The original background artwork from the television series Samurai Jack by illustrator Scott Wills :: via animationbgs.blogspot.com
Beautiful short film “Kiss”
The Prison of the White American View of History
James Baldwin writing in the August 1965 issue of Ebony magazine, starting on page 47:
My point of view certainly is formed by my history, and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.
This is the place in which, it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America.
The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage. I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Besides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I also despise the governors of Southern states and the sheriffs of Southern counties, and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing! What have you got against me? What do you want? But, on the same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, the white American, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much.
On that same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, the black American finds himself facing the terrible roster of his lost: the dead, black junkie; the defeated, black father; the unutterably weary, black mother; the unutterably ruined black girl. And one begins to suspect an awful thing: that people believe that they deserve their history, and that when they operate on this belief, they perish. But one knows that they can scarcely avoid believing that they deserve it; one’s short time on this earth is very mysterious and very dark and very hard. I have known many black men and women and black boys and girls who really believed that it was better to be white than black, whose lives were ruined or ended by this belief; and I, myself, carried the seeds of this destruction within me for a long time.
via Abagond
(via loveyourchaos)
Lush UI for the NOOKA iPhone app
(Source: Laughing Squid)
From a very young age we’re basically taught to think of racism and “anything bad” isms as something “very bad people [consciously] do.” We are always taught to identify with the good guys and wonder what the bad guys were thinking. We then have a lot of trouble actually identifying evil thoughts within ourselves, because we don’t see ourselves as being “evil people.”
But part of truly understanding the horror of many acts in history is understanding that the people who made them happen were not particularly evil- the people that followed weren’t particularly evil. That evil often happens in little steps, tiny jokes and references and cultural nuances until something snaps and the whole thing snowballs into chaos and upheaval. Evil as it occurs when groups of people are denied rights or killed or discriminated against or whatever isn’t necessarily the result of an evil thought, but rather the result of a lack of conscious thoughts fighting evil.
