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It is Black August, this month the heat escaping our pores reminds us of the huge segment of our community locked up for being too bad, too black too brave, too brilliant, too much in love with us. In Durham, QBG Nia reminds us to write haikus towards the freedom of all political prisoners every year this month. Here's one I wrote this morning:
assata throne out
bone in set cheek glare pierce win
love each yes nothing to lose
add your own haikus to the QBG forum:
http://quirkyblackgirls.ning.
August is also a good time of year to transform and re-energize for those of us involved in the Academic Industrial Complex (which we remember shares many of the funding sources and disciplinary purposes as the prison without forgetting the privilege that access to academic spaces grants some of us). And some of us are brave. Work is beginning on a website for black feminist scholars to supplement publication of Still Brave a Black Women's Studies reader in the tradition of ground breaking book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.
Wanna help? Email alexispauline@gmail.com!
And last but not least this week we are lifting up the Smart/Ugly conversation that has been going on for sometime on QBG. In 1977 the Combahee River Collective pointed out that:
”We discovered that all of us, because we were ”smart” had also been considered ”ugly,” i.e. ”smart-ugly.” ”Smart-ugly” crytallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop out intellects at great cost to our ”social” lives. The sanctions in the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers is comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes.”
see Kameelah Rasheed's brilliant observations and join the convo:
http://quirkyblackgirls.ning.
love,
QBG Lex
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