"Denying the reality and significance of race is not a problem for just my students. The problem is also prevalent in the profession that I have chosen. Given the often myopic view about what constitutes philosophy and what constitutes “genuine” philosophical problems, especially as dictated by philosophical gatekeepers who think that race is not a topic worthy of philosophical discussion, I often find myself fighting on two fronts. Pedagogically, I find myself confronted by hostility and defensiveness on the part of my white students, especially as they deny that race continues to matter. Professionally, I find that I am up against a certain abstract and purist conception of philosophy that relegates anything that has to do with the inchoate and messy domain of embodied social reality (like race) to sociology or anthropology. This is one way that philosophical borders are policed; indeed, this is one way of restricting what constitutes philosophical intelligibility."
From a post on the Temple University Press blog by George Yancy on trying to explain white privilege to his philosophy students.
(Source: templepress.wordpress.com)
From a review of Alia Malek's "Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice" which tackles the systematic attacks against people of colour in the US thought to be "Muslim terrorists."
Racism, tied intimately to nationalism and empire, doesn’t make studied and careful distinctions. Its essential distinctions are centered on itself: they are not us. The construction of enemies, of majorities and minorities, is the constitutive violence of the nation. It labels and targets particular kinds of ‘Others’ at a given historic juncture, and especially those perceived to be cosmopolitan, people of suspect loyalties with links with the enemy without. Minorities are the foil against which the unity of the nation is constituted and injustices obscured.
“Petite Mort” by Meshell Ndegeocello (remixed by Miguel Migs). So sexy.
(Source: soulbounce.com)
"…it is not religious intolerance that will cause Nigeria to split. If that happens it will be because the people who wield power can no longer agree to divide up the spoils, not because of their religious differences."
(Source: theratshead.blogspot.com)
Taken in Niger by Italian photographer Alessandro Vannucci.
"One thing I really believe is that setting your sights beyond what you can do at a particular moment is a great way to force yourself to keep learning. To this day, I start a book and I think, ‘Oh, no, I can’t do it.’ It’s pretty scary, and it can be depressing to realize that you’re working beyond your skill set. But hopefully, by the time I will have finished with it, I will have figured out how the hell to do it. That’s the challenge. That’s how you grow."
Jennifer Egan
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
In his words: goodgodalmightygoddamn.
So happy that D’Angelo is coming back.
I discovered Lianne La Havas through one of the many blogs I follow and I’m totally in love. Such a great voice, and her music always puts me in a good mood.
Eyo Masqueraders. I remember being told to fear them as a child, but I just found them really intriguing and elegant.
Badass women running things during WWII
On Noor Inayat Khan:
“The product of an unlikely marriage between an Indian prince and a distant relative of Mary Baker Eddy, Inayat Khan was largely brought up in Paris, where her father instructed fashionable French ladies in the ways of Sufi mysticism. Ethereal and beautiful, she was a poet, a considerable musician, and a published writer of fairy stories for children; but when her family found refuge in London in 1940, Inayat Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and became a wireless operator. Fluent French and training as a wireless operator was an irresistible combination of skills for the SOE recruiters. So it was that in 1943 this unlikely agent—she seemed incapable of telling a lie—was landed by light aircraft in France, to work with the ill-fated PROSPER network in Paris. While her colleagues were being arrested, Inayat Khan remained at large for months, the only active SOE radio operator in the Paris area. Changing addresses on a daily basis, lugging her wireless from one safe house to another, she evaded capture by a mixture of luck and native cunning. The end came when she was betrayed in October 1943. At first imprisoned in the Gestapo HQ in Paris, Noor was later kept shackled and in solitary confinement in a prison in Germany; in September 1944, in the company of three other captured SOE women, she was moved to Dachau. There, after being stripped and hideously beaten, she was shot. Inayat Khan died, so one of the witnesses reported, with a single word, liberté, on her lips.”
Romanticism aside, these women are seriously inspiring.
"It is the oppressor that dictates the nature of the resistance."
Nelson Mandela
Joan Smalls x Usain Bolt = Hotness
Eko o ni ba je o
Falomo Bridge, Summer 2007.
