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#identity – @protoslacker on Tumblr
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Three Good Links

@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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jacobwren
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probablyasocialecologist
That I have experienced my share of traumatic experiences, have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near death from accidental circumstance and from violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture

(via probablyasocialecologist)

When I was the little protoslacker, I would ask my father: “Tell me a story about when you were a little boy.”  I work in a big box store garden center. Today is Mother’s Day and there were lots of children around.  Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s words,  “experiential manifestation of the vulnerability,” express an essential part of being little. One way or another I think most of us can remember  being little. To think of vunerability as a bridge between us and others is beautiful.

Elite CaptureHow the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

#fragility#solidarity#book#elite capture#identity
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Developing Stories - Native Photographers in the Field
Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field is a series of three photo essays created by Native photojournalists Donovan Quintero, Tailyr Irvine, and Russel Albert Daniels in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. These photographers share the same desires: to break down stereotypes of Native peoples and to portray the diversity and complexity of their contemporary lives. Each photographer explores an issue that is of deep personal interest to them and touches the lives of Native people in a specific community. Their essays feature poignant and compelling photography. Together, they provide thought-provoking insights into contemporary Native life and nuanced perspectives on an American experience that is largely invisible to mainstream society.
americanindian.si.edu|The National Museum of the American Indian

This is Tailyr Irvine’s contribution. Website

#native american#photojournalism#culture#settler colonialism#genocide#identity
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In the tension between the determination of the first songs on the album, and the more personal, veiled stories of love in the last ones, Chapman captured the flow of feelings that I felt, both hyper-visible and invisible as a Black woman in a white space, and still in formation in my own identity — as blurred as that fuzzy image of Chapman on the album cover. What I needed was some space in-between, just to think. Tracy Chapman created that space of protection, confirmation and contemplation as I figured out who I was, rather than just who others wanted me to be. Given the pressures that I was feeling, especially in graduate school, to "represent," that indeterminacy was a pleasure. Tracy Chapman for me dramatized the space on the verge of action, where desire begins to crystalize. That crystallization can absolutely happen in the moment of singing, when I was all alone in my room, matching my voice to Chapman's as she digs into those last lines of each song.

Francesca Royster in Turning The Tables at NPR. Meeting Tracy Chapman In The Spaces Between

A beautiful meditation on Tracy Chapman’s debut album, Royster tells the story--which I hadn’t heard--of how at at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday  clelebration, a glitch in Stevie Wonder’s equipment created a sudden delay and Chapman was sent out to “keep the crowd warm’ with a few songs. Alone with only an acoustic guitar in her arms she performed in front of a 90,000+ crowd at Wembly Stadium. The performances are onYouTube, Fast Car which choked me right up, and Talkin’ About A Revolution. What courage!

#music#tracy chapman#performance#representation#identity#portals
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If we code-switch to get jobs, to make friends, at what point are we indicating that we will mold to expectations no matter how they clash with our realities? Why do we try so hard to fit in when doing so might make it harder for us to be seen as we are? That is, when our trying to fit in makes it so that people expect us to try to fit in and yet also makes it so that we never can.

Matthew Salesses in Code Switch at NPR. The Overwhelming Nature Of Code-Switching

#whiteness#adoption#identity
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The two books that I had in mind while writing were Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels. These were my bibles as an undergrad, and I was trying to follow in these scholars’ footsteps: trying to use music as a lens to understand links between empire and racial oppression.

Hisham Aidi in interview with Jadaliyya. Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/1199/rebel-music-by-hisham-d-aidi/

Source: jadaliyya.com
#music#book#race#identity#muslim youth culture
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Identities are of great significance for our sense of ourselves, our grounding in the world and our relationships to others. Politics, though, is a means, or should be a means, of taking us beyond the narrow sense of identity given to each of us by circumstance and personal experience. As a teenager, I was drawn to politics because of my experience of racism; but if it was racism that drew me to politics, it was politics that made me see beyond the narrow confines of race. I came to see there was more to social justice than challenging the injustices done to me. I discovered the writings of Marx and Mill, of James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt, of CLR James and Frantz Fanon. Most of all, I discovered that I could find more solidarity with those whose ethnicity or culture was different to mine, but who shared my values, than with those with whom I shared an ethnicity or culture but not the same political vision. Politics was not shackled to my identity, but helped me to reach beyond it.

The rise of white identity politics | Prospect Magazine

Source: prospectmagazine.co.uk
#identity#politics#whiteness#reactionary#solidarity
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Land, Language, and Lifeways: What Native Americans Lost (ep. 85)
www.aclu.org

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case that will decide whether nearly half of Oklahoma is legally an Indian Reservation. The Court’s decision could have massive implications for tribal sovereignty and subsequently, many other Native issues that are impacted by jurisdictional power. Our guest this week is Rebecca Nagle, an activist, writer, artist, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, whose Crooked Media narrative podcast, “This Land” explains the process by which native people in Oklahoma lost their land and the court case that could help restore it. This live discussion took place at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Night of Philosophy and Ideas.

#law#indian law#identity#podcast#history#black history
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Education is the modern day buffalo. You've got to have skills if you want to fit in this modern day world but you have to know where you came from too. Today when I walk through the school I can find the entire hall area filled with buffalo artwork. Teachers are including the history of the buffalo and our people in our curriculum. The kids are using research they are doing to help them get in touch with their identity.

Allan Bird quoted in an article by Lorne McClinton in The Furrow. Where Hope Roams

Buffalo return to Peepeekisis First Nation

This is a great story of people reaching across difference with heart.

#buffalo#first nations#identity
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It was Simmons’s film that first inspired me to revere Essex Hemphill as a Black feminist prophet and ancestor.  His impact on an intergenerational community of Black feminists is well-documented and should be celebrated even more. For example, in the Beam collection at the Schomburg you can read a letter from Audre Lorde to Joseph Beam where she unabashedly gushes about how much she loves Essex Hemphill and how grateful she is that her son will grow up in a world that Essex and Beam have changed.  All of this is to say that the self-love that allowed Essex Hemphill to “be who I am,” was not individualistic.  Countless communities, families, institutions and movements continue to benefit from the “being who I am” practice that Essex Hemphill fought for with the self-love a racist homophobic society told him was impossible.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs at Brilliance Remastered. Essex Hemphill: I love myself (enough)

This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

No!: The Rape Documentary

#essex hemphill#love is#community#identity#joseph beam#film
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A key shift over the past half-century has been the disintegration of those wider social movements and radical struggles. Labour movement organizations have weakened, the new social movements have disintegrated, as indeed has the left. As the old social movements and radical struggles lost influence, so the recognition of identity became not a means to an end, but an end in itself. As the political philosopher Wendy Brown has put it, ‘What we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalism.’ Through these changes the meaning of belongingness and of solidarity transformed. Politically, the sense of belonging to a group or collective has historically been expressed in two broad forms: through the politics of identity and through the politics of solidarity. The former stresses attachment to common identities based on such categories as race, nation, gender or culture. The difference between leftwing and rightwing forms of identity politics derives, in part, from the categories of identity that are deemed particularly important. The politics of solidarity draws people into a collective not because of a given identity but to further a political or social goal. Where the politics of identity divides, the politics of solidarity finds collective purpose across the fissures of race or gender, sexuality or religion, culture or nation. But it is the politics of solidarity that has crumbled over the past two decades as radical movements have declined. For many today, the only form of collective politics that seem possible is that rooted in identity.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium. The history and politics of white identity

#solidarity#identity#enlightenment#politics#history
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I do not think that writers should necessarily speak out on political issues, but I also do not think that art is a valid reason for evading the responsibilities of citizenship – which are to think clearly, to remain informed, and, sometimes, to act and speak.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in The New Statesman America. Shut up and write

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on art, citizenship and what it means to be “an African writer”.

This essay was presented at the British Library by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as winner of the tenth PEN Pinter Prize. The prize is awarded annually to a writer from Britain, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world

#art#civic participation#identity
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Clearly in Trump's America, we have a variety of different constructed narratives, and everyone's got a bunch of facts to prove that they're right. And everyone is internally consistent, and nothing that anyone else says on the outside matters, you know, because they've got it right. So I wanted to upend that entire way of thinking to say that the job of a critical thinker — I would like to say a good American — is to critically investigate your own constructed narrative to break it down when it needs to be broken, and to be willing to listen to entirely different ways of even framing and understanding.

Marc Dollinger in interview with Leah Donnella at Code Switch on NPR. Exploding Myths About 'Black Power, Jewish Politics'

Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s by Marc Dollinger

#black jewish#identity#history#america#book
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We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.

Kwame Anthony Appiah in iainews.  The Lies That Bind Us

Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses how identities form, trap or set us free

#identity#world society#morality
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It’s impossible not to wonder whether his was a flight from color consciousness, a retreat to a place where he would not be defined by his complexion. A place where Amo Afer could be just Amo again; where he didn’t need to be the African. Indeed, his odyssey asks us to imagine what he seems to have yearned for: a world free of racial fixations. It asks if we could ever create a world where color is merely a fact, not a feature and not a fate.It asks if we might not be better off if we managed to give up our racial typologies, abandoning a mistaken way of thinking that took off at just about the moment when Anton Wilhelm Amo was a well-known German philosopher at the height of his intellectual powers.

Kwame Anthony Appiah at Lit Hub.  On the Kidnapped African Boy Who Became a German Philosopher

Kwame Anthony Appiah Tells the Tale of Amo Afer

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

#book#identity#philosophy
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