i’m such a n00b i don’t even know how to navigate my own blog. like i put a caption on something the other day and now *poof* it’s gone :(
James Baldwin, Just Above My Head, pg 571
When someone you love is happy, you have been given a great gift; you are the honored guest at a rare celebration. If you are burdened, the joy of your brother lightens your burden, if you are crawling on your belly, his joy brings you to your feet. It’s true: my soul is a witness. After days, or weeks, of despair, and inertia, you are given the force to go out and contend for the rent money, and to get your watch out of the pawnshop. The happiness of someone you love proves that life is possible. Your own horrors, whatever they may be, must simply await your return from the celebration - there can be no question of your taking them with you. And there they sit, indeed, in your room, when you return, looking baleful and neglected, and you realize that some horrors need you far more than you need them, and mercilessly, you begin to clean house.
James Baldwin, Just Above My Head
To overhaul a history, or to attempt to redeem it - which effort may or may not justify it - is not at all the same thing as the descent one must make in order to excavate a history. To be forced to excavate a history is, also, to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power, and power is history’s most seductively attired false witness.
James Baldwin, Just Above My Head, pg. 350
[trigger warning: racial violence]
“A black man does not look around him in the same way a white man does: there is a difference. In a way not too unlike the way i have learned to live, more or less, with my fear of flying, i have learned to live in a white world. It may sound banal, or unfriendly, but it must be said: when a black man looks around him, he is looking, after all, at the people who control his social situation, if not his life, at the people his children will encounter, win lose, or draw, at the people who menace everything and everyone he loves. And, though this fact controls every single aspect of their lives, the people he sees when he looks around him, either do not know it, or do not know they know it, or do not want to know it, or pretend not to know it. Yet they use, and are protected by this power every hour of every day. In the humiliating, dangerous, disastrous, or bloody event, it will make no difference what they know or don’t know. All that will matter is what they do, and he knows what they will do: they will kill him, or allow him to die. if one of their number protests this, and attempts to protect him, this white person then becomes […] a traitor - a reproach - and the two, the black and the white - are dispatched together.
It is impossible for a black man, here, not to anticipate, endlessly, disaster at the hands of his countrymen. The result is that he is always looking around him at people who do not know, or dare not know, what he is thinking, people who have been rendered incapable of seeing him. I listen to what white people say and, still more, to what they don’t say. I must: my life may depend on what I hear: I cannot afford to be surprised.
This means that, in the generality, everything a white man says to a black man is a confession, though the white man never knows it. Sometimes i sing because i’m happy, true, and sometimes i sing because i’m free: but sometimes i sing because it is so grinding down to spend one’s life listening to confessions”
omg,
peoplefeminists keep saying “i didn’t agree with her “politics” but she was still a woman” or some shit—they keep calling what she did her “politics.” her “politics.” what a neutral kind word. as if her “politics” were really just her “feelings” on something, rather than a very real set of consequences from her policies that had devastating repercussions for women throughout the world.
(via youarenotyou)
International Roma Day // April 8, 2013
International Roma Day is an opportunity to celebrate Romani culture but also to highlight the persecution and discrimination that Roma people face in all areas of life.
Photos :
1. A woman holds a sign during a protest against Romani evictions in front of the European Union Parliament to mark International Roma Day in Brussels on April 8, 2013. (REUTERS/Francois Lenoir)
2. A Roma child loads recycled items on his bicycle in Pristina on April 8, 2013. (AFP/Armend Nimani)
3. A Roma woman and her baby are seen though the window of their caravan at a camp in Strasbourg on April 8, 2013. (REUTERS/Vincent Kessler)
4. A teenage girl fixes her hair near hanging laundry in Indre, near Nantes, western France on July 30, 2010. (REUTERS/Stephane Mahe)
5. Roma children wear masks during activities marking the International Roma Day in Pristina on April 8, 2013. (AFP/Armend Nimani)
6. Ioan Plesa, a Roma man, carries a bundle of twigs he collected to make brooms in Prislop village, 300 km northwest of Bucharest on September 29, 2010. (REUTERS/Radu Sigheti)
(via grrlyman)
