Up in the rice terraces of the Cordillera mountain range of the Philippines live the last few tattooed women of Kalinga. Traditional tattooing is seen as archaic and painful by the younger generations of Kalingas. As an Indigenous group that has successfully fought against colonizing forces, it is losing the practice of traditional tattooing because of the changing perspective of beauty and interpretations of the practice by outside scholars.
Studies on the tradition interpreted the practice to show that men were given tattoos because of brave acts during tribal wars while the women were given tattoos just to decorate their bodies. Men who attempt to get traditional tattoos without acts of bravery are shunned by the community and are now unable to continue the practice without facing criminal charges from the government. Women are unconstrained by the same reasons but are struggling to continue the practice because of the pervasive western interpretations of aesthetics that changed the perceptions of “beauty” in Kalinga. To the women of Kalinga, the batok or the tattoo goes beyond beauty and prestige but it is symbolic of the traditional values of women’s strength and fortitude.
The traditional tattoo is an indigenous body art, an expression of the psychological dimensions of life, health, love and it defines local perceptions of existence. Sadly there is now a decline of the traditional art among indigenous women brought about by the changing perspective of the meaning of the tattoo and its stigmatized practice. It is now considered a vanishing art along with the gatekeepers of the knowledge associated with it.
The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga by Jake Verzosa. Jake Verzosa is a freelance photographer based in Manila.
Brokey McPoverty on February 26th, 2013
This post originally appeared at Uptown Magazine.
I watched every piece of the Oscars Sunday night, from pre-shows to the very end, which means that I was in front of my television for roughly 23 hours. My viewing experience began in anger and fury, and it ended the very same way. And thanks to some despicable behavior from the internet, that anger and fury is persisting hours after the show has ended.
It began when I heard Ryan Seacrest say that “they” (meaning, I assume, he and his E! red carpet cohorts) had decided to call Quvenzhané Wallis, the 9-year-old dynamo nominated for her role in Beasts of the Southern Wild, “Little Q” instead of her actual name. Here’s a quick breakdown of the problems with this:
1. That isn’t her name.
2. To my knowledge, neither Quvenzhané nor her family OK’d this nickname.
3. That nickname wasn’t given to her out of love or adoration; it was given out of discomfort around something “other.”
Naming and names are important because they are entwined in our ownership of ourselves and our bodies. We name things that belong to us. We name our children. We name our pets. We name our cars and our plants and our stuffed animals and even our hair. The act of naming and/or re-naming something is absolutely about power and control, and this is something that slave owners knew very well–a standard practice in “seasoning” and “breaking” a slave was assigning them Anglo-Saxon names. This established that those men and women were, without a doubt, property of their purchasers, and completely severed them from the identities they knew. Further, the names that were assigned to enslaved black men and women were often diminutive versions of common names–Billy instead of William; Donnie instead of Donald. These were verbal reminders that you were not a whole man or a whole woman, that you were not fully human. And when that wasn’t enough, they were stripped of those names and called “boy” or “gal,” because acknowledging a person’s self-approved name is to acknowledge the humanity in someone.
This is still the function of naming, and precisely why the insistence on not learning how to pronounce Quvenzhané’s name so crazy-making.
Not saying Quvenzhané’s name is an attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to step around and contain her blackness. Yes, sometimes black people have names that are difficult to pronounce. There aren’t many people of European descent named Shaniqua or Jamal. Names are as big a cultural marker as brown skin and kinky hair, and there’s long been backlash against both of those things (see: perms, skin bleaching creams, etc.). The insistence on not using Quvenzhané’s name is an extension of that “why aren’t you white?” backlash.
It is easier to be colorblind, to simply turn a blind eye to the differences that have torn this nation apart for centuries than it is to wade through those choppy waters. And Quvenzhané’s very existence is enough to make the societal majority uncomfortable. She is talented, successful, beautiful, happy, loved, and adored–all things that many people don’t figure that little black girls with “black” names could, or should, be. Their answer? Let’s make her more palatable. If she insists on not fitting the mold of the ghetto hoodrat associated with women with “urban” names, let’s take her own urban name away from her.
Refusing to learn how to pronounce Quvenzhané’s name says, pointedly, you are not worth the effort. The problem is not that she has an unpronounceable name, because she doesn’t. The problem is that white Hollywood, from Ryan Seacrest and his homies to the AP reporter who decided to call her “Annie” rather than her real name, doesn’t deem her as important as, say, Renee Zellwegger, or Zach Galifinakis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of whom have names that are difficult to pronounce–but they manage. The message sent is this: you, young, black, female child, are not worth the time and energy it will take me to learn to spell and pronounce your name. You will be who and what I want you to be; you be be who and what makes me more comfortable. I will allow you to exist and acknowledge that existence, but only on my terms.
And as if calling her “Little Q” wasn’t enough, The Onion took it to an entirely unnecessary level by calling her one of the most deplorable, abhorrent words there are: “c-nt.”
The outrage was swift, and rightfully so, but so was the defense. Instantaneously, Twitter became flooded with tweets explaining the function of satire (as if those who were upset didn’t already know) and protecting The Onion’s tweet as a simple joke.
The underlying message there? If we package it the right way, we can still call you whatever we want, whenever we want.
Not all of us have the space or luxury to see this kind of attack as “just a joke,” and make no mistake, this was absolutely an attack. On the surface, it was a bit of poorly planned satire that missed its mark by a million yards. Quvenzhané was a prop in, not the subject of, a very tasteless joke. As a writer and humorist, I understand that. Sure, it was “just a joke,” but it was a joke constructed of venom that black women have had to withstand since the beginning of our time on American soil. Beneath that joke is a culture that has made the lampooning and mistreatment of black women a perfectly acceptable thing, and this is where the attack lies: in the residue of an era that permitted the systemic rape and murder of black women even as the protection of the cultural purity of white women was viciously protected, claiming the lives of countless innocent black men in the process. The attack lies in the space that allowed anyone to ever think that a statement like this would ever be accepted, and in the realization that a lot of people not only accepted, but defended it. The attack is that we are always attacked.
Black women are routinely stripped of control of ourselves and our bodies. We are “Little Q” on the red carpet. We are “c-nts” on the internet. We are “baby/honey/sugar/shorty with the fat ass” on the street as we go about our lives, minding our own business. And when we open our mouths to speak against it all when it seems no one else will, we are charged to defend our defense of ourselves.
That Quvenzhané’s skin and gender are seen as permission to treat or call her however they wish is a jagged pill to swallow. Let’s not get it twisted: calling Quvenzhané Wallis a “c-nt” is deplorable, but ignoring what she wants to be called and giving her some cutesy little nickname because you can’t be bothered to learn her name is every bit as bad.
“Give your daughters difficult names,” Warsan Shire wrote. “Give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right … Give your children difficult names, so the world may learn how to unfurl its tongue in the direction of our stolen languages.”
Beware of anyone who looks at you and says “I am going to call you what I want to call you in spite of what you call yourself;” they mean you no good, regardless of how big they smile at you when they say it.
FROM: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/02/23/the-difference-between-nerds-and-hipsters-with-glasses/
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NERDS AND HIPSTERS WITH GLASSES
by Rania Khalek on February 17, 2013
I’ve watched and shared this video so many times that I figured I should blog about it. The poets are Kai Davis (left) and Safiya Washington (right) of the Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement performing at last year’s Brave New Voices semi-finals.
The term “hipster racism” was coined by Carmen Van Kerckhove at Racialicious and refers to using racist language “ironically”. But I would go a step further and say that the hipster lifestyle is quite racist in and off itself and Davis and Washington’s performance perfectly encapsulates why that is. As s.e. Smith explained back in 2009:
Hipsters are a driving force behind gentrification, driving out low income people and people of colour. They consistently co-opt and appropriate elements of other cultures, piecemeal, and often without any cultural sensitivity or respect. They regularly draw upon the work and legacy of people of colour, usually without crediting them, and most of their contact with people of colour comes in the form of the service personnel serving them their food, cleaning their wine bars, and picking their organic produce.
This isn’t to say that anyone who owns vinyl records and shops at Urban Outfitters is a raging bigot. In fact, most hipsters I know consider themselves very liberal and part of the counter-culture that despises the establishment, so they equate racism with people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. What they refuse to grasp is that racism is way more complex than that.
This can be seen in the reaction to the video. In my experience, people either love or hate it and those who hate it are more often than not (surprise surprise!) white hipsters who complain that Davis and Washington’s performance is too angry, too aggressive. They’re basically demanding that people who are routinely insulted and oppressed by the world around them temper their criticisms to spare the feelings of the oppressor. Fuck that!
BY ALFIE KOHN
When people who write about agriculture or dentistry tackle the important issues in their respective fields, do they try to shake things up? Are they feisty and willing to peer beneath the surface of whatever topic they’re exploring? I have no idea. But I do know that those qualities are awfully hard to find in what’s written about education.
Consider the question of parent involvement in schooling. Almost everything published on this subject leaves the ideological foundations of the discussion unexamined. Either we’re treated to a predictable announcement that Involvement Is Good (“Parents should do more!”) or else we’re warned that some folks have a tendency to get, well, you know, a little too involved. (“Jeremy, I’m wondering whether you might have had some help with your science fair project? I ask only because it’s unusual for a sixth grader to build a working nuclear reactor”). Put these two themes together and the message seems to be that the interest parents take in their children’s education is either inadequate or excessive.
Does that mean there’s a sweet spot in the middle that consists of just enough involvement? Or are we looking at an example of what a statistician might call a bimodal distribution when involvement is plotted against socioeconomic status: Poor parents don’t do enough; affluent parents do too much?
Let’s begin by noticing that the whole question is framed by the extent to which educators think parents ought to be involved. The parent’s point of view is typically absent from such discussions. And, of course, no thought is given to the student’s perspective — what role kids might want their parents to play (or to avoid playing). But then that’s true of so many conversations about education that we scarcely notice its absence.
There’s something both short-sighted and arrogant about exhorting low-income parents to show up at school events or make sure the homework gets done. The presumption seems to be that these parents lack interest or commitment — as opposed to spare time, institutional savvy, comfort level or fluency in English. Annette Lareau and other sociologists have described how class differences play out in terms of parental advocacy — including why poorer and less-educated parents may be less effective when they do become involved.[1]
But even observers who are sensitive to issues of class don’t always take a step back to ask what kind of involvement we’re talking about, and to what ends. As is so often the case, our questions tend to be more quantitative than qualitative, with the result that we focus only on how muchparents are involved.
Imagine someone who monitors his or her child’s schooling very closely, for example, and doesn’t hesitate to advocate for — or against — certain policy changes and resource allocation decisions. Is that a good thing? Rather than just asking whether the level or style of advocacy is effective, we’d also want to know whether this parent is asking for changes that will benefit all children or mostly just his or her own child (possibly at the expense of others). Our intensely individualistic, free-market-oriented culture — witness the growing push for charter schools, vouchers, and privatization — encourages us to see education not as a public good but as just another commodity one shops for, and to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of how much my kid gets out of it. Thus, those of us who value the cause of equity have reason to be disturbed by many sorts of parent involvement — not just because some are more involved, or better at being involved, than others but because of what that involvement is intended to achieve and for whom.[2]
Proponents of progressive education, too, have reason to be disturbed by the focus of much involvement, even in individual classrooms. What are the pushiest parents pushing for? If they’re judging schools by test scores and children by grades, if they’re demanding more traditional forms of math and reading instruction, tighter regulation of students, and more homework, then the content of their agenda will strike us as more relevant than the degree of their involvement. Some of us may be inclined to ask, “How can we invite these parents to reconsider whether their preferences are really consistent with their long-term objectives for their children?” And: “What would it take to create a powerful parent constituency pushing in the other direction?”
Likewise, while everyone wants parents to be engaged with what their children are doing in school, what matters more is the nature of that engagement. There’s a big difference between a parent who’s focused on what the child is doing — that is, on the learning itself — and a parent who’s focused on how well the child is doing. To ask “So, honey, what’s your theory about why the Civil War started?” or “If you had written that story, would you have left the character wondering what happened, the way the author did?” represents a kind of engagement that promotes critical thinking and enthusiasm about learning. To ask “Why only a B+ [or a 3 on the rubric]?” is a kind of engagement that undermines both of these things.[3]
Of course, parents wouldn’t be asking the latter questions if the school weren’t reducing students to letters and numbers in the first place; they’re taking their cue from educators who blur the differences between a focus on learning and a focus on performance, or between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Nevertheless, this issue seems to have escaped the notice of just about everyone who writes on the topic of parent involvement.
Finally, there’s the matter of whether established educational practices are, on the one hand, accepted uncritically, so that the only question is whether kids are compliant and successful by established criteria, or whether, on the other hand, those practices are examined to see if they make sense. Not surprisingly, it’s the rare educator who encourages the latter. The result is that parents are urged to become more involved (ma non troppo!) in a way that may be more about perpetuating the status quo than about doing what’s in children’s best interest.
A “partnership” between school and family sounds lovely unless that partnership is perceived by the child as an alliance against him. If the purpose is to coerce him into obeying rules that may not be reasonable, or to “live up to his potential” by working harder at assignments of dubious value, then we’d want parents to ask penetrating questions about the school’s practices. Parents should aim higher than helping teachers to make children toe the line.
Homework offers a vivid example. Even on its own terms, parental involvement may not be beneficial. A recent study of middle schoolers found that “the more teachers intended to establish a close link with parents and to involve them in the homework process, the less positive the student outcomes were.”[4] And a review of fifty studies found that, while parental involvement in general was “associated with achievement,” the one striking exception was parental help with homework, where there was no positive effect.[5]
But the predominant outcome measures in such studies are test scores, which means that even if “positive effects” did turn up, they wouldn’t impress those of us who doubt the validity and value of standardized test results. Nor would they tell us about the possible negative effects that certain kinds of involvement might have on students’ creativity, psychological health, excitement about learning, their relationship with their parents, and so on.
The practice of forcing children to begin working what amounts to a second shift after they get home from a full day of school has absolutely no proven benefits before high school, and there are increasing reasons to doubt its value even in high school.[6] What kids need, therefore, are parents willing to question the conventional wisdom and to organize others to challenge school practices when that seems necessary. What kids don’t need is the kind of parental involvement that consists of pestering them to make sure they do their homework — whether or not it’s worth doing.
Exhortations for more “parental involvement” remind me of calls to be “a good citizen”: In the abstract, everyone is for it. But inspected closely, what’s most often meant by the term turns out to be considerably more complicated and even worthy of skepticism.
__________________________________________________________________
NOTES
1. For example, see Lareau’s book Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education (Philadelphia: Falmer, 1989).
2. Alfie Kohn, “Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform,” Phi Delta Kappan, April 1998. Available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ofmk.htm.
2. I review research relevant to this distinction in my book The Schools Our Children Deserve(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), chapter 2. Also see this 20-minute video presentation: http://cfee.me/PSPvidAK.
3. Ulrich Trautwein et al., “Between-Teacher Differences in Homework Assignments and the Development of Students’ Homework Effort, Homework Emotions, and Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology 101 (2009), p. 185.
4. Nancy E. Hill and Diana F. Tyson, “Parental Involvement in Middle School: A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Strategies That Promote Achievement,” Developmental Psychology 45 (2009): 740-63.
5. Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006); and, for a look at a new high school study, http://ow.ly/fzwxn.
BY
Everyday in the world there are friendships between animals and humans. One unique and charming relationship between the species’ is the one of an elderly lady in Japan and her little cat “Fukumaru.” Together they do just about everything in their daily lives.
SEE ALSO CATS POSE AS FAMOUS ART PORTRAITS
For the past thirteen years Misao has been photographed by her granddaughter Miyoko Ihara as a way to commemorate her life. Little Fukumaru, whose name means circle of good fortune, had joined Misao 8 years ago. Graced with a unique heterochromia iridum (different colored eyes) and a sweet disposition, Fukumaru enjoys doing things like farming, eating and resting with Grandma Misao. A book was published on their companionship titled “Misao the Big Mama and Fukumaru the Cat.”
via bpanda
Nothing incredible is accomplished alone. You need others to help you, and you need to help others. With the right team, you can form a web of connections to make the seemingly impossible practically inevitable.
The Instigator:
Someone who pushes you, who makes you think. Who motivates you to get up and go, and try, and make things happen. You want to keep this person energized, and enthusiastic. This is the voice of inspiration.
The Cheerleader:
This person is a huge fan, a strong supporter, and a rabid evangelist for you and your work. Work to make this person rewarded, to keep them engaged. This is the voice of motivation.
The Doubter:
This is the devil’s advocate, who asks the hard questions and sees problems before they arise. You need this person’s perspective. They are looking out for you, and want you to be as safe as you are successful. This is the voice of reason.
The Taskmaster:
This is the loud and belligerent voice that demands you gets things done. This person is the steward of momentum, making sure deadlines are met and goals are reached. This is the voice of progress.
The Connector:
This person can help you find new avenues and new allies. This person breaks through roadblocks into finds ways to make magic happen. You need this person to reach people and places you can’t. This is the voice of cooperation and community.
The Example:
This is your mentor, you hero, your North Star. This is the person who you seek to emulate. This is your guiding entity, someone whose presence acts as a constant reminder that you, too, can do amazing things. You want to make this person proud. This is the voice of true authority.Nothing incredible is accomplished alone. You need others to help you, and you need to help others. With the right team, you can form a web of connections to make the seemingly impossible practically inevitable.
The Instigator:
Someone who pushes you, who makes you think. Who motivates you to get up and go, and try, and make things happen. You want to keep this person energized, and enthusiastic. This is the voice of inspiration.
The Cheerleader:
This person is a huge fan, a strong supporter, and a rabid evangelist for you and your work. Work to make this person rewarded, to keep them engaged. This is the voice of motivation.
The Doubter:
This is the devil’s advocate, who asks the hard questions and sees problems before they arise. You need this person’s perspective. They are looking out for you, and want you to be as safe as you are successful. This is the voice of reason.
The Taskmaster:
This is the loud and belligerent voice that demands you gets things done. This person is the steward of momentum, making sure deadlines are met and goals are reached. This is the voice of progress.
The Connector:
This person can help you find new avenues and new allies. This person breaks through roadblocks into finds ways to make magic happen. You need this person to reach people and places you can’t. This is the voice of cooperation and community.
The Example:
This is your mentor, you hero, your North Star. This is the person who you seek to emulate. This is your guiding entity, someone whose presence acts as a constant reminder that you, too, can do amazing things. You want to make this person proud. This is the voice of true authority.
