(Source: lovelyandbrown)
(Source: femburton)
“Some of the dangers of glorifying obesity may include:
- Young girls might not fear getting fat more than they fear nuclear war, losing their parents, or cancer.
- Fat people might no longer be at an increased risk of having their illnesses (including cancers) misdiagnosed or diagnosed late, by doctors working in a medical community in which disdain for fat bodies is rampant, or given the wrong dosages of medicine — both of which can cost millions in unnecessary tests and prolonged treatment.
- Eating disorders — which admittedly are not exclusively about weight but which are cultivated by a culture that identifies fatness as a failure of control — might no longer be a central feature in the lives of 10 million Americans.
- We might not have a weight loss industry that generated $60 billion in revenue in the United States last year, mostly by making women feel like crap about themselves.
- Fat people might not have to worry about whether seats on airplanes or in restaurants or basically anywhere they go can physically accommodate them.
- Dudes might not yell at me in parking lots.
- Fat people everywhere might develop a powerful self-respect, and demand respect from others, and might be less likely to suffer bullying and shaming in silence.
- Fat people might not be so handy for scapegoating, schadenfreude and cheap laughs, or as a means by which others can feel superior.
- People of all sizes might feel better about themselves, because no one would be wasting energy and focus worrying about what would happen to them, how their life would be ruined, if they became fat.
”
- Fat people might no longer be at an increased risk of having their illnesses (including cancers) misdiagnosed or diagnosed late, by doctors working in a medical community in which disdain for fat bodies is rampant, or given the wrong dosages of medicine — both of which can cost millions in unnecessary tests and prolonged treatment.
- Eating disorders — which admittedly are not exclusively about weight but which are cultivated by a culture that identifies fatness as a failure of control — might no longer be a central feature in the lives of 10 million Americans.
- We might not have a weight loss industry that generated $60 billion in revenue in the United States last year, mostly by making women feel like crap about themselves.
- Fat people might not have to worry about whether seats on airplanes or in restaurants or basically anywhere they go can physically accommodate them.
- Dudes might not yell at me in parking lots.
- Fat people everywhere might develop a powerful self-respect, and demand respect from others, and might be less likely to suffer bullying and shaming in silence.
- Fat people might not be so handy for scapegoating, schadenfreude and cheap laughs, or as a means by which others can feel superior.
- People of all sizes might feel better about themselves, because no one would be wasting energy and focus worrying about what would happen to them, how their life would be ruined, if they became fat.
— The amazing Lesley Kinzel
http://www.xojane.com/issues/the-problem-with-glorifying-obesity (via fatstrawberries)
Leda and the Swan by Adam Schultz at http://www.adamsculpture.com Part of his ‘Goddess Series’
Princess Nona heart
Nina Simone talking about The Blackness.
“I will convince them by hook or crook”
Before Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols or even the Ramones, there was a band called Death. Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early ’70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death’s music— and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, A Band Called Death chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger. Playing music impossibly ahead of its time, Death is now being credited as the first black punk band (hell…the first punk band!), and are finally receiving their long overdue recognition as true rock pioneers.
(Source: iamjudithbutler)
©Nona Faustine 2012
©Nona Faustine 2013 self-portrait
“There is something about the beautiful, and there’s something about misplaced desire, and wholeness… and that for me the thing that is cracked, the thing that is broken within our culture, is a refusal to see the wholeness of brown people, and so to the extent that we refuse to see the wholeness of ourselves, is the extent to which we are also then made “not beautiful”, but made ugly and unsightly, right? Which is why then the media doesn’t curate us very far, which is why we don’t really exist anywhere outside of the work that for the most part black women make. It’s a really complicated, complicated problem! It’s beyond the question of beauty to relate the way in which this thing, this disease mind, is really corrupted our surface, and that then becomes our challenge. How to make us whole? How to make us complex creatures, cause we are complex, therefore how to make us reveal that?” - Carrie Mae Weems
New at bdp bookstore: “The Black Photographer” by Various Artists
http://store.bookdummypress.com/product/the-black-photographer-by-various-artists
A catalogue of an exhibition cooprated by the Center for Afro American Studies’ Folk Art Gallery, Syracuse University; the New York State Council on the Arts and Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration. Organized by the James Van DerZee Institute, Inc. NY. Participated by 45 photographers.
Dear Alicia Keys,
I have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other’s path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists. You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people. Google ‘Montgomery Bus Boycott’ if you don’t know about this civil rights history already. We changed our country fundamentally and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we learned from our own struggle in America, nonviolence is the only path to a peaceful future.
If you go to my website and blog alicewalkersgarden.com you can quickly find many articles I have written over the years that explain why a cultural boycott of Israel and Israeli institutions (not individuals) is the only option left to artists who cannot bear the unconscionable harm Israel inflicts every day on the people of Palestine, whose major “crime” is that they exist in their own land, land that Israel wants to control as its own. Under a campaign named ‘Brand Israel’, Israeli officials have stated specifically their intent to downplay the Palestinian conflict by using culture and arts to showcase Israel as a modern, welcoming place.
This is actually a wonderful opportunity for you to learn about something sorrowful, and amazing: that our government (Obama in particular) supports a system that is cruel, unjust, and unbelievably evil. You can spend months, and years, as I have, pondering this situation. Layer upon layer of lies, misinformation, fear, cowardice and complicity. Greed. It is a vast eye-opener into the causes of much of the affliction in our suffering world.
I have kept you in my awareness as someone of conscience and caring, especially about the children of the world. Please, if you can manage it, go to visit the children in Gaza, and sing to them of our mutual love of all children, and of their right not to be harmed simply because they exist.
With love, younger sister, beloved daughter and friend,
Alice Walker
Source: Rolling Out
Watch: Alice Walker visits Gaza
Related: Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of IsraelAlice Walker isn’t having nan of it.
