This is mostly a band blog, but there's some other stuff here too.
Sunday, April 19th
One week ago, Freddie Gray was arrested in Baltimore for no apparent reason. While in police custody, he was beaten so severely that his spine became 80% severed from his neck. He died in the hospital this morning.
What happened in Puerto Rico
I wanna know what happened in Puerto Rico
It’s too late for me to remember where I put the receipts for this, but IIRC more experiments + forced hysterectomies on women.
^^^ yeap…
keep in mind Tuskegee happened at a HBCU and lasted 40 years (originally only planned to last 3 months) and the US knew of a ‘cure” penicillin.
In Puerto Rico: oral birth control pills trials (with not full disclosure given to participants and some deaths during trials) more at PBS “The Puerto Rican Pill Trials“ this also happened in Haiti.
My testimonio re: not celebrating the pill here. (tw: white folks don’t like my pov just see comments and this article was posted on other sites where white folks didn’t dig it either).
forced sterilization of PR women (we still have the highest rates of sterilization, read more about the 3 generations of sterilization (non-consensual and consensual) in her book, Matters of Choice, Iris Rodriguez who does qualitative work interviewing women in families, she also coined the phrase “agency within constraints” in her texts about this topic. this has happened with various women of color and women with disabilities throughout US history and currently.
They experimented on Puerto Ricans in the Rockefeller center for years as well, illegally.
And yeah, the medical abuse of white supremacy extends much further than most realize. It’s as big of a industrial complex as the military or the prison system.
Hell they made penicillin by stealing a black woman’s DNA, a black woman who they never compensated and let die off after they stole the DNA.
Why doesn’t this have more notes
Because white people don’t like to reblog the truth
(Source: coutois)
(Source: kemetic-dreams)
167 days #MikeBrown
157 days #KajiemePowell
122 days #KimKing
106 days #VonDerritMyers
29 days #AntonioMartin
2 days. #IsaacHolmes #STL
The US has a serious racism and police agression problem that seriously needs to be solved.
However some people need to realize that going on a “all cops are bad” and “all white people are racist” rant isn’t going to solve anything.
Not all black people are criminals. Not all cops are shit people. Not all white people are racist. Set an example for the shitty people who think it’s okay to just shoot someone because of the colour of their skin. Be better than them, don’t generalize.
stop fucking telling black people we cannot say “fuck white people” because while you’re saying we’re being ‘reverse racist’ our race is being fucking murdered. this is a mass genocide, don’t be a goddamn fool.
Mass genocide? Are you retarded? 10 fucking deaths a week, even 100 deaths per week at the hands of cops wouldn’t be a mass genocide. You are a terrible person for equating the systemic annihilation of a people with this. You know what is actually a mass genocide? The holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and many other actual occurrences that you can look up.
And how the fuck is saying fuck white people helping your cause. Oh congratulations not only have you turned people away from your cause but now you are turning people against your cause lol good luck with that one.
First of all, ease up off the ableist slur.
Secondly, it may not “equate” to the mass genocides that make it into the history books, but this is still systemic annihilation, in a less obvious way to those who don’t recognize or understand the nuances and think racism ended with slavery.
When people say “fuck white people” they more or less mean “fuck the system that tells us we’re inferior and kills us every day.” You have to understand that it’s not about you. You have to understand where it’s coming from. It’s centuries of anger and seeing that some things haven’t really changed for the better, that the system has evolved. Yeah, it sucks when you hear “fuck white people” because you might be one of the “good ones” that “isn’t racist,” but the moment you open your mouth and try to talk about how you’re not racist and make it all about yourself and your qualifications, you prove the opposite. “Fuck white people” is nothing but sigh-worthy and does not compare to the disadvantages and aggression people of color face every day. Now please, shut your mouth and stay off her post.
(Source: bratsins)
James Baldwin
Quote is from “The Price May Be To High,” originally published in 1969 and essay can be viewed in a posthumous collection of his writing, The Cross Of The Redemption.
This quote comes to mind when I think of: the anti-Blackness that is State violence; the lack of structural and social contrition that exists in response to the extrajudicial execution of Black people, including many Black men, Black teens like Michael Brown and the Black girls/Black women and especially Black trans women who are ignored; the fact that racist Whites co-opted “I am ____” to support a racist cop, Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown; the fact that White supremacist message boards (who have been attacking Black women online for a long time) and groups, in conjunction with Ferguson police organized raising a quarter of a million dollars to support Wilson who has not been arrested, let alone tried for this murder and has not lost a cent of income, so basically he was paid for a lynching; the fact that GoFundMe profited off of that fundraiser; the pathological violence added as messages on the donation board that amounted to picnic talk after a lynching; the fact that Whites think State violence is acceptable and necessary if Black people, like other races of people, including Whites by far, experience intraracial crime.
This quote comes to mind when I think of: the fact that many Whites (and in this case, also non-Black people of colour) are engaging in epistemic violence via co-opting, generalizing or erasing the context specific to Ferguson and its connection to centuries of State violence on Black people; the fact that many Whites are engaged in sheer celebration of this violence while simultaneously suggesting violence has no connection to their very identities and is inherently “Black;” the fact that the media is willfully pushing regularly debunked myths about “injuries” that do not exist for Darren Wilson; the racist media framing that dehumanizes Michael Brown as standard protocol since death is never the “final act“ because of anti-Blackness and post-mortem violence ultimately trying Black victims not White murderers in the press and the courts, is psychological warfare and violence on the Black people who remain, and acute unspeakable violence against the family of the executed; the endless cycle of lies, trolling and abuse towards Black activists (on the ground and online) from Whites who defend Darren Wilson or are abusive as “allies” that play “devil’s advocate,” as if this is about a single White man in theory and not a real Black death and the reification of White supremacy, State violence, and anti-Blackness that policing was built on and confers.
This quote comes to mind when I think of: the fact that the same racist liars who claim they are “waiting for facts” to decide if Black life is valuable gladly share phony images of Michael Brown, taunt Black people for sheer pleasure, and consistently repost debunked lies; the fact that they search Michael Brown’s name on Twitter solely to attack random Black people online; the fact that many White “allies” are more concerned with yelling #NotAllWhites than considering that structurally, #YesAllBlacks deal with anti-Blackness, and structurally, #YesAllWhites benefit; the fact that they demand to be “loved” as if rejection of the violence of White supremacy is about love or hate.
When I discuss sociopathy and White supremacy (which is NOT Axis II Anti-Social Personality Disorder, nor is the DSM-V infallible, so White supremacist academics who think they own disability discourse, don’t bring your epistemic violence here, nor your racist, misogynoiristic assumptions of my own neurotypical status, which is not the case) this is what I am talking about. Specific socialization, in position of power (that makes empathy for Black people virtually non-existent; that facilitates dehumanization and rationalization of that violence), not a mental health issue that would impact Whites’ interaction with anyone. Thus, Whites trying to excuse this violence by suggesting it is mental health-caused is an ableist response; the notion that socialization of the oppressor also exists, is not.
And this is just a snippet of violence that anti-Blackness guarantees for Black life. I barely said anything here…barely covered the scope of the violence that Whiteness confers as a social position of power. And I am exhausted right now. I am tired.
Blackness itself is not considered human, despite the reality of our humanity that we know our lives embody despite oppression. Yet this, what I described above—this, Whiteness as social position of power—is considered the standard for humanity.
(via gradientlair)Whites Dehumanize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Into A Trope To Silence Black People
MLK is regularly evoked by Whites in a dehumanizing fashion in order to police Black vernacular (subversion/reclamation), police Black people’s response to continued State violence and anti-Blackness, and to control Black culture and life via the myth that the politics of respectability can “earn” us humanity; humanity denied us as the very foundation and current reality of this country, in fact.
It is triggering, erasure, abusive, ahistorical and violent to remind Black people practically on the hour of the coordinated State violence (abuse, arrests, physical violence, FBI intimidation, surveillance/COINTELPRO, psychological warfare and eventually assassination) on MLK and other Black activists/ordinary Black citizens, and then suggest that us behaving like a White-washed version of MLK (one erasing his work and humanly flaws and replacing it with appeasing Whiteness and empty deification) now will “protect” us from the same State violence that Black people have always faced. (MLK’s “non-violent” actions were still classified as “extremist.”) Whites, who benefit from racism, think it is acceptable to tell Black people to “behave” like MLK, when he was murdered for the same reasons that we have to fight today.
Darren Wilson has half a million dollars via donations from racists, had paid leave, a new wife, is viewed as a White hero and was not indicted (such a decision is apparently statistically rare); will not even face a trial for murdering Michael Brown, despite dehumanizing and killing him. (Not suggesting that his theoretical singular indictment or trial would be “justice” in this anti-Black country; the system itself is violence on us.) He called Michael’s expression of pain after being shot looking like a “demon” and his own strength like that of a child versus Michael as “Hulk Hogan” despite being close to the same size as Michael and had a gun while Michael did not. He claimed that he thought Michael’s punch could “kill” him though his hospital photographs are bruise-less. Clearly he is illogical because of anti-Blackness; the entire testimony is negligence, willful distortion and a racist farce. Whites benefit from violence on Black bodies yet have the audacity and cruelty to suggest how Black people should feel and respond to that violence, in which Whites use other Black people like MLK as dehumanized vessels to funnel those suggestions through.
It is basically White people so utterly willfully ahistorical and intellectually dishonest that they engage in cognitive dissonance with why MLK had to exist as he did in the first place and why we fight now. They use his body as a vessel for their own racism, since their own bodies and lies are never enough. Always the use and consumption of a Black body. Even celebration of the lack of indictment isn’t enough for them; so many of them are trolling Black people online right now because even the State’s affirmation of our dehumanization cannot satiate their appetite for harming Black people. They always want us to accept their version of reality, at the price of our humanity.
(Source: gradientlair.com)
The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture has reached the House floor.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
I’m never gonna say that starting fires, looting, and ruining people’s business is okay. But I’m also not gonna sit here as a white person and condone what happened. These people have been protesting for months for justice. They’ve been opressed for decades. And what has peacefully protesting done…
(Source: cagedlions)
(Source: mizzhabibi)