If it’s meant for you, you won’t have to beg for it. You will never have to sacrifice your dignity for your destiny.
— Chelsis Porter (via stellablu)
And here is the good news nested inside the bad: Many of you, most of you, are about to make that journey. You will go from being the best-informed, most engaged students at one of the finest universities around to being the person who brings coffee to people, or a Steak n Shake waiter, as I once was. Whether you’re a basketball player or a pharmacist or a software designer, you’re about to be a rookie. Your parents’ long-asked questions—what exactly does one DO with a degree in anthropology—will become a matter of sudden and profound relevance. Your student loans will come due and you will need a very good answer for why exactly you went to college, which answer you will have a hard time coming by as you sit at your job, provided you are lucky enough to find a job, and suffer the indignity of people calling you by the wrong name or, if you are forced to wear a name tag, people calling you by the right name too often.
That is the true hero’s errand—strength to weakness. And because you went to college, you will be more alive to the experience, better able to contextualize it and maybe even find the joy and wonder hidden amid the dehumanizing drudgery.
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John Green’s tumblr: The Commencement Address
This is so great. I wish my speaker (can’t remember who he was, but he was bad) had told me these things.
(via hermionejg)
Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.
my feet tell the storyOf an immigrant and refugee who leftHome in search of home.
Nothing enrages the American injustice system more than an escaped slave. When Harriet Tubman was liberating Black people from institutionalized genocide, rape and servitude, the state offered a reward of $40,000 to any bounty hunter who could bring her to “justice.” And if you think $40,000 goes a long way now, imagine what it did in 1875. Tubman was so vigorously desired by the state, not only because she broke the laws of chattel slavery (she was legally a thief, who ran away with thousands of dollars worth of what they considered to be stolen property), but also because she represented a revolutionary ideology. In many ways, her impact on the minds, hearts and souls of African American people was more damaging to the system of enslavement than the hundreds of African people that she emancipated physically. Same bed, new sheets.
Former political prisoner and member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur is still being aggressively perused by her former captors, over three decades after her escape from prison. Utilizing the same tactics as their slave holding predecessors, the New Jersey Police and U.S. Justice Department offered a $1,000,000 reward for her capture in 2005 - the largest reward placed on an individual in the history of New Jersey. Like Tubman, Shakur is being hunted not only for her alleged crimes against the state of New Jersey, but also because of her unwavering revolutionary opposition to imperialism and injustice.
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President Obama Asked To Extradite Assata Shakur
This article is from 2009 but these words are extremely relevant today.
(via theraceproblem)
