inlovewiththepractice:

I heard this on the radio. Mike Brown was a kid who didn’t want to play football, even though he had the body for it. When asked why, he told his friends that he didn’t want to hit anybody.

This is the child that they’re going to paint as a thug.

imanismith:

Yup I’m going to keep posting all this crime against our people!

cornbread-mafia:

angrywocunited:

(x)

The Pentagon provided Ferguson’s police department with military weapons and vehicles

jamesdeenhateclub:

i think it’s important that myself and other white ppl remember that we can not even begin to truly understand the pain and trauma of what is happening in ferguson, nor can we grasp the anger and sadness black communities experience due to this situation. all we can do is stand in solidarity, listen, and not derail or take the focus away from the true face of racism and white supremacy.

iwriteaboutfeminism:

A sample of tweets on #Ferguson tonight, 8/13/14

weepingwitch:

hey other white radicals/anarchists/leftists/whatever,

when talking about how the police violence and brutality, we need to continuously highlight that this is very much an issue of anti-black racism.

like, don’t try to generalize this.

it is definitely about race.

yxxz:

i’ve never seen police throw tear gas or shoot rubber bullets at Westboro Baptist protestors.

missauset:

journolist:

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at who lives in Ferguson, who’s in charge, who gets stopped by police, and more.

Wow

stereoculturesociety:

CultureHISTORY: The Ferguson Protests – #NMOS14

In light of Mike Brown’s murder, and the police occupation of Ferguson, something extraordinary is happening. With the help of #BlackTwitter, social media, the spotlight of national attention and the impassioned citizens of Ferguson, a protest movement is taking shape and it is important to bear witness.

First there was the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown thread which was reported in the NY Times & LA Times, the #DontShoot thread of photos (some above), and tomorrow a National Moment of Silence across the country for the victims of police brutality.

Thursday, August 14^th – #NMOS14 – 4:00P (PT) / 6:00P (CT) / 7:00P (ET). Check cities/location here.

The issue of police brutality against communities of color is a decades-old problem. But with new technology, everyone has access to more information and these cases are getting more attention. Plus, in the last four weeks, four unarmed black men have been killed by policemen across the country. Along with Mike Brown in St. Louis, Eric Garner in New York, John Crawford in Dayton, OH and Ezell Ford in L.A. Yes, it’s time for a movement.

OITNB star visits Kara Walker’s exhibit, misses point: some notes for our fellow white queers

transqueermediaexchange:

by Emma Shakarshy and Cordelia Nailong

Click the title for the full article.

Queer communities have a long way to go to be the welcoming places that we would like them to be, especially when it comes to racism.

Orange is The New Black’s “Big Boo”, Lea Delaria, recently viewed Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety”, an exhibit in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory that highlights the legacies of white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, anti-blackness, slavery, and patriarchy that have shaped the past 500 years. The Domino Sugar Factory was chosen as a venue for this piece for a number of reasons including the fact that enslaved folks were the foundation of the sugar economy that Domino rose from and were the enslaved labor of the sugar plantations. This is not to mention that factories like this one literally processed sugar from brown to white. Walker’s exhibit features sculptures of enslaved children made of molasses to highlight the sugar factories, as well as many other industries’, reliance on black labor to benefit white capitalistic goals.

The center of Walker’s exhibit is a 40 foot-tall sphinx created out of sugar, with the head of the black “mammy” stereotype, representing the racist iconography of the black female domestic servant at the hands of white families. The sphinx’s body is that of the oversexualized black woman, often seen as props in music videos (think Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”) and TV and film.

Many white viewers of Walker’s piece have made the news by taking racist,misogynistic selfies with the piece, cupping, licking, and generally abusing the work. In his piece, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” Nicholas Powers writes that the pornographic jokes are recreations of the very racism that the art is meant to critique.

Lea Delaria, queer comedienne and celeb with an Instagram following of 167,000 users, unfortunately offered no exception. DeLaria posed with the piece, positioned between the sphinx’s breasts, with the head of the work cut off, and the caption “Sugar Tits.” Her next photo is of her looking smugly from beneath the buttocks and vulva of the sphinx, with the caption, “That’s what I call looking into the face of god. #karawalkerdomino #theeffectsofgammaraysonmaninthemooncunt.” This is incredibly disrespectful. In viewing a sculpture critiquing the oversexualization and white exploitation of black bodies, DeLaria is perpetuating that same sexualization and encouraging her followers to do so as well.