I just read this morning that the wonderful Govenator of California has decided that an appropriate way to fix California's budget problems would be to cut ALL state funding to domestic violence shelters... And when I say ALL, I mean ALL... 100%... GONE...
Ok... so to ease back into this blog after a break that was way too long I thought I might pass on a link to Paul Kivel's "Men's Work - To Stop Male Violence". Take a look and share your thoughts!
Hey Friends!
So here is an anthology on privilege that I've compiled. It is a compilation of interviews, reflections and transcripts from a panel on privilege hosted at Willamette University on January 21, 2008. The "Interrogating Privilege" panel was part of Willamette's annual, week long celebration of the life and spirit of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Please read through and when you are done, feel free to share it with anyone and everyone who is willing/should engage.
I hope that you find it meaningful!
Tristan Knutson-Lombardo
Education, information, and communication are important issues in our collective struggle for justice. We all know the power of knowledge, of telling stories and sharing new ways of knowing and being that help us fight inequality, injustice, and cynicism. The internet has drastically changed the way that we learn and acquire information in our society and has created new liberatory possibilities for building communities and creating change. Imagine a new politics based on open access to information, better education, more communication, and new opportunities to direct and shape our future.
The democratization of information has been a powerful outcome of the new role of technology in society. Now, we have access to indy-media and blogs which provide a grassroots alternative to corporate mass media. We have access to Wikipedia, which provides opportunities for people to contribute to popular knowledge. We have access to networking sites and listservs that help us to connect with others involved in struggle and provide new possibilities for organizing. All of these have been used to great effect within the social justice community, but now its time to branch out to the general population.
This letter is a call to socially just internet users to engage in a broad-based, collective, and sustained effort to claim the internet, more specifically Wikipedia, as a tool for social change. Wikipedia is the place to start, by making the ultimate source of popular knowledge a place for sharing social justice. There is already a presence of socially just thinking on Wikipedia, but what would it mean to ensure its growth by actively connecting popular articles and ideas with issues of justice and equity? Participating in the construction of popular knowledge by editing articles on Wikipedia, taking part in online communities like blogs and listservs committed to justice, and actively living our justice ideals in our participation on the internet is a way for us to use the opportunities afforded to us by new technology to enact change.
In Solidarity,
A Fellow Social Justice Activist, Sam Menefee-Libey
Larry Craig's Opponent is now 'Pro-Life'
A Senate candidate has legally changed his name to Pro-Life and will appear on the ballot that way this year, state election officials say.This is why I stayed in Salem over spring break. I'm not even kidding. This man's politics aren't even being contested (at least not on a large scale) by fellow Idahoans. Instead, he's being criticized for subverting the system by changing his name to a slogan. Ridiculous. Resolved, if I ever run for public office, I will change my name to something equally amazing like 'Fucking Egalitarian Radical.' I really want to know what ya'll would call yourselves...
As Marvin Pro-Life Richardson, the organic strawberry farmer from Letha, 30 miles northwest of Boise, was denied the use of his middle name when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006 because the state's policy bars the use of slogans on the ballot.
Now, though, officials in the Idaho secretary of state's office say they have no choice because Pro-Life is his full and only name. He says he will run for the highest state office on the ballot every two years for the rest of his life, advocating murder charges for doctors who perform abortions and for women who obtain the procedure.
Last weekend, some of my peers and I viewed The Spook Who Sat By the Door. It was an incredible piece of protest art, predicated on the premise of Black militias rising up out of the ghetto, trained by an Ex-CIA agent, to actively fight the White supremacist powers that be. It wasn't high art (it was an independent film from the 1970s without mainstream talent or support) but as a vision for change it was quite extraordinary.
As I sat contemplating why I had never heard of the film before, I began to think about what other antiracist media may be out there. There are a few recent films that I would lump into that category, but they don't have the bluntness, force, and unambiguous nature of The Spook Who Sat By the Door. The Matrix, for instance, is one of my favorite anti-oppression films, but few mainstream critics and viewers treat it as such.
All of this leads me to beg the question, where is the protest media? I know that there's some great protest music out there like Dead Prez and A-R 15, and some good alternative news sources as well like Alternet and the Guerrilla News Network, but where's the antiracist fiction? Even Spike Lee went from Bamboozled to . . . Inside Man? Where are the freedom dreams that should be inspiring the people to question authority and ask for something more? There are some things like that out there, but I want something that I can really draw hope from and point to as a popular reference for what I mean by a freedom dream!
Are there things out there that I've missed? Are there things that are coming? Please, tell one, tell all, and let the dreaming proliferate!
In Solidarity,
Sam
So I was trying to write this poem the other night… and struggling. Usually when I’m writing poems that I really like, they just sort of come to me, almost fully formed. As long as I don’t get in the way, they happen on their own just fine. But I definitely got in the way of this one, and I’m pretty sure I know why. The pieces of it that did come to me were about “the revolution” – how it’s not going to go down as easy as people want it to; it’s something you choke on, even if you’re the one working for it. I think that my urge to write it stemmed from my frustration with white liberalism, and the general tendency of privileged folk to intellectualize the revolution and do a lot of talking/thinking about the boxes instead of acting/dreaming outside of them. It frustrates me because it seems like solidarity with the idea of change, but not solidarity with the action or the people.
And then I realized that the thing that was getting in the way was the fact that I was trying to write it without confronting my own privilege. I identify as a queer woman of color. I did not grow up in a wealthy family. In fact when I was born, they were downright poor. My dad never graduated from high school. And yet…
I am a student at a private liberal arts school. My parents own their home. I’ve never had to go without food when I was hungry. I’ve never been the victim of a hate crime. I’ve never worried about where I will sleep at night. I have not (yet) been denied access to something I want/need because of my identity. People assume that I am trustworthy when they meet me. All in all, my life is pretty damn comfortable. I can pass for white, my parents make enough money to put us in the “upper-middle class” box now, and I haven’t been out for all that long.
I can’t write about how the revolution will make white liberals uncomfortable, because I can’t admit that the revolution will make me uncomfortable. My visceral reaction will be every bit as painful as the people I want to criticize, because my privilege will be dismantled too, whether or not I recognize it as mine. I hate that I live in the constant contradiction between an oppressed identity and a privileged existence, because the fact that I see it as a contradiction means I’m still stuck in the boxes… I have to pick whether I’m going to acknowledge my oppression or my privilege for the day because I can’t see myself as both/and. Maybe that’s the pain that the revolution causes me – I know the boxes are wrong, that the system is failing… but it’s the house I live in and I don’t know what lies outside the walls.
February 26th, 2008 | Race, Media, Politics
I’m not proud, because a) I take Proverbs 16:18’s counsel (”Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”) to be flawless, and b) I try not to cultivate feelings about abstractions.
This even though, according to my calculations, I’m exactly six weeks older than Michelle Obama. Because I’ve had an adult life just a bit longer than she has, you’d think I would have had time to develop some form of her pride by now.
Let’s do a week-in-review-style wrap-up on what she said last week in Madison WI, on Monday, February 18:
“What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something — for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”
Now, she also spoke in Milwaukee, earlier that day. In that speech, she said:
“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”
Note the absence of the word really, above, in the earlier speech: proud vs. really proud. (Some have made a point of her later inclusion of that adverb, during her second, Madison speech.)
Here’s a link to a clip comparing the two.
What to make of this?
Well, besides betting that Tavis Smiley wishes he’d had her on his show now, I found her statement startling, as I suspect many Black people initially did. It was, to quote Roots, a real toubob come moment.
That is, the Obama campaign has been so much about generating a mysterious but powerful anti-race force, I wasn’t sure that it could withstand a massive lump of race smashing into it without being completely annihilated.
But then I thought, “Wait a minute: This is a campaign that doesn’t misspeak. There must be a strategy, right?”
I might have been doing more thinking than they deserve. The New York Times‘ politics blog, The Caucus, quoted an Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, on Michelle’s statements:
“Of course Michelle is proud of her country, which is why she and Barack talk constantly about how their story wouldn’t be possible in any other nation on Earth. What she meant is that she’s really proud at this moment because for the first time in a long time, thousands of Americans who’ve never participated in politics before are coming out in record numbers to build a grassroots movement for change.
“Look at the quote in its full context and that is clear.”
Gaze upon it: A soft and gentle spin cycle that would be the envy of today’s finest labor-saving devices.
On Wednesday, CNN’s blog, Political Ticker, ran Obama’s own explanation for her words, given to their Providence RI affiliate, WJAR-TV:
“What I was clearly talking about is that I am proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process.” … “I mean everyone has said what I said, in that we haven’t seen these record numbers of turnouts, people who are paying attention, going to rallies, watching debates.
“For the first time in my lifetime I am seeing people rolling up their sleeves in way that I haven’t seen and really trying to figure this out, and that’s the source of pride I was talking about.”
The Associated Press, covering that interview, wrote on Thursday:
When asked if she had always been proud of her country, she replied “absolutely” and said she and her husband would not be where they are now if not for the opportunities of America.
It’s not a direct quote. But her “absolutely” response to an “always” question would directly contradict her first (and second) statement, re: being proud for the first time, or really proud.
I don’t buy this. I pretty much agree with the outraged white people. Of course, she’s talking about race, which is why they’re reacting. Race is about them.
In short, Obama was saying this: “If the essential substance that makes up our nation is equality, then this is the first time that I can say our nation’s equality is not questionable, defective, or sub-par.”
That’s the heart of it. She’s not saying this because a successful presidential campaign benefits her husband, and thus her. She’s saying that being so close to the sight of a Black man getting this near to the nomination has been transformational. (Or as she said to Katie Couric, “This is a trip.”) That’s what all her talk about seeing people “rolling up their sleeves” is about. But the meta-conversation is about race.
An analogy might be useful, here:
Say you’re the plant manager of a factory that makes tires, but one that, until today, has only made square ones, or figure 8-shaped ones, or flat ones, or inside-out ones. Or white ones.
Then, one day, a perfectly round, perfectly inflated, black steel-belted radial rolls off the line.
That would be a proud moment. It might be the first one in your adult life, because you’ve been working at the plant for a long time. You might say, “This is the first time I’m proud to be the plant manager.”
Now your line employees, team leaders, and shop people might get mad if you said that.
They might say, “What do you mean? What about all of your training? What about all of those other tires we made? What about everything we’ve done for you?”
To which you might say, “All of that was important. In fact, we couldn’t have gotten here without it.
“But this is the first time, it appears, that it all came together, in the way it was supposed to, to make what we’re supposed to be making, the way we’re supposed to be making it.”
Listening to many white people recite the list of junk about which Michelle Obama should be proud—law degrees, given by white people, so that she can work to make white people more powerful—is like listening to that bunch of offended tire-makers.
Or, perhaps, as my mentor Asiba Tupahache might say, it’s like listening to a drunk and/or abusive parent or spouse recite the list of things they’ve done for you, telling you how ungrateful you are for their kind and generous beneficence.
