Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://blog.historyisaweapon.com/post/5 ... pon-poster



UPDATED

This is an old History Is A Weapon poster (the original had a bunch of arrows turning on themselves). It’s cool to see your words reappear elsewhere, their resonance still going strong.

UPDATED

So we wrote this a long time ago and then reposted it this morning when we saw that it was making the rounds on TUMBLR, albeit with a radically different design. But in our morning stupor, we missed all the comments in it, so we wanted to respond.

This isn’t an argument for “brocialism” (wtf?), excusing bad behavior, silencing dissent, or solidarity in place of intersectionalism. Really. We’re pretty big proponents of intersectionality and taking flaming pitchforks to transphobic misogynist racist capitalist swine. We’re not just saying that. Look through History Is A Weapon and see what we’re trying to put out there. If you knew us in the real world, you’d know we mean this.

This poster was made for two reasons.

First, we’re sick and tired of drunken arguments about the Spanish civil war. We’re bored with the posturing. We don’t have time for the games of play pretend activism where everyone dons the uniform of 68 or Mao or whatevs and pretends. We’re here to win, and if you think there isn’t winning, you’ve never really been hungry or needed something before, like medical care, for someone you loved that you couldn’t have because you didn’t have enough money.

Second, and here’s the part where we lose a bunch of you who are will start hating History Is A Weapon, but we have to say it because it’s what we believe.

There are two poles in American Left Activism: the subculturalists and the mass movement.

The subculturalists are great, we love you, we drink with you, but we’re not you. You show up, you identify, a bunch of you seem lefter than thou, do all the most radical acts, get arrested, spraypaint, coordinate actions, raise hell, wonderful. But you think this is your club and you could’ve picked star trek or singing with the stars or radiohead or the grateful dead or fixing up cars or knitting or whatever. You picked lefty politics as your little club, and like the indie rock kids whining that they heard of the band before everyone else, you want your politics pure and clean and just right. You tend your book collection and you weed out your friends and you know the right answer to every question the 101s ask you.

We don’t hate you, we love you, but we’re part of the second group.

We’re here to make radical change, not in a safe space, but everywhere. And we work with everyone who’ll have us and listen and participate and teach us and help us grow. We’re not trying to coordinate our friends on a road trip to the action, we’re trying to spark something with people we’ve never met, organize the uninitiated, with all of their hang ups, with all of our hang ups, knowing that the homophobic jerk who gets it on wall street and the war but still says the F word because he doesn’t know any better yet, is a product of the same sexist homophobic racist transphobic capitalist society that we are, and here’s the kicker, we’re not going to discover some fifty first state with a hundred million people who are down with the cause. These are the people who we make the revolution with and we can’t do it if we spiral into a crystalized community of the eight other perfect vegans, we have to spiral out into a mass movement that loves people and grows with them, moving them along and helping them, not excusing it if they say sexist nonsense or try to shut people of color down or make trans jokes or whatevs, but that nurtures and grows with them.

Because, and here is where we’re just really upset but it needs to be said, CeCe McDonald is not in a “safe space.” She’s in a scary jail. And if we mean what we say and we want to make a world where CeCe gets to live her life and be who she wants to be, then we need to create a movement fierce and large enough to become a threat, to be a force to be reckoned with, something so powerful that by its very form, it cannot be repressed or co-opted because it becomes like the hurricane wind or the tidal wave, an unstoppable force tearing down the structures of ignorance and hate and their systems of reproduction. And if we mean that, and we’re going to do it, we have to have less purges and more community, more work and less infighting, less nonsense and more revolution.

And none of this, not a word, is an argument against holding sexist behavior accountable or silencing people of any identity in the name of solidarity, but rather in saying we need to deal with it in a way that grows our power from within in a way that fortifies our struggle.

(Seriously, we’re sick of the Spanish war arguments. The conflict was pretty specific, we’re not working within that context, and get over yourselves. And if you find yourself in a room/party where it’s being debated, just take a breather until people chill.)



(Source: amodernmanifesto)

[American Dream]

Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain



"Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái" (Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain) is a dream of freedom from Western civilization's oppression of minorities. Mari Boine portrays a woman who tries to escape from the darkness, the bleak conditions of the Sami people after the Norwegian colonization.

[American Dream]

http://www.ne2ss.org/history/

Two Spirit History

Originally published on June 25, Two Spirit Times

By Harlan Pruden and Melissa Hoskins, Co-Chairs of NE2SS

On the land we know as North America, there were approximately 400 distinct indigenous Nations. Of that number, 155 have documented multiple gender traditions. Two Spirit is a contemporary term that refers to those traditions where some individuals’ spirits are a blending of male and female spirit.

The existence of Two Spirit people challenges the rigid binary view of the world of the North American colonizers and missionaries, not just of a binary gender system, but a binary system of this or that, all together. The Two Spirits’ mere existence threatened the colonizers’ core beliefs; the backlash was violent. Sketches, housed at the New York City public library, depict Two Spirit people being attacked by colonizers’ dogs. Word of this brutal treatment spread quickly from nation to nation. Many nations decided to take actions to protect their honored and valued Two Spirit people. Some nations hid them by asking them to replace their dress, a mixture of men and women’s clothing, with the attire of their biological sex. After years of colonization, some of those very same nations denied ever having a tradition that celebrated and honored their Two Spirit people.

The Two Spirit tradition is primarily a question of gender, not sexual orientation. Sexual orientation describes the relationship a person of one gender has with another gendered person. Gender describes an individual’s expected role within a community.

Within traditional American Indian communities, there was an expectation that women farmed/gathered food and cooked; men hunted big game. Although there was division of labor along gender lines, there was no gender-role hierarchy. Within the American Indian social construct of gender, a community could not survive without both of the equal halves of a whole. The American Indian commitment to gender equality opened the door for the possibility of multiple genders, without the idea that a man was taking on a lesser gender by placing himself in a women’s role.

Gender Roles of Two Spirit People
People of Two Spirit gender functioned as crafts-people, shamans, medicinegivers, mediators, and/or social workers. In many American Indian communities, men and women styles of speech were distinct; sometimes even different dialects were spoken. The Two Spirit people knew how to speak both in the men and women’s ways. They were the only ones allowed to go between the men’s and the women’s camps. They brokered marriages, divorces, settled arguments, and fostered open lines of communication between the sexes.

Their proficiency in mediation often included their work as communicators between the seen (physical) and un-seen (spiritual) worlds. Many of the great visionaries, dreamers, shamans, or medicine givers were Two Spirit people. In some traditions, a war party could not be dispatched until their Two Spirit person consulted the spirits of the un-seen world and then gave their blessings. In the Lakota tradition, before any war party’s departure, the party preformed a dance with the Two Spirit person at the center of the circle to show their respect and honor.

It is traditional to present gifts at gatherings to those who exemplify the “spirit” of the community or who have done the most for the community. Two Spirit people were respected and honored with gifts when they attended gatherings. They did not keep the gifts, but passed them on to spread the wealth. In this respect, Two Spirit people were similar to modern day social workers.

When a family was not properly raising their children, the Two Spirit person would intervene and assume the responsibly as the primary caretaker. Sometimes, families would ask the Two Spirit person for help rearing their children. This unique role of social worker was specific to Two Spirit people, for they had an excess of material wealth as a result of the gifts they received.

Remembering Our Traditions
Since the time of colonization many American Indians have forgotten the “old” way. Many converted to a Western religion, which did not accept traditional spirituality and community structures.

However, there are groups of elders and activists that have quietly kept the Two Spirit tradition alive. In some nations that have revived this tradition, or brought it once again into the light, Two Spirit people are again fulfilling some of the roles and regaining the honor and respect of their communities.

The Two Spirit tradition is a very rich one that deserves a closer examination. The LGBTI activists engaged in achieving equality for all should remember that there was a time when people who engaged in same-sex relationships were accepted and honored for their special qualities.

Two Spirit people are a part of the fabric of this land, and we stand here today as a testament of our collective strength and fortitude.

[American Dream]

WHITE GIRL DON'T - Chrystos

WHITE GIRL DON’T


tell me about El Salvador or Nicaragua
especially
if you go there for an educational
vacation
Tell me about First Street in Seattle
the bench where the drunk Indians hang out
tell me how long we’ve been wearing these same clothes
& when was the last time
we had something good to eat
Tell me about the uranium pilings we’ve built our houses
out of down in Four Corners
Tell me about seeing your supposed people endlessly flickering
across gray screens & still
being called savages
White girl don’t tell me about South Africa
Tell me about the streets of Philadelphia
where a Black man slept in the snow & nobody cared but me
Tell me about being an eleven year old girl
whose leg is shot off
because she was accidentally in the way of an argument
the numbers runner is having with the Mafia Man
Tell me about having a mother so drunk
she can’t take care of you because she knows
even sober she couldn’t give you what you need
For every hungry belly you want to blame
on somebody else somewhere else
exotic or romantic
I can show you ten bellies here
empty as your words
Don’t talk to me about the prison conditions in Russia or Peru or Argentina
Let me take you to Purdy white girl
I’ll show you some torture that works & works & works
doesn’t leave a mark
Somewhere else is safer & not your fault & not your responsibility
Easy
to be outraged & run off to save somebody
on your white horse airplane
come back with slides to show me how horrible it is down there
gore gleaming in your eyes your excitement just
held in
I’ll show you blood on every street in america
We aren’t the latest fad in your candy-striper life
You want genocide
look out the window at the road going past your house
honey
it’s killing us
Don’t send me letters asking me to mail you money
so you can go here or there
to see how things are
You need an eye exam right here in this town
I’ve got El Salvador & South Africa in my throat
when I stare down two white ladies
staring at me in the fish & chips
When I go on vacation
if I ever have the gall to ask you to send me money
I’m going to stay right here
just not clean toilets for two weeks
which will be quite educational
stop crying stop whining
Don’t aim 5,000 miles away to a land whose words
you barely speak if at all
Right here now genocide
I’ll tell you about it

[American Dream]

"You told me about all the Indian women you counsel
who say they don’t want to be Indian anymore
because a white man or an Indian one raped them
or killed their brother
or somebody tried to run them over in the street
or insulted them or all of it
our daily bread of hate
Sometimes I don’t want to be an Indian either
but I’ve never said so out loud before
Since I’m so proud & political
I have to deny it now
Far more than being hungry
having no place to live or dance
no decent job no home to offer a Granny
It’s knowing with each invisible breath
that if you don’t make something pretty
they can hang on their walls or wear around their necks
you might as well be dead."

- Chrystos “Old Indian Granny”


http://eljotitodeperris.tumblr.com/post ... ou-counsel

[American Dream]

YA DON WANNA EAT PUSSY

that Chippewa said to that gay white man who never has
Ya don wanna eat pussy after eatin hot peppers he laughed
I stared in the white sink memorizing rust stains
He nodded in the general direction of the windows behind us
Two Native women chopping onions & pickles
to make tuna fish sandwiches
for these six men helping to move
He said Ya didn hear that did ya Good
She answered I chose to ignore it
I muttered So did I
Ya don wanna take offense at an Indian man’s joke
no matter how crude
in front of a white man
Close to my tribe he probably guessed we’re lesbians
said that to see what we’d do
which was to keep on doin what we had been doin
That gay white man stopped talking about how much he loved
hot peppers
That Chippewa said Not too much for me Don eat fish
Probably another joke we ignored I said
The grocery was fresh out of buffalo & deer
Much later that gay white man called that Chippewa a drunk
we both stared at a different floor
in a different silence just as sharp
& hot

—- Chrystos, Not Vanishing, 1988.

[American Dream]

Audre Lorde: Why the Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

http://critical-theory.com/happy-birthd ... ers-house/

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities
conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting
upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American
women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these
considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the
political.

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist
theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant
input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I
stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment
within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists
and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this
conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are
inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women
have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and
silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what
does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women
who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it
mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of
that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of
change are possible and allowable.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the
consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this
conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on
material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model
of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In
this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems
of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and
women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of
nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too
high a price for the results,” as this paper states.

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but
redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is
rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal
world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social
power open to women.

Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to
be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a
difference between the passive be and the active being.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest
reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in
our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of
necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a
dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become
unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths,
acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world
generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no
charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that
security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return
with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect
those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw
and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view
them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for
change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable
and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But
community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic
pretense that these differences do not exist.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of
acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of
difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who
are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how
to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common
cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to
define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to
take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will
never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat
him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine
change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define
the master’s house as their only source of support.

Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily
manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our
daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not
deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our
oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean
your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist
theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the
theory behind racist feminism?

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the
groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to
recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the
first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become
define and empower.

Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference?
Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only
possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black
panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love
between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who
don’t love each other?

In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We
did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility,
the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions,
Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the
occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off
your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white
feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the
past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black
women and the differences between us — white and Black — when it is key to
our survival as a movement?

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male
ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an
old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with
the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to
educate white women — in the face of tremendous resistance — as to our
existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This
is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal
thought.

Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine
conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our
reasons for acting.”

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and
time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of
knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any
difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as
the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

[American Dream]

http://amodernmanifesto.tumblr.com/post/50781156185

[American Dream]

..these innocent people (whites)...are still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

--James Baldwin

[American Dream]

“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea…This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives….I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings….And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love…”

--Audre Lorde

[American Dream]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/p ... -is-the-be

[American Dream]

Matthijs Krul on Nazi settler colonialism

It's no secret that Nazi Germany set out to create a settler colonial empire in eastern Europe. But what role did this effort play in the larger Nazi project? How was it connected with Nazi economic, military, and racial policies -- including the annihilation of European Jews?

Continues at: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2013/ ... ttler.html

[American Dream]

http://intercontinentalcry.org/guatemal ... rotestors/

Guatemala: Tahoe Resources Security Chief gave direct orders to kill protestors
BY JOHN AHNI SCHERTOW • MAY 13, 2013

For months now, Tahoe Resources has claimed to have no part whatsoever in the murders and kidnappings of Xinca community members who are opposing the company’s Escobal silver mine in the department of Santa Rosa, Guatemala. We now know that to be utterly false.

Last week, Guatemala’s Public Ministry revealed wiretapping evidence that has Tahoe’s security chief at Escobal, Alberto Rotondo, giving direct orders to assassinate opponents of the mine.

The wiretap has Rotondo making several statements, including: “God dam dogs, they do not understand that the mine generates jobs”. “We must eliminate these animals’ pieces of shit”. “We can not allow people to establish resistance, another Puya no”. “Kill house [sic] sons of Bitches”.

Rortondo was apprehended at an airport as he attempted to flee the country.

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/meredith_stern/09tree.html

Meredith Stern

Meredith Stern
Tree Of Life



This is a six color print using reduction block printing, spray paint stenciling, and coffee staining. When I was creating this image I was focusing on the importance of friendship, cooperation, and human's collaboration and co-habitation with nature. This print is a loose portrait of my friend Adee Roberson of the Black Salt Collective in California, and myself.

[American Dream]

“But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me.”

– Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place