feminist blogs

Of the many people who did not or could not evacuate New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Katrina, prisoners were especially helpless.  Seven thousand prisoners, including 100 juveniles, were in New Orleans Prison when Katrina hit landfall.  Prisoners were generally not evacuated and the flood waters created the conditions for a hideous human rights tragedy.  Drawing on a report from the ACLU, political scientist Caroline Heldman writes:

Many reported being left in their cells while the water rose above their heads; being beaten and sprayed with mace once evacuated (to state maximum security prisons); and left on Interstate-10 in the hot sun for days without food or water. An entire building with about 600 prisoners was left behind in the evacuation process and weren’t rescued for days (Quigley, 2006). Most of the 7,000 prisoners had been charged with misdemeanor offenses and would have been released within a few weeks, even if convicted. But Governor Blanco effectively suspended habeas corpus (due process; right to a speedy trial) for six months, so some were incarcerated for over a year – doing “Katrina time” (Flaherty, 2006). “The court system shut its doors, the police department fell into disarray, few prosecutors remained, and a handful of public defenders could not meet with, much less represent, the thousands detained” (Garrett & Tetlow, 2006).

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This photo of prisoners guarded on I-10 was taken more than two days after the storm:

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This hour-long BBC video documents their experiences:

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

look. i am not abusive to my kid. not even close. and neither is her father.

she is a happy, healthy three year old. she speaks three languages, loves to dance middle eastern style, and explains to strangers that ‘mama is from america’ but she is from bumblebee (the name of her preschool).

but, us american society, history, government is abusive to black children.

and egyptian society and government is abusive to black children. i know this cause i worked with sub saharan african refugees in cairo. i worked with ex child soldiers and teenage sex workers from sudan, refugees from eritrea and ethiopia. they are stuck here in limbo, cairo, legally segregated from the rest of egyptian society, not allowed to attend public schools, hospitals, racially profiled by the police, making 150 dollars a month is a considered a good job, living in ghettos, and struggling to either be repatriated or moved to europe, the usa, or australia.

they have been my teachers, my students, my friends.

some of them are mothers, and many of them didn’t have a real choice in the matter.

a lot of them look like me.

a lot of them don’t have the luxury of child free spaces, because many of them are children, themselves.

i know what abuse is. i grew up with it, day after day, year after year. and there are times when i would rather have my daughter with me at a bar, than with a babysitter that i barely know.

i work really hard so that my daughter knows that she is a person. because it is rare for black girls or women to be allowed to be people, a full fledged person, in this world.

so, when i was in the west bank back in the summer of 2006, israel was bombing lebanon, and i realized i might be pregnant. my partner was in the states at the time, so i had to rely on a couple of friends to help me procure a home pregnancy test in israel since we couldnt find one in the west bank. as we were sitting in the park in jerusalem at night, eating cake, and hiding from the guards, one of my friends explained that she would most likely not be able to have kids. i nodded my head. and then she went on a small rant about how immoral it was to have kids, and be a breeder.
whoa. that word, breeder, was like a smack in the face. i wont go deep into the racial implications of that word, but as bfp pointed out earlier this week, black women in the states have historically been forced to be pregnant and to produce offspring, but not to be a mother. being able to not choose to bear a child can be a privilege. and so can being allowed to be a mother.
later that night when i was finally home, i saw the two pink lines appear on the plastic wand. and my suspicions were confirmed, i was ‘with child’.

i was pro choice before i became pregnant, but it was being pregnant for ten months that made me proclaim, loudly, to anyone who would listen: i am so pro-abortion because no one, and i mean no one, should have to be pregnant if they dont want to! anyone who thinks that adoption is an alternative to an abortion is nuts, it totally ignores that you have to be fucking pregnant for a fucking year first.

i know that giving birth, and/or being a mother is not always a choice. in a lot of the world a safe abortion is not necessarily available. here in egypt, is in a lot of the world, abortion is outlawed. and even in countries where abortion is legal, it can be out of the price range for the majority of women. in a lot of countries, an abortion is not feasible for a woman because of the red tape that she needs to go through. or the distance that the nearest clinic is. or if her family or partner discover that she has had an abortion she will be turned out of her house with no resources, no money, no job, no safety net, nothing. or she will be beaten. or the only type of abortion available are so dangerous to the woman’s health that she risks her very life in having one.

in the eastern congo, rape is used as a primary weapon of war. and women are kidnapped and raped for months until they become pregnant, then they are set free in the mountainous jungle. abortion is illegal in this country. and i talked with methodist christian ladies who were working day and night to be able to provide the morning after pill for every woman they can in their region. the work they do is but a drop in the bucket. they never have enough supplies.

maybe its because i grew up around girls in the states who didnt have a choice to become a mother. they had sex. they got pregnant by accident. and then they were stuck, threatened, beatened with no resources to be able to get to a clinic, that i dont assume that a woman chose to give birth; simply because she cares for her child. nor do i know what kind of internal choices she has made to be able to love a child.

i do know that it took everything inside of me to not start crying and never stop when i sat in rooms full of congolese rape survivors nursing their children. i know that they told me that their children were a gift, and i believed them.

this is why i work hard to do what i do. why i created the lilith plan. provide alternatives to clinical abortions that are not always available and can be traumatizing even if available. i research plants, herbs, flowers for their abortifacient qualities. i study acupressure texts. i build del-ems. i make the information available through any means i can find. cause a lot of women, women that we see everyday with their children never had the choice whether or not to become pregnant or be a mother. they walk by us, not screaming their life stories at us. and we judge them, not even with the little facts about them that we have, but with the stories and narratives that we make up about them in our heads.

i saw the lilith plan in a vision one night as i was meditating. and am slowly working to make it a reality.

Over the past few weeks, I've been following the Lebron James story with great interest. For those who don't follow sports (or live under a rock), Lebron recently announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat, after much hype, speculation, conspiracy theories, and an hour-long ESPN special. That's all fine and good. I'm not foolish enough to try to opine on such a still touchy subject in a public forum.

What I WILL talk about is the fact that for months, the critical backlash against Lebron has involved blatant, disrespectful, and anti-feminist slut-shaming of his mother based on rumors that she slept with Delonte West, another player on the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The rumors have inspired such jabs as the shirt pictured ("You can head south but your mom is riding west") as well as countless sites, articles, and street corner conversations claiming to verify or dispel the rumors, pondering their effects on Lebron's game, and employing various other methods of ridiculing him for the alleged indiscretions of his mother. The rumor has grown to be so ubiquitous that when you type "Lebron" into google search, the second thing google suggests is "lebron james mom delonte west". Dang. You don't even need to type his last name.

So..why do I care about this gossip-fueled rumor about some basketball player and his mother, neither of whom I've ever met? Because the underlying cultural attitudes are dangerously anti-woman, and represent the same misogynistic attitudes about women, honor, sex, and bodily autonomy that lead to rights violations, violence, and even death for women here in the U.S. and all over the world.

The concept of female sexual behavior bringing either honor (with purity and celibacy) or shame (with sex or too much perceived sexiness) upon her family is nothing new. For one, it's common in hip hop culture, with verses by some of the most famous rappers of all time being populated with what amounts to glorified "yo momma" jokes in lyrical form. ("mess around you'll find my silk-boxers in your mommas hamper", etc.) But this attitude isn't restricted to the realm of hip hop, or the music industry, or even to the American context. And despite the seemingly innocuous nature of a "yo momma" joke, such attitudes can have very sinister consequences for women all over the world.

Perhaps less conspicuously than Lebron' James' mother, another woman halfway across the world was also being ridiculed and shamed for her alleged sexual relations over the past few months. Buried amidst the Lebron coverage, the New York Times reported a few weeks ago on the story of Nirupama Pathak, 22, who had recently announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, and was found days later dead in her bedroom. The police have arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, on suspicion of murder, while the family contends that the death was a suicide.

From the article:

"One thing is absolutely clear," said Prashant Bhushan, a social activist and lawyer now advising Ms. Pathak's fiancé. "Her family was trying their level best to prevent her from marrying that boy. The pressure was such that either she was driven to suicide or she was killed."

When we do things that enable members of society to feel entitled to control the women's bodies, women get hurt. They get hurt when their name is gleefully dragged around in the mud to shame, embarrass, and dishonor their family, and they get hurt when their families take matters into their own hands to prevent that same shame, embarrassment, and dishonor from coming to be associated with them. I'm not saying that telling a "yo momma" joke is akin to performing an honor killing. But I am saying that, in the case of those who titter at the thought of embarrassing Lebron by commenting on the sexual behavior his mother may or may not have engaged in, the underlying assumptions are the same as those of someone who chooses to undertake an honor killing- a woman's sexual decisions are not her own to make, but rather, criteria by which to measure the "honor" of her and her family and the ability of the men in her life to maintain control over her body, her actions, and her sexual autonomy.

Over the past few weeks, I've been following the Lebron James story with great interest. For those who don't follow sports (or live under a rock), Lebron recently announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat, after much hype, speculation, conspiracy theories, and an hour-long ESPN special. That's all fine and good. I'm not foolish enough to try to opine on such a still touchy subject in a public forum.

What I WILL talk about is the fact that for months, the critical backlash against Lebron has involved blatant, disrespectful, and anti-feminist slut-shaming of his mother based on rumors that she slept with Delonte West, another player on the Cleveland Cavaliers.

The rumors have inspired such jabs as the shirt pictured ("You can head south but your mom is riding west") as well as countless sites, articles, and street corner conversations claiming to verify or dispel the rumors, pondering their effects on Lebron's game, and employing various other methods of ridiculing him for the alleged indiscretions of his mother. The rumor has grown to be so ubiquitous that when you type "Lebron" into google search, the second thing google suggests is "lebron james mom delonte west". Dang. You don't even need to type his last name.

So..why do I care about this gossip-fueled rumor about some basketball player and his mother, neither of whom I've ever met? Because the underlying cultural attitudes are dangerously anti-woman, and represent the same misogynistic attitudes about women, honor, sex, and bodily autonomy that lead to rights violations, violence, and even death for women here in the U.S. and all over the world.

The concept of female sexual behavior bringing either honor (with purity and celibacy) or shame (with sex or too much perceived sexiness) upon her family is nothing new. For one, it's common in hip hop culture, with verses by some of the most famous rappers of all time being populated with what amounts to glorified "yo momma" jokes in lyrical form. ("mess around you'll find my silk-boxers in your mommas hamper", etc.) But this attitude isn't restricted to the realm of hip hop, or the music industry, or even to the American context. And despite the seemingly innocuous nature of a "yo momma" joke, such attitudes can have very sinister consequences for women all over the world.

Perhaps less conspicuously than Lebron' James' mother, another woman halfway across the world was also being ridiculed and shamed for her alleged sexual relations over the past few months. Buried amidst the Lebron coverage, the New York Times reported a few weeks ago on the story of Nirupama Pathak, 22, who had recently announced she was secretly engaged to a young man from a caste lower than hers, and was found days later dead in her bedroom. The police have arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, on suspicion of murder, while the family contends that the death was a suicide.

From the article:

"One thing is absolutely clear," said Prashant Bhushan, a social activist and lawyer now advising Ms. Pathak's fiancé. "Her family was trying their level best to prevent her from marrying that boy. The pressure was such that either she was driven to suicide or she was killed."

When we do things that enable members of society to feel entitled to control the women's bodies, women get hurt. They get hurt when their name is gleefully dragged around in the mud to shame, embarrass, and dishonor their family, and they get hurt when their families take matters into their own hands to prevent that same shame, embarrassment, and dishonor from coming to be associated with them. I'm not saying that telling a "yo momma" joke is akin to performing an honor killing. But I am saying that, in the case of those who titter at the thought of embarrassing Lebron by commenting on the sexual behavior his mother may or may not have engaged in, the underlying assumptions are the same as those of someone who chooses to undertake an honor killing- a woman's sexual decisions are not her own to make, but rather, criteria by which to measure the "honor" of her and her family and the ability of the men in her life to maintain control over her body, her actions, and her sexual autonomy.

Film actress and television host Ricki Lake, twice pregnant (in real life and also in the movie Mrs. Winterbourne, alongside his royal hotness, Brendan Fraser), brings one of her birth experiences to the silver screen in The Business of Being Born.  Upset with the hospital birth experience the first time, Ms. Lake opts for a home birth the second time (Go Ricki! Go Ricki!  Go Ricki!).  Her second son, Owen Sussman (now 9 years old), greets the world in gooey glory about 45 minutes into the movie, so you know it’s good.  The only thing that might have made it better is, as is the case for all movies, Brendan Fraser.

Somewhere between Frontline and Fahrenheit 911, this documentary presents a fact-based albeit slightly sanctimonious (and one-sided) examination of midwifery (mid-whiff-er-ee) and birthing options in America.  The statistics are frequently sobering – the one that really stuck with me was that, in 1900, 95% of all U.S. births took place at home, which was down to 50% by 1938 and <1% by 1955 (where it is today).  The movie partially credits hippy communes with the “rebirth” of midwifery in the U.S., noting necessity and the empowerment aspects of home birth.  (more…)

***TRIGGER WARNING: Descriptions of homophobic and transphobic violence***

It’s come to light that noted misogynist David Vitter, the Senator who protected his women’s rights staffer after he slashed his girlfriend with a knife and threatened to kill her and who doesn’t think abortion is a “women’s issue,” is also a raging homophobe. I know, I was shocked too – I’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor.

This episode of “Saw That Coming From 100 Miles Away” involves Vitter’s comments on a right-wing radio show this morning about MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and her high school yearbook photo, which has been making the rounds on the internet. Vitter commented the photo “must have been a long time ago” because Maddow was then “looking like a woman.”

All the mainstream media I’ve seen on the incident shies away from using the “H-word” (HOMOPHOBIA), instead taking the cowardly route of assuming their readers will know why this is wrong and worthy of comment. This is shameful.

I’d bet the first journalist in the MSM to take this on will be Rachel Maddow herself, who has a history of taking on ridiculous criticism with humor and grace and at the same time, packing a powerful political punch. I’m a huge fan of Rachel Maddow and have devoted hours of my life wishing I could write for her show. If I did, here’s what she would say to Senator Vitter:

“It’s come to my attention that Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, made a funny on the radio by suggesting that my high school yearbook photo must have been taken a long time ago because in it, I look like a woman. I can only assume he’s referring to my short haircut and business suits, which don’t fit into his personal idea of what a woman should look like. Senator Vitter, I’m not one to make this accusation lightly but your comment on the radio was an attempt to get a cheap laugh on the fact that I am a lesbian. It was a political play to your constituents, who you evidently believe vote based on hate and bigotry. This, I think, is incredibly disrespectful to the good folks of Louisiana.

I think I’ve proved on this show that I have a sense of humor but this time I’m not laughing. For many people in this country and around the world, failing to fit into a random individual’s profile of what a man or woman should look like is no joke. For many, it is the difference between getting a job or not, the difference between getting into and remaining at their educational institution of choice or not, the difference between being able to safely use a public bathroom or not. For many, not fitting neatly into a gender category is a matter of life and death.

Senator Vitter, I’d like to tell you a story about a young woman named Sakia Gunn. Like me, Sakia Gunn had short hair and dressed in a more masculine way than, inferring from your comment, you’d think is appropriate for a woman. In 2005, fifteen year-old Sakia and her friends were waiting for a bus in Newark, New Jersey when they were approached by a group of men who made sexual advances toward them. When the women refused, stating they were lesbians, the men pulled out knives and started yelling homophobic slurs. Sakia was stabbed in the chest and she bled to death, in the arms of her best friend, in the middle of the street.

Let me tell you another story, Senator, about an eighteen year-old transgender woman named Angie Zapata. Again inferring from your comment, Angie Zapata, with her long hair and form-fitting clothes, fit the bill in terms of what you think a woman should look like. At her murder trial, Allen Ray Andrade’s lawyers claimed that since Angie looked like a woman their client just couldn’t help beating her to death with a fire extinguisher when it was revealed she was born biologically male. Angie Zapata wasn’t brutally killed because she looked like a woman; she was a woman. No, she was savagely beaten to death because of the type of hate you’re peddling, the kind that says a person’s gender expression, how they choose to dress and present themselves, and by extension, a person’s gender identity, how they choose to identify regardless of their gender at birth, are reasons to see someone as less deserving of respect, as less than human.

Senator Vitter, I’m not addressing you personally tonight because I was offended by your joke. I’m addressing you because your type of hate impacts the lives of thousands of Americans who do not, without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity, fit into capricious standards of what it means to look “male” or “female.” It’s time to toss these standards out the window because they are meaningless, destructive and sometimes, deadly. Moreover, it’s time to legislate against the hate bred by these standards by passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, known as ENDA and currently proposed in the Senate, that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which includes appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

I received your apology this afternoon, Senator, and your explanation that you were simply joining in on a joke made by the radio hosts. I accept your apology, sir, but not your excuse: you are a United States Senator and as such you have a responsibility to stand up and correct anyone making bigoted slurs against American citizens. It’s to the American public, not me, sir, that you still owe an apology – and actions that make good on it.”

**This post was edited by the author on July 17th to add a trigger warning for depictions of homophobic and transphobic violence.

The ongoing quest of the French government to preserve their country’s “secular traditions” came to the fore once again Tuesday when the lower house of France’s parliament voted to ban women from wearing any face-covering veil, such as the infamous burqa or the less “extreme” niqab — a move obviously targeting French Muslim women, of which perhaps 1,900 wear a face-covering veil. France has the highest population of Muslims in Europe, comprising about 5 million of France’s population of 64 million people.

I’m sure you remember the “no hijabs in public schools” ban France passed in 2004 after almost a decade debating it, barring students from wearing a headscarf or any other piece of clothing that would indicate the religion of the student wearing it. To be fair, that does include Jewish yarmulkes and cross necklaces, however, the surrounding debate was particularly focused on the Muslim hijab. It just seems that since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Western countries have been not-so-subtly putting their Islamophobia on display.

Of course, this is not to say that all Muslim women disagree with the banning of the burqa or niqab. Some Muslim feminists have spoken out in favor of the ban. I fully support the right of Muslim women to not be forced to wear face-covering veils. However, I think banning religious clothing at the governmental level is taking the issue in a scary direction. I believe in choices, and banning burqas and niqabs eliminates the ability of women who actually wear the veils of their own volition to continue to make the choice to wear them, however few the women may be that make that choice. The author of the Huffington Post article, Caryl Rivers, makes a lot of good points, but I really do believe that in order to truly gain equal rights for Muslim women in their culture it’s going to have to come from changing Muslim men’s “hearts and minds” and not changing Muslim women’s clothing.

In the Salon article linked above, Eqyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy states:

I support banning the burqa because I believe it equates piety with the disappearance of women. The closer you are to God, the less I see of you — and I find that idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that basically wants to hide women away. What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

I agree with her on basically every point she makes, yet I can’t reconcile my feelings about government-enforced bans on religious clothing. I just don’t think that simply legally preventing women from wearing burqas, niqabs, or hijabs is going to cause transformative change in Islamic culture. This is a crude analogy, but it seems like banning black women from relaxing their hair. Yes, black women would be unable to cowtow to the oppressive beauty standards forced on us by Western culture, but would their minds be freed as well? Would black men suddenly stop desiring women with long, straight hair? With the banning of burqas and niqabs, are sexist, oppressive Muslim men and the governments they run suddenly going to stop treating women like second-class citizens? I don’t see that happening. Western governments using women’s rights as an excuse to ban Muslim religious garments just smells like Islamophobia couched in “progressive” rhetoric. Some leaders in the U.K. have actually voiced their concern over the “growing threat of Islamism“.

So what can we expect this ban on face-covering veils to do for Muslim women’s rights in France? Eltahawy had this to say:

What I hope it will do is that it will create a situation where a woman can say to a man, look, you know that I have to go out and work so that we can continue to live here, and I can’t go out with my face covered, even though you want me to, because that’s what the law says. I hope the law gives women this kind of out. I have no idea if that’s actually going to happen or not.

I can’t get behind legislation like this when the only benefit for women would be that you get to tell your husband that you’re required by law to not wear the veil, and the many benefits for the government and Islamophobic French people include not having to be visually reminded there’s Muslims in their communities and also stopping the spread of “Islamism”. I don’t trust the women’s rights angle at all from Western governments when it comes to Islam. We continue to ally with countries that do much more than just expect women to cover themselves head to toe when in public — we’re in bed with countries that beat and jail women who have been gang raped and impregnated because the rape constituted the woman committing adultery. I personally don’t think her lack of burqa helped at all in that situation.

So I’m not exactly joining the cheerleading squad because France decided its Islamophobia was good for women’s rights. Of course I don’t want Muslim women to be forced to cover themselves head to toe. But I firmly believe true change in the Islamic world will never come via simply outlawing certain types of clothing, and I question the veracity of France’s reasons for doing so. The fact that they’re mentioning things like “defining and protecting French values” sounds eerily familiar and to me, is more of a nationalist concern than a concern for women’s rights.

There needs to be substantive change in Muslim men’s attitudes towards Muslim women rather than superficial change mandated by a government that seeks to erase those parts of immigrant populations they find distasteful.

A powerful and courageous speech from Dan Cho at the Campus Progress National Conference this last week, with an impassioned plea for immigration reform and to support the Dream ACT.

This just gave me chills. Thanks to Jorge Rivas for the link.

[Trigger Warning: discussions of sexual assault and deadly State force.]

Love your enemies.

For feminists, is there any phrase more terrifyingly reactionary?

Love your enemies. Even the one who assaults you in private and reaps accolades as a brilliant community organizer in public. (One of my mom’s former boyfriends.)

Love your enemies. Even the ones who throw cherry bombs at you in the school bathrooms. (My dad’s fellow students at Yale, in the 1950s.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you women should be seamstresses, not lawyers. (Opa — my mom’s dad.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you, as a child, to bit down on your lower lip so it won’t grow too big. (Grandma — my dad’s mom.)

Love your enemies. Even the white police officer who shot and killed you while you were lying helpless, face-down on the ground with another officer’s knee on your neck. (Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man killed Jan 1, 2009 in an Oakland subway station.)

Jury deliberations began yesterday for Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant. All of Oakland awaits the verdict. Both police and non-profits are making preparations to quell the “violence” anticipated after this “deadly lightning rod” of a trial.

Deadly? Violence? According to CNN’s coverage, not one single person was seriously injured in the 2009 protests following Grant’s death. Nobody injured, let alone killed. Windows were broken; dumpsters set afire. Is this violence? Sounds more like property destruction to me.

Whatever happens, whether riots flare up or not, things will once again settle, and the ordinary state violence will resume as usual. After all, there’s only one individual on trial — not an entire racist police force armed with deadly weapons. Not an entire patriarchal, militaristic, anti-immigrant, plutocratic (ruled by wealth) law enforcement system. Not California, the US state running “the largest prison system in the Western world.” That won’t be standing trial anytime soon. So what are we supposed to do?

Love your enemies.

What an injunction, huh? Just how are we supposed to achieve this? And why?

The “how” I’ll leave aside for now. Let’s focus on the why.

Why should we love our enemies? Why not hate them? Or at least get angry?

Audre Lorde, one of my all-time favorite feminists, has one answer. With hatred we harm ourselves, and anger only takes us halfway to where we need to go. From “Eye To Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”:

And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus on what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it – hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.

Thirty years after “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding To Racism,” her keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Lorde’s questions about anger are just as relevant now as then. When and how is our anger useful? When and how is it harmful?

One of my best clues at the moment comes from the dhamma — the teachings of the historical Buddha. Dhamma does not condemn anger as wrong or sinful. Instead, it shows us how to look at our own anger objectively, and start breaking it down. See its useful, neutral, and harmful qualities.

Meditation, not cogitation (thinking) is really the key there. But on the intellectual tip, a very useful explanation for me came from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s book The Myth of Freedom: a chapter called “Working With Negativity.” I don’t have the book on me, but this online excerpt gets at the essence:

“We all experience negativity–the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout there is a sense of one’s own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

Negativity breeds tension, friction, gossip, discontentment, but it is also very accurate, deliberate and profound. Unfortunately, the heavy handed interpretations and judgments we lay on these experiences obscure this fact. These interpretations are negative negativity, watching ourselves being negative and then deciding that the negativity is justified in being there. This negativity seems good-natured, with all sorts of good qualities in it, so we pat its back, guard it and justify it. Or, if we are blamed or attacked by others, we interpret their negativity as being good for us. In either case, the watcher, by commenting, interpreting and judging, is camouflaging and hardening the basic negativity.

. . . . . The basic honesty and simplicity of negativity can be creative in community as well as in personal relationships. Basic negativity is very revealing sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of its intelligence. Negativity breeds a great deal of energy, which clearly seen becomes intelligence. When we leave the energies as they are with their natural qualities, they are living rather than conceptualized. They strengthen our daily lives….”

You’d think Lorde had been reading up on this guy. “Anger is loaded with information and energy,” she says. “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Negativity clearly seen.

So here we have an alternative. Rather than making anger comprise our actions toward an enemy, we let it inform and energize our actions.

Instead of directing venom toward “the pigs,” we might use this precise negative mind to observe, The forces that are supposed to be keeping our communities safe — serving us — are making us less safe. Killing us. These forces control the people, but they’re not of the people. They have little to no accountability to the majority of the human beings whose lives are in their hands.

I don’t want a racist patriarch “protecting” me. This serves neither of us.

Safety and community rule enforcement groups need to protect the welfare of ordinary, working-class people, not just wealthy people. The welfare of people of all genders, not just men; of all races, not just white; of all birthplaces, not just US; of all religions, not just Christian or secular; of all mental and physical conditions, not just the ones considered “normal.”

“Community policing” — collaboration between existing law enforcement agencies and the groups they serve — doesn’t go far enough. I want people from my own community protecting me — people I know and trust. People I’ve elected to a community safety body; reflecting the genders, races, class, and national and ethnic origins of the community; not sadistic or prone to power-trips; militant but not militaristic; who can perform equally well the work of confrontation and of de-escalation, healing, and peacebuilding — who won’t just selectively enforce the laws and rules that favor the powerful. Who won’t use handcuffs and tasers loaded guns to break up young Black men’s non-fights on New Year’s Eve.

This is what my anger over Oscar Grant’s death tells me. That we’re fit to govern and protect ourselves. In fact, we’re better at it.

If Mehserle and the cops are my enemies, I know this: they and I equally deserve real safety. We all deserve to provide it and receive it, to the best of our abilities and to the extent of our needs, in the context of our own communities. We’re all worthy of that.

And if I need to disobey some existing laws in order to build toward that real, true safety, then I’m breaking those laws with love for my enemies as well as for myself.

Because, as we know, our enemies are often our very closest neighbors. And there’s that other famous phrase:

Love thy neighbor as thyself.

We love ourselves – protect ourselves – and protect our neighbors and enemies, too – as we question and challenge the state’s idea of what ’safety,’ ‘order,’ and ‘protection’ really are.

Oakland itself, hardly a stranger to up-ending conventional ideas of protection, has one of the strongest recent histories of community self-defense in the US. Imperfect and unromantic, yes, but game-changing nonetheless.

And feminists, womanists, and gender-oppressed people are among the most inspiring leaders in this kind of loving action. We create our own protective forces based on analysis of intimate violence, community violence, and state violence — preventing, healing from, and transforming all three.

We also employ whatever tools best suit us — therapy, prayer, meditation — to heal our internal selves from cancerous hatred; to patiently harvest the honey of insight from the beehive of anger; and to cultivate the quality — socially awkward and spiritually indispensable — that Che Guevara so aptly described:

Let me say at the risk of sounding ridiculous that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love.

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Please keep in mind the comment guidelines as we come to the end of our experiment!