confused?????

bae: texts back 20 minutes later

“Blow minds, not dudes” 

God forbid a woman be more than her body.

There are members of Israeli society who are applauded for objecting to Israel’s callousness, who even denounce the actions of the military, and who demand restraint be shown towards the people of Gaza (how very brave of them). They spill forth words that could be categorized as poetry, asking for fellow Israelis to reach deep down inside and see the lives destroyed by every bombing. They are human, just like us, they say. These Israelis are flaunted about. You see, they epitomize the lone voice of reason which has survived the madness of the “conflict” and their expressions are like honey, eagerly lapped up by those still straddling the fence, seeing fault in “both sides.” This is not decolonization but appropriation, that which removes Palestinians, diminishes their positions in their own history and works to further marginalize them. Their non-violence is praised while Palestinian resistance and non-violence is admonished and scoffed at. Their voices have weight in the eyes of the media while Palestinians are only there to provide a semblance of “balance.” If Palestinians are not at the forefront of the decolonization process than the process itself is a sham. […] The words of Israelis oftentime work as distractions that move conversations away from understanding the profound influence and multidimensional complexities of Israel’s history so that they may frame their existence as uninvolved in order to escape the status of ‘settler.’ In Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang define and discuss “moves to innocence” which are methods that work to deflect from the settler identity: Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler. The distractions used by Israelis are “moves to innocence.” They are superficial diversions that only further the desires of Israelis who refuse to see themselves as complicit in the occupation. Such diversions only contain the settler-colonial state rather than disassemble it. As Frantz Fanon notes in The Wretched of the Earth decolonization “is a program of complete disorder” that can only come as a historical process, not by way of “friendly understanding” and that “it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.”

I am not Mike Brown. I am white. I am middle class. I am female. I am small. I am not considered a threat. When police see me they see someone who looks like them. They see their mothers, their daughters, their sisters, themselves. I am not at risk of being shot by police for existing while black. I am not at risk of being shot while unarmed. I am not at risk of being shot while armed with nothing more than a BB gun. I am not at risk of being shot for reaching for my wallet. I am privileged. But I am outraged. And if you aren’t outraged, then you aren’t paying attention. This is America in 2014. This is our reality. It’s so easy to get jaded and to ignore these atrocities, to act like this doesn’t affect us. It’s so easy to get apathetic. In the past it was the youth who protested. Where is the rage of the youth? Where is our rage? Like I said, I am not Mike Brown. But I am outraged.