sleepynegress

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Since all three of these young ladies are hated for and called out of their names for being too Black... That Blackness is what I affirm. Too many people try to gaslight the abuse for Nico Parker specifically by denying the Blackness as well, *at the same time* they hate her for it, for me to just not peep the WOC thing.

if nobody got me overhated women of color heroine leads in an action/fantasy series got me 🙂‍↕️

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It's really funny to take Spanish with people from different Spanish-speaking countries, because the ones from South American countries are like "Yeah no one uses vosotros, we don't know what it's doing here" and the ones from Europe are like "If you don't give our beloved second-person plural its due respect, the Hounds will find you"

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Local people in Fiji photographed by Nick Dewolf, 1972.

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Five months into Trump's presidency, and we are in a war.

Did his supporters have that on the bingo card?

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people in books and tv shows are always getting so upset they throw an untouched meal in the trash. that would never be me. i'd receive the worst news of my life and still be like Let me put this in the fridge.

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wunmi mosaku • via instagram • @/dionnesmithhair

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Keep track of the vocabulary, everyone.

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wow I love to sit crosslegged without moving for several hours straight!

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🎉👑 Honoring a LEGEND: Happy 78th Birthday, Octavia E. Butler!

The Queen of Speculative fiction.

The Mother of Afrofuturism.

The Visionary who changed the game for Black women in sci-fi forever.

Today we celebrate her brilliance, her imagination, and her power.

“Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.”

“Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow”

“The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.”

Ms. Butler didn’t just write stories; she built futures, she cracked open possibilities, she dared to ask: What if?

Her work still shakes the table to this day.

Without her, would we have masterpieces from Ryan Coogler or Jordan Peele? 🤔🤔

We are because she was.

Her legacy is eternal. 🌌🖤

Happy heavenly birthday, Ms. Butler. 💖👑

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Okay, so this one you may have seen on twitter back when it was called that... but it's from the "unknown" pile so the imagined stories behind this photo can go places. A tip or trick for those interested in doing these kinds of deep digs? Go to University collections of Black history. They always have something interesting. This one is from Harvard:

It's a tintype photo from 1856 and I posted it initially, on the old twit app a few years back, because I was tired of seeing media depictions from period history of Black women with lazily done or just wrapped hair and I wanted to show a real life example of how Black women *actually styled themselves* in those days... Yes, Virginia, Black women styled their hair outside of kerchiefs and wore elaborate gowns back then too. I'd like to think these woman are either sisters, relatives, or three generations of women... But they really do feel contemporary.

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hard cider was invented when someone decided to make beer that tastes good instead of bad

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Spin this wheel first and then this wheel second to generate the title of a YA fantasy novel!

(If the second wheel lands on an option ending with a plus sign, spin it again)

Share what you got!

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The famous piece of art below by Edward Degas, depicts a Black female acrobat by the name of Miss La La. It's called Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando...

Olga Brown was the real name of the Afro Polish aerialist and "strong woman" Degas painted; born in the German/Prussian territory to a Black father and white mother and raised in the circus, billed in many ways... my faves being Black Venus and La Femme Canon.

That is her trope and family Kaira (sometimes billed as the Black and White Butterflies).

She was known for being suspended by her teeth, holding a canon with her teeth, as well as performing juggling, trapeze, and other circus arts. She later met and married an African American circus performer by the name of Emanuel "Manuel" Woodson. They had three daughters who formed their own act, The Three Keziahs.

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Another for the Black History hyper-fixation brain dump pile.... This is Charles Henry Turner... He proved that insects could think remember and feel... He also studied the difference between personalities within species, a precursor to animal behavioral studies.

His special focuses were on ants, wasps, and especially bees. So, I want you to picture this gentle nerd of a Black man (pictured at 35 above) who was valedictorian and got advanced degrees; who became a humble high school teacher... Studying the habits and personalities of insects and finding out they could think, and feel in the Victorian Edwardian era, in his spare time. ...Even getting published in the Bee Journal.

Imagine this man happily focused in on a hive with a wasp or bee under close observance, with some kind of specialized spectacles, taking detailed notes. Again... YET another way Black people lived in the past beyond the typical narratives we never see depicted in media. (This is the kind of thing I do in my spare time... BTW reading this stuff and just imagining their lives) Henry published 49 papers in his lifetime about bees, wasps, ants, and spiders. Here he is as an elder: