padawan-historian

[padawan-historian]

“To be poor in the United States today is to be always at risk, the object of scorn and shame. Without mass-based empathy for the poor, it is possible for ruling class groups to mask class terrorism and genocidal acts. Creating and maintaining social conditions where individuals of all ages daily suffer malnutrition and starvation is a form of class warfare that increasingly goes unnoticed in this society. When huge housing projects in urban cities are torn down and the folks who dwell therein are not relocated, no one raises questions or protests.”

— bell hooks  (via transformfeminism)

[padawan-historian]

There’s a new world coming ✨

[padawan-historian]

As educators, one of the best things that we can do for our students is to not force them into holding theories and solid concepts but rather to actually encourage the process, the inquiry involved, and the times of not knowing—with all of the uncertainties that go along with that. This is really what supports going deep. This is openness.

Judith Simmer-Brown (as quoted in bell hooks’s Teaching Community)

[padawan-historian]

A collection from London’s Studio Voltaire showcases posters that celebrated queerness and challenged prejudice around HIV and Aids.

Source: x

[padawan-historian]

Charles Simic, ‘Totemism’, from Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

[padawan-historian]

Ancestor Octavia Butler had galaxies and gardens deep in her bones that bloomed and transformed how we radically restore, resist, and reimagine worlds before and beyond us.

She would have been 78 today 🥺

[padawan-historian]

“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett (via peatbogbodyhasmoved)

[padawan-historian]

Everyone I know in Gaza is messaging me saying they can't find internet anymore and are barely able to connect using esims that are running out. Please don't stop donating esims.

[padawan-historian]

Mahmoud Khalil is free and my heart, while still heavy with the world, floats with a little more ease. Keep making good trouble ya'll~!

[padawan-historian]

The Daily Tar Heel, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 17, 1939

[padawan-historian]

What type of democracy builds its military bases under a hospital? Every accusation that escapes a white supremacist or a fascist is a confession.

[padawan-historian]

“““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.””

—

— Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

[padawan-historian]

As we keep the Juneteenth energy flowing throughout the month, let’s center our histories and learnings around the hearths of the many Black women and queer folks who have woven the memories, miracles, and magic of our futurepast into their good work and good trouble as scholars and storytellers.

Quilted artworks by Stephen Towns

* A Black Women's History of the United States // Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross (2020)

* Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism // Jenn Jackson (2024)

* We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance // Kellie Carter Jackson (2024)

* Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All // Martha Jones (2020)

* Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class // Blair Kelley (2023)

* A Black Queer History of the United States // C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost (2026)

* Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community // Vanessa Holden (2021)

* Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People // Tiya Miles (2024)

* Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance // Nikki Taylor (2023)

* Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century // Tera Hunter(2017)

* The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation // Anna Malaika Tubbs (2023)

* Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad // Miriam Thaggert (2022)

Curated by @Rosecolored_Scholar Find these works on my Cite Black Women booklist series: https://bookshop.org/shop/neighborhoodhistorian

[padawan-historian]

“Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for—companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood. It is a wall that separates you from others as effectively as if it were concrete, thick, and very high. There is no way through it, under it, or over it. Certainly”

— bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (via inhernature)

[padawan-historian]

“True self-love is about loving justice and isn’t pathological narcissism. The joy of love comes not from one person, but from a circle of love we can dance in.”

— bell hooks’ search for love (via artblackafrica)

[padawan-historian]

Empathy is political

Empathy is spiritual

Empathy is an act of solidarity

Empathy is a requirement for revolution

You can practice nonviolence while feeling empathy for pained rebellion and violent resistance

You can feel empathy for Israeli civilians + still demand sovereignty and land back for Palestinians

You should feel deep sorrow for how the multigenerational trauma of the Jewish Holocaust has been weaponized to justify apartheid state facilitating another Holocaust

[padawan-historian]

“The term “illegal immigrant” was first used in 1939 as a slur by the British toward Jews who were fleeing the Nazis and entering Palestine without authorization. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel aptly said that “no human being is illegal.””

— Why ‘illegal immigrant’ is a slur - CNN.com  (via galileogalllei)