cultureofresistance:

rudermensch:

Saudi student Talal al Rouki (pictured) was questioned by FBI agents after neighbours saw him carrying a pressure cooker. FBI are vigilant after Boston bombers used a pressure cooker to make an explosive.

“An FBI agent said: ‘You need to be more careful moving around with such things, Sir’ ”

#cooking while arab

Majak Daw: the first Sudanese born professional AFL player. Just saw a poster for “Majak Happens.” Also he’s adorable. 

I’m waiting for the racial vilification stuff at this level. You know it’ll happen (already happened at VFL level). 

ourcatastrophe:

for part of the time when John Howard was Prime Minister my sister happened to be working for the Japanese government, and once she met the Japanese Minister for Agriculture at an official function where people had gotten a bit shitfaced

and he said “so… I met your Prime Minister…”

and she was like “yeah, he’s a nong, we’re really embarassed, sorry”

and he laughed and said “ok man one time he was busting our balls trying to get us to buy more Australian rice, which, whatever, we don’t need more Australian rice”

“so I pretended to speak English really badly”

“and patted my stomach and said ‘very sorry, Japanese have only small stomachs! we cannot eat so much rice!’”

“and he totally fell for it!  man, what an idiot”

cryyyying

princessnijireiki:

remember that one time sir patrick stewart really wanted to play othello because othello is gr9

and so his solution was to do a racially flipped cast of othello and he hired all black actors for the rest of the story so he wasn’t being mr. all the time white dudes while at the same time providing opportunities not often available in theater for black actors to fill the stage, incl. an interracial relationship w. a black woman who was presented as desirable

without changing the original text and having “an increased emphasis on abuse against women”

…this was in 1997

just throwin’ that out there

Nineteen-year-old Tarikuwa Lemma is a survivor, of an international adoption scandal. When she was 13, she was effectively sold from her native Ethiopia to an American family. The corrupt “adoption agency” convinced her father, who was a widow, that Tarikuwa and her younger sisters were headed to the U.S. as part of an educational exchange program, and that they would return home every summer and on holiday breaks. Little did he know, his daughters had been placed with adoptive couples in the U.S., never to return. Tarikuwa’s name was changed against her will, and she was forbidden by her American “family” from speaking her native language.

The issue of transnational adoption, its evangelical Christian component, and the exploitation of communities that sometimes results, is the subject of the book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce, who appeared, along with Tarikuwa, on last Sunday’s “Melissa Harris Perry” show on MSNBC.

Here’s Tarikuwa’s satirical look at the “rescue” of children from her home country, to “better lives” in America:

“It is a tragedy to travel to this deeply historical country of Ethiopia. We see the streets, the roads, the shack doors, crowded with poor Ethiopian mothers, women who have been collecting whatever scraps they can find to feed their hollow-eyed children. Teenagers, living on their own on the streets, shoot their own looks of desperation. Ethiopian men lie on the ground with exhaustion from not having been fed for days, for instead of eating, they feed whatever tiny amounts of food they get to their children.

I think it is agreed by all parties overseas that we should come up with a solution to help Ethiopian children we see on a late night TV programs: children with flies on their faces, no clothes, no food or water, begging for families to sponsor or adopt them. It is time that America comes up with an easy and simple solution to save all these children.”

Click here to read the rest at The Grio.

aamerrahman:

At the ‘Bollywood’ themed industry party I went to last night, I decided to hold a ‘Best Costume’ contest. These are some of the finalists, who were all happy to have their photos taken. Click through for my comments.

 

ardhra:

US-centrism is people in Australia following the US news cycle incessantly about violence in Boston, but having no awareness of violence in Bangalore, and simply being desensitised to violence in Baghdad.

elaran:

Thank you for the helpful advice fb but Australia is already stuck with me

i want to say something witty and insightful but i can’t 

thesavagesalad:

shespeaksoflove:

I also don’t trust white people in this country because of the Pacific Islander slave trade that was going on in Australia from 1842-1904, which til this day is either ignored or in describing it, words like recruited, encouraged and employed are used. When in reality South Sea Islanders were coerced, kidnapped, forced, and sold. Slavery by any other name, is still slavery. 

And the only reason this stopped is because of the ‘white Australia’ policy that was brought into place to try and keep Australia for white people. When thousands of the men and women who were stolen from their homes, were returned, some being returned to the wrong Island (because brown and black people are all the same to white people) and others dying on the journey home. 

Also, to add on to this is that during the period of labour that was forced onto Pacific Islanders, many of those people did settle down and have families with Indigenous communities in the places that they were made to work.
 They had already built new lives for themselves, with the means that were given to them- they had families and new identities, so when the white supremacist policy took place, not  only were these people displaced AGAIN but they were FORCED to leave their families AGAIN there for harming their own community but also the Indigenous communities in those areas.

Australian history is a load of fuckery and so is the federation that this nation is founded upon and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

littleredridingcat:

you can attain native fluency when people pull their eyes up at the corners and call you “Ching chong Chinese girl” when white people tell you “go back where you came from” when the asshole on the bus tells you your breakfast “smells like shit” when you’re too embarrassed to speak your native tongue in public with your parents when you’ve lost so much of it you can’t be called “fluent” anymore and instead have to sit by and watch pretentious white boys write papers in Chinese and Japanese and get called “cultured” “educated” “worldly” when you’re too embarrassed to introduce your aunt to your friends because she doesn’t speak their language when you’ve forgotten all the words. when you try to study it in college to pick it up again. when it’s not your area of focus or study and you speak it anyway, you whisper it in your head and translate coworker conversations, looking for the right phrasing. when you smile at the lady who works the dumpling cart, call her aiyi and have her eyes crinkle in a smile only shared between two people of the same background, to have her tell you that you’re welcome back any time in a warm voice like your mother’s. 

kittening:

indian and hindu women apparently aren’t inspiring enough to be featured on a bindi blog.

vintar:

roachpatrol:

Okayyy disclaimer I’m neither Australian nor aboriginal, so this is some second hand stuff, but hey America does deeply shitty things to its own native populations so it’s pretty easy to spot when we’re doing it to other people’s! 

Read More

when I read the part about creating Australia as a haven for rabbits I think my body automatically tried to turn inside out with rage

they are the number one invasive vertebrate villain here. number one! they have driven dozens of species to extinction or endangerment by out-competing natives for food and shelter, destroying soil stability, spreading weeds, and facilitating the spread of cats and foxes and feral dogs (because rabbits with their crazy reproduction rates can shrug off feral predation, but their native counterparts just plain can’t)

but no, sure, dress up the worst ecological disaster to happen to this country* as a cute thing, go for it

*amongst other things (original post does say besides people but yes)

it’s funny the things that make me mad

like the rabbit in this movie

i watched the trailer for this and got really super angry about the boomerang and it all went downhill from there 

otaachimow:

girljanitor:

I actually kind of felt like this deserved a post on its own because I think not many people realize that the demand for quinoa, which provides a ridiculously expensive source of all the essential amino acids and central to the “new” vegan diet, is causing near anarchy in Bolivia as the prices get driven up and up.

According to one farmer quoted in the story, “Quinoa was always comida para los Indios [food for Indians.] Today it’s food for the world’s richest.”

Fights over territory previously considered worthless is now being fought over as prime land for growing the new cash crop, and have resulted in kidnappings, injuries, and bombings.

It’s also destroying the environment, since everyone is selling their llamas and planting quinoa instead, which is stripping the soil from overfarming and lack of llama poop for fertilizer.

I’m sick and tired of vegans claiming that their food exists in a vacuum. I mean, are these people THIS far removed from understanding that we all exist in nature? That your stupid fucking quinoa, your excuse to be more militant than ever, more elitist than ever, demanding everyone adhere to your dubious moral convictions, is destroying a country’s economy AND ecosystem? Because of a sudden, insatiable demand for their Indigenous peoples’ food?

Half the world’s quinoa supply is grown in Bolivia.

Also, this article doesn’t mention, but indigenous people were banned from growing quinoa for centuries by the Spanish because it was so connected to their spiritual traditions and ceremonies. They denigrated it as heathen Indian food. So the native people weren’t allowed to eat their own traditional food. And then suddenly white people want quinoa, so now the indigenous people are FORCED to make so much of it it’s destroying their country, but they STILL can’t eat it because it’s all expensive and produced for foreigners.