Amy > Recent Status Updates

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.

Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.

In the telling of our histories, some forms of Indigenous resistance receive more recognition than others. The truth is that no tactic stopped the US policy of ethnic cleansing. But every act of resistance helped us save what we still have– whether it’s pieces of our homeland, language, ceremony, or the plain fact that we survived.

But maybe that’s all a good ghost story is: a way of handing out consequences to the people who never got them jn real life.

Grief is normal. Grief is important. Grief is sacred. You have the right to experience your own unique and evolving blend of emotions about your abortion(s), including grief in whatever forms it may take. Your grief belongs to you. You have the right to embrace it and express it. It’s part of your story like any other.

We are not moving through a black-and-white world of binaries, in which the presence of one feeling negates or invalidates another.

…you may feel many things. You may even feel them all at once, or in rapid succession, or on a delayed release, emotions appearing much later than you expected and often out of the blue. Grief does what it wants inside of a body. As does trauma. As do joy, and love, and acceptance.

Pelosi knew that making people feel heard, making them think they were getting something, was at least as important as meeting them halfway on policy, but Obama didn’t seem capable of absorbing this lesson. Again, and again, he would offer Republicans what he thought they were supposed to want, then be shocked when they wouldn’t take it.

If you’re a loose conglomerate of people who have a commonality of interests but who can’t tie it together, who wants to join that club?

If Indigenous dispossession and genocide and African enslavement and atmospheric anti-blackness have remained parallel yet intertwined social, political, and economic processes, then we should continue to find common ground in our pursuit for liberation.

If Indigenous dispossession and genocide and African enslavement and atmosphereic antiblackness have remained parallel yet intertwined social, political, and economic processes, then we should continue to find common ground in our pursuit for liberation.

Eby knew all too well that there was a fine line when it came to grief. If you ignore it, it goes away, but then it always comes back when you least expect it. If you let it stay, if you make a place for it in your life, it gets too comfortable and it never leaves. It was best to treat grief like a guest. You acknowledge it, you cater to it, then you send it on its way.

Tricky to translate, sisu encapsulates the Finnish spirit of gutsy courage, grit, and tenacity. The Finns use it to describe their national identity, their people’s soul.

I’ve met a lot of Black women who had to learn it was OK to choose to be happy, but you’re the only one I know who was raised to expect it.

Grief has a palpable quality, and it is all she can feel unless she’s making an active effort to feel something else.

State violence performed as street violence became streamed violence.

Half apologetic, I started to build a different kind of person, one who was rude sometimes and who didn’t always do the right thing, and who’s big stupid heart made her endlessly seem to hurt, but also one who deserved to be here, because she now had something to give

Coexistence should not be a passive state...Coexistence, rather, should be the active practice of becoming familiar, whether through exposure to works of imagination or through personal interaction, with people who are different.

I want as many people to dance as want to. I want the whole world to dance, but dancers are a strange breed, Cypress—don’tchu know that. We are compulsive-obsessive, I think that’s the phrase. We dance all day, we move round dancers, in our spare time we go see other dancers and for fun we go dancin’. There’s no way to make us less intense, unless we fall in love...but not with another dancer. — Idrina

“We are a nation of dancers, musicians and poets,” Olaudah, my adopted kinfolk, declared in his famous narrative. Olaudah speaking of the things that sustained us in our wide dispersal.

"I am different. I am an original. And like everyone else, I am here to take up space in the universe. I do so with pride."

Lucky implies I didn't do anything. Lucky implies something was given to me. Lucky implies that I was handed something I did not earn, that I did not work hard for. Gentle reader, may you never be lucky. I am not lucky. You know what I am? I am smart, I am talented, I take advantage of the opportunities that come my way and I work really really hard. Don't call me lucky. Call me badass.