• ELIXHER
• On July 19, 2013

WNBA’s Brittney Griner has Learned to Rise Above it All

WNBA star Brittney Griner remembers a day in seventh grade as if it were yesterday. Class had just let out and the hallway was flooded with students. As Griner made her way through the crowd, a boy stopped her. “You’re a dude,” he said. “I just stood there and took it. I was humiliated. The whole school was laughing at me,” Griner recalled.

Continue reading over at the LA Times.

Jazzie Collins, San Francisco Transgender Activist, Dies

Jazzie Collins, a community organizer and well-known transgender activist who was involved in social justice causes in San Francisco, died Thursday at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in the city. She was 54 and had deteriorating health the past few weeks, friends said, although the cause of her death is being determined. Ms. Collins also was open about being HIV-positive.

More via the San Francisco Chronicle.

Laughs And Drama Behind Bars With ‘Orange Is The New Black’

By the third episode, we’re as familiar with the nightly head-count routine as Piper is — and by the end of these 13 episodes, we not only know all the characters in this very large, very diverse ensemble comedy-drama, we feel for them, too. And that’s quite an achievement. The cast is so large that singling out only a few for specific praise is tough… And my verdict, after all that, is that Netflix has indeed done it again. After House of Cards and Arrested Development, Orange Is the New Black is the outlet’s third triumph this year.

Read more on NPR.

White Chick Behind Bars

Both Morello and Nichols are minorities in the prison, which is realistic—the majority of prisoners in the United States are people of color. But while white female prisoners may be in the minority, Orange is clear about their placement in the hierarchy of voyeurism. White women’s nakedness is almost always artfully covered…The problem here isn’t that women of color are shown naked. It’s that their bodies are starkly eroticized where white women’s are concealed in order to preserve their putative modesty.

Continue reading on In These Times.

Cameroon Gay Rights Activist Found Tortured and Killed

Prominent Cameroonian LGBTI activist and journalist Eric Ohena Lembembe was found brutally tortured and murdered in his home in the latest of a series of violent anti-LGBTI hate crimes in Cameroon. Lembembe’s friends went to his home after being unable to contact him for days by telephone, and found his apartment in Yaounde padlocked from the outside. Through the window, they saw his body and called the police. Police broke in the door. One friend said his neck and feet were broken, and his face, hands, and feet were burned with an iron.

Details at GLAAD.org.

We are NOT all Trayvon: Challenging Anti-Black Racism in POC Communities

“Community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” – Audre Lorde

I have been trying to articulate the depth of my grief, rage and sadness at the verdict in the Trayvon Martin show-trial for days now. Every word seems insufficient, hollow. But one thing I do know for sure: I am not Black. As a brown, Muslim, cis queer man of color there are a lot of oppressions that I face, that allow me to relate to the gravity of what has just occurred, but anti-Black racism is not one of them. I know that so many of us feel the weight of this grief right now. I know that we want to show our solidarity with Black folks in this historical moment. But appropriating and universalizing this tragedy will not do justice to Trayvon Martin.

Continue reading over at Black Girl Dangerous.