"There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil’s advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women’s Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life."
Melissa McEwan (via lavender-labia)
you arent enlightened or above things for thinking you can *debate* peoples humanity and life. if you ever think its up to you to do such a thing, know youre as ignit as they come, instead.
(via bad-dominicana)
(Source: sanitywatchers, via bankuei)
White anti-fascists and anti-racists need to organize poor and working class white people.
In America, we find that, while the white supremacist groups are going to poor and working class white youth and presenting them with contrived enemy images and false solutions, the white people of the anti-racist and anti-fascist communities are often too busy living in and around POC communities and trying to lead them to intercede. Then, they collectively wonder how why the rank and file of fascists organizations is filed with working class youth. Worse yet, some often deride poor and workings class whites as simply being particularly racist, without any deeper investigation into the matter.
I have no reason to believe that the white people with limited economic power are more racist than the white people with vast economic, social, and institutional power who legislate, propagate, and enforce our collective oppression. The white supremacist leaders packs up his (and I gender this for good reason) charisma and goes to the working class white, who want a reason for their squalor, and presumes to give it to them, to subvert their squalor with white power.
We who are anti-racists, anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, anarchists, people of color, etc. know full well that the economic strata of social war is a battlefield dominated not by struggling immigrants but by capitalism and its militia. In revolution, we have the true solution, class war. However, if the radical white community as a whole is too busy with a collective twiddling of thumbs, is it any wonder why the fascists organizations have been neither destroyed nor seriously challenged?
Furthermore, as it is the responsibility of every white person to do what is within their ability to subvert white supremacy, it follows that it is the responsibility of white radical to organize other white people to subvert white supremacy.That there are so many poor youth in white supremacist organizations or else apathetic or ignorant, is not a failure specifically of the those are susceptible to the propaganda of the dominant narrative but of white people as a whole, particular those who proclaim themselves our allies.(ATTN WHITE FOLKS: THIS IS A THING ABOUT WHITENESS THAT YOU CAN/SHOULD REBLOG. but remember to direct your racist followers to your own ask boxes.)
“thinking about yr privilege” all day does absolutely fucking nothing. this generally translates to “yeah i am working on my shit as a white person! by ~thinking~ about how advantaged i am in every situation bc of my whiteness! and ~thinking~ about how i am socialized to think that i am entitled to every space and to think that everyone/everything, particularly POC and shit that belongs to POC, exists for my selfish purposes! and not doing anything to change that!” (white people moving to places like oakland to ‘organize’/’anarchy’/whatever is gross for a million reasons but this is a big part of it.) your white anarcho gentrification is the most disgusting bullshit. you better be schoolin other white peopleat the very fucking least.
also it is particularly bothersome when white ppl hold white ppl who are doing/saying racist shit at a distance like they have nothing to do with each other, like confronting a racist white person would be too uncomfortable forthem, like they expect me or another POC to call out the fucked up bullshit that’s happening or just sit through the discomfort like we don’t have to do that so much already. white ppl learn to collect your folks in real life too, damn.
(via skinnytiesensurround)
Omar Khadr, a sixteen year old Guantanamo Bay detainee weeps uncontrollably, clutching at his face and hair as he calls out for his mother to save him from his torment. “Ya Ummi, Ya Ummi (Oh Mother, Oh Mother),” he wails repeatedly, hauntingly with each breath he takes.
The surveillance tapes, released by Khadr’s defence, show him left alone in an interrogation room for a “break” after he tried complaining to CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) officers about his poor health due to insufficient medical attention. Ignoring his complaints and trying to get him to make false confessions, the officers get frustrated with the sixteen year old’s tears and tell him to get himself together by the time they come back from their break.
“You don’t care about me. Nobody cares about me,” he sobs to them.
The tapes show how the officers manipulated Khadr into thinking that they were helping him because they were also Canadian and how they taunted him with the prospect of home (Canada), (good) food, and familial reunion.
Khadr, a Canadian, was taken into US custody at the age of fifteen, tortured and refused medical attention because he wouldn’t attest to being a member of Al Qaeda, even though he was shot three times in the chest and had shrapnel embedded in his eyes and right shoulder. As a result, Khadr’s left eye is now permanently blind, the vision in his right eye is deteriorating, he develops severe pain in his right shoulder when the temperature drops, and he suffers from extreme nightmares.
He has been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, suffering extremely harsh interrogations and torture (methods), and is now 25 years old.
How can they justify shooting and imprisoning a CHILD
normalized psycopathic behavior at the national level.
This is seriously serial-killer level torturing shit. If a single person did this, capturing a teenage boy and keeping them locked up and treating them like this, we’d call them a serial killer, a predator, a sociopath.
But when the government does it and has several individuals on a lot of levels making it happen, suddenly it’s okay.
And this is why civil liberties matter. This is why we need due process, in a transparent fashion.
If your first concern about Guantanamo and other detention sites is cost? FUCK YOU.
If your first concern about government power is that the TSA searches you? FUCK YOU.
No lawyers, no due process, no rights, no trials, no rule of law. This doesn’t stop terrorism, this IS terrorism.
Smashed Wrapper: "queer" people
i had a friend in a gender studies prog (puke) who often talked about how popular this is in academia, lifestyle politics and stretching the idea of queerness to make a bunch of ultra-privileged types look “subversive”.
This is about people who have no actual connection to the LGBT community in any way whatsoever trying to take “queer” away from the LGBT community by turning it into an all-inclusive umbrella term for “not vanilla”.
This.
Tattoos don’t make you queer. A nose ring doesn’t make you queer. Having sex while dressed up doesn’t make you queer. Having a kink doesn’t make you queer. Being able to play every version of the theme from Zelda on your harmonica doesn’t make you queer.
This kind of appropriation: a) tries to glorify whatever little thing you’re into, into some kind of freedom struggle on a level it is not at, and b) trivializes people who are literally getting assaulted, killed, thrown into prison, denied healthcare, etc.
And I feel like this shit comes out of people who really can’t deal with facing up to the fact they’ve got privilege. Instead of looking at the grim truth that there’s an entire society out there which hates some people, and promotes other people, and they happen to be in that promoted side, they try to act like the sides don’t exist, like it’s all equivalent. (“I don’t have to feel bad that there’s people being attacked for being queer because I’m also being attacked because someone didn’t like the color of my shoelaces and said something mean to me!”)
The answer to straight privilege isn’t to pretend not to be straight - it’s to build a world and society where everyone is valued as a human being, and it’s no one else’s business who they love or how. But doing that means actually having to: a) check your own shit, b) check other straight people’s hate, including friends, family, coworkers, etc. c) keep an eye on laws and take action to improve them, and d) step up to protect and promote LGBT folks because the fucking game ain’t fair.
Or you can pretend that because you like to wear gloves when having sex that you’re some kind of oppressed group and write emo tirades about it online and why won’t those damn lesbian/trans/gay/bi folks shut the fuck up and respect your “struggle”.
Seems like nowadays every gender-conforming cisgender motherfucker in a heterosexual/heteroromantic…
La Vie Noire: Dear fellow light skinned POC,
Being rejected for your lightness is not nor will it ever be, the same as being rejected for your darkness or visible Blackness.
It just isn’t ever going to be the same.
I need y’all to understand, and I mean understand, the rejection of whiteness and/or lightness by…
Man Right Activists (aka IDIOTS) propose a plan on how to get rid of "obnoxious" white women: marry a "submissive" brown woman. Yay for Orientalism and Misogyny!
LOL…hilarious. Some of the most outspoken, demanding, aggressive women I have met in my life are all South Asian or Middle Eastern (including MYSELF). Yes please, “whiteboys,” come flock to us and we will happily fuckin’ beat the shit out of your racist white asses into submission before you limp back into your little Orientalist racist misogynistic world.
these are the kinda emasculated dudes who buy mail order brides and visit developing countries to scoop up domestic slave wives of color. :/
heh i remeber when they tried the same with cuban women in fla cause latin@ was s’pposed to = submissive…damn whitey got caught by surprise! BUT so did mis hermanas when they realized gringos were on that machismo life too and light eyes and a different accent wasnt enough to change the same patriarchal-racist-womanhating-childresenting shit into nothing speshul -except life just got all bland and shit and to my eye funny loookin. Las mujeres seguian siendo mulas…pero quando los blancos saw women like my mom with her new - white por gusto menz…she lost that wifey respectability cred and got called the maid or the jump off…that wild piece of ass rewarding whitey for his exec game. So the long and the short of it - immigration visas and adjustment of status for women, children, and men who are victims of abuse at the hands of a US citizen or LPR under VAWA is a no go for whitey BUT fiance visas and family based immigration for contract/mail order brides (hate that fuckingterm) is A OK - but green card marriages amongst consenting adults who dont engage in the whole human chattle process IS PUNISHABLE UNDER FEDERAL LAW. Sad and enraging how white men consume communities like locusts but with less conscience
so many truths have been spoken
OMFG
this this THIIISSSSS
they make buying and importing women of color easy as fuck for white men
just dont no POC try to marry their own kind to try and bring them to the u.s. :/
(via bankuei)
"Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."
Audre Lorde, ‘Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface’, in Sister/Outsider, p. 63. (via feministquotes)
(via bankuei)
"Dominant groups typically show the least tolerance for allowing themselves to feel guilt and shame. Privilege, after all, should exempt one from having to feel such things. This means that, sooner or later, dominant groups experience reminders of their potential for feeling guilt as an affront that infringes on their sense of entitlement to a life unplagued by concern for how their privilege affects other people. The right to deny that privilege exists is an integral part of privilege itself, so men can be quick to complain about being made to feel guilty without actually feeling guilty. I’ve met few men who seem genuinely guilt-stricken over male privilege, just as I rarely meet white people who seem guilt-stricken over racism. Such people exist, but they aren’t the ones who complain so loudly about being made to feel guilty."
Allan G. Johnson
so relevant
(via wretchedoftheearth)
(via bankuei)
“I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho, and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieThe entire context of that awesome quote is also worth watching:
(via sajiasultana)
Haha, oh look, it’s Subhash pretending he cares about women who defend themselves against abusers.
http://www.letstalkaboutit.info/2012/05/different-views-on-marissa-alexanders_11.html
I guess when it gets his name in print and the perpetrator isnt his personal friend, he’s all for it. In private, having a tepid “accountability process” with mild demands is overly ”demonizing” and “perpetrators are people too”.
