“When is making a short zombie film an act of protest?
When the heroes and heroines are black. When there is no Sacrificial Negro to fulfill the fantasy that our lives matter less than white lives. When there is no cooning, shucking or jiving. When no black “Spiritual Guide” exists only to ennoble and enlighten white characters. When artists and backers unite to circumvent cultural barriers to tell our own stories.
As authors and screenwriters, we never set out to become filmmakers. But after years of options, pitches and meetings, we realized Hollywood is just a money machine following the ticket-buying habits of America as a whole. It will never lead. It was time to stop waiting for Hollywood to translate our stories to screen.”– Why sci-fi power couple Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due are making a zombie movie. Read the whole thing.
#read the whole thing
“
We are not psychopaths, terminally maladjusted, forever torn between two cultures in a way that will inevitably destroy us. We are not freaks or hybrids or mongrels or circus animals, forever exhibited as examples of what can go wrong in human/alien/magical creatures relationships; neither are we featureless saints exhibited as examples of interracial/interspecies harmony.
We are not special, magical or possessed of numinous powers by virtue of our non-white/non-human blood; we are not the tamed Other, made acceptable by an infusion of white blood and white customs, the “safe” option with only a hint of fashionable exoticism and none of the raw difference of “true” foreigners. We are not a handy, non-scary substitute for diversity in fiction.
”– Aliette de Bodard rants about mixed-race tropes in recent sf/f.
io9 » The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction »
A fascinating overview of notable black sf from the 1850s to 1945, by Jess Nevins.
“Ghetto nerd” Chauncey DeVega goes to ChiCon »
This bit elicited a kind of horrified lol:
It is a bad look when a group of white folks get up and walk out of a panel on steam punk—a very white imaginary where colonialism and imperialism as global systems are conveniently white-washed—because they do not want to have their fantasy derailed or challenged.
Hazel Lee [1912-1944]
Experienced women pilots, like Lee, were eager to join the WASP, and responded to interview requests by Cochran. Members of the WASP reported to Avenger Field, in wind swept Sweetwater, Texas for an arduous 6-month training program. Lee was accepted into the 4th class, 43 W 4.[2] Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to fly for the United States military.
Although flying under military command, the women pilots of the WASP were classified as civilians. They were paid through the civil service. No military benefits were offered. Even if killed in the line of duty, no military funerals were allowed. The WASPs were often assigned the least desirable missions, such as winter trips in open cockpit airplanes. Commanding officers were reluctant to give women any flying deliveries. It took an order from the head of the Air Transport Command to improve the situation.
Upon graduation, Lee was assigned to the third Ferrying Group at Romulus, Michigan. Their assignment was critical to the war effort; Deliver aircraft, pouring out of converted automobile factories, to points of embarkation, where they would then be shipped to the European and Pacific War fronts. In a letter to her sister, Lee described Romulus as “a 7-day workweek, with little time off.” When asked to describe Lee’s attitude, a fellow member of the WASP summed it up in Lee’s own words, “I’ll take and deliver anything.”
Described by her fellow pilots as “calm and fearless,” Lee had two forced landings. One landing took place in a Kansas wheat field. A farmer, pitchfork in hand, chased her around the plane while shouting to his neighbors that the Japanese had invaded Kansas. Alternately running and ducking under her wing, Lee finally stood her ground. She told the farmer who she was and demanded that he put the pitchfork down. He complied.
Lee was a favorite with just about all of her fellow pilots. She had a great sense of humor and a marvelous sense of mischief. Lee used her lipstick to inscribe Chinese characters on the tail of her plane and the planes of her fellow pilots. One lucky fellow who happened to be a bit on the chubby side, had his plane dubbed (unknown to him) “Fat Ass.”
Lee was in demand when a mission was RON (Remaining Overnight) In a big city or in a small country town, she could always find a Chinese restaurant, supervise the menu, and often cook the food herself. She was a great cook. Fellow WASP pilot Sylvia Dahmes Clayton observed that “Hazel provided me with an opportunity to learn about a different culture at a time when I did not know anything else. She expanded my world and my outlook on life.”
Lee and the others were the first women to pilot fighter aircraft for the United States military.
Image (via World War II Database)
Text [click for full article] (via Wikipedia)
reblog with info
i know i just blogged this but here is more info
ovaries.
I need to reblog this again to point out just why I love this particular picture so. That thing he’s holding? Yeah that’s a roll of packing tape in a plastic holder. That’s a thoroughly mundane, inarguably ‘modern’ artifact. Let me tell you why that’s important.
Many of the most famous and ‘iconic’ vintage photos of NDNs are from the body of work of Edward Curtis. You probably recognize some of them:
Thing is, Edward Curtis was a fucking lying liar about NDN lives.
Curtis documented some aspects of the customs and lifestyles of American Indians of the trans-Mississippi West. The publication of Curtis’s work, highly romanticized and most craftily staged, exerted a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture. Curtis is reported to have retouched some of the photographs in order to remove modern objects, adding to the popular illusion of Native Americans as a primitive people.
VS
Yeah, see how that second photo is deliberately sepia-toned and how the clock between the two individuals has been removed because it’s ‘too modern’? Fuck that shit.
That image up there is of a child in full tradition regalia…carrying a roll of tape. Because that child exists today in the modern world where tape is a thing. That regalia exists -today- and is not a ‘historical costume’. My love for that image is the same as my love for things like this traditional elk hide hand drum painted to look like Captain America’s shield by NDN Etsy Artist JBear:
Or this kid in Superman Powwow Regalia:
(Photo of Brandon B at the Red Paint Powwow by R. Lohr)
Because NDNs are modern, living people influenced by modern pop culture. It’s what makes things like traditionally-beaded sneakers so awesome:
(Beaded sneakers made by Elizabeth Doxtater, Mohawk)
We are here, living -today-. Sometimes we own clocks and carry tape and reference cheesy summer movies and wear sneakers. And when we do these things, they are NDN things.
moniquill is rocking my world? must be a day ending in y
raganwald » A Woman's Story »
Software developer Reginald Braithwaite tells the story of his mother Gwen, one of the first black female computer programmers in Canada.
Carl Zimmer profiles Neil deGrasse Tyson (for, of all things, the latest issue of “Playboy”.) »
It is really good and you should read it.
Chicago Art Magazine » “Are you ready to alter your destiny?”: Chicago and Afro-Futurism
Afro-Futurism is an exploration and methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey. The creative ability to manifest action and transformation has been essential to the survival of Blacks in the Diaspora. “Black Secret Technology (The Whitey on the Moon Dub)” Julian Jonker writes, “Black Americans have literally lived in an alien(-n)ation for hundreds of years. The viscerality of their abduction is equaled only by the ephemerality of the bonds which the disciplinary state has since imposed on them.” Similarly, Boykin notes that in this context, “freedom is futurist.”
Chicago’s history is rooted in liberation struggles; the concrete jungle gives rise to a fiesty, rag-tag, Mad-Maxian, blue-collar style that respects hard work and survival of the fittest. We are alchemists in this city of steel, akin to the Yoruba god Ogun, fusing metal to metal. We claim a real space traveler astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space and graduate of Chicago’s Morgan Park High School. In the tradition of grand-forefather Sun Ra who graced our lake shores with his mystical genius, Chicago “shows out” with the sanctification of conduit Avery R. Young’s sweet nectar sweat as he navigates between states of being in his signature Sunday Mornin’ Juke Joint performance style. Chicago Afro-Futurism is revolutionary discopoet Khari B. levitating at the HotHouse long before will.i.am teleported from Grant Park to CNN headquarters on November 4, 2008. It is Krista Franklin’s multi-layered visual planes with giant children spinning LPs on oceans; spliced figures from antique photos become extra-terrestrial as she coaxes new stories from their faded mysteries.
Chicago prophet Curtis Mayfield’s train in “People Get Ready”; Sun Ra’s Solar Arkestra; George Clinton’s Mothership; “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line: these vessels of transformation rise from the Black mythos. Sun Ra’s musical ascension coincided with the inauguration of space travel; his contemporaries included young, Chicago-born Gil Scott Heron whose percussive poem “Whitey On the Moon” reflected those left in Earth’s tenements whom Ra came to rescue in Space is the Place. “A rat done bit my sister Nell but whitey’s on the moon…”
Afro-Futurism is hot, moist, black nutrient-rich, deep in the bowels of memory and soul iterations. It lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. “The central fact in Black Science Fiction…is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in Public Enemy’s phrase) Armageddon has been in effect.”[i] In Afro-Futurism, however, “everything is alive and transformed as opposed to being destroyed.”[ii] Afro-Futurism says: even “solid” matter is made of slow-moving molecules; Jesus walked on water and you can, too.
Via Charles Tan.
“
To less than 100,000 readers a month the Green Lantern is a white guy — to millions of television viewers he is a black man.
To DC Comics, Wonder Woman is a problem that requires constant fixing and doesn’t appeal to their core readers — to the Estee Lauder corporation she is a valuable brand that drives revenue.
To formerly “male-focused” entities such as the NFL and NASCAR women are a valuable, core audience — to the big two comic companies they are an after thought.
To Marvel an all black team of Avengers is a contrivance and the Avengers should consist of “A team” players — to many sports teams an all-black starting line-up are their superstars and their “A-team.”
In big two comics gays barely exist — in the real world they are everywhere.
The world is changing. It is time to care. Diversity is important. The choice is simple — do it and evolve, or be a dinosaur.
”– DC Women Kicking Ass: “When a coloring mistake means much more”. On Marvel & DC’s failure to diversify. Read the whole thing.
