Reclaiming Our Lives

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

—Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House 

(Source: thefemmeinistmystique, via blck-grrl)

Poverty is not simply having no money — it is isolation, vulnerability, humiliation and mistrust. It is not being able to differentiate between employers and exploiters and abusers. It is contempt for the simplistic illusion of meritocracy — the idea that what we get is what we work for. It is knowing that your mother, with her arthritic joints and her maddening insomnia and her post-traumatic stress disordered heart, goes to work until two in the morning waiting tables for less than minimum wage, or pushes a janitor’s cart and cleans the shit-filled toilets of polished professionals. It is entering a room full of people and seeing not only individual people, but violent systems and stark divisions. It is the violence of untreated mental illness exacerbated by the fact that reality, from some vantage points, really does resemble a psychotic nightmare. It is the violence of abuse and assault which is ignored or minimized by police officers, social services, and courts of law. Poverty is conflict. And for poor kids lucky enough to have the chance to “move up,” it is the conflict between remaining oppressed or collaborating with the oppressor.

—Megan Lee

(Source: docs.google.com, via newwavefeminism)

Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It’s nothing that’s going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.

If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.

If this frustrates you, try to remember that women are blamed for lapsed vigilance. If a woman does get raped, everyone rushes to see where she let her guard down. Was she drinking? Was she alone? Was she wearing a short skirt? Did she go to a strange man’s room for coffee at 4am?

A woman must be seen to be vigilant as well as be vigilant. If she is deemed insufficiently vigilant, she will be at least partly blamed for any sexual violence that befalls her. If she’s regarded as downright reckless, that “evidence” can be used to completely exonerate her rapist. If it comes down to a he said/she said dispute over whether sex was consensual, as so many rape cases do, the dispute becomes a referendum on whether the woman seems like the sort of reckless person who would have sex with a stranger.

If a woman does go back to a strange man’s hotel room at 4am, even if she only wants a coffee and conversation, she’s more or less given him the power to rape her. No jury is going to believe she went up there for anything but sex. So, don’t be surprised if a stranger reacts badly to that suggestion.

Ten Lies You are Told Every Single Day

  1. If you don’t physically hold someone down, you can’t be an oppressor.
  2. Racism is physically hating and acting on that hate based on a person’s race.
  3. White Privilege means you are rich and/or have an easy life.
  4. Pointing out racism is a racist act.
  5. Not knowing better is a perfectly justifiable reason to have hurt someone.
  6. There is a specific way to be (insert race here)
  7. White and whiteness are the same thing.
  8. Anger is childish.
  9. Using angry phrasing or curse words makes your point invalid.
  10. It is my job to teach you but not your job to search for knowledge on your own.

(Source: racismschool, via rashers)

If you speak in an angry way about what has happened to our people and what is happening to our people, what does he call it? Emotionalism. Pick up on that. Here the man has got a rope around his neck and because he screams, you know, the cracker that’s putting the rope around his neck accuses him of being emotional. [Laughter] You’re supposed to have the rope around your neck and holler politely, you know. You’re supposed to watch your diction, not shout and wake other people up— this is how you’re supposed to holler. You’re supposed to be respectable and responsible when you holler against what they’re doing to you.

—Malcolm X 

(Source: ancestryinprogress, via ellephanta)

Guide to loving your body:

1. Get naked and take a good long look at your body. Trace your stretch marks, feel your hip bones poking out, place your hand over your tummy and take a fistful of yourself in. Appreciate your scars and pimples, your uneven,large,or nonexistent breasts. Take pride in your un/shaven, un/cut, fantastically odd private bits. Hold up a mirror to yourself and study your body. Love it.

2. Be Ugly, reclaim words that are used to put you down and shut you up and scream right back at these fascist beauty standard reinforcing scumbags. Give them the finger and tell them to kiss your fat/skinny/somewhere in between ass ‘cause you ain’t got time to waste with their body hating bullshit. and remember, you don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Validate yourself by accepting yourself.

3. Wear clothes that don’t fit, that are too big or too small and show all your “problem areas” that cosmo insists you hide and walk down the street like the fucking fabulous queen you are. Sashay the hate away.

4. Do what YOU want with YOUR body. Shave or don’t, wear makeup or don’t, whatever choice you make is yours to make, and anyone who shames you for your decision can keep it moving. This also means respecting the choices of others, even if they differ from your own.

5. Surround yourself with loving and supportive people. Rid of the toxic bullshit in your life if possible, and immerse yourself in a community that embraces body positivity and diversity.

—brazen bitch (now blck-grrl) (via pussy-envy)

(via blck-grrl)

stoprobbers:

Unless you are poor, brown, female, Jewish, or gay.

I’m not gonna tag this Disney cuz that’s rude, but I’m not into the Walt Disney worship I see here on Tumblr, or in real life. The man was a racist and sexist bigot who designed Disney Land as a tribute to a pastoral version of America that never existed. He placed it in Anaheim, where minorities who were too poor and marginalized in Southern California to, by and large, afford cars could not get to it, and instructed admissions employees to discourage them from coming. He refused to hire black or brown people except one woman who was forced to perform in near-minstrel capacity as Aunt Jemima in the Aunt Jemima Pancake House on Orleans Street. He also was a public supporter of some of the most vile anti-Semites in America.

You can talk about modern Disney and all the progress its made from these frankly nauseating beginnings, but holding Walt Disney up as some champion of individuality, self-expression, and self-esteem is a damn lie. He only wanted you to be yourself if you were white and middle class. 

(Source: curiiouser, via lucifelle)

Enculturated lens theory focuses on the three lenses of gender that exist in the United States and most of the Western world: gender polarization, androcentrism, and biological essentialism. The lens of gender polarization centers on the concept that men and women are considered completely different, even opposite, from one another, which underlies the organization of society. The lens of androcentrism centers on the idea that men are superior to women and, as such, men and their experiences are the norm against which women are judged. The lens of biological essentialism both minimizes and justifies gender polarization and androcentrism by interpreting these lenses as biologically ordained; men’s presumed superiority, using men as the default category, and unequal power relations between men and women in society are viewed as the result of natural, unavoidable differences, rather than socially constructed differences, between males and females. These three lenses operate together to influence individuals to think and act in sex-typed ways that are supported by the culture.

—Carolyn Corrado, “Gender Identities and Socialization”, Encyclopedia of Gender and Society. 

(Source: marxisforbros)