They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should be treated as such. These maniacs are not fit to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika. Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.
People Not Places (Detroit, New York, Palestine, 12 min) Directed by Iqaa The Olivetone Score by Vaughan T (LABTECHS) Produced by EMERGENCE and Palestine Education Project
This docu-music-video is based on the song of the same name by Invincible featuring Abeer and Suhell Nafar (DAM). Invincible plays two characters in the video: a Birthright Israel tour recruiter, styled as a used car salesman; and herself, subverting the recruiter’s mission by exposing the buried Palestinian significance of each location in the tour.
Invincible exposes the process of historic and continued colonization of Palestine as being even deeper than land seizure and ethnic cleansing, but one that attempts to erase the indigenous language, culture, and memory of Palestinians.
Intertwined with the music video are interviews that expose how Zionist claims to a Jewish “birthright” to Palestine have come at the expense of the Palestinian Right of Return to their indigenous land. These interviews show how the Right of Return of Palestinians is interconnected with the resistance of occupied and displaced refugee communities globally, from Turtle Island to Puerto Rico and beyond.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
There’s been a lot of bullshit written lately about what is or is not feminist. Notable bones of contention include: ladyblogs, working in finance, doulas, “having it all,” housewifing, rioting, protesting, protesting in lingerie, getting married, watching Girls. Essays in publications ranging from mass-circulation glossies like the Atlantic to small literary magazines like n+1 appeal to a widespread fascination with the confused meaning of the term. The narcissism underlying the debate is parodied by the blog “Is This Feminist?” featuring stock photos of people shaking hands, walking the dog, and doing laundry. The pictures are rated as either “representing feminism” or “problematic.”
With no sense of what feminism is, these writers turn to personal experience. With each step and gesture, they wonder what they’re contributing to feminism. Is navel-gazing feminist?
Let us borrow a definition from bell hooks: feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression.
It cannot be about this or that group of women’s ability to have careers or about individual moments of empowerment while doing laundry. Feminist movements have long suffered from the disconnect between white middle-class feminism, often focused myopically on certain careers and lifestyle choices, and the goals of working-class women. The “Wages for Housework” demands of 1970s Marxist feminists sought to make women’s uncompensated labor under capitalism visible whether the woman was a bourgeois housewife, a factory worker, or a poor mother. Since capital requires the housewife to reproduce the worker, they argued, this need dictates the role of women up and down the class system.
Those who demanded state wages for housework sought two things. First, to make wifely love visible as productive work. Second, to uncover for women the leverage that workers have in their potential to strike. “To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it,” wrote Italian feminist Silvia Federici, “because the demand for a wage makes our work visible … both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.” This was feminism designed not to increase individual compensation, but to reveal and create power while undoing sex roles in all realms of life.
Looking for expressions of these objectives helps sort out what, today, is usefully “feminist.” If feminism is in fact the struggle against sexist oppression, and not merely a thousand little paths toward women’s personal fulfillment, we can orient ourselves toward struggles that not only benefit large numbers of women, but highlight the ways in which uncompensated labor shapes the meaning of what it is to be female.
Consider a movement rarely discussed in terms of feminism, certainly not in the Atlantic. Domestic Workers United (DWU) is “an organization of Caribbean, Latina, and African nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York, organizing for power, respect, fair labor standards and to help build a movement to end exploitation and oppression for all.” They recently pushed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights through the New York State Legislature against all expectations.
DWU allies with unions, but it isn’t a union. Its members know that their labor is brutally exploited because of the sexist assumption that care work done in the home is an act of love and shouldn’t be subject to such crass impositions as labor standards. Employers of domestic workers frequently refer to these workers as “part of the family” – meaning, as always, that women in the kitchen don’t need to be compensated. The DWU is fighting to gain recognition for labor that has been historically pushed from public view again and again.
The plight of the 1970s housewife and that of the domestic worker are not the same, but they are linked. It is an ideological sleight of hand that renders care workers “part of the family” instead of properly paid employees, in much the way that Marxist feminists described housewives as arbitrarily uncompensated for their contributions to the economy. The domestic workers’ movement, located in the most rapidly growing sector of the US labor market, has the power to address the way un(der)compensated work underwrites the global economy by caring for the sick, young, and old.
The DWU’s struggle serves a similar revelatory function to the Wages for Housework campaign. Once care work across social strata is considered real work, radical compensatory mechanisms become imaginable, most notably an unconditional basic income. That demand is intrinsically feminist because it recognizes the domestic work vital to the reproduction of labor power.
Wages for Housework insisted that labor did not mystically become love by virtue of occurring within the household. And members of the DWU are converting what has been a tactical weakness – the invisibility of female labor – into a demand for power and recognition. If the feminism of the future is about more than bloggers watching Girls, it will have to directly address how sexism enables the exploitation of women today, and draw on the rich tradition of fighting for the recognition of women’s work.
Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, forgetfulness is encouraged. When people of color remember ourselves, remember the myriad ways our cultures and communities have been ravaged by white domination, we are often told by white peers that we are “too bitter”, that we are “full of hate.” Memory sustains a spirit of resistance. Too many red and black people live in a state of forgetfulness, embracing a colonized mind so that they can better assimilate into the white world.
The Reagan/Bush administrations also realized that racializing welfare by painting it as a program that unfairly benefited Blacks was a sure-fire way to win White votes. This context created the controlling image of the “welfare queen” primarily to garner support for refusing state support for poor and working-class Black mothers and children. Poor Black women’s welfare eligibility meant that many chose to stay home and care for their children, thus emulating White middle-class mothers. But because these stay-at-home moms were African American and did not work for pay, they were deemed to be “lazy”.
Most women in the United States do not even know or use the terms colonialism and neocolonialism. Most American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally. When unenlightened individual feminist thinkers addressed global issues of gender exploitation and oppression they did and do so from a perspective of neocolonialism.
What redeems it is the idea only - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
The “it” is colonialism, imperialism, Eurocentrism and European cultural supremacy, which is imposed on non-Europeans by brute force. It is the idea that Europe and its off-shoots are better, advanced and superior to the “other”. If we upgrade the idea, then it would be that West is democratic, it espouses human rights, liberty, justice, and freedom that the “other” does not have. The idea also includes that “We” have to civilize “them”, bring them to light, give them democracy, freedom and liberty. The goals depend on the time in which you are living.
In an abstract way let’s compare the past and the present. I am taking about cultural imperialism in this case. I will divorce the analogies from their social and historical conditions, but the idea of it will, however, remain the same and adaptable:
We have to beat the Indian out of the Indian. We have to modernize Muslim women by Westernizing them.
The first one will ring a bell to North American readers. The Native population of this continent was forces into boarding schools where the colonizers wished to “civilize” them and bring to them the light of Christianity. They were forced to learn English and forget their own languages. They were forced to give up their cultural clothing and wear a suit and tie. They were forced to cut their hairs and have “proper” haircut. They were forced to read the Bible and forget their spirituality. The idea that to be civilized one had to become European was forced on them by sheer brutality. What I want to focus on, and what I would like you to keep in mind, is the emphasis on the appearance. The Indian had to rid themselves of any appearance which was Indian, and had to transform themselves into a suited and booted European. This was the idea how to save the Indian from the Indian - by forcing it out of them.
Fast forward to today. Muslims are backward, traditional, narrow-minded, religious fanatics and Muslim women are oppressed because of how they dress. Again, let’s focus on the appearance and clothing. “We”, the West, have to “liberate” “them” from their misery by forcing them out of “backwardness” and into “modernity”. Muslim women have to take off their headscarf, veil, hijab, niqab, burqa and chador, because this is the only way to emancipation. Muslim women have to appear European to be considered free. Only short-skirts and mini-skirts will do. Even better would be a cover photo for Playboy. The only way forward, the purpose of history, the way to live a life and the way to be yourself is to transform into a European looking lady. The Eurocentric discourse is that destiny of a Muslim woman is found in Europe, and that Europeans have to absolutely lead them or show them the way to it.
In both cases, Europeans are “helping” the ignorant “other”. And both cases are that of ethnocentrism, which means that the world has to conform to our idea of how to be.
The Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain emerged as a way “to empower women to make of them individuals capable of contributing to the structuring of the future society, individuals who have learned to be self- determining, not to follow blindly the dictates of any organisation.”
They recognised that although “it’s necessary to work, to struggle, together because if we don’t we’ll never have a social revolution,” they also “needed our own organisation to struggle for ourselves.” In facing the twin oppression of sexism and Spain’s peasant society, they “set up literacy programmes, technically oriented classes, and classes in social studies.” They “ran a lying-in hospital, which provided birth and post-natal care for women, as well as classes on child and maternal health, birth control and sexuality.” And they “helped to establish rural collectives” with the anarchists of the CNT and FAI.
But their challenge to sexism and patriarchy occurred within the revolutionary movement as well as alongside it;
In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists. Attending meetings with one another, they checked out reports of sexist behaviour and worked out how to deal with it. Flying day-care centres were set up in efforts to involve more women in union activities.
This demonstrated an awareness of the discrimination, both direct and indirect, that can plague even a struggle to reorder society, must be addressed proactively.
Queers and Capitalism Part One: The Dialectics of Moving Towards A Larger Social Acceptance
“. . . the waters around you have grown “
I remember the first time I saw a B.Scott video. I sat in my freshman dorm and listened to this very flamboyant, very androgynous, bi-racial man rant and rave about Shemar Moore’s penis being exposed online. A moment like this sounds very mundane and trivial, but has profound meaning when placed into context. As a queer person it is very rare that I see myself reflected, even if it is slight, in media and this doubles when we’re talking about queer people of color, who are all but invisible in the culture. So when we see representations of ourselves it becomes something spiritual, something affirming, something that touches us and says: “you are worth attention and love.” The 7-minute rant did that for me. Move ahead 5 years and we get this . . .
The same B.Scott I knew and loved is now a bonified star complete with music videos, red carpet appearances and celebrity interviews. Looking at this very feminine, queer, man of color on the screen brings all kinds of questions to the surface for me:
“Has society come to a place where we can accept queers as people?”
“Does capitalism need homophobia (patriarchy) to exist?”
and “What does this mean for queer struggle and activism?”
I want to think out loud a bit about these things . . .
“Has society come to a place where we can accept queers as people?”
For someone like this and many other gay figures to come to such prominence in our time means that there is a large shift in society. Homo-life is a commodity now, something being placed onto the pedestal of consumer culture and devoured: your favorite pop singer has probably stolen swag from the ballroom, and there is a gay plotline on just about every show. In addition to that, more and more states are sanctioning some degree of union between gay couples and DADT is becoming smaller and smaller in the rear view. The state and big business are slowly adapting to a shift in public opinion. I believe that much of the work of 60’s queer activists to prove that gay culture was just as legitimate as others paved the way for certain aspects of the culture to take center stage in the way that they have thus influencing public consciousness. I also believe that the majority of this “gay is okay” push comes from capitalism’s understanding that it cannot afford for the queer population to be isolated in total from the whole of society.
I’ve always said that queer people represented a very particular threat to capitalism, especially in the United States, because of their positioning in the society. Queer folk prior to many of the movements of the 60’s and 70’s had little to no material connection to the American melting pot. And it can be argued that in certain communities of color the nature of queer oppression had a different character because of the fact that people found themselves already segregated and marginalized. Thus, many queers of color a.) Identified more with their racial caste and were kept in the embrace of their families because of their shared oppression and/or b.) weren’t given access into larger queer spaces because of the segregation.
However, I believe that the generalization can be made that queer folks challenged the stability of capitalism because of their status as people pushed outside of the nuclear family, which is one of the most basic oppressive structures of society and patriarchy. It becomes too dangerous to have pockets of the society that have no material attachment to it. It is also dangerous for capitalism to have spaces in which the development of such a critique can be developed and shared.
In addition, radical queer politics, much like feminism challenged many of the assumptions of the culture and capitalism. What does it mean for white supremacist hetero capitalism when the nuclear family, male/ female socialization and personal identity are challenged? Many older, less fabulous, leftists would say that it means nothing or very little because the means of production, the material ways in which capitalism operates, are not immediately being challenged. But they would be wrong on multiple fronts. The challenging of patriarchal social relations not only means liberating womyn from unwaged labor but also brings the political and the personal together. Something desperately missing from a lot of movements of the past has been the revolutionary observation and transformation of gender identities. By this I mean, that feminism and anti-patriarchal ideology have never really been taken seriously by groups involving a straight male majority and that’s because it strikes at the most guarded and unchallenged of our identities; our gender. Feminist and queer movements of the past have sought to turn this on its head by placing an emphasis on personal development along these lines along with organizing in the workplace.
Slowly and subtly, queers have been brought into the fold. One interesting moment in this history was in the wake of the 60’s and 70’s, in the middle of the AIDS crisis-we saw thousands of gays –revolutionary or otherwise- pass away at epidemic levels. This crisis had varying effects on gay communities, some of which are relevant to this post and some aren’t. Something that is important to recognize is that the effect of the AIDS epidemic and the response to it not only left a vacuum of leadership in queer spaces but it also paved the way, in part, for queer struggle to be co-opted through the nonprofit industrial complex. This is important because we see a very distinct change in the character of queer activism around this time. Friendlier, more passive things like quilt making and appealing to the state for sympathy became more prominent. A little later on, queers became more attached to the causes of DADT repeal and marriage rights, the latter can be understood partially in the context of having to watch loved ones die without any recourse or protection from their biological families. I would argue that this more identity based activism, and less aggressive stance in the mainstream, had a less alienating and more tolerance inducing effect on the some of the population.
So I think the boost in queer visibility can be attributed to a push and pull between forces. I think that movements against patriarchy and capitalism paved the way for aspects of oppressed peoples humanity (specifically queers here) to be accepted in the mainstream and capitalism, by it’s very nature and need to survive, adapted to this shift by exploiting and incorporating what it could.
“Does capitalism need homophobia (patriarchy) to exist?”
For me, a struggle against homophobia must mean one that addresses capitalism. I see my oppression as a Black, gay male as one whose roots are intrinsically linked with the beast of capitalism. In order for the power structure to maintain itself it needs to suppress certain parts of the population. Does this mean that we will never see wealthy gays? No, San Francisco is proof of that. However, it does mean that the majority of queer and trans folk, especially those of color, can bet that they will never be apart of the ruling class. The very nature of the society cannot allow for that. Queer folk, being a one of the more vulnerable parts of the population, find themselves subordinated into lower levels of the working class through homophobia or excluded entirely as seen in the case of trans folk. This strengthens the elite and their machinery because the horizontal violence (homophobia) maintains a division of labor and permanent caste position. We also see the building of a surplus army of labor (the unemployed) to be used against working people who may feel the need to challenge their abuse at the hands of the elite. Workers who seek to withhold their labor (strikes) until better conditions arise are quickly met with the leagues of unemployed folk who will scab (break the picket and replace the strikers) and that makes sense in a society where there is no space for the entirety of the population to work for a decent wage.
Also, just as in the case of race, socialized gender is a one of the pillars of capitalism. In using patriarchy as one of it’s stepping stones, capitalism has created the conditions under which it’s demise cannot come without attacking the gendered division of labor, homophobia, etc . . . This means that our ascension into the utter fabulousness of liberation means that gender, and capitalism must be destroyed because the destruction of such a poisonous ideology (patriarchy) would mean the crumbling of walls built between working people. The system needs us isolated into paranoid fractions.
“What does this mean for queer struggle and activism?”
It is in the best interest of capitalism to bring queers into the fold (through a very narrow, white supremacist, patriarchal view of course) the potential to expand capital through an exploitation of queer images and culture is vast. At the same time this gay assimilation dulls the blade of radical queer politics. Because capitalism’s veil of justice and equality is kept in place through the façade of acceptance and limitless upward mobility, embodied in the emerging queer ruling class, it becomes harder for queer militants to argue for the necessity of a revolution against capitalism itself. Reform to the system is popular when the connection between class oppression and patriarchy isn’t clear. If I believe that patriarchy is something completely separate from the otherwise redeemable capitalist world order then it makes no sense to seize the means of production as apart of liberation because my conceived liberation is tied to the eradication of an ideology within certain people and not connected to a material struggle against the bourgeoisie (the top 10% of people who own everything) to end the totality of oppression. Radical queers, in this historical moment, find themselves struggling to articulate the need for a queer struggle that includes a radical class analysis and positive program that reflects such. We must also win people away from bourgeois delusions like equality under capitalism.
I think it’s exciting to be alive right now, and to organize right now. We have an opportunity to present a new proposition and deconstruct past failures with the intent of building a movement that can win. For me, radical queer organizing looks like many things: the building of safe spaces where we can heal and build self determination, the challenging of straight and male privilege, and the inverting of gender roles with the intention to create the conditions where all beings can fully express themselves are a few of those. The incorporation ideas such as self-care, and consciousness raising around gendered dynamics are some others. The appropriation of queer identities by the mainstream has, in an unintentional way, given us the opportunity to observe and reflect on our organizing and position in struggle. It also has made the ground fertile to plant revolutionary seeds. More queers are out and engaging in some form of political activity than we’ve seen in a while. (Maybe ever, I would wager that the amount of queers campaigning for reform and the amount visibly/verbally opposing the reformist queers out numbers the activists of 40-50 years ago) And that means we have some work to do. We have some questions to pose. We have some ideas to raise. And we have some consciousness to change.
SUNO {listen} [aug 2012] sample 1 The power & fierceness within us Harness our strength & own truths to build palaces of self love Slay aall the patriarchal filth that comes in our way Deconstruct, unlearn Western Feminism that tries to “save us” We don’t need your saving We don’t need your intrusive fingers pricking at us, as though we are your oppressed case study My body is not your battleground Listen to our stories SUNO, world
