Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/31/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

"The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate." -- Oprah Winfrey

Watch Aretha Franklin Make President Obama Emotional

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/30/15

Song Of The Day.....

Today's Reflection:

When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion.—Ethiopian Proverb

Michael Jordan Pays Tribute To Kobe Bryant

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/29/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“Don't get lost. Give it a try. Go find the place that you're wishing for.” ― Natsuki Takaya

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/28/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

"A good friend is like a bra: hard to find one you're comfortable with, always provides support, holds you tight and is always close to your heart." -- Anonymous

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/23/25

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“What is important is what can be explored throughout Christmas, in the company of your Soul.” ― Eleesha

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/22/15

Song Of The Day.....

Today's Reflection:

"In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." -– Albert Camus

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/21/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

"A lovely thing about Christmas is it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together." -- Garrison Keillor

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/18/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don’t ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.” ― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/17/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“In every change, in every falling leaf there is some pain, some beauty. And that's the way new leaves grow.” ― Amit Ray

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/16/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC” ― Kurt Vonnegut

NBA Referee Bill Kennedy Comes Out.....

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/15/15

Song Of The Day.....

Today's Reflection:

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”
― Warsan Shire

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/14/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“Opportunity seldom rises with blood pressure.” ― Jarod Kintz

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/11/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive...” ― Malcolm X

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/10/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“Celebrate who you are in your deepest heart. Love yourself and the world will love you.” ― Amy Leigh Mercree

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/09/15

Song Of The Day.....

Today's Reflection:

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” ― Aldous Huxley

Call for Papers - Special Issue of TSQ on Blackness

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume IV, number II, 2017

Special issue: The Issue of Blackness

Guest editors: Treva C. Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, C. Riley Snorton

issue /ˈiSHo͞o/: the action of supplying or distributing an item for use, sale, or official purposes; to come, go, or flow out from.

This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, titled “The Issue of Blackness,” explores and questions the issuance of Blackness to transgender identity, politics, and transgender studies and proceeds from the premise that the position of Blackness in relation to the project of universality is both overseen and unknown. Black scholars like Saidiya Hartman have argued that Blackness functions as a fungible site of accumulation in relation to the projects of knowing, representation, and self-craft. Blackness is overseen in the sense that the literal and figurative capture of Blackness is a source of value for social and political subjectification and a mechanism of valorization for institutions and institutionalized knowledge. However, the phenomenology of Black life and Black peoples’ multiple lived experiences are routinely disavowed via the same circuits and institutions of power, knowledge production, and politics that make claims on and about Blackness. Additionally, as scholars like Denise Ferriera da Silva, Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and George Lipsitz have written, the hegemonic socio-spatial relationships and imaginaries that constitute life as we know it (including academic disciplinarity) often render Black people and a Black sense of place as perpetually out of place, un-geographic, and unknown. We are interested in how this dual operation of Blackness across space and time: overseen and unknown, functions in relation to constructions and articulations of transgender identity, transgender politics, and the field of Transgender Studies.

As a growing field of inquiry, transgender studies provides a fertile ground to analyze the instability, variation, and re-construction of gender and gender normativity across space and time. In this special issue, we are interested in thinking about how an attention to Blackness, Black people, and Black Studies opens up trans as an analytic and puts pressure on gender as a stable social category. We hope that this issue contributes to ongoing thought and action that deploys trans as a heuristic that is attentive to transgender embodiment, but that diverges from normalizing tendencies of subjectification.

We seek essays, poems, and artwork that contend with how and where transgender and Black meet, contradict, and interface as social and political categories of difference, sites of scholarly inquiry, and categories of political praxis. We are interested in hearing from a broad spectrum of scholars, artists, thinkers and organizers who consider Blackness as it circulates diasporically. We wish to engage across many fields of study such as, but not limited to, cultural studies, ethnic studies, American studies, English, history, geography, anthropology, and sociology. We seek to publish numerous shorter pieces (1000-2500 words) to represent the diversity of practices and problematics, and welcome original research articles as well as theory, reports, manifestos, opinion pieces, reviews, interviews, and creative/artistic productions rooted in the themes and goals of the issue. While the language of publication will be English, we accept submissions in any language and will work with authors to translate submitted work. Below are some questions to consider, but we are open to others:

How has Blackness been a source of value and a site of valorization for transgender politics and identity?
How has transgender studies theorized or contended with Blackness?
What do theories of Blackness and anti-Blackness offer to the field of transgender studies and to transgender political praxis?
What political, material, and intellectual conditions give rise to Black trans* futures?
How do Blackness and the experiences of Black people throughout the African diaspora recast or redefine trans studies, in matters of history, theory, politics, and culture?
How does a trans* as a heuristic and / or mode of analysis align with, or conflict with Black feminism’s challenge to normative constructions of womanhood?
How do theories of Blackness as well as Black people’s lived experience help us locate the relationship between the trans* transgender and the trans* in transnational?
Through what means and in which contexts do Black and transgender get rendered as oppositional categories?
How has the law been a medium through which the relationship between Blackness and transgender identity and politics been posited, worked out and / or contested?
How do the lived experiences, activism, intellectual work, and expressive knowledge of Black transgender and gender non-conforming people put pressure on dominant articulations of trans identity, trans politics and notions of coalition and solidarity?
How do theoretical insights grounded in Blackness, such as Fred Moten’s notion of the break or Hortense Spillers’ conception of the body versus the flesh, help us to understand the polyvalent senses of trans?
How have technological developments in media been employed to posit relationships between Black and trans? How has the category of “the human” been examined in studies of animality, Blackness and trans--ness?
How do discussions of temporality work in transgender studies and Black studies? Is there a trans sense of time? Does it collide, conflict contradict or support a Black sense of time?

Please send complete submissions by June 1, 2016. (Note that we cannot accept submissions earlier than January 15, 2016.) To submit a manuscript, please visit http://www.editorialmanager.com/tsq. If this is your first time using Editorial Manager, please register first, then proceed with submitting your manuscript. If you have any difficulties with the process, contact the journal at tsqjournal@gmail.com. All manuscripts must be double-spaced, including quotations and endnotes, and blinded throughout. You must also submit an abstract, keywords, and biographical note at the time of initial submission. Please visit the editorial office's website for a detailed style guide. Questions for the editors of this issue may be addressed to Treva C. Ellison (trevaellison@gmail.com), Kai M. Green (kai.m.green@northwestern.edu), Matt Richardson (matturichardson@gmail.com), and C. Riley Snorton (riley.snorton@gmail.com).

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is a new journal, edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker published by Duke University Press. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ will be a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other special issues, visithttp://lgbt.arizona.edu/transgender-studies-quarterly. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php….

Song Of The Day..... & Daily Reflection 12/08/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ― Rumi

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/07/15

Song Of The Day.....

Today's Reflection:

“The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/04/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

"Create all that you are capable of doing. Your disabilities can be turned into capabilities. You really can overcome and prosper." -- Miles Patrick Yohnke

These People Complaining About “The Wiz” Seem To Have Forgotten That “The Wizard Of Oz” Exists (Via BuzzFeed)

As you might already know, The Wiz Live! is premiering on Dec. 3 and it’s probz going to be amazing.

It’s a live performance of the now-classic 1970s musical, which was famously made into a film starring Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Lena Horne, Richard Pryor, and many other incredible performers.


The musical, which was written to feature an all-black cast, is based loosely on The Wizard of Oz, which had its own screen adaptation.

Let the record show that The Wizard of Oz had an all-white cast.
Some people aren’t aware of the difference between the two, though, and seem ~confused~.

Still not getting it.

Nnnnnnope.

Maybe we should tell them that The Wiz and The Wizard of Oz are two different musicals.

And that there’s already been an all-white Wizard of Oz.

Because they really seem confused.

Not grasping the concept. Or the irony.

Sorry, everyone, but Glee did it first.

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/03/15

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

"We acquire the strength we have overcome." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/02/15

Song Of The Day....


Today's Reflection:

"Grace
Give me a day
Too beautiful
I had thought
To stay indoors
& yet
Washing my dishes
Straightening
My shelves
Finally
Throwing out
The wilted
Onions
Shrunken garlic
Cloves
I discover
I am happy
To be inside
Looking out.
This, I think,
Is wealth.
Just this choosing
Of how
A beautiful day
Is spent." - Alice Walker

December 1, 1955

The misuse of 'Allahu akbar' and how the phrase has been co-opted by terrorist

Lisa Biagiotti Contact Reporter


Attackers in Paris and Mali shouted the phrase "Allahu akbar" before firing shots and killing people. "Allahu akbar" translates simply to "God is greater." Muslims explain how misuse of the phrase has affected their lives in the U.S.

They discuss the media sensationalism, religious extremism, Donald Trump and fascism, and their cultural adjustments because of the backlash.

On what it means ...

"It is perhaps the most defining term in Islam, which reminds those who use this term that they would give up their egos, that they would not use their political, cultural, social, ethnic and geographic interests to promote their own ideas." — ASLAM ABDULLAH

On its misuse ...

"One phrase itself doesn’t explain the whole heart of Islam. Islam does not tell people to go and kill." — RAHMAT PHYAKUL

On recent terrorist attacks ...

"And when terrorists use this 'Allahu akbar,' they are hijacking this term, they’re hijacking religion, hijacking God." — ASLAM ABDULLAH

On the role of the media ...

"The media has become a vehicle for religious extremism. Because the lens of extremism is what dominates the definition of religion, especially when it comes to Islam. ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram want nothing more than for us here in the West to believe that Islam has no place in the West, that Islam is alien to the West." — SALAM AL-MARAYATI

On the backlash against Muslims ...

"My hijab, I have to do the adjustment, also because I don’t want people to attack me. It’s sad but it’s a reality." — HEDIANA NIES HADI

"We have to achieve political integration so that we are countering the hatred from people like Donald Trump that wants to see more waterboarding, more surveillance, national registration. Those are fascist ideas." — SALAM AL-MARAYATI

On fear of flying ...

"Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar. There’s a little prayer that Muslims say when they travel. Now I have to worry that if the person sitting next to me and hears this under my breath that now all of a sudden, we have to turn around the plane and land or everyone’s going to freak out." — MARC MANLEY

Contact Lisa Biagiotti at lisa@latimes.com or @lisabiagiotti on Twitter.

Contact Irfan Khan at irfan.khan@latimes.com or @latfoto on Twitter.

Song Of The Day.... & Daily Reflection 12/01/15 (World AIDS Day Edition)

Song Of The Day....

Today's Reflection:

Ignorance and prejudice are fueling the spread of a preventable disease.

World AIDS Day, 1 December is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV and AIDS....

It's up to you, me, and us to stop the spread of HIV and end prejudice.