mappemunde

"We must be very careful to avoid the use of the term “tribe” to describe these ethnic groups...."

Fri, 24 May 2013 19:44:18 -0700

“We must be very careful to avoid the use of the term “tribe” to describe these ethnic groups. “Tribe,” Ukpo points out, is largely a racist term. The Ibo and Hausa-Fulani of Nigeria are each made up of five to ten million people, a figure comparable to the number of, say, Scots, Welsh, Armenians, Serbs or Croats. Yet we do not refer to the latter groups as “tribes.” The term “tribe” is almost exclusively, and very indifferently, applied to peoples of Native American or African origin. It is a label which emerged with imperialism in its application to those who were non-European and lived in a “colonial or semi-colonial dependency…in Asia, Africa and Latin America” (14). As we are attempting to discard the prejudices of imperialism it is in our best interests to discard the use of the term “tribe” when referring to the ethnic groups of Nigeria.”

- Ethnicity in Nigeria

Why people should not even think of using the word “tribe”.

(via cosmicyoruba)

I’ve always hated this word.

(via zorascreation)

ya the word tribe is a no

(via l-angston)

blackfashionstars: <3

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:49:17 -0700

blackfashionstars:

<3

"Rather than fighting for every woman’s right to feel beautiful, I would like to see the return of a..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:48:59 -0700

“Rather than fighting for every woman’s right to feel beautiful, I would like to see the return of a kind of feminism that tells women and girls everywhere that maybe it’s all right not to be pretty and perfectly well behaved. That maybe women who are plain, or large, or old, or differently abled, or who simply don’t give a damn what they look like because they’re too busy saving the world or rearranging their sock drawer, have as much right to take up space as anyone else.

I think if we want to take care of the next generation of girls we should reassure them that power, strength and character are more important than beauty and always will be, and that even if they aren’t thin and pretty, they are still worthy of respect. That feeling is the birthright of men everywhere. It’s about time we claimed it for ourselves.”

- I don’t want to be told I’m pretty as I am - I want to live in a world where that’s irrelevant (via brute-reason)

There are no such things as safe spaces cause everyone is an asshole.

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:43:10 -0700

hailldope: “The leg kick before a female starts...

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:29:26 -0700

hailldope:

“The leg kick before a female starts to twerk symbolizes the shackles of 400 years of slavery and oppression being broken. God bless America”

the color of low self esteem

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:25:04 -0700

miguu:

what i never
learned
from my mother
was that
just because someone desires you
does
not mean they value you.
desire is the kind of thing that
eats you
and
leaves you starving.

"Of Althea and Flaxie In 1943 Althea was a welder very dark very butch and very proud loved to cook,..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:47:15 -0700

“

Of Althea and Flaxie

In 1943 Althea was a welder
very dark
very butch
and very proud
loved to cook, sew, and drive a car
and did not care who knew she kept company with a woman
who met her every day after work
in a tight dress and high heels
light-skinned and high-cheekboned
who loved to shoot, fish, play poker
and did not give a damn who knew her “man” was a woman.

Althea was gay and strong in 1945
and could sing a good song
from underneath her welder’s mask
and did not care who heard her sing her song to a woman.

Flaxie was careful and faithful
mindful of her Southern upbringing
watchful of her tutored grace
long as they treated her like a lady
she did not give a damn who called her a “bulldagger.”

In 1950 Althea wore suits and ties
Flaxie’s favorite colors were pink and blue
People openly challenged their flamboyance
but neither cared a fig who thought them “queer” or “funny.”

When the girls bragged over break of their sundry loves
Flaxie blithely told them her old lady Althea took her dancing
every weekend
and did not care who knew she loved the mind of a woman.

In 1955 when Flaxie got pregnant
and Althea lost her job
Flaxie got herself on relief
and did not care how many caseworkers
threatened midnight raids.

Althea was set up and sent to jail
for writing numbers in 1958.
Flaxie visited her every week with gifts
and hungered openly for her thru the bars
and did not give a damn who knew she waited for a woman.

When her mother died in 1968 in New Orleans
Flaxie demanded that Althea walk beside her at the funeral procession
and did not care how many aunts and uncles knew she slept with a woman.

When she died in 1970
Flaxie’s fought Althea’s proper family not to have her laid out in lace
and dressed the body herself
and did not care who knew she’d made her way with a woman.

”

- Cheryl Clarke (via throughmotion)

"Kanye West is white America’s worst nightmare. Because as much as one may attempt to dismiss him —..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:39:42 -0700

“

Kanye West is white America’s worst nightmare. Because as much as one may attempt to dismiss him — by calling him an asshole or classless or deranged or various other adjectives that fill the comment sections of literally every article about him — you still have to turn on your regularly scheduled late night comedy program and stare him in the face. You can’t avoid Kanye. He’s made very sure of that.

[…]

Kanye is not a “new slave” in the same sense as the victims of the prison industrial complex, but he is still trapped in a world that expects him to not only be complicit with the struggle of his people, but to be appreciative that he is not one of them. And on top of all that, while he gets to exist in the world of the 1%, having the money and signifiers of success still aren’t enough to make his (white) 1% peers actually even respect him.

[…]

The ideals of Public Enemy are as relevant today as they were in the 80s, but hip-hop was nowhere near as dominant and omnipresent a cultural force as it is at this moment; to compare the reach of their messages is silly. Upper-middle class white families did not have to deal with Public Enemy if they didn’t want to. Similarly with politically-minded “noise rap” artists that have been name-dropped in reviews of Kanye’s new material — it’s all well and good for Death Grips and Blackie and even Killer Mike to espouse similar messages and sounds (and honestly, the sonic qualities of “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead” are hardly at the top of the list of why they’re important), but none of them have anywhere near the amount of visibility and influence as Kanye, even if they did hit it first.

[…]

People in current positions of comfort and stability are so willing to dismiss the transgressive thoughts of an angry black man that they will use any convenient excuse to diminish from them; if someone says something that makes you uncomfortable, why not immediately change the subject to his girlfriend’s ass or that time he yelled at a papparazzi or that time he got drunk and embarrassed a white girl? When was it exactly that Kanye shifted, in the eyes of the mainstream, from lovable polo-wearing backpacker to perpetually and unanimously An Asshole? When, precisely, did everything he said get immediately categorized as a “rant” or “controversial” regardless of the actual content? I want to say it was around the time when he said that George Bush didn’t care about black people on live tv. Hmm. Odd.

”

- Meaghan Garvey, Who Will Survive In America? (via machistado)

If god is white

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:38:57 -0700

howtobeterrell:

I will be so pissed

I wil ask personally for a pass to hell

strugglingtobeheard: zennaphobia: strugglingtobeheard: blackgi...

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:36:21 -0700

strugglingtobeheard:

zennaphobia:

strugglingtobeheard:

blackgirlsarefromthefuture:

Dope. You may want to consider posting this on the Quirky Black Girls// SF page as well.

this looks super interesting but the font on that post is so damn small i have to strain my eyes to see it, just putting a note out there. if anyone could write out what the poster says that would be awesome, if not i understand.

Afro-Futurism: Envisioning the year 2070 and Beyond

Exhibit: May 17 - August 1, 2013
African American Center
Main Library, Third Floor

Related Program
Artists Reception and Talk in Commemoration of Juneteenth:
Sunday, June 1, 2013
2 p.m.
Koret Auditorium
Main Library, Lower Level

Afro-Futirms: Envisioning the year 2070 and Beyond, curated by Kheven LaGrone, uses art to create a future for us to aspire to. It comes from an African American perspective. Runaway slave and heroine Harriet Tubman once said, “I freed a thousand slaves, I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” More than 100 years later, writer James Baldwin praised Black revolutionaries for daring to break down barriers. He wrote in 1970 a letter to activist Angela Davis: ” The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation.”

What will be the black consciousness in the year 2070, one hundred years after James Baldwin’s letter?

All programs at the Library are free.

thank you!

going to put this on my list of things to see when i go to VONA in S.F. at the end of june

The Body Is Not An Apology: The Curiously Oppressive Power of Positive Thinking

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:32:48 -0700

The Body Is Not An Apology: The Curiously Oppressive Power of Positive Thinking:

thebodyisnotanapology:

The Oppressive Power of Positive Thinking
by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, Content Intern

Occasionally, I read articles and see memes that suggest that loving ourselves and our bodies involves believing in the power of “positive thinking” – a belief that dictates that if we just believe in…

"The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:32:03 -0700

“The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others. For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.

The language of an African child’s formal education was foreign. The language of the books he read was foreign. The language of his conceptualisation was foreign. Thought, in him, took the visible form of a foreign language. So the written language of a child’s upbringing in the school (even his spoken language within the school compound) became divorced from his spoken language at home. There was often not the slightest relationship between the child’s written world, which was also the language of his schooling, and the world of his immediate environment in the family and the community. For a colonial child, the harmony existing between the three aspects of language as communication was irrevocably broken. This resulted in the disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation. The alienation became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe.”

- Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (via abstractverses)

"My energy, emotion, time and space are reserved only for those who can reciprocate properly in love."

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:37:38 -0700

“My energy, emotion, time and space are reserved only for those who can reciprocate properly in love.”

- (via notesonascandal)

"As I get older, as time goes by, I care less and less and less about whether someone can talk..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:00:41 -0700

“

As I get older, as time goes by, I care less and less and less about whether someone can talk pretty. I care about action. At the end of the day, I don’t care how well you can articulate your perfectly punctuated anti-oppressive political points, I don’t care how many buzzwords fall from your mouth, I don’t care if you name-drop a thousand acronyms or theorists – I care if you will show up. I care if you will fucking show up.

And I know that showing up is complicated when you struggle with whether or not you can get outta bed. Sometimes showing up means biking to a friend’s house with coconut water & ginger ale & Saltines when she has stomach flu. Sometimes it means sharing your leftover pain meds from your emergency root canal when a friend has a pain spike. Sometimes it means making soup in a friend’s kitchen, stocking his fridge & freezer, blowing him a kiss across his bedroom & miming tucking him up under his sheets, because you can’t actually tuck him in or kiss him good-bye, because your own immune system is fragile enough as it is. And sometimes it means texting a little emoticon heart from your own sick bed, where you are laid up with a shoulder that aches so bad when the weather gets damp (which is a lot in San Francisco), or stomach that can’t digest a fucking thing, or clogged-up sinuses, or a throat on fire, or a wet raspy cough. Sometimes it just means saying Honey, I love you. Honey, my sick heart reaches out to your sick heart. Honey, I wish I could be there, and I can’t, but I can do this. You mean the world to me. Sister. Brother. Love.

”

- (via howtohaveabody)

confusedtree: In all seriousness Idris Elba as the 12th Doctor would be a great casting choice...

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:09:11 -0700

confusedtree:

In all seriousness Idris Elba as the 12th Doctor would be a great casting choice because he’d kill it and we’d get to find out just exactly how many anglophiles are also gigantic racists

like, ALL of them, and ALL of the fandom.

"There is no single jurisdiction in the U.S. where a minimum wage worker can afford the fair market..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:06:38 -0700

“There is no single jurisdiction in the U.S. where a minimum wage worker can afford the fair market rent for a home.”

- National Low Income Housing Coalition (via presidentjonesco)

divinemoon: You are beautiful mother! Maferefun Yemaya every...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:19:22 -0700

divinemoon:

You are beautiful mother! Maferefun Yemaya every day! You are the Queen of Sea, Land and the Heavens above us. She is mother of all of us and all that lives, seen as the cosmic mother of all things. Yemaya is a fiercely, protective mother and her children are not allowed to go too deep into the water.

dynamicafrica: yannickbrouwer: This little company from Kenya...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:19:03 -0700

dynamicafrica:

yannickbrouwer:

This little company from Kenya makes toys from slippers that wash up on the beach. Pictures by Ben Curtis

The company’s name is Ocean Sole: http://www.ocean-sole.com/

geek-joints: throughjo: Moroccan house by Christophe...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:05:51 -0700

geek-joints:

throughjo:

Moroccan house by Christophe Decarpentrie

"THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the destruction of..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:16:27 -0700

“

THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons.

In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental antiBlackness.

”

- The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal

Frank B. Wilderson, III

doing some work and found this article. this is like basically the entire premise of my paper and the point i want to make in response to this book the two reconstructions which discuss the strengths of the second and the failures of the first (first being 1877 times and second being 1964 voting rights time). the second reconstruction is considered a success but there is immense black disenfranchisement still. frank b wilderson breaks down so much shit but ugh, i have to find a way to use this to critique political sociological type stuff -_-

(via strugglingtobeheard)