I told my students in France that Jackie Chan is my father when they asked me if I knew kung fu. When they ask me to speak in Chinese sometimes I say, “I could tell you that a rat crawled up my asshole and you would still think this language is beautiful or at least impressive.” I went to Paris and was unimpressed by art but very impressed by the pho. I went to Scotland and met two American girls who didn’t know Spanish is spoken in Latin America and had the most depressing drinking stories about waking up with black eyes and ha ha ha ha ha ha ha then I went to work drunk and totally fell on a five year old girl.
I hate myself when I wish other people didn’t exist.
I have the sorest throat in the world.
How chill is this photo? It makes my asshole quiver.
More archival Black Panthers photos here.
“asshole quiver”, turds, lying about your parentage, boob hearts, tripping on babies? Jenny, I didn’t think it possible but I think I like you even more after having read this new spot of yours.
it didn’t feel all that ‘chill’ at the time…it was bone-dead scary and depressing. nightmarish, in fact – and 40 years on, mr. mehserle shows us things have barely moved an inch.
but the main thing is that you experience a somatic sensation….. …..
Nope, there’s nothing chill about racism, oppression, violence against people of color, or the need for solidarity and action as a response to physical, spiritual, and moral assaults on an interpersonal level as well as on a structural level, the kind of assaults that are embedded in the social fabric and structure of our world and occur as casually and frequently as blinking one’s eyes when first encountering sunlight. There’s nothing chill about the outcome of the Oscar Grant trial and the centuries of sickening racist history, which is full of this type of injustice, and it’s not only the Oscar Grant case, it’s the average life expectancy for a young black man living in the inner-city versus his white counterpart, it’s the growing nativist mood in this country, it’s the misdirected anger and frustration so many Americans are feeling right now, it’s the blatantly racist propaganda and legislation targeted at immigrants and workers of color that has resulted from aforementioned anger (rather than directing these feelings of resentment toward say, how fucked up NAFTA is and its role in the number of jobs that have moved south and the number of people who have moved north,) it’s disturbing reports and lived experiences of residential and educational segregation (worse now than before the Civil Rights movement,) access to healthcare, rate of incarceration for African American and Latino men, etc etc etc you could finish this list a year from now as well as I can.
There’s nothing chill about the erasure of radical Asian American and Yellow Power movements from historical and contemporary relevancy. There’s nothing chill about the mainstream acceptance of the narrative and the archetype of the politically and fiscally conservative Asian American, or studies that show Asian Americans, by and large, have been found to hold the most racist and negative views toward African Americans, because racial triangulation (although simplistic and hardly contains the whole story,) is real and and people of color really are pitted against people of color, which conveniently allows racist/sexist/imperialist/colonialist/homophobic/ableist/classist power structures to go untouched even by anger. I’m proud of this photo for making visible (and making beautiful) the role that radical Asian Americans played in the Civil Rights movement, and for doing even the most minute work than an image can do to remind us the importance and necessity of solidarity between oppressed groups.
Please don’t leave a snarky, unkind, ellipses-punctuated comment enforcing the intractability and rigidity of language, especially if you stand in solidarity and compassion with people of color, who are often the first to be shamed and ostracized for their ‘nonstandard’ English usage, not to mention the complete impossibility of poetry–one of the most beautiful things on this earth–unless we give way to the utter possibility of inscribing a multiplicity of meaning to each and every word that already exists as well as all the words that have yet to be created, negated, or torn asunder and sutured to another!