A Winding Road...

heyfranhey:

Hey beautiful ones! Check out a quick story, via Carol’s Daughter, on how I helped my mom transition from relaxed hair to natural hair. Hope it’s helpful <3

Trying this with my Haitian mother. It’s tough but I’m trying to be a better example :)

gaypocalypse:

22-year-old Idalys Ortiz of Cuba, 2012 Olympic women’s heavyweight judo champion. Ortiz is the first woman not from China or Japan to claim the title.

This is what an Olympian looks like. :)

(via heyfranhey)

darklovelyandsouthasian:

In a similar vein to you, I started a literary magazine called Kalyani Magazine (named after my Indian grandmother who passed away couple of years but was a pillar of courage).  The first issue should be coming out in about a month (we got amazing submissions) and the theme for the second issue has been posted on the site and is currently accepting.  I bet a lot of readers of your site would have great stories to submit and I would really welcome them!

My Tumblr dash is what inspired me to reevaluate my entertainment choices. Specifically pictures of Emma Stone.

Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, and Emma Stone have been the most prominent actresses on my dash this year. After July 20th I’m sure Anne Hathaway will be added to the list. That’s fine. I admire all these women; they’re smart, talented and beautiful. But I found myself sighing, “Gosh I wish they weren’t all… white.”

My first instinct was to try to think of who I’d want to see on my dash instead. I was stumped. Who are the contemporary young actresses of color these days? I’m SURE they’re out there, but for people like me who only watch summer blockbusters and only know the names of the those in leading roles, they might as well not exist. 

Now imagine if I were 14 years old and there wasn’t one actress of color on my radar. Imagine that every gif set I came across on Tumblr that was tagged “OMG she’s so amazing! I wanna be her friend!” was of a white woman. How could I not internalize that? How could I believe that people who look like me are also admirable?

Edit to add: Zoe Saldana! I’d love to see her in more movies. :)

simplyann:

rocharlotte:

Will do.

Okay.

That’s the plan.

(Source: thetaoofdana)

saintsally:

bankuei:

racemash:

thespunkywallflower:

J. Marion Sims is called “the Father of Gynecology” due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama who were often submitted as guinea pigs by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure. 

He kept seven women as subjects for four years, but left a trail of death and permanently traumatized black women. 

Anarcha was one of the women Sims experimented upon. A detailed history of this monster is in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid.

Sims believed that Africans were numb to pain and operated on the women without anesthesia or antiseptic. The procedures usually happened this way. 

Black female slaves who were guinea pigs would hold one subject down as Sims performed hysterectomies, tubal ligation, and other procedures to examine various female disorders.

Sims also performed a host of operations on other slave populations. The following excerpt details his “practice” on enslaved infants.

Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on his captives. He took custody of slave infants and, with a shoemaker’s awl, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment.

 

You guys should really google him. 

(if you click the link, I did it for you)

And people wonder why POC stay side-eying the medical industry.

Medical violence is torture and murder for profit.

The history of the medicalization of women’s bodies is a trail of torture and gore basically :\

(via sartorialing)

fyeahkerrywashington:

How Scandal on ABC Got Off the Ground
This trio is keeping politicians’ secrets—and breaking ground at the same time.

Female writers and producers are no longer a rarity in television—think Chelsea Handler, Whitney Cummings, and The Good Wife co-creator Michelle King—but it’s hard to not notice that most of these shows are written by and for and feature white women. All that changes with Scandal on the spring lineup. When the hourlong drama—the brainchild of Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes and starring Kerry Washington—debuts in April, it will be the first time in 30 years that a single African-American woman leads a primetime show on network TV. (The last time was Teresa Graves’s turn as an undercover detective in the 1974 made-for-TV flick Get Christie Love!)

Scandal is inspired by the real-life story of Judy Smith, the noted African-American political-crisis-management expert and former White House aide. Smith’s work over the years has included cooling the fires of such high-profile controversies as Monica Lewinsky, Michael Vick’s dog-fighting charges, and the disappearance of D.C. intern Chandra Levy.

Though the show is only “inspired by” Smith’s career and has a few embellished details, it promises to keep audiences engaged with sizzling storylines straight from recent news events. One steamy subplot suggests that Olivia Pope—the main character, played by Washington—had an ill-fated romantic liaison with the commander in chief. (“I can assure you that didn’t happen,” says Smith, laughing.)

Read More

(via racebending)

afroboheme:

18-15n-77-30w:

afrikanwomen:

Among the current crop of writers in South Africa, Kopano Matlwa stands uniquely head and shoulders above the rest. This grounded twenty two year old author of provocative novel Coconut about black South African youths’ loss of identity in their highly Westernised nation highlights what can happen to African children when they realize that in a world that is black-and-white, life can be cruel when one is not black enough to be black but too black to be white.

Matlwa is not only the youngest European Literary Award winner to come out of South Africa but in addition, continues to manage a hectic writer’s schedule of book readings, literary fairs et al, with a full-time schedule as a medical student at University of Cape Town.

She cites Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembgwa’s Nervous Conditions as one of her favourite books. (source: http://www.african-writing.com)

WOW. DAMN.

Dang. Get it girl.

androgynousblackgirl:

Above, a video by Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan multimedia journalist who works on ”media, women, peace and conflict issues.” She writes, “This is me talking about the danger of portraying people with one single story and using old footage to cause hysteria when it could have been possible to get to DRC and other affected countries get a fresh perspective and also include other actors.”

(more responses here)

Watch Video here

(Source: masembe, via theafricatheynevershowyou)

nessfraserloves:

Meet Betty Bigombe.

Born into the Acholi tribe of Northern Uganda in 1957, Betty has spent the majority of her life fighting the injustices faced by the people of Uganda. Not only has she spent time in displacement camps talking to those who have been directly affected by Kony’s militia, she’s personally worked to build trust with Kony and arguably would’ve succeeded in bringing the rebels and government to peace 1990s, if not for last-minute interference by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.

After Museveni’s interference after the “Bigombe talks”, Bigombe moved to the United States and earned a Masters of Public Policy from the Harvard Institute for International Development (on top of her Bachelor’s degree from Makerere University in Uganda). She began working with the World Bank, first as a senior social scientist, then as a consultant to the World Bank’s Social Protection and Human Development department.

In 2004, after seeing the a news broadcast that displayed the devastation still happening in her homeland and being toted as the only person to come close to succeeding at bringing peace to Uganda, Bigombe left the United States and moved back to Uganda with hopes of once again making a difference.

Once in Uganda, Bigombe organized a series of peace talks between the rebel forces and the Ugandan government. Though she was backed by government support, she used much of her own money to facilitate the talks in hopes bringing peace to Uganda. Once the LRA started expanding into neighbouring countries, Bigombe invited them along to the talks as well. Peace was looking promising. After talks that Kony and other LRA commanders would be indicted by the International Criminal Court for their numerous crimes against humanity, Kony fought back and war broke out once again.

Bigombe has since moved back to the United States and works as a senior fellow for the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has founded two non-profit organizations since her return — one to raise awareness about the children of war, and another to fight corruption in world governments.

Women like Bigombe are who we should be listening to. Her and people like her should be at the forefront of this movement. We should raise up the decades of work she has already accomplished, rather than re-focus this fight on white North Americans and our desire to save the world.

(Information paraphrased and sourced from this article.)

(Source: doulaness, via theafricatheynevershowyou)