The End.

tbgptumbles:

And then there were 10! We have 10 awesomely wonderful tees for you to choose from and they celebrate the dopeness that is Black women. You can choose what color and style you want and all the proceeds go to The Black Girl Project and you’ll look fabulous. Win-Win!

Go on and buy 1 or 5!

becuzur: hi-imcurrentlyobsessed: {MTV’s “True Life” Casting Black Women Going Natural}Im excited to inform anyone that doesnt know that MTV will be casting African-American women who are ready cut off their relaxed hair and go natural. If you appear to be between the ages of 15 -28 and would like to document your transition to natural hair, send an email to casting@lintonmedia.com and tell them your hair story. please reblog so all in natural community can go and maybe represent us well.Thanks!!!!! Ooooo this could be good or go horribly wrong. ::crossing fingers for an accurate, anti-racist portrayal::

becuzur:

hi-imcurrentlyobsessed:

{MTV’s “True Life” Casting Black Women Going Natural}Im excited to inform anyone that doesnt know that MTV will be casting African-American women who are ready cut off their relaxed hair and go natural. If you appear to be between the ages of 15 -28 and would like to document your transition to natural hair, send an email to casting@lintonmedia.com and tell them your hair story. please reblog so all in natural community can go and maybe represent us well.Thanks!!!!!

Ooooo this could be good or go horribly wrong. ::crossing fingers for an accurate, anti-racist portrayal::

vintagegal: Josephine Baker by Olivia De Berardinis

vintagegal:

Josephine Baker by Olivia De Berardinis

International Year for People of African Descent goes unnoticed

lati-negros:

International Year for People of African Descent goes unnoticed

latinosexuality:

b-sama:

By Ludlow Bailey

The mainstream media has largely ignored the year. I have yet to see any serious coverage by US television, radio or print media on IYPAD. The black press in the U.S. has also barely covered any of the issues, events and programs associated with IYPAD. Therefore, the level of the awareness of the Black Diaspora in the U.S. has also been negligible. Main stream media coverage in the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America has been equally minimal.

The United Nations clearly did not promote the year as it should. It made, in my opinion, no serious effort to raise the funds necessary to support the kind of events and programs that would align with their grandiose proclamations. The OHCHR (The Office of the High Commission for Human Rights) at most provided logos for print media. They were no radio or television spots produced. Consequently, the year has gone by quickly without much consequence.

It is fair to say that the majority of the African descendant populations in Latin America, the United States, Africa and the Caribbean have minuscule knowledge of IYPAD and have in fact not benefited at all from the International Year for People of African Descent.

Nevertheless, the International Year for People of African Descent gives us (particularly enlightened people of African descent) a unique opportunity to examine our current strategies as it relates to the systemic socio-economic and political problems of African Diaspora people in the world. It is time for African descendants to take full responsibility for creating solutions for our problems in the world and work tirelessly to create communities and societies in which we honor and respect ourselves.

IYPAD most importantly gives us another reason to reflect on our challenges and to remind the international community of the continued devastating impact that the institutions of slavery, colonialism and racism have created for millions of Africans in the diaspora.

It is also a year for black people to think about our collective histories and to figure out ways to share information and resources that contribute to our spiritual, economic and political growth. It is encouraging to see the number of online groups that have emerged to share information (IYPAD Central, IYPAD Africa, IYPAD Nigeria, IYPAD Caribbean and IYPAD-St. Thomas). IYPAD therefore clearly represents an opportunity for Afro-descendants to create new ideas to motivate people of African descent to work together to empower themselves to move beyond the barriers of nationalism and tribalism. It is time for the people of the African Diaspora to clean up their politics.

i do wish we would capitalize the b in Black to make it a proper noun not just an adjective. 

vintageblackglamour:

Regal Esther Rolle chats with Sammy Davis Jr. on “Sammy & Company” in the early 1970s. Charo, Danny Thomas and Charley Pride are also on the couch. Via @swtblackberry

supersonicelectronic:

SUPERSONIC REVIEWS: HIGH LINE

High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky offers a intriguing look into the development and design of the iconic, beautiful park by the project’s co-founders Joshua David and Robert Hammond. The book, perfectly designed by Pentagram, holds the story of how the High Line came to be, from the original elevated railway on Manhattan’s west side until it’s reclamation and urban renewal as an elevated park. With over 250 pages of photographs, High Line, is certainly attention worthy. But, perhaps, the book’s most wonderful attribute is the artistic and design sensitive ideals that David and Hammond held so dearly in the production of the park.

kwesiabbensetts:

(c) Kwesi Abbensetts

Who is the joke and who is the Joker.

Am I really of “Post-Black-ness”. Is that my new heritage.

“Post-black art is a phrase that refers to a category of contemporary African American art. It is a paradoxical genre of art where race and racism are intertwined in a way that rejects their interaction. I.e., it is art about the black experience that attempts to dispel the notion that race matters. It uses enigmatic themes wherein black can substitute for white.[1] Some suggest the term is attributable to the 1995 book The End of Blackness by Debra Dickerson.”

darkjez: 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

darkjez:

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

The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth).”

He continues: “Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean”

Elikia M’bokolo, April 1998, Le Monde diplomatique. (via comingonstrong)