“Agha Khan is quoted to having said, ‘If a father has two children, one a son and the other a daughter and if he can educate only one of them, such parents, if they were to consult me, I would advise them to educate the daughter first.’ Such a statement reflects the thinking that by educating a man one educates one individual and by educating a woman one educates a family.”
"Learn to use what you feel to move you toward action. Change, personal and political, does not come about in a day, nor a year. But it is our day-to-day decisions, the way in which we testify with our lives to those things in which we say we believe, that empower us. Your power is relative, but it is real. And if you do not learn to use it, it will be used against you, and me, and our children. Change did not begin with you, and it did not end with you, but what you do with your life is an absolutely vital piece of that chain. The testimony of your living is the missing remnant in the fabric of our future."
—
Audre Lorde, “Commencement Address, Oberlin College, May 29, 1989” published for the first time in I am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, from the Audre Lorde Papers, Spelman College Archives
(via tgstonebutch)
(via feministquotes)
"Hiphop listeners and creators at their best are really archivists of all music that know better than anyone how to draw on that storehouse of knowledge and pay homage to those who came before. Hiphop has always been the respectful son of music that’s been treated like shit in a billion different ways by a billion different people."
— from an interview with mike finito who produced heems’ nehru jackets
"You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it."
— Junot Diaz
REST IN PEACE CHINUA ACHEBE.
I remember having to petition my teacher to read “Things Fall Apart” in middle school for an independent project in my ‘Honors Brit Lit’ class - where lauding the origins of eurocentric language and anglo cultural hegemony was more important than reading about the long-lasting implications of British colonial rule in Nigeria.
“Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle…
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!”
from “The Education of a British-Protected Child” pg. 57
And so we grew up sort of outside the realm of all the protections that that society chose to offer its members. So from a very young age, one was aware of the fact that you were not going to be given those protections. You had to constantly try to understand what was going on and how to survive…
"When you look at Roots, nothing about it rings true in the storytelling, and none of the performances ring true for me either,” says Tarantino. “I didn’t see it when it first came on, but when I did I couldn’t get over how oversimplified they made everything about that time. It didn’t move me because it claimed to be something it wasn’t.”- Quentin Tarantino"
— #YIKES
(Source: http)
Junot Diaz is my hero. Amazing interview.
"From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah."
— Teju Cole (via eastafrodite)
(Source: maarnayeri, via thisisnotindia)
"How can you change something if you won’t even acknowledge its existence, or if you downplay its significance? White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet. The silence around white supremacy is like the silence around Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, or the Voldemort name which must never be uttered in the Harry Potter novels. And yet here’s the rub: if a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you, doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s that old saying: the devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it exists always in other people, never in us."
— junot diaz (via funkyfest)
(Source: bad-dominicana, via bare-life)
"Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time [perhaps in Obama’s second term]? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality…?"
— Terry Eagleton [via] (via pushinghoopswithsticks)
(via pushinghoopswithsticks)
"An analysis of more than 2,000 alleged voter fraud cases over the last decade shows that the occurrence of such fraud is infinitesimal and that in-person voter impersonation is virtually nonexistent. But 37 state legislatures have enacted or are considering tough voter ID laws in the run-up to the 2012 election"
"
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.
Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.
These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”
"— http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_careerists_20120723//
"We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. […] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs."
— Paul Mazur (Lehman Bros, ca.1930)
"on a September evening, when the days are growing
shorter…he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time."
shorter…he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time."
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 7
