#educate yourself
from observations, I feel like many people took “history books are full of propaganda” and ran with it and instead of more deeply investigating history from varying sources, they just don’t know jack shit about history
I need everyone that has ever talked about “overthrowing capitalism” to understand that
- people have tried to create a peaceful, oppression-free society before, but it turns out that’s really hard.
- The reasons it’s really hard are almost entirely practical and many of them are the boring and logistical sort of practical.
- Change happens incrementally. Revolutions and revolts…they happen when people hit the breaking point. But the idea that they throw out an old society completely and create a new one from scratch is itself propaganda. They don’t always result in a better society. They always result in a deeply flawed society. Also people die. Very often the most powerful people don’t die, and sometimes they end up powerful in the new society.
also there are things you didn’t learn about in history class that nobody was trying to hide from you
(there are definitely things some people sometimes ARE trying to hide from you, and that was even more true in the pre-Internet days when it was easier. I’m not saying it never happens. but it’s not always the reason)
if your teacher is trying to cover all of…I don’t know, Modern European History™, they might not have time- between wars and economic crises that impacted the fate of nations -to get into Virginia Woolf’s gay love letters. that doesn’t mean they’re ~hiding her as part of a homophobic conspiracy~. it just means they have a lot to cram into like six months to give teenagers some vague understanding of the events that shaped our society
I see a lot of people on here like “why didn’t I learn about [historical figure who is important in the history of an oppressed group but didn’t have a huge impact on the Big Picture of the world] in school?” and other people responding “you know why…” and like
sometimes. but definitely not always
people do their PhDs on getting into the nitty gritty of this stuff, even undergraduates are asked to write about specifics in papers. high school is meant to be a foundational level, you were learning the foundation.if your learning stopped in high school (and I’m not even talking about university here, you can learn outside of uni and college) then things weren’t hidden from you, you just weren’t looking.
for some things anyways, suppression definitely happens, but if you’re leaving a comment on a public widely shared post saying ‘why didn’t we learn about this in high school’ then it’s not a suppression conspiracy anymore, some scholar did the work and it’s freely available and being relayed to you.
it’s just likely a specific topic that was not on that foundational level yet, thus not learned in high school.
We love banned books!
[deGruy] We’ve got to really rewire the way human beings look at our relationship to nature. In the same way that humans have the ability to conciously shift the balance of the Earth, which we’ve done, we also have the capacity and capability of stopping it. We can shift it. We have to. What we have on Earth is all we’ll ever have.
[Safina] The sad fact of it is that the ocean could be empty and it would still look the same. It’s a very hard thing to convey what’s happening, how it will affect you personally. And so as the ocean is being emptied and as the ocean is dying, the surface looks the same, the waves look the same.
[Earle] If I could be born anywhere in time, it would be now. It would be now because this is the time, as never before, that we know. We understand what we didn’t know 50 years ago. If we wait another 50 years.. opportunities we now have will be gone. This is the moment. Our decisions, our actions will shape everything that follows.
“I felt the pain from time to time. Wanting to do things that were tough to do for me as a woman.. because I was a woman, and not because I was a scientist. You can think of a thousand excuses why you can’t do something. The trick is to not let that get in the way of making things happen.”
Mission Blue / sylvia earle
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is the undercurrent theme of this blog. Perhaps this is a new concept. If so, here are some things to get started:
Kimberlé Crenshaw (who coined the term in 1989) on intersectionality: “I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use.” (source)
“Intersectionality promotes an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ‘race’/ethnicity, Indigeneity,gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion). These interactions occur within a context of connected systems and structures of power (e.g., laws, policies, state governments and other political and economic unions, religious institutions, media). Through such processes, interdependent forms of privilege and oppression shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, ableism and patriarchy are created.
PUT SIMPLY: According to an intersectionality perspective, inequities are never the result of single, distinct factors. Rather, they are the outcome of intersections of different social locations, power relations and experiences.” (source)
Read more things! There are a lot. Here are just a few:
1: Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality in NewStatesman
2: USCB Center For New Racial Studies
3. Interview with bell hooks in Common Struggle
4.Lecture by bell hooks at the New College of Florida
5. The Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy
Why do white people want to say the n-word so bad? Why do they act like they didn’t use it to put down and degrade black lives and dehumanize black people? Why do they still call it a “double standard”? Why can they still not understand the concept of reclaiming a word?
Reappropriation:
“Linguistic reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (change in a word’s meaning). Linguistic reclamation can have wider implications in the fields of discourse and has been described in terms of personal or sociopolitical empowerment.”
The whole point is that the marginalized group takes back the power they were deprived from for all these years. When black people choose to use it, it’s to turn it’s meaning around, use something that was used to oppress them to elevate each others. When white people say it, all the power that they initially had comes right back. The word gets all it’s primary hatred and it’s no longer the subject of anything else than discriminatory language.
It’s not a slur because it offends people all of a sudden, it’s a slur because it was used against a community for hundreds of years. You don’t get to decide when it will stop being a vicious word, you don’t get to criticize and say that we’re giving too much power to a word. White people were always the oppressors, and WE live in a society where YOU will never experience racial discrimination, the color of your skin will never disadvantage you. So please for the love of god, shut the fuck up.
Not in a song. Not for a joke. Not to insult. Not to greet. It’s not dark humour, you’re just very unfunny.
If you’re a non-black person, don’t say it, it’s really easy to do it. Educate yourself.
FREE PALESTINE
Educate yourself on what’s happening right now. Having well formed opinions on relevant topics matters more than you may think.
Israel is not a country, there are no “struggles on both sides”. This is not anti-semitism, an actual genocide is currently taking place and defending Palestine and it’s people should not a controversial topic.
Links to great and informative instagram accounts:
- https://instagram.com/letstalkpalestine?utm_medium=copy_link
- https://instagram.com/eye.on.palestine?utm_medium=copy_link
- https://instagram.com/mohammedelkurd?utm_medium=copy_link
- https://instagram.com/ifnotnoworg?utm_medium=copy_link
- https://instagram.com/nouraerakat?utm_medium=copy_link
- https://instagram.com/jewishvoiceforpeace?utm_medium=copy_link
- https://instagram.com/decolonizemyself?utm_medium=copy_link
These people make me ashamed to be human. Be better, if this is our version of a advanced society, I can only apprehend what could come next. Please educate yourself and your loved ones, this is inadmissible.
Include jewish people in your activism.
Via @jewishpridealways on ig
HUGE list of free (!!) books by black authors and revolutionaries. includes writings by toni morrison, james baldwin, assata shakur, angela davis, malcolm x, audre lorde and frantz fanon.
Visit this link!
FYI, project sekai fandom, if you see no problem with the outfits or think it’s not as bad, that’s just as bad as the people who watered down the puchiseka incident.
Residente comes from the Puerto Rican band Calle 13. Their songs are widely acclaimed across Latin America and Spanish speaking countries, for the way they mix different beats, the way they’ve changed genres like raggaeton and for their social critique. You may know them for their hit song ‘‘Atrévete’‘
Fifteen years ago, Calle 13 wrote LATINOAMÉRICA. I really reccomend it – it never fails to make me emotional. This is THE song for me and many others. They depicted Latin America, its variety, our multiple struggles day to day while still honoring us. For this song, they travelled up and down the continent and met up with so many people from so many collectives – and the result shows it.
The band eventually split up and Residente, its singer, kept up his solo carreer.
Last thursday Residente put out a song that - for me - once again speaks intimately to the continent. The angry younger brother of Latinoamerica and a mournful, yet powerful tune.
THIS IS NOT AMERICA is both a social critique and a scream. Its title honor Gambino’s ‘’This is America’’ and also stems from the usual annoyance many Latin American artists, writers and common people have voiced in the past: Why is the USA ‘’America’’ when the continent includes us as well? Why are people from the United States ‘’Americans’’ and recognised as such, when the Americas is a continent that goes from Cánada to Tierra del Fuego?
But it goes deeper than that. In four minutes, Residente packs an infinite amount of offenses and crimes Latin America has suffered under both colonialism and - currently - US imperialism. The song and the video just, reference so many things: how this continent was ransacked and massacred and - after the fact - we just kept being stolen for by another empire, the dictatorships financed by the School of Americas, how the US put money in death squads and narco cartels, how they killed so many people, including artists (theres a clear visual reference to Victor Jara’s murder - a musician dissapeared and killed during Pinochet’s time). It’s about struggle but also about resistence ‘’We’re here, we have been here, we’re not leaving’’.
It’s not an old story – from Puerto Rican Lolita Lebrón in 1954 to the 2001 Argentinian crisis and police violence to Ayotzinapa’s 43 in 2014 to the 2021 Colombian protests. Bolsonaro. Narco Cartels. Immigrants dying at the border. I’m literally just naming a few. The story of violence and resistence in Latin America is messy and consistent.
He’s done it again. Just like fifteen years ago with Latinoamerica, Residente speaks for us and to us. It’s relevant. It hits hard – it’s graphic and blunt and… it’s us.
I’ll leave the lyrics under the cut.
Wonderful post about such an incredible song and videoclip
I just wanted to point out as well the presence of indigenous people in the video, mostly represented by small children and how they are affected by USA imperialism
(Here are amazon boxes polluting the amazon forest, and starbucks selling us coffee that was produced by latino countries)
And again what a fantastic video
If in your head you still find it normal to call the USA “America” as well as call Latin America the USA backyard, please watch this
You can change yourself and you can change the situation but you absolutely cannot change other people. Only they can do that.
:’)
Look at where you get your information. Make sure it’s reliable. Stop causing more pain to people already in a rough place.
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