matt and kim - daylight
broken social scene - 7/4 shoreline
OAKLAND: Turning Towards Each Other: Communication Skills for Queer People of Color
Turning Towards Each Other is an accessible, free space for queer people of color to concretely build and practice skills for generative, supportive and loving relationships and community. Many of us know the kind of relationships we want to have with each other, but we don’t know how to make them happen. We often have good intentions and analysis about communication, but lack actual skills. Many of us are continually frustrated each time we don’t hold conflict well, don’t listen well, don’t know how to share or stay connected to the very people we love.
This will be a series of sessions to practice communication skills with each other. Together, we will learn and practice different communication activities, techniques and tools. We will start with the basics (listening and sharing) and practice, practice, practice. We will discuss why communication is important and create concrete tools for our relationships. This is not a space for therapy; it is a practice space.
We invite people to come with someone in their life with whom they would like to practice better communication with. We would like folks to be able to use the skills/tools we practice in real time, with real people in their lives. Communication is an ever-evolving process and skill set. We encourage folks to attend with someone who is committed to growing that process and skill set together. Folks will practice with the person they came with as often as possible.
This is a space for friends, coworkers, chosen family, platonic life partners, political partnerships, romantic friendships, mentors and mentees, housemates, comrades and more who identify as queer people of color. We expect people to register in pairs and ask that people not partner with folks they are “coupled” with or in sexual romantic relationships with. (We would like to prioritize non-sexual relationships, given the dominance of sexual and sexually romantic relationships in our communities.) Couples are welcome to attend, but we ask that you each attend with someone in your life whom you are in a non-sexual relationship with and whom you would like to work on communication with.
We will meet at least once a month, at most bi-monthly, beginning in June. You do not have to come to every session. All sessions are open to any queer people of color who would like to attend.
Our first session will be June 30th from 1pm – 4pm at 6206 Baker St., Oakland.
Please RSVP to totheothersideofdreaming@gmail.com, so we can provide enough food and seating space. RSVPs are encouraged, but not required.
All sessions are free and there will be food. If you’re down to help with food and/or logistics, please email totheothersideofdreaming@gmail.com. This is a community-run and supported series; all resources are donated.
This space is wheelchair accessible and there is ample street parking. There are 6 steps up to the front of the house and a ramp to the back door. Please refrain from wearing scented products (lotions, perfume/cologne, hair products, laundry detergent). If you have any access needs or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out and we can figure it out together!
Turning Towards Each Other: Communication Skills for Queer People of Color is organized by To the Other Side of Dreaming.
excerpt from ‘Dearest Creature’
“Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
Spin many nests. Cultivate stinging
bristles. Don’t get sentimental
about your discarded skins. Grow
quickly. Develop a yen for nettles.
Alternate crumpling and climbing. Rely
on your antennae. Sequester poisons
in your body for use at a later date.
When threatened, emit foul odors
in self-defense. Behave cryptically
to confuse predators: change colors, spit,
or feign death. If all else fails, taste terrible.””
- Amy Gerstler
Here are some pictures of the “Angola Prison rodeo”, where prisoners compete to win packs of smokes and a few bucks. By sitting in a poker table while a bull charges them. The goal? To get the poker chip hanging off its horns.
These people aren’t cowboys, or glorified participants in a well respected tournament. These prisoners are shuffled over to this thing to be trampled by raging bulls for SMOKES, and maybe a hundred bucks. This is not something that would happen to anyone other than prisoners, and is part of an institution that systematically devalues their worth as people.
The rodeo rakes in millions of dollars a year, and that’s just the beginning of how shady the place is:That year, the rodeo produced $2,463,822 in revenue.But for all the hair-raising moments, the most unsettling part may be the strange symbolism of the opening pageantry. Putting a Confederate flag in a black man’s hands on a former slave plantation seems a little too deliberate for an institution that claims to have shed its darker past.
“I have always said, and I continue to say, that if slavery had persisted up until 2010, into the modern day, that would probably have been a well-run slave plantation,” Wilbert Rideau says. “I think it would have evolved into what exists right now at Angola.” We’re in his living room in Baton Rouge, with his wife, Linda.
Angola was a plantation first, housing slaves who cut sugar cane for the master. At the end of the 19th century it evolved into a prisoner lease system, with sentenced prisoners being rented to area companies. In 1901, Angola officially became a state-operated penitentiary, but in name only. It remained a plantation, with prisoners crowded into large wooden buildings and working from sunup to sundown in sugar cane and cotton fields—rain or shine, 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week.
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011…ana_prison.html“Angola is disturbing every time I go there,” Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. “It’s not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what’s going on.
Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.ETA: the colorlines link above doesn’t work, but here is another article they wrote about it.
ETA2: the redphoenix link doesn’t either. here’s the actual article.
there is no way that the racism of the prison-industrial complex could get any more obvious than this.
for the love of fucking god.
(via seanpadilla)
snailhouse - clean water
big drill car - no worse for wear
THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL HOUSE
THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE
