“There needs to be white people who do the right thing,” he said. There needs to be Black people who do the right thing and someone does the right thing. And so who cares who does the right thing, as long as the right thing is achieved?” - source
White folks loveeeeeee to re-write history to put them in a favorable light.
“There needs to be white people who do the right thing,” - Actually, they need to do it in real life not movies!
They did the same thing with another awesome Black historical figure - Navy Master Diver Carl Brashear.
They spent half the movie focusing on the life and troubles of Robert DeNiro’s character - someone that didn’t exist. He was a “composite” of a couple of real people Master Chief Brashear knew - but the fact that they spent so much time on this fake person (and made him the savior as well) really irked me when I found out…
Its like, people are theoretically fine with protests, (Lord knows we go on and on about the fucking Boston Tea Party enough, and pay at least some lip service to MLK) until they think that it might actually negatively impact them in some way.
Like.
That’s the point.
Protests aren’t there to be convenient and comforting.
If you aren’t part of the protest, it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. It’s supposed to make you upset. It’s supposed to make you notice shit that you otherwise ignore.
I remember when I was doing Rent and I was too thin, and I was doing that on purpose because I’m dying, I’m a HIV+ drug addict. I remember having to eat raw food and doing all this work to make sure I could stay thin…And I remember everyone asking when I was doing press for the movie, ‘What did you do to get so thin? You looked great’ and I’m like, ‘I look emaciated’…It’s a form of violence, in the way that we look at women and how we expect them to look and be– for what sake? Not health, not survival, not enjoyment of life, but just so you can look pretty. I’m constantly telling girls all the time everything is airbrushed, everything is retouched to the point it’s never even asked. None of us look like that. - Rosario Dawson
funny that i’ve never seen rosario mentioned in those “women respond to sexist interview questions” things with anne hathaway and scarlett johansson
Claire acknowledges the anniversary of her father’s death every year, but this year, her family’s past comes back to haunt her, and ends up putting her and her friends in danger. She learns that her father was a member of the yakuza, a Japanese organized crime syndicate. While trying to learn more about this big secret that no one bothered to tell her, Claire begins receiving mysterious—and dangerous—packages.
Ink and Ashes is easy to read, pulls you through the Takata family mystery, and makes you want to follow Claire’s mystery solving adventures into future installments.
Winner of the 2013 Lee and Low New Visions Award, Ink and Ashes is Valynne Maetani’s first novel. (I wrote more about the award it won, which is open for submissions, over at Black Girl Nerds.) Ink and Ashes show how Claire and her brothers navigate the line between their Japanese heritage and American culture. Claire doesn’t speak much Japanese, but performs a ritual for her deceased father every year. She doesn’t really understand Japanese symbolism, but is sent mysterious messages in fours, meaning death.
It’s a great exploration of what kids of immigrant cultures go through when they don’t understand everything about their heritage growing up
As someone who love mysteries… this made me happy.
Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.
Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
[…]
We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.
