(Source: simonefiasco)
I like how people act like you can’t be racist and sleep with a person of color as if misogynists don’t sleep with women all the time
Hypothetical Dystopia
The Voting Rights Act exists because states were innovating voter discrimination tactics faster than the Feds could catch them.
—Justice Sotomayor’s core point during yesterday’s oral arguments in Shelby v. Holder
— (via arimelber)
L submitted this picture.
Wow, it’s really surprising that the news is reported in a fucking racist-ass way.
Stop owning the idea of black dysfunction. Stop repeating that “we” act this or that way. Stop believing that every ill-advised or socially unacceptable act of an individual black person (or 20 black people or 1,000) is a blight on the whole of the black community or YOU personally. Stop pretending that all black behavior is endorsed by the black collective. That racist America thinks this way is no endorsement. But taking to comments sections to proclaim loudly your disgrace at how other black people are living is an endorsement of credit-to-your-race type thinking as well as the idea that the caricatures the media treat us to really are representative of our race.
—
-Tami Winfrey Harris, “Black America Is Not Shawty Lo,” Clutch Magazine (via greenthinksthings)
I think I might reblog this every other week tbh
(via blacktemple)
(Source: thekatestorm)
Striking racial differences in health and their persistence over time are not acts of God. Neither can they be understood as simply reflecting racial differences in individual behavior or biology. Instead, considerable evidence suggests that they reflect, in large part, the successful implementation of specific policies. Racism has been responsible for the development of an organized system of polices and practices designed to create racial inequalities. … Racial differences in health importantly reflect the impact of the social environment and the accumulation of adversity across multiple domains. Efforts to improve the health of racial minority group members and reduce racial disparities in health may have to be equally comprehensive in the implementation of strategies that address the fundamental underlying causes of these disparities.
— David R. Williams, Race, SES, and Health: The Added Effects of Racism and Discrimination (via sociohealth)
The men and women who owned slaves were not bizarre cartoon villains or the bumbling proto-Klansmen depicted in Django Unchained. They were educated. They attended churches. And they used their education and religion to try to justify the horror that the majority of their wealth was not in land or livestock, but based in their ownership of other human beings. When we think about slavery in these terms, it isn’t as easy to laugh.
—
The Price of ‘Django’
PROFESSOR BLAIR L. M. KELLEY SAYS THE HISTORICAL INACCURACIES IN THE HIT FILM DON’T COME CHEAP
Blair L.M. Kelley is an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University; she is also the author of the award-winning Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. Follow her on Twitter: @profblmkelley
(via latinegrasexologist)
“I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine,” said Doug Preisse, chairman of the county Republican Party and elections board member who voted against weekend hours, in an email toThe Dispatch. “Let’s be fair and reasonable.”
He called claims of unfairness by Ohio Democratic Chairman Chris Redfern and others “bullshit. Quote me!” (via Columbus Dispatch)
just how hard is it to get an ID?
if they don’t want you to have one, i’ll tell you:
My Nana is a year younger than Ms. Cooper, and is very close to going through the same shit. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, because in her area, when she was born, they really took a lackadaisical attitude toward them in the first place, let alone for Black children, a further step backward for Black girls, and even further steps back for a child born of rape. One of the only two ways she can prove who she is is that she currently has an ID that she got (yes, legally) ages ago, and has been renewing ever since.
The only other way is to find someone who was around when she was born or was a small child. Let me clarify that. She will have to go down to NC, where she was born, track down a neighbor, a friend, someone who was there, who was related, who waved at her from across a room once. Somebody who knew her when, and is willing to go on record to say so.
Except there isn’t anyone. There isn’t anyone left alive who knew her and her family back then. Of 12 children, she was the oldest, and outlived them all. Town hall has nothing. City Hall? Nothing. Hospitals? What hospitals? Those hospitals are gone, and she was born at home anyway. There’s only her kids.
There’s only us.
My grandmother was born and raised here, but she is also undocumented.
My grandmother has been eligible to vote since the summer of ‘35. She already can’t get a passport — we know, we’ve tried. If she is ever asked for further documentation than an SS card/number and state ID, she is screwed.
I wanted to post this because this is a problem that is more common among Black seniors than most know. My husband’s grandmother has a similar issue. During Integration, citizen records had to be integrated too. Black records were routinely badly kept prior to integration sometimes in leaky basements or in poorly ventilated rooms. Sometimes misfiled and later disgarded. There were also a high number of home births. This is one reason that birth certificates weren’t required for marriage, but rather the attestment by two or more witnesses that the two parties seeking marriage were who they said they were.
Anyway, one of the forms of protest of integration was the mass “accidental” destruction of Black records. Records corresponding to property ownership, birth records and more, simply disappeared. Most people would think that seniors would have needed their birth certificate at some point before now, but really, think about the reasons you need a birth certificate. Most often it’s for a job. Well, they’re retired. Or for services- their SS Card was sufficient to get those services.
Stories such as this aren’t even taking into account the fees associated with getting the birth certificate- THERE SIMPLY ISN’T ONE. This person, according to county documents don’t exist, through no fault of their own.
Now are you seeing the problem with these laws? Is it starting to become more clear? How do they prove who they are if the documents needed to do so don’t exist?
Hell I was born in 1976 & I didn’t get an official birth certificate until 1990 when I filled one out for myself (long story), & I only found out then because my state started requiring students to get social security cards. Different laws & I could have easily not been aware of it until adulthood.
Voter ID laws disproportionately affect people of color, the poor, students, and the elderly. They are racist and classist an unconstitutional (if it costs money to get one, which it does in most states). Here is an example of one of thousands of disenfranchised voters.
(Source: deliciouskaek)
[TW: violence] And then there’s Charlie Sheen. Sheen’s sordid history includes shooting Kelly Preston with a .22 calibre pistol, throwing chairs at his then wife Denise Richards, being sued by a UCLA student for allegedly hitting her in the head after she refused to have sex with him, allegedly strangling at least two of his former girlfriends and just generally being a god-awful d-ckmonger. Yet none of that mattered to Chuck Lorre and the other people making squillions of dollars from the long running Two and a Half Men, a televisual fart that didn’t just succeed in offending the tastes of thinking people everywhere but also legitimised Sheen as some kind of raffish japester. In the end, Sheen was fired not because he’s a disgusting human being with a gross history of violence against women but because he had a drug problem and was publicly rude to his boss.
—
Clementine Ford again, on the topic of why we seem to forget that Chris Brown is not the only famous person who has ever been abusive to women (via exportswede)
And let’s also not forget that the media NEVER lets it go if any black celebrity is caught on gun possession, not even, you know, actually SHOOTING PEOPLE.
(via bankuei)
Caucasian students receive more than three-quarters (76%) of all institutional merit-based scholarship and grant funding, even though they represent less than two-thirds (62%) of the student population.
Caucasian students are 40% more likely to win private scholarships than minority students. These statistics demonstrate that, as a whole, private sector scholarship programs tend to perpetuate historical inequities in the distribution of scholarships according to race.
—
The Distribution of Grants and Scholarships by Race
i am so sick of white people coming to me talking about “affirmative action” and how there aren’t any scholarships for white kids. let me get my fucking violin out
(via esaedders)
can i get this on a business card?
(via ghoulpower)
It’s Simple Math: There have been 10 cases of voter fraud since 2000. That averages out to 3.33 fraudulent votes per election. So if these Voter ID laws make it harder for 3 or more people to vote, than they’re doing MORE harm than good… Right? Ok. Well. One study found that the Pennsylvania’s ID law could disenfranchise 785,000 voters. That’s a lot more than 3. Like, A LOT more. And that’s just Pennsylvania… There are 7 other states enacting laws like this.
785,000 > 3.33
Governor Jan set off a heated national legal debate and scored points with her conservative fans by issuing an “executive order” denying Arizona’s 80,000 Dreamers driver licenses and state identification cards, along with a handful of state benefits. That evening, Brewer said her order clarified that there would be no state-funded benefits and “no driver licenses for illegal people.
— Arizona Governor Jan Brewer continues to be a pain in the side for Obama (and countless undocumented young immigrants), with her latest directive denying DREAMers driver licenses. (via newsweek)
