Why you should visit the Lucille Clifton Papers @ Emory! →
youtube.com
Don’t take their muffled word for it. Visit yourself! I’ve spent two weeks during two different years and I can’t wait to go back!
September 2011
49 posts
Lex's Article On Audre Lorde and Berlin →
micmovement.com
I’m excited about the new website Mic Movement amplifying the arts in Berlin and around Germany…and thrilled to be able to chime in on behalf of Audre Lorde based on some new information I found in her letters from her years in Berlin. Check it out!
“Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut,and heart, and mind or we’re talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die, who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.”
— — June Jordan (via theredtree)
“
“…brown/black queer men exist within ideological terrains and amidst structural conditions that literally murder us. To live, then, we must commit to the hard work of provoking resurrections in our lives and the lives of other queer men of color. To live, we must put an end those things that would, otherwise, be cause for our own funerals.
If we are to offer eulogies, let them be on behalf of those things that push us toward death. “
” —brother comrade genius warrior Darnell Moore from “Reflections of a Black Queer Suicide Survivor” http://yoloakili.com/2011/09/reflections-of-a-black-queer-suicide-survivor-part-2-of-2/
I am blessed to have such powerful men in my life. →
yoloakili.com
Reflections of a Black Queer Suicide Survivor Part 1.
we are free →
hermanaresist.com
What white people see when they look at you is not visible. What they do see when they do look at you is what they have invested you with. What they have invested you with is all the agony, and pain, and the danger, and the passion, and the torment-you know, sin, death, and hell-of which everyone in this country is terrified.
Conversations with James Baldwin
—
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (via littlejudith)
Hey
King
i’m waiting for their next step February was fantastic for this memory =)
KING - HEY
I’m actually surprised I haven’t posted anything about this talented trio yet! Well here goes: back in February, on one of the great neo-soul/fusion sites I frequent, I happened upon new music that was love at first hear! It was soulful, jazzy, ethereal, catchy and fresh! I loved it right away. Even went to download their EP (paid for it, if you know me, that’s of note! lol), which hadn’t been released when I first discovered them. A month or so later twitter was all a-buzz with RTs from big people like Erykah Badu, The Roots and others all singing the praises of King. From obscurity to fame in a night. Soon the group would be asked to open for Prince…check these darlings of soul out…float.
“Muchas mujeres se encargan de la problemática de otros pero sin embargo la propia, la dejan de lado. Eso es algo que duele y que nos demuestra un ejemplo de que nosotras mismas tenemos que solucionar la problemática y no pedir que alguien la venga a solucionar.”
—
Rigoberta Menchú
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia Por Elizabeth Burgos
(via inthepursuitofgrowth)
“Sonia Sanchez on Audre Lorde: “she taught out of the classroom. She taught from stages, she taught in workshops, she taught wherever she was. Wherever she took a deep breath and opened her mouth, she taught, she taught and she taught.”
—(Angela Bowen’s interview with Sonia Sanchez. Nov. 10 1994.)
“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
—Toni Morrison (via black-culture)
“The more homophobic we are as a people, the further removed we are from any kind of revolution. Not only must black lesbians and gay men be committed to destroying homophobia, but ALL black people must be committed to working out and rooting out homophobia in the black community. We begin to eliminate homophobia by engaging in dialogue with the advocates of gay and lesbian liberation, educating ourselves about gay and lesbian politics, confronting and correcting homophobic attitudes, and understanding how these attitudes prevent the liberation of the total community.”
—
Cheryl Clarke “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” (1983)
This essay was phenomenal. She gives a very severe verbal lashing to heterosexual black “intellectuals and politicos” as she refers to them as who she claims are perpetuating most of the homophobia present within our communities. she tears into bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman book (which hooks then responds to in Feminist Theory). I can’t say that I completely agree with every criticism she made of hooks but Clarke definitely calls for the end of bullshit, the end of black heterosexual privilege and the end of black intellectuals skipping over or completely ignoring the presence of black lgbtq individuals.
(via agradschoolbreakup)
“The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”
—Che Guevara (via lifeisliterallylimited)
“And if going home is denied me, then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture — una cultura mestiza — with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.”
—
—Gloria Anzaldua
My life mantra: I hand wrote this out recently and pinned it on the wall facing my bed so I can wake and sleep to this message.
(via corigami)
Learning more about origin everyday. →
thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com
Origin poem for my friend from Oregon. Much love to Jade Brooks!
“Without a vision, every social change feels like death.”
—Audre Lorde, Foreword to the English Translation of Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out
Listen
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston “Ever Been Down”…from Speak So You Can Speak Again, published by Lucy Anne Hurston and the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston. What y’all think?
“I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.”
—Zora Neale Hurston, Draft of chapter “Love” in Dust Tracks on a Road
Every conversation a revolution. Thanks Yolo!!!! →
yoloakili.com
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the co-creator of the Mobile Home Coming project and the Founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. She is also, without a doubt, one of the most visible queer women of color visionaries & creators of our generation.
Alexis’s classes, poetry, videos and her uncompromising commitment to grounding us in our ancestor’s experiences have inspired people across the world.
In this interview I took some time to talk to Dr. Gumbs about her inter-generational work, her views on privilege, oppression and of course, Black feminism! As expected, she did not fail to reflect her magic.
Enjoy!
Star-Apple for Leah Lakshmi →
thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com
st. croix sweetness inspired by and for Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ♥♥♥
Unsleepable poem the night before St. Croix! →
thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com
Don’t sleep on the abundant brilliance of Lisa Factora-Borchers. I love you sister-comrade!!!! ♥♥♥
“The supposition that one [group] needs the other’s acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal. This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.”
—
Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving” (1978) (via annaham) (via novazembla) (via shadowofthebridge) (via so-treu)
Relevant to me at the moment.
(via flymetothemooon) (via strugglingtobeheard)
(via extravagantpromises)
Audre Lorde, yall. Always accurate !
(via praisethelorde)
“One of my goals in thinking about redefining the way we view relationships is to try to treat the people I date more like I treat my friends—try to be respectful and thoughtful and have boundaries and reasonable expectations—and to try to treat my friends more like my dates—to give them special attention, honor my commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in our futures together. In the queer communities I’m in valuing friendship is a really big deal, often coming out of the fact that lots of us don’t have family support, and build deep supportive structures with other queers. We are interested in resisting the heteronormative family structure in which people are expected to form a dyad, marry, have kids, and get all their needs met within that family structure. A lot of us see that as unhealthy, as a new technology of post-industrial late capitalism that is connected to alienating people from community and training them to think in terms of individuality, to value the smaller unit of the nuclear family rather than the extended family. Thus, questioning how the status and accompanying behavior norms are different for how we treat our friends versus our dates, and trying to bring those into balance, starts to support our work of creating chosen families and resisting the annihilation of community that capitalism seeks.”
—
Dean Spade, For Lovers and Fighters (via martaunderthesea)
P.S. This is one of the first things Julia Roxanne Wallace and I read together as part of our process of intentionally defining our relationship…passed onto us by our beloved comrade Manju <3<3
“It is not wrong to hunger
for a cause till the need
burns upriver
to your heart becomes
an unquenchable taste
only you must believe
yourself
and the power to choose
your own selves
your best campaign.” —Audre Lorde “Starting All Over Again” (internal spacing not accurate)
for a cause till the need
burns upriver
to your heart becomes
an unquenchable taste
only you must believe
yourself
and the power to choose
your own selves
your best campaign.” —Audre Lorde “Starting All Over Again” (internal spacing not accurate)
