ThirdLight

They are smiling down on you…

please also take a moment to read about amaria diljohn, the fourteen-year-old black girl who was murdered in toronto yesterday when a public city bus driver ran over her and drove off, leaving her on the road. the driver has not been charged. please spread this. please talk about this. i know canadian issues aren’t often widely discussed on tumblr, but it’s important that this becomes widely known so the driver is brought to justice.

STOP STRIPPING BLACK CHILDREN OF THEIR CHILDHOOD

Within the global economy, Black transatlantic cultural forms such as hip-hop and RnB as well as Jamaican dancehall music, are highly lucrative cultural commodities. Due to its commercialisation, hip hop is now accused of producing hegemonic representations of globalised Blackness. Paul Gilroy describes African American popular music and culture as ‘being reduced to the role of soundtrack to the new imperium’. Here, Gilroy seems to be making a rather sweeping point that cleanly implicates African American music and culture as part of the axis of globalised US imperialism. He too holds African American culture to account for creating a generic US-centred form of Blackness that has become the ‘lingua franca for bored and disenchanted youth everywhere’. As a result Gilroy warns us that ‘many young Black Britons have no idea that their social and economic predicament might differ from the position of African Americans trapped in an environment where rigid segregation remains an unspoken norm’. Gilroy is suggesting that many young Black people in Briton have access to unique and distinctive historical experiences that can not be fully articulated, in any meaningful way, by simply imitating commodified US representations of Blackness.

My rapist: