Break

I quite obviously haven't posted in the past two weeks. Reasons.

But I wanted to come on to say

Happy New Year's!

I'll be back to posting soon, I think.

Where is the offense?

(this video, this tumblr post for gif)

It is not offensive to call someone racist or sexist. 

In our culture, the default is racist and sexist. It should not be offensive to be told the truth, that you grew up in a culture that encouraged bigoted thoughts and behavior because those benefit a hurtful system of power. Even though I exert a lot of effort to educate and improve myself, I know I am racist and sexist - I am saying as a mulatto woman. We all internalize negative messages, even about ourselves. The work of unpacking is unending. We can't stop before the work begins because we're offended. We can't stop because it's hard because it's harder to be the recipient of these harm from these systems of power.

People are called racist or sexist based on their behavior. As long as the problematic behavior is pointed out and the reason/basis for the problem is explained, that call out is valid. 

For example, a while ago, a friend of mine called me out for the way I was blogging about the Sochi Olympics. I didn't understand why at first. I was defensive; I explained why I thought that what I was doing was right. But also I listened to what she said; I asked how I could respect her and her culture. I didn't leave seeing everything the way she did, but I sympathized with her position - I did my best to relate her experience to my experience to understand where she was coming from, why she was hurt. I asked questions about why what I wrote was a problem. Once I understood, I apologized. I thanked her for trusting me. I changed the way I spoke and wrote about the topic.

Of course, I'm still going to mess up, but I'm trying. I didn't deny that the way I acted was harmful. Instead, I changed my behavior so I wouldn't be harmful in the future. I hope that our friendship grew because of talking about this.

Call outs are not about silencing. Call outs are usually meant to be the start of a conversation. One doesn't passively receive a call out nor does one stop talking because of a call out. As I said, I asked why what I did was wrong or hurtful. The call out was part of a conversation: a conversation I needed to listen to and engage with about the topic. Of course, the person who was offended is not responsible or required to engage with you. If they ask you to google it or refer you to other resources, that's still about talking and listening to those specifically educational sources. We aren't offended by out teacher's saying "You are wrong." We listen to our teachers and correct our error. Nor do we require everyone to be a teacher all of the time.

Mthembu highlighted the need to engage in open dialogue about race, despite the potential discomfort. [...] In order to have these vital conversations, Mthembu explained, “We have to allow for mistakes and forgive each other.” (MIT Black Lives Matter event)

Call outs are helpful, educational, trusting. If I am calling someone out, it is because I think they can change their behavior. Often, I only call out people who I care about, people I trust enough not to be violent or hurtful. I call people out because I think, Surely this person wouldn't want to hurt me, surely they'd care enough to change their behavior. Someone - a friend, colleague, activist - has invested time and effort to bring a matter to your attention, likely a matter that they care about and affects them. A call out is supposed to instigate deep thinking: Why was this wrong? How can I improve?

Of course, most times this is not the response. People become angry or defensive.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8xJXKYL8pU[/embed]

They say 'I'm not! I didn't mean it that way! You know I'd never!'

'It's not helpful to call people racist. Surely you've messed up before'

'Why can't you just accept different opinions? Why are you so angry, aggressive, worked up, sensitive?'

A call out is not about any of those things. Some people think that call outs are a call to censorship. But they are not. They are a call to consideration and respect; we have all learned from an early age to express ourselves carefully and with consideration for others. We do not blurt "I want that now! Mine!" We do not throw things to express our anger. We don't cuss at people when we are upset with them. Hopefully. Similarly, we must learn how to empathize and respect people in the way we speak, write, and act.

Arrogant Girls' Club

[caption id="attachment_479" align="alignnone" width="418"] Jenny Holzer, My arrogance knows no bounds and I will make no peace today, and you should be so lucky to find a woman like me[/caption]

Imagine our Amazonian future. Enjoy your vision, visage, victories. Know that loving yourself as a woman – connecting with our history – exploring our witches’ strength and creativity – know that this like all women’s work is real. (via Aria)

Ferguson: More on Rioting

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-Pd62hq0w[/embed]

BLACK LIVES MATTER

you don't understand what i'm talking about

BLACK LIVES >> PROPERTY

Ferguson Protests

My friends and I went to one of the protests against the failure to indict Darren Wilson, the murderer of Mike Brown. We ended up being photographed by the Tech. Since Wednesday, there have been national peaceful protests. In addition to protesting the failure to indict the murderer of Mike Brown, our government has failed to indict the murderer of Eric Garner, a murderer who used an illegal chokehold and had his crime caught on camera. It's an absolute perversion of justice to think that black people can be extra-judiciously murdered. I am so proud and honored to be part of a movement to stop racial violence in the country I call home.

[caption id="attachment_473" align="alignnone" width="300"] It me![/caption]

i remember my mother telling me about the white dismissal of justified anger and grief in dc over the gov't sanctioned murder of MLK. While I am proud of my actions, I am sad that I may have to recount my own stories to future generations of young black women. I have written about my white passing privilege before. I feel that it is my responsibility to speak, write, and act in solidarity with black people, my people. The call 'white allies to the front,' strangely enough, applies to me. I do not want to be the face of this movement, but I want to utilize my resources to help protect black lives from institutional - specifically police - violence. We remember and we'll keep on dreaming!

On Facebook, people seem comfortable airing out their unsolicited racist opinions. Some such gems include:

People who are protesting should actually learn about about the situation and how rioting might not get them anywhere but cause more aggravation and riots itself

and

I'm sorry, but i think it's a little far to claim that it is a "burden" to be black in America.

and

1000s of lives, homes, and property have been destroyed in these riots! how terrible

While it is not the responsibility of black or minority people to deal with this sort of blatant ignorance, I have generously taken the time to address some of these concerns.

A Reality of Kindness

All of these statements go against factual evidence. They also go against my personal experience, of the kindness, peacefulness, and empathy exhibited by the protesters in Boston. The national protests have been non violent protests, including marches, die ins and boycotts.

Chief O’Neill said the protesters [in NYC] had not prevented ambulances or other official vehicles from responding to emergencies during the first two nights of demonstrations. No sick person, or civilian with a health emergency has been unable to get help, he said. (via Ny Times)

Protesters have moved to allow ambulances through in NYC. Protests have been attended by children. Protesters have carried injured people to safety, caring for those hurting from tear gas. Furthermore, protesters in Ferguson have tried to peacefully engage with police while helping injured people. In response, they were attacked with tear gas! Who is being violent here? The people carrying an injured woman? Or the people using military grade weapons?

Police fired tear gas at a crowd of protesters who were carrying an apparently unconscious woman to safety during violent clashes in Ferguson on Monday night. (Daily Mail)

Ferguson has often been described as a site of violent riots. While there are sensationalist titles like "Fires and looting at businesses as violence overtakes protests over no indictment in Ferguson," the reality is far less frightening and violent. The description of violent riots is not the reality, not in Ferguson and not nationally! Even the sensationalists have to admit

A short time later, Brown's family issued a statement asking people to keep their protests peaceful (via Fox News, Fires & Looting)

The protesters, an organized political movements, have consistently regulated their own behavior. When people were getting too amped up at the protest I attended, people would begin to chant "This is a peaceful protest" or urge once-strangers to calm down. I linked arms with black women who chastised their male friends for getting aggressive; I was ushered through the throngs by caring men when I told them I had been split from one of my friends; I was offered homemade food by an elderly couple. I was awed by the kindness and concern exhibited by the protesters in Boston; our protest was a gathering of empathetic people who were grieving a national loss of life and justice. Certainly the protest I attended was not every protest, but I don't think you can dismiss the 1400 people who protested in Boston that night nor the students who walked out of class Dec 1. Protests are groups of large people, thousands of people. It's impossible to control the actions of everyone, but protesters are doing their best to keep everyone level headed and in line with a standard of non violent behavior.

Property Damage

it's a disingenuous lie to claim that homes or lives have been destroyed.

Again, let's look to the location that's been described as a site of violent riots:

1 As news of the decision spread, protesters surged forward, throwing objects at officers in riot gear. The sound of gunfire could be heard. 2 Police officers used tear gas and smoke to disperse people who were hurling rocks and breaking the windows of parked police cruisers. A vehicle was set on fire.3 At least a dozen buildings were set on fire around the city, many in the vicinity of Ferguson Market and Liquor, the store Michael Brown was in before he was killed by Officer Wilson. (via Ny Times)

As the Ny Times explains, there have been instances of property damage. With the exclusion of privately owned cars, all property damage has been of either police property or commercial buildings. No private homes have been destroyed. While cops claim to have heard lots of gun fire, I cannot find any news coverage of serious injuries or deaths. So no deaths; no homes destroyed. Just property that was probably insured.

Causation: Was it even protesters?

Returning to the idea that protesters have called for non violence and peace, I wonder: did protesters cause these fires? The Klu Klux Klan has made their presence in Ferguson known, by threatening to use lethal force against protesters. The KKK also has a history of terrorizing black people by setting fires. Racist white people have a history of setting fire to black communities and businesses, as in the Tulsa Riots that destroyed the prosperous Black Wall Street. In those riots, white people killed at least 30 black people in addition to destroying what would now be $30 million in property damage, including the black hospitals.

At around 1 a.m., the white mob began setting fires, mainly in businesses on commercial Archer Street at the southern edge of the Greenwood district. (via Wikipedia)

Other sites have started to connect the KKK to the burning of Mike Brown's church. The KKK is entirely unlike the kind and empathetic people I met at the Boston protests. The KKK's members find joy in bombing churches, killing little children, and inflicting pain on black people. They incite and encourage violence in order to protect white supremacy; they pervert justice and lack empathy. Isn't it more reasonable to think that a violent hate group with a history of setting fires is responsible for fires in Ferguson? Rather than blaming protesters who have explicitly called for peace?

More so, police have been using tear gas canisters and smoke bombs. Both are known to be flammable.

Officers responded by firing what authorities said was smoke and pepper spray into the crowd. St. Louis County Police later confirmed tear gas also was used. (Fox News)

To counter the crowds, local police have attempted to use the same techniques that security forces use around the world, including tear gas, bean bag rounds and wooden bullets. [...] In Ferguson, MO, police have attempted to disperse protesters using smoke bombs – fireworks that generate smoke after ignition. (Al Jazeera)

Although modern smoke grenades are designed not to directly emit fire or sparks, they remain a fire hazard (Wikipedia)

A report distributed today by an Idaho State Fire Marshall shows that tear gas was the source of a house fire on July 12, 2006.  The canister first ignited the fabric covering and foam cushions of a couch in the residence (KHQ)

A video has surfaced of para military appearing individuals starting a fire at one of the confirmed locations, an Auto shop. These individuals are clearly not normal protesters. To ascribe their isolated and unsanctioned actions to the movement is very disingenuous.

Many people who were comfortable airing their uninformed racist assumptions suddenly fall silent when confronted with the deluge of evidence that protesters at the national level have been peaceful.

Moralities of Protest

The Rosewood Massacre was a racially motivated attack on African Americans and their neighborhood committed by a white mob in Florida during January 1–7, 1923. The town of Rosewood, a majority-black community, was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot (with the implication blacks had broken out in violence (Wikipidea)

Unfortunately, our country has a history of violence targeting black simply because they are black. At the same time, white mob violence targeting black communities is often ascribed as being the fault of black people. As if somehow one could provoke a lynching! As if the murder of black people could ever be justified! This tendency of whites to blame blacks for white violence is a historical reality that we must confront and dismantle, brick by brick, word by word. While some people would like to forget about our history of racial violence, that sort of forgetting is a support the dominant narrative of racial inequality. These sorts of narratives are violent and dangerous. I feel that it should be morally clear why you shouldn't blame black victims of racially motivated violence.

It’s depressing that we’re still dealing with these issues, but most of us are on the right side of history. Most of us. (Vanity fair)

I'd never that claim property damage is worse than the possibility of our nation approving of extra judicious murder due to the victim's race. Equating 'property casualties' to the loss of lives, especially black lives in this context, is particularly callous. Black people are not chattel or property. We cannot measure black lives against property values.

[Stop] the senseless killing of young black voters across the United States by law enforcement. (Hands up united)

At no point can individual acts of protest measure up against the injustices and violence of institutions. Even if these acts of property damage are ascribed to black people, the anger is justified! There are clear constitutional and moral protections for the right to assembly and the right to self defense. As members of DGR have wisely written, "Every resistance victory has been won by blood and tears, with anguish and sacrifice." We need to use short and long term strategies and tactics to disrupt the systemic police violence that is actually killing hundreds of civilians and incarcerating us when we flee or try to defend ourselves.

As a black mulatto person, as a woman, as a member of DGR, as a empathetic person, I feel that I cannot be silent or complicit. I urge people to take action to change the messed up violent politics that approve of killing black women and men, children as young as twelve, and that try to measure our value against cop's cars. 

Summary

• Property damage is nothing in response to the extra judicious killing of a man


• Unclear if these were caused by protesters or from other groups such as the KKK


• Smoke bombs and tear gas canisters used by police can cause fires


• Black lives >> property


• What about the national non violent protests? 

Agency: It's the Soul that needs the surgery

In one of my classes, we were talking about agency as it related to gender and the hierarchy of gendered behavior, performance, and capacity. In particular, women performing masculinity in order to have access to male dominated and male coded jobs. One female student mentioned that she and her friends had debated about what to wear to a career fair - skirt or pants - and the requisite cost toward being taken seriously, getting the job. We just went in pants, she muttered at the end of their considerations. Pretty hurts.

At a minimum, a feminist theory of agency must explain how it is possible for women in male-dominated societies to live in ways that reflect their genuine needs and concerns, and it must explain how it is possible for women to develop critiques of sexist social and political institutions and to mount active resistance. Moreover, it must accomplish both of those tasks without pretending that people are capable of stepping outside their own socially determined viewpoints to attain a God-like perspective. (via britannica)

I replied that while we might technically call the ability to choose between these "agency," we can't expect either of those options to increase women's agency, the availability of more choices. In fact, both choices reinforce the hierarchies of gender within capitalist competition; they decrease women's agency long term. So in this sense, her conflict and choice was certainly not political nor efficient resistance. And to me agency is tied up in political resistance. The personal is political. Of course some personal choices are act of resistance, but theory must acknowledge the agent who access these choices. Agency describes not only the set of options that we are able to consider due to our socialization, but also those options that are made available to us by our leverage of capital and privilege over a field that is set against women and especially women of color. 

Agency requires a well-developed repertoire of skills in self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction.(via britannica)

Your sense of agency within systems of power is based on utilizing your privilege to the best of your advantage, to convince the systems of power to over look your Otherness, to reinforce the system with the fractures of your bones growing back in the shape of the dominator. As long as you move within the field of dominance-submission masculine-feminine, you are increasing the strength of that field and its rules, no matter how you move through it.  Of all the privileges I have utilized to make it here, what's one more? and certainly one such as whether I wear pants or earrings to appease an interviewer's buy-in with femininity. That's not where my work lies. 

There is no denying that there exist dispositions to resist; and one of the tasks of sociology is precisely to examine under what conditions these dispositions are socially constituted, effectively triggered, and rendered politically efficient. [...] Often forget that the dominated seldom escape the antinomy of domination. for example to oppose the school system, in the manner of the British working class 'lads' analyzed by Willis (1997), through horseplay, truancy, and delinquency, is to exclude oneself from school, and, increasingly to lock oneself into one's condition of dominated. On the contrary, to accept assimilation by adopting school culture accounts to being coopted by the institution. The dominated are very often condemned to such dilemmas, to choices between two solutions which, each from a certain standpoint, are equally bad ones (the same applies, in a sense, to women or to stigmatized minorities) (via The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant)

Again women, the dominated, the Other, must continue to define agency - our possible actions and resistance - in terms of biophilic creativity and possibility. Look through the fallic fallacy: patriarchs construct us to see our agency in this limited meaningless way.

But it is seeming to me that race (together with racism and race privilege) is apparently constructed as something inescapable. And it makes sense that it would be, since such a construction would best serve those served by race and racism. Of course race and racism are impossible to escape; of course a white person is always in a sticky web of privilege that permits only acts which reinforce ("reinscribe") racism. This just means that some exit must be forced. That will require conceptual creativity, and perhaps conceptual violence. (via White woman feminist at Feminist Reprise)

Agency is violent resistance. Agency is not thoughtless or reckless. Agency is not exerted when you perform normative behavior. Agency is not tested when there are no sanctions for your choice. Agency is mute when you voice and reverberate in the chorus of existing power structures. (Note the phallic thefts: how Bourdieu attempts to give credit to the dominators for activating our work and resistance and erase how in reality dominators actively suppress resistance. Ha! Witches' work is ours and ours alone.)

I do not see how relations of domination, whether material or symbolic, could possibly operate without implying, activating resistance. The dominated, in any social universe, can always exert a certain force, in as much as belong to a field means by definition that one is capable of producing effects in it (if only elicit reactions of exclusion on the part of those who occupy its dominant position). (via The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant)

Agency is the tears you share when you listen to your friend who was raped. Agency is the weight of a mattress on campus, the lawsuits and the threat of expulsion.

Agency is the threat of arrest and death at a legal non violent protest.  Agency is the pain of a rubber bullet during a media lock out. 

Agency is Strange Fruit and agency is singing at the Lincoln Memorial.

Agency is how much you're willing to give up to make a point.  Agency hurts, but pretty hurts too. Agency is not easy, painless, or quick. It's slow and it hurts and you've got to think long and hard about what you do, what you're risking, the worth of your impulse towards life and liberty. Agency is the pain of learning to unbind your feet, your heart, your mind and learn how to stand again. Agency is the joy of finding yourself outside the field of cruelty, the beauty of standing with your sisters.

I'm talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live. (Andrea Dworkin, via DGR)