Mobley will be performing at the Parish at 7 p.m. on Saturday June 21 and Monday at 8 p.m. on June 23. Within his recent wave of new music, the Austin-based, singer, producer and songwriter is also back with a new album “We Do Not Fear Ruins,” which debuted late April, with singles such as, “Y’rGhost,” the lead single off the album, along with, “No Exit” and, “Phantom Hands” and “Had To Be There, “his latest single track off of the much-talked about album. Known to tell stories in his epic-lazed montages of society and life, Mobley is considered a one-man show and is currently with Last Gang Records. Tickets are on sale now.
Influencers alike gathered at Google Fiber on Thursday, Dec.8 for DivInc’s inaugural Demo Day.
The event showcased ten diverse technology entrepreneurs who participated in the organization’s 12-week pre-accelerator program, where they were given access to investors, workshops and technical experts.
Mentors enthusiastically introduced techpreneurs to the stage as they pitched their company to a packed audience.
On stage, Redenim founder Kelly Ernst described her company’s vision as straightforward, saying, “We want you to get in our pants.” Redenim is a marketplace for designer jeans for affordable lease through a membership program.
Ernst told the Austin Urban Post that the growth she experienced while at DivInc was tremendous compared to last year.
“If you are not focusing on what you are doing, your company is going to flounder,” said Ernst. “My company would not be what it is [today] if were not for DivInc… and their leadership team’s ability to help bring focus to what we are doing.”
Plume founder, Bobby Menefee
Bobby Menefee, founder and CEO of Plume — a millennial solution to building credit through a mobile app — held the same sentiments as Ernst toward DivInc, which was formed to address the lack of diversity in the tech startup ecosystem.
“The 12-week program, it was a significant opportunity for me. It really [allowed] me to get my foot in the door,” said Menefee. “I learned so much… I feel like I [am hopefully carrying] this momentum going forward.”
At the event, DivInc also announced that they are currently accepting applications for their next group of technology entrepreneurs.
Co-founder Preston James expressed his enthusiasm for the completion of the organization’s inaugural program.
“It’s an amazing feeling. It’s very gratifying and I am extremely proud of the founders for the progress they’ve made,” he said.
To view all those who participated in the program, visit divinc.org.
Chemical Planters Soulbrain was present at city council meeting that included unanimous approvals for surrounding area constructions that all held the same agriculture, constructor for the community – including Soulbrain plantation facilities – within and around the city of Taylor.
The Korean company has been making rounds throughout the city as they are preparing for the initial groundwork to begin for their new location in Taylor, with many promises from the city that Soul Brain needed to confirm including the stability of contracts, in addition to 50 jobs that had been added onto the employment roll.
“This is a minor change to the agreement that the city has with Soul Brain, their company was a miscommunication about when the 50 jobs would be established, agreement hadn’t matched and we called knowing that people ramp up to the job application,” said Ben White, Austin City Councilman.
In addition, residential staff had the backings to say an absolute inaccurate flaw was happening with the building of a 300-foot cell tower being placed as a replacement located at 118 Cratis Lane that would be “very close to residential” putting many for risk public health, safety and general welfare within the community.
Scott Dunlop, Development Services Director, explained that part of the special use permit is the approximate reimbursement, the way, our cold reads for this area, the distance residential reset the distance is four times the height.”12 hundred feet , the closes house 100 and 13 feet away should the tower bucket, should collapse as one bid piece,’ with no effect.
Much of the concern is that the 10,000 worth of trees that will help in the surroundings of the 300-foot cell tower would be something that residents would have to considering manually and according to representatives that is not the case, “This is a self-supporting tower that has no guide specifics,” said Brian Sullivan, Craft and Communications. The 300-foot tower is set to be all automated.
Boxwood two-site development plan that would be located at 2002 w. Second St. was almost completely knocked down heavily by residents with an asked for fee in lieu of the unfulfilled trees. A development that could keep residents safe from risk of loss due to unsafety seriousness due to old guided, manual improvisations, a plan that included agricultural renovations.
“There was some trees that were removed, some trees that got credit for and some trees they were planting , further plan they had about 33 trees to plant however when we were out to the cite inspection and we were and we were wrapping up the planting that did not match how they were approved,” said Dunlop.
Planned Parenthood can be added to a long list of groups that the Trump administration has verbally condemned and threatened for expressing their First Amendment rights.
Since one of their services goes against his pro-life beliefs, President Trump handed the women’s health care organization a hefty ultimatum, saying that Planned Parenthood will continue to see government funding only if the abortions stop.
Trump wishes to block Planned Parenthood from federal assistance in order to prevent abortion, but the Hyde Amendment of 1976 already took care of that. The law allows government funds to go toward abortion only in the cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger.
After it was passed, the amendment was challenged in the Supreme Court where it was upheld that “The funding restrictions of the Hyde Amendment do not impinge on the ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment held in Roe v. Wade…to include the freedom of a woman to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy…”
The government aid Planned Parenthood receives goes not toward funding abortions but instead toward funding critical health care services — such as pap smears, birth control, family planning and HIV testing — for 2.5 million Americans annually.
Men and women alike march in support of Planned Parenthood. via. Getty Images.
The $500 million cut that Trump has cautioned would injure countless lives of both women and men alike. Certainly, Planned Parenthood serves men, too — the very people Trump swore to protect when he took office. For men, the nonprofit provides vasectomies, condoms and cancer screenings, among other gender-appropriate services.
Whether it’s through information sharing, surgery or examinations, Planned Parenthood’s supply of sexual and reproductive procedures and education saves lives. And it is the low-income patients, men and women, who rely on Planned Parenthood because often they cannot afford their own health care insurance, that would suffer the most were federal dollars to be discontinued.
If Trump follows through on his threats, that will only increase the rates by which Americans are at risk of unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and several types of cancer.
Life as we know it began 48 years ago when scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles transmitted a message — Lo — to a server 350 miles north at the Stanford Research Institute (they were going for Login, but the system crashed at g). The researchers wanted to collaborate with one another without knowing where, or even who, the other person was. It was this essential network that would become the Internet, and later, the spark to a global information age.
A plaque at the birthplace of the Internet on campus at UCLA in Los Angeles.
We are now in a situation where we can evaluate what impacts the Internet has had on society.
Certainly some of them are good — transcendent and transformative, it adds new perspectives. It empowers science, foreign commerce and humanitarianism. It brings convenience, connectivity and truth. And best of all, it’s all yours…
But not without cost.
The Internet doesn’t deliver benefits without peril — with convenience comes security risks, with truth comes convoluted information, with global dialogue comes divisive rhetoric, with a focus on the self comes too much focus on the self.
Online, people lie. They say hurtful things. They share things they shouldn’t. They pose as others. They steal. They spy. They hack.
In this way, researchers most original intentions of anonymity might just be the Internet’s modern day pitfall. It lacks accountability, and with that, many of the physical interactions that typically restrain behavior vanish when one acts through a screen.
Taking advantage of obscurity, many use it as a platform to propel false information. Such lies push ideological ends, damage reputations and, as the fake news torrent has shown us, fallaciously influence public opinion.
Despite this negativity, our lives continue to become more and more engulfed in and reliant upon technology yet we never stop to question it.
A digital you
The line between the real you and a digital representation of you is becoming less and less distinct. Though connectivity promises to make life more convenient, it also jeopardizes the security of information — anything stored digitally can be stolen, manipulated or destroyed.
Though cyber criminals hack with a variety of motives, profit is typically the driving force. Similarly complex are the many ways by which one could carry out a hack. The term has become synonymous with a range of actions and can refer to anything from taking advantage of flaws in software to making a phone call to convince someone in an organization to do things they shouldn’t to seizing control of machinery used to run industrial complexes.
Whereas computer viruses only affect disks, cyber hacks affect objects. Regardless of circumstance, cyber is the perfect weapon — any person can remotely and inconspicuously take over digital information that controls physical objects, be it a computer, train, plane, power plant or an entire infrastructure system.
Me, me, me
I wonder about the relationship between the Internet and morality. Has it improved morality for the way it exposes users to a diverse marketplace of ideas? Or has it hindered common decency for the mental state it provokes in us?
A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that most agree with latter, though they did say the Internet has benefitted the realms of education, relationships and the economy.
From Hollywood to social networking to politics, you don’t have to look far to see evidence of narcissism in our culture.
Dr. Jean Twenge has spent years studying the societal rise of narcissism. A core finding of the psychologist’s work is that today’s culture is far more focused on the self — and less on social rules — than we were 50 years ago. Moreover, she argues that a culture of individualism is counterproductive to achievement and happiness.
Dr. Jean Twenge
One of the many factors Twenge investigated was the presence of individualistic language in American books. Looking for phrases such as “You can be anything,” “I am the best” and “You are special,” and words like personalize, me and mine, she found that individualistic language is much more prominent in today’s literature than it was in the past. This deviation indicates that a rise in narcissism goes beyond generational differences and is instead part of a broader cultural shift.
Our affection for building self-esteem and maintaining positive self views are good things, but only to a certain point. Most of us take for granted that in order to succeed you must have high self-esteem, but that’s not true — people who score high in self-esteem aren’t necessarily more successful than anybody else, according to Twenge’s research.
We often tell kids that they are unique and special, but they are the ones most susceptible to having their abilities impeded by an overload of self-esteem.
Those who build it up without actually experiencing the accomplishments and effort required to build self-esteem in a genuine fashion could become dissuaded from doing the things that would lead to achievements, since what psychological incentive do you have to work hard (and build self-esteem) when your self-esteem is sky-high to begin with?
Dr. Jim Taylor elaborates in a Huffington Post blog: “Certainly, the shift in societal values away from collectivism and toward individualism, away from civic responsibility and toward self-gratification, and away from meaningful contributions to society and toward personal success have also contributed to the cultural messages of narcissism in which children are presently immersed.”
Repercussions of the shift have already manifested in millennials. Despite no generational improvement in performance, millennials are much more likely than baby boomers to think they are above average compared to the rest of people their age.
Twenge’s studies show that millennials’ buoyant expectations for the future are often not met by the time they hit their 30s. It used to be that people over the age of 30 were happier than those in their 20s, and though they still are, it’s by a much smaller margin. Sky-high self-impressions collide with reality, and in that way act as a disillusionment, ultimately causing depression and other mental health issues in adulthood.
To avoid a self-serving life, Twenge recommends focusing not on how you feel about yourself but on what you do. It’s good to have faith in oneself, but there’s a fine line between confidence and overconfidence. To be overconfident is to have no careful reflection, self doubt or caution.
Technology like Apple’s iCentric Internet of me panders to the idea that It’s my world and you’re all just living in it — iMac, iMovie, iTunes, iPad, iMe, iEverything. It makes sense to associate self-centeredness with our becoming more and more accustomed to having all of our most trivial needs met by the net.
Via: (Pinterest)
Ego aside, the Internet also does us a disservice for the way it endorses group think and echo chambers.
Humans filter evidence through our own biases and preconceptions. In having control over the information we receive, we are likely to gorge on what confirms our ideas and snub what does not. “Then we all share what we found with our like-minded social networks, creating closed-off, shoulder-patting circles online,” writes the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo. We can see this manifesting in, for example, the intersection of politics and news media — the very same lines that divide voters now divide audiences.
I don’t know if technology has all the answers.
What I do know is that the Internet is an imitation of humanity; as Werner Herzog says, a representation of what is deeply embedded in ourselves.
In this way, it acts as a platform to propel both good and bad. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that we maneuver carefully in virtual reality.
Set strong passwords, and don’t open emails from people you don’t know. Act as your own filter by being skeptical over the information you receive. Embrace the Internet to your heart’s desire, but not without first embracing the thought that in this digital age of unparalleled potential, unparalleled risk also lurks.
In the documentary “Cartel Land,” director Matthew Heineman portrays an unexpected side to the drug war.
His story goes a little something like this.
In early 2013, Dr. José Manuel Mireles Valverde of Michoacán took up arms with other town residents to form the Autodefensas. The group of vigilantes fought in the name of self-protection — to repel the Los Caballeros Templarios cartel from their community.
As they found ascendancy, the paramilitary faction aimed toward something bigger: to eliminate the cartel band from each city in Mexico.
The movement gained force. Cue federal dismantle.
Mexican officials gave them a choice: disband or join us as part of the Rural Defense Force. And hey, we’ll load you up with guns and vests if you choose the latter.
Most gave in. Some, like Dr. Mireles, refused.
Before long, the same men who joined the Autodefensas with wholesome intentions were out in a deserted field under a night sky tending to a big black pot of steaming meth. As the film ends, one of the cooks acknowledges — “We’re the lucky ones. For now.”
Cartel Land poster. Via: (Collider Movie Talk)
Writing for the New Yorker, Dan Slater reflects on Heineman’s film: “The drug war is typically depicted as a problem of hypocrisy and delusion in the United States, and of tumult in Mexico. It’s a matter of ‘corruption,’ one hears. But corruption… fails to convey the extent of the problem… there is no accountable government; no public trust exists that can be broken… in a void of central authority, evil moves through the poor communities of a narco state with a cancerous gravity, making every cell sick.”
Innocent people turned casualties of a war they wanted no part of.
Those who join the cartel typically do so for one of two reasons. The first, that it’s one of few means by which a person can escape poverty in rural Mexico.
Given the nature of their work, it’s hard to conceptualize that these drug producers might possess motives similar to our own — they are capitalists, seizing on a market.
The second, that joining the cartel is often the only way to escape the cartel. The gang has infiltrated our southern neighbor across all tiers of society: government, police, military and civilians alike.
Since 2007, some 236,000 homicides have been reported in the bureaucratic black hole. An estimated 27,000 are missing. Half live in poverty. Violence and torture related to organized crime run rampant.
Those who dare to rebel against the system do so nobly, but will likely end up either as another bad guy or as a subject of the bad guys’ manhunt, as was the fate of Dr. Mireles, who now sits in a Michoacán prison awaiting trial. As he once said, you can’t stop the cartel, no matter what you do.
Who are the real criminals of the drug war? Before pointing your finger toward Mexico, ask yourself: would you, given the chance, take revenge on the man who killed your mother, father, sister, brother, husband or wife? Would you join a cartel if not joining meant dying? If they were coming to your house, would you have the courage to rumble?
War by its nature is cyclical. Patterns of retaliation combined with deep-rooted institutional corruption make it hard to envision Mexico ever freeing itself from cartel-induced mayhem.
U.S. policy is largely responsible for the demand the cartel supplies. Indeed, as America’s war on drugs took full effect, we began to see the rise of cartels. Most trace their origin to the Guadalajara cartel, formed in 1980 by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
Escalation of the drug war has only proven to make these drugs more valuable.
Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, broke this thought down for The Huffington Post’s Marc Lamont Hill: “Things like cocaine, heroine, marijuana — these are minimally-processed agricultural commodities,” he said. “They’re very easy to produce… They’re very cheap to produce. There’s no reason they should be worth this kind of money that people are willing to kill, and torture and massacre over.”
For the cartel, the riskier a transport, the more it’s going to cost — production fees that must be remade in sales and distribution, one might suppose.
To work toward eliminating illegal drug trade, drug decriminalization, like what’s beginning to happen with marijuana, is a good start.
Sufficient, widespread decriminalization would mean far less people in prison, unfortunate news for those who make billions annually off the incarcerated population — like the $70 billion private prison industry, or the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, which collected $4.5 billion from state seizures of cash and property in 2014, according to their own report.
Ending the war on drugs would certainly lose such entities money, but it’s action well worth the cost if it helps to bring about peace in Mexico and on the border.
Mexico needs reform, as does the U.S. For them, it’s economic, political, social and institutional resuscitation. For us, it’s changes in policy that embrace drug treatment instead of punishment, impartiality instead of discrimination, empathy instead of callousness.
Overdose took 50,000 American lives in 2014.
Common forces drive people to abuse drugs. A study by the Kaiser Southern California Permanente Medical Group, for example, found that those who endure four or more traumatic childhood events (including but not limited to sexual abuse, violence against mother and living with a substance abuser) are 4 to 12 times more likely to experience alcoholism, drug abuse and depression than those who endured none.
Our government’s systematic response to drug use and abuse contains no compassion for such human tendencies. Instead, it serves to capitalize on our fallibilities, ultimately forgoing public well-being for the sake of profit and power.
It’s no secret the war on drugs has failed. But there’s more to it than that. The drug war is actively harming an American public it’s supposed to be protecting.
The first anti-drug legislation in the United States – passed by San Francisco in 1875 – was rooted in anti-immigrant sentiment: it banned opium smoking, a habit unique to the Chinese.
Comparably, former Richard Nixon administrators have openly confessed racism was one of the reasons for the president’s declaring a war on drugs in 1971.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s magazine.
Nixon launched a war on drugs despite knowing that drug treatment works and incarceration doesn’t, according to Dan Baum in his book “Smoke and Mirrors.”
Before long, prison numbers skyrocketed. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, America’s incarcerated population in 1970 was 196,441. By 1980, it was 503,600; by 1990, 1.2 million; and by 2014, 2.2 million.
It was in that shift that police became a militarized, numbers-driven group. Communities came to see police not as protectors but as potential prosecutors.
Highly incentivized to make arrests, police go after the easiest targets: minorities. According to data from the Prison Population Initiative, blacks in 2010 accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. population and 40 percent of our prison population. Whites, on the other hand, accounted for 64 percent of the country’s population and 39 percent of those incarcerated. Demonstrating a similar trend, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People tells us that blacks are arrested at nearly six times the rate of whites.
Worst of all, the war on drugs that institutionalizes discrimination doesn’t even address the pills most lethal to society: prescription opioids.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history.
CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham, “the epidemic of deaths involving opioids continues to worsen. Prescription opioid misuse and use of heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl are intertwined and deeply troubling problems.”
Over the last decade, prescription opioid overdose rates have grown exponentially — annual quotas have quadrupled since 1999. Informatively, so have opioid prescribing rates.
The American pharmaceutical system is unique. In most advanced economies, the government bargains for and buys pharmaceuticals. U.S. law, on the other hand, bars the process from negotiation.
Capitalizing on the available market, pharmaceutical companies — at the expense of citizens’ health — make drugs readily accessible. Subsequent abundance makes prescriptions ripe for abuse. Because of their effect, opioids in particular have a high probability of being misused.
But the pharmaceutical industry banks off of you not necessarily knowing that. As a result, drug companies are willing to do whatever it takes — lie, cheat, schmooze — to convince consumers of either requiring or desiring their pills.
When Purdue Pharma first began to market OxyContin in 1996, it advertised the drug as a non or less addictive opiate, knowing good and well that wasn’t true. They contended that the narcotic, “because of its time-release formulation, posed a lower threat of abuse and addiction to patients than do traditional, shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet or Vicodin.”
That lie eventually landed the major drug manufacturer in court, where they settled the case with $600 million in fines — a sum equivalent to 21 percent of their profit off OxyContin in the first six years of sales alone.
A billboard at W. Ben White Blvd. and S. 1st St. in Austin.
Guiding these inconsistent systems to how we respond to drugs is similarly incredulous policy.
Back in 1970, alongside declaring drug abuse America’s public enemy number one, Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act to regulate the manufacture, importation, possession, use and distribution of certain substances.
As federal law has it, cannabis, which has not once been linked to death, is more hazardous of a drug than benzodiazepines like Xanax, which were involved in 30 percent of prescription drug overdoses in 2013, second only to opioids. Meanwhile, 8.5 million die annually from alcohol and tobacco, according to the World Health Organization.
This way of inaccurately labeling drugs has blurred the lines of what is right and what is wrong when it comes to drug use. One would think that if a drug is illegal, it must be dangerous; and if a drug is legal, it must be safe. Clearly that is not the case.
People are going to do drugs regardless of what anyone else says or does. That is not going to change.
In place of laws that allow corporations to play the American people as pawns in a crooked, real-life game of monopoly, we need accurate policies that keep big pharma and its huge profits in check. Until such regulation is achieved, the self-inflicted war will continue to linger.
As startup companies like DivInc and Urban Co-Lab develop, it’s becoming evident that Austin’s community is working to cultivate inclusion in the tech field.
DivInc, a local nonprofit dedicated to championing diversity in the startup industry, launched its 12-week pre-accelerator program in September to help “foster the growth and development of ethnically diverse and women-led tech companies,” according to the organization’s website.
DivInc’s CEO Preston James told the Urban Post that he believes Austin possesses the infrastructure necessary “to lead the nation in becoming a top ecosystem for diverse entrepreneurs.”
“The infrastructure and resources for a highly successful ecosystem are here already, still growing and getting better each year,” he said.
Austin continues to top vitality lists. The Kauffman Index, a site that examines startup activity in major metropolitan areas, ranked the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos area No. 1 this year.
The city can attribute much of those accolades to its much-talked about, community-friendly business mentorship model.
“Based on what we are experiencing at DivInc there are a lot of influential, sincere and passionate people who want to affect change as it pertains to greatly improving diversity in the tech startup ecosystem,” said James.
Urban Co-Lab, a shared-work community for urban innovators, examined the startup and tech community’s relationship with minority entrepreneurs in its inaugural Austin Startup Diversity Report.
The report notes that while Austin is more diverse than the United States as a whole – not one group accounts for more than 50 percent of the city’s racial demographics – Hispanics and African Americans earn $21,000 less per year than Asians and whites.
Nevertheless, Hispanic-owned businesses continue to pop up in Austin. The city leads in women entrepreneurship and continues to be one of the top cities where minorities are doing economically well.
Primpii Founder, Dr. Tausha Robertson
Dr. Tausha Robertson, founder of the beauty-sharing app Primpii, said that as a black female entrepreneur, she has learned to navigate Austin’s small tech community in order “to find out the best practices and where resources are” from like-minded business owners.
“I do think that in Austin, if you take advantage of some of the meet-ups and events held around town, you can get the ball rolling. I wasn’t a tech person before I started this venture,” said Robertson.
Access to resources such as investors, workshops and technical experts are some of the key elements that DivInc provides through its classes.
James acknowledges that it’s more difficult for women and people of color to acquire the capital necessary to fund their startups. “This network will include mostly people who don’t look like them, so they need to get used to that, embrace it and go with it,” he said.
On a national level, women and underrepresented groups are 2.6 percent and 21.7 percent less likely to raise private equity funding, according to Urban Co-Lab’s report. They are also approximately 20 percent less likely to raise venture capital than their white male counterparts.
Much of that is due to the majority of the nation’s top venue capital firms being predominantly white and male, according to the report.
The National Venture Capital Association did however label Austin as No. 12 on their list of the top metropolitan areas in the country. As the Austin American-Statesman reported, a total of 99 Austin-area deals received $740 million in venture capital last year.
James suggests that strong collaboration – not just locally but nationwide – is key to addressing diversity issues happening across tech communities in the U.S.
“I would love it if in 10 years there would be no need for a DivInc because the startup ecosystem has changed to be instinctively inclusive and we’ve minimized the biases,” said James.
Since its conception, Instagram has evolved from a photo-based platform to a place where users can freely express themselves in a variety of ways.
South Asian poet ena ganguly (who prefers her name to be lowercased) is forming a strong social media following as she explores race, class and religion through real and poignant Instagram-based poetry.
A University of Texas senior, ena spoke with the Austin Urban Post on how her experiences and multifaceted cultural upbringing have influenced her explorative writings.
ganguly’s poem “Double Standards” can be viewed on her Instagram @enaganguly
She created the poetry-based platform as a means to connect with others on a personal level. I started writing poems on Instagram near the end of my freshman year in college because it was a way for me to feel less alone. I wanted to… recreate this sort of intimacy with people that day-to-day interactions don’t permit. I think poetry — and all art really — has this beautiful way of doing that. There’s this access point that allows many different people with different backgrounds to relate to one another. That’s the real reason why I started making my poems more public, but I’ve been writing since high school.
Her poetry originates from experience. For a long time my poetry has been about my ancestors and the experiences they had. By ancestors I mean my living relatives and also those who have passed — those who I haven’t had physical interactions with but whose memories are still very much alive. It’s like I have this sense of what to write about and [when I do] it feels like I’m speaking from those memories. Poetry to me is about empathizing with other people; making sure it’s a form of healing and not one that rehashes trauma.
At six years old, she moved from Northeast India to Sugarland, Texas. I grew up in a predominantly black community and I think that really helped me understand what solidarity and community memory look like… [But] I also grew up in India.
I feel like most people of color, especially black folks in America, experience this certain thing where we have to code-switch, so to speak, in order to move into another space appropriately. I’ve had to do that growing up.
In India there is a lot of poverty — very in-your-face, on-the-street poverty. I grew up in an upper middle class household there, which was a place of privilege in India. When I came here [America], I was in a more sort of marginalized space with working class folks.
Having these multiple lenses of experience has shaped my work because complicating the South Asian identity is what a lot of my writing is about; opening up dialogue that lots of people don’t want to have. Talking about class, religion and anti-blackness in South Asian communities, these are all things I want to address with my poetry in one way or another. There’s lots of multiplicity to it.
ganguly’s poem’s can be viewed on Instagram @enaganguly.
An East Austin native, Elizabeth has seen her neighborhood transform over time due to what she refers to as “neocolonialism.” Somehow, though, she continues to maintain the essence of the black and brown people who once populated the area.
Elizabeth spoke with the Austin Urban Post on her love for the original East Austin and why she attributes her art to the black existence.
She contributes her art to her existence as a black woman.
My art is a tribute to black life, to the black existence. For me, it’s a way of reimagining what blackness is; reimagining… what we are fed about blackness and our
Elizabeth’s “Divine Protection.”
capabilities; reimagining the richness of blackness and our power, and kind of looking at those things and undoing what we have been taught.
She’s a witness to the changes happening in East Austin.
There have been a lot of changes in East Austin, ones that have not been equitable for everyone. Instead of “change,” I think a better word would be “neocolonialism.”
Black folks have been shifted around Austin for decades. The difference now is that we are being pushed out of the city.
With my art I try to capture the essence of the black lives still here, many of whom risk losing their homes. Homes not in term of materials, but in terms of community. All of that is being taken away. So, I take photographs of buildings that have been here since my youth.
She continues to capture the essence of her neighborhood.
I go to Givens Park to take photographs of our community – barbeques, people driving around in the nice cars, those slabs with the popped trunks and lights, [or whatever it may be]. In this way, I try to take pictures of all that East Austin has been for me. I try to capture all of that now so that we can hold on to it and use it as a way to tell the history of a culture that is still here and holding strong.
She incorporates her existence as a black LGBTQ woman into her work.
I think art is very necessary for black and queer folks to survive and thrive. We experience the most exploitation, marginalization, abuse and trauma, especially sexually.
I create my art out of desire to create a new reality for myself and other black women. I think it’s important that we see ourselves as powerful. Even to be able to see ourselves, period. That is not something that happens often. When black women are seen, it’s in very particular ways. It’s as the world wants us to be. It’s never as we truly are.
There are lots of characters who are black women. It seems like we are always the comedic relief. Always the joke, and the means of telling the joke. I think it’s critical that art challenges that and forces us to see black women in different ways.
I strive to demonstrate our essence by creating these worlds where black women are goddesses; in terms of raising women beyond the level, above the level, of being human. But also using that as a metaphor to describe our true power and beauty and humanism. Because most of the time, people don’t want to see us as humans, equals, or as having all of the nuances so-said people have. We are always supposed to be able to take anything that is thrown to us. But the real question is, why is it being thrown to us in the first place?
Her work “Goddesses in Hue” glorifies the black woman’s existence.
It came about as an extension of the original series [Goddesses] that I did digitally a few years ago. That was inspired by my desire to place black women in a light where we truly exist. For years I had been wanting to bring that digital collage to life in order to do more effective things with it. This new series was inspired by that desire.
I used a lot of photographs of a church on the corner of 12th Street and Airport Boulevard that I grew up around. The church is an anchor for me to have in this series. As a young black woman in East Austin, being around those areas and types of spaces was very integral to my upbringing.
I grew up Baptist. That is where my relationship with the divine came from; my first understanding of what the all-powerful is. That gave me direction in creating this reality of divinity when it comes to black women.
That also proved an inspiration for bringing the series together. I used the scripture to tell the story of each goddess in the series and their role in society, the universe and my personal life. I also used flowers to connect the different pieces, because flowers remind of me of birth, beauty and life, and that’s what all of these goddesses represent to me.
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