Great map showing where most enslaved Africans ended up in the Americas. As you can see, Blackness doesn’t end in the United States.
From Black and Latino.
a reminder
It might be useful to make mini-flyers of this when people ask me my ethnic background….fareelzdoe. #sickandtired
First off I’m too confused
Secondly you know my blackness envelops me
… Thirdly my articulateness fails me
When the marching feminists come by
I walk with them for awhile
And then I trip over pebbles I didn’t see
My sexist heels are probably too high
I’m stuck in the sidewalk cracks
Oh where Oh where has my feminism gone…
Don’t you know it’s chasing after my blackness
Somewhere in the white sea
I’m in the movement
No chile
I’m not talking about dancing
I’m in the liberation movement
Yeah I’m talking about the PLO
Yeah I’m talking about South Africa and apartheid
No I didn’t say you were fit to be tied
I am a woman
You are a lady
We are sisters in the movement
It’s about neapolitan ice cream
Mixed and oh so sweet
It’s not about white and sterility
Girl what are you talking about
I can have kids
My people have always had kids
Not it’s about oppression of all oppressees
But they never come in peace
They just got some different labels
Tell me
Is sisterhood the same as the 60’s brotherhood
Oh where Oh where has my blackness gone
Don’t you know it’s chasing after Ms. feminism
Somewhere in the white sea
I belong to a consciousness raising group
I have rhetoric
I am a sociologist
I study race, pride, sex, class, humanity
I also make mention of all the “isms”
I am a feminist
Well I am a sister
I am fluid in the dozens
I study us
I study urban renewal
Which includes my bathroom roaches
And my kitchen mice
And the animals down at Public Aid
Tell me about the man that has filled my belly
and ten others with babies
Come share with me sister feminist
Let us dance in the movement
Let my blackness catch your feminism
Let your oppression peek at mine
After all
I ain’t the right kind of feminist
I’m just a woman
-Cheryl L. West
| — | Zerubavel in “The Social Division of the World” (1999) |
The incredible screen printed posters of Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza, a graphic arts collaboration based out of Oakland. You can find their stuff at Dignidad Rebelde.
I just chose some of my favorites. (I have the first two and I love them).
To all the women who quietly made history.
This reminds me of this:
Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren’t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical “women’s work”—they also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and it’s usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.
Which is by the Reclusive Leftist, which I found through this excellent post, with comments, via meganwest.
Bisabuela Juanita, Abuelita María Lucha Quintana.
so powerful
| — | Kifah Shah (via albinwonderland) |
“Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything black ugly and evil. Look in your dictionary and see the synonyms of the word ‘black.’ It’s always something degrading, low, and sinister. Look at the word ‘white.’ It’s always something pure, high, clean. Well, I wanna get the language right tonight. I wanna get the language right so that everybody here will cry out ‘Yes I’m black! I’m proud of it! I’m black and beautiful!’ ”
