Ariana > Recent Status Updates

“Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment. Indeed, in many of these places, what will have a real economic effect is if the bombing stops.”

“You broke the contract when you killed us in the fucking street”.

Reminds me of the discourse on violence. it’s always the people who have historically used violence for colonization who all of a sudden hate violence. For “civility” to be had, black people need to be treated properly, and that is impossible w/a long history of racism and people being tortured and killed for simply having a black body.

They forced the men to build the facility. Brick by brick. A “captive” workforce so you mean slavery?

This one is going to haunt me.

White politicians believed new found freedom “given” to black people was causing insanity and there was a need to create institutions to lock them away.

Whew 😅 the book takes you to the start of reality tv in 1940s, and the objections of recording people without their consent. Objections include, “if the show was a hit, America would be plagued with hidden microphones.”

Sir, it’s much worse!! We carry them around and record anyone just because.

“Show me a woman who isn't, though. Show me a woman who, beneath all the eyelash extensions and hair dye and loose beach waves isn't fucking boiling with rage at the sheer injustice of it all, and I'll show you someone who's not paying close enough attention.”

“The mainstreaming and assimilation of gay life into dominant culture felt both near and impossibly far; both a dream encompassing safety and freedom-and a nightmare in which only the right kind of queers could be assimilated, leaving those of us who were sick, or gender nonconforming, or poor, or non-white, out in the cold.

“It is a gift to see the world through Marsha's eyes. In order to change the harshest conditions-to survive in a world not designed for your survival; to believe in your dignity amid constant disempowerment, violence, and loss—you have to be able to see beyond what is right in front of you. Instead, you need to see into what is possible: what might have been, what could be, what will be.”

“Morty may have censored
his own recorded accounts," Carter wrote, "fearing that to publicly credit a severely mentally ill transvestite prostitute with starting the Stonewall Riots and thus indirectly the gay liberation movement could have been used effectively by the movements opponents."

To this day we do this. Why do we try to build our narrative for our oppressors?

“…and party and get high and think about walking down the street someday and not worrying about getting busted by the police. That was a dream we all had, sitting in those hotel rooms or in the queens' tanks of the jails. So, honey, when it came [to] that night, I was ready to tip a few cars for a dream. It was that year—1969—when I finally went out in the street in drag full-time.

“Stonewall was an inflection point of powerlessness turning into power. It was a culminating and inciting moment in history in which a group of people remembered who they were— who they really were, not how the law saw them, or how the bouncer saw them, or how straight society saw them.”

“Times Square was the place where trans people came to survive and thrive together--and it became a place for collective dreaming. This was where Marsha first felt she could live as her fullest self, and where she was able to meet Sylvia and other trans women who became foundational for the trans community she had scarcely been able to imagine as a child in New Jersey.”

“Whatever activity the girl was actually doing was entirely irrelevant; cops were legally allowed to assume that the mere presence of a trans woman in a particular neighborhood meant she was intending to sell sex.”

“Bebe Scarpi, a trans activist and friend of Sylvia and Mar-sha, explained that in Times Square you were arrested for “walking while trans": the criminalization of simply being, which New York only repealed in 2020. Up until 2020, the NYPD was given incredibly wide latitude to arrest any trans woman for "loitering," which simply means standing or walking in a public place.”

“Marsha didn't wait for the world to tell her she could be free; she told the world she already was free, and that they'd better catch up.”

“I wrote Marsha because she deserves a joyful, inspiring, and accessible biography that honors the fullness of her life.”

“She used her artwork as care work, and she sought to be as close to her community as possible in a moment when government neglect was escalating the epidemic.”

“To love is to reach your hand across a distance that you’ll never fully close.”

“Was I alone and caring for my father for who he truly was?”

You spend your whole life in active subliminal repression of the fact that one day you will cease to exist. You have to forget this fact in order to get up and eat breakfast and work your menial job and pay the bills. Otherwise, you'd be a sobbing, terrified ball on the floor. The Real Crime Network felt liberating because they trafficked in the truth that death comes for all and, for some of us, in devastating ways.

This is so upsetting 10 pages in

“The trick of life, as I see it now, is to make what’s around you beautiful. It’ll grow from there. Took me a long time to see that.”

No one writes unhinged women better than Ms. Anna 🙂‍↕️

“I'm not mentally ill. I'm just alive. And being alive mostly involves pain and suffering and disappointment, and the only thing that makes it tolerable is a distraction from all that.”

“What we do know from figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that Native people are killed by police at a rate higher than any other racial or ethnic group in the country.”

“Black students are almost four times as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as their White peers.”

“Part of the gospel of intellectual inferiority is the assumption that only White people's knowledge is worth knowing-indeed, that only White people's knowledge counts as knowledge at all.”