Summertime, and the living is easy.
Dadcrafts.
And lo- white smoke billowed from the Vatican, heralding a new form of fuckery God hath unleashed upon the earth.
[video]
[video]
“Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It’s a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I’ll meet in my life to appreciate the general public.” — Dean Spade (via mostexerent)
There should be a White History Month in America. That way we can teach all about the things White Americans have done in history, like:
- Cherokee Trail of Tears
- Japanese American internment
- Philippine-American War
- Jim Crow
- The genocide of Native Americans
- Transatlantic slave trade
- The Middle Passage
- The history of White American racism
- Black Codes
- Slave patrols
- Ku Klux Klan
- The War on Drugs
- Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
- How white racism grew out of slavery and genocide
- How whites still benefit from slavery and genocide
- White anti-racism
- The Southern strategy
- The rape of black slave women
- CORE
- Madison Grant
- The Indian Wars
- Human zoos
- How the Jews became white
- White flight
- Redlining
- Proposition 14
- Homestead Act
- Tulsa Riots
- Rosewood massacre
- Tuskegee Experiment
- Lynching
- Hollywood stereotypes
- Indian Appropriations Acts
- Immigration Act of 1924
- Sundown towns
- Chinese Exclusion Act
- Emmett Till
- Vincent Chin
- Islamophobia
- Indian boarding schools
- King Philip’s War
- Bacon’s Rebellion
- American slavery compared to Arab, Roman and Latin American slavery
- History of the gun
- History of the police
- History of prisons
- History of white suburbia
- Lincoln’s racism and anti-racism
- George Wallace
- Fox News
- Cointelpro
- Real estate steering
- School tracking
- Mass incarceration of black men
- Boston school busing riots
And so on. No fear of running out of topics: there is more than one a day! I am sure my commenters can come up with tons more, probably some big ones that are not coming to mind at the moment (I did not list slavery, the abolitionist movement, the civil war, Reconstruction or Lincoln since they are, in fact, covered in history class, however poorly).
So true.
welp
There you go
(via iwalkless)
Even though Silicon Valley is an hour south, most of its employees have settled up here, and it’s almost impossible to talk about San Francisco or Oakland without mentioning the word “gentrification” or it’s developer-friendly euphemisms “changing,” “transitional” and most sinister “up-and-coming.”
Instead of looking at the last boom and bust or questioning the wisdom of building an entire economy around a luxury good (and as much as you think you can’t live without wifi, the internet is, in essence, a luxury), most of us are happy to bask in the reflected glory, or to live our lives in the shadow. But whichever way we turn, whether we welcome or condemn it, we’ll eventually have to face the unpleasant truth: for many low-income communities of color, these young white kids with asymmetrical haircuts and single-speed bikes might as well be the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and the Google bus their herald.
When I first came to see my apartment, I remember being surprised by five or six kids running around the main hall. The complex was mostly families. A single mother next door, a bickering couple with their four kids in the studio at the bottom of the stairs, three generations spread out across the ground floor.
And one by one these families were driven out. The only traces left are the forgotten toys in the backyard of the complex. Each empty unit filled by some minor variation of a prototypical young, white, college-educated (usually) couple. Most young people couldn’t afford these places on their own, and most families wouldn’t settle for such little space for this price.
I convinced myself that my former neighbors’ departures had nothing to do with me. I felt content to critique the insular hipness of Temescal (dozens of new businesses, not one employs an Oakland local), without actually supporting any of the original, local businesses. I’ve made a thousand excuses for staying here for four years, the strongest being that it was close to my ex’s house and our son’s daycare. I had scored a cramped one bedroom at a price that seemed expensive at the time, but is now (and for just a little longer) a pretty great deal.
I’ve managed to straddle the divide between yuppie and family, shopping for books and records at the nearby thrift stores and converting a nook into a kids room. I barely make rent most months, but I’m close enough to the train and daycare to justify my continued existence in this place. I hauled groceries up the two flights of stairs, bathed my son in a plastic tub because we only had a shower stall, and stubbornly refused to deal with the shifting landscape around me. The new neighbors were just a mild annoyance, I rationalized. The annoyance of an overcrowded cafe or a few bikers taking over a car lane, or an urban farming co-op reeking of chicken shit.
And today I came downstairs to find a notice that the building my son and I called home was being sold out from under us. I want to blame these kids, the irresponsible, naive young couples who don’t negotiate lower rent because they have the money, because they’re only here til they break up or find a nicer place. But I was one of them. I had outlived the other families and their vanishing kids, but now it’s my turn. These are the chickens coming home to an unaffordable roost.
