Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People
By Maria P.P. RootI HAVE THE RIGHT…
-Not to justify my existence in this world.
-Not to keep the races separate within me.
-Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity.
-Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy.
I HAVE THE RIGHT…
-To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify.
-To identify myself differently from how my parents identify me.
-To identify myself differently from my brothers and sisters.
-To identify myself differently in different situations.
I HAVE THE RIGHT…
-To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial.
-To change my identity over my lifetime — and more than once.
-To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.
-To freely choose whom I befriend and love[Maria P. P. Root, PhD, is author of
“The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier”
which you can purchase through Interracial Voice and Amazon.com] http://www.mixedfolks.com/rights.htm
(via sex: unknown / a digital zine by and for intersex folks / call for submissions! « Jai Arun Ravine)
So I suck, because when i was offline a while i left this in the queue until after submissions had closed *doh*. want to share anyway so ppl. know about it and the organizing artists.
This project is put together with love by a group of queer POC writers and activists living in Oakland and Berkeley, California. Chi Mei Tam is an intersex genderqueer Chinese American immigrant who grew up in Oakland. She is a passionate organizer for social and economic justice, specifically for immigrant and queer communities. Dylan Casama is a tomboyish boy Pinoy. He writes intersex love and ghost stories. See him published here. Jai Arun Ravine is a trans-identified mixed race Thai American artist and ally to the intersex community. They are excited to support Chi Mei and Dylan in the production and design of this zine.
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.
(via Anita Heiss - Author, Poet, Satirist, Social Commentator)
I’m Aboriginal. I’m just not the Aboriginal person a lot of people want or expect me to be.
What does it mean to be Aboriginal? Why is Australia so obsessed with notions of identity? Anita Heiss, successful author and passionate campaigner for Aboriginal literacy, was born a member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales, but was raised in the suburbs of Sydney and educated at the local Catholic school. She is Aboriginal - however, this does not mean she likes to go barefoot and, please, don’t ask her to camp in the desert.
After years of stereotyping Aboriginal Australians as either settlement dwellers or rioters in Redfern, the Australian media have discovered a new crime to charge them with: being too ‘fair-skinned’ to be an Australian Aboriginal. Such accusations led to Anita’s involvement in one of the most important and sensational Australian legal decisions of the 21st-century when she joined others in charging a newspaper columnist with breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. He was found guilty, and the repercussions continue.
In this deeply personal memoir, told in her distinctive, wry style, Anita Heiss gives a first-hand account of her experiences as a woman with an Aboriginal mother and Austrian father, and explains the development of her activist consciousness.
Read her story and ask: what does it take for someone to be black enough for you?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Year’s War. Who
Else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
| — |
Bertolt Brecht. Questions From a Worker Who Reads. (via philosophy-of-praxis) |
(via The People’s Apocalypse by Ariel Gore — Kickstarter)
so i along with a bunch of wonderful writers will be published in this book. please support this project. i am so excited.
reblog other tumblr cos [points up] the GMM coolness
| — | helene cixous, the laugh of the medusa, 1975 (via karaj) |
| — | Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell (via heymorticia) |
Ntozake Shange & Michaela angela Davis on Feminism, Tyler Perry & More. 2010
Noted urban culture critic Michaela angela Davis and legendary poet and author Ntozake Shange recently sat down for a discussion of Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuff, it’s adaptation into the film For Colored Girls, black feminism and plenty more recently at The Brooklyn Museum in New York. It’s humorous, frank, refreshing and real. See what I mean and peep the conversation plus an inspiring audience q&a over at my other home, ParlourMagazine.com
Michaela angela Davis: Many people think you are the priestess of feminism…that you gave us the manifesto. And it’s interesting; I used to call For Colored Girls, our manifesto for a very long time. Do you consider yourself a feminist? Also do you think what feminists are today is radically different than in the 70s. Do you think there needs to be a redefinition or a new pr campaign for feminism?
Ntozake Shange: Am I feminist? Yes I am. Do I think there needs to be a new pr campaign for feminism? I think the Black people need one. White people just take the word feminism and walk away with it. We call ourselves womanist or all kinds of other weaker sounding words and let them take the big word that has to do with power and walk away with it and tell us it doesn’t have anything to do with us. Or we tell ourselves that. They never told me that, so I never became not a feminist.
So since nobody told me personally that it had nothing to do with me, I assumed that because I was a woman and I was seeking a better life for women and children, that I was therefore a feminist. I wanted human rights for women and children, so I am a feminist. I want political power for women and children and I am a feminist. I want to bring out from hiding working with roots and folk medicine. I want to bring midwives back into our lives. There are all kinds of things that I want to do as a feminist that I can do as a womanist. But why get all these different words going? Why not just have one word that covers all we want to do for ourselves? It’s very difficult how we can separate over something when we’re all working towards the same thing. Or are we? Sometimes I don’t’ know what we want to happen. If we tell the white women they own feminism , then they can have the political power to do this that and the other, then what are we supposed to use to take our own freedom with? I don’t understand.
When I was a little girl, I was influenced by two very important biographies as a child: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Toussaint L’ Overture and Susan B. Anthony. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered Susan B. Anthony abhorred black people. And so did Europeans and she wanted to do everything she could to get them away from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The same was true of Jane Hull. That was obvious, racism. We don’t have so much obvious racism right now (but from stories people tell me it’s coming around quite quickly). We need to be able to look at our own heroes and heroines who we do have for examples of how to help women and girl children and little boys be safe in the country where they live. And that’s what I try to do with my work and that’s what I try to support when I do charity work. And that’s what I try to do when I speak out with people like you.
“Sex workers know that what creates demand for the sex trade is not men “enslaving” us for sex, but the exigencies of survival. The demand for the sex trade lies in the demands of childcare, loan officers, debt collectors, landlords and dependent family members – in short, the demands most working people struggle to meet.
Given the gravity of these real, systemic demands that sex workers face, to focus only on ending men’s demand for sex is a cheap way out. In this way, sex workers’ needs are reduced only to what happens during the sex transaction; it ignores the rest of our lives outside the sex trade. By advancing this myth of male demand and sex workers being powerlessly enslaved in catering to it, the media and politicians fixate on the power of male desire more than sex workers ever do.”
| — |
(via thedailyhavis) This a thousand times. (via crankyskirt) I love seeing something I wrote come ‘round again like this. (via melissa) reblog for perennial truth. |
Call for Submissions: AQSAzine - Shameless Magazine - for girls who get it
Call for Submissions AQSAzine Issue #4: Ancestors and Descendants, due Jan 15th.
Dear family, sisters, brothers, allies and revolutionaries,
Submit and spread the word about AQSAzine Issue #4: Ancestors and Descendants – “Where’d you come from/Where are you going?”
Submit because you cannot but know what your roots are, where you came from and how you came to be. Because you cannot be present here without knowing about “back there.” Because you have yet to learn who your ancestors are and what were their journeys. Because you want to carry forward the stories of your great grandparents. Because you want to share your origins with your children. Because sometimes its too painful to know and other times its all that you know.
Because your history has been submerged, erased, disjointed or cut off you. Because you want to understand how your present came to be. Because underneath all the silence is a rich history of lessons learnt that would be helpful in guiding you. Because you are proud of your lineage. Because the question of where you are from is complicated and a simple answer boxes you in. Because your history is multidimensional just like your identity. Because you fear that you are losing your connection to home through language, memories, stories. Because your descendants might have all your struggles in common.
Types of Submissions:
· Stories (fiction or non fiction);
· Poetry;
· Artwork;
· Graphic arts;
· Photography;
· Visuals;
· Media reviews;
· Interviews
· Any other form of personal art or writing under 1,500 words
Confidentiality: Submissions will not be reprinted without the author’s permission. You can use your first and/or last name, a pen name, or even remain completely anonymous. We want you to feel safer in making a contribution.
Send us your submissions with short bio along with questions, resources, information to aqsazine at gmail.com by January 15th. You can also submit online at http://www.aqsazine.com.
AQSAzine is a grassroots zine open to 16-35 year people who self-identify as Muslim. It is a creative avenue for us to express ourselves, share our experiences, and connect with others. We strive to work from a feminist, anti-oppressive, pro-choice, queer and trans positive framework.
Peace, love and hugs
AQSAzine Team
| — | a single man (via quellequaintrelle) |
