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Acts of Omission et al: Prop 8, Racism, etc

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Acts of Omission I am typically not one to speak of anything political publicly. However, in the back rooms, I have been privy to a conversation that sympathizes with the highly-publicized fight for gay marriage but finds itself unable to overlook the acts of omission that have come with it. As a person who has lived the predominant part of her adulthood in rural areas as a triple minority, I find several things lacking in the modern gay rights movement that if addressed would assert a more inclusive and progressive agenda. First , I would like someone to take more seriously the prosecution of hate crime statutes that already exist, statutes that have been unable to cease the physical brutality enacted against gay bodies, particularly racialized ones. Second , it would also be nice if someone attended to the spread of AIDS to previously-uninfected communities, an epidemic spread that is exacerbated by the inadequate screening practices of prisons, the patronizing attitudes of scient...
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Kamala Harris, 46th VPOTUS: The Visions of the Second Generation Immigrant

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Kamala Harris represents an immigrant's dream for their posterity -- that their children will realize the dreams that even they may not live to see. A second generation immigrant, I recognize the roots of the Black Diaspora embedded in the persistence, competitiveness, and optimism of sociopolitical mobility. In her sits the paradoxes of assimilation and systemic racism. At once, she is an insider and an outsider to her intersected ethnoracial communities of race, ethnicity, nation, and religion; a pride and warning in flying so close to the sun; and the center and bridge of complex families and social networks.  The coming years will reveal more of the nuances of her history. My favorite revelation so far is that of @archivistchris, who posted a picture of a young adult VP Kamala Harris posed with a tall box cut softened with the curls of a cultures interwoven into the scalp. In the photo, her eyes are fixed to a horizon that she gazes at with her chin raised. She is not looking i...
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You Can Call Me "Ali"

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Dear Folx, I invite you into a new space that has provided me comfort. About six (6) months ago, I wrote my last blog as a writer without tenure. During that time, I asked people to start calling me "Ali", which is an Arabic root that means, "high", "elevated", "champion". People must have thought me completely obnoxious. "Call me `Ali'...like Muhammad Ali," I offer. Oh, ohhh, ok:  "Ali?!?" "Yeah, Ali," I respond. There is a soft rhyme in the name, "Abigail Ali"..."A.Ali"..."Dr. Ali". Call me "Ali". Ali, for me, is short for Alyasah, so you can know how to pronounce the name properly: Ahh--lee--ah--sah. Not, Al-Ya-Sah. Not, A-lish-a. Not, Ally-as-ah. Not, Ally, Al-lie. Call me, "Ali". Derived from "Aliaxa", my champion for infinity. How I got here from Abigail is a hard story to tell. It is a story of love, of grief, of misdiagnosis, of asylums, of p...
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