As Black people, we have been fed the lie that the Black body is an “Always Able” body, with no time to rest, feel safe, or breathe easy. Though there isn’t one of us who can live up to these unrealistic expectation whiteness forces upon us, we still belittle and shame our kin. Black People, it is time to reclaim our Black bodies as our own.

It is time to shed these harmful, white supremacist, capitalist, cishet, patriarchal, binaric notions of The Worthy and Unworthy under ableism. ALL Black bodies are lovable, beautiful, brilliant, and whole—whether or not they are dealing with mental health concerns or living with chronic pain. It is the stigma and prejudice associated with illness, the racist, anti-black ideals filling this systemic society with hatred and violence that makes no room for ALL of us who just want to rest and feel free. We don’t have to “do” anything or “go” anywhere to be revolutionary and worthy of love, family, and community. Our mere existence as people on the margins of society—as Black, Queer/Trans, Chronic, Poor, and all the other labels we use to define our unique intersections—IS revolutionary.

–Lynx Sainte-Marie, “Our R/evolutionary Bodies: On Being Black and Sick”

(via the dopest ethiopienne)

Men want what they want.

So much of our culture caters to giving men what they want. A high school student invites model Kate Upton to attend his prom, and he’s congratulated for his audacity. A male fan at a Beyoncé concert reaches up to the stage to slap her ass because her ass is there, her ass is magnificent, and he wants to feel it. The science fiction fandom community is once again having a heated discussion, across the Internet, about the ongoing problem of sexual harassment at conventions — countless women are telling all manner of stories about how, without their consent, they are groped, ogled, lured into hotel rooms under false pretenses, physically lifted off the ground, and more.

But men want what they want. We should all lighten up.

It’s hard not to feel humorless as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you’re not imagining things. It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening, it’s that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.

These are just songs. They are just jokes. They are just movies. It’s just a hug. They’re just breasts. Smile, you’re beautiful. Can’t a man pay you a compliment? In truth, this is all a symptom of a much more virulent cultural sickness — one where women exist to satisfy the whims of men, one where a woman’s worth is consistently diminished or entirely ignored.

—Roxane Gay, What Men Want, America Delivers

(via QueerIntersectional)

Of course, this is one of the profound ways in which oppression works—to mire us in body hatred. Homophobia is all about defining queer bodies as wrong, perverse, immoral. Transphobia, about defining trans bodies as unnatural, monstrous, or the product of delusion. Ableism, about defining disabled bodies as broken and tragic. Class warfare, about defining the bodies of workers as expendable. Racism, about defining the bodies of people of color as primitive, exotic, or worthless. Sexism, about defining female bodies as pliable objects. These messages sink beneath our skin.

–Eli Clare, “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies”

(via CSPH)

You may not like me because I’m an outspoken Black woman who speaks truth to power & “always makes it about race” but I still love you.

I know you think you’re a special snowflake who “isn’t like those Black people,” but white supremacy doesn’t differentiate.

I love you despite the fact that you hate me for my Blackness, because I know you also hate yourself for the same reason. It isn’t an accident that you hate yourself you were taught that from birth & most likely that self-hatred was fostered by family, in school or in your community.

As a Black person it is incredibly hard to love yourself when everything tells you that you are worthless, your culture has no value and your people are destined for poverty and crime. Don’t believe the lies. Your skin is beautiful, your people are amazing and have overcome challenges white people refuse to imagine. Self-love is the best gift you can give to yourself, no, it’s not easy, but it is worth it.

When you decide to love yourself, your sisters, your brothers we will be here for you with open arms. But until then I will love you at a distance and mourn for your lost soul and pity your love of whiteness. You are complicit in white supremacy and I must treat you as such until the day you choose to remove the shackles that have you believing the lies they told you about yourself and your people.

—The Black American Princess

“I feel like painting.”

That’s what my mom said as she was waking up this morning. 

“So paint,” I replied. 

“It seemed pretty easy. And they didn’t have any fancy paints. They just had paint.”

“Yup. So when you get home, take yourself to Michael’s, buy some canvases, some brushes, and some paint. And paint.”

“I think I will.”

…Last night, I took my mother to a sip and paint fundraiser for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation’s Young Professionals Network of DC. For as long as I can remember, my mom has often mentioned off-hand that she wishes she could paint. When I took my first wine and paint class in DC during my first year here, she immediately said that she wants to do that when she comes to visit me someday. So it’s been in a little corner of my mind waiting for someday, and so when she decided to spend a weekend down here to visit my hair salon, it was the first thing that I wanted to incorporate into our agenda. 

In an incredibly serendipitous moment, I got an email a couple weeks ago from a friend of a coworker, whose father also has multiple myeloma, telling me about this sip and paint fundraiser, that happened to be happening the Friday night of the weekend my mother was planning to visit. We went last night, and it was a great combination of touching and fun. Unlike the other two wine and paint classes I’ve attended, this wasn’t structured or instructed in any way: they had a staff member wandering around to offer assistance if you needed it, but everyone painted whatever they wanted. After hemming and hawing about how we didn’t know what we were going to paint, my mom and I turned our tiny canvases into miniature celebrations of black womanhood, both painting colorful backgrounds with semi-abstract figures of black women with lotsa hair. 

She was shocked by how easy it was. The first time is always the hardest, right? Just the process of convincing yourself that this thing you want to do is a thing you’re capable of doing, that you’re not going to fuck everything up beyond recognition and be an embarrassment even to yourself. It has me wondering at what point of growing up we learn to feel unqualified, rather than simply not knowing how to do something and trying anyway. When I was a kid, I felt like I could do anything. Where does that feeling go? When do we become scared of our own potential, and why? How do I make it stop?

I want to unbox myself, and I want everyone who is important to me to feel unboxed too. We live in a world of special certifications, of titles, of needing to be above the pack to feel that anything you’re doing is worthwhile. Fuck that. I hate that the feeling of needing to prove your worthiness is so pervasive in our culture that it gets under our skin and psyches us out about things we want to do for ourselves. If you want to paint, and you have the means to paint (or access to the means), then paint. 

If you feel invisible, unwanted, or worthless because of the people you’re surrounded by, you don’t have to stay silent. You don’t have to just hang in there and hope that things get better. You’re allowed to speak up and be honest about how these people are making you feel. You’re allowed to voice your needs and share what does and doesn’t feel good to you. And more than anything, you’re allowed to get up and walk away. You don’t ever have to stay in an unsafe space with people who make you feel small. You don’t have to sit and wait until someone shows up to validate your worth. You have to trust that you have the right to leave anyone and anything that hurts you. You have to trust that the person you’ve been waiting for to recognize you for the gift you are, is you.

–Daniell Koepke

(via spinsterette)

When my student Wilson asked me how I want to be loved, I was afraid to tell that I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves me enough to say and mean that Trayvon Martin, Rachel Jeantel, you and I are beautiful and worthy of second chances and healthy choices.

This is just part of our story.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that refuses to accept poverty and sexual abuse as reasonable.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves black art and black communities enough to insist that black artists stop dismantling black women’s bodies, hearts and minds for profit. I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves black art and black communities enough to insist that every letter, color, word, shade, scene, rhyme, paragraph, photograph and step be rooted in a textured exploration of unreasonable black love.

I want to love and be loved by an unreasonable imaginative love that swings back and insists on superb universal health care, progressive tax rates that eliminate all rich folks exemptions, and mandatory courses on Intersectional Love and Discourse in every middle school, high school, college, church and community center in this country.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that refuses to conflate honesty with transformation and hard work with revelatory work, a love that expects unreasonable love from police, teachers, doctors, politicians, presidents and CEOs.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love unafraid to reckon and fight and listen and share before going to bed, an unreasonable love that gets turned on by periodically turning off crippling pathologies and the Internet.

This is just part of our story.

I want to be loved unreasonably by an unreasonable love because we’ve nearly drowned in the poison of reasonable loving, reasonable liking, reasonable living, reasonable essays, reasonable art and reasonable political discourse.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that knows the only reason we’re still here, breathing, imagining, fighting, wandering and wondering is because of the unreasonable work of a small but committed group of black southern unreasonable lovers.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves itself enough to leave me if I insist on loving it reasonably, an unreasonable love that tells its mama, its father, its friends, its co-workers, its auntie, its mentors, its mentees, its lover, its grandmother, that the reasonable era of black American death and destruction ended in 2013.

This is just part of our story, but I want the rest of the story to be written by reliable black characters, black activists, black parents, black children, black aunties, black uncles and black authors ready to demolish American reasonable doubt with waves and waves of unreasonable black American love.

–Excerpt from Kiese Laymon on Trayvon, Black Manhood and Love published by Colorlines on 12/30/2013

(via KEW)

Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.

–Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

(via spinsterette)