"Some people might claim that my mother has no idea how systems of oppression work. Some might also claim that her focus on survival means she has internalized the system’s logic so that she oppresses herself. But get this: my mom has a different—but extremely deep—understanding of how systems of oppression work. She interacts with them daily, fighting to survive despite structural disadvantages. Working class laborers don’t need a physician to know that they’re straining their bodies or an economist to know that they’re being exploited. Most of the time they don’t even need organizers writing articles about “the struggle” to know that it’s there and it’s theirs. The lived experience of these oppressions is not only real, it’s indispensable. No movement is legitimate without it. We don’t do justice to mothers like mine when we alienate them by privileging analytical understandings of systems of oppression."
Ngoc Loan Tran, “My Movement Mom”
That is…. Every damn thing I’ve been trying to say, for years, about academic understandings of oppression, in a nutshell. I get so frustrated with it I could smash my head on a wall. Not only don’t you need academic understanding, you don’t even need understanding of language, any language (and I’m talking about language disabilities here) to understand this stuff in your bones. I used to say, “You don’t need to know the word freedom to know when it’s being taken away from you.” And I just… I’m so glad someone is talking about this because everywhere on tumblr all I see is people discovering academic models of oppression and forgetting direct experience and approaches that don’t fit the academic mold.
I’m not good at abstractions and ideologies, and I’m less and less able to fake it, so this stuff has always felt like hands pushing me away. People thinking they’re better than me because they’ve discovered how to use all the perfect ideas fit them together make jargon about something…. Something I feel in every bone and every pore and everywhere, something I react to from my guts, something I don’t do academically, and often the academic stuff feels like poison to my brain, then my brain wants to throw up to get it out of my system so I can just act on what I know do what I need to do.
(via youneedacat)
"Take a day to heal from the lies you’ve told yourself and the ones that have been told to you."
(Source: the-healing-nest)
My “white privilege” is negated by this little problem called SEXISM, wherein I still receive less money for the same job that a man has.
Not it isn’t. If you are white you have white privilege. Not only are white females the primary beatifically of affirmative action but they still make more money than other women who are People of color.
So needed to bold that.
white tears
(Source: odontocetii)
"[Obama is] just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal. You can’t meet every Tuesday with a killer list and continually have drones drop bombs. You can do that once or twice and say: ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I’ve got to stop.’ But when you do it month in, month out, year in, year out – that’s a pattern of behaviour. I think there is a chance of a snowball in hell that he will ever be tried, but I think he should be tried and I said the same about George Bush. These are war crimes. We suffer in this age from an indifference toward criminality and a callousness to catastrophe when it comes to poor and working people."
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa
September 26, 1942 - May 15, 2004In honor of Gloria Anzaldúa, I will be giving away 5 prints of my Anzaldúa piece!
To enter you must reblog this with your favorite quote/passage from Anzaldúa before May 15th, 2013, 11:49pm … and that’s it!
5 Winners will be selected randomly and announced between May 17th-20th between (You will be messaged too so please keep your ask boxes open)
Suerte! *hugs*
-whereismimente
Anzaldúa vive!
Already stressed and then bam, more shit to worry about.
BUT ACTUALLY if I hadn’t gone home for the weekend, I probably would’ve had some sort of breakdown ✌
