Photos from Wednesday’s I AM Rally at UCI.
Thank you to all who participated. This is not the last time you’ll see us or hear us.
Take notice.
(via abolitionista)
We focus on race, but rarely on the everyday system of terror and pleasure that in varying proportions makes race so useful a category of difference. But siting and citing everyday racism is almost like stating a belief in the paranormal. Racism dismembers the “real” — so robs and eviscerates it that nothing and no one can appear as “whole” in its strange and brutal refraction.
The Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon P. Hollard (via abolitionista)
People-of-Color-Blindness: A Lecture by Jared Sexton
(Yup that’s my advisor. Pointless and selfish self plug. I know I know)
…
Shout out to my advisor, your last email was timely and invaluable. Good lookin’ out!!!
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.
I need to take number 7 more seriously.
I try to write in a small notebook Cindy got me a while back; I cherish it to no end. But sometimes putting pen to paper is a lot different than putting fingers to keys.
Every time I write from now on, I’ll turn off that internet connection for good measure.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
negrosunshine on Lupe Fiasco: Lupe is a BEAST
Robert Glasper, Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, “Always Shine,” from Black Radio (album)
[Outro: Lupe Fiasco]
And to my hero Heron, Gil Scott
In a discourse with Baldwin
On a jet plane with no fear for fallin’
But wishin’ it never lands
Reminiscent of the dream time
Presently en route to the rhymes of the machine time
Magazine times
With coffee more sugar and milk than coffee
Aborted rhymes, rotten beats, and failed hooks
Roads as bumpy as braille books
Fail cools, bad French, and mad push at the door
Gourmet food at the starving soiree
A choice of one easy woman at a time
I’ll take three the hard way
Trying to be as abstract as possible
And vulgar, the more shocking the more profitable
A baby fed molten gold
And sat upon a pedestal promote getting called 24 carot souls
How to describe this
Insightful remarks such as the best thing I’ve ever heard is silence
Some more technically impressive
In a faux Spanish romantic hues of a Marxist dialectic
Please listen to the critics, pointless is the common passerby
Might as well not even exist, not even a bit
In the event of my demise give everything I prize to the poor
And to the oppressors, I leave a war
And so on and so forth
1 month ago - 
55
55 “Read so hard, libraries tryna fine me. That shit cray.”
B*tches in Bookshops (based on Jay Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas in Paris”) (by readsohard)
The Human need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world.
Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,” p. 33.
People of Color Organize: Editor: 2011 Most Memorable
Thinking about 2011, I contemplated what posts were most memorable. While many were highly important, the productions which were most significant and profound for me were the Watershed episodes with brother Kambale Musavuli, spokesperson for Friends of the Congo and sister Patrice…
4 months ago - 5
5 The disqualification of black resistance by the logic of racial slavery is not unrelated to the longstanding cross-racial phenomenon in which the white bourgeois and proletarian revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic can allegorize themselves as revolts against slavery, while the hemispheric black struggle against actually existing slavery cannot authorize itself literally in those same terms.
Jared Sexton,“‘The Curtain in the Sky’: An Introduction,” in Critical Sociology (2010), pg. 15
