I am a person. Represent me as such.

Blacking it up does an interview with occupy the hood

very good stuff on representation /a place for poverty in the occupy movement /posers/ protesting for protests sake/ real talk / how to start something when you have no money otherwise known as the hustle and my favorite community gardens in the hood!!!!!

@occupy the hood  on twitter

So the last what three of four big stories going around have been

• rue hate in the hunger games
• trayvon martin shooting
• anna detainment and death

These all have the exact same underlying thread of cultural bias. So as much as is saddens me pisses me off, kills me that they occurred. The fact that they occurred at the same time has allowed some people to connect the dots.

•   Rue’s character was portrayed as innocent above all else and therefore was not in the eyes’ of American culture - and perhaps others, black. Because black = guilty and white innocent. These are the cultural associations the media those in positions of power put into our brain. As a result actors can not get certain jobs and when they do they get them they are mercilessly attacked for it, even when they are small children.   

• No one knows innocent can never be seen as black more than any young black man in America. The world now knows that Trayvon was unjustly murdered and his killer roams free, what they do not know is that this is a systematic engineered distrust and fear of the black male. Ask yourself how you can live in a society in which everyone you meet thinks you are going to hurt them. The answer is of course you can’t you will be isolated, people will treat you differently, refuse to associate with you, and in turn try to hurt you themselves. People have tried to blame hoodies, Zimmerman’s individual racism, gun control legislation. We need proper gun control laws in this country but the real culprit, the true reason any of this shit ever happens .The fault lies squarely on the media, for peoples’ career’s for people’s lies. This is what happens when you single out and brand an entire group of people as untrustworthy or just flat out unworthy of respect. If only it were one group.

• Anna Brown was refused hospital service and care because she was homeless. Because she was poor (and maybe black) they assumed she was on drugs. She wasn’t. There was never any evidence of drugs ever. She was drug tested regularly- without any reason- after they took her children away. She was never on any drugs. They took her kids because she was poor and couldn’t afford gas, water, or electricity so they said she was an unfit mother. She couldn’t afford these things because a tornado came and took her fucking house away, and then she lost her job. In this economy imagine that. She was suspected to be unsavory because she had no money to pay for things and she needed help. There was some evidence of mental instability which could most likely be attributed to extreme fucking stress for having a tornado take your house and the state take your kids and you’re are now homeless- I’d be a little upset of that shit happened to me. Most of all the police were angry because they except absolute obedience and when she got belligerent after for what must have felt like an eternity getting the crap kicked out her, well the police are trained to lord over civilians. 

These preconceived notions that we have in our head are just that, preconceived. Before they come near us they were fabricated and sold to us by the main stream media, who are either

lazy and would go with a convenient story,

greedy, and would alter the facts to fit into some narrative to sell more shit

culpable, and put good people in bad places for their own ends

They no longer concern themselves with the truth, only on what makes them money, and keeps them in position. They will happily paint, poor, black, differently abled, and [insert non-normative behavioral aspect here] any way they chose and have you take it as truth. Normally no ones care but now you can clearly see the consequences of such actions, Namely, people’s lives.

Representation matters. These are not tragedies, there are people who must be held responsible, they are in your TV’s, your magazines, your radio’s, your billboards, your computers they sell you wars over seas and conflict in your neighborhoods. They are the media conglomerate run by old rich cis-white males who don’t give a damn about how what they produce effects everybody else- or even other cis-white males for that matter. They do this for money and position, without regard for others. They are not your friends. Turn them off, don’t buy them off the shelves, tune in to independent sources who are accountable to the people. We are all affected, we are all people. 

TYT , specifically JR Jackson

Kicks Ass in this news coverage

»»representation of homeless persons, people in poverty black people