"You sit in the back of the class because you’re ashamed of your hand-me-downs. You can’t afford glasses so you can’t see the board. You don’t have enough money for your own art supplies, and your school doesn’t supply them because all that money goes to the jocks, so you guiltily shoplift them. The entire machine you’re being pushed through is engineered to ignore you in favor of the elites. The athletes. The rich kids.
If you choose, right now will be your lowest ebb. And right now will be the highest pinnacle of the elites.
If you nurture it, if you are tender with yourself, your suffering now makes you strong in the future. It lights a fire in your heart. This fire fuels you. As the elites lazily drift from one free opportunity to the next, you’re being given the gift of hardship. You’ll have to be harder than them. You’ll have to be smarter than them. You’ll have to be faster than them. Make yourself be these things. Use the gift of the shadow you’ve been placed in to forge new and striking ways of thinking, doing, and being.
The elites will become cogs in the machine. You will become a bright, silver, indestructible wrench that breaks it. You will become the creator of your own machine, and they will envy you your purity.
And the money they inherited, they will give to you. And unlike them, you will have earned it.
They will buy your art. They will pay you for your ideas. They will line up outside your club, behind the velvet rope you have a former athlete guarding. They will beg for backstage passes to your show. They will pay you for VIP access to your company. They will always ask themselves, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And you’ll know, “Because you didn’t have to.”
Hang in there. It will happen. The present belongs to them. The future belongs to you.
Love,
Clayton"

Clayton Cubitt (via mollycrabapple)
@1 week ago with 435 notes

Gangster Bankers Too Big To Jail - Matt Taibbi 

“If you can imagine a drive-thru heart-transplant clinic or an airline that keeps a fully-stocked minibar in the cockpit of every airplane, you’re in the ballpark of grasping the regulatory absurdity of HSBC Mexico’s “Cayman Islands branch.” The whole thing was a pure shell company, run by Mexicans in Mexican bank branches.”

@3 months ago

dope-rahwinfrey:

meyllendjneres:

ta-ta-ta-thea:

youngblackandvegan:

keekeers:

brokeymcpoverty:

eyan-j:

fishingboatproceeds:

Leonard is a boss.

DA GAWD

THIS IS THE BEST BLACK HISTORY MONTH EVER!

Lool awesome

my hero lol

I just watched this with my dad yesterday! He was so excited when Leonard won!

Oh man, Leonard was so awesome.  He seriously had the best comeback I’ve ever seen on Jeopardy!

Hahah that guy in the middle is blown.

The balls on this kid. Must what’s counter balancing the hair.

@3 months ago with 9337 notes

Week’s Reads

Rodney Carmichael on Miya Bailey and black tattoo artists.

Catherine Rampell on the college degree as entry-level admission to employment.

Sarah Fay interviews Marilynne Robinson for the Paris Review.

@3 months ago
beingblog:

Injecting a bit of humor into the stream while a cosmic surplus of rocks comes our way.
(h/t Michael Wells)

beingblog:

Injecting a bit of humor into the stream while a cosmic surplus of rocks comes our way.

(h/t Michael Wells)

@3 months ago with 154 notes

"Of course the excitement of a steady paycheck quickly gave way to that feeling of going to someplace in order to subsidize your living, but deriving no actual positive feelings from it until you’ve spent money on something fun and life-improving. I don’t dislike work; It is fairest to say, on most days, work is a void I step into for thirty hours a week and step out of with about eight hundred dollars a month."

@3 months ago
#writing