Are Women Human?

blackamazon:

milkeemountainmama:

and you know…the reason I bleat on and on and on about love being more powerful than hate and loving ourselves enough to make change and love love love love—it’s not because i’m some sort of starry eyed dreamer (weeeell, i am sorta)—but because FUCK—how radical is the act of self-love *when the world wants you dead*? when the world sees no value in your existence? when you could die (or be murdered) and not have anybody notice *EVER*—because you have just that little value in the world?

when you’ve grown up believing you’re trash ****because you have structures of power invested in proving to you and the world that you’re trash****—when you find out that’s not true—that’s a moment of radical change right there. that is the moment where anything is possible. which is why everybody from malcom x to mlk to audre lorde to gloria anzaldua wrote about that moment when they realized. they aren’t who everybody thinks they are. and they have the right to decide on their own who they are.

to see that moment of radical change rewritten such that a rich white male can more comfortably exist within the upper echelons of professionalism…

:| <———my happy face.

CHURCH

This. This. Polerin and I were just talking this afternoon about how this change narrative applied to Hugo is so perverse, because it’s being used to affirm someone whose identity is privileged and whose problematic behavior past and present is upheld by abuse and rape and racist culture. The truly radical change narrative of those of us who are trans, or of color (I use these particular example because that’s what Erin and I were discussing as our some of respective identities), coming to a place where we realize the bigotry we’ve internalized is fucked up and doesn’t have to apply to us: that’s attacked. That’s shot down. Especially by privileged people who tell us we have to take whatever is dished out to us, but even by people in our own communities. So to apply it to say we have to buy the change of a man who represents power and abuse of power in so many ways, while the transformation of refusing to accept internalized bigotry and privileged/bigoted behavoir from others is shouted down by the same people….