My personal blog

Black women are not universally angry, because no group of human beings is universally angry. Black women can be kind, warm, sensitive, gentle, thoughtful, and forgiving. Every day, millions of women of African descent around the world prove the accuracy of this statement, prove it quietly, with unseen gestures and whispered words as they go about the business of leading challenging, unobtrusive, but meaningful lives that rarely attract the glare of media spotlights or the sharp tongues of patronizing, preening, pundits. And yet, without the radical kindness of Black women on every continent of this planet, even more Black children would suffer before they had the chance to grow, even more of the elderly of all races would die alone and without care, even more Black women and, yes, more Black men - and more people of all races whose lives have been touched by the kinds of Black women you never see on television or read about in academic articles - would exist with less love, grace, and meaning in their lives. We speak here of RADICAL KINDNESS because Black women have every social, political, cultural, and historical reason to be relentlessly and perpetually unkind, in the interest of their own success and survival, to abandon kindness as an unwieldy and unrewarding burden that they cannot afford to carry. But carry it they do and distribute it with great, and greatly ignored, generosity.

Source: ramou

Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.
It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.

Source: sherunsfromdarkness

[Talking about the “misleading tidy five-part U.S. census categorization of ‘races’”] The census is in fact heterotopic, mingling issues of race (blacks), language (Hispanic), and geography (Asians) as if they were commensurate categories. “Asian-American,” for example, is often applied only to East Asians, excluding Iranians, Pakistanis, Lebanese, or others from South and West Asia (the Middle East). “African-American,” similarly, does not usually denote recent immigrants from Africa, or black immigrants from South America and the Caribbean. “Arab” is usually misconstrued as synonymous with Muslim, though some Arabs are Christian and others are Jewish. Reductive categories like “Jew,” “Arab,” and “Latino/a,” similarly, hide the racial variety of a chromatic spectrum that includes white, black, mestizo/a, and brown. In the U.S. many communities and individuals fit only awkwardly into the single-hyphen boxes, yet bureaucratic pluralism does not allow for the polysemy in the politics of color. The usual ways of talking about “minority” identities leave little room for the complexities of these categories or for the porous borders between them.

Source: axiones