think twice.

this post is going to be a little didactic.

think twice before you laugh at antoine dodson. i know everything is supposed to take a backseat to short-lived fame and exposure. but how would you feel if your sister was attacked by a rapist and people did nothing about it? officials laughed at you, police took their time coming to investigate, media crews didn’t arrive until you called them, and then your time on the news gets spoofed to entertain others instead of warn them. antoine’s taking his time in the spotlight in stride, and i think he’s doing it for kelly’s sake. i hope all the people laughing and singing “hide your kids, hide your wife” are writing all of the people in kelly’s community and state to do something about catching the rapist.

i planned to write about this at feministe, fast on the heels of the gang rape of a 12-year-old at a nearby skatepark. what does it mean when you read about attack after attack after attack, and one of the thoughts in your head is “i hope no one auto-tunes something like this” or “how can this story garner more attention than it’s gotten,” when these stories should be enough to knock ten people on their asses with grief.

there aren’t psychic holes deep enough to hide away from all the violence and deception this culture heaps on us every day. so if we must sit desensitized and wading through day after day, trying to survive amidst the chaos, let’s use our strong stomachs and weary eyes to bear witness. reinforce our hearts by opening them and letting the scar tissue thicken around them. occasionally be sick with grief instead of overeating, overexertion. let a raw nerve throb for something more than too much sex, too much self-indulgence.

“opinions, we all have them. i try to keep mine to myself, especially in social media forums.”

sometimes keeping things to yourself can kill other people. can get other people attacked. can allow evil ideas to conquer the marketplace and argue why they should go unchallenged. because of the importance of keeping dissent mum. because no one wants to be told that maybe what they’re feeling and thinking is wrong. maybe they ought to think twice before inflicting their will on the world.

maybe everyone should speak loudly. all at once. without looking for a cheap laugh. hide your kids. hide your wife. hide your husband because they’re raping everybody up in here. say it three times with a straight face and wonder how hard you’d laugh if it were your reality. think of how hard you laugh if it is your reality.

how loudly would you scream if you realized no one is truly safe?

Where is home?

In BFP’s recent post Helen Thomas, she reinforces the solid point that Israel is a settler nation founded on the land of Palestinians.  She also points to the irony of progressives calling Thomas’ remarks out of line, when they adopt the indigenous demands that white racist nationalist settlers of the United States demand that other undocumented nationals (typically brown undocumented nationals) “go home.”  They seem to think they have exemption from the call.  It’s easier to excuse oneself than it is to face responsibility for the actions of those who built this nation on the bodies of indigenous peoples.

However, I think it is also relevant to consider another conundrum about the homes some of us lack.  In this particular situation, Polish and German Jews and Black Americans descended from slaves have a similar problem.  We have no homes, and we may lack the economic and social capital to recreate a home in the places from which we were taken.

Now, keep in mind that this is not an excuse for indigenous peoples being murdered, starved, and subjected to ethnocide.  But Helen Thomas seemed to fixate on a quick solution to send “Jews” back to Poland and Germany.  Kind of like when Whites fixated on sending Black American descendants from slaves back to Africa.  Some members of our peoples likely agreed and tried it.  But both perspectives, however justified partly in historical context, fail to consider the full circumstances of how we arrived where we were and how we got to where we are.

Our forced displacement from our lands, for purposes of genocide and enslavement, have made us culturally homeless.   Why do we have a cultural and social obligation to return to lands that robbed us of our dignity?  What resources do we get to rebuild homes if we cannot afford to go where our families originated?  What happens if those lands reject us again?  Where would we settle without losing some piece of our cultural identities to the area we occupy, to take some space in the international cultural community?  Economic enrichment was another key motivator for the Holocaust, and it clearly fueled the transatlantic slave trade for several centuries.  Who owes us the totality of our lives and work before our homes were destroyed?

We can all sit on our little acres and shout “go home go home go home” all day.  But the construction of home amidst occupation and trafficking runs deeper than telling People X to set up shop in Locale A or settling for colonization because the international landscape was founded on it, is steeped in it, and knows little else but legitimizing opportunistic violent human enclaves.  The solution isn’t as simple as move as close to the past as possible without repeating it and/or rebuilding history using scraps of citizenry and a road map.

If we all have a right to exist, what antiquated notions of possession and siege should we relinquish in order to exercise it?

On Gaza, Oaxaca, and the assault on human rights

What we are seeing with the attack on the Turkish flotilla to Gaza and the attack of aid relief workers heading to Oaxaca is an assault on basic humanity.  It is not defense of borders; it is not protection of resources; it is not authority of states.  It is the violent intervention between people and their right to live, to thrive, to flourish on a planet created for all living beings to exist.

A group of overarmed, depraved necrophiliacs are declaring war on our right to live because we do not crave death as much as they do.  It is wrong.  We should not stand for it.

I commend the bravery of the people who gathered resources together, who walked into the belly of the gunpowder-bloated beast and said, “No.  We will not let you deter us from helping others.”  It is civil disobedience in its most sacred form.  It is worth the price of death to try to save another’s life.  I, like many others, only wish it did not have to come at such a high price.

I am disappointed at the way people have treated those who condemn killers of good samaritans, of human rights workers, of peace supporters.  It is tragic that our culture has taught us that if logic can twist to justify one killing, it can start contorting to justify them all.

I am also unafraid to say this, even though it resulted in the firing of a journalist: if you cannot see the clear parallels between imperialism and colonialism around the globe and the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land, you are willfully ignorant.

By acknowledging that the so-called civilized nations that permitted the wholesale extermination of entire groups of people sought to ameliorate their slowness to act by stealing land from yet another indigenous, autonomous group of people, I am not invalidating history or calling for the eradication of anything.  I am simply stating what happened, and why it is unsurprising that fighting continues for land, and why it is shameful that the Palestinians are joining the devastated ranks of other indigenous peoples around the world.  I am simply stating that the so-called civilized nations would rather steal land and arm its designated occupants to the teeth rather than create a peaceful, social solution to the ongoing racism and anti-Semitism that plagues their populations.

The nations would rather give away land that isn’t theirs so they can continue to preach in their churches, indoctrinate in their schools, and codify in their laws that a few decades’ worth of band-aids will fix centuries of injustice, hatred, and murder.  The nations would rather transform every human body that opposes it, no matter how small or slight or unarmed, into a menace that must be put down.

And with every humanitarian who dies to share food and medicine with their fellow human, we civilized ones are reminded that these fixes are not enough.  Just as we have the right to speak, the right to arm ourselves, the right to justice and the right to believe, we have the right to aid. We do, and we should.

God bless those people who are brave enough to help in their communities and in the world.

What If Privacy Is More Than Hiding Your Dirty Laundry?

The so-called “tell-all generation” is losing its sense of a private life for privacy’s sake.  However, young[er] people are responding to professional pressures and market pressures that demand that a public/private sphere exists for all of its workforce above a certain class level.

I do think that over time, the joke about “if it’s not online/there aren’t pictures/it’s not chronicled, it isn’t real/didn’t happen/isn’t true” took on a strange nugget of truth and absolution for my generation and its relationship to the net.  And since it is a publishing medium, however mutable it can be, the act of publishing something legitimizes it.  Since you can find everything from the sacred to the profane online, it seems natural to share the sacred and the profane parts of ourselves wherever we can display them, for some kind of permanence in what was once a relatively open space.  But now with so many privacy raiders taking over, it’s no longer like we’re tiny specks in an open field of information.  We’re not being watched by people who validate our choices anymore; we’re being monitored by people who will find excuses for us not to work, not to live, not to flourish.  And if that isn’t disaffirmation…

Now we have to find ways of preserving our reality by hiding them in pockets and provisions online — whether it’s locking blogs and pictures, creating secret forums and redirects, cache and IP blockers, multiple profiles/personas etc.  We’ve created fragmented selves (and pseudo selves, to quote blackamazon from a private convo) where generations of private selves used to be.

It’s also a bit telling that people’s private selves from earlier generations are now popular fodder for republishing and sensationalism in our modern media — film, websites, etc.  Not that people weren’t publishing and publicizing journals in the past and making novels out of them; but I think it’s different now because we’re doing it less for entertainment value and more in this quest to hoard and categorize as much information as we can, from wherever we can get it, and the more remote in time the information is from our digital padlocks, the more susceptible it is to reproduction and exploitation for the market and for mass consciousness.

Publishing generational novels/journals/stories — it’s another attempt to demystify the past and bring more absolution to the present.  You see your mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers speaking in colloquial terms about blow jobs and benders in their diaries, and suddenly your generation doesn’t feel so alienated and demonized for enjoying recreational drugs, partying and music.  The only thing is I don’t know if sharing that information creates an environment of understanding or one of more distance between the past and the present.

And I guess here’s where hiding our personal lives really doesn’t help: if we’re trying to say that there are certain behaviors and mindsets that were previously taboo but can be (or are) okay with more exposure and understanding, what does it say when we’re asked to hide them again and pretend that they’re still taboos for survival?  Doesn’t that make them taboos again?  It seems like there needs to be dialogue about reclaiming openness, reclaiming exchange of ideas and not just presentation of moments, and actually trying to build a culture with rules of engagement.  Because when anything goes fails to go, we’re left with old and archaic rigidity that betrays its own hollowness.

The hollowness then breeds executives like Zuckerberg and the types of problems arising around social networking.

Punishing Radicalism: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Andrea Smith, and Due Process

When I ran The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum, I linked a post about one of many political prisoners in the United States right now, Mumia Abu-Jamal. (A consequence of nuking one’s blog is not knowing which post it was, or who wrote the post you linked. *sigh*)

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a renowned journalist from Philadelphia who has been in prison since 1981 and on death row since 1983 for allegedly shooting Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He is known as the “Voice of the Voiceless” for his award- winning reporting on police brutality and other social and racial epidemics that plague communities of color in Philadelphia and throughout the world. Mumia has received international support over the years in his efforts to overturn his unjust conviction.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was serving as the President of the Association of Black Journalists at the time of his arrest. He was a founding member of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Black Panther Party as a teenager. Years later he began reporting professionally on radio stations such as NPR, and was the news director of Philadelphia station WHAT. Much of his journalism called attention to the blatant injustice and brutality he watched happen on a daily basis to MOVE, a revolutionary organization that works to protect all forms of life–human, animal, plant–and the Earth as a whole.

[...]The prosecution claimed that the shot which killed Faulkner came from Mumia Abu-Jamal’s legally registered .38-caliber weapon, contradicting the medical examiner’s report that the bullet removed from Faulkner’s brain was a .44-caliber. This fact was kept from the jury. Moreover, a ballistics expert found it incredible that police at the scene failed to test Mumia’s gun to see if has been recently fired, or to test his hands for powder residue. One of the most damning prosecution claims was that Mumia confessed at the hospital. However, this confession was not reported until nearly two months after December 9th, immediately after Mumia had filed a brutality suit against the police. One of the officers who claims to have heard the confession is Gary Wakshul. However, in his police report on that day he stated, “the Negro male made no comments.” Dr. Coletta, the attending physician who was with Mumia the entire time, says that he never heard Mumia speak.

The star prosecution witness, a prostitute named Cynthia White, was someone no other witness reported seeing at the scene. During the trial of Billy Cook (Mumia’s brother) just weeks before Mumia’s trial, White gave testimony completely contradictory to what she stated at Mumia’s trial. Her testimony at Billy Cook’s trial placed someone at the scene who was not there when police arrived. This corroborates the other five witness accounts that someone fled the scene. In a 1997 hearing, another former prostitute, Pamela Jenkins, testified that White was acting as a police informant. Other sworn testimony revealed that witness coercion was routinely practiced by the police. In 1995, eyewitness William Singletary testified that police repeatedly tore up his initial statement–that the shooter fled the scene–until he finally signed something acceptable to them. The following year, witness Veronica Jones came forward to testify that she had been coerced into changing her initial statement that two men fled the scene. Witness Billy Cook, who was present the whole time, has stated very clearly that Mumia is absolutely innocent.

Due to police manipulation of witnesses, fabrication of evidence, and the rights of the defense severely denied, Mumia was found guilty. He was sentenced to death during the penalty phase based solely on his political beliefs. Mumia has been unjustly separated from his family for twenty-two years, with the threat of death looming over his head.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reviewed Abu-Jamal’s case, and they affirmed the federal district court decision to conduct a new sentencing hearing and invalidate the death penalty sentence, rather than award Abu-Jamal a new trial. (Via Xicano Power.) Robert Bryan, the lead counsel for Abu-Jamal, spoke with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now about the pros and cons of the court’s decision:

On the one hand, the death penalty—the court threw out the death penalty in this case, even though Mumia remains on death row today, and if the state appeals or seeks further relief, nothing will change, at least for the present. The court did order a new jury trial on the issue of whether he should be on death row. In effect, what they did, as I said, was throw out the death penalty. So that’s the good part of the decision. And having done this type of work defending people facing the death penalty for over three decades, I can tell you any time the death penalty gets thrown out is a real victory.

On the negative side, as Juan just pointed out, the jury—the court ruled against granting a new jury trial on the issue of guilt and innocence. And we were rather astounded that the court made that ruling. The silver lining to that ruling, to that dark cloud, is that it was a split court. We were before three judges. Two judges ruled against us; a third judge, Judge Ambro, rendered a forty-one-page dissent in which he strongly criticized the majority and said that racism was a work in this case, that racism—that the prosecution engaged in removing people of color, African Americans, from sitting on the jury of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

For some brief background, before the start of a trial, the prosecution, defense, and judge conduct a process of jury selection called the voir dire. A pool of potential jurors enter the courtroom (thinking of excuses to get out of serving), and the judge or the lawyers ask the potential jurors questions about their abilities to decide the case in question fairly and impartially. In most jurisdictions, the lawyers can ask questions — Maryland, which is in the minority on this issue, has the judge ask potential jurors questions.

During this process the prosecution and defense have two mechanisms for eliminating jurors from the panel until they receive the final 12 triers of fact: challenges for cause and peremptory challenges. Challenges for cause are unlimited, and they are used when the lawyers and/or judge determine that a juror’s conscious or unconscious biases will affect his/her impartiality. Peremptory challenges, however, are limited depending on the type of case before the jury. Peremptory challenges can be used for any reason by either side. In crimes carrying the possible penalty of death, the peremptory challenges are very high and the voir dire is more stringent.

The exclusion of people from juries on the basis of race via peremptory challenges has affected the state and federal court system through a large portion of United States jurisprudence. Prosecutors would routinely strike black Americans from the juries of black defendants using peremptory challenges; as a result the trial, conviction, and sentencing would not be determined by a proper jury of the defendant’s peers.

The seminal case that outlawed this practice of excluding people from juries on the basis of race is Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986). The Court at that time articulated a test where defendants could challenge the prosecutor’s peremptory challenges if it followed a pattern of removing members of a certain race from the panel. Upon being challenged, the judge asks the prosecutor to go back and give legitimate reasons for striking the jurors removed. If the prosecutor cannot provide satisfactory reasons, the jurors stricken are reinstated.

Getting back to Abu-Jamal’s case, Robert Bryan notes in the Democracy Now interview that the Supreme Court reinforced the principles of the Batson case earlier this month in its decision in Snyder v. Louisiana, 128 S. Ct. 1203 (2008). Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion for the court, reinforces the importance of upholding the general principles of Batson:

As previously noted, the question presented at the third stage of the Batson inquiry is “‘whether the defendant has shown purposeful discrimination.’” The prosecution’s proffer of this pretextual explanation naturally gives rise to an inference of discriminatory intent.

[...]In other circumstances, we have held that, once it is shown that a discriminatory intent was a substantial or motivating factor in an action taken by a state actor, the burden shifts to the party defending the action to show that this factor was not determinative. [...]We have not previously applied this rule in a Batson case, and we need not decide here whether that standard governs in this context. For present purposes, it is enough to recognize that a peremptory strike shown to have been motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent could not be sustained based on any lesser showing by the prosecution.

However, the Third Circuit decision in Abu-Jamal’s case does not take the extra step to order a completely new trial for him — only to have his sentencing redetermined by a new jury.

But since the jury during the course of a normal jury trial decides the defendant’s guilt and innocence, as well as recommends a sentence of life or death, why won’t Abu-Jamal’s entire case — guilt or innocence determination included — be reevaluated in a new trial by a new jury?

The poor logic in this case reminds me of the poor logic of the University of Michigan in denying tenure to Andrea Smith, an eminent Native American feminist scholar.

Jointly appointed in the Program in American Culture and the Department of Women’s Studies, Dr. Smith’s body of scholarship exemplifies scholarly excellence with widely circulated articles in peer-reviewed journals and numerous books in both university and independent presses including Native Americans and the Christian Right published this year by Duke University Press. Dr. Smith is one of the greatest indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time. A nominee for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Smith has an outstanding academic and community record of service that is internationally and nationally recognized. She is a dedicated professor and mentor and she is an integral member of the University of Michigan (UM) intellectual community. Her reputation and pedagogical practices draw undergraduate and graduate students from all over campus and the nation.

With this type of record, the reasons for denying tenure seem incomprehensible. However, the fabric of Andrea Smith’s work consistently challenges the racism, sexism, colonialism, and systematic disenfranchisement and violation of Native Americans at the hands of the United States and its supporting institutions. (See her published work, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, as an example.) This trend of radical thought and activism, when considered along with the fact other women of color professors at the university being denied tenure, indicates a more invidious reasoning is afoot for these decisions.

Comparatively, since Abu-Jamal’s incarceration and long wait on death row, he has written a series of published works about the nature of his imprisonment, his life on death row, and the legitimacy of the operation of the U.S. criminal justice system. His lawyer thinks, and I agree, that the reluctance of the court to award a new trial for Abu-Jamal stems from a reluctance to accord any substantial benefit to him because of the body of his work, despite the fact the remedy would be entirely appropriate considering the prior history of his case:

What’s interesting about this decision yesterday, and Judge Ambro raised this question twice in his forty-one-page dissent, and that is, why is this case being treated differently from other cases? Why is the majority, the other two judges, treating this case differently? It’s what we often think of as the Mumia exception. And that is, the law is one thing for everyone else, but the courts seem to strive to carve out an exception for Mumia Abu-Jamal, because obviously he’s outspoken, he’s very critical of the establishment. And I might say that the big issue lingering over all of this is that he is absolutely not guilty of murder.

The overarching result of this decision is Mumia Abu-Jamal gets the option between facing death (again) or receiving life in prison, even if his attorney presents exculpatory evidence that proves his innocence. On what planet is this choice just?

Why is it seemingly a facet of this system that if you challenge its illegitimacy or its flaws — within its logic, using its rules, with acknowledgment of the paths constructed to allow everyone following them a fair chance at life — its response results in more erosion of its so-called just and neutral foundation? I hold little doubt that the penalties lodged against Abu-Jamal and Smith stem from their work to criticize and to expose the history and cycle of unjust and immoral practices this society encourages daily. And it’s sickening to be raised under such high ideals about this country’s capabilities when its foundation can’t even face up to its own history, its own consequences from the bloodshed implanted into its legacy.

The criminal justice system of the United States, along with many of its other institutions, needs redemption and transformation desperately. It needs restoration and drastic transformation into a system that truly tries and judges people accused of crimes fairly and impartially, granting the appropriate remedies and levying the appropriate punishments when required. And Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case is one of many cases that proves our system has a long road to travel before it reaches its highly lauded standards of due process and equal protection under its laws. Through its everyday application, these guarantees of rights, justice, and liberties seem to exist for people only in this country’s deluded idealizations of itself.

Shirley Chisholm is NOT to be forgotten now or ever.

The thing that angers me about Obama and Clinton is this is NOT a historical first with regards to a black person or a woman seeking the presidency. The REAL historical first is Shirley Chisholm back in 1972.

Clinton has been using Chisholm’s legacy as a pawn with black folks and black women since one of the things she did as a junior senator is contribute to legislation honoring her. That’s it.

Obama, on the other hand, has channeled her “Unbought and Unbossed” campaign into an appeal to the people, catered to the hopes of young people with complete audacity, and has painted himself as the Every Person Candidate. That’s it.

Just as Chisholm did! Before Jesse Jackson, even!

It’s no coincidence or surprise from either politician to give her lip service about what she did. I mean, I read these words from Chisholm and it sounds like something Obama’s used in his speeches in almost the exact same words:

“You can be part of the system without being wedded to it,” I say. “You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don’t measure America by its achievement, but by its potential. There are still many things that we haven’t tried — that I haven’t tried — to change the way our present system operates. I haven’t exhausted the opportunities for action in the course I’m pursuing. If I ever do, I cannot at this point imagine what to do next. You want me to talk to you about revolution, but I can’t do that. I know what it would bring. My people are twelve percent of the population, at most fifteen percent. I am pragmatic about it: revolution would be suicide.”

Chisholm’s the one who paved the way. All these folks can spin Obama and Clinton as historical firsts and discard the importance of her run post-Civil Rights Acts era. I don’t buy the “first with a chance” theory. The fact that she ran knowing that she may not win reflects more on the superficiality of the American people than it does on the merits of her campaign and her spirit. Junior Congresswoman vying for the ticket, all of that. People have thrown lip service in her direction and a few quick glances; but if they look at her ideals you can see so much of her in this season. So much, and yet not enough.

Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.

And ironically, when I look back at descriptions of how Chisholm ran her campaign and garnered support, tactically Obama’s rhetoric squares with hers. (Aside: Why is this historical first’s biography out of print?)

On Young People and Change

One question bothers me a lot: Who’s listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It’s as if I’m facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what’s wrong with the whole system. Why isn’t it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances.

There are no new leaders coming along. Where are they? What has happened suddenly? On the national level, on the state level, who commands respect, who is believed by a wide enough cross section of the population to qualify as a leader? I don’t see myself as becoming that kind of a leader. My role, I think, is more that of a catalyst. By verbalizing what is wrong, by trying to strip off the masks that make people comfortable in the midst of chaos, perhaps I can help get things moving.

It may be that no one can have any effect on most adults on this society. It may be that the only hope is with the younger generation. If I can relate to them, give them some kind of focus, make them believe that this country can still become the America that it should have been, I could be content. The young may be slandered as “kooks” and “societal misfits” by frightened, demagogic old men, but that will not scare them. They are going to force change. For a while they may be beaten down, but time is on their side, and the spirit of this generation will not be killed. That’s why I prefer to go around to campuses and talk with the kids rather than attend political meetings. Politicians tell me I’m wasting my time and energy. “They don’t vote,” I’m told. Well, I’m not looking for votes. If I were, I would get the same kind of reception that a lot of political figures get when they encounter young people, and I would deserve it.

There are many things I don’t agree with some young zealots about. The main one, I suppose, is that I have not given up — and will not give up until I am compelled to — my belief that the basic design of this country is right. What is essential is to make it work, not to sweep it away and substitute — what? Something far worse, perhaps.

Most young people are not yet revolutionary, but politicians and police and other persons in power almost seem to be conspiring to turn them into revolutionaries. Like me, I think, most of them are no more revolutionary than the founders of this country. Their goals are the same — to insure liberty and equality of opportunity, and forever to thwart the tyrannous tendencies of government, which inevitably arise from the arrogance and isolation of men who are securely in power. All they want, if it were not too fashionable for them to say so, is for the American dream to come true, at least in its less materialistic aspects. They want to heal the gaping breach between this country’s promises and its performance, a breach that goes back to its founding on a Constitution that denied that black persons and women were full citizens. “Liberty and justice for all” were beautiful words, but the ugly act was that liberty and justice were only for white males. How incredible that it is nearly 200 years since then, and we have still to fight the same old enemies! How is it possible for a man to repeat the pledge of allegiance that contains these words, and then call his fellow citizens “social misfits” when they are simply asking for liberty and justice?

Such schizophrenia goes far back. “All forms of commerce between master and slave are tyranny,” intoned Thomas Jefferson, who is rumored to have had several children by black women on his estate. If the story is true, the great democrat was a great hypocrite. Even if it is not true, it has verisimilitude. It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.

The main thing I have in common with the kids is that we are tired of being lied to. What we want is for people to mean what they say. I think they recognize at least that I’m for real. They know most adult are selling something they can’t deliver.

I wonder if Gloria Steinem even remembers what she wrote about Shirley Chisholm as she shills for Sen. Clinton, or if any of the Obamaniacs recognize the person who tried it first.

Perhaps the best indicator of her campaign’s impact is the effect it had on individual lives. All over the country, there are people who will never be quite the same: farm women in Michigan who were inspired to work in a political campaign for the first time; Black Panthers in California who registered to vote, and encouraged other members of the black community to vote, too; children changed by the sight of a black woman saying, “I want to be President”; radical feminists who found this campaign, like that of Linda Jenness in the Socialist Workers’ Party, a possible way of changing the patriarchal system; and student or professional or “blue-collar” men who were simply impressed with a political figure who told the truth as she say it, no matter what the cost.

The Chisholm candidacy didn’t forge a solid coalition of those people working for social change; that will take a long time. But it began one. If you listen to personal testimony from very diverse sources, it seems that the Chisholm candidacy was not in vain. In fact, the truth is that the American political scene may never quite be the same again.

So perhaps it is time for the electorate to ask ourselves honestly what we want to see our President do, instead of listening to what they want to do for us.

With more straight talk and crystal clear positions. (PDF) Her announcement speech:

I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. (Clapping.)

I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. (Clapping.)
I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. (Clapping.)

I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests.” (Clapping. cheers).

I stand here now without endorsements from many big name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop. I do not intend to offer to you the tired and glib clichés, which for too long have been an accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America. And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.

I have always earnestly believed in the great potential of America. Our constitutional democracy will soon celebrate its 200th anniversary, effective testimony, to the longevity to our cherished constitution and its unique bill of rights, which continues to give to the world an inspirational message of freedom and liberty.

We Americans are a dynamic people…

More on the inside of the campaign.

And no white feminist would dare say she neglected women’s rights.

But I understand why most people now would rather have you forget her. She is perhaps the first black woman who knew her place and dared to ask people to help her get there.

“The Chisholm candidacy… confused and unsettled the niggers — and by niggers, I don’t mean just the black niggers, but also the student niggers and the woman niggers and the poor niggers — plus a whole lot of other people who thought they were revolutionaries but discovered they couldn’t dig her wig.”

— Florynce Kennedy, lawyer, black activist, a founder of the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Party

(Above quote added for Daisy after I recognized the speaker! Hehe, gracias! )

The Miracle Worker

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, 1888 

Modern-Day Eugenics: Human Value and Population Control

While I am not pro-life in the sense of condemning any and all types of abortion as a form of infanticide, I am pro-life in my analysis of how reproductive justice plays out on the bodies of underprivileged and marginalized women.  Last year, E. Rocha (better known as XP at Xicano Power) wrote an excellent and lengthy analysis of how the eugenicist politics of the reproductive justice movement’s history still affects our sociopolitical positions on parenthood and family planning throughout the world and the lives of immigrants to the United States.

Some highlights, starting with historical influences of eugenics on the reproductive rights movement:

Although eugenics is associated with Hitler, but the truth is, eugenic thinking has been part of Western intellectual history since the 1860’s. Francis Galton, one of Darwin’s disciples and cousin, used his cousin’s work to create Eugenics, a term that he coined which means, “the cultivation of race.” Galton believed that the ruling classes ought to take it upon themselves to guide the development of the human genetic heritage by thinning out the weaknesses in a species, since nature couldn’t do it. Galton said:

I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.

Under the philosophies of Galton, Eugenists began building their cause. By the turn of the 20th century, such ideas were commonplace. In fact, in the US, the American Breeders Association (ABA) devoted itself to exploring issues that would have interested Sir Francis Galton. With a committee focusing on the presumed hereditary differences between human races, the ABA popularized the themes of selective breeding of superior stock, the biological menace of “inferior types,” and the need for recording and controlling human heredity. At one time, 33 states had a domestic policy of eugenics, sterilizing over 60,000 citizens who were considered unfit to reproduce. A bitter pill must be swallowed; despite all the admiration Margaret Sanger has received for establishing the American birth control movement and being the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood Federation of America). The truth is, she was a member of both the American Eugenics Society and the English Eugenics Society and a proponent of eugenics, which she pushed the idea of “race hygiene” through “negative eugenics.” Even though the current Planned Parenthood Federation of America does recognize this view unacceptable and outmoded, it is hard to argue against historical fact.

How history ties into modern policy and positions:

Sustainable development, as defined from the Our Common Future report (known as the Brundtland Report), is development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The promises was to defuse the longstanding tensions between environmental protection and economic growth; and during the ’90s, nearly everyone favors it, including individuals, firms, national and local governments, militaries, and the range of non-state actors. However, sustainable development has been stripped of its critical content and has been transformed and reconfigured for compatibility with the larger priorities of the post-Cold War era.

Sustainable development appeals to those preoccupied with the tendencies of capitalist development to lay waste to the world in its haste to convert anything and everything into commodities, which could be sold for a profit. Advocates of sustainable development seemed to reason within Western traditions that see humans as stewards of Nature, with responsibility for its protection. Competitive capitalism has long required explanations for why people are impoverished and expendable and through sustainable development. However, whenever a global environmental crisis emerges, Third World poverty or world hunger instantly becomes an issue to economists, demographers, planners, corporate financiers, and political pundits.

Today, population activists do realize the value of poverty reduction; however, their center is on the value of family planning. As population growth rates fall around the world, demography is focusing once again on ‘quality’ concerns such as the differential fertility of competing ethnic groups and the problems surrounding an aging population. While eugenic ideologies and practices have changed over time, they have hardly gone away.

Little has been done to challenge the problematic assumptions, language and perceptions that make American environmentalism particularly susceptible to eugenic influences. Notions of natural and cultural purity blended together reinforce make racism and ethnic prejudice more acceptable in the process and are leading to a resurgence of nativism.

The entire entry is rich with links, maps, and comprehensive analysis.  Go read The Anti-Immigration Movement’s Propaganda on Reproductive Rights.  More on this theme coming soon.

There’s still history being made elsewhere

Via Yale Daily News by way of What About Our Daughters?:

Last year, Harvard University welcomed the first female president in its history. In a few months, the university will mark another milestone: the installation of the first black female as dean of Harvard College.

In a statement Tuesday, the university announced the appointment of Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard’s senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity and a professor of the history of science and African-American studies, to the top post in Harvard College. The appointment comes just as Yale administrators are launching an effort to encourage more racial diversity within the upper ranks of the University’s administration.

“This is an exciting moment of change for the College, and Evelynn’s academic values and leadership qualities promise to serve our undergraduates well,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, who last year became the first woman to be elevated to Harvard’s presidency after nearly four centuries of male rule, said in a statement.

Hammonds, 55, will be the first female and first black person to hold the position of dean of the college. Yale has never had a black or female dean of Yale College, although Judith Rodin, who went on to become the first female president of the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed Dean of the Graduate School in 1991.

Hammonds’ job places her in charge of matters ranging from academic affairs to student life to the general administration of Harvard College, the oldest undergraduate school in the United States. [Emphasis added.]

You ain’t never feel your feet moving before?

Okay, I’ve been wanting to write a bunch of substantive posts and I’m already putting off important duties to write this one. But I’m fucking tired of people acting as if racism and sexism and its undertones and suggestions were invented by Election ’08. I really am.

Most importantly, I am sick of this posturing embodied by the term “dog whistling.” I can’t hold my tongue anymore. I can’t sit around and act as if all these people who are whining about racism and sexism now have taken the subjects seriously before this political climate shot consciousness to holy heights.

Take this thank-you post, for example. Look in the comment thread where people take a principled stance against Margaret Sanger, despite all her progress for birth control and reproductive justice, because of the racist and ablist rhetoric she employed to make these inroads possible. Then look at the (completely unsurprising and not new) response those commenters are given about Sanger’s track record.

Margaret Sanger did what would be considered the political equivalent of blowing a dogwhistle in the 20′s, and we still fight about her worth as a historical vanguard for women’s reproductive rights. Because people like those rights even though they were ill-obtained.

Look at the blatantly racist bullshit that gets passed as “satire” in newspapers published at institutions of higher learning. Show me where in all that racist rhetoric, anyone issuing apologies for giving those words the benefit of daylight cared to mention it was unforgivably racist. Show me.

Tell me the last time you’ve seen your people torn down. Where were your damned dog whistles then? I’m going to need you to come again and give me more than just “what she said” and explain this shit to me in bite-sized chunks.

‘Cause I see this “periodically” thing, and it’s really unclear to me.   I’d like to think of myself as a feminist, but right now I feel completely out of the loop with this one.  And I see in some instances that I’m not alone.  I see that ugly women gets more understanding in some circles than calling off a lynching party.

But someone please, please explain why Biden calling Obama articulate is blowing a dog whistle; but Miriam calling Charles Barkley inarticulate is not. Use tiny words. I’m talking about “See Spot; See Spot run” type of constructions here.

Where are the folks with these magic whistles? When will they blow them here? Or here? Why weren’t they running and decrying shit then?

Here’s a dog whistle people dare not blow very often!

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! LET THE FUCKING DOGS COME SWARMING IN!

Maybe I should blow this one dog whistle I have here a bit harder! WHOOOOOOO! Or this one! Ooh, damn; I have pockets full of whistles and not enough damned breath!

And I believe very strongly in holding people accountable for what they’ve done.  I do.  But when people are talking about not voting and oh yes/no superdelegates and oh yes/no electoral colleges (I can’t wait for that October-November discussion) and thinking we were better than this and how tragic and horrible this all is, oh the humanity, what’s going on, why haven’t we changed — I wonder if we’ve been looking around us and understanding how much this rhetoric has gone on for all those elections when white males took the ticket.

And I’m glad people are speaking but please don’t fucking try to fool me into thinking it’s new.  Because this whole discussion to me reads as a dog whistle of “people never gave much of a shit when all forms of oppression were blatantly peddled in the news media, when people were dying and being neglected, but now that history making is afoot for the Democratic party it is of tragic importance.”  And my fingers came flying to write this response.

I’ve heard all variations of dog whistles before, and I know many people have heard variations of dog whistles that I haven’t.  That’s the nature of an oppressive society.  That’s what people have been talking about for a long, long, long time.  But yet it takes this election for people to argue about who’s running and how and why and its importance, and the discussion isn’t moving past looking for the signs to getting rid of oppression.  Not voting won’t do shit for getting rid of oppression!  No amount of claws and shuck and jive will get rid of oppression!

Did you know you were running?  You ain’t never feel your feet moving before?