We Are Nothing (And That is Beautiful)  Full Text by Alok Vaid-Menon I’d like to begin with a poem remember the first day of freshman year of college when we were nothing but a name and a dot on the map at the front of the hall? remember when we did not cry when our parents left us in those rooms too cramped for all of our expectations (and, perhaps, naïveté)? remember the first time we met and you told me that you were still open, but you were pretty sure you’d declare a major in philosophy or english because you wept the first time you read the perks of being a wallflower and we shared a sacred and unquenchable lust for bad science fiction

remember how hopeful we were – that this school would allow us to “find ourselves,”  “change the world,” and other slogans we recited from all the view books the ones we stitched to our throats  when they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up so when you changed your major to econ, so when you pledged that fraternity, so when you replaced t-shirt with j-crew,  so when you accepted that ‘prestigious’ position at an investment bank  and expected me to be proud of you because you were going to ‘dismantle the system from within’ because you were different from ‘them’ i couldn’t help but wonder at what point we become the tucked in shirt, the wallet in pocket, the 9-5 we grew up fearing you: whose love of learning stuck longer than the stickers your teachers adorned your homework with you: who couldn’t fall asleep after reading marx in debate camp because things finally made sense again you: who came to this university with a spirit unable to be disciplined  what happened to you?

you who sacrificed dream for diploma, revolution for resume, in that factory that produces profit out of potential prophet where change falls from hearts into pockets won’t teach you how to stop it 'cuz gotta make that endowment rocket! ‘liberal arts college degree’ becomes a fancy way of saying ‘can spend 8 hours designing power point slides’   OR ‘can forget all promises for promotion’ OR 'can quote classic literature at business dinners to seduce the clients' so what if this education was really about making you so ignorant that you forgot how to think for yourself? 

so what if the best way to dominate a world is to pretend that you are saving it?  you, the twenty something year old idealist gone corporate in your  first suit throwing theory at a Wall that will swallow you up and spit you back on the Street discharged like the cold hard cash of an ATM machine your heart beat reduced to a series of transactions when you hugged me goodbye i almost expected you to ask me for a receipt: proof of purchase for a friendship you consumed when it made cents for your career trajectory.

I’m sorry i did not make the cut for the walking resume you mistake as a body

But I want to believe you because I want to believe in the power of a creativity undisciplined: that time we read our first book, saw our first eclipse, saw her smile. The joy and chaos of it all. So what if it’s just chaos?  That space and time before friendship got postponed by deadlines future segregated into interviews and internships So what if we are really insignificant like the dot on the map from freshman year? Why does it matter?  What if we are nothing? What if that is beautiful?  What if we cried when our parents left us but didn’t tell each other?  What if I am crying because you are leaving me but will not tell you because I do not have the market value to make you listen that I think you are worth more than any salary increase they will give you, that your mind cannot be transcribed on a spreadsheet of numbers, that I am waiting here for you, broke, but not broken, remembering what you could have done before you sold out.

Thank you. In the spirit of full disclosure I am here to recruit you. This is not a recruitment interview like the ones your career centers have prepared you for. This is not about your resume and job skills. I do not care where you went to school nor what you majored in. These things are no longer relevant in a world where we are losing some of our most creative minds to the epidemic of success. This is not the crisis they tell you about on the news: that the economy is tanking, the world is at war. This is something different. This is a crisis of success. Too many things are working too well. The government isn’t broken; it is thriving. The universities are not broken; they are perfect. Our generation is not apathetic; it is flourishing.

This means that you are not actually a leader, an innovator, an exceptional student, and all of the other medals they have placed around your neck. These are merely accomplishments that you have been taught define your worth. Should you desire to be successful you will not actually bring human rights for all, eliminate poverty, end nuclear war, or fix Congress. If you go in with this mindset chances are you will be defeated like all the generations before us. The key to changing the world is to fail to live up to its expectations. My name is Alok Vaid-Menon and you could call me a fashionista, activist, or provocateur but I’d prefer to call myself a professional failure: someone who (at least my mother reminds me) was set for all the riches of the world but somehow took a detour on the way. You see, I grew up in a comfortable middle class Indian family where the expectation was that I’d always be some fancy schmancy academic. Both of my parents were PhD’s so from a young age the bar was set high: I remember getting chastised for talking on the phone rather than reading the New York Times. I had to learn how to argue for the legitimacy of everything. The key was finding a scholar who had written about something and then it became magically legitimate: this is how I discovered Critical Youtube Studies (it’s real). It’s not that my parents pressured me to do well in school; it was more of a quiet expectation. This was part of our immigration story: to move to this country and not challenge its rules, but do better than everyone else. Which goes to say that from an early age success seemed like the only way to justify my parents’ journey across the ocean. When I got into Stanford my parents didn’t really congratulate me, it was something more, well…expected. But when I got to school I started to see how violent success could actually be.

At my opening convocation – before we had actually done anything — I was told that I was surrounded by the future leaders of the world. Yet what I soon realized is that the way we were defining success was less about our impact and actually more about prestige.  In the beginning everyone seemed to have some brilliant idea of what it was going to take to change the world. But then at some point the methods became… shall we say…less specific. We were expected to congratulate the class leader– a self proclaimed ‘public servant’ – even though he accepted a job offer at a corporation that left hundreds of thousands of people starving. We were expected to applaud for a successful keynote speaker and not mention his vocal support for racist policies. Low and behold my classmates continued to flock to all of the talks by these ‘success stories’ not because of what they’d actually done, but because of this elusive concept of who they were.

Success has never really been about fixing problems; it’s been about perpetuating them. The pomp and circumstance around success masks over the incredible violence it takes to accomplish. Think about it: What happened to the thousands of students who were denied admission to your university? What happened to the hundreds of applicants who didn’t get the job you got? Who is made to suffer so that you can thrive? Do you even care?

Success is about self-promotion, not putting change into motion.

We are part of a generation whose elders expect us to fix the problems we inherited. But the irony is that we are bound to fail just like them because we are using the same tactics.

Success just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Ask yourself this: If all the best universities really produced the most successful leaders then why do we still have so much corruption?  If all the success stories throughout time were really successful then why do we still find ourselves living in a violently unequal world?  I think it’s time we broke up with success, at least as it’s currently been defined.

I know you’re skeptical. This contradicts well everything we’ve been taught about how the world works. Success feels good and I am asking you to feel bad about it.  I get in: I sound totally ridiculous. It’s like what would it have felt like in second grade to write your first love poem and have your teach respond “you failed!” Hear me out. 

I didn’t always think this way. It took me failing — and recognizing how beautiful that was — to understand.

In 2011 I had the opportunity to work with transgender movement in South Africa. I was there to study the discrepancy between progressive legislation and the tremendous experience of violence. Naturally – as a type A model minority — things went according to plan. I got the most generous research grants, obtained cutting edge interviews and I genuinely felt that I had identified what could be fixed.

I returned to the US to start writing my thesis. In the process I got an email that one of the women I worked with in the office with had passed way. I had just listened to her interview the day before. Her name was Cym. What is the point of a thesis written in a language inaccessible by the very people it is about? What is the point of a researcher who knows the name of theorists but not the names of her own neighbors? Who is invited to present a paper on a movement and who must die for it? I never spent the time getting to know Cym because I was so fixated on being the perfect academic. I was so concerned with success that I glossed over the places where real transformative work could have occurred: the work of building trust, solidarity, empathy. The hard and invisible parts. I shared the same office with her for two months and I couldn’t tell you her favorite color, where she lived, and what made her weep for joy. The only parts of her that mattered were the parts that fit into my own analysis. 

Success can be a violent and manipulative process. The thesis committee didn’t care about my ability to contribute to the movement, my ability to make the knowledge relevant and accessible by local organizers. The publishing of my thesis would do nothing to end violence in South Africa – if anything it would continue it so that future foreign researchers could come and study it for their own job promotion. Let’s call that a success story. So I changed my topic. I deleted Cym’s interview. And I started thinking. Even though I failed at being an academic, I succeeded at becoming a better human being. Failure is, in its own way, another type of success. The system isn’t broken.

Every problem in the world can actually be reconsidered as the successful implementation of an idea: the persistence of segregated schools is the accomplishment of institutionalized racism, the crisis of student debt reveals the success of the logic that we should pay for our education rather than be entitled to it, the persistence of violence against LGBT people reveals the clout of a currency of intolerance. These issues are not problems. They are victories; they are success stories.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working. It is working so well that it teaches us that it broken in order to keep us continually trying to improve it rather than building alternatives.

To be successful is actually to maintain the status quo. Few of us have thought about who determines the standards of success let alone challenged them. Because we have allowed the crisis of success to go unregulated, we find ourselves in a peculiar state of contradiction: celebrating so many success stories while by and large – the world is actually getting more unhealthy, unequal, and unbearable for the majority of people.

Those of us interested in solving these problems can no longer defer to the typical success sorry. We have to create new models of success: models that are not as superficial and selfish. Our models might be thought of as failures, and to some degree they are right. We are failing to accept a world of injustice. We are failing to buy into the myth of progress. We are failing to leave one another behind.

So I encourage you to fail more.

Consider how your passion has been stolen from you and manipulated into a career trajectory oriented toward status and not substance. Think about whose standards define success and what this success will actually and realistically accomplish for people beyond yourself.

And what I hope you will find by failing is that a whole new world of possibilities opens up for you: like the time I failed and remembered how to love strangers. There are possibilities for transformation hidden by our drive to succeed. This is actually the most important work: work like building relationships with your neighbors, crying together, making art and movements, healing, and all of the million skills that will never fit on your resume. These can become your new standards of success. Think about the parts of the day you do not tell people about, the gray areas that do not make it into your conversations and job interviews. These parts are the most exciting and transformative. Major in that feeling. Personally I am trying my best to reconsider the parts of my life I used to think were insignificant and find beauty in them in. The most important work I do now is entering data in spreadsheets, ordering food for political organizing meetings, listening to people share their stories, and calling my mom every night to explain my politics. These things are not going directly change legislation, they will not give me an award or a degree, but I hope they are doing the slow work of tearing the fabric of our culture.

And this, I think, is what is going to change the world. It’s not going to happen tomorrow or the next day it’s going to happen when we stop aspiring to be successful and reaching to the top, but rather reaching our arms out and clinging onto one another desperately and ferociously. Remembering an interconnectivity that our schools, our careers, our own insecurities are trying to eradicate. Remembering that we are nothing and how beautiful that is because they won’t be able to anticipate what is coming. I’d like to close with a poem to honor Cym and all of the other casualties of our success stories. my summer in cape town: or, i’m sorry for using you

They will ask you Whether your project can inflict ‘harm’ And you will respond: “minor discomfort” to expedite the review process 

Her name is Cym, And the arc of her smile mirrors her painted eyebrows,

On Mondays she asks you what you did over the weekend. You do not tell her. 

You are guilty of the conversion rate, how you can afford a club, a skin, a language that she never will. She wants to know what it feels like to live in America If you have a handsome boyfriend there who will buy you dinner sometimes

In your field research class they will teach you about the importance of obtaining consent.

Cym cannot sign your forms So she communicates with the earnesty of hazel eyes Smiles, tells you how she used to let heroine and men Inside of her and sometimes couldn’t tell the difference, Laughs Tells you how the cops would beat her in men’s prisons

In the international research workshop they will tell you not to get involved in your subjects’ personal life.

Your palms are sweaty, do not let them smear the ink. Keep writing as she laughs and encourages you to ask more questions

An aneurysm is a blood-filled bulge in the wall of a blood vessel. When the size of an aneurysm increases, there is a significant risk of rupture, often resulting in death.

A researcher is an ambitious distraction at the back of the room. When the amount of information increases, there is a significant risk of an epiphany, often resulting in a published paper. 

She will die nine months after your interview.  You can still remember the scent her smile 

One. Dear Cym: In America I am learning how to think that I am better than you. In fact, I am majoring in you. Don’t worry, they don’t use your name, keep it confidential

Two. I am turning your body into a new theory Academics work like Johns sometimes Don’t worry they will pay me to use you, I will cut you some of the profit in my acknowledgements.

Three. My thesis will be in English, In the accent you heard on re-runs of friends, Cym I’m sorry we weren’t friends, but I wanted to keep it professional I promise I will print it on the whitest paper I can find, So they can see the black in your words

Four. I will bury you in a library, I hope you will find home there In this haunted house of quotations Hanging on the shelves like skeletons

Listen to the recorded transcript on repeat, Feel her laughter crawl into you, Watch it spark the timber wood of your bones, And burn your paper in the flames

And cry because we refuse to let people inside of us in fear of imploding And cry because you have the story of a woman nested in the back of your throat and you do not deserve it.

Dear Cym

by Mauro Sifuentes

I’ve noticed a giant uptick in pop-culture criticism, especially within progressive, queer, and people of color communities. This criticism is usually aimed at news articles, current events, judicial maneuvers, police cruelty, movies, music videos, celebrities, etc. that exemplify a dominant racism. Critiques are usually leveled against forms of racism that most college Ethnic/Gender/Women’s/Queer Studies students can easily recognize after taking an Intro class and that many feel equipped to analyze based on rudimentary tools. Paring it down to the essential messaging, the arguments in these analyses follow this basic structure: point out something is racist, list how that thing is racist/appropriative, blame the white people responsible, then end the piece of writing feeling righteous and vindicated. Usually, people of color are portrayed as immune from blame and the category “white” is rendered flat and monolithic.

I am usually quick to notice and critique subtle dynamics formed through a racism that permeates every aspect of U.S. culture. Nothing here exists outside of racism. Let me repeat: nothing here exists outside the dynamics of racism. Having said this, I also feel it important to say that white people aren’t exactly the problem, though this may sound strange. It is the regulatory ideal of whiteness that strangles all people, except white people stand to benefit disproportionately for assimilating into these ideals. Having had many conversations with both white and mixed-raced people about experiences of race, I’m often baffled by how dismissive many progressive people of color can be when it comes to issues of race. White, as a category of analysis, is an ever-shifting category, with lines drawn and redrawn constantly. There are also huge differences in racial experience, mediated by class, nationality, gender, sexuality, ability, region, and religion. Our impoverished analysis of race has led us to passively absorb tropes of biological determinism that tell us that race is about genetics rather than socialization. Just as all people of color of various identities contain great depths of diversity, so do white people. We need to acknowledge the violent processes that go into teaching white people how to exploit imbalances of power. We need to make space for the rich histories of resistance to racism that have existed within white and European communities for centuries; to ignore these histories is also contributing to a disturbing trend of anti-Semitism that I’ve picked up on in communities of color. We refuse to acknowledge the different ways that Jewish communities live their whiteness – to say that all white/European people are always-only oppressor is to mask rich and complicated legacies of Jewish (and Irish and working class and…) resistance. As a mixed-raced person of Mexican and Irish/Scandinavian (white) descent, I often feel as though I have to leave a part of my family history at the door when I enter into communities of color, especially those who invest a lot of energy in imagining themselves as pure and devoid of the problematic dynamics of oppression. One of the most intense effects of a history of racism is the search for purity – an effect I see reproduced in many progressive communities of color. We cannot grant ourselves the privilege of reactivity if we ever hope for change. Our analyses of white people and culture must become more particular and robust. Reactivity can be a moment to pass through as we come into full consciousness about the devastating effects of racism, as our eyes are opening and we are seeing race for the first time through a critical perspective.

My straight, white, male father used to unknowingly absorb a lot of my frustration with regard to my immediate family’s history of assimilation. I used to blame him in my mind for a lot of the issues that came up in my family, with regard to classed and raced expectations of me, until I realized that my own analysis was so flat that I wasn’t able to acknowledge the ways that living with a family of color as the only white member shifted him in so many crucial ways – I found that I was, in fact, reproducing a denial of agency to myself and my other family members. People of color are often portrayed as passive actors, rather than agents of change. My father has become pleasantly odd through the decades, doing most of the cooking, always offering food to visitors and friends, asking questions of curiosity and humility about my queer/trans life, and becoming increasingly frustrated with the ways that imbalances of power hurt the world (and his children).

Every resistance is colored by the oppression whose conditions it seeks to alter. Black is beautiful. Queers are sexy. Trans people are powerful. These tropes, while serving as forms of resistance, still leave much unquestioned. We are united only by mistreatment and by the complex ways we have internalized mistreatment; alliance ought not be reduced to Facebook debates and comment-policing. Meaningful engagement requires depth of involvement and continued tenure in community spaces. As the phrase “social justice” becomes increasingly trendy, how people understand what constitutes “social” and “justice” becomes evermore problematic as it is stripped of meaning. We have to learn rigor and what it can look like. We must not focus only on that which affirms us. As many queer spaces are predominantly shaped by those who have been socialized female (women, female-assigned-at birth genderqueer and transgender people), we have to contend with an effect of internalized sexism that no longer requires the presence of straight men to function: we demand interpersonal affirmation because we are denied structural approval in so many moments. When we become locked into specific roles, we are unable to be allies. We need to strengthen our communities so we can be allies to one another and to those outside our immediate circles.

I do not perceive much humility within our communities, beyond self-labeling as such. One result of our oppression as queer people, people of color, and trans people is that we are given the binary option of being a know-nothing or a know-it-all; by this, I mean that in a world that recognizes intellectual posturing as a form of authority, we might not be taken seriously if we demonstrate any admission of partial knowledge. Instead, we flaunt pseudo-knowledge and personal experience as the be-all-end-all. Somewhere along the lines we conflated experience with expertise. While experience and second-hand information can be incredibly useful and powerful, what becomes of us when we try to universalize our experiences inappropriately? It is an act of strength and vulnerability to admit that we are confused, that we don’t know enough, and that we can always push ourselves to be better. If we refuse to fight against class oppression by sidelining issues faced by working class whites, we denigrate the rich history of solidarity between working class whites and people of color. Competing with one another is also a product of internalized oppression – who do we push back on most? How do we engage people across difference? Call-out culture borders on verbal abuse – how do we become strong enough to be hospitable and patient? The violence of conditioning people into different groups is a form of violence that begins when we are all small children and have no say over who influences our perspectives. We must keep this in mind and we must assume that everyone is doing the best they can with the information they have been given – our job is to pay attention to what keeps information away from groups of people and to how we can build relationships to gain the entitlement to push back on all the -isms that come up. We must do all of this while holding ourselves accountable to the -isms that largely go unquestioned in meaningful ways in our own lives.

Drawing binary oppositions (POC/white, black/white, straight/queer, etc.) and focusing energy and attention on white people and all the ways they fuck up distracts us from the work we need to do in so many moments. It is also draining. The hardest thing for us to accept is that white people as individuals do not oppress us, but that structural racism positions people across imbalances of power to enact mistreatment on others. Internalized racism makes it so that we cannot be strategic about how we respond to racism when it shows up interpersonally, so we rage against each white person as if they are the whole structure of racism, freezing both white people and ourselves (people of color) in place. We also need to understand that constructs of race in the United States are particular to this time and place and that what constitutes a white person in San Francisco is different from a white person in the North East United States or a white person in the South or in England or South Africa and so on. Gaining an international perspective will help us think more critically about how race functions here in the U.S.

Essay by a Gradient Lair guest writer, Lauren Chief Elk:

Black and Native American women experience the highest rates of violence. It has been largely researched and reported that the number one cause of death for both Black and Native women is murder. In the current mainstream conversation it’s important to have awareness of current rates of violence but also important to acknowledge the history of violence against Black and Native women. Violence against Black and Native women is historically a form of terror perpetrated by White men against both of our communities, and the sexual and physical abuse of Black and Native women was legal (1). Violence against Black and Native women was and is a pillar of both ongoing genocide and slavery. Both Black and Native American women face difficulties with the legal system. Many scholars, activists, and victim advocates have long discussed state and colonial violence against women of color, and the legal system reflects and reinforces that. This is directly a symptom of ongoing genocide and violence against our bodies not considered illegal. 

It is difficult to be expected to report incidences of partner violence when police respond with dual arrests of victim and perpetrator as mandatory arrest laws have led to significant incarceration of brown and Black women who are victims of violence. There is also the threat of police officers assaulting us directly, even in the name of public safety (2). We live in a society that constantly tells us to just fight back or self- defend, but as cases like that of Marissa Alexander and as Project Nia points out, we have no selves to defend and are again criminalized (3). We also have to remember that in many places domestic violence is considered a crime against the State, not the person. This means the person who has been assaulted does not have the power to press charges—that decision depends on whether or not police considers your case worthy of building and whether the prosecutor considers charges worthy. In addition to domestic violence being a crime against the State, it is only a crime if the abuse fits the legal definition of violence. Law enforcement is predominantly looking for immediate signs of a physical attack, and in a lot of situations, signs of violence aren’t immediately available. With the idea that Black and Native women are “unrapeable” (courtesy of stereotypes and myths about sexualities) and are immune to violence (not considered women) complaints of domestic violence are taken even less seriously. It is very clear that Black and Native women are deemed not worthy of equal rights and protections and this is proven by lack of prosecution (and reporting) for women of color.  

This year the Violence Against Women Act was reauthorized but not without huge pushback from many of our senators and representatives. A piece of legislation that has always been easily reauthorized took over 500 days for our government to pass because of the new provisions in the bill for Native American women who reside on reservations. At one point during the VAWA floor debates Representative Gwen Moore invoked Sojourner Truth’s extraordinary “Ain’t I A Woman” speech to address Native women. She asked our Congress, “Don’t women on tribal lands deserve the constitutional right of equal protection and not to be raped, and battered, and beaten…ain’t they women?!” (4) She asked this, and many of our Congresspersons responded with a resounding “No.” (5)

The mainstream anti-violence movement is still heavily invested in protecting white-womanhood. This is evident by things like “teach men not to rape” without acknowledging racism and colonialism. There is no part in this education that says “teach men not to rape Native American women, because they’re most likely to be sexually assaulted than anyone else, particularly by [white] men.” (6) It is also evident that the anti-violence movement that is pushed by mainstream feminism is not concerned with Black and Native women’s historical or current relationship with the legal system. VDay and Eve Ensler (7) who are famously lauded as the leaders of the feminist anti-violence movement have decided that February 14, 2014 will be the global day to report your assault, as if Black and Native women can just simply do that. In May, Ensler stated, “We are asking women who have been attacked to file charges” at an event in Philadelphia. First of all, Pennsylvania (the state where she made this grand announcement) is a place where domestic violence is a crime against the State, and as mentioned earlier, this means you do not have the discretion to file charges, it is up to the prosecutor. Secondly, the constant push for criminalization as the only solution to violence demonstrates the total lack of concern for Black and Native women who are victims. But when you’re still predominantly concerned with protecting white-womanhood, these issues can be easily dismissed.

Although the state and mainstream anti-violence movements are mostly invested in protecting white womanhood (this is evident by who gets laws passed based on their experiences, campaigns in their honor, funding for services, etc.) there are instances where society has enacted positive changes for victims of violence that was not based in that. In 2007, a transgender woman of color named Ruby Ordenana was raped and murdered in San Francisco. Her rape kit was not processed until two years later; it was only after that in which her attack was linked to the assaults of other trans women by a man who was serially assaulting them. After the man was convicted the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a new law that mandates rape kits must be picked up by authorities within 72 hours of being collected and processed within 14 days (8). As part of this new law San Francisco also established the Sexual Assault Victim Bill of Rights which says law enforcement officials have to notify victims with specific information, and victims have the right to obtain information about their rape kit and case. Based on the collective need to protect and honor the humanity of trans women of color, San Francisco’s groundbreaking law has now become a model statute for the rest of the country. This law is revolutionary because in at least one area of law enforcement, officials can’t toss the experiences and humanity of women of color aside, but because of this fact, the law and foundation of this law have seldom been acknowledged in any areas of feminism, including by those involved in the anti-violence movement. 

With our tanked economy and federal and state governments constantly cutting funding for social programs (with program funds to combat violence against women being one of the first things cut), it is increasingly important for us to create and support our own community initiatives - initiatives that address current and historical trauma. Save Wiyabi Project’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month image series focused on simple ways to support people who have been abused because we are constantly concerned with community and individual accountability in violence. We have to deconstruct our situations, hold ourselves accountable, and mend our own communities. Restorative justice doesn’t just mean restoring the individual, it means restoring everyone. Other groups like the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (9) constantly work to dismantle systems of oppression and cultivate solutions applicable to Black and Native women, including trans women. Look to who is already doing the work for support and guidance and assist in figuring out how to further expand it. 

Sources: 

Sexual Assault and Women of Color, At The Dark End of The Street

Stop-and-Frisk: Women Who Are Stopped Feel Deeper Embarrassment

Project Nia: “No Selves To Defend”

Gwen Moore (video)

VAWA and Native women

Amensty International - Maze of Injustice

VDay/Eve Ensler

San Francisco/rape kit law

INCITE!

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Lauren Chief Elk (Nakoda/Blackfeet) is the co-founder of Save Wiyabi Project (@SaveWiyabi), an advocacy group that addresses interpersonal violence in Indigenous communities. She is a long time victim advocate, community organizer, and educator on relationship and sexual violence. You can find her ranting on Twitter at @ChiefElk.

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Let the hinges wiggle out of their holes. Strip

wood with your twisting. Honor maggots, but not flies. Twist

tie everything you own to everything you own. Elbow

to bicep. Torso to sternum. Faith to the back of your hand. Slap

someone with the back of your hand. Hold court with

no one watching but every single one of your selves,

especially the runt. And her little sister. Carry packages

over the river above your head, even if reassured

they’re water proof. There are always leeches.

Carry salt. Salt their wicked blind bodies. Use a match.

Careful not to burn your fingers. But if you burn, relish.

Pain will make you pure again. Talk into canisters

attached to strings, leading to empty cans

of pumpkin in the ears of your demons. Tell them

to slow down. Everyone needs a vacation. To refresh

for life’s purpose. Tell a story to your littlest

demon. Rock her on your knee. Whisper mosquito

sonnets into her coiled leaf bones. When she falls into a deep

slumber, return her to her pride. Even demons need their beauty

sleep. Feed yourself like a mother bird

feeds her young. Because the second time

around you might be able to digest what you tell yourself.

Screw wheels to the bottoms

of everything. Even your knees. Even your hinges: don’t tell them                               they aren’t bolts                               no one likes to                               hear about that

sort of thing. Cover your calluses. Toil.

No one should see you work this hard to remain

vertical. Without chemical. Repeat yourself

in list form. Drop yourself in the grocery.

Paula Gunn Allen, American Indian Writier (via poppascrew)

Soldiers, bishops, generals, kings, and other assorted stuffy white men badly in need of a bath — that’s what white people call history, friends.

"You get proud by practicing…" - Laura Hershey Some days you would tell them, the kids on the playground,  you were born different. Some days you would say you were just like them but needed a little help. Some of the time it felt real to say that your legs were broken and would never get better. Eight years old and you were into complexity. Not a bad start I would say. The only requirement was that you told these stories yourself because it was the only way. That time on your first day of middle school when you visited the second grade classroom and the boy took one look at you and dived underneath a bookcase, I’m sorry about that. You did a really good job luring him out with your warm smile and kindness, but it was totally reasonable for you to wonder when it was that you entered the business of assauging discomfort and why it is that you got so good at it. You were born into a world where disabled people were and are doing battle against an image of ourselves that was unthinkably negative and devaluing. I have learned about, indeed I have felt in myself, the sense of urgency that this instills. I sometimes scathingly refer to this as “operation overcompensation.” And it is unfair and it has done harm particularly, I think, to the disabled women of our generation. None of that is to undermine the horror of what people before us have experienced. I try to think a little bit everyday about the fact that I live at home with my family most of the time. When I’m not home I’m at school. These simple facts make me (us) different from most people before us. But in our efforts to prove ourselves, let’s try, not to lose our richness.  One time I was at a scooter demo with my mom and I met the first person ever who I consciously perceived as being a disabled activist. She told me that what her organization did was to raise hell until everything got better. I admired the sentiment, but could feel innately that that is not what I believed in. I do not eat nails for breakfast and I do not raise hell. I value nuance and complexity more that I value hard hitters. This realization evoked in me a good deal of self-loathing. I would lie in bed at night wondering if I would end up on the right side of history or have the courage to help my community. This, I’m sorry to say, is what you have to look forward to.  What I think now is this: the movement takes all types and who you are is valuable. I think the work of that movement is not to take an extremely negative narrative and flip it positive. It’s to challenge all narratives that make disabled lives seem simple. You are not worthless and you are also not a hero (yet), live rich and live messy (a concept I took from Harriet McBride Johnson—read her!) and you are doing the work of disability rights activism. That and tell your story  Part of what this means is that just as you question the systems that kept disabled people down, question the ones that govern the way we pull ourselves back up. Think about what it means to overcome disability, and how if we do maybe something gets lost. I promise that this way you will start to develop some pride in who you are. Also, think about how the narrative of overcoming compounds the stigma on people who can’t function within it. Think about how ideas about success are reinforced by societal forces bigger than any of us and that they leave people behind sometimes.  You need to know that understanding complexity doesn’t have to mean lacking moral grit. It just means being generous to people until you can’t be anymore. Like that time when the accessible theater led you through a garbage dump for the privilege of riding up their freight elevator, maybe we should have left that theater. Maybe equal access concerns are not segregation, but they are not ok either. So challenge yourself to navigate that thoughtfully.  Figuring things out is really a life-long process. Feel the urgency, don’t let it take your pride. I am writing to you from a place of hope still to come. 

"In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the years, I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their gender/race/sexuality/class/etc. privilege.  These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: “I am so and so, and I have x privilege.”  It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions were.  It was not as if other participants did not know the confessor in question had her/his proclaimed privilege.   It did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their privilege.  Rather, the confessions became the political project themselves.    The benefits of these confessions seemed to be ephemeral.  For the instant the confession took place, those who do not have that privilege in daily life would have a temporary position of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and forgiveness.  The sayer of the confession could then be granted temporary forgiveness for her/his abuses of power and relief from white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt.   Because of the perceived benefits of this ritual, there was generally little critique of the fact that in the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of domination it was supposed to resist.  One of the reasons there was little critique of this practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to be the “most oppressed.”  Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the judge of those who did have privilege.  Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed.  Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered.  “I may be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me to be oppressed when we played together.”  Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible.  These rituals often substituted confession for political movement-building.  And despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.

These rituals around self-reflexivity in the academy and in activist circles are not without merit.   They are informed by key insights into how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute who we are as subjects.    Political projects of transformation necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as well.  However, for this process to work, individual transformation must occur concurrently with social and political transformation.   That is, the undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges.  The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice.  Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression.  However, the response to structural racism became an individual one – individual confession at the expense of collective action.  Thus the question becomes, how would one collectivize individual transformation? 

[...]

Native peoples are not positioned as those who can engage in self-reflection; they can only judge the worth of the confession.  Consequently, the presenters of these narratives often present very nervously.  Did they speak to all their privileges? Did they properly confess?  Or will someone in the audience notice a mistake and question whether they have in fact become a fully-developed anti-racist subject?  In that case, the subject would have to then engage in further acts of self-reflection that require new confessions in the future.

Thus, borrowing from the work of Scott Morgensen and Hiram Perez, the confession of privilege, while claiming to be anti-racist and anti-colonial, is actually a strategy that helps constitute the settler/white subject.   In Morgensen’s analysis, the settler subject constitutes itself through incorporation.  Through this logic of settlement, settlers become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous – land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture.  Thus, indigeneity is not necessarily framed as antagonistic to the settler subject; rather the Native is supposed to disappear into the project of settlement.  The settler becomes the “new and improved” version of the Native, thus legitimizing and naturalizing the settler’s claims to this land.

Hiram Perez similarly analyzes how the white subject positions itself intellectually as a cosmopolitan subject capable of abstract theorizing through the use of the “raw material” provided by fixed, brown bodies.  The white subject is capable of being “anti-“ or “post-identity,” but understands their post-identity only in relationship to brown subjects which are hopelessly fixed within identity.   Brown peoples provide the “raw material” that enables the intellectual production of the white subject.

Thus, self-reflexivity enables the constitution of the white/settler subject.  Anti-racist/colonial struggles have created a colonial dis-ease that the settler/white subject may not in fact be self-determining.  As a result, the white/settler subject reasserts their power through self-reflection.  In particular, indigenous peoples and people of color become the occasion by which the white subject can self-reflect on her/his privilege.  If this person self-reflects effectively, s/he may be bestowed the title “ally” and build a career of her/his self-reflection.  As many on the blogosphere have been commenting recently (see for instance @prisonculture and @ChiefElk), an entire ally industrial complex has developed around the professional confession of privilege.

Of course, this essay itself does not escape the logics of self-reflexivity either.  Rhetorically, it simply sets me up as yet another judge of the inadequacies of the confessions of others.  Thus, what is important in this discussion is not so much how particular individuals confess their privileges. If Native peoples are represented problematically even by peoples who espouse anti-racist or anti-settler politics, it is not an indication that the work of those peoples is particularly flawed or that their scholarship has less value.  Similarly, those privileged “confessing” subjects in anti-racism workshops do so with a commitment to fighting settler colonialism or white supremacy and their solidarity work is critically needed.  Furthermore, as women of color scholars and activists have noted, there is no sharp divide between those who are “oppressed” and those who are “oppressors.”  Individuals may find themselves variously in the position of being the confessor or the judge of the confession depending on the context.  Rather, the point of this analysis is to illustrate the larger dynamics by which racialized and colonized peoples are even seen and understood in the first place...

[...]

The Trayvon Martin rally in NYC marched 30 blocks to Times Square

Hey tumblr,

You may have heard about Marissa Alexander, the black survivor of domestic violence from Jacksonville, FL who was sentenced to 20 years for defending herself from her abusive estranged husband.  Despite the fact that Marissa caused no injuries and has no previous criminal record, and despite the fact that Florida’s self-defense law includes the right to “Stand Your Ground,” she was arrested by Jacksonville police, charged with aggravated assault, and sentenced to 20 years due to mandatory minimum laws.

Marissa’s supporters are getting organized and there’s a Free Marissa tumblr: http://freemarissanow.tumblr.com

and a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FreeMarissaNow

So, please help spread the word!

So yesterday I went to a Justice for Trayvon rally in downtown Chicago. I was hoping for a space where grief and anger could be turned into righteous action, organizing strategy, and community building. Instead I found myself in the middle of a propaganda party being co-hosted by the International Socialist Organization and the Revolutionary Communist Party. 

Newsflash radical/liberal/democratic/wherever you politically are white activists: the death of black children and issues of racism are not spaces to advertise for your predominately white political parties, why your beloved chairman or leader has the solution to racism in America (even though nine times out of ten your leader is a white man), speak over or on behalf of people of color, or center yourselves in the movement to end racism and white supremacy in this country. 

If you’re essentially saying that your “allyship"/concern/passion/drive can only be tapped into if people of color center your bodies and voices in our (many) movements, then you’re effectively saying you don’t want racism and white supremacy to end. that you are perfectly fine with status quo, essentially everyday life as many people of color know it. 

no matter how much you claim you’re actively anti-racist or not racist, no matter how many critical race theorists you can quote, no matter how many brown friends you have, no matter how many times you can turn the black power fist into a white one, no matter where you went to school, what you took in school, or how much music by brown people you have on your iPod. 

say what you mean and mean what you say

and if you can’t manage that much