Black Representation Quotes

I tell you to think black thoughts and you come up with that?!" the lieutenant had screamed. "Is a guinea pig bad? Do you consider a guinea pig the representation of all that is evil?" Maybe... if it's an evil guinea pig.

When I moved my hands down away from the window I caught sight of my reflection in the glass, bright against the black morning beyond. I couldn’t contain the audible gasp that sounded in my throat. I had expected to see the slightly translucent representation of my face mirrored on the pane, but instead I saw an ivory haze where my features should have been.

It is not surprising that young white males – most between thirty and forty – play major roles in the production of hip-pop. It’s easy to forget this because when most people critique rap and hip-pop harshly, they assume that young black men are the sole creators and producers of misogynist rap. In fact, nothing is unilaterally produced anymore. As we’ve discussed, once you have a corporate takeover of the street culture, it is no longer the property of the young, Black and Latino men and women who have created it. It is reinvented with the mass consumer audience in mind. The hard-core misogyny and the hard-core sexism isn’t a translation from street to big-time studio, it is a product of the big-time studio.

Tying representation to the land as opposed to the people living on it is, among other things, fucking stupid.

The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

It may sound like I am making too much out of all this, but the only way you can allow a kid to truly dream is if you expand their idea of what is currently possible. A kid who has nothing, sees nothing, and is taught nothing can only dream of breakfast. They can only hope to get to the next moment successfully. I want more than that for my kids...just like my mom wanted more than that for me. And I want them to want more than that too.

The prison-industrial complex is a $182 billion industry that feeds off the lives of Black, brown, and poor people caught up in its vicious cycle.* While mass incarceration is a complex problem, I wanted to simply (ha ha) focus on how it’s almost impossible to prove someone is innocent without adequate representation.

Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

...consider the possibility that to love blackness is dangerous in a white supremacist culture- so threatening, so serious a breach in the fabric of the social order, that death is the punishment.

One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that 'an ugly man.

The discussion of representation is one that has been repeated over and over again, and the solution has always been that it’s up to us to support, promote, and create the images that we want to see.

And I remember in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood, in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation… For he argued thus; that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated… …he leaves me worse than in ignorance, for I am led to believe a thing black when it is white, and short when it is long.

our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught.

It doesn’t matter that a Black woman heads the national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets are still the same.

Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered by Lorrain's horrified and complicitous gaze. This decadent detective is at one with the criminal he pursues, acknowledging openly that the representation of corruption is one of the most pleasurable forms that corruption can take. In this enterprise, art is the mask that both exposes and conceals culpability.

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are "wrong," by betting against his representation of the world.

The Non-ist I am anti: I descend when others clamber up: Formally attired when others are not; I un-imbibe while others sip At parties, and bars and on vacation trips. I'm abstract: Formless in a world of representations, Flat in a world of 3-D demonstrations, Yet occupy space/time in Einstien's manifestations, And invisible in a world of flamboyant excitations. I am black and white in a land of a million hues, Kaleidoscopic when the world's all greys and blues; Monotone and taupish while all around is crimson, But luminescent in the depths of prison. I cannot be while others do, And yet I will, when others fail to; And when they've done all they could do, I remain retired, sudued.

I BOUGHT THIS house for the door. The house itself was a ruin, but I had to have that door. Over the years, I’ve painted it many times, all different ways: abstract, representational, blue, black, brown. I’ve painted it in the hot green of summer, in the dead of winter, clouds rushing past it, a lone yellow leaf drifting down. I painted the door open only once. Just before he died. In every picture after, it was closed.

There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, “I’m not sure” is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can’t be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking.

Her being the first Black homecoming queen really had me walking around thinking we had accomplished something great. But representation isn’t enough. It isn’t the liberation I thought it was. The homecoming elections policy, the racial quotas, it’s all another form of performative activism. It doesn’t really fix the issue if the same oppressive systems remain.

For centuries, the West has regurgitated representations of colonized women that came to be accepted as more real than the real. Jezebels. Black velvet. Harem girls. China Dolls. Princess Pocahontas. All of these reduced complex human beings to cardboard cutout sexual objects without agency and whose surrendered sexuality was de facto justification for white supremacy.

People think that representation doesn't matter, but it does. It makes a difference. The problem is that sometimes people of color in show business- and this is true of women too- think that they just have to eat it. They don't want to hurt anybody's feelings or be an asshole or be looked at as overly sensitive. I was certainly that way during Totally Biased. But now I think, Fuck that. Why am I not naming names? Why am I protecting white men's feelings? They weren't protecting my feelings.

Online content and new media are changing our communities and changing the demand for and accessibility of that content. The discussion of representation is one that has been repeated over and over again, and the solution has always been that it’s up to us to support, promote, and create the images that we want to see. Ten years ago, making that suggestion would have required way more work than it does now, and my love of taking shortcuts probably wouldn’t allow me to make any dents on that front. But with ever-evolving, new accessible technologies, there are so many opportunities to reclaim our images. There’s no excuse not to, and I’ve never felt more purposeful in my quest to change the landscape of television.

Representation matters. It matters that you sit in an audience and see yourself onstage. It matters that a company who sells to a multiethnic, multicultural world works to bring every voice in so that they consider as many perspectives as possible. Black, white, Latino, Asian, old, young, gay, straight, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, differently abled, plus-size, petite—everybody should be at your table. Everybody should be on your stage. Everybody should be on your staff. Everybody should be invited to your kid’s birthday party. Everybody should be welcome in your church. Everybody should be invited over for dinner. Every single woman you know and every single one you don’t could benefit from the truth that she is capable of something great. How is she ever going to believe that if nobody sets an example? How is she ever going to believe that if nobody cares enough to see it in her and speak the truth aloud?

The model minority myth is often used to separate Asian Americans from other people of color by using their perceived socioeconomic and academic success and docile nature to compare and contrast with black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. This divide-and-conquer technique serves to redirect struggle against oppressive White Supremacy to competition between Asian Americans and other people of color. The real animosity between some Asian Americans and other people of color that has been manufactured by the model minority myth prevents Asian Americans and non-Asian people of color from recognizing and organizing around shared experiences of labor exploitation, lack of government representation, lack of pop culture representation, cultural appropriation, and much more.

It showed a tiny baby girl floating in a clear glass vessel. The baby held a silver rose in one hand, a golden rose in the other. On its feet were tiny wings, and drops of red liquid showered down on the baby’s long black hair. Underneath the image was a label written in thick black ink indicating that it was a depiction of the philosophical child—an allegorical representation of a crucial step in creating the philosopher’s stone, the chemical substance that promised to make its owner healthy, wealthy, and wise. The colors were luminous and strikingly well preserved. Artists had once mixed crushed stone and gems into their paints to produce such powerful colors. And the image itself had been drawn by someone with real artistic skill. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from trying to learn more from a touch here and there.

In other words, representation alone will not save us, no matter how much we want it to, because most representation that exists now is designed to placate instead of liberate.

We say food is a weapon, which is another way to say that food is a means of protest, but good food can also be a tool of liberation.

But representation is not the same thing as power, and the hiring of a few black officers was an ambiguous victory.

This is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It’s a foretaste.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.

Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was “amazing,” “marvellous,” incredibly funny,” worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

This is why reading representations of disability as simultaneously metaphor and materiality is so essential -- disability oscillates between abstraction and material meanings due to its social history.

You know," he added reflectively, "we've got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we'd had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women's suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums . . ." "What is all that?" asked the Emperor. "Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.

the structure of the Senate is the result of the “Great Compromise” or “Connecticut Compromise” at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Smaller states were worried about being controlled by larger, more populous states. The South in particular was worried about losing the privilege to work and rape Black people to death. The compromise provided that one chamber of the legislature, the House of Representatives, would be apportioned based on population, while the other, the Senate, would give equal representation to each state. To put it another way: white slavers feared “democracy” so much that they wrote it out of the Constitution.

The universe, the landscape, it is all changing. It has not changed enough-that is a given- but it is changing, and evolution is something to embrace. Racism is alive and well and we still encounter microaggressions on a regular basis, bat at least now we can go home and close the door and enjoy some entertainment, see ourselves on-screen, imagine ourselves as superheroes and goddesses. Before, you got hassled, you went home, and you had nothing. That's the difference

Discrimination can be subtle but it undoubtedly exists in the workplace. Corporate culture can be sexist, classist, racist and ableist, and simply having representation without challenging the roots of the ‘isms’ will not get us very far

What possible rationale demanded this many debased representations of the recently freed Black people produced in the final third of the nineteenth century? How many ways can one call a woman or a man a "n*****" or a "c***"? How many watermelons does a person have to devour, how many chickens does an individual have to steal, to make the point that Black people are manifestly, by nature, both gluttons and thieves? Why in the world was it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of these separate and distinct racist images to demean the status of the newly freed slaves in a set of fixed types and motifs, which reached their perverse apex with the characterizations of Black people during Reconstruction in The Birth of a Nation, in the figures of deracinated Black elected officials and, of course, the black male as rapist? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow, or, in three different words, disenfranchising Black voters

Traditionally, the burning of a cross, or a ‘cross-lighting ceremony,’ is considered a religious celebration. The burning of a religious symbol has never been seen by Klan members as a sign of desecration; it has always been considered an honorable representation of their Christian faith and beliefs. But they historically used it to strike terror in those who feared the force and wrath of the Klan. In other words, from its very beginning the Ku Klux Klan and it’s members were dedicated to the cause of domestic terrorism.

So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality—as it continues to do—there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.

The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes.

In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, provides the absolute exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This "shuddering before the beautiful," this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound level.

Sensitivity readers are readers who provide cultural consulting and critiques on manuscripts for a fee. Say, for example, a white author writes a book that involves a Black character. The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes. It’s a nice way to avoid getting dragged on Twitter, though sometimes it backfires—I’ve heard horror stories of at least two writers who were forced to withdraw their books from publication because of a single subjective opinion.

But whatever the academic debate on the topic, Nixon was correct that black Americans “don’t want to be a colony in a nation.” And yet he helped bring about that very thing. Over the half-century since he delivered those words, we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn’t actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don’t work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity. A political regime like the one our Founders inherited and rejected. An order they spilled their blood to defeat. THIS

Fallen Angels have fiery eyes, black pointed wings, with blood dripping from their demonic representations of their body, they have a smoky orb around them, and a trail of fog that follows behind them that leads into destruction as they sail by. All a white angel has to do is hug a fallen angel, or show them any kind of compassion, and they scream and instantly disappear or just disintegrate.

These anti-slavery Founders argued that if the South was going to count its “property” (that is, its slaves) in order to get more pro-slavery representation in Congress, then the North would count its “property” (that is, its sheep, cows, and horses) to get more anti-slavery representation in Congress. Of course, the South objected just as strongly to this proposal as the North had objected to counting slaves.

What do you most want to be remembered for?” she whispered. His lids lifted and his eyes shifted to her own. “My love for you.” He blinked slowly. “I wish to be best remembered for how much I loved you. Of all the places I’ve gone and people I’ve known and things I’ve done…my love for you is the purest representation of who I am. It’s the best of me, of who I am, of my soul. My love for you…is everything of me.

Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work: the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy. Which is why the success of these unruly women is inextricable from the confluence of attitudes toward women in the 2010s: the public reembrace of feminism set against a backdrop of increased legislation of women’s bodies, the persistence of the income gap, the policing of how women’s bodies should look and act in public, and the election of Trump. Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

As lawyers, our first responsibility is, of course, to see that the legal profession provides adequate representation for all people in our society. I would suggest there is no subject which is more important to the legal profession, that is more important to this nation, than & the realization of the ideal of equal justice under law for all. RICHARD NIXON, IN HIS SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL LEGAL AID AND DEFENDER ASSOCIATION (OCTOBER 1962) [E]very

Now, early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes, it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter fried. But its logical path would have been straight. The South would have returned to its place in congress with less than its former representation because of the growing North and West. These areas of growing manufacture and agriculture, railroad building and corporations, would have held the political power over the South until the South united with the new insurgency of the West or the Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance.

Black people forgive because we need to survive,” Gay wrote. “We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

The Language of the Birds" 1 A man saw a bird and found him beautiful. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone—solid, inevitable—but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. This went on for a long time. 2 A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy—series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve? And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Anyone can. Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn’t a bird, it’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible. Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn’t there, with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway. The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. 3 They looked at the animals. They looked at the walls of the cave. This is earlier, these are different men. They painted in torchlight: red mostly, sometimes black—mammoth, lion, horse, bear—things on a wall, in profile or superimposed, dynamic and alert. They weren’t animals but they looked like animals, enough like animals to make it confusing, meant something but the meaning was slippery: it wasn’t there but it remained, looked like the thing but wasn’t the thing—was a second thing, following a second set of rules—and it was too late: their power over it was no longer absolute. What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does. The night sky is vast and wide. They huddled closer, shoulder to shoulder, painted themselves in herds, all together and apart from the rest. They looked at the sky, and at the mud, and at their hands in the mud, and their dead friends in the mud. This went on for a long time. 4 To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself. These are some choices. The night sky is vast and wide. A man had two birds in his head—not in his throat, not in his chest—and the birds would sing all day never stopping. The man thought to himself, One of these birds is not my bird. The birds agreed.

I think it's very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write.' ... 'I'd hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn't write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history--sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn't tackle this subject if I'm willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact-checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise of empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit--I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? should creatives not be paid for their work?

The act of forgiveness seems a silent clause in a one-sided contract between the subordinate and the dominant. “Black people forgive because we need to survive,” Gay wrote. “We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

So in addition to being overly reliant on politicians, blacks typically have poor political representation. “Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America,” wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites.31

Many unlearning racism workshops focus on helping white individuals to see that they too are wounded by racism and as a consequence have something to gain from participating in anti-racist struggle. While in some ways true, a construction of political solidarity that is rooted in a narrative of shared victimization not only acts to recenter whites, it risks obscuring the particular ways racist domination impacts on the lives of marginalized groups. Implicit in the assumption that even those who are privileged via racist hierarchy suffer is the notion that it is only when those in power get in touch with how they too are victimized will they rebel against structures of domination. The truth is that many folks benefit greatly from dominating others and are not suffering a wound that is in any way similar to the condition of the exploited and oppressed. Anti-racist work that tries to get these individuals to see themselves as "victimized" by racism in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy. And indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via their political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. Such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. It can be based on one's political and ethical understanding of racism and one's rejection of domination.

Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud, and embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines, and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation.

How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message? By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history. It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.

This book challenges the premises of the growing crusade against law enforcement. In Part One, I rebut the founding myths of the Black Lives Matter movement—including the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. I document the hotly contested “Ferguson effect,” a trend that I first spotted nationally, wherein officers desist from discretionary policing and criminals thus become emboldened. In Part Two, I outline the development of the misguided legal push to force the NYPD to give up its stop, question, and frisk tactic. In Part Three, I analyze criminogenic environments in Chicago and Philadelphia and put to rest the excuse that crime—black crime especially—is the result of poverty and inequality. Finally, in Part Four, I expose the deceptions of the mass-incarceration conceit and show that the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison is actually the result of violence, not racism.

I saw him assess the field ahead- and transform. The talons came first. Replacing fingers and feet. Then dark scales or perhaps feathers, I couldn't get a look at them, covered his legs, his arms, his chest. His body contorted, bones and muscles growing and shifting. The beast form Rhys had kept hidden. Never liked to unleash. Unless it was dire enough to do so. Before the Cauldron swept me away, I beheld what happened to his head, his face. It was a thing of nightmares. Nothing human or Fae in it. It was a creature that lived in black pits and only emerged at night to hunt and feast. That face... it was those creatures that had been carved into the rock of the Court of Nightmares. That made up his throne. The throne not only a representation of his power... but of what lurked within. And with the wings... Hybern soldiers began fleeing. Helion beheld what happened and ran, too- but towards Rhys. Shifting as well. If Rhys was a flying terror crafted from shadows and cold moonlight, Helion was his daytime equivalent. Gold feathers and shredding claws and feathered wings- Together, my mate and the High Lord of Day unleashed themselves upon Hybern.

I think it's very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write." I open strong, and this gets some approving murmurs from the crowd. But I still see some skeptical faces, especially from the other Asians present, so I continue. "I'd hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn't write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history—sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn't tackle this subject if I'm willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact- checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit—I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? Should creatives not be paid for their work?

Tolkien preferred the still, small voice of Elijah to the resounding horns of Sinai. Accordingly, his commitment to myth as his medium was dogged. He repeatedly denied that The Lord of the Rings was allegory. The reason is this: allegory intends that this particular thing in the story is meant to be that particular thing known outside the story. In a way, it is coercive, forcing the reader to see things in a certain way. For example, Lewis’s lion in the Narnia books, Aslan, is meant to be understood by the reader as a representation of Christ. Tolkien, in fact, was annoyed with Lewis for engaging in allegory, which he found heavy-handed. (Lewis, for his part, denied that his Narnia books were only allegory.) He believed myth to be a more artistically subtle device. Tolkien did not, for instance, intend his War of the Ring to be a battle of good versus evil. He didn’t see matters in such black-and-white terms and did not believe in absolute evil. During the Great War, he didn’t view the Germans as all bad and the English as all good. In the Lord of the Rings, even Sauron, like Lucifer, did not start as evil. Evil for Tolkien was a personal battle within each and every individual. A battle might be won or lost, but the war was unending.

It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women, on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens. But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money, more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring vehicle for suppression.

The demand to be intimate or honest with a public can be invasive when the experiences of racial others are commodified as stories or objects that might be traded as evidence of intimacy, as proof of 'being good,' for nonracial others. In this way, intimacy might act as surveillance, through which some people--women of color, for instance--must reveal themselves to bear the burden of representation ('You are here as an example') and the weight of pedagogy ('Teach us about your people'). Intimacy can be a force--especially when others set its terms and conditions. So what if you don't love the (white) girls who exhaust you, who want too much from you, who want to turn you into a commodity or a badge or an experience to share? What if you become a girl in opposition to other girls? This is also the problem with definitions of racism as ignorance, and ignorance as the absence of intimacy--which posits that intimacy is the solution to ignorance. This gives us terrible, stupid disavowals like 'I'm not racist, I have black friends,' as if intimacy is a shield that protects the wearer from harm. It limits our sense of what racism is to the scale of the interpersonal, when it is in fact this enormous constellation of forces and moving parts that structures our institutions--and so-called institutions--profoundly.

As I noted in the previous chapter, we interpret active eyes as a sign of an active mind. But mantis shrimps actually have small, weak brains. The hypermobile nature of their eyes is not a sign of a probing intelligence. But it is the key to understanding how and what they see. Our retinas have cone-rich foveae, where our vision is sharpest and most colorful. We train this zone onto different parts of the world by flicking our eyes from place to place. And when we spot something interesting in our peripheral vision, we redirect our gaze at it to analyze it in detailed color. Mantis shrimps do something similar. The midband sees color, but its view is confined to a thin strip of space. The hemispheres probably only see in black-and-white, but their view is panoramic. As the mantis shrimp moves its eyes around, it looks for movements and objects of interest with the hemispheres. When it spots something, it flicks its eyes across and scans the midbands over the area, as if waving two supermarket scanners along a shelf. Does the mantis shrimp start with a monochrome view, which it gradually paints with colors? “I don’t think so,” Marshall tells me. He suspects that “they never construct a solid two-dimensional representation of color” in their brains. Instead, as they scan with their midbands, they simply wait for anything that excites the right combination of photoreceptors.

Someone brings up “Sandwiches,” and someone else a Bottle, and as night comes down over New-York like a farmer’s Mulch, sprouting seeds of Light, some reflected in the River, the Company, Mason working on in its midst, becomes much exercis’d upon the Topick of Representation. “No taxation— ” “— without it, yesyes but Drogo, lad, can you not see, even thro’ the Republican fogs which ever hang about these parts, that ’tis all a moot issue, as America has long been perfectly and entirely represented in the House of Commons, thro’ the principle of Virtual Representation?” Cries of, “Aagghh!” and, “That again?” “If this be part of Britain here, then so must be Bengal! For we have ta’en both from the French. We purchas’d India many times over with the Night of the Black Hole alone,— as we have purchas’d North America with the lives of our own.” “Are even village Idiots taken in any more by that empty cant?” mutters the tiny Topman McNoise, “no more virtual than virtuous, and no more virtuous than the vilest of that narrow room-ful of shoving, beef-faced Louts, to which you refer,— their honor bought and sold so many times o’er that no one bothers more to keep count.— Suggest you, Sir, even in Play, that this giggling Rout of poxy half-wits, embody us? Embody us? America but some fairy Emanation, without substance, that hath pass’d, by Miracle, into them?— Damme, I think not,— Hell were a better Destiny.

At the risk of oversimplifying a topic that deserves entire books, we can summarize like this: During enslavement, many Black cooks learned their way around kitchens because their lives could depend on having that knowledge and skill. After slavery was abolished, many took to slinging fried chicken (or cooking in general) as one way to make a living. Interestingly, it wasn’t until Black folks began navigating their supposed freedoms-applying to schools, looking for paid work, seeking housing-that cartoonish, offensive images of Black folks eagerly consuming chicken or stealing chickens began to appear in essays, comics, advertisements, and postcards, perpetuating a narrative by white society that Black people were subhuman and needed to be controlled, policed, and locked out of mainstream opportunities. Exacerbated by the deep white resentment of Black people’s increasing social and political mobility (this period saw the largest representation of Black people in Congress than any time since), the idea took root that being Black meant that you loved fried chicken so much that you couldn’t resist it. This narrative is a painful legacy of slavery that wasn’t of our own making and is ironic, given that people all over the world get down with wings and things. But the essence of this stereotype persists. We know folks who refuse to eat fried chicken around white people, or chefs who don’t cook it in their restaurants, because they feel that’s the only thing certain diners expect from them…American fried chicken tastes good. It’s also complicated.

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations -- the user interfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. it is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses, created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space. Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has. By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business. Some of them even got very rich off of it. That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by- 30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.

Closed mouths don't get fed While I couldn't yet articulate a concept like representation, I identified with Grace's compulsion to emulate... It was the same yearning I felt to emulate Tyra Banks... Oprah Winfrey... They showed me how I could expand when I didn't feel like enough. I didn't have to be just like them, but their quiet guidance and encouragement afforded me space. In simply being themselves, they widened the room. -- "Amazing Grace" by Carla Bruce-Eddings

One of the most potent ways white supremacy is disseminated is through media representations, which have a profound impact on how we see the world. Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews. Given that the majority of white people live in racial isolation from people of color (and black people in particular) and have very few authentic cross-racial relationships, white people are deeply influenced by the racial messages in films. Consider one statistic from the preceding list: of the hundred top-grossing films worldwide in 2016, ninety-five were directed by white Americans (ninety-nine of them by men). That is an incredibly homogenous group of directors. Because these men are most likely at the top of the social hierarchy in terms of race, class, and gender, they are the least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships. Yet they are in the position to represent the racial “other.” Their representations of the “other” are thereby extremely narrow and problematic, and yet they are reinforced over and over. Further, these biased representations have been disseminated worldwide; while white supremacy originated in the West, it circulates globally.

The Three-Fifths Clause had to do only with representation: it was an anti-slavery provision designed to limit the number of pro-slavery representatives in Congress.

One of the shortfalls of representation rhetoric is that it advertises a simplistic blueprint for racial equality in which people of color are visually “included” in spaces regularly reserved for white people. The dominant thought is: If we just show more minoritized faces in the white marketplace, then progress is being made.

Despite such secular acclaim, the book put Black Elk in an awkward position in relation to the Catholic Church. His reputation on the reservation was built as a Catholic catechist, not as a native religious leader. The Jesuit priests at Holy Rosary Mission were shocked and horrified at the suggestion that one of their most valued catechists still harbored beliefs in the old Indian religion. For them to accept Black Elk Speaks at face value necessarily called into question the genuineness of their success in converting the Lakotas to Catholicism. Rather than accept the book as a true representation of Black Elk, they blamed Neihardt for telling only part of Black Elk's story. The priests objected most strongly to the epilogue portraying Black Elk as a believing, practicing "pagan," praying to the six grandfathers when he knew well that the Christian God was the only source of salvation. Ben Black Elk told the missionaries, no doubt truthfully, that he and his father had not realized that Neihardt

I tell you to think black thoughts and you come up with that!?” the lieutenant had screamed. “Is a guinea pig bad? Do you consider a guinea pig the representation of all that’s evil?” “Maybe…if it’s an evil guinea pig?

This collection consists of the following pieces: COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1. The Embodied Cognition View 2. On Flanagan's Ideas On Dreams and Ahead: An Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness 3. "The Pragmatics of Cartoons: The Interaction of Bystander Humorosity vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity." 4. Integrationist School or on 'Rethinking Language'. 5. On Steven Pinker's 'Language Instinct' or Some Remarks on Evolutionary Psycholinguistics 6. On the (Im)Possibility of Psychotherapist Computer Programs: An Investigation within the Realm of Epistemology 7. Thai Language: A Brief Typology. ART NARRATIVES 8. Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan's Stories from the Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry. 9. A Critique of The Stories By South East Asian Writing Awardees 10. Mulholland Drive: Another impasse for the American film industry. 11. On 'About Schmidt' 12. On Black spirituals. 13. The possibility of an African American poetry.

should also be noted that the Constitution’s distinction in counting people for representation in Congress was between slave and free, not black and white. Free blacks were counted the same as whites—and free blacks existed before the Constitution existed.

have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swan events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.

Fiona Zedde’s entire body of work), and Alyssa Cole’s body of work (Once Ghosted, Twice Shy and How to Find a Princess). There is sporadic representation of bi Black women, such as Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown. The self-published options, however, are broader. There’s Chencia C. Higgins’s Things Hoped For and Consolation Gifts, Meka James’s Being Hospitable, J. Nichole’s A Girl Like Me, Christina C. Jones’s Something Like Love, and G. L. Tomas’s Wander This World and The Love Bet.

Art is power. Representation is power. And for millennia, humans have fought wars over the right to wield it.

As long as black people foolishly cling to the rather politically naive and dangerous assumption that it is in the interests of black liberation to support sexism and male domination, all our efforts to decolonize our minds and transform society will fail.

If black men and women take seriously Malcolm’s charge that we must work for our liberation “by any means necessary,” then we must be willing to explore the way feminism as a critique of sexism, as a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression, could aid our struggle to be self-determining.

To be Black in predominantly white spaces for the majority of your days often means affirming yourself or going without affirmation and representation for long stretches at a time. Aggressions like “I don’t see color” or assumptions that educational achievement somehow offsets racism and sexism are laughable and offensive. We are intentionally robbed of opportunities to see the spectrum of who we can become. Without an accurate reflection, our world becomes a funhouse mirror of distorted expectations we can never meet. More often than not, the people around me believe that they are doing me a favor by not acknowledging my differences.

Many could see that placing affirmative action onto a world of declining opportunity was little more than a zero-sum game—and most likely a fast track to further racial resentment. The problem, as Bayard Rustin put it in 1974, was overcoming the divisiveness of “Affirmative Action in an Age of Scarcity.” As Andrew Levison made the connection between the future of racial progress and the limits on economic opportunity in the New Yorker in 1974, “until progressives deal seriously with the idea of full employment and government guaranteed jobs, black representation in skilled jobs will remain a question of throwing a white carpenter out of work in order to employ a black, or making a Pole with seniority continue to tend the coke ovens while a black moves up to a better job.

Similarly, our experiences of color have an intrinsic three-dimensional structure that is mirrored in the structure of information processes in the brain’s visual cortex. This structure is illustrated in the color wheels and charts used by artists. Colors are arranged in a systematic pattern—red to green on one axis, blue to yellow on another, and black to white on a third. Colors that are close to one another on a color wheel are experienced as similar. It is extremely likely that they also correspond to similar perceptual representations in the brain, as one part of a system of complex three-dimensional coding among neurons that is not yet fully understood. We can recast the underlying concept as a principle of structural coherence: the structure of conscious experience is mirrored by the structure of information in awareness, and vice versa.

Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.

In the 1980s he noted that “my representation of black defendants has been motivated by one of my strongest beliefs: that our society is always racist. Black people rarely get justice in our courts; so for me, cases in which defendants are black are political.” As early as 1970 he told the Playboy interviewer that he found it “hard to conceive of most routine criminal cases not also being political cases. I say that because so often the person accused of a crime is poor or black and poor. He has been subjected to an oppressive system, and the very crime of which he is accused is probably a reaction to that oppressive system.” In 1992 a reporter asked Kunstler the flat question

According to his daughter Karin, Kunstler always justified his cases in political terms. Kunstler extended the political nature of representation far beyond blacks. It eventually included American Indians, Muslims, and even mobsters such as John Gotti. Michael Ratner believes that Kunstler was more “flexible” than most New Left lawyers in finding political significance in certain facts and in certain clients, a matter that caused some disagreement with his wife Margie. Nowhere was that flexibility more apparent than in Kunstler’s explanation of why his representation of mob figures had political significance:

The most ancient pictures and statues in Italy and other parts of Europe, of what are supposed to be representations of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, are black. The infant god, in the arms of his black mother, his eyes and drapery white, is himself perfectly black. [335:8]

Desiring to match my lover, I designed a ‘Twin’ costume that was based on a similar idea to Gabrielli’s ‘Happy and Sad’ theme; ‘Twins’ was an over-sized costume which could easily accommodate two people when worn. It was black in front and white at the back. The sides were ombre shades of grey, graduating from black to white and vice versa. It is true that all colors merged to become black or white; ‘Twins’ was therefore representational of all beings connected as one and one as all. It was a Yin and Yang concept I didn’t realize I had created at the time. Forty years had passed and I now realize this process was a part of an unconscious spiritual evolution: morphing from adolescent to adulthood.

Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The

The solution Ben Ginsberg hit upon was to use the Voting Rights Act’s provisions governing majority-minority districts to create African American seats in Southern states. Work closely with minority groups to encourage candidates to run. Then pack as many Democratic voters as possible inside the lines, bleaching the surrounding districts whiter and more Republican, thus resegregating congressional representation while increasing the number of African Americans in Congress. The strategy became known as the unholy alliance, because it benefited black leaders and Republicans at the expense of the Democratic Party. Ginsberg had another name for it when a reporter asked him to describe it: Project Ratfuck. The

In the Bible, Ham finds Noah drunk and naked in Noah's tent. He tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who proceed to cover their father without gazing at him. When Noah finds out what happened, he curses Ham's son Canaan, saying he shall be “a servant of servants.” Yet, in the earlier biblical account, Noah and his family are not described in racial terms. Before the 16th or 17th century, the racial interpretation of Ham is absent or contradictory. But as the story echoed through the centuries and around the world, variously interpreted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars, Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude, and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked. The racist interpretation of scripture was never adopted by the African Coptic Churches, and in Europe, some of the earlier representations of Jesus Christ, Mary, etc. depicted them as being dark-skinned. By the early nineteenth century, many supposed scholars in America supported the belief that African-Americans were descendants of Ham, who were cursed and consequently blackened by their sins, was a primary justification for their enslavement.

There are many compelling reasons why social scientists should turn more attention to the situation of whites in the underclass. Prime among these is that researchers and politicians have constructed a grossly distorted image of poverty in this country. While whites constitute a vast majority of the poor population in the United States, blackness composes the most familiar visage in representations of poverty.

The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of “deputies” to represent it. This meant that the clergy and the nobility together could outvote anything that the rest, collectively known as “the Third Estate,” wanted; the idea of proportional representation—or any meaningful voice for the people—was

At length, one of those low murmurs that are so apt to disturb a multitude, was heard, and the whole nation arose to their feet by a common impulse. At that the door of the lodge in question opened, and three men, issuing from it, slowly approached the place of consultation. They were all aged, even beyond that period to which the oldest present had reached; but one in the centre, who leaned on his companions for support, had numbered an amount of years to which the human race is seldom permitted to attain. His frame, which had once been tall and erect, like the cedar, was now bending under the pressure of more than a century. The elastic, light step of an Indian was gone, and in its place he was compelled to toil his tardy way over the ground, inch by inch. His dark, wrinkled countenance was in singular and wild contrast with the long white locks which floated on his shoulders in such thickness as to announce that generations had probably passed away since they had last been shorn. The dress of this patriarch — for such, considering his vast age, in conjunction with his affinity and influence with his people, he might very properly be termed — was rich and imposing, though strictly after the simple fashions of the tribe. His robe was of the finest skins, which had been deprived of their fur, in order to admit of a hieroglyphical representation of various deeds in arms, done in former ages. His bosom was loaded with medals, some in massive silver, and one or two even in gold, the gifts of various Christian potentates during the long period of his life. He also wore armlets, and cinctures above the ankles, of the latter precious metal. His head, on the whole of which the hair had been permitted to grow, the pursuits of war having so long been abandoned, was encircled by a sort of plated diadem, which, in its turn, bore lesser and more glittering ornaments, that sparkled amid the glossy hues of three drooping ostrich feathers, dyed a deep black, in touching contrast to the color of his snow-white locks. His tomahawk was nearly hid in silver, and the handle of his knife shone like a horn of solid gold. So soon as the first hum of emotion and pleasure, which the sudden appearance of this venerated individual created, had a little subsided, the name of “Tamenund” was whispered from mouth to mouth.

Auner, Joseph Henry. “‘Soulless Machines’ and Steppenwolves: Renegotiating Masculinity in Krenek's Jonny spielt auf.” In Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart, 222–36. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Black people, read books. We drink coffee and get the names of our professors; we show up late to class. We go shopping for water filters and shop at Ikea like everyone else. Far too often, our art and representations of us in the media don’t get to depict this. We don’t get to be normalized. We don’t get to be human… But my interest in what is boring has as much to do with the act of being as a form of rebellion and resistance as it does with the idea that we don't need an idea of what a state of being is to just be in the first place.

Line: An artist’s tool used to illustrate the outer edges of shapes and forms. Technically, no physical lines exist in nature. For example, there is not an actual line around an apple to distinguish it from the table it’s sitting on, nor is there a physical line between the sky and the land at the horizon; therefore, lines in art are an artist’s interpretation of the boundaries between forms in a scene, or the perceived edges of shapes in a composition. Repeated lines can also be used to create values and textures in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art. Shape: The outside two-dimensional contour, outline or border of a form, figure or structure. Form: The three-dimensional representation of a shape. In drawings, paintings and other two-dimensional art, the artist creates the illusion of a three-dimensional form in space using light, shadow and other rendering techniques. In sculpture, the form is the manifestation of the object itself. Texture: The distinctive surface qualities found on all things as well as the overall visual patterns and tactile feel of objects and their surroundings. Value: The relative lightness or darkness of shapes, forms and backgrounds of two-dimensional or three-dimensional compositions. Value plays a prominent role in both black-and-white and color artworks, potentially adding dramatic contrasts and depth to an otherwise bland composition. Color: The spectrum of hues, values and intensities of natural light and man-made pigments, paints and mineral compounds that can be used in all art forms.

Rihanna is a celebrity who really stands to represent Cocoa and Black Women...and all other races and people too. A role model who lives what she says, wears what she sells, and raw about who she is. She's the definition of the word, "authentic"!