Category: politics

#HFLW For Heart Month

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Heart Disease is the number one cause of death in America, and as is so often the case, women, poor people, and people of color are disproportionately affected. National Heart Month, designated by congressional order in 1963, was created to bring attention to the impact of heart disease, yet the death toll continues to rise and the disparities remain entrenched. The #HFLW mission is to dig up and remove barriers to wellness that allow dis-ease, like cardiovascular dis-ease, to root and flourish in certain populations. Join me this month to talk about it.

Which One Doesn’t Belong

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So look, even if you could buy and sell them, since they don't know you from the one place they daily confront people who look like you with their wine, rice, and cilantro at the register, you are dismissed if you're lucky. If you're noticed it is with the disappointment that their come up has not been far enough up to escape the likes of your kind.

Comply or Die

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He explains that he understands compliance intimately by sharing this story: as younger men he and friends were stopped and robbed by police. Their choice, he suggests, to face the wall, hands up as told and accept the stick up, saved their lives.

Black Death and the What Ifs (is not a singing group)

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So what if the mission of those profiting from Black Death porn is to accomplish their stated mission: to remind The State (of mind) that Black and Brown lives should be recognized and treated as actual lives? What if The State (of mind) changed as a result of their activism? The Black Death porn market would be diminished, right? No demand so no need for a supply. No supply no profit.

So another what if--what if Black Death porn proliferates in order to keep this market going?

2016 Espys

darlene anita scott4 Comments

When we gonna start naming black women whose bodies have been abused by a system that fails to see beyond the melanin that covers them (or maybe sees them and responds in kind--another argument for another day)?

Black Lives Matter: Death By Assimilation

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There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure.

Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.

Black Rage and the Invisible Black Body

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I am here to talk about silence. And the violence of it.  How it traumatizes the body that practices it as well as the bodies it is imposed upon. I want to talk about how it (silence, I mean)—and I made up this word—invisibilizes.  And how that act—to render someone, a body, invisible is violence. [...]

What can we tell them?

darlene anita scott1 Comment

Can we give them our stories
without curling their backs into it, yellowed pages crisp and crumbling like
sepia snow into piles we sweep from in front of
our bookshelves?

Will we love them
only; wait and watch them
turn to men who fail themselves
for want of recognition?