suzy-x:

Committing a crime does not remove…

mcgoats:

lavender-labia:

thegreenwolf:

Committing a crime does not remove someone’s humanity. I would rather live in a society where rapists and murderers are still treated as human beings, even in a prison, because preserving their right to be human is as important as protecting my right to be…

Wow ok I’m not gonna treat or think of rapists with compassion literally ever thx xoxo

sorry not sorry

Okay so this thread has really started to irk me.

Everyone crying “BUT WHERE WILL ALL THE RAPISTS GO?!?!?!” at those for prison abolition really miss several points here. And one of them is that actually, the vast majority of rapists actually DO NOT end up in prison.

If only 56% or estimated rapes are reported and only 3% of those charged with rape ever see a jail cell, who’s to say that most prisoners are rapists? In fact it seems a minority of prisoners actually are violent offenders. Meanwhile, a rising number of people in prison are actually “drug offenders” (AKA young people of color who sell or use drugs) who’ve been racially profiled. According to wikipedia:

As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes. As of 2008, 90.7% of federal prisoners, or 165,457 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.^[22] Drug offenses account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population since 1985; approximately half a million people are in prison for a drug offense today compared to 40,000 in 1981—an increase of 1,100 percent.^[23]

The reason we demonstrated in front of a women’s prison on Mother’s Day is because incarcerated women, especially women of color, are disproportionately survivors of violence and trauma. Many of them are incarcerated as a result of their abuse; many fight back, many get duped by their abusers, and many consequently have to leave their families behind. Also, with regards to transwomen, many are profiled by police under the suspicion of being sex workers, and have had to fight off hate crimes.  Eve Ensler, who I usually feel iffy about, has made an excellent documentary and play called Any One of Us, and Victoria Law has written a book called Resistance Behind Bars, which articulates women’s struggles in prisons and outside of them. Angela Davis has also written extensively on the subject as a black feminist and former political prisoner. These works show that these prisoners don’t need to be confined; they need serious help.

If the current criminal justice system was any good, the assholes on Wall Street would be done for, and so would roughly 94% of rapists. If it was any good, my own father wouldn’t have been thrown in prison under the racist pretense that he was undocumented, when he actually showed up to court to pay a debt. But instead, prisons uphold white supremacy and slavery, and continue cycles of abuse for marginalized people. So you all need to do yourselves a favor and read up before you start attacking prison abolitionists, instead of individualizing a structural problem by saying things like “But I need prisons!” When you obviously have no idea what happens in them or how most people get there. No sympathy for rapists, but no excuses for a fucked up prison system. 

Yeah Suzy!

I should also add, too, that this kind of argument completely erases the fact that prison subjects bodies to rape in hugely escalated ways. IE, people go to jail for, say, drug possession and then are raped or (less rampantly) become rapists. There aren’t really stats on this, but the idea that most prison rape is committed by other prisoners bothers me and is probably not true at all. Prison makes bodies particularly vulnerable to rape by cops, guards, doctors, janitors, fucking everyone. A prison industrial complex, a prison system at all, is always going to be what we call a “rape culture” because it is a culture which removes economic and legal value from bodies, which completely separates bodies from their autonomy, which by definition erases the right/power/capability that any body has to exercise anything that looks like “consent,” and which makes a rape of these bodies unpunishable by any means.

And (if you watch SVU you know this all too well) a support of prisons is a complicity in using rape as punishment for (almost always) lesser wrongs, most of which are not actually bodily infractions but are capitalist ones—drugs, property theft. Rape becomes something that it is okay to do to certain bodies, and rape becomes something it is especially okay to do to bodies that fuck with capitalism. In prisons, rape props up capitalism. (And let’s not forget that this is literal: guess how many things in your home and neighborhood were made by prison labor? Guess how many things on your boobs were made using prison labor?)

If you fuck with capitalism you go to jail. If you go to jail you get raped. If you get raped you don’t go to jail. If you rape a prisoner you get a high five from Eliott Stabler.

I don’t want to overlook the important fact, though: dude socialists will always always use the PIC as a way to derail and redirect any conversation about accountability for rapists. Even though, as you said, most rapists are not in prison, nor will they ever be in prison.

a: I want my rapist to go to jail
dude socialist: you are propping up capitalism, and also I am probably going to rape you because that’s what dudes like me do

*anarchists too, and really any dude, or maybe anybody, but I’ve met mostly the socialist ones

Smashing The Prison Industrial Complex In Three Easy Steps, According To White Dudes In Their Twenties:

1. FREE ALL RAPISTS! ANY WOMAN OR QUEER PERSON WHO WANTS TO INVOLVE THE STATE IN THEIR TRAUMA IS AN ENEMY OF THE CAUSE AND SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM ALL ORGANIZING SPACES. ALSO PROBABLY RAPED.
2. ANY PERSON WHO DOES NOT PROTEST MY WEED POSSESSION CHARGES* IS AN ENEMY OF LIBERATION
3. IF WE SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS, ALL THE POOR BLACK PEOPLE WILL BE SAVED

*wherein I will never face jail time if I am white but am really mad about having to do community service

(via tarae)

fuckyeahgenderstudies:

drunkorexhausted:

fuckyeahgenderstudies:

drunkorexhausted:

What a thoroughly well constructed academic rebuttal from fuckyeahgenderstudies!

Thanks, glad you like it. 

I don’t need academic anything to know that if anyone has a boot on anyone’s neck it’s radfems on trans women, not the other fucking way around.

And if anyone needs to show anyone some fucking courtesy—again, that’s not the lookout of trans women.

So.

Shut the fuck up.

Is this what we’re doing in “gender studies” now? Telling people with differing opinions to shut the fuck up? How progressive.

“We” aren’t doing anything in gender studies.  There is no “we” and there never will be. I’m flattered you think there could be but… I think we should see other people.

Differing opinions? You’re telling outright lies! So… (you can guess what’s coming)…

Shut. the. fuck. up.

I have a lot of problems with OP (duh). Not the least of which being that the Quakers didn’t, at, all, have “diametrically opposing” beliefs w/r/t the Black Panthers. That’s kind of…what they are? That’s kind of…why they were doing it? Like, Christians of many denominations are quick to say that Quakers are into peace and pacifism and all that shit because they’re just ~being Christlike. While I agree that the Friends have been the most Christlike Christians ever, that sort of “they were doing it just to be good people!” bullshit drives me up a wall. They were, but don’t pretend like they weren’t/aren’t making politically charged statements within and beside of Christianity. Quakers weren’t just tryin’ to be nice, they were politically aligned with the Black Panthers.

(At least if we’re talking about New England/PA Quakers, the Friends started to align with the Klan in Indiana in the 1920s and there was a small schism, most of the conservative/racist Quakers ended up in California. Hence Nixon.)

Also, that kind of had everything to do with the whole “the cops won’t shoot white Quakers” thing, which, um, doesn’t apply to trans people?

also stfu jfc

Other things I like about the University of Michigan: George Jewett.

The funny thing about that diversity report where the University of Michigan boasted that the academic pedigree of their students has steadily increased over the past ten years (~~34% were in the 96th percentile for ACT scores~~) is that they don’t mention that since 1998 the entering class has seen a decrease in black students from 8.7 to 4.4%.

The U of M entering class of 2011 was 4.4% black

Like, The Harvard entering class of 2011 was 12% black

like

what

what

what are you

Once I toured University of Chicago’s campus with McNair scholars (all of whom, except me, were of color and only one of whom wasn’t a woman). We were given a diversity ambassador tour guide. She was showing us the support facilities and things like that. People in my cohort kept raising their hands—

“What is the percentage of minorities that attend this university in graduate appointments?”

—and the ambassador kept being like—

“Uhhh…”

—and then someone else would be like—

“I see that you have a nice muliticultural lounge. Would you consider this campus racist?”

or

“Right, but are there any actual black women here?? Because I haven’t met one.”

And the diversity rep was visibly terrified.

It was hilarious.

This U of M diversity report is post-racial. Like, it actually doesn’t mention race.

For my final project in my Asian American Studies class, I’ve been reading The Beautiful Generation and compiling a series of pieces about fashion via different approaches. Right now I’m cross-referencing Asian-American designers, SS/FS12 collections which cite “Asian” influences, and models of East Asian or Middle Eastern descent who walked in New York, Paris, London, and Milan. It becomes really complicated to interpret ethnic identities of girls who were born in East Asian countries but began working in European and American markets (as a migrant, away from their families) by the time they were teenagers. Except! Actually! There are volumes and volumes of scholarship about just that transnational, migrant labor dynamic except usually they are written about the other end of the fashion industrial complex. What about this migrant labor?

Of his Fall 2012 collection, Jason Wu said “I suppose this hasn’t really been done before—an Asian designer tapping into the Asian side. Usually, culturally, we stay away from it.” In that show, as far as I can tell, three out of about 42 models claim Asian heritage: Liu Wen, who is from China but has worked internationally since she was a teenager, Tao Okamoto who is Japanese but has also been working globally for years, and Shanina Shaik, who is Australian of Pakistani and Saudi Arabian descent.

A question that I am also considering: what are the major structural differences between the traffic of East Asian models and South American or Eastern European models? Wen worked in Chinese fashion circuits before becoming famous in the U.S., Tao didn’t sign to Elite until she was 19. How much does the “undesirability” (and professionalization/tokenization) of unambiguously East Asian bodies contribute to a significantly smaller fashion body trafficking industry than exists in, say, Brazil or the Baltics? Where does the sex trade overlap with the modeling trade in Southeast Asia? Why does it seem less obvious that those two things are inseparable than it does when we’re talking about the Eastern Bloc? Take, for example, Karmen Pedaru (“discovered” in Estonia when she was fifteen), Zuzanna Bijoch (in Poland when she was thirteen), Erjona Ala (fifteen or sixteen, from Kosovo, “scouted” in Oslo), Ginta Lapina (sixteen, Latvia), Anabela Belikova (seventeen, Belarus), Alina Ismailova (fourteen, Russia), Daga Ziober (fifteen, Poland), Kristina Romanova (fifteen, Russia), Simona Andrejic (fourteen, Serbia), Tayane Leao (fourteen, Brazil).

NYmag’s model directory lists three Japanese models (none of whom were working in fashion before they were 19), thirteen Chinese models (none working internationally in fashion before the age of 17), seven Korean models (none of whom were working before eighteen, most of whom were not working in Western circuits until at least twenty), three Filipino girls (one who started working at sixteen, one at nineteen, one at twenty), one Indian model (sixteen), and one Thai model (nineteen).

This disparity has everything to do with markets, marketability, and whose bodies perform different types of labor in this industry. Still, there is so much to be unpacked about white exploitation of marked bodies and their ages, and it’s not just about transnational migrant labor. Consider this: under the American model listings, there are only a handful of models that I know claim Asian heritage. Chanel Iman and Devon Aoki are exceptions—they started modeling as children and preteens—but the average starting age for American, British, Australian and Canadian models whose bodies “read” as Asian bodies is noticeably higher than that of white-passing models. How are we transposing age ideologies onto bodies in ways that create differentiated patterns of exploitation? Briefly: why are thirteen-year-old Chinese girls sewing D&G while thirteen-year-old Estonian girls are wearing those clothes in Vogue? The answer is obvious, maybe, but it also bears enunciation.

I should add that there are very, very few listed models of Western nationality who claim East Asian and Middle Eastern heritages, and most of them are multiracial black women. What else can we say about fashion’s refusal to incorporate black women who are not ethnically “ambiguous,” and Asian women who are not sufficiently “alien”? Where are the Asian-Americanmodels? And what does it mean to even claim a hyphenated identity when you’re swept into the model migrant stream so young?

kimyadawson:

When you let your kid paint your face for the parade you end up in blackface. (Taken with instagram)

panda doesn’t see race

she’s got a future in the fashion industry, that one

oneweekoneband:

The video for “Underneath Your Clothes” begins with a reporter asking Shakira how it feels to sing in English. She answers (in Spanish) that music is about reaching your audience on a deep level and forming a connection with them. And this is a large part of the reason for Shakira’s crossover success. Shakira has said in interviews that when she performs, she always requests that her audience be well-lit because she wants to look at the people she is singing to. She is such a dynamic performer that even at a stadium show with thousands of other spectators and Shakira as only a tiny figure in the distance, you connect with her and her music and everyone who is present in that moment. That is such a powerful thing, and not all performers have that kind of command.

The fact that Shakira answers the reporter in Spanish is a way of saying that even though she now sings in English that doesn’t mean that that’s all she’s about or that she’s forgotten where she came from. Shakira has always remained committed to her Spanish-speaking fans, and it’s important to note that none of her post-crossover albums have been entirely in English. “Te Dejo Madrid,” with that harmonica part and that line, “yo no quiero cobardes que me hagan sufrir” (“I don’t want cowards who make me suffer”) and “Que Me Quedes Tu,” a song about the willingness to renounce everything in the name of love, are two of the strongest tracks on Laundry Service. Continuing to dedicate the time to write songs in Spanish (and not just as an afterthought) and continuing to explore different styles and sounds, while still remaining very distinctly Shakira, is part of why Shakira has been able to reach global pop star status. 

She makes it look easy, but crossovers are very tricky. An artist making the Spanish-language to English-language transition risks alienating their fan base without knowing if they will be received well by English-speaking audiences. Remember Paulina Rubio’s attempt in 2002? Probably not. And she did pretty well with Border Girl. What about Ximena Sariñana, who is taking a shot at it now? Despite having a savvy team behind her and despite her tireless touring, she hasn’t made too big of a splash. What Shakira has done is extraordinary and, quite frankly, baffling. Had you told me back when I was listening to Pies Descalzos in my bedroom that Shakira would be where she is today, I would not have believed you. But her talent, ambition, intelligence, charisma, and whatever secrets to a successful crossover she had up her sleeve have made her one of the most important and beloved pop stars of her time. 

I’m not sure that it’s this easy, though? But I’m not really qualified to comment. I’m reblogging because I know this discussion popped up my dash recently—Suzy, I think?—and I wanted to note that this is happening over at OWOB right now.

And because this song is fucking great so whatever.