🌬️🍃

“when we start to understand that a lot of these people working in law enforcement in the military are government workers, it means we bring into focus more how the economy is actually organized and what role the state plays in its organization, and what are the big functions of government jobs”

Chickens Coming Home to Roost, II — solutionsforpostmodernliving When troops are inserted into the everyday — into subway stations, tourist districts, shelters, street corners — is the aim only “restoring order”? Or is there a quieter wager at work: that somewhere,...

“insecure fascism organizes conditions under which crisis becomes likely, then retrofits those crises into proof of its own necessity

places its soldiers & surplus pops into a shared kill zone of political risk. Any rupture (shove, thrown object, pulled trigger) can be narrativized as confirmation”

"We have classrooms because you have to learn how to sustain a thought aloud— exposed to others and to your own ineloquence— to see that other people can help you reach where you can’t quite go and to see that you can help others reach better clarity…”
- Lauren Berlant to 20 y.o. about college #Lit

there’s def a raciolinguistic story there, the 90s-00s borderlands, mexican american children inspired to learn spanish (spanglish) from her crossover music felt as a return to the culture

finally watched the Selena documentary 💗

love learning her backstory, brings up childhood memories from htown, a true fighter

OP showing new ink, abstract lily flower in black and red colors

i couldn't believe what the water had told me

that man and plant had used to talk

man, i’d do anything to hear the redwoods talk

(un)documentation & (dis)identification where and for whom is the undocumented immigrant?

“we must make a nondreamer life livable, to pry open eyes to the value of the unseen. we must shake off any doubts we have when we say that we value the life of the “criminal“, that we value the life of those who invisibly survive and thrive in the u.s. in ways that aren’t considered excellence…”

still get scared of the weight 🏋🏽‍♂️

Screenshot from Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick's chapter "Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations" (2015). Text: Fanon put forward the idea of our skin/ masks, thereby of the hybridity of our being human, in 1952. Crick and Watson cracked the genetic code in 1953. Now, I argue that Fanon's masks enact a "second set of instructions": that of the sociogenic code of symbolic life/ death. Further, within the overall enactment of each such "second set of instructions," the ism of gender is itself—while only one member class —a founding member class. Gender is a founding member because in order to auto-institute ourselves as subjects of a genre-specific referent-we, we must, first, co-relatedly and perfor-matively enact each such code's "second set of instructions" at the familial level, in terms of our gender roles. We know of this brilliant concept of the performative enactment of gender from Judith Butler 6° I am suggesting that the enactments of such gender roles are always a function of the enacting of a specific genre of being hybridly human, Butler's illuminating redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun, therefore, set off bells ringing ev-erywhere! Why not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations as, in our contemporary Western/ Westernized case, in terms of, inter alia, gender, race, class/underclass, and, across them all, sexual orientation? All as praxes, therefore, rather than nouns.

"Butler’s illuminating redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun set off bells ringing everywhere! Why not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles in our contemporary Western/Westernized case, gender, race, class/underclass, sexual orientation? All as praxes rather than nouns"

OP laying in bed, a plant and lamp to the sides of the bed, a big art primary color art piece on the wall above.

if you don't go outside, well nothing's gonna happen

I am from Chicago. Friends are regularly telling us how abhorrent ICE/CBP tactics are and that it’s obvious their goal is to make everyone afraid.

I’m proud of Chicagoans for standing up to them every day.

“that excitement to ask a question differently or to see something anew is what keeps the field growing in the midst of a fed gov that is trying to erode these fields

They will not disappear bc they exist within the curiosities & the minds of people who are doing the work

We're not going anywhere”

Patrice D. Douglass - Department of Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley Podcast Episode · The Black Studies Podcast · 07/30/2025 · 1h 1m

“I see a lot of students in Black Studies really bringing disciplines to bear on having to be accountable to Black Studies in a way that I think is really important

really great to see them carving their own lanes & developing a language of engagement that is specific to their desires & concerns”

"And momentarily, they were making these challenges all together. Ah, but when you separate them, you retreat into the bourgeois order of things.

All such humanly emancipatory struggles, all then so fiercely fought for! You bring them together, and the world system had begun to question itself!"

Screenshot from Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick's chapter "Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations" (2015). Text: Now with respect to the challenges to the single biocentric model of liberal monohumanist Man, the sixties’ movements were really the first opening phase of the dynamic in which the series of “isms” (initiated by the black antiapartheid struggle for civil rights, women’s rights/feminism, indigenous and other of-color rights, gay and lesbian rights, and so forth) had erupted to challenge Man’s episteme, its truth, and therefore its biocentric descriptive statement. And momentarily, they were making these challenges all together. Ah, but when you separate them, you retreat into the bourgeois order of things. And that was the remimeticized Bovaryism trap into which we all fell.39 The sixties’ movements had begun that whole ripping apart of the emperor’s clothes—and remember, the sixties movements had been fueled by the earlier anticolonial movements all over the world, which had climaxed in Vietnam, Algeria, and elsewhere. All such humanly emancipatory struggles, all then so fiercely fought for! You bring them together, and the world system had begun to question itself!

"the sixties’ movements were really the first opening phase of the dynamic in which the series of “isms” (initiated by the black antiapartheid struggle for civil rights, women’s rights/feminism, indigenous & other of-color rights, gay & lesbian rights) erupted to challenge Man’s episteme, its truth"

🔥

screenshot of Zohran Mamdani's victory speech

"Turn. The. Volume. Up."

OP taking a mirror selfie, sitting on a dark couch in a cream colored room, colorful art and hexagonal wooden art on the wall behind OP, wearing colorful tanktop, grey pants, beige sliders

s i é n t a t e

“Mexico, the only country where he held a passport. It was a place that, to him, had ‘always felt like both a wound and a possibility’”

ditto, the thought of return has only grown sweeter

love seeing us refuse illegalization, flex our agency, to build a life on our own terms

“Is Black history American history — or does it offer a challenge to the very idea of the U.S. and the way it’s been constructed?

invitation to allow students to think bigger —not just stop at the nationalism that textbooks promote, but investigate areas of Black history that point beyond borders”

🥁 ahora, los tambores 🥁

Different tax systems for working Americans & wealthy:

Working Americans cant use charitable giving (often to nonprofits) to offset income taxes

Wealthy can use philanthropy (often to their own private charities which can hoard $) + tax benefits to eliminate wealth taxes

Public loses this revenue

Pre-1982 investors would get returns in highly taxed dividends

1982 FCC allowed companies to buy back stock (increases company value & skyrocketed stock market growth). Returns transformed from taxable dividends to non-taxable growth in company value

Mainly benefits owners, gov loses those taxes

"Income earners (working Americans, not the wealthy) are the ones that are really carrying the expenses of government

Income taxes: 50% of total federal revenue
Payroll taxes: ~35%, pays for social security & medicare
Corporate taxes: %11
Estate taxes: <.05%

“It is the continued existence of the estate tax that is serving to benefit the richest Americans, what it does is provide a cover that makes people think the wealthy are subject to taxes, when they are not/ it is riddled with loopholes”

“High wealth owners hide behind high income earners. High income earners do pay higher taxes, but wealthy are not necessarily ppl w high taxable income/ have low tax liabilities by avoiding taxes, borrowing against assets (only taxed if sold instead), & inherited wealth not subject to income taxes”

“Data & information science have been & continue to be resistant to theories like libidinal economy/critical race theory, bc they are resistant to things which are not of them/ don’t want to engage with question of how they benefit from certain structures, how to fix the problems they’ve created”

“we have named the vice in which we are held captive. The question is whether others are willing to know what we know, whether formations of knowledge & power that enabled this capture can be expected to produce something else – or whether we must rethink existence, world & Earth from the ground up”