20-something native of South Florida.
Just the world through my eyes...
Fair warning: it gets a little nerdy in here.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
You start out in 1954 by saying “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like “forced busing,” “states’ rights,” and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.
Lee Atwater, a head republican strategist, in an anonymous interview in 1981. He is admitting that republicans use coded-language to appeal to the racists in their base. Because, as he always said, “people vote their fears.”
Lee, who would eventually become the head of the Republican National Committee, helped Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush win their Presidential elections by teaching them to use overtly-racist tactics.
When the N-word became taboo, Republicans began referring to black people in less-direct ways, with terms like “welfare queens.” They learned how to say the N-word, without saying the N-word.
Sadly, this still continues today. As seen in Newt Gingrich’s claim that Obama is a “food stamp President” and Rick Santorum’s assertion that he doesn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”
(via thesoapboxschtick)
lol this applies right now
America needs an honest discourse with itself. It’s like the greatest country in the world by default. But, we could be the greatest country that ever existed if we were just honest about who we are, what we are, where we wanna go. Things like racism are institutionalized, it’s systematic. You might not know any bigots, you feel like, ‘well, I don’t hate black people so I’m not a racist’ but you benefit from racism, just by the merit of the color of your skin. There’s opportunities that you have, you’re privileged in ways that you may not even realized because you haven’t been deprived in certain ways. We need to talk about these things in order for them to change.
Dave Chappelle on Inside the Actors Studio (via lucy-vanpelt)
Dave…come back. Please.
(via trill-scott)
(Source: beaucoupshade)
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition - austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are ‘always with us.’ What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to a faintness before the end of the shift. The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick day or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans - as a state of emergency.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (via infinitelyawkwords)
(Source: mykicks)
I thought I’d put some of my Cosby Show pictures to good use.
I have a folder full of pics/gifs called “lol white people.” I should use it more.
“Nobody cares about your white feelings.”
Some Nickelodeon executives were worried, says Konietzko, about backing an animated action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won’t watch shows about girls. During test screenings, though, boys said they didn’t care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.
‘Airbender’ Creators Reclaim Their World in ‘Korra’ (via meggannn)
I don’t think some people realise that this attitude is something that is taught by society—people teach boys they shouldn’t care about anything feminine, people make them play with toys that are gendered as masculine, people berate them when they do anything feminine, society essentially tells them that anything masculine is better, then people produce literature and film and TV that reinforce this mindset. It’s obvious that. it. doesn’t. have. to. be. this. way. Sexism isn’t inherent. Literature and TV and film don’t have to reinforce this mindset—entertainment can go against the grain; if people create well-rounded characters, kids have the capacity to accept them, whether they’re male or female.
(via watermeloncholy)
(Source: the-unpopular-opinions)
Friendly Neighborhood - LBFA
