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by American Dream » Sat Feb 02, 2013 8:05 pm
by American Dream » Sat Feb 02, 2013 8:20 pm
by American Dream » Sun Feb 03, 2013 10:25 pm
“History does not happen to society: history is the self-deployment of society.
--CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS,Turkish-born French theorist of radical political autonomy
by American Dream » Sun Feb 03, 2013 11:38 pm
One pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery. This logic renders black people as inherently enslaveable—as nothing more than property. That is, in this logic of white supremacy, blackness becomes equated with slaveability. The forms of slavery may change, be it explicit slavery, sharecropping, or systems that regard black peoples as permanent property of the state, such as the current prison–industrial complex (whether or not blacks are formally working within prisons).3 But the logic itself has remained consistent. This logic is the anchor of capitalism. That is, the capitalist system ultimately commodifies all workers: one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labour market while the profits of one’s work are taken by somebody else. To keep this capitalist system in place—which ultimately commodifies most people—the logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as long as you are not black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism. Anti-blackness enables people who are not black to accept their lot in life because they can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy—at least they are not property, at least they are not slaveable.
A second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This logic holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable non-indigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, and culture. Genocide serves as the anchor of colonialism: it is what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because indigenous peoples have disappeared.
A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of orientalism. “Orientalism” was Edward Said’s term for the process of the West’s defining itself as a superior civilisation by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient”.4 (Here, I am using the term “orientalism” more broadly than to signify solely what has been historically named as the “orient” or “Asia”.) The logic of orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and deems them to be a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire. These peoples are still seen as “civilisations”—they are not property or the “disappeared”. However, they are imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movements in the United States that target immigrants of colour. It does not matter how long immigrants of colour reside in the United States, they generally become targeted as foreign threats, particularly during war-time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies. Orientalism allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide as these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars. What becomes clear, then, is what Sora Han declares: the United States is not at war; the United States is war.5 For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war.
Under the old but still dominant model, organising by people of colour was based on the notion of organising around shared victimhood. In this model, however, we see that we are not only victims of white supremacy, but complicit in it as well. Our survival strategies and resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself. What keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced by the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-black peoples are promised that if they conform, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And black and Native peoples are promised that they will advance economically and politically if they join US wars to spread “democracy”. Thus, organising by people of colour must be premised on making strategic alliances with one another, based on where we are situated within the larger political economy. Coalition work is based on organising not just around oppression, but also around complicity in the oppression of other peoples as well as our own.
It is important to note that these pillars of white supremacy are best understood as logics rather than categories signifying specific groups of people. Thus, the peoples entangled in these logics may shift through time and space. Peoples may also be implicated in more than one logic simultaneously, such as peoples who are black and Indigenous. This model also destabilises some of the conventional categories by which we often understand either ethnic studies or racial-justice organising—categories such as African American/Latino/Asian American/Native American/Arab American. For instance, in the case of Latinos, these logics may affect peoples differently depending on whether they are black, Indigenous, Mestizo, etc. Consequently, we may want to follow the lead of Dylan Rodriguez, who suggests that rather than organise around categories based on presumed cultural similarities or geographical proximities, we might organise around the differential impacts of white-supremacist logics. In particular, he calls for a destabilisation of the category “Asian American” by contending that the Filipino condition may be more specifically understood in conjunction with the logic of genocide from which, he argues, the very category of Filipino itself emerged.6
In addition, these logics themselves may vary depending on the geographic or historical context. As outlined here, these logics reflect a United States–specific context and may differ greatly in other places and times. However, the point I am trying to argue is that analysing white supremacy in any context may benefit from not presuming a single logic but assessing how it might be operating through multiple logics (even as these multiple logics may vary).
by American Dream » Mon Feb 04, 2013 9:32 am
by American Dream » Mon Feb 04, 2013 10:10 am
by American Dream » Mon Feb 04, 2013 10:28 am
Guadalupe the Sex Goddess
Sandra Cisneros
In high school I marveled at how white women strutted around the locker room, nude as pearls, as unashamed of their brilliant bodies as the Nike of Samothrace. Maybe they were hiding terrible secrets like bulimia or anorexia, but, to my naïve eye then, I thought of them as women comfortable in their skin.
You could always tell us Latinas. We hid when we undressed, modestly facing a wall, or, in my case, dressing in a bathroom stall. We were the ones who still used bulky sanitary pads instead of tampons, thinking ourselves morally superior to our white classmates. My mama said you can’t use tampons till after you’re married. All Latina mamas said this, yet how come none of us thought to ask our mothers why they didn’t use tampons after getting married?
Womanhood was full of mysteries. I was as ignorant about my own body as any female ancestor who hid behind a sheet with a hole in the center when husband or doctor called. Religion and our culture, our culture and religion, helped to create that blur, a vagueness about what went on “down there.” So ashamed was I about my own “down there” that until I was an adult I had no idea I had another orifice called the vagina; I thought my period would arrive via the urethra or perhaps through the walls of my skin.
No wonder, then, it was too terrible to think about a doctor—a man!—looking at you down there when you could never bring yourself to look yourself. ¡Ay, nunca! How could I acknowledge my sexuality, let alone enjoy sex, with so much guilt? In the guise of modesty my culture locked me in a double chastity belt of ignorance and vergüenza, shame.
I had never seen my mother nude. I had never taken a good look at myself either. Privacy for self-exploration belonged to the wealthy. In my home a private space was practically impossible; aside from the doors that opened to the street, the only room with a lock was the bathroom, and how could anyone who shared a bathroom with eight other people stay in there for more than a few minutes? Before college, no one in my family had a room of their own except me, a narrow closet just big enough for my twin bed and an oversized blond dresser we’d bought in the bargain basement of el Sears. The dresser was as long as a coffin and blocked the door from shutting completely. I had my own room, but I never had the luxury of shutting the door.
I didn’t even see my own sex until a nurse at the Emma Goldman Clinic showed it to me—Would you like to see your cervix? Your os is dilating. You must be ovulating. Here’s a mirror; take a look. When had anyone ever suggested I take a look or allowed me a speculum to take home and investigate myself at leisure!
I’d only been to one other birth control facility prior to the Emma Goldman Clinic, the university medical center in grad school. I was 21 in a strange town far from home for the first time. I was afraid and I was ashamed to seek out a gynecologist, but I was more afraid of becoming pregnant. Still, I agonized about going for weeks. Perhaps the anonymity and distance from my family allowed me finally to take control of my life. I remember wanting to be fearless like the white women around me, to be able to have sex when I wanted, but I was too afraid to explain to a would-be lover how I’d only had one other man in my life and we’d practiced withdrawal. Would he laugh at me? How could I look anyone in the face and explain why I couldn’t go see a gynecologist?
One night, a classmate I liked too much took me home with him. I meant all along to say something about how I wasn’t on anything, but I never quite found my voice, never the right moment to cry out—Stop, this is dangerous to my brilliant career! Too afraid to sound stupid, afraid to ask him to take responsibility too, I said nothing, and I let him take me like that with nothing protecting me from motherhood but luck. The days that followed were torture, but fortunately on Mother’s Day my period arrived, and I celebrated my nonmaternity by making an appointment with the family planning center.
When I see pregnant teens, I can’t help but think that could’ve been me. In high school I would’ve thrown myself into love the way some warriors throw themselves into fighting. I was ready to sacrifice everything in the name of love, to do anything, even risk my own life, but thankfully there were no takers. I as enrolled at an all-girls’ school. I think if I had met a boy who would have me, I would’ve had sex in a minute, convinced this was love. I have always had enough imagination to fall in love all by myself, then and now.
I tell you this story because I am overwhelmed by the silence regarding Latinas and our bodies. If I, as a graduate student, was shy about talking to anyone about my body and sex, imagine how difficult it must be for a young girl in middle school or high school living in a home with no lock on the bedroom door, perhaps with no door, or maybe with no bedroom, no information other than misinformation from the girlfriends and the boyfriend. So much guilt, so much silence, and such a yearning to be loved; no wonder young women find themselves having sex while they are still children, having sex without sexual protection, too ashamed to confide their feelings and fears to anyone.
What a culture of denial. Don’t get pregnant! But no one tells you how not to. This is why I was angry for so many years every time I saw a la Virgen de Guadalupe, my culture’s role model for brown women like me. She was damn dangerous, an ideal so lofty and unrealistic it was laughable. Did boys have to aspire to be Jesus? I never saw any evidence of it. They were fornicating like rabbits while the Church ignored them and pointed us women toward our destiny—marriage and motherhood. The other alternative was putahood.
In my neighborhood I knew only real women, neither saints nor whores, naïve and vulnerable huerquitas like me who wanted desperately to fall in love, with the heart and soul. And yes, with the panocha too.
As far as I could see, la Lupe was nothing but a Goody Two-shoes meant to doom me to a life of unhappiness. Thanks, but no thanks. Motherhood and / or marriage were anathema to my career. But being a bad girl, that was something I could use as a writer, a Molotov cocktail to toss at my papa and el Papa, who had their own plans for me.
Discovering sex as like discovering writing. It was powerful in a way couldn’t explain. Like writing, you had to go beyond the guilt and shame to get to anything good. Like writing, it could take you to deep and mysterious subterranean levels. With each new depth I found out things about myself I didn’t know I knew. And, like writing, for a slip of a moment it could be spiritual, the cosmos pivoting on a pin, could empty and fill you all at once like a Ganges, a Piazzolla tango, a tulip bending in the wind. I was no one, I was nothing, and I was everything in the universe little and large—twig, cloud, sky. How had this incredible energy been denied me!
When I look at la Virgen de Guadalupe now, she is not the Lupe of my childhood, no longer the one in my grandparents’ house in Tepeyac nor is she the one of the Roman Catholic Church, the one I bolted the door against in my teens and twenties. Like every woman who maters to me, I have had to search for her in the rubble of history. And I have found her. She is Guadalupe the sex goddess, a goddess who makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy, who reminds me that I must, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés so aptly put it, “[speak] from the vulva … speak the most basic, honest truth,” and write from my panocha.
In my research of Guadalupe’s pre-Colombian antecedents, the she before the Church desexed her, I found Tonantzin, and inside Tonantzin a pantheon of other mother goddesses. I discovered Tlazolteotl, the goddess of fertility and sex, also referred to as Totzin. Our Beginnings, or Tzinteotl, goddess of the rump. Putas, nymphos, and other loose women were known as “women of the sex goddess.” Tlazolteotl was the patron of sexual passion, and though she had the power to stir you to sin, she could also forgive you and cleanse you of your sexual transgressions via her priests who heard confession. In this aspect of confessor Tlazolteotl was known as Tlaelcuani, the filth eater. Maybe you’ve seen her; she’s the one whose image is sold in the tourist markets even now a statue of a woman squatting in childbirth, her face grimacing in pain. Tlazolteotl, then, is a duality of maternity andsexuality. In other words, she is a sexy mama.
To me, la Virgen de Guadalupe is also Coatlicue, the creative/destructive goddess. When I think of the Coatlicue statue in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, so terrible it was unearthed and then reburied because it was too frightening to look at, I think of a woman enraged, a woman as a tempest, a woman bien berrinchuda, and I like that. La Lupe as cabrona. Not silent and passive, but silently gathering force.
Most days, I too feel like the creative/destructive goddess Coatlicue, especially the days I’m writing, capable of fabricating pretty tales with pretty words, as well as doing demolition work with a volley of palabrotas if I want to. I am the Coatlicue-Lupe whose square column of a body I see in so many Indian women, in my mother, and in myself each time I check out my thick-waisted, flat-assed torso in the mirror.
Coatlicue, Tlazolteotl, Tonantzin, la Virgen de Guadalupe. They are each telescoped one into the other, into who I am. And this is where la Lupe intrigues me—not the Lupe of 1531 who appeared to Juan Diego, but the one of the 1990s who has shaped who we are as Chicana/mexicanas today, the one inside each Chicana and mexicana. Perhaps it’s the Tlazolteotl-Lupe in me whose malcriada spirit inspires me to leap into the swimming pool naked or dance on a table with a skirt on my head. Maybe it’s my Coatlicue-Lupe attitude that makes it possible for my mother to tell me, “No wonder men can’t stand you.” Who knows? What I do know is this: I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.
I can’t attribute my religious conversion to a flash of lightning on the road to Laredo or anything like that. Instead, there have been several lessons learned subtly over a period of time. A grave depression and near suicide in my thirty-third year and its subsequent introspection. Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing that has brought out the Buddha-Lupe in me. My weekly peace vigil for my friend Jasna in Sarajevo. The writings of Gloria Anzaldúa. A crucial trip back to Tepeyac in 1985 with Cherríe Moraga and Norma Alarcón. Drives across Texas, talking with other Chicanas. And research for stories that would force me back inside the Church from where I’d fled.
My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God. She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.
Once watching a porn film, I saw a sight that terrified me. It was the film star’s panocha—a tidy, elliptical opening, pink and shiny like a rabbit’s ear. To make matters worse, it was shaved and looked especially childlike and unisexual. I think what startled me most was the realization that my own sex has no resemblance to this woman’s. My sex, dark as an orchid, rubbery and blue-purple as pulpo, an octopus, does not look nice and tidy, but otherworldly. I do not have little rosette nipples. My nipples are big and brown like the coins of my childhood.
When I see la Virgen de Guadalupe I want to lift her dress as I did my dolls, and look to see if she comes with chones and does her panocha look like mine, and does she have dark nipples too? Yes, I am certain she does. She is not neuter like Barbie. She gave birth. She has a womb. Blessed art thou and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…. Blessed art thou, Lupe, and, therefore, blessed am I.
by American Dream » Mon Feb 04, 2013 1:48 pm
The oppressor is in solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor — when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
by American Dream » Mon Feb 04, 2013 4:52 pm
To live in the borderlands means you
are neither hispana india negra espanola
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from;
To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
the mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;
Cuando vives en la frontera
people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,
you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and half-both woman and man, neither-a new gender;
To live in the Borderlands means to
put chile in the borscht,
eat whole wheat tortillas,
speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;
Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to
resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,
the pull of the gun barrel,
the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;
In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have scattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;
To live in the Borderlands means
the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you roll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;
To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.
To Live in the Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua
by American Dream » Tue Feb 05, 2013 11:32 am
by American Dream » Tue Feb 05, 2013 11:52 am
by American Dream » Tue Feb 05, 2013 2:20 pm
Power does not only operate on our bodies, and the use it makes of our bodies is—even in extreme cases, such as torture—often but a means for imposing on our interior worlds. For power seeks to shape, mobilize, and exploit, not just our bodies, but our desires, fears, insecurities, loyalties, values, creativity—our whole selves. These elements—which characterize both our individuality and our shared humanity—may also be seen as sites of struggle, and may provide a basis for resistance.
— ::: Kristian Williams, Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy
by American Dream » Tue Feb 05, 2013 2:54 pm
“This enemy of ours is not just Wall Street, it’s the whole culture. It’s a way of looking at us and valuing ourselves in each other. And how you are going to move beyond challenging Wall Street … how you’re going to move to become part of the solution…
You begin with a demonstration. You begin with a protest. But you have to move on from there, and that’s what I see happening now with [the Metamovement]. The people are rightfully, righteously protesting the corporations and the domination of the culture by the corporations and the suffering that that is inducing. But out of the protests they have to move to another stage.
You have to begin doing something that doesn’t depend on exposing the “enemy”. You have to begin becoming the solution yourself instead of just protesting and challenging the enemy. We need people to be reinventing the institutions in our society: Reinventing work, so that we don’t think that having a job and being able to pay the bills is what being a human being is all about. And reinventing education, so that our young people are able to see themselves as part of the rebuilding of our society.
So many of the institutions of our society need reinventing, need re-thinking, and you [the Metamovement] need to do that. You cannot be satisfied with rebelling. You have to be aware that we are at one of the turning points in history where we need revolution, and revolution means reinventing culture.”
— Grace Lee Boggs
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