amazonfeminist:

Barbara Smith (born December 16, 1946) in Cleveland is an American, lesbian feminist who has played a significant role in building and sustaining Black Feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s she has been active as an innovative critic, teacher, lecturer, author, independent scholar, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities over the last twenty five years. Smith’s essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions (magazine) and The Nation. In 1975 she reorganized the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization to establish the Combahee River Collective. Barbara has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.

caricapapaya:

“If you ask most people what the most pressing issue for queers is in America today, they will say “marriage.” Inherent in this is the assumption that everything else is great for gay people, and only marriage remains. Yet there is no national anti discrimination law, and marginalization in publicly-funded institutions like schools and the New York City Saint Patrick’s Day parade is firmly in place. There is no integration of lesbians of all races or gay men of color’s perspectives into mainstream arts or entertainment. Familial homophobia is the status quo. We are not integrated into education curriculum or services. Being out is professionally detrimental in most fields. Most heterosexuals still think of themselves as superior and most gay people submit to this out of necessity or lack of awareness. Basically, in relation to where we should be—we are nowhere….

…The AIDS crisis made gay people visible. For the first time we were on prime-time news programs, in newspapers, while dying and death made the closet more difficult to maintain. I’ve gone into this process in depth in my book Stagestruck: Theatre, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, but in short, the visibility created by AIDS forced the dominant group to change their stance. They could no longer insist that homosexuality did not exist. What they could do is find representative homosexuals with whom they were comfortable, and integrate them into some realm of public conversation. If they didn’t, the gay voice in America would be people with AIDS disrupting mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. It was crucial to the containment crisis that acceptable gay personalities be identified and positioned as “leaders,” even if they had no grassroots base. It’s kind of like the CIA setting up a puppet government.

This is a classic gentrification event. Authentic gay community leaders, who have been out and negotiating/fighting/uniting/dividing with others for years, the people who have built the formations and institutions of survival, become overlooked by the powers that be. They are too unruly, too angry, too radical in their critique of heterosexism, too faggy, too sexual. The dominant culture would have to change in order to accommodate them. And most importantly they are telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty. The dominant culture needed gay people who would pathologies their own. Supremacy ideology could not tolerate the confrontation with the heterosexual self that is at the core of gay liberation.

So instead of the representative radicals, there was an unconscious but effective search for palatable individuals with no credibility in the community, no accountability to anyone, with no history of bravery or negotiation with other queers, who were then appointed in their stead. This replacement process, facilitated by the straight media, really became visible in the late nineties. It was the first time that i noticed a crew of guys being interviewed on television as emblematic gay men whom I had never seen in a community capacity. It was the moment when the corporate media was creating its own gay personalities, who were entirely different from the people featured in the gay-owned press. And eventually, the grassroots voices were drowned out completely, as gentrification co-opted the gay media, and tehg ay liberation movement, dialogically, was demobilized.”

—

Sarah Schulman - The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. (via tremblebot)

blackgirldangerous:

By Mia McKenzie

Queer POC community can be severely dysfunctional. That’s true of all kinds of community, really, but in queer communities dysfunction can reach an exceptionally high level of holy shit. To help with this, I’ve compiled this short list of things we can all do to kick the dysfunction down a notch.

Don’t Take Sides When You Really Have No Idea What’s Going On

Unless you were there and saw and heard everything that happened, you don’t know anything. Just because one of the people in a disagreement is your friend doesn’t mean that person is right (or innocent). Loyalty is important, but try to be loyal to your friends without making judgments about people who have issues with your friends.

Chill. You Are Not the Queer Behavior Police

Queer POC community is, I think, at least in part, about rejecting mainstream (heteronormative, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.) social systems that don’t help people feel free. Still, often, we mimic those same busted systems when navigating our own communities and relationships. What this often ends up looking like is queers telling other queers how to do queerness: what to wear, who to date, what to read, what to think, in order to be authentically queer. In other words, “Here are the boxes you must fit into in order to avoid fitting into boxes.” Y’all see the problem here, right? Stop. That’s ridiculous.

Don’t Be A Self-Righteous Dick

The bible says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And then it goes on to condone lots of rape and killing. So, it’s mostly bullshit. Still, the initial idea is a good one. Translation: Don’t be a dick. Don’t be unkind to people who have not been unkind to you. Don’t talk shit about people who don’t talk shit about you. (You could even take it a step further and not talk shit about people who do talk shit about you, but, hey, you gotta walk before you can run, right?) We all have our triggers. We all have past hurts. But they do not give us license to be reckless, thoughtless, trauma-monsters raining down self-righteous asshole-ness under the heading of, “I must do whatever I have to do to feel safe!” If feeling safe requires unfortunately high levels of dickishness on your part, consider tweaking your coping mechanisms.

Stop Saving Face

This is good advice in QPOC community and everywhere else. Because we are so often led around by our egos, we often put a lot of energy into saving face. Rejection is hard, but it’s a necessary part of life and if we accept and even embrace it, it can help us grow. But if we always respond to rejection by pretending we didn’t care anyway (As in: I just got fired, but I really didn’t want that job anyway and I was totally thinking about quitting because they’re kinda racist and stuff, or, I just got dumped but I didn’t really like that person anyhow and I was planning on breaking up with them), then we really don’t get to take advantage of what rejection offers us—an opportunity to really consider what we might have done that didn’t work, so that we can avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. It’s not always somebody else’s fault. It’s not always somebody else’s loss. Sometimes it’s you. Sometimes it’s your loss. Saving face and letting your ego dictate how you respond to rejection only muddies the waters of self-reflection.

Hold Your Homies Accountable

Again, just because someone is your friend doesn’t mean they’re right. In fact, just because someone is your friend doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes do extremely fucked-up shit. If you know that your friends are doing fucked-up shit, call them out. Hold them accountable. They don’t get a pass to act a fool and hurt people because y’all grew up together, or they saved your life that time you almost choked on your In ’N Out burger, or even because they are always there for you. And being “neutral” in the face of your friends’ bad behavior can be tantamount to condoning it. So, don’t. Hold your friends accountable, and give them room to do the same for you.

Together, we can end QPOC community dysfunction in our lifetimes!

Got other Tips for Slightly Less Dysfunctional Queer POC Community? Submit them in the comments section!

**Mia McKenzie is the creator of Black Girl Dangerous and the Black Girl Dangerous Photography Project. She is a writer (winner of the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award, winner of the Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award), a reader, a photographer, an activist, and a nerd.

Read more Black Girl Dangerous here.

Support the black Girl Dangerous Writing Workshop and QTPOC Community Space here.

susegadnz:

This lecture examines the potential for affective connectivities and conviviality to rethink neoliberal stratification. Noting that discourses surrounding queer suicide reproduce problematic assumptions not only about race, class, and gender, but also bodily health, debility, and capacity, Jasbir Puar will be linking Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project and related discussions about the recent spate of queer suicides to broader social justice issues about disability as well as theoretical concerns in animal studies and post-humanist studies.

julinkah:

amandaonwriting:

Zadie Smith - On Writing

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

nezua:

The capitalist social pyramid is black at the base and white at the top. In South Africa, until apartheid was formally abolished in 1994, this pyramid was legally sanctioned. Elsewhere, while slavery and segregation have been outlawed, the richest people are still the whitest and the poorest are the blackest.

Racism suits capitalism because it’s an important way of justifying economic discrimination. It’s no accident that wherever you find racism, someone seems to be making money from it.

Racist ideas help capitalism get away with super-exploiting racial and ethnic minorities, and all non-white people.

“Those Arabs” or “Those Asians”, we’re told, “are used to doing dirty, hard work, and they’ll be glad to get a job at all.”

Or when unemployment is on the rise, it’s always handy to blame “Asians”, or whichever ethnic group is being demonised at the time, for taking jobs away from “real” Australians.

And when governments in the rich countries impose welfare funding or wage cuts on working people, they always start by targeting the most vulnerable groups — non-Anglo migrants or indigenous people. International students are often the first to cop attacks on higher education.

Racism fosters the idea that the massive under-development and deprivation faced by the people of the Third World is “their fault”. This leads to acceptance of the idea that, while rich countries should give some aid or loans, it should be tied to the recipient government agreeing to terms favourable to the donor countries, including huge interest charges.

Without racist and nationalist ideas prevalent in the populations of imperialist countries, people would be less likely to accept as “natural” or “inevitable” the huge inequalities between the First and Third Worlds or endorse wars on Third World peoples who resist imperialist domination.

In other words, racism is a way for the capitalist class to divide ordinary people from each other, within and between countries: divide and rule.

Important.

producermatthew:

Cupertino high school student Angela Zhang may know the cure for cancer: As a freshman, she started reading doctoral-level papers on biological engineering. By her sophomore year in high school, she managed to convince Stanford University to let her use their laboratories, and by junior year, she began doing her own research that led her to develop a recipe that boggles even her chemistry teacher.

Zhang’s recipe won her a $100,000 award at a national science competition sponsored by Siemens.

Her method of curing cancer by aiming an infrared light at mutated cells killed cancer in mice; it will be a few more years before it can be determined if the method works in humans. Nevertheless, Zhang’s three years of research is considered a breakthrough. [CBS News]