I demand that people do some research before they start picking which countries of black people the US military should invade. I crack jokes about how easily they feel they should decide who’s worthy of autonomy and survival while not knowing where those places are on a map. I give examples of history but don’t spend time holding white people’s hands through it, especially if they’re saying “sure colonialism, but who cares.”

And now I’m being told I’m too aggressive? I’m a bully? I’m talking about black people’s lives. I’m not talking hypotheticals. I’m not talking fantasy worlds where everyone is on an even playing field. I’m saying do your fucking research before you decide who your country should bomb.

Why is this a problem? Why should we have to fight so hard?

Why in a conversation about colonialism and US imperialism and things white people have destroyed in Africa and are hellbent on continuing to destroy and willful ignorance, why is my insistence that people educate themselves before gambling away black lives the thing that’s too aggressive? That’s not nice? The barrel of a gun is aggressive; a fighter pilot is aggressive; the CIA is aggressive; a foreign coup is aggressive; the prison industry is aggressive; economic institutions are aggressive; the whims of masses of white people with no knowledge of their subject being listened to and acted upon by government are aggressive. How am I the bully here?

When I watch movies where white westerners show up in POC countries knowing nothing, screw up other people’s lives, get people in trouble or killed on their behalf, and still get saved by the grace of their white skin, with a backdrop of colonialism I don’t root for them to get away better than everyone who is trapped without a European passport.

And this is a problem, I’m told?

jalwhite:

ihavethisblog:

We were talking about globalization and cross cultural exchange

And people were like

“globalization is great! I love yoga! I love Tibetan prayer flags! We get all these great things from our contact with other cultures!”

And then someone was talking about dreamcatchers and that kind of shit

So I raised my hand and started talking about how being native isn’t a trend and you can’t just take a part of someone’s culture and assign your own meaning to it.

And then there was a thing where people pulled the whole “these cultures help us feel connected to something spiritual”

And I just started going off about fetishization and how people just take the parts of a culture they think are pretty and fuck over the actual people from whose culture they’re stealing.

And then residential schools

And genocide

And racism

And power

And imperialism/colonialism

…

And then I was shaking and almost tearing up and my professor was like

And everyone stared.

And then I said

“These things mean something. My existence means something. These are people’s lives. It’s easy to think of cross cultural contact as this great thing when you’re the one getting all the benefits but it’s more complicated than that. “

I was really mad at myself for getting all red-faced and tremble-y but I thought that closing was tumblr-worthy.

Those tremle-y red-faced moments are so hard but you’re a champ! I would have probably applauded with a closing like that!

It’s super rad & tough to keep talking even when you get trembly! That’s when many people just stop.

obruniradio:

lysscglobal:

Maybe their hearts were in the right place. Maybe not. Either way, these are solid contenders for the title of “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism.”

1. One million t-shirts for Africa

2. TOMS Buy-One-Give-One

…dumping shoes in places where people might otherwise be employed to make them.

3. Machine gun preacher

Problems with Sam Childers, the machine gun preacher, are so much more straightforward.

It’s dangerous and insane.

4. 50 Cent ransoming children in Somalia

So let’s break that down.

A. If you Like Fifty’s Facebook page — without even buying the drink — a child, presumably in Somalia, gets fed.

B. We can infer that there is a pot of dollars somewhere earmarked for feeding needy children. Two million meals worth of feeding if you count the million Like-meals plus the potential million bonus.

C. Those meals, while they could be donated, and have presumably been budgeted for, willnot be, except to the extent that you give Street King props online.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is called extortion.

5. Donor fund restrictions

6. Making food aid the same colour as cluster munitions.

Left is delicious. Right will kill you. You try tell the difference if you can’t read English and live out in the steppes.

7. Making USAID a foreign policy tool

In 1990, on the eve of the first Gulf War, Yemeni Ambassador Abdullah Saleh al-Ashtal voted no to using force against Iraq in a security council session. US Ambassador Thomas Pickering walked to the Yemeni Ambassador’s seat and retorted, “That was the most expensive No vote you ever cast.” Immediately afterwards, USAID ceased operations and funding in Yemen.

Seriously, people need to stop buying Tom’s they only hurt local economies and the free shoes you think people are getting for free are actually being sold at high prices at markets so only rich people can afford them.

(via karnythia)

liquornspice:

Oh. Let’s try:

• prisons/private prisons/prison labor
• immigrant detention centers
• juvenile detention centers
• slavery/slave trade
• the entire placement of the US-Mexico border
• Patriot Act
• segregated schools/the continued extralegal segregation of schools
• sterilization of women of color and immigrant women
• eugenics
• George Bush declaring war on an idea
• COINTELPRO
• McCarthyism
• the three-fifths clause
• the fact that raping a black woman during slavery was trespassing, not sexual assault
• lack of universal health care
• stop-and-frisks
• racial profiling/racial checkpoints/religious profiling
• the failed Sensenbrenner Bill/Arizona’s SB 1070/banning ethnic studies
• Japanese-American internment camps
• Chinese Exclusion Act/Alien & Sedition Acts
• Brasero Program
• US’s continued existence occupying indigenous land

but maybe you haven’t experienced those things or their legacies. Trust me, there’s more; that was off the top of my head in five minutes, but now I need to go to work.

This doesn’t scare me. I’ve BEEN scared. I’ve also been angry. This shit has been around my whole life.

- Ayn Rand, statement at a Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 

“Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.”

I don’t even need to analyze this or add commentary to the extent I normally do. Ayn Rand is just a jerk.

(via she-hulk-smash)

She seriously is fucking terrible.

(via offbeatorbit)

I wish I had brought in this quote to school today! The kids I was working with are starting a project about exactly this.

(via bad-dominicana)

Who’s down?? Fuck this noise about reclaiming (black) neighborhoods for the (white) masses. Fuck this noise about flying the 13 colonies flag at the occupation (srsly white people are saying this on the facebook page).

one of my favorite students, to a room full of other students doing homework.

We then had a nice little chat because I asked him about what he was reading. He and a classmate were mad that no one had taught them anything realistic about Columbus and that it was garbage to say a European discovered America. I said that, yeah, history classes were usually a bunch of racist lies.

I asked about the essay he was going to write, did he want to tell me about it, and he started with, “Can I swear? I don’t want to get in trouble for swearing, but I’m so mad!” I said he always had my permission to swear when talking about colonialism, and so he started yelling about what an asshole Columbus was. So smart!

firesandwords:

                 

this labor day, we will see people in mainstream politics give lip service to the american (white) working class, while ignoring the irony of widespread poverty and scaling back of workers rights for even white, formerly middle class workers. doubly ironic is the fact that the current ‘crisis’ in capitalism is mostly just the crisis that many have already been experiencing, magnified by runaway environmental crisis-  leaking into formerly comfortable classes and intersections of privilege.

we will also predictably see many white radicals saying across the internet, ‘they’ve got it all wrong, they’re ignoring true working class history, they don’t want to talk about any real history of class struggle’, invoking a mythical time when the settler working class existed in a racial and colonial vacuum and which was motivated by multiracial, anti-imperialist and feminist ideals. where the fight for the 8-hour workday in the u.s, and the growth of (white) trade unions had nothing to do with white mobs terrorizing black, chinese, american indian and other colonized communities. where  white workers never incited violence against prison laborers brought in against their will as scabs to factories euro-american workers were striking. Where the general consensus of white workers in the west coast was to violently force out east asian and latin-american immigrant workers.

it’s important that these realities of the white labor movements be out in the open and dealt with sincerely. it’s also important that the idea of  labor not get stuck in a  late 19th century white euro-male definition, but that it be expanded to domestic & reproductive (‘womens’) work, which is most often unpaid, forcefully instills oppressive gender and sexual roles- and gets written out of even the most radical labor histories (including, unfortunately, settlers).

as well, it needs to  be expanded to reconcile issues of (dis)ability, forced prison labor and colonization of native land. anyways, there’s a lot to revisit for radicals this labor day, but it’s important we not just simply revisit the past that is convenient and unchallenging for those of us who are white

My roomie K I L L I N G    I T.