Archive for the ‘storytelling’ Category
proud of my girls…
there are so many amazing things going on that i’ve been meaning to link. this is a what-inspires-cripchick post. lately i feel exhausted and like i’m barely hanging on but then i see revolutionary ideas, projects, ways people can come together that are being envisioned and created by radical women of color and i am energized again. below are some projects friends are working on. This is just the beginning!—
i.
Broken Beautiful Press is continuing the work of the Combahee River Collective, a group of black, lesbian, socialist, feminist writers and thinkers who put out the Combahee River Collective Statement in the 1970s. This new study group/zine group/black feminist group can be found at combaheesurvival.wordpress.com
An excerpt from the new Combahee Survival website:
This booklet moves survival to revival, like grounded growth, where seeds seek sun remembering how the people could fly. We are invoking the Combahee River Collective Statement and asking how it lives in our movement now… Black feminism lives, but the last of the originally organized black feminist organizations in the United States were defunct by 1981. Here we offer and practice a model of survival that is spiritual and impossible and miraculous and everywhere, sometimes pronounced revival. Like it says on the yellow button that came included in the Kitchen Table Press pamphlet version of The Combahee River Collective Statement in 1986 “Black Feminism LIVES!” And therefore all those who were never meant to survive blaze open into a badass future anyway. Meaning something unpredictable and whole. We were. Never meant. To Survive.
ii.
Then we also have the Cyber-Quilting Experiment, a rwoc-led project examining how the internet can be used as a resource for social justice work and movement building activities. You can find the Cyber-Quilting Experiment at cyberquilt.wordpress.com
From the vision page on Cyber-Quilting Experiment website:
As cyberquilters, we believe that what we need is bigger than our individual calendars and our possible days. What we need is bridging of movements. Whole, ready and connected. Where we can see, hear and feel each other. Where we know how to help meet each others’ needs. Where we can unite at important political moments and make a difference. Where we remember, with every heartbeat, that our work does not start and begin in our individual bodies. Where we realize that our work is expansive because it resonates in the working blood of women of color organized, mobilizing everywhere in tune.
iii.
The first edition of the Quirky Black Girls magazine is out! Check it out at www.crawldog.com/qbgmagcom/ The Quirky Black Girls social networking site can be found at http://quirkyblackgirls.ning.com
From the QBG manifesta:
Because Audre Lorde looks different in every picture ever taken of her. Because Octavia Butler didn’t care. Because Erykah Badu is a patternmaster. Because Macy Gray pimped it and Janelle Monae was ready. Resolved. Quirky black girls wake up ready to wear a tattered society new on our bodies, to hold fragments of art, culture and trend in our hands like weapons against conformity, to walk on cracks instead of breaking our backs to fit in the mold.
iv.
mamita mala, a radical nuyorican mami, activist, and an amaaazing poet, spoke at the This Is What We Want speakout this week.
Here is a delicious excerpt (full transcript below the cut:
We cannot just vote with our hands. We need to vote with our feet hitting the streets. We need to vote with our mouths yelling and spitting truths and that can happen around our kitchen tables and in our kalles. Mujeres latinas, we need to vote with our lips, tits, and hips and the history they carry, from forced operaciones that left our women sterile to attempts to take away all of our choices about our bodies.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM5Z74TnSsk&hl=en&fs=1]
how I began to identify as a (radical) woman of color
I made a commitment to a close friend that I would write about my personal journey from being a right-wing, flag-waving evangelical fundamentalist to a proud, disabled, queer, radical woman of color that is always growing and never having the answer… however, it is too much to tell in one story so I’m going to make it a series of posts. (See, Ry, now the pressure is officially on! <3)
My sister would never come to me to talk about race. I’m too irrational and “out there” in my politics.
Still, my mother told me tonight how on the way home from a church group meeting, my sister had asked her to pray because she wasn’t fitting in at church and was dreading the trip she had signed up (and already paid for) next week. Though my sister is devoutly religious, if she asked her to pray, it must be serious.
“dah hin sadahm ya, guchee?” I asked in broken Corean so my brother and dad wouldn’t understand.
“yes. all of them.”
While my mom talked to me, I could see her playing back memories in her head. Recent memories, though very painful, that had actually brought us closer (finally she understood what I had been saying for years about where we fit in with white people and why I didn’t go to church). My own head was busy with thoughts. Sterile white-walled classrooms. Clean white girls laughing over inside jokes. Role-model white women teachers telling us how to be good Christian girls. Read the rest of this entry »
