The movement continues. Jess Solomon of the ground-breaking and love-making Saartje Project & Emerson Zora Hamsa, of Planet Mixtape, Shifting Vantage Point and a Come Correct #blackfeministsex rabble-rouser, are hosting Rainbow Reclamations DC, a series of discussions, workshops and rituals for queerky girls of color:
With infinite love, Emerson Zora Hamsa and Jessica T. Solomon will host a seven-month creative, collaborative effort called Rainbow Reclamations DC!
Things have been pretty quiet lately. But spring is here and everyone is waking up. Ms. Walker‘s in the kitchen, making dinner. Pretty Magnolia is with her, washing the greens and watching her own reflection silver through the running water. The Sable Fan Gyrl is walking barefoot outside, waiting for the sun set. And I’m writing to you.
I’ve got updates.
Actually the whole crew is. The WOC Survival Kit, theSable Fan Gyrl, Zora Walker and Pretty Magnolia will be there & in full effect. If we can raise the funds.
Allied Media Conference is an annual gathering of journalists, writers, bloggers, artists, organizers, mamis, youth, pets–folks who are really interested in participatory media & social justice:
Kismet Nuñez, the WOC Survival Kit and the rest of the iwannalive crew is going to be at the Allied Media Conference this year! And we are sharin’ our skillz with other fierce folks from across the interwebs. But to get us all to Detroit, shawties gotta fundraise:
Hello Interwebs!
It’s about that time again for the best conference ever! Yes The Allied Media Conference will be happening June 23-26 in Detroit and we want to be there!
Who are we?
We are the Skillsharers of the 3rd Annual INCITE! Shawty Got Skillz workshop! We are cis women, trans* and genderqueer people of color making media that directly mingles our personal lives with the political issues we care about. We believe, as Audre Lorde did, that “it is better to speak, knowing we were never meant to survive.” We are all pushing the boundaries of what media is capable of and sharing the lessons of that experience with each other, and would love for you to help us get to Detroit this June to do just that!
Skillsharers include but aren’t limited to:
who will be presenting topics that range from: Nihilism for Negroes, What Up Doe! Detroit Hustle & Resistance, Sex Worker Saftey, How to Tumbl & Tweet for Social Justice, and so much more!
YOU can help us get there by:
- Reposting! – Tell folks that we are trying to get to the AMC! Tweet, Tumbl, Facebook, Myspace (I mean, there are still some folks on there) telling folks about what skills we are sharing and ask them to support us getting to the conference! Should you feel so inclined to blog or tumbl about it we can put your post on our site!
- Pre-Buying our ‘Zine! – We know a lot of folks aren’t going to make it to the AMC and we also know that what we share there is going to be amazing! We will document all the fabulousness of the skills shared with a zine, dropbox folder, and cd that encompasses digital versions of the skills we shared all housed online in a dropbox or via a CD or zine we could mail to you. For just $7 (the price of a fancy cup of coffee) you can live or relive the dream that was this years Skillshare!
We need to raise $6 G’s to get all 15 of us to the AMC (a low estimate)! YOU can donate Here! We so appreciate what ever you can give! A reblog and a tweet make us so happy!!!
http://quirkblackgirls.chipin.com/shawty-got-skillz-skillsharers
xoxo,
Shawty Got Skillz Skillshare Crew
Help us get there! Kismet’s been daydreaming about being at AMC–where black girls are queerky, mamis are radical and activism is sexy–since she first began a little ole blog named Waiting 2 Speak. YOU can help her make it happen! Let’s go! Fifty dollars or fifty cents (no really; she’ll take it…..)
Head over to the Shawty Got Skillz Tumblr to donate, browse our projects, read our bios, and hear more. And please support!!!!
ATL Shawties got skillz too! We are traveling from all over!
I’m rocking my purple in GLBT solidarity….
And want to note a couple of things:
Til then: #itgetsbetter
Cosby Koolaid Anyone? (H/T @divafeminist for this reference)
In case you decided to forego the interwebs today (or you’re still recovering from the #EddieLong Twitter bonanza that was last Sunday’s social media brunch special–see Jelani Cobb or Dr. Goddess for the recap), last Wednesday saw the internet launch of the No Weddings, No Womb Movement. The site can feel a bit confusing in part because the founder, Christelyn Denise Karazin is doing a commendable and blog award worthy job of posting both criticism and support–the woman is braver than most Twitterati and I applaud her for it. But if you want a quick rundown, you can find the FAQs here, the initial announcement here, and follow the citizen-bloggers listed on the site here.
Plenty of critique has been levied at the No Weddings, No Womb “movement.” Two of my favorites were written by Bené and Sister Toldja but just throw the #NWNW hashtag into a Twitter search and you’ll get slammed with responses. Nothing gets the blogosphere buzzing like the action going on in a black woman’s womb.
There are also a number of supporters–like Sophia Angeli Nelson who wrote a lovely, non-judgemental post for the Grio. Some aren’t even turning a pro-marriage stance into an excuse to re-hash old Moynihan-esque arguments full of single mother stigma. Or offering chastity belts & promise rings to fourteen year old girls to be returned upon completion of their wedding ceremony.
Unfortunately, over the course of the last week, the conversation grew increasingly vicious. Twitfam were getting blocked and swarmed, misconstrued and misunderstood. The vitriol came from both sides (Note to Self: Is “Google it if you want to” the new “Meet me outside”?) and none of it is fostered productive and healthy debate. So I’m going to suggest something unusual and unnatural in this brave new world of 24 hours news and 21st century cyborgs.
Let’s. Slow. Down.
Yes, I know: Your timeline is full of words like #wedding, #marriage, #womb, #singlemother, #blackfatherlessness, or #wedlock. And I know that when those words appear alongside #black, #African-American #woman or #woc it causes some of you to break out into hives, scream invectives at your computer screen and run to your local library for a copy of Gutman’s, The Black Family in Slavery & Freedom, or perhaps E. Franklin Frazier’s The Black Family in the United States.
And yes, I know: You are the daughter of a married couple who have remained so despite X number of obstacles –or– you are the daughter of a single mother who made it do what it do despite X number of obstacles. This issue is personal for you–I hear you. And yes, I do recognize the extent to which the black/African-American community’s post-civil rights movement-traumatic stress and betrayed expectations of same are feeding into the intense, emotional and physical reaction we are having.
But there have got to be some things we can agree on without jumping down each other’s throats, making personal attacks or using our considerable, 140 characters worth of wit and sarcasm to discredit each other.
For example, and just for argument’s sake, let’s all agree that the “movement” in this case is the health, welfare and well-being of all children born under God’s yellow sun. Equal access to a safe, quality education. Equal access to opportunities and resources that will lead them down the professional path of their choice. Equal access to housing, to communities free of violence, to safe bodies and minds (no rape, no incest, no street harassment) and while we’re at it, we can throw in full bellies in those bodies, literacy to fuel those minds, confident images of themselves and their future in the world, a support network of kin (elders, parents, siblings and all other kin, fictive and real) who are completely committed to their just and whole development.
Is that a decent enough baseline to start with?
If so, the question becomes what did #NWNW leave out that may be causing such a ruckus? And is there a way for the #NWNW movement (or something similar) to assimilate the things that are missing–or is it just what the detractors are saying it is? (#Solutions)
Like….
1. Where are the men? This one is easiest. The #NWNW FAQs clearly state:
Edit: Colorlines has the bullet points of the decision if you don’t have time to read the 143 page document above. Also check them out for their follow up post on marriage, immigration and people of color.
In case you didn’t know:
After a five-month wait, 9th Circuit District Court Judge Vaughn Walker offered a 136-page decision in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, firmly rejecting Proposition 8, which was passed by voters in November 2008.
“Although Proposition 8 fails to possess even a rational basis, the evidence presented at trial shows that gays and lesbians are the type of minority strict scrutiny was designed to protect,” Walker ruled.
“Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy — namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.”
“Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.”
The judgment was the first offered by a federal court with respect to laws banning gay marriage at the state level and it promises to have massive reverberations across the political and judicial landscape. The decision is now expected to head to the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, also based in San Francisco, for appeal, and from there to the Supreme Court. (Gay marriages will not resume immediately in California; the decision has been stayed until August 6 to consider arguments regarding an appeal.)
via Huff Po
“To answer death with utopian futurity, to rival the social reproduction of capital on a global scale with a forward dreaming diasporic accountability is a queer thing to do. A strange thing to do. A thing that changes “the family” and “the future forever.” To name oneself mother in a moment where representatives of the state conscripted “black” and “mother” into vile epithets is a queer thing. To insist on an black motherhood despite black cultural nationalist claims to own black women’s wombs and white feminist attempts to use the maternal labor of black women as domestic servants to buy their own freedom (and to implicitly support the use of black women as guinea pigs in their fight to perfect the privilege of sterilization) is an almost illegible thing, an outlawed practice, a queer thing….”
A queer thing, indeed. Guerrilla love.
Read the rest.
or, We are still the ones we’ve been waiting for.
***
This has become our folklore.
Soft, curling words memorializing our mother’s gardens. Wistful brushes against kitchen tables where grandmothers, mothers and aunties sit, knead hard fingers against water, flour, yeast that they will speak over to make dough–their coughing laughter and hoarse whispers hot enough to make bread rise. Walks through small towns we’ve never seen with our own eyes but experienced through the tart reach of longing: “Mami, remember? Remember when…” enough to send two generations of women into a wonderland of once & then punctuated by sighs, admonishments and warnings.
This is our legacy. This we give our whole heart to. But this is not us.
Los afrodescendientes–somos de la tierra. We are a rural people. Our worldview is steeped in the dirt that we were taken to and dirt that was taken from us; dirt we were forced to mine for sugar, tabac, cotton and rice and dirt that we claimed for ourselves to grow collards, beets, tomatoes, beans and corn. Dirt that received our blood, our birthing fluids, our shit and our tears; and dirt that we never received because emancipation did not end our alienation within our societies.
But many of us can only pretend that we know those forested valleys, dusty towns or quiet nights. Somewhere between Reconstruction and the Great Society, Exodus and the Beloved Community, yellow fever and HIV/AIDS–we were born. By 1968, the U.S. black pop officially stopped being rural and became urban. Hopeful and hoping mothers baptized us in warm cement, glass and steel. Concrete jungles sprouted from our hair. We walked in lands better evoked by Delaney than by DuBois. We spoke tongues better conceived by Hurston than by Morrison. We set FIRE!! to Harlem. Then we set fire to Harlem. We breathed in smoke but exhaled rhymes and left them strewn for our little brothers and sisters to find, pick up, take a hit. We fought, fucked and fell from grace; were lifted up, saved and did it again. We ran. We’re always running. We were men and–finally–we were women. And then we slipped genders like snake skin and vibrated between and defied both. We were young. We traversed worlds, space pod people–confused, distant, anxious spores floating apart in summers “down South” but we came back. And sometimes with a deeper, wider sigh of relief than we wanted to admit.
This here, this is futuristic black folk shit. Android fucking behavior.
There is no post-racial America. But there may be a post-South black America that we need to pay very close attention to.
There is a post-segregation America. And a drug war/prison industrial complex caste society replaced it.
We are an immigrant people. Forced migration, untold geographies, and diasporic African proclivities run in our blood.
Our history is rich and dense. We hold it close and continue to move forward, waging war. But we demand you respect the present. Respect those cyborg black kids who grew up surrounded by cityscapes and rage, rage, rage against everything they’ve been told they should be able to do but cannot. Who are still trapped in the throes of a history not of their making and suffer while we argue over kibbles and bits. Who speak in explosions and gun blasts, who scream on stages and in theaters, who bend, wind, stretch, swing, sweat, spinning to get out, to give way, to give voice to the sprites in their heads, whistling siren songs, to say–
We are here.
Womanism Month continues with some “futuristic black girl shit” (@MDotWrites)
Video via @alicewonder
