The Smithian

May 21st, 2013

thesmithian

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brazilwonders:

Brazilian people (by VECTORINO)

[meaningful glance] x2

Reblogged from Brasil

May 20th, 2013

thesmithian

‘…every Republican on the House Agriculture Committee voted to approve an omnibus farm bill containing a $20 billion cut in food stamps over the next decade in the program’s $800 billion or so 10-year budget…’

While less devastating than turning the program into a capped block grant to the states, which the House Republicans have previously endorsed, the cut is nearly five times the reduction approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate Agriculture Committee, which already is too much. The House bill’s cuts would end food-stamp assistance for nearly two million people, with the pain falling mainly on low-income working families with kids and older Americans…

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May 15th, 2013

thesmithian

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art: photo by Gordon Parks. “First Aid: Interracial activities at Camp Nathan Hale.” Southfields, New York,1943

May 15th, 2013

thesmithian

We’ve kind of enlisted the help of the gangs…If your goal is not gang eradication, which none of us knows how to do, but instead violence reduction, and you enlist the gangs as aids, then you begin to change the physics of the neighborhood…We’re doing it with the cooperation of the gangs because they’re so powerful—they control some of the neighborhoods. We get them into classes and training, and we say, if you help us stop the violence, we’re not going to hold your past against you. Everyone agrees we should keep the kids safe… [bloodshed wasn’t just the result of gang identification and drug disputes, but also personal grudges and simply] the power of the barrel of a gun…If you don’t give them a way to exert power legitimately, they’ll do it another way.

Connie Rice, Los Angeles civil rights attorney

In 2003 police brass asked Rice to help them formulate a new strategy for coping with LA’s…gang violence. The effort resulted in the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development, an initiative housed in the LA mayor’s office that includes recreational programs at night in city parks, intervention with preteen youth in neighborhoods with high gang membership, and appeals to former and current gang leaders to stop retaliatory violence. There’s…an experiment underway to offer…children of gang members a…college education if the kids stay out of gangs.

May 10th, 2013

thesmithian

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[on the move]

May 5th, 2013

thesmithian

When my daughter was born the hospital put black on all of her documents (immunizations etc). I am black and my hubby is white, I thought it was a little weird that they should ignore the fact that my child is bi-racial. The nurses told me, (a little condescendingly mind you) that ALL government docs default to the race of the birth mother. So I had a question for the white mothers with bi-racial children with black fathers, did they put white on your child’s documents? Or was this some backwards thing they do just to black mothers?

Carmen, a mother

May 1st, 2013

thesmithian

…the only exposure I get to news and current events is through Reddit, and I mostly only see updates about things like the situation in North Korea.

Nikhil Rajaram, grade 9

April 25th, 2013

thesmithian

The website theydontworkforyou.org is designed to make you mad.

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April 23rd, 2013

thesmithian

malformalady:

Eleven year old Elsa Armindo Chela, is from Angola, she was picking mangoes with her cousin when she lost her eye to an anti-personnel land mine accident. Her cousin died. Kuito, Angola.

Photo credit: © Tim Grant.

[look of the hour]

Reblogged from 블로

April 18th, 2013

thesmithian

‘…American children are on average worse off than children in Western Europe and barely better off than their counterparts in the Baltic states and the former Yugoslavia…one of the report’s more alarming findings for the U.S. is the degree to which income inequality has increased the population of children who grow up in relative poverty…’

…meaning that the U.S.’s famously abundant wealth does not equally benefit all children.

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April 18th, 2013

thesmithian

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PSA

April 3rd, 2013

thesmithian

If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planet…It is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.

Jim Yong Kim, head of the World Bank

April 1st, 2013

thesmithian

[look of the hour]

(Source: tearsnsighs)

Reblogged from My name means a lot make sure you say it right

April 1st, 2013

thesmithian

This endorsement of what a man in spate can do with a body he regards as chattel is the building block of all oppression: that body, usually female, is the template on which every other kind of disempowered being is modeled. The language of abjection that describes what a woman is to a man in patriarchy extends to the child, the aged, the queer, the captive, the slave, the subaltern, and the injured; that is why patriarchy is the foundation on which the citadels of race, caste and class are built. The young women and men protesting on the streets of Delhi know this when they say “Nari Mukti, Sabki Mukti” (the liberation of women is the emancipation of all). They know, instinctively, that the protocols of patriarchy are hard-coded into the rules of the alienation of the labouring body, as they are in the distancing devices of race and the indices of purity and pollution that anchor the sacred horror and hierarchy of caste. The woman in labour is the first worker. The menstruating woman is the first outcaste, the first untouchable.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta

April 1st, 2013

thesmithian

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‘…what’s interesting is out of these hundreds and hundreds of kids I photographed and had them answer the question who are you, the kids hardly ever refer to race. They don’t talk about their race. They say, who are you? I’m a ballerina. I’m a football player. You know, I’m a ninja. They don’t default like we do as adults to race.’

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‘…what’s interesting is out of these hundreds and hundreds of kids I photographed and had them answer the question who are you, the kids hardly ever refer to race. They don’t talk about their race. They say, who are you? I’m a ballerina. I’m a football player. You know, I’m a ninja. They don’t default like we do as adults to race.’

more.