Oh, I Mixed It Up! Thank You For Educating Me.

electing a brown skinned cop who uses imperial feminism to reinforce American exceptionalism all while she backs the same colonial projects and state funded violence that allows for the re-criminalization of poverty, the erasure of civil rights, and the expansion prison industrial complex is not a win.

there are a multitude of ways and workings to disrupt, divest, and dismantle the master’s house. kamala winning this election doesn’t fix this lovecraft country. kamala winning this election means a return to our communities to manifest direct action, collective liberation, and radical abolition that upRoots fascism, imperialism, and white supremacy from our gardens.

Yep

The Labyrinth

Labyrinths from mythology are described more as mental quests, a challenge of the mind for the hero to overcome. Labyrinths are a deadly loss of misdirection, physically and mentally. The most famous story is the creation of the labyrinth, created by Daedalus, the greatest inventor and master craftsmen in all of Athens, Greece, for King Minos of Crete to conceal his monstrous son, the Minotaur, a creature half-man, and half bull. Theseus, the son of Zeus, was sentenced as a sacrifice for the Minotaur but was helped by King Minos’ daughter Ariadne, who gave him a pure thread to retrace his steps and slay the monster.

Several films, poems, and books talk about labyrinths and then some. Labyrinths are seen as grand symbols, as human beings have been fascinated with them since the beginning of time. The journey of the maze is the main character having to dive into a physical as well as mental underworld of sorts. ‘‘ ‘Labis’ is the Greek term for the double-headed ax. The earliest images of labyrinths. Their passageways like ripples or echoes radiating from the form of a double-headed ax; The acquisition of language, the mind-body problem, the question of meaning, of free will, consciousness. And the nature of that innate faculty of the ethical. Robert Morris says, ‘‘ideals, the admirable, right and wrong, the good, logic, principles. All connected in any given form of life. But maybe down deeper things are simpler.’’

Every corner of the world covers the symbolism of the linear one-way labyrinth as a pathway towards the center, towards salvation, God, and the tree of life. Trees play an important role, as they are connected to the labyrinth, they too are connected to the symbols of life, in Christianity and paganism. It is the archetype of the human experience and self idealization and leads us down a quest where the only way is through, emotionally, psychologically, and physically. The labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness, combining the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. It represents a journey to our own center and back again out into the world. ‘‘They [Labyrinths] have long been used as meditation and prayer tools. They have been found in ancient Crete, Egypt, and Etruscan; they have been inscribed on Neolithic tombs. They are a call to the center, a worship structure where the eternal beloved waits to be encountered. The labyrinth has always been associated with unity with God and conversation with the divine, with spirituality, worship, and the sacred mystery. Long ago, Christians were expected to travel to the holy land at least once during their lives. But as travel was often both difficult and dangerous, labyrinths were designed as alternative pilgrimages. If travel was out of the question, spiritual merit could be gained by walking a labyrinth.’’

Rest in peace.

Sacheen Littlefeather has passed away on October 2nd 2022 . While people remember her for her acceptance speech on behalf of Marlon Brando, know that she also ended the media blackout of the Wounded Knee occupation, won an Emmy & co-founded the American Indian AIDS Institute of San Francisco.

“Every time a man yells you are seven years old again and he is packing that suitcase once more. Picking you up by the neck, teaching you obedience. To be soft, like the belly of a fish exposed to a knife.”

— Clementine von Radics 

Tezcatlipoca, or "One Leg".

NO. 1

Tezcatlipoca is the god of the night sky, hurricanes, obsidian, conflict, and providence. When depicted, he usually wore a talisman with a disk worn as a chest pectoral. While depicted with black and yellow stripes painted across his face, he is usually shown with his left foot replaced with an obsidian mirror, bone, or snake, as it was lost to the sea monster Cipactli in the mythos. In the Aztec religion, he was the central deity. In Aztec or Mesoamerican folklore, he and other gods could shapeshift, and he was no different as his counterpart was the illusive but powerful jaguar, which is why he is known as the jaguar god.

NO. 2

This figure is extremely popular, and worshipped by the Mayan and Olmec communities. His name in the Mesoamerican language means ‘Smoking Mirror.’ This deity has numerous epithets which allude to different characteristics, like Ipalnemoani ("He by Whom We Live"), Necoc Yaotl ("Enemy of Both Sides"), and Tioque Nahuaque (‘Lord of the Near and the Night’), etc. His power to omnipresence was more a connection that extended far beyond obsidian since ritual bloodletting and human sacrifice were conducted with obsidian. Apart from being a creator god, he was also a trickster and ruled over the modern Aztec pantheon.

NO. 3

Tezcatlipoca, according to Aztec mythology, was born to the primordial creator deities Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, and had four siblings; one of whom, Quetzalcoatl, the god of the wind, patron of priests, and inventor of calendars and books; he was known as the Serpent Feathered god. The brothers feuded as much as they worked together, working towards the same goal but sometimes in opposition towards each other. After being born, this deity spent over 600 years for his youngest brother Huitzilopochtli to grow flesh before Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, together, made the world. Before the world was made, the only thing that was technically alive were a few gods, a massive ocean and the sea monster, Cipactli, which Tezcatlipoca successfully lured away and killed by using his foot as bait. Both brothers were able to create the world on the sea monster’s body.

Housing Discrimination

NO. 1

 Racial exclusion, or segregation had real damage to the black communities persistent in their fight for freedom to own and be included in everything whites were already allowed in; the fight for equality, economic security, for education, and for fair housing was just beginning. Racial exclusion was such a severe enough problem, since in every near northern city, black newcomers crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods left behind by upwardly mobile whites. White builders, in charge of housing and agencies related could dictate who could own, and William Levitt, of Leviittown where massive developments were made in the suburb, was no exception. 

       These types of houses were ‘affordable for the common man’, and remade America’s landscape after World War II. The iconic images of little ranches and Cape Cods, set in spacious yards on curvilinear streets, stood for everything that America celebrated in the Cold War era. These subdivisions attracted a heterogenous mix of surburnites, blue-collar workers employed by U.S Steel factories, teachers, clerks, and administrators. Levitt celebrated the ‘American-ness’ of these houses, saying ‘’No man who owns his house and lot can be a communist. He has much to do.’’ Don’t really know how owning a house can get in the way of your political ideologies, but alright. And when Levitt was questioned about the racial homogeneity of his planned community, he responded, ‘’We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.’’  But the housing and racial problem was connected, as blacks could not get these houses because they were black. One instance of racial exclusion was in metropolitan Philadelphia, where between 1946, only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks. Langston Hughes, popular poet described black neighborhoods as the ‘land of rats and roaches, where a nickel cost a dime.

 NO. 2

   Economist Robert Weaver spoke, ‘’among the basic consumer goods, only housing for Negroes are traditionally excluded freely competing in the market.’’ The struggle to open housing was not just a matter of free access to a market excluded to blacks. Racial segregation had high stakes. In post war America, where you lived shaped your educational options, your access to jobs, and your quality of life. The housing markets also provided most Americans with their only substantial financial asset. Real estate was the most important vehicle for the accumulation of wealth. Breaking open the housing market would provide blacks to access to better-funded, higher-quality schools. It would give them the opportunity to live in growing communities–near the shopping malls, office centers, and industrial parks where almost all new job growth happened. And more importantly, it would narrow the wealth-gap between blacks and whites. The battle against housing discrimination in Levingttown, or anywhere else would be the most important in the entire northern freedom struggle.

      NO. 3

 Housing segregation in the north was built on a sturdy foundation of racial restrictions encoded in private regulations and public policy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Midwest–and especially Indiana and Illinois, were dotted with ‘sundown towns’ places whose residents drove blacks off by force, enacted ordinances to prohibit black occupancy (although such ordinances were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917), and sometimes posted signs, like that in Wendell Willkie’s Elwood, Indiana, warning blacks of the dire consequences of staying around after sunset. Such crude techniques succeeded in driving blacks out of small towns, but they were less effective in the major northern metropolitan areas that attracted the vast majority of African American migrants beginning in World War I.

Three devices were used to help housing discrimination: first, private but legally enforecable restrictive covenants—attached to nearly every housing development built between 1928 and 1948— forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone other than whites. Second, federal housing policies, enacted during the Depression, mandated racial homogeneity in new developments and created a separate, unequal housing market, underwritten with federal dollars, for blacks and whites. And third, real estate agents staunchly defended the ‘freedom of association and the right of home owners and developers to rent or sell to whom they pleased, steering blacks into racially mixed or all-black neighborhoods. Whites in the North had economic reasons to fear the ‘Negro invasion’ as they called it. Their ability to secure mortgages and loans were at risk. But their motivations were not solely economic. Intertwined concerns about property values were fears of black predation. North and South recoiled at the prospect of miscegenation. In the South, they feared the legal restrictions on intermarriage and racial mixing in public spaces; the North feared the regulation of housing markets.