I’m like ‘the Tea Party is racist’ and my friend is like ‘Kamau, you can’t call the Tea Party racist. They’re not all racist.’ And I was like, you know what, I don’t need the Tea Party to be 100% racist for me to feel perfectly fine calling them racist. I don’t need 100% racism in the group. It could be way less than 100%. 10% is plenty for me. If the Tea Party is 10% racist I feel comfortable labeling the whole group racist.
Let me explain how that works. If I offer you a shake, a milkshake. I say ‘would you like a milkshake?’ You go “yeah, sure I’d like a milkshake.” I go, ‘okay, here you go, but just so you know it’s 10% shit.’
Oh, now you suddenly you understand how it works. 10% is kinda a lot ain’t it. You go ‘uh oh, that’s too much shit in my shake.
— W. Kamau Bell on the Tea Party and Race
(via modernmonkeys)
(via loveandchunkybits-deactivated20)
the secret to life is if you’re not a Mami Wata, make yourself one
— Mom (via chisomu-xvi)
(via chisomu-xvi-deactivated20121202)
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
— Agatha Christie (via itsloudinsidemyhead)
The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else
— Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Bilingual Blues: Poems, 1981-1994. (via tobia)
(via tupsyturvy)
Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body.
—
Horace Silver
(via jazzpages)
(via tupsyturvy)
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
— ~Oliver Wendell Holmes (via acollectedgentleman)
(via acollectedgentleman)
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love.
— Charles Bukowski (via seabois)
(via tupsyturvy)
pieties:
The only people that go hard for WOC are WOC.
Lemme change that.
The only people that go hard for black women are black women.
(via tupsyturvy)
I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.
—
Toni Morrison (via tobia)
*takes note*
(via
lawd-knows)
(Source: tinyfist, via orobolicious)
Well, is it a terrible loss not to be able to buy a big car, or is it an opportunity to regain our legs? … I think you look at the “Motor City” and how the auto industry has depopulated the city, has made us dependent upon cars, has done so much to remove people from the streets and to the decline of neighborhoods… A lot of the decline of neighborhoods and of community is due to the auto industry.
—
Grace Lee Boggs (b. 1915), Chinese American philosopher, civil rights legend, and social activist.
On Being Podcast: Becoming Detroit
and very interesting talks on Urban Farming
Went to Angela Davis & Grace Lee Boggs “in conversation” today and certainly have a lot to think about.
(via vanessamcqueen)
(Source: swandiver, via orobolicious)
The obnoxious self-righteousness of liberals who accuse everyone but themselves of oppression is topped only by the obnoxious self-righteousness of conservatives who accuse everyone but themselves of freeloading.
— An Anonymous friend of mine (I think he stole it from reddit though. but I couldn’t find it). (via anticapitalist)
(via orobolicious)
historicalslut:
jtotheizzoe:
astrotastic:
romeitoiumono:
…don’t ever forget that!
And don’t say “I’ll never be good”. You can become better! and one day you’ll wake up and you’ll find out how good you actually became.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
He really just makes me smile.
Me too.
Remember, you can. I got your back, folks.
Is it bad he is pretty much the only current scientist I care about? Probably not.
(via simplygarrison)
It takes a lot of different women to make up ONE woman
— Jill Scott (via bighairsmallwaist)
(via theelectricrelaxation)
We are told ‘if you work hard, you’ll succeed’-but if that were true, black people would own this country.
—
Stokely Carmichael (via thechanelmuse)
(via howtobeterrell)
(Source: elegantly-tasteless, via tupsyturvy)
We are told ‘if you work hard, you’ll succeed’-but if that were true, black people would own this country.
—
Stokely Carmichael (via thechanelmuse)
(via howtobeterrell)
(Source: elegantly-tasteless, via tupsyturvy)
1.