justaprocessofreadjustments

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you: whines constantly about how ignorant supposedly americans are. also you: dropped out of school

Hola, anon. Since you want to be snide and classist, I wanna teach you what I’ve learned about poverty, education, and Paulo Freire.

What you should understand about me is that I was born in a small and very poor village in southern México. Most of my village only speaks Nahuatl. My parents have gnarled hands from physically demanding jobs working the land and earn roughly 3k pesos a month, about 100 US dollars. As the oldest, I dropped out as soon as compulsory education ended so I could help my mom and dad earn money. Why wouldn’t I? My parents needed me. I never knew anyone who’d left the village or anyone who’d gone to college. One of the girls a few years before finished preparatoria (high school), which was incredible to us, but she ended up having a baby and raising her family instead of going to university. And that’s fine to us, because motherhood is a cultural sign of maturity and our villages raise the children as a collective.

Think about it. Why would public schooling be meaningful or relevant to teenage me? To kids whose parents make 5 US dollars a day, kids who suffer from tropical diseases and malnutrition, kids who worry that if their dad’s back goes out... will they eat? Where a cow or a goat dying of illness can mean starvation. Whose country tried to genocide us. Whose language and religions are dying because we were violently forced to speak Spanish and adopt the Catholicism of our oppressors. People who live and die in cycles of poverty because we are condemned to one hundred years of solitude.

So that brings me to Paulo Freire who is a famous writer and educator from Brazil. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of his most famous works. In that book, he talks about his experiences practicing literacy education to poor peasants in Brazil. People just like mine. In that book, Freire teaches us that education as an institution is a practice of domination and subjugation. And the oppressed (think: the people in my village) are purposefully kept unaware of this. 

Education as an institution is made inaccessible to the poor, to the indigenous, to the illiterate, all the people who need it most. It is a system designed to kill women like me off. Through systems of conformity, cultural genocide, and forced assimilation. Freire says that when education becomes inaccessible to the oppressed, they become passive and alienated in the struggle for freedom.

And this isn’t something you can just throw money it. The government has tried that already. It is because you cannot liberate oppressed people. Oppressed people must liberate ourselves. We are not, as Freire says, “objects that must be saved from a burning building.” To attempt to “save” me is really just a means of manipulating me.

To re-engage a kid like 14-year-old Reina, for instance, think of what you have to do. You’d have to rearrange the school year so that the harvest and planting seasons align with school vacations. (During harvest and planting season, Nahuas will quite literally drop out of school for a month to help their parents.) You’d have to ensure that 14-year-old Reina’s parents are healthy and taken care of. That they have food to eat and safe water to drink.

But ultimately 14-year-old Reina has already internalized the image of herself that the oppressor has pushed onto her. That she will be a dropout. She will be a drunk. She will be stolen and trafficked for sex. She will live and die in a vicious cycle of poverty.

Have you ever had to claw your way from a web of lies and fear just to see a glimpse of freedom? How on earth does this girl see herself teaching university?

Well, it’s through revolution, love, critical pedagogy, and decolonization. Freire realized that the poor peasants that he worked with were not engaged with education until he made it relevant and meaningful to them. He codified it in a way that the peasants saw their needs being felt and met. Instead of seeing the peasants as poor illiterate savages with nothing to bring, he saw them as teachers. He reconciled the role of students so that they did not feel as though they were objects in a burning building.

So even though you saw an opportunity to attack a woman who made you come to terms with your country’s imperialism, to dehumanize her and force your image of what you think about Mexicans onto her, you will fail. 

You will always fail because I have liberated myself.

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Angela Davis & Ursula K Le Guin, visionary women for a hopeful future

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“Gandhian tactics do not, generally speaking, work in the US. One of the aims of non-violent civil disobedience is to reveal the inherent violence of the state, to demonstrate that it is prepared to brutalize even dissidents who could not possibly be the source of physical harm. Since the 1960s, however, the US media has simply refused to represent authorized police activity of any sort as violent. In the several years immediately proceeding Seattle, for instance, forest activists on the West Coast had developed lockdown techniques by which they immobilized their arms in concrete-reinforced PVC tubing, making them at once obviously harmless and very difficult to remove. It was a classic Gandhian strategy. The police response was to develop what can only be described as torture techniques: rubbing pepper spray in the eyes of incapacitated activists. When even that didn’t cause a media furor (in fact, courts upheld the practice) many concluded Gandhian tactics simply didn’t work in America. It is significant that a large number of the Black Bloc anarchists in Seattle, who rejected the lockdown strategy and opted for more mobile and aggressive tactics, were precisely forest activists who had been involved in tree-sits and lockdowns in the past.”

— David Graeber, On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture

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So excited to listen to this! Her first interview is w the fabulous Joy Cox. This podcast is so needed. 

From Melissa’s IG: 

My new podcast is finally here! Hearing Our Own voice is a podcast that centers the stories and experiences and Black fat activists and health & wellness pros who have taken an anti-diet, weight-inclusive approach to their work. Yes, I know there are thousands of podcasts out there in the world, and quite a few anti-diet pods too. But despite the plethora of options, there aren’t enough that are solely focused on Black voices speaking specifically about the way diet culture affects us. You can listen on Apple, Spotify, and on my website I hope you enjoy it!

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To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

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Justice RBG's death has just been announced, what happens now? I'm terrified of what's going to happen if the GOP manage to replace her; I don't know if they even CAN, if there's enough time, or if that could somehow be prevented until after the inauguration. I don't know what's going to happen next but I'm afraid of what this will mean.

Not to be an anarchist on main but the answer is always:

Connect with your local communities to share resources and make sure everyone is safe.

learn new skills whenever you can, especially survival, communication, and first aid skills. Look for CERT trainings as a good source of free classes and hands-on education.

join and support unions whenever possible.

look to the activists of the past for guidance: if the ACA is overturned start staging die-ins (and if you’re a medical professional then now is the time to work with your colleagues to figure out how you’re going to provide care to people who are going to lose their medical coverage)

work local; the supreme court isn’t something that you can control, but maybe you can have an impact on your city’s zoning policies or on whether or not unused land becomes a community food garden.

do jail support, film cops, and listen to cop communications so that you can report on their movements to the people they threaten.

feed the hungry.

hack the planet.

If not you then who? If you see a need, fill it.

Take care of yourself and take care of each other.

Shit is fucked up, the government is fucked up, the world is fucked up. It probably won’t always be that way, but right now all that you can do is make the part of the world that you’re in contact with a little better, so do that.

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eating disorder treatment centers/franchises are a booming industry; venture capitalists and investment bankers love them. these facilities rarely provide evidence-based treatment, and have little to no oversight or accountability to any specialized scientific body. hundreds of thousands of dollars to pet a horse, experience weight bias, and watch inspirational dove commercials w inept clinicians is mainly what we’re working with, my beans

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ATTENTION

The US government just killed Lezmond Mitchell, a Native American man.

It is against the law for the US Government to order the death of a tribal citizen without the approval of the corresponding sovereign Nation's approval. The Navajo Nation (to whom Mitchell belongs) actively campaigned against his execution. This is the first execution of a Native American by the occupying US government in modern times.

This is a Big Fucking Deal.

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Accountability culture

One of the problems of what I am for now going to call accountability culture (because it stretches far beyond call outs) is that it makes doing nothing or silently withdrawing the safe option.

We’ve made being accountable into a terrifying and humiliating and very public experience, so logically most people avoid it at all cost, which can create a kind of ‘always playing it safe’ approach.

If someone gets called out, cutting them out of your life is always going to be safer than deciding to help them change and having to defend that you’re still spending time with them. If an organization abuses power, walking out makes sure you are not complicit, but also means there is one less conscientious person in that organization willing to stop the process. If you never stand by people who experience a different kind of oppression than you, you can at least be sure never to be a ‘bad ally’.

If you keep your head down, you won’t have to be accountable for anything. If you withdraw at the first sign of ‘problematic’ things, you won’t have to be accountable for anything. If you never do the difficult work of trying to fix a messy situation, you won’t have to be accountable for anything. If you never make anything your responsibility, you won’t have to be accountable for anything.

This encourages a passive attitude where we care more about not being part of a problem than about solving the problem.

If we want to actually solve problems, we need for more space for making mistakes, for being flawed, for the struggle within the messy complicit processes of change. The willingness to engage in imperfect change should be acknowledged as a good thing. Passiveness and treating others as disposable to stay out of all controversy shouldn’t be rewarded.  

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Y’all I went to my county’s dem meeting for Paid Work Purposes and oh boy! I thought d*a meetings were too obsessed with Robert’s Rules and were bad at staying on time but they got nothing on the dems

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if left unity is impossible explain THIS

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‘Abolition not reform. Defund Prisons, Police. Reinvest in black communities’

Graphic by @nobrainszine

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Actually the MOST cottagecore thing is fighting for indigenous sovereignty and then working communally on the land to support each other as well as the environment while not upholding colonial ideologies

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I can’t stand jokes about how young people are more politically radical than past generations cause they erase the history of activism, it just feels so disrespectful even if it’s a joke.....like bro you would be nowhere without the black panther party and other past liberation movements I hope you know this....

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