Yes, imagine - a country that takes hundreds of thousands of its young men and women, puts them in harm’s way for the benefit of a small elite, doesn’t provide them with an economy that can absorb them when they’ve completed their service, doesn’t provide them with adequate healthcare, doesn’t deal with the emotional and physical costs of the violence it asks them to unleash and suffer, and thinks not a whit about the people on whom that violence is exercised.
Imagine if the US as a whole behaved even more like its military. Or, moving to the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum, think if American corporations all followed the example of Apple, today among the most profitable and powerful corporations in the world, which even as its profits have soared has squeezed its suppliers to charge even less for the products and labour they provide, and in so doing ensure that hundreds of thousands of poor workers in China continue to work for ludicrously low wages in suicide-inducing jobs all so that more Americans can buy iPhones or iPads for $5 less than they’d otherwise pay.
Solar Storms Trigger Northern Lights
Awesome new Aurora Borealis pictures.
Photographs by Ole C. Salomonsen and Thilo Bubek
An anonymous person called me a nigger cunt yesterday and told me to kill myself. In all caps. I stared at it for a few seconds and then deleted it. What else is there to do? There were a couple more. I’m sure by the same person. I deleted those too.
It’s amazing how much a black woman’s anger and perceptible disillusionment (in other words, my feelings) can anger racists in such an undermining sort of way that they feel the need to be so upfront in their attacks. A white person don’t wanna know that I don’t need whites to feel good. I don’t want whites to make me feel good. I don’t care for white people’s approval and respect. They ain’t ready.
That ruins everything.
White supremacy needs blacks to be emotionally dependent on whites, to only filter their emotions through the eyes of whites. I am supposed to be Mammy, you is smart, you is intelligent…forgetting all about me. You didn’t mean to step on my neck, so we’re still cool people.
Blackness is the shadow to whiteness, that inflates whites and allows them to feel bigger and smarter than me. Cutting the cord takes away the mirror. Suddenly, they find themselves standing beside their equal. In every way. I have my own feelings, separate from how I’ve been taught to feel. I have my own inner life, that is divorced from white supremacy. And now I’m a threat.
A black woman’s feelings upset the whole construction of racism. The reason racism works is because the black person is dehumanized and that process strips him or her of an internal existence. An internal existence consists of feelings.
I quickly figured out that I confused white people when I would openly show my unadulterated feelings. I am not supposed to feel. Thomas Jefferson wrote a long time ago, in the Notes on the State of Virginia, that unlike whites, blacks did not think. We were like animals, instinctual only. No inner life. The reason why caricatures still thrive today, is because this ideology has been perpetuated to modern time.
That’s why my writing is so transparent. My posts sound exactly like I’m talking to someone. I don’t attempt to demonstrate anything less than what I’m fully thinking, in my posts.
I’ve been angry. I am a little angry right now. I am getting a lot of flack for being angry. And all of this has made me realize, that I’mma be angry whenever I feel like it.
White people are cool when they lie and use stereotypes to make a black woman angry. But it absolutely terrifies them when they encounter a black women who is so in tune with her feelings, with her anger, that it is impossible to circumvent or caricature it. You can’t reduce me to a stereotype.
But you can call me a nigger cunt. A nigger bitch. You can get me thinking of my mother ancestors hanging from trees and being raped by white men and being stripped of her man and their children. And you can get me to sink in the heaviness of those ancestral memories for a moment.
But you really can’t reduce me to a thing. To a Strong Black Women or an Angry Black Woman. I have feelings too.
Ya’ll ain’t ready. But that’s cool, because I’m ready. Been ready to be seen as a human since I was born.
Cosign!
I’m pro-choice because the personhood of a embryo/fetus is irrelevant: no person has the right to impose themselves on another’s body.
I’m pro-choice because without the right and ability to say no, we lack the ability to say yes.
I’m pro-choice because every child should have the right to be a chosen child, whether or not their conception was intended.
I’m pro-choice because parenthood is way too damned hard for anyone to be forced into it.
I’m pro-choice because people with uteruses are, y’know, people, and capable of making their own decisions.
I’m pro-choice because there’s no way to ban abortion without upping the death rate of women.
I’m pro-choice because intended or not (and I’d argue it mostly is), the outcomes of abortion bans are misogynist and reify patriarchy.
I’m pro-choice because I refuse to tell you what to do with your body, and I wish the same right extended to me.
I’m pro-choice because banning abortion doesn’t help recognize the personhood of children, it removes the personhood of people with uteruses.
