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Not even a new clip. I just love Sampha and I’ve always loved this song.

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A white woman can say that a neighborhood is “sketchy” and most people will smile and nod. She felt unsafe, and we automatically trust her opinion. A black man can tell the world that every day he lives in fear of the police, and suddenly everyone demands statistical evidence to prove that his life experience is real

Fact Check: Your Demand for Statistical Proof is Racist » Cyborgology  (via lesscontrived)

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Thandie Newton #blacklivesmatter (edited to add T-shirt link)

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I’ve noticed a lack of awareness for black female victims of police, so I’ve made a list.

Tanesha Anderson (37) was slammed against the pavement by police officers. She was apparently disturbing the peace in the neighborhood.

Duanna Johnson (43) was tortured, then shot...

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D’Angelo + Grace

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“I don’t think I was born white. I think white children are manufactured.” —Quinn Norton, in a quote from her great new piece up on Mashable. https://medium.com/message/whiteness-3ead03700322

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Meanwhile, amidst its state-sanctioned homophobia, misogyny is alive and well in the courts of Indiana.

Purvi Patel Isn’t the First Woman of Color to Have Her Pregnancy Put on Trial in Indiana: Indiana’s feticide law is being used to criminalize pregnancy outcomes—and women of color are targets.

In America’s heartland, Purvi Patel, a 33-year-old Indian American, is in the midst of a criminal trial. Last July, Patel went to an emergency room in South Bend, Indiana, to seek assistance for heavy vaginal bleeding. According to court documents, Patel told her doctors she had miscarried, believed the fetus was not alive, and placed it in a bag in the dumpster. A few hours after she underwent medical treatment, local police arrived to interrogate her; after investigating further, they found text messages indicating that Patel may have ordered drugs to terminate the pregnancy. A toxicologist testified at the trial this week that no record of these or other drugs was found in Patel’s blood samples. Even so, the State of Indiana has decided to charge Patel with feticide and neglect of a dependent. If convicted of both charges, she could face a maximum sentence of up to 50 years.

Read more from Deepa Iyer and Miriam Yeung, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, at RH Reality Check.

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Trans Artist ​Juliana Huxtable’s Fight for Acceptance

Juliana Huxtable's penis and breasts are both triumphantly on display in Frank Benson's new 3D-scanned plastic sculpture, which is simply titled Juliana. I saw the statue in late February at the opening of the New Museum Triennial—the prestigious New York exhibition that focuses on emerging artists. Exhibited with Huxtable’s poems and futuristic photographs, the presentation offered an intimate look into the sexual and creative evolution the downtown DJ and internet it-girl underwent to become a local trans icon. But, on a personal level, it also served as an intimate message from the artist to her estranged Southern Baptist mother, whom she hadn’t spoken to in five years.

"It was intense for her, as a mother, who was still processing me as I exist in the world," explains Huxtable. "It has been a journey. But to be in a room with people looking at an object of me, as me—that’s why I invited her."

Continue

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Bey is definitely saying the Lord’s Prayer in her head

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What more needs to be said?

A 2 year old baby gets called a thug and white people want to argue how that’s not racial at all. Yeah…okay… Until that boy is laying dead on pool of blood for hours and the justification for his slating is that he was a thug. Because Trayvon was a thug. Tamir was a thug. Michael was a thug.

It starts with us not even being seen as children or as human. He’s 2 and he’s already been labeled as a damn thug. And I’m trying my hardest not to cry over this article because I am about to birth a baby boy and every day I see on the news what happens to little Black boys who get labeled as a thug. What if somebody thinks my son is a thug one day? That’s the difference. White mothers don’t have to think about their child’s life being taken just because of their skin color and the stereotypes against them. That’s why it’s funny when white people get offended at the Starbucks stereotype. Nobody ever felt threatened because you went to starbucks. But what happens when somebody feels threatened because my son is a Black man, a fact he cannot control, and assume he’s a thug because that is the stereotype?

It’s always about race, NOT because WE make it about race, but because white people remind us of race and racial stereotypes every damn day. Thugs are criminals and this little 2 year old boy has already been labeled one. Think about THAT.

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WE ASK THE WORLD TO KEEP AN EYE ON US TODAY. On September 26, 2014, 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. According to official reports, they had travelled to Iguala that day to hold a protest for what they considered discriminatory hiring and funding practices by the government. During the journey the local police intercepted them and a confrontation ensued. Details of what happened during and after the clash remain unclear, but the official investigation concluded that once the students were in custody, they were handed over to the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate and presumably killed.

Mexican authorities believe that Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa were the probable masterminds of the abduction. Both of them became fugitives after the incident along with the town’s police chief Felipe Flores Velásquez. The couple was arrested about a month later in Mexico City. The mass kidnapping of the students quickly snowballed into the biggest political and public security scandal Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto had faced in his administration. It led to massive protests all across Mexico, particularly in the state of Guerrero and Mexico City, and condemnations at a global scale.

A mass grave, initially believed to contain the charred bodies of 28 of the students, was discovered near Iguala on October 5, 2014. They had been tortured and, according to reports, burned alive, three gang members confessed to loading them on to trucks, murdering them at a landfill, burning their bodies and dumping their remains in a river. “The detainees pointed out that in this area they took the lives of the survivors and then they put them under the rubbish dump where they burnt the bodies.”They took shifts so that the fire lasted hours, using diesel, petrol, tires, plastic.” Subsequent reports raised the estimate of the number of found bodies to 34. On October 14, police announced that forensic tests had shown that none of the 28 bodies from the first mass grave corresponded to the missing students, but the same day four additional graves, with an unknown number of bodies, were discovered.

Many protesters in Mexico City carried handmade banners with the words Ya me cansé (“I’ve Had Enough” or “I’m Tired”), in reference to a comment made by Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo, at the end of the press conference on Friday. The phrase has been turned on its head to express public exhaustion with both the violence that has taken hold in many parts of Mexico, where organised criminal activity is protected by corrupt authorities, as well as the federal government’s failure to act against it, which many believe underpins the events in Iguala. Protesters also chanted: “It was the state”, in an effort to push home the message that the federal authorities have yet to accept the depth of the institutional crisis exposed by the apparent massacre.

Please

don’t believe when they say that the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa were brutally murdered. The government has not presented any physical proofs. The parents of the missing boys have not accepted the government’s explanation, arguing that it is merely a strategy to shut them down. They demand the truth, the Mexican state is a criminal state, and it will do anything to shake this case off.

We demand that the truth about Mexico has to be told, our media is partial to our corrupt government, but we have social media and we have our streets, we will march, we will protest, we will not remain silent.

These 43 students are not the first ones and we know they won’t be the last ones. We are tired of a repressor, murderer and corrupt government that kills its own people. DON’T LEAVE US ALONE. WE COULD CHANGE. WE COULD SAVE LIVES, WE NEED EACH OTHER.

PLEASE SHARE OUR INFORMATION, OUR VIDEOS, OUR PLIGHT.

"WE WERE SEARCHING FOR 43 BUT WE FOUND HUNDRED, THOUSANDS, WITHOUT A FACE, WITHOUT AN IDENTITY."

#AccionGlobalporAyotzinapa #JusticeForAyotzinapa #YaMeCanse

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Happy Black History YEAR!

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Do we all remember how fierce Beverly Peele was?

Azzedine Alaïa Spring/Summer 1991