feminist blogs

So, I have to admit - I was a little nervous when posting about street harassment the other day. I was really eager to open up the conversation, especially because it was focused on a queer/gender non-conforming/trans experience and perspective that I’m not used to hearing. But I was also worried about certain dynamics that tend to surface during these conversations, namely dynamics of race and class.

While women and other gender underprivileged folks of all races, ethnicities, and classes can and often do experience street harassment, the voices that I usually hear in these discussions are most often of women with either race or class privilege. This is not unique to conversations about street harassment: most larger conversations are dominated by the voices with the most privilege. In conversations about street harassment, though, this has an interesting and profound effect, as you’ll often have some very complex and conflicting power dynamics going on: men exerting their gender privilege and sexism over women who have class and/or race privilege over them.

Power and privilege are complex things. Sometimes, you’ll have instances when the power differentials clearly go in one person’s favor - an upper-class white man harassing a poor woman of color is a nice, neat situation in which you don’t have to hurt your brain to understand what’s going on. But what about when it’s a poor man of color harassing an upper-class white woman? There are weird and complex things going on with power in that situation. And again, let me stress - street harassment is never justifiable. Victims of street harassment, on the other hand, are fully justified in their rage and hurt and other feelings around it, and are also justified in standing up to their harassers and speaking out against it. However, I don’t think we should pay attention to one power dynamic - gender - while disregarding others, like race and class. Yeah, it might be harder than simply writing off the men as sexist assholes and leaving it at that, but that’s the thing: if we ignore the complexities of different forms of power and privilege, we often wind up perpetuating discrimination and oppression in the process.

When I was writing my last post, I looked at the HollaBack NYC and Boston for the first time. I think there’s a lot of worth in the tactics and the message behind the website - turning a critical lens on harassers, quite literally. And yet, I found myself cringing every once in a while. Both the NYC and the Boston sites have anti-racist statements (here and here; the Boston site also includes class in theirs, saying that “replacing sexism with racism or classism is not a proper Holla Back” and that they ask that “contributors do not discuss the race or class of harassers or include other stigmatizing commentary.” They also acknowledge right out that “initiatives combating various forms of sexual harassment and assault have continually struggled against the perpetuation of racist and classist stereotypes.” I appreciate that acknowledgment and the site creators’ commitment to avoid perpetuating that dynamic.

However, can it really be avoided? As soon as a picture of a person of color or a person whose class privilege you can read from looking at them is posted, race and class come into play. It’s unavoidable. Even when people don’t post pictures of their harassers, their are often clues in what they write, most often in the language and grammar and accent cues used when describing what the guy said.

Even outside of the posts themselves, class and race come into play. Right from jump, we have the name of the sites - “HollaBack.” Now, Gwen Stefani may have brought this into wider parlance, but I think that many people understand “holla back” as part of Black urban vernacular. Whose image, then, is conjured up up immediately by the name of the sites, a name that frames the rest of the sites’ content? The header images on each site say something, too. On the Holla Back Boston site, the header image uses an urban alley backdrop with a tagged dumpster and a graffiti-style font for the words; these things are inflected with class and cultural references and send messages about them.

The header and sidebar images on the HollaBack NYC site are even more interesting. There are seven people in the image, all holding up camera phones - representative of the people “snapping back” against harassment. Now, we can only go with visuals here which aren’t always good indications of race, but when I see these images, I definitely see mostly white people (at least five out of seven.) The images in the sidebar that depict people wearing HollaBack NYC merchandise are both of apparently white people. People of color start to show up far more on the site when you’re looking at the pictures of the harassers. So this sets up a weird dichotomy: the people depicted as being behind the cameras, doing the snapping, wearing the merch and supporting the site are mostly white; the people depicted as doing the harassing are more mixed but (by my count of the first 36 images on the site) mostly people of color.

I also can’t help but wonder about how subjectivity works, both on what winds up being posted on the site and in the larger conversation about street harassment. Our society works damn hard trying to convince us that Black folks, Latinos, and other people of color, especially men, are really scary, scarier than white men. How much of that have we internalized? Hell, I’m a person of color and I know I’ve internalized enough to kind of hate myself for it sometimes. How does that affect how we experience street harassment? What comments seem most threatening, and from who? What’s going to just mildly annoy us and what’s going to make us feel angry, gross, or threatened enough to take a picture and post it up on a blog?

I’m not trying to say that these sites suck or are worthless or should be taken down or anything like that. What I am trying to communicate is what I take from the site as a woman of color - there’s parts I can say “right on” to, but there are other parts that really squick me out. Yeah, there’s something that makes me feel uncomfortable about the image of a white person snapping a picture of a man of color, even a sexist jerk of color, and posting it up on the web for all to see in a manner that sometimes reminds me of the mug shots of men of color that the media just loves to show us all the time. Am I less of a feminist, do I care less about women, am I less angry about street harassment and committed to ending it because I acknowledge that discomfort, put it out there, want to discuss it and interrogate it? Nah, I don’t think so, because I think we’ve learned many a lesson from the early years of feminism about asking women of color to put aside their race and their race politics for the sake of “all women.” It ain’t right, it don’t work, and it won’t get us anywhere.

So let’s get somewhere. This is the first time I write about this stuff, or even think so much about it. I’d like to hear people’s thoughts and reactions; I’m especially looking forward to hearing what other women and gender-oppressed people of color about this.

(Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch)

THESE DAYS, a good way to fall out of favor with the Reich Wing is to treat Mexican Migrant Homelanders (or “ALIENZ”; “Migrant Homelanders” is my papás phrase) as if they are human beings. That is just not cool, and you will be castigated and cast out for it. Guess Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) of is figuring this out. But the man doesn’t care, apparently.

WASHINGTON - Democrats are praising Sen. Jon Kyl. Republicans are damning him.

This topsy-turvy political scene would have been unbelievable a year ago, when the conservative Arizona Republican was facing his toughest challenge yet in his bid for a third term.

But Kyl’s key role in this year’s failed immigration compromise has former supporters howling, foes taking a second look and everyone re-evaluating his record and his legacy. [… ]

Immigration is the No. 1 problem bedeviling Arizona, and despite the Senate’s rejection of his bipartisan prescription, Kyl says he has no intention of leaving the resolution solely to the majority Democrats.

‘Obviously, I wasn’t thinking of my political career when I took the leadership role I did in the immigration debate,’ Kyl said during a recent interview in his Capitol Hill ‘hideaway’ office beneath the Senate. ‘Sometimes you do what you have to do.’”

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Ouch. Hideaway office! Nice sly phrasing. Too bad he wasn’t speaking from his “Master” suite or “Central office,” or something a bit more leaderly. (Must remember, no matter what. Never give interview from Hideaway office.)

Don’t get me wrong. Reading the whole article, I doubt that most of Kyl’s motivation is thinking of immigrants as “human beings.” He’s probably just a bit more politically savvy than his brain-frothy compatriots, who have lost all sense of balance and reason in the storm of racism that has also lately swollen the ranks of the KKK, the Minutemen, and other rabid non-thinking segments of America.

Along with McCain, Kyl has infuriated many Republican activists and bloggers, some of whom have painted him as a turncoat with insults such as ‘Judas’ and ‘Benedict.’

At the same time, he has earned respect from the other side of the aisle.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat running for president, praised both Kyl and McCain for their work on the immigration bill.

‘That’s leadership from the Southwest,’ Richardson said during a recent visit to Phoenix. ‘I don’t want to say too many more nice things about McCain and Kyl because that won’t help them, but I commend both of them for their efforts.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

How do these anti-immigration advocates see these Mexicans who work so hard to gather a bit of food and money with which to live? It’s easier for me to think of them with a human angle, of course. My father and Mama Lucha, his mother and my abuelita made their way working the fields in the American Southwest. Mama Lucha came to El Paso from Mexico City and that’s why I exist as a human being deemed citizen of one United States of America. (One of the reasons!) They were able to come because cousins Beto and Vicente Quintana joined the U.S. Army so that they could all be citizens. (These types of sacrifices and contributions to the U.S.A. by Latinos is exactly why Ken Burns’ omission of us in his The War documentary was so offensive and remains an important issue.)

But…green card, no green card. I don’t see these people as different, so different. We all want to eat, we want to grow, we want to prosper and not be ill or dying, and be able to take care of those we love. All of our economies and lives and means are influenced and limited by the political powers that be, moving things behind the scenes, opening up opportunities, or closing them down, and almost always as a consequence of them shoring up their own coffers. For Mexican immigrants, it is not so simple as “Stay in Mexico and make it better.” It is not so simple as “you are criminally invading our land.” Oh, if it were only so simple. But in our soundbyte society, these juvenile non-arguments actually have legs. Who cares about systematic economic war waged on a nation? Who cares to look up the history of Mexico and the U.S.A.? Who cares to understand more than the headlines they dump on our benumbed brains? And who cares for what the whole idea of the U.S.A. was once advertised to be.

Somehow, I do. I know many of you do. And if it’s too hard for some of today’s politicians (some on both “sides,” but it seems mostly from the Right) to frame this issue in human or empathetic, compassionate terms? Then use self-interest. You still have some of that, I take it?

A registered Republican, Bermudez predicts that Arizona eventually will be a Hispanic majority state and says that Republicans such as Kyl and McCain are crucial to the party’s continued vitality. The strident anti-immigrant commentary from other Republican segments turns off many Hispanics, he said.

That wasn’t always so. President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli legislation that granted amnesty to more than 3 million illegal immigrants. Immigration restrictionists look back at the law in horror, but many Hispanic Americans see it as a breakthrough.

‘There are a lot of Hispanics who remember President Reagan as the person who came in and solved at least some of the problems for 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country in 1986,’ Bermudez said. ‘We consider him to be a hero, and he’s the reason why I became a Republican, for instance.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Oooh! Sing it: Wouldn’t ya like to be a Reagan, too?

I know these politicians who condemn Kyl for his latest shift in outlook or behavior are in denial, but let me help you out (because I know you are reading this, ése). The “Hispanic” voting block/buying block/population? It’s not a joke. It’s not hype. It’s not a threat, or some radical Xicano activist pump-the-first bravado-inspired phrase. It’s simply reality. We are large, and we are growing at faster rate. And cálmate, porque it’s not about alienz flooding your borders. Natural born Latinos are the ones mostly swelling the census ranks. We are simply growing at a faster rate. High population numbers are a manifestation of the Latino destiny.

So, por favor, think hard on the human angle, or at least making friends with your fellow humans and citizens, Right Wing and anti-immigrant factions. Before long, it will be inarguably and utterly self-defeating to position the Hispanic/Latino population as adversaries. It actually already is. Just scope out the mass of corporations and merchants responding to the new markets. That’s all you have to do to sniff the maize-wild wind.

In a month or so, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City will unveil its new Web site, which for the first time will be bilingual. And the chamber’s meetings also are now in Spanish. […]

In addition to building a Web site, Gomez has been busy making sure that every one of the chamber’s publications is bilingual.

‘We’re making a concerted effort to embrace bilingualism and also focus on small businesses,’ Gomez said. ‘We had a series of lunch-and-learns we did in English. Now we’re doing them in Spanish. The response we’ve been getting from the Spanish-speaking community has been tremendous.’

Gomez believes he got involved in the chamber at the right time.

By the end of this year, one of every 10 small businesses throughout the nation will be owned by a Hispanic, Gomez said. […]

‘After a year of lobbying, I convinced the vice president of marketing to test it,’ Gomez said. ‘It went over so well, they decided to put it in every Best Buy store.’

—Bilingual push is part of Hispanic chamber outreach, kansascity.com

With harsh, unforgiving, or punitive conditions in your immigration bills or a hostile attitude toward Mexican@s, you can punish all those Mexicans who are not citizens, if this speaks to your fear and sense of territory. But you can’t deport us all, as is said (and in a fun and spicy video, even). And even after you’ve been intractable on this issue, or even if you manage to stuff the bill full of obstacles or fire up the hate and ignorance that is already sadly raging and having very real effects on many of us, remember: the rest of us live here. We do feel connected to their fate. Very often we are connected to their fate. We do see them as human. And we do care about what laws are now being passed, ignored or manipulated. And we do buy things. And vote.

We’re the passionate ones with the long, long memories right? I mean if you’re going to buy into the old stereotypes, go all the way, vato!
Continue reading at Feministe …

THESE DAYS, a good way to fall out of favor with the Reich Wing is to treat Mexican Migrant Homelanders (or “ALIENZ”; “Migrant Homelanders” is my papás phrase) as if they are human beings. That is just not cool, and you will be castigated and cast out for it. Guess Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) of is figuring this out. But the man doesn’t care, apparently.

WASHINGTON - Democrats are praising Sen. Jon Kyl. Republicans are damning him.

This topsy-turvy political scene would have been unbelievable a year ago, when the conservative Arizona Republican was facing his toughest challenge yet in his bid for a third term.

But Kyl’s key role in this year’s failed immigration compromise has former supporters howling, foes taking a second look and everyone re-evaluating his record and his legacy. [… ]

Immigration is the No. 1 problem bedeviling Arizona, and despite the Senate’s rejection of his bipartisan prescription, Kyl says he has no intention of leaving the resolution solely to the majority Democrats.

‘Obviously, I wasn’t thinking of my political career when I took the leadership role I did in the immigration debate,’ Kyl said during a recent interview in his Capitol Hill ‘hideaway’ office beneath the Senate. ‘Sometimes you do what you have to do.’”

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Ouch. Hideaway office! Nice sly phrasing. Too bad he wasn’t speaking from his “Master” suite or “Central office,” or something a bit more leaderly. (Must remember, no matter what. Never give interview from Hideaway office.)

Don’t get me wrong. Reading the whole article, I doubt that most of Kyl’s motivation is thinking of immigrants as “human beings.” He’s probably just a bit more politically savvy than his brain-frothy compatriots, who have lost all sense of balance and reason in the storm of racism that has also lately swollen the ranks of the KKK, the Minutemen, and other rabid non-thinking segments of America.

Along with McCain, Kyl has infuriated many Republican activists and bloggers, some of whom have painted him as a turncoat with insults such as ‘Judas’ and ‘Benedict.’

At the same time, he has earned respect from the other side of the aisle.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat running for president, praised both Kyl and McCain for their work on the immigration bill.

‘That’s leadership from the Southwest,’ Richardson said during a recent visit to Phoenix. ‘I don’t want to say too many more nice things about McCain and Kyl because that won’t help them, but I commend both of them for their efforts.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

How do these anti-immigration advocates see these Mexicans who work so hard to gather a bit of food and money with which to live? It’s easier for me to think of them with a human angle, of course. My father and Mama Lucha, his mother and my abuelita made their way working the fields in the American Southwest. Mama Lucha came to El Paso from Mexico City and that’s why I exist as a human being deemed citizen of one United States of America. (One of the reasons!) They were able to come because cousins Beto and Vicente Quintana joined the U.S. Army so that they could all be citizens. (These types of sacrifices and contributions to the U.S.A. by Latinos is exactly why Ken Burns’ omission of us in his The War documentary was so offensive and remains an important issue.)

But…green card, no green card. I don’t see these people as different, so different. We all want to eat, we want to grow, we want to prosper and not be ill or dying, and be able to take care of those we love. All of our economies and lives and means are influenced and limited by the political powers that be, moving things behind the scenes, opening up opportunities, or closing them down, and almost always as a consequence of them shoring up their own coffers. For Mexican immigrants, it is not so simple as “Stay in Mexico and make it better.” It is not so simple as “you are criminally invading our land.” Oh, if it were only so simple. But in our soundbyte society, these juvenile non-arguments actually have legs. Who cares about systematic economic war waged on a nation? Who cares to look up the history of Mexico and the U.S.A.? Who cares to understand more than the headlines they dump on our benumbed brains? And who cares for what the whole idea of the U.S.A. was once advertised to be.

Somehow, I do. I know many of you do. And if it’s too hard for some of today’s politicians (some on both “sides,” but it seems mostly from the Right) to frame this issue in human or empathetic, compassionate terms? Then use self-interest. You still have some of that, I take it?

A registered Republican, Bermudez predicts that Arizona eventually will be a Hispanic majority state and says that Republicans such as Kyl and McCain are crucial to the party’s continued vitality. The strident anti-immigrant commentary from other Republican segments turns off many Hispanics, he said.

That wasn’t always so. President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli legislation that granted amnesty to more than 3 million illegal immigrants. Immigration restrictionists look back at the law in horror, but many Hispanic Americans see it as a breakthrough.

‘There are a lot of Hispanics who remember President Reagan as the person who came in and solved at least some of the problems for 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country in 1986,’ Bermudez said. ‘We consider him to be a hero, and he’s the reason why I became a Republican, for instance.’

—How migrant-reform effort changed the image of a powerful conservative, http://www.azcentral.com

Oooh! Sing it: Wouldn’t ya like to be a Reagan, too?

I know these politicians who condemn Kyl for his latest shift in outlook or behavior are in denial, but let me help you out (because I know you are reading this, ése). The “Hispanic” voting block/buying block/population? It’s not a joke. It’s not hype. It’s not a threat, or some radical Xicano activist pump-the-first bravado-inspired phrase. It’s simply reality. We are large, and we are growing at faster rate. And cálmate, porque it’s not about alienz flooding your borders. Natural born Latinos are the ones mostly swelling the census ranks. We are simply growing at a faster rate. High population numbers are a manifestation of the Latino destiny.

So, por favor, think hard on the human angle, or at least making friends with your fellow humans and citizens, Right Wing and anti-immigrant factions. Before long, it will be inarguably and utterly self-defeating to position the Hispanic/Latino population as adversaries. It actually already is. Just scope out the mass of corporations and merchants responding to the new markets. That’s all you have to do to sniff the maize-wild wind.

In a month or so, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City will unveil its new Web site, which for the first time will be bilingual. And the chamber’s meetings also are now in Spanish. […]

In addition to building a Web site, Gomez has been busy making sure that every one of the chamber’s publications is bilingual.

‘We’re making a concerted effort to embrace bilingualism and also focus on small businesses,’ Gomez said. ‘We had a series of lunch-and-learns we did in English. Now we’re doing them in Spanish. The response we’ve been getting from the Spanish-speaking community has been tremendous.’

Gomez believes he got involved in the chamber at the right time.

By the end of this year, one of every 10 small businesses throughout the nation will be owned by a Hispanic, Gomez said. […]

‘After a year of lobbying, I convinced the vice president of marketing to test it,’ Gomez said. ‘It went over so well, they decided to put it in every Best Buy store.’

—Bilingual push is part of Hispanic chamber outreach, kansascity.com

With harsh, unforgiving, or punitive conditions in your immigration bills or a hostile attitude toward Mexican@s, you can punish all those Mexicans who are not citizens, if this speaks to your fear and sense of territory. But you can’t deport us all, as is said (and in a fun and spicy video, even). And even after you’ve been intractable on this issue, or even if you manage to stuff the bill full of obstacles or fire up the hate and ignorance that is already sadly raging and having very real effects on many of us, remember: the rest of us live here. We do feel connected to their fate. Very often we are connected to their fate. We do see them as human. And we do care about what laws are now being passed, ignored or manipulated. And we do buy things. And vote.

We’re the passionate ones with the long, long memories right? I mean if you’re going to buy into the old stereotypes, go all the way, vato!
Continue reading at Feministe …

Jeffrey’s right — this picture really does say it all. The NAACP invited all of the Republican presidential contenders to the NAACP GOP Presidential Candidate Forum. A grand total of one showed up. Jeffrey hits it on the head when he writes:

The resulting photo of Tancredo–standing on a stage of empty podiums–sums up the Republican party’s commitment to civil rights in America: the only Republican interested is the guy running to deny immigrant workers their rights.

All of the Democratic candidates showed up for their forum.

And then GOP voters cry when the NAACP doesn’t cave into their demands.

via Hughes for America.

LOL! Pro-lifers from Georgia are upset about being ignored again at the NAACP annual convention:

This July approximately 8,000 NAACP members met in Detroit for the organization’s annual convention. While Saturday’s major theme was improving access to heath care, NAACP authorities rejected the pro-life resolution of the Macon, Georgia, chapter for the second time since 2004.

Well, duh. “Pro-life resolutions” are about removing access to health care, not improving it.

Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and pastoral associate for Priests for Life, strongly urged the NAACP to recognize the importance of the pro-life resolution. “The NAACP has always been about justice,” said King, quoted in the Christian Post. “Today, there is no greater injustice facing black people than abortion.”

No greater injustice?? Seriously? What about all the poverty and the lack of health care and the racist justice system? If black women were not more likely to be faced with these injustices (and many others), they would not be more likely to abort.

A friend of mine once had to abort a twin pregnancy because she already had one baby (under 1), her boyfriend was mentally ill, violent and always out of work, her car was a broken-down piece of shit, and she lived with her terminally ill mother in a tiny, rented duplex. The family was struggling to care for the one baby while she attended community college; three would have been impossible.

But according to these crazy pro-lifers, the fact that she was allowed to have a safe, doctor-provided abortion so she could survive it and finish school and get a good job to give her daughter a better life is the greatest injustice of all! Give me a fucking break.

cross-posted

(Sorry for the delete and repost. My HTML got screwed up somehow, and it wouldn’t save my edit.)

I was buying lotion at The Body Shop the other day and was taken aback by a display of “moisture white” skincare products. They don’t seem to be advertising it as skin-whitening cream, but it does claim to “brighten” skin — and, come on, the name is moisture white.

Am I over-reacting?

Every Supreme Court decision seems to get worse and worse:

With competing blocs of justices claiming the mantle of Brown v. Board of Education, a bitterly divided Supreme Court declared Thursday that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.

Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools.

In other words, the court has just taken a major step toward resegregation in schools. The Times has a good editorial on it:

Chief Justice Roberts, who assured the Senate at his confirmation hearings that he respected precedent, and Brown in particular, eagerly set these precedents aside. The right wing of the court also tossed aside two other principles they claim to hold dear. Their campaign for “federalism,” or scaling back federal power so states and localities have more authority, argued for upholding the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., programs. So did their supposed opposition to “judicial activism.” This decision is the height of activism: federal judges relying on the Constitution to tell elected local officials what to do.

The nation is getting more diverse, but by many measures public schools are becoming more segregated. More than one in six black children now attend schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority. This resegregation is likely to get appreciably worse as a result of the court’s ruling.

There should be no mistaking just how radical this decision is. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was his “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” He also noted the “cruel irony” of the court relying on Brown v. Board of Education while robbing that landmark ruling of much of its force and spirit. The citizens of Louisville and Seattle, and the rest of the nation, can ponder the majority’s kind words about Brown as they get to work today making their schools, and their cities, more segregated.

As Geoffrey Stone points out, both Alito and Roberts are guided more by ideology than rule of law, despite their confirmation hearing claims that they would stick to the principle of stare decisis. You should also read Scott’s thoughts on the case.

Justice Breyer’s dissent is also worth a read (thanks to Scott for providing the link). He offers crucial information on just how segregated our schools already are:

Between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending a school where minority children constituted more than half of the school fell from 77% to 63% in the Nation (from 81% to 57% in the South) but then reversed direction by the year 2000, rising from 63% to 72% in the Nation (from 57% to 69% in the South). Similarly, between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending schools that were more than 90% minority fell from 64% to 33% in the Nation (from 78% to 23% in the South), but that too reversed direction, rising by the year 2000 from 33% to 37% in the Nation (from 23% to 31% in the South). As of 2002, almost 2.4 million students, or over 5% of all public school enrollment, attended schools with a white population of less than 1%. Of these, 2.3 million were black and Latino students, and only 72,000 were white. Today, more than one in six black children attend a school that is 99-100% minority. See Appendix A, infra. In light of the evident risk of a return to school systems that are in fact (though not in law) resegregated, many school districts have felt a need to maintain or to extend their integration efforts.

The Seattle plan, which was modest and limited, sought to make a tiny dent in this segregation. Now, we can expect things to go from bad to worse. More Breyer, because his dissent is so powerful:

Indeed, the consequences of the approach the Court takes today are serious. Yesterday, the plans under review were lawful. Today, they are not. Yesterday, the citizens of this Nation could look for guidance to this Court’s unanimous pronouncements concerning desegregation. Today, they cannot. Yesterday, school boards had available to them a full range of means to combat segregated schools. Today, they do not.

The Court’s decision undermines other basic institutional principles as well. What has happened to stare decisis? The history of the plans before us, their educational importance, their highly limited use of race–all these and more–make clear that the compelling interest here is stronger than in Grutter. The plans here are more narrowly tailored than the law school admissions program there at issue. Hence, applying Grutter’s strict test, their lawfulness follows a fortiori. To hold to the contrary is to transform that test from “strict” to “fatal in fact”–the very opposite of what Grutter said. And what has happened to Swann? To McDaniel? To Crawford? To Harris? To School Committee of Boston? To Seattle School Dist. No. 1? After decades of vibrant life, they would all, under the plurality’s logic, be written out of the law.

And what of respect for democratic local decisionmaking by States and school boards? For several decades this Court has rested its public school decisions upon Swann’s basic view that the Constitution grants local school districts a significant degree of leeway where the inclusive use of race-conscious criteria is at issue. Now localities will have to cope with the difficult problems they face (including resegregation) deprived of one means they may find necessary.

And what of law’s concern to diminish and peacefully settle conflict among the Nation’s people? Instead of accommodating different good-faith visions of our country and our Constitution, today’s holding upsets settled expectations, creates legal uncertainty, and threatens to produce considerable further litigation, aggravating race-related conflict.

And what of the long history and moral vision that the Fourteenth Amendment itself embodies? The plurality cites in support those who argued in Brown against segregation, and Justice Thomas likens the approach that I have taken to that of segregation’s defenders. See ante, at 39-41 (plurality opinion) (comparing Jim Crow segregation to Seattle and Louisville’s integration polices); ante, at 28-32 (Thomas, J., concurring). But segregation policies did not simply tell schoolchildren “where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” ante, at 40 (plurality opinion); they perpetuated a caste system rooted in the institutions of slavery and 80 years of legalized subordination. The lesson of history, see ante, at 39 (plurality opinion), is not that efforts to continue racial segregation are constitutionally indistinguishable from efforts to achieve racial integration. Indeed, it is a cruel distortion of history to compare Topeka, Kansas, in the 1950’s to Louisville and Seattle in the modern day–to equate the plight of Linda Brown (who was ordered to attend a Jim Crow school) to the circumstances of Joshua McDonald (whose request to transfer to a school closer to home was initially declined). This is not to deny that there is a cost in applying “a state-mandated racial label.” Ante, at 17 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). But that cost does not approach, in degree or in kind, the terrible harms of slavery, the resulting caste system, and 80 years of legal racial segregation.
…
The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.

Absolutely.

The majority opinion atrocious and a major step backwards. But I also have big problems with how the more progressive side of the court has handled integration issues. In affirmative action (”AA” from here on out) cases particularly, the more liberal justices have often based their support of AA on the idea that it contributes to “diversity,” and diversity is important.

That’s true. But who is benefitting from that diversity and who are the bodies that make a place “diverse”?

The underlying rationale in the diversity argument is that AA (and desegregation policies) are important because they make things more interesting for white people. Just look at how diversity is framed: It allows the majority population to come into contact with people of different races, cultures and backgrounds; it widens our horizens; it prepares us for a life of interaction with people unlike ourselves. In other words, diversity is good because the presence of minorities help the majority. It’s kind of like the argument that racism is bad because it hurts all of us — which isn’t exactly true. Racism hurts particular classes of people far worse than others, and it maintains a system wherein a certain class is in power. I don’t like racism and I would like to see racism obliterated, but as a white person racism most certainly does benefit me.

The fact that the diversity argument is the one that still (kind of) flies with the Court is pretty indicative of just how far we haven’t come — arguments for desegregation policies still must be premised on the grounds that they’re good for white people. That in itself should indicate that we aren’t living in a colorblind society, and shouldn’t pretend that we are. Unfortunately, as BfP points out, conservatives have taken to perverting anti-racist concepts of equality in an effort to re-segregate schools and society in general. If I have to hear “Affirmative action is all about judging people by the color of their skin, and not by the content of their character” one more time, I might hit something. Because, newsflash: People are already judged by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. Beyond that, there is a thriving racial caste system in this country. Ignoring it and braying on about “equality” when nothing resembling actual equality has been reached doesn’t do a damn thing except to maintain the status quo.

These cases should be about realizing equality, and they should be about the people who are treated unequally. Instead, they’re about a powerful majority crying persecution, and liberals promoting progressive policies only when they can argue that the policies benefit white people.

I don’t think that’s the dream Dr. King was talking about.

Hi everyone, I’m your new guest-blogger, filling in for piny sporadically over the summer, probably depending on whether piny has net access in Europe and lines up more guest bloggers, and how much I have to say. A little more about me: I’m the queer, multi-racial trans woman of Asian descent from around these parts who’s NOT the totally amazing little light. Astonishing, I know: there are more than one of us, despite all those intersections. I haven’t had a blog in some time, and don’t have a public one at the moment, so please pardon any signs of rust.

Like piny, I’ll probably be posting a fair amount about trans issues, but hope to write about other stuff as well, starting with a very interesting paper I found (via Machinist) about social networking sites. danah boyd, the author, has been doing ethnographic research in high schools across the country about how teenagers are interacting with networked public spaces–also known as Web 2.0 sites, but I can’t stand that buzzword–such as Myspace and Facebook and LiveJournal. Here’s the crux:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

In order to demarcate these two groups, let’s call the first group of teens “hegemonic teens” and the second group “subaltern teens.” (Yes, I know that these words have academic and political valence. I couldn’t find a good set of terms so feel free to suggest alternate labels.) These terms are sloppy at best because the division isn’t clear, but it should at least give us terms with which to talk about the two groups.

I have to admit, the first thing I think of when it comes to high-school divisions like this is the cliques from teen movies from The Breakfast Club to Heathers to Mean Girls. (Not to mention videogames like Bully, pictured above.) The high school I went to had its own stark issues of segregation but didn’t exactly look like this. Still, I think danah boyd is right… at its heart, this is a matter of class, and she goes on to point out that this is true elsewhere, too. “Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook,” she says — and points out that the military has banned use of MySpace, but not Facebook. I also have to wonder, on the other hand, what happened to discussion of the biggest digital divide barrier: what about all the teens out there who don’t have access to the internet at all?

I’m curious as to what the impressions and experiences the readers of this blog have had with the various social networking sites, especially the ones that in my mind are very similar except for style: Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, etc. Based on conversations that I’ve had in the last five years, as well boyd’s recounting of the history of MySpace and Facebook, it does seem like these sites are shaped by who happens to show up… and that’s often due a series of intersecting coincidences and historical contingencies. Apart from pointing out that yes, class does exist, even in corners of the internet where people often assume it doesn’t, it’s also an interesting opportunity to think about how each of us fit into this puzzle. Here’s my personal take on each site:

Friendster: A whole ton of people I know joined this back when it started in 2002. Everyone was talking about it for a while, and it eclipsed dating sites like the Spring Street Network as a way for people to flirt and hit on people via the Internet. It still seems to be really popular amongst the 20 and 30-something urban queers that I know; the typical unsolicited message I get on Friendster is something like “hey I saw you at that party the other night.” For a while it was so popular that some people would groan whenever it was mentioned in real life. Not a lot of new people seem to join it, and very few teenagers.

Myspace: When this appeared it seemed like a nice alternative to Friendster, which at the time was doing annoying things like banning people who were gaming the system and trying to rack up lots of friends, or making fun fake accounts for states and singers and abstract concepts. (I still remember the “Lesbian Feminism” Friendster account fondly, before it was deleted by The Man.) My more network-savvy friends jumped on board, but it didn’t get really big (as boyd notes) until all sorts of bands started putting pages up, with music. At this point, Myspace pages also got insane looking, which some people liked. All of my friends who are more into hipster culture or music scenes (specifically goth & industrial music, in my case) hang out much more on Myspace and have abandoned Friendster. The typical unsolicited message I get on Myspace is from some random band or person I’ve never heard of, or someone asking me if I’m some girl they went to high school with (I’m not, ever). I used to get hit on by random jerks, but managed to stifle that by changing my age to 68, my main picture to an illustration of a roaring vagina-dentata-looking sandworm, and my music to Throbbing Gristle.

Facebook: By the time this site came around, I was totally burnt out on social-networking sites, and I joined it when someone invited me but never filled out a profile or went back on the site again. Practically every other mention of Facebook I’ve heard recently either has to do with suspicions about its privacy policies or else have been posts by Rachel S. from Alas, a Blog about white college kids getting minimally busted for yet another disgusting racial-stereotype-themed party after they put pictures up on Facebook. So I’m not real inclined to go on there.

I think that basically points out that in the age of social networking sites, I’ve been one of those annoying, net-savvy hipsters, hanging out mostly in networks where urban queers hit on each other. How about you?

1. I’m not used to writing on a site that gets so many visitors. For those of you that read my tiny little blog, you might notice that the comments are from the same group of people, some that I know personally and some that I feel I have gotten to know. Part of the reason why I didn’t write yesterday is because I suddenly became intimidated by the number of people that read my previous two posts. It shouldn’t overwhelm me, really, because this is a great opportunity, and to some extent, this is what blogging is about. And a part of me hopes that one day W.O.A.C. becomes as large as this community here. Until then, I’m really thrilled to be a guest blogger here - I think it is an important experience.
2. One of the things I noticed in comments on my own site as well as here, in response to the wedding post that I put up, is the notion of women needing to “be themselves” and “make their own choices” and “worrying about what is culturally acceptable”. I want to address this here rather than in another post because it borderlines on being such an issue for me that I don’t want to make it one. I think there many brown women, many women from diaspora communities and immigrant communities, many women who are from working class and poor families, many women who are hard working and hustle everyday of their lives…who can’t necessarily “just be themselves”. Sometimes these women have to pick their battles - sometimes they have to follow their hearts and their dreams and sometimes they have to yell and scream so that people will hear them at the risk of being emotionally wounded and even ignored. But sometimes women have to help their parents and their families. Sometimes they have to keep the peace by performing certain gender roles or holding their tongues. My choice to “be myself” is always going to come at a price - and sometimes, and for other women many times, this price is simply not worth it. So we learn to pick our battles, work through the system. I become weary of the comments and phrases above because it ignores the system and risks putting blame on the victim (not to suggest that women are victims - but rather that we are products of larger institutional systems that need to be looked at). There is so much more to say about this but for now this will have to be sufficient. My thoughts aren’t clear enough to be completely articulate.
3. Self-care is really really hard. So many of my women of color and queer people of color and working class friends become so invested in taking care of one another and in facing the challenges of the everyday, we get exhausted and the thought of taking care of ourselves seems daunting. As someone who has the privilege of accessing healthy food choices, I sometimes get too tired to just make a salad. I get lazy about exercising everyday. Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier if I had a lot of money to buy myself beauty services and gym subscriptions. I need to remember that women of color have to take care of themselves, their bodies, because otherwise what do we have left? We just become empty and then who are we helping and empowering and supporting?
4. Gaining weight is difficult and upsetting and frustrating. Staying healthy is something I need to think about more consciously.
5. Sometimes my posts, my discussion of race&gender, my specifications of women of color, alienate some white people and make them uncomfortable and guilty and defensive. I have encountered this while blogging, in classrooms, and in public. I’m beginning to believe more and more that this is about doing my work. My work right now is to talk about these things because it keeps me sane. Because there are people who leave me wonderful comments that say “I totally feel that way”. Do your work. That’s all there is to say about that. There isn’t really a response to the discomfort/alienation claim - I agree that this is a result of my writing, a result of my voice, a result of being a loud working class woman of color, and a result of someone who is extremely against second wave feminism, rather hoping for transnational frameworks of solidarity.

Tomorrow I will write something good!

I wrote the entire post - it took me two hours. I was so looking forward to putting it all up.

And then wordpress did not save the draft even though it said it had and it is lost forever. It was such a good post. It was such a well written post and it simply cannot be replicated. Nothing you’re about to read will be as good as what are now mere ashes floating in cyberspace.

It’s one of those days where this kind of thing makes me get so mad and then I just cry for 10 minutes and then it’s over.

So instead of finishing up my work at home this afternoon, I will be attempting to rewrite the post as well as trying not to mumble profanities while doing so.

I have spent nearly a month going back and forth between commenting on the New York Times article that was published regarding skin lightening creams in India. As a U.S. citizen and inhabitant of the First World/Global North, I find myself so weary of commenting on trends or situations of this kind that are taking place in the Global South/Third World/developing countries (from here on out I will be using the term developing countries). It’s very easy to get caught in the mindset that somehow, one’s education or upbringing or condition or geography grants the person some kind of right or privilege to decide what is best or appropriate for another community of people. It’s easy to get swept into the postmodern missionary system, where phrases like “helping” and “saving” become ways of further removing agency from those communities. Language is an important and influential thing. So I’m going to try very hard not to get caught up in deciding what is right or wrong about skin lightening in India, and focus on the argument that is being made about the companies that are making these creams. This is a complicated issue because it speaks volumes about the larger issues that are at play here - the media and advertising, sexism in the workplace, long histories of patriarchy, and globalization.

I will be referring to this article here - entitled “Telling India’s modern women they have power, even over their skin tone” - it is an archived article so I’m not sure if there will be full access to it. Maybe someone will find a link to the article on another website. For now I will be putting up small excerpts from the article in order to talk about a few things that I thought were a big problem.

“The modern Indian woman is independent, in charge — and does not have to live with her dark skin.

That is the message from a growing number of global cosmetics and skin care companies, which are expanding their product lines and advertising budgets in India to capitalize on growth in women’s disposable income. A common thread involves creams and soaps that are said to lighten skin tone. Often they are peddled with a ‘’power'’ message about taking charge or getting ahead.

Avon, L’Oréal, Ponds, Garnier, the Body Shop and Jolen are selling lightening products and all of them face stiff competition from a local giant, Fair and Lovely, a Unilever product that has dominated the market for decades.

Fair and Lovely, with packaging that shows a dark-skinned unhappy woman morphing into a light-skinned smiling one, once focused its advertising on the problems a dark-skinned woman might face finding romance. In a sign of the times, the company’s ads now show lighter skin conferring a different advantage: helping a woman land a job normally held by men, like announcer at cricket matches. ‘’Fair and Lovely: The Power of Beauty,'’ is the tagline on the company’s newest ad”

Fair and Lovely’s advertising has always been targeted to dark skinned and often working class women who should lighten their skin if they want that promotion, or a job, or respect, or a husband. You might YouTube some advertisements of the company - they often depict women who are shunned by some high power executive or modeling agency or studio run by Western-clothes-wearing-light-skinned-Indian folk. Then they go back to their homes and use the cream and transform into similar looking W.c.w.l.s.I.f and everyone is so taken aback at how good they look and then they look so happy and youthful now that they have new skin. The problem goes beyond the issue of telling women that they can obtain lighter skin and invoke more opportunities - the problem is that this company is reflecting companies and workplaces that do in fact discriminate against women who have darker skin, or are not from global cities like Bombay or Delhi. Before I go on, I will say that this is not an exclusive characteristic of developing countries - the U.S. still, albeit not necessarily as overtly, privileges certain women over others in the job market and in everyday situations and discriminate based on gender (how much do you look like a woman), color, race, age, sexuality and class (where did you go to school, what kind of education have you pursued, etc.). The advertising for products like Fair and Lovely (and for newer lightening creams made by L’oreal - called White Perfect - big sirens going off in my head about that) continues to enforce certain color and regional and class related prejudices in communities.

Here’s the thing that I really want to get into though.

“‘Half of the skin care market in India is fairness creams,'’ said Didier Villanueva, country manager for L’Oréal India, and 60 to 65 percent of Indian women use these products daily. L’Oréal entered this specific market four years ago with Garnier and L’Oréal products, but so far has a small market share, he said.

The idea of ‘’glowing fairness'’ has nothing to do with colonialism, or idealization of European looks, Mr. Villanueva said. ‘’It’s as old as India,'’ he said, and ‘’deeply rooted in the culture.'’

There’s no denying that the notion of ‘’fairness,'’ as light skin is known in India, is heavily ingrained in the culture. Nearly all of Bollywood’s top actresses have quite pale skin, despite the range of skin tones in India’s population of more than a billion people.”

Fairness has nothing to do with colonialism or the idealization of European looks?? Oh Mr. Villanueva, what a silly man you are. Because what you should have reminded the large population of people who read the New York Times and use quotes from authentic Indians as facts about the entire Indian population is that while fairness, i.e. light skin, has indeed been privileged in Indian culture for years before British colonization, it doesn’t mean colonialism didn’t reinforce the power of white skin.

I remember extended family members always reminding me of the many things that can apparently make you dark - don’t be out in the sun too long. Don’t drink so much tea (did anybody get that one?) it will make your skin dark. I had the feeling that everything that young girls weren’t supposed to do was rooted to dark skin. Dark skin, at least for North Indian communities, meant you worked in the sun. Maybe you couldn’t afford servants. It meant you were poor or working class. But if anybody thinks that privileging white skin didn’t get reinforced by white folk coming to India and taking over the entire nation, then I’m going to go as far as to say maybe they’re in a bit of denial. Because with the white skin of Britain came whiteness and white privilege and those things become very tied together. So while fairness doesn’t have everything to do with colonialism or whiteness, it sure as hell as something to do with it.

I read some comments floating around the internet, and on the Sephora blog, that compares skin lightening in India to tanning in the U.S. This is a very interesting comparison to me, because from the outside it appears to be a valid one. But I’m going to argue that it isn’t and here’s why in a nutshell: when white people tan, they aren’t stripping themselves of any kind of white privilege that they have - I understand that there is a stigma about white people being considered “pasty and unattractive” but tanning does not strip white people from the privileges that they benefit from because of their race. In fact, tanning is a way of benefiting from the exotic-ness and trendy appeal that comes from dark skin without the racism and colorism that many if not most people of color face in their day to day lives. Lightening one’s skin strips brown folk of oppressions that they will encounter based on the way they look. Tanning is a luxury. Skin lightening is a process that is created out of the institutions that tell women (and men) that it is a product of survival. Big. Difference.

I’m going to end on this final reinforcement - this is a complex issue. Not because skin lightening creams are a big issue - education is an issue. Poverty is an issue. Patriarchy is an issue. And they are issues everywhere. Skin lightening creams, and that NY Times article, is an issue because it is a testament to these larger issues. It is a lens through which issues of race and color and gender need to be challenged and talked about. It is a portal through which whiteness and patriarchy and media can be discussed.

Now I am going to save this post in three different programs and proofread and publish it.

Crossposted at Women of (An)other Color