Posts + Projects

How often have you learned about a historic accomplishment made by a Black person in America and wondered, why am I just now hearing about this? The answer is because it’s by design. As some U.S. corporations and politicians distort American history by either misrepresenting actual events or altogether omitting the contributions of marginalized people from textbooks and public school curriculums, new apparel company Thank You Tees is returning the power to educate to the people.

Water is a vital element of human life, and is a limited resource. Today, only 3% of the available water of the earth is used for human consumption. 2 billion people don’t have access to clean water, and every 20 seconds a child dies due to complications from not having clean water. Half of the beds in hospitals are in use due to illness related to not having access to clean water. Water could be considered the blue gold of the 21st century.

This project is an extension of Feminist Killjoys, PhD, a podcast that emerged in the spirit of Sara Ahmed’s theory of killing joy as a necessary component of feminist praxis. Ahmed suggests that harkening back to early feminist “consciousness-raising” (as well as to Marxist notions of “false consciousness”) is a useful (re)turn in order to make sense of our contemporary cultural desire for happiness. Ahmed argues that the happy housewife is the foil to the construct of the “angry black woman” or, she posits, the “feminist killjoy.” That is, the feminist who ruins a good time by speaking about injustice, inequality, their dire position as women, and so on. She writes:

What remains when the war ends? Ruins preserve histories that are often forgotten. In the face of conflict and destruction, ruins are proof that there was something before the wreckage, before the war, and before the painful emotions they now evoke. Not all ruins are the same; some buildings remain standing despite attempts to turn them into rubble. They are manifestations of people’s indestructible hope, resilience, and survival.