Note-a-bear

classicladiesofcolor: Happy 74th Birthday to Nancy Kwan!

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:09:01 -0400

Happy 74th Birthday to Nancy Kwan!

israelfacts: A Health Ministry inspector poured bleach over...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:55:38 -0400

A Health Ministry inspector poured bleach over pots full of food in a Sudanese restaurant in Tel Aviv Sunday night.

The inspector, from the ministry’s district office for Tel Aviv, was participating in a raid by police and municipal inspectors on illegal businesses owned by African migrants. Altogether, the raid shut down 10 businesses in the city’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood, confiscating their equipment and welding the doors shut. The equipment was then loaded onto vans by other African migrants who had been hired as contract workers.

Many diners saw the inspector pouring bleach on the food, and one, asylum-seeker Aladin Abaker from Sudan’s Darfur region, posted photos of the incident on his Facebook page. He also described his feelings of humiliation.

“Everyone − except the destroyers − was in tears from the humiliation,” he wrote. “The waitress told us, ‘I’ve seen very harsh things in my life, like torture in Sinai, but this humiliated me more than what happened to me in Sinai.”

Abaker accused the inspector of “insensitivity to people and their culture, which sees food as a sacred thing that must be respected,” and said the raid was aimed at “embittering our lives so we’ll return to Africa ‘voluntarily.’”

Altogether, he said, more than 200 kilograms of meat, chicken and fish and over 500 prepared meals were destroyed.

The inspectors said they didn’t know where the meat came from and therefore feared for the diners’ health, Abaker wrote. “We told them: But this is the only place we’ve eaten all our meals for four years now, and none of us ever had stomach problems. Even whites eat here.”

The Health Ministry responded that inspectors had discovered “deplorable sanitary conditions, food stored under unsuitable conditions and temperatures, and food from unknown sources. In order to preserve the public’s health and that of the diners themselves, it was decided to destroy the food immediately. As part of the process of destroying the food, chemicals suitable to this purpose are used. It should be noted that this was a routine process of food destruction that is no different from other destructions of food/meat.”

Tel Aviv’s deputy city manager, Ruby Zelof, said the raids were carried out “to eradicate the undesirable phenomenon of businesses operating illegally, with sanitation and safety problems and illegal connections to electricity and water, and sales of alcoholic beverages without permits.”

Haaretz | Photo credit: Aladin Abaker

Israel is deporting Africans and also planning to put tens of thousands into detention camps.

Knesset Member Miri Regev — a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party — called the refugees “a cancer in our body” and Danny Danon — also a Likud Knesset Member — wrote on his Facebook page referring to the Africans as “infiltrators”. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said the African asylum seekers threaten “the Zionist dream,” adding, “Jobs will root them here.”

See also:

Why is the birth rate in Israel’s Ethiopian community declining? Ethiopian women who immigrated to Israel were coaxed into agreeing to injections of long-acting birth control drugs, or told they would not be allowed into the country

Israeli woman has her photo taken with Africans, titles the Facebook album: “Late night tour of the Tel Aviv Safari”, captions the photo: “There are no signs forbidding taking pictures with the animals. There were no signs that forbid feeding, but we passed on that.”

nudiemuse: manjascosmos: Medieval Muse by pinterest YES...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:52:20 -0400

nudiemuse:

manjascosmos:

Medieval Muse by pinterest

YES PLEASE.

Also i would look amazeballs in that. Just saying, in case anyone is shopping.

The Seven Shittiest Sins

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:44:11 -0400

Greed: I want shit
Envy: I want your shit
Wrath: I'm going to wreck your shit
Lust: I'm into some freaky shit
Gluttony: This is some tasty shit
Sloth: I don't feel like doing shit
Pride: I am the shit

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:43:28 -0400

skoolqueen80: Queen Latifah by Stefane Sednaoui - Vibe December...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:08:44 -0400

skoolqueen80:

Queen Latifah by Stefane Sednaoui - Vibe December 1993.

sexartandpolitics: Here’s what the transit map’s gonna look...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:06:41 -0400

sexartandpolitics:

Here’s what the transit map’s gonna look like until October.

[click to embiggen]

My heart goes out to you Southeast siders.

malanga-coco: okayfirstofall: guh fi di cutlass! Lmao!!!

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:58:01 -0400

malanga-coco:

okayfirstofall:

guh fi di cutlass!

Lmao!!!

Elementary/Luther crossover “In 1988, two psychologists...

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:44:42 -0400

Elementary/Luther crossover
“In 1988, two psychologists published an article arguing that positive self-deception is a normal and advantageous part of most people’s life. It turns out people lie to themselves about three things: they view themselves in implausibly positive ways, they think they have far more control over their life’s than they actually do and they believe the future will be better than the evidence of the present can possibly justify. But we’re way beyond that now; we’re on the other side of that particular mirror.”

covenesque: theuppitynegras: shortformblog: joshsternberg: WS...

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:37:28 -0400

covenesque:

theuppitynegras:

shortformblog:

joshsternberg:

WSJ reports Yahoo board has approved a $1.1 billion deal — in cash — to purchase Tumblr.

There it is.

it’s the beginning of the end

Lol welp!

And lo! the internet heaved a great sigh.

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:28:57 -0400

blackwomenasianmen: Erin & Steve Engagement photos Source-...

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:17:40 -0400

blackwomenasianmen:

Erin & Steve Engagement photos

Source- http://annyphotography.com/erin-steve-engaged/

"[While talking about Indian writing in English, specifically about What Is Indian Writing and What..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:32:19 -0400

“

[While talking about Indian writing in English, specifically about What Is Indian Writing and What Kind of India Do We Talk About]— Much of the unease expressed by Mishra, and in a different form by Sharma, and earlier by Sealy and even Mukherjee, comes from questioning the need for the Big India book—at some level, we understand that these books are very rarely written by Indian journalists, and that, even so, the stories they tell, whether simplified or not, are influential. Some of the unease comes from a sense of disenfranchisement: it is telling, for instance, that there seems to be little need for the Big India book in Hindi or Urdu or Marathi. Other than in English, we lack either the curiosity or the need to explain India to ourselves.

[…] Writing from the margins—Dalit writing, the resurgence in Indian poetry in English, writing from the Northeast—is rarely visible; when it is visible, it is exoticised, both here and abroad. And by its nature, Indian writing in English has been largely privileged writing—if not quite the sons of St Stephens College, most contemporary writers in this language come from the relatively enfranchised middle class, and their work reflects the limitations of their backgrounds.

The Census 2001 figures, released late last year, revealed that English had, effectively, become India’s second language, behind Hindi. Many of the new English speakers come from the small towns or belong to metropolitan areas that lie outside the charmed circles of privilege. English belongs to them now, as much as it once did about two to three decades ago, to the old class of writer-Brahmins.

And as this generation begins to tell and write its stories, it may not need to beguile the souks of the West with its Indiennisme. There are 125 million English speakers, of whom a much higher percentage has made it their first language in the decade since the Census data was collected, a number large enough to make its own marketplace. If that happens, this new generation of writers might finally be able to step away from the debates that have come down across a century-and-a-half of Indian writing in English.

Or perhaps they will find a new set of things to argue about. In the years before the call centre phenomenon spread across India, adding an American accent to Indian English, the first signs of the hunger for English—a language that might offer a passport to better jobs, more money, more status—showed up in the India of the 1980s and the 1990s in the ads for the very popular Rapidex English Speaking Course.

[…] From that period of Indian history, I retained for many years a small memento, picked up in my travels across the Hindi heartland. A flyer from the Prince School and Education Bureau, distributed at a bus stand, it offered the familiar ‘English Tutions’ (“tuition” is often misspelled, and the Indian version sounds more euphonious to my biased ears), and this beguiling promise: “IN THREE WEEKS, LEARN HOW TO READ IN GREMAN. HOW TO READ IN ENGLISH. HOW TO READ IN INDIAN.”

I like the enterprise behind that promise. I think, in many ways, we are all still trying to learn how to read in Indian, even if we don’t always have the right glossaries.

”

- From Nilanjana Roy’s fantastic essay How To Read in Indian from this issue of the Caravan.

Too tired to write paragraphs, so tumblr have a neato list:

1. Before we go anywhere—here, have another beautiful essay about the Bombay Poets, and if nostalgia over Modern English Poetry doesn’t work for you, read it for the wonderful conversation Anjum Hassan manages to resurrect, for herself and us.

2. Coming to Roy. First off, ALL THE HEARTS AND HUGS for recounting the long history of the Neemrana and the same conversation we seem to be having every time we talk about Indian writing in English.

3. I’ve often wondered too—why don’t we supervise and aim to regulate other conversations about other India(s) happening in All Languages Except English.

4. I don’t know why this is either—are we “okay” with ‘regional’ langauges, or ‘vernacular’ dialects (okay, so isn’t English a regional and a vernacular language by now?) (Is there a time stipulation?) (Another century of being a post-post-colony, perhaps?) (INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW) challenging and holding the notion of the country and the community in scrutiny, or we don’t like that it is done in English because (supposedly), Indian writing in English is international in ways regional writing isn’t?

5. (Okay, so strangely enough, my most recent foray into North America was a surprise in this department) (I met about a dozen people who’d read Mahashveta Devi, Arun Kolatkar and Kiran Nagarkar in Polish, Dutch, Czech, some in English translations etc) (And they’re not any ‘special’ readers either, they like ‘pulp’ fiction, sci-fi and so on). (The surprise came when I’d assumed ‘regional’ *and* ‘Indian’ writing were monopolies in South Asia) (and mostly undergrad libraries) (but back to the point).

6. Like Roy, I do like the premise and crudely put, the statistical evidence that English (rather access to English and its affective worlds) is no longer a preoccupation of a certain caste/class. However, there are different Worlds such Englishes create, and I am not quite sure how those filter in our publishing markets, precisely without demarcating them as “voices from the margins”, without forgetting the processes that ensure their marginality?

7. Yes, yes, we have Navayana (brilliant catalog really), and Zubaan and Stree and Orient Black Swan. We have, again the statistical reality where caste-and-class (and specifically, its democratic upward surge in the 90’s) can no longer be a concern of the people “who are born with that problem”, we’ve come around to be a population that (very reluctantly) agrees that we’re all a part of the Problem. in various different ways.

8. But, sadly such trajectories water down to—1. “Well, now look, ‘those people’ have a veritable presence in society, we have to write about them, because let’s face it, representation sells”, which in turn feeds into the neoliberal rights-as-assets democracy or 2. “Now that ‘those people’ are around, they will publish also. Surely, they will have sympathisers to their ‘sect’ and ‘caste’ etc” which I see the Roy argument going towards, by the end.

9. We won’t talk (yet again), about how ‘Indian’ writing—in English and otherwise—aren’t circles easy to break into (or out of) (interestingly, Nalini Jameela joked at a conference/reading that she finds lit circuits as difficult to break in/out of as circuits of sex work) (and we laughed, because there wasn’t much else to say). And that these ‘markets’, ‘audiences’, ‘writers’, call it whatever you must, have to be created. Just because the “democratic” space exists that does not oppose such presence, doesn’t mean we’re doing much to fix the absence, no?
(via woh-battameez)

Racism monitor to sue over French bank's Haiti 'plunder' - FRANCE - HAITI - FRANCE 24

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:30:23 -0400

Racism monitor to sue over French bank's Haiti 'plunder' - FRANCE - HAITI - FRANCE 24:

freshmouthgoddess:

searchingforknowledge:

malanga-coco:

freshmouthgoddess:

A racism watchdog group in France announced Friday it will file a legal suit against a state-owned bank over its role in the slave trade in Haiti even as President François Hollande ruled out reparations to the former Caribbean colony.

Hmmmm… I know they don’t wanna give reparations to the most lucrative colony they had. And they still mad about the revolution. I am all for people who still got slave trade / enslaved labor money giving it back to the people who earned it.

so the socialistr is no better than the capitalist? how amusing

oh come on .. he is Fench there is no fucking way this will ever happen.. and there is no fucking way that they will stop meddling in our affairs.. after the earthquake sarkozy was like i will rebuild the national palace..but you need to make it smaller.. because it’s a small country.. and the old one was to big….. we said it’s okay .. keep your money .. we”lll figure it out.. i mean .. i don’t expect shit .. except maybe them shitting on our lives forever

Reminder of things you should be DONE with

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:27:06 -0400

so-treu:

blackamazon:

So in relation of things folks are done with here

This is the article

She is so DONE with us because never should the experiences of black women be centered.

fuck whiteness, fuck white feminists and white feminism

Holy fuck. Wait….
Yo.
Just.
I can’t believe that either the defense or the original article got published.

Then again, these are the same crackers who thought it was okay to call Quvenzhanè a “C—-“

stg, all of them need to stop

When I find myself in times of trouble britney spears comes to me speaking words of wisdom

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:26:09 -0400

When I find myself in times of trouble

britney spears comes to me

speaking words of wisdom

Big Barda's Black Baby Girl: You wanna be DONE huh?

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:25:48 -0400

Big Barda's Black Baby Girl: You wanna be DONE huh?:

blackamazon:

@jesswakeman wrote an article for thefrisky to call us all humorless for not finding the Onion article funny.

I would love if I had storified it but magically when that happened a good set of folks especially a lot of the ONES in it weren’t tapped but a bitch has a macbook and keyboard shortcuts

I really hope my phone doesn’t cut this off

clottedcreamscone: Chocolate Tart by *zolinach

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:34:44 -0400

clottedcreamscone:

Chocolate Tart by *zolinach

awesomeetsy: (via Cloud Brooch Set OF 3 PreOrder by...

Sun, 19 May 2013 09:43:09 -0400

awesomeetsy:

(via Cloud Brooch Set OF 3 PreOrder by MySelvagedLife on Etsy)

roropcoldchain: upnorthtrips: WIN A PHONE CALL FROM A JODECI...

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:51:43 -0400

roropcoldchain:

upnorthtrips:

WIN A PHONE CALL FROM A JODECI MEMBER!

PRVSLY: “Win a Phone Call from EPMD!”

Holla at me, Mr. Dalvin!