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“We may not currently have the might of the Israeli army and the power of traditions confine us in certain roles, however, we know that one woman standing behind another in a line of solidarity is a force more powerful than both.”
–kefah, speaking in at-tuwani village, west bank, palestine

i am going to start with kefah. kefah will be on a speaking tour in italy this fall.

i met kefah in the fall of 2004 under horrible circumstances. we were living in the southern west bank. and a couple of international friends had been walking with palestinian children passed an israeli settlement, when the israeli settlers jumped out of the woods and beat my two friends down. luckily, the kids weren’t physically hurt, but they were scared, very scared. but my two friends were taken to the hospital with a punctured lung, broken knee and arm, and psychological trauma. so i and a couple of other internationals who were living in palestine went to at tuwani and walked with the children the next day passed the settlement. and the day after that.
those kids were amazing. they faced death just so they could go to elementary school.
the israeli soldiers told us that if the settlers attacked us, they would not protect us. and we believed them since a lot of the soldiers were from neighboring israeli settlements.
at night we slept in the women’s museum, a palestinian women’s craft co-op started by kefah.
kefah is amazing. she is a wife, a mother to four sons, a self-avowed feminist, a leader in her village, a visionary, a business woman, a community organizer. when i think of revolutionary motherhood, i think of kefah.
and she has a great raunchy sense of humor.
kefah expanded for me what i understood motherhood to mean. well, actually not just kefah, a lot of palestinian women did that for me. women who daily confront israeli soldiers just so they can work in their fields, harvest plants, leave their house, go to the clinic, go to the neighboring town. women who do it with a babe riding on their shoulders. women who do it with little money and a lot of strength. women. who. do. it.
dont get me wrong, i dont romanticize living under an occupation. its not pretty. its too little food, and too many people dying. its your husband, your son, your father, your brother in jail and you trying to figure out how to get the money to get him out, if that is even allowed. its eid under curfew. its watching your house be demolished simply because it was standing and then rebuilding it just to watch it be demolished again. its your mosque, your school be demolished. apartment buildings being shelled. its never having enough. its living on the breath of survival. its life. and its painful.
revolution aint pretty and it doesnt come cheap.
but it was kefah that i became friends with. and kefah who i watched as she organized women while mothering young boys.
and it was kefah and her village, at tuwani, that i wanted to return to when i tried to return to palestine in the winter of 2009.

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in late december of 2009 israel decided to bomb gaza. and bomb her and bomb her. my lil family and i traveled during the bombing. first to scotland to see our friends theresa and jim. and then we got on a plane in mid january and flew to tel aviv, israel. (you have to enter israel in order to enter the west bank). instead of allowing us to enter israel, the airport security put me, my partner, and my one year old daughter in israeli jail for three days. (and no, we dont know why they would not allow us to enter israel, israel is like that, we have some good guesses, but no hard facts…)
there is a lot i can say from those three days in jail. i can tell you that all the guards are hopped up on speed and uppers and live in a world of paranoia that wafts through the jail like cigarette smoke. i can tell you that they refused to give us diapers for aza so she had to piss on the floor for a day until the cleaning lady came in and told the guards to give us diapers or else. i can tell you that in the cell next to us was an eight month dutch nigerian pregnant lady with her husband who had their passports confiscated. and that through the vents aza and i heard the guards torturing him while they videotaped it.
and there are things i cannot tell you. i cannot tell you the sound of aza screaming because she was locked in a room for over twenty four hours, ill never forget it, but ill never be able to describe it either. i cannot tell you the soft look in aza’s eyes when the guard told me: i dont care what happens to your daughter, whatever happens to her is your fault. because you are in here.
even though i had spent the past couple of days trying to get the fuck out of there.
i can tell you how by the end of that experience, no matter how horrifying many of the guards had been, i was so grateful that i was not them. that i still walked with my humanity. that i still could feel compassion for them even if they could not afford to do so for me.
i can though tell you that what we experienced was normal. and whatever was abnormal about our experience in jail was due to the privilege we were extended as us citizens.
after three days they let us go and flew us to amsterdam.
the bombing of gaza ended while we were in jail. and obama was inaugurated a day after we got out. i can tell you that i wasnt feeling very much hope as i watched pieces of the inauguration celebration from our hotel room television set.
i was missing palestine deeply. i wanted kefah to meet aza.

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a lot of people want to quibble over israel and palestine. they want to start with the right of israel to exist. they want to start dividing up land for a two state solution. they want it over with. done with. cause they are tired of it.
no body i have ever met is more tired of the occupation than palestinians. bone tired. they dont get a day off from genocide.
and that means they dont get a day away from struggle.
people ask me what do i think about hamas and their refusal to acknowledge israel’s right to exist.
ummm…i have a lot of critiques of hamas. a lot. but israel does not have a right to exist. no nation based on occupation and genocide does (and that most definitely includes my home country the us of a). and no one should require that the oppressed acknowledge the ‘right’ of the oppressor to abuse, violate, and murder. no real peace can be bought at such a price. (i do not believe in rewriting history and so israel does exist, whether or not it has a right to. and we have to deal with it as it exists. but damn, dont ask for the natives to thank the conquerors for their chains…)
and there are few places where this is better articulated than in palestinian hip hop.

so i will end with darg (da revolutionary arabian guys) team. a few amazing mc’s from gaza. they had been trying for months to be allowed to leave gaza and after the massacre on the mavi marmara a couple of months ago and in response israel opening the gazan borders, darg team was able to escape to switzerland where they are hanging out now, planning to come to the states in september and go on tour. if we can get the visas and the funds for them to do so.

“on December 27th 2008 Israel started it’s first strike on Gaza killing hundrends no thousands of lives for 23 days. DARG TEAM after the war recorded and filmed it’s first video clip ‘23 yoom”.
today, one year after the war and DARG TEAM steps in again but this time calling every one to participate and start rebuilding what the war left behind.”

rebuild by us

(it’s in arabic. i really can’t translate it.)

the question i hate the most when i write or speak about palestine is: but is there any hope? did you feel any hope when you were there?
what. the. fuck?
hope? fuck hope.
i saw mamas breastfeeding babies. and old men tending flocks of sheep in full defiance of the israeli military. i saw wild poppies covering a graveyard. and a boy etching graffiti on the apartheid wall. and a 12 year old girl in hijab and school uniform sing umm kulthum with a tenor that would make the stoic weep. i have seen a full bellied palestinian pregnant woman turn her back to an israeli soldier who had a gun pointed at her so she could talk on the cell phone to her four year old son and tell him that she would be home soon. and communities get together and remove the large earth mound road blocks that the israeli army puts down in the middle of highways to cut off transportation between neighboring cities. and grandmothers who will yell at soldiers and lock arms protecting their sons. thrown rocks off of mountains with seven year olds (who had a much better arm than me) and drank tea in front of the rubble that used to be my hosts bedroom.
hope? i have seen much more than hope.
i have seen life. and love. and revolution.

and someday i will see kefah again.

[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!

This is a guest-post by Diane Lucas. Diane is an attorney in New York.

By now, everyone in the country with access to a television, the internet or a book store has gotten the memo that black women marry at a dismally low rate compared to women of other races. We’ve seen and read it in the Economist, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Essence Magazine, Ebony and on The View, Oprah, and Nightline, among others. We know that of the hetero-black male population, there are significant numbers of black men incarcerated, lower rates of higher education, and disproportionate numbers of black men marrying outside of their race, as compared to black women. We heard that even setting aside those factors, there are fewer black men than woman in the U.S. population. No one is denying that there is an issue. It’s been an issue for a while now. So why the New York Times recently published what seems like the millionth and one article on why black women can’t find a man is absolutely baffling.

I have been thinking a lot about this issue and discussing it with friends — black and white, male and female — to pinpoint precisely why these articles bother me so much. I, like many other black feminists/womanists, constantly call for more discussion of issues affecting black women and other women of color in the mainstream media. Black relationships and the black family are important mainstream topics. But the media is obsessed with unmarried black women. One black woman commenting on the ABC Nightline post put it best — she said she is waiting for the article about black women tripping down altars riddled with reporters and social scientists. The inundation of these articles, T.V. specials, and books is an attack on black women. The overall message conveyed is unproductive and harmful.

Specifically, here’s my beef (and bear with me, because I have a lot of it):

Blame Game

The media often places the blame on black women for their perceived inability to find successful black men, especially when black women become more educated and achieve greater success in their careers. Although some articles and T.V. specials acknowledge the disparate number of available black men vís a vís black women due to the racialization of the criminal justice system, the discussion rarely turns to how black men can improve their romantic interactions with black women. Rather, the media often focuses on black women and their “issues.” Many of these articles, T.V. specials and books are purposed to instruct black women on how to be more desirable to black men or how to lower their standards. A prime example is the book The Denzel Principle: Why a Black Woman Can’t Find a Good Black Man, which blames black women for setting their standards too high — they apparently only want Denzel Washington, not the mail man.

The Nightline multi-part special entitled “Why Can’t a Successful Black Woman Find a Man?” sent the message that, as the title implies, black women are to blame for many of their problems finding a man. The Nightline special posed questions that begged for “experts” (including Steve Harvey, a comedian, whose “expertise” on black women and relationships remains unclear) to figure out what is wrong with black women. Are they too strong? Too powerful? Too aggressive? Too demanding? Of course, these stereotypical characteristics of black women are the same traits often attributed to successful people generally, regardless of race or gender. So the take away to black women is that the very characteristics that made you successful are the same ones that will keep you single, lonely, and of course unhappy.

Instead of being asked to make a choice between being either strong and independent or married, black women would be better served if our strengths were celebrated and not demonized, and if we were recognized as individuals. Black women would fare better if writers, experts and social scientists would take a break from hyper-examining and over-analyzing us to figure out what our “problems” are.

Scare Tactics

The media employs age-old scare tactics in their over-coverage of this topic. Black women, particularly educated ones, are scared into thinking that they are undesirable. Media coverage of unmarried successful black women presents an image of black women as desperate, angry, helpless, and unfit for love and happiness. Even the articles that do not blame black women convey a similar message. The Economist article, Sex and the Single Black Woman: How The Mass Incarceration Of Black Men Hurts Black Women, contributes to the scare campaign. In this article discussing how the criminal justice system has decreased the number of eligible black men, the accompanying cartoon depicts scavenger-like, angry black women fiending over an empty pool of eligible black men, fighting desperately to avoid the “prospect of spinsterhood.” The article quotes a relationship counselor, Audrey Chapman, who says, “The skewed sex ratio ‘puts black women in an awful spot.’” This article and its artwork tells black women, Be scared! Be ready to fight to the death if you want a successful black man.

Many of my black women friends with whom I spoke about this issue share the same sentiments about the media’s coverage of this topic. They are all in their late 20’s or early 30’s and highly successful; some are Ivy League educated, have graduate degrees, and are moving up the ladder in their fields. Some are single, few married, and many in serious relationships. One of my closest friends, Merary Soto, has a successful career in finance and a burgeoning acting career, and is also angry about the barrage of articles on unmarried black women. She said that articles like these are part of a larger structure to keep women constantly dissatisfied — just like how “diet fads are used to keep women insecure and unhappy.” She explained the damaging effects of this scare campaign, which I think is right on point: “An insecure and unhappy woman will start under-performing at work, will exclude herself from positive social activities. The list of negative effects goes on and on.”

Obama Effect

I spoke to another successful black female friend about the motivation and timing of these articles. Television ratings and magazine and book sales are obviously a key factor, but why so many of these articles, and why now? These issues are not new. My friend suggested that it was the Obama Effect. Basically, the image of the Obamas — a black president (arguably the most successful man in our country), who married an incredibly successful black woman — is everywhere. Barack and Michelle are on television, magazine covers, the walls of local barbershops and salons. In her article Love & Marriage: Happy Black Women Would be Bad for Media Business, writer Theresa Lasbrey argues that the media launched an “anti-black woman campaign” to counter the image of the Obamas. She writes that the media screams, “The Obamas are not the norm! Do not dream of this for yourself!”

The Obama Effect is very real. It is further evidenced by the article, “Marriage Eludes High Achieving Black Woman: Many Remain Single and Childless, According to New Research.” The article is illustrated with a gleaming picture of Barack and Michelle Obama, coupled-up, smiling and happy. But the text of article, curiously, makes no mention of the Obamas. The message sent to successful black women readers is clear: You may want this, but sorry — this type of happiness will elude you.

Marriage as a Measure of Success

In the Nightline special about the low rates of marriage among black women, the problem was described as follows:

“[O]ne group of women has found it harder to leverage professional success into the model personal life.”

This group of women is, of course, successful African American women. The article states that although “black women in America have made historic strides academically and professionally,” the statistics “point to another issue: Many of the women are single.” The article notes that, “42 percent of African-American women have yet to be married, compared to only 23 percent of white women.” Further, “[t]here’s also a gap in numbers. The 2000 U.S. Census counted 1.8 million more African-American women than black men.”

The Nightline special concludes that the model personal life for successful black women is marriage. In other words, black women cannot truly be successful without a husband. This conclusion is not only sexist, but a fallacy. Black women will not be any less successful if they do not marry. I do not want to be misunderstood; I know from personal experience that many black women want to find a companion with whom they are compatible and can potentially build a family. But even if a black woman does not find this man, does not want a man, or ends up with a man who is not black, she can still be a success.

* * *

To be clear, I am in no way denying that successful black women seeking to marry black men face more difficulties than women of other races who want to marry within their race. Many black women are frustrated. I hear the lament of many of my single black women friends. I am a single black woman and understand the effects of a limited pool of successful black men. I have experienced “black male privilege” (coined by sociologist L’Heureux Lewis), which, among other things, explains that black men take advantage of their limited numbers and oppress black women in the relationship context. I know that many successful black men are aware that they are a commodity and are in the highest demand. Many of them refuse to cash in, so to speak, when their stock is so high. I have had many conversations with professional black men who explained that they couldn’t get “any play” in high school or college because they were considered a nerd, but now they are desirable and have their pick of black women. They are going to be greedy because they can. Further, I have personally encountered a significant number of black men who exclusively date outside of their race. So, I get it.

My point is that the media has failed to show a balanced perspective, and the effects are reckless and promote feelings of self-hatred among black women. Although the numbers do not lie, the numbers presented in this media attack do not reflect the reality for black women. Black love still exists; it is not an anomaly. And black women have options. There are many black women who have, and are beginning to, date men of other races. There are also single black women who are working on self-development and focusing on their personal goals, careers and other things that fulfill them and make them happy. There are women who choose not to marry, but have a long-term relationship with significant others. And there are plenty of black women who marry black men.

The media attack on black women can only be assuaged by showing the multitudes of black women’s experiences with dating and marriage. But I suppose that story is less sexy — and less intentionally scary — than warning black women to Be Afraid, and demanding that we lower our expectations.

The incredible Kamala Harris won the primary for the bid to become attorney general of California. If she wins she will be first woman and first person of color elected Attorney General of California.

via SFBG Blog.

She praised good ideas that her fellow Democrats raised during the primary around fighting gang crime, corporate greed and fraud, protecting kids and the environment.

'It's been an honor to work with you," Harris said, promising to call her opponents, "to ask you to help us put those great ideas to work."

Then she talked about getting "tough and smart on crime" by addressing gang crime, but also focusing on early intervention and truancy.

She talked about cracking down on predatory lenders, supporting health care reform, and protecting California's environment.

"When the President passed healthcare reform, it was the right thing to do," Harris said. "People deserve to have medical care when they need it. The Attorney General has got to stand up and support that. It must be the work of the next Attorney General to ensure that the disaster and tragedy that happened in the Gulf of Mexico never happens in California," she said, warning of attacks on AB 32, which set California's 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal into law in 2006. "

Read more about her politics on her wikipedia page. Having lived in the Bay I know that Harris has exceptionally progressive views and solutions, including most notably her work around re-entry for first time offenders. This is pretty exciting.

Today is officially the last day to vote for Our Bodies Our Blog's 2010 Women's Health Heroes Awards. There are tons of amazing heroes on the nominees list, we thought we'd highlight a couple of our faves:

Marianne Bullock and Lisa Andrews, Co-founders, Prison Birth Project:

Marianne Bullock and Lisa Andrews founded the Prison Birth Project (PBP), which serves incarcerated mothers at the regional women's jail in Chicopee, Mass.

PBP visits inmates prenatally and postpartum. PBP provides childbirth education classes or individual instruction, as well as time-intensive labor support ("doula care").

PBP doulas ease transitions between jail and hospital, support single mothers and whole families, help mothers cope with labor, and help mothers to make informed decisions about medical care. They've even made it possible for some incarcerated moms to breastfeed successfully.

Eugenia Lopez Uribe, Mexican activist and coordinator of the MARIA Abortion Fund for Social Justice:

Eugenia helps women access safe, legal abortion and defends the right to abortion in Mexico. This is no small task. Abortion throughout Mexico has been restricted to cases or rape, life or health of the woman, or fetal malformations. Even when women "fit" within these restrictions, it's impossible to find safe abortion care because most states do not have protocols to provide it. Finally in 2007, Mexico City became the exception and decriminalized abortion up to 12 weeks.

Yet, abortion continues to be a matter of social justice in most Mexican states. Upper class women can pay private providers or travel to Mexico City or leave the country. However, poor women continue to risk their health and lives by seeking back-alley abortions. This is why the work Eugenia does is so important. The MARIA Abortion Fund for Social Justice helps these women.

There are tons of other nominees who we're loving, including the founder of GEMS Rachel Lloyd, one of our bestie blogs RH Reality Check, and our bowling buddies the National Network for Abortion Funds. So check them all out and vote today!

This guest post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Liliana Segura is a senior editor at AlterNet.org and a board member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates,” California prisoner Meagan Calvillo wrote a few years back, in a blunt summary of what happens every day in American prisons. Among transgender people behind bars, her story is not unusual; as Emily Alpert wrote in 2005, “outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.”

Cavillo’s experience may sound extreme, but it mirrors that of the most vulnerable prison populations in the U.S. In 1994 in the case Farmer v. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prison official’s “deliberate indifference” to the risk that a trans woman prisoner named Dee Farmer would be raped when placed within the general population of a men’s federal prison violated her Eighth Amendment rights. Yet, “deliberate indifference” remains a good phrase to define the broader attitude towards prisoners who are raped behind bars; among them, transgender prisoners, gay prisoners, young prisoners, prisoners who are locked up for the first time, and prisoners who are mentally ill are often the most targeted for sexual assault by guards and other prisoners alike, their bodies treated as a commodity in the prison power economy. If survivors of sexual assault are routinely silenced in the outside world, those who are assaulted behind prison walls are even more invisible. They are also the least likely to receive sympathy or help from people on the outside.

“Survivors of sexual abuse behind bars experience the same emotional pain as other rape victims,” the staff at Just Detention Inc, the only organization in the country that is “dedicated exclusively” to eliminating sexual assault in prisons or jails, remind us. Yet the ugly reality — familiar to anyone who has ever seen depictions of prison on TV or in popular music, or heard the phrase “don’t drop the soap” — is that prison rape has long been ingrained in the cultural imagination as, at worst, a hilarious punchline about deserving convicts, at best, an indignity that simply comes with the territory.

To combat this attitude, JDI launched an ad campaign a few years ago to force people to visually confront their unconscious double standards about rape victims. “Would you joke around about this man being raped?” asks one ad about a young man dressed in a nondescript t-shirt. In the next frame, the same man is dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. “How about now?

Printed on postcards and sent out to prison administrators, these ads have attracted a lot of attention in the past several months, but as Lovisa Stannow, JDI’s Executive Director told Change.org’s Matt Kelley last month, they are not a new phenomenon. “JDI has been distributing these postcards for several years, to prison officials and others,” she said. “We revamped our website earlier this year and featured them prominently on the homepage, which led to the ‘discovery’ of the images among bloggers.”

In the public debate, prisoners tend to be silent and invisible. Most inmates come from marginalized, low-income communities and people of color are vastly over-represented among them. Prisoners cannot stage public relations campaigns to counter injustices on late-night television or on the big screen. But flippant and ill-informed attitudes about inmates and their right to be free from sexual violence are major obstacles to ending this type of abuse. That is why JDI has made it part of its mission to ensure that prisoner rape is described accurately — as a crime and a devastating human rights violation. The postcard campaign is part of that effort.

It is probably impossible to know exactly how many prisoners are raped behind bars. “According to the best available research,” reports JDI, “20 percent of inmates in men’s prisons are sexually abused at some point during their incarceration. The rate for women’s facilities varies dramatically from one prison to another, with one in four inmates being victimized at the worst institutions.” With some 2.3 million people behind bars in the U.S., the implications are nothing short of a human rights and public health epidemic.

Fortunately, things are starting to change. Stannow cites a “dramatic shift in the debate about prisoner rape” in the past year alone, thanks in part to decades of work by dedicated activists, many of whom are former prisoners and rape survivors themselves.

Stephen Donaldson, one of JDI’s former directors, was a pacifist protesting his government’s bombing of Cambodia in 1968 when he was arrested on the White House lawn, tossed in jail, and, in his own words, “gang-raped about sixty times over two days,” with the complicity of a DC prison guard. Donaldson was one of the earliest people to speak publicly about prison rape, authoring the Prisoner Rape Education Project, which published “practical information and advice on prisoner rape.” He died of AIDS, the result of contracting HIV from one of the people who raped him.

Thanks to the pioneering work of people like Donaldson, today survivors of rape have more of a voice.

“I continue to contend with flashbacks of what this correctional officer did to me and the guilt, shame, and rage that comes with having been sexually violated for so many years,” former prisoner Necole Brown told the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) in testimony published last year. “I felt lost for a very long time struggling with this. … I still struggle with the memories of this ordeal and take it out on friends and family who are trying to be there for me now.”

Brown is just one of many prisoner voices in the 276-page NPREC report, which offers an important, newly comprehensive look at the problem of prison rape in the United States. Mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the report makes recommendations for how to address issues like housing, staff training, prisoners education, and medical and mental health care for victims of sexual assault. The U.S. Attorney General has until this coming June to codify the recommendations.

Anyone who wants to learn more about the pervasiveness of rape behind bars should read the NPREC report, which, in addition to compiling expert and survivor testimony, sheds new light on the increasing problem of sexual assault in immigrant detention centers: “In the 15 years from 1994 to 2009,” the authors write, “the number of immigrants held in detention pending a judicial decision about their legal right to remain in the United States increased nearly 400 percent. For the 2009 fiscal year, ICE has budgeted enough money to detain 33,400 people on any given night and more than 400,000 people over the course of the year. The population of immigration detainees includes adults, thousands of ‘unaccompanied’ children, and whole families confined together.”

Because immigration detainees are confined by the agency with the power to deport them, officers have an astounding degree of leverage — especially when detainees are not well informed of their rights and lack access to legal counsel. The Commission learned that officers have propositioned women whose cases they control, telling them that if they want to be released they need to comply with their sexual demands. The fear of deportation cannot be overstated and also functions to silence many individuals who are sexually abused. Those brave enough to speak out may face retaliation. After women detainees at the Krome immigration detention facility in Miami reported sexual abuse by staff, several of them wrote, “We are afraid….each time one of us is interviewed by investigating officers….[S]ome of the women who have given statements have either been transferred or deported to their countries.”

With immigrant detention (in its current form) a relatively modern phenomenon in the U.S., this is a new version of an old problem.

Go here to learn more about prison rape: http://www.justdetention.org/

Go here to read the testimony of prison rape survivors: http://www.justdetention.org/en/survivortestimony/portraits_of_courage.aspx

Last month, Yerawada prison in Maharashtra, India, became in part an open prison. Prachi Pinglay of the BBC reports that ‘women will soon be allowed to roam the premises and farmland in relative freedom’. Inspector General (Prisons) Uddhav Kamble explains that ‘Selected women inmates will mostly work in fields during the day and return to barracks in the evening. Our agricultural officer will train them. They get to step out, learn a skill, make some money and get their sentences reduced’.

“There are four such jails in Maharashtra alone for men and many more in other states. Now women convicts will also be able to get the benefits,” she [Principal Secretary (Home) of the Prisons department Medha Gadgil] said.

Social activists say that the move to introduce women’s open prisons is long overdue. India is a country where many female inmates are in prison because of crimes they have committed in response to domestic violence at home.

The Hindu has more, including that the women are also to ‘be trained in other skills such as candle-making, screen printing, etc. to help them start a new life after being released from jail’.

A must-read article about race, class, caste and the American prison system. A few facts from the piece:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
  As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The mass incarceration of African Americans over the past 30 years is primarily related to the War on Drugs — a convenient cover for a program essentially targeted at the black community. The talking points all came back to the supposed rates of drug-related violence, but that doesn’t exactly compute with historical fact:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The vast majority of people arrested for drug-related offenses are non-violent, and are arrested for possession rather than selling. Just read the whole thing.

(Found via New York City Anarchoblogs.)

For those of you in and around the capital of capital, here’s an upcoming event at Left Forum at Pace University in New York.

WHAT: What Does the Left Need to Know about Prison? panel with Vikki Law, Asha Bandele, Cleo Silvers, and Laura Whitehorn, moderated by Susie Day.

WHEN: Sunday, March 21, 3pm-5pm

WHERE: Left Forum, Pace University, One Pace Plaza, New York, NY 10038

What Does the Left Need to Know about Prison? (a panel at Left Forum)

Placated by TV-cop-show justice, worried about economic survival, most of the U.S. Left – like the U.S. mainstream – ignores the ongoing reality of prison in the lives of poor people and revolutionaries, alike. Yet prison in this country is the basis for the creation of new forms of increasing government/corporate control. The prison system has already played a critical role in ensuring that popular rebellions, like those of the mid-20th century, do not occur again. What do people who do support work for political and social prisoners have to teach us about building a more viable and oppositional Left?

Panelists: Vikki Law, Asha Bandele, Cleo Silvers, and Laura Whitehorn, moderated by Susie Day.

Asha Bandele: Journalist, editor-at-large of Essence magazine, mother, and author of The Prisoner’s Wife, her memoirs of her relationship with a New York State prisoner with whom she had a daughter. She is also the author of other books, including Daughter, a novel about the impact of police brutality. Asha continues her writing and work as a prison activist.

Laura Whitehorn: Political activist who was incarcerated for more than 14 years on political charges, Laura now does support work for U.S. political prisoners. At the request of Wonda Jones, daughter of former Panther, political prisoner, and prison activist Safiya Bukhari, Laura edited a compilation of Bukhari’s writings and speeches, just published by the Feminist Press.

Cleo Silvers: Former Black Panther Party member and South Bronx community worker, Cleo has worked for years as a union and labor organizer and has done extensive work on behalf of U.S. prisoners. She is currently a member of the Safiya Nuh Foundation for the Support of Political Prisoners.

Vikki Law: Writer, photographer, and mother. She is a co-founder of Books Through Bars-New York City, an organization that sends free radical literature and books to prisoners nationwide; editor of the ‘zine Tenacious: Writings from Women in Prison, and author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2009).

Susie Day: Assistant editor at Monthly Review, writes a regular satire column and has, since 1988, written about political prisoners and prisons.

at Left Forum

Pace University, One Pace Plaza
New York, NY 10038
Sunday, March 21st, 3 to 5 pm, W-504

—Vikki Law, Resistance Behind Bars (2010-03-08): What Does the Left Need to Know about Prison? (a panel at Left Forum)

Via Radical Doula, we find that as Washington state is proposed with a bill that would outlaw shackling of pregnant incarcerated women, the superintendent of Washington's only prison that houses pregnant women contended that only about 30 percent of pregnant women are restrained:

The Superintendent at the Corrections Center for Women said pregnant inmates are not restrained during the final moments of labor.

Superintendent Douglas Cole said only about 30 percent of pregnant offenders are restrained while they're at the hospital.

On those occasions, said Cole, the women are attached to the hospital bed with a 3-foot-long handcuff.

And this number is supposed to be appeasing how exactly?

Related posts:
Racism, Xenophobia and Misogyny Intersect: Giving birth while in shackles.
Victory for incarcerated pregnant women
Judge jails HIV positive woman to "protect" her fetus
New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression