"don't make me airdrop you the hands"
on advanced caucasian gymnastics and being 42 in black years
shout out 2012 bid adieu on dropping new heat; ‘sanity’ here now 🎶
shout out abena boamah and her hanahana beauty line, give it a look 💋
shout out to kenice mobley and her fallon set, for the last time: she’s not harriet tubman 📺
no shout out netflix for sending me a big box of government, ya not low 😑
shout out to yedoye and his drew barrymore set 🙏🏾
no shout out to joe biden finding time in his very busy schedule of going back on campaign promises to drone the middle east, yaaaas imperialist zaddy go off 👎🏾
shout out to “mutual aid in the bando,” iykyk 🙃
this is the last week of insanity; shaun t, it’s still on sight 🥵
shout out to tee for starting a space for women's mental health in nouakchott, mauritania! the first-of-its-kind in my home country, i'm super proud of her 🇲🇷
shout out to jah cooking up some art that i'm excited to see ✨
shout out mariame kaba and her new book “we do this til’ we free us” ✊🏾
no shout out to the yakubs making me and all my bipoc homies become simone biles to make them see our side of things. more on that next time 👀
shout out to me for some shit i can’t talk about yet ✨
shout out ellen eritreaand her new single “negus”(single artwork by maria) 🎶
no shout out to adidas for collabin’ with mcdonalds with the “ba da ba ba nahs” 🙄
on god, if i see these on ya feet, i’m frying you like the nugget you are
stories have core components then you add the layers. you don’t upload a photo to ig and then deselect filters, you gotta add what works for you
don’t be an abolitionist and anti-prisons and then put people into boxes
the anti-racist writing workshop: how to decolonize the creative classroom - felicia rose chavez
this book has synthesized a lot of my thoughts into a very digestible and readable way. justified, honest frustrations, lifelong anger, and a roadmap for inclusive storytelling that doesn't center itself on white classics are the strengths of this book. it’s analysis using ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ by paulo freire and ‘white fragility’ by robin diangelo help remove the tethers to revered white literature and centers the individual’s story and how they want to tell it ( without conforming to white notions of storytelling). this book also references liz lerman’s “critical response process” which centers the artist's intention over audience interpretation, while building community with other creatives as opposed to competition. this is the book that i have waited my entire life for and while i have spent the last years trying to build a framework of community-based creative power, this book knocks it out of the park and made me rethink the way i look at almost every step of the writing process.
i have been part of creative “community” before, however, it was very white-centered and it was based on visible and invisible competition; if this person get something that means that i don't get something. thoughts of “i'm better than that person, why are they getting things?” “why are they on that team?” “i guess mine isn’t good enough” were the lifeblood of the community that i started out doing comedy in. as time went on, i realized that i was never going to grow in a world that never wanted anybody else’s success but their own and that community was way much more than being random niggas we see each other from time to time; it felt like high school in more ways than one. community needed to be built, needed to be cultivated, needed to be upkept, and that is what i have been working on for the last year.
everybody’s story matters and before we tell them how to tell it we need to support them and let them make as many mistakes, try as many new avenues, and be as weird as possible. the only way to break the mold is to be either free from it from the jump or understand it so deeply that you know how to subvert expectation. the first way is faster and for you and i wish i had been onboarded into my creative journey through felicia’s process first. there is power in the personal and in order to reach our true power as creatives of color, we need to break free from the shackles of a white supremacist literary structure first.
so much of being a creative of color is filtering your experience through a white lens for mass consumption and the product that you get at the end is not the full honest version of what you want. hopefully, we're moving towards a world where this is not the case but until then, this book fuckin slaps.
standout chapters: all of it, nigga. all of it. chapter 1 til close, so good.
white feminism: from the suffragettes to influencers and who they leave behind - koa beck
first off, if you know you know. second, this is a wonderful book that more or less reinforces information about white women and their relationship to feminism and how historically that is left women of color and queer women behind since the days of elizabeth cady stanton and susan b. anthony all the way up to the ceo of thinx underwear. the core argument of this book is that capitalism and a penchant for deflecting the abuses of white women (or women who moves to the world with a white feminist politic) often obfuscates the true egalitarian arguments and politics of feminism. i decided to read this book mostly because i needed to know that i wasn't crazy in getting tired of all of the excuse racism, excused queerphobia, and the refusal to contend with the invisible white power dynamic that i see in feminism but as a man feel uncomfortable calling out. perhaps it's a good thing that i don't use my voice that loudly to call out white feminism however, it has made a victim of many of my friends, (male, female, and gender-nonconforming) and in the past felt like an insurmountable prison warden that kept me and my friends in “our place.” koa beck really parses through the white feminist playbook all the way from exploiting labor to climbing a corporate ladder not caring who is left behind and calling it being a “girlboss” and does it very thoroughly, using applied history to explain where we are today and what really struck me was the roadmap for the future.
standout chapters: chapters 17, 18, and 19. an incredible analysis of what needs to change so that we do not fall into the same cycle of violence and make a radically more inclusive world for women of color, trans folks, and gnc/nb people.
my takeaways:
capitalism has poisoned feminism just like it's poisoned other types of social justice activism
there is a schism between people who actively fight for gender (or racial) equality and those who use the language of that fight to avoid accountability for their own abuses
keep an eye out for those who want to oppress like they've been oppressed as opposed to creating a radical new space for change regardless of gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc
if there's one thing that i love doing its cooking my homies, frying them, roasting them, toasting them, etc the imperative word here being “my homies.” some people get too familiar too quickly or think because they met me once in 2013 that they can say whatever the fuck they want, that is a problem.
i find that when i am spending time around other black creatives we find ways to roast each other, our circumstances, and choices in a way that is playful and fun while checking in to make sure that we haven't gone too far.
i was working in a job once where me and the only other black woman in the room and i had an already established relationship of roasting each other; big foreheads, hung out with white people, listen to the black-eyed peas, ironing jeans before hitting the club; we truly would spend parts of our days going in on each other. it seemed like we had known each other for years but we at that time only had known each other for a few months. howmstever, one day a woman of no color (or wonc) that we worked with came in and saw us roasting each other and having shared experiences and asked us why we didn't roast her. all i remember is thinking...no.
here's the thing. it's not just white fragility. it's that we (as the blacks) roasted each other because we had built a familiarity, sometimes it felt like it was a survival mechanism to get through a day of yakubian nonsense, petty power plays, and meetings that could have been emails, hell even a text. i'm trying to be mr. inclusivity all the time, however, this ask was not something i think i could do because quite frankly, we would shatter this woman. we would break her entire world. she would spend the next four therapy sessions talking about how we exposed her insecurities then yelled “boooooiiiiiii” in her face. then, she would take her experience and give it the rupi kaur remix and take it to a poetry open mic where people would snapplause at her poem entitled “white girl, black sheep.” then she'd go to red table talk with her story, they would dub her, then she would go to ‘white table talk’ aka fox news. with one joke, our whole lives could be over. and i know that some could be like “nah you're paranoid, she couldn't be that fragile” and you'd be wrong, bucko.
neat thing about being black: we all were black teenagers at some point, and if you haven't gotten there yet, it's coming; enjoy it. we know how to cook each other because we were born in it, molded by it, did not see peace until we went home for the weekend. i have several white friends that i roast and can roast me back because we have shared experience, shared lifestyles, and intimate knowledge of each other that makes this possible. but i guess the point that i'm trying to make…is roasting a white woman worth the cost of possible misinterpretation, of being misquoted in a fit of emotion, of watching them become inexorably defensive?
nah.
this being said, i'm really glad that i never roasted that big bird looking nicholas sparks reading shaun king following “did you know zara is having a sale” sounding taylor swift stanning queerbaiting blm in her bio then saying nigga while she raps ass goofy
i have taken to calling my friends who believe in astrology my “star niggas” like they're my lawyers and i think that one's going to stick
*ala the wandavision ep 7 tune* 🎶it was this nigga all along🎶
yo supreme, drop a kufi
shocker: inc’s article about the reason why things go viral are the same reason people were cool in high school
facebook rolling out a freestyle function called “bars” is the worst thing to happen to music since tekashi69
*migos voice* trauma
went from happy go lucky to knuck if you bucky real quick
reminder: i ain’t no nda youngboy so talk to me nice, *****
i have no idea what the march of dimes is and at this point i’m scared to ask
defenestrate that nigga at your earliest convenience
kim and ye being over means we either getting 808s and heartbreaks 2: more 808s, more heartbreaks or we getting a yeezy shaped like kim
wonder if kanye gonna be all on that jesus is king/no premarital sex shit now that he’s not in a relationship with kim…
there is a man who is owed a fade. while he is far away and i abhor violence, i will fly spirit, don’t get it twisted
natasha bedingfield, let’s collab, someone share this with her