This is a super valuable event to support. They are still a ways out from reaching their fundraising goal. 

Click here to support their campaign to fundraise this weekend of events. 

Click here to check out the events’ Facebook page.

The revolution will not be sponsored. Events like this need your attendance, your attention, and your support. If you can support it in anyway, please do. 

REMINDER: Baltimore PD is also the force that last year said Tyree Woodson managed to shoot & kill himself while handcuffed in jail. #Baltimore #BaltimoreRiots #BlackLivesMatter #FreddieGray #tyreewoodson

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4tOUF_BJPE)

TW: Rape, violence, police abuse and murder

This is important. PLEASE WATCH & SHARE THIS. This is an interview we conducted with Baltimore Black Panther and community leader Reverend Annie Chambers about the murder of her grandchildren by the police, and the long history of violence against Black people in Baltimore. 

This interview was conducted back in 2012. I blame myself for the video cutting out after 47 minutes. The camera died and I didn’t have replacement batteries. Someone in the Baltimore area should reach out and follow up with Reverend Chambers if possible. 

What we’re seeing in Baltimore today is the culmination of years decades  centuries of continuous violence and oppression against Black people at the hands of police and White supremacy. 

I want her story to be heard.

I lose followers every time I say “trans women are women”

so I’m gonna keep saying it until I weed out all ya

immediately lost two followers

This thing. I agree with this thing. trans women are women.

They most certainly are women. If any of my followers disagree, feel free to make your exit.

& TERFS are terrible people.

Overcoming the American Dream | AmericaWakieWakie

April 29th, 2015

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”  —  James Baldwin

My house sat tucked a mile deep, wrapped in 500 acres of sprawling oaks and towering pines. Dense thickets crisscrossed the land like formidable barricades protecting masses of forests from the intrusions of bored, yet curious children. They would leave you picking daggers from your sides and forearms if you journeyed too far. I grew up in a remote place called Farmhaven, the midway point between Canton and Carthage, Mississippi. Driving through you would never know you were somewhere with a name. Farmhaven is one of those places marked by only an intersection and a road that always goes somewhere else. It is here though, with my father and my brother, in the heart of the South, that I learned the most important lesson life could teach me.

When I was very young the world was a place of limitless potential. Like a naïve summer breeze still clinging to the fantasy that winter will never come, I was no different than most children who believe the world is theirs. You do not have to be rich to dream such dreams. A swift run and leap off the South end of our porch, where the ground was soft and the magnolia leaves puddled, was all it took. With my arms stretched wide I pretended to be a fighter pilot leaving the deck of an aircraft carrier. I never really knew or cared what fighter pilots do; I just wanted to see the world through a bird’s eyes. It was my own American Dream. And the further from the porch I landed, the more I believed I would someday soar.

It’s probably not an unfamiliar story. After all, in children imagination abounds. About this time we start being told to follow our dreams, as if the world were built in such a way that the realization of all our dreams is possible. Certainly that’s what I believed, that people just out to make the imagined real. Life is not without a cruel sense of irony though, and elders rarely mention to adolescents the kind of world in which we live. They shield us from it, understandably not wanting to damage the authenticity and fragility of our youthful ambition. But reality will come knocking. It always does. It will come to tell us that the world has been built in such a way that our dreams will be withheld from us, that the joys of making them real cannot be ours, but rather, with and atop our backs, they must be forfeited to erect someone else’s.

This is the price of poverty.

Knock, Knock

“Capitalism is cruel and heartless and tears people apart, mentally, physically and socially.”  —  Susan Rosenthal

My father taught me the value of work. For all his faults, I could never question how hard he labored to provide for my brother and me, or how determined he was to instill in us a love for building with our own hands. He tried to teach us how to work the land. We plowed and planted. We built homes for our chickens, turkeys, and ducks. We constructed wooden and wire fences for rotating our goats and horses from one field to another. During the winter months when our grazing fields turned to tundra, I hoisted buckets of feed to the troughs I had built. My brother and I became so proficient with our hands that often my father would drop us off in the woods with supplies and expect a job to be done when he returned with lunch.

But neither our farm nor all the work we put into it was ever what kept a roof over our heads. Even after the fruits of our labor yielded plates for our table, we still needed money. I knew this all too well, even as a seven year old. My room was in the middle of our house. You could not get from the kitchen to the living room without first walking through it. Often a door was left cracked open, not intentionally, but because door frames shift with age and require a firm snug to be pulled completely shut. Through the years while I had a step-mother I heard my father and her argue about bills when the doors were ajar. Always more bills. They both worked in addition to our farm. She worked at a cigarette store. His job always changed. And still it was never enough. Sometimes they got loud. Her voice screeched. His slurred. And mine would make lists in my head of everything I was going to do the next day to make it all better.

I began doing my own laundry about that time because I wanted my step-mother to stay. My child’s mind thought it would make a difference. She left after a few more years though, and when it happened I really could not blame her. My father had begun turning to his bottles more often than he turned to her. When he got drunk enough one night to put a shotgun to my brother’s head, she lost all composure. Refrigerator doors flung open. Voices thundered. Walls shook. Glass bottles clanked and flew further off the porch than I ever had, exploding all over the lawn — just like my family, exploding. My screams were equal only to my tears. Every little list I had made in my head was useless. The gun landed in the yard too after my step-mother snatched it. My brother and I spent that night in the shadow of two people we loved parting ways forever. Soon we lost the farm… and our father too.

I never soared into those magnolia leaves again. In the years to come dreams of a family and a home where I belonged replaced all desire to fly.

Not till much later did I realize that nothing I did then would have made a significant difference. Neither my brother nor I held fault for our poverty and, despite his drinking, it was not entirely my father’s fault either. Addiction, I learned, is most often endemic of a society that generates addicts. Something bigger loomed, something far more pervasive and far-reaching than the lives of a few backwoods Mississippians. Reflecting on how expensive poverty had been for my family, asking why I was poor and why were we ripped apart, I found myself on an inescapable trajectory to discover the origins of inequality.

Their Gluttony Is Our Starvation

“The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.”  —  Eugene V. Debs

My family’s farm was bought by a group of wealthy men who wanted a hunting resort. For the majority of the year our old home sits empty and rotting. It is a reminder that in the halls of country clubs and on the decks of overpriced yachts, poverty is, in the most acute sense of the word, the abundant currency of the rich. Their very existence is predicated on the existence of the poor.

This is not a fact we like to grapple with in America. Here everybody believes they can get rich. We believe the realization of ALL of our dreams is possible. We call this belief the American Dream, and it has been incredibly successful at stifling plausible attempts at equality outside the capitalist framework. To paraphrase John Steinbeck, socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. It is the worst sort of fabrication because it makes us believe the preposterous — my family could have our house, our farm, a decent living with ample food, and an environment where addiction would stymy, while simultaneously rich folks could use it all to shoot animals for sport.

If it sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is.

Under capitalism one party was always going to lose, and generally the party which loses is the one with significantly less money. Our socioeconomic realities are structured this way. “Losers” are a necessity for capitalism’s survival. My family’s misfortune was a microcosm of structured events that play out against billions of poor people in orchestrated symphony every day. They (we) find ourselves in battles with people, organizations, and nations who have enormous financial capabilities, and therefore power, and because our global political system was built around empowering the moneyed class, before the battle ever starts our circumstances are engineered for defeat. Scaled up or down, this predisposition between those with power and those without is consistent. It is why my family lacked the financial agency over our lives to survive. But it is also why entire poor communities are displaced and gentrified by wealthy developers, or entire swaths of the planet are exploited by wealthy nations and their corporations. Where ever we are, our struggles are connected.

The American Dream then has at least two primary functions. Its first is to generate a mythology around itself which can effectively negate the reality that within capitalism not everybody can realize their dreams, that there must be an oppressed class. Such a mythology atomizes people from collective struggle. It induces a form of hyper individualism often seen in the “Boot-Strap Myth,” or the idea that anybody of little means, with hard work and determination, can lift themselves to the highest rungs of bourgeoisie society (the richest of the rich). By focusing on individual stories of capitalist success, the Bill Gates and Sam Waltons of the world, the vast poverty and suffering required for the emergence of massive fortunes is left out of the picture. One can point to Gates and believe their own ascendance is possible without understanding its possibility is predicated on the systematic exploitation of tens of thousands of workers in mines and factories across the globe. And more importantly, focus on the few success stories of the super-rich invisibilizes the structure which keeps wealth within their hands at the direct expense of the poor and makes it beyond examination or reproach.

A second primary function of the American Dream is to facilitate an overpowering sense of entitlement through exploitive competition. It cleaves us from cooperative modes of thinking and existing by constantly pitting us against each other. Through competing with fellow human beings for the necessities of life — work, housing, education, affection, nourishment, social belonging, etc. — an individual is conditioned to accept that competition is the natural state of human existence, and therefore competition necessitates winners and losers. Here, belief of capitalist mythology graduates into acceptance of capitalist power structures, and then finally into the endorsement and full-fledged participation in them. The latter is crucial, for in order to amass a huge fortune a person has to endorse a sort self-maximizing choice which, in their minds, justifies widespread exploitation. At this point it is believed that “losers” (the exploited) are inevitable, thus the more losers, or the greater number of exploited, the richer (and fewer) the winners. If you play the game ruthlessly enough to win, or even thrive, the logic follows that you are entitled to all the rewards and privileges expropriated from the oppressed.

With little doubt, I imagine the men who bought our farm thought nothing of it. In their minds having the money for it was the only requisite needed, and since they had played by the rules of capitalism well enough to be rewarded with the money needed to purchase it, they were “entitled” to it. But it was never their home. They had never toiled in the fields for crops. They had never spent a birthday or Christmas Eve in the house. They had never fished the ponds. They had never run around the yard filling the trees with laughter, or fed the hummingbirds from the clotheslines. They had never made peace with the bees that burrowed into the oak joists beneath the porch. They had never labored with an axe to stock firewood or climbed beneath the house and wrapped the pipes for winter. They knew nothing of the land or the house but its acreage and price. And that was enough, because the memories of children don’t fetch power when money talks.

(Read Full Text) (Photo Credit: AmericaWakieWakie)

A friend of mine/organizer in Dallas is trying to get the funds together to make it to Baltimore. 

Please share and contribute if you can! 

Also, if you know anyone who has a couch to spare…he’s a great guy, and a pleasure to know.

Black women and girls lost to gun violence, police brutality, intimate partner violence and transphobia:

Dana Larkin

Kassandra Perkins

Rekia Boyd

Tarika Wilson

Aiyana Stanley-Jones

Adaisha Miller

Brandy Martell

Deanna Cook Patrick

Tyisha Miller

Ashley Sinclair

We remember your names and we honor your lives.

I thought it was Black People looting and burning down Baltimore? 90% of the people destroying Baltimore is non Black!

Well you know when you probably won’t be able to leave your house for a while, you might need food to live.

Well you know when cops keep killing blacks with no explanations & no indictments & throw bricks at you while you’re protesting peacefully, which is our first amendment right, you might need to rebel :)

I didn’t realize how essential beer and doritos are. Hm.

funny how that water is going untouched

THEY SAID THESE WHITES WERE LOOTING TO SURVIVE

AS THEY CARRY CASES OF BEER OUT OMFG

For those that think protesters are just randomly attacking people in Baltimore.

YOU NEED TO BE SHARING THIS!!! 

ALL WE’VE BEEN SEEING IS PICTURES AND VIDEOS OF BLACK PEOPLE DESTROYING THINGS

NOT SHOWING WHAT THEY’RE FACING.

#TheHomelessPeriod exposes the unique menstruation problem homeless women face 

The new campaign shines a light on homeless women who need assistance caring for their menstrual cycles. According to the Guardian, approximately 26% of people in the U.K. who receive “homelessness services” are female. But in most shelters, “sanitary ware or any kind of period ephemera is scarce,” Vice reported earlier this year. Three women have a plan to fix that.

Important .

#Every28Hours (2/23/15): Meet Janisha. Janisha was involved in a domestic dispute with her girlfriend, which resulted in her girlfriend calling the police to take her in for a mental health evaluation. Janisha’s girlfriend warned the officer’s upon entry into their apartment that she had a knife, but the she didn’t believe that she would hurt her, stressing again that Janisha was unstable and needed evaluation. When Janisha did not drop the knife, an officer proceeded to shoot her twice. According to Janisha’s neighbors she was a quiet and small young woman, barely standing above five feet. According to her girlfriend, Janisha was more than 6 feet away from the cops who shot her. Janisha’s story is not an easy one, but she deserved a chance at life, not a bullet when she needed help. Uplift her name. Janisha Fonville, we fight for you now too. #staywoke #farfromover

smh @ Guiliana’s racist remark about Zendaya because of her hairstyle. watch nobody say anything

zendaya please let them know

boop! guiliana who...

February is Black History Month! Here are just a few Black Queer People who dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. Black history month is about remembering all the types of Black people who helped further the progress of justice. Thank you to all of those who paved the way. 

Bayard Rustin (1912-1987)

A lot of times noted as the man that Homophobia Erased from History.His impact not illustrated seen in a lot of history books, Bayard Rustin became most recognized for his work for the civil rights movement. Bayard Rustin was the lead organizer of the March on Washington, and ultimately was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s right hand men. From Marching on Washington, to his work in the Black Power movement, to being imprisoned for being in a relationship with a man and his advocation of the advancement for LGBTQ people, Bayard Rustin was a force to be reckoned with. Although he put so much of his time and effort into making the world a better place, his presence has been erased in some of the light of the civil rights movement because at the time people thought him being gay would hinder the advancement of black people.

Angela Davis (Born in 1944)

Angela Davis is a loved political activist, author, scholar, and professor. Davis contributed a lot to the Black Panther Party and worked hard for the advancement in the Civil Rights Movement. Davis was also very involved in Prisoners rights, and feminist theory (and where Women of color fit into mainstream white feminism). She also fought hard for the advancement of LGBTQ rights. Overall Angela Davis is a queer women of color whose list of activism efforts goes on and on. Angela Davis did and continues to spread her efforts to all types of oppression and injustices.

Marsha P. Johnson (1944-1992)

Marsha P. Johnson was a Black Trans Woman whose efforts for the queer community and overall essence of love and self acceptance in the face of ridicule touched the hearts of many. Marsha P. Johnson was a pivotal part of the Stonewall Riots, being at the epicenter of it all, (which isn’t always illustrated). She was noted as the person who “really started it all”. The stonewall riots really sparked queer and especially trans activism, but also essentially birthed what we now know as the Pride Parades. Another reason to remember to not erase the “T” in LGBTQ rights. 

February 10 2015 - Activists in Bologna, Italy, vandalise a Deutsche Bank branch, in support of Greece and against austerity. [video]

Fuck austerity.