saschaeatsteeth:

When I first started tumblring there were for sure times that I raceblogged for cookies, had “I’m one of the good ones” moments, and spoke up with my big fat opinions where none were wanted, relevant, or necessary. As time went on & I saw how harmful, foolish, obvious, self-serving, & gross this was, I cut it out. I continued to reblog things without comment when it was something actually written by a POC, and was either A. a call to signal boost or something along those lines or B. something that made me smack myself in the face like “Damn, that made me more aware of some shit & now I’m sitting here considering how I’m going to move around in the world as a white person with this knowledge, I want to reblog this information.” (Plus it’s not like Blogging About Race is this totally separate thing one can choose to Do or Not Do, because of that little thing called intersectionality. I think that whatever you’re blogging, unless it’s like, kittens, if you think race isn’t a factor then you’re fucking up.) The evolution I’m describing here is in the direction of being less shitty, but tbh, I’m starting to creep myself out, so this definitely isn’t the best and most perfect way to be doing things. I follow other white people who seem to reblog in the same way & at the same rate and when I see it, something just doesn’t seem…right. It’s just off somehow. Because it’s still “this is some POC authored writing on race that I Approve Of.” Idk. Also I’m on my phone now & I can’t remember who started me thinking about this (I think it was blacudorian) but I’ve been thinking about how reblogging something by a POC that is very critical of whiteness is going to draw attention to that post. And presumably if someone writes an inflammatory thing on the internet, they probably want people to read it & expect there to be some fallout- still, to reblog it and have this badge of “yes I loathe whiteness too” on my blog (no matter how much I agree with that with my own limited understanding/perspective & no matter how genuinely important & informative I find their words to be) isn’t fair unless I am willing to take out the trash in the ensuing fallout I’ve helped generate. And this is tricky too, because “taking out the trash” cannot mean “speaking for POC”.

I don’t think the solution to all this is “white people on tumblr shouldn’t reblog any writings on race/racism or help spread any information.” Super white blogs who avoid the topic of race? I think there are enough of those. This is just something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, I (obviously) am not the one with the answers. I know tumblr just loves simple solutions, ways of Doing It Right (quickly followed by call-outs of who is Doing It Wrong) but I think shit is complicated & I guess I’m just saying that I’m trying to be more careful and thoughtful about WTF it is I’m even doing & why when it comes to these things. If anyone wants to message me/reblog I’m down for whatever & open, although tbh I’m not really interested in advice from other white people on this one, lol.

Do you have any idea how much shit I have caused for WOC by reblogging them to Feministfilm? Yeah.

*criticisms of Am Poehler’s racism brings out the BIG RACIST WHITE LADY GUNS and when you show those criticisms to 17,000 capital-tumblr-white-ladies well, well.

maozedongisnotcool:

What doesn’t stop wars = you hating soldiers while your privileged ass goes to college and gets educated. That’s what they thought they’d be doing when they enrolled to the Marines. Oh but wait a second, they couldn’t afford it? That’s why they enrolled? The reality that they might be sent over seas [to fight wars for people who’ve exploited their vulnerability] never sunk in?

It’s fine to be principled and hate war, hate the draft, hate whatever, OBVIOUSLY. But the reality is one of war, a “voluntary” enrollment to the military that targets poverty-struck communities, usually communities of color, etc. In other words, business as usual in America.

So take your principles and channel them - don’t confuse the symptoms for the causes.

Hey I don’t usually wanna go there/have politics which err on either side of this particular argument but hey if you ever wanna know about poor kids who get promised college (also paychecks but particularly college) by recruiters and then serve for a few years and come back (or don’t come back) only to, oh, you know, not ever get to go to college because that was a lie—if you ever wanna hear about that, let me tell you about every man and a few women in my family.

(via bookmarrow)

whiskey-robot:

delicatetbone:

whiskey-robot replied to your post: On Duh.

I had no idea about that history. Do you have a source for that? Not that I don’t believe you; I just like to read about language an its history.

here’s a bit from the ol internet - http://www.mtannoyances.com/?p=383 in my…

Thoughts on this? I say duh a lot, but didn’t realize a possible origin of this is hurtful. Kind of like the end of this source mentions that the “origin has passed into obscurity.”

My mother didn’t let me say “duh” growing up partially for this reasons, which is why I only use it in very specific ways now.

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)

The American Friends Service Committee, “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, a study of international conflict,” 1955

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.

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.

I was going to post Little Red Car Wreck’s “Teenage Welfare Mother” w/r/t the topics of late: songs I’ve gotten from K’s mixes, and On the oppressions of the childless woman’s body. I don’t have access to a version of it that I can post, though. Girl, didn’t you put that on a mix you uploaded?? Can you help me out with this? The world needs this song (and also maybe if you wanna put all of her discog on SP that would be cool too whatever).

See, there’s a conversation where Aria was like “ugh middle class white women shut up about how yr grandma wants you to make a baby” (she’s so right) and then PS was like “right but that’s a form of regulation of women’s labor/bodies as well” and she is also right. But, like,why? This was such a good post with so much good stuff in it but it’s REALLY not pertinent to the question at hand (ie,is whiny white middle class feminist complaining about your mother’s expectation that you have childrenactually even a regulation of your reproductive labor? because I don’t think it even really is but whatever, maybe I’m just biased because I don’t have a prodding grandma to whine about). Anyway, look at this, it’s good:

but bodies that can reproduce have for a long time been sites where ideologies are projected and made to contest one another rather than being sites where subjects can make their own meanings and bodily choices. so there are conflicting injunctions especially for poor women and women of color: reproduce because it will make your man stay around, or because you made a mistake that you don’t have the resources to address, or because it’s your duty to make and maintain a family (whether you want to or not). i think the converse injunctions not to reproduce (or more likely, to be demonized for having already reproduced) come from people and institutions who have a stake in maintaining the precarity of poor bodies/bodies of color, or in maintaining national borders at all costs, to name a few. these ideologies are super raced and classed, but they rotate on foregrounding women’s fertility as their primary utility—which can threaten or bolster whatever—society, the nation, the family, the working class.

so nobody cares about water cooler talk but i don’t think it’s fair to call social-institutional injunctions to reproduce or not reproduce (cause let’s be real, it’s never one without the other) in order to serve anyone’s interests other than the person with the reproducing body “white middle class feminism.”

I just, honestly, am sick of a few things. I’m sick of how we (we! me included!) always complain about the “foregrounding women’s fertility as their primary utility” when that actually is doing violence to the fertile body itself. (That is, this ultimately privileges the body that is not reproducing and is instead enacting labors which are productive in other ways: by saying “~all women are harmed by the emphasis on their reproductive capacity” then you ultimately allow a conversation which devalues this reproductive capacity as labor in the first place. Like, what if I complain about “foregrounding women’s intellectual labor as their primary utility”? That conversation would skew a lot differently, right?*
*I would complain about that. Brains aren’t even real.)

But mostly what I’m sick of is conversations that go around and around like this forever:
a: right but black women have babies and they aren’t valued, and white grandmothers aren’t asking THEM when they are gonna make with the oven buns
b: right but that’s because they don’t have any choice because of access to abortion
or
b: right but that’s because of a history of eugenics

Which is obviously true, but again: you can’t talk about/try to legitimize reproductive labor while at the same time only affording middle-class options of that labor the credit for being based on some sort of (not-false) consciousness. That’s straight-up choice feminism. (It’s also straight-up racist.) It’s just as boring as anything else everyone is bored by everyday.

And I just have like a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE problem with this exchange:
poor person: middle class feminism is boring, idgaf if your feelings about reproduction are hurt*
educated person: you’re wrong though, because everyone is harmed in specific ways by the regulation of reproductive labor, and also it’s really obvious that my stake in this conversation is that I don’t want babies/I’m sick of my grandma whining about it**
*a valid statement which isn’t necessarily theoretically infallible but also doesn’t need to be
**also a valid statement which isn’t necessarily theoretically infallible but also doesn’t need to be, except that this statement is used to disarm the first statement via the classic “right but let me use words like ‘sites’ and ‘contested’ and ‘injuction’ over and over again because I know and have been told countless times that these are words that I have access to and that you don’t have access to and so I have more right to be engaging in this conversation/am smarter than you***
***again, being the middle-class person who likely falls on the “not exercising fertility labor right now” who then uses education (read: one of the reasons you/we have been afforded relatively “fair” access to choice-making apparatuses when it comes to reproductive labor in the FIRST place) to disarm women/people who are participating in reproductive labor ****
****IE, I could go to my poor aunt and be like “right but when you ask me whether I someday want to have kids, you are inflicting the same violence on me that was inflicted on you when you got married and had kids at age seventeen because you were an orphan/it was the seventies/Flint Michigan. LET ME CITE THEORY TO BACK THIS UP because I made the -choice- to participate in intellectual/middle-class labor instead of baby-making labor and I am now going to use that to completely shut you out of the conversation [and, incidentally, talk a lot about ‘the valuation of fertility as labor’ while slyly devaluing your fertility labor entirely].” And it would be obnoxious, and also it would just be me exercising my Smart Boner and saying a lot of empty things (empty things that may be right but are still totally pointless) and being a dick.

******sorry JB but the internet is ruining you: “the situated body” is like the new fucking “is a capitalist construct”—I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it used in a way that didn’t amount to “STOP TALKING POOR PEOPLE/WOMEN/BLACK WOMEN/TRANS PEOPLE, it’s all about context and your invocation of a lived reality is doing violence to my epistemology”

Also, LISTEN, I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT CHILDREN RIGHT NOW OKAY.

(I brought Emily to my family’s house and there were ten children there and Emily’s always like “waahhh I see babies and get all emotional” but then she got there and was like “NO BABIES THIS IS BAD” which I 100% relate to [I feel like I was doing a service to her to remind her that NO BABIES NO BABIES NO THIS IS GROSS WE DON’T WANT BABIES DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE]. Like, if any of y’all want to get your baby urges out of your system, COME HANG OUT WITH MY FAMILY THERE’S SO MUCH BABY JUICE.

But also there is something fully squicky to me about how we are all “oh babies/ovaries/blah blah blah” but when we are faced with the reality of it* we want to immediately disassociate from the scene

*what I mean by the “reality of it” is not poop and crying or whatever but—
hey , we are all comfortable cooing over babies when they are presented in the public sphere with a middle-class white (or ~appropriately ethnic) mothers who BECAUSE OF THIS VERY PROCESS OF REGULATION have been afforded the tools to appear/be in control [ie, present as if they are good/progressive mothers and have freely been offered informed consent procedures to be Moms and thus read as “moms who are in control of their life,” an ~inscribed ideology that you would never operate if you were at the mall in Flint, MI and that mother was a black woman with a weave, LET’S BE REAL]. And, you know, the babies in my family are a bunch of lower-class/nonwhite littleuns with moms in velour shorts or mom jeans or whatever, moms who still pencil their brows on or moms who don’t wear any makeup at all. Moms who say “ain’t” or whatever.)

Onto my own baggage: “the reality of children” is so bound up in my life with a specific sort of classed reality. And there’s this weird distance between
“I cannot be responsible for children because feminism” (which is 100% my feeling, tbh—too selfish 4 life)
and
“I understand that my sense of responsibility for family is a result of ~gender roles and I’m not OBLIGATED to do this but also I’m doing it because of where I come from, which is that EVERYONE IS A TEENAGE WELFARE MOTHER and that’s how things are and we help each other”
(and my reading of the latter is entirely grounded in my training in theory written by white middle-class women)
(but God forbid we ever have a discussion about how teenage welfare mothers understand the gendered nature of their labor but w/e w/e)

And also, right now, I REALLY DON’T WANT BABIES but I hate it when people talk about it in abstracts because it’s just so real to me? I guess? Where I come from women have children as THEIR LIFE but they aren’t walking around with some Feminine Mystique shit over their head or whatever. Like, when did “you like your kids/don’t resent them” come to signify automatic false-consciousness? Or rather, when did that lens begin to be exclusively applied to poor and non-white mothers? And, for the millionth time, why why why why dear god why is that lens employed almost exclusively by the same people who will argue on tumblr that women’s reproductive labor is “real labor”? ? ?  (and as I type that sentence I never ever wanna do it again because god “DON’T WORRY POOR WOMEN, THE LABOR YOU DO IS REAL TOO” is so fucking condescending and I never wanna go there again.)

For the sake of disclosure, my mother was 21 when she had her first kid. She got pregnant then she got married. She didn’t have a high school diploma. My dad’s first wife was in high school when she got pregnant, yet he still got to do a semester at U of M (guess what—she didn’t) (guess what—he’s white and was middle class and she’s indigenous and was not middle class). His second wife was just out of high school. My sister Rebel was married when she was 17 and got pregnant right after that. I think my oldest sister had her first one when she was 20, shockingly. My second-oldest sister barely finished high school then she enlisted but she didn’t even get to finish basic training ‘cause they found out she was pregnant (lol). And all of these people are at least marginally pro-choice.* (*Rebel has said that she doesn’t believe that abortion is right but that it isn’t Christlike to legislate based on what is Christlike, but also she has LITERALLY SAID that if anyone she knows is considering having an abortion she would take care of them and adopt their baby, and the thing is is that she would.)

WHATEVER I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS RIGHT NOW ABOUT HOW MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE ARE GROSSED OUT BY CHILDREN. I can’t even remotely fathom being the kind of woman who wasn’t too selfish to take care of a kid, but that kind of woman is probably the only woman I know in the places I come from. (saving the conversation about rhetorics of selflessness for another time—that is The Story of My Second-Wave Mom for sure.)

And in my mind, I’m thinking about all those women with all those kids and then thinking about a feminism that would look at that scene and think “oh well a woman shouldn’t feel obligated to do all that labor, and the only possible reason she might have chosen to participate in that labor is if she was trying to manipulate a man/if she couldn’t afford an abortion/because she is uneducated. and I am gonna Arlie Hochshild on your asses til my thumbs fall off but in the end I also would argue that having an education means that you would more likely not choose to participate in this type labor, because secretly I don’t actually think it’s valid. And also I’m going to write a bunch about how my childless body is as oppressed by virtue of its childlessness as your ten babies are oppressed because of the devaluing of poor women’s bodies, and I’m going to pretend like that isn’t eyeroll-worthy at best and horrific at worst. And I’m like, this isn’t my shit, get out of my living room.*
*let me get out of your living room

What I’m trying to say is none of you guys should have bothered having this conversation because this song resolved everything anyway
”I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child.”

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I am used to treating the Earth like my own personal compost pile, am all for filling the planet up to its ears with my child

I’m a teenage welfare mother, I’ll have more babies if I want to.

For my ~graduation present, a family friend who graduated from my university (James Madison, actually) got me gift cards to the local organic/specialty store as well as to the food co-op. Super thoughtful present, really. Gonna get All The Raw Almonds. We went to the former and got goat cheese, gouda, tapenade, dates, mint tea, frozen potstickers, chai concentrate, and balsamic vinegar. The whole thing cost $40. It’s fucking absurd, the same thing—same conscience provenance and everything—would have cost about half at the market down the street from us (which is independent and owned by an immigrant family). Or, like Kroger, which is actually a pretty reasonable Michigan-based business that sells almost all of the same Michigan products and ~organic foods.

We were gonna stock up on sushi stuff, but the same shit cost in some cases ten times as much as it does at the Asian grocery stores a few streets over. Fucking god forbid white people buy their ethnic foods from ethnic people. The extra cost is like a service charge for these assholes to be able to do business without having to look at a person of color.

When you have a personal guideline that says “never buy a product that uses the faces and bodies of non-western and non-white bodies on the packaging in ways that are exploitative” it is almost impossible to shop at an ~organic store. Women with bindis on LITERALLY MANY boxes of tea packaged in New Jersey. Illustrations of smiling brown men picking your organic pintos. Fucking braids, like, everywhere.

But it was a really nice gift and honestly I probably couldn’t have gotten bulk medjool dates at Kroger, but God knows who harvested these motherfuckers that we pay $8 per pound for.

END CROTCHETY FOOD POST.