Big Fat Phallusy

thegoddamazon:

hamdoullahcava:

Muhammad Ali on the Vietnam War Draft

The fact that this is STILL relevant should be very telling.

(via heirofmedusa)

daftandchildish:

New Slaves (Live on SNL) | Kanye West

Kanye hits so hard he can barely censor himself. So amazing.

Watch. this. now.

(via wretchedoftheearth)

“I went to a prestigious small liberal arts college in Maine. And like many other people of color who have gone to prestigious institutions of higher learning, I had a lot of white liberal friends. And I am sick of some of these white liberal friends telling me how guilty they feel all the time. How guilty they are, how their whiteness makes them feel bad.

“You know, I’m not impressed. Because if I had the choice between white guilt and racism, I’d take the white guilt every time! White guilt sounds great! Are you kidding me?

“Imagine this; you’re in a line, you’re about to board an airplane. All of a sudden security shows up. They pull a Sikh man with a beard and a turban off, they search his bags. You’re watching, what do you think to yourself? ‘Oh this is terrible, I feel terrible! This is again racial profiling. That man’s done nothing wrong. How ‘bout they search––they should search me, I’m a white man! I could be the next Timothy McVeigh. They don’t know that! Why don’t they search my bags? ‘Cause I’m white. I feel terrible. I feel so terrible. I mean, I’m still gonna board the plane, but I’m gonna feel bad about it, I’m gonna sit in my chair, I’m gonna feel gross- Oh! I’ll write Rachel Maddow an email, that’s what I’ll do! And I’ll tell Terry Gross, and I’ll read my bell hooks on the plane. Yes, see then, everything will be better. I’ll feel better!’

“…to any white liberals watching, remember this; your white guilt is a part of your white privilege.”

— Hari Kondabolu

(Source: youtube.com, via irresistible-revolution)

notime4yourshit:

keppps:

Alice in Wonderland racebent dreamcasting:

Amandla Stenberg  »  Alice
Aziz Ansari  »  Mad Hatter
Viola Davis  »  Queen of Hearts
Aldis Hodge  »  Cheshire Cat

inspired by @longjackets’s tags here ♥

This needs to be a thing. NAO.

yes this

(via irresistible-revolution)

Junot Díaz - Facing Race (2012)

(Source: msleahhbic, via irresistible-revolution)

angryasiangirlsunited:

I’ve always had a problem with my racial identity. See, my father is a Malaysian native with Chinese roots who moved to the States to come to college. His entire family has since moved here. My mother is the definition of a Southern Belle. Born and raised in North Carolina, she is blonde haired, blue eyed and looks nothing like any of her children.

I feel like an outsider among the Asian community because although my father’s side of the family is here, I never learned the language, I’m only semi-versed in the traditions, and I have never been to the country where my father was raised.

However, I also feel like an outsider among the white community because, guess what? I look Asian. My middle name is “Meixin” which has sparked many a joke because of its spelling (people seem to think that it looks like the word “Mexican”). I’ve been told by ex-boyfriends that my “asian-ness” is what makes me attractive, I was expected to be the top of my class in high school (I was close, but not in the top twenty of my graduating class), my failure to grasp the concepts of calculus baffles people, I say that I want to teach elementary school and people automatically ask why I don’t want to be a doctor, and when answering that my favorite Disney princess is Mulan, people smirk and say, “oh of course.” No one bothers to ask why I like her so much (because she takes charge of her own destiny). No one thinks twice when casting group, Harry Potter themed Halloween costumes (Oh Ashley! You can be Cho! I’d much rather have a choice).

So, I stared at the bubble on college applications for a very long time. I felt like I was lying if I said Caucasian, but I also felt like a liar if I said Asian. Even now that I’m in a college, I struggle with how to identify myself. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I fit in on this blog or not yet. At this point in my life, I’m not sure how to identify and I’m not sure how to figure it out.

SAME

thegoddamazon:

robyewest:

satanic2chainz:

stevebuscreaming:

So let me explain this theory for those of you who haven’t heard it before already.

The Great Gatsby is a story of a man that makes his fortune bootlegging and throws countless magnificent parties all in hopes of attracting the attention of his old flame Daisy.

But it’s really a story about insurmountable class barriers. Daisy will never be with Gatsby, no matter how much she claims to love him. No matter how hard Gatsby tries, he will always be stuck on West Egg, only able to admire the ‘green light’ of upper class american romanticism from afar. 

Themes of insurmountable class barriers permeate the entire novel right from some of the famous opening lines:

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

And so here’s the theory: 

Jay Gatsby was black, passing for white (“High yellow”)

Lower class vs upper class. Old money vs new money. East Egg vs West Egg. White vs black. Don’t believe me? 

• Early in the novel, Daisy’s beau Tom goes on a full fledged rant about the oncoming threat of the rise of the black race in society
• Another reference to race is made when Nick and Gatsby pass by a limo driven by a white chauffeur with “three modish negroes”
• Numerous references are made to Gatsby’s notably dark skintone in comparison to Daisy’s lighter skintone
• “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t— at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t— drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.”

Not only was the insurmountable barrier between him and Daisy one of class and upbringing, but also one of race.

What we take for granted as Gatsby’s whiteness is actually a omission of detail rather than a specific indicator that he was white.

From the article Was Gatsby Black?

Thompson adds, “When I ask people what basis there is for Gatsby being white, I get silence. I have asked students, colleagues. They don’t know. They cannot give me any evidence to back up the speculation. And why haven’t people made this argument so far?”

Of course as with any theory or reading of a classic text, there’s room for disagreement:

Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli has one answer. “Because it’s mishigas! If Fitzgerald wanted to write about blacks, it wouldn’t have taken 75 years to figure it out. If that’s what Fitzgerald wanted, he would have made it perfectly clear in April 1925. Great works of literature are not fodder for guessing games. This kind of thing is bad for literature, bad for Fitzgerald, bad for ‘The Great Gatsby’ and bad for students who get exposed to this kind of guessing game.”

But why shouldn’t we play a guessing game with it? We don’t have Fitzgerald around to verify any of these details so why not have a bit of fun with the text? It’s a very modern reading of the text and it makes it not only more relatable but more heartbreaking.

Everyone has their own reasons why they can’t be with their own Daisy.

Why shouldn’t Gatsby be black? And why can’t he really be with Daisy?

In this discussion about whether or not Beethoven was black, the point is made:

Another tight question along these lines: Was Jay Gatsby black? Again, it’s probably not literally the case (as Fitzgerald intended it) –- but what’s much more interesting is everyone’s utter inability to take it seriously as a legitimate reading of the text, which it is.

The great thing about this theory is that if you’re at all familiar with the passing novel or “tragic mulatto” trope, The Great Gatsby mimics their structure pretty and given how popular they were in American literature, there’s no way Fitzgerald wouldn’t have been aware of and possibly read some of them.

I’d say the only real problem with this theory is that the thing standing between him and Daisy would have to be that she knows he is black and that would only be an issue in regards to why he would tell her in the first place

EDIT: truthfully, my only real personal problem with this theory is that there are plenty of great novels about passing, written by black authors (including some who had the ability to pass but didn’t like Charles Chetnut) and we should be talking about those books

The line: 

“You can’t change the past. Why of course you can” takes a WHOLE new meaning now…

I hated this book but this has to be the best analysis I’ve ever read on it.

(Source: pollums, via heirofmedusa)

Paul Robeson (1898-1976), from testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956 (via indizombie)

(via genderagnostic)

ethiopienne:

oh whoa this is me

(Source: fashionistazapatista, via stiffcrosscurrents)

Roger Ebert on Do The Right Thing. (via jsmooth995)

(via vampirefinch)