Posts tagged People of color
Internetty Goodness
Please help us to premier "Color Me In" in a local theater! We are trying to raise $1,000
From the site:
In 2011, Philadelphia youth poet Kai Davis wrote and performed a spoken word poem entitled “Homicidal Rainbow” about a bullied gay teen who “planned a mass murder in a red notebook”. One of Kai’s mentors, Sharvon P. Urbannavage, a film student and aspiring filmmaker, worked with Kai to adapt this story to a short film screenplay.
In 2012, the short was filmed. Shortly after, the Aurora Batman theater shooting happened in Colorado. Due to this, Sharvon felt the need to delay final production and distribution of the film. Later in 2012, the Sandy Hook school shootings occured in Connecticut. Unlike with Colorado, this now encouraged Sharvon to complete the film due to the necessary discussion about the mental health of young people in today’s social environment.
The post-production of the film is almost complete. The director and cast have decided to organize an official premiere for the film, featuring a Q&A and talkback session about the topics addressed in Kai’s poem and the film. This is where we need help!
They need $675 in 11 days to get this funded!!!!
We got Sistah Sinema funded in less time!
COME ON FOLKS SUPPORT THE VOICES OF POC.
(Source: locksandglasses, via hamburgerjack)
märƒmεℓℓow: The Project
Hello. My name is Kaden. I am a 22-year old transgender male. I have a 2-year old child, and one of my greatest endeavors is to teach him about the world.
In that endeavor, I often take him to our public library. He runs around being a 2-year old and I look at which books I…
Ignore the Hamburger Operating the Banana Slicer: It Will Never Be The White Man's Fault.
TW: rape, murder, killing.
I’ve always noticed how in cases of mass tragedy, and even smaller, less-national-covered cases, that white men have been treated differently in comparison to people of color. And since this Connecticut shooting has occurred, I’ve noticed that it all…
Tenure For Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, WOC
Even if you don’t go to UC Davis, this issue is very relevant to the system of higher education. Women of color professors are an extremely marginalized community on almost all campuses. Please help us fight to help increase the number of WOC professors at UC Davis.
“Prof. Valverde’s faculty position was created as a direct result of a coalition movement of people of color and LGBT communities in protest regarding the 2000 anti-Asian violence at UC Davis. Furthermore, she is one of the few Southeast Asian American professors at UC Davis. She is also the only professor qualified to teach courses focused on Southeast Asian American experiences, despite the sizeable and diverse Asian Pacific Islander student population at UC Davis. The tenure denial of Prof. Valverde may be indicative that UC Davis is not truly committed to its claims of valuing diversity.”
https://www.facebook.com/pages/SaveVnow/104969952996084?sk=info
(via sara-huynh)
Why is Breast Cancer Killing So Many Black Women?
Although 1 out of 8 women will develop breast cancer in the United States, it remains deadliest for Black women. A recent study by the Sinai Urban Health Institute in Chicago, IL reveals that African-American women are more likely to die of breast cancer not due to genetics, but because of racial disparity and inequality in health care. Subsequently, nearly five Black women needlessly die everyday because they lack the proper information and quality services.
The realities of inadequate health care, access, and poverty in the Black community are also mixed with fear, silence, and suspicion of the medical system who only fifty years ago purposefully infected 400 poor Black men with syphilis in a medical study known as the Tuskegee experiment.
Mistrust and historic disenfranchisement greatly impact those battling breast cancer, a disease that has a 98% survival rate if caught early. In an interview with Dr. Regina Hampton of the Capital Breast Center the Washington Post writes of this skepticism:
“… Hampton and others think [Black] women also carry angst stemming from a historically unhealthy relationship between African Americans and a medical system that was inaccessible. Often lacking the money or insurance for preventive care, many [Black] people didn’t seek medical help until they were seriously ill.”
In addition to Black women, Black male breast cancer patients and survivors like African-American icon Richard Roundtree who played John Shaft in the 1970s Blaxploitation action film Shaft, face the same barriers compounded with the social stigma with having an illness that rarely impacts men. Because male breast cancer accounts for just 1% of all breast cancer diagnoses, Black men are even less likely to visit their healthcare provider upon discovery of a lump. Roundtree, a breast cancer survivor since 1993, is an outspoken advocate male breast cancer and encourages others to break the silence and seek treatment.
Yet beyond the silence, institutional barriers and discrimination in the American healthcare system persist. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry recently moved to cut $5 million in funds to the Texas Women’s Health Program allotted to Planned Parenthood. The “war on Planned Parenthood” launched by Republican politicians and the pro-life lobby threatens the organization, which provides millions with vital breast cancer screenings and mammograms nationwide. With the rate of uninsured African Americans rising to 20.5% in 2010, Planned Parenthood has seen an increase in Black patients rise to 36%, including an increase of 27% of Black males.
As Breast Cancer Awareness Month and October draw to a close, the efforts to spread awareness of breast cancer and secure life saving services should continue.
Early detection and screenings remain critical and The American Cancer Society recommends the following::
● Breast self-examination starting in the 20s
● Yearly mammograms starting at age 40
● Clinical breast exams as part of a periodic health exam and yearly for those over 40
Check out “The Wisdom of Survivors,” featuring African-American breast cancer survivors sharing personal experiences and how they overcame the disease and the barriers to access here.
(note on article content: during the Tuskegee Experiment, the men experimented upon were never told they had it and never given information or an access to the cure-instead, they withheld treatment, allowed them to spread it to their wives and children, and watched 400 men go insane and die of a horrific disease that would have been easily cured with antibiotics. I’m unaware of any evidence that shows that the men were initially infected on purpose, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t, nor does that make it any less terrifyingly nightmarish.)
(via hamburgerjack)
Whiteness in the gay community is everywhere, from what we see, what we experience, and more importantly, what we desire. The power of whiteness, of course, derives from appearing to be nothing in particular (Lipsitz, 1998). That is, whiteness is powerful precisely because it is everywhere but nowhere in particular. When we see whiteness, we process it as if it doesn’t exist or that its existence is simply natural. We don’t see it precisely because we see it constantly. It blends into the background and then becomes erased from scrutiny. And this whiteness is imposed from both outside and inside of the gay community.
Gay Men of Color and the Racial
Politics of Exclusion” by Chong-suk Han (via uncensoredsupplement)
(Source: criticalqueer, via sara-huynh)
Ohio Murder Shines National Spotlight On LGBT Violence: Kendall L. Hampton, a 26-year-old gender non-conforming person, was found dead in Cincinnati late Saturday night.
(via sara-huynh)
The Bechdel Test and Race in Popular Fiction
1. It has to have two POC in it.
2. Who talk to each other.
3. About something other than a white person.
No Joss Whedon show passes, neither does Supernatural, or Being Human.
Veronica Mars passes, but doesn’t pass the original Bechdel Test.
Check out a few more here.
Brooklyn women make their building theirs
The rent strike started two years ago when Sara Lopez woke up early one morning. No one sleeps much in these three buildings — in the winter there’s no heat, in the summer there’s no electricity, and all year there are rats and cockroaches scurrying in the walls — but that morning Lopez had slept even worse than usual, and she was mad.
“I thought and thought and decided that I needed to do something,” she said. “So I knocked on 51 doors because I got mad of so much injustice.”
At each door she and Trelles spread a clear message: Stop paying rent. It wasn’t an idea born out of an ideology regarding private property or capitalism or self-governance. Instead, Lopez — a retired public employee who says she still has faith in the power and intentions of the local government — was espousing a radicalism born from necessity and experience. She knew that tenants could run the buildings better than Petito, whom she called un payaso, which means “clown” in Spanish but sounds far more poisonous than that when hissed in her Honduran accent. In the winter of 1982, after a former landlord simply abandoned the buildings without heat, Lopez brought the buildings’ families together, and they governed themselves — collecting money to pay the bills and replace the boiler, and forming teams to clean the hallways, put the trash out and make repairs.
Read the article in its entirety, it’s so good. These ladies know what’s up.
(Source: brujacore, via sara-huynh)
Just a PSA
If:
- You just “can’t see a person of color doing” anything that doesn’t involve them being a slave/being a stereotype,
- You white wash established characters of color in any sort of artwork you create,
- You defend whitewashing in Hollywood
- You whinge about how a story is ‘ruined’ because a character whose race isn’t specified turns out to be a POC in the adaptation.
- You demand the small amount of poc oriented shows to cater to white people while telling poc who want representation in white majority shows to stfu?
You are defending racism and white supremacy.
(via stopwhitewashing)
