Falling in love is dangerous for brown boys because under white supremacy we are not people to love. Falling in love is dangerous for brown boys because people don’t fall in love with brown boys. Falling in love is dangerous for brown boys until we can learn to love ourselves. How do I decolonize my desire so I can desire myself? How do I love myself in a world that has tells me over and over I am not someone to love? How can I decolonize my desire so I will never again look at a white boy who will never see me as the goddess I am?

Brown bodies can’t be neutral. Brown bodies have to aggressively love ourselves and each other as a process of healing.

I wonder if white boys take it personally when they’re loved. I wonder if they recognize they’re just the modern manifestation of the centuries of valuing bodies like theirs.

It would be silly if they took it personally.

—queering the game of life

When you don’t have firsthand knowledge of an incident — if you’re a casual acquaintance or an occasional collaborator or just a stranger watching the details fan out over your social-media feeds — where you come down on such accusations boils down to which experience you identify with more. Do you know more people who feel they’ve been falsely accused of using their power to harm others, intentionally or unintentionally? Or do you know more people who have been on the receiving end of that harm? Even those who feign neutrality on these cases are taking a stance. As Aaron Bady writes at the New Inquiry, “If you are saying things like ‘We can’t really know what happened’ and extra-specially pleading on behalf of the extra-special Woody Allen, then you are saying that his innocence is more presumptive than hers.” By this standard, a lot of people — many of them journalists — are frighteningly quick to presume women are guilty when they speak out against older, powerful men. […] It’s safe to say that, in the age of superficial social-media accountability, many male journalists have felt falsely accused or unfairly attacked at some point — for their participation in all-white, all-male literary events, for their failure to hire or advocate for women in their profession, for a “lighthearted” tweet that some people thought was sexist. I think it’s also safe to say that far fewer have experienced routine sexual harassment or been sexually assaulted. This matters because, historically, it’s journalists who have been responsible for asking questions about the private lives of public figures. They write the profiles illuminating the “myth behind the man,” and are the first to start making phone calls when there are whispers about wrongdoing. Of course there are powerful male allies who bring survivors’ stories to light and treat them with respect: Nicholas Kristof published Dylan Farrow’s firsthand account, and reporter Jim DeRogatis reminded music fans about R.Kelly’s misdeeds after most of us had chosen to forget. But they are exceptions. It’s no coincidence that many of the loudest voices questioning women’s motives in coming forward belong to male journalists.

— Believe Dylan Farrow: But Whom You Believe Depends on Which Story You Recognize | NYMag

(via She Who Shall Not be Linked to)

It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: firstly, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognise these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.

–Michel Foucault

(via Egyptian Soapbox)