The transatlantic slave trade was really something, the way culture was retained in the harshest of circumstances, from food to instruments. I learned to play the berimbau as part of the Afro-Brazilian culture of Capoeira. I don’t know what they call this instrument in Burundi, but it is WILD what our ancestors endured and yet…
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“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”
-Frederick Douglass
MLK on Doing what’s right
Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.
Martin Luther King Jr. (via whensungoesdown)
Audre Lorde on Oppressors
Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
Audre Lorde (via lunetlautre)
bell hooks on Challenging racism
Individual black people/people of color often describe moments where they challenge racist speech at meetings or in other formal settings only to witness a majority of folks rush to comfort the racist individual they have challenged, as though that person is the victim and the person who raised questions a persecutor. No wonder then that while discussions of white supremacy and racism have become rather commonplace in individual scholarly writing and journalistic work, most people are wary, if not downright fearful, of discussing these issues in group settings, especially when among strangers. People often tell me that they do not share openly and candidly their thoughts about white-supremacist thought and racism for fear that they will say the wrong thing. And yet when this reason is interrogated it usually is shown to cover up the fear of conflict, the belief that saying the wrong thing will generate conflict, bad feeling or lead to counterattack. Groups where white folks are in the majority often insist that race and racism does not really have much meaning in today’s world because we are all so beyond caring about it. I ask them why they then have so much fear about speaking their minds. Their fear, their censoring silence, is indicative of the loaded meaning race and racism have in our society.
bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (via fuckyeahradicalquotes)
like black butterflies 