I Keep Thinking About How Fast They Murdered Tamir Rice. Less Than Two Seconds On Scene, Before They

I keep thinking about how fast they murdered Tamir Rice. Less than two seconds on scene, before they could even put their car in park. Tamir’s skin color alone was all the justification police needed to use deadly force. Pretty much the same thing with Adam Toledo. But even knowing that white shooters have literally killed people and are still armed, cops will bend over backwards to see their “humanity” and take them in alive.

And it’s not just the race of the active shooter that matters to the police—it’s also the demographics of the neighborhood and the race of the victims that plays a large part in deciding which mass shooters get taken to Burger King, and which ones get executed on sight.

Anyway

FUCKN LOVE MERMAY 

also love the waterhouse that this is referencing

a steve n bucky for mermay

« Several layers of nostalgia are at play with these images [old Polaroids]: not just for the 1980s style on display—the gelled hair, the jean jackets, the oversize T-shirts—but for a time before the internet and phones, before everyone could carry a camera and instantly distribute the images. Sometimes this manifests directly in the images’ content, when someone is talking on a corded phone or listening to a boombox or sitting in a bedroom whose walls are covered with pictures cut out of magazines. You can see how everyday life was saturated with analog media, which makes the relative absence of screens palpable.

But pre-digitality also comes across as a nostalgia for the technology of print photography itself. Its limitations now read as stylistic choices, particularly since they have become filter options for us in contemporary camera apps. In the old photos, the fading colors, the flashbulb glare, the imperfect focus, the chemical blotches and anomalies from the developing process can seem at once both accidental and deliberate, or as accomplishing the deliberate capture of the incidental.

Looking at images like these—a kid sleeping in the back of a Ford Escort; a woman in a bathing suit sitting on a lawn chair in the driveway smoking a cigarette, a guy with a mullet in an apartment complex living room crouched beside a tower of Carling Black Label cans—I’m tempted to romanticize that mystery as a kind of grace that enchants the people in them, who don’t know yet that they are living in the before. None of the images are selfies, which feels strange in itself. The subjects usually know that they are being watched, […] but they can’t imagine, even in theory, that it could be everyone watching. They can’t even frame that as an aspiration, which, to me looking back on them now, seems to animate their behavior with a guileless innocence, an indifference, an aura they’re unaware of, an absence of self-consciousness that I could trace in their faces, though I am certainly projecting it.

An illusion arises that in these snapshots people are somehow more present, more themselves, as though the camera were capturing something more elemental about them because they had less wherewithal to stage the image or manipulate it after the fact. It is as though who they were in general was more fixed and objective, less fluid and discursive. Though they are anonymous, they register more concretely as specific people, unpatterned by the grammar of gestures and looks that posting images to networks seems to impose. [N]ot every image of them will be taken to define them or will be seen as expressing something they were trying to say. The photos appear not as assertions of reality but reality as it was. This is all tantamount to a nostalgia for denotation, for a time when images were less rhetorical, less overtly intentional […].

A photographer once could make an occurrence into an occasion by recording it. Accordingly, one can be nostalgic for the way film cameras could sanctify mundane experience, rather than making experience seem mundane. Cameras are ubiquitous now; they can no longer be added deliberately to a situation. All of [the above] has been displaced by the ability to send things to the network. No longer is it magic to represent and preserve, but to circulate, to influence and tally up the proof of it. Photos that document “reality” as it was are necessarily trapped in a drawer somewhere or in an album buried in an attic. Photos that document intentionality are everywhere and nowhere, disappearing into the way we see everything. »

— Rob Horning, “Found images: On the nostalgia for image scarcity”

good read for all YA book fans and fandom

ricks blog statement about leah's casting:

thank you, nurses

Original caption: “arriving in Australia, the first Negro nurses to reach these shores try bicycle riding near their quarters in Camp Columbia, Wacol, Brisbane.” 2nd Lts: L-R: Beulah Baldwin, Alberta Smith, and Joan Hamilton. 11/29/1943. NARA ID 178140880.

“First Negro WAVES to enter the Hospital Corps School at Nat'l Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, MD.” L-R Ruth C. Isaacs, Katherine Horton and Inez Patterson. 3/2/1945. NARA ID 520634.

BLACK (military) NURSES ROCK!

By Miriam Kleiman, Public Affairs

For National Nurses Day we highlight Black nurses who served with courage and distinction in WWII. “In the European Theater… are the first units of Negro nurses and WACS to go overseas… They are described by their Commanding Officer as being the equals of any nurses in the area…”—Truman Gibson, Jr, chief adviser on racial affairs to Secretary of War Henry Stimson

Statement by Truman Gibson, Jr., Aide on Negro Affairs to Secretary of War Stimson, 4/9/1945. NARA ID 40019813 (full doc below). Gibson was the 1st Black awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit, for advocating for black soldiers during WWII.

Capt. Della H. Raney, Army Nurse Corps, head of nursing at hospital at Camp Beale, CA, “has the distinction of being the first Negro nurse to report to duty in the present war…” NARA ID 535942.

“American Negro nurses, commissioned second lieutenants in the U.S. Army Nurses Corps, limber up their muscles in an early-morning workout during an advanced training course at a camp in Australia. The nurses will be assigned to Allied hospitals in the southwest Pacific theater.” 2/1944. NARA ID 535782.

Commissioning ceremony: Phyllis Dailey, 2nd from right, became the 1st Black nurse in the Navy Nursing Corps 3/8/1945. NAID 520618.

See also:

We honor WW2’s #InvisibleWarriors! Black Women in WWII

Pictorial History of Black Women in the US Navy during World War II and Beyond, by Dr. Tina Ligon, Rediscovering Black History.

The Closed Door of Justice: African American Nurses and the Fight for Naval Service, by Alicia Henneberry, The Text Message.

Black Female WWII Unit Gets (Congressional) GOLD! WWII’s 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion

Their War Too: US Women in the Military During WWII, The Text Message

Pictures of African Americans During World War II

African American Women in the Military During WWII

African American Activities in Industry, Government, and the Armed Forces, 1941-1945).

African Americans and the War Industry by Alexis Hill, The Unwritten Record blog

I too, am Rosie by Dr. Tina Ligon, Rediscovering Black History

Women’s History Month and African American History National Archives News special topics pages.

Mary McLeod Bethune to Return to Capitol Hill

Opportunity not missed.