#New School of Afro-American Thought

[yearningforunity]

Stokely Carmichael addresses an October 1968 gathering outside of the New School of Afro-American Thought following the police shooting of Elijah Bennett.

D.C. Public Library, Star Collection

#Stokely Carmichael #Washington DC #New School of Afro-American Thought #African American #African Diaspora #African Descent #shooting of Elijah Bennett #Umoja #Unity #Black Men

[ofonikabutobeetlesandmen]

Pre!4.0 Fontaine Thoughts & Musings

While I do plan on dropping my Fontaine theories pre!4.0 at some point, this is just more of my thoughts surrounding the nation as a whole based on the teasers and summaries of some leaked items. So this is most definitely your chance to back away now if you end up being one of the few people that read my ramblings and find them amusing in some way.

But yeah if you were here way back during 2.1, you’ll have seen this post of mine talking about how excited I was for Sumeru and Fontaine. I started playing the game in 1.1 and these were the nations I looked most forward to after seeing the Teyvat Travail trailer. My interest in these nations only grew further with the various NPCs we’ve run into talking about these countriesー and now both of my preferred nations are finally about to be on the ‘released nations’ list.

I’ve enjoyed Sumeru’s deserts and forests, the struggles of the desertfolk and the Eremites and seeing Cyno and Collei again, as well as some new friends made along the way. Now it’s time for Fontaine.

(Fingers crossed for some Afro-Fontainians since rock n roll was in real life was made by African Americans evolved through several genres of our music like Blues, Jazz, R&B and gospel among other genres but because this is Hoyoverse and we all saw how ‘well’ they did with Sumeru, I highly doubt there will be any despite France’s diversity. Welp, nothing the power of making OCs and edits can’t fix. Maybe I’ll use that time to finally relearn French like I’ve been planning, which I took for a year in high school because Creole runs in both sides of the family but then I forgot it all.)

Fontaine had me in a death clutch a while back during the Tatara Tales questline when Xavier had a small little monologue about his homeland in 2.0:

"For instance, I could tell you of the majestic waterfall that made a deep impression on my soul as I worked in my study in Petrichor. Or perhaps I could sing the praises of the countless gorgeous maidens in the Court of Fontaine, ethereal as the clouds themselves... Or the mesmerizing lake that held the reflections of the stars and the moon, such that walking along its banks was like treading amid the celestial skies..."

It sounded so beautiful that I wanted the remote from click to just fast forward to the point in time in which we’d finally be there. Every NPC from Fontaine until that point had talked about Fontaine being pretty, but none of them ever went into that much detail before.

I ate up the Dew of Repudiation Petrichor crumbs "Even if it were to flow into the surpassingly pure waters of Petrichor, this drop of water will likely resist assimilation as strongly as mercury."

Pocketed every trinket of info given by event NPCs about Fontaine’s energy crisis and how 

Noted the lore on the Lochfolk/Oceanids from Rhodeia to Endora to the Spring Fairy and the information about the Lord of Amrita.

And now we have Idyia in that lineup with the new summer event going on right now in 3.8! It has long-since been stated since 1.4 that the Lochfolk were followers of the previous Hydro Archon, now known as the Lord of Amrita aka Egeria (according to leaks). They were tasked with spreading out across Fontaine as her spies, but they note it wasn’t because she was plotting war or anything of the sort on the other nations, but she wanted to do so as a way to connect everyone similar to how water is connected (or like how the Lochfolk come together in water to quote Endora:

Want to grow quickly. Want to find Rhodeia. A child. New life, like Endora. A child's mission is to grow. To grow? I thought it was to see the world. Love. For Oceanids, this is to meld together as one. There will be no division then. That is why Oceanids need no learning or thoughts of their own. All that is needed is love. It seems that Oceanids cannot love others, for others will only drown in the embrace of pure waters. So they disguise themselves as the dreams of young children, and withdraw from the lives of all other people. Every day, a child takes a stumbling step forward. Every day, a stream flows into the sea. Love, that is our destiny. But I still have a whole world left to see.).

But once the Lord of Amrita died, most Lochfolk went on a self-imposed exile from Fontaine, not getting along with the current Hydro Archon, Focalors, the God of Justice.

In 3.8, we got some more information on that from Idyia:

According to her, the waters of Fontaine changed when Focalors came into power, the water now full of pain and hatred and for those who left fleeing seemed like the best choice “if we wanted to live.” But as shown in 1.4′s Wishful Drop event with Endora and Rhodeia’s line at the beginning of a fight (and with some leaks stating that wild Oceanids can be fought in Fontaine’s overworld), line at the beginning of a battle, there are some Lochfolk that still remain in Fontaine for some reason unexplained.

According to the descriptions of the Water-Splitting and Water-Spouting Phantasms, new enemies in Fontaine, with most of the Oceanids having left Fontaine, new strange elemental lifeforms have taken their place after the cataclysm.

According to the Water-Splitting Phantasm description, while the water have long since been diluted and cleansed, Fontaine’s waters will never naturally birth Oceanids again until there are containers of pure water somewhere.

And if you look at the description of the Water-Spouting Phantasm, it states that: It is said that in Egeria's era, the Oceanids often lived alongside humans, and lived in the springs of clear waters dotted across the lands, and through this, they connected the waters of the world. But most died with their god, and for the survivors, the world no longer has any god they recognize. That unrecognized god obviously being Focalors. 

I’ll expand on it in an actual theory post, but I do believe part of the Fontaine AQ will be restoring the waters of Fontaine to how they once were, allowing new Oceanids to be born from Fontaine’s water and bringing the Oceanids back to the regionー maybe even get them on better terms with Furina.

Speaking of Fontaine’s water, ever since 3.0, I am fascinated with it.

If you go to Port Ormos, specifically the port close with all the porters and the Eremite guards, you’ll run into an adventurer NPC named Vasco. If you talk to him, he goes on a bit of a tirade about sea monsters, but he starts off the dialogue with something very interesting. “Should I go to Fontaine and get a diving certificate?”

Even more interesting was the follow up: “To prevent myself from the cook's fate, I'm considering getting a diving certificate from Fontaine before adventuring again. But I heard the water in Fontaine is different from here, so it won't be a useful endeavor.”

Fontaine had me in a chokehold just by being the Hydro nation to start with, but the idea that Fontaine’s water is different from the rest of Teyvat’s? How is it different? What are the unique properties that separate from Fontainian water from regular Teyvat water? What do Fontainians living in/visiting other nations think of regular Teyvat water? What do people from other nations think of Fontanian water? I’ve got to know.

Part of “The Terrestial Sea, Origin of All Waters” description mentions that Fontaine where all waters of the world originate. It’s further elaborated on in the description of the set of drops from the Fontemer Abberant enemies (I will not be fighting the Puffbeast. Fuck everything else though lmao, those crabs and seahorses can catch these hands).

From left to right:

Transoceanic Pearl: A small crystal obtained from a defeated Fontemer Aberrant. Fontemer Aberrants arise from Fontaine's seas. They are believed to be a unique life form born from the mysterious energy in the water.

Transoceanic Chunk: A crystal obtained from a defeated Fontemer Aberrant. It gives off a somewhat mysterious energy. Although many legends speak of great life forms residing in remote seas beyond human reach, ordinary oceans can hardly compare to the vibrant seas of Fontaine.

Kaleidoscopic Crystal: A large crystal obtained from a defeated Fontemer Aberrant.It contains a mysterious energy. All rivers and seas originate in Fontaine, but the water loses all its unique properties once it flows outside Fontaine's borders.

Back to back, each description mentions that Fontaine’s water has a certain energy to it, that ordinary oceans cannot compare. But most interestingly enough, it reaffirms that all rivers and seas in the world of Teyvat originate in Fontaine but the moment it leaves Fontaine’s borders, it immediately loses all its unique properties.

I don’t doubt that the uniqueness of Fontaine’s water will be mentioned in Fontaine’s storyline. A good chunk in the AQ, considering Furina coming into power led to the Lochfolk leaving the country. But I also think a good chunk of it will come from WQ’s and likely from the Melusines, a race of seafolk unique to Fontaine that still live there. Which begs the question as to why they haven’t left Fontaine when nearly all of the Oceanids have.

According to one Melusine NPC from a leaked video that’s been removed, Melusines originate from a creature called the Elynas and if I remember correctly they come from its flesh or bones. And the Primuses came after the cataclysm and can be found near the Elynas, but I’m not sure if that’s the same for the Melusines since there isn’t more elaboration on it but I hope to find out more once Fontaine’s initial WQs start dropping.

And of course, I’m excited for the lore potential of the upcoming character.

Lyney, Lynette and Freminet all seem to have a connection to Arlecchino and the House of the Hearth and may even be working for her now as Fatui agents who possibly hope to one day live peaceful lives.

Neuvillette was once speculated to possibly be an Oceanid who remained in Fontaine, but it now looks like he is the Hydro Dragon. It sucks that it isn’t Kokomi but either way it doesn’t change the fact that the Hydro Dragon IS living among humans and even working closely with an Archon, when it has been shown through Apep that dragons from the time before the Seven hate Celestia, Archons and humans alike in this new era of Teyvat. So why live peacefully with them? I’m curious to know!

But by far, the character with some of the most interesting lore potential is of course going to be the Archon especially with what we know about her.

She’s a reason the Oceanids left Fontaine, according to Neuvillette she’s prone to hysterics and in a leaked clip of the AQ she even liquefies a man. Like, she is truly prepared to be the best worst Archon and I am here for it, she’s getting my guaranteed pull and maybe even her signature weapon if I can get it without pushing myself back too far on my Clorinde pulls.

And if we look at the Hydro gemstone for the Archon quote that gives more insight into their character, Furina’s says:

And according to Dainsleif in the Fontaine portion of the Teyvat trailer: “The God of Justice lives for the spectacle of the courtroom, seeking to judge all other gods. But even she knows not to make an enemy of the divine.”

If we look at some more leaks about her, we get some more interesting tidbits.

More specifically in this dialogue exchange with some NPCs:

In other words, it is looking like Furina is going to be a Chaotic Neutral character. She’s nonsensical, she’s a wild card, she welcomes being judged by even her own subjects she holds dominion over yet she considers herself pure and magnificent. If you’re able to win some sort of trial she places you in, she’ll be thrilled. Hell one might even get a medal. Sure that could all just be hyperbole from the locals, but even hyperbolic statements have some truth to it and with how long she has been in power, there have probably been instances such as the ones those NPCs described.

Yet even Furina fears Celestia because she knows the sort of damage they are capable of delivering if they ever deem her an enemy or a liability.

And with the concept that she may have two personalities, one can’t help wondering how that will come into play if it was kept as something final for Fontaine’s story and her design. I can’t help wondering about how she came into power as well. I don’t want it to be another ‘family’-based story.

Ei and Makoto were twins, Rukkhadevata and Nahida are avatars of Irminsul with Rukkha essentially being her mother plant so to speak.

I would like for Furina and Egeria to be unrelated. Maybe Furina was once a nymph that resided in Fontaine who later on ascended or I would find it cool if she ascended to Celestia as a regular mortal years ago and was given Fontaine to govern. And I would also like it if Fontaine didn’t have a new Archon for a while after Egeria’s death.

Both Ei and Nahida were able to immediately step in for their respective predecessors after they died. It would be interesting if for Fontaine, it took a while for someone else to step in which lead to a civil unrest. That could be used to even tie into Zhongli’s hesitance in retiring from being an Archon, siting Fontaine’s period of Archon-less complications as a reason to stay until he was otherwise reassured that Liyue would be fine without him.

There’s just a lot of potential with Furina and Fontaine’s story and I’m hoping they stick the landing considering how poorly Inazuma’s storyline was completed.

Anyway, this is getting long enough so I’ll stop now. This is mostly to just look back on my hype for Fontaine in the future when it’s been a while since its release and Natlan is on its way out of the basement.

#genshin impact #genshin #genshin impact leaks #genshin spoilers #genshin leaks #being a black genshin player is hard but i work harder #fontaine #focalors #furina #oceanid #neuvillette #lyney #lynette #freminet #arlecchino #genshin idyia #hydro

[elbienamado]

Is that BIBIANO DE LA CRUZ? A JUNIOR originally from MANHATTAN, NY, they decided to come to Ogden College to study PRE-MED. They’re THE BIG MAN ON CAMPUS, but even they could get blamed for Greer’s disappearance.

updated 8/17/2023

tw: implied death of sibling(s), child/infant death, implied parental neglect, references to religion (Catholicism)

The Basics:

Full Name: Bibiano Yasiel De La Cruz-Aguilera

Nick Names: Bibi, B, {Big Man,B-Man, Mr. President, Biber, Beebs} (by Hyatt but they're (mostly)free game), BB (Dartboard only, negative connotations so don't call him this haha)

Pronouns: He/him

Ethnicity: Afro-Cubano

Sexuality: Straight

Gender: Cismale

Age: 22

Birthday: December 28, 2000

Zodiac: Capricorn Sun, Aquarius Moon, Libra Rising

MBTI: INFJ-T

Enneagram: 2w1

Religion: Roman Catholic

Family: Abraham De La Cruz - Father, 55 (Andre Royo), Consuelo De La Cruz-Aguilera - Mother, 54 (Gina Torres), Maricruz Acosta - Au pair, 45 (Rosario Dawson), Sibling(s) † TBD (his parents had 5 failed pregnancies before Bibi was born)

Language: English, Spanish, can understand spoken and written Portuguese (doesn't actually know the language but because of the similarities to Spanish he is able to gage what is being said), very basic conversational spoken Japanese

Appearance:

Face Claim: Rome Flynn

Height: 5'11" 

Eye Color: Dark Brown

Hair Color: Black

Hair Style: Close skin fade with roughly 2 inches of longer curls at the top front of his head

Tattoos: None (if you see one of Rome Flynn's tattoos in a pic I used, no you didn't 🤫)

Style: Cocktail Attire to Business Formal during school hours, Athleisure to Soft Boy Aesthetic on off hours

Piercings: Single piercings on both ears

How he embodies THE BIG MAN ON CAMPUS:

The son of a prosecutor turned senate hopeful and a brain surgeon, Bibiano has always been destined for success. And he’s done a good job so far, if you ask him. As Ogden’s football team Captain, the President of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and a member of the Junior Class Board, he’s got a lot on his plate besides his studies. But if there’s one thing his parents instilled in him since childhood, it’s that good things come to those who work hard. So work hard he does. It’s fine. After all, what more could he ask when his entire life had been preordained?

Extracurriculars: President of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Football team Captain (Quarterback), Junior Class Board, Pre-Med Society, Ultimate Frisbee, Squash

Relationship to Greer:

If you had asked Bibiano last year how his relationship with Greer was going, he would have smiled brightly and answered, ‘Never better!’ while brushing a stray curl away from his face, letting his promise ring catch the light in the down stroke. Saddest thing was that he would have meant it. Wholeheartedly. Things were going great between him and Greer. Fantastic even. Despite the fact that they were talking and seeing each other less and less every year. It’s not like he hadn’t noticed, but with the MCAT looming over the horizon, he couldn’t afford to slack off. He thought she would understand, but once he had ‘stopped being fun’, she had stopped telling him whenever she’d go out and blocked his number. He’d only learn about what she was up to because she hadn’t bothered to block him on Snapchat. But all couples have their ups and downs, and he wouldn’t be the first boyfriend to get blocked during a fight. It was fine though, because Bibiano knew that they would make up eventually and everything would go back to how it’d always been.  Greer and him were an inevitability. They were destined to get married and start a family. 2.5 kids, the picket fence, all of it. They were the New American Dream. Idyllic, yet achievable if you just put in the work. It was as true as the celestial bodies in the sky that circled the Earth. As true as the love of the Lord. A year later and his promise ring was tucked neatly into the black velvet box that had originally held Greer’s.

Character Inspirations:

Scott McCall (MTV's Teen Wolf), Wolfgang Grimmer (Naoki Urasawa's Monster), Shima Sousuke (Skip and Loafer), Finn Hudson (Glee), Aaron Samuels (Mean Girls), James Wilson, M.D (House MD), Ann Perkins (Parks and Recreation), Phoenix Wright (Ace Attorney), Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Laios Touden (Dungeon Meshi), Papyrus (Undertale), Noelle (Deltarune), Kota Ibushi (DDT/NJPW/AEW - Wrestling, Seiya Sanada [j5g era] (NJPW - Wrestling) (i'm being so real rn wrestling is just professional sports larping where the audience is also part of the collaborative story telling and the wrestlers are constantly rping in real life i cannot stress enough that i am being so so real rn))

Character Tropes:

Lovable Jock, Captain Oblivious, The Unwitting Comedian, The McCoy, Mr. Nice Guy, Extreme Doormat, The Cutie, Horrible Judge Of Character, Perpetual Smiler, Only Sane Man, Beware the Nice Ones, Reluctant Fanservice Guy, Adorkable, I Just Want to Be Normal, Creature of Habit, Token Good Teammate, Super Gullible, The Teetotaler, Crisis of Faith

Vibes:

a puppy with paws still too large for their body ; awkward and sweet he stumbles over his own two feet / a single deer fawn in the middle of a forest clearing, their round eyes sparkle with curiosity, not yet knowing the cruelty of the world they clumsily walk towards you ; far too trusting for his own good, that naivety will only cause him more pain / what if we erased all of our mistakes? i want to be nice to you ; a man who doesn't guard his own heart, he says he won't trust like that again but makes the same mistake over and over again / i wanna be a fool, but you're not making it easy for me ; it's in his nature to forgive far to easily, he'll almost always bend first, but be careful, even a perpetual doormat can grow a spine if pushed too far /

Expanded Personality:

Bibiano's father has been trying to run for the senate for as long as Bibi can remember. However, as an Afro-Latino immigrant, securing the conservative vote has been quite the challenge, to say the least. To that end, Bibiano is under unending pressure to be the perfect All American Boy.

This upbringing has forced him to be more down to earth than most of the other affluent kids in Greer’s circle and thus allows him to make fast friends with people way out of his parent’s tax bracket.

Tw: references to religion, death of a child/ death of siblings (brief references to miscarriages, still born children): Bibi comes from a conservative Roman Catholic Afro-Cuban family. According to his parents, his conception was a miracle from God, a gift to reward them for their years of faith despite the siblings he had lost before they could be born. So, no, he’s not an only child, he’s the youngest of six. They’re his guardian angels, taken far too soon by their God so they could watch over him. Bibiano lives for them. To make them and their parents proud.

more to come 🕺

Connections: { here }

Playlist, Pinterest

Sample RP:

“You wouldn’t have wanted Greer to disappear, would you?”

“Excuse me?” The words were spat out of Bibiano's mouth with far more venom than he had intended. He realized his mistake when he turned his head and matched gazes with a pair of detectives in neat business casual. All in all, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The ex is always one of the first people they looked at, especially when they hadn't exactly broken up in amicable terms. And despite Greer's valiant attempt at astroturfing the reason for their split, no one had really bought the lies. (At least Bibiano sure hadn’t.) So of course Bibi knew this was coming. From the instant he had heard that she was officially a missing person he knew. He wasn’t stupid. He just, somehow, hadn’t expected this moment to come so soon. Call it naivety. It was fine. He had learned how to handle these types of situations after he hit his first major growth spurt and was 5’8” at 14. Pursing his lips, Bibiano regarded the detectives for a moment before cocking his head slightly and giving them an exasperated smile. “I’d really love to answer any question you have, detectives, but it’ll have to go through my father first. You two know how he is; a real by-the-book type of guy," Bibiano chuckled softly, scratching lightly at the side of his neck. “You have Prosecutor De La Cruz’s number, right?” Bibi then pressed his lips together in a tight lipped smile, eyebrows rising good naturedly. The challenge had been clear. They should have known better.  “I’m sure the guys back in the office can help you find it if you don’t.”

Does it ever bother you, how small of a school Ogden is? And how everyone is everyone else’s business?”

“It’s all a matter of perspective.” Bibiano answered, turning away from the computer screen to look at his lab partner from over his shoulder. “Personally, I like to think of it more as…  ‘cozy’. Like, yeah, people know way more about my business than I’d like them to but the benefits outweigh the cons by a long shot.” Bibi laughed when he heard multiple grumbles in response. He hadn’t realized he had an audience. “I’m serious! Just think about it, college is half studying half networking. Where else would you have a chance to meet and make connections with all these rich kids?” Bibi asked, pushing away from the desk so he could spin his chair in a lazy circle to get a better look at the others. “Aren’t you one of the rich kids, too?” Someone said. Bibiano quirked an eyebrow at that, his lips pushed forward in an annoyed pout. “I mean, yeah, technically. But they’re old money; my family is what they call ‘new money’. Big difference,” Bibi said, tapping the side of his forehead. “Even though I grew up with the Morrisons, I don’t think they ever really thought of me as an equal. I mean, look at how fast Greer dropped me when–” Bibiano snapped his mouth shut as he noticed eyes light up with interest. He had almost said too much. “Y’know what, that’s not important. Stop distracting me, cuz if we turn in a half finished assignment I got no problem throwing you under the bus to save myself.” Bibi snarked, pointing at his lab partner. His laughter bounced off the walls when he was forced to dodge a quickly formed paper ball thrown his way. “Let’s just get back to work, okay?”

“Popularity isn’t supposed to matter past high school, but do you think Ogden has a popular crowd? Like…Greer was popular, wasn’t she?”

“Why the fuck are you talking about her in the past tense?” Bibiano snarled, glaring daggers down at the party goer that had pulled him into a private room. “Cuz last time I checked, Greer’s still marked as a missing person. Unless there’s something you know that I don’t?” Bibiano took two steps forward, closing the distance between them. “Well?” He lifted his eyebrows, his smile warped into something unfamiliar and dangerous. The usually gentle warmth in his eyes burned hotter, fueled by indignant rage. “If you got any new information, I’m dying to hear it.” It was silent in the room except for the muffled sounds of music and chatter coming from the frat party on the other side of the door. “Nothing to say now? Figures.” Bibiano sneered, pushing past them to walk towards the door. He reached for the handle and paused before turning back. “Y’know what? Do me a favor and don’t speak to me again. Matter of fact, stay away from the Morrison twins, too. God knows they have way more important things to worry about than another know-nothing clout chaser looking for the next juicy piece of gossip.” With that, Bibi stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. A few heads turned towards the noise, but he didn’t wait to see if anyone called out. Taking long strides, he made it to a familiar gaudily furnished bathroom, stepped in, and locked the door behind him with trembling hands. Dropping clumsily onto the sink countertop he gripped it like a lifeline as the adrenaline slowly drained out of him. His mind was a jumbled mess, the thoughts racing far too quickly for him to make sense of anything. Bloodshot eyes flickered up to the antique gold mirror hung in front of him. He looked awful. There’s no way he could face the rest of the party looking like this. Not after the scene he had just made. They probably were already whispering among themselves, chomping at the bit to watch another star ignite into flames on their fall from grace.  Well, too bad for them. They’d have to wait a little longer before he’d let himself burn up into ash and dust.

#ogdenintro #i will add more later 😖

[chasingmemoriesofficial]

Trivial BG Information that has no actual bearing on the story but I find interesting part 1

I bet a lof you guys (well, some of you) are wondering why I made the Ninja's skin tones what I did, and that's because Ninjago is basically post-apocalyptic Earth so all the humans are ACTUAL humans.

The Ninja do have real-world ethnicities that I assigned them as in my AU (they are canonically yellow LEGO people I can interpret them in any ethnicity as I damn well please) but they're not really important. Just some visual interpretation, and some characters are bilingual in ways that make sense for how they're written.

Zane - Nordic/Middle Eastern (yeah, I know the second one is unexpected but he's based off Dr Julien's actual human child who died, and their mother was of Middle Eastern descent, and Zane's human identity is that of that dead child's nephew)

Kai and Nya - Latino/Filipino (I thought they fit with their Elements. I think of fire, I think spicy food. I think spicy food, I think Mexico. So Master of Fire = Latino. Plus Kai canonically speaks some Spanish so that also influenced my decision. The Philippines are islands, which are surrounded by water, so that made sense to me)

Cole - Indian/Native American (Cole reminds me of Harry Potter and there's a popular headcanon that Harry's of Indian descent, so I also made Cole Indian. The Native American I kept from the time I based his grandma on one of my friends from school, who is also Native American like me)

Jay - French/English (yeah I couldn't really give him anything super interesting or different like I did the others. Jay is the odd one out by being the only one not super out there)

Garmadon and Wu - Russian/German (I got a LOT of hate for this decision within the Ninjago fandom. Wu is canonically blond, dammit, and do either of them actually LOOK like the clearly Asian-coded background characters? No, so shut the fuck up and let me write my fanfiction. Goddamnit, NYA looks more Asian than they do.)

Misako - Japanese/Irish (obvious Japanese-sounding name? Check. Red hair? Check. Plain and simple.)

Lloyd should be obvious from the above choices.

Dareth I'm pretty sure is at least of Italian/Jewish descent from his Brooklyn accent (his ancestors HAVE to be from New York) while I'm gonna keep quiet on Ronin for a bit. He's a surprise character.

Now, Cyrus I actually made Afro-Latino (Like Luz from TOH), but because of how washed out his coloration is (which ties into another future plot thread) it's not obvious. He's actually pretty greyscale compared to all the more colorful characters around him. Even his clothes are desaturated.

#ninjago #alternate universe #character design #fanfic #chasing memories au #worldbuilding

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Gerald Early

Published: Jul 19, 2023

In the spring of 2020, I taught a class at Washington University in St. Louis entitled “Black Conservatives and Their Discontent: African Americans and Conservatism in America.” Eight students enrolled in the course, all of them Black. Among the readings were portions of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. On one particular day, we were concentrating on Steele’s objections to affirmative action. Steele made the standard anti-affirmative-action arguments: It stigmatizes Black people as inferior and fills them with self-doubt in a mostly white setting; it makes them trade on their past of victimization; it does not improve life for most Black people. When I asked my students what they thought of these views, they did not say much at first, probably waiting to see someone else commit. Finally, one of the more activist-minded among them said that he agreed with everything that Steele said about affirmative action, which he thought shamed Black people. But, he added, with strong emotion, “I hate Steele for saying it.”

There is an adage in football, this student explained: Take what your opponents give you, even if it is not exactly what you want. The ice broken and the tone for discussion set, the rest of the class agreed. Everyone disliked affirmative action and Shelby Steele in equal measure. It was a strange revelation, for all of us in that room knew that affirmative action had made this moment possible, both for me, as a Black professor at a prominently white university, and for them, as Black undergraduates at that same institution. At that moment, it was if the same realization struck us all: What does it mean that affirmative action brought us all here to criticize affirmative action? Why are we here? Therein lies a complex story of Black people’s feelings about affirmative action as both a gateway and a burden.

“For all its imperfections,” the sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote in his 1997 book The Ordeal of Integration, “affirmative action has made a major difference in the lives of women and minorities. … In utilitarian terms it is hard to find a program that has brought so much gain to so many at so little cost. It has been the single most important factor accounting for the rise of a significant Afro-American middle class.” It was the notion that I could more easily become a middle-class professional in the white world that led me to attend the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate in 1970, at the beginning of the era of affirmative action in college admissions. My family thought going to Penn was a great opportunity. My sisters had attended Temple University, the working-class college, but Penn was Ivy League, a high-status school. It could open more doors for a kid of my background, so everyone thought. Perhaps it did. I cannot say for sure.

There were a few things all of us Black kids who came to Penn in that year knew. We were the aggrieved and underprivileged being given access to education’s La La Land. We were expected to be a bit churlish — diversity must have its spice of difference and social adjustment — but also dazzled by the riches. We were Dorothy in Oz with a chip on our shoulders. Second, we knew we all felt varying degrees of severe inadequacy. Huddling together sometimes eased the dislocation, but it sometimes made it worse, reinforcing the sense of being a grunt lost in the gun smoke of a war. Finally, we all knew that this largess was not going to last. There was an expiration date to affirmative action. Everyone said so: jurists, civil-rights leaders, politicians, and folks on the street. “You better get it while you can,” I remember one Black co-ed telling me, “The white folks won’t keep the gates open forever. Once it’s closed, they’ll say, ‘we gave you your chance.’ White folks’ bouts of doing right by the Negro don’t usually last long.” Realizing this made everything seem urgent to me. I felt a bit like Jesus’ disciples immediately after he died: The end could come any day now.

Black Americans have had ambivalent feelings about affirmative action since its inception in the 1960s. Though the extent and implications of the policy have changed radically over time, it has never benefited more than a small minority of Black people. Yet its symbolic importance has been enormous, especially in how it has affected the culture of higher education. Once a few Black students were admitted to elite and prominently white universities, they began to exert pressure from within to admit more Black students and hire more Black faculty. This was the fight against tokenism. The two populations of Black students and Black faculty were intertwined as a political force; together, they helped to change higher education in the United States. (The other major American institution as deeply affected by affirmative action has been the military.) What made affirmative action important for so many Black people, despite the fact that comparatively few directly benefited from this rather boutique social policy, was that it changed the way we thought about where Black people could be or where they belonged. If it was not quite the broad-based intervention Black Americans needed, they were still happy to take what they made their opponents give them.

But if affirmative action was viewed as a civil-rights victory by many Black people it never directly benefited, it often became a source of embarrassment for some it did. In college admissions, affirmative action effectively protected Black students from competing against non-Black students. Black people felt stigmatized by affirmative action because it came to mean that you had lesser qualifications — that you were admitted to a college or appointed to a job merely because of your race. In academe, a whole phalanx of jobs — including appointments in African American studies, in diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, and the like — became “race” jobs, jobs that existed in part in order to diversify the campus. Many Black people do not hold these jobs in as high a regard as, say, being the dean of an engineering or medical school. (For instance, my mother, who never understood the nature of my job but was exceedingly proud of whatever it was, would never introduce me as a professor of African American studies but rather as a professor of English.) Many Black parents do not wish their children to major in or even take courses in African American studies, as they don’t think of it as a practical or prestigious field of study. But the phenomenon of “race herding” on college campuses — students and faculty of color clustering in disciplines directly related to race — is partly misunderstood: Colleges, by their administrative nature, tend to encourage cliques, silos, and fiefdoms as vectors of power. Black people, in part, are just conforming to the academic environment, by using the element that got us in the door: our race.

This institutional development over the past 50 years has made some Black people feel uneasy about, if not ashamed of, affirmative action, and led many Black elites on both the right and the left to deny that they ever benefited from it. How can one feel pride in winning something that perversely acknowledges, or even rewards, your historically induced inadequacies? Affirmative action seems to say not just that racism persists, but that there is — still — something lacking in Black life.

While the liberal-leaning Black majority has always had mixed feelings about affirmative action, Black conservatives have been virtually unanimous in opposing it. Indeed, they have had to, if they wanted to be taken seriously by their White conservative allies. As Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, the most prominent Black conservative in the country, wrote in his 1991 essay, “No Room at the Inn: The Loneliness of the Black Conservative”: “For blacks the litmus test” for conservatism “was fairly clear. You must be against affirmative action and against welfare.” This point is reiterated more recently in the sociologist Corey D. Fields’s Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans, which states that many Black Republicans “thought affirmative action served as a test to gauge their relative commitments to the GOP and to their fellow African Americans, particularly since the issue could easily be framed as putting race and partisanship in direct opposition.” Because Black conservatives were looked upon with suspicion by their white counterparts, suspected of prioritizing racial self-interest above ideology, they had to constantly prove themselves. This pressure was intensified by the fact that Black conservatives had little leverage among conservatives, as so few Black people voted for Republicans. Black conservatives did not bring any sort of sizable constituency with them. Of course, to have Black conservatives espouse policies that white conservatives also supported protected them, or seemed to, from the charge of racism, since conservatism and racism in the United States have long been intertwined.

For Thomas, opposition to affirmative action is a not merely a test of conservative allegiance but a principle to be defended against the wrong-headedness of Black liberalism. His 57-page concurrence to the majority decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College is a full-throated denunciation of affirmative action as a shameful and cynical form of institutionalized special pleading on behalf of Black people. He advances, once again, the paradoxical position that Black Americans can best press their claims as a special interest group by behaving as if we had no racial grievances and accepting the basic aspirational fairness of a colorblind society.

Thomas argues that “the Constitution continues to embody a simple truth: Two discriminatory wrongs cannot make a right.” The U.S. Constitution does not allow punitive racial discrimination, but it also does not permit, as the dissenters argue, any sort of compensatory racial discrimination as amelioration for past discrimination. It does not permit racial discrimination — period. He proceeds “to offer an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution.” Part of this defense is countering the “‘antisubordination’ view of the 14th Amendment: that the amendment forbids only laws that hurt, but not help blacks.” There are two overall points that Thomas makes. The first is the legal one about the constitutionality of racial discrimination. The second is social and practical, regarding whether discriminating in favor of a racial group really winds up helping that group. The dissenters argue that affirmative action is “‘good’ for black students.” “Though I do not doubt the sincerity of my dissenting colleagues’ beliefs,” Thomas responds, “experts and elites have been wrong before — and they may prove to be wrong again.” Thomas is expressing doubt about the insistence of Black liberals that Black Americans can only achieve their full citizenship claims through racially specific emoluments. He thinks that belief is not only specious but has damaged Black people, by effectively making them more racially self-conscious.

In portions of his concurrence, Thomas offers a mildly chauvinistic version of Black history that, on the whole, shows us as a striving, hard-working folk who had intact families, full employment, and excellent schools, like the legendary Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, in Washington D.C. We Blacks went along on our self-reliant, religiously conservative, social valiant way until something called social-welfare programs in the 1960s came along, and Black progress came to a crashing halt: a virtuous, dignified people made into dysfunctional dependents overnight. (This declension story is much indebted to the economist Thomas Sowell, an intellectual who has had an enormous impact on Thomas; he refers to five different works by Sowell in his concurrence.)

Such jeremiads against the welfare state are the way Black conservatives display race pride: by telling the race to be true to itself and abhor the aberrations of liberalism and leftism. For the Black conservative, Black people being liberal or leftist is essentially inauthentic. After all, we are reminded by white Republicans and conservatives, as well Black conservatives themselves, how brave Black Republicans are for taking the positions that they do in the face of admittedly bitter and sometimes unfair or opportunistic attacks from Blacks who are, to use the conservatives’ language, still on the liberal plantation. These attacks are proof of the Black conservative’s sincerity. Black Americans were noble once, coming out of the hellfire of slavery, and they can be noble again, by following the conservative platitudes of responsibility, rectitude, and respectability.

Thomas details the principal points of the Black conservative’s opposition to affirmative action: It violates the colorblind intentions of the constitution, particularly the 14th Amendment; it stigmatizes Black people as inferior and in need of help; highly selective colleges that accept Black students who do not meet their admissions standards only hurt and demoralize these students; affirmative action helps only a small number of bourgeois-aspiring Black people. Nothing new in any of that.

Thomas’s concurrence is especially strident in its criticism of the dissents of his fellow Supreme Court judges, the liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor. At one point, Thomas characterizes Jackson’s linkage of slavery and white inherited wealth as locking Black people into a “seemingly perpetual inferior caste” as “irrational,” “an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”

Finally, Thomas emphasizes in his concurrence his intense dislike of racial categories, which he thinks “are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person’s ideology, beliefs, and abilities.” Orlando Patterson strikes a different chord: “The simple truth, the simple reality, is that ‘racial’ categorization is a fact of American life, one that we can do away with only by first acknowledging it.” Patterson’s view, like those of many other supporters of affirmative action, is that the virus that made you ill can be made into the vaccine that cures you. But if racism is evil, Black conservatives like Thomas would argue, how can the fruits of racism be good? To think as Patterson and other Black liberals do validates the logic of racism as something that can be manipulated but never transcended.

For Thomas, the ongoing insistence on racial categorization is the inevitable result of protest politics, which revels in the charisma of the category as identity. What Black conservatives fear is that Black Americans overvalue the power and the repetition of protest, which intensifies our experience as an immutable social category, which is why Black conservatives complain so passionately about Black people clinging to victimhood. This is the category-binding that denies Black people transcendence, any hope of escaping race consciousness, or of having a full-fledged, authentic life, as the Black conservative sees it. To glorify protest, Thomas and other Black conservatives argue, is simply to reduce Black people to anger and reaction.

There has been much mourning for affirmative action among liberals of all races in the past couple of weeks. But a recent Economist/YouGov survey found that 44 percent of Black people supported the court’s decision to end affirmative action, while only 36 percent oppose it. Perhaps affirmative action has been more of a burden on us than we have been willing to admit, and Thomas’s triumph may speak for more Black Americans than we realize. Will the strange hope in colorblindness in a country crazed by color save us from the tyranny of our categorization? It is actually touching that some Black folk think it can.

[ Via: https://archive.is/Vj1Jx ]

#Gerald Early #affirmative action #racial discrimination #college admissions #university admissions #supreme court #religion is a mental illness

[whileiamdying]

As Much As I Can, As Black As I Am: The Queer History of Grace Jones

In this career overview, Barry Walters details how one of the most transgressive stars of the 1980s, Grace Jones, gave voice to the oppressed while offering a bold example of what it means to be free.

Grace Jones is perched on a ledge above the dancefloor of New York’s 12 West, the state-of-the-art, members-only gay disco, about to take the stage for one of her first performances. The year is 1977, and no one is prepared for what’s about to hit them.

Tom Moulton, father of the dance mix and Jones’ early producer, describes the scene: “All of a sudden the spotlight hits her. She starts singing ‘I Need a Man’, and the place goes crazy. After she finishes, she goes, ‘I don't know about you, honey, but I need a fucking man!’ Talk about a room-worker. Whatever it takes. She was so determined.”

To understand the impact of this moment, one must understand a bit of history. Just a few years earlier, it had been illegal for two men to so much as dance together in New York City. With the exception of maybe hairdressers and artists, queer people risked unemployment if they merely hinted at their orientation outside the confines of gay bars and clubs, and it was in these discos that the seeds of liberation were sown. At 12 West, gay people could grasp the power of their collectivity and understand what it meant to be free.

That night, Grace Jones sang “I Need a Man” just like a man might—tough and lusty, she was a woman who was not just singing to them, but also for them, as them. She was as queer as a relatively straight person could get. Her image celebrated blackness and subverted gender norms; she presented something we had never seen before in pop performance—a woman who was lithe, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribald, butch swagger. In ’79, Ebony got her je ne sais quoi exactly right: “Grace Jones is a question mark followed by an exclamation point.”

Even now, her transgressive charisma remains bold. She still feels outré.

In 1960, a 12-year-old Beverly Grace Jones moved from Spanish Town, Jamaica, to Syracuse, New York, with her family. She didn’t have many friends; a high school report card described her as “socially sick.” Halfway through her studies at Syracuse University, she impulsively abandoned school to work on a play in Philadelphia. The Pentecostal preacher’s daughter realized there was no going home after that, and she moved to New York City in 1975 to fulfill her dream of becoming a star.

At first, Jones modeled for the Wilhelmina Agency while doubling as a go-go dancer under the pseudonym Grace Mendoza. “Even though the agency kept me pretty busy, I auditioned for every play and film I could find,” she told The Baltimore Afro American in 1985. “But they all wanted a black American sound, and I just didn’t have it. Finally, I got tired of trotting around and took myself to Paris.”

In France, her blackness set her apart from other models, and Jones landed covers of Stern, Pravda, and Vogue. Within a few months, she recorded a few singles; one was sent to Cy and Eileen Berlin, an enterprising husband-and-wife team who later managed Tom Cruise. Jones flew back to NYC with her roommate, actress Jessica Lange, and met with the Berlins. Impressed by her exuberance, star quality, and willingness, they signed on to manage her. “I thought of her as family,” says Eileen Berlin. “My son had gone to college, so I gave her his room.”

At the time, Tom Moulton’s pioneering club-specific mixes were blowing up both discos and R&B radio, and the Berlins begged him to produce their new client. Moulton and Jones’ partnership began with the double-sided ’76 single, “Sorry” / “That’s the Trouble”, and their next collaboration, “I Need a Man”, quickly rose to the top of Billboard’s disco chart the following year. Hoping to capitalize on Jones’ burgeoning fame, the Berlins approached Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who signed her in short order. Given the combination of Blackwell’s status as an international reggae ambassador and Jones’ Jamaican roots, Cy Berlin anticipated a good fit. He didn’t know how right he would be.

Although Moulton and Jones made three albums together in three years—’77’s Portfolio, ’78’s Fame, and ’79’s Muse—the two former-models often clashed: “I always teased her about sounding like Bela Lugosi,” recalls the disco godfather. “I stood next to her while she was singing because I got so sick of hitting the talkback button [in the control room]. The moment she'd go off, I'd stop her. I was hard on her, but no matter how much I pushed her, she would take it and push herself.”

Portfolio’s continuous first side featured Broadway tunes set to string-intensive bluster arranged by the Salsoul Orchestra’s Vince Montana and performed by members of MFSB, a cohesive pool of studio musicians who played on nearly every Philadelphia-originated soul hit of the ’70s. But against the plush effortlessness, Jones sounded strained; the weight of Moulton’s hand was audible and uncomfortable to hear.

However, the LP’s second side dished out a masterstroke in Jones’ take on Édith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose”, a version of which Moulton previously recorded with forgotten ’70s singer Teresa Wiater. Jones had gotten her hands on an acetate pressing of Waiter’s unreleased recording, which was wowing the 12 West crowd, and she lobbied Moulton to let her have it, baiting him that it would be a sure hit for the two: “I’m big in France.” The same rawness and struggle that worked against Jones on Portfolio’s Broadway arias conveyed the absolute heartbreak of “La Vie En Rose”.

On Jones’ second album, Fame, Moulton bolstered the French connection: Most songs were written by Jack Robinson and Jacques Pépino (credited as James Bolden, but elsewhere known as disco singer David Christie). Once again Moulton contrasted Philly soul’s lush romanticism with Jones’ confident, almost stentorian vocals. This time around, though, that combination gelled throughout because the material was made for her. Jones dedicated the album “with love” to her then-partner, Jean-Paul Goude, a Parisian multimedia artist who collaborated with her on the creation of subsequent album jackets, photos, videos, and stage shows. (Goude is also the father of her only child and author of a book that details their relationship, Jungle Fever.)

While the follow up, Muse, didn’t yield as many memorable songs, it did feature another nonstop A-side that moved from sin to salvation via stormy arrangements by Iceland’s Thor Baldursson, whose keyboards and charts lit up Giorgio Moroder and Boney M songs alike. It also brandished a killer floor-filler with “On Your Knees”. Laced with sadistic intent by D.C. LaRue, a cult disco act whose world-weary, gay-coded “Cathedrals” presaged Pet Shop Boys, and former Sugarloaf frontman Jerry Corbetta, the most soulful of Jones’ disco singles also pointed toward her future. The philharmonic instrumentation oozed luxury, but the swagger of the lyric and the toughness of her vocal suggested rock’n’roll dissent waiting to be unleashed.

I grew up in Rochester, New York, 90 miles from where a teenaged Grace Jones daydreamed about her grand ambitions in Syracuse. I was a fan of a local band called New Math, whose frontman did promo for Island and passed me a copy of Fame—the first piece of my disco vinyl collection. Later that week, I watched Jones on “The Midnight Special”, where she performed “Below the Belt”. She took the stage clad in a satin boxing robe, her hands taped for a fight. Halfway through, she pulled a brawny muscleman from the crowd, pretended to knock him out, and then stood with a foot planted on his chest, all while crooning, “Gotta take my chance/ Gotta go the distance.” She then did a victory dance as fake snow fell in celebration of Christmas (and perhaps—this being 1979—cocaine). I was hooked.

That jaw-dropping TV appearance prompted a discussion with my high school drama teacher. He bragged that his brother had once met Jones at a Manhattan roller rink, where, instead of offering him a business card, she gave him a plastic whip with her name emblazoned on it. I knew at that moment that I belonged in Grace Jones’ New York, that suburban life would kill me the same way it had killed my alcoholic father. A year later, I arrived. 

Jones’ “On Your Knees” was the last single I bought before leaving Rochester and it was one of the first songs I heard on the local disco station in New York City. Subway cars plastered with graffiti bore nearly inscrutable codes I was hungry to crack, for danger preyed upon the ignorant: Each weekend brought stories of fellow students who had been mugged. I remember protesters disrupting the filming of William Friedkin’s Cruising, which retold the real-life story of a fugitive who had lured men out of gay bars to bed and then killed them. In that anything-goes, pre-AIDS era at the tail end of the ‘70s, pleasure and danger were quite literally bedfellows.

Macho, close-cropped clones ruled the city’s mega-discos, but I hadn’t escaped my small suburb just to conform, so I sought out unconventional spaces like Hurrah’s, the Mudd Club, and Danceteria, where dub, reggae and post-punk alternated with chilly synth pop and radical funk. All those genres would mingle and mutate in Jones’ next incarnation.

When Muse fizzled in the clubs and on the charts, Chris Blackwell took over as Jones’ producer. “I wanted to treat her not as a model, but to involve her as a musician,” he recalls. “Tom Moulton had been recording the instrumentation and then having Grace come in later, but I wanted her to feel as though she were a member of a band, and record her the way bands used to make albums, with the singer and the players doing their thing all at once.”

Blackwell’s approach united two things he knew well: Caribbean ease and British audacity. “I wanted a rhythmic reggae bottom, aggressive rock guitar, atmospheric keyboards in the middle, and Grace on top,” he says. To get all that, he assembled a sextet of studio ringers at his Nassau studio, Compass Point. The soon-to-be signature sound of the Compass Point All-Stars went on to animate hits by the Tom Tom Club, Robert Palmer, Joe Cocker, Gwen Guthrie, and others.

The sessions began with an unlikely remake of the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette”. Jones’ version preserved the original’s deadpan vocal delivery and minimal melody but dropped the tempo to a saunter, twisted the rhythm into a sharp funk, and sashayed with offhand earnestness, as if sexual intercourse while dying from vehicular collision was just another kink worth trying. The sessions moved with disarming speed and ease: “If Grace or the group hadn’t nailed a song by the third take,” Blackwell recounts, “it was dropped and they’d move to the next number.”

Keyboardist Wally Badarou attests to Jones’ active role in the recordings: “Grace was there even during most instrumental overdubbing sessions. She was a part of the sound and the spirit that came out almost from nowhere. We all knew we were in for something quite experimental.”

Soon they had amassed enough material for 1980’s Warm Leatherette and the beginnings of a follow-up LP that would become 1981’s Nightclubbing. Upon its release, Leatherette failed to charm either radio audiences or most dance clubs; it was too authentically reggae for the New Wave crowd, too slow for disco. But by the following year, both New York radio and the club scene had grown eclectic. Primed by kindred punk-funk blasts like Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice” as well as Taana Gardner’s “Heartbeat”, a far more open-minded dance music world was ready to re-embrace Jones and her new sound.

Nightclubbing provided Jones with newfound popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. European audiences appreciated “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango)”, a vocal reimagining of Argentine tango master Ástor Piazzolla’s 1974 instrumental “Libertango”. For that track, co-writer Barry Reynolds penned lyrics about a Parisian stalker, and Badarou provided a haunting introductory riff. Jones’ lyrics were a rebuttal, en francais, penned with the help of Blackwell’s girlfriend, actor Nathalie Delon: “What are you looking for? Hoping to find love? Who do you think you are? You hate your life.”

In America, Jones’ R&B breakthrough came via an instrumental recorded by drummer Sly Dunbar during the Warm Leatherette sessions. The track first leaked out as “Peanut Butter” on the B-side of kiddie reggae crooner Junior Tucker’s “The Kick (Rock On)”, but, eager to make it hers, Grace co-wrote new lyrics equating cars with carnality. “Pull Up to the Bumper” pushed that metaphor towards lewd entendre: “Grease it, spray it/ Let me lubricate it,” she drawled. A summertime smash, “Bumper” became one of the last thoroughly sexual jams before a new virus began to complicate that kind of fun.

The sessions for 1982’s Living My Life marked a culmination of the synchronicity between Jones and the All-Stars. “Blackwell felt the band was so good it deserved to be doing its own material,” Badarou remembers. As a result, the album was made up entirely of originals, save for a cover of Melvin Van Peebles’ “The Apple Stretching”. Each song began with Jones’ lyrics, from which Reynolds wrote the music to fit. Recorded in the wake of her breakup with Jean-Paul Goude, the album found Jones getting deeper and more rigorously percussive: The percolating lead track, “My Jamaican Guy”, has been sampled by acts from La Roux to LL Cool J. The title track was eventually left off the album but it showcased just how personal the work was for Jones, a world away from the show tunes and entendres. “You kill me for living my life,” she sang. “As much as I can, as black as I am.”

By 1982, AIDS and Reaganomics were striking down Jones’ core audience, and the freedoms of the previous decade shifted to contractions. MTV arrived, and the New Wave dance sounds it championed—sonic stepchildren of Jones including Eurythmics, Culture Club, and Duran Duran—launched a second English invasion on the charts. Jones’ singular appearance and meticulously crafted presentation made her a natural fit for the burgeoning music video medium, especially in its early, experimental days.

She asserted herself as an astute visual artist with her 1982 VHS release, A One Man Show. Directed by Goude and nominated in ’84 for the first Best Long Form Music Video Grammy, it combined still photography, concert footage, and video clips to distill the pair’s simultaneously sensational and intimate collaborations into a heated, unbroken montage. Jones donned pointedly geometric designs that accentuated her angles while clad in screaming Pop-Art colors that flashed and flattered. Goude’s art direction came alive through Jones, who glared at the camera as if possessed; she was imposing, alien, almighty—it’s not surprising that she would soon be stealing scenes in films like Conan the Destroyer and A View to a Kill.

What came after One Man and the Compass Point trilogy would have to top them, which is precisely what “Slave to the Rhythm” did. Bruce Woolley, co-writer of the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”, wrote the song on spec for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but helped to re-draft it for Jones. Producer Trevor Horn was brought in, and a nine-month studio odyssey ensued, allegedly costing Island $385,000—a fortune for a singer who had never scaled the U.S. pop charts. (The exorbitant single was offset by padding its accompanying album with eight different versions of the track in attempt to break even.)

“I remember a huge amount of experimentation with early digital techniques—the Synclavier, Sony digital tape spliced with sticky tape, and the Fairlight,” Woolley recalls. “We recorded a new version every four weeks, with Horn and Blackwell in search of the perfect track.” Between her acting roles, Jones returned to the studio month after month to update her vocals on the latest arrangements. “Slave to the Rhythm” was finally released in October 1985, and one would be hard-pressed to argue that all the laborious studio work and astronomical expenditures weren’t justified: Horn’s production work was ornate and opulent, lurid and symphonic. The spell cast by a larger-than-life black woman singing both metaphorically and directly about slavery was profound; the lyrics coaxed infinite interpretations. The Face—England’s authority on all things hip—declared “Slave” the single of 1985, and Jones appeared on the magazine’s January ’86 cover painted in whiteface. From the pure gloss of its ambition to the obsessiveness of its lyric, “Slave” is the ’80s.

Her ultimate hit in much of the world, “Slave” underscored how Jones’ incandescence and charisma made her bigger than her sales figures might indicate. MTV virtually ignored the track’s Goude-directed video; even when framed by Horn’s familiar transatlantic brilliance, Jones was, for them, still too black, too strong. Nevertheless, she got over elsewhere on the sheer magnitude of her presence. With the help of Hollywood and some crazy commercials for Citroën, Honda Scooters, and Sun Country Wine Coolers, she became more massive than ever.

“I like conflicts,” she told Playboy in 1985. “I love competition. I like discovering things for myself. It’s a childlike characteristic, actually. But that gives you a certain amount of power, and people are intimidated by that.” 

By the following year, with Goude and Blackwell out of the picture, Jones wanted more involvement in her debut album for EMI subsidiary Manhattan Records, 1986’s Inside Story. Taking EMI A&R head Bruce Garfield’s direction to “imagine a leaf being blown through the streets of New York, twisting and turning in the sunshine” as a starting point, Jones and Woolley wrote every song together, then joined multi-platinum Svengali Nile Rodgers in New York to transform their demos. This mutually flattering union yielded her last R&B radio victory, “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)”. Indicting white-collar criminals and Hollywood liars, Inside Story revealed the singer’s observant, socially conscious side, while the jagged arrangements meshed Rodgers’ ricocheting, jazz-schooled guitar with Woolley’s smart pop. It is a singer/songwriter record you can dance to.

She followed it with 1989’s Bulletproof Heart, which yielded one resplendent club triumph, “Love on Top of Love”, courtesy of David Cole & Robert Clivillés, a house remix/production duo who later scored with C+C Music Factory. Jones co-wrote and co-produced most of the album with her new husband, Chris Stanley, whose output fell far below her avant standards; the two soon divorced. Having tried harder, thought broader, and crossed more boundaries than most of her contemporaries, this dance-floor renegade closed out the decade boxed in and coasting.

By the late ’80s, I had moved to San Francisco; AIDS was decimating the gay community. One night in 1993, I finally got my chance to see Jones perform at a local gay nightclub and took my friend Brian, whose partner Mark was too sick to join us. Jones’ lived up to her reputation for diva behavior and didn’t take the stage until well after midnight. At first she stuck to her hits, including that year’s house excursion “Sex Drive”. But it soon became apparent that she didn’t need the spectacular filigree of her Goude years. The special effect was her smile: It just wouldn’t stop, and soon it became contagious. She didn’t back away from the elephant in the room: She dedicated one song to artist and AIDS casualty Keith Haring, who had used her body for a canvas on the occasion of her legendary 1985 Paradise Garage performance.

That night’s show was remarkable for the simple fact that Jones just kept on going, granting one encore request after another, waiting patiently while the sound man scoured backing tapes to find the fans’ offbeat choices. When Jones got to such minor numbers as “Crush”, it became clear that she didn’t want to leave. She was giving as much of herself as she could to the beleaguered troops, knowing full well that many wouldn’t live long enough to see her again. A few months after that show, I inherited Mark’s cherished copy of Goude and Jones’ art book Jungle Fever after he and Brian died within weeks of each other. 

Jones’ lust for life that night represented not just resilience to repression, but also a way of fighting back that sent a message: We, who are thought less than, shall burn brighter than our oppressors. That was why she was so beloved—because she led the way, even when we couldn’t proceed. Along with the lesbians and lucky survivors who nursed our fallen, Jones had borne witness to what Reagan, Bush, and most of the country willfully ignored; she knew the toll of it all. 

Throughout the ’90s, rumors of new albums surfaced; Blackwell recorded several sessions, so did Tricky. Even Moulton buried the hatchet for a 1997 house remake of Candi Staton’s “Victim”, but Island nixed its release on conceptual grounds: They thought Grace Jones couldn’t be a victim of anything.

In 2008, Jones unexpectedly reemerged with Hurricane, her first record in 19 years. She brought back Woolley and the Compass Point All-Stars while adding contributors like Emmy-winning composers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, who worked with her for a month in their home on the the gospel-shaded canticle “Williams’ Blood”. “Prince has a presence and everybody in the room goes, ‘Whoa,’” Melvoin attests from first-hand knowledge—she and Coleman were key members of his Purple Rain–era backing band, the Revolution. “When Grace walks into the room, it’s more subtle, but it has the same effect. You just go, ‘My God, she’s taken up all of the space with that personality.’”

Hurricane mirrored that kaleidoscope. Unlike commonplace pop and rock luminaries who took extended vacations, Jones came back more polished and unpredictable than ever. With her trenchant track “Corporate Cannibal”, she even protested capitalist dehumanization by embodying it via grinding, insidious metal. But while her image as a constantly morphing, couture-clad hellion persists, the 67-year-old iconoclast stays true to herself. After all these years and so many disciples, there’s still no one like her. 

While gathering up my Grace Jones memories, I was reminded of what Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon once said about entertainers. This was 25 years ago, so my memory may have altered her words, but it went something like this: We pay to bask in the confidence of our most beloved performers so that we may learn to similarly love ourselves. Grace did that for me, for her audience, for anyone who has ever been too queer, too black, too female, or too freaky for the world around them. Grace Jones is liberation.

As a companion to Barry Walters’ Grace Jones piece, various Pitchfork contributors highlight some of the artist’s finest moments in music, film, and talk-show badassery:

The “Russell Harty” Incident 

In 1981, Grace Jones pummelled British talk show host Russell Harty on his own BBC show. Harty always sat among the guests on his early evening gabfest, and on this particular night he chose to focus his attention on the men to his right, leaving Jones, seated alone to his left, out of much of the conversation. The scene plays out with a frustrated Jones admonishing Harty: “If you turn your back to me one more minute.” Harty dismisses her, wagging a finger before turning away. Jones then clips him on the neck and lands one, two, three more hits in quick succession before slapping him on the head. The confused audience applauds—was this planned? Is this funny? Is it art?

This was my introduction to Grace Jones: elegantly beating the hell out of a man who won't take her seriously, her black body and everything it knows asserting itself for the good of fed up women everywhere. —Sara Bivigou

“Use Me”

Grace Jones’ version of Bill Withers’ “Use Me” is exactly what a cover song should be: It honors the strengths of the original while restructuring it, truly taking possession of it as if it were her own work. While Withers’ original is full of human pain and love, Jones’ version–produced by Sly and Robbie for Nightclubbing–turns on one robotic heel into S&M, all sex, all strength. The distinctly American, organic funk of the original is refashioned as electro-Caribbean minimalism, letting Jones’ voice be as powerful as Withers’. When issued from Jones’ lips, “use me up” becomes a challenge: a love song for power bottoms everywhere. —Jes Sklonik

Vamp 

Grace Jones fascinated me at a young age (seeing her as a kid while watching Conan the Destroyer with my dad both scared and excited me), but I didn’t become obsessed with her until seeing the movie Vamp at a sleepover in 1986. In the film, Jones plays Queen Katrina, a wicked vampiress running a strip club somewhere in Kansas (naturally). She makes her first on-screen appearance nude, save for a red bob wig and full body paint, doing a seductive dance that is as bizarre as it is weirdly erotic. At the time I didn’t really know much about her music (I was 11 years old and lived on a farm) nor could I appreciate that her body paint and the chair upon which she writhes were done by Keith Haring. The film is glorious ‘80s trash of the highest order, but Jones manages to transform the whole thing into high art by virtue of simply being there and, even though she’s playing the undead, sort of just being herself—beautiful, artful, exotic, and frighteningly wild. —T. Cole Rachel

“Breakdown”

Everyone from Suzi Quatro to the Replacements have covered Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1976 slowburner “Breakdown”, but Grace Jones’ take is the version most worth discussing. Given a sauntering, reggae reconstruction, Jones’ rendering is shaded by a subtle gradation of vocal inflections that give the song a searing potency: She is sturdy and commanding one second and mournful the next, the song’s titular collapse filtered through a distinctly Jonesian lens of fortifying self-sufficiency. Even Petty recognized that quality about Jones, writing a killer kiss-off of a third verse to cap her interpretation: “It’s OK if you must go/ I’ll understand if you don’t/ You say goodbye right now/ I’ll still survive somehow/ Why should we let this drag on?” In Jones’ more-than-capable hands, a bluesy classic is transformed into a clarion call, summoning strength from the depths of its vulnerability. —Eric Torres

“Warm Leatherette”

Grace Jones' cover of the Normal's “Warm Leatherette” is one of her more bizarre interpretations. The original song, based on J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel Crash, was a cold proto-industrial track riffing on the flattening of human affect due to post-modern technology. In Jones' hands, the song becomes a sassy tribute to the pleasures of ultraviolence, queering the original text from a self-serious and mega-ironic love poem into a campy exploration of black female sexual identity. By subverting the tropes of white, male, anglo sci-fi, Jones turned the Ballardian porno-nightmare into a celebration of perversion via the intersection of technology and sexuality. —Eric Shorey

“Pull Up to the Bumper”

Grace Jones pioneered the way for Shamir, Stromae, and countless other dance mavericks of today—not just with her bewitching candor but through her use of androgynous innuendo. “Pull Up to the Bumper” was initially banned in the United States for suggestive lyrics—“Pull up to my bumper baby/ In your long black limousine”—that were revolutionary because they were smart, risky, and intriguingly gender inclusive, just like Jones herself. By combining Studio 54’s pulsing drums and chic new-wave licks with the kaleidoscope of Andy Warhol’s playhouse (Jones was a regular in both scenes), “Bumper” became a crucial track for American dance music while pushing boundaries of raw sexuality. —Molly Beauchemin

#Grace Jones #Queer History

[tracichee]

It's finally starting to sink in. A THOUSAND STEPS INTO NIGHT is on the longlist for the 2022 National Book Award.

Yesterday, when I read the news, I thought at first that it must be a mistake. My book? My silly Ghibli-esque adventure? My tongue-in-cheek romp? My episodic road trip through a magical world teeming with demons and spirits? My haunting Japanese-inspired folktale? My critique of American patriarchy in the guise of an escapist fantasy? My unapologetic declaration of joy?

Was important? Literary? Worthy of recognition?

Wow.

YES.

That’s what this incredible recognition says to me. Yes, there is value in adventure, in laughter, in critique and fantasy and joy. Yes, these things are necessary, noteworthy, and engaged in a national conversation about gender and sexism and power, hierarchy and marginalization and the making of a better, more inclusive world.

They’re also (I hope) fun. And there’s value in that too.

As I come to grips with the news, I find that I’m excited. I’m tickled. And I’m so, so grateful.

My bird boy is on the National Book Award longlist.

My trash monkeys are on the National Book Award longlist.

My demon girl in all her awkwardness is on the National Book Award longlist.

Congratulations, little heroes. Today, you are seen.

Thank you to my editors, Catherine Onder and Emilia Rhodes, and to the entire team at Clarion and HarperCollins. Thank you to the National Book Foundation and the judges for recognizing this story among so many notable and important titles. And my deepest congratulations again to all the longlisters! It is truly such an honor to be here with you.

Kelly Barnhill, The Ogress and the Orphans

Isaac Blum, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen

Johnnie Christmas, Swim Team

Anna-Marie McLemore, Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix

Sonora Reyes, The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School

Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile, Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist For Justice

Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

Sherri Winston, Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution

Lisa Yee, Maizy Chen’s Last Chance

#blog #news #awards #traci chee #a thousand steps into night #books

[cherienymphe]

Euro anon is back! Ok, so first of all - I know about the electoral college (how about actually forming a consistent movement to abolish that one, huh?), about gerrymandering, about Hillary losing the pop vote, about RBG not wanting to quit and all that *because* americans constantly stuff it down our throats. SInce 2016 it has been impossible to exist in “international” online spaces without running into a yank complaining about their own political system. I also used to work in news media and have interviewed a few mid-level american politicians. I know that your democracy is not fair. When I talk about *voters* I mean all voters - also the republicans who made poor choices because they were too stupid and blinded by Fox News/OAN/Murdoc propaganda. And how is me criticising the USA "punching down"? It is literally the greatest cultural and military super power in the history of the world.

I am tired of “feeling sorry” for the USA, and I think that is true for many other europeans. It does nothing, and we get very little in return. Things like the attacks on Krudttønden, Barcelona, Utøya, the Manchester bombings, all of this barely registers on the american radar for more than a week and still you demand our sympathy whenever the Republicans are on their bullshit or when yet another white dude shoots up a school. It’s giving us all compassion fatigue, especially considering the war in Ukraine and how the russian blockade on ukrainian foodstuffs might cause a famine in the “global south” part of afro-euroasia; leading to new waves of immigration (and those refugees are not gonna swim to the USA, they’re going to be our responsibility).

And yes - America has been terrible from the get go! I did however not know this until I got on an american social media platform (when I was well into my teen years), because american history and culture isn’t widely taught where I live. In my country we learn about the American revolution as a precursor to the revolutions that actually matters to us, meaning the French and the Haitain, and we learn the basics about the civil war and the civil rights movement. I didn’t learn about the black panthers in school in the same way that you probably don’t learn about the Count’s Feud or the Singing Revolution - it is not important to you, even though those things are important to the Danes and the people of the Baltic States. What reason does a person from Greece or Belgium have to know that the USA has the highest maternal mortality of the “developed” world if it isn’t relevant to their every day life?

Also, I do not think that americans know how big an influence your politics have on us. If Trump managed to pull out of NATO as he wanted, we would all be fucked! Remember how he wanted to buy Greenland? Imagine how that would have rocked the power balance of the North Atlantic! International politics are about cooperation, and when the idiot citizens of one of your most important allies have put a mega-idiot in a position of leadership, you rightly start to get fucking worried!

When I talk about the past 8 years or so, yeah, I should probably have gone for a greater age range, but I mean how you went from Obama, a somewhat alright guy (if you look away from the war crimes, his financial policy failures, the ACA and so much else…) who was in somewhat in tune with the politics of my (liberal) home country (I won’t way where I’m from, but it’s a Nordic country) and a general movement of hope and unity, to Trump and his outright divisive, idiotic retoric. In short: We thought you guys were moving forward with us but you didn’t. That, in part, is why we make fun of you. And yes, americans get super triggered when that happens, and yes, it’s often the conservatives who are the worst, but why whould that matter to us? We make fun of all countries and their problems.

Your first ask was incredibly disrespectful so I'm letting you know I didn't read a single word of this because why would I be any kind of understanding towards someone who came out the gate like that?

#asks

[caribeandthebooks]

January 2024 Reading Wrap-Up

I read 4 books and got 5 kindle challenge achievements this month!

Now lets look at the breakdown :)

Reading Challenge Progress: I committed to reading 30 books in 2024 so currently I'm ahead by 2 books!

Top Genre read in January 2024: Young Adult

My first read for the year was Gallant by V.E. Schwab. Rating: 3.5/5

This has been on my TBR since it came out and Kindle's New Year Challenge: Goodreads Choice Award coaxed it out of the TBR jar.

I really like Schwab's writing and this author is, if nothing else, consistent. Which means that the books always land at ~3/5 stars for me. Loved the premise but the story did not deliver how I wanted it to....which is on-brand for my experience with Schwab lol.

Since this was my first Kindle book for the year I unlocked the Bookish achievement in the New Year Kindle Challenge. Light work, no reaction.

My options for this award were to either read Gallant or Yellowface. Gallant has been on the TBR longer but Yellowface is a guaranteed read for me this year. So I went with Gallant for this challenge.

Book #2 was Interesting Stories for Curious People by Bill O'Neill. Rating: 1.5/5

This was my first pluck out of the TBR jar! This book left me with more questions than answers. At the end of many of the stories I thought "Why introduce me to a vibe you can't maintain?" . If you're into (mostly North American) trivia or play games that use that type of trivia this might be of interest to you. It would have been nice if there was a variety in countries and non-North American cultures represented here.

At least I got something out of that read. I unlocked the Bookworm achievement in the New Year Kindle Challenge once I completed my second Kindle book of the year.

Book #3 was Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. Rating: 4/5

This book was also plucked out of the TBR jar and it was a page-turner! I liked that the main character isn't JUST a black slave. I see enough Black struggle in the media that I usually stay away from it in recreational media that I consume. This book gave what I think is a pretty accurate depiction of how a black person who didn't grow up in slavery would behave if they were flung back into that time randomly. I feel like the Epilogue could have given me a bit more "where are they now" but I understood why it didn't. This one is going in my favourite reads and diverse read tags (as soon as it gets out of the queue)

I unlocked the Resolution Keeper achievement in the New Year Kindle Challenge while reading my third book of the year.

Book #4 was The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonara Reyes. Rating: 4.5/5

Lets get 1 thing straight and 2 things gay: I was WAITING for my TBR jar to give me one of my highly anticipated reads. I love a queer YA book, they are SO adorable (the ones I've read at least) and the fact that the author is also a Latina queer who went to Catholic School? Chef's Kiss! This was a fun read for me as I expected. As an Afro-Latina and a baby polyglot I liked that they didn't do that weird "here's a Spanish word just 'cause I can" thing. The way the parents handled the situation was sloppy and tbh needed MUCH more nuance. I also wish we got more from her brother's point of view but I enjoyed it all the same, difficult topics and all. This one is going in my favourite reads and diverse read tags (as soon as it gets out of the queue)

I unlocked the Bibliophile achievement in the New Year Kindle Challenge once I completed my third Kindle book of the year.

And that's it! If you stuck around for the whole thing, thank you so much! I try to keep my review's spoiler free - be the good you want to see in the world, right?

See you next month and Happy Reading!!

#2024 Reading Challenge #monthly wrap up #book blog #bookish #kindle challenge #book tumblr #booklr #bookblr #kindred #gallant #interesting stories for curious people #the lesbianas guide to catholic school #v.e. schwab #bill oneill #octavia butler #sonora reyes #books #kindle books #kindle ebooks #ebooks #book review

[danicadenniss]

Na’Luzia Rio Garcia-Naruto

Aliases: Luz, Lu, Clover, Cloverleaf, Cloves, Clovis, Clovie, Mija by her mother and her maternal grandmothers, Mixed Girl by Lori Anderson

Abilities: Earth Bending, Lava Bending, Metal Bending, Glass Bending, Sun Breathing, Stone Breathing, Seismic Sense

Elements: Earth, Lava, Metal

Occupation: Student At Titan City School, Employee At Claymore’s Blacksmith Metal Shop (Part Time)

Dates of Birth: April 24th, 2007

Species: Human

Gender: Female

Height: 4’10

Ethnicity: Afro Asian Latina (Afro Puerto Rican, Chinese Jamaican, Indo Trinidadian)

Hair Color: Dark Auburn/Golden Dirty Blonde

Eyes Color: Hazel Brown

Skin Color: Dark Golden Bronze Tan

Skin Types: Olive Brown Freckled, Honey Beige Vitiligo

Family Members: Na’Coda Naruto (Father), Stella Mia Garcia-Naruto (Mother), Niagara Naruto (Partial Aunt), Blaze of Domino (Partial Uncle), Na’Kai Naruto/Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III/New Limbonar (Older Cousin), Navajo Naruto (Partial Grandfather), Novae Naruto (Partial Grandmother), Unnamed Partial Great Grandmother✝️, Unnamed Partial Great Great Grandmother✝️, Kumora Naruto✝️ (Ancestor), Naruto Ancestors✝️, Karen Sara Garcia-Clark, Trudy Ana Garcia (Maternal Aunts), Calvin Lucas Clark (Maternal Uncle), Leonardo Santiago, Marcus Carlos, Megan Paola and Antonio Clark (Younger Maternal Cousins), Savannah Azan-Garcia and Gloria Garcia (Maternal Grandmothers), Mr. And Mrs. Garcia✝️ (Maternal Great Grandparents) Mrs. Azan✝️ (Maternal Great Grandmother) Garcia Ancestors✝️

Love Interest: Jennifer May O’Neil (Girlfriend)

Voiced By: Olivia Olson

Appearance:

Na’Luzia Rio Garcia-Naruto is an athletic dark bronze tan skinned Afro Puerto Rican, Chinese Jamaican and Indo Trinidadian pre teenage girl (later teenage girl to young woman, she was born as half Dougla and half Hakka), with shoulder length texture dark auburn and golden dirty blonde ombré dyed hair with right sides bangs kept in a low back ponytail bun with a burgundy hair tie, thick narrow dark auburn brown eyebrows, short eyelashes, hazel brown eyes, olive brown freckles on her cheeks, honey beige vitiligo on her forearms and legs reddish orange lava kanji symbol on her right wrist, and round natural tan lips. Her attire consists, few accessories, she wears two ebony black metallic ear hoop ear piercings on her right ear, pair of blue diamond star shaped earrings, a Creature Slayer sliver metal chain necklace with light blue wave and dark blue, navy bluish black checkered yin yang charm around her neck (Parody of Demon Slayer) and a black leather braided bracelet with orange topaz and emerald green charms on her left wrist. She wore a mid cropped burgundy graphic fit tank top with a white jaguar print on it front, a red leather jacket with 3/4 sleeves, dark red Japanese textured and Ghosted Away Haru print on its back (parody of Spirited Away Haku) a pair of black torn capri mid rise jeans with a lesbian pride flag and a poke ball patches on its right side front and left side back pockets, a reddish brown leather belt with a silver buckle around her waist, a dark red mini leggings underneath, red crew socks with black stripes and burgundy and black checkered combat boots with dark gray laces, and ebony black soles.

Personality:

Clover is thoughtful, kind, generous, and supportive tomboy.

Trivia:

Clover’s Ethnicity from American descent to Afro Asian Caribbean descent.

She is mixed race as half Dougla and half Hakka, her mother Stella is an Afro Puerto Rican and Afro Jamaican and her father Na’Coda is Chinese Trinidadian and Indo Trinidadian. She is an Afro Pueto Rican, Chinese Jamaican and Indo Trinidadian.

Her hair is dark auburn with golden dirty blonde hair dye, it’s wavy/curly texture.

She worked at Claymore’s Blacksmith Metal Shop.

She is a tomboy instead of girly girl.

She is a lesbian.

She had fear of water, she had a fear scary dolls.

She likes spending time with her girlfriend Jenny.

#tmnt 2012 #totally spies #clover totally spies #totally spies clover #lesbian pride #afro asian #afro caribbean #indo caribbean #asian #puerto rican #chinese #indian #afro latina #african #trinidadian #tomboy #wlw

[historyhermann]

Habits of a digital reader and the appeal of old books

Day after day, I look at the lighted screen of my phone, reading articles of the day, whether posted on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, or some other social media platform, apart from thumbing through new emails or photographs on Instagram from librarians, archivists, genealogists, and friends. In the meantime, books in my own personal library, whether in my small apartment or in my childhood home, often sit on the shelf, collecting dust, untouched and unmoving. Some could say I’m like Abby Hargreaves who finds a “lot of comfort in books not-yet-read” with her books “stacked high on the floor” of her office, next to a bookshelf that is overfull. Perhaps like her, unread books do not disappoint me. More than that, however, with a life in flux, my collections of books are divided, leaving me to only focus on chance books to read, whether on the bus or the train, riding public transit from one part of Maryland to another. At the same time, the strain of reading articles for my classes during library school at UMD takes time away from reading physical books, with many textbooks available in a digital form and the articles for each class like a nest of PDFs that are portioned out, week by week.

This is an article I wrote for Book Riot back in August 2019, but it was never published. So it is being published here. It will be published on my History Hermann WordPress blog on Feb. 25, 2023.

While saying all of this, I especially love old books, even “recently old” ones like the 1990s or early 2000s. This expands to novels, like Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow or Albert Camus’s The Plague, which I’m still in the process of reading. Recently, at a book sale hosted by the friends of my local library, I bought a number of books like Spencer R. Crew’s 1987 historical overview for  the National Museum of American History, Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915-1940 and Norman G. Rukert’s 1982 illustrated history, The Port: Pride of Baltimore. Events like the booksale show, once again, that physical books are not fading away and being replaced by e-books, whether they become something like holobooks in the Star Wars universe or not.

Perhaps it is this love of old books which drew me not only to research my own family history, but to events like the wonderful National History Day, which can be called a “science fair for history” for short, and ultimately to library science. A physical book you can hold, smell, touch, and turn the pages offers something that no online resource cannot. This fact is the reason that most of the documentary evidence of my life and thoughts lives in paper journals, sketchbooks, and binders, rather than through any sort of digital footprint. But, with some people it is very different, especially with the newest generation of young people, whom are more plugged into their devices more than ever.

Perhaps my reading habits, of physical books, are akin to Will (played by Matt Damon) in the classic 1997 film, Good Will Hunting, who reads only books at the top of bookshelf of his therapist Sean (played by Robin Williams), rather than the others. He even declares at one point to Clark (played by Scott William Winters), a Harvard student, that “you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.” This is a message worth hearing in light of National Library Week earlier this month (April 7th to 13th) and the newest report on the state of U.S. libraries from the American Library Association.

In the end, while paperback and hardback books will sit on a bookshelf collecting dust, old books will still be calling to me even as my phone sits on the desk right next to me.

© 2019-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

#books #reading #old posts #umd #pdfs #national history day #good will hunting #matt damon #ala #american library association #1990s #1990s films

[vomains]

Dutchess from black ink

DUTCHESS FROM BLACK INK FULL

Lattimore is not just curvy, she is gorgeous in every sense. The 34-year-old African woman Dutchess is mightily endowed with natural curves which she has remarkably maintained with physical exercising & balanced diet. Standing 5’5’’ tall, this Afro-American woman, Dutchess Lattimore just loves to flaunt her sculpted hips, fuller breasts, perfect legs, and massive curves online. After creating a name for herself in small screen, she currently owns her own tattoo shop called ‘Pretty-N-Ink’ in Charlotte, NCĭutchess Lattimore Height – 5 feet 5 in (170 cm), Weight.She was also the part of a VH1 reality show, ‘Black Ink Crew’ along with ex-fiancé, Ceaser Emanuel.Seizing the starring opportunity, she was the only female tattoo artist employed by the popular tattoo shop called ‘Black Ink’ in Harlem.With her growing popularity in the ink community, she received a career-changing opportunity with VH1.Showcasing her real talent, she quickly became sought-after & demanded individual in the field which eventually led to moving New York City to perfect her craft in the bigger platform.Right after receiving Bachelor degree, she attended graduate school for her MBA and in the process decided to embark on a career as a tattoo artist.

DUTCHESS FROM BLACK INK FULL

The two have since cut off all communication. Check out the full interview with Ceaser below. The Pretty-N-Ink owner accused Ceaser of cheating on her. However, the pair called it quits a year later. That’s why it bummed me out you asked me that question because I really never ever thought about that s–t until right now because that loss in itself helped propel me to the man I am right now.”Ĭeaser and Dutchess dated for a while before getting engaged in 2015. And then from then, I haven’t stopped opening up shops. As soon as she left, three months later, I opened up Black Ink Atlanta. “And at that point is when I started expanding. “Now it’s like God put me in a position that basically, ‘N-gga, don’t ever rely on nobody. However, he says, losing Dutchess helped create the businessman he is today because he no longer had someone to rely on and was forced to take care of his business affairs independently. I had two shops at the time, and I’m just still trying to figure it out.” There’s a lot of things we didn’t grow up knowing like logistics of business and s–t like that.”Ĭeaser continued, “So when she left, I had to start second-guessing everything - you feel me? Because I didn’t know business. It was the fact that, knowing when you had somebody who like…Jim knows, we from the hood. Because you know… it’s not the fact that, you know what I mean, me and her split and all that over s–t. “But my most defining loss of my life I have to say was is when I lost my fianceé. “You know the funny thing is, I never really thought about that s–t until you really said that s–t,” Ceaser admitted. The tattoo boss expressed that he lost more than his partner when the pair broke up, but he lost one of his most trusted confidantes when it came to discussing matters regarding his business. L-R: Ceaser Emanuel, Dutchess Lattimore Photo: a candid conversation, around the 25-minute mark, Ceaser admitted that losing Dutchess was the “most defining loss” of his life. When asked about his most defining loss and the lessons he learned from his experience, the 41-year-old mentioned his former “Black Ink Crew” co-star and ex-fiancée Dutchess Lattimore. However, it didn’t always come easy, and there were a few times the reality star and businessman almost lost it all.ĭuring episode one of the “Rare Knomads” podcast with hosts Jims World, an entertainment personality, and rapper/actor Rap Is A Martial Art earlier this month, Ceaser sat down with the guys to talk about his career and his perspective on failure. He stars in a popular reality show and owns several tattoo shops across the nation, including in New York, Georgia and Florida. “ Black Ink Crew” Star Ceaser Emanuel has had a pretty successful career.

#Dutchess from black ink

[trustoutdoor]

Easy rider bikes

EASY RIDER BIKES SKIN

EASY RIDER BIKES FREE

After 3 years of active duty, he worked at the Boston Navy yard on the cruiser ‘Boston’ as a technician on its radar installations for guided missiles. Instead, he was transferred to Electronics Technician School at Great Lakes NTC. “Things were different in Florida than Boston”, noted Cliff. He was immediately rebuffed by the CO of the base, who turned him right back to Boston, refusing the possibility of a black pilot on his watch, and an integrated flight training school. In 1953 he joined the Marines, and tested so highly he was scheduled for flight training, and sent to a base Pensacola, Florida. As a boy, Cliff attended the Boston Latin School, from whence he derived a particular pattern of speech, and a facility with language – Cliff was specific about his words, and at times prickly in their usage. ‘Soney’ (the spelling is his mother’s) Vaughs was born in Boston on April 16th, 1937, to a single mother who was 16 at the time she’d been kicked out of the family compound in Gibbsboro, New Jersey, for her unwed status, so moved to Massachusetts to be near a more sympathetic aunt. That Cliff ‘Soney’ Vaughs and Ben Hardy have never been properly acknowledged as the men behind the world’s most famous motorcycle is a complicated story a result of racism, their personal disinterest in fame, and a contractual settlement with the film’s financiers, Columbia pictures, to delete Cliff from the film’s credits.Ĭlifford A. Cliff ‘Soney’ Vaughs on his white chopper on Malibu Beach, 1971 The Captain America and Billy bikes were a collaboration of several men, built by several hands, and were an outgrowth of an established legacy of Afro-American chopper builders in South Central Los Angeles, in 1968. It is a powerful work of art, a coveted, elusive object, copied a thousand times all over the globe, but it cannot be truly captured, as it exists only in the realm of dreams. They wanted to own that bike and ride it and eat it and absorb everything the bike stood for into their very beings, to become the gods that bike promised we could become. Those admiring the Easy Rider choppers didn’t want to be Peter Fonda, they wanted to be Captain America.

EASY RIDER BIKES SKIN

Its lines and proportions are perfect, as is the American flag paint job, which slip under one’s skin and electrify subconscious associations: the cowboy, the outlaw, America, freedom, power, speed, sex, drugs and rock music. If anyone thought to ask ‘who built that?’ (and few did), they might have assumed Peter Fonda built it, but most admirers of Captain America were simply glad it existed, as if it had been delivered from the gods. The Easy Rider choppers: ‘Billy’ and ‘Captain America’, ridden by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda Far more people idolized that motorcycle than ever saw the film all they needed was a photograph of Dennis Hopper (on the ‘Billy’ bike) and Peter Fonda, riding through the anonymous landscape of the American West, modern day cowboys roaming the land free, just free. Such is the power of the machine’s image, and its place in the cultural history of motorcycling around the world. The Captain America chopper transcends its own story nobody needs to have seen the film, nor recognize Peter Fonda, to understand they’re looking at an icon, a magical talisman of Freedom. Show them TE Lawrence on his Brough Superior, and they’ll recognize neither the quizzical WW1 hero, nor his Brough Superior.

EASY RIDER BIKES FREE

Show them Rollie Free stretched out in a bathing suit over his Vincent at Bonneville in 1948, and they’ll laugh, but won’t know a thing about the bike or the man. Show someone a photograph of the ‘Captain America’ bike from ‘Easy Rider’, and everyone knows what they’re looking at. It’s the most famous motorcycle in the world, period. The Daymak Easy Rider also comes with 26 x 2.4 inch tires which provides the comfort and stability that you need on your ride.Adapted from Paul d’Orléans’ book ‘The Chopper: the Real Story’ With the 48V lithium-ion battery pack and 350W motor, you’ll be able to climb hills with virtually no effort. The Easy Rider comes with an ultra-wide 32” handlebar span that curves towards you making it easy to hold and keeps your back upright and stress-free. This electric bike is built for taking in the scenery and enjoying the outdoors on a leisurely ride. Take a joy ride on Daymak’s comfort cruiser the Easy Rider.

#Easy rider bikes

[toongrrl-blog]

Body Image 2021 in the Media

We should all feel like Joan when we look in the mirror...

Okay so onetime I read this article and I thought: “Lovely lovely, but there is something about it that is bugging me...” Then it hit me that the representation wasn’t diverse in that article and I know 2021 had media depictions that would expand the conversation regarding body image. 

So here are my picks:

1. Never Have I Ever (Season 2)

It wasn’t the best decision Devi made when she blurted out that the new girl (and her fellow comrade as being the token Indian girls at their school) Aneesa, is recovering from an eating disorder that she picked up while at a all-girl’s prep school where she was the only Brown girl (and only Muslim at that) where she was ignored except when receiving positive feedback about her slim figure, thus triggering her disorder. 

Sadly WOC often are overlooked when eating disorders are discussed, in favor of privileged white girls (thin ones at that), and recovery is often presented as accessible and overnight. But Aneesa shows that even the most together person could be struggling with something and given how little her bites are, her ED habits don’t disappear overnight. It’s also important to note that Aneesa picked up her disorder in a high-stress (especially in academics), upper class environment where racism was in the air. Aneesa felt the pressure to fit in, her body was the only thing that gained some semblance of approval from her white peers, it made sense that she was determined not to lose it. 

That said: the series does a good job putting women of color (and their experiences) front and center. From the Indian American Devi (a flawed and relatable character played by newcomer Maitreyi Ramikrishnan), her Afro-Latina friend Fabiola (who refutes the Sassy Black Woman stereotype with her quiet nature and holds STEM interests and explores her lesbian identity), Chinese American Eleanor (who is loud, dramatic, loving, and bold in her presentation), the Indian American Aneesa (outwardly confident and easy-going), Devi’s grieving and strong-willed mother Nalini, and Kamala (Devi’s “perfect” cousin who starts to push back against the expectations put on her as a South Asian woman from both her family and her professors). 

2. Why Women Kill (Season 2)

Classism, Ableism, Fatphobia, Social Totem Poles, Prejudice. These issues are at the core of the characters who struggle with self-image or desirability in the second season of this (highly underrated) anthology series of the dramedy from Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry. The story centers on the seemingly meek and hapless “frump” Alma Fillcott (played by a drabed down Allison Tollman) who envies and wants to join the garden club presided over by the beautiful trophy wife Rita Castillo (Lana Parilla who ATE this role); Alma deals with a lot of slights her direction due to her appearance, despite the love of a devoted husband and a daughter (Dee, who is heavier than her mother and more fashionable and prettied up) while Rita deals with an elderly and abusive husband (who refuses to die) that throws her former life as a sex worker in her face. We learn that Alma was cheated on by her high school boyfriend at senior prom for a thinner and more glamorous girl, Detective Vern (Rita’s detective and Dee’s eventual husband) dealt with being dumped after a disfiguring injury he gotten in World War II (did I mention this story was set in 1949?), Dee puts up with men who only see her in secret due to her weight, and Rita came from a poor family that was regarded as dirt by members of the community she grew up in and ended up in a physically abusive marriage until her cousin shot the guy (sadly turned out to be still alive) before being in her current one. Through the Garden Club, we see how social privilege and prejudice can be weaponized to climb up on the necks of other members (basically hierarchies are very predatory). 

3. The Baby-Sitters’ Club (Season 2)

Back when the original book series came out in 1985, Stacey McGill made history as a character with a chronic health condition/disability (Diabetes) whose character wasn’t defined by her illness. She was glamorous for girls her age, sophisticated and somewhat mature, she was pretty as a model, boys liked her (currency in middle school), the kids she babysat adored her, she had well-coiffed and fashionable blonde hair, she was super good at math; she was proof that a person with a chronic condition/disability could be relatable, natch, even aspirational. 

The sadly now defunct Netflix series updates the story and goes further, with Stacey; showcasing how social media and the shame projected upon by a parent can hurt a child. Instead of pricking her fingers, Stacey has a insulin pump that her Mother (at first) wants her to conceal, therefore making the girl feel she needs to be ashamed of her appearance and while she was harassed at her old school for fainting at lunch and missing school and wetting the bed at a sleepover, Stacey had a seizure in the lunchroom that was filmed by a classmate. Therefore Stacey endured her shame going viral online (this goes hand in hand with Monica Lewinsky’s story as she details in 15 Minutes of Shame and in our last entry of this post) and after moving to Connecticut, has to revisit it there too where parental skepticism (unconscious ableism) even forces her and her friends to defend her competence and skill as a babysitter. That same season also sees Stacey live life as usual, being boy-crazy and babysitting her charges before she confronts one of her former tormentors at summer camp, gifting some catharsis despite the result of poison ivy.

Season Two sees Stacey with bickering parents and struggling to reconcile her image of a young person positively managing her condition with the ambivalence she feels about her disability, especially when she tells a friend (a talented ballerina) that she envies the girl’s body for being able to make these elaborate and demanding movements while Stacey has to work hard to make sure her body functions regularly. 

Stacey’s storyline showcases a disabled character who is a full person in her own right, with the important caveat that if you can’t reach body positivity, body neutrality is just as sufficient. 

4. Encanto.

I have problems with this movie and many of it’s characters; that said, lets get into the good, the bad (well how it depicts the bad with some awareness), and the not really “unspecial” on what this film says about body image. 

Good: FIrst, the family and the villagers showcase a mixture of skin colors, body types, sizes, shapes, heights, hair textures without depicting one or the other as worse or better; facial features are brought into the mix with the large noses of Abuela Alma, Pepa, Bruno, and Isabella, Indigenous and African and Mestizo and European features are in the mix, Mirabel is a young woman with a short-ish, “average” body type with a wide nose and curly hair while older sister Luisa is depicted as muscular and feminine.

The Depiction of the Bad: The film depicts (subtly) how beauty ideals can poison family relations, especially who is the most pressured or ignored. Abuela Alma ignores/disrespects her average-build and regular-cute with wide nose and curly hair and bespectacled Mirabel while forcing the muscular and large Luisa to be a workhorse and Dolores to be used as a snitch despite being as pretty and slender as Isabella with her long, straight/wavy hair. Let’s not get into how Mirabel’s lack of powers can be an allegory for disability, something that society has used as an excuse to dehumanize and see as “surplus”, and sadly an attitude that hasn’t gone away (environmental fascism and straws). I also wanna look at how Luisa’s body marks her as a workhorse who gets no rest or relaxation (not even on her cousin’s ceremony or sister’s engagement dinner) by her grandmother and that raggedy ass village while Isabella gets to be the ornament and how Isa getting her “imperfect” white blossoms plucked by Abuela after she stresses out stands in for the many times that women, like myself, could be doing or talking about anything but the focus is still on our looks rather than our substance. 

Not Really “Unspecial”: The film points out, like The Breakfast Club did 36 years before, it’s a grave mistake to reduce people to “the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions”. Luisa is more than the muscle, she is a sensitive and loving person who needs a rest; Mirabel lacks magic powers but she is a loving and devoted girl (too devoted, I say) with talents in parkour and fashion design; Isabella is more than the beauty queen, but is a creative agriculturalist; and Bruno is a loving man who keeps it real and a creative who acts out plays with his rats. 

5. Spencer.

A jarring and beautifully creative look at a woman struggling with her eating disorder and her dying marriage under the weight of in-laws who don’t respect her boundaries and see her as just a ornamental broodmare. We see Princess Diana in the final days of her marriage as she experiences the Christmas Holiday at Sandrigham where the family is ceremonily weighed before and after the festivities, the movie left me breathless, like texts I read for Women’s Studies classes in college and plus we need more car scenes like this in the cinema again. 

6. American Crime Story: Impeachment.

Monica Lewinsky is my dream wifey. She is also someone who dealt with having her sexuality and body bashed and demeaned in the media either as a grotesque for her fluctuating voluptuous figure (this was the age of heroin chic) or as a girl with more looks and breasts than brains or a venomous femme fatale. 

Monica’s struggle can be tied to the trope of The Bombshell, who is either adulated for her beauty (like Bill Clinton and Linda Tripp did when meeting her) or treated like an animal for her sexuality (the media fallout and how her ex lover and ex friend betrayed her); like I feel so angry for Monica to the point I wanna fight Bill, Linda, Ken Starr, David Letterman, and Jay Leno. Like I am mad that Monica, young and gorgeous and educated was raked over the coals so hard. Like people acted like she wasn’t it, then again those folks thought Hillary wasn’t hot enough for Bill (NEWSFLASH: From what I saw some Gen Z thought young Hillary looked like Sabrina Carpenter, who is Disney Star pretty, while Bill is meh in presentation); how could they see Monica with that broad, gleaming smile, those soft cheeks, the babylike skin, the long and thick shiny hair that was the hottest thing to have in the 90s, the square jawline that made Brooke Shields launch a standard of beauty that lasted more than a decade, the full lush lips that no amount of collagen injections could replicate, the green eyes with the dark lashes, symmetrical face that fit most Western standards of beauty, and the curvaceous figure with breasts and hips and everything....but she was made to feel bad about those features because she grew up in Beverly Hills where (as Mo’Nique said) they prefer knitting needles with boob jobs to hourglasses and pears. Let’s not get into how every woman in Bill Clinton’s orbit was look shamed in the media: maybe his Momma, Hillary, Chelsea, Betty Currie (like Linda was portrayed in drag on SNL, but funny we don’t get much shine on that), Monica, Paula Jones (despite being one half of Ugly Guy, Hot Wife, was shamed into a nose job), Linda Tripp (hack hack hack), Janet Reno. 

As an aside, as much as I loathe the late Linda Tripp (my TikTok could be considered a Linda Tripp Hate account), the mocking of her looks skewed as fatphobic and transmisogynistic. We can talk about what a shitty person she was and make fun of her without throwing marginalized people under the bus, people. Plus she is a look at how the Plain Jane type can have the potential of churning her bitterness over rejection into directing it at other women, especially prettier women. Hurt people, hurt people and I believe that Linda was a Karen of the highest order, a lady in waiting to Carolyn Bryant and a DUFF to Yolanda Salvidar with Phyllis Schlafly’s raggedy weave. 

I was a kid then and I wondered what pretty Monica, who looked like a movie star had to do with the President. Good thing I didn’t know how bad it was, would’ve made me wanna die. I’m so happy she is telling her story, which is why we are all here today.

Now I think we need to end this post with this bop to carry out your day

#body image #intersectionality #feminism #intersectional feminism #race #gender #disability #eating disorders #diet culture #women in media #never have i ever #why women kill #the babysitters club #encanto #spencer #impeachment acs #princess diana #monica lewinsky #linda tripp #hillary clinton #betty currie #chelsea clinton #paula jones #fatphobia #classism #the proud family louder and prouder #penny proud

[zukump3]

fixated ✰ s. aizawa

aizawa takes interest after you, but he doesn’t really know how to go about it.

genre: fluff, some smut in the second part! fem!reader

warnings: two parter!! aizawa has a CRUSHHHH, he pins after you heavily, counselor!reader. zawa used to have a thing with ms joke, black!reader

a/n: this idea was super cute so i had to write it. i hope you guys like it!!

requested: yes!!

part 2 (coming soon)

Aizawa has never been one for dating. Honestly, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had a relationship.

Back in high school, when he sat in the very desks his students sat in, he was often teased at by Mic about getting a partner. The hero tried to set him up on dates, give random people his number and all types of other methods, but Aizawa was just never interested. No one really caught his attention that way... until Fukukado came along.

She was everything he despised. She was loud, she talked too much, and she never took anything serious. But somehow she made her way into his cold heart and he indulged in her.

He enjoyed his time with her. Underneath all that goofiness she was a sweet woman who cared deeply for her job and her students. Aizawa felt emotions he had never felt with her, and was a bit peeved when they split. However, they remained friends. Since then, he hasn’t bothered dating with anyone.

“Have you seen the new counselor?!” Aizawa opened one eye to see Kaminari and Sero gushing as they entered the class. “She’s sooo hot. And she’s foreign!”

“Doesn’t she speak English and Japanese fluently though? She’s smart and attractive, jeez.” Sero huffed, and Aizawa furrowed his brow, zipping down his zipper on his yellow sleeping bag.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Miss L/N!” They both yelled, making Aizawa blink. “She’s our new counselor. She said parents were complaining that the students mental health wasn’t being cared about enough, so U.A hired her. She’s from America too.”

“America.” Aizawa groaned. He already had an image in his own eyes—a stereotypically one, but oh well. You probably had blonde hair and blue eyes. There was probably nothing special about you at all. His students weren’t as used to foreigners, so of course they would find you attractive.

Throughout the entire day he kept hearing his students chatter about you. About how kind you were, how pretty your voice sounded, how you looked so unique. He was getting peeved—why was everyone so hung up on you?

He carried the thought with him until the end of the day, when he headed down the hall to what seemed to be your room, just as you were leaving.

And—wow. He really understood why everyone was talking about you.

You weren’t blonde haired, blue eyed at all. Your hair was in a fluffy afro, like Mina’s but kinkier. You had the most supple brown skin and dark eyes that lit up when they caught his. His eyes widened a bit at just how radiating you seemed, your multi colored lips raising into a smile.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Aizawa! I’m L/N,” you spoke, your hand pushing out to shake his. He shook your hand silently, noting at how warm your palm was against his cold one. “I’ve heard a lot about you from your students!”

“You’ve met them?” he asked, voice deep with shock.

“Ahh, well, they kind of pranked me earlier,” you said sheepishly. “They came banging on my door and said there was a fire, and that I needed to leave as soon as I could. But then they said they were just joking when I was about to jump out my window,” you laughed, shaking your head. “They’re pretty goofy huh?”

Aizawa couldn’t help but note at how good your Japanese was. He knew English and Japanese were two different languages—you must’ve been pretty smart and hardworking to learn it.

“Well, I have to go do paperwork at my apartment-hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?” you smiled once again. Aizawa only nodded and then you were off, with his eyes burning into your back.

His fists clenched. You were much more attractive than he originally imagined. But he wasn’t going to indulge—he knew that would only end badly.

Right?

The next day, Aizawa heard the same chatter about you. And the next. And the next. He didn’t see you again until about a week later, when he saw you chatting with Midnight and Mic in the lunch line. He cringed—the two were notorious for gossiping and he really hoped they weren’t telling you anything stupid.

“And then I—aye yo, Zawa! Good afternoon! Have you met L/N?!” Mic screamed, and Aizawa’s eyes went to meet yours ago. Your hair was styled differently to the point where he could see your eyes better, and it framed your face so nicely. You waved at him and he smiled sheepishly.

“We were just talking about our high school days~” Midnight’s voice rang out. “American high school is reaaaally different from Japanese high school, according to L/N.”

“The students here are really well behaved, especially in Aizawa’s class,” you smiled at him. “You’re doing a damn good job with them. They’re some of the most charming students I’ve seen! The ones in American high school can be really rude and nasty... I haven’t experienced any of that here. It’s nice.”

Aizawa breathed shakily. Thank god his students weren’t embarrassing him.

“L/N here’s got a degree in psychology and all that mental stuff!” Mic yelled once again as you all moved down the lunch line. “She understands da brain! We really needed someone like her here, with all the breakdowns our students have!”

Aizawa huffed. Teachers, too.

“I’m here for everyone,” you spoke. “Students, teachers, even the Recovery Girl if she’s got a lot on her mind. I’m just here to help everybody as much as I can.”

“Aizawa needs some of that help fo sure!” Mic yelled, smiling so hard all of his long, white teeth showed. “Motherheffa never talks to anyone about his feelings, keeps em balled up! That’s not healthy!”

Aizawa’s ears turned red. “No, I don’t need-“

“I’ll help ya!” you offered, moving so your body was right next to his. He couldn’t help but inhale your scent—it was strong and sweet, something he’d never smelled before. “Don’t worry—whatever we discuss in my room stays in my room. It’s something I pledged to do when I became a therapist.”

Aizawa laughed nervously, shaking his head. “I really don’t-“

“It’s okay if you don’t wanna have a session immediately, no worries,” you shrugged. “But I’m here whenever you need me. I have more work to do later, but I’ll see you guys later!”

And then you were off, with Aizawa’s eyes still on your back.

“You’re staring pretty hard Aizawa,” Midnight raised perfectly done eyebrows. “She’s pretty—I would stare too.”

“Be quiet.” He spluttered, his ears still red as he made his way back to his classroom to eat.

Another week had passed of Aizawa admiring you from afar. You always came into work with a smile on your face, greeting students with handshakes and hugs—the hugs threw him off a bit, but Kaminari told him it was an “American thing.” He didn’t know how much he would daydream about it until he started to long for hugs from you, thinking of how your arms would wrap around his middle before class.

He wasn’t obsessed with you, no, but rather infatuated. You were intelligent and easy to approach, and your appearance matched your personality. He was attracted to you but due to him not having a relationship in years and also not having the best social skills, he had no idea how to approach you. He didn’t even know much about you. His students knew you more than he did and you were his age! It made no sense.

Time after time during the third week of you being here he tried to talk to you. During lunch, when Midnight and Mic would force you all to sit together, he would want to open his mouth but he couldn’t. He’d come by your room to start conversations after school but the most he’d say was “have a good evening, L/N.” and leave you alone. He even found your social media and took a quick look through your pictures—leaving your page when he saw you in a bikini, his cheeks red.

By the time the fourth week came around, his students and his work buddies were noticing his changes in behavior. He was getting distracted much more than before and whenever someone would mention your name he’d go scarily silent and look deep in thought. It wasn’t until Mina chatted with the rest of the Bakusquad that his students actually began to do something about it.

“Miss L/N!” you heard Jirou’s voice rang out from your doorway, with some other students from Class 1-A coming in behind you. “Good evening~”

“Good evening Jirou! Hey everyone,” you smiled warmly at the students that were entering your classroom, confused as how many of them were coming in. “What’s up...?”

You had formed a pretty close relationship with the class of 1-A during your short time here. You had sessions with most of them and got to know their personalities and feelings pretty well—even Bakugo, who was closed up and rude at first, but eventually shed a few tears in your room.

“Mr. Aizawa said he needed your help with planning lessons today—he said he’s asked everyone else and they’re all busy,” Mina told you, and your brows furrowed in confusion. Aizawa needs help from... you? That was odd. “He needs you to come by as soon as possible!”

“Oh! Well, alright,” you laughed sheepishly, rubbing the back of your neck as you stood up and grabbed your phone. “Thanks for telling me—you all get to your dorms and don’t cause too much noise okay?”

You heard rings of “yes, miss l/n’s” as everyone left your room and you locked it behind you. You started to make your way to Aizawa’s classroom, your palms a little sweaty against your notebook. You hadn’t talked to Aizawa in a while and it was weird that he had requested your help, but you didn’t mind getting closer to him. Truthfully, he had been on your mind a lot the past few days—you found him pretty attractive despite his quiet demeanor. Although, you were a new teacher, and didn’t want to be involved with anyone too early in your school year.

Aizawa jumps a bit when he hears sudden loud knocks on your door, and sees your face come into view. “Good evening, Aizawa. You needed my help?”

“Huh?” Aizawa asked, his face twisted in confusion.

“Jirou and Mina came by and said you needed my help with lesson planning—I’m not the best with planning stuff to teach but I don’t mind offering my assistance,” you offered him your normal, gentle smile. “So where do we start?”

Mina and Jirou? Ugh. Of course they would tell you that.

“Um-um-well,” he stuttered, his face already starting to heat up. “I just need a new quirk training game... yeah. That’s why I need help with.” Fuck. He hoped that sounded believable.

“Okay!” you nodded, suddenly taking a seat that was in the corner of the room and sitting right. Next. To. Him. He had to clench his fists to keep his cool, not used to such an attractive woman being so close to him at all. “Where should we start?”

He spent two hours with you discussing new games to play with his students that would also train their quirks, and those were some of the best two hours of his life.

He so enjoyed the time he spent with you. You were so easygoing and natural to talk to—he didn’t feel awkward or nervous talking to you which is what he feared he would feel in the first place. He cracked more smiles with you in the span of two hours than he did the whole week.

“You can’t just make them play dodgeball with their quirks! They’ll get hurt!”

“We have a Recovery Girl for a reason.” Aizawa rolled his eyes, smirking at the glare he got from you.

“Still! You know some of them—Bakugo—are going to take out their anger on other students,” you huffed.

“But it’ll be fun to watch?”

You were quiet for a moment, but inevitably started smirking along with him. “...you’re right. It will be.”

Together, the both of you planned for Class 1-A dodgeball, with you and Aizawa as the referees. You two even planned to go by the outfits together—and now he was out at a sporting store with you, looking for a fucking black and white striped shirt. He couldn’t believe this.

“I’ve never worn one of these before—you think I’ll look cute in it?” you asked him, raising your eyebrows repeatedly and he couldn’t help but chuckle gently at your antics. “I’m serious!”

“I’m sure you will F/N,” he told you, not even noticing his slip up until a few moments later. “I—I meant-“

“So we’re on second base huhhhh? Don’t worry, I’ve accidentally called you Shota a few times to Mic and Midnight. I’m not used to calling people by their last names, we don’t do that in America.”

“You talk about me?” Aizawa couldn’t help but feel a little proud of the fact.

“What?! Of course not, no.” you quickly shook your head, and he grinned at the flustered look on your face. “The only thing I tell them about is how you need more sleep. Your brain doesn’t function correctly on a small amount of sleep.”

“My brain doesn’t function correctly at all.”

“Wrong. You’re pretty smart, Aizawa. Pretty understanding too,” you hummed, you two walking through the aisles so you could get whistles. “Your students are always telling me how much you care about them, even though you don’t show it. They really appreciate you you know?”

He was expressionless, but his heart did warm a little bit at your words. “I know.”

You two bought the items and soon enough you were back at the school. You got out of his car, sending him a wave and a quick goodbye before heading to your own car, and Aizawa let out the longest sigh of his life.

“Shit.”

#bnha x poc!reader #bnha x reader #mha x reader #mha fluff #bnha #bnha fluff #mha fic #bnha fic #aizawa #shoto aizawa #shota aizawa #aizawa x black!reader #aizawa x reader #aizawa fic #aizawa fanfiction #bnha fanfiction #mha fanfiction #aizawa fluff

[kemetic-dreams]

Introducing the West to world music, this Nigerian drummer also fought segregation with MLK, Malcolm X

From a Yoruba family in Lagos State, Nigeria, Babatunde Olatunji, while living in the U.S. after winning a scholarship to study at Morehouse College in Atlanta, wanted to become a diplomat. Thus, after graduating from Morehouse in 1954, he enrolled in the Graduate School of Public Administration and International Relations at New York University.

But two things later moved him towards a career in music. The first was his visit to Ghana as a delegate to the All African People’s Conference organized by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, who told him he thinks he should be a cultural ambassador. The second was his meeting with Columbia Records producer John Hammond after a concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Hammond would help Olatunji produce his 1959 debut Drums of Passion album which some say may have been the first African music release recorded in a modern U.S. studio.

That album became a major hit, selling millions of copies globally and helping introduce Americans to world music. Olatunji would go on to promote African music, earning a Grammy nomination, being behind compositions for Broadway and Hollywood, as well as appearing on programs including the Tonight Show, the Mike Douglas Show and the Bell Telephone Hour.

In 1964, after performing at the New York World Fair’s African Pavilion, he used the proceeds to open his own Olatunji Center for African Culture in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, where he offered classes in African dance, music, language, folklore, and history. Soon, Olatunji became highly recognized as a pioneer in the fusion of African music and jazz. “…We were playing ‘Afro-jazz’ before anybody called it that,” the recording artiste, who grew up in a fishing village in Nigeria where drumming accompanied every celebration, recalled in an interview.

But while his contribution to music is well known, his commitment to social activism is rarely talked about. “He really deserves to be remembered more for his role as a political activist in the US civil rights movement – before it was even a movement,” Robert Atkinson, who collaborated with Olatunji on his autobiography The Beat of My Drum, was quoted by the BBC in a report. Indeed, Olatunji’s social activism work started right from his days at Morehouse, where he debunked common myths about Africa.

“They [classmates] had no concept of Africa,” he recalled. “They asked all kinds of questions: ‘Do lions really roam the streets? Do people sleep in trees?’ They even asked me if Africans had tails! They thought Africa was like the Tarzan movies. Ignorance is bliss, but it is a dangerous bliss. “Africa had given so much to world culture, but they didn’t know it.”

Thus, Olatunji started educating his colleagues about Africa, including its cultural traditions and music. He then went ahead to play African music at university social gatherings while organizing and performing at concerts featuring African and African-American students. These activities were during the height of Jim Crow, and soon, Olatunji was organizing students to challenge the status quo in the south.

Even before Rosa Parks would spark the Montgomery bus boycott, Olatunji was already staging protests on public buses with some of his fellow students.

As president of the Morehouse student body in the 1950s, he was able to meet scores of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. As a matter of fact, when King delivered his historic I Have a Dream speech in August 1963 during the March on Washington, Olatunji was among the over 200,000 people at the event. The percussionist, social activist and educator performed many times for the NAACP and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And at many civil rights rallies, Malcolm X would request him to drum. The man, who is to date described as “the father of African drumming in the U.S.”, was also on the civil rights jazz album We Insist! with playwright Oscar Brown Jr and Max Roach. Back home in Africa, Olatunji was also a part of the anti-colonial resistance movements that had risen across the continent, attending the All African People’s Conference organized by Nkrumah.

The conference, attended by delegates from African countries, prominent African Americans and liberation movements, held discussions on how to achieve continental freedom. Nkrumah had argued that Ghana’s independence would be meaningless if other African states are still colonized by the European powers, and Olatunji couldn’t agree more.

As stated in a report, his involvement in the civil rights movement in the U.S. was largely inspired by the several forms of resistance to colonialism that was occurring in Africa. “He saw himself as a pan-Africanist who always reached out to unify Africans and African Americans,” his wife, Iyafin Ammiebelle Olatunji, told BBC in an interview.

Olatunji in his last years continued to perform while teaching others about African culture and drumming. Before he passed away in 2003 aged 76, he had become known for recordings such as “Celebrate Freedom, Justice and Peace”, “Healing Rhythms, Songs and Chants”, as well as the 1998 Grammy-nominated release, on Chesky Records of “Love Drum Talk”.

#chesky records #olatunji #pan african #african #africans #bbc #african american #malcolm x #max roach #oscar brown jr #nkrumah #iyafin #kemetic dreams #dr martin luther king jr