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Let’s stop this facade that we are a beacon of tolerance. I don’t need you to “tolerate” me. I don’t want you to merely put up with my presence. All I ask, all I have ever asked, is to be treated as a human being, that bigoted jingoism is not injected into every minute facet my life, that there remains at least the illusion of decency.

…

So, I no longer want a seat at your restaurant, where you serve me begrudgingly, where I am belittled for asking for food without pork, where I endure your dirty looks at my hijabi friend. I want my pride intact, I want this struggle of mine to be recognized, for you to look me in the eye and acknowledge that yes, this tumor called bigotry is indeed rivering through your veins, polluting your mind, and is so malignant that it compels you to squash my dignity.

It’s the little indignities that slowly devastate your soul. The ones where your guard is down, and you just expect to dress up, look pretty, and enjoy an evening as a newlywed, or at the Oscars, but instead end up humiliated and snubbed. The ubiquitous racist slap in the face is thinly veiled just beneath the carefully crafted façade. This filthy, highly infectious plague is transforming our nation into one of unwarranted suspicion and anguish inflicted on disenfranchised, voiceless people of color. And now, it is no longer my job to enlighten you. To quote what you so often tell ethnic communities, “It’s time for you to step up to the plate, take responsibility, and stop taking what I have earned,” my integrity, my dignity.

—Seema Jilani, My Racist Encounter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (via versaria)

Being a vegan while living in the United States food system is a class issue. It is also a choice. Having celiac’s disease is not a choice. Processed food is cheaper (especially in urban areas) than fresh food, and processed food is rarely vegan. A healthy vegan diet takes a lot of money and time - something that working class people in urban areas don’t have a lot of. You make some good points - everyone eats vegetables, historically, meat has been a status symbol (it’s not anymore, not in the US, land of the dollar menu - which, by the way, is where many poor people can turn in order to get the calories they need to work in demanding, physical labor-intensive jobs at a price they can afford). The original argument was about some privileged people, including vegans, who try to act like their diet made them morally superior in some way to people who don’t eat it. Not all vegans are like that - but your response shows a lack of awareness about how things like food deserts work. Being vegan is a choice, and it’s one that is often dictated by class. —Seriously, USA?:   (via veruca-assault)

thinksquad:

“Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? You know why? Because there’s no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick!”

—George Carlin

When you’re a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don’t even think things are low art. I don’t believe in that. Low art is something racist or something. —

Patrick Stump 

(from this interview)

I love lipstick. I want to write an essay about the politics of lipstick. I like lipstick that’s deep, deep red. I like lipstick that’s purple, lipstick that’s black and dark for when I want to dress up my melancholy. I like sharing lipstick with sisters. And I laugh at boys that think I wear lipstick for them to notice, I laugh, lipstick is an art you can’t ever understand. From picking out a color, testing it on the inside of my wrist, pursing my lips during the application of it. I like when I kiss a baby and leave lipstick on their cheek, when you hug someone and leave lipstick on their shirt, when it gets on your teeth and you use your tongue to get it off, when you sleep in lipstick and wake up with it on your pillow case. In 1997, Mama left for Ethiopia to see her mama for the first time in twelve years. I was six and I cried the entire way home from the airport. And when we came home there on the kitchen table was the teacup Mama had been drinking out of. At the bottom a sip of tea and black cardamom seeds, there on the rim of the cup the lipstick imprint of my mama’s kiss. —Nomad Manifesto  (via perfumedsecrets)

…throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.’ —Friedrich Nietzsche (via myhorancanpiercethesky)

The real message of “Friday Night Lights” is a message about the joy of little things: the awkward thrills of a first kiss; the strange blessing of an unexpected rainstorm on a lonely walk home from a rough football practice; the startling surge of nostalgia incited by the illumination of football-stadium lights just as the autumn sun is setting; the rush of gratitude, in an otherwise mundane moment, that comes from realizing that this (admittedly flawed) human being that you’re squabbling with intends to have your back for the rest of your life. “Friday Night Lights” embraces the rough edges, the fumbling, the understated beauty and uncertainty of the everyday. It’s rare for a TV show to acknowledge that happiness is a fragile, transient thing. Although the tenure of “Friday Night Lights” may have proved just as fleeting, its exquisite snapshots of ordinary life won’t fade from our memories so quickly. —The New York Times  (via monkeyknifefight)

I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night   (via wizlaqueefa)

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”

We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move. Sometimes the battle becomes so violent that a perversion in the artist can occur: these days, Joni Mitchell thinks of herself more as a painter than a singer. She is so allergic to the expectations of her audience that she would rather be a perfectly nice painter than a singer touched by the sublime. That kind of anxiety about audience is often read as contempt, but Mitchell’s restlessness is only the natural side effect of her artmaking, as it is with Dylan, as it was with Joyce and Picasso. Joni Mitchell doesn’t want to live in my dream, stuck as it is in an eternal 1971 - her life has its own time. There is simply not enough time in her life for her to be the Joni of my memory forever. The worst possible thing for an artist is to exist as a feature of somebody else’s epiphany. —Zadie Smith, “Some Notes On Attunement: A Voyage Around Joni Mitchell,” The New Yorker, December 17, 2012 (via tiona.m)

Depression is a good lover. So attentive. Has this innate way of making everything about you. —Kait Rokowski, ” A Good Day” (via larmoyante)

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. —Nick Carraway (via partyanimalliberationfront)

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. —

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

(via canned-peas)

High school, it seems, has changed. It has become competitive. Young men and women — 13 to 18 years old — must work more or less tirelessly to ensure their spot at a college deemed worthy to them and their families. So rather than living their adolescent lives — lives brimming with desires and vitality, with vim, vigor, and brewing lust — these kids are working at old age homes, cramming for tests, popping Adderall just to make the literal and proverbial grade. And for what? So they can go to a school that puts them in debt for the rest of their lives. School has become a great vehicle of capitalism: it quashes the revolution implicit in adolescence while simultaneously fomenting perpetual indebtedness. —Daniel Coffeen (via commovente)

Don’t fool yourself. English isn’t inherently superior, or easier to learn, or more sonically pleasing. Its international usage comes from forceful assimilation and legacy of colonialistic injection. It isn’t a deed that one should take pride in. —my uncle left this comment on his friend’s Facebook status, a white British man who was bragging about how easy it is to be a native English speaker when trekking to different nations. (via maarnayeri)