Privilege 101

Privilege.  Let’s see.

Privilege is what happens when a group has so much power that they expect explanations and catering when none is deserved.

Privilege is what happens when closed spaces are opened, bigotry is exposed, and the powerful group demands 1) resuming closure of the ranks, or 2) opening all spaces created to avoid the closed spaces to them to import their ignorance.

Privilege is failing to understand why epithets are offensive at all.  Forget context or the speakers.  Language becomes “communication for human beings” instead of another mechanism for control and exclusion.

Privilege is a powerful group not having to worry about what they wear or who watches them as they perform daily tasks.

Privilege is a powerful group not being questioned about income sources, and escaping scrutiny and regulation because society deems them fit to live.

Privilege is never having to apologize and only regretting the possibility of offense.  Because surely, for privileged people, offense does not exist except when accused of offending.

Privilege is a group’s outrage when accommodating others unlike themselves with complete obliviousness to the customized world in which they thrive.

Privilege is a group bending and shaping unbreakable rules when applied to the unprivileged.

Privilege is a face with no eyes, no nose, no ears, and no mouth.  It is a steamroller that forges paths on the bodies of the powerless.

Privilege looks at the faces of the Others and only sees itself reflected back.  It does not look for common ground, only redemptive qualities and trends to absorb and possess.

Privilege is not friendship, scholarship, or authority.  It is chaos warped into world order.

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.

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.

“Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition” | Mari J. Matsuda

[I haven't forgotten what I wanted to share. One of a few women of color legal scholars that shaped my introduction to women of color feminism. --M]

…

I. Three Women Working

A. Daughter of Pi’ilani

Haunani-Kay Trask is a paradox to those unfamiliar with the world from which she comes. She writes of working in coalition with environmentalists who, in her community of Hawai’i, are often white in-migrants. Expressing bitterness and frustration, Trask recounts the dispossession of Native Hawaiian people — their landlessness, poverty, unemployment, imprisonment, rates of disease, and illiteracy. Trask speaks of the haole (Caucasian) colonizers who removed the Hawaiian government by force, leaving wounds in the native population that have never healed. Expressing outrage at the haole-backed takeover of Hawai’i has earned Trask the reputation of “haole-hater.” She speaks out in the press. She writes. She debates. Trask is constantly engaged in dialogue with the haole. She works with whites in coalition on a variety of issues, from nuclear testing in the Pacific, to South African divestment, to degradation of the environment through geothermal development.

I have heard people say of Professor Trask, “She would be much more effective if she weren’t so angry,” as though they expect a Native Hawaiian feminist to work in coalition without anger. There is a politics of anger: who is allowed to get angry, whose anger goes unseen, and who seems angry when they are not.

Once, when I intended to compliment an African-American woman on a powerful speech she had made, I said: “I admire your ability to express anger.” She looked at me coolly and replied, “I was not angry. If I were angry I would not be speaking here.” Another African-American friend of mine jumped into the conversation. “I’m disappointed in you,” she said. “This is what always happens to us when a Black woman speaks her mind. Someone calls us angry.”

I remember this exchange because it was an uncomfortable one for me, and because it was a moment of learning. Talking across differences, my colleague told me that if she were hatefully angry, beyond hope of coalition, she would not talk. In this light, Professor Trask’s strong words are acts of engagement, not estrangement.

Would Professor Trask be more effective if she were less angry? There is a cost to speaking without anger of the deaths and dislocation that Native Hawaiians suffered in post-contact Hawai’i. On the simple, communicative level, failure to express the pain created by this legacy obscures the depth of one’s feeling and discounts the subordination experienced by one’s community. More significantly, the use of polite, rational tones when one is feeling violation is a betrayal of the self.

Professor Trask’s many white and Asian colleagues who choose to remain in the room when she speaks in tones of outrage about the destruction of Hawaiian lives, land, and culture inevitably find their understanding greatly enriched. The discomfort brings with it an opportunity for learning. As a third-generation Japanese-American, I have felt the discomfort and benefited from the learning when Professor Trask criticizes the role of immigrants in displacing Native Hawaiians. The choice is mine to remain in the conversation, discussing (sometimes with acrimony) the role of colonialism in bringing my peasant ancestors eastward from Asia to work on the land that once belonged to indigenous peoples of Hawai’i and North America.

I could shelter myself from conflict by leaving the conversation, but I have come to believe that the comfort we feel when we avoid hard conversations is a dangerous comfort, one that seduces us into ignorance about the experiences of others and about the full meaning of our own lives.

…

C. The Multi-Cultural Feminist

…

[Some] suggest that coalition has limits of both tolerance and utility.

Why, then, given the frustration of coalition, do…women [of color] not retreat into racial separatism? In the quest for a theoretical underpinning for social change movements, women of color have the choice of remaining in coalition or dispersing to do separate work. The emergence of feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, critical legal studies, and the women of color and the law movement has raised fears of division and parochial separatism in the legal community. If it is so hard to work together, if the gulfs in experience are so wide, if the false universals of the modern age are truly bankrupt, what need binds us? What justifies unity in our quest for self-knowledge?

My answer is that we cannot, at this point in history, engage fruitfully in jurisprudence without engaging in coalition, without coming out of separate places to meet one another across all the positions of privilege and subordination that we hold in relation to one another.

II. Theory Out of Coalition

Through our sometimes painful work in coalition we are beginning to form a theory of subordination; a theory that describes it, explains it, and gives us the tools to end it. As lawyers working in coalition, we are developing a theory of law taking sides, rather than law as value-neutral. We imagine law to uplift and protect the sixteen-year-old single mother on crack rather than law to criminalize her. We imagine law to celebrate and protect women’s bodies; law to sanctify love between human beings — whether women to women, men to men, or women to men, as lovers may choose to love; law to respect the bones of our ancestors; law to feed the children; law to shut down the sweatshops; law to save the planet.

This is the revolutionary theory of law that we are developing in coalition, and I submit that it is both a theory of law we can only develop in coalition, and that it is the only theory of law we can develop in coalition.

A. Looking at Subordination from Inside Coalition

When we work in coalition, …we compare our struggles and challenge one another’s assumptions. We learn of the gaps and absences in our knowledge. We learn a few tentative, starting truths, the builing blocks of a theory of subordination.

We learn that while all forms of oppression are not the same, certain predictable patterns emerge:

• All forms of oppression involve taking a trait, X, which often carries with it a cultural meaning, and using X to make some group the “other” and to reduce their entitlements and power.
• All forms of oppression benefit someone, and sometimes both sides of a relationship of domination will have some stake in its maintenance.
• All forms of oppression have both material and ideological dimensions. The articles on health, socioeconomics, and violence i this symposium show how subordination leaves scars on the body. The damage is real. It is material. These articles also speak of ideology. Language, including the language of science, law, rights, necessity, free markets, neutrality, and objectivity can make subordination seem natural and inevitable, justifying material deprivation.
• All forms of oppression implicate a psychology of subordination that involves elements of sexual fear, need to control, hatred of self, and hatred of others.

As we look at these patterns of oppression, we may come to learn, finally and most importantly, that all forms of subordination are interlocking and mutually reinforcing.

B. Ask the Other Question:

The Interconnection of All Forms of Subordination

The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call “ask the other question.” When I see something that looks racist, I ask, “Where is the patriarchy in this?” When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, “Where is the heterosexism in this?” When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, “Where are the class interests in this?” Working in coalition forces us to look for both the obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination, helping us to realize that no form of subordination ever stands alone.

If this is true, we’ve asked each other, then isn’t it also true that dismantling any one form of subordination is impossible without dismantling every other? And more and more, particularly in the women of color movement, the answer is that “no person is free until the last and least of us is free.”

In trying to explain this to my own community, I sometimes try to shake people up by suggesting that the patriarchy killed Vincent Chin.^{[1 ]} Most people think racism killed Vincent Chin. When white men with baseball bats, hurling racist hate speech, beat a man to death, it is obvious that racism is a cause. It is only slightly less obvious, however, when you walk down the aisles of Toys R Us, that little boys grow up in this culture with toys that teach about being pretty, baking, and changing a diaper. And the little boy who is interested in learning how to nurture and play house is called a “sissy.” When he is a little older he is called a “f-g.” He learns that acceptance for men in this society is premised on rejecting the girl culture and taking on the boy culture, and I believe that this, as much as racism, killed Vincent Chin. I have come to see that homophobia is the disciplinary system that teaches men that they had better talk like 2 Live Crew or someone will think they “aren’t real men,” and I believe that this homophobia is a cause of rape and violence against women. I have come to see how that same homophobia makes women afraid to choose women, sending them instead into the arms of men who beat them. I have come to see how class oppression creates the same effect, cutting off the chance of economic independence that could free women from dependency upon abusive men.

I have come to see all of this from working in coalition: from my lesbian colleagues who have pointed out homophobia in places where I failed to see it; from my Native American colleagues who have said, “But remember that we were here first,” when I have worked for the rights of immigrant women; from men of color who have risked my wrath to say, “But racism is what is killing us. Why can’t I put that first on my agenda?”

The women of color movement has, of necessity, been a movement about intersecting structures of subordination. This movement suggests that anti-patriarchal struggle is linked to struggle against all forms of subordination. It has challenged communities of color to move beyond race alone in the quest for social justice.

C. Beyond Race Alone

In coalition, we are able to develop an understanding of that which Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has called “intersectionality.” The women of color movement has demanded that the civil rights struggle encompass more than anti-racism. There are several reasons for this demand. First, and most obviously, in unity there is strength. No subordinated group is strong enough to fight the power alone, thus coalitions are formed out of necessity.

Second, some of us have overlapping identities. Separating out and ranking oppression denies and excludes these identities and ignores the valid concerns of many in our constituency. To say that the anti-racist struggle precedes all other struggles denigrates the existence of the multiply oppressed: women of color, gays and lesbians of color, poor people of color, most people of color experience suborination on more than one dimension.

Finally, perhaps the most progressive reason for moving beyond race alone is that racism is best understood and fought with knowledge gained from the broader anti-subordination struggle. Even if one wanted to live as the old prototype “race man,” it is simply not possible to struggle against racism alone and ever hope to end racism.

These are threatening suggestions for many of us who have worked primarily in organizations forged in the struggle for racial justice. Our political strength and our cultural self-worth [are] often grounded in racial pride. Our multi-racial coalitions have, in the past, succeeded because of a unifying commitment to end racist attacks on people of color. Moving beyond race to include discussion of other forms of subordination risks breaking coalition. Because I believe that the most progressive elements of any liberation movement are those who see the intersections (and the most regressive are those who insist on only one axis), I am willing to risk breaking coalition by pushing intersectional analysis.

An additional and more serious risk is that intersectional analysis done from on high, that is, from outside rather than inside a structure of subordination, risks misunderstanding the particularity of that structure. Feminists have spent years talking about, experiencing, and building theory around gender. Native Americans have spent years developing an understanding of colonialism and its effect on culture. That kind of situated, ground-up knowledge is irreplaceable. A casual effort to say, “Okay, I’ll add gender to my analysis,” without immersion in feminist practice, is likely to miss something. Adding on gender must involve active feminists, just as adding on considerations of indigenous peoples must include activists from native communities. Coalition is the way to achieve this inclusion.

It is no accident that women of color, grounded as they are in both feminist and anti-racist struggle, are doing the most exciting theoretical work on race-gender intersections. It is no accident that gay and lesbian scholars are advancing social construction theory and the analysis of sexuality in subordination. In raising this I do not mean that we cannot speak of subordination second-hand. Rather, I wish to encourage us to do this, and to suggest that we can do this most intelligently in coalition, listening with special care to those who are actively involved in knowing and ending the systems of domination that touch their lives.

^[1] Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was murdered in Detroit by assailants who shouted racial slurs while attacking Chin with a baseball bat. See Detroit’s Asian Americans Outraged by Lenient Sentencing of Chinese American Man’s Killer, Rafu Shimpo, May 5, 1983 (on file with the Stanford Law Review).

Matsuda, Mari. “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition.” Feminist Legal Theory: An Anti-Essentialist Reader. Eds. Nancy E. Dowd and Michelle S. Jacobs. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 73-77.

An Open Letter to Western Feminists

You really have to read all of it and drink it in.

In the current climate of U.S.-initiated or U.S.-backed assaults on women in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we are deeply troubled by one kind of hypocritical Western feminist discourse that continues to be preoccupied with particular kinds of violence against Muslim or Middle Eastern women, while choosing to remain silent on the lethal violence inflicted on women and families by military occupation, F-16s, Apache helicopters, and missiles paid for by U.S. tax payers. This is a moment when U.S. imperialism brazenly uses direct colonial occupation, masked in a civilizational discourse of bringing Western “freedom” and “democracy.” Such acts echo the language of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify U.S. colonization of the Philippines and Pacific territories in the 19th century, not to mention the genocide of Native Americans. U.S. covert, and not so covert, interventions in Central, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have devastated the lives of countless indigenous peoples, and other civilians, in this region throughout the 20th century.

The U.S., as well its proxy militias or client regimes, has inflicted violence on women and girls from Vietnam, Okinawa, and Pakistan to Chile, El Salvador, and Somalia and has avenged the deaths of its soldiers by its own “honor killings” that lay siege to entire towns, such as Fallujah in Iraq.

It is appalling that in these catastrophic times, many U.S. liberal feminists are focused only on misogynistic practices associated with particular local cultures, as if these exist in capsules, far from the arena of imperial occupation. Indeed, imperial violence has given fuel to some of these patriarchal practices of misogyny and sexism. They should also know that such a narrow vision furthers a much older tradition of feminist mobilizing in the service of colonialism–”saving brown, or black women, from brown men,” as observed by Gayatri Spivak.

While we too oppose abuses including domestic violence, “honor killings,” forced marriage, and brutal punishment, we are disturbed that some U.S. feminists-as well as Muslim or Middle Eastern women who claim to be “authorities” on Islam and are employed by right-wing think tanks-are participating in a selective discourse of universal women’s rights that ignores U.S. war crimes and abuses of human rights.

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! )

My Answer to an Unasked Question

Why are you so angry for seemingly no [good, recent, relevant] reason?

I know that people reading this entry will get pissed off at me for writing the above question and then attempting to answer it. Anger is something a black woman should not do, likely because she does it so well. I also run the risk of appearing to martyr myself since I have established through my question that I strongly believe 1) I am angry and 2) I am angry for a reason I think is good, recent, and relevant.

But the question is unspoken and asked all the time when I rain down some righteous indignation around the internet and I offer very contextually-based reasoning for it. My anger gets watered down in buckets of you had to be there hearing this stupid shit and my points are drowned in names attributed to temporal acts and targeted voices. I will write this entry without links for that reason. Upside: I will be forced to bring out substantive points of argument. Downside: my refusal to link and to reference certain situations and people will make me look underhanded and passive-aggressive. But that’s a part of being angry sometimes, isn’t it? Looking foolish to people afraid to join you? So let’s keep it philosophical and keep it moving.

I am angry because I dislike when people refuse to introduce discussions of history into events happening presently. I hate when people justify this refusal to engage history with refocusing on the rosy happenings of Right Now. I can’t stand it when people claim bringing up distastefulness of the past leads to present gridlock. And I loathe when people look at some of our horrible historical moments and answer, “Well, yeah, but so what?”

I especially hate the indifference. What is the point of having history if we don’t try to learn from it? There is a key difference in learning from history and learning history. Learning from history requires more active engagement, more questioning of motive, and more analysis. Learning history simply leads to the passive indifference, incapacitation, and hasty retreats that pervert our current progressive discourse. Learning from history is more dangerous and therefore more necessary.

Learning history is a lecture. Learning from history is a conversation.

The more people learn from history, the easier it becomes to recognize dangerous patterns of thought and perceptions of reality. It is through learning from history that we recognize the power of a movement and of leaders stems from the people. It is through learning from history that we discover the bigotry of a few can damage the reputation of many, if the few are loud and the many are silent. It is through learning from history that we realize the tales of the winner do not incorporate the tales of the loser, and any incorporation of the loser’s tales sours the victory.

Perhaps that is why celebration of victory needs enforced silence and broken narrative spirit. Perhaps that is why I come from a group of people who risked their lives to sing, to dance, to run, to read, and to write under penalty of death. Perhaps that is why the losers try to join the winning side, to mimic the joys of triumph as much as possible — they contort their tongues to forget their languages; they numb their minds to forget their stories; they change their walks to forget the fighting that led them to a false peace.

It is easier to forget. It is easier to look at a flood of sunlight and to distill life into it as if you’re making a simple cup of tea. The leaves color the water; you ignore the heat and the whistles. You ignore the initial scalding of your tongue because that requires recognizing the heat. You ignore the bitterness of the taste because that requires recognizing something’s missing. You ignore the increasing bitterness because that requires taking the bag out of the cup. You are engrossed in the act of drinking tea — no matter how bitter and unfulfilling and putrid the beverage becomes as you drink it.

That is not the way to drink, and that is not the way to live.

So I get angry when people ignore histories and do so under the guise of progress. I get angry when people ignore histories and do so under the guise of showing proper appreciation. I get angry when people ignore histories and do so under the guise of avoiding pain. Our histories are like wounds — they are necessary to life. You cannot treat wounds if you cannot find them. You cannot treat wounds if you do not look at them or have someone examine them with you, sometimes for you. And the wounds always hurt most when they are found and concentrated upon.

Our histories hurt our consciences; they hurt our relationships with each other. We are afraid to love each other while we examine the past. But until we look at our pasts with an eye to learning, an eye to fixing the problems, we cannot begin the process of healing. We cannot even begin to prepare a balm for the symptoms of our hatred, our discrimination, and our suffering. We run out of experience to tell when the balm has grown old when we do not check it and redress the wounds. We cannot tell when new symptoms spread if we never understood the earlier signs in the first place. How do we locate pain if our neglect of our wounds has grown to the point that our nerve endings die?

History is the nervous system of our social ecology. When parts of our history are neglected or reconfigured, we risk numbing ourselves to everyday living in the search for an elusive future.  We act as though we must take everything that comes, even when what comes now resembles what arrived before.  We interpret current losses without the eyes of old pain, not realizing that loss can be healthy with time.

Sometimes the sins of our histories affect the present so viscerally that we cannot move forward until we address it.  No matter how many steps we try to take, our refusal to deal with the pain leads us to march in place.  We imagine our limbs are moving even though they no longer respond to our commands.  It is true that we cannot spend time dwelling on activities we cannot do.  We cannot Change the Past.  But that is not the point.  Healing is a process; we want to care for the present.  We can make impacts on the present while using our pasts as guides for understanding.  Caring for the present is not an attempt to move the unmovable.   We do not lament our paralysis and hide our maladies away.

Our role as activists, as changing beings, as healing agents is this: we have to accept paralysis as a blessing and find new ways to move. We create new activities or approaches to living that allows healing to grow.  We learn we do not have to do things in traditional and harmful ways — we do not have to exacerbate painful situations.  We reach this point through interactivity with the past; we sail through the present with the wind from our histories. And the process is slow; the process is painful. But it is helpful.

So I get angry because when people tell me or tell others to ignore histories, it is the same as telling someone to ignore pain and suffering.  Ignorance of pain and suffering deadens reaction; it doesn’t make it stop.  I don’t want to accept pain and suffering as part of my present because I am too afraid to confront the past that left it festering for me.  And I do not want the aid of someone that recommends that course for me.  I reject it, and I do so angrily.  I would rather be stupid and ignorant while finding my pain than intelligent and aware without realizing I hurt.

The trials and tribulations of histories are not trifles to be summarily dismissed.  I want to heal, not to cope.  I embrace histories; I want to learn how to unlearn, to emerge from death with better ways of living.

B-Day Intervention

b-day: the day when birth grew wings and traveled through generations through soul-fused song 

Look at it. Look at what you’ve done.
You’ve impaled it,
Had it gang raped,
Date raped,
Free bleeding,
Self destructing,
Gun probed,
Homeless,
Plundered from your unholy war
On white patriarchy.

Use a pocket mirror,
If you must,
And look at what you’ve done.

I am a brown woman
And I have a vagina
And I do not want to
Tell you or anyone else
My story and I do not
Want a captive audience
Probing into my most
Private and
Painful moments
As its only mode of release –

You told them
That if we are young
And the right person—
The right woman—
Drugs and sexualizes us
So that we feel something,
It must be good.

Stop speaking for me.
Look at it.
Talk to it.
Not through it.
Not beneath it.

Not deciphered with
The barrel of a gun.

Not with trivia for the love
Of our fathers,
Sent to jail for protecting us.

Not through the phantasm
Of our brothers,
Taught to rape for lost causes.

You globalized us
Into pain magnets
Through our vaginas
For your fame and
For the delight of
White-privileged, mat-thrashing,
Dress-staining, sex-revering,
Birth-loving, choice-chasing
Hair shaving, cunt-crying women.

I am a vagina and I have learned
Some of us are not happy
But I will not display our pain
Among a sea of smiles for trinkets
And expect little love to come later
Instead I will hug my friend vaginas
And we will rise in many hues
And we will fight while holding hands
And stamping feet and vamped voice boxes
Shocking muses with songs of love –

We had no luxury
To board our vaginas up,
Having our men
Or any men
Staring at our vaginas,
Making us feel whole;
No blue mats, no lost rings,
No Schick Tracer Effects,
No miracles of childbirth –

Stop speaking for me.
Look at it.

My vagina just told me
It hates you and it will learn
To hold a pen and write a
Womanifesto about how it loves
And feels and knows and heals
And sometimes it shudders from
How great it feels when she
And sister clitoris go sailing
Together –

You gave us a sour moan,
An alien wailing,
An animalistic whimper
For brown womanhood:

Stop speaking for me.
Look at it.

I am a brown woman
And I have a vagina
And it has lips
And it wants to speak
But not to you
Because you are the Yellow
Paper of Brown Vagina Tales
And its story is not a gawker
Or a gasper –

You told them
That if we are violated
And brutalized
And beaten until
Our bodies fell apart,
The pride we had
In our hips and lower lips –
Our life spring, our love spring –
Would be destroyed and
Devastated forever.

Stop speaking for me.
Look at it.

I don’t have a vagina,
Goddamn you, I don’t,
But I am so many women
And so much love
And so alive and feeling
And very much still here
That I do not want one
To be name-wrecked by you –

If we left the task
Of learning to love our bodies
To women like you,
We would be dead and
Our woman-souls would take over,
Forcing us whole into a
Hysterectomy of will
To make our deaths easier.

Stop speaking for me
Or you cannot come (not without guilt)
And you will be the first to hurt
When my sisters levitate
Off the House of Impalement
Your monologues built.

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?

how whiteness kills the body

via BBC News (and I hate the tone of the article, as if using skin lightening cream is the most difficult thing to understand on the planet; someone please explain the damned picture with the article and the passive-aggressive byline with it):

The patient, who is black, also had thin, bruised skin and mild hair growth on her back and face as well as muscle weakness.

Doctors diagnosed her with Cushing’s syndrome, which is caused by high levels of steroid hormones such as cortisol in the blood.

It is usually caused by a problem with the adrenal glands, which make the hormones, or with the pituitary gland sending too high a signal to the adrenal glands.

But blood tests on the patient showed very low levels of cortisol and of corticotropin, the signalling hormone in the pituitary gland.

The patient initially denied taking any drugs, but later admitted she had been using skin-lightening creams for seven years, buying them from a local shop rather than a pharmacy.

The cream was found to contain a steroid called clobetasol.

The woman was using about two tubes per week – about 60 grams of the cream.