Source: thegang
my newest piece :) Ema Sweeney from Scotland, guest-spotting at South Shore Tattoo Co
Source: fuckyeahblackwork
Ruined Polaroids
Series created by William Miller - more here
(via sanaa-tamir)
Source: williammillerphoto.com
Two things:
1) I cannot even handle how attracted I am to Dean Winchester.
2) Lady Partner just described her pit hair as “like a sea urchin”.
Source: fuckyeahblackwork
(First I want to say that I am white. I am a white person working in Black communities, and the views I express here cannot be untangled from the fact that I am white, and coming from a place of huge privilege, while I work in Detroit. So if I fuck up here and you all have the spoons and inclination for a call-out, I welcome it and will listen closely. Just wanted to make a full disclosure.)
These four posters were hung on the walls of a school I went to today. I was there to organize a few teachers, not to scope out student-made art on the walls, but on of the cool perks of my current gig is getting to see students’ creative expression and shit. Anyway, a bit of background on this school: it’s middle/elementary school for the dramatic arts in the Detroit Public School system. It’s one of DPS’s application schools, which means the kids in it had to go through a selection process to get in. It serves high-achieving driven kids, and the school has comparatively more resources than many of the other schools I interact with (although, given that I work with schools on the east side of Detroit, take not of ‘comparatively’).
These are posters the students made for College and Career Day. I saw about eight or nine posters in all, and I snapped pictures on my phone of the ones that featured people because I noticed a pattern: all the people in these posters are white.
Even though I literally have never seen a white student at this school and probably 90% of the staff are Black, all the people in the College and Career Day posters are white.
This is fucked. I am 100% sure that anyone who follows me already knows this, and most of the people I follow are people of color who know this in a deeper way than I ever possibly could. But I just…it broke my heart. Even in their own communities Black children are getting the message that to be successful means whiteness.
One of the ways class and race intersect in this society (one of many, many fucked up ways) is how class and race are conflated. The higher the class the whiter the person. The more successful the whiter they must be. To look around you’d think that poor white people and ESPECIALLY successful people of color (ESPECIALLY successful Black people) do not exist.
When there are no resources given to the schools in communities of color - even the good schools in communities of color - of course kids will read whiteness as a necessary and sufficient condition of success. And this lack of resources reinforces this class-race link by making college and high-paying careers harder to access and attain for these kids. And these kids are so bright and so talented, and they know it. And still the pictures they draw of successful people are blindingly white.
It’s not their fault, and it’s not the fault of their teachers and community. It’s the fault of a white supremacist society that devalues and ignores and hates them. A society that actively fucks them over from birth.
(Again, if I have misstepped in writing this post, I genuinely apologize and will take any and all feedback.)
Freedom Bucket
When I was in preschool there was this really weird system of time-out where they’d put you in this giant plastic bucket sort of like this one:
And the rule was you couldn’t leave the bucket for ten minutes.
In case you didn’t know, I was what the teachers referred to as a “difficult child” which is code for “walking entity of sass” so I was in the time-out bucket quite a bit.
Once they put me in the bucket for thirty minutes— and I thought that was incredibly unfair so I grabbed the handles and shifted my body repeatedly until the bucket and I were out of the classroom, in the hallway, and through the front door. They found me in the parking lot scooting to freedom in the time-out bucket. The teachers were furious and I said, “Hey, I never left the bucket”
So they called my mum and told her what I did and she just said, “Well, he never left the bucket.”
brilliant
(via tal9000)
Source: digatisdi
Source: the-moth-princess
Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert Delany (brother of the Delaney Sisters) overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem in the 1920s. Photo via the Schomburg Center.
Source: vintageblackglamour
