suspicious

#TrayvonMartin

omg … reading rainbow

theblacksophisticate:

yourdailynarcissist:

azaadi:

superdupertimemachine:

Old School Reading Rainbow Theme Song

butterfly in the sky

i can go twice as high

take a look

it’s in a book

a reading rainbow

i can go anywhere

friends to know

ways to grow

a reading rainbow

i am GIGGLING!!! LOLOLOLOL 

(Source: niggaimdeadass)

#TrayvonMartin

seems that the Sanford PD thinks that “self-defense” is only possible as a reasonable response when the force of such purported “defense” exceeds the that of the one against whom such force is supposedly necessary. that Trayvon could not ask “what’s the problem?” to a dude who was slowly trailing him in a car did not register as a desire to guard his own personhood…it’s only the continual elevation of force, turned fatal, that gave Zimmerman license to claim he was merely, only acting in “defense” of his “self” (not a little problematic category in the general, given the necessarily violent and violative history of such a concept in the west…certain folks, through privilege, can claim such status, it seems and a black boy [140 pounds to Zimmerman’s 200] threatened such “selfhood”). but what was the thing he was guarding, what was ths thing he was defending, other than his “right” to claim that someone was “suspicious” and his “right” to protection against the very appearance of suspicion. he was guarding against a general antagonism - a black boy walking home (like Elizabeth walking to a Little Rock school, like Emmett whistling) - guarding against thr capacity for black folks to be suspicious of the grounds and foundational claim for following and being suspicious of us in the first place.

“Peter’s Pans: Eating in the Diaspora” - Hortense Spillers

“[The black] sermon was a carrier of the music, was often itself a hybrid motion between word and music — the dissipation of syllabic contours in highly agitated layers of air, in shouts, lengthened moans and groans, etc. — and above all else, it became the ‘voice’ that kept on talking across the long feverish nights of America’s ‘race’ dilemma. The Big Voice, the Big Mouth. If the sermon were motive amplified and enlarged to the extent that differences were effaced by its enactments, then it was the rhetorical/social field to understand the most” (26).

“Untimely Intellectuals and the University” - Ronald AT Judy

“[T]he inclusion of Black studies in the university was not as a response to external political pressure but as a moment in the university’s function as a social institution responsible for the development and transmission of knowledge. That is to say, understanding how Black studies got included requires understanding the nature and function of knowledge in the university. Accordingly, the significant question is not whether Black studies is a valid academic subject but how Black studies goes about identifying and making sense of its field of work” (124).

“the figure of w.e.b. du bois as a problem for thought” - nahum chandler

“We can think of a problematic as the ensemble of questions that are given to a thinker as a task by the conditions of time and situation, by the historicity of his or her emergence as an intellectual. We might specify this idea a bit more by suggesting that what compels our attention here is not simply history as an organization of external condition that comprises a demand or obligation for a thinker. Rather, what we want to understand is a movement of problematization in which a certain order of life becomes the object of a sustained attention and preoccupation of reflection and elaboration. Thus, what interests us is formed as a certain relationship between what is announced at the level of history and social condition in general and the movement of critical engagement that takes shape as a form of inhabitation: as the work and thought of a thinker (an intellectual, a scholar, an artist, a teacher, an activist). A problematic, or better problematization, is thus the organization of social or historical condition as a relation that is announced in or as thought. In the terms of traditional formulations of the matter: a problematic or problematization is thus a relationship of thought and context. And then to specify a bit more our own sense: context is thus also always plural, configured in the movement of thought, and not simply and purely given beforehand. Historicity here would have the shape of a possible future of a future and a future past as much as it would have the character of a given past.”

MLK day plans

negrosunshine:

sangria at some point in Boystown, i have a dream that one day little black boys, and little white boys will join hands, (that may or may not be a queer paraphrasing).

BUT FIRST!

i will make it through Nahum Chandler’s “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought,” so i can quit lying to myself that i read this and knew what was happening.

i will read this today! and i will love it!

i wonder what my headspace will be like upon finishing it. it may make for interesting table-talk as this son of slaves sits with the sons of “former” slave-owners (another queer paraphrasing?)

what did you think of “Of Exorbitance”? it’s on of the most beautifully complex argumentations i’ve read. 

The Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program

youmearebeautiful:

1. We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine
   The Destiny Of Our Black Community.

   We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We Want Full Employment For Our People.

   We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We Want An End To The Robbery 
   By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.

   We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.

   We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We Want Education For Our People That Exposes
   The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society.
   We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History 
   And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.

   We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.

   We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We Want An Immediate End To 
   Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.

   We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.

8. We Want Freedom For All Black Men 
   Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.

   We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In 
   Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black
   Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.

   We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.

10. We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education,
    Clothing, Justice And Peace.

    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

(via looking-for-oisin)