Exactly as titled.I live in Boston.
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TW: Hate crime - Friends remember Mark Carson, black gay man shot & killed in NYC, as a ‘beautiful, fabulous gay man’
May 20, 2013More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, a 32-year-old gay black man who was shot and killed in Greenwich Village over the weekend. Carson’s death is being investigated by police as a hate crime after he was allegedly chased out of a restaurant by a man brandishing a gun and yelling homophobic slurs.
Carson’s friends and family shared their grief with the local press.
“I thought that kind of hate stuff was gone, but I see that it’s not,” the victim’s father, Mark Carson Sr., told the New York Post. “It’s simply ridiculous. People are what people are. They do what they do. You can’t knock down who people are.”
Carson’s brother, Michael Bumpars, told the New York Daily News described him as “a beautiful person…he was our foundation.”
Kay Allen, a friend of Carson’s for more than a decade,told the New York Times: “He was a proud gay man. A fabulous gay man.” She added that he loved going to the Village: “His spirit was too big for this city. He didn’t have a negative bone in his body.”
Carson’s violent death has come as a shock for many in New York City’s iconic West Village. The area was home to the infamous Stonewall riots, the event largely credited with sparking the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970’s. Blogger Joe.My.God. reported from last weekend’s rally and has photos from the event.
Thirty-three year old Elliot Morales has been arrested as a suspect in the crime.
Gothamist reports that Carson’s death was the fourth hate crime targeting a gay man in the last two weeks in Manhattan, and the 22nd anti-gay attack so far in New York City this year.
the queer community seriously needs to stop forgetting that the majority of violence against it is targeted at queer and trans POC.
He was injured in the blast and was running away like everyone else. But a bystander thought that was suspicious and tackled him. Police grilled him and ransacked his apartment. The new York post calls him a suspect immediately. Drudgereport links it under a screaming headline. World media pick it up. Everyone thinks he’s behind it. But. It’s. Just. Not. True.
I like how an innocent, injured, and scared man was tackled by bystanders, taken into custody, and defamed in the international media just for his skin color and his audacity to run from a fucking bombing and this warrants one tiny paragraph in an article about how “vigilant” they’re being in their investigation.
all of the ignorant, racist fucks on tumblr need to read this
You know why people were wearing hoodies? It was kinda chilly. That’s what saved my cousin from bring hurt, he and his friend stopped ON THE WAY TO BOYLSTON FINISH LINE to buy a SWEATER.
You know what’s frustrating? Trying to find a way past the rails, tents, crowds, and whatnot to try and catch your train home. You might hop a restricted area or two in order to make it to Back Bay station on time.
You know who gets let by restricted areas while wearing a hood and trying to catch my train home? This girl. I will let you guess why.
(via theslavbarbarian)
No longer is racism largely made up of segregated accommodations, white mobs with nooses in hand, and blatant and violent racist activity that will be accepted by society. Instead, racism today is disguised through the outward show of color-blindness and tolerance that masks a duality of race-consciousness and prejudice.
I think the problem is that many people in America think that racism is an attitude. And this is encouraged by the capitalist system. So they think that what people think is what makes them a racist. Racism is not an attitude.
If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.
Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.
You cannot be a racist without power. You cannot be a sexist without power. Even men who beat their wives get this power from the society which allows it, condones it, encourages it. One cannot be against racism, one cannot be against sexism, unless one is against capitalism.
—Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) answering a question about racism, sexism, and capitalism.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tug8RJyLoz0
(via disciplesofmalcolm)
(via ethiopienne)
(via siddharthasmama)
Almost every marginalized group that cites evidence of violence, especially police violence and abuse, is actually citing statistics against African-American members of that group.
1. Police assault a gay man. It is reported and framed as an “anti-gay” attack. White gay people say “look at the terrible violence we face!”
He is a black man.
2. Feminists decry the horrific new developments in regard to the criminalization of pregnancy, i.e. people with uteri who are prosecuted and/or sent to prison for refusing a c-section, having a miscarriage or stillbirth, having a mental illness, being perceived as “irresponsible”, et cetera.
White women: “this is happening to women!!!” News stories invariably show the pregnant bellies of white women. The stories are written by white women, and are addressed to white women. Which is also cissexist.
This is happening to Black and Native American women like Regina McKnight and Martha Greywind:
First, we describe characteristics of the women and the cases, finding that low-income women and women of color, especially African American women, are overrepresented among those who have been arrested or subjected to equivalent deprivations of liberty.
who are poor, and often living in the South, with its rich history of forced sterilizations and eugenics. South Carolina especially showed preference for sterilizing African American women.
From the report:
For example, in South Carolina thirty-four of ninety-three cases came from the contiguous counties of Charleston and Berkeley.
3. A white Autistic person writes the line, “Being mentally ill means that I am more likely to be shot by police”, and explains why hiding a mental illness can be a survival tool.
Unfortunately, here in reality, those Autistic people who are shot to death by police can’t hide the immediate, visual fact that they are Black men.
Stephon Watts, 15
Ernest Vassell, 57
Stephen Eugene Washington, 27
Roger Parker Jr., 9
4. The face of LGBT activism is white gay men writing about police violence toward white gay people. Pepper spray at a Pride Parade is big news. In fact, many articles defend a white gay man who assaulted a Black woman and told her to “go back to Africa”. White gay men love to write about how subject to violence they are.
and almost all of those (44 percent of overall) are against the “t” in LGBT
and nearly all of those crimes are against Trans* women of color
Also, trans* women of color are sent to prison for surviving a vicious attack. After a trial in which evidence of the attacker’s racism, swastika tattoos, and criminal history is suppressed.
5. Disability advocacy organization in Washington decries disabled children being criminalized, arrested, and prosecuted for minor or nonexistent infractions. News sites report that Mississippi School-To-Prison Pipeline “targets African American AND disabled children”, and uses this image:
When in fact, ALL of the children targeted were children of color:
all of them “children of color,” says Jody Owens, with the Southern Poverty Law Center–were routinely arrested at Meridian schools allegedly on the say-so of teachers or administrators, handcuffed and taken to jail where they were held for days on end without benefit of a hearing, a lawyer, or understanding their Miranda rights.
Meridian county is 55% African-American, and about 70% of schoolchildren are African American.
Disabled children of color face torture, imprisonment, vicious beatings perpetrated by teachers, and are African American children with or without disabilities are 3 1/2 times more likely to receive “disciplinary action” against them in school than white students.
6. There is a huge outcry against the NRA’s suggestion of armed guards at Elementary schools in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
A bare footnote or completely lost in this outcry is the fact that an overwhelming proportion of children of color, especially Black and Latino children, already go to schools with armed guards and police presence on the campus.
The notorious and unapologetic racist sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, has sent out more than 3,000 untrained “posse” volunteers to “police” schools under his purview. This is when his “trained” deputies already torture, abuse, beat, and murder people of color in Maricopa County on a terrifyingly regular basis.
The problem is, if you are a Black student, the campus police may be quite likely to shoot you dead.
To come full circle, the student shot dead by police in the link above also had a mental illness.
Almost every marginalized group that cites evidence of overwhelming discrimination and violence, especially police violence and abuse, is actually citing statistics against African-American members of that group.
The point of all this is that journalism repeatedly fails to accurately report that people of color suffer the overwhelming majority of police violence. The racism built into the very foundations of American society and culture ensures that this violence continues, is under-reported, misrepresented as evidence of criminality, when it fact it is evidence of the criminalization of people of color, especially Black Americans.
If you are a white person, and you experience a particular axis of marginalization and want to give statistics on the violence you face as an oppressed person, especially in regards to police violence, you should consider checking whether these statistics accurately reflect the violence against white members of the marginalized group you belong to.
And also of note: police violence is the measure of which overtly sanctioned violence perpetrated by U.S. government and society is glaring gateway into overall violence and discrimination is perpetrated again people of color, especially Black Americans. It permeates the education system, the medical and mental health systems, the social security and welfare systems, the legal system, the higher education systems, the banking systems, the commercial and entrepreneurial systems, and every single institution.
(via heirofmedusa)
white people
how morally bankrupt are we to see all these receipts, to listen to the horror stories from PoC, to hear how people suffer at our hands, to read how it’s not enough to eradicate their culture and traditions through colonialism, how we then take their culture and their language and their identities for our own (white transethnics)
and to then turn around and DENY that it ever even happened
to say that to point it out is racist in and of itself
I swear to God, if you actually listen to PoC and you are STILL going to turn around and complain about how WE’RE NOT ALL LIKE THAT or that generalizing white people is JUST AS BAD, you are a shit of a person and I hope horrible things happen to you
and don’t go thinking that NOT doing the above earns you a gold star because it’s just decent human behavior
(via theslavbarbarian)
(via think-progress)
serves only to divide you from potential allies and limit your own learning. — From 28 Common Racist Attitudes & Behaviors (PDF Link) By Debra Leigh, Organizer, Community Anti-Racism Education Initiative (via whatwhiteswillneverknow)
(via themanedlioness)
look. it’s okay to appreciate another culture.
really.
I have dozens and dozens of non-chinese friends who, for whatever reason, decided to learn mandarin chinese. (which is fantastic—multilingualism is wonderful.) and through learning mandarin, many of these friends learn about various aspects of chinese cultures, and they’re now totally in love with china and have a really deep appreciation for everything chinese.
and I am cool with that.
a lot of them would love to live in china. a lot of them wish they’d grown up in and with chinese culture.
but.
they know that they’re always going to be laowai (foreigners, others), and that they can’t change that.
the thing about ~*transethnicity*~ though? well, there are multiple things about it:
(1) it essentializes and homogenizes races, ethnicities, and cultures. (link contains gifs)
(2) it trivializes the struggles that many peoples go through to claim their heritage. people are persecuted for their heritage. people die to claim their culture. these are ongoing struggles.
(3) it does not erase the presence of white privilege. I am aware that there may be transethnics that are not white. but many of them are white, and they still have white privilege. they will still go through society benefiting from the system that privileges them and rewards them for their existence. the system of racism does not oppress them as it does people of color. white people may scream all they want about how they’re really Black on the inside, but that won’t change their skin color, and they will still receive the benefits of white privilege.
(4) and furthermore, physical designation of race and ethnicity is all very much arbitrary and constructed. that is to say, people who are of a certain race or ethnicity have a vast spectrum of physical appearances. there are very light Black people, very dark Black people, and every shade in between. there are chinese people with straight hair; there are chinese people with wavy hair. there is no one way to look a certain race or ethnicity, and yet transethnics very often stereotype these physical appearances into one model that very frequently is the dominant fetishized model of a certain race/ethnicity (dainty Asian women, strong Black men, etc. etc. etc.)—and I don’t think that that’s a coincidence. it’s a form of incognito racism.
(5) transethnicity appropriates from the trans* community as well. violence and discrimination against trans* people, especially trans* people of color, are on the rise: trans* people are murdered for simply existing. trans* people struggle for access to basic human necessities such as healthcare and housing, and it is still very much legal in too many places to fire someone from their job for being trans*. and this discrimination, this oppression, is systematic and normalized. transethnics do not face this kind of oppression. maybe there’s some prejudice and discrimination on an individual level, but on a societal, institutional level? nope.
(6) marginalization based on race and marginalization based on gender are not the same. they are two struggles that often intersect, that may have similarities, but they are not parallel. my experience as a cis chinese-american does not in any way qualify me to talk about marginalization based on gender. being trans* does not qualify a white person to talk about racism. etc. etc. etc. being “transethnic” is not parallel to being transgender.
(7) there is also the question of transracial/transethnic adoption, which is a whole different set of struggles, and I don’t really know enough about it to say anything on that topic.
mostly, for me, the reason why transethnicity pisses me off the way it does boils down to this: people of color in a white-dominant society have essentially been forced into “transethnicity” for as long as the system of racial oppression has existed. that is, people of color who talk white, dress white, act white, think white, step all over their fellow people of color as an act of buying into white supremacy, are rewarded and allowed to advance in white-dominant racist societies.
we’ve been forced to assimilate. we’ve had our cultures and heritages stripped from us. we’re forcibly whitewashed. we struggle to reclaim our heritages and histories. these struggles are deep collective wounds that span generations, and we’re shown signs every day that these struggles are in no way ending.
and ~*transethnics*~ want me to respect their identity? while denying me the autonomy of defining my own damn heritage?
no. just no.
here’s some more eloquently worded anger. (contains gifs)
I’m gonna return to my regularly scheduled fandom blogging. I’ve spent far too much time on this topic.
(via cosmicrubric)
“Do you have proof? Convince me that this is harmful and racist or else everything you say is invalid!”
Oh, how I fucking hate this derail.
Basically, it’s set up to put PoC on the defensive, and that’s why white folks and “colorblind” racists do it — they make us feel defensive about our experiences, our feelings, and our perceptions, which are all valid.
Yet they need to invalidate them and try to drive us insane by forcing us to give them evidence, which they usually always dismiss. They try to make us not trust our own gut instincts and intuition, saying that they’re inherently “unreasonable” and “irrational.”
Which, when it comes to racism? PoC are going to know more than white people. Automatically. We experience it, so of course we’re going to know. Racism and whiteness are the things that are unreasonable and irrational, not PoC’s perceptions, experiences, and very valid feelings with living through it.
And you wonder why a lot of PoC don’t trust white people? We constantly feel like our minds and hearts are being put on trial.
We don’t have to prove shit. If you’re not open-minded enough to at least hear about what we have to say and consider it without automatically invalidating it because you’re so afraid of your whiteness being deconstructed and your perception not being the only one that’s “right” and “true,” then the burden’s on you to prove to us why we need to give a shit about your opinions and why we should waste any of our time and energy on you.
(via wretchedoftheearth)
Myself and my Korean friend. I know she’s not the same kind of Asian as myself, but it still saddens me to know that I will never have the chance to be as beautiful and Asian as her without cosmetic surgeries. I simply want to shed this ‘white’ shell and all the stupidity and ugliness of American/European culture that came with it. Japanese people and Asians are so much more beautiful and artistic. Sigh.
yt folks time to get ur stuff
this is
this is bad
what the actual fuck
girl.
girl stop.
OP… stop. Look at what you are saying, look at what you are doing. It’s wrong. it’s FUCKED. STOP IMMEDIATELY.
(via cosmicrubric)
A man in Kentucky made this sculpture of Obama eating a watermelon and says it’s not racist and that everybody loves it.
It’d be unfortunate (read: awesome) if one of those power lines came down and set his mobile home on fire.
(via stfuconservatives)
When I ask you not to use the word Gypsy
It’s because it hurts me.
It’s not because I think you’re a bad or evil person. It’s not because I hate you as person.
It’s because it hurts me. It hurts my family. It hurts my parents, my child, and it hurts my ancestors.
I’m not being dramatic or emotional. I’m not being a bitch or being mean.
The word Gypsy is a racial slur and is used against us every day. It means we can’t get jobs or houses; health care or education; a place to live; food; water. It means we live in used shipping containers; in old toxic factories; on trash dumps and abandoned land behind high walls designed to keep us out.
Being “racist” is seen as something terrible and evil. We all think we’re good people and we wouldn’t act that way. We might think that because we only took the good parts (the skirts or the music or the femininity) that it can’t be offensive. We think that our intent shoves the dark aspects of the word away and leaves only the pretty pieces.
But, there is nothing good about the word “Gypsy”.
We are Romani. We are Sinti. We are Kale and Calo; Manouche and Pavee. We are mothers and daughters, uncles and sons.
We are so much more than a hideous word etched into our skin or written in arcane and draconian laws.
In France headlines this week read “Riot Police take on Gipsies” as hundreds of my brothers and sisters were evicted, again, forcibly.
Racist TV shows like American Gypsies are allowed and encouraged by international media (American Gypsies Breaking Old Stereotypes but Creating New Ones).
And countries such as the Czech Republic continue to harass, marginalize, and victimize Romani on a daily basis…. “While “never again” happens again”.
So, I’m not trying to rain on your parade, be a “reverse racist” or imply that you’re somehow bad…
I’m simply asking you to please stop hurting me. Stop hurting my son. Stop hurting my people.
