Completely unforeseeable situation: Without slavery we'll have no slaves. D:

So it turns out when you deport your exploited refugee workforce, you don't have a conveniently-exploitable workforce anymore. OHNOES.

Georgia's new crackdown on illegal immigration has been law since July 1. Farmers say it's scaring away both documented and undocumented workers. And now other sectors are beginning to feel the pinch. Some businesses say without these workers, they can't get the job done.

John Barbour's company, Bold Spring Nursery, is one of those businesses. Barbour grows 200 varieties of shade trees on his 1,100-acre farm in Pulaski County, south of Macon.

It's painstaking work. Employees manually prune specimens for high-end landscapes. Barbour's trees dot the Augusta National golf course and the Washington Monument.

Driving on his farm, Barbour says he's lost five workers since May.

"We had three Latinos quit, and move out of Georgia, and say they no longer felt safe in Georgia," Barbour said, while driving around his farm last month. "They didn't walk up to me and say, 'Hey I'm here illegally and I have to get going,' but now it's probably safe to assume that was the situation."

He continues, "You could look at that and say, 'Mission accomplished, right?' That's what we are trying to do, is get rid of illegal immigrants, but..."

"Now you have to fill those jobs."

"That's right," he said.

In an attempt to replace them, Barbour hired two Americans. Tending to trees in the hot sun, they couldn't handle the same hours as he and his migrant workers.

"They lasted seven weeks," which was longer than usual, he said. "The problem was, during those seven weeks, we averaged 47 hours a week working, and they averaged 27 hours a week."

Link courtesy of elf.

I keep reminding myself that this is going to affect a lot of people who are not personally to blame for the fact that a large part of our economy is built on near-slavery and that I shouldn't be happy that they're going to suffer the economic consequences of the voting habits of Georgia racists (or at least those willing to pander to Georgia's racists). Living in Indiana, though, I am just all out of sympathy. I have heard too many people complain about how we got all these gottdamn illiguls stealin jobs and tax dollers an' we oughta just kick 'em all out.

But god fucking forbid they have to pay an extra dollar for fruit. Their racism and their reasoning are seriously not getting along here, and it's like a shit-ton of people didn't see this coming. Little known history fact: building an economy on the exploitation of people who are too desperate or scared to demand better is bad, and for more reasons than "slavery is mean."

Overall I'm just fucking pissed that we still have to contend with the "but if we end slavery, the prices of shit will go up because we'll have to treat workers like people" argument in twenty goddamn eleven.

Amusingly, just this morning I was remembering a conversation I had with Glenn Welch (the guy who writes the Things Mr. Welch is not Allowed to do in an RPG lists) about this years ago. He's one of those "ragh unlimited capitalism will solve all things because the free market is magic" guys, but he was simultaneously arguing that undocumented migrants are terrible JUST TERRIBLE because they're willing to work for less and in shitty conditions and as a result no self-respecting American can compete with them.

When I pointed out that it's ridiculous to argue that people who fail to compete in a capitalist market deserve what they get and also to argue that white American workers should be sheltered from the consequences of their failure to compete with migrant workers, he changed his tune and started talking about how awful the companies are who hire these workers to exploit them and how really we have to deport them all for their own good because illegal immigration is just so tragic. That didn't stop him from going all "THEY'RE STEALIN UR JOBS BY WINNING AT CAPITALISM OH WOE IS WHITE" on later occasions. This is typical of every conversation I have had with the kind of people whose votes are responsible for laws like Georgia's, and the one we got in Indiana more recently.

Pissed. Baffled. Also pissed.

"All Christians aren't like that!"

There's something I understand better now than I used to back when I was self-identifying as a theist. I, too, was really upset that atheists were so prejudiced and bigoted and just pigeonholed any religious people they knew and assumed that if you aren't an atheist, you're an enemy. Or something.

I understand marginalization and privilege a little better now, though. Only some of it is from beginning to identify as an atheist. A lot of it's stuff I've heard from LGBT people and people of color and feminists and just... y'know, people who have experience with this stuff. Here's what I've learned about generalizing about the members (or affiliates) of organizations that hate me (or you, or someone else, or whoever).

It's hard sometimes, when someone walks up wearing the badge and uniform of one's oppressors, to assume that they don't want to be associated with the other people wearing it. It's hard for me (for example) to see someone who self-identifies as Catholic and not see an ally of the homophobia, misogyny, and just general callousness that characterizes that organization. They may not personally hate women or gays or child rape victims, but they're comfortable affiliating with an organization that plainly does, and I have to wonder at that rate whether they're true allies.

Sadly, that type of Christianity is still setting the tone in a lot of the country. While I'm supportive of the efforts of other Christians to clean up their image, I no longer feel like I should suffer at the hands of the Christian cultural system and simultaneously do their PR for them. When more Christians are like Quakers, I'll talk about them like more of them are Quakers.

I get that it's got to suck having people running around acting a fool who are using teachings from the same book as you are to do some terrible things to innocent people. It always sucks to feel like someone else has enough control over your reputation to screw with it by being bigots and just generally showing their whole ass to the world.

That's the thing, though, about continuing to wear the badge and uniform of a group that--for a lot of people--has done them nothing but personal and very tangible harm. Depending on how badly they've been hurt and for how long and how much hope they have left, they might just assume that you're an ally to the people who hurt them. They're not assuming this because they're bigoted, or bullies, or intolerant. They're assuming it because they're tired of giving chances to people who put on that uniform and then getting kicked in the face for it. So... they stop taking the risk.

I'm not quite there yet, but I've seen people get there, and it's hard for me to begrudge them. It's not hate. It's hurt, and it's weariness, and they're right. They should never have had to always be the one giving out chance after chance after chance to people who didn't take it. It's hard exhausting work, and the people I know who've given up on trying to find common ground with Christians? That's why.

So this is why I've stopped saying, "Not all straight/cis/white/etc. people are like that! Please only talk about your painful experiences in a way that protects my feelings!" and it's why I think it'd be great if Christians did, too.

Things I am reading!

Obligatory mention of the attacks in Oslo.

Obviously the groups he was a member of and who were his (apparent) ideological guiding posts are appalled, you guys, just aghast and amazed that someone went out and did what they all seem to want done.

Sound familiar to you? Sounds familiar to me. Remember, kids. Every politically-motivated right-wing white murderer is an isolated case and not a real terrorist representative of any kind of trend and remember that people on the left are just as likely to gun down strangers. Right? So let's ignore the right-wingers and get back to being scared of brown Muslims.

More links!

Anders Behring Breivik was deranged, but also a serious conservative political thinker! Didn't complain enough about Jews in his manifesto, though, so Richard Spencer is going to fill in some gaps by linking to Kevin MacDonald. Can't make this shit up, guys.

The Political Ideas of Anders Behring Breivik

Okay, so. I resolved not to post anything about Amy Winehouse (because the Norway incident is obviously kind of a big deal), but this blog entry sort of made me curl up in a ball, so I judged it worthy of passing on. It's only partly about her. It's about the people like her that we can't see because there's no money in dragging them out to die in front of the world. Read it.

Yes, I’m an addict too: Why I’m no different from Amy Winehouse (H/T stoneself)

Unrelated, and in (sort of) better spirits: Scarleteen is one of the best things on the internet. I think if my hometown had had sex ed that looked more like this website, I would have seen a lot less rape and unplanned pregnancy among my peers through junior high and high school.

How You Guys -- that's right, you GUYS -- Can Prevent Rape.

It’s obviously hard for guys to really look at this stuff, but it’s also hard for women to know that rape is nearly always a crime done by men (as well as to live in a world where it’s something we are afraid of). We love the men in our lives dearly, very much want to be able to trust men, and we think of men, as a group, as our brothers. Suffice it to say, it’s also really tough for us to have to know that our actual brothers, our fathers, our boyfriends, our male friends, might be or have been rapists: it’s a terrible betrayal. So, while we women can’t personally understand, in some ways, how it’s got to feel for guys to be suspect with rape, or to know that it’s a crime almost exclusively perpetuated by a group to which you belong, in plenty of ways, we feel your pain, because men belong to at least one of our groups too: to the all-people group.

That's all I've got for now.

Winning it with Metta

Canvassing used to eat up a lot of my patience for having sensitive and nice conversations, and I'm finally getting my groove back. I had a conversation with somebody who complained about how rude atheists can be, and I made a difference instead of just chewing their face off. I'm pleased with myself, and with the universe for rewarding my effort at kindness.

Yes, this is a Reddit thread.

Not everybody has the spoons to sit down and explain that sometimes atheists act like they're going to be attacked because--newsflash--we basically constantly are. This time I did, and I was pleased with myself and with the person I was talking to and with the universe in general that I was able to make an impact.

Sending out huge gratitude to all the feminists, LGBT activists and wonderful POC who teach me patience every time I say some dumbass thing and they're super nice to me and make me understand new stuff. Turns out atheists need to know how to do that shit, too.

Stop Defending the Catholic Church: Day 3

Day Three: The Church Hates Africa

Scientists at The Lancet are really sick of the Pope distorting the evidence---AKA lying--about AIDS.

It is evidently the official position of the South African RCC that condoms have not prevented a single case of HIV ever, and that's what they're teaching vulnerable African populations. What could possibly go wrong?

Cardinal who heads the Pontifical Council for the Family suggests that condoms in Africa be labelled as unsafe and ineffective, comparing a condom to a cigarette filter. Way helpful, guys.

The RCC has such a problem with Africa that they're willing to let priests rape African nuns. Presumably they're less likely to get AIDS that way than if they rape African children. Or something. Of course, this plan doesn't work as well if you're still also raping the children. But more about that on Day Four!

If you missed it, here's Day One: The Church Hates Gays, and Day Two: The Church Hates Women.

What.

Why is the city of Montgomery condemning the property of African-Americans along a civil rights trail?

Over the last decade or so, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of homes in Montgomery have been declared blighted and razed in a similar manner. The owners tend to be disproportionately poor and black, and with little means to fight back. And here's the kicker: Many of the homes fall along a federally funded civil rights trail in the neighborhood where Rosa Parks lived. Activists say the weird pattern may not be coincidence. (...)

Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange didn't respond to my request for an interview, but he has insisted in other outlets that the reaction from Jones, Beito, and other critics is overblown. "I want property owners to act responsibly," Strange told an Atlanta Fox News affiliate last month. "If they don't care about their property then I want them to sell it to somebody that does care."

And yet one city resident, Jimmy McCall, was in the process of building a home when the city declared his property a public nuisance in 2008. When the city said the construction wasn't moving fast enough, McCall got restraining orders from both state and federal courts to prevent the city from destroying the building. The city tore it down anyway, then sent McCall a bill for the destruction. McCall won a court judgment for damages. The city is appealing.

Jim Peera, an Atlanta real estate developer, fought the city for six years over eight acres of low-income housing he owned that the city declared a public nuisance. After he won two court victories, two of his buildings mysteriously caught fire. He says the fire department never investigated, though a city official publicly suggested Peera set the fires himself to collect insurance. Peera eventually broke down and sold his land rather than fight the city's appeals. The property now belongs to Summit Housing Group, one of the country's largest developers of subsidized housing. Mayor Strange told ABC News last month that the city of Montgomery's involvement with these properties ends once the rubble is cleared—that the city isn't taking land from residents and selling it to developers. But in Peera's case, the city of Montgomery, not Summit, wrote the check for his land. (...)

Jim Peera filed an open records request for all of Montgomery's demolitions in 2008, then plotted them on a map, which he presented at a rally earlier this month sponsored by the libertarian public interest firm the Institute for Justice. The first thing you notice about Peera's map is that the vast majority of 2008 demolitions were west of Court Street, a part of the city that's mostly black. Within this area, the demolitions seem to fall rather consistently along the Selma to Montgomery Trail route. Hurst speculates that the city is trying to condemn and seize properties along the trail instead of buying them at fair market value—as eminent domain would require. I wasn't able to substantiate that claim (and short of a smoking gun document, I'm not sure how I could). But even if the demolitions are more generally about keeping eyesores out of a tourist area, it's hard to ignore the context: The city of Montgomery is destroying the homes of low-income, African-American residents along a trail commissioned to celebrate the civil rights movement.

About Moderation

This entry started as a comment on this entry about what "Progressive Christian" actually means. It's a subject about which I've given a lot of thought, and I've held this opinion for a pretty long time before being willing to say anything about it. There's a lot that I believe that I'm unwilling to say, for fear of alienating people who would otherwise be my allies.

Isn't that silly? Once I really looked at it, I realized what a condescending and nasty thing that is for me to think about my moderate theist friends. If you learn what I really think, you'll stop caring whether the courts blame rape victims, whether our judicial system executes an inordinate number of mentally-challenged and black or latino convicts, or whether gays ever have equal contractual rights in this country. You'll stop fighting with me if you hear the things that I didn't want to hear back when I was a theist.

I didn't, though. When I was a theist, I listened. Eventually. Brian can attest that it took a lot of time and patience on both of our parts before we came to a meeting-place on the question, but I didn't abandon the people and causes I cared about, so I'm going to trust the people reading this not to do it either.

See, when theism was still something I was down with, I'd get kind of butthurt when atheists lumped all religious people together and said that anybody who believes in a God is failing to get it, is unwilling to face their beliefs head-on and really question them, and is enshrining a dangerous irrationality. I hated it when I was painted as complicit in the social evils perpetuated by conservative religion. After all, I was a friendly science-loving atheist-dating Pagan. That stuff had nothing to do with me, and I was actively involved in fighting the tide of hatred and bigotry that came from those other traditions.

I thought, "What does this have to do with me? Don't they know that not all theists are like that? Some of us like you guys!"

I think it's the kind of argument that takes a while to really sink in. For example, I know guys who seriously have failed to understand why I didn't want to walk someplace alone at night. If I say, "Listen, if you were a woman and you lived with a target on your back and an entire culture ready to blame you for getting hurt because you weren't aware enough of that, you would refuse to go anyplace alone, too," the correct response is not, "Yeah, I mean, I see what you're saying, but you gotta understand. Not all men are like that, and it kind of hurts my feelings that you look at us all the same way."

To contrast, I've had guy friends who say, "Oh. Shit, you're right. Hang on, I'll get my coat." They didn't say that not all men are saddled with a sense of entitlement that drives them to do everything from trivialize sexual assault to actually commit it. They didn't say that. They didn't tell me. They showed me.

So what does this have to do with religion? If you're not sort of seeing where I'm going, let me make it a little clearer. I don't care anymore when people say "Not all X are like that," if they're not showing me. White people can't stop being white. We're a group of people who share a privilege whether we choose it or not. Men can't choose to stop being men. They're a group of people who share a privilege whether they choose to or not. Can we really say that Christians are similarly stuck? Or can they do more to show the victims of their privilege than white people, or men?

Can more be asked of people whose privileged position is based on VOLUNTARY factors like religious affiliation? I think it can. I think if you're choosing to be part of the dominant group, then you are a different sort of animal than the people who are born with privilege printed on their skin. Religious affiliation is a choice, no matter your beliefs. Ask Jimmy Carter. Ask Anne Rice. Ask any of the other followers of Christ who finally got tired of apologizing for the cultural system they're feeding and just finally DITCHED it altogether.

It’d certainly be POSSIBLE (not probable, but possible) to redeem Christianity and reshape it into the mold of progressive thought that I know a lot of Christians would find more palatable. But if we’re going to start deliberately molding and changing the religion to fit our beliefs, why NOT start from scratch? If the tradition needs so much change for it to be workable for progressive Christians, what exactly is their attachment to it in the first place?

I know there are moderate Christians who are trying to reform its myriad sects from within. What they’re doing is good. However, they still seem to me (as an outsider) to be more attached to keeping a Christian identity than they are to creating lasting cultural change. I mean, if suppressing women and hating LGBT people isn’t a dealbreaker when it comes to associating with a certain group, then what is? Is it too much for me to ask that people stop associating with a major world religion like the RCC until its holy men are assaulting children at a rate LOWER than the rest of the population?

I acknowledge the reformers’ hard work, but I can’t see it being sufficient. Until reforming Christianity seems like a faster or more effective way to fix the broken-ass homophobic and misogynist culture that Christianity currently feeds… then I’m not going to do their PR for them and disclaim everything I say with “but I know not all churches are like this.” If them reforming their own broken and terrible organizations relies on the cooperative efforts of the people they’re hurting in order to clean up their PR… then sorry. I guess they’re screwed, and I have a hard time regretting it.

And besides. Christian organizations and churches are not going to clean up their act until they know that their members are willing and able to vote with their feet. As long as people are content to stay with the group no matter what, Christian organizations have no incentive to reform. I don’t know if there are many self-identified workers for reform who are happy to see people like Anne Rice or Jimmy Carter voting with their feet, but unless churches realize that this is a very real risk, they won’t be listening to the reformers anytime soon. Why would they?

It’s the same reason that the DNC doesn’t listen to LGBT activists and allies. They know we’ll never vote Republican, so why appease us? They’ve got us forever. It’s not until they realize that we need to be appeased that they’ll ever start to try. The difference is that in a two-party system, LGBT people have nowhere else to go. Christians who want to find less poisonous religious organizations have plenty to pick from, so there’s no excuse not to join an LGBT-friendly congregation for the people who actually care.

The author of the blog post upon which I initially commented has another entry that goes a little further than I'm currently willing to, but which still really resonates with me. It's here, entitled Moderate Religion - Two Lies in One.

Moderate Christianity is deceptively alluring because of its seemingly scientific basis. Most educated Christians have no problem admitting that there’s something to evolutionary science, and they have no problem admitting that the earth is very old, and that dinosaurs once roamed about. In fact, if you get a good Moderate Christian into a theological discussion, they will almost inevitably tell you that they believe questions are good, and that any thinking person ought to question what they believe.

Forgive me, but the devil is in the details, and they’re missing a very, very important detail. The admission that questions ought to be asked makes it seductively simple to believe that moderate Christianity is ok, and doesn’t hurt anyone. Maybe it’s even helpful in some way. The problem, and the main point of this essay, is that questioning is not ok for moderate Christians. I can prove it. Next time you’re talking to a moderate, try getting them onto the nature of god. If you’re any good at debate, you can quickly steer them to one of the half dozen paradoxes inherent in god belief. Once you get them there, note how quickly they will revert to the position, “There are some things you just have to take on faith.” If you press them into explaining why, they will get defensive. They will probably end the discussion very quickly.

The simple, indisputable fact is that any god belief requires faith, and if you follow my writings at all, you know that “faith,” properly defined, is “belief in a thing despite evidence to the contrary, or a total lack of evidence.” Once you get them to the point of admitting that they hold a belief despite it’s opposition to reason, you can see that the facade of moderation is just that – a facade. At their core, they are exactly the same as fundamentalists. They just pick a more socially acceptable irrationality. What they really mean when they say you should question everything is that you should question everything – except for the validity of faith as a means of acquiring knowledge.

I know I'm quoting a lot here, and I apologize for leaving these great huge chunks of the other entry in here. However, for the link-phobic, I want you to understand why I'm including this.

Accepting the belief that some things are true and irrational is what gives a perception of validity to every religious belief. Right wing fundamentalists are crazy. These are people who are out of touch with reality. The reason they are not either publicly ridiculed or maybe even forcibly medicated is that they are given a free pass — because it’s religion. If people believed the Jolly Green Giant was making proclamations from the side of a can of vegetables, they would be examined by a psychologist. However, when they believe an invisible man in the sky tells them to kill abortion doctors, they’re politely encouraged to be a little more moderate.

The primary reason that moderates refuse to come out publicly against fundamentalists is the vulnerability of their own position. The really smart moderates know this, and I suspect that the rest sense it even if they can’t put their finger on it. The only way to effectively call out the fundamentalists is to challenge them on rational grounds. Moderates are too intellectually dishonest, or too scared, to apply logic to all questions, lest they have to give up the precious illusion that their own personal invisible friend will make everything ok for them. So, you see, the lie in Moderate Christianity is that it is moderate at all. It is not. It is, however, to use the colloquial term, chicken shit.

I'm not yet willing to blame the value on faith for all of our culture's ills. I'll say that right now. However, I do believe that faith can only exist under the same circumstances that allow racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia to exist. It requires that certain beliefs be above and beyond question, even if the person holding them also wishes to see themselves as rational (as, I think, most people do). I don't think faith is the root cause of all this rampant magical thinking, knee-jerk self-destructive loyalty and xenophobia, or prejudice. It's just another symptom of the same cowardice, the same unwillingness to really ask oneself a single crucial question.

"I know that I like this belief. But is it true?"

People of faith are not the cause of irrationality. However, because of their own love for their own pet delusions, they do tend to enable the irrationality of others whose insanity is far more dangerous in its impact. This... this I do resent, even if the faith they treasure is not itself a threat to me. I resent the other delusions protected by our reverence for faith. Faith may not be the root of our culture's ills, but defending faith defends those roots. By making it okay to build a worldview around an unquesetionable assumption and defending vocally the virtues of doing so, they unthinkingly (or perhaps uncaringly) defend the very premise behind what they tell me and tell me and tell me they're against.

They tell me and tell me and tell me, but this is what they show me.

Ancestry

This came up because someone asked me what I thought of PETA the other day.

My paternal grandfather moved to Massachusetts from Sicily. I seem to recall that he was a firefighter or something, but because he and my paternal grandmother were both married to other people, there isn't a lot of information about him to be had. My biological father reconnected with his half-siblings after his father's death, and I heard that this was kind of done in a... sort of crass manner. Knowing him, he probably walked in with a big sense of entitlement to the family he never had so everybody start loving him, damn it.

My mother's side is more complicated, and it's more interesting because we have more detail about it.

She did some geneology tracing, for which I am grateful. Means we have records of a lot of cool stuff now. Her great-grandfather (whom I remember, though he died when I was very young) was half-Kennebec (a tribe which was absorbed into the Penobscot, which was part of the Eastern Abenaki confederacy, for those of you who are curious in the whatnots and whyfores). He was a "half-breed" at a time when you DID NOT WANT to be of mixed-race. I guess he didn't like to talk about it, but I think my mother managed to make some connections anyway. I have a small sweetgrass basket and a silver and turquoise (and porcupine quill?) necklace that she was given to keep for me until I was old enough, and I do indeed still have them.

That was actually the source of my first little "a-ha" moment, the beginning of whatever racial consciousness I can claim. We were there for some kind of circle dance, and I remember being aware that it was important not to break the circle, not to leave, but I REALLY REALLY REALLY HAD TO PEE AND OMG I HAD TO PEE and I was a little girl so they laughed and said it was okay and I went back to their trailer to use the bathroom.

They had towels drying on a rack in the tub. There was a Barney towel. This blew my mind. INDIANS HAD BARNEY, TOO. It was then that it hit me. This world of beautiful jewelry and skilled crafting and dancing and reunions was actually the same world I lived in. Their kids watched the same television shows, whined in the store for their parents to buy them the same sorts of TV-inspired towels I owned (Power Rangers bath towels REPRESENT).

My mother traced her grandparents' ancestors back, and found that we've basically always been New Englanders. A ship came to our Eastern shore in the sixteen-hundreds (though I don't recall the year), and on that ship was an ancestor of my great-grandmother, and of my great-grandfather. New England is a small small world. When my great-grandparents met, did they realize that their ancestors might have known each other? Stuck on a boat for weeks or months at a time, how could they not?

Then things get fuzzier, and there may have been a union between a French royal and his favorite whore in there somewhere, but who knows. Makes a funny story, but I don't think there's good evidence to be had on that one either way.

As a nod to my Italian heritage, I took four semesters of Italian in college. It was the language that my grandfather's family spoke, and I wanted to know some of the rhythm of the words that would have seemed so familiar and automatic to them. I wanted to know how my grandfather's parents told each other that they loved each other. I wanted to know what they called their son when he was a boy.

My Native American heritage requires something a little more complicated. It requires that I at least learn SOMETHING from what European colonists did to Native American nations living in North America, doesn't it?

My lesson is this: Oppression matters because it's always closer to you than you think. You think you're a white New Englander whose ancestors didn't even own slaves like those bastard savage southerners? You think being from New England, where we fought in the Revolution and refused to own slaves, means that oppression is something that other people did to other people? It's closer than you think.

When movies like Dances with Wolves and AVATAR tell us that everything would have been different if Native Americans had just had a white guy to lead them in every battle and every negotiation, their lives wouldn't have been taken over and run by white people, I boggle and think, "How the hell dare you?" Because you're not talking about people who don't exist anymore, whose fates are mere hypotheticals. You're arguing about people who are still struggling to own themselves and their own lives, who are still fending off white people who want to come in and gobble them up until there's nothing left but whitewhitewhite. You're not telling people who are totally unlike me that they don't think right, and need somebody who can think a little "whiter" before they can succeed; you're telling people like me that they don't think right.

When a bunch of rich white celebrities from PETA come in to tell Native sealhunters that their culture marks them as animal-abusing savages, and that if they want to be good people they should chuck their culture and use the land like white people do (and yes, there are people who miss the monstrous irony in white people telling Natives how to live sustainably), I can't say, "those sealhunters aren't like me." Because they are. They may not be related to me, we may never meet, and they'd probably not see me as kin if we did. But damn it, those are my people you're shitting on, PETA, and you knock it the hell off.

When museums talk about Native Americans like they stepped out of history in the eighteen-hundreds and into museum dioramas where they would be enshrined next to mammoths and mastodons for the rest of time, part of me shouts, "Damn you, we're not extinct, I'M STANDING RIGHT HERE." Why is some little millionth-of-a-percent white girl the only one in the place who gets angry? Isn't there somebody more qualified who notices?

I'm not "Native enough" to claim membership in a tribe, and I wouldn't try. But just being connected to the people in Maine who are related to the people who are related to the people who are related to the people that my great-grandfather was so ashamed of has impacted who I am, and taught me a great deal. Those people are mine, y'know? And there's only so much I can do for them without taking their lives away from them and being part of the problem.

There are efforts right now to preserve the languages spoken by the people my great-grandfather was related to. I'm so glad they're doing that, and I hope that when I finally get back to New England, they'll still be offering lessons. Maybe it's not my tribe, not really. Maybe it's not my language, not really. But if I can help keep their language from dying by being one more person interested in learning it and passing it on... maybe I can be some use to them, after all. I owe them that much for all that they taught me.

Nuh uh YOU'RE a bigot!

Evidently complaining about racism, homophobia, and misogyny is just as bad as complaining about black people, gays, and women. Solution: refuse to have a problem with anything ever. Safe! (Bonus points for silencing minorities who don't realize yet that anger makes them bad people. TOP SCORE.)

I am really tired of being called angry and hateful because I have the gall to dislike the people who feed a system that shits on me (and several other sorts of people who may or may not be a lot like me) every day. I am particularly bothered by all the "bullying" language being thrown around. Here's what I feel is happening (and this is just my perception, but since it's coloring my reactions, I feel obligated to explain it).

A lot of people have a "zero tolerance" view of disliking other people the way that my junior high had a "zero tolerance" policy toward fighting. I ran afoul of this policy, and I think that the way it played out says a lot about how I approach these situations.

I was being bullied by a girl who not only followed me around the halls, but cornered me for what was clearly going to be a fight. It didn't come to that, but the administrators told both of us that fighting is wrong, wanted both of us to apologize, and we both got a suspension for in-school violence.

Seeing the connection? For those who aren't catching it, I'll beat the dead horse. Sometimes it isn't right to paint all parties to a conflict as though they are all equally wrong and all equally bad and all equally to blame for the situation. There are situations where this is the case, but they are far more rare than a lot of people would like to think.

The people who treat hatred of homophobia as though it were as bad as hating gay people, the people who treat revulsion toward racism as though it were as bad as revulsion toward other races, and the people who treat bitterness at misogyny as though it were as bad as bitterness toward women? They are doing to marginalized people what my school administrators did to me when I was a kid, and I don't stand for it now.

Just because there's a conflict doesn't mean everybody involved is a bad person, and just because someone finally hits back doesn't mean they're just as much of a bully as the person who's been brutalizing them all along. Conflating these two things is not only logically screwy, but it only serves to shame and silence people who are trying to finally stand up for themselves.

So yeah, I'll say it. I mistrust conservatives, mainly social conservatives. I mistrust social conservatives because people who identify that way have tried in many identifiable and clear ways to make my life less fulfilling than theirs, because I belong to several classes of people who have faced identical objections over and over to our desires to live as equal citizens in this country (whether it's my voting rights as a woman, my right to be free from religious coercion as an atheist, or my right to equal contractual rights when it comes to civil marriages).

My dislike is different from that of homophobes, religious zealots, or sexists, or racists, because I am not trying to deny them any rights except for their perceived right to hurt me. That means the roots of our dislike, as well as our intended aims, are not just a totally different animal, they're a whole world apart.

Every time somebody equates the two, calling both me and the people who hurt me "bullies," I kind of want to bite them in the face.

Man...

Why in the world should it take me more than an hour to try and explain to a Marine that using the word "Hajji" to refer to all terrorists/Arabs/Muslims/whatever is racist, and that this makes it bad?

Gaaah, such a waste of my time and energy. But whatever. Maybe some white person that he'll actually listen to will give him the lecture again later, and then maybe he'll get another one, and eventually we'll wear his ignorant ass down into something resembling decency. If the best I can do for the universe is to waste a little time explaining to someone that it's not okay to talk about people that way... then hell, I guess I can do that much.

Seriously obnoxious, though. This shit is not fucking sorcery, people. I get that in the military the norm is to be racist to the enemies you kill and rape the allies you serve with, but the rest of the world cannot fucking operate that way. At least, not in my goddamn IM windows. If that's the only space I can police, then so be it.

"Vanguard?"

I'm reading discussions about the idea of a communist "vanguard" for the working class, and trying to sort out my feelings about the whole thing.

The bare bones idea seems to be that you can't wait for a group of people who've been marginalized, denied educational opportunities, and denied opportunity for political expression to figure out how to start a revolution and then do it effectively (since all that crap piled on them seems aimed at preventing precisely that). The solution some people have come up with (if I'm understanding what I'm reading correctly) is that what's needed is for a "vanguard" of intellectual working-class-allies to agitate the working class, get them all riled up and carve out some room for them to express themselves and start exercising the power they were always told they didn't have or deserve.

This sounds fairly reasonable, especially because it's speaking to the part of me that gets very frustrated with low-income self-identified conservatives who repeatedly vote against their own self-interest (oddly, in the name of protecting the sanctity of self-interest itself). However, I feel like I have to check that part of me. That part of me also says that these low-income self-destructive conservatives are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them, and clearly a bunch of educated elites like me (since, though it seems odd to me, an education is kind of an "elite" quality, for good or ill) to come in and take their whole lives and all their problems out of their hands so that someone who knows what to do can make it all better.

How fucking disempowering is that logic? That's why I resist it. If I look at people who disagree with me as though they must be saved from their own decisions, I stop being the person who's trying to help them realize their own power.

Seems to me that's the power and the danger of the "vanguard" notion as well. Obviously not all corners of middle- or working- or lower-class society are going to be class-conscious enough (or have the energy to spare, or have safe enough conditions, though those are obstacles I don't see mentioned much in leftist discussions) to go out and kick patriarchal classist capitalist ass. Obviously those people who have a better idea should lend those skills to something useful instead of using them to further their own power.

But they can use this to further their own power. We've seen this with TEA Parties organized by multi-billion dollar insurance companies that are agitating less-conscious working-class people to give their power over from working for their own welfare to working for the welfare of their oh-so-helpful-and-sympathetic new corporate masters. That's the really nasty thing about astroturf organizing like this; it uses people's suffering and gets them all riled up to diffuse that bitterness and hope in a direction that accomplishes nothing and is therefore "safe" for the companies holding their leashes.

How to organize without doing that? How is it possible to get people interested in a cause without taking their energy and directing it as a commodity belonging to whomever can take it?

I think it comes down to something I learned in a women's empowerment circle (and yes, I attended one for a little while, and still would be if my work schedule allowed it). There is a huge difference between offering support to someone while she works through her problems, and taking her problems out of her hands to solve them for her. One of these affirms her right and ability to control her own life, and one undermines it even as it attempts to assist.

It seems to me there's a place for a "vanguard," but the term makes it sound cohesive enough to worry me. The only reason I'm even conceding the term is that--should the seemingly-impossible occur and a revolution come or... or something--these people will have power. They will. Since I am firmly against power being wielded in secret (since power that is openly named can be more easily held accountable), naming this kinda-sorta-group of people is okay with me right now.

I'm just trying to sort out my feelings on the whole thing, and trying to figure out just what it is that people are advocating when they talk about a "vanguard." I guess it might just be like any "ally" out there. White allies to POC are good, but shouldn't use their advantages to take over anti-racist work. Same with hetero and cis allies to LGBT people, men who support feminism, etc.

Maybe this is a case of an archaic word being jammed into a discussion which has moved beyond it. I'm still not sure what I think; I'm just rambling here and hoping it goes somewhere useful.

Happy Columbus Day!

I've officially seen a Youtube comment that impressed me on this Youtube video about Reconsidering Columbus Day.

"Columbus Day! The day we celebrate the much hallowed voyage of Christopher Columbus.

Screw Columbus! You can't wander into someone's backyard and start discovering stuff. I remember as a kid, I "discovered" some apples from my neighbor's tree. They told my mom, and I discovered an ass-beating later that day.

So on October 12th, If you really want to commemorate Columbus Day in a genuine way, Make a bunch of wrong turns and give some Native Americans smallpox."

Thank you, christopherdavis777 for completely blowing my mind by posting something intelligent on Youtube.

Martinsville

Place we canvassed today kind of pissed me off, because I was supposed to walk back to our pickup point along about a quarter of a mile of totally unlit suburb and unlit country road. A couple male coworkers met me along the way and I had a big fucking stick that I'd picked up early in my shift, but it still kind of freaked me out.

Then I found out on our ride home that Martinsville is apparently a huge Klan haven in Indiana. Which explained why the other burb went to Greencastle instead. One of our canvassers is black. According to one coworker, in a place like Martinsville and when it's getting dark now before we finish at nine, "he'd be dead."

And you know what? First off, it just burns me that there are places like this that my employer just straight-up has to make sure his black canvassers do not go. Secondly, if people in Martinsville are that fucking hateful and violent... is a woman alone all that much safer there than a black guy?

The most frightening thing about racist people, at least to me, is not how deeply and insanely they are capable of feeling and acting upon hate. It's how nice they seem when they're talking to a white girl. It's how fucking friendly and fucking concerned for my goddamned safety they are in a town where those very same people would string me right the fuck up if I weren't the same color they are.

God damn this place. I never want to canvass there again. Night left me feeling like shit. As my partner said, "I'm sorry. I know it's not my fault, but in a cold and impersonal universe that will never apologize, somebody should."

To every person of color I know and to every white person with a conscience, please accept my apology on behalf of this fucked-up universe we live in.

"Reverse Racism"

God damn it, white people. Stop talking about how POC have this huge advantage over you. Equating the baggage that comes with "nigger" and the baggage that comes with "cracker" is comparing apples to rocket ships. Even if white people and POC are equally racist individually, there are still more white people and white people have more money, which means that POC experience far more racism than white people.

Which means their experiences are not equivalent. Any white person who says otherwise is devaluing the completely-justified anger of those who--as a rule--have it harder than they do. And that's just a shitty thing to do.

Seriously. When a POC calls you a nasty name, it isn't the same as when you call them a nasty name. Do you know why? Because POC don't determine how you're treated. POC don't draw the lines around your life determining what you're able and not able to do. POC don't have power over you, which means that they can't ever swing the hammer quite as hard as you can--as hard as you have probably done without even thinking about it.

This is why a gay man calling a straight man a "breeder" isn't as bad as a straight man calling a gay man a "faggot." This is why a woman telling a sexist joke isn't as damaging as a man telling a sexist joke, even though they're both probably committing similar errors of stereotyping and generalizing. They aren't the same because even if the principle is similar... the damage isn't even comparable.

Why is this so fucking hard to understand. I'm so scared that I was this stupid before I started thinking about racism, that I was allowed to be this stupid. I sure hope not.

Fight or Flight

Odd dilemma. I'm trying to convince some guy on a forum that it's not cool to blame POC when they get--disproportionately, to a white person--angry about being marginalized. Saying, "I would have more sympathy if the guy weren't so angry/hostile/etc." has never really done wonders for civilized discourse.

My problem is that I want to vent about this, and the most socially-conscious people I know (the people who will intuitively know what I'm getting at without me having to explain all over again why victim-blaming is shitty) are POC. And, quite frankly, I don't want them to feel like they have to deal with this guy. A couple of them stepped in on their own to say, "wtf no," but the last thing I want them to feel I'm doing to them is saying "HEY COME HELP ME FIGHT RACISM! *bounce bounce* =D IT'LL BE FUN AND THEN YOU CAN GIVE ME A COOKIE AND I'LL BE ONE OF THE GOOD WHITE PEOPLE." This is a stupid thing to do.

So I'm ranting here. What the fuck, humanity. The fact that it still needs to be explained that, "No, you shouldn't punish a child of color for punching a kid who threw racist insults at him and who hit him first," in any social setting at all... it's just sad. When a relatively-privileged white girl can look at what you're saying and tell you, "Please stop placing further barriers to POC defending the legitimacy of their personhood," then you know it's glaringly obvious.

I'm not an expert at this shit. Quite frankly, as a white person, I think the best that I can do is say that the experience of being that marginalized is so huge and so comprehensively awful that I'm just not gonna get it. And as a result, the fact that I or this other guy or whoever else wouldn't have been upset enough to give a violent racist who attacked him a bloody nose? Doesn't mean shit. We don't know enough to be upset to a realistic degree. The best we can do is know we don't know, and try to have a little fucking empathy if we can.

Again. If a white person is calling you out on the implications of what you're saying, you've probably already gone so far over the line that people who've experienced real discrimination noticed loooong ago, and long ago wrote you off entirely as beyond redemption--at least redemption by them.

I don't want a cookie. Not wanting victims to be shit on for defending themselves doesn't make me awesome. It means I have half a damn conscience. I want people to stop failing so hard that it takes a member of the privileged race to tell them they're out of line. But that's not going to happen. So now I want a nap and a vacation from other people.

What pisses me off most, I think, is knowing that I can walk away from this whenever I want because I'm white. I can choose not to engage in this, and whether I'll even pay attention to it is completely optional. So I don't feel like I deserve to walk away just because I'm tired of it and getting angrier than I want to be right now. What gives me the right?

Troy Anthony Davis

I wanted to talk to some of you about Troy Anthony Davis. Today is Troy's Global Day of Action through Amnesty International, and in that spirit I wanted to tell you a bit about what's going on. I wanted to tell you how you can do very small and easy things that could save a man's life, just like it has been saved before by people doing exactly what many of you are about to do.

Many of you received an email, saw a blog post, or read a thread on a forum from me about the then-pending ban on capital punishment in New Mexico. A lot of you helped out, and sent a strong message to New Mexico's Governor. And we made it happen. I need you again. Troy needs you.

Many of you may feel that there is no excuse or appropriate situation in which the state should have the power to kill its citizens. That's fine. I am not one of you. I am one of those people who believes that there are some crimes for which death may be an acceptable response from the justice system. However, people have to have actually committed a crime. I mean, ideally, right?

Among many wrongful convictions is included Troy Anthony Davis. There is no physical evidence against him. The case is based entirely on eyewitness testimony, but seven of the nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony. Some of those who've recanted stated that they originally testified under police coercion, and one of the two people who hasn't... is the prime alternative suspect (and whom nine people have already implicated in signed affidavits).

So Troy Davis is set to be executed because the alternative suspect and one other person are pointing the finger at him. That's it. Seriously.

Multiple times his date of execution has been called off. Georgia has decided--more than once--that there is insufficient evidence to execute Troy, and yet… this isn't sufficient evidence for them to grant him a new trial. Thanks, Georgia. His request for a new trial (that’s right, his appeal for an appeal) has been refused and an execution date is going to be set (again).

For more information about his case, check out the info Amnesty International has pulled together: http://www.amnestyusa.org/uploads/file/TroyDavisfactsandtimeline_2(1).pdf

I got involved in Troy's fight because a friend of mine who worked with me for the House of Representatives at the State House knows Troy personally, and has personally combed through the documentation of his legal battles. It was talking with her that got me interested.

When word came that his life was in danger (again), a lot of people got ready for another round of fighting. I didn't think I'd be involved until I read the letter that Troy sent my friend, dated March 10, 2009:

Hello Ashley,

Thank you so much for your lovely letter. It was nice to hear from you. I pray that you, family and friends are all doing well despite the stress from the Economy.

Personally, I'm holding up okay. They have another execution tonight for Bob Newland. The Parole Board refused to hear his case.

How did your finals turn out? I'm sure you did well. Are you still having bad dreams about being in my situation?

Maybe you're worried too much about my situation. Read Mark 11:22-24. Positive thinking can increase your faith. Don't dwell on the things you pray for, just give them to God and believe He'll take care of them.

Congratulations of getting a perfect grade doing your paper about my case. Say hi to your classmates and Professors for me.

The biggest problem with my case is the Anti-Terrorism/Death Penalty law prevents my new evidence from being heard. I htink the Judges know I'm innocent but decided to hide behind the law instead of helping correct this injustice.

As long as people are willing to stand up and fight, changes will be made to right every wrong. You'll be one of those people who force a change and soon. Keep learning, keep praying, keep believing and never stop fighting for True Justice.

I'm proud of you being a Straight A student. Your parents have done a great job and I know they are proud as well.

Don't let the road blocks of this System slow you down. Just push them out of the way. Fighting for what you believe in isn't easy and some of those close to you may disagree. Stand firm Ashley.

Your friend,

Troy D.

Troy may be about to die, and people like you are the ones on his mind. People like you are the ones he believes need encouragement. So here's your encouragement.

Do something.

Here is a link to Amnesty International.

It'll take half a minute to do what they ask you to do. Just sign your name to tell Governor Perdue that people outside his state are watching. Use Amnesty's words, use your own, sign your name, whatever.

But do something. You think this won't work. But it has worked, and for Troy specifically. He is alive right now because people like you know his name, know his case, and care what happens to him.

Do it again. Do it now.

Stuff I've Been Reading!

Okay! My Firefox window is full of open tabs, and I'm going to drop a bunch of links here so that I can get rid of them. Yay? Yay!

LGBT

Gay Kentucky Students: "You Can't Pee Here"

Fifteen students protested outside a Frankfort, Ky., high school on Friday after an official allegedly sent a notification to teachers advising them to bar gay students from leaving class to use the restroom.

The reported e-mail was sent by Franklin County High School assistant principal Karen Buzard after two female students were reportedly seen kissing in a bathroom, according to the Kentucky Equality Federation.

RACISM

Letter from a slave freed in the Civil War, responding to his former master's promise to pay him if he'll return. Read this. Now. Two word summary: "Oh, snap."

Womanism and Feminism: The Difference?

When we look at social justice movements across the western world they all have one thing in common, they are led by whiteness. Despite a claim that said movements are about equality, the racial dynamics are positioned in such a way as to reaffirm our dissonance in worth and value. This purposeful erasure, or more specifically absence of power, is a result of the social belief that whiteness is not only naturally fit to lead but ordained to do so.

How many times have blacks and whites worked together in various organizations only to find that our voices are silenced? We continually make suggestions for activism only to have it denied and then later accepted when it is rephrased by a white member of the organization. The racism in this activity is never acknowledged and the white person is given the credit for the idea. When we make a comment as to how race interacts with an issue, we are again silenced and told that we “are imagining racism”, as though whiteness is any position to decide what is and isn’t racist.

Police Brutality and the National Political Agenda Great analysis on the original page, as always from these guys.

Just how systemic the police harassment and brutality is can be seen in polls and in social science research. For example, one 2001 Gallup poll found 83 percent of black respondents had experienced racial profiling in the last year. In addition, in a 2007 Gallup poll a fifth of the black respondents reported that had suffered discrimination at the hands of police officers, a proportion that has increased in recent years.

Lest some think that we are ignoring lots of white victims of police brutality here, we might note that one social science study back in the 1990s analyzed 130 police-brutality accounts in several cities across the country. In that reviews of cases, criminologist Kim Lersch discovered that the targets of this type of police malpractice are almost always black or Latino. The latter made up 97 percent of the victims of police brutality, while the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of officers involved were white. Police brutality overwhelmingly involves white-on-black or other white-on-minority violence.

Remedying Racism: The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action This is an issue I'm still deeply ambivalent about, but the people whose voices and judgment I've come to trust the most are making some very good arguments, and I'm doing my damndest to give them a fair hearing. Check out this article.

What would the reverse of this centuries-old anti-black discrimination and other oppression look like? The reverse of the institutionalized discrimination by whites against blacks would mean reversing the power and resource inequalities for several hundred years. In the past and today, most organizations in major institutional areas such as housing, education, and employment would be run at the top and middle-levels by a disproportionate number of powerful black managers and officials. These powerful black officials would have aimed much racial discrimination at whites, including many years of slavery and legal segregation. Millions of whites would have suffered—and still suffer—trillions in economic losses such as lower wages, as well as high rates of unemployment and political disenfranchisement, widespread housing segregation, inferior school facilities, and violent lynchings. That societal condition would be something one could reasonably call a condition that significantly “reversed the discrimination” against African Americans.

What is usually termed reverse discrimination is something much different from this fictional anti-white scenario. The usual reference is to affirmative action programs that, for a limited time or in certain places, have used racial screening criteria to overcome a small part of past and present discrimination that targets racially oppressed people.

Anti-Latino Racism: SPLC Report on Discrimination

We might note that the principal discriminators are not named as white in any sentence in the 64-page report. Indeed, the world “whites” never appears in the report, and the only place “white” appears is in a few references to “white supremacist” groups. Even in critical research reports like this there seems to be an etiquette of not offending white dsciminators explicitly, but leaving the elite and ordinary white actors as “implicit” in the commentaries, unless they are part of supremacist groups.

MISC

State-by-State Recovery Breakdown. Check the page and hover over your state to see what your area is getting.

California Appeal Court Declares Life Without Parole Sentence Unconstitutional for 14-Year-Old

EJI attorney Bryan Stevenson represents Antonio Nunez and argued his case at the Court of Appeal last October. “We’re very encouraged by the Court’s thoughtful and careful analysis of the issue presented by this case," Stevenson said today. "Young children who commit serious crimes may need punishment but those punishments must be reasonable and thoughtful. Hopelessly condemning 14-year-old children to die in prison is at odds with everything our constitutional norms and values are designed to protect.”

Antonio Nunez spent his childhood in a dangerous South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. Shortly after his 13th birthday, Antonio was riding a bicycle near his home when he was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting. His brother, who was 14 years old, ran to help Antonio and was shot in the head and killed. Antonio was critically injured and underwent emergency surgery to repair his intestines.

In the wake of his brother's murder, Antonio suffered severe trauma and depression. After he was released from the hospital, Antonio left South Central and spent over six months with family in Nevada before he had to return to Los Angeles.

Within weeks of his return to his home in South Central, 14-year-old Antonio got into a car with two older men who picked him up at a party. One of the men later claimed to be a kidnap victim. When their car was chased by the police and shots were fired, Antonio was arrested and charged with, among other offenses, aggravated kidnapping.

No one was injured during the chase, but Antonio was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

Britain's Youngest Female Funeral Director There may be hope for me yet! Also, check out this woman's amazing style. She wins at fashion.

Louise Ryan never wanted to be stuck in any ordinary job - so she figured it was only natural to follow in her father's footsteps and work with the dead.

Miss Ryan, who is already leading funeral processions, has undertaken 12 months of training, and at 20 years old is believed to be Britain's youngest female funeral director.

The teenager admits leading funeral processions and escorting coffins to churchyards is a far cry from her previous two jobs as a hairdresser and call centre worker.

Obligatory Swine Flu Post (Or: Why I don't want to make a big deal of it)

Someone else here must have noticed how it only became something to worry about when there was one American casualty. The 152 Mexicans just didn't seem to have the same impact, but one baby in America and the news goes nuts.

And what good is it to them to go nuts right now, at this particular time? Other than the obvious benefits of sensationalism to news networks, swine flu is being used to stoke the white supremacist anti-immigration crazies, which is my main objection to the hysteria. I was reading about it the other day and the top story on my Google news search starts with the following: "311 Swine Flu Deaths! Close the Mexico Border!"

Because, you see, brown people are filthy and diseased. Contact with them will kill you. Never mind that it was white tourists who brought the disease across the border.

For a further rundown of the highly-racialized discussion on this topic, check my acquaintance's blog over here, where she's made a good compilation of examples.

See also here:

With swine flu now hitting the United States, I figured it was only a matter of time before someone started to blame Mexican people. But this is an impressive turn-around, even for Michael Savage and Neil Boortz. Plus they get the "OMG terrorizm!" aspect in there too:

Neil Boortz claims that Mexico doesn't have a CDC, so from the perspective of someone who wants to commit an act of bioterrorism against U.S. citizens, "What better way to sneak a virus into this country than to give it to Mexicans?"

At least one better way comes immediately to mind.

One would think that if terrorists were going to release a virus with the intent of killing Americans, they would do it on, say, the New York City subway system and not on a Mexican pig farm. But there are no lengths to which these guys won't go in order to convince us that we're constantly on high Terror Alert in the face of threats from any passing brown people.

It's phenomenal how easily these guys can fit anything - including a potential global health pandemic - into a one-size-fits-all racist narrative about Mexicans being dirty and sneaky mules. It's phenomenal that they can get away with it even in a situation like this, where the virus was spread outside of Mexico in large part because of tourists. And it's particularly appalling in its victim-blaming - is it so easy to forget that 150 people have died in Mexico, and thousands more are living in fear?

I'm just trying not to participate in something that is becoming so irrational, y'know? All we can do about this is the same thing we do about any illness, unfortunately. It's just that the consequences are worse if we don't*. That's my critique on the whole thing. If I talk a whole lot on my blog or on my forums about this, I feel like I'm feeding this great nasty racist side of it no matter what I say.

So I haven't been encouraging the alarm for that reason, even though I agree it's troubling that it's going after those with healthy immune systems (with the exception of the infant casualty). With that, I leave you with this important website, relevant to your interests:

http://doihaveswineflu.org/



*The consequences are also notable when you consider that our government's phobic avoidance of regulating businesses has created a situation in which citizens are being urged to stay home if they're sick to avoid the spread of infection, but cannot afford to do so because employers are not actually required to give employees paid sick time.

If you actually want to do something to help prevent the further spread of diseases like this one--though likely change won't come in time to significantly affect this outbreak--please consider using this tool to send your Congressperson an email supporting the Healthy Families Act, which will allow workers to care for their health and the health of their families without having to choose between forgoing needed pay and spreading deadly diseases.

This sucks, so to the Americans reading: Do something. Something besides hate on brown people, okay?

U.S. will boycott U.N. conference on racism

U.S. will boycott U.N. conference on racism

GENEVA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will boycott a United Nations conference on racism next week, the U.S. State Department said on Saturday, citing objectionable language in the meeting's draft declaration.

The United Nations organized the forum in Geneva to help heal the wounds from the last such meeting, in Durban, South Africa. The United States and Israel walked out of that 2001 conference when Arab states tried to define Zionism as racist. (...)

Juliette de Rivero of Human Rights Watch said the meeting in Geneva would lack needed diplomatic gravitas without Washington's presence.

"For us it's extremely disappointing and it's a missed opportunity, really, for the United States," she said.

A draft declaration prepared for the conference removed all references to Israel, the Middle East conflict and a call to bar "defamation of religion" -- an Arab-backed response to a 2006 controversy over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Western states see as a way to quash free expression.

Wood conceded there had been improvements to the document, but he said it was not enough.

"The United States will work with all people and nations to build greater resolve and enduring political will to halt racism and discrimination wherever it occurs," he said.

Diplomats said the high-profile presence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the forum made it probable that touchy subjects would still dominate the proceedings.

*sigh*

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, we obviously can't allow one nation to define all interest in their rival as "racist," because allowing nations to redefine actual jargon from social critique in order to serve their own interests is a huge pain in the ass. (At one point some nations were invoking "cultural relativism" as a shield against criticism instead of the analytical tool that it is, which is why I'm annoyed that "racism" is now also getting co-opted.)

On the other hand, I'm getting kinda sick of allowing so much of our foreign policy decisions be determined by what Israel thinks we ought to do. There are other nations in the world, and maybe we should also be giving them some consideration. Like, oh say... all the nations that would benefit from having us there. Including our own.

So I'm ambivalent. I'll grant that the way Israel was discussed at the earlier meeting does sound out of line. But is this really wise?

I think what pisses me off most is the hesitation to talk to Iran's president lest uncomfortable topics come up. Hello, guys. You've put together a gorramn conference on racism. If somebody isn't uncomfortable by the time you're done, you're fucking doing it wrong. This isn't useful at all if it's just a way for everybody to get together and congratulate each other on how anti-racist they all are. Unless the nasty racialized barriers between members countries aren't brought up and hashed over... then what the hell are they doing all this for?

I realize there would and must be diplomatic consequences to a conversation of racism any deeper than superficial "we don't like racism, give us a cookie for how great we are" crap. However, I feel that until the uncomfortable stuff with diplomatic consequences is brought up, they're not really even talking. Maybe it's more diplomatically sound to waste so much time and money on an anti-racism circle jerk, but it's hard for me to imagine them actually accomplishing much if this is their approach.

But this is why I'm not a diplomat. I just want to drag shit out and get it over with, because as a rule people aren't actually going to examine themselves and their behavior any more deeply than they absolutely have to. This doesn't really work with people who aren't rational, and I suppose if any of those people I talked to had high-powered weapons of war just waiting to be used in a self-righteous temper tantrum, I might be inclined to be a little less honest, too.

It's just frustrating, that's all.

"Don't park your car here. I don't like this neighborhood, it's full of Canadians."

Has anybody ever heard people in food service using "Canadian" as a code-word?

I would appreciate if anybody who has heard this could read this article and tell me what they think of it.

What we have here is an example of a phenomenon that I've noted before, that of "whispering the word 'black.'" In certain situations, some white people use "Canadians" to refer covertly to black people when they think they shouldn't use another word. That other word probably isn't "black people" or "African Americans," but instead, a "worse" word. A more overtly racist word.

So white people apparently use "Canadians" this way because they might be overheard by the black people they're referring to. However, I suspect that in some cases, they use it because they don't want to be seen or heard saying the "worse" words by not just by black people, but by anyone--maybe even themselves.

If white people sometimes resort to this euphemism instead of a more clearly racist term when no black people could actually overhear them, then they're demonstrating something about the common workings of white psychology. Sometimes, when white people have racist thoughts or feelings, and we know we would look bad openly expressing them, we still manage to find other ways to express them. These are ways that we think don't make us look bad, but also ways that nevertheless also allow us to communicate the racist thought or feeling.

I've heard plenty of times of people doing this, but I've never heard it done myself.

The logic I've heard from servers who've mentioned this to me is that waiting tables "makes" a person racist, in the most purely privileged sense of the word. Racism here--like with so many people in so many situations--fails to mean "unfairly shitting on people for being the wrong ethnicity," but gets mutated into something racist people are more comfortable with. "Racism" is their word for all those things that everybody knows really are true, but try not to say because if they're caught speaking these truths (truths like the common laziness of black people, or how poorly POC treat their wait staff) they'll get in trouble with the "PC police." In short, it'll upset other white people, which is somehow more of a problem than participating in a system that actually harms POC.

Here's my personal feeling on certain occupations "making" someone be racist. Waiters become racist because black people make them be racist. Cops become racist because black people make them be racist. It's not their fault, you see, and there's nothing they can do. If black people don't want to be treated like shit by white people, clearly the solution is for them to quit being so... *whisper* ...you know. Black.

Then white people will finally be able to stop going through the pain of believing racist and hurtful things, finally be able to stop inventing codewords to express those racist things without getting caught using nasty words (that can't possibly be off-limits for a reason), and finally... finally... we'll all be able to get along. Once people stop "making" each other be racist. I mean, come on, POC. Personal responsibility, people! If I'm saying racist things, just accept that you are to blame, and we'll finally be able to move toward a solution after you change your behavior.

But y'know. Those fucking "Canadians" never were very good at personal responsibility, am I right? Am I right?

Goddamn it.

Seriously, guys. Victim-blaming. Please stop getting so enthused about it like it solves all social problems, because saying, "If black people weren't so cheap and rude, I wouldn't be racist," is like saying, "If women weren't so vapid and petty, I wouldn't be sexist."