness, white privilege, and white people as long as they don’t hurt your feelings.
To put it another way: you’re saying that not having your feelings hurt is more important to you than actually trying to understand PoC’s experiences of enduring racism—which is, itself, perpetuating racism. No, maybe you didn’t partake in whatever act of racism we’re talking about in this very moment, but if you’re white, then you are benefiting from the systemic racism that allowed it to happen, whether you like it or not.
Yes, listening to the ways that your privilege fucks over other people is uncomfortable. Yes, it can be embarrassing & lead to feelings of guilt, but it is not up to People of Color to censor ourselves to spare your delicate fee-fees. If you truly want to be considered anti-racist, you need to deal with those feelings with other white people & not add to the burden of PoC’s experiences of racism by saying that you won’t take us seriously unless we’re ‘nice’ about the emotional & psychological violence that we endure simply by being PoC in a racist society.
So literally, all I want you to do is understand that being anti-oppression (of any kind) is about understanding how the oppressed group is affected & then countering those systems, activities, mindsets, etc. It’s not about you being comfortable, because if you’re doing it right, it’s not going to be comfortable.
VELOCICRAFTOR (via sapphrikah)
to my fellow white friends: we’re supposed to be uncomfortable. if you aren’t, we need to probably talk.
(via brownroundboi)
seriously important and well articulated. this is why i always challenge “reverse racism”. it does not and cannot exist.
The other day I got an [angry, condescending] anonymous message saying that a claim I had made online that only white people can enact racism was “patently untrue.” The anonymous writer backed this up by saying that racism was discrimination, prejudice, or hate based on one’s race. I strongly, passionately disagree with this definition. Here’s why.
I’m a mixed person—my mother is a white American, and my father is an indigenous Mexican immigrant. I identify as a light-skinned Chicano. I share this because I think it is very important that I speak to my specific experience (and no one else’s.) In my life, being a light-skinned Chicano has meant receiving and accessing an incredible amount of white privilege. I frequently pass as white, or am labeled as “racially ambiguous” by fellow people of color and white people alike.
I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, a largely white-liberal city in which my racial and ethnic identities were often misread. This meant that, though I was raised in a bilingual, multi-culturallly identified household, a household in which discussions of racism and politics were frequent, my primary identity was shaped through a lens of whiteness.
I, like many of us, received messages all of my life (from school, society, the media) that racism was a personal act of prejudice against someone based on their skin color. Because I had not yet begun to identify my white privilege, and because I was not only comfortable with the pervasive, unquestioned whiteness that surrounded me but actually benefitted from it, I accepted this definition of racism.
I have a distinct memory of the first time I was asked to question this. I was 14, a Gay Straight Alliance organizer at a training retreat in St. Louis, attending my first “Anti-Oppression” workshop. A simple formula was presented to me:
POWER + PREJUDICE = RACISM
While it seems simple enough, I became outraged. The facilitators were proposing that only those with POWER (white people) are able to perpetuate racism. This means that those lacking power (people of color) are not able to perpetuate racism. Somehow my whiteness felt wronged, insulted. I had been bullied plenty for being “white” by kids of color growing up, and I wanted desperately to call it something that it was not.
What I came to understand in the following years is that racism (and sexism, and ableism, and heterosexism, and shadism, etc.) is not an isolated act. It is not a personal prejudice or an individual problem (though it does indeed operate interpersonally and internally as well). Its true destructiveness lies in its pervasiveness: racism operates at every systemic and institutional level. I believe that racism is an institutionally supported system of perpetuating, enforcing, and valuing whiteness and white supremacy in our society. Racism operates at every level to marginalize, criminalize, devalue, imprison, and yes, kill off, people of color. Our prison industrial complex*, our economy**, our “War on Drugs”***, and our criminal, family, and environmental**** laws, are racist in that they work to maintain incredible rates of poverty, incarceration, health disparities, inadequate housing, and unequal pay for people of color.
So when I say that people of color can’t enact racism, I mean it. We may have a black president, we may think of ourselves as highly evolved or “post-racial” (BARF), but our society remains firmly entrenched in racism at every level. People of color can be just as prejudiced and hateful as white people. I have no interest in denying this. What I am hoping to clarify is that, without POWER, prejudice is just prejudice. It takes the centuries of power and supremacy that whiteness carries with it to enact racism in this country.
As a person that still regularly receives white privilege, regardless of my identity as a person of color, I actively work to dismantle my internalized racism and work against racist systems and white supremacy at personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels.
I believe that, if you are white and are not actively anti-racist, you are a part of the problem. A mentor of mine once described whiteness as a moving sidewalk. In order to be part of the solution, in order to not work with the system to enforce racism, you can’t walk with the crowd, and you certainly can’t just stop moving. You have to turn around and you have to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
*Information about racism in the prison industrial complex:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:8Z6UwI072QYJ:www.defendingjustice.org/pdfs/factsheets/10-Fact%2520Sheet%2520-%2520System%2520as%2520Racist.pdf+racism+statistics+prisons&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShibigS3ZrWaxTXB0Igwwd83IG-sDIA3d4QruNr_VQdc3EWfToqgGPwSTZY3Gu2tOGIJK3cc6DBCw4J6TSagqG3n_uLIaIrAMuROrjMWG0cDRUAZDLiN0ibfEbEiq2FGkqpzpDh&sig=AHIEtbSJbxrPDjAHe7G8nwGtA9W2EesN0A&pli=1
**About racism in our economy
tomweston.net/ReichRacism.pdf
***About the “War on Drugs”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UqDunp0JTE&feature=player_embedded#at=31
****About environmental racism
http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/jpc/echoes/echoes-17-02.html— please reblog! —
s.e. smith, Hipster Racism (via darkjez)
you mean there are people who still haven’t figured out that they’re just budding yuppies in disguise?
(via ayiman)
An amazing article. Read it.
(via mycultureisnotatrend)
this article is fucked. first of all it makes insane assumptions about what hipster even is. there are no even slightly agreed upon definitions of hipster and the lack of definition makes the argument fall apart instantly.
it assumes all hipsters are white (have you been to new york city at all?! or read the nytimes article that, horribly, coined the term blipster?). it assumes all hipsters have access to capital, education, and employment.
hipster is not a definition for white, middle class, trendy millenials that live in predominantly POC neighborhoods in larger cities. hipster is a fluid term that half the millenial generation uses to deride and discredit all people our age.
stop being lazy when writing. because as much as i agree with the racism spoke of in the article, the defining term is bullshit.
(via revolutionnow)
