Roxane on Sandra Bland:
Recently, my brother and I were talking on the phone as he drove to work. He is the chief executive of a publicly traded company. He was dressed for work, driving a BMW. He was using a hands-free system. These particulars shouldn’t matter but they do in a world where we have to constantly mourn the loss of black lives and memorialize them with hashtags. In this same world, we remind politicians and those who believe otherwise that black lives matter while suffocated by evidence to the contrary.
During the course of our conversation, he was pulled over by an officer who said he looked like an escapee from Pelican Bay State Prison in California. It was a strange story for any number of reasons. My brother told me he would call me right back. In the minutes I waited, my chest tightened. I worried. I stared at my phone. When he called back, no more than seven or eight minutes had passed. He joked: “I thought it was my time. I thought ‘this is it.’ ” He went on with his day because this is a quotidian experience for black people who dare to drive.
I saw Kingsman this weekend. The ending is stupid and bad and not-good and actively offensive to me as a human and a woman and a filmgoer, and I would like us to express our feelings around it via GIFs and emoticons and such.
Hood’s porny polemic, with its talk about wives being mounted and begging from the corner, is proof of how the term “cuckservative” is popular because it pushes psycho-sexual hot buttons. Racism and sexism have always been connected, with one of the prime justifications for racial hierarchy being the supposed need to protect white women from black men and also, more implicitly, to keep black women sexually submissive to white men. A “cuckservative” thus conjures up one of the supreme nightmares of the white supremacist imagination, the fear that white men will assume a submissive role (or position) in the sexual hierarchy.
The crime of homelessness in Los Angeles:
“The de facto policy on homelessness in L.A. is enforcement and criminalization,” said Eric Ares, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a group on skid row that advocates for the homeless. Ares sees the mayor’s call for compassion as empty rhetoric that distracts attention from what the city could be doing. “At this point it’s no secret what the solution is: it’s housing and services,” Ares said. “But what we’re seeing is — and this has been going on for at least 10 years, particularly in the gentrifying parts of Los Angeles — a blank check for policing.”
ugh why isn’t mallory here to talk about this
In March 2013, the townspeople gathered in the neighboring village of Kalachi to celebrate the spring festival of Nauryz. They watched their children perform traditional Kazakh dances, sing songs, and recite poems in the village’s playground. After a few hours, they settled into the bar next door for the evening, drinking into the night. Over the long weekend, three college-age kids and five adults fell ill with the same symptoms. First they would slur their words, as if they were drunk. They would see double, and start swaying, then they would fall asleep and snore heavily. They could be roused, speak, go to the bathroom, even eat food, but then they would fall back asleep. They stayed in this state for days. When they finally woke up, they didn’t remember anything. The villagers didn’t understand what was wrong. Maybe the kids had been doing drugs, they told each other, maybe the adults drank too much. But it didn’t add up.
Essential female directors! 25 of them!
broseph tried to leave 13 different comments on Jess’ emotional labor piece, nikki banned his i.p. just as I set him to auto-delete, but obviously you want to see this:
Can’t explain that! He got us there!
