Sex, Love & Drake =]

Meals on Wheels delivers prepared food to seniors all across the country. This is especially important in the pandemic, as seniors are at high risk, and limiting their need to go to the grocery store by delivering these meals is a critical service.

No Kid Hungry makes sure that children get the food they need, especially since schools are closed across the country. Their service is especially important as families who lose their jobs need to keep their kids fed.

Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund is providing direct financial support to restaurant workers who are out of work or have reduced hours because of the pandemic. They are also supporting community organizations of local workers and providing loans to restaurants to re-open when it is safe.

National Domestic Workers Alliance is giving financial support to in-home care workers, nannies, and house cleaners who have to stay home and not work in order to reduce the spread of the virus.

One Fair Wage Emergency Fund gives funds directly to service workers affected by the pandemic, including restaurant, salon, airport, rideshare, and gig economy workers who find themselves out of work or without customers.

These five groups cover a large section of the problems that we are immediately facing as the health crisis creates an economic crisis. While we need to do much, much more as a country, supporting these groups is a good first step to take if you’re able to do so right now.

Disguising ourselves as secret lovers, we’ve become public enemies.

We walk away like strangers in the street.

Gone for eternity.. We erase one another.

No phone calls, no sweet text messages.

We are mere specs of particles, floating, unknown to our partners’ existence.

So far from where we came.

With so much of everything..how do we leave with nothing?

Lack of visual empathy equates the meaning of L.O.V.E

Hatred and attitude tear us entirely.

Don’t turn around; continue walking away.

Disappear into that darkness that rests upon your gritty shoulders.

Let that dark cloud follow you wherever you go.

So long ex-lover.

American Terrorism… Lynching Postcards

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Western media likes to paint terrorists with a brown face, but one of the most horrific campaigns of terror happened in the past century on American soil – the estimated 3,436 lynchings of black American men and women between 1882 and 1950, intended to control and intimidate the recently freed black population. There is nothing more disturbing than being confronted with visual evidence of humanity’s dark heart, especially when it is evidence of a widespread, mainstream hatred for and violence towards one another. Hatred that stems from fear, and is driven by religion and a belief that murder is morality made distorted flesh; violence that aims to cow and suppress any aspirations a community might have for equality and a brighter future.

When I came across this collection of American postcards from James Allen and John Littlefield, published in a book entitled Without Sanctuary, I saw how important it is to look at these images, today more than ever. These postcards were made to commemorate events that made many American white people feel proud – of their race, of their superiority, of their civilization and their intelligence. They took photos of their disgusting, cowardly accomplishments and memorialized them for future generations, to be found and collected and remembered by their descendents. On the backs, they wrote to friends and family in sociopathic excitement about the mob the participated in. These postcards capture the mobs witnessing with glee the murder of young men and women, whose most serious crime was the color of their skin. The corpses hanging and charred in these postcards lived in a world that counted down the days until their murder from the second they drew air into their infant lungs. This history is potent, stomach-churning and of essential importance to the America of today, and to the world of today. And the most striking thing about these photographs is that they don’t erase the perpetrators like many histories and memorials do today, preferring to focus on who was victimized rather than on those who proudly – and with government backing – tortured, raped and murdered people. The murderers in these photos stand proud, grown men looking at the camera with the smiling conviction that the teenage boy they just killed, one against a hundred, was deserving of their hatred, fear and frustration. No grand jury needed; the law was in the hands of the murderers.

History is not linear; history is happening all around us, all the time. These photos are context, they are reality, they are pictures of American terrorism. Read James Allen’s commentary below and be aware that these photos are sickening, and all too real.

Africans in America mounted resistance to white people lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity in that violence. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as numerous other organizations, organized support from white and black Americans alike and conducted a national campaign to get a federal anti-lynching law passed. African American women’s clubs raised funds to support the work of public campaigns, including anti-lynching plays. Their petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings and demonstrations helped to highlight the issues and combat lynching.[4] In the Great Migration, extending in two waves from 1910 to 1970, 6.5 million African Americans left the South, primarily for destinations in northern and mid-western cities, both to gain better jobs and education and to escape the high rate of violence.

Friend: stop pulling the handle

Me:

Nobody:

we’re talking about 51 human lives and they’re honestly complaining about documents being scattered?

Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality) (2019)

Growing out of the music scene, afrofuturism has emerged as an important aesthetic through films such as Black Panther and Get Out. While the significance of these sonic and visual avenues for afrofuturism cannot be underestimated, literature remains fundamental to understanding its full dimensions. Isiah Lavender’s Afrofuturism Rising explores afrofuturism as a narrative practice that enables users to articulate the interconnection between science, technology, and race across centuries.

By engaging with authors as diverse as Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Samuel R. Delany Jr., Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, Afrofuturism Rising extends existing scholarly conversations about who creates and what is created via science fiction. Through a trans-historical rereading of texts by these authors as science fiction, Lavender highlights the ways black experience in America has always been an experience of spatial and temporal dislocation akin to science fiction. Compelling and ambitious in scope, Afrofuturism Rising redefines both science fiction and literature as a whole.

by Isiah Lavender III (Author)

Get it here

Isiah Lavender, III is Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction.  In addition to his book Race in American Science Fiction (Indiana UP, 2011) and edited collection Black and Brown Planets: the Politics of Race in Science Fiction (UP of Mississippi, 2014), his publications on science fiction include essays and reviews in journals such as Extrapolation, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Science Fiction Studies.  He’s currently working on his second monograph Classics of Afrofuturism as well as a second collection, Yellow Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, now under contract with the University Press of Mississippi.