(Source: blackyardigans, via gloomydunmer)
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(Source: reparrishcomics, via nostalgicfuturity)
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(Source: my-teen-quote, via gloomydunmer)
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A “touch-me-nots” (mimosa pudica) leaves fold up after being touched through a process called thigmonasty.
If you like this you might like “How a beanstalk finds support.”
(Source: educational-gifs, via currentsinbiology)
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Pompeii
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(Source: pinmedownandtakemybreathaway, via stopfollowingmeokbyethnxkbye-de)
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Oskar Garvens (1874-1951) - Le Repentir
(Source: silenceformysoul, via getstupiddontstop)
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Aaliyah as the fictional Queen Akasha of Kemet in the 2002 film Queen of the Damned.
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My bra size should be C-4 cause these are some bomb ass titties
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via Racialicious
I’ve spoken before at length about images used by instructors to accompany history lessons, and what they teach us about history versus what they don’t.
This leads to students given the impression that many different people of color somehow “showed up” just in time to be exploited by slavers and colonizers (think of how “First Contact” narratives are commonly the first mention on Native Americans in US History, or “Chinese Immigrants” show up in time to build railroads and then mysteriously disappear), and contribute to the misconception of a socially and racially isolated Europe in perpetuity.
Which of course leads to this phenomenon in popular media:
As if merely stating the location and the time is a total justification for ubiquitous whiteness in casting. If you were actually interested in historical accuracy, it might be noted:
By the eighteenth century the black population in England, particularly in London, had indeed become a community, with a concern for joint action and solidarity. When in 1773, for example, two black men were confined to Bridewell prison for begging, more than 300 black people not only visited them but provided for their economic and emotional support. In the later eighteenth century there were black pubs, churches and community meeting places, changing the picture of isolated individual domestic servants and roving beggars on London streets to that of a thriving and structured black community.
Black London: Life before Emancipation, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. Rutgers University Press, 1995.
The problem here is that if the visual narrative shows a person of color, especially a Black individual, who is not being subjected to horrific violence, dehumanization, or is not literally a photograph of a dead body, it’s seen as an “exception” or “anomaly”. Note the tweet above that cites the use of lynching postcards, a terrifying example of how racist murders were not only common, but normalized.
I think that if these kinds of images are used as the only types of images from history students see of Black people, that is absolutely a form of racial aggression and even violence that has been embedded and institutionalized in American culture.
See Chimamanda Adichie’s powerful talk, The Danger of a Single Story:
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.”
If you are an educator, you hold a piece of that power.
It’s important to tell the truth about oppression, violence, and genocide in history. But beware of making that the only stories that are seen and heard.
Part of the point of Medievalpoc is to try and create a visual and textual narrative in which people of color can also enjoy history as playground, as a point of pride, as somewhere they can see themselves, ourselves, as something other than subjugated.
How can we foster educational environments where these topics can be discussed without putting the onus on students of color? Without making students who may already be “the only” one in their learning environment feel even more singled out?
Given my own experience in educational and professional spaces, I try to be more sensitive to what it feels like being “the only [insert your category here]” in class and to be more mindful of how the particular composition of the classroom can inflect a discussion.
In one of my classes, we were discussing the Travels of John Mandeville and its description of “Ethiopians” and discourses of blackness and beauty. There happened be only one black student in class that day, and as we approached this topic many of the classmates’ glances began to drift, as if on cue, toward this person…perhaps in anticipation that this student would soon speak up, or otherwise just to gauge her reaction; in any case, it was an unconscious and unspoken shift in the class dynamic that “singled out” the student in a way that obviously made her uncomfortable.
This student avoided eye contact with me as this was happening (clearly she did not want to be called upon) and, picking up on this weird classroom dynamic, I redirected the conversation by inserting myself in the moment. I said something to the effect that “as a nonwhite person I find these Eurocentric racial discourses cause me great discomfort. We obviously have both white and nonwhite people in this room, so what are some ways we can all approach reading this passage today?”
I found that at this point all the students felt they had more of a “way into” the discussion and there was no longer this perception that only one “type” of person bore the burden of responding to this passage. It was one way to give us all permission to openly acknowledge the many different bodies in class and to engage in a shared discussion.
Although I touched base with this particular student later about things in office hours and we had a productive conversation about this and made sure she hadn’t felt alienated, I don’t doubt that I could have done better—but I at least tried to “call out” a (subtle) shift in class behavior as it was happening and do something productive with it.“Intersections: On Annoyances, Mistakes … and Possibilities” by Jonathan Hsy (The Medieval Middle)
We can do better.
We can do better.