Part of a climate-related project in the run-up to COP26′s “Do the Green Thing’s The Colour of the Climate Crisis”.
Taking place at Glasgow’s Pipe Factory but existing as a permanent digital space, the exhibition brings together the work of 24 black creatives and creatives of colour.
The work explores climate injustice – the idea that black people, indigenous people and people of colour are most affected by the climate crisis (and sometimes least responsible for it).
Data visualisation artist Mona Chalabi, Pentagram partner Eddie Opara, and type designer Tré Seals have all contributed.
The Colour of the Climate Crisis is a project by Do The Green Thing, an environmental social initiative that uses creativity to combat the climate crisis. Come say hi.
Protest march against the unscrupulous real estate “sharks” in Berlin and the insane and uncontrolled increase in flat rents - 14 April 2018 - Part 2/2 (10 Photos)
Protest march against the unscrupulous real estate “sharks” in Berlin and the insane and uncontrolled increase in flat rents - 14 April 2018 - Part ½ (10 Photos)
Your favourite actors, singers, comedians, millionaires, etc. are not invested in revolutionary politics – even the ‘political’ ones.
They are just as entrenched in misogyny, racism, ableism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, and all the rest as any other random person. They have no reason to be any more invested in liberation as anyone else, and they often benefit even morefrom systemic oppression than the average person, because having a voice in this society requires a position of power in a system built on myriad forms of oppression.
Even if they experience one or more forms of oppression, even if their art comments on oppression, it does not mean they are invested in revolutionary anti-oppression efforts, certainly not across the board. Even if they make the attempt, their efforts will not be automatically useful or even harmless.
Celebrities and content creators do not automatically have better intentions, information, politics, or praxis than any other random person.
Sometimes people make great media/art, sometimes that art even speaks out about some form of oppression. But that does not mean that art is going to be free of the influence of other forms of oppression, and it does not mean that the same art condemning one form of violence isn’t at the same time supporting oppressive structures.
It can be incredibly affirming to see parts of your own experience reflected back to you. It’s one of the things that makes people connect strongly with art and media. That experience can be great, and it doesn’t automatically mean you endorse the way that person or media handles every topic.
But if you hold up celebrities, or the media they are involved in, as Pure Unproblematic Beacons of Liberation, if you shout down anyone who says, “This media is reinforcing the values that lead to the suffering of real people; this media is portraying harm against a vulnerable group as excusable or funny or just; etc; etc. –” If you demand that the media or celebrities you like receive only praise and never honest criticism just because the elements you like are important to you – that’sendorsing the bad shit.
Go enjoy what you like! The search for art/media/etc with no stake in oppression is futile; anything that is allowed to flourish in an oppressive environment has a stake in perpetuating that oppression. The answer is neither to stop engaging with culture entirely or to plug your ears and pretend your affinity for something means it can’t be harmful.
Like what you like. But be a critical consumer and pay attention to the ways the media you consume and the people that produce it are invested in maintaining and perpetuating certain ideas about vulnerable groups and the forces that oppress them. You can think something or someone is amazing for its/their handling of certain things and also acknowledge the ways they’re/it’s harmful to people who experience forms of oppression you don’t.
You don’t have to pretend something is Pure and Unproblematic to enjoy it.
Stop pretending your faves are infallible, stop throwing a fit anytime anyone critiques them, and just enjoy them for what they are; flawed but relatable/entertaining reflections of the oppressive society that produced them.
(And before you think I’m vagueposting someone or something specific – this issue comes up every single time a person or piece of media becomes popular among people who think of themselves as progressive. It’s constant, this drive to pretend anything you love must have no flaws. Look to your own interactions with these things.)
“When we deny women and girls representation, we put them in ever smaller boxes,” she wrote. “And when we limit their potential, we limit the potential of our culture as a whole. When we limit the contributions of half our society, we cut our potential in two.”
THERE’S THIS PERVASIVE NOTION THAT WHITE MALE IS THE, LIKE, THE BASIC MODEL HUMAN AND ANYTHING NOT WHITE MALE IS A VARIANT EDITION
She added, “If superheroes are meant to reflect the best of us, they should reflect the best of all of us, especially as that message can become confusing, and we can internalize the idea that heterosexual white males are the best of us.”
Thank you for your commitment to Young People For (YP4). The application deadline for the 2015-2016 YP4 Fellowship Class is swiftly approaching. Please direct young social justice activists in your communities and at your institutions to apply for the Fellowship by the February 7th, 2015 deadline and nominatethem.
By the way, YP4 just celebrated its 10th Annual National Summit and the graduation of our Inaugural Los Angeles Front Line Leaders Academy. Over 200 young progressives converged in Washington, DC to network, connect, and build community. To read more about the awardees and the events of the National Summit, please visit YP4’s new website or view photos of the event on Facebook.
Thanks again for your interest in YP4. If you have any questions about the YP4 application and program, please feel free to reach out to me.
@stevebunge asked about the anniversary and about how things are here in Kent, Ohio. Thanks for the question - I’m glad for the reason to share these incredible resources with you all.
Kent State University and the city planned an extensive observance of the 50th Anniversary (that a lot of people feel is a watered-down version of what could and should have been produced.) We were able to have the opening live event on March 8th - a concert at the UCC “We March On! Music of Social Justice” featuring the Cleveland Chamber Choir and my daughter’s Kent Roosevelt High School Choir ChoralWorks.
All of the music was by women composers. One of the pieces had five parts, each a unique composition with lyrics that were the final words of unarmed black men and boys moments before they were killed.
Our 33rd Annual Jawbone Poetry Festival that kicks off the actual May 4th weekend with 3 days and nights of poetry all around Kent was held as a 4 hour open reading that about 50 people tuned into on Zoom. It was strange and left a big gaping poetry shaped hole in our hearts to not be able to stand by the Cuyahoga where it bends by the railroad tracks and shout our poems against the clacking of the train and into the rolling water.
Downtown Kent is sparse and quiet except on warm days when everyone is out walking. I avoid it and stick to my neighborhood sidewalks on the west side of town. A few restaurants have managed to stay open doing takeout and many are uncertain how to manage the dine-in experience that is set to begin on May 21. There seems to be a collective “I don’t fucking think so” in the air about reopening now.
KSU announced a $30M budget cut and adjuncts are scrambling to find work. The city is talking major cuts, too. Not sure how that will shake out yet. Nearby Akron University announced a $70M budget cut in the face of ongoing struggles pre-COVID and say they will eliminate 6 of its 11 colleges. I don’t even have words.
Meanwhile my grass is overgrown and my Dogwood and Redbud and tulips are in full glorious bloom. Garden plans are slowly coming together. I have potential work on the horizon. Kent, Ohio is a beautiful place to live but it will never be the same place it was again, just as it was never the same after the day the national guard killed four unarmed students and injured nine others, paralyzing one.
The struggle that caused May 4th continues and I am grateful for all of the people who are working so hard to help shape the new reality in a positive, healthy, equitable way in the face of so much ugliness.
This hit my feed and the need to share was strong. This describes so much of what happened woth two of my past partners. Constantly refusing to seek help for sometimes very extreme trauma or unhealthy practices (self medicating, et cetera) and then toting their strength for doing so much on their own.
So many folks who fit this end up relapsing because the core issues are not addressed, which means they return. Beware of concepts of superiority, they are destructive by nature.
Be well folls, seek help, seek support, physical health, emotional health, mental health.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu (7 October 1931 – 26 December 2021)
Desmond Tutu, the cleric and social activist who was a giant of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90.
It is impossible to imagine South Africa’s long and tortuous journey to freedom - and beyond - without Archbishop Desmond Tutu. While other struggle leaders were killed, or forced into exile, or prison, the diminutive, defiant Anglican priest was there at every stage, exposing the hypocrisy of the apartheid state, comforting its victims, holding the liberation movement to account, and daring Western governments to do more to isolate a white-minority government that he compared, unequivocally, to the Nazis.
When democracy arrived, Tutu used his moral authority to oversee the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that sought to expose the crimes of the white-minority government. Later he turned that same fierce gaze on the failings, in government, of South Africa’s former liberation movement, the ANC.
Many South Africans today will remember Tutu’s personal courage, and the clarity of his moral fury. But as those who knew him best have so often reminded us, Tutu was always, emphatically, the voice of hope. And it is that hope, that optimism, accompanied, so often, by his trademark giggles and cackles, that seems likely to shape the way the world remembers, and celebrates, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Known affectionately as The Arch, Tutu was instantly recognisable, with his purple clerical robes, cheery demeanour and almost constant smile.
Ordained as a priest in 1960, Tutu went on to serve as bishop of Lesotho from 1976-78, assistant bishop of Johannesburg and rector of a parish in Soweto. He became Bishop of Johannesburg in 1985, and was appointed the first black Archbishop of Cape Town the following year. He used his high-profile role to speak out against oppression of black people in his home country, always saying his motives were religious and not political.
After Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994, Tutu was appointed by him to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to investigate crimes committed by both whites and blacks during the apartheid era.
He was also credited with coining the term Rainbow Nation to describe the ethnic mix of post-apartheid South Africa, but in his latter years he expressed regret that the nation had not coalesced in the way in which he had dreamt.
Anti-GamerGate SJW attacks and mocks disabled woman for supporting GamerGate while being disabled and then tries to criticize her for taking money from GamerGate supporters to pay for installing a stair lift in her home. This was then followed by an SJW dog pile on her in Twitter.
This pissed me off enough I had to make a Tubmlr post for it. SJWs don’t think minorities are allowed to disagree with them on anything. They view them as unequal objects to be used as debate pieces in mean girl crusades against other people. They aren’t allowed to have independent thought or agency beyond what their “liberal” overlords allow them.
And fuck everyone who said NotYourShield were sockpuppets including that disgusting slob Tim Schafer. You have no position to complain about erasure when you’re guilty of it in the worst way.
Now, Schmidt wants tech companies to make it harder to express those traits: “We should make it easier to see the news from another country’s point of view, and understand the global consciousness free from filter or bias. We should build tools to de-escalate tensions on social media — sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”
(…)
It’s also unclear what Schmidt means by “hate and harassment.” The former CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, once expressed surprise at the number of people who came to him with complaints of “harassment” on the platform that were in fact mere political disagreements.
But others, especially feminists, have been doggedly attempting to expand the definition of “online harassment” for some time. Notable examples include the arrest and trial of Toronto artist Gregory Alan Elliott for disagreeing with feminists on the internet, and the push by feminists at the U.N. to make “cyberviolence” a major political issue.
