Watch: Poet Porsha Olayiwola Heartbreakingly Reminds Us All That Black Women’s Lives Matter Too. 

HARRIS 2024

❤️🤍💙❤️🤍💙

“The most disrespected person in America is the Black Woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black Woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black Woman.”

-Malcolm X (1962)

(Originally made on insta by @michaelabalogun)

[Multiple people have pointed out that the Sojourner Truth speech isn’t accurate. Interesting none of you bother recommending other resources to spread awareness of what it’s like to be a Black Woman while you are pulling attention away from the main point–Black Women need to be recognized. If you have such a problem with how accurate the speech is, just know I looked into it and apparently she approved the second version which also expresses how she’s feeling. Let’s move on or pm me and I can list some alternatives if it’s weighing on your mind.]

It's officially Banned Books Week, so now is as good a time as any to remind everyone that libraries still get frequent challenges to books on our shelves. Books continue to be challenged, banned, and even burned. I'm a librarian in a blue state, yet one of my neighboring libraries has recently been the target of book bannings and threats of violence (they had to shut down an all-ages LGBTQ event due to these threats too).

Please support your local libraries. If you want more books by queer and disabled authors and authors of color, TELL US. Give us recommendations. Check out books and ebooks when we get them in. Tell us when you write books too. We're here to make information and stories accessible.

P.S. And if you notice patrons or staff acting like assholes (particularly managers) please let someone know. Library government is weird, so a lot of libraries aren't union and also don't have any sort of HR. Trust me, if you frequently notice someone being a jerk, chances are good everyone else has to and has been stonewalled.

AWWW! 💓

s/o to the artists on tumblr that spend hours making art and only get three notes if theyre lucky. youre still awesome and your art is still fantastic

I'm a red-blooded corn-fed AMERICAN MAN and if I wanna get my tits chopped off that's my god-given right as a tax payer.

An essay Darren Seals wrote to MTV after Darren Wilson was not indicted

“I was actually outside of the Ferguson police department headquarters, standing on top of a car with Mike Brown’s mother and some friends – all the people who have protested and fought with us. We were in the middle of the street and there were a lot of cameras around, CNN and [other outlets].

We already knew what the decision would be, but at the same time it still hurt to hear it.[Darren Wilson] got married right before the decision, so that’s how we knew he wasn’t going to jail. That was the ultimate slap in the face.

And for Mike Brown’s mother to be right there in my arms crying — she literally cried in my arms — it was like I felt her soul crying. It’s a different type of crying. I’ve seen people crying, but she was really hurt. And it hurt me. It hurt all of us.

I don’t recall anyone having a longer protest, a more productive protest, a more creative protest than what we did. I don’t think people will ever really appreciate what we did until years from now. We really did the best we could.

[Mike Brown’s family] is not a family of revolutionaries — this is a family of black people who grew up in the inner city and didn’t have the best education on these topics.

It’s easy to kill black people because we’re the have-nots. We’re at the bottom of the totem pole. What people don’t understand is, we actually live in a nightmare. We actually live in a place where gunshots [are normal]. We hear gunshots everyday.

We plan to rally more and protest more, but the long-term goal: We’re trying to use all the resources we gained from this to educate people, because we all know the system will never change. Black men being killed by police and not going to jail for it – it’s been going on for years and it’s not going to stop.

Our long-term goal is to educate young black men and young black women throughout the world on how to deal with police brutality, how to deal with the police, how to deal with traffic stops and learn their rights.

We don’t educate them on those things now. They don’t teach them that in school, and a lot of their parents don’t know these things because they were never taught. So the goal is to teach people how to avoid those situations, that way another Mike Brown situation won’t occur. We’re trying to prevent the next Mike Brown before it happens, through music, through writing, speaking at schools, talking to the kids and just educating them.

People who are not from our community don’t understand that Missouri [is filled with] oppressed people. That’s why we’ve got a lot of heart to fight this battle. We’ve been taught to fight our whole lives. They will literally have to shoot us down in the streets for us to stop fighting [for this cause].

Police brutality is going on everywhere, this is nothing new, but everyone talks about what we should do, and no one actually does it. For the first time we actually did every step – we marched, we protested, we voted – we did some historical things. We did everything they said we should do. We spread awareness, we kept it positive, we kept it peaceful. For 108 days, we did everything they told us we should do and we didn’t get one day in court. We did all of that and didn’t get ONE day in court.

What’s a civil suit going to do? Give us a little money? That’s just a pacifier. Make [it safe] for a couple of days? A couple of months? Maybe a year or two, before they kill the next Mike Brown somewhere? Maybe not even in St. Louis, it might be in Chicago, Memphis, anywhere. It’s a pacifier. We don’t want a civil suit, that’s not going to do anything. After Trayvon Martin…guess what? Cary Ball died. Mike Brown died. Eric Garner died.“

Source

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

This is a result of the inhumane decisions that members of this administration want you to be silent about in public for fear of a loss of “civility”.

Kiss Art February // Day 8 : "Shy"