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Authoritarian regimes supported by the USA in the past and present.

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INVISIBLE UNIVERSE: A History of Blackness in Speculative Fiction

documentary by M. Asli Dukan

In 2003, independent filmmaker, M. Asli Dukan, set out to make a documentary about the 150 year history of Black creators in speculative fiction (SF) books and movies. What she didn’t realize at the time was that she was about to document a major movement in the history of speculative fiction. A movement where a growing number of Black creators were becoming an effective force, creating works that had increasing influence on the traditionally, straight, white, cis-male dominated SF industry. However, while these Black creators imagined better futures for Black people within their fictional works of SF, in reality, the everyday, lived experiences of Black people in the United States – e.g., the rise of massive inequality, the prison industrial complex, and police brutality – stood in stark contrast. She began to wonder if these phenomena were related. 

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I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.‘

-Toni Morrison (via medievalpoc)

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Women of colour activists in anti-austerity and in Black Lives Matter movements are undertaking vital work in analysing intersecting inequalities, demonstrating the ruinous effects of white supremacy in everyday life and organising, often at great personal costs, for social justice. However, women of colour activists must shoulder an ironic double burden of building protest communities and resisting our domination in these protest spaces. Women of colour activists’ experiences demonstrate the fictive quality of solidarity on the left. Too often solidarity is an abstract ideal that is rarely enacted in ways that recognize women of colour as competent, knowing and active agents. Erasure in movements is a burden women of colour will continue to shoulder in our activism and is a violence that undermines the radical democratic posture of the left.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Anti-Austerity: Women of Colour and the Politics of Solidarity

(via resourcesforradicals)

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Tajikistan

by Damon Lynch

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A mosaic of Themis, the Hellenic goddess of justice, at the Tajik Constitutional Court in Dushanbe.70-s

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It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it? The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of  US society. This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.

What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-income children of color?

Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”. 

(via gaski)

How is this even satire

(via siaradah)

This is literally all true why even bother calling it satire

(via thisiswhiteprivilege)

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Man Imprisoned After Filming Eric Garner’s Death, Refusing to Eat, Rat Poison Found in Jail Food

22-year-old Ramsey Orta, the young man who filmed the NYPD killing Eric Garner, was arrested shortly after on trumped up charges. He has since been locked up at the notorious Rikers prison in New York.

It was reported by the New York Post last month that 19 different inmates were denied medical testing after bluish green pellets were found in their food. The prison admitted that these pellets were rat poison, but failed to give the inmates medical attention, and failed to offer any kind of explanation as to why the prison’s food was tainted with rat poison.

Orta was not the only person to be targeted for filming the Garner murder either, Taisha Allen, who also filmed the death of Eric Garner, is speaking out and saying that her involvement with the case has put a target on her back with the NYPD.

Now, we are witnesses of how a man who stood up for our rights, for our equality, a man who tries to prove that for every life deserves to be protected, under pressure of a police state tyranny. He used social media to achieve justice, we must continue his work.

#RamseyOrta #EricGarner #NYPD

boooost dat stuf 

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Parks & Rec, Pretty Little Liars and the Fast & Furious films all exist in the same universe

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I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year

The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women, books by people from outside the US or in translation, books by people with disabilities. After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent a marginalized identity or experience by any author. In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths, working class or poor, and asexual (as a start).

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(x) - thank you parks and rec.

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Geographic distribution of schools of Islamic jurisprudence

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via https://www.behance.net/gallery/22912099/7-Ways-to-Combat-Manterrupting

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Look at Buzzfeed inverting the gaze like a bunch of pros