The Fugees - Fu-gee-la (by stillgotza)

Lauryn Hill is going to jail for tax evasion plus she will pay a $60,000 fine. A true shame for this tremendously talented woman. CNN quotes Hill, who said:

“This wasn’t a life of jet-setting glamour… This was a life of sacrifice with very little time for myself and my children.”

She is apparently still working on a new album. 

Hill’s lawyer also that the law is uneven in the way it sentences celebrities for tax fraud. He cites Willie Nelson as one example. 

No doubt, Hill did the wrong thing, as she does not contest the charges. Celebrities shouldn’t get special treatment, period. The undertone of Hill’s lawyer’s comments, however, is that race might influence the leniency showed to some high profile performers over others.

Debt Amongst American Youth: Mixed Economic Outcomes

The Pew Research Centre reports that the proportion young people who own homes went down to 34% in 2011 compared to 40% in 2001. Also in 2011, only 66% of people aged 25 years or younger owned or leased a car compared to 73% of young people in 2001.

Good news is that credit card debt is down to 39% in 2010, in comparison to 50% of youth who had credit debt in 2001. Bad news is that student loan debt rose from 34% in 2007 to 40% in 2010. Then again, debt trends are mixed, as the median debt for young people is now $14,102, which is around $1,000 less than in 2007. These patterns reflect a shift in economic priorities after the recession as well as broader changes in society that include delayed marriage, which impacts on household formation and spending. 

nprhuddle:

Erika Andiola’s mother and brother were taken from her Arizona home in a raid last night. She recorded this video shortly after.

Maria Arreola, and her brother, Heriberto Andiola Arreola, were taken into immigration custody, and while Andiola’s brother was released, her mother faced imminent deportation. But Andiola herself is not just any young Latina. She’s a well-known undocumented immigrant activist from Arizona who has fought against SB 1070 and anti-immigrant state laws, and advocated for the DREAM Act and humane immigration policy. She is a co-founder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition and served on the board of United We Dream, a national network of immigrant youth organizations who have successfully defended undocumented immigrants from deportation with public campaigns.

(via racialicious)

“The thing that sucks about Girls and Seinfeld and Sex and the City and every other TV show like them isn’t that they don’t include strong characters focusing on the problems facing blacks and Latinos in America today. The thing that sucks about those shows is that millions of black people look at them and can relate on so many levels to Hannah Horvath and Charlotte York and George Costanza, and yet those characters never look like us. The guys begging for money look like us. The mad black chicks telling white ladies to stay away from their families look like us. Always a gangster, never a rich kid whose parents are both college professors. After a while, the disparity between our affinity for these shows and their lack of affinity towards us puts reality into stark relief: When we look at Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, we see people with whom we have a lot in common. When they look at us, they see strangers.”

Hipster Racism Runoff And The Search for The Black Costanza by Cord Jefferson @ Gawker

When they look at us, they see strangers.

(via darkdarkgirlvashti)

I was trying to find this quote recently. I don’t think most white people understand how it feels to be thought of as only as a dehumanized stereotype or a token. Never as someone like you who can be relatable and have things in common with you. It’s always a surprise to people online and offline when people find out that I like things that they do, too ; that I’m not just some angry activism-obsessed woman. When people like Lena Dunham  say they don’t know how to write Black people, it’s pretty much saying that she doesn’t think that Black people are also fully complex human beings like her. Sure, there are cultural considerations to be made, but it’s ignoring the fact that people of color are diverse and not a monolith, so it’s not like the only girls who are like her are white.

(via wretchedoftheearth)

(via racialicious)

“Black sexuality is a taboo subject in American principally because it is a form of black power over which whites have little control — yet its visible manifestations evoke the most visceral of white responses, be it one of seductive obsession or downright disgust. On the one hand, black sexuality among blacks simply does not include whites, nor does it make them a central point of reference. It proceeds as if whites do not exist, as if whites are invisible and simply don’t matter. This form of black sexuality puts black agency center stage with no white presence at all. This can be uncomfortable for white people accustomed to being the custodians of power. On the other hand, black sexuality between blacks and whites proceeds based on underground desires that Americans deny or ignore in public and over which laws have no effective control. In fact, the dominant sexual myths of black women and men portray whites as being “out of control” — seduced, tempted, overcome, over-powered by black bodies. This form of black sexuality makes white passivity the norm — hardly and acceptable self-image for a white-run society”

—

Cornel West

excerpt from “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject” in Race Matters,

Second Vintage Books Edition. Boston: Beacon Press (1993): p. 119-131.

Excerpt from p. 125-126

via sociolab (via getaneducation)

Over Half of Native Trans People Have Attempted Suicide

technoccult:

Klint Finley

Depressing: The Advocate reports on a survey by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality. Among the findings: “Fifty-six percent (56%) of American Indian and Alaskan Native transgender respondents reported having attempted suicide compared to 41% of all study respondents.”

Full Story: The Advocate: Over Half of Native Trans People Have Attempted Suicide

(via socialworky)

Racism and Violence of New York Police Department's Stop-and-Frisk

USA: The Nation reports that The New York Police Department data show that 1,800 New Yorkers are stopped by police every day. One fifth of these “stop and frisk” events involve the use of force. This video captures that the racial dimensions of this violence, where two police officers threaten a young man for questioning the motives for their search. The police give no reason for detaining him. Instead, they use racist language, telling the youth that they will break his arm and punch him in the face for questioning their authority. While we only hear a snippet and don’t know the full context, this audio presents a deeply disturbing abuse of power. Click on the link to hear the altercation and read more.

“With the expansion of European and U.S. colonialism into Asia and Africa in the last half of the nineteenth century, new emphases were added to the prevailing racial frame. One relatively new emphasis was “teleological racism”—the view that non-European peoples, including Africans, had been created as inferior so that they could serve, and be civilized by, whites. A famous statement of this is Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (“Take up the White Man’s burden/ Send forth the best ye breed”). From Kipling’s perspective whites had a missionary obligation to help “inferior races,” termed in the poem as “half-devil, half-child.”These white-racist formulations explained not only the character and conditions of those oppressed but also celebrated whites as especially civilized, Christian, powerful, and generous toward those conquered. Variations on this old racist framing have long rationalized the oppressive policies directed by Western corporations and governments at peoples of color across the globe, to the present day.”

Joe Feagin

the white savior complex among activists is rooted in the white man’s burden

(via wretchedoftheearth)

(via sociolab)

Andy: We all have ancestors who may have done horrible things in the past but it’s in the past and it’s not our fault so we don’t have to talk about it.

Oscar: The different is, Andy, that you’re the only one here still benefiting from the terrible things your ancestors did.

Nexus of race politics, history and white male privilege get a pithy work out on The Office.

(via marvelous-merbutler)

This great clip comes from the PBS documentary, Two Spirits. “We’re in a many-gendered world”, explains one of the participants featured.

pamalamela:

According to old Navajo traditions, there are 4 basic genders which include the nadleehi and dilbaa — persons born, respectively, as males or females, but who fulfill the roles of their opposites in adulthood. These individuals are described as having two spirits. In this excerpt from the film, a more fluid way of describing gender is considered.

unapproachableblackchicks: “What began as an artistic curiosity for Deborah Willis turned into a sociological discussion a decade later. Willis is the curator of “Posing Beauty in African American Culture,” an exhibit opening today at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport. “I’d been interested in looking at the history of beauty in African-American culture and how it has been basically ignored as a conversation in art,” Willis said from her office at New York University, where she is the chair of and a professor in the photography and imaging department. “I decided to look at beauty from the aspect of empowering and segregation. During the civil rights movement, there was evidence of people trying to debase black people based on difference,” she continued. “So I wanted to look at beauty in a different way, look how both black and white photographers photographed the black community.” Willis combed through the photos in the archives of museums throughout the country, including the University of Iowa. “When I conducted the research, I was amazed at the array of images that were there but had never circulated in a collection,” she said. She found photographs dating to the 1890s, such as a portrait called “Desert Queen” and a beauty pageant for black women. “Not objectifying women in terms of objects, but finding a sense of self-worth in a 30-year period after slavery,” Willis said. “People were not looking at them as desirable.” The traveling exhibit, which continues through Nov. 4, has been touring the country for four years and spawned a book of the same title. Willis, who will appear at the Figge to discuss the exhibit Sept. 27, said that “idealized beauty” has always been viewed “through the lens of the white woman.” “That’s the negotiating that causes the basic trouble of how they look at the body,” she said. The response to the exhibit, she said, has been beyond what she imagined. “I was thrilled about it, but people were amazed. They were shocked,” she said. “Some people, in terms of blacks, said, ‘I didn’t know we looked like that.’ “It was heartbreaking to hear that.” “

unapproachableblackchicks:

“What began as an artistic curiosity for Deborah Willis turned into a sociological discussion a decade later.

Willis is the curator of “Posing Beauty in African American Culture,” an exhibit opening today at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport.

“I’d been interested in looking at the history of beauty in African-American culture and how it has been basically ignored as a conversation in art,” Willis said from her office at New York University, where she is the chair of and a professor in the photography and imaging department.

“I decided to look at beauty from the aspect of empowering and segregation. During the civil rights movement, there was evidence of people trying to debase black people based on difference,” she continued. “So I wanted to look at beauty in a different way, look how both black and white photographers photographed the black community.”

Willis combed through the photos in the archives of museums throughout the country, including the University of Iowa.

“When I conducted the research, I was amazed at the array of images that were there but had never circulated in a collection,” she said.

She found photographs dating to the 1890s, such as a portrait called “Desert Queen” and a beauty pageant for black women.

“Not objectifying women in terms of objects, but finding a sense of self-worth in a 30-year period after slavery,” Willis said. “People were not looking at them as desirable.”

The traveling exhibit, which continues through Nov. 4, has been touring the country for four years and spawned a book of the same title.

Willis, who will appear at the Figge to discuss the exhibit Sept. 27, said that “idealized beauty” has always been viewed “through the lens of the white woman.”

“That’s the negotiating that causes the basic trouble of how they look at the body,” she said.

The response to the exhibit, she said, has been beyond what she imagined.

“I was thrilled about it, but people were amazed. They were shocked,” she said. “Some people, in terms of blacks, said, ‘I didn’t know we looked like that.’

“It was heartbreaking to hear that.” “

(via racialicious)

 Heidi Lewis (The Colorado College), Representations of Black Gay Men on Television

I don’t wholly agree with this researcher’s argument that the gay male characters in The Wire and The Shield challenge stereotypes of gay Black men. Yes, as Lewis notes, these men are represented as being “hyper masculine”, which is the opposite of mainstream portrayals of gay men as “effeminate”. At the same time, these characters problematically play into other stereotypes of Black men as violent drug criminals, or as being “on the down low” (not publicly identifying as homosexual). Lewis includes some interesting clips from Noah’s Arc, essentially arguing that some presentations of gay black men is better than none, as they encourage Black communities to discuss and move past their fear of gay masculinity. This “micro lecture” is worth watching and debating.

Link via SocyCinema.

reginasworld:

Recently The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered over 70 unpublished photographs by Parks at the bottom of an old storage box wrapped in paper and marked as “Segregation Series.” These never before series of images not only give us a glimpse into the everyday life of African Americans during the 50′s but are also in full color, something that is uncommon for photographs from that era.

(via criedalicee)