Soma Buy - HQ Pharmacy

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]

I'm going to say something extremely unpopular that goes against what the mainstream media and the candidates themselves are telling us and I'm specifically addressing this to my Latino hermanas and hermanos, your vote doesn't count. In fact with all this hype around the Latino vote I'm gonna tell you not to vote. Now before you start throwing stuff at me, allow me to qualify my statements. Your vote does not count and you shouldn't vote if you think that your vote alone is going to change the state of things in the United States. As my mentor Richie Perez, que en paz descanse, once told me, voting is just one weapon in our revolutionary toolbox and we all need to think not about just fixing what is broken in this country, but tearing it down and building anew and in building something new we need to use all the weapons available. So, yes vote on November 4th but not if you think your work is done when you walk out of that booth. There is a reason both John McCain and barack Obama haven't brought up immigration at the last three debates despite the fact that redadas/raids keep tearing families apart.. There is a reason Sarah Palin is talking about and to hockey moms and not futbol mamitas, the ones who are bearing the brunt of the heathcare crisis. There is a reason we are not hearing/reading about the fact that there are two women of color, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente running as a presidential team. 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. So what does this Mamita Mala, this mujer want, seeing that is the theme of the night? This mujer wants you remember those that died to vote in this country, those that got their asses beat to vote, those who still can't vote including the incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, residents of U.S. colonies like my patria/homeland Puerto Rico and millions of immigrants. Use your vote wisely the way a soldier is supposed to use weapon, the way a construction worker uses his tools. Use it to support and work towards something bigger. It doesn't end on November 4th.

love you all. keep speaking.

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. “I should have kept us at the Corean church, right? Your sister went to Johnny’s graduation party yesterday and all the kids there were his friends from Corean church. The Corean church was like a fishbowl, I wanted you kids to have an aquarium experience so you could go far.” She cupped her hands like a bowl and then stretched them like a box. After thinking long and hard, I told her I didn’t have an answer. I was an outsider at the Corean church and it wasn’t cause of race or cultural values. All the kids there were half white, half Corean too. It made an interesting dynamic--- the white army daddies stayed home and Corean women ran the whole church. Though this Confucian, strong Corean woman background is part of me, I didn’t fit in as an ugly, penguin-steppin (I walked bobbing from side to side) kid who wore FOB clothes that emo sent from Seoul. Not knowing what else to say, I told my mom that my sister would be okay. After all, they couldn’t get their deposit for the trip back. “Umma. Remember I met Desiree, Henry, Angie, Richard and the others at church? She’ll meet people too. When she comes back from the trip, she can switch to Johnny’s church. She’ll be okay.” Even though I reassured my mom that everything would be fine, the pangs in my heart told me different and I felt bad for my beautiful, perfect younger sister (how could SHE be an outsider?). Maybe my sister would be lucky enough to meet good people like I had. Des’ mom, though born in this country, forced her to come to church for the same reasons my mom had. We became best friends and when a few latino, black, and Lumbee kids trickled in, we formed an impenetrable group of teenagers (you know how we folks of color multiply!...sarcasm noted hopefully). The environment was so hostile that this group was the one place there that love seemed to grow. From the outside, we looked liked we had nothing in common (I was the only gimp and one of the few non-black kids of color) but inside our friendship flourished. And in a world where White Jesus loved us but told us we were bad (but white kids were less bad), we managed to go on without being too heartbroken about this... Anyways. I am forever thankful to those friends and thankful for the experience of hammering out such a space. This is one of the stories in my journey in which I have begun to call the place I build with other rwoc home.