i just read Performing Blackness Won't Fill Our Asian-American Culture Deficit op ed on colorlines and i think its an article u would find interesting!!

“For non-Black Asian Americans who actually did grow up in Black neighborhoods, it’s one thing to absorb their culture, it’s another to monetize and exploit Blackness. They are effectively being rewarded for Blackness in a way that Black people are not.

Second, Asian Americans resent the model minority stereotype because we often feel it obscures our suffering and flattens our humanity. Thus, some seek to break out of that mode not by questioning the class and racial hierarchy that we are deeply complicit in, but by extracting Blackness. Awkwafina has even said that she got into hip hop, and her associated persona, because there was something “subversive about hip hop.”

Kenyon Farrow writes in his incredible piece “We Real Cool?: On Hip-Hop, Asian-Americans, Black Folks and Appropriation”: “If first-generation White European immigrants…could use minstrelsy…to not only ensure their status as White people, but also to distance themselves from Black people, can Asian Americans use hip hop (the music, clothing, language and gestures, sans charcoal makeup), and everything it signifies to also assert their dominance over Black bodies, rather than their allegiance to Black liberation?”

Third, despite Black people discussing and writing extensively about the fact that hypervisibility does not equal privilege, the fervor around “Crazy Rich Asians” and the incessant comparisons to “Black Panther” feels like we are resentfully chasing the hypervisibility of Blackness.The fight for media representation has become one of the most prominent rallying cries among Asian Americans. But applauding performers who trade in caricatures merely asserts our feigned dominance over Blackness and our aspiration to ascend to Whiteness. If we wish to subvert White hegemony, we must step away from this imitation of Whiteness’ exploitation of Blackness.” 

Good article! 

“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

— Ocean Vuong, from “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”, published in The New Yorker

guys at my university I have a part time job where my sole responsibility is filling up the piano humidifaction systems with water

I literally am a piano waterer & tbh I kinda feel like I’m thriving

My aunt used to write horoscopes for the newspaper as a part time job. She had a friend in college who a)always read that newspapers horoscope and b)didn't know my aunt wrote it. So whenever the friend had a shitty episode my aunt would make her horoscope as positive as possible to cheer her up. Long story short they recently got married and are both my aunts now.

what do mean “long story short” give me this entire sappy gay romance novel right now 

Time to Bring Back this Classic

come on theathon thix! letth get thickeningggggggg!

the vixen: everybody’s telling me how i should react, but nobody’s telling her how to act

me:

a few words on xxxtencion

- he brutally beat a young gay man, with the intent of killing him, in a jail cell where the man had no way of escaping, because the man was staring at him

- he horrifically abused and sexually assaulted his girlfriend, including holding her head under a sink and threatening to drown her

- he beat his girlfriend to the point of blindness while she was pregnant and then used his fans to further intimidate her into not testifying against him

- then later said he wouldn’t change any of his actions.

i am sick of seeing people try to justify his actions and their “r.i.p” posts by saying “his music was good”.

i have empathy for the family and friends who knew him before he was violent and abusive but the man himself deserves no respect. he lost that right because of his actions and karma caught up with him.

the bottom line is death does not automatically give you a free pass from being a horrible person in life. 

xxxtentacion almost beat a man to death because he was gay and now he got shot during pride month

My sexuality is Cate Blanchett wearing a sky blue suit sitting like she has the biggest dick of ‘em all.

I would like to personally thank Cate Blanchett for wearing only suits for the Ocean’s 8 press junket

THE MET

Athena got a kiss on the ear and everybody else looks scandalized

“We are, after all, citizens of the world—a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico, and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafés and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”

— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

anthony bourdain was literally the reason I started in the food industry, and a lot of what I learned is how hard, how grueling those jobs are. so many cooks are depressed, in constant pain, never able to see their families and friends because of the long, odd hours. he knew that, he was there, and he was an advocate for marginalized people both in and out of the restaurant industry.

if you’ve ever heard of xi'an famous foods, it’s because he visited a tiny stall in a flushing strip mall that he loved and he put its owner front and center, allowing them to grow exponentially in the course of a few years. he treated asian cuisine with respect and understanding, was always curious and never condescending. he never overstepped the boundaries of the hospitality he was offered. he’s the only white chef I’ve ever seen who truly walked the walk, and I’m genuinely gonna miss him. the food industry is a less honest, less righteous place without tony bourdain in it.

Django Jane, 2018. instagram: @yung.yemi