Race – Page 3 – Prog Gold

It happened to me!

Published on February 16, 2014Leave a comment

Well, no, it didn’t, but a couple of weeks ago one Jen Caron got a little bit flustered when a black woman joined her yoga class:

I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.

It all seemed a bit over the top and somewhat patronising, though if you’re feeling charitable, you could say it was one woman’s inept attempt to articulate some of the racial privileges she hadn’t had to think about until well, she was confronted with an black woman in her class. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t make it any better, making this woman a prop in her enlightenment.

Anyway, the piece got a lot of pushback and sarky comments online and what struck me was reading the same story from the other side, revealing that this may have been an unique experience for Caron, not so much for actual plus size women:

I mean, it would be ~~racist~~ weird to say “OMG! You’re so big and black!” so instead she says “OMG! I’m so white and small”

As a plus size woman of color, people are constantly “telling on themselves” in regards to how they see me. It could be as simple as calling me “girl” instead of my name or being shocked when I sing along to Incubus songs, it could be something as nuanced as mentioning their own appearance in contrast to mine, or as awkward as quoting Tyler Perry to me and assuming I’ll get the reference (I won’t).

“I had a feeling of liberation, restored manhood; I had a natural high.”

Published on January 10, 2014Leave a comment

“I certainly wasn’t afraid. And I wasn’t afraid because I was too angry to be afraid. If I were lucky I would be carted off to jail for a long, long time. And if I were not so lucky, then I would be going back to my campus, in a pine box.”

NPR reports the death of Franklin McCain yesterday, one of four black North Carolina A&T University students who sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the Woolsworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960. Franklin McCain, together with Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond walked into Woolsworth and sat down at the lunch counter. When they were denied service, they refused to leave and stayed until the store closed early.

That simple protest was the start of a renewed wave of civil rights protests in America, as shown in this NPR timeline and triggered dozens of similar sit-ins in the days after their protest, with a thousands protestors showing up at the Greensboro store on the 6th, when a bomb threat by desegration opponents closed both the Woolworths and a nearby department store.

Though the city of Greensboro has long since embraced Franklin McCain and the other three protestors, originally they were called the A&T Four and it’s not surprising the university library’s page on them still refers to them as this. (This site features a long radio interview with McCain, but you’ll need Realplayer to play it.) Another interview, dating from 1979 is available at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro site.

For more on the sit-ins, the Greensboro Sit-ins: birth of the Civil Rights era website is invaluable. To hear more from Franklin McCain as well as Joseph MacNeil and Jibreel Khazan, the local North Carolina NPR station, WUNC has put up interviews held when the Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Center and Museum was opened in 2010, housed in the same Woolworths building where they’d started it all.

Franklin McCain was active in the civil rights movement for the rest of his life. He graduated from A&T and worked as a chemist in Charlotte, North Carolina until he retired. He was seventytwo.

Call somebody a whore? Fine. Complain about it? Whoa now

Published on October 12, 2013Leave a comment

Science blogger DNLee has her blog at the Scientific American network of science blogs, is approached by another network to guest blog for them. She asks some questions, including what their pay rate is and ultimately declines. Then the editor calls her a whore for not wanting to write for free for them. Below she describes the whole incident in her own words:

Then Scientific American responded by pulling her blog because “the post wasn’t appropriate for this area“, which of course is grade a nonsense. More relevant may just be the fact that Biology Online, the ones who approached DNLee, are a partner of SciAm.

dramatic chipmunk

As you may have noticed from the video above, DNLee is a woman of colour and you can’t help but think that if it had been a white man in this situation, SciAm would never have responded this way. Oh what the fuck am I saying? A white man would never be called a whore this way in the first place.

fuck this thing cat

Three strikes

Published on October 3, 20132 Comments

Lakisha Briggs was a victim of domestic abuse, having been beaten unconscious by her boyfriend. When a neighbour called the cops, the boyfriend went to prison for assault. And then the police served notic to her landlord to evict her and her 3-year old son or lose his rental licence. The reason? She’d made three 911 calls in four months and a local Norristown, Pa. police ordinance calls for tenants who do this to be evicted.

This turns out not to be an isolated case. A new study by Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez
shows the impact of this sort of socalled third party policing on already vulnerable people (PDF):

Recent decades have witnessed a double movement within the field of crime control characterized by the prison boom and intensive policing, on the one hand, and widespread implementation of new approaches that assign policing responsibilities to non-police actors, on the other. The latter development has been accomplished by expansion of thirdparty policing policies; nuisance property ordinances, which sanction landlords for their tenants’ behavior, are among the most popular. This study, an analysis of every nuisance citation distributed in Milwaukee over a two-year period, is among the first to evaluate empirically the impact of coercive third-party policing on the urban poor. Properties in black neighborhoods disproportionately received citations, and those located in more integrated black neighborhoods had the highest likelihood of being deemed nuisances. Nearly a third of all citations were generated by domestic violence; most property owners abated this “nuisance” by evicting battered women. Landlords also took steps to discourage tenants from calling 911; overrepresented among callers, women were disproportionately affected by these measures. By looking beyond traditional policing, this study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of new crime control strategies for women from inner-city neighborhoods.

Currently the ACLU is suing Norristown over this ordinance, arguing that:

These laws violate tenants’ First Amendment right to petition their government, which includes the right to contact law enforcement. They also violate the federal Violence Against Women Act, which protects many domestic violence victims from eviction based on the crimes committed against them, and the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex.

While Norristown officials argue that “the purpose of the disorderly behavior ordinance is to promote peaceful neighborhoods and discourage frivolous calls to the police.”

Class war by any other name, this is a good example of how the structural inequality in American society and how this is translated in local politics is far more important to the day to day life of a great many working class people, than whatever happens in Washington. These sort of laws don’t even pretend to distinguish between criminals and victims anymore, just recognises nuisances.

Manufacturing outrage

Published on August 13, 2013Leave a comment

Flavia Tamara Dzodan on the meltdown of socalled feminist leader Hugo Schwyzer and how the mainstream feminist media helped built him up and enabled him to attack women of colour:

I despise the TMZ of feminist media that “reports” our issues and sells us a lip gloss version of our politics and gives space to people like him so that he can shit on us and tell us how we should take it in the face while he puts Women of Color in “their (our) places”. This is how White Supremacy works and I am pointing all my fingers at Jezebel and xoJane and The Atlantic and every other publication that paid him to publish his repulsive opinions. The shame is on each of you and not merely on his cock shots or pathetic sexting. The shame is on every editor that thought selling women like Blackamazon or brownfemipower (or even my fucking self) for page clicks was a worthy trade off. Each and every one of those editors that knew what he was, how he acted and how his misogynist racism operated behind the scenes has played a part in this. And you get to “represent” feminism. You are the filters of who gets published and who doesn’t. You are the ones that hold the doors and set the agendas. The dick pics are also on you. You helped create the monster, now I hope you enjoy the money shot. And don’t say you weren’t warned. Countless others aside from myself had extensively documented his antics, his skeevy politics, his racism, his misogyny. But he brought the page clicks. At our fucking expense. Sisterhood! Yay!

Brownfemipower:

today’s foundations and 501c3s are being brought on at the insistence of feminism. clicking outrage is encouraged. change dot org gets paid for outrage. jezebel got paid for hugo outrage. the “movement” is carefully controlled by clicks, outrage and grants all hidden under the disguise of “change” and “sustainability”. liberal reformists steal radical content and get paid to translate it into a liberal vision.

radical women of color were turned into “The WOCs” and feminists write reports congratulating themselves on everything they’ve done