Author: Glenn (Freedom of Movement) Robinson

by

Touch your own hair. (yes, still)

 

“Why am I still talking about this?

 

This is a picture of me from 2007. I made these t-shirts back then, and you can still buy them here.

 

The phrase is a sentiment I began to feel much earlier of course, sometime in my early youth when the kids and teachers in my mostly-white school poked and prodded at me from everything from my skin, to my hair, to getting tan, to why my hair didn’t look the same as theirs when it was wet. Curiosities that expressed once or twice can be dismissed as the process of learning and growth of youth, but when expressed daily, continually, become instead the failure of an educational system that allows some children to remain ignorant of those with whom they share their classrooms.

 

But then it continued, well into my teenage years, adulthood, and now *cough* middle-age—right up to yesterday.

 

I don’t feel like describing the idiot in the grocery store who got angry at me when I was not flattered by his attention to my hair…because, sure my expectations for “regular” people might be too high. Instead let me tell you that two days ago, I was talking to a black friend in academia whose boss (yes, boss), in front of a group at a work-related event (yes, in-front of everyone) grabbed her hair and commented on it (yep).

 

…”

 

Click through for full article.

 

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

Now I understand why my wife got mad at me when I moved her bangs from her forehead and asked other ladies to comment if she looked better without bangs.

 

*woops!*

 

🙁

See on us1.campaign-archive2.com

by

Empty the Prisons, Fuck the Courts!

 

“It’s not often I use profanity to ‘make a point’. Some would suggest such profanity is even unacceptable in context of a serious discussion. But with respect, what is more profane: the use of expletives or the fact that Black persons are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites? Rephrasing Malcom X, can someone be put on a stove and not be expected to scream? And we hear this scream everyday. The ‘senseless violence’ of America’s ghettoized communities is the scream of the colored body still sitting on that furnace. The collision of social forces, violent antagonisms, and a legacy of oppression exploding forth in a stream of destruction all too real for those who live it everyday.”

 

Covers:

 

  • Social Construction of Justice
  • Illusion of ‘Objectivity’
  • What About the State?
  • Rethinking Justice
 

See on anti-imperialism.com

by

Bullied Students Sneak Thousands of Guns Into Schools

 

“Bullying victims are sneaking hundreds of thousands of firearms, knives and clubs into U.S. high schools, according to a chilling new analysis that carries the eerie echoes of one recent mass school assault and two potential near misses.

Extrapolating from a survey of American high school students by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that bullied students who are threatened or injured by a weapon on school property were eight times more likely to then choose, themselves, to carry a weapon to campus.

More alarming: Bullying episodes have a cumulative effect, vastly boosting the likelihood that a chronically harassed student will choose to pack a weapon before returning to a high school, the study found.

Specifically, bullied students who have endured four types of aggressive clashes at school — being verbally tormented, sustaining a physical assault, suffering personal property theft or damage, and cutting school due to safety concerns — are nearly 49 times more likely to have recently carried a weapon to school and 34 times more likely to have carried a gun within the past 30 days, the study found.

“When you combine all of those risk factors, you see scary figures,” said the lead author, Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York.

“The data is staggering.”

“The CDC gave us the dots — we connected them. The data is staggering,” Adesman added during a phone interview. He will present the findings Sunday to a meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Vancouver, B.C.
See on www.nbcnews.com