Berliner Göre Schlägt Alarm!

Have you popped into the Black artists on Tumblr tag yet? It’s an endless scroll of GIFs, photography, paintings, illustrations, and more, more, more. Here’s a small collection of Tumblrs you can follow to get you started:

The Artist Akuji (@theartistakuji​)

Beautiful digital art that just feels clean, fresh, and pleasing to look at. The artist’s Jamaican-American background shines through in a lot of her work, like this West Indie piece.

Maya Ajani (@mayaajani​)

Gritty, detailed, cool as hell marker art. Everything is a little bit gnarled up and raw and, just to repeat with deserved emphasis, cool as hell.

Liam Gavyn Salt (@liamgavynsalt​)

Liam Salt dabbles in seemingly all things visual art: painting, digital, photography, illustration. He does it all well, but It’s his GIFed up self-portraits that we wanted to showcase. Those are some finely tuned, well-thought-out scribbles up there.

Into this stuff? Want more of it? Right over here. 

Don’t miss our upcoming BHM Answer Times. Next week we’ll have:

2/6—The activists behind the TheBlackout movement (@theblackoutofficial) are already taking your questions. Ask them about the second anniversary of #blackout, the current goals and future of their mission, or anything else you find relevant. 

2/7—Fashion designer Jerome Lamaar (@531jerome).

W.E.B. Du Bois, from The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (via universitybookstore)

This story is written in honour and recognition of a Canadian hero: Canada’s first black university graduate and our country’s first black lawyer, Robert Sutherland (1830-1878).

Gifted scholar, distinguished debater and noble philanthropist, Robert Sutherland, a native of Jamaica, became the first known black student to graduate from a Canadian university when he graduated from Queen’s University in 1852.

To offer some context, Sutherland was a university student at a time when black people were still being owned, brutalized and traded as chattel throughout the Americas and the Antebellum South. Added to this, he was a black man pursuing studies in Canada during a period when the lingering effects of slavery still loomed heavily over this country, which had abolished the wretched institution less than 15 years earlier.

Yet still, while at Queen’s Robert Sutherland managed to masterfully overcome and discredit the popular perception of black skin being a badge of inferiority.

Undeterred by the deeply racist climate of the time, Sutherland’s keen intellect shone brightly and did not go unnoticed at the university. During his time at Queen’s, he managed to gain acclaim as a formidable debater on what is now Queen’s Debating Union, an organization which he also served as treasurer. His commitment to excellence in scholarship was such that he also earned 14 academic awards in various subjects including Latin and Mathematics.

Emotional numbness is where we experience mild to severe feelings of detachment – so it’s hard for us to access normal feelings any more. This includes both negative and positive emotions as you can’t decide to shut just one feeling off. Common causes of emotional numbness include different stresses or traumas … from receiving bad news … to being in an accident … to recovering from the death of someone close … to a relationship breakup … to feeling deeply humiliated or ashamed. So how do you overcome emotional numbness and live with emotional integrity again?

1. The first thing to do is to choose to respect and allow all emotions – no matter what they are. Also, try and grasp the fact that suppressing your emotions will likely lead to heartache and problems later on (as they’ll possibly resurface at inappropriate times.)

2. Try and understand that feelings and actions are two very different, and unrelated, things.  That is, you can still feel angry without becoming violent – so don’t assume your feelings will affect your actions, too.

3. Try to figure out the message behind intense emotions. Are you angry because you’ve been hurt, used or abused? Are you sad because deep down you feel that you’ll never find true love - as you can’t believe that anyone will love you for yourself?

4. Take that risk – and find the courage to ask someone for help. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know that there are those who genuinely love you like – like a true and caring friend. The important thing is not to try and isolate yourself, and to make the extra effort to prioritise self-care. You need other people to help you work through this.

5. Seek professional help if the symptoms persist. There are excellent counsellors and therapists out there who have the training and skills to help you to get free – so you can live a more fulfilling and normal, healthy life.

„Mipsterz“ – so nennen sich die jungen Frauen vor und die Männer hinter der Kamera, Habib Yazdi und Abbas Rattani. Mipster, das steht für Muslim Hipsters. Ein Mipster, erklären die in den USA geborenen und aufgewachsenen Muslime Yazdi und Rattani, interessiert sich für die neueste Musik, Mode, Kunst und ist ein kritischer Denker.

Portal vermittelt Wohnraum für Flüchtlinge

Es gibt eine Menge praktischer Internetseiten. Manche zeigen, wie man mit einfachen Tricks die heimische Wohnung verschönert, andere machen den geneigten Beobachter zum Sternekoch – und wieder andere verändern ein ganzes Leben. Letzteres trifft auf die Website „Flüchtlinge Willkommen“ zu, die Flüchtlinge und WGs mit freiem Zimmer zusammenbringt.