Radical CUNTS
We are officially affiliated with the IRC (Intercultural Resource Center), which is run under the umbrella of the OMA (Office of Multicultural Affairs).
It Did Not Start With Stonewall: Black Lesbian Elders Tell Their Herstories: Our revolution didn’t start with Stonewall. African American lesbian elders tell the tales of gay New York life in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx before the world-altering Stonewall rebellion. In this clip they recall, raids and suffocating laws and racial discrimination faced within the gay community.
(via newwavefeminism)
Signal boost! (for those in the nyc area)
Ladies First 2012: Our Expansion in Consciousness - A Celebration of Black Female Expression & Ceremony into Freedom Spiritual Dance
Co-Curated/Organized by Casey Johanna, Alexandria Lust
Lehna Huie, Kazembe Balagun and Sophia Dawson
The “Ladies First 2012” art exhibition at the Brecht Forum explores the ideas of the past and present: recognizing the iconic imagery of the Black femininity, while realizing the possibilities through ideas of Afrofuturism. During these trying times socially and economically, we hold the conversation of agency and colonialism when discussing our most recent attempts to “occupy” back our self respect and dignity.
The second annual “Ladies First” art exhibition is a continued celebration of Black female expression, bridging together to collective works of video art, performance, visual arts, workshops, panels, and film screenings. This is a time to acknowledge the Black women’s historical struggles and triumphs, while engaging a critical lens on our withstanding stereotypical visions of womanhood in our society.
Artists and Performances TBA
Sister Citizen: Shame Stereotypes and Black Women in America with Melissa Harris-Perry
MSNBC commentator, columnist for The Nation, and Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, where she serves as founding director of the Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South, Melissa Harris - Perry examines black women’s political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images in her new book, Sister Citizen. With wit and family anecdotes, Harris - Perry elaborates on how the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links black women together in America.
A must watch (and, judging from the video, a must read)!
From the article:
African American girls and young women have become the fastest growing population of incarcerated young people in the country. Efforts to stop mass incarceration focused on black girls are almost nonexistant in government policy, the media, foundations and academia.
Recently, the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Law School took the bold and necessary step of organizing a day-and-a-half free event titled, “African American Girls and Young Women and Juvenile Justice System: A Call to Action.”
The beauty of this conference was the focus on black girls and the passionate energy to create a path for action among the participants.
Academics and activists, among them formerly incarcerated African American girls and young women, gathered together from across the divides of class, age, race and place to talk about what we know about these young people, their interaction with the criminal justice system—and what we are going to do about it.
Sociologist Nikki Jones of UC Santa Barbara, and Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii opened up the conference with a look at the statistics.
“No”, said Jones, “Black girls are not committing more crimes, even though they are being incarcerated in record numbers.”
“I’ve been studying this for decades,” said Chesney-Lind. She added, “We have never seen these kind of numbers before. National policies like zero tolerance are responsible for the school to prison pipeline. And a dual justice system that treats white girls differently from black girls is disproportionately impacting African American girls.”
She continued, “In 2008, we knew the arrest rate in California was 49 out of every 1,000 for black girls, 8.9 per 1,000 for white girls and 14.9 per 1,000 for Latinas.”
The cause of the over criminalization of African American young women is best understood by looking back through the lens of American history and the ideological construction of black criminality…Click the link to read more!
(via so-treu)
Pariah, in theaters today!!
Read up on the film and find theaters where the movie is playing.
why is it in limited theaters?!? i want to see this soo bad. ughvia Pariah Gets Real
I want to see this movie so badly.
I am nearly out of my seat waiting…waiting…Black queer womyn are you ready? Finally, our stories will be brought to the silver screen. Someone will speak to us. For us. About us. WITH US.
*tears up*
Someone will tell the world one of our multitude of stories. We shall rejoice. We will be heard.
Everyone is going to go see this opening weekend right?! opening weekend?!
(via lezbuild-s)
Rosie the Riveter re-imagined as a black woman
That was a white woman’s story. I was an African-American woman. “Colored” in those days. -Betty Reid Soskin
important tidbits from the article:
In the 1980s, Crenshaw was trying to understand why US anti-discrimination law was failing to protect Black women in the workplace, and she discovered it was because the law distinguished between two kinds of discrimination: gendered discrimination and racialized discrimination.
That is, US law distinguished between discrimination against women (on the basis of their gender) and discrimination against Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous people (on the basis of their race).
But in her study of discrimination in workplaces, Crenshaw observed that Black women were discriminated against on both bases – their gender and their race – at once.
So, for example, Black women were the last group to be hired at a workplace she studied – after white women and Black men. When the boss decided to lay people off, Black women were fired because they were the least senior – the last to arrive. But that they were hired last was itself due to discrimination. This group of Black women took the company to court and the judge said, “there’s no gender discrimination here because white women weren’t fired. And there’s no race discrimination here because Black men weren’t fired.”
So, Crenshaw concluded that discrimination against Black women in the workplace – as Black women – was invisible to legal concepts of discrimination that saw it in terms of “gender” only or in terms of “race” only. Black women’s experiences of discrimination were rendered invisible by these ways of categorizing discriminatory practices.
(via thatneedstogo)
