zerokanada:

Mama is watching after me!

haiyaxai-deactivated20151103:

My great grandfather was murdered in front of his son because he told a big successful company in San Diego they couldn’t have his land. It was rightfully his land, he lived on it, he built a house for his family on it, he grew crops, he raised animals; he was a successful Kumeyaay man.

His children were then split apart and put into the boarding schools, his wife was sent to Mexico and all record of her disappears. The youngest child was adopted into a white family, further erasing my culture and language, and the son that watched the men from the Edison company stab his father to death was sent to a reform school up in Northern California where he was killed by the kids within 6 months of his arrival. His remains are still at the school and will never be returned home for proper burial. The other remaining kids were split among the reservations, which has caused some of my cousins to not learn my language, while some have learned the northern dialect and further causes a contradiction within our oral history and makes communication harder.

Further more 1 in 3 Native women will be sexually assaulted in her life. I’d like to point out (since you’re so upset by my white guilt) that most sexual assaults on Native women are performed by non-Natives. We also have a high rate of domestic violence, which is a direct result from the boarding school system in which the founding motto was “Kill the Indian, save the Man”, and was to reform all Native children in the system to act and behave like whites. Prior to the boarding schools there was no form of physical punishment within my tribe.

Did your great grandfather deal with this kind of racism? Did he deal with colonialism that ripped his land away from him, literally beat his native tongue out of him, took his culture, and forced his tribe into slavery to build a Mission? Did he have his stories passed down from many, many generations by skilled story tellers only to be replaced by Catholicism or Christianity? Were his children taken from him and put into schools to be beaten until civilized? Does your family now live on left over land that is virtually impossible to live on, while white people still squat on portions of it?

Does your ethnicity get misrepresented by media causing your own country to only believe racist caricatures of your people? Is your collective culture still disrespected after 500 years of survival by bratty little teenagers who think “Native culture” is beautiful? And when you speak up about it do white people tell you to stop complaining?

Do you have representation in government? (We hardly do) Does your country recognize your rights and that your people still exist? Is your history in your textbooks?

My life could definitely be worse, and I’m fortunate it’s not. Despite being a victim of abuse, seeing my friends kill themselves over racism and apathy, having gone to multiple funerals before I was 15, get picked on all throughout school because of how poor I was or how dirty I sometimes showed up, have children call my family lazy drunks, go to a now-reformed boarding school where I got to see headstones of my family, I have a good life.

But don’t you ever compare your great grandfather’s racism to my family’s. Because chances are your great grandfather was never murdered because society thought he was less than human.

I’m not here to push white guilt on people, and I do my best not to put blame on the entire world’s population of white people or say I hate them. My reasons for posting videos and photos and articles of the racism and ignorance we deal with to this day is to open at least someone’s eyes that we still exist and the cultural genocide is still not over. If you feel like I’m pushing white guilt on you, then take a moment to think about why you feel guilty.

deepbones:

Listen, when you use a word of hate ironically — like, and your defense is “I’m not racist, how could you ever think I’m racist??” I want you to imagine owning a gun, but never buying live ammunition. You only purchase blanks. Ok?

And say sometimes when you hang out with your close friends, you take out your gun, which they know contains no live ammunition, and you shoot it at stuff, and you think it’s funny. And maybe the first time you do it, they’re like “Shit. I mean, I know those are blanks, but that’s kind of fucked up,” but your argument is, “But I can’t really hurt anyone! They’re just blanks!” And over time they just get used to it and find it kind of funny. “Oh, that Cliff, sometimes he takes his gun out and shoots some blanks, but he doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just funny! You know how it goes.”

Now, imagine that over time, having received the acceptance for your actions from your friends, you decide you can start firing blanks around people you’ve never met. In mixed company. You’re at a dinner party one night, you’ve had a few, so you go “Hey, wanna see something cool?!” and those who are your friends at the party know what’s coming, so they’re prepared, but then the people who don’t know you, they see you whip out a piece and go “Oh shit, I’m going to die, it’s everything I feared,” but your friends explain to them it’s not a big deal, there’s nothing to be afraid of, “Cliff wouldn’t hurt a fly,” so they eventually, begrudgingly, don’t say anything about it, don’t call you, Cliff, a fucking asshole. “Fine, it’s kind of ridiculous, but whatever.” Something like that.

And then you are at a large public place. A concert, an open mic, where you and your friends are outnumbered by the rest of the audience. And maybe someone pushes you or gives you a hard time, so you decide, just to give the guy a taste of his own medicine, to pull out your gun, and fire some blanks. Give him a real, real visceral jump. And everyone around you feels threatened, unsafe, about to be part of something they were always on some subconscious level afraid would happen, but at the same time hopeful it would never happen because our society’s getting smarter and more considerate of those around them. And then some other people, who after seeing it happen, feel relieved that you were firing blanks, but also feel empowered by your choice to fire a weapon in a public place, and choose to do the same thing.

Do you get it yet?

The fact is that derogatory remarks, whether used sincerely or ironically, and ammunition, whether blank or live, still creates the same environment of discomfort and fear every time it is used. So cut the shit.

- Junot Diaz

my-caliginous-romance:

hey girls friendly reminder that if another girl is being mean to you, avoid calling her a bitch, slut, or whore, because it’s likely there will be dudebros nearby and if you say that they might think it’s ok to say that to other women.  Call her “motherfucking shithead” or “cranberry fucknut” or something that’s genderneutral.  If we wanna change we gotta start somewhere

headwrapandcamera:

simchiller:

they outlawed this move just because she was the only woman who could do it. 

Surya Bonaly was infamous for (among other things) doing aone blade backflip in the 1998 Olympics, and is the ONLY figure skater who’s ever pulled that off. Not just the only woman, the only figure skater PERIOD. There’s like all ofthree Olympic-class male skaters who did backflips in their routines, and NONE of them could do it one blade.

But wait, there’s more.

Backflips were banned from the 1976 Olympics onward on the official justification that skating jumps are supposed to be landed on one blade, whereas backflips are landed on both blades. The unofficial justification was it was too dangerous, both to the athlete and to the rink — if you didn’t land it perfectly, you could not only break your ankle, but also punch THROUGH the ice surface.

Surya Bonaly was openly contemptuous of the figure skating judges, because they were a bunch of openly racist white men who always screwed her over by giving her lower scores than she deserved. That one-blade backflip was her ultimate FUCK YOU! to the Olympics judges, because she took an “illegal” backflip and made it legal by landing it on one blade. Pretty much DARING them to mark her down for being epic awesome and pulling a move that their precious coddled white girls didn’t have the guts to even think about.

They did, of course. White racism knows no bounds. But she utterly owned them with that move.

not only did she do a fucking backflip and land, she landed then went right into a triple loop. like holy fuck

Go SISTAH!! *raised fist*

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