You see something absurd. You hear something absurd. You read something absurd = Yeah,TNTG. Posts tagged politics.
“ In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It’s worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power.
— Ezra Klein, per Ta-Nehisi Coates (via politicalprof)
Last week, Ed Kashi posted to The New Yorker’s Instagram feed from Nicaragua, where he spent the week working on an ongoing project about Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown origin (CKDu), an epidemic that has killed thousands of sugar-cane workers throughout Central America. The disease is more than twenty years old, and has now reached its third generation of workers, many of whom are young men in their twenties. Kashi spent most of his trip in the town of Chichigalpa, the center of the epidemic, which has been called the Island of Widows.
Click-through for a slideshow of Kashi’s photos: http://nyr.kr/YwOGHA
“ This tribe called ‘Women of Color’ is not an ethnicity. It is one of the inventions of solidarity, an alliance, a political necessity that is not the given name of every female with dark skin and a colonized tongue, but rather a choice about how to resist and with whom.
— Aurora Levins (via counterstorytelling)
“Fiscally conservative but socially liberal” is a hip, trendy way of saying “I still think poor kids are being too grabby with this whole ‘wanting food’ thing, but I also like weed.”
“This government is too complicated.” - D.W.
by Jessica Valenti
The same week that a leaked video out of Steubenville, Ohio showed high school boys joking and laughing about an unconscious teenager in the next room who had just been raped—“They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson!”—House Republicans let the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expire. They opposed an expanded version of the legislation that had increased protections for the LGBT community, immigrants and Native American women.
This week we’ve also seen mass protests in India after a woman was brutally gang raped and died from her injuries. American media covering the Indian protests have repeatedly referenced the sexist culture, reporting how misogyny runs rampant in India. The majority of mainstream coverage of what happened in Steubenville (click here for a primer), however, has made no such connection. In fact, the frequent refrain in discussions of Steubenville in comment threads is that these boys are “sociopaths,” shameful anomalies. We’d rather think of them as monsters than hold ourselves accountable as a nation and tell the truth—these rapists are our sons.
It’s not just the parents of the accused rapists or the boys who made jokes who are complicit—it’s not just Steubenville, a town criticized for putting their prized high school football team above the law and justice for a young woman. Steubenville happens every day in the United States, and we’re all responsible.
We live in a country where politicians call rape a “gift from God” and suggest that women regularly lie about being raped. Where a group of young men in high school think so little of sexual assault that they thought it was fine—hilarious, even—to post pictures online of a passed out rape victim, and to live-tweet the rape, joking about the victim being urinated on. We live in a country where media as revered as The New York Times finds it necessary to describe an 11-year-old gang rape victim as “wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.” Where a woman can be fired because her boss finds her “irresistable” and a woman’s rape case falls flat because she isn’t married.
It’s time to acknowledge that the rape epidemic in the United States is not just about the crimes themselves, but our own cultural and political willful ignorance. Rape is as American as apple pie—until we own that, nothing will change.
Undocumented women are some of the most vulnerable to sexual violence. Read how the GOP has left these victims with even fewer options.
“ Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit. Neoliberalism is marked by a shift from the manufacturing to the service sector, the rise of temporary and part-time work, growth of the financial sphere and speculative activity, the spread of mass consumerism, the commodification of practically everything. Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions. Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating the concept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.
— Henry Armand Giroux (via mehreenkasana)
“ So why are [people of color] not filling the ranks of the Anarchist movement? What it is that prevents those people of color that have been feeling the brunt of police brutality, and have been living off the scraps of what capitalism leaves behind, why have they not joined the movement?
The answer is simple: because is not their movement. It can never be their movement while it is being created by and for white middle-class kids with a Jesus complex who think they can save the world (or the ones with Buddha complex who think they can get wet by talking about water). You cannot hustle the movement and you cannot hustle the people. Revolution is not a game in which you can pretend to listen to the voice of the people of color only when is convenient and shut them off when they start questioning your privilege.
The answer is simple: because is not their movement. It can never be their movement while it is being created by and for white middle-class kids with a Jesus complex who think they can save the world (or the ones with Buddha complex who think they can get wet by talking about water). You cannot hustle the movement and you cannot hustle the people. Revolution is not a game in which you can pretend to listen to the voice of the people of color only when is convenient and shut them off when they start questioning your privilege.
—
Pedro Riberio, Senzala or Quilombo: Reflections on APOC and the fate of Black Anarchism (via tipsforradicals)
i havent read all of this yet, but i want to read the whole thing soon. i also want to tag this with “hello my experiences in white anarchist space forever”
(via feral-femme)
Ahhh so many of my feelings about (North American) anarchy foreverrrr
(via queerandpresentdanger)
“ While transphobia certainly exists in both subtle and overt ways, this lack of debate has contributed to an assumption that the political elements that are at the heart of transphobia do not affect men and women of color who are not trans-identified and who may even be transphobic. It seems that some transgender proponents assume that it is only the trans body that is under scrutiny or fails to live up to appropriate (read white) norms of gender and sexuality. It is true that there is a particular fixation to determine the genitalia of people whose gender expression is not easily “readable” and that such a fixation is bound to a desire to sexually interrogate and physically and socially discipline the trans body. Yet this fixation with genitalia and with the sexual “nature” of the body and the violence associated with such preoccupations are not limited to trans bodies. They affect anyone whose body is not white, regardless of the person’s gender, sexuality, or politics regarding either. While many of us, as women of color who identify as women, will be identified by the state and individuals as women, we need to confront the fact that the non-white body is never fully free from serving as gendered and sexualized spectacle. That is, all of our bodies are subject to scrutiny, exotification, appraisal, intrusion, and violence. The same goes for men of color who identify as men, regardless of how much they want to ignore how vulnerable they are to gendered and sexualized violence perpetrated by men and women. In other words, simply being non-white in the world means that our bodies are subject to a violent white gaze (which non-whites may adopt) that determines how our bodies are ranked, interacted with, taken in, or punished.
The possibility of transgender politics, then, is not simply to reaffirm the “real” gender existing within the body. Such a reaffirmation neglects the reality that all non-white bodies, to varying degrees, are struggling to define what makes our bodies and our internal sense of self “real” in a world in which whiteness serves as the ultimate standard for gender and sexual normalcy and blackness as deviance. This struggle often leads to a variety of problematic behaviors among non-whites, including attempts to secure physical whiteness (and move away from being associated with physical blackness) through bodily alteration, appeals to patriarchy, masculinity, and homophobia in an effort to “reform” or “rehabilitate” bodies from being perceived as deviant, or, in the case of some trans people, the use of tropes of blackness to show they are “fucking with gender” (and in turn, reaffirming the idea of blackness as deviance). Rather the possibility of transgender politics lies in its potential critique of bodily fixation, gender divisions, heterosexuality, and modernist aspirations that informs our lived experiences with and activist challenges to white supremacy and anti-blackness. Such an approach would serve a less solipsistic agenda and rather work to push vital and urgent conversations about racialized gender and sexual violence that happens to, and between non-whites, trans and non-trans.
The possibility of transgender politics, then, is not simply to reaffirm the “real” gender existing within the body. Such a reaffirmation neglects the reality that all non-white bodies, to varying degrees, are struggling to define what makes our bodies and our internal sense of self “real” in a world in which whiteness serves as the ultimate standard for gender and sexual normalcy and blackness as deviance. This struggle often leads to a variety of problematic behaviors among non-whites, including attempts to secure physical whiteness (and move away from being associated with physical blackness) through bodily alteration, appeals to patriarchy, masculinity, and homophobia in an effort to “reform” or “rehabilitate” bodies from being perceived as deviant, or, in the case of some trans people, the use of tropes of blackness to show they are “fucking with gender” (and in turn, reaffirming the idea of blackness as deviance). Rather the possibility of transgender politics lies in its potential critique of bodily fixation, gender divisions, heterosexuality, and modernist aspirations that informs our lived experiences with and activist challenges to white supremacy and anti-blackness. Such an approach would serve a less solipsistic agenda and rather work to push vital and urgent conversations about racialized gender and sexual violence that happens to, and between non-whites, trans and non-trans.
—
The trouble with transgender politics | Bandung 1955
So. This was posted in 2008. And I know Riley has made this point several times. And, hey, looks like in almost 5 years the white trans community *still* isn’t listening, by and large. to poc.
also nicely wrapped up in super academicy jargon. for those people who require their truth dressed up like this.
(via biyuti)
ha i was totally gonna post this yesterday before my browser crashed and i forgot about it. but no, seriously, read it.
(via so-treu)
