#''that when we are discussing indigeneity it is not meant to be an identity or discourse over who deserves land but of a people's

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Missive for all video essayists.

[ausetkmt]

NYU hosts white-only anti-racism workshop for public school parents in New York City so they can 'unlearn' their prejudice without 'traumatizing' minorities

The five-month-long course at the School of Education cost $360 to attend 

It was racially segregated so attendees could 'unlearn racism' without inflicting 'undue trauma or pain' on minorities in the process

Several attorneys said it likely violated federal Civil Rights law 

Published: 17:02 EDT, 11 July 2023 | Updated: 17:57 EDT, 11 July 2023

New York University is under fire for hosting a racially exclusionary seminar for white public school parents to train them to become anti-racist and build 'multiracial parent communities.'

The five-month-long course, which cost $360 to attend, was, according to a handful of legal experts, a clear violation of civil rights law, according to the Washington Free Beacon.  

The seminar, called 'From Integration to Anti-Racism,' was held half-a-dozen times this year and was run through NYU's Steinhardt School of Education.

The educators running the course distributed a document produced by the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, which informed the class that the reason the seminar was being kept all white was so attendees could 'unlearn racism' without inflicting 'undue trauma or pain' on minorities in the process.

'From Integration to Anti-Racism' was an all-white course offered by NYU to public school parents in an effort to teach them how to unlearn racism away from racial minorities

The course was run by Steinhardt faculty member Barbara Gross, who defended the all-whiteness of the class by saying: 'People of color are dealing with racism all the time. Like every minute of every day. It's a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts'

The course was run by Barbara Gross, Steinhardt's associate director of the school's Education Justice Research group, who claimed that 'people of color are dealing with racism all the time. Like, every minute of every day.

'It's a harm on top of a harm,' she said, 'for them to hear our racist thoughts,' explaining again why the course would need to be an all-white space.

Recordings of parts of the seminars appear to have been provided to the Beacon by a parent in the class. 

During the inaugural workshop session, roughly a dozen parents were welcomed with a rendition of the song 'All You Fascists Bound to Lose' by Woody Guthrie, performed this time by the Resistance Revival Chorus - a group of women and non-binary singers.

Gross repeatedly instructed participants to 'resist the urge to intellectualize' the content of what they were about to learn. 

'What we know intellectually is very different from what's in our bones and in our nervous systems. What we have internalized. What we have inherited,' she said, implying that racism is as good as imprinted on white DNA.

When the seminar discussed a text called 'Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture' by Tema Okun, one parent who works as an editor proclaimed: 'I've been correcting grammar a lot and typos, and reading this I was thinking, ''Wow, I had no idea''.'

At one point Gross shared with the class a moment of bigoted thinking she once internally experienced.

She said that several 'women of color' in her office were joking around and playing games instead of working on the event they were meant to be planning.

'I was thinking, "How can they get anything done?" I had to catch myself,' she said.

Parents in the class were given readings ahead of their next meetings that included: 'Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism' by Robin DiAngelo, and 'Qallunology 101: A Lesson Plan for the Non-Indigenous' by Derek Rasmussen.

The syllabus also included 'Internalized White Superiority' and 'Toward a Radical White Identity.' 

Parents were assigned a number of antiracist texts, including Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility'

NYU's Steinhardt School of Education offered the class to public school parents - according to several attorneys, the course may have violated federal Civil Rights law

The Free Beacon polled five attorneys, all of whom said that the workshop in all likelihood violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, in addition to violating laws that ban discrimination when establishing contracts. 

Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute told the Beacon: 'It’s quintessentially illegal. This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory whereby left- and right-wing radicals end up agreeing on race-based societal balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: "Woke or KKK?"' 

The school told the Beacon that it would review 'these matters to determine whether they confirm to our standards.'

NYU was under a consent agreement with the Department of Education pertaining to a handful of anti-Semitic incidents on campus when the workshop took palace. 

[college-girl199328]

A top minister in Premier Blaine Higgs's government says she is resigning from cabinet immediately and will also quit as a member of the legislature "in the near term says she made the decision "after much consideration and discussion with my family" but did not provide any reasons in a statement released Friday morning.

She said she made the decision "with mixed emotions. … Serving the people of New Brunswick and representing the wonderful people in my riding of Saint John Harbour has been a true privilege and honor of a lifetime."

The premier is not required to call a by-election to fill a vacant seat in the 12 months before a scheduled general election, which is considered a key battleground in the provincial election scheduled for this fall.

The Liberals have nominated Saint John City Councilor David Hickey to run there, while the Greens have chosen Mariah Darling, an activist and education coordinator with a local LGBTQ organization.

They both said Friday that Dunn's departure was another sign of the Progressive Conservative Party veering further to the right.

Darling said Dunn's resignation "shows some cracks in the Conservative party right now" and called it "a real sign that people in Saint John Harbour need new leadership and don't need to look to a party that can't keep their own members currently."

Dunn was seen as a star candidate when she was elected in 2020 and was handed several cabinet responsibilities, including economic development, immigration, and Indigenous affairs on post-secondary education, training, and labor, in June 2023 after Higgs shuffled his cabinet in the wake of a revolt over his changes to the education department's Policy 713 on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Dunn opposed the changes but was not in the legislature the day six other Progressive Conservative MLAs voted against the government on the issue.

Higgs said at the time the fact she was not there for the vote was why he kept her as a minister after dumping two of the others who broke ranks reporters Friday that he expected his internal critics to put Dunn's departure "in a negative light" but said, "I don't think that we should read anything more or less into the fact that it's an opportunity for others to get involved in politics."

Dunn's announcement came just hours after Natural Resources and Energy Development Minister Mike Holland announced he'll be leaving politics when the provincial election is called this year, a regional vice-president of the PC party who supported a push to remove Higgs as leader last year, said the two departures are a sign of "poor management and poor leadership in the PC party" that rests with Higgs.

He said there was no mechanism to remove Higgs at this point, but said he hoped the premier might still step down before the election.

Holland, however, said he was leaving because he's accomplished everything that was on his to-do list when he became minister in 2018 and it's time to pass the baton.

He added that his decision was "not whatsoever" influenced by divisions in the PC caucus and cabinet over Premier Blaine Higgs's handling of he wouldn't have been able to accomplish initiatives such as the doubling of protected areas on Crown lands without Higgs's support.

Elected politics "is meant to be, you come in, you do your work and you pass it on," Holland said.

The Progressive Conservative party has scheduled a candidate nominating meeting in the Albert-Riverview riding for Feb. 14. The riding on the new electoral map is a redrawn version of Holland's current Albert riding elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2020, said his decision was also driven by the fact that his partner lives in Nova Scotia.

Economic Development Minister Greg Turner will take on Dunn's responsibilities for post-secondary education, labor, training, and immigration, while Holland will absorb her Indigenous Affairs portfolio.

Higgs is facing the loss of other ministers when he calls the election this year said in October he will retire when Higgs calls the election, and Health Minister Bruce Fitch also hinted last fall that he will not run again.

[averagepathologicenjoyer]

@geeneelee

Completely agree with this, there needs to be more nuance when discussing it beacause the problem is: indigenous cultures have historically and still are being portrayed as being savage beasts by colonisers because it others them and gives (white) people an excuse to want to control them and either assimilate them or eradicate them. I acknowledge as a white person that I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss these issues as well as a native individual can, though it is still important to make sure we don't ignore it

I think the concept of a culture that is intrinsically tied to the Earth and therefore believes that humans are further from Earth than animals are is interesting, especially since in the context of the game, we know that all these claims about the Earth and the Town being alive are true. The Town has a heart, there are creatures made of bone and clay that exist, the Aurochs were real creatures. The rituals that the Kin performs both have meaning and are very literal in nature. By soaking the Earth with blood herbs do grow, and the Sand Pest only affects those who have strayed too far from Mother Boddho (though I think there is a little more to that due to what happened in the Termitary). It's undeniable, it is literally right in front of your eyes. There probably are metaphorical aspects to it, but we still know all this to be true

However, by having an indigenous group have arguably brutal practices that mainly involve spilling blood (that also mainly revolves around killing women specifically), and have a desire to become more like animals, who have also been enslaved and massacred, you are walking along a very thin dangerous line where you can fall into racist tropes that are still perpetuated in a lot of media whether you meant to do that or not, and one of the problems in my opinion, is that the game doesn't do enough to give you a good reason not to let the Kin die. Artemy is half-Kin for crying out loud and while its fine to have a character want to reject part of their identity, it also leaves a huge area of lore completely untouched that you never see otherwise. The game gives this illusion that you can help the Kin reestablish themselves away from the humans that have oppressed them, while still having a future for the Town, but then kinda, takes that away from you in the end. The Kin aren't allowed to have a happy ending unless it is at the expense of their oppressors, but even then you still see it from a humans point of view, regressing back into more primitive times and therefore never moving forward, and its so frustrating

I want to know more about the Kin, I want Artemy to be less of a massive dick about his own people, I want there to just be more

After getting boths endings for Pathologic 2 I have a lot of feelings about the Kin and how they are portrayed in relation to the endings

Throughout the game the Kin are portrayed in such a way that really makes it feel like the game wants you to dislike them in some way. You see that the townspeople have a lot of disdain for them, and they aren't really cared about by anyone except the player and Artemy if you choose to play him that way. They're enslaved by the Olgimskys and Big Vlad is just a piece of shit about it, but in that way that big company owners don't really care about their workforce in any way other than how controllable and useful they are, but in more of a 'I did what I had to do' kinda way. Younger Vlad has better motivations and interests but he still falls a bit short of seeing the Kin as a group of living individuals and treats them with an interest that is still a little divorced from the group themselves. Like how people will treat unknown and 'exotic' cultures as things to be studied rather than still living practices that aren't for gawking at. The Kin are portrayed as barbaric and strange, and seen as beasts that need a strong hand to govern them, and while you can not follow this path and give them the space and freedom they deserve, you don't really learn much more about them and what makes them so unique as a culture, or understand their ways in a way that matters to Artemy as someone who is supposed to be related to them

The Nocturnal ending is very depressing, and I understand the point it was trying to make. By keeping things preserved in the past you essentially kill the future. A world that only looks behind can never look forward so it feels timeless and like its stuck in place. There is no future to be had. But my question is, why is it associated with the Kin flourishing and the town dying? Why is that seen as such a bad thing?

The Diurnal ending brings about a future, a new life for the town. They can leave behind what has happened and move forward unto better things. There is a future to be had and tomorrow is brighter than today. But why did the Kin have to be sacrificed for that to happen? Why is this culture that was part of the foundation for the town, that was enslaved and essentially massacred out of neglect and control, not deserving of a chance to flourish and move forward as well? The Kin don't really hold back the town, they aren't really part of the town in the first place, they don't want to be part of the town

It feels a though there were some biases that slipped into the writing and while it doesn't make the overall experience bad, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when I think about it. Something has to be sacrificed for something to survive, but it felt a lot more black and white than the game had been making it out to be. You can free the Kin, allow them to live in their old settlement, allow them to exist free of appression for the first time in goodness knows how long. But it doesn't really make a difference if bringing about the future means they will all die anyway

Idk I just wish there was more nuance to it all, and that it didn't feel like a colonial/settler bias seeping into the work. It could've been done much better, but I understand what they were going for

[reanimatedcourier]

How to Write Indigenous Characters Without Looking like a Jackass:

Update as of December 26th, 2020: I have added a couple new sections about naming and legal terms, as well as a bit of reading on the Cherokee Princess phenomenon.

Boozhoo (hello) Fallout fandom! I'm a card-carrying Anishinaabe delivering this rough guide about writing Indigenous characters because wow, do I see a lot of shit.

Let's get something out of the way first: Fallout's portrayal of Indigenous people is racist. From a vague definition of "tribal" to the claims of them being "savage" and "uncivilized" mirror real-world stereotypes used to dehumanize us. Fallout New Vegas' narrated intro has Ron Perlman saying Mr. House "rehabilitated" tribals to create New Vegas' Three Families. You know. Rehabilitate. As if we are animals. Top it off with an erasure of Indigenous people in the American Southwest and no real tribe names, and you've got some pretty shitty representation. The absence of Native American as a race option in the GECK isn't too great, given that two Native characters are marked "Caucasian" despite being brown. Butch Deloria is a pretty well-known example of this effect. (Addendum: Indigenous people can have any mix of dominant and recessive traits, as well as present different phenotypes. What bothers me is it doesn't accommodate us or mixed people, which is another post entirely.)

As a precautionary warning: this post and the sources linked will discuss racism and genocide. There will also be discussion of multiple kinds of abuse.

Now, your best approach will be to pick a nation or tribe and research them. However, what follows will be general references.

Terms that may come up in your research include Aboriginal/Native Canadian, American Indian/Native American, Inuit, Métis, and Mestizo. The latter two refer to cultural groups created after the discovery of the so-called New World. (Addendum made September 5th, 2020: Mestizo has negative connotations and originally meant "half breed" so stick with referring to your mixed Latine and Indigenous characters as mixed Indigenous or simply by the name of their people [Maya, Nahua].)

As a note, not every mixed person is Métis or Mestizo. If you are, say, Serbian and Anishinaabe, you would be mixed, but not Métis (the big M is important here, as it refers to a specific culture). Even the most liberal definition caps off at French and British ancestry alongside Indigenous (some say Scottish and English). Mestizo works the same, since it refers to descendants of Spanish conquistadors/settlers and Indigenous people.

Trouble figuring out whose land is where? No problem, check out this map.

Drawing

Don't draw us with red skin. It's offensive and stereotypical.

Tutorial for Native Skintones

Tutorial for Mixed Native Skintones

Why Many Natives Have Long Hair (this would technically fit better under another category, but give your Native men long hair!)

If You're Including Traditional Wear, Research! It's Out There

Languages

Remember, there are a variety of languages spoken by Indigenous people today. No two tribes will speak the same language, though there are some that are close and may have loan words from each other (Cree and Anishinaabemowin come to mind). Make sure your Diné (you may know them as Navajo) character doesn't start dropping Cree words.

Here's a Site With a Map and Voice Clips

Here's an Extensive List of Amerindian Languages

Keep in mind there are some sounds that have no direct English equivalents. But while we're at it, remember a lot of us speak English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The languages of the countries that colonized us.

Words in Amerindian languages tend to be longer than English ones and are in the format of prefix + verb + suffix to get concepts across. Gaawiin miskwaasinoon is a complete sentence in Anishinaabemowin, for example (it is not red).

Names

Surprisingly, we don't have names like Passing Dawn or Two-Bears-High-Fiving in real life. A lot of us have, for lack of better phrasing, white people names. We may have family traditions of passing a name down from generation to generation (I am the fourth person in my maternal line to have my middle name), but not everyone is going to do that. If you do opt for a name from a specific tribe, make sure you haven't chosen a last name from another tribe.

Baby name sites aren't reliable, because most of the names on there will be made up by people who aren't Indigenous. That site does list some notable exceptions and debunks misconceptions.

Here's a list of last names from the American census.

Indian Names

You may also hear "spirit names" because that's what they are for. You know the sort of mystical nature-related name getting slapped on an Indigenous character? Let's dive into that for a moment.

The concept of a spirit name seems to have gotten mistranslated at some point in time. It is the name Creator calls you throughout all your time both here and in the spirit world. These names are given (note the word usage) to you in a ceremony performed by an elder. This is not done lightly.

A lot of imitations of this end up sounding strange because they don't follow traditional guidelines. (I realize this has spread out of the original circle, but Fallout fans may recall other characters in Honest Hearts and mods that do this. They have really weird and racist results.)

If you're not Indigenous: don't try this. You will be wrong.

Legal Terms

Now, sometimes the legal term (or terms) for a tribe may not be what they refer to themselves as. A really great example of this would be the Oceti Sakowin and "Sioux". How did that happen, you might be wondering. Smoky Mountain News has an article about this word and others, including the history of these terms.

For the most accurate information, you are best off having your character refer to themselves by the name their nation uses outside of legislation. A band name would be pretty good for this (Oglala Lakota, for example). I personally refer to myself by my band.

Cowboys

And something the Fallout New Vegas fans might be interested in, cowboys! Here's a link to a post with several books about Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Wild West.

Representation: Stereotypes and Critical Thought

Now, you'll need to think critically about why you want to write your Indigenous character a certain way. Here is a comprehensive post about stereotypes versus nuance.

Familiarize yourself with tropes. The Magical Indian is a pretty prominent one, with lots of shaman-type characters in movies and television shows. This post touches on its sister tropes (The Magical Asian and The Magical Negro), but is primarily about the latter.

Say you want to write an Indigenous woman. Awesome! Characters I love to see. Just make sure you're aware of the stereotypes surrounding her and other Women of Color.

Word to the wise: do not make your Indigenous character an alcoholic. "What, so they can't even drink?" You might be asking. That is not what I'm saying. There is a pervasive stereotype about Drunk Indians, painting a reaction to trauma as an inherent genetic failing, as stated in this piece about Indigenous social worker Jessica Elm's research. The same goes for drugs. Ellen Deloria is an example of this stereotype.

Familiarize yourself with and avoid the Noble Savage trope. This was used to dehumanize us and paint us as "childlike" for the sake of a plot device. It unfortunately persists today.

Casinos are one of the few ways for tribes to make money so they can build homes and maintain roads. However, some are planning on diversifying into other business ventures.

There's a stereotype where we all live off government handouts. Buddy, some of these long-term boil water advisories have been in place for over twenty years. The funding allocated to us as a percentage is 0.39%: less than half a percent to fight the coronavirus. They don't give us money.

"But what about people claiming to be descended from a Cherokee princess?" Cherokee don't and never had anything resembling princesses. White southerners made that up prior to the Civil War. As the article mentions, they fancied themselves "defending their lands as the Indians did".

Also, don't make your Indigenous character a cannibal. Cannibalism is a serious taboo in a lot of our cultures, particularly northern ones.

Our lands are not cursed. We don't have a litany of curses to cast on white people in found footage films. Seriously. We have better things to be doing. Why on earth would our ancestors be haunting you when they could be with their families? Very egotistical assumption.

Indigenous Ties and Blood Quantum

Blood quantum is a colonial system that was initially designed to "breed out the Indian" in people. To dilute our bloodlines until we assimilated properly into white society. NPR has an article on it here.

However, this isn't how a vast majority of us define our identities. What makes us Indigenous is our connections (or reconnection) to our families, tribes, bands, clans, and communities.

Blood quantum has also historically been used to exclude Black Natives from tribal enrollment, given that it was first based on appearance. So, if you looked Black and not the image of "Indian" the white census taker had in his brain, you were excluded and so were your descendants.

Here are two tumblrs that talk about Black Indigenous issues and their perspectives. They also talk about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia.

However, if you aren't Indigenous, don't bring up blood quantum. Don't. This is an issue you should not be speaking about.

Cherokee Princess Myth

"Princess" was not a real position in any tribe. The European idea of monarchy did not suddenly manifest somewhere else. The closest probable approximation may have been the daughter of a chief or other politically prominent person. But princess? No.

Here is an article talking about possible origins of this myth. Several things are of note here: women from other tribes may have bee shoved under this label and the idea of a "Cherokee Princess" had been brought up to explain the sudden appearance of a brown-skinned (read: half Black) family member.

For a somewhat more in depth discussion of why, specifically, this myth gets touted around so often, Timeline has this piece.

Religion

Our religions are closed. We are not going to tell you how we worship. Mostly because every little bit we choose to share gets appropriated. Smudging is the most recent example. If you aren't Indigenous, that's smoke cleansing. Smudging is done in a specific way with ceremonies and prayers.

Now, a lot of us were forcibly converted. Every residential school was run by Christians. So plenty of us are Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran, etc. Catholicism in Latin America also has influence from the Indigenous religions in that region.

Having your Indigenous character pray or carry rosaries wouldn't be a bad thing, if that religion was important to them. Even if they are atheist, if they lived outside of a reserve or other Indigenous communities, they might have Christian influences due to its domination of the Western world.

Settler Colonialism and the White Savior Trope

Now we've come to our most painful section yet. Fallout unintentionally has an excellent agent of settler-colonialism, in particular the Western Christian European variety, in Caesar's Legion and Joshua Graham.

(Addendum: Honest Hearts is extremely offensive in its portrayal of Indigenous people, and egregiously shows a white man needing to "civilize" tribals and having to teach them basic skills. These skills include cooking, finding safe water, and defending themselves from other tribes.)

Before we dive in, here is a post explaining the concept of cultural Christianity, if you are unfamiliar with it.

We also need to familiarize ourselves with The White Man's Burden. While the poem was written regarding the American-Philippine war, it still captures the attitudes toward Indigenous folks all over the world at the time.

As this article in Teen Vogue points out, white people like to believe they need to save People of Color. You don't need to. People of Color can save themselves.

Now, cultural Christianity isn't alone on this side of the pond. Writer Teju Cole authored a piece on the White Savior Industrial Complex to describe mission trips undertaken by white missionaries to Africa to feed their egos.

Colonialism has always been about the acquisition of wealth. To share a quote from this paper about the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples: "Negatively, [settler colonialism] strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others." (Positive, here, is referring to "benefits" for the colonizers. Indigenous people don't consider colonization beneficial.)

An example of a non-benefit, the Church Rock disaster had Diné children playing in radioactive water so the company involved could avoid bad publicity.

Moving on, don't sterilize your Indigenous people. Sterilization, particularly when it is done without consent, has long been used as a tool by the white system to prevent "undesirables" (read, People of Color and disabled people) from having children. Somehow, as of 2018, it wasn't officially considered a crime.

The goal of colonization was to eliminate us entirely. Millions died because of exposure to European diseases. Settlers used to and still do separate our children from us for reasons so small as having a dirty dish in the sink. You read that right, a single dirty dish in your kitchen sink was enough to get your children taken and adopted out to white families. This information was told to me by an Indigenous social work student whose name I will keep anonymous.

It wasn't until recently they made amendments to the Indian Act that wouldn't automatically render Indigenous women non-status if they married someone not Indigenous. It also took much too long for Indigenous families to take priority in child placement over white ones. Canada used to adopt Indigenous out to white American families. The source for that statement is further down, but adoption has been used as a tool to destroy cultures.

I am also begging you to cast aside whatever colonialist systems have told you about us. We are alive. People with a past, not people of the past, which was wonderfully said here by Frank Waln.

Topics to Avoid if You Aren't Indigenous

Child Separation. Just don't. We deserve to remain with our families and our communities. Let us stay together and be happy that way.

Assimilation schools. Do not bring up a tool for cultural genocide that has left lasting trauma in our communities.

W/ndigos. I don't care that they're in Fallout 76. They shouldn't be. Besides, you never get them right anyway.

Sk/nwalkers. Absolutely do not. Diné stories are not your playthings either.

I've already talked about drugs and alcohol. Do your research with compassion and empathy in mind. Indigenous people have a lot of pain and generational trauma. You will need to be extremely careful having your Indigenous characters use drugs and alcohol. If your character can be reduced to their (possible) substance abuse issues, you need to step back and rework it. As mentioned in Jessica Elm's research, remember that it isn't inherent to us.

For our final note: remember that we're complex, autonomous human beings. Don't use our deaths to further the stories of your white characters. Don't reduce us to some childlike thing that needs to be raised and civilized by white characters. We interact with society a little differently than you do, but we interact nonetheless.

Meegwetch (thank you) for reading! Remember to do your research and portray us well, but also back off when you are told by an Indigenous person.

This may be updated in the future, it depends on what information I come across or, if other Indigenous people are so inclined, what is added to this post.

[simonalkenmayer]

Complex emotions are always alright.

I hate the British Monarchy so much I helped behead a king. Doesn’t mean I didn’t regret that when I saw what got put in its place. Doesn’t mean I don’t see an elderly lady, sometimes kind as a person, who was loved by her family. I hate imperialism. I hate colonization. I participated, but I came to regret that. I saw death and destruction first hand. Doesn’t mean I cannot see why it was done, and what it meant to the people doing it. What was devastating and a crime against the indigenous, led to hope and discovery for the colonizers, an emotional memory that permeates to this day—and it changed the world. We can both condemn imperialism, colonization, racism, while also being being sorry for a family. We can recognize that her government murdered indigenous babies in schools, but that she was a staunch (if reserved) advocate for ending apartheid. We can see that there are dozens of personal stories of her kindness, while also knowing that she treated Diana poorly. We can see she was racist while also worrying how the trauma affects her grandchildren. We can decry an expensive funeral that we see as wasteful, but also recognize that some people need that funeral to distance themselves from that aspect of their identity—a ruler who has been a constant for their entire lives, and indeed that of their parents. The queen, for some, represents continuity for some, while still being a figurehead of racism.

People are not simple. Their lives are not reducible. They can be behaving in simply terrible ways for complex reasons, or kind ways for simple reasons. As much fun as it can be to selfishly vent my frustrations by over-simplifying a person as evil, that’s in fact the same dehumanizing crime they’re guilty of. I can see that a narcissist’s behavior is bad and harmful, while also recognizing that their actions come from deep self-esteem issues. I can pity them while discussing with them.

Complex emotions are fine. Simple emotions are fine. Please don’t debate emotions. They’re often not rational, and people are capable of having irrational emotions while logically knowing otherwise. That’s how phobias are a thing.

What’s my point?

Stop fighting over complex emotions. Embrace them and ask questions. Allow people to have theirs while also recognizing yours. Bad things can still be fought properly, even when the participants have mixed feelings. Remember how many of your impressions and ideas first formed in childhood, and know how strongly emotions affect the developing brain. Recognize that their emotions aren’t the same as their rational knowledge. You can actually both have your ideas, and converse about them in respectful ways. You can respect each other enough to discuss the truth, but also indicate why your emotions are mixed.

Maybe the queen was a fixation of a parent you loved who died. Maybe you had a special fixation on monarchy for a while. Maybe she’s a distant relative. Maybe your parents were treated terribly by her government. Maybe imperialism raped your people. These are all true at the same time, you see. And they have nothing to do with the actual character or personality of Elizabeth

Truth is complex. It’s the amalgamation of all the versions of a moment, and then a decision as to whether or not that history is behind us, or indeed leading to something ahead of us.

Arguments around this are pointless. Discussions are the recognition of others feelings and are very important. Being able to see the Queen as a person doesn’t mean you support her decisions or her reign. Saying you don’t want to celebrate a death, isn’t a declaration that you approved of her life.

Do you see?

Groups fragment when the narcissism of small differences begins to pop up. Once you begin subcategorizing members of the group, saying we all agree but this one tiny detail divides us, you are creating categories that people will settle into as identity, and then defend.

Groups that embrace complex emotions with supportive and compassionate focus, like group therapy, manage to do fine. Groups that subdivide or form cliques, inevitably collapse without mitigation.

Knowledge is built. It’s not produced by tearing everything down and walking away. Give people space to think and refine. Given them a chance to change. Accept them if they do. Don’t be so quick to make enemies out of allies.

[skaldish]

...I didn’t want to be the one to start this because, as a white person, I’m not qualified to speak on this topic. But I’ve yet to see any serious, ongoing discussions about racism in pagan and witch communities. That can’t slide.

Pagans and witches are not exempt from returning sovereignty to Black, Indigenous, and Witches/Pagans of Color in our communities. It’s time to act and make these changes in our spaces.

Allyship is an ongoing practice that doesn’t end, and this list of “do’s” and “don’t’s” is only meant to get you started. I’m sure this list is far from complete, so if you’re BIPOC and want me to add anything, I’ll gladly do so. Readers, please check back on the OP periodically for these contributions.

Please read all the way through before reblogging.

Things you can do:

Afford BIPOC communal and cultural influence in ALL pagan/witchy spaces, be they Wiccan, Heathen, Hellenic, etc. Paganism and witchcraft are global and intersectional. BIPOC influence in paganism and witchcraft does not begin and end with BIPOC-specific magic and practices.

Confront your internalized racism. I promise you have it, and ignoring it won’t solve it. Having internalized racism doesn’t make you a bad person, but it DOES mean you’re responsible for working on it. Begin by examining any racist tendencies you may have. Sit with it and educate yourself on what you can do to move past it.

Buy direct from BIPOC! Support BIPOC-created art and spiritual shops! If you can't support financially, use your social media platforms to boost shop links and other BIPOC-created content. Buying from BIPOC also allows for cultural appreciation rather than appropriation.

Use your privilege as a white person to uplift the voices of BIPOC in witch and pagan communities. This looks like giving platform to their thoughts and feelings without trying to co-opt their message for yourself. Find blog posts written by BIPOC that talk about racism or appropriation in our spaces and give them platform.

Recognize helpful allyship vs. performative allyship. Saying you hate racism or that the gods hate racism is a nice sentiment, but unfortunately it doesn't actually do anything to solve racism. Make sure you back it up with allyship that actively helps BIPOC in our communities!

Read the following: Closed cultures are cultures that have experienced (or are currently experiencing) aggressive colonization and have decided to close off their cultures to their colonizers. In this case of Black Cultures, Indigenous Cultures, and Cultures of Color, their colonizers are white people. White people have only ever been colonized by other white people so white people can’t close their cultures to BIPOC. There. Now you know how that works.

Some Don’t’s:

Don't appropriate. Seriously. This is baseline at this point. We all start at a place of ignorance, but it’s our job as white witches and pagans to learn what’s appropriation and what isn’t. This includes adapting your practice if you discover you’re appropriating. If you know you appropriate and defend it, you admit your magic only works because it’s stolen. Do you think this truly serves you or anyone else?

Don't compare the subjugation of BIPOC to the burning of witches or being part of a religious minority. No matter your intention is with this, it won’t come off as commiseration or showing sympathy. Racism is a systemic form of oppression that can't be compared to any other kind of prejudice. Understand that you can’t understand.

Avoid being a “white savior.” Tackling racism isn’t supposed to feel comfortable, rewarding, or heroic for a white person. It should actually feel like shadow-work. Likewise, don’t expect acclaim or reward for proper allyship.

Don't work with spirits, deities, or concepts from closed cultures unless it’s permitted by that culture, and only within the context permitted. If you think a spirit from a closed culture is trying to interact with you, seek out a community-recognized spiritual leader from that spirit’s culture to talk to about it.

Don’t say “politics should stay out of spiritual spaces” when it comes to human rights issues. There’s many problems with this: First, Human rights issues and politics are very different. Second, if you want to have a truly inclusive environment, that environment needs to be intersectional. This means allowing other identities to overlap into paganism and witchcraft, including their issues. Regardless of your intention, it’s oppressive to deny room for those issues for the sake of “love and light.” Your “love and light” is not about healing, then, but about maintaining the status-quo.

Remember, true justice isn’t something that happens after a wrong. It’s something that prevents that wrong from ever happening. If we want justice in our pagan and witchcraft communities, we need to do the right work to achieve it.

[hunkygreenbean]

Example A.

Misogyny + contemporary and historical European Christian doctrine are inherently tied together. I will say that all Abrahamic religions have issues with misogyny, however since in my original post I mention European Christianity, I will be discussing just that.

European Christianity as we know it was largely shaped by the Roman and Byzantine empires. These cultures already were quite patriarchal, so they adapted the theology to reinforce that. @unsentimentaltranslator gets a point in that regard; misogyny does predate Christianity. I will admit I did miss the goal on that point.

As Christianity spread through the Late Roman Empire, so too did it's misogynistic ideals. Fast forward a hundred years when Europeans discover a whole ass other continent, these ideals would be forced upon the indigenous peoples there.

But what about the beliefs of pre-colonial peoples? What of their ideas of gender?

The one question that TERFs/radfems will always dodge when you pose it to them. Why? Because TERF "feminism" is both ahistorical and euro-centric. They believe that because Christian Europe had a strict divide of male and female, that other non-white non-European cultures naturally had this too. Their evidence for this comes from post colonial gender and sex roles in these countries. They completely ignore that these people had whole other ideas about gender and sexuality, and that most of the violent misogyny and strict gender divide is a result of Christian European colonialism.

Don't believe me? Here are some historical gender identities from numerous cultures that have existed well before colonialism into the modern day:

North America:

Two Spirit-- A term that is not claimed/limited to one indigenous group. It was meant to replace the term "berdarche," a slur that Europeans would call indigenous peoples who did not conform to their gender roles and expectations. There have been numerous accounts of multiple different gender identities and expressions across North America before Europeans arrived. Europeans called these two-spirit folks "abominable acts," and through multiple generations of cultural genocide, these identities were almost completely erased.

South America:

Muxes--In the Zapotec culture of Oaxaca, MX, Muxes are AMAB people who dress in women's clothing. Some identify as trans women/nonbinary, while others are simply GNC. In fact, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (the area with the highest Zapotec population in Mexico), trans women, nonbinary folks and GNC men are actually the safest and most welcome there in the entire country!

Pacific Islands:

Mahu--In Native Hawai'ian and Tahitian cultures, Mahu people are regarded as those who do not percieve themselves as man or woman. In pre contact times, mahu were respected as teachers of hula dances and chants. They were respected as the keepers of genealogies, and many parents would go to mahus to name their children. The term Mahu is both used as a pejorative towards the LGBTQ+ in Hawai'i, and is still a respected identity and position in traditional Hawai'ian culture.

Fa'afaine/fa'afatama--A gender identity from the indigenous peoples of Samoa that is described as "moving between male and female." These folks also held respected roles in their societies, as they were the ones who would dispense knowledge about sex, a topic that was considered taboo.

Asia:

Hijras--Hijras are trans women, nonbinary folks or GNC men who form their own seperate communities away from cis society. They have played important roles in both modern and ancient times. They are accounted for in Hinduism's big holy texts, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Hijras are trusted to learn secret rituals that are not open to the larger cishetero society, and are invited to bring blessings upon newborns.

And there are many more out there. I just listed some that have recently grown to prominence.

So yeah, I may have fucked up in saying that European Christianity upholds patriarchy, not men. Roman patriarchal culture adapted Christian theology to continue their misogynistic reign, which spread throughout Europe and eventually the larger world. But for radfems to say that ALL CULTURES across ALL TIME either a) only recognized cis men and cis women and had a strict gender binary and/or b) were all patriarchal and misogynistic is complete bullshit.

There are a million little reasons why some societies gravitated towards patriarchy, matriarchy, egalitarianism, etc. But to pose that the gender binary in these countries exists in a vacuum and has always been there since the beginning of time is counterproductive to both feminism and queer rights.

Y'know, having a sense of nuance and using that to form your own, unique opinion on the internet is fucking exhausting. Specifically in feminist spaces.

Like I'll be over here saying "The beauty industry is inherently misogynistic, racist and predatory; most cosmetic procedures are targeted at women, and the traits they see as flawed or ugly are rooted in white supremacy, as well as upholding a rigid beauty standard that is constantly changing." And I'll get libfems in the notes going "OH, so you're just a FUNDIE PRUDE who hates WOMENS RIGHTS TO CHOOSE!!!!!"

And then I'll go say, "Historically, there have always been accounts of trans people. Several pre-Christian and pre-Colonial cultures had mixed sex events and living spaces and were fine. Patriarchy is upheld not by men, but by Western Colonial and Christian doctrine. Patriarchy also hurts trans folks because it upholds the rigid classification of male and female, girly and manly." And I'll get radfems in the notes saying "OH, so you want WOMEN TO GET RAPED BY TIMs???? you just hate all the women who've BLED OUT and DIED in BIRTH???? You want to legalize BEATING UP WOMEN??? YOU CAN JUST BE GNC THO!!!!"

And I'm like....y'all, how have you made it this far without basic reading comprehension.

[transgenderer]

okay im gonna put my complaints with decolonization is not a metaphor in one long readmore

As an Indigenous scholar and a settler/trespasser/scholar writing together, we have used forward slashes to reflect our discrepant positionings in our pronouns throughout this essay

trespasser? come on. youre smuggling in some bizarre ethnic property based conceptions of land here!

the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence

Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backwar

you cant just drop "epistemic, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land" in your treatise like thats not yknow, a major at contest point, that those are things that exist. or at least elaborate dude!

Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place

this is such a bad definition! doesnt...almost every old world culture have this? are the british indigenous?

He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as production in excess of the "natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world).

does this author think indigenous people only engaged in sustainable farming practices? via idk, some sort of psychic connection to the land that told them when the long term trends were negative?

Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations

Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire- utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial project. This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial force

this is so weird! what are you talking about! what does immigrant MEAN then? (also, like. the US fucking up other countries isnt some dastardly plan to get more immigrants? thats bizarre? if we wanted more immigrants we could like dectuple our current amount and still not be letting everyone who wants in. this is bizarre)

okay i fizzled out. i hate this essay. gonna keep reading it but touching lightly

[sor-jimena-idar]

untitled piece

soy un niño <<no sabo>>. i did not learn this phrase until i started using social media. before that i had to rely on the english “my mother never taught me.” but perhaps it is best to start at the beginning.

genesis.

i was born to a mexican immigrant mother and a white american father. they are fine people but that is beyond this. my memory of my youth is foggy, without definite shapes, times, or recordations. my mother tells me she could not teach me spanish, because i refused it as a baby; much how a graft does not take to a tree. as a very young child i did not understand the ramifications of being chicane. to be white but not entirely. an undefinite other. during a month long trip to mexico with my abuela (one of the few spanish words i knew), a trip which i do not entirely remember, i had eaten nothing but plain cheese quesadillas because i refused to try foods i was unfamiliar with. in school i had taken a great deal of pride in my chicanismo despite not knowing spanish. i also often conflated mexicanismo with nahua culture; i had often imagined mexico as simply a modern indigenous country where they had maintained the customs of the aztecs and other nations, my understanding of colonization would come much later. it is around this time that my mother tells me i refused to learn spanish, in english this time.

malinchismo.

when one becomes an adolescent, around ten or sometime later, one begins to form the identical foundation on which their character will be built. it was then i had become attached to the juvenile concept of cosmopolitanism, believing myself to be not a part of any grand culture group, regarding america not as a nation or ideology but simply a place in which i lived. to be american, i thought, was to just live in america. i had met other people like me, children born to dominican, puertorican, cuban, nicaraguan parents but who spoke broken or no spanish. but i had still not understood that we formed a part of the whole, perhaps out of my own lack of understanding or my internal shame of not actively participating in american latin culture. this pattern continued through the last years of high school.

exiting the cave.

my ideological development began in the last two years of schooling, i had come to understand that the current state of society would not allow for equality, and that those at the top of the societal pyramid were to blame. but i still found myself identifying as mexican american, not truly understanding what either of those words meant. when i began college, with access to more books than i could reasonably read, i was entranced. for one course or another, i checked out a number of books; the labyrinth of solitude being the principal of these. i only read the first few pages, where paz discusses the pachucos and their “in betweenness” being the basis of their identity, and i found some comfort in that, but also an intellectual hunger had begun to fester. i registered for spanish classes the next year.

impresent day.

“no hablo español, lo siento.” my spanish, even after a couple years of studying, is very stilted, my voice carries my uncertainty within it. i still struggle with accepting this. there is a terrible shame in being unable to read márquez, paz, azuela, magón, o sor juana in their tongue, there is an unspeakable embarrassment in having your fucking boyfriend translate the poetry of gloria anzaldúa or sandra cisneros. but i will get over it. my spanish will always be that of a twenty something who got started too late, but it’s okay. no es una cosa.

[comrade-meow]

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.” —Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

“It is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.” —Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto

Introduction

“[…] the question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. But it is difficult and a complicated task to carry out in the present conditions of our economic life and in all the prevailing circumstances. There you have one aspect of the women’s problem which, after the seizure of power by the proletariat, looms large before us and demands a practical solution.” —V. I. Lenin, Conversation with Clara Zetkin, 1920

The subject is endlessly debated on the internet—and terms like “sex work” are slipped in to distract would-be Marxists from examining the matter of prostitution. But we must begin by stating that the matter of prostitution for Marxists has been resolved for approaching 200 years, and there is no ambiguity on this. It is mentioned three times in the Communist Manifesto—the most basic introductory text to Communism that all Communists unite around. To be a Marxist is to oppose prostitution. More importantly, Marxism gives us the framework to analyze exactly why Marxists have historically come to this position, and why Marxists today reject terms like “sex worker” that seek to sanitize prostitution, which we understand as sexual violence, mainly against women.

It is trendy to compare prostitution to work—without ever delving into what Marxists even mean by “worker”—and to frame the most basic Marxist positions as “backward.” Without delving too far into the individual theorists behind the sanitation of sexual violence as “sex work,” it is enough to identify this tendency as the inheritance of third-wave feminism, which has overlapped with postmodern method of analysis. Engels himself likened prostitution to slavery, and for very precise political economic reasons. What brought Marx and Engels together to begin with were Engels’s astute observations on political economy. Suffice it to say, Engels is a great authority on the subject second only to Marx. Engels wrote,

“Wage labor appears sporadically, side by side with slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave.”

Engels viewed these as a necessary correlate, meaning a unity of opposites, where the identity of each depends on the existence of the other.

When examining the trend of “sex worker advocacy” we see two things most often. The first is to totally hollow out the term “worker” of any of its political-economic definitions. The second is to lump various classes and strata together into a single category—this means even distinct trades undertaken by distinct classes are conflated and flattened into one singular “oppressed” group. By defect of the first error, which destroys the understanding of the economic identity of the worker, we arrive at the second, that porno movie performers, exotic dancers, street prostitutes, “cam girls,” and others are all one thing. Apologists maintain this as if the exchange of money for a sex service or sexualized service somehow, in and of itself, constitutes such an ultimate commonality among these “workers” that it obliterates the profound concrete differences in each case to their actual relationships to production. One of the most critical phenomena erased in their analysis is the profound stratification, which exists even within groupings that do have a similar relationship to production. Putting their position into practice entails forcing class collaboration between management, entertainer, and slave.

A brief history

Comrade Mary Inman, one of the staunchest antirevisionists in the CPUSA of the 1930s-40’s, whose contributions will be discussed more thoroughly later, offers the following powerful passage:

“Prostitution did not start with folk customs. It did not grow out of group marriages between free people, for pre-slavery tribes had no such institution. It did not grow out of mystic rites, nor sex worship. It was always a rape institution. Even in the earliest records of prostitution, the evidence shows that the people lived in terrible degradation rising from economic slavery, and did not have the freedom to decide such matters.”

We do not have any interest in going over the earth’s recorded history of prostitution, and will use this section only to establish some relevant facts pertaining to its history in the US.

In the war for control over the colonies that some call the “American Revolution,” as well as throughout the US Civil War, women were unofficially enlisted as prostitutes to follow the soldiers to “keep morale high.”[1] At this time, the ruling class found this a necessity in order to sustain the war. It is useful to understand the shifts and changes that the ruling class makes in terms of prostitution. In wartime, their puritanical Christian opposition vanishes in favor of the cold pragmatism of whatever they think it takes to win.

Prostitution, while technically illegal in the 19th century, was widespread, and brothels were commonplace. The laws were simply not enforced. This period was not without war, considering the increase in Native genocide carried out by the settlers during westward expansion. And this colonial expansion meant the expansion of brothels as well.

In the early 1900s, the precursor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigations, cracked down on prostitution in earnest for the first time in US history.[2] Their reason, far from having anything to do with the rights of those experiencing sexual violence, was, as they put it, “to oppose white slavery.” In practice this effort constituted a political maneuver as well as a propaganda effort. In order to enforce social segregation and further consolidate settler-colonialism, the ruling class attempted to get white women out of brothels. This campaign has had long-lasting effects: even today the majority of prostitutes are not white. This is similar to the way the US imperialist ruling class carries out the “War on Drugs,” primarily to harm the oppressed nations of its population.

What we have attempted to sketch out here is that the question of prostitution in the US cannot be separated from the US history of settler-colonialism—that these things march in step as what Engels might call “necessary correlates.” Prostitution, like chattel slavery and settler-colonialism (genocide against the indigenous North Americans), was an ingredient in the US imperialist project, and it served its master well. This argument, that prostitution and colonialism in the US are necessary correlates of each other, deserves its own paper, but here we must move on from it.

In all of these instances, economic conditions provide the impulse for prostitution.

Some basic prostitution statistics

One of the strongest examples of the unbreakable link between, on the one hand, the fact that the US is a prisonhouse of nations, built up through settler-colonialism and slavery, and prostitution on the other hand, is the fact that 40% of prostitutes in the US are Black[3] (Black people constitute only 13.4% of the overall population), while the majority of johns are white.[4] And it is commonplace that many regular johns are police.[5]

According to Havocscope, a website dedicated to researching global black markets, the average cost of a trick in many places is £14–50, with minors earning less. Due to the constant conditions of national oppression in the US, Black people tend to earn less than others. This trend cannot be forgotten when we evaluate prostitution. This is yet one further way the stratification of the trade takes shape. While prostitutes earn twice as much as the average US worker and three times as much as the average woman in the US, much of this income is withheld by pimps.

The sex-positive apologists of prostitution will without fail argue that the trade somehow is or can be ��empowering.” But statistically, the majority of prostitutes are victims of child abuse (one study found 73% were physically abused as children)[6], and there is evidence that they enter the trade at an average age of 15.[7] An average starting age of 15 or anywhere close all but eliminates the myth of the consenting prostitute. Underage prostitutes—which is what the majority of them start as— face physical violence, emotional manipulation, and other forms of gendered abuse to coerce them to start.

It is economic necessity that sets the conditions for prostitution—there are no exceptions. Sex that a woman would not otherwise engage except in exchange for money is no longer “sex” but rape, as the ability to consent is removed by economic coercion—and a prostitute is always coerced economically. Prostitution is most often rape.

Some men are prostitutes as well, but 69% of those arrested are women, including arrested johns and pimps.[8]

Atlanta, one of the US cities with a majority Black population, is home to the country’s highest-grossing pimps, who reap about £23614 a week on average.[9] Some of these pimps are women who maintain hierarchy and obedience among the prostitutes, another way stratification manifests. This also makes it obvious that prostitution is caused by economic conditions and is not just (as some maintain) a result of personal sexist attitudes.

For obvious reasons, the majority of assaults experienced by prostitutes go unreported. 89% of adult prostitutes want to quit, but due to economic coercion feel that they cannot.[10] Being in thrall to a pimp, who controls everything and deploys severe psychological and sometimes physical abuse, makes the victim of prostitution far less likely to admit to wanting to quit, which itself skews statistics. Understanding that many enthralled women cannot speak up about their abuse, we would do well to understand that things are far worse than the picture painted by what makes it into official reports.

Which prostitute?

Unlike workers and more specifically proletarians, prostitutes are not engaged in productive, socially-productive, or reproductive labor. They do not receive a wage in the proletarian sense (of receiving a portion of what they produce in a value form/money, with the bulk of their labor being exploited by the owner) and are not devoid of the tools of their occupation, which in this case are the bodies of the prostitutes themselves. To return to the question of stratification, we can observe that in terms of relationship to production, a woman engaged in street-level prostitution without a pimp is distinct from those with pimps, and both are distinct from women who work for escort services or through self-promotion on websites (past examples are Backpage and Craigslist).

For the majority of women trapped in prostitution, the reality of a pimp forces them to the lower strata (this is combined in many cases with national oppression). They have no financial independence from their boss/owner, who makes all or all major decisions regarding their activity: what they do and do not engage in, what subsistence is allowed, and what accommodations are awarded or denied. But those in this most common situation do not qualify in any sense as proletarian despite the pimp behaving like a boss or even like an owner, because he does not simply “own the business”—he owns the women. These women come far closer to being slaves than to being workers. The wage of a slave is nothing except subsistence; the owner of the slave, in our instance the pimp, is the chief executive of every aspect of life. That includes housing, food, clothing, tools, and everything else—provided by the pimp to subsidize the prostitute in order for her to live and continue earning them profit. This is one of the most extreme forms of exploitation, not to mention the most inhumane. Nonetheless, the degree of oppression and brutality one faces does not determine one’s relationship to production, nor does intense oppression alone place one in the social class of the proletariat. Further distancing the enthralled woman from the worker is the fact that she cannot just quit of her own accord; like the slave, she can only organize her escape.

The only method of organization for a slave is rebellion and escape; there are no such things as reformist options for the slave. These contradictions are part of why slavery as a widespread mode of production was replaced by feudalism (in turn replaced by capitalism), which was more manageable, and why capitalism itself is more profitable than slavery in terms of the performance and capacity of the productive forces.

This highlights the position that in the women’s struggle, the only Communist approach regarding the majority of women in prostitution is to organize them out of it, and that this is accomplished mainly through People’s War and socialist revolution. At some stage of revolutionary struggle, this means the use of revolutionary violence against lumpenproletarian gangs that back up the pimps in the military sense. Short of this option, the only acceptable tactic is to secure the transition of individual women into productive work and the opportunity to gain other skills, a total change of social environment, and continuous political education and thought reform. This can improve the conditions of some prostitutes and rehabilitate them into being proletarians, but it cannot emancipate them as women or end prostitution. Furthermore, it requires a high level or organization: it needs Party committees and mass organizations to lead the effort and a Red Army and militias to defend this work and protect the ex-prostitute, securing her escape from the trade, preventing retaliatory action from pimps, and so on.

Any effort to transpose the methods used in workers struggles’ into the realm of prostitution falls hopelessly short. A struggle against a pimp cannot be carried out in the same way as a struggle against a factory owner or regular boss. Arguing that it can and must be carried out the same way—viewing prostitutes as workers and pimps as bosses to be struggled against—really lacks all Marxist understanding of why workers can be organized against bosses and so lapses into a subjective moralist approach to combating oppression. People of this persuasion attempt to implement prostitute unions; like the syndicalist, they dream of a union for everything, and are under the delusion that slaves can unionize and struggle for reforms against their slave-master.

While the so-called Maoists who promote right-opportunism will admit that prostitution cannot persist under socialism, they often make concessions, by believing in and promoting the construction of prostitute trade unions.

Being under the control of a pimp prevents a prostitute from all independent activity and independent thinking. The woman chained by the pimp cannot be organized into a trade union. A union of prostitutes who through some unknown force have ceased to be enthralled to pimps, due to the inevitable emergence of leadership and people who professionally manage such a union, will inevitably just generate its own, internal pimps. This is true because if the union bureaucracy is not completely ineffective (that is, if the union actually exists and functions), they would find themselves enforcing payment from reneging johns, securing housing in times of income shortage, bribing or negotiating with police, and sustaining their professional organizers with dues: they would in essence be pimps with a more charitable subsidiary. The use of violent reprisal and or the lack thereof is not the decisive factor in determining a pimp’s relationship to production—what is principal is the fact of reproducing prostitutes. The likelihood of successfully organizing such a union— or even making a substantial attempt at doing so—is so slim that it hardly merits mention beyond the totally hypothetical. We give it attention here only to point out the utter ridiculousness of the right-opportunist line.

In the case of prostitutes without pimps (who are not being pimped upon the point of being organized), who basically take contracts independently and have full access to their own income, these are more or less the lumpenproletarian (declassed) version of the petty bourgeoisie who own their own means of production. For them the formation of a union is impossible. After all, a “union” of those who own their own means of production (lumpen or not) is actually called a cartel. Furthermore, the existence of a cartel gives impulse to the hiring of a general staff—plus, the stratification of prostitution would allow the cartel to employ other prostitutes under its protection—this again is a return to pimping. Prostitutes who become pimps are not unheard of, and some reports show that new pimps are drawn to the trade through familial connections with prostitutes.[11]

A free market always has a trajectory that can be scientifically understood and described. A free market that sees the formation of cartels to manage the market will in turn eventually see the formation of conglomerates and monopolies. For legal and illegal trade, this inevitably leads to war. It is much more difficult for illegal businesses to establish conglomerates and monopolies due to the nature of the competition in these markets. In this case, competition is for clients (market share), for slaves (“workers”), and for other resources. The organization of competition for illegal businesses brings war faster and more often than it does for legal business. This facet restricts growth—nonetheless, these prostitution cartels would be held to the same economic laws as drug cartels and would need the same level of maintenance (the protection of the business’s interests through violence).

The existence of all sexualized business further engenders pimping, by normalizing sexual performance for money. This is made worse with the line that sex is work.

“Sex work” as a catch-all term

Rarely is the word “worker” so arbitrarily attached to any trade (or multiple trades), without any regard to class as it is with sex trades. Yet the bourgeois feminists of the “sex positivist” variety will insist that “sex worker” is a legitimate and useful category, like “service industry worker.” While it is true that sexualized professions are organized along industrial lines (including aspects of reproductive labor), prostitution, sexual entertainment, and so on do not even constitute a single industry, and this fact certainly doesn’t qualify everyone in these industries as “workers.”

Attempts to treat “sex work” as a coherent scientific category run into trouble immediately. In the case of prostitutes, a slave is not a worker, and a small business venture does not make one a worker either. A stripper is ultimately a performer. No one would assert that a professional comedian or actor is a “worker,” just as professional athletes are not “workers” and so cannot be lumped into the category of “athletic worker.” A stripper, like all performers and entertainers, has a totally different relationship to production from a worker, given the category of workers as it is understood by Marxists. Even in instances where they do not own the venue or website, these professionals still mainly own their own means of production, making them part of the petty bourgeoisie and not part of the proletariat. In the instance of those carrying out their trade in strip clubs, the stripper most often tips out the staff and pays the club a portion of her earnings. For workers, this relationship is the other way around: a hostess at a club or restaurant, like the rest of the general staff, is paid a wage by the business itself (even if she is forced to rely on tips) and thus experiences exploitation of her labor power.

Like a craftsman or small merchant who rents a booth or a stand, the “cam girl,” like the stripper, is merely paying a rent or service fee to the club or website. Furthermore, unlike workers, these people are making a brand for themselves, cultivating a clientele that follows them from outlet to outlet.

Women in pornography in some cases are coerced or trafficked and therefore have a relationship to production more like that of a pimped prostitute. In other cases, the individual has an agent and is free to take contracts, as an actress would—and no professional actress can be classified as a worker. Therefore the overwhelming majority of people engaged in pornography in the US, who occupy one of these two relationships to production, cannot be scientifically understood as workers.

It is far more apt to say that, of those whom (apologists of sexism) call “sex workers” who aren’t engaged in prostitution, the majority are small-scale sex-capitalists of the petty-bourgeois class. The term does not hold the same appeal as “sex worker” for these apologists precisely because it does not serve the purpose of sanitizing sexual exploitation, violence, and rape. While there is much discussion about rape culture, there exists a massive blind spot in its organization through the sex trades.

Sanitization of rape and sexual violence through terminology

“To describe prostitution as sex work and a prostitute as a sex worker means to give legitimacy to sexual exploitation of helpless women and children. It means ignoring the basic factors, which push women and children into prostitution such as poverty, violence and inequalities. It tries to make the profession look dignified and as a ‘job like any other job’.”

—New Vistas Publications, originally printed in People’s March, an organ of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)

The term “sex work” was coined in the 1970s by Carol Leigh, for exactly the purpose identified and criticized in the above quotation. Leigh heads an NGO called BAYSWAN (Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network). A large part of the financing for this organization comes from its collaboration with law enforcement.

As with all efforts to sanitize rape and other violence against women with the term “sex work,” BAYSWAN uses the term as a catch-all to include anyone in the “adult entertainment” industries, as well as street prostitutes. Its ambiguous inclusion of “massage parlor employees” is just an obscurantist way of providing ideological legitimization to brothels, most typically attached to human trafficking and the sexual abuse of undocumented women. While BAYSWAN claims to provide social benefits and other types of help to these women, their liaison work with the police speaks the loudest to their actual class position. The police are nothing more than the strong arm of the bourgeois state. Typical of NGOs in imperialist countries, BAYSWAN serves as a managerial department delegating scraps from the master’s table to some of the most destitute. This is not undertaken in the interests of the people but in the interest of maintaining and reproducing the rule of the imperialist class at home. It is important to state that the main purpose of BAYSWAN, and other NGOs like it, is not to rehabilitate women out of prostitution but instead to normalize the abuse they face, so that their trade is seen as comparable to any normal job, and accepted like any other.

The typical liberal and postmodernist analyses of the oppression faced by prostitutes hold that its roots lie in socially imposed “stigma” rather than in the exploitive nature of capitalism—as if workers who were proud of their assembly-line jobs would be any less abused and exploited. Even proletarian jobs under capitalism that maintain some shoddy “integrity” in the social sense or at least lack “stigma” are still alienating for the worker and operate on exploitation of the workers’ labor. But again, prostitution is unlike any proletarian job, as nothing is produced or reproduced, and the “labor” itself is not socially necessary. In fact, for women as a whole and particularly for women of the proletariat, it is socially destructive.

For the Marxist, not recognizing prostitutes and entertainers as proletarians is a matter of political economy and not of any kind of outdated moralism. Marxism does not blame the victims, in this case women forced into sexual violence and exploitation due to economic hardships.

Marxists have never evaluated prostitution in moral terms but instead have insisted on examining it in political-economic terms and, as always, with a class analysis. This is why Lenin considered bourgeois women to be engaged in prostitution. Lenin also grasped the progressive aspect of those would-be defenders of prostitutes, but he drew the line at defending prostitution itself. In his conversations with Clara Zetkin in 1920, he explained how this moral impulse can turn into a backward idea:

“I have heard some peculiar things on this matter from Russian and German comrades. I must tell you. I was told that a talented woman communist in Hamburg is publishing a paper for prostitutes and that she wants to organize them for the revolutionary fight. Rosa acted and felt as a communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its accursed moral hypocrisy. That is obvious. Only he who is brutal or short-sighted can forget it. But still, that is not at all the same thing as considering prostitutes—how shall I put it?—to be a special revolutionary militant section, as organizing them and publishing a factory paper for them. Aren’t there really any other working women in Germany to organize, for whom a paper can be issued, who must be drawn into your struggles? The other is only a diseased excrescence. It reminds me of the literary fashion of painting every prostitute as a sweet Madonna. The origin of that was healthy, too: social sympathy, rebellion against the virtuous hypocrisy of the respectable bourgeois. But the healthy part became corrupted and degenerate.”

While addressing the means that bourgeois forces use to “combat” prostitution (or, in reality, to maintain it in whatever form they need it to take in a given historical circumstance), Lenin was equally critical: “What means of struggle were proposed by the elegant bourgeois delegates to the congress? Mainly two methods—religion and police. They are, it appears, the valid and reliable methods of combating prostitution.”

Lenin did not argue for the legal recognition of prostitution to combat social stigma, but for its end, through socialist revolution, which destroys the root economic causes of it. We must understand that even after socialist revolution, exploitation does not vanish overnight; it is done away with in the processes of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, critically, with cultural revolution. Marxists, while insisting that prostitution is not “sex work,” still stand firm against the hypocritical moralization of the bourgeoisie, who create and preserve the very conditions that force women into prostitution.

What is crucial to understand in the position of the great Lenin is that he simultaneously opposed the organizing of prostitutes as prostitutes for the revolution while at the same time condemning the bourgeois moralism that helps reproduce prostitution and deepens the oppression of prostitutes. After the revolution, Lenin and those who held the revolutionary line after his premature death worked tirelessly to abolish prostitution. We will get more into the experience of the socialist projects’ approaches to prostitution in later sections.

Arguments for legalization

Those most committed to the sanitization of rape and sexual violence are the most vocal advocates for the legalization of prostitution, which Marxists emphatically oppose. Legalization, far from securing “workers’ rights” in the instance of prostitution, only opens the floodgates for major investment of capital on the part of imperialists. With legalization, the pimp becomes protected by law—taking on a new form, and the prostitute legally owes and pays him a portion of her earnings. With legalization come legal recruitment and the widespread indoctrination of women and girls to prepare them for the trade.

Arguments that legal recognition protects the employee are based on bourgeois moralism and not Marxist political economy—and profound naiveté or ignorance of the actual workings of capitalism. Miners, factory workers, and fast food workers all have laws that are in place (usually hard-won through class struggle) that are supposed to protect them, yet as long as capitalism persists they are hounded, worked to death, and exploited without mercy. The legal recognition of these trades has not stopped the boss from stepping on our necks.

The idea that legal recognition will somehow limit the use of trafficked girls and women is also absurd. Pornography has been legal for decades, and the flow of black-market pornography and coerced women has not gone away. For that matter, many workers are hired illegally for all sorts of trades, hyper-exploited, and then discarded like old shoes. This would be magnified with legal prostitution. Countries with legal recognition of prostitution can and do see an increase in sex tourism;[12] people from all over the world can go exploit and dominate women in these countries, the only difference being that in these places the bourgeois State can tax it officially rather than unofficially through payoffs.

“Prostitution Is Sexual Violence,” first printed in People’s March, an organ of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), explains the global forces behind prostitution in this way:

“Firstly, the sex trade is now organized on a global basis just as any other multinational enterprise. It has become a transnational industry. It is one of the most developed and specialized industries [and] offers a wide range of services to the customers, and has most innovative market strategies to attract clients all over the world. The principal players and beneficiaries of the sex industry are cohesive and organized. The intricate web of actors involved in the sex trade today includes not just the prostitutes and the client, but an entire syndicate consisting of the pimps, the brothel owners, the police, the politicians and the local doctors. The principal actors connected to the sex trade are not confined by narrow national or territorial boundaries in the context of a globalized world. They operate both legally as well as clandestinely and it is believed that the profits … to the organizations of [the] sex-industry currently equal those flowing out of the global illegal trade in arms and narcotics. Moreover [it is] like any [of the] other multinational enterprises, such as the tourism industry, entertainment industry, travel and transportation industry, international media industry, underground narcotics and crime industry and so on.”

From this they draw the following conclusion:

“Thus the magnitude, expanse, organization, role of capital accumulation and range of market strategies employed to sell sexual services make the contemporary global sex industry qualitatively different from the old practice of prostitution and sex trade.”

Suffice it to say that genuine Marxists must insist that any legalization in the US would be the further bane of women in the nations oppressed by US imperialism. As “Prostitution is Sexual Violence” puts it,

“in fact this argument [for legalization] is being promoted to make it easy to legalize the import of prostitutes to the imperialist countries and other centers of tourism.”

They highlight the dialectical relationship between the sex trades of the imperialist and oppressed nations. We will quote the pamphlet at length:

“As Engels succinctly put it, it is ‘the absolute domination of the male over the female sex as the fundamental law of society.’ She is a victim of patriarchal oppression within the profession. Once a woman enters the trade, there is no way out. She is completely at the mercy of the sex-starved customer, the pimp and the police. Physical assaults and rapes are a daily occurrence. More than half of the prostituted women in the Third World countries had contracted HIV/AIDs. A 1985 Canadian report on the sex industry reported that the women in prostitution in that country suffer [a] mortality rate 40 times the national average. It could be even worse in countries like India. All this proves that the argument that once prostitution is legalized it can be more effectively regulated[,] making it safe for all those involved, that the spread of HIV can be slowed, that sex workers can have access to health and so on, are sheer fraud. The fact is that all forms of sexual commodification, whether legalized or not, lead to an increase in the level of abusive and exploitative activity.

The interest of the State in permitting legalization is not the prostitute and her rights but to check the spread of sexually transmitted deceases. It involves heavy regulation of prostitution through a whole host of zoning and licensing laws. Zoning segregates the prostitutes into a separate locality and their civil liberties are restricted outside the specified zone. Licensing means issue of licenses, registration and the disbursement of health cards to the women. Legalization makes it mandatory for the women to undergo medical check-ups regularly or face imprisonment.

Legalizing prostitution is legalizing violence.”

We must look beyond the ideological sanitizers of sexual violence, who speak loudly from academic, activist, and “harm reduction” circles and look closer at the actual economic forces behind these advocates. It is the commercial sex industry that stands to benefit the most from legalized prostitution, and so they are its biggest backers. Legalization is just a moral shield to protect and secure greater profits from the continued sexual abuse of women. With legalization, small brothels can become big chains, and whole corporations can be built up; those involved legally and illegally in the sex industry who possess the most capital are in the best position to reap the profits. The same issue exists with the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana: the small-time grower/dealer gets swallowed up by the white corporate elite, while oppressed-nations people remain incarcerated for their role in the trade. Legalization, in the final instance, benefits only the ruling class.

The Indian Maoists address the question of legalization succinctly:

“Legalization of prostitution is not a solution because legalization implies men’s self-evident right to be customers. Accepting services offered through a normal job is neither violent nor abusive. Legalizing it as a normal occupation would be an acceptance of the division of labor, which men have created, a division, where women’s real occupational choices are far narrower than men’s. Legalization will not remove the harmful effects suffered by the women. Women will still be forced to protect themselves against a massive invasion of strange men, as well as the physical violence.

Legalization means [the imposition] of regulation by the State to ensure the continuation and perpetuation of prostitution. It implies that they have to pay taxes, i.e., the prostitute needs to serve more customers to get the money needed. Legalization means that more men will become customers, and more women are needed as prostitutes, and more women, especially women in poverty, will be forced into prostitution. Legalizing prostitution will only increase the chances of exploitation. The experiences of the countries where prostitution was legalized also show how this [has] given [a] big boost to the trade and [has] increased sexual abuse. For instance, in Australia and in some states in the US where legalization was implemented, it was found that there was an alarming increase in the number of illegal brothels too along with an increase in the legal trade.”

Prostitution, through allowing the purchase of access to women’s bodies, harms all women, and not just those in the trade—legalization, far from being harm reduction, just increases social harm for all women. Recruitment is one of the cornerstones of pimping. With legalization, the horrors of recruitment and the pressure to be recruited take on dystopian proportions.

American exceptionalism: The legacies of revisionism and settler-colonialism

The women’s struggle was going strong in the Communist Party of the USA—up until Earl Browder became general secretary of the Party and began implementing his arch-revisionist line. The revisionist ideology that overtook the CPUSA—Browderism and then William Z. Foster’s continuation of it—was like a prototype of the revisionism that would take hold in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even though the latter would completely consume the former, the former was in many ways its forerunner. Foster, like Brezhnev, would come out against his predecessor—and just as it was with Brezhnev’s condemnations, this was only superficial politicking that still carried forward, and in fact fortified, the revisionist position. This revisionism brought deep harm to the women’s movement, with a lasting stain on the US left today that extends far beyond the husk that calls itself the CPUSA.

Browderism successfully liquidated not only the program of the Party but the Party itself in 1944. It comes as no shock that Browder’s wife led the liquidation of the women’s struggle against antirevisionist women in the Party like Mary Inman. Inman wrote a great deal on the question of prostitution, devoting three chapters to it in her book In Woman’s Defense. To understand the question of prostitution today, it is important to grasp the reverberating effects of Browderism. Rightist lines that seek to either sanitize prostitution by dressing it up as “sex work” or misconstrue prostitutes as a revolutionary subject all result in part from a faith in American exceptionalism—first, in that they all seek to establish a reformist, class-collaborationist approach to prostitution; and second and more importantly, because they divorce the phenomenon from imperialism. It is important to remember that the bourgeois definition of “work” is anything you do for money. In this way they can frame owners and bosses as workers alongside those they exploit, since any job (legal or illegal) can therefore be misconstrued as work.

Many of these rightists (who are abundant in progressive struggles as well as in every revisionist organization) will concede that sex-based tourism in the Third World and human trafficking are, in principle at least, something to be opposed. They take no major issue with the writings on the subject from the Maoists in India, including the text “Prostitution Is Sexual Violence.” But when it comes to applying these universal principles at home in their imperialist country, they stir up the ghost of American exceptionalism. For reasons they cannot explain without their belief in this exceptionalism. They impose an artificial disconnect: here in the First World (not just in the US but clearly in Canada also, with the opportunists in the fake PCR-RCP), prostitutes are now workers, and furthermore an important part of the proletariat!—and to hell with actually studying nearly 200 years of Communist agitation and propaganda on the matter! They charge those who do assert the correct historical position with being outdated dogmatists. To oppose prostitution from the Marxist position, just as Marxists have always opposed it, earns one a volley of buzzwords and condemnation as a SWERF (that is, “sex worker exclusionary radical feminist”)—even while (a) “sex work” is a made-up term that runs counter to Marxist political economy and (b) Marxists explicitly reject radical feminism on a fundamental level. Without any economic analysis, the American exceptionalists have made defending prostitution a prerequisite for being a leftist, not only defending it from a moral standpoint but even going so far as to frame degradation and abuse as empowering. Revisionism still plays its part in turning a thing into its opposite.

Mary Inman described the continuum of revisionism aptly:

“Furthermore, wrecking on the Woman Question has not only continued since the ousting of Browder, but has even been accelerated under the leadership of Dennis (ably abetted by Foster, who warned against an ‘over correction of errors’ at a time when nothing had been done to stop their liquidatory practices affecting Communist work amongst women).” (13 Years of CPUSA Misleadership on the Woman Question)

The liquidation of Communist work among women today is assisted tremendously by postmodernism, which has practically been established as “common sense” for the left and occupies a near-hegemonic position in mainstream US activist movements. And of course, postmodernist cretins agree with Browder that the class struggle itself is mitigated in a country like the US, where “free women” can “freely choose” prostitution and it is backward to pass critical judgment on the trade of women.

Inman referred to this thinking as the “culture of prostitution”:

“Prostitution has been laid at women’s door, and it is said that she enters the practice from choice because it suits her nature, and is one of the attributes of Eve. Nor is this all. Prostitution has created its own degenerate philosophy, which has penetrated into circles not directly affected by it.” (In Woman’s Defense)

The contemporary apologists still maintain that prostitution is a choice, by insisting they are workers like any other who are free to choose a career (within the confines of their class and circumstance). Even though they do not resort to Scripture to justify their views, the same metaphysics finds traction.

Inman contributes valuable criticism of bourgeois culture’s portrayal of prostitutes in films as free-spirited travelers who select their own johns. Writing in the 1930s and 40s, Inman portrays this superstructural device, which has remained in currency since the time of her writing:

“Persons who acquired their opinions about prostitution from such as Mae West pictures, wherein the talented star portrayed the woman of questionable character who went freely about the country having adventures, knowing romance, wearing swell clothes and dominating the situation in which she found herself, selecting carefully her lovers and avoiding those men who did not appeal to her esthetic tastes, in fact roving, wise-cracking, free-lance, exploited by no one, will have the wrong picture of the real lives of such women.” (In Woman’s Defense)

We can cite obvious examples like the film Pretty Woman, but the message is driven home in the more up-to-date postmodern approaches in films and television shows, where the term “sex worker” has fully replaced the term “prostitute,” and “prostitute” is now viewed as nothing more than a sexist slur. The culture of prostitution still exists, finding its niche in the phony progressivism of postmodernism, which tirelessly seeks to pass off a fanciful illusion as the truth.

On the website Mel Magazine we find articles like “The Most Realistic Sex-Worker Portrayals in Pop Culture, According to Sex Workers.” In this article we find such gems as the following: “The Deuce is a sweaty buffet of debauchery calling back to the kind of heroin-soaked freedom Janis Joplin sang about.” Only the most profoundly deluded petty-bourgeois dilettante would conflate heroin with freedom, as it exists mainly as a weapon to keep the lower classes enchained, robbing them of even the most basic freedoms.

The author continues, “The protagonist is Candy, a clever veteran escort played by the excellent, but oddly cast Maggie Gyllenhaal, who walks the tracks, pimp-free. Unfazed and visibly bored, Candy works alone while her cohorts — mostly large and lovely black women — get smacked around by their white regulars and bullied by their pimps. She says to one fast-talking hopeful, ‘No one makes money off this pussy but me.’ Candy’s optimism in this regard is admirable but naïve (capitalism, for instance); still, she has more agency than most of the show’s other characters.”

The tokenization and abuse of Black women is merely unpleasant background noise for the free-spirited “Candy,” whom the author finds immediately relatable. No mention is made of the fact this devil-may-care character rises throughout the series to become a well-paid pornographer and exploiter of other women. The only real criticism of the show put forward by the article is on the basis of crude identity politics—they complain that the show was written by men and not co-written by “sex workers.” This is the best they can come up with when parroting the culture of prostitution today.

For the petty-bourgeois dilettante, “sex workers” are often imagined as struggling heroines, usually white women who choose prostitution as a clever way of bucking the system, and thus they view it as a rebellious act against capitalism itself. They are far removed from the mass tragedy and genocide that the women of the Third World face. Nor can they fathom the anguish of the people of the internal colonies in the US, where prostitution is the most prevalent.

The “sex worker” image constructed by bourgeois intellectuals has a special allure for the petty bourgeoisie: it evokes the myth of class ascension (like that of the fictional Candy mentioned above). With this myth we find a girl—most likely from a troubled background—who grinds her way toward becoming a small business proprietor. Maybe she becomes a pornographer producing the films after starring in them. For the identity politics crowd, this is thrilling because now exploited women are the ones exploiting women. They are not at all concerned that exploitation remains intact and has now simply found a better way to apologize for itself. This rags-to-riches story so often told is a powerful device in the service of ruling-class management of class relationships under capitalism. After all, their argument goes, this is just the unchained agency of free modern women.

In the following passage, Inman might as well be writing in the present day on the question of those who argue for the existence of agency in prostitution by rebranding it “sex work”:

“There is a noticeable tendency in much of the literature on prostitution to confuse a wanted sex act with prostitution, and efforts are made to show by indirection, or otherwise, that they are either the same or that the former leads into the later.” (In Woman’s Defense)

Of course, she also recognized that the phenomenon is not exclusive to women from the working class:

“The scope of prostitution is wider than the working-class women, for by no means are all the daughters of the middle-class families secure, nor, for that matter, are daughters from professional and upper-class families where fortunes were affected by economic breakdown.” (In Woman’s Defense)

Anyone “freely choosing” “sex work” without the pressure of economic conditions is not experiencing the reality of the declassed women Inman is writing about, or of the majority of women trapped in prostitution in the US for that matter.

Browderism did not limit its assaults only to the women’s struggle. It also directed attacks against the national liberation struggles of the internal colonies, and a major casualty of this time was the Communist work among the Black Nation. The work among the Black Nation was more or less eroded by the Popular Front period of the Communist International, and it was none other than Popular Frontism that gave powerful impulse to the rightists in the Party, led by Browder and then Foster.

The national question has all but gone from the program of the CPUSA and only a few of the revisionist relics of the New Communist Movement still uphold it even superficially. And even given their acknowledgment of the necessity of this work, no meaningful struggles are led to conquer the power of self-determination for the internal colonies. And it is perfectly natural for these types who insist on delinking prostitution from colonialism to be seduced into the quagmire of prostitution apologia. No honest study of colonialism can go without mentioning the settlers breaking the colonized into prostitution, through direct violent coercion as well as the violence of economic coercion, both equal in their atrocity.

Even cursory examinations of the real conditions faced by indigenous people in the US and people in the internal colonies—even studies carried out by bourgeois researchers—can highlight the way settler-colonialism manifests in prostitution, as the following passage reveals:

“Many AI/AN [American Indian and Alaskan Native] people live in adverse social and physical environments that place them at high risk of exposure to traumatic events with rates of violent victimization more than twice the national average. High rates of poverty, homelessness, and chronic health problems in AI/AN communities create vulnerability to prostitution and trafficking among AI/AN women by increasing economic stress and decreasing the ability to resist predators. AI/AN women are subject to high rates of childhood sexual assaults, domestic violence, and rape both on and off reservations. The vast majority of prostituted women were sexually assaulted as children, usually by multiple perpetrators, and were revictimized as adults in prostitution as they experienced being hunted, dominated, harassed, pimped, assaulted, battered, and sometimes murdered by sex buyers, pimps, and traffickers.” (Farley, Deer, Golding, et al., Prostitution and Trafficking of American/Indian Alaska Native Women in Minnesota; citations removed from quotation for brevity)

The argument that prostitution is a free choice, combined with the disproportionately high representation of Black and native women in prostitution, is nothing short of the thinly veiled racism of the petty bourgeoisie.

It is as absurd and cruel to divorce these facts from the US settler-colonial project as it would be to pretend that South African apartheid had nothing to do with prostitution in that country, as elaborated on here:

“Indigenous South African women are at great risk for all of the factors that increase vulnerability to prostitution: family and community violence including an epidemic of sexual violence, life-threatening poverty, lack of educational and job opportunities, lack of health services throughout their lifetimes, and lack of culturally appropriate social services that would help them escape prostitution. When alternatives to prostitution are not available—although it can appear to be a choice—prostitution is coerced by social harms such as child abuse, racism, sexism, and poverty. All of these forms of violence against women, including prostitution, are related.” (Madlala-Routledge, Farley, Barengayabo, et al., “‘I feel like I’m still living under apartheid’: Racialized Sexual Exploitation of 100 Women in South African Prostitution”)

While bourgeois feminist researchers can come up with no actual method of abolishing prostitution, they can be useful insofar as their data can be verified. Socialism, meanwhile, has direct means of both fighting and abolishing prostitution successfully.

According to Lenin, “no amount of ‘moral indignation’ (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labor and, second, their women as concubines for the ‘masters.’”

The great socialist projects’ approaches to combating and abolishing prostitution

“We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement—prostitution.”

—Engels, Origin of the Family

“Not only have the people in the Soviet Union abolished prostitution, but wherever the people have become the dominant economic power, even in part of the country, they have abolished prostitution, for example in the districts in China controlled by the people’s movements.”

—Mary Inman, In Woman’s Defense

Engels was speaking of a hypothetical socialist revolution, but one that would inevitably take place based on a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. This social revolution would erupt in Russia in 1917 and have world-changing consequence:

“The workers’ revolution in Russia has shattered the basis of capitalism and has struck a blow at the former dependence of women upon men. All citizens are equal before the work collective. They are equally obliged to work for the common good and are equally eligible to the support of the collective when they need it. A woman provides for herself not by marriage but by the part she plays in production and the contribution she makes to the people’s wealth.” (Kollontai, “Prostitution and Ways of Fighting It”)

Kollontai—understanding that society maintained much of its old superstructure post-revolution as well as widespread conditions of economic hardship, low productive capacity, and other difficulties resulting from the still-developing economic base—firmly grasped that the revolution, while having abolished the main causes of these things (private property, etc.) still had much to do in the struggle against prostitution that persisted in these conditions.

She took up the charge to lead the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in this effort:

“Some people might say that since prostitution will have no place once the power of the workers and the basis of communism are strengthened, no special campaign is necessary. This type of argument fails to take into account the harmful and disuniting effect that prostitution has on the construction of a new communist society.”

The above quotation should be particularly salient for Maoists who grasp that revolution must continue under the dictatorship of the proletariat to align society with the new socialist base.

She further insisted that the prostitution that persisted under the proletarian dictatorship posed a great risk to social unity, to class unity, and to the economic construction of the Soviet Union. Her position was that prostitution was a private enterprise running counter to the workers’ republic and hence had to be abolished.

And great changes had indeed begun to take place in the workers’ republic, revolutionizing both the base and the superstructure. Merchants of any sort were now considered speculators, and all citizens were to be involved in productive labor. Kollontai writes,

“We do not, therefore, condemn prostitution and fight against it as a special category but as an aspect of labor desertion. To us in the workers’ republic it is not important whether a woman sells herself to one man or to many, whether she is classed as a professional prostitute selling her favors to a succession of clients or as a wife selling herself to her husband. All women who avoid work and do not take part in production or in caring for children are liable, on the same basis as prostitutes, to be forced to work.”

In the period of tsarist Russia, just prior to the revolution, prostitution was regulated but not illegal. There was punishment for procuring and pimping but not for prostitution. The revolution stepped in to shake the world and change everything. This included the lives of women in prostitution, who were now to be provided productive jobs.

Given that the conditions which give rise to prostitution were being combated, and that former prostitutes were undergoing political education and engaged in labor, prostitution could not remain the force that it had been in tsarist Russia. Women were mobilized in Soviet society, and prostitution did not come back in force until capitalist restoration post-Khrushchev.

China, having the oldest brothels in the world, surpassing even those of the Netherlands, had much to accomplish after Liberation in 1949, approaches developed in the liberated areas, where prostitution had been abolished must now be applied country wide. Pre-revolutionary China, like tsarist Russia, had only regulated prostitution rather than legally banning it. In pre-revolutionary China there were “licensed prostitutes,” who were some of the worst victims of social oppression. These were called “mist and flower maidens.” After the victory of the revolution, these women were provided lodging and education in socialist reformatories. Most crucially, these women were liberated and taught the differences between the old and new societies.

One of the first acts of the socialist State in the People’s Republic of China was the abolition of old marriage laws that treated women as the property of their husbands. The overthrow of these laws benefited the former prostitutes, many of whom were women and children sold into lives of sexual slavery by husbands or fathers trying to avoid starvation. The liberation of China from the yoke of imperialist and colonial domination reverberated through all of Chinese society (and in fact throughout the whole world), with Mao’s great declaration that “women hold up half the sky” signaling a new age where women would come to carry out half of production.

The women’s movement found its continuation and further flourished in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, when Jiang Qing helped to lead an assault on the old culture, which at best portrayed women as little more than accomplices to male revolutionaries—and at worst as property. Notably, this can be seen in the remake of the Chinese classic “The Bride with White Hair,” wherein the heroine, instead of relying on a male soldier as in the original, sees to her own liberation. And the old society’s conceptions of prostitution came under similar attack.

With the persecution of Comrade Jiang and her three comrades, who represented the Communist line against the reactionary line of Deng Xiaoping and his clique, came an assault on the women’s movement of an even greater magnitude than the one that occurred in the US.

Among many other comparable measures, Deng removed women from such jobs as factory worker and train driver and threw them into office administrator positions.[13] Gendered labor that had been combated during the Cultural Revolution found its full expression in the Deng years.[14] Sex-based advertising and prostitution made a big comeback.[15] Female stereotyping made a return even in children’s books, training a new generation for the restored capitalist mode of production.[16] The Japanese film Yearning for Home that depicted prostitutes was aired on state TV and defended by the Dengite-run Beijing Review against critics who insisted that the film harmed young women and ran counter to the revolution. The old operas that had been banned—ones like “The Drunken Beauty,” about an emperor and his concubines—were performed at the Peking Opera. Pornography and prostitution were restored with capitalism.

Of course, the existing People’s Wars in Peru, Turkey, India, and the Philippines provide living examples of how to regard prostitution, how to end it in Communist-controlled base areas, and how to organize women out of the trade and into the People’s Army. Unlike bourgeois or imperialist armies, People’s Armies have no need for prostitution in “boosting the morale” of male troops, and so bands of prostitutes do not follow the soldiers. People’s soldiers are upstanding and fortified against such low behavior.

Before becoming a full-blown revisionist, Parvati described the effect of People’s War on the women peasants of Nepal:

“People’s War has given a revolutionary alternative life to young aspiring men and women. Women’s lives, particularly in rural areas, are so monotonous, set in a repeated pattern of reproductive activities. [With] marriage being arranged at much younger age[s], they have no way of escaping from this beaten track life cycle. For aspiring women to venture out of village means almost getting trapped into prostitution or being trafficked to India (it is estimated that about 150,000 women from Nepal are trafficked to urban centers of India!) or are trapped to [low-paying] sweat shops where sexual harassment is rampant. Thus for such aspiring women, the People’s War offers them [a] challenging opportunity to work side by side with men on equal term[s] and to prove their worth mentally and physically.” (“Women’s Participation in People’s War in Nepal”)

Conclusion

Many apologists for prostitution refuse to hear analysis on the question from anyone who is not “a sex worker.” Others still will claim that they are or have been “sex workers” themselves, and are therefore beyond the need for an objective class analysis. Few have actually studied the economic forces behind prostitution, getting deeper into what is actually being bought and sold, who owns the business, what class forces are in contradiction, and so on. Many still refuse to explore prostitution as an economic phenomenon—one occurring in a world in the thrall of imperialism at that. They have (likely before even reading this article) come to the conclusion that the only possible criticisms of prostitution are moral ones, ones that intend to stigmatize the prostitute for daring to defy the chastity sometimes imposed on women. Like the bourgeois religious hypocrite, they cannot fathom prostitution beyond moral objection—morality is the only framework they can find.

As discussed above, Marxists, unlike any of the above-mentioned camps, do not view prostitution (or almost anything else) in terms of morality, but in terms of class struggle—this means we criticize on the basis of an economic analysis. It is, after all, economic conditions that provide impulse to the trade in the first place. Moral objection does not rate here.

There are those who will say they are Marxists, but that they are “not dogmatists”—thereby justifying their clean break with 200 years of analysis on the matter. They may not be dogmatic Marxists, but they are dogmatists nonetheless: dogmatists of postmodernism, of identity politics, of third-wave feminism, and other degenerate bourgeois ideology. They do not so much object to the conclusions of Marxism (at least not most of the time), and they may even have a strong dislike of capitalism. What they oppose is the Marxist method—the same method that is universal and ever-improving, which has led comrades throughout history to develop clear lines on the matter of prostitution. This method and framework for analysis has been sharpened through discovery and mainly through violent class struggle. It has made new discoveries (a scientific analysis of modern imperialism, an understanding of the necessity and forms of proletarian dictatorship, cultural revolution, etc.) along the way. None of the apologists of prostitution can offer a single development, discovery, or condition that fundamentally alters the historic Marxist analysis of prostitution.

Marxists have never understood prostitution as simply the plight of “fallen women” who were just “raised wrong” in slums or other harmful conditions. Marxism has never sought to blame women for the conditions that force them into prostitution. Yet accusing all critics of prostitution of this thinking is the knee-jerk reaction of the apologist. This is the only response they can imagine from those who do not see the trade as “empowering” or “a job like any other.” No job, legal or illegal in the capitalist system, is empowering; all jobs without exception are alienating.

So how do the sanitizers of anti-woman violence come to their distorted views? Well, when an adventurous and impulsive petty-bourgeois dilettante, like one of Mae West’s characters, willingly chooses “sex work” (as a growing number of petty-bourgeois people are claiming) and finds the “stigma” to be the only uncomfortable part, all while never experiencing the raw and inhuman degradation that is imposed on most women in these trades—her goal can only be to sanitize the whole thing. In their attempts to be seen as better than the majority, they work to rebrand any trade that has to do with sex or that has been sexualized—now framing entertainers and performers and even enslaved women as “workers,” now not only defending prostitution as a trade but even preaching its virtue to anyone they can guilt into listening. Some of them will even insist against all reason that these trades must be allowed to continue under the socialist system. But, of course, a socialist society cannot “legalize” or “nationalize” prostitution without the state becoming a pimp. These women who claim that “sex work” empowers them, at the same time, are acknowledging that regular working-class jobs are disempowering. This speaks volumes about their class stand and ambitions, and their detestation of the working class. They would rather be sexually exploited than engage in production alongside the proletariat—these can only be considered sham Marxists, and likened to compradors among women. For these it is not economic poverty or low social status or colonialism that drives them to the trade—it is the mere threat, faced by all petty bourgeoisie, of forced integration into the proletariat. They are in solidarity with the rest of their class in labor desertion.

Feminism emerged with dual aspects of progress and reaction. It has existed with these contradictions ever since and has principally become a tool of the bourgeoisie, in a buffet of bourgeois feminisms. The worst of these take facets of women’s oppression and simply re-dress them as their opposites, women’s empowerment. Now the most degrading trades imposed upon women are the most championed. The petty-bourgeois sex adventurist will brag about making more than the stupid women at work in maid service, food service, transportation, and factory work. She will say that she is smarter and has managed to get out of the rat race. She identifies her trade as labor desertion, and she is correct. But she is incorrect that this somehow makes her choice the correct one while the women of the proletariat are just sheep. It is one thing to have an incorrect idea—it is another to spread it like gospel.

The petty-bourgeois sex-capitalist has nothing in common with working women. She lives a life of bourgeois decadence and is a commercial for misogyny. She insists that it is a good and normal thing for women to be able to be rented. She gives men a fair price, so as to reproduce the idea within themselves and among men broadly, that women are a commodity. All the women who struggle against this collectively form a sort of picket line, and the petty-bourgeois sex-capitalist gleefully crosses it. She is uninhibited.

For the Communist in the women’s struggle, the line is perfectly clear: we must serve the people. Inman writes,

“The struggle against prostitution is the struggle against the capitalist class. Since prostitution has an economic basis and the woman enters it because of economic insecurity, one form of the struggle must be economic: demands for a living wage for all women who work.

And for those denied a role in industry or social production, either directly or indirectly in legitimate service, demands must be raised that they be given compensation. Social production in general must be made to bear the responsibility of their support until such a time as they can be given a part in such work.

But an effective struggle against prostitution must also attack and expose the whole cynical, decadent moral structure that supports sex-subjugation, and the role of sex vigilantes who then dog the footsteps of subject women.” (Inman, In Woman’s Defense)

Thus our aim is not to stigmatize the women forced into prostitution but to justify their liberation from slavery with a Marxist class analysis.

Article by Kavga

Notes

Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Prostitutes!” National Museum of Civil War Medicine website.

Melissa Gira Grant, “When Prostitution Wasn’t a Crime,” AlterNet.

rights4girls.org, “Racial & Gender Disparities in the Sex Trade.”

Devon D. Brewer, John J. Potterat, and Stephen Q. Muth, “Clients of Prostitute Women.”

Matthias Gafni, “Oakland Police Scandal: How Often Are Cops Having Sex with Prostitutes?” Mercury News (Bay Area).

Jo-Anne Madeleine Stoltz, Kate Shannon, Thomas Kerr, et al., “Associations between Childhood Maltreatment and Sex Work in a Cohort of Drug-Using Youth,” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 6, 1214–21.

Janie Har, “Is the Average Age of Entry into Sex Trafficking between 12 and 14 Years Old?” PolitiFact; Emi Koyama, “The Average Age of Entry into Prostitution Is NOT 13,” eminism.com.

Howard N. Snyder, “Arrest in the United States, 1990-2010,” U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Erin Fuchs, “Atlanta’s Underground Sex Trade Is Booming,” Business Insider.

Melissa Farley, “Risks of Prostitution,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 3, no. 1, 97–108.

Meredith Dank, Bilal Khan, P. Mitchell Downey, et al. “Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities,” Urban Institute.

Barbara Kavemann, “Findings of a Study on the Impact of the German Prostitution Act,” Social Science Women’s Research Institute at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences Freiburg.

Hong Guo, “The Impacts of Economic Reform on Women in China,” MA thesis, University of Regina, 1997.

New Vistas Publications, Women in the Chinese Revolution (1921–1950).

Elaine Jeffreys, China, Sex and Prostitution.

New Vistas Publications, Women in the Chinese Revolution.

[noperopesaredope]

2nd "Mini" Ramble

This is gonna get a bit more messy and complicated, but it's something that I think is important to discuss at least a little bit. It will also require a bit of context, though you might be able to skip it, so I separated it a little.

The Context

The post where someone yelled at me was a post I made a while back regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict (I think a few weeks or so into Gaza). In it, I was talking about how I had seen some people say that Palestinians were not actually native to the region and were "Arab conquerors" who stole the land. Apparently, this happened more than a thousand years ago, and many Palestinians have been living there for an extremely long time. On top of that, the region is known for being extremely diverse and a hub of religious change and whatnot.

There was a lot to it, and I was just rambling rather than trying to make a strong argument. The main point of the post was that I was wondering why people stated that it could be only one or the other, and that it's possible that maybe both groups were, in a way, indigenous to the land (I regret some parts about that post, but not that particular point. If you disagree, just ignore me. If you're gonna try to start an argument, you will be blocked. I rarely make posts on that particular subject for a reason)

The reason the person was mad at me was because of a part where I mentioned that I felt kind of weird seeing Jewish Europeans (who I perceived as White) refer to a group of brown people who had been living there for thousands of years as less valid than them (I specifically clarified that I was not talking about Jewish people who had also been living in the Middle East for thousands of years, as I still considered them to be Middle Eastern).

I will admit I had phrased it poorly at the time and there are some parts that I cringe at while reading back on it. I could have used a lot more tact and can see why the person was annoyed ("White ass mfs"??? Really Past-Me??? Did you have to phrase it that way??? Did you even read back what you wrote before posting it??? Do you think before posting??? Do you think before doing anything??? Do you have any brain cells??? I think I was trying to be snarky and was a little pissed off about the whole thing so I tried to bring out the AAVE like a dumbass on a post where that really wasn't appropriate).

I also may have said some shitty/unintentional ignorant statements in trying to explain my point and invalidated some people's identities, which the person pointed out as being hypocritical. I can get that and will accept that I was being slightly hypocritical for invalidating one group's identity in an attempt to defend another's identity (I still do not know what they meant when they said I was perpetuation "claims that Jews are European interlopers". Someone please explain to me what a European interloper is. I have no idea wtf that means and it's been bothering me ever since I saw that).

As we talked, they explained how their racial identity as a Jewish person from Europe works, and I explained how my experience raised in America as an African-American affected my understanding of race. It was a very interesting conversation, and while I'm still a bit confused and admittedly feel like I wasn't completely listened to as a Black person talking about my perspective on race, I still feel like I got something out of it.

The Point of This Ramble

My main point of this ramble is about this argument between me (a half-Black African-American raised in America) and a Jewish European (who identifies as being of Middle Eastern descent). The root cause of the argument was a fundamental misunderstanding/disagreement on who counts as White and how we define Whiteness. This is another example of my point about Americans and Europeans trying to have conversations about race. However, it is also an example of a bigger thing that I think may be affecting conversations on Israel-Palestine.

One thing that is pretty important to note is that I'm aware that, in Europe, Jewish people aren't really considered White (maybe. This might also just change from person to person. IDK the internet is unreliable and people have strong opinions. As I said before, I'm a little confused). I know that in the US, Jewishness isn't as strongly tied to race and any race can be Jewish.

However, I don't know what, say, Canadians think (we live right next to each other and share some similar history, but our histories with things like slavery are pretty different, which is pretty significant). I don't know what people in Central or South America think. I don't know what Australians think. I don't know what the perspective on race is in a lot of places, even places that seem "similar" to the US. Because the US and Europe appear like they would have similar ideas on race, but this whole thing is literally about how they don't. Hell, I don't even know if it's the same across all of Europe!

So all that's pretty important to note here in regards to what I want to talk about.

What I noticed is that some pro-Palestine individuals refer Israel as a colonizer in this situation. They think of most Jewish people as being White (and I'll admit, a lot of those who first came to Israel when it was founded were fleeing from Europe, so add European to the list), and that this is White people oppressing Brown people (We will not argue on whether or not anyone is a colonizer. That is not the point here). This results in a lot of very strong comments related to, again, colonization, and sometimes other comments that I think maybe are also not particularly great to say and will not be repeating here.

In turn, this may anger/confuse many European individuals, who perceive Jewish people as being POC, and thus see this as a POC vs. POC conflict or even a Middle Easterner vs. Middle Easterner conflict. Thus, any points related to things like racism and/or colonization are much more questionable or feel like they are being blown out of proportion in a way.

And for some Jews in Europe who may agree with certain points, they may end up feeling like their identity is being invalidated and react accordingly, causing them to ignore the rest. I mean, that's kind of what happened when I was arguing with the person. Even if I did have a point somewhere in there, the more insensitive side overruled all that. They didn't even fully/directly disagree with the rest of the post, but the part that invalidated their identity and was more hypocritical may have resulted in them finding the entire post invalid (honestly, I can get that to a certain degree).

What I'm mainly trying to explain is that I've noticed that because some cultures perceive some of these Jewish people as White, they will react to the situation from that perspective and with more hostility. Meanwhile, Europeans and other certain cultures that perceive all Jewish people as being non-White/Middle Eastern will find the American (and others) perspective to be much more anti-semetic.

It's already a controversial topic, but I think this kind of stuff makes it that much more complicated. That's why I think we need to mention that different places/cultures have different ideas of race, and we need to remember that when talking about race with others, especially online.

Sometimes, neither is truly "wrong", especially since different people within the same groups will identify differently. So we need to have strong cultural relativism in regards to topics like these and even times when people might talk about race in general, since race in their culture may be different than in yours. Doesn't mean you should take everything, just that people may not have the same concept of things like race as you.

Hot Take: When it comes to the topic of race and racism as a whole, Europeans and Americans need to have separate conversations from each other.

(Explanation in this reblog)

[46ten]

curious as to your take on the current debate going on in hamiltonia re: hamilton a slaver vs hamilton not a slaver?

Whew, this is going to be a long answer. Since Jessie Serfilippi’s “As Odious and Immoral A Thing” was first published (I posted a few brief quotes here), likely as part of an ongoing interest in the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site with the subject of the Schuyler and Hamilton families and slavery (see here for blogposts labeled ‘slavery’ including a couple about AH specifically), there have been three versions of a rebuttal by Michael E. Newton and some people calling themselves Philo (”Love”) Hamilton, one of whom is Doug Hamilton*. The ongoing engagement on this topic also brings up issues of historiography and hagiography.

In this whole discussion there is only one new piece of evidence that Serfilippi has referenced on Twitter but is not part of her article - I’ll get into that below. Everything else is a re-analysis of known and fairly popular sources, so I don’t think going through it point by point would be helpful.

But let’s be clear about something. This discussion around AH is in large part because of this Chernow falsehood: “[f]ew, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton.” Chernow also calls AH a “fierce abolitionist” and a “staunch abolitionist” because Chernow doesn’t know what abolitionism is. This lie got tons of mileage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical character AH may have personal moral defects, but not blind spots as huge and disastrous to a modern audience as a lackadaisical approach to the owning of other human beings. (That Miranda’s approach totally riled some Black artists and scholars is well-known, and I wrote briefly about it here.) Serfilippi’s article doesn’t get the media play it does without the popularity of the abolitionist Founding Father myth that Miranda put on stage. So this conflict and news-cycle interest arose from Chernow’s need to give AH the moral high ground by claiming that he was the best best best abolitionist because Chernow is interested in hagiography, not biography. Unfortunately, Newton-Hamilton seem interested in the same thing.

A brief note on word usage: an enslaver, in most current usage, is defined as someone who participated in any aspect of the slavery enterprise. Considering AH’s undisputed role as money-handler (or the more laughable ‘he was a banker’ assertion in the Newton-Hamilton essay) for members of the Schuyler family acquiring enslaved persons, AH was an enslaver.

In my opinion, on the issue of slavery, AH is damned by his extensive ties from 1780 onwards to the Schuyler family. There’s nothing that can explain away the fact that AH at times lived with, visited, and sent his wife and children for extended stays and to be educated by his slave-owning in-laws. AH did not somehow become innocently involved in slave trading and ownership. Rather, he knew what he was doing when he married into the heavy slave-trading and owning Schuyler family and when he engaged in business acts for that family, including helping them to acquire/sell enslaved persons. These were morally weighty - and abominable acts, argued even in his day - and he did them anyway. There is not any record that remains that he had a problem having his children reared within an abhorrent system/household where people were enslaved and served them; in fact, given the number of times he sent his children to his father- and mother-in-law’s home for extended periods, it could be suggested he found nothing morally objectionable going on there. Philip Hamilton even thanked his enslaver grandfather for his advice on how to “be a good man.” P. Schuyler’s wealth and trading was through the slavery economy. Moreover, AH’s economic concerns were also inextricably tied to slavery - keep in mind that every mention of tariffs on sugar is connected to the slave trade. Almost everything led back to that evil institution.

During AH’s lifetime, a number of white AND Black persons articulated that all enslaved Black and Indigenous persons should be freed, that the practice of enslavement was a grave moral failing. AH was well-informed enough to know that Black Americans were articulating how freedom should be applied to them - indeed, many of the manumission policies of the original states arose from these efforts. So AH was fully aware of the arguments. (His son was involved!) Maybe this helped inspire him and his slave-owning friends and political colleagues to form the NY Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, although none of this group agreed to give up their own enslaved persons as part of the organization of this group.

Or, as Newton-Hamilton audaciously state, “[AH] was more involved in building a nation” sotto voce based on enslavement and racial distinction than he could be bothered to care about the lives of enslaved people. This shouldn’t be a surprise when it comes to AH’s major moral failings/blind spots - he didn’t care about the lives of the people affected by his whiskey tax either. If one wants to nevertheless call this a “good man,” we’re probably looking at each other from across a void.

But this is well-trod territory. Several articles post-Chernow have evaluated and summarized positions on AH and slavery that I share:

“Hamilton's position on slavery is more complex than his biographers' suggest. Hamilton was not an advocate of slavery, but when the issue of slavery came into conflict with his personal ambitions, his belief in property rights, or his belief of what would promote America's interests, Hamilton chose those goals over opposing slavery. In the instances where Hamilton supported granting freedom to blacks, his primary motive was based more on practical concerns rather than an ideological view of slavery as immoral. Hamilton's decisions show that his desire for the abolition of slavery was not his priority.” Michelle DuRoss, “Somewhere in Between: Alexander Hamilton and Slavery,” Early American Review, 2011 [part 1, part 2]

“But it does illustrate something that his primary modern biographers have been reluctant to concede: Hamilton routinely subordinated his antislavery inclinations to other family and political concerns, and he did not ever approach even a modest level of engagement on the issue in his otherwise voluminous published works.” Phil Magness, “Alexander Hamilton’s Exaggerated Abolitionism,” 2015

“He was not an abolitionist...[h]e bought and sold slaves for his in-laws, and opposing slavery was never at the forefront of his agenda.” Annette Gordon-Reed, “Correcting ‘Hamilton’,” Harvard Gazette, 2016.

Serfilippi extends this:

When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapably apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

I have no objection to her statement. We simply have no record of AH strongly challenging the institution of slavery, while several of his colleagues and friends most certainly did. Instead, we have the financial transactions, the possible use of enslaved labor, and the possible ownership of enslaved persons, alongside his strong personal, professional, and political ties to owners of enslaved persons. And the new evidence: the inclusion of the following in a list of persons dead of Yellow Fever in NYC 1798, “Hamilton Alexander, major-general, the black man of, 26 Broadway” An Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in the City of New-York, 1799. We cannot know if this was an enslaved man or a free Black man who lived and labored for the Hamiltons, but it should eliminate anyone confidently stating that the Hamiltons did not own enslaved persons.

Thus, Serfilippi has successfully accomplished at least one important goal: bringing to the forefront the names (as we have them) of persons, servant or enslaved, connected to the Hamiltons.

I wrote above that part of the problem here is hagiography. If his concern is with the truth, I certainly look forward to Newton’s chapter-by-chapter repudiations of books written by Chernow, Brookhiser, and Knott on AH and the AH/GW relationship.This leads to the second issue that has arisen: the unprofessional, and frankly gross, glee in trying to punch down on a young female scholar. In my own field (an ex-partner is a military historian so I’ll speak for their field too), the approach when one believes a colleague is publishing in error and one has additional information that could illuminate the issues is to contact them and seek to work together to analyze and draw conclusions. Newton and the anonymous Love Hamilton clan didn’t treat Serfilippi as if she were deserving of this respect. Moreover, Newton has never, to my knowledge - and I purchased his books! - gone this hard after Chernow, who certainly deserves it even more.

But Newton-Hamilton betray their own concerns here: “Considering the era in which Hamilton lived, the challenges he faced, and his accomplishments, it is not difficult to understand why Hamilton did not make opposition to slavery his primary focus. His attention was on building a nation.” And what kind of nation was that? At the Constitutional Convention, AH’s lengthy speeches on the formation of the government have been recorded. There is no record of him offering any statements about the slavery issue, unlike his friend Gouverneur Morris.

Newton-Hamilton continue: “Unfortunately, that meant neglecting other important matters, not just slavery but also his own financial well-being.” Wow, a comparison is made between AH’s personal finances and the ownership of human beings. Could these authors be any clearer that the slavery issue is an inconvenience that they are ultimately unconcerned about? I’m unsure if Newton-Hamilton realize just how gross their attempt at addressing this issue has been, and that it’s hard to take their interpretation and analysis of the evidence seriously when these are the kinds of statements making their way into the rebuttal essays.

Now there is an interesting discussion about how even later abolitionists did not see a conflict in the employment of enslaved labor, but that too isn’t something that Newton-Hamilton show interest in. Instead, their approach seems to be that AH needs to be celebrated at all costs, and thankfully, those days are passing into history.

*It’s ridiculous that a group of people have given themselves a stupid pseudonym to avoid attaching their actual names to a so-called scholarly article. And I’m aware that I’m writing this anonymously, but on tumblr where maybe 5 people have made it to the end of this (I’m not publishing it on my real blog).

**I will not link it, but it can be found on Newton’s blog discoveringhamilton.

[fidespeaks]

Laying The Groundwork For How Privilege Works

Okay, so before I get into any other topics on this blog I want to talk about privilege.  I feel like it’s something we’re all simultaneously very aware of but a lot of us fall into this trap of very quickly forgetting about how it works.  Or, alternatively, it’s something we know exists because we frequently use the term for it but we forget the nuances of multiple layers of privilege when it comes to talking to people in marginalized groups that aren’t our own.  So, that’s kind of what I want to discuss with this post before anything else: multiple layers of privilege, how they stack, and how we should stay conscious of them while being allies to other marginalized groups.  

A lot of what I want to talk about today is pulled directly from and reflection upon the book: Me & White Supremacy by Layla Saad.  If you haven’t read the book before, it’s similar to a guided journal that’s meant to be completed over the course of a month and if you’re serious about your allyship and supporting BIPOC & BLM, I highly suggest you read it.  But be sure you’re in a decent state of mind - some of the things you may uncover while doing the work can be pretty heavy, especially in my experience. 

Now I know a fair number of people are probably thinking: "but Fides, I’m (multiracial, biracial, a good ally, def not a racist, have experienced discrimination, am a person of color, ect).  Why do I need to read this book?”  to which my response would be to point you towards one of the very first sections of the book, titled “Who is this work for?”  which actually inspired the entire post that I’d like to write today.  Layla begins that section by clarifying:  

This work is for any person who holds white privilege. By any person, I mean persons of any gender identity, including gender-nonconforming persons, and by who holds white privilege, I mean persons who are visually identifiable as white or who pass for white. Therefore, this includes persons who are biracial, multiracial, or white passing People of Color who benefit under systems of white supremacy from having lighter skin color than visibly Brown, Black, or Indigenous people. 

And that seems pretty simile, right?  Not all people experience privilege or discrimination to the same degree and sometimes the ways that we do experience discrimination are vastly different from one another.  I’m completely aware that this seems like... honestly really obvious stuff, but I remember first reading this and the first week of work titled “Me and White Privilege” in which Layla discusses that lacking one kind of privilege does not mean you don’t still have white privilege and thinking... wow.  I’ve definitely tired to pull this “oppression olympics” shit before.  Sometimes I didn’t even do it on purpose.  Sometimes I was just trying to explain that I understand and I can relate.  But that brought the conversation back to me, and that’s exactly the problem. 

In the chapter “Me and White Privilege”, Layla specifically goes out of her way to point out that white privilege specifically is separate from, but can sometimes intersect with, other kinds of privilege (class, gender, sexuality, age, able-bodied, and so on).  She then goes on to make a slew of examples, stating that just because a person lacks a certain kind of privilege, doesn’t mean they don’t still (in the case of her topic) have white privilege.  She also clarifies that it works in reverse and finishes her thought with off with: 

“...and having white privilege with other privileged identities adds to the amount of overall privilege that you hold.”

it’s this thought that brings me to my idea of the day: in my own personal experience, people on tumblr tend to forget that just because you are in possession of one form of privilege it does not mean you suddenly don’t still benefit from holding another. Layla uses white privilege as an example, but it goes in any direction.  If you’re straight and BIPOC, you still have straight privilege.  If you’re white, gay, and neurodivergent, you still have white privilege.  And I’d like to even take it a step farther, to incorporate a concept I’ll be discussing later: your experience does not define the experience of a person who is lacking a type of privilege. 

What I mean to say is: someone who is eastern asian is going to face an entirely different, albeit similar, kind of discrimination vs someone who is latinx or black.  If you’re of color, or if you’re gay, or if you’re transmasculine, you don’t get to speak for or over other people who have similar but different circumstances to your own.  Every voice matters and each voice ought to be given a chance to speak and add it’s opinion.  The experiences of someone who’s nonbinary are going to be completely different from the experiences of someone who’s binary trans.  Hell, even the experiences between lesbians and gay men are incredibly different:  minorities aren’t a monolith and treating them as such silences other voices.  You cannot decide just because you belong to a group that you get to speak for them. 

But that’s a different topic that I want to tackle in multiple different forms, because it goes in a lot of different ways.  What I mostly mean to do today is to clarify that when someone else who has lacks a privilege you have speaks to you - listen.  And I know it’s really fucking hard not to be like “oh yeah, I've been there dude, I’ve had xyz happen to me before so I get it” because it’s a way of empathizing, especially for neurodivergent people.  But you have to listen and you have to make sure that you’re not overfocusing the conversation back onto you.  A simple “I understand” is enough and if you don’t, as for clarification.  And if they don’t feel up to giving it, try to research yourself or ask if you can ask another time. 

Most importantly to all of this however is this: we have got to stop hiding behind our own lack of privilege as a way of excusing our shitty behavior.  If someone calls you out (or in, which I highly encourage over calling out because... people on tumblr don’t fucking know how to call people out in a productive fashion but I’ll get there trust me) you CANNOT say as a defense: oh, you can’t talk to me like that I’m neurodivergent.  Or if someone calls you out for being transphobic you can’t say “oh you can’t talk to me like that, I’m POC”.  Hell, if someone calls you out for being a fucking asshole, you don’t get to flip it around and be like “naw, you can’t say that, because I’m this that and another thing”.  You can clarify, especially if there’s a cultural difference or you’re neurodivergent, but you don’t get to hide behind shit. 

And you especially do not get to turn around and tell someone who’s calling you out for abusive behavior that they’re (racist, transphobic, homophobic, etc). They aren’t calling you out because of your identity, they’re calling you out because you’re a manipulative brat.  That doesn’t have to DO with those things.  Lack of privilege does not give you an excuse to be abusive.  End of conversation.  But... I suppose to end this conversation today, I’ll say this: CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE, which is actually another book that I want to read and incorporate into these essays.  So I’m trying not to put the cart before the horse. 

Anyway, hopefully that clarifies at least a little bit the trend I’ve noticed of people forgetting that lacking one kind of privilege doesn’t magically mean they don’t have another.   The fact that you’re trans doesn’t exclude you from being racist,  your race doesn’t exclude you from being homophobic, and none of those things give you a right to be a jerk.  But they all do make it a little bit easier to understand when someone else comes to us with their own story of oppressions. 

Thanks for reading <3

[coraxaviary]

An Essay on POC and Fics

[ORIGINALLY A WRITER ASK GAME]: Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

(AKA me explaining in long-form why June is white, complete with some drama and a lot of rambling. Do not feel obligated to read).

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I’ve never talked about this extensively, but I want to discuss ethnic minority OFCs in fics. Specifically, SiA. I originally was going to make June partially nonwhite. And I ran into problems.

I really found myself worrying about relatability. If a character is POC, I thought it would ruin immersion for people who are looking for an OFC fic to lose themselves in. It’s no secret that I’m Asian-American, and I was originally all for making the character part Asian. It’s ironic that I was worried about immersion when outside of fic spaces, I argue unendingly for Asians to be cast as leads and stereotype-defying roles. Because any POC is also just a person who can be as “relatable” as any white character, theoretically. I feel a little hypocritical, but at the same time it’s true.

When I watched The Walking Dead, Glenn was my absolute favorite. Because he was Korean-American. And for the first time, I watched a major (Asian!) character in a show become hailed as a man defined not by his race, but for his achievements and his personality. If Glenn was white, he still would’ve been one of my favorites. But seeing Asians portrayed as... normal people shouldn’t be this rare. However, it is, at least in mainstream America.

The issue with creating POC characters is racism. That’s always the issue, isn’t it? Racism has been ingrained into every system and cultural dynamic, globally. The remnants of colonialism are alive and well, and the treatment of POC people, generally, is far from sterling.

Thus it became almost impossible for me to justify creating an Asian-American (or, for that matter, any other POC) OFC. They would be defined by race, because back in the 40s, any American ethnic minority had no choice but to be characterized by their appearance. It still happens today. And I wanted the focus to be on humanity, war, bonds, and gender. Not race, because race is unpleasant to talk about. It wouldn’t be fun for me to be researching 1940s race discrimination to create a character who must overcome that too. I’m not looking to undergo an identity crisis in the pursuit of a fic aimed at social justice. I just want to write something fun.

Fic is created, many times, by minority groups, including POC. However, like any institution, it’s white-centric. And I don’t fault it for that. Most media in the mainstream is white-centric and thus it makes perfect sense for the works created based on the material to be also that way. But I felt like I was betraying myself by writing fic and not taking a chance to diversify the narrative.

Because if a significant part of my irl advocacy is attempting to champion race diversity, and I don’t take that chance in the fandom space, am I a hypocrite?

The fault of this culture, and this struggle, is not with me. It’s with the centuries and ages of oppression and typecasting and discrimination in the pages of world history. It’s unavoidable.

However, to be kind of frank, it sucks to have to consider these things when all I wanna do is write a self-indulgent narrative about WWII boyfriends. I want to just be myself and imagine a fun time with my favorite characters. But I know, deep down, that anyone who is not white would not have been accepted into the group. I decided to just circumvent all these problems by writing a white character.

And it’s not true to the narrative if I wrote a POC OFC and then bent all the other characters OOC and forced them to be non-problematic. Because I know, regrettably, that the norm back then (and still in some areas) is casual racism. It was only 1948 when the American Army officially desegregated. You can watch The Pacific for yourself and find out what the Americans called Japanese people. The racial slurs, I’ll admit, made me uncomfortable despite how much I love the series. Army culture in the 40s towards a woman who is also a racial minority would have been egregious. And that’s not fun to write about in a fic.

I can’t not think about race -- not forever, at least. I don’t have that luxury. I do acknowledge that I, as an Asian-Amerian, benefit from a white-centric culture that has designated us (condescendingly) as a “model minority” and as an exception race. Systemic racism is less impactful towards Asians. This is, however, not to discount the terrible history of Asian-American discrimination that is not immediately apparent (I have been told that not everyone is educated of the existence of the Japanese-American internment or other examples of irrefutable discrimination). There is history in my family of experiencing both ends of the Asian-American experience: as a “model” and also discriminated against as a perceived threat (or a scapegoat, if you will, for the Vietnam war and other matters).

I went through a phase (as many American POC do) of wanting to be white when I was very young. I don’t know exactly why. Is it because the American identity is so deeply rooted in the striking visual of the white settler, despite the deep history of the continent in indigenous people? Is it because diversity is (or was) not common in the mainstream -- when we didn’t have people like Glenn at the forefront of media representation but instead had stereotyped caricatures like Mr. Yunioshi? I didn’t know what it meant to be beautiful back then unless the portrait was of caucasian features. I have a distinct memory of complaining to my mother when I was about five or six years old that I didn’t like my black hair, and I think my way of thinking unconsciously had to do more with my Asian heritage than the actual color. I cannot tell you honestly what specifically caused this type of thinking, but it’s more widespread than you’d think among POC children.

So this is why I am a POC and yet I choose to write a white protagonist. Historical fiction always contains complexities: decisions that must be made with the wisest discernment that I don’t feel like I can always make. History is a burden upon us all. The present will never be free of the past, and it’s our job as writers to navigate the gray patches between interpretation and accurate portrayal. Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task, and sometimes it’s as if I can forget about my POC-ness altogether and lose myself in my OFC without thinking about heritage or discrimination.

But here we are, writing fanfiction of WWII heroes who come from a different time and a different era.

It had to have felt different back then, don’t you think? When I think of the forties, I think of patriotism and B-24s and victory; I think of a feeling of hope tinged with despair. I think of radios and dance halls and tragic heroes and the glory of soldiers dropping from the sky, backlit like angels and tasked with democracy and hope and things that are right and true. I think of a time where Americans united for good.

But this is a glamorized version of history. It’s the enjoyable version, we all know. And it genuinely consisted partially of these snippets of greatness, but there was a larger part that lay, vast, underneath the golden panorama that sometimes we forget about. And I think the WWII fic-writing community is keenly conscious of this aspect. I see it in the writing that we all so lovingly produce: a lot of us understand, at least on a surface level, that war is not glamorous and that the times were still as turbulent as they are today.

It’s something we all must grapple with.

And this, in a slightly dramatic fashion, is my personal conflict of being a person of color, and choosing to write a white character for the sake of joy and fun.

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Thank you for reading if you got to the end! I love you all :)

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(Partially inspired by this post by @rhovanian, but mostly my own ruminations based on the brief time I have existed on this earth).

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[action]

Art by Natalie Bui courtesy of 18MR

APAHM Spotlight: 18MillionRising

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we sat down with Cayden Mak, Executive Director of @18MR, an organization that works to organize young Asian Americans online with a strong focus on building knowledge and identity. With Cayden living in the Midwest, he didn’t have a strong concept of what it meant – or could mean – to be Asian American, but finding the Internet meant finding a like-minded community that didn’t exist in his hometown. For him, this work is urgent. Let’s dive in.

How does 18MillionRising incorporate the importance of activism within the Asian/Pacific Islander community?

Activism by, for, and in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities is critical because our influence on culture is growing. From entertainment to politics, Asian Americans are becoming more visible. We can use this opportunity to make it clear what we stand for and why, or be manipulated by people who don’t have our best interests at heart for their own agendas. In order to properly defend against that kind of dis-organizing, it’s critical to be visionary in what we want, and our activism is about really about that vision. Now is the time to get organized and get involved.

When discussing the importance and impact of immigration within the Asian/Pacific Islander community, what are some common misconceptions about the community?

I don’t think a lot of people realize just how many ethnic groups, nationalities, and languages are encompassed in the umbrella of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This plays out in a lot of ways, but I notice that people sometimes don’t have an appreciation for the wide variety of experiences that AAPI new arrivals in the United States have. Whether due to class, faith community, reason for emigrating, or any of many other factors, AAPI immigrants struggle against the systems that other communities of color struggle against. For example, the Cambodian American community has been brutally targeted by Immigration & Customs Enforcement over the past few years, but if you live somewhere without a large Cambodian American community, you might not be aware of it.

It seems cliche to say, but AAPIs are far from the model minority stereotype that you often see in the media. It bears repeating, though, because that stereotype was invented to shame and blame Black communities for their own struggles – it’s shorthand for saying, “If Asian immigrants could do it, why couldn’t you?” which elides how immigration policy has shaped the most visible parts of the Asian American community while erasing the ongoing implicit and explicit rules that have kept Black communities from gaining wealth and power in our society -- starting with the way the Thirteenth Amendment was even written.

Let’s talk about your operating principle of “Co-Conspirators Instead of Allies.” How do the truths of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism affect the Asian/Pacific Islander community?

From the colonization of many of our home countries by Europe and the United States to the way skin color impacted the way those colonizers related to and categorized our homelands, it’s easy to see the way these things have played out for us, historically. It’s also the case that here, in the U.S. and in the present, our communities have an uneasy relationship with both anti-Black racism and settler colonialism.

For example, like the vast majority of Americans, we’re settlers – even if we came here as refugees, we have an important role to play in decolonizing this place and supporting Indigenous sovereignty on Hawai’i and the mainland. Our work is focused on figuring out how to come from a place of strength and power rooted in developing our identities as Asian Americans, so we can work as peers and equals with Black, Indigenous, and other people dedicated to mutual liberation.

We’re so grateful for the work that Cayden and his team at @18MR are doing. What has been your experience growing up Asian American? Use the hashtag #APAHM to share your story.

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