strugglingtobeheard:

so-treu:

ladyatheist:

pleadingthefilth:

recycleyrself:

blck-grrl:

If any PoC/WoC would like to participate/give their 2 cents please do so! Submissions are open 

(Although it’s the Black feminist manifesto, I want it to be inclusive to all non black PoC/WoC! I will probably end up changing the title a bit to reflect that, but right now this gets the point across) 

Please spread this around even if you’re not interested maybe your followers might be! If you’re not a PoC but would like to be apart of the discussion just let me know. Be warned this will be a safe space for PoC and I won’t put up with any bullshit.

Follow Black-Feminist-Manifesto on tumblr for updates and to submit your work/drawings/thoughts

if any poc/woc are interested paula’s making a zine and she’s super cooly cools so plz help her out!!! :)

Could this possibly be the answer to my ‘wanting to illustrate for a magazine over the summer’ dream?

Is this….a sign?

*clouds part and a ray of sunshine illuminates my laptop* 

This is amazing and so needed!

signal boost!

signal boost! i am still considering but i will let you know soon!

I’m down. This is the kind of stuff I daydream about.

What I love about working with teenagers is being able to see them grow over time, or even just over the course of a conversation. My kids’ willingness to just blurt things out means I’m hearing their thoughts—and sometimes I really don’t need to (“Miss Camille, I gotta go take a huge doo-doo”, Great, thanks for sharing), but often that means I’m getting insight on how they’re figuring things out.

So my zine class this session is mostly this crew of younger girls of color who are some of the most bad-ass women I have met in my life under any circumstances, like they know I am their biggest cheerleader and intentionally get them riled up about sexism and racism so we can yell and call people on their bullshit and hopefully make something creative out of our yelling. Then there’s two boys who I’ve worked with really closely since last year who have a tendency to yell about everything whether or not they really have a sense of what they’re talking about.

I showed them the video Walking Home about street harassment, because most of the girls are writing about judgment of teenage girls, body image, weight, sexual harassment, etc. They all started arguing, first along the lines of “Guys always do blah blah blah,” “Girls always do blah blah blah” that was too general to be productive and was just getting everyone mad at each other. So I made a rule that we had to talk from experience (their teachers stress being able to use text evidence in essays and responses, so that was how I framed it but where their lives were the text) and we started getting more productive.

The girls all started sharing stories about street harassment, but the boys stayed defensive so I asked them to talk about why the conversation bothered them. At first they were saying they didn’t want to talk about sexual harassment, but then it turned out that they really didn’t want to be associated with dudes who harass women and that they were responding to being lumped in with sleazy dudes. So I asked them what they do to not be jerks like that, and they were really adamant about thinking it’s fucked up how a lot of guys treat girls.

THIS IS THE SUPER RAD PART: One of them shared a story about one of those exercises where everyone steps forward if some question is true (like an ice-breaker exercise), that he remembered from several years ago, where every single girl stepped forward for a question about having been harassed by strangers in public, and he told us all how much that stuck with him and made him realize how seriously all the women around him have to deal with harassment. He then announced, “One of the things that I hate the most is domestic violence,” and started talking about his community intervening in a domestic violence situation. So I brought the conversation back to make sure everyone caught that connection, one that many adults fail to make, that street harassment and domestic violence are related and that there is a whole spectrum of ways women, and especially women of color, have to fight for ownership of their own bodies. I asked them about what they can do as dudes to support the girls and women around them, and they talked about calling out other guys for harassing girls and being willing to fight (physically and non-physically) if need be to get guys to cut out sexist behavior. Those boys might now be teaming up to make a comic about that realization of how the girls around them are treated by men.

It was awesome to see them move from defensiveness to anger to creativity over the course of about 10 minutes. We all got heated, like kids were shouting at each other and getting mad at me too. And I loved it. Cause it isn’t often that class is a space you can bring in your own life as your text, or feel compelled to start yelling about the subject, or can express that much emotion, so I felt like maybe I’m starting to do this all right. Mostly I was excited to see how much they were willing to share with each other, both their experiences and their emotion and energy and ideas. Instead of being competitive with what they’re working on, we’re making plans to collaborate or let their zines converse with one another. They’re making plans already to distribute their zines around the school, or make posters to put up, and most of them haven’t even written much yet. They were already going, “We need a campaign against sexism!”, “Let’s protest harassment!” so we’re going to start with what they’re writing and finding ways to spread those ideas they’re heated about around the school.

So I don’t even have words for how cool they all are. Like, nothing I could say is gonna cut it.

After school I worked with some freshmen to start putting on paper the things they don’t like about the school, like structural things that the administration and teachers could change. Things like certain actions of teachers that make students feel disrespected and untrusted. They yelled and I took notes, and we told the principal that we will be handing her a manifesto sometime soon (can I coin the word “FRESHMANIFESTO”?), and they even threatened a flash mob in her office. Among many brilliant things they brought up, I had never before thought about the relationship between body image of girls of color and school dress codes. Like I’d had conversations with girls of color before where they’ve said that girls who are more curvy (and almost always black and/or latina) are more likely to get in trouble for dress code violations or perceived violations. But today they pointed out how sometimes wearing something like leggings is a celebration of finally feeling okay with your body and your black-girl-curvy-fullness, and it feels fucked up to then get disciplined for breaking the dress code but seeing skinny flat white girls not getting in trouble for wearing the same thing.

In conclusion, they are the shit. And this is me saying that after two 10-hour days in a row.

crankyskirt:

Deadline: 1 August 2012

Nearly There: A Queer POC Zine

What: Nearly There is a zine project meant to address the serious absence and silencing of stories about the experiences of queer people of color. For those of us who occupy the spaces of both queer and of color (along…

Today is the last day of the zine class I’m teaching. This time around we only had 8 sessions start to finish, so I’m not sure everyone will be done with their zines today but they’ve at least done some writing and arguing and flipping through zines and thinking about the fact that they can write something that someone else would read. All of that’s the important stuff anyway, more than having something totally finished. And we started out with some basic media literacy work, and they had lots of good stuff to say. They’re writing about awesome stuff like getting in trouble at school and how fucked up money makes people and using music to get you through really difficult things and how young women of color are shown in the media and being from a black immigrant family and all kinds of awesome stuff like that.

They’re a really rowdy group of kids and we were really slow getting work done, plus most of them are in some sort of special ed so they’re not used to hearing how awesome and brilliant they are and having people tell them that they should write down their stories because they’re worth reading. Next week is break but I’m gonna set up an open mic one day after break so whoever wants to present their work can be famous and we can cheer for them. (The incentive is that if enough kids volunteer to read, I bake cookies to have at the open mic.)

oh! pls send to me too! me & my youth r starting a qpoc zine for highschoolers :)

Oh heck yeah! I’ll go through my stash & put some things together, and I’ll put out my curriculum, which was pretty shaky but that’s how I roll. I found out this week that I’m gonna keep the same group of students for the next session, so that now that we’ve done just really quick writing and basic layout, we can do a more serious version in the next session, so I’ll put together notes from that too.

popca:

so! i suppose they are less exciting for me and more exciting for my sister. my sister is going to try and go back to school. you may be thinking college but, no. my sister was pushed out of high school. yes that’s right she didn’t merely drop out, she was pushed out. i’ve heard of this term…

This is something I’ve been mulling over every day for the past bit. Chelsea posted this the very next day after one of my students dropped out. I really felt this same way, like he was pushed out, or at least didn’t have reason to trust we were trying to do what he needed in his life (which I would say counts as a pushout). Then immediately after that, the local paper ran an article about students being pushed into alternative schools.

Yesterday I drank a bunch of coffee (thanks, Mom!) and started over on planning the next issue of my zine, which I’d been stumped on. I want to let it be halfway personal, something I’m very bad at—I tend to keep anything I’m talking about removed from my own (muted) feelings. So, bringing together these sorts of dynamics of education and my own experiences with my students, plus women of color lit as always, I’m working out a new issue finally. This is gonna be a space to put all those things together in the next couple weeks.

Haven’t read this yet, but a few of the articles have been floating around the internet and I’ve read/posted them already. This went out on the APOC email lists. I’m sending it to the person that’s been distro’ing zines at Occupy New Haven that me & firesandwords give him.

Today we had the first meeting of the zine club I’m starting at work. It was a small group, because most of the kids I’ve talked to about working on the project had a meeting for another program today, but it was still awesome to work with a few students. We talked about zines and making media, and how it’s up to them to decide what we work on and what other groups we might collaborate with. Then we made mini zines, the kind from one sheet of paper folded and then cut a bit in the middle (I’ll post a tutorial later), and they got started filling their zines up. I told them how impressed I was that they could just sit and write, and spend a half hour writing without needing any outside persuading.

Next week when I have more students, which I think will be a group that is a bit more social justice-minded, we can talk about the role of media in social change. Some of those students are involved in activism or are curious about it, and many of them have the very keen critique that comes from being young and a person of color. So we’ll talk politics a little at that meeting: there was a lot of violence here this summer, and several high school students were shot and killed, and I generally want them to feel like they can make themselves heard and express themselves. We’ll watch some hip-hop videos like I promised. I’ll tell them about Troy Davis, and I’m still holding out hope that I’ll be able to show them the injustice people can thwart when they mobilize.

The borders I am honing in on for my zine are:

• prisons, penal abolition, 13th amendment
• nuclear family as a unit for capitalism, using examples of pathologizing black family, gay marriage vs. queer liberation, immigration & birthright citizenship
• national borders and citizenship, DREAM Act, poc liberation movements’ difficulty finding an alternative framework
• patriarchy of manifest destiny, privatization of land, gentrification
• body autonomy, e.g. forced sterilization, migrant workers’ workplace hazards, reproductive justice framed by people of color, environmental racism

Fun?