Truth bombs, mostly

As we write this piece, we have to turn our phones on silent to drown out the frenzied buzzing of our inboxes and texts. We’ve gone on strike. It’s not the kind of strike you are used to, like an MTA shutdown or a crowd outside of Walmart with picket signs. We are Black Women, AfroIndigenous and women of color who have organized a social media Blackout. 

We are your unwaged labor in our little corner of the internet that feeds a movement. Hours of phone teach-ins, hashtags, Twitter chats, video chats and phone calls to create a sustainable narrative and conversation around decolonization and antiblackness. As an online collective of Black, AfroIndigenous, and NDN women, we have created an entire framework with which to understand gender violence and racial hierarchy in a global and U.S. context. In order to do this however, we have had to shake up a few existing narratives, just like K. Michelle and her infamous table rumble on Love & Hip Hop.

The response has been sometimes loving, but in most cases we’ve faced nothing but pushback in the form of trolls, stalking. We’ve, at separate turns, been stopped and detained crossing international borders and questioned about our work, been tailed and targeted by police, had our livelihoods threatened with calls to our job, been threatened with rape on Twitter itself, faced triggering PTSD and trudged the physical burden of all of this abuse. This has all occurred while we see our work take wings and inform an entire movement. A movement that also refuses to make space for us while frequently joining in the naming of us as “Toxic Twitter” Why do we face barriers at every turn? If you hear many tell it, we are simply lazy women with good internet connections.

Quite simply, our interests are quite different than the people usually allowed to set the agenda for our bodies—not only on a state level, but even within movements that claim to be for our benefit. We are just too different, our ideas are just too out there. And besides, people still wonder what we’re so angry about anyway. Despite this gospel medley of media, academia, the non-profit industrial complex and “proper organizers” raising their voices in collective “Get off the internet and DO SOMETHING REAL,” our inboxes now sit full with those people requesting to know where have we gone and what are we doing. Don’t we know they have dissertations to write? Suddenly, your favorite activist’s timeline sounds less brilliant and more like a Magic Eight Ball or one of your Auntie’s Tarot Card Readings. The media landscape begins to dry up and people panic without their usual sacrificial lambs.

Even in our very silence, we are drama queens who are doing something personally harmful by removing ourselves from a space. No matter what we do, it’s considered petty and malicious, even if its just taking an absence from Twitter. It’s no coincidence that this is the landscape with which we view the physical disappearances of Black and NDN bodies. You see, that’s how surveillance works. The devaluation becomes the justification for the watching, followed by a frenzy of consumption, and an ensuing panic once we move beyond the eye of the surveyor. We are hated as women, but we have to be watched so we don’t do real harm to ourselves and others.

Never mind that we are constantly a full month ahead of the news cycle and that our frameworks mysteriously appear in a rash of articles and essays after we hammer them out publicly on digital mediums. We hear the refrain of “meeting people where they are,” but there is a constant devaluation exactly where marginalized Black and NDN grassroots women actually do show up.

In an age where young women often have cell phones with internet access before they have access to healthcare and social services, why are so many so quick to demean the work of digital feminism in the hands of Black women? When depression, anxiety and disability make it so that getting out of bed, much less into the streets, is a debilitating challenge and risk, why do we demean social media and tell people they cant fully engage without taking up physical space? Whose interests are we centering if we constantly hyperfocus on the limits of grassroots social media, instead of the impact and possibilities, while not making the physical spaces safe or accessible for these women? When we ask these questions, we uncover that the only people who meet these qualifications of real activism are cis gender, able bodied people—frequently male.

We replicate systems of power because we place high valuation on spaces they can access and devalue the spaces that marginalized identities have access to, while refusing to make the physical spaces of our movements safe by addressing interpersonal abuse or accessibility. People who have access to those spaces and understand how to navigate those systems then capitalize off the labor of marginalized women, show up to the movement and halls of academia, and present themselves as thought leaders and change makers. Once we expand our understanding of violence to include plagiarism, harassment, gaslighting, emotional abuse, ableism and exploitation of labor, we find huge fissures in a movement that the women we are prescribing solutions for fall through on a daily basis. We find a replicated system of violence that prioritizes those closer to systemic and hierarchal values of bodies rather than anti-violence. We then use this hierarchy to convince ourselves that these people are important (sometimes they are) and that their work is more necessary than addressing the violence that follows marginalized women attempting to engage a movement. 

The way we are moving now, it’s simply not sustainable. What is the sustainability of a movement that leaves women behind and unsupported once the teach-ins and video chats end? Will we be a movement that only allows marginalized women to perform a lifetime of unwaged labor, only to be abused, and have to crowdfund their heating bills in middle age? No. We must prioritize the engagement of grassroots marginalized women in a movement over charismatic leaders and organizers who do good work. We have to stop leading with “But he/she does good work” and start leading with “How do I make this space safe for you?” 

The question for 2015 is :“How do we, as a movement, engage unaffiliated women with no institutional covering or backing, on the grassroots level? How do we close ranks around these women in both digital and physical spaces so that they can continue this work? There is a refusal to legitimize the words of women of color without the backing of academia, established media, and non-profit monikers. How do we then legitimize the lens with which marginalized women of color view their lives and the spaces where they are actually allowed to assert their agency? Currently the tools women of color use to engage a movement that has long viewed them as silent subjects, relegated to frying chicken and frybread for the real movers, are devalued at best—and threatened after mined for content at worst. All of this and more take place to the tune of stalking, plagiarism, and an outright refusal to look at the interpersonal violence that we face as a result. Still, no one can quell our concern about how it is that we can expect to be respected and kept safe a physical movement space if you won’t respect and keep us safe in a digital one. 

Currently, much of the defining dialogue on activism excludes the very women who have made it possible via sustainable conversations on anti-violence on social media and across a variety of informal platforms. The idea of “real activism” also ignores the fact that most marginalized women support their own mini communities and are at the core of providing care and resources for those around them. It is radical activism when an unemployed elder or younger woman provides free or reduced childcare for working women in her family and her community. It is radical activism when an abuela makes hundreds of tamales to feed a community during holidays or cooks extra, just in case visitors drop by. It is radical activism when women create informal economies to support themselves and their family. Whether you are selling tamales out of your truck, letting a cousin who was sexually assaulted stay with you until she can survive, or hosting a community teach in with your computer YOU ARE A RADICAL ACTIVIST. 

We discourage people from engaging in a movement that doesn’t center their interests because it doesn’t even know how to recognize those interests—or a movement that creates a hierarchy of activism that excludes our ways of being and our ways of knowing before we ever heard of terms like 501(c)(3) or non-profit. When we shift our thinking to recognize real work to include that labor that isn’t calculated as part of an IRS tax exemption, when we recognize daily survival and the work of women who will never get to use certain doors because they’re busy looking to escape through a window, we will start to see a shift in consciousness. 

What would it mean to have a revolution that’s making sure we are all safe (not to be confused with avoiding inevitable discomfort when held accountable—this is not lack of safety, but reckoning) and have our needs met, both physical and emotional? What radical shift would take place if we centered us being okay and decided nothing is more important than that—not even the revolution itself?

@tgirlinterruptd

@chiefelk

@bad_dominicana

@aurabogado

@so_treu

The US requires cheap, undervalued labor to maintain itself, which is why you have places like Foxconn, like sweatshops, like these under the table factories that treat their workers like shit and pay them pittances for wages and yet still are being used. 

These countries are targeted by the US so their economies can’t grow so the US can maintain cheap labor. 

Don’t believe me? Why do you think the US forced an FTA agreement with Korea so forcefully despite widespread protests? It was to attack the Chinese economic influence in East Asia. 

The US saying it has a humanitarian interest in underdeveloped countries developing economically? Then why is their main way of “helping” through institutions like the IMF which are more parasitic and harmful than helpful (trust me, I’m Korean, we have experience with the IMF). 

In the US the brunt of this falls on Black and brown people. Black people are forced into bad schooling system, are targeted by police, have the hoods flooded with crack by Reagan and then are targeted by a War on Drugs thus de facto criminalizing Black bodies. 

The same for a large part of brown people. A large fact of why immigration reform fails again and again is because the US reaps so many benefits from a large undocumented worker population. Taxes, payments into social security which those who paid can’t see, and cheap labor they can abuse with the constant threat of reporting and deportation. 

The threat of violence whether it be through physical or political or economic means is an important part of the US’s way of maintaining their Capitalistic system which is also infected with a racist ideology of demeaning, devaluing, and destroying PoC, especially Black, lives. 

Rather than have countries outright dominate colonies. the US had the idea to “privatize” colonialism; put it in the hands of banks through the IMF and World Bank. Rather than have troops and bureaucrats from imperialist countries dominate, local elites with ties to the West take out high interest loans that come with terms like privatizing their infrastructure or resources (to be owned by investors in London or New York), setting limits on how much of the national budget can be spent on schools and healthcare and how much should be spent on military and police (supplied, of course, by US arms industries), and in some countries, the establisment of special “economic zones” where national laws on taxes and labor don’t apply and in which corporations from the West (almost always the US) can set up shop. These are especially common in places like Jamaica, where these economic zones became either factories where workers are treated like shit and paid next to nothing or where all-inclusive resorts were built so Western tourists can leave but still have McDonald’s or KFC and stay in a nice Hilton hotel. As you expect, workers aren’t paid much and no taxes are collected on any of this.

It’s especially nice that you bring up the undocumented in the US, because for the bulk of the undocumented, who are Mexican, our arrival to the US is a direct result of NAFTA. The US foisted NAFTA on Mexico through an elite that stood to gain from US economic imperialism. In short, NAFTA forced mexico to amend its constitution to undo land reform that had protected millions of poor Mexicans, many indigenous, and open the land up to speculation and purchase by American companies (wherein Monsanto would come in and plant its patented corn strains, which, fun story: when Monstanto patented corn seeds are carried by the wind or animals into Mexicans’ farms, Monsanto is allowed to launch investigations into these farmers lands to genetically test their corn. If the corn’s DNA matches that of the patented corn, Monstanto will then sue the farmer for compensation and being a poor farmer, will end up settling with Monstanto by selling them his land). Along with that came another constitutional protection that guaranteed subsoil rights to be given to Mexican companies rather than foreign ones, ANYWAY, millions were uprooted not just from undoing land reform but also Mexico devaluing the peso in the 80s to make it cheaper for US companies to resettle and make their exports back to the US cheaper, while average Mexicans found their peso too worthless to buy basic staples. Thus millions fled north from the late 80s through to this day.

Free trade agreements like NAFTA also open up labor markets to compete with each other. American workers not only compete among themselves but also find themselves competing with labor in Mexico, while those fleeing north create an even bigger surplus that depresses wages further.

This is a very cursory example of one country that the United States fucks over, and there are others. Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Dominican Republic, Iraq, basically throw a dart on the map and the US has colonized it.

You might wonder if this is so fucked up don’t people fight back? They do, and every country I just listed has experienced an American invasion or coup at least twice in its history. The US military is the global police force that maintains this order, where if US capitalists see a country whose land, resources, or labor it wants to exploit, it will do so through “legal” means (IMF, world bank) and when that fails or people resist, in comes the Army and Marines to fuck everyone’s shit up and force them into compliance with the free trade agreement.

I could go on and might one day, but for now, leave with this: the United States is the most vicious, predatory, bloodthirsty empire the world has ever seen, and it will not stop at nothing to seize whatever it wants from whoever stands in its way by whatever means necessary. 

Ferguson’s resistance might only seem to be for the justice of a young boy executed by America’s domestic enforcer of a racial and economic hierarchy that it’s exported to the rest of the world, but the fact is, holding Darren Wilson accountable for murdering Mike Brown might set a precedent for anyone who has ever demanded justice from the depredations and excesses of an aggressive imperial state, that if we resist enough we might get justice. 

Comoelfilodelmachete posted:

“the story is told of the Indian chief in Hispaniola, Hatuey, who fled before the invaders to Cuba. Captured in Cuba, he was ordered as an encouragement to others to be burnt alive. At the stake a Franciscan friar exhorted him to take pity upon his soul, and not expose it to eternal damnation, when he might procure it the happiness of dwelling in Paradise for ever. Hatuey inquired whether any Spaniards were in Paradise. The friar assured him that on the good ones were. Hatuey is supposed to have replied: ‘The best are good for nothing, I will not go where there is a chance of meeting one of them.’” Eric Williams —————————————————————————————————————————————————- there was never a more bad ass motherfucker. from wiki, and you prissy assholes cuh judge me for it lol Bartolomé de Las Casas later attributed the following speech to Hatuey. He showed the Taíno of Caobana a basket of gold and jewels, saying:

Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea… They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break…[3]

The people of Caobana could not believe Hatuey’s message, and few joined him to fight. Hatuey resorted to guerrilla tactics against the Spaniards, and was able to confine them to their fort at Baracoa. Eventually the Spaniards succeeded in capturing him. On February 2, 1512,[2] he was tied to a stake and burned alive at Yara.[1] Before he was burned, a priest asked him if he would accept Jesus and go to heaven. La Casas recalled the reaction of the chief:

[Hatuey], thinking a little, asked the religious man if Spaniards went to heaven. The religious man answered yes… The chief then said without further thought that he did not want to go there but to hell so as not to be where they were and where he would not see such cruel people. This is the name and honor that God and our faith have earned.[4]

1. Southern Exposure: This is the most important feature, since a proper exposure means that your house will be able to gain heat from the sun in the winter and you will be able to place solar panels. Basically there needs to be a potential building site and a potential garden site that has unobstructed sky facing to the south.Even in town or in the city an apartment that has windows facing south will receive more sun in the winter and might be able to heat itself much of the year.

     The garden part is assuming you want to feed about 4+ people you will need about 1/4acre of land that is either already arable ( good soil that you can squeeze and will hang together if slightly moist). If the soil is rocky or clay you will have to be able to bring in a lot of compost and may need to build beds. Typically arable farmable soil is near a river or creek, or somewhere where soil has been deposited like a valley.

2. Water- Sometimes you can find property that has municipal water, and hook ups to municipal power or sewage. In that case you need to determine what it will take to get a utility station set up for construction and gardening.

  If the land comes with water it needs to be in the form of a spring or well generally. In California for example you are not allowed to use “second class waterways” which basically means creeks and streams. Those belong to the whole state not you as a landowner.

  You want to have a number that tells you how many gallons per minute are produced by a spring, and generally how many daily gallons are available through a well/pump system.

  Bring a gallon jug of water when you go and look at the piece, as well as a watch with a second hand, basically use the jug to figure out for yourself if you have at least a gallon per minute.

DO NOT buy land that has “shared” water or water easement from someone elses parcel. This is essentially a dry parcel and there is too much difficulty.

3. Easements- easements are legal agreements to share infrastructure between neighbors. Usually they concern things like a road cutting through your piece, or power lines. If you have a creek on your property fish and game can walk that creek for example.

The really troublesome ones are best to be avoided : sharing water, sharing a poor quality driveway.

If you provide water for your neighbor you can be forced to become their utility company of sorts, if they steal it long enough. You are responsible for walking the perimeter of your property and making sure that no one is squatting, taking water, or improperly using your land to access other parcels.

Basically 1,000gal per day needs to be stored and distributed to cover a full garden and four+ people and animals living needs.

4.Corners-

This is how you determine the perimeter of your property, and you should always have the real estate agent find them with you and document them together. Now you can also see the property lines online with GPS images and often this is all available through a county or city online entity.

  You want to be certain that the building site is on the property you are buying. (I know this sounds basic but many of my neighbors in Southern Humboldt got fooled on this one). Often the corners include iron spikes and official markers from older mapmaking methods.

These are the basic things you want to think about when you are looking at land. If the piece is nice and flat and has sun all over it you can live and garden pretty nicely on as little as an acre. The more you have rough soil and hilly conditions the more land you will need in order to accomplish a house, garden, and utility shed.

Our last piece had a beautiful solar/hydro setup that husband put in, if there is interest I can bug him to get the water flow needs in order to do the hydro.

Effects of racism on white children: 

-Denial of reality -Rationalization -Rigid thinking -Superiority -Fear and hatred

Effect of racism on children of color:

-Overidentification with white people -Separation and alienation  -Confusion and bewilderment -Rejection -Shame -Anger and Rage

A silent protest in Love Park, downtown Philadelphia orchestrated by performance artists protesting the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The onslaught of passerby’s  wanting to take photos with the statue exemplifies the disconnect in American society.  Simply frame out the dead body, and it doesn’t exist.  

Here are some observations by one of the artists involved in the event:

I don’t know who any of these folks are.

They were tourists I presume.

But I heard most of what everything they said. A few lines in particular stood out. There’s one guy not featured in the photos. His friends were trying to get him to join the picture but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body.

"Something about this doesn’t feel right. I’m going to sit this one out, guys." "Com’on man… he’s already dead."

(Laughs.)

There were a billion little quips I heard today. Some broke my heart. Some restored my faith in humanity. There was an older white couple who wanted to take a picture under the statue.

The older gentleman: “Why do they have to always have to shove their politics down our throats.” Older woman: “They’re black kids, honey. They don’t have anything better to do.”

One woman even stepped over the body to get her picture. But as luck would have it the wind blew the caution tape and it got tangle around her foot. She had to stop and take the tape off. She still took her photo.

There was a guy who yelled at us… “We need more dead like them. Yay for the white man!”

The truth is, the death of Mike Brown is not unusual. Black bodies appear to be disposable in the American psyche, and black men are major targets of police violence. Most of the time when a black man is the target of violence at the hands of the police, few of us outside their communities hear about it. But when cases are elevated to the mainstream, they are usually men or boys who are deemed “innocent” — which then is called into question by media outlets who seek to construct them as thugs (see #IfTheyGunnedMeDown). But an important question here is who is even allowed the privilege of being constructed as an innocent, ever?

How are the deaths and beatings of women — cis and trans — at the hands of the police or with their complicity so much less compelling? I think the obvious answer here is misogyny and transmisogyny, not on one specific occasion or by one specific person, but at the systemic level: what tweets get tweeted and retweeted, what events seem newsworthy, and what bodies are deemed to hold value.

I want to mourn the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, and I want to question why the deaths of Renisha McBride and Islan Nettles and Kathryn Johnston haven’t gotten similar traction. Why the beating of Marlene Pinnock isn’t on all of our lips. Why the nation is not familiar with the names of Stephanie Maldonado, or of Ersula Ore. And how many women’s names do we not know because they don’t dare come forward? Because the violence they experience at the hands of the police is sexual, and the shame and stigma around sexual violence silences them?

Stirring the oatmeal is a humble act — not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything. Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Gandhi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary.

Jung once said that feeling is a matter of the small. And in human love, we can see that it is true. The real relatedness between two people is experienced in the small tasks they do together: the quiet conversation when the day’s upheavals are at rest, the soft word of understanding, the daily companionship, the encouragement offered in a difficult moment, the small gift when least expected, the spontaneous gesture of love. When a couple are genuinely related to each other, they are willing to enter into the whole spectrum of human life together. They transform even the unexciting, difficult, and mundane things into a joyful and fulfilling component of life. By contrast, romantic love can only last so long as a couple are “high” on one another, so long as the money lasts and the entertainments are exciting. “Stirring the oatmeal” means that two people take their love off the airy level of exciting fantasy and convert it into earthy, practical immediacy. Love is content to do many things that ego is bored with. Love is willing to work with the other person’s moods and unreasonableness. Love is willing to fix breakfast and balance the checkbook. Love is willing to do these “oatmeal” things of life because it is related to a person, not a projection.

Human love sees another person as an individual and makes an individualized relationship to him or her. Romantic love sees the other person only as a role player in the drama. A man’s human love desires that a woman become a complete and independent person and encourages her to be herself. Romantic love only affirms what he would like her to be, so that she could be ‘identical to,’ anima. So long as romance rules a man, he affinns a woman only insofar as she is willing to change, so that she may reflect his projected ideal. Romance is never happy with the other person just as he or she is.

Human love necessarily includes friendship: friendship within relationship, within marriage, between husband and wife. When a man and a woman are truly friends, they know each other’s difficult points and weaknesses, but they are not inclined to stand in judgment on them. They are more concerned with helping each other and enjoying each other than they are with finding fault. 

Friends, genuine friends, want to affirm rather than to judge; they don’t coddle, but neither do they dwell on our inadequacies. Friends back each other up in the tough times, help each other with the sordid and ordinary tasks of life. They don’t impose impossible standards on each other, they don’t ask for perfection, and they help each other rather than grind each other down with demands. 

In romantic love there is no friendship. Romance and friendship are utterly opposed energies, natural enemies with completely opposing motives. Sometimes people say: “I don’t want to be friends with my husband [or wife]; it would take all the romance out of our marriage.” It is true: Friendship does take the artificial drama and intensity out of a relationship, but it also takes away the egocentricity and the impossibility and replaces the drama with something human and real.”