#black dreams matter

[ashotasfireandasdeepastheocean1]

...❤🖤💚💛

.

Black Lives, Dreams & Futures Matter

Art by Kelly Marcelle Malka

[stephen-stilwell]

and if you think that this love poem is about, I promise you, it is.

[heartshapelocket]

“she’s so me”

[nickysfacts]

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian Socialist!

🕊️

[bnwo-metaverse]

First Date 🍒🖤

[stephen-stilwell]

Just need someone to match my nasty energy & be a freak who loves kisses.

[kemetic-dreams]

Meaning of Afẹ́ni(Yoruba name)

One who loves another.

Morphology

a-fẹ́-��ni

Gloss

a - someone fẹ́ - love, want ẹni - person, individual

Tupac Shakur's mother, Afeni Shakur, was born Alice Faye Williams on January 10, 1947, in Lumberton, North Carolina. She changed her name to Afeni Shakur when she joined the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. The name "Afeni" is indeed of Yoruba origin, and it means "lover of the people" or "dear one" in the Yoruba language spoken in Nigeria and some other parts of West Africa.

Afeni Shakur was inspired to adopt the name "Afeni" during her involvement with the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary Black nationalist and socialist organization that sought to address issues of racial injustice and inequality in the United States. The Black Panther Party had connections to various movements and ideologies across the African diaspora, including the Black Power movement and African liberation struggles.

By taking on the name "Afeni," Tupac's mother was expressing her solidarity with the struggles of oppressed people and her commitment to fighting for social justice and equality. The name change symbolized her dedication to serving her community and advocating for positive change, reflecting the values and principles that were central to her activism and personal beliefs.

[cosmicwhoreo]

"Why do you look so frightened...?"

BLOOD WARNING Also me questioning the Dreams update thingy for oyster because I'm me-

Okay look, while I myself do like sum good ol' added angst material; I don't really know why she even stole and (maybe) murdered her "friend" in the context the nanny gave. I mean- I get it in the lore-sense to specify how she apparently got "cursed", but that just didn't feel right to me. Because it conflicts with this flavor text in a trivia screen. "Old sailors say that when a mermaid loses her pearl, she will be cursed to descend into the lightless abyss." Soooooooo.... Originally I thought because since she gave her pearl to moron Oyster Senior, she was slowly becoming more and more corrupt along with the growing greed of dumbass. But. she was still putting on a brave and happy front. Because love right? Until eventually Oyster just ran off and completely and literally threw her to the deep end... And THAT'S how she got cursed and bitter. And it seemed to be going the way I figured... More or less, the naivete and growing greed was a new one but eh, I'm flexible. But then the whole petty theft thing happened suddenly and just... Why is it when she steals from her buddy does she THEN get cursed? Is that one different from the first one? does she have two? Is the Nanny's story add-libbed? WHY DID SHE EVEN STEAL FROM THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE, WHAT WAS HER GOAL THERE???

[kaifish-pond]

Chappell Roan is GREAT for my regression space as a kiddo who grew up partially closeted/forced myself to have crushes on the boys in my class…

I wanna make a Chappell Roan regression/moodboard :3

[bredforloyalty]

anyone else feel like life is a trap or is it just me

[oliviacharlotte245]

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

hmmmm having angsty Lights Out thoughts

[joshuadunshua]

[Image ID: a cropped image of an excerpt from “The Will to Change” by bell hooks. Various spots are highlighted in different colors. Beginning from the first full sentence, the paragraph reads, “He was not interested in forgiving him or understanding the circumstances that had shaped and influenced his dad’s life, either in his childhood or in his working life as a military man.” The following paragraph reads, “In the early years of our relationship he was extremely critical of male domination of women and children. Although he did not use the word ‘patriarchy,’ he understood its meaning and he opposed it. His gentle, quiet manner often led folks to ignore him, counting him among the weak and the powerless. By the age of thirty he began to assume a more macho persona, embracing the dominator model that he had once critiqued. Donning the mantle of patriarch, he gained greater respect and visibility. More women were drawn to him. He was noticed more in public spheres. His criticism of male domination ceased. And indeed he begin to mouth patriarchal rhetoric, saying the kind of sexist stuff that would have appalled him in the past.” The last paragraph is cut off, the top which is visible reads, “These changes in his thinking and behavior were triggered by his desire to be accepted and affirmed in a patriarchal workplace and rationalized by his desire to get ahead. His story is not unusual.” End image ID]

Trans mascs that “speak out” against transandrophobia/anti-transmasculinity/transmisandry/antimasculism/whatever word of the month they’ve forced us to coin, I need you to see yourself in this. This is you. This is you leaning into the patriarchal role of “protectors of the poor weak permanently victimized women,” this is you leaning into the patriarchal role of “ignore your pain, ignore your emotional distress, ignore your psychological needs, stuff it deep down inside and suck it up.” This is you enforcing patriarchal (and therefore also white supremacist) attitudes about gender. This is you learning to shift how you operate under the “logic” of a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal system so that you can get and maintain access to what little scraps of privilege the system will give you for your conformity.

You cannot apply “logic” to oppressions—it is not a math equation you can solve for. It is not internally consistent.

(And when I say logic, I mean formal logic, I mean mathematical logic, I mean specifically Western conceptualizations of logic.)

You can’t simply state that “men don’t face oppression for being men because that then logically means [something untrue about women’s oppression] would be the case and it’s not.” Oppression is inherently illogical. To assume it operates on a truly definable and fully understandable logic is to suggest there’s a “good” reason for its existence. Which if you examine that for just a moment, you find it also then suggests that there is truth behind how oppression works. Or rather, that oppressed people did some thing or are some way that deserves oppression in response.

White supremacy doesn’t operate on any logical basis. Patriarchy doesn’t operate on any logical basis. They weren’t constructed to be logical, they were hardly “constructed” at all. They came about specifically to uphold and maintain powerful people’s access to power. To call the systems “constructed” is almost to give people too much credit.

Perhaps at one point “white supremacy” was a very specific spark in the mind of quite a number of powerful fair skinned Western Europeans, (though many would understandably point out that white supremacy existed well before it was made explicit), but to suggest that white supremacy as it exists now, as a self-perpetuating system that is able to chug away, an engine for capitalism built and sustained on the exploitation and slaveability of Black bodies, was consciously and carefully designed to operate only within specific bounds that we can define and uncover? That’s trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.

Trying to equate the operation of white supremacy with patriarchy, or any system of oppression with any other system of oppression (though you really do see this most often with people equating racism with sexism) similarly does not work because they are not organized logically. They are not separable entities, either. It is true that there are common elements to different oppressions (see: Suzanne Pharr, bell hooks, Paulo Freire) and it is true that the different systems are interlocked and work together to hold it all up (see: Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Andrea Smith) and it is true that they impact people at different intersections of oppressive systems uniquely and dynamically (see: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jennifer Nash, Bonnie Thornton Dill & Ruth Enid Zambrana) and the systems themselves intersect and interact in different ways to produce unique effects which are dynamic across time and space and context (see: Cathy J. Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Rita Kaur Dhamoon).

At the end of the day, too, this whole conversation is also excruciatingly Western-centric, and most often Americentric. The white trans mascs (and any other white queers) decrying the concept that men could ever be oppressed for their being men, that men’s experiences of oppression could ever be shaped by their manhood (or their proximity to it), betray their ignorance to men’s experiences outside of their specific version of Western patriarchy. It betrays their understanding of patriarchy, white supremacy, and feminism as having been wholly informed by white radical feminists who appropriate the language of Black feminism while maintaining essentialist perspectives that reify and protect the same patriarchy they want to critique. As though patriarchy is just about men holding power over women and not also about men holding power over other men, not also about women’s complicity in maintaining and perpetuating it, not also about Western nations holding power over the Global South, not also about kinship organization, not about nationalism, not about colonialism, not about international and transnational politics, not about capitalist globalization.

I suppose this turned into something much bigger than it was originally meant to be, but I have fucking had it. I am fed up with white trans mascs from Western countries whose understanding of feminism is stalled at the stage where they’ve learned that white neoliberal feminism is bad because it’s not anticapitalist or intersectional enough but they haven’t actually learned what the fuck that criticism means because they think or behave as though “intersectional” is just another word for “diverse,” which they also maintain a neoliberal understanding of. I am also fucking heartbroken for all the trans mascs who are willing to lean into this patriarchal role where they close off their own emotions and dismiss their own problems and downplay the reality of being a transgender person at their particular intersection all because they’ve been convinced that men’s problems aren’t real problems, that the oppression they experience because they are transmasculine people is nothing to do with their masculinity or association with or proximity to (and subsequent distance from) manhood.

To claim that there is nothing unique about transmasculine experiences of oppression at the intersection of trans identity and gender is to willfully ignore reality in quite the same way that transphobes do when what they protest is “trans ideology.” Trans people will exist whether you personally believe our gender claims or not, right? So to fail to incorporate us into your reality is to have the temper tantrum of a toddler all because the world and its people aren’t as simple and uniform as you wanted them to be. Similarly, transmasculine people will experience oppression at this intersection regardless of what you want to call it, but to demand that we capitulate to language that flattens our experiences along the lines of either being transgender (it’s literally just transphobia) or our proximity to womanhood (it’s literally just misogyny), or even the two together but-not-really (it’s transphobia and misogyny but it’s not because of your proximity to manhood), is to suggest that there is nothing unique about our experiences of transphobia and misogyny as transmasculine people. Is to suggest that unless and until we are perceived as men by society, our experiences with oppression and penalization (and privilege by this logic, but notably not in practice) are indistinguishable from those of cisgender women and there is no value in discussing, dissecting, naming, or otherwise acknowledging anything transmasculine people experience—and then on the flip side, when society does perceive us as men, suddenly our experiences with oppression and penalization (and privilege by this logic, but notably not in practice) are indistinguishable from those of cisgender men, and so there is no value in discussing, dissecting, naming, or otherwise acknowledging anything transmasculine people experience.

We’re either basically cis women or basically cis men, whichever is more convenient and makes it easier to disregard us in the moment.

[bnwo-metaverse]

Pre-Game Ritual 🐰❄️🏈

[stephen-stilwell]

in the quiet halls of museums, our footsteps echo like ghosts searching for meaning.

[luniiitunez]

Spending time with myself is probably the most important part of the day