Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

“One of the most serious errors, if not the most serious error, committed by colonial powers in Africa, may have been to ignore or underestimate the cultural strength of African peoples.”

- Amilcar Cabral, assassinated on 20 January 1973 by Portuguese forces

[American Dream]

Selma James: Sex, Race and Class -- The Perspective of Winning

On March 28, Sonali Kolhatkar of KPFK radio's Uprising interviewed Selma.




SONALI'S SUBVERSIVE THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

April 2, 2012: “The perspective of wages for housework… is the demand of women for power, for autonomy against capital. It is the perspective of winning.” – Selma James, 1973...

[American Dream]

http://whb2.tumblr.com/post/17219405855 ... ide-of-the



The Namibia Genocide the first genocide of the 20th century Horrifying Secrets of Germany’s Earliest Holocaust

*This should be taught in school

When you hear of Death Camps and Genocide, Nazi Germany and world war two come to mind. But Germany had practiced it’s murderous craft over sixty years before WWll. Before the Armenian Genocide, before the Jewish Genocide over 150,000 Herero and Nama peoples of modern-day Namibia were murdered by the order of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany between 1904 and 1909.

Along the coastline of Namibia runs the Namib desert, a 1,200 mile long strip of unwelcoming sand dunes and barren rock. Behind it is the central mountain plateau, and east of that the Kalahari desert. Namibia’s scarcest commodity is water: this is a country of little rainfall, and the rivers don’t always run. But the very sand of the Skeleton Coast is the dust of gemstones; uranium, tin and tungsten can be mined in the central Namib, and copper in the north; and in the south there are diamonds. Namibia also has gold, silver, lithium, and natural gas. For most of the region’s history, only metal was of interest to the native tribes. These tribes lived and traded together more or less peacefully, each with their own particular way of living, wherever the land was fertile enough. The San were nomads, hunters and gatherers. The Damara hunted and worked copper. The Ovambo grew crops in the north, where there was more rain, but also worked in metal. The Nama and the Herero were livestock farmers, and they were the two main tribes in the 1840s when the Germans (first missionaries, then settlers, then soldiers) began arriving in South West Africa.

Before the Germans, only a few Europeans had visited it: explorers, traders and sailors. They opened up trade outlets for ivory and cattle; they also brought in firearms, with which they traded for Namib treasures. Later, big guns and European military systems were introduced. The tribes now settled their disputes with lethal violence: corruption of a peaceful culture was under way.

During The Berlin Conference Germany was awarded what is now called Namibia and settlers moved in, followed by a military governor who knew little about running a colony and nothing at all about Africa. Major Theodor Leutwein began by playing off the Nama and Herero tribes against each other. More and more white settlers arrived, pushing tribesmen off their cattle-grazing lands with bribes and unreliable deals. The Namib’s diamonds were discovered, attracting yet more incomers with a lust for wealth.

Tribal cattle-farmers had other problems, too: a cattle-virus epidemic in the late 1890s killed much of their livestock. The colonists offered the Herero aid on credit. As a result the farmers amassed large debts, and when they couldn’t pay them off the colonists simply seized what cattle were left.

In January 1904, the Herero, desperate to regain their livelihoods, rebelled. Under their leader Samuel Maherero they began to attack the numerous German outposts. They killed German men, but spared women, children, missionaries, and the English or Boer farmers whose support they didn’t want to lose.

 At the same time, the Nama chief, Hendrik Witbooi, wrote a letter to Theodor Leutwein, telling him what the native Africans thought of their invaders, who had taken their land, deprived them of their rights to pasture their animals on it, used up the scanty water supplies, and imposed alien laws and taxes. His hope was that Leutwein would recognise the injustice and do something about it.

The German Emperor replaced Major Leutwein with another commander, this time a man notorious for brutality who had already fiercely suppressed African resistance to German colonisation in East Africa. Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha said, ‘I wipe out rebellious tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge’. Von Trotha brought with him to German South West Africa 10,000 heavily-armed men and a plan for war. 

Under his command, the German troops slowly drove the Herero warriors to a position where they could be hemmed in by attack on three sides. The fourth side offered escape; but only into the killing wastes of the Kalahari desert. The German soldiers were paid well to pursue the Herero into this treacherous wilderness. They were also ordered to poison the few water-holes there. Others set up guard posts along a 150-mile border: any Herero trying to get back was killed.

On October 2, 1904, von Trotha issued his order to exterminate the Herero from the region. ‘All the Herero must leave the land. If they refuse, then I will force them to do it with the big guns. Any Herero found within German borders, with or without a gun, will be shot. No prisoners will be taken. This is my decision for the Herero people’.

After the Herero uprising had been systematically put down, by shooting or enforced slow death in the desert from starvation, thirst and disease (the fate of many women and children), those who still lived were rounded up, banned from owning land or cattle, and sent into labour camps to be the slaves of German settlers. Many more Herero died in the camps, of overwork, starvation and disease. 

By 1907, in the face of criticism both at home and abroad, von Trotha’s orders had been cancelled and he himself recalled, but it was too late for the crushed Herero. Before the uprising, the tribe numbered 300,000; after it, only 15,000 remained.

During the period of colonisation and oppression, many women were used as sex slaves. In the Herero work camps there were numerous children born to these abused women, and a man called Eugen Fischer, who was interested in genetics, came to the camps to study them; he carried out medical experiments on them as well. He decided that each mixed-race child was physically and mentally inferior to its German father (a conclusion for which there was and is no respectable scientific foundation whatever) and wrote a book promoting his ideas: ‘The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene’. Adolf Hitler read it while he was in prison in 1923, and cited it in his own infamous pursuit of ‘racial purity’.

The Nama suffered at the hands of the colonists too. After the defeat of the Herero the Nama also rebelled, but von Trotha and his troops quickly routed them. On April 22 1905 Lothar von Trotha sent his clear message to the Nama: they should surrender. ‘The Nama who chooses not to surrender and lets himself be seen in the German area will be shot, until all are exterminated. Those who, at the start of the rebellion, committed murder against whites or have commanded that whites be murdered have, by law, forfeited their lives. As for the few not defeated, it will fare with them as it fared with the Herero, who in their blindness also believed that they could make successful war against the powerful German Emperor and the great German people. I ask you, where are the Herero today?’ During the Nama uprising, half the tribe (over 80,000) were killed; the 9,000 or so left were confined in concentration camps.

From this it was a short step to advocating the racial supremacy of Aryans in Nazi Germany. Nazism was not an isolated instance of human infamy, then, but part of an earlier behaviour that went back to Imperial German Africa.

Hermann Göring’s father, Dr Heinrich Ernst Göring, served as the first Commissioner of German South West Africa, orchestrating that barbarity, before becoming the Kaiser’s ambassador to Haiti in 1893. The notorious brown shirts worn by the Nazi storm troopers had originally served as uniforms in Namibia.

Not long after Dr Göring had begun to confiscate Herero and Nama tribal lands, Berlin sanctioned the use of concentration camps. The most notorious of these, set up in 1905, was situated on Shark Island near the town of Lüderitz. The enormity of Shark Island has been suppressed and forgotten too long, say the authors. By the time the Konzentrationslager was closed in 1907, thousands had died there due to beatings and forced labour. Though the death toll is impossible to establish accurately (the Germans later burned incriminating documents), the liquidations were carried out so efficiently that by 1908 the Kaiser’s government had wrested a total of 46 million hectares of land from the Africans.

*The guards of the Namibian concentration camps also sold Herero skulls to German universities and private collectors.

After the First World War, South West Africa was placed under the administration of South Africa. South Africa imposed its own system of apartheid (now banned in Namibia by law). In the late 1940s a guerrilla movement called SWAPO (South West African People’s Organisation) was founded to fight for independence. In 1968 the United Nations recognised the name Namibia, and the country’s right to independence, but it was another 20 years before South Africa agreed to withdraw and full independence was gained. By then the country was ravaged by war.

Today most of Namibia’s 1.7m people are poor, living in crowded tribal areas while powerful and wealthy German ranchers still own millions of acres stolen by their predecessors over 100 years ago.

Some of the descendants of the surviving Herero live in neighbouring Botswana, but others remained in their homeland and now make up 8% of Namibia’s population. Many of them are in the political opposition party. Most Herero men work as cattle-handlers on commercial farms. Although as opposition members they don’t get government support, the Herero on their own initiative recently asked Germany to give them compensation for the atrocities the tribe suffered, which the president of Germany recently acknowledged were ‘a burden on the conscience of every German’.

The 25,000 or so present-day rich German settlers are among those who deny that there was a genocide, fearing that reparation might mean losing their valuable land.

-by peace pledge union

* Dr Ben always said europeans only use democracy and christianity when it suits their purpose.

This documentary is well worth watching: http://youtu.be/6oCxyFks4gY

[American Dream]

http://arielnietzsche.tumblr.com/post/2 ... -continent




Before calling Africa a “Third-World” continent, think again.

It’s western imperialism and capitalism that strangled Africa.

[American Dream]

Fun Facts: The Democratic Republic of the Congo has enough natural resources to feed the entire African continent.

Alone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has the third largest hydroelectric potential in the world, after China and Russia, but less than 6 per cent of its population has access to electricity. Furthermore, the hydro potential of the Democratic Republic of Congo is estimated to be sufficient to provide three times as much power as Africa currently consumes. This potential remains largely untapped. In short, KEEP YOUR GREEDY HANDS OFF OF AFRICA with your exploitative and neocolonialist ass!



http://theeducatedfieldnegro.tumblr.com ... -congo-has

[American Dream]

What About the Men? Why Our Gender System Sucks for Men, Too

By Ozy Frantz and Noah Brand, The Good Men Project
Posted on July 11, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/156194/wh ... men%2C_too

This article is from a book in progress by Noah Brand and Ozy Frantz.


If you are anything like us, you spent some time when you were younger playing with optical illusions: the vase that, if you looked at it differently, was two faces; the fish that were also birds; the old woman who was also a young lady.

If you were reading this in a book in a bookstore, and some malicious person had not moved it into the Local Birdwatching category, it would almost certainly be next to some other books about gender. (Yes, this is related.) Look at the other books, and you’d find they have one thing in common—they’re almost all about women. Women and work. Women and body image. Women and race. Women and sex. Women and feminism.

You’d think that only women have a gender.

For a long time, we’ve only been able to see half the illusion—we see the birds, but not the fish; the vases, but not the faces. We’ve noticed the thousands of ways, big and small, that our current gender system wounds women. Rarely, however, and often only as an afterthought does anyone remark on how the current gender system harms men.

♦◊♦

We live in a sexist society, one where gender programming starts at birth (though the advent of the sonogram has allowed parents to get a head start by painting the nursery pink or blue and stocking up in advance on gendered toys and clothes) and is so pervasive as to be inescapable. Feminism has done an excellent job analyzing and challenging the ways that these assigned and enforced gender roles damage and deform the lives of women. The same tools of analysis can be applied to the damage and deformation that men suffer. And that damage, sad to say, is severe.

The general term for the incredibly restrictive social codes on male behavior is hegemonic masculinity, though Paul Kivel refers to it as the “Man Box” in his work, and Charlie Glickman clarifies that to the “Act Like a Man Box” to emphasize the performative nature of the restrictions. We choose to use hegemonic masculinity as our term because it is less likely than “Man Box” to be used in a trend piece about how it’s okay for men to own steamer trunks now.

Indeed, the current cultural trend of terms like bromance, guyliner, mancession, and so on -- “bromanteaus” as we call them -- just demonstrates the power of hegemonic masculinity. Anything that might potentially be seen as outside the narrow bounds of acceptable male behavior, such as having a close relationship, wearing makeup, or being out of work, must be given a special name to assure people that it really is masculine, it’s not outside the box in any way.

So what is the box? What are the bounds of hegemonic masculinity? The essence of it is that the things we think of as “manly,” the things a “real man” does or is, are a mess of unreasonable, contradictory and impossible expectations and assumptions. A real man is supposed to be attractive to women, but not do anything for a woman’s approval or attention. A real man is supposed to be stoic and emotionless, but is permitted to show anger. A real man is supposed to be tall and have a big penis, for heaven’s sake, and if your genetic dice didn’t shake out that way, you’d better perform the rest of the list even harder to make up for your supposed deficiency.

Men who do not fit the box of hegemonic masculinity get all kinds of stigmatized. For instance, consider men who want to help raise their children. Stay-at-home dads and men on the “mommy track” often face disapproval and the belief that they “laze around all day” or “aren’t real men.” In public, men are all too often patronized as “Mr. Mom” or treated as though it’s exceptional and startling that they want to spend time with their children; it’s depressingly common for men openly interested in childcare to be called pedophiles.

Social pressure has astonishing effects on people’s behavior: just ask any teenager who drove home drunk from a party. Many people find it so unthinkable that men might want to have traditionally feminine jobs such as nurses or teachers that they tend to promote men out of those jobs and into more traditionally masculine positions such as administration; this sounds like an advantage, but most people become nurses to take care of patients, not to deal with paperwork, and it’s based in misandric stereotypes around what men can do. The social pressure to conform to the man box can be internalized, sometimes with tragic effects: unemployment increases a man’s risk of suicide more than it does a woman’s, partially because of the association between masculinity and success.

Even if they don’t experience social pressure, the expectations that they should act in a certain way can disadvantage men who don’t act that way. Straight men are all too often expected to approach women, ask them out, and pay for the date—which causes disproportionate pain to men who are socially awkward, shy or just broke. Male virgins are more likely than their female counterparts to feel shame because of their virginity.

Ultimately, the most important concepts in hegemonic masculinity are “strong," “tough,” and “winner.” Each of these is code for a wealth of symbolism and subconcepts, so that “tough” implies both “stoically emotionless” and “does not seek medical attention.” “Strong” covers “supports his family financially” and “bench-presses more than his bodyweight,” among other things. “Winner” is the key to a Pandora’s box of competition and inadequacy, where the twin concepts of “loser” and “failure” lurk, waiting to consume men’s sense of self at the least excuse.

Even for men who conform to these demands, these ideals of masculinity can burden them. Take toughness, for instance—it’s good to be tough, right? Chuck Norris is tough. Wolverine is tough. Toughness lets you survive in this hard world, keeps you from being weak and vulnerable. That’s a good thing to encourage people to be, right?

Turns out, not so much.

The ideal of physical toughness kills people. Especially men. Except for sex work, the most male-dominated jobs are the most dangerous, from lumberjacks to firefighters to soldiers, men are more likely to be injured on the job and suffer an astonishing 92% of fatal occupational injuries. Historically and cross-culturally, men’s life expectancy is shorter than women’s; in the United States, men tend to live four years less than women. While some of the discrepancy may be biological, much of it is due to socialization: in fact, the level of patriarchy in a society is associated with lower life expectancy for men. Men are encouraged to “tough out” pain and not go to doctors unless they absolutely need to.

Emotional toughness can also cause men pain; if you can’t open up emotionally to another person, it makes it more difficult to have friends. The social support gap is large and growing—men tend to report having fewer close friends and being less connected to their communities than women. For far too many men, romantic relationships are the only acceptable venue for them to express their feelings (and even there, the idea that men hate emotional intimacy limits them). In fact, men tend to report more distress due to a strained romantic relationship, possibly because women are far more likely to have a group of friends to help with the social support. The nervously joking societal construct of “bromance” arises from the notion that having a close male friend is something weird enough that it needs its own name.

Then there’s rape. When was the last time you heard men mentioned as rape or molestation victims in any public discussion of such issues? Despite the fact that 1 in 6 men are subject to unwanted sexual activity before the age of 18, despite the fact that 1 in 4 rape survivors in America is male, far too many people still believe a man cannot be raped, especially by a woman: the myth that an erection is consent, instead of a biological function, remains strong. The Centers for Disease Control’s own statistics draw a line between “rape” and “being forced to penetrate someone.” Not to be rude to the CDC, but we have a word for sex that someone is forced to have against their will. It’s called rape.

Even in cases of boys as young as 13 who are raped by teachers or other authority figures, many people congratulate them or call them lucky. Try to imagine anyone saying that to a 13-year-old girl who was molested by her teacher, and you begin to see how deep the gender gulf is here. In fact, some male rape survivors never acknowledge, even to themselves, that what they endured was rape. Rape of men is endemic within the prison system, which is not treated as a human rights outrage, but as an appropriate subject for jokes. Some even speak glowingly of prison rape as the real deterrent to criminal activity. It’s amazing how many people are downright enthusiastic about their government running rape camps, so long as the victims are male.

The ideal of toughness also impacts male survivors of abuse. Many people believe that men cannot be abused, because they’re “stronger,” or that if a man is abused it’s proof that he’s a wimp or a weakling; many believe that men who were raped are responsible for and enjoyed their rapes. Many of the guides to recognizing abuse are gendered with a female survivor and a male perpetrator, rendering abuse of men invisible. Many shelters do not provide services to male survivors (although some female-only shelters will put male survivors up in hotels).

Most men will never end up in prison, a majority will never be raped or abused, but the same societal expectations that allow us to laugh off the rape and abuse of men give rise to a thousand smaller micro-aggressions, all the little ways in which men are made to feel horrible in a gendered way. It sounds strange to say that the same system tells men that they are grotesque and laughable for being masculine, and simultaneously pathetic and laughable for not being masculine enough, but bizarrely, that is the case.

Of course, a few men do manage to perform hegemonic masculinity quite well and even avoid most of the negative consequences of masculinity. They avoid the treacherous edges, they navigate the contradictions as best they can, they do everything they’re supposed to to stay inside the box. And what’s the prize? They get to live the rest of their lives inside a box, unable to make even the slightest move lest they fall out of it. These, we are told, are the winners.

The problem of gendered, sexist expectations of men is enormous, and deeply ingrained into the culture. How are we to even begin dismantling such profoundly entrenched and damaging ideas? By using the same skills and tools that have worked before.

♦◊♦

In many feminist spaces, most particularly on the Internet, it is difficult to establish a decent dialogue about women’s issues without various men intruding, insisting that circumcision rates in the U.S. must be addressed instead of the issue of female genital mutilation in Africa, insisting that male rape victims must be discussed instead of female rape victims. These persistent conversation-derailers have succeeded in making a bad name for themselves, and given rise to the “what about teh menz?” trope as a boilerplate dismissal of these tired distractions from the addressing of women’s issues that is the raison d’être of most feminist communities.

There’s a problem with that, though. Once the dismissal is done and the conversation is dragged forcibly back onto the rails… what about the men?

Feminism tends to focus on women. The name’s a bit of a giveaway there. Many of the biggest feminist issues have been women’s issues: reproductive rights, discrimination against women in the workplace, derogatory stereotypes of women. These are all serious issues, and feminism has made great strides in addressing them. The historical abuses against women’s rights are too numerous to list here, but even a cursory glance at the history of feminism shows that a focus on the rights of women has been necessary, important, and successful.

Then, too, many feminists have done excellent work in dealing with men’s problems. Stronger rape laws and paternity leave are just two of the benefits men have received because of feminism, and many survivors and many families are better off for it. Shelters, counselors and hotlines for survivors of rape and abuse, usually established by feminists, almost always also provide support for male survivors, support that would not exist otherwise. Groundbreaking feminist theorists like Michael Kimmel and Shira Tarrant have focused on men’s issues in addition to women’s. However, this valuable work has just made the problem clearer by highlighting how much more needs to be done. Freedom is not a zero-sum game. Liberating men from restrictive gender roles and gendered oppression is intrinsically bound up with liberating women from the same things.

Many feminists respond to arguments along these lines by saying that men ought to start their own movement, that they don’t see what feminism has to do with any of it. Unfortunately, this is the latest manifestation of an issue that has long dogged feminism and held it back: the inclusion problem. Feminism started as a movement by and for straight white middle-class women, and there were struggles over the inclusion of people of color, poor people, sexual minorities, trans people and the disabled. Many of these struggles continue to this day, and they all have one thing in common: the side of “we wish you well, but that’s not our thing, and that’s detracting from the important issues we want to deal with” turns out to be wrong. In fact, second-wave feminist lack of inclusion turned out to be wrong with such embarrassing regularity that the third wave gave up and invented a word for it being wrong: intersectionality, the overlapping and reinforcing structure of different forms of oppression.

The same thing is true for men’s issues within feminism. The anti-racism, economic freedom, queer rights and disability rights movements all are movements independent of feminism: however, they are all movements that feminists agree with and pay attention to when they work on the same issues. Similarly, the feminist movement ought to take the same attitude to men’s rights.

Underscoring this point is the fact that there is something that calls itself a men’s rights movement, but it consists of nothing but kneejerk anti-feminism. It is made up primarily of angry, alienated men who have fully bought into the myths of hegemonic masculinity and gender roles, and not found the success and happiness that the myths implicitly promised. Since feminism is the only movement around that is attempting to dismantle those myths, they conclude that feminism is the cause of their unhappiness. If not for those meddling feminists, things would be okay. They would argue that this is a mischaracterization, but a thorough examination of their arguments reveals that this is, in fact, their sole intellectual basis. Any analysis of any issue that does not begin and end by blaming feminists, or preferably all women, is immediately discarded. Thus, lacking the social analysis tools feminists pioneered, they can accomplish nothing but surly misogyny and occasional outbreaks of violence. We spent quite some time attempting to find MRMs who could be engaged in a constructive manner, but eventually gave up. If men’s rights are to be addressed on any kind of serious level, it will have to be by feminism.

The inextricable interconnection of men’s issues and women’s issues is a complex subject. The simplest reason why feminists should get involved in masculism is this: feminism is the single largest and most politically powerful gender-oriented movement. Millions of feminists across the globe have been trained in analysis and activism by the feminist movements. Feminists have developed the verbal and conceptual vocabulary necessary to unpack and examine “how things are supposed to be” and all the ugly assumptions that go with that. Feminist theories of privilege and gender performance work just as well when applied to men’s issues. This toolset exists, and it’s the right one for the job. Facing a problem that hurts a lot of people and having the tools to solve it is, frankly, enough of a reason to do anything. In and of itself, the invaluable help it could provide is enough of a reason to say that feminism ought to support masculism. However, there are practical reasons for feminism to support it as well.

Masculism is a great recruiting tool for feminism. Everyone is best at seeing the problems that affect them personally. A man skeptical of the harm caused by sexual harassment or the beauty myth may be well aware of the harm caused by macho attitudes toward sports injuries or the social pressure to be “a success.” If we have a gender egalitarian movement that addresses his concerns—not in opposition to, but along with, women’s concerns—then we have a movement that has massively expanded its potential base of supporters.

Many men get a bad first impression of feminism from zealous young feminists who, regardless of their intentions, alienate the heck out of men. Some of those men will later see the nuance that they initially missed and come to understand the value of feminist thinking. Many, perhaps most, will not. This is not a net win for feminism. Most feminist spaces, online and in the real world, are not particularly welcoming to men. Even given that there are often good reasons for that, how many men have been lost to gender egalitarianism forever because they didn’t put in the extra effort to overcome that perceived hostility, or because they had already had their bad first impressions cemented and were not willing to change their minds? What might have been accomplished by not chasing away so many potential allies?

There’s a concept, generally used in communities that help people get out of religious fundamentalism, of a safe landing zone. When someone is leaving an ideology, such as a traditionalist view of gender roles, they need to have somewhere safe and welcoming to leave to. It can feel strange, confusing and lonely to question something that everyone around you believes; a community of people who think the way you do can mean the difference between fully leaving that belief or sticking with it, no matter how obvious its flaws. Human beings are social animals; even the nonconformists usually need a group to conform to.

A lot of feminist communities don’t make good landing zones for guys who are still learning the ropes of gender questioning, who might still have a lot of work to do on their own problems and assumptions. These communities might be bad landing zones for many different reasons: sometimes, they might be a safe space (for instance, for survivors of abuse or rape) and so have no tolerance for questions that sound like victim-blaming; sometimes, anti-feminist trolling or harassment has made a community so sensitive that they lash out at well-intentioned but naive newbies; sometimes, they are intended for feminists to talk to other feminists and new people detract from this purpose.

That’s fine: it’s not any particular feminist’s duty to create a safe landing space. Education is often difficult activist work, and many people are not suited to it: it takes a lot out of you to answer the same questions about “But is there really a gendered wage gap?” over and over again, particularly when the people you’re answering feel like their questions are very original. You can’t have every place be a safe landing space for everyone: you’d never get anything done.

That is just one of the ways that masculism will benefit feminism. Because masculism can be a safe landing space for men entering into gender egalitarianism, the same way that feminism is a safe landing space for women entering into gender egalitarianism. It will engage with their problems and issues that they can see affecting their own lives. It will provide a supportive environment for men unlearning their sexism. It will answer the questions men have about gender theory and the realities of how sexism works in our society. It will socialize them into the norms of social justice work, such as call-outs and checking one’s privilege. In fact, it will do all the things that feminism does for women in similar situations, and that is an unambiguously good thing.

♦◊♦

Ultimately, however, there’s another reason why feminism needs men—more than practical issues of making the movement more efficient, more than ethical issues of inclusion. In fact, it is impossible for feminism to accomplish its goals without men; liberating any gender requires liberating all genders.

One of the central principles we’ve come to recognize is that, in the binary-gender thinking of most culture, sexist stereotypes always come paired. Generally speaking, any stereotype or assumption about women carries with it an implicit stereotype or assumption about men, and vice versa.

Men have to be the breadwinners… women have to take care of the family.

Men are all slobs… women should be keeping house.

Women need to cover up their bodies or they’re asking to be raped… men are animals who commit immediate rape at the sight of cleavage.

Women shouldn’t feel desire for men… men can’t be desired by women.

Men always want sex… women never want sex.

Men don’t cry… women are hysterical.

Men don’t need emotional support… women need constant emotional support.

Women are expected to know how to take care of children… men can’t be expected to even know how to change a diaper.

Men who put on makeup are gay… women who don’t put on makeup are dykes.

Women are all golddiggers… men are only valuable for their success and money.

Women are only valuable for their looks… men are all shallow.

You can sit all day and come up with sexist tropes about men and women and pair them up. The moment one looks beyond the surface, it becomes impossible to come up with something stupid and sexist about one gender that doesn’t link directly to something stupid and sexist about another gender.

Based on this, we have proposed a rule of thumb called Ozy’s Law: It is impossible to form a stereotype about either of the two primary genders without simultaneously forming a concurrent and complementary stereotype about the other.

Or, more simply: Misandry mirrors misogyny.

This isn’t to say that in any given case, the misandry and misogyny are necessarily equivalent. Sometimes they are, other times one or the other definitely predominates. But they’re always paired. Often they’re just an unspoken assumption, something people take for granted as axiomatic, which is why it’s so difficult to notice the trend.

Feminists sometimes speak of “click moments” or more recently, “seeing the matrix,” the moment when an unexamined structure of oppression is suddenly examined and comes into sharp focus. Once you see that every structure that seeks to condemn women to household servitude also seeks to condemn men to wage slavery, that every structure that seeks to “protect” women from the toxic invasion of male sexuality also casts men as toxic and invasive, there’s no unseeing it.

It’s interesting to observe the different forms the paired stereotypes take. Sometimes a negative stereotype of one group is paired with an unfair expectation of another group: for instance, men are slobs, so of course women have to do all the cleaning. Sometimes unfair expectations are paired: men are supposed to sleep with dozens of women, while women are supposed to only have sex in committed relationships; that one’s not only sexist, it’s mathematically implausible. Occasionally negative stereotypes pair up: for instance, men are all shallow (and hence probably unkind and also dim), while women are all only valuable for their appearances as opposed to their brains (and hence probably unkind and also dim).

Most of the Ozy’s Law pairings have one of two sources. Some are naturally complementary: for instance, “men are all slobs” provides a nice justification for why women always have to clean house. Others come from a dichotomous, “complementarian” view of gender: if men don’t cry, this thinking goes, women must cry a lot; after all, if they didn’t, how would we be able to tell which gender was which? The one thing both sources have in common, however, is that they both make misandry and misogyny feed into and reinforce each other.

The problem is that it’s possible to question one half of an unspoken assumption without even really examining the other half. Thus, you get women who (rightly) complain about the wage gap without seeing how men are made into “success objects.” You get men who complain about the stupid-manchild-husband trope in media, without seeing that it always comes with the humorless-killjoy-wife trope. You get people unable to see past their own sense of grievance to look at how the system that’s hurting them is hurting other people.

Unfortunately, for a long time, feminism has been blind in one eye. It has seen half of how sexism damages people, but it hasn’t been able to engage with the other half. A lot of ugly stuff and a lot of pain has gone unnoticed by a movement dedicated to unpacking and examining the stuff that used to go unnoticed. Not only does that leave half of society still wounded, but it dooms the larger feminist project to failure. When the oppression of women and the oppression of men are so deeply linked, one cannot ever defeat one without addressing the other.

Ozy’s Law suggests that misandry and misogyny are inherently linked: if you eliminate one without the other, it will only mutate into a new sexist form. For instance, the "second shift” is when women who work outside the home come home and still do a disproportionate amount of the chores. It’s the classic consequence of liberating women so they can work outside the home without having their femininity questioned, but not liberating men so they can lift up a dishrag without having their masculinity questioned. By not liberating men, feminism traps women in a sexist situation that is little, if any, improvement.

Without masculism, feminism will never fully succeed. As soon as we defeat one unfair expectation or negative stereotype of women, a new negative stereotype or unfair expectation will pop up, shaping itself around the negative stereotypes and unfair expectations of men. The hydra of societal sexism will keep growing new heads. Only when we slay the hydra, only when we liberate people of all genders from unfair and regressive gender roles, will we be able to liberate people of any gender from those roles.

♦◊♦

Traditional assigned gender roles are unfair and awful for everyone. It might be possible to create a list of all the disadvantages men face and all the disadvantages women face and add them up to figure out which one is currently worst off, but that’s not really necessary, and really, who wants to win that fight?

As a corollary of that, gender liberation is a positive-sum game. All the patriarchal ugliness is connected: when you tug on one string in the knot—no matter where that string is—you end up loosening the entire knot. When you say women can work outside the home, you give men more freedom from having to support their wives; when you encourage men to have closer platonic friendships, you take the burden of caretaking and providing emotional support off women; when you allow people who identify as neither men nor women to live in peace, you give more freedom to everyone.

Our other major premise is the concept of “privilege.” Everyone has some privilege. If you’re white, that’s privilege. If you’re middle-class or even upper-class, that’s privilege. If you’re American, that’s privilege. If you’re able-bodied, that’s privilege. If you’re neurotypical, that’s privilege. If you’re straight, that’s privilege. If you’re cis (not transgender), that’s privilege. If you’re college-educated, that’s privilege. If you’re conventionally attractive, that’s privilege. And so on and so forth down the list.

Many people, on hearing that they are privileged, perceive it as an attack on them. This is understandable, but not really helpful. Being told you’re privileged feels a lot like being told that you’re bad, that you’ve had it easy, that you don’t deserve what you’ve got. None of these are true, of course. Everyone’s luckier than some folks, less lucky than others. Just because you got a slightly easier path to run doesn’t mean you haven’t run as fast and hard as you can. It just means your path lacked a couple hurdles some other people had to deal with.

The nature of privilege is that it’s invisible to those who have it. Most people generalize their experiences, holding a vague, unexamined idea that everyone else is basically like them. This is a known bias in all human cognition, known as the Typical Mind Fallacy. This means that an able-bodied person may, with the best intentions in the world, plan a meeting in a third-floor walk-up, because they’ve never had to think about mobility problems.

Similarly, a person may generalize about the experiences of women when they actually mean the experiences of women who are white, middle-class, American, abled ... well, you can fill in the rest. They might even write The Feminine Mystique. Thus, a common practice in social justice circles is to ask people to “check their privilege,” or stop and think about how other people’s experience of the world might differ from their own. Unfortunately, in practice “check your privilege” often sounds like “shut up, rich boy” and leads to further misunderstanding.

In general, people who are marginalized multiple ways, such as by being both trans and gay, tend to experience their marginalizations differently than a person who is only marginalized one way: this is called intersectionality. For instance, a trans gay man may be told he’s not “really” trans, because clearly there are no men who are attracted to men in the world; although this relates to both the marginalization of gay people and trans people, it’s qualitatively different from either. Nevertheless, it is a gay and trans experience, and as such subject to its own set of intersecting issues. Within this book, whenever we discuss the disadvantages that men face, we will do our best not to erase marginalized men and to acknowledge the ways that other identities—sexuality, class, race, ability—can intersect with masculinity.

Everyone is a little bit privileged and a little bit not privileged. Think about a wealthy black man: he’s privileged because of his class, but marginalized because of his race. In some ways, his wealth shields him from racism: however, he is still more likely to be called a racial slur than a white person is, even if the white person is poor and therefore more likely to work a crummy, low-paying, injury-prone job. In fact, that wealthy black man might perpetrate harmful stereotypes about poor people at the same time that he is a victim of harmful stereotypes about black people. The complex interaction of privilege and marginalization is called the kyriarchy, which some have defined as “everyone oppressing everyone else.”

The thing about the kyriarchy is that there aren’t a bunch of people in a shadowy headquarters, twirling their mustaches as they plot how to best use their Oppression Beams and Discrimination Rays to cause misery and suffering on earth. It would be easier if there were, because we could blow up their headquarters, make a wry quip and roll the closing credits on social injustice. Instead, the kyriarchy is made up of real people, some of whom are saints and some of whom are bastards and most of whom are just muddling through as best they can. The kind of people who love their families and give to charity and foster kittens and sometimes get angry at drivers who don’t know how to use turn signals. Ordinary people. And it’s those people who are perpetuating the kyriarchy, the sick system that oppresses all of us.

Unlearning your kyriarchal conditioning is a process. Nobody is as good as we deep down know we ought to be: you, us, Mother Teresa, famous people who write about feminism for big-name print magazines, everyone messes up. The point is to learn to do it less. As Samuel Beckett once said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

That in mind, we two fallible, privileged, well-intentioned authors have some ideas about gender, about oppression, about the men.



This article is from a book in progress by Noah Brand and Ozy Frantz.

[American Dream]

THE AWAKENING IN AMERICA

“A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic ‘social studies’ or leftist ‘consciousness raising.’ . . . Everything seems possible — and much more IS possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in ‘the old days.’ . . . Passive consumption is replaced by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. . . . Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible. Far from being abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are; they make our ‘normal’ life seem like sleepwalking.”

–Ken Knabb, THE JOY OF REVOLUTION

[American Dream]

http://kloncke.com/2011/08/22/ableism-a ... y-network/

Ableism and East Bay Solidarity Network

August 22, 2011

To me, femme must include ending ableism, white supremacy, heterosexism, the gender binary, economic exploitation, sexual violence, population control, male supremacy, war and militarization, and ownership of children and land.
Love this image from Mingus' site, labeled
"watercolor painting of an octopus done in
greens, yellows, oranges and pinks."


—from Mia Mingus’ keynote, “Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability” at the Femmes of Color Symposium this weekend in Oakland


Yesterday: downtown Oakland is in full Art-And-Soul festival mode, and a small squad of us from East Bay Solidarity Network gather outside its gated entrance to do our own jovial yet serious work. Once we finally locate one another in the crowd (who has whose cell numbers?), it’s on to the business of distributing xeroxed posters and tape (did we bring enough tape? it sucks to run out), and divvying out areas to flyer. Some of us are slow and others are impatient. Caught in between as an unofficially appointed problem solver, I feel my face edge toward a scowl. Luckily, though, our little gang laughs together more and more as months pass. And laughter is nature’s aspirin for the headache of logistics. Besides: no one’s getting paid here, and there are no managers or fears of getting fired and losing that paycheck, so we’re more free to move at our own pace.

Have I told you about our current fight? Mel Hill was a security guard working for ABC Security. After working at a number of different locations, he was stationed way, way out at a bus yard, miles from any public transport. The way Mel puts it: “I had leg muscles big as Popeye from walking to and from work.” He posted up in a little World War II tin shack (“hot when it’s hot; cold when it’s cold”) with no heat, electricity, water — nothing. Leaks in the roof let the rain in. Misery. After months of enduring this, with no administrative response to his complaints, he began bringing a yellow blanket along on his shifts, to keep himself warm. This, he was told by management, is “unprofessional” and unacceptable. Eventually Mel was fired, and brought his case to us, the East Bay Solidarity Network. We explained that in order for us to take on his fight to win his job back and improve site conditions, he would have to join the network and agree to be there for other people’s fights, as well.

There’s more than enough fights to go around.

Economic need compels people who don’t own the means of production (a.k.a. the vast majority of us) to work in conditions that are often terrible for our bodies. Job conditions are set up that way in order to save time and production costs (including wages). If we object, as Mel did, we get the message (implicitly or explicitly) that (a) we’re lazy, or (b) our bodies are the problem; our bodies are defective. Look: other people can do it. Why can’t you? Stop bringing the blanket. It’s unprofessional.

What can we do about this core of ableism within the exploitative, competitive, profit-driven system?


Master of not-fitting: Chican@ queer & disability scholar Gloria Anzaldúa

Building on the praxis of many theorists and worker militants, we must include ableism in our understanding of the way capital categorizes and divides labor, and pathologizes, commodifies, punishes and “corrects” what may not even be problems in people’s bodies and minds.

When Mel would get cold during his overnight shift at the bus yard, his body was telling him that something needed to change. So he asked for improvements in the site infrastructure, and when he was denied/ignored, took it upon himself to bring a blanket. For this management punished him. Whereas we can clearly see Mel’s discomfort as an institutional problem, his bosses painted it as something wrong with him, his attitude, and his body. When bosses expect us to adapt to shitty, toxic, stressful conditions that don’t work for our particular mind/body, they are denying our lived, embodied experience, and casting us as unfit, unable, and, in a sense, ugly. We better shape up or ship out.

As Mingus puts it, though, we can go a long way toward reclaiming the ‘ugliness’ of our bodies.

As the (generational) effects of global capitalism, genocide, violence, oppression and trauma settle into our bodies, we must build new understandings of bodies and gender that can reflect our histories and our resiliency, not our oppressor or our self-shame and loathing. We must shift from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence. That moves us closer to bodies and movements that disrupt, dismantle, disturb. Bodies and movements ready to throw down and create a different way for all of us, not just some of us.

The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself. The magnificence of a body that doesn’t get to choose when to go to the bathroom, let alone which bathroom to use. A body that doesn’t get to choose what to wear in the morning, what hairstyle to sport, how they’re going to move or stand, or what time they’re going to bed. The magnificence of bodies that have been coded, not just undesirable and ugly, but un-human. The magnificence of bodies that are understanding gender in far more complex ways than I could explain in an hour. Moving beyond a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic, seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength.

. . .

Where is the Ugly in you? What is it trying to teach you?

And I am not saying it is easy to be ugly without apology. It is hard as fuck. It threatens our survival. I recognize the brilliance in our instinct to move toward beauty and desirability. And it takes time and for some of us it may be impossible. I know it is complicated. …And I also know that though it may be a way to survive, it will not be a way to thrive, to grow the kind of genders and world we need. And it is not attainable to everyone, even those who want it to be.

What do we do with bodies that can’t change no matter how much we dress them up or down; no matter how much we want them to?

. . .

If you leave with anything today, leave with this: you are magnificent. There is magnificence in our ugliness. There is power in it, far greater than beauty ever can wield. Work to not be afraid of the Ugly—in each other or ourselves. Work to learn from it, to value it. Know that every time we turn away from ugliness, we turn away from ourselves. And always remember this: I would rather you be magnificent, than beautiful, any day of the week. I would rather you be ugly—magnificently ugly.

This is wonderful and necessary. But in addition to transforming our subjectivity, we need solid ideas about how to transform our material, day-to-day existence. Right? Even as we learn to love our own ugly, non-performing bodies and minds, we also need to team up with other bodies and minds to resist the ongoing process of worker discipline.

How can we also conceive of our bodies in terms of collectives, teams, and super-organisms? Worker-led unions, solidarity networks, and deeply rooted international coalitions? How can we be there for each other in a material way that takes the focus and scrutiny off of our individual bodies/minds and their workplace “performance,” and instead furthers the power and solidarity of the collective?

Yesterday as Mel and two other EastBaySol organizers were postering near ABC’s offices, a former co-worker spotted him and came over to talk. He recognized our flyers, and while he wasn’t angry with us for badmouthing the company, he did seem upset. “What am I supposed to do, Mel?” he asked. “I’m stuck. I can’t just go get another job. I’m stuck here.”

That’s why we gotta get together, right?

Or as Mel often says from behind his aviator sunglasses, chin lifted: “We can show the others that they don’t have to take it, either. Together we’re strong, and we won’t stand for this.”

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sylvia0702.php

Leslie Feinberg interviews Sylvia Rivera

'I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot'

Workers World Managing Editor Leslie Feinberg interviewed Sylvia Rivera. Rivera, a Puerto Rican drag queen, was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion in June 1969 that ignited the young gay liberation movement.

Sylvia Rivera and African American drag queen Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR: Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries in New York City in 1970. In this interview, which is included in Feinberg's upcoming non-fiction book "Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue" (Beacon, Oct. 1998), Rivera describes memories of life on the streets of New York as a drag queen, the uprising in Greenwich Village, and the era that followed:

I left home at age 10 in 1961. I hustled on 42nd Street. The early 60s was not a good time for drag queens, effeminate boys or boys that wore makeup like we did.

Back then we were beat up by the police, by everybody. I didn't really come out as a drag queen until the late 60s.

When drag queens were arrested, what degradation there was. I remember the first time I got arrested, I wasn't even in full drag. I was walking down the street and the cops just snatched me.

We always felt that the police were the real enemy. We expected nothing better than to be treated like we were animals-and we were.

We were stuck in a bullpen like a bunch of freaks. We were disrespected. A lot of us were beaten up and raped.

When I ended up going to jail, to do 90 days, they tried to rape me. I very nicely bit the shit out of a man.

I've been through it all.

In 1969, the night of the Stonewall riot, was a very hot, muggy night. We were in the Stonewall [bar] and the lights came on. We all stopped dancing. The police came in.

They had gotten their payoff earlier in the week. But Inspector Pine came in-him and his morals squad-to spend more of the government's money.

We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops.

And then the bottles started. And then we finally had the morals squad barricaded in the Stonewall building, because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn't know we were going to react that way.

We were not taking any more of this shit. We had done so much for other movements. It was time.

It was street gay people from the Village out front-homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar-and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark.

One Village Voice reporter was in the bar at that time. And according to the archives of the Village Voice, he was handed a gun from Inspector Pine and told, "We got to fight our way out of there."

This was after one Molotov cocktail was thrown and we were ramming the door of the Stonewall bar with an uprooted parking meter. So they were ready to come out shooting that night.

Finally the Tactical Police Force showed up after 45 minutes. A lot of people forget that for 45 minutes we had them trapped in there.

All of us were working for so many movements at that time. Everyone was involved with the women's movement, the peace movement, the civil-rights movement. We were all radicals. I believe that's what brought it around.

You get tired of being just pushed around.

STAR came about after a sit-in at Wein stein Hall at New York University in 1970. Later we had a chapter in New York, one in Chicago, one in California and England.

STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people and anybody that needed help at that time. Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms. Marsha and I decided to get a building. We were trying to get away from the Mafia's control at the bars.

We got a building at 213 East 2nd Street. Marsha and I just decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids. We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out and hustled the streets. We paid the rent.

We didn't want the kids out in the streets hustling. They would go out and rip off food. There was always food in the house and everyone had fun. It lasted for two or three years.

We would sit there and ask, "Why do we suffer?" As we got more involved into the movements, we said, "Why do we always got to take the brunt of this shit?"

Later on, when the Young Lords [revolutionary Puerto Rican youth group] came about in New York City, I was already in GLF [Gay Liberation Front]. There was a mass demonstration that started in East Harlem in the fall of 1970. The protest was against police repression and we decided to join the demonstration with our STAR banner.

That was one of first times the STAR banner was shown in public, where STAR was present as a group.

I ended up meeting some of the Young Lords that day. I became one of them. Any time they needed any help, I was always there for the Young Lords. It was just the respect they gave us as human beings. They gave us a lot of respect.

It was a fabulous feeling for me to be myself-being part of the Young Lords as a drag queen-and my organization [STAR] being part of the Young Lords.

I met [Black Panther Party leader] Huey Newton at the Peoples' Revolutionary Convention in Philadelphia in 1971. Huey decided we were part of the revolution-that we were revolutionary people.

I was a radical, a revolutionist. I am still a revolutionist. I was proud to make the road and help change laws and what-not. I was very proud of doing that and proud of what I'm still doing, no matter what it takes.

Today, we have to fight back against the government. We have to fight them back. They're cutting back Medicaid, cutting back on medicine for people with AIDS. They want to take away from women on welfare and put them into that little work program. They're going to cut SSI.

Now they're taking away food stamps. These people who want the cuts-these people are making millions and millions and millions of dollars as CEOs.

Why is the government going to take it away from us? What they're doing is cutting us back. Why can't we have a break?

I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot. I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, I thought: "My god, the revolution is here. The revolution is finally here!"

I always believed that we would have a fight back. I just knew that we would fight back. I just didn't know it would be that night.

I am proud of myself as being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kind of hurt because that's when I saw the world change for me and my people.

Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.


**

13TH JUL 2012



thespiritwas:

Sylvia Rivera kicking ass on stage after some radfems & transphobes tried to refuse her the right to speak at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally. Said radfems then had their own march in part protesting trans participation in Pride. A precursor to today’s Dyke March.

40 years later in the very same park trans women are still fighting for space within Pride as this year’s Dyke March fiasco demonstrated. I’m feeling challenged and troubled by the narrative that trans women’s response to transphobia must take the “form of serious, calm, point by point analyses of why radfems are wrong” as Stephen Ira pointed out.

What strikes me about this video is that she isn’t trying to be calm and collected after being attacked. She’s not internalizing the notion that fighting transphobia has to take on the oppressive notion of “respectability.”

These conversations have left me wondering: has the non profit industrial complex and professionalized activism gentrified our political activity?

So within all of that, I say: nothing but love and power to trans women creating space for ourselves in queer community! Special shout out to Voz who inspired this post!

[American Dream]

Hip-Hop can be a very powerful weapon to help expand young people’s political and social consciousness. But just as with any weapon, if you don’t know how to use it, if you don’t know where to point it, or what you’re using it for, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot or killing your sisters or brothers. The government recognized immediately that Rap music has enormous revolutionary potential.

— Assata Shakur

[American Dream]

Hallucination Engine 1994

William S. Burroughs -- voice

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... al-brides/

TECHNOSEXUALS AND THEIR MECHANICAL BRIDES
by Lisa Wade



Wired describes the new documentary, The Mechanical Bride, as a “moving, weirdly human exploration of artificial companionship.” Directed by Allison de Fren, explores the range of mechanical brides, from robots to Real Dolls (NSFW), and the “technosexuals who love them.” I can’t wait to see it.

Trailer:

[American Dream]

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.

— Assata Shakur (via daughterofassata)

[American Dream]

DEAR IMPERIALIST+ US HEGEMONIES,

STOP COMMODIFYING MY CULTURE, EXOTIFYING MY PEOPLE, DEHUMANIZING MY PEOPLE, DUMPING YOUR CORPORATIONS ON US, USING OUR LABOR, FEELING PITY FOR OUR CONDITION BUT IT IS YOU WHO CAUSED THE DAMAGE, FUELING BROWN ON BROWN/BLACK ON BLACK CONFLICTS, COLONIZING OUR LANDS, STEALING OUR LANGUAGE, NEVER GIVING US CREDIT, VALIDATING US BY STEREOTYPES, FORCING ASSIMILATION, OTHERIZING US, DEPORTING US, IMPOSING YOUR BELIEFS/CONTROL ON US, FORCING US TO BE PRIDEFUL OF A COUNTRY THAT IS THE REAL TERRORIZING NATION, FORCING MY PEOPLE TO SUBMIT TO YOUR PATRIARCHAL, OPPRESSIVE CULTURE AND POLICE STATE, MAKING MY PEOPLE HATE THEMSELVES & STRIVE TO REACH YOUR WESTERN BEAUTY STANDARDS+ THE AMERICAN DREAM NIGHTMARE. I AM VERY ANGRY. ALSO STOP TELLING ME TO NOT BE ANGRY.

WE ARE CHILDREN OF SO MANY LANDS COLONIZED, SO MANY WOMYN RAPED, SO MANY VILLAGES PILLAGED, SO MANY MINDS INDOCTRINATED, SO MANY MOVEMENTS OF RESISTANCE, SO MANY GENERATIONS OF TRAUMA. WE WANT TO HEAL FROM THIS. WE NEED TO HEAL

I dont like you.

With rage,
KSG.KALI SHERNI

(Source: umbartha)