January 2011
29 posts
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“No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.” (my bold)
lol: you’d think these three things are all FORMS OF OPPRESSION and EQUIVALENT. it’s all quite telling...
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive...
“How many [teachers] (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the...”
– Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.”
“White femininity which, in the antebellum South, works as an aesthetic representation of gender at the cost of almost total disembodiment of white women, functions as a central defining moment of white dominance, as visceral allegory of an unassailable white gentility. This in turn is made possible by ascribing to black female slaves a status of pure flesh, so to speak (in the sense of...
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“[E]x slaves did much more than establish a tradition of educational self-help...”
– James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.
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Anonymous asked: ur my favorite crush, commie.
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Anonymous asked: I genuinely love and am in awe of your writing. I like your mind and your political (academic) writing but I'm thinking especially of your personal writing (what a blurry, non existent line there...) I wish you wrote more about your life and I think you are very talented.
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Anonymous asked: commie
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Reblog if you want an anon's honest opinion of...
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“Many of those who embark on a PhD are [people who have been trained to...”
– Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist (via literarypiano)
Sometimes you need to place the toxicity of dominant forms of rationality on blast. Or in brackets.
In November 1964, weeks before Martin Luther King was to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize an anonymous correspondent sent him a package in the mail. It contained an audiotape, and a letter.
The tape was a compilation of material recorded via Bureau wiretaps over the previous year. It consisted of off-color jokes and remarks King had made in private, among friends, interspersed...
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The aversion some black people have to certain other segments of the black population plays out in the implicit and explicit policing of the boundaries of the behavior deemed acceptable for “respectable” black people. To be sure, Lucinda may not have been making the argument that domestic work is itself an unacceptable field of work, but her “devastation” at being mistaken for a domestic worker...
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Julianne Hing on Arizona's Ethnic Studies ban →
I was entranced by that photo. And something about old Asian people stirs up feelings of automatic reverence. I blame my upbringing. The photo also reminded me just how deep Asian-Americans’ roots in this country go, and my ignorance of that history. Ethnic studies courses offer a version of this experience for all students of color, a chance to look at history and see the images of...
and even after all my logic and my theory i’m name droppin’ derrida so all you grad students hear me.
The Student Loan Debt Abolition Movement in the... →
Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Student loan debt in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though...
“I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the...
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“The older woman looked at me and said, kindly, ‘Don’t give up, I’m sure you could write a best seller!’ And I said, ‘I doubt it; I write about not understanding things.’”
- Lauren Berlant