95% OF PROSECUTORS ARE WHITE MEN!! You wonder why jails are filled with black and Latino men?
Exactly
race
The possibilities are these: [Sandra] Bland died from an untreated head injury after State Trooper Brian Encinia bashed her head against the pavement and police staged her suicide; Bland died from an epileptic seizure (recall that Encinia’s response to Bland telling him she had epilepsy was “Good”) and police staged her suicide; Bland was killed or died in some other way in police custody and her sucide was staged; or Bland indeed took her own life, after she informed police of previous suicide attempts and they utterly failed to prevent another while she was in their care.
There is no version of events where police are not culpable for Sandra Bland’s death.
And all because Officer Encinia was angry that Sandra Bland knew her rights and was exercising them. No matter how she died, she is dead because that man became enraged that a black woman wouldn’t unquestioningly submit to him.
http://www.shakesville.com/2015/07/sandra-bland-case-updates.html
Melissa McEwan sums up how the police are responsible for Sandra Bland’s death no matter how she died. They need to be held accountable.
(via riversofgold)
Kodak’s film was so bad at capturing the different hues and saturations of black skin that when director Jean Luc Godard was sent on an assignment to Mozambique in 1977, he flat-out refused to use Kodak on the grounds that its stock was “racist.” Only when the candy and furniture industries began complaining that they couldn’t accurately shoot dark chocolate and brown wood furniture did Kodak start to improve its technology.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Only MLK quote I’m entertaining for the day. If you can’t get down with this MLK, the forgotten, less cheery-hand-holding MLK, then don’t come at me about what my relationship to his legacy should be and why I should be a pacifist.
(via evolutia)
The Angry Black Woman stereotype can mean getting mocked and overlooked like Nicki Minaj or beaten and killed like Sandra Bland.
People think these stereotypes are innocuous when the former happens without realizing that the same stereotypes are the underlying justifications for bigger issues like state violence.
Some thoughts…
StandardAll taylorswift did today was let her white privilege and white feminism show to the masses. Systematic oppression of black people, especially black women, is why Nicki will never be a cultural phenomenon in pop culture like Miley or Taylor because they are starting from two different levels. Nicki is starting 17 steps behind Miley (who has an industry parent), and 17 steps behind Taylor – who is America’s sweetheart just by being white and traditionally pretty – because she is a black woman.
Therefore, when Nicki does something in the industry, especially in the hip hop industry, she has to work twice as long, and twice as hard, to get half of what white artists are literally handed without trying. And even then, her allocades come with the * of “black artist”, and not just “artist”. So not only does Nicki have to survive in the entertainment as a woman, which is hard enough, she has to survive in this industry as a black woman. Black women are the literal bottom of the barrel in society due to the systematic oppression of gender and race.
So when Nicki is upset that her video, which broke records, and became a hit by media standards, doesn’t receive a nomination, as trivial as the VMAs may happen to be, she has every right as a hard working black woman to be upset that white women, doing the same thing, are getting recognition for their work.
More often than not, those women, are copying/imitating things black women have been CONDEMMED for in the past. For instance: Miley twerks and it’s a new cultural phenomenon. A black woman has been twerking since God created Earth and being told that what we are doing is degrading/too sexual/too exotic/too black/too anything but right.
Just like black women have bigger butts, lips, or finding new ways to do our hair (cornrows/weaves etc), we get stomped on for these features or techniques that get deemed ugly or ghetto, but the minute a white woman begins to do it, it’s “edgy” and new.
So what I’m not going to stand by and let happen is more white people sit around and say, “Nicki didn’t deserve an award anyway bc a, b, c….” When Nicki likely WOULDN’T be nominated at all because those in power (usually white people), find any black person in a position of power/creativity/uniqueness , as a threat to the way they see the power balance of the world, and will consciously or unconsciously condemn the black person for that, and refuse to give praise or awards or whatever when it’s due.
Additionally, Taylor telling Nicki to come on stage with her if she wins is her shrugging off this systematic racism that benefits HER, and maintaining her position of power as a white person, and instead showing pity toward an oppressed person. It’s truly embarrassing.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Im so proud of eminent black women in the industry standing up and defending their role while white women sub due them and take them as trivialized occurrences