Ramblings of a childlike Goddess...

peardita:

dammit-mcu:

broadlybrazen:

kurumayu:

magdalenarivera:

saarqamek:

spvcepvssy:

staarlord:

"Up from a past that’s rooted in pain, I rise." - Maya Angelou (x)

is this a joke like did you really use a maya angelou poem that is literally about her life and overcoming not only racism but sexism and being sexually assaulted for a fucking iron man gifset

madame angelou has barely stepped into heaven and y’all steady disrespecting her life and work 

lmao is this actually happening right now? really? am i actually seeing this shit?

what in the fresh hell is this mess

every time I think that MCU fandom can’t surprise me anymore with its bullshit, somebody still finds an exciting new way to be terrible.

There is literally no fucking way to interpret this poem as ~~~universal struggle~~~ or whatever. It is about a particular experience and particular triumph - it is about being a black woman in America, soaking in toxic antiblack racism, and still finding strength and joy and beauty in yourself. 

It is not about rich white dude manpain. To wit:

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

I don’t know how someone reads this poem, written by a luminous black artist and activist about her real life struggle as a black American woman, and the real life struggles of millions of black Americans, and still finds it acceptable to stick this poem onto a mediocre gifset of a fictitious rich white warprofiteering imperialist. And I truly can’t fathom how anyone has the unmitigated gall to pull this shit less than a week after Dr. Angelou passed.

Among other things, it is a poem whose narrator declares “I am the dream and the hope of the slave." The defiant celebration and glorious power of this poem…It is goddamned sacrilege to appropriate such a thing for whatever fictional white dick you’re obsessing over.

Here is the poem in full.

This fandom is the fucking worst.

There are people explicitly reblogging this post to ~support/defend~ the OP, saying anyone can interpret a poem to mean anything they want.

No. No you fucking can’t. “It’s my interpretation” is not the new free pass to be exempt from all criticism. And if you are stealing the words of someone in a marginalized group who already has to fight to be heard, and twisting those words to support people with the most privilege, yeah your interpretation is offensive and wrong.

Interpretation means looking at the poem as a whole, and the OP already admitted “i read the poem and a few lines fit his story so i used them on a gifset” (x) that’s not interpretation that is stripping away/erasing the voice of a black American woman’s experience so you can deny her words their context and twist them to apply to the opposite of what she was talking about. Dr. Angelou was in fact calling out the rich white people who own the “oil wells” “gold mines” and “diamond mines” and think that makes them better than her and who want to keep her beaten down because  they feel like it’s an attack on them if she refuses to be silenced and instead shows her power, her pride and her celebration of herself to the whole world. And Tony Stark is exactly the kind of character to think that because he’s rich and powerful, he’s better than other people—he thinks the rules for “normal” people never apply to him, and he can use his money to do whatever he wants.

So yeah this is disrespectful as hell and people should be angry. And the people who are defending this shit need to stop and think about why they are actively supporting a toxic white-supremacy culture in which a black woman can’t talk about her own experience and claim her own power without people stealing and twisting her words around and using them to praise and raise up rich white men.

This is some Grade A white bullshit.

(via abbiemillskicksass)

Posted 1 day ago — 1,305 notes