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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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On Twitter, there’s a new movement that started up on... Thursday, I guess, with the hashtag #SpeakingOut, where women were encouraged to call out instances of sexual abuse. I’m not sure if it started with the pro wrestling community or not, because earlier in the week I saw some stuff about comic book pros like Warren Ellis and Cameron Stewart, but maybe that was a precursor. All I know is that right now, I’ve been seeing all sorts of names being dropped in the pro wrestling business, each of them accused of being sexual predators, or covering up for the crimes of others. Some of the names I don’t recognize, because they’re independent wrestlers from promotions I’m not familiar with, but I’ve seen some names I do know, and that’s pretty tough to take. I’m going to discuss this here.

Predictably, I’ve seen some backlash to #SpeakingOut, which reminds me of the same bullshit talking points used by the #IStandWithVic crowd last year. In case you didn’t know, Vic Mignogna was a voice actor who worked for Funimation and provided the dub performances for Broly in DBZ, and Eward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist. I think those were his two most famous roles. Over the decades, Vic garnered a reputation for being a sex pest, kissing and inappropriately touching women and teenage girls at conventions, and harassing his colleagues. I assume the release of the “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” movie in the U.S. in 2019 precipitated a newfound interest in those allegations, and fans started objecting to his bookings at 2019 conventions. By mid-year, Vic was fired from Funimation and RoosterTeeth, and he responded to this by starting an ill-advised defamation lawsuit.

Vic’s defenders are, to put it mildly, idiots. There were professional lawyers on Twitter who explained, very clearly, why this lawsuit was a bad idea. The main reason being that it was done in Texas, which has a lot of laws designed to make it harder to sue people for defamation. I think Vic’s goal was to find some way to punish his accusers for making him look bad and getting him fired. Winning the lawsuit, was a way for him and his supporters to feel like they “cleared his name”, except that was never how it worked. If he had been arrested and tried for sex pest crimes, the burden of proof would be on his accusers to show that he really did bad things. But he was suing people for slander, so that means the burden of proof was on him to show that they really were saying things that were demonstrably false and damaging to his reputation. The main problem with that is everyone had been talking about his sex pestery for years, so it doesn’t make sense to single a few people out in 2019 and blame them for reinforcing something everyone already believed. But the ISWV crowd kept insisting that this distinction didn’t matter, and that it was wrong to ostracize or turn against Vic without “proof”. I see the same demands for “proof” being tossed around for all these wrestling personalities.

I think there’s a couple of things going on with this. One is simple denial. If you’re a fan of someone and you find out they did something terrible, you really don’t want to believe it. I was never that into a lot of these guys, but I know I felt pretty low when I first heard about Vic’s shenanigans, because I liked his work. And I’m feeling that way about Warren Ellis now. Not a huge fan, but I liked some of his stuff, and now I feel a little guilty by association for ever liking that stuff in the first place. It would be nice, I suppose, to just pretend that I hadn’t heard those accusations, or that they weren’t real. Then I could just go back to the way things were before, without all the uncomfortableness. I just can’t do that, but it seems like a lot of people can and will. It’s not about “proof”, it’s about putting up some sort of barrier that will excuse them from confronting an unpleasant truth.

I think this is why you see people going out of their way to defend Christopher Columbus and Confederate monuments. They want to believe that there was something noble about that stuff, because the alternative is to admit that a lot of the things they learned in school aren’t true, and a lot of the “heritage” they cling to is built on white supremacy and slavery. I don’t think anyone really cares about a Robert E. Lee statue, but I’ve seen people go out of their way to try to say Lee opposed slavery, like he’s one of the good Confederates, so he should get a pass. Except he did own slaves, and even if he hadn’t, he still fought to defend a nation founded on slavery as a guiding principle. Tearing down a statue of Lee is a tacit admission that Lee never deserved a statue in the first place, and everyone who admired him was wrong, and maybe the admiration was rooted in racism all along. That’s a bitter pill for people to swallow, and a lot of them just refuse to swallow it. So they deny and deflect, and do anything they can to make this about something else.

The other side of it is just plain hatred. I don’t know if Vic’s defenders were all misogynists to begin with, but it seems like they all got there, one way or another. The train of thought always seemed to be “He didn’t do these things, but even if he did there’s nothing wrong with it.” From what I saw, it really seemed like Vic’s backers were all fired up about defending a man’s right to creep on women in any way he sees fit. “What, so kissing is illegal now?” No, jackass, but when you’re fifty-fucking-five and you kiss a seventeen-year-old girl who only wanted to take a picture with you, it’s pretty damn messed up. When you use your celebrity status to try to mack on young fans, that’s messed up. When you’re an established wrestler and you try to take advantage of up-and-coming wrestlers, that’s messed up. And some of that behavior is totally illegal, but the sad reality is that most of these creeps will never get prosecuted for any of it. That’s why the calls for “proof” are so hollow, because everyone knows it’ll never end up in a courtroom. At best, some of these guys will get fired, and guess what? “Innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t apply to employers. I lost a job once because my “teamwork” wasn’t good enough, and that was the closest thing to an explanation I got. Don’t bullshit me about “proof”.

I guess I should tie this train of thought in with Black Lives Matter while I’m at it. I find it absurd that the police in this country are so out of touch that when there’s a nationwide protest against police brutality, their immediate response is... more brutality. This, more than anything I’ve seen, is the reason to defund the police. They appear to only have the one mode of conduct, and they don’t even know how to do things a different way. If the situation is this bad, we may as well scrap the police as they are and start over. If the cops wanted to fix this situation, all they have to do is treat people with respect and hold themselves accountable, but they can’t let go of their hatred for five fucking minutes and figure that out. This is why you hear about those guys who make up stories about restaurants spitting in their food. They’re paranoid that everyone’s out to get them because they know they deserve to face some consequences, so they’re constantly on guard for this sort of thing. It’s sick.

Somehow, people who support these guys end up supporting the very behavior they were supposed to be denying. Maybe this is why Columbus is such a sticking point. I never gave a shit about Columbus. One of my high school yearbooks had a Columbus theme because it just happened to come out on the 500th anniversary of his first voyage to North America, but I never understood what that had to do with my high school. I think there’s people that want to give him tons of credit, basically thank him for everything that’s happened in the Western Hemisphere since 1500, not in spite of his atrocities, but to retroactively justify them. What I mean is, if you can convince society that Columbus was a great man, and that his achievements outweigh his wrongdoing, then you can also convince society that the wrongdoings aren’t actually that bad. “The price of progress,” they can say. It’s like the idea that Robert E. Lee is admired solely for his “brilliant” military mind. His side lost the fucking war, so I never understood how he gets all this credit for being a great general. The point is that if you can convince people that he was a noble man in spite of the slavery thing, then you can open the door to the idea that the Confederacy as a whole wasn’t That Bad, and that only opens the door to the idea that slavery wasn’t That Bad, and so on.

Same deal with Roman Polansky and Woody Allen. It amazes me that people will still try to defend those fucks, but it probably has a lot to do with all the other sex pests in Hollywood, who hope that everyone will stick up for them when they get exposed. So you have this little chesnut about how “Yeah, they did bad things, but they sure made some good movies.” The implication is that you have to accept a few sex crimes if you want good art. And no, that’s not true, and even if it were true, it wouldn’t be worth it.

I don’t know where things will end up with J.K. Rowling. I’d like to think that one of these days, she’ll wake up and apologize for all this TERF rhetoric she’s been spouting. That would probably be the best-case scenario. More likely, she’ll cause an entire generation of Harry Potter fans to wrestle with their loyalty to her books. There’s no job to fire her from, no laws to punish her, no government agency to step in. She’s got no financial stake in repairing this PR damage. There’s going to be an audience of bigots that will still kiss up to her no matter what she says, so her ego will be well-insulated. Maybe a hundred years from now, people will be talking about tossing her statue in a river, as society admits that we don’t need to accept transphobia in exchange for YA literature.

I don’t know, I think I went all over the place with this one, but I had a lot to get off my chest. I think the overall lesson from this year is that we can’t put these people on pedestals. Some of them are just hell-bent on letting us down, and it’s just a matter of time before their misdeeds are brought to light. I see these dopes with Thin Blue Line flags and “I stand with [X]” hashtags and I’m like “Who are you supporting here? What is it you’re standing for, exactly? Why should they be worthy of your loyalty?” And I think the answer is less about loyalty to a person or group, and more about sticking it to someone else. Women, minorities, whoever. They just want to stand by someone to spite someone else. And that’s awful.

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catholiccom-blog · 7 years ago

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Questioning the Questioning of Authority

Having now lived in Eugene, Oregon for over twenty years, I’ve long dreamed of parking next to a car with a “Question Authority” bumper sticker and asking the driver: “By what authority do you tell others to question authority?” The resulting conversation would, without doubt, be interesting; with any luck, it might also be civil.

The slogan, quite popular in university cities such as Eugene, was apparently made popular by the notorious psychologist and LSD proponent Timothy Leary, and it certainly reflects the mentality of “the Sixties,” which sought to question, reject, or even attack any and all authority: political, social, academic, and religious. But, actually, it wasn’t opposed to all authority because, of course, it assumes some sort of authority on the part of the person proclaiming the slogan.

The key word here is “assumes,” for when it comes to personal autonomy and authority, most people makes significant assumptions. The recent conflicts between racist groups and Antifa (or “anti-fascist”) groups is a good, if depressing, example. The rhetoric of both is filled with strong assumptions about authority.

For example, one Antifa website states, “We don’t rely on the cops or courts to do our work for us. This doesn’t mean we never go to court, but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression. We must rely on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.”

This, without doubt, is all about authority: who has it, whose authority is legitimate, how authority should be handled. The site further outlines the Antifa desire to “to build a broad, strong movement of oppressed people centered on the working class against racism, sexism, nativism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people.” This includes supporting “abortion rights and reproductive freedom.” And what is the ultimate goal? “A classless, free society.”

Never mind that such a stance never could actually result in a “classless, free society,” for the simple reason that the claim to authority immediately and logically creates a class—that is, those with supposed moral and political authority—and also raises the question of what “freedom” is like in such a society. (I think Islam is a serious concern and I believe homosexual acts are immoral; would I be free to say so? It doesn’t sound like it.) Who decides what “freedom” involves? And, to go even deeper, how does the Antifa movement decide what is “oppression” and “discrimination”? Is not the killing of unborn babies a form of oppression? As is almost always the case, such idealistic movements are heavy on passion and light on philosophical substance.

Every philosophy, institution, movement, and belief system relies upon some sort of authority. The Catholic apologist, in considering the claims of, say, an atheist or the Watch Tower Society or a Protestant, should always examine the assumptions made about authority. This is one reason I left Evangelicalism and became Catholic: I realized that the claims to authority made by the Catholic Church had a logic and substance not found in the Protestant tradition, whose claims to authority had serious defects.

A wonderful guide in this regard was Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957). The son of the Anglican bishop of Manchester, Knox became Catholic as a young man and went on to write a wide range of books and even translated the entire Bible. In his classic 1927 apologetic work, The Belief of Catholics, he addressed the growing skepticism in England about the claims of Christianity and certain arguments made against the Catholic Church by various Protestants. One of the latter is the faulty claim that a Christian is not dependent, whether historically or practically, upon the Catholic Church for correct doctrine—all a believer needs is the Bible. In the chapter titled “Where Protestantism Goes Wrong,” Knox demonstrated that how one views the Church will either make or break the basis of one’s view of Christ, the Bible and, yes, authority:

[A] proper notion of the Church is a necessary stage before we argue from the authority of Christ to any other theological doctrine whatever. The infallibility of the Church is, for us, the true induction from which all our theological conclusions are derived. The Protestant, stopping short of it, has to rest content with an induction of the false kind; and the vice of that false kind of induction is that all its conclusions are already contained in its premises. Perhaps formal logic is out of date; let me restate the point otherwise. We derive from our apprehension of the living Christ the apprehension of a living Church; it is from that living Church that we take our guidance. Protestantism claims to take its guidance immediately from the living Christ. But what is the guidance he gives us, and where are we to find it?

The claim of many Christians that it is the Bible that fully guides them and provides the authoritative say in matters of their faith is inconsistent; it cannot stand in the face of reason, as Knox explained with brilliant lucidity:

In fact … the Protestant had no conceivable right to base any arguments on the inspiration of the Bible, for the inspiration of the Bible was a doctrine which had been believed, before the Reformation, on the mere authority of the Church; it rested on exactly the same basis as the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Protestantism repudiated Transubstantiation, and in doing so repudiated the authority of the Church; and then, without a shred of logic, calmly went on believing in the inspiration of the Bible, as if nothing had happened! Did they suppose that Biblical inspiration was a self-evident fact, like the axioms of Euclid?

Not only does the Bible itself not teach that it is the final and sole authority in the Christian life, such a belief ignores the historical facts about how we received the Bible and by whose authority the canon of Scripture has been set. The Catholic faith, in sum, is a seamless garment demanding “all or nothing”; if someone accepts the authority of Scripture, it is logical that he, like Ronald Knox, must also accept the authority of the Catholic Church—it is both necessary and consistent. So, yes, feel free to question authority, but be sure to tease out the logic of your questions to their very end.

#CAMO #Catholic Answers #Carl Olson #Antifa #Protests #anti-authoritarianism #Politics

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therethinkers · 8 years ago

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get out: black educator edition (new orleans schools)

by a black educator in new orleans | pen name barbara jean wells

The 2015-2016 school year was easily the most traumatic work year of my adult life. I was a teacher at an alternative high school in New Orleans, a job very similar to one I left in Philadelphia. Alternative schools are intended to address the pushout crisis by creating spaces for students who have not found success in traditional schooling environments. Sometimes this is simply because they need a smaller environment than those provided by traditional schools. Sometimes it’s because they are the kids who have dropped out or been pushed out of the charters that claim to be educating ALL of our kids. Sometimes they are kids in the justice system, or young parents caring for children of their own. The possibilities are endless. It’s a population that I am very comfortable with, having worked in alternative education for a few years and also one that I care deeply about because of the unique challenges and struggles that come with serving youth.

Despite my passion for, and comfort with, alternative education, last year led me to question the very foundation that I had built my career as an educator on. I cried a lot, emoted on facebook, journaled during professional development meetings, frequented happy hours with other educator-friends and soaked it all away over margaritas paired with chips, and salsa (yes, we’ll need another pitcher). I worked out for self-care, got a therapist to maintain balance, and dug into my yoga practice to begin meditating regularly. I did the usual things one does when they’ve got a stressful job.

When those folks are teachers, all of the above are done with student stories sprinkled in between. Exasperating, funny, touching, and annoying moments with kids that make the job everything that it is. But when my coworkers and I went out to vent about a stressful day, the kids weren't the main topic of conversation. We talked about them, sure, but much more of our dialogue was spent on how racism played out in the daily grind of our work as educators. We vented about administrators whose savior complexes were evident in the very way they spoke to and about students. We talked about how meager the expectations were of our low-income, predominately Black kids. We talked about the lack of ability for our white coworkers to even acknowledge the life differences between themselves and their students, so great was their desire to be colorblind. And more than anything, we talked about how the behaviors that spawned from these beliefs about Black kids and the communities they came from indicated the same age-old (and, well… racist) idea that our students should not be expected to excel.

What I realized halfway through this school year was that my desire to center Blackness in the classroom, to help my students unlearn most of the things that the media told them about themselves, still had to be done within a racist system. Perhaps this isn’t shocking to folks of color who are teachers, but after 9 years in the profession, the realization hit me like a ton of bricks. The progress I felt like I was making in the classroom with my students was directly counteracted frequently by other staff members in the building: those who looked down on them, made wild assumptions about their lives based on stereotypical views of Black communities, and centered conversations about the kids on their academic deficits more than anything else.

So what exactly did this look like on a day-to-day basis?

Extreme white saviorism

For starters, the level of white saviorism was intense. In this alternative school setting it translated to exceedingly low expectations of students and their futures. In one staff meeting, a white teacher claimed that it was actually a great thing if students ended up working at local grocery stores after graduating because at least, “they weren’t in the streets shooting each other up.” Others nodded along in agreement.

The idea that they were essentially “saving” kids from themselves and the communities around them drove some staff members to befriend kids rather than encourage their academic or personal development. One white teacher whose actions were particularly infuriating, let’s call him Mr. Frank, taught special education students who struggled behaviorally and academically. In this setting, it meant his class was full of the Black boys who could not sit still. Students dubbed it the place you go to “listen to music and eat snacks.” In meetings, Mr. Frank spoke openly and often about all the academic tasks he felt like students were incapable of even trying. These ideas help to explain some of the trash that passed for rigor in his classroom. He let students print Wikipedia pages and paste them to trifolds for final project work. He excused them from completing assignments and rarely failed kids regardless of what their effort or attendance looked like. Instead of encouraging academic growth in any meaningful way, he took kids to the store, bought them food, and handed out money. Let’s pause here, because many of these things sound incredibly sweet when done by a family member or friend. And yes, relationships are super important when teaching. But building them isn’t the ONLY part of teaching. As educators we focus on building relationships with kids in order to better TEACH them. To do this we have to actually believe in their intellectual capabilities enough to push for their academic growth. Mr. Frank didn’t see the second part of the equation as important though. He thought so little of the kids’ intelligence that there was no urgency in actually teaching them. He was there to be nice to them. To call them his “boys.” To make friends.

Mr. Frank’s existence as a 60-something year old white man didn’t stop him from greeting Black kids as the n-word and jokingly calling a young woman a “ratchet ass bitch” in front of a group of males in order to get a laugh from them. In previous years before I had arrived to the school, Mr. Frank had a co-teacher who was a gay trans man. When students in his class had been verbally assaulting, and in one instance physically taunting the co-teacher, Mr. Frank simply ignored the situation. He claimed his co-teacher needed to make better relationships with the kids, instead of using the teachable moment to encourage students to confront their blatant homophobia and transphobia. It would not have been easy. But actual, true teaching never is.

Over the course of my year there, it became clear that Mr. Frank’s class was a fun holding cell. Its sole purpose was to have somewhere to put kids. And with the low expectations and easy grades, it wasn’t difficult to see how the desire to be a savior to his idea of poor, broken, Black kids translated to the goal of befriending his students rather than teaching them.

the following is a snapshot of interviews with teachers and students about their experience.

The privileging of white voice/ opinion

Outside of Mr. Frank’s outrageous everyday actions, another obvious indicator of racism in our workplace was the constant approval of white opinion and the subsequent shutting down of voices of color. One white teacher who was covering a Black educator’s classroom told students that their definition of racism, one that recognizes that all whites receive benefits and privileges from systems of white supremacy, was wrong because it made white people uncomfortable. He justified his assertion by coolly stating that he could speak to the issue because his partner was mixed race.

Over the course of the year, several teachers of color had complained about Mr. Frank’s behavior, specifically about their discomfort with him using the n-word and how his decision to do so made the workplace feel unsafe. They were told several times, “He has his methods.” Early in the year, a young Black woman was hired as his co-teacher but didn’t last in his classroom a month before needing to be placed with another educator. She expressed to me that he often seemed unprepared to teach and when she asked for lesson plans or outlines, she was scolded. He told her, “You don’t ask questions. I’ve been doing this for years. I’m the surgeon, you’re the assistant.” When she went to the principal with complaints of being treated condescendingly, she was reprimanded for causing trouble and made to sign a contract stating that she would never discuss Mr. Frank with other teachers while on the school premises.

Later in the year, when I tried to organize a meeting with a few teachers of color to talk about how best to deal with a white man calling Black kids the N-word, and brainstorm coping strategies for the growing list of racial microaggressions at work, I was called into the principal’s office for a meeting with her and the dean. Some folks suspected that someone had ratted me out and brought the principal the information. Others insisted that she regularly read staff emails. Either way, in the meeting I was made to apologize for my unprofessional behavior, despite the fact that I had previously addressed the principal with my concerns and was dismissed without any promise of further action.

All these instances taught an easy lesson. Other teachers of color and I quickly learned that if you had issues with how white teachers treated you, you kept your mouth shut. If you questioned how certain practices and behaviors were impacting students of color, you kept your mouth shut. And if you wanted to address issues of microgressions that made the workplace toxic, you didn’t discuss it at work in hopes of bringing about change. You went to happy hour with people you trusted and cried.

Valuing Intention over Impact

One of the major things that became apparent to me during my time at this school was how heavily white people who made the workspace uncomfortable leaned on their good intentions. Because everyone meant well, because everyone could couch their behaviors in the altruistic deed of educating Black kids with huge academic gaps, they did not seem to mind if their actions had negative impacts on coworkers of color or even the Black children they were supposed to be serving. When I realized this about my boss and coworkers, I began to see how strongly whiteness seeks to protect itself in schools. Everything from Mr. Frank’s “methods,” to teachers doing work for students they didn’t deem capable, to oft-expressed colorblind sentiments that white teachers used to make connections between themselves and the kids, were excused and never questioned because the people who did or said them “meant well.” It didn’t matter what impact this had on the kids and it sure as hell didn’t matter how it made staff members of color in the school feel.

It was around this time that I began to draw connections between law enforcement and education systems in this country. I knew from the many instances of cops who got off for murdering unarmed Black men and women, that whiteness in their institution also tended to protect itself. And much like with law enforcement, the issues that exist in education aren’t addressed as system-wide problems indicative of attitudes and biases towards people of color. Instead we discuss the few bad apples. In the education field, this means the teachers who DON’T care at all. They are essentially, the teachers with ill intent.

The problem with this approach is that most all white folks, teachers and otherwise, never see themselves as bad apples. They know that they mean well so they assume that they couldn’t possibly be a part of the problem. At this alternative school, the white folks who caused a great deal of the microaggressions could barely hear us decrying their actions and language. I imagine because our complaints were drowned out by the sound of them patting themselves on their backs every day for their hard work.

Recently, I read a headline that announced that percentages of Black teachers in the classroom have fallen drastically in the past few years. I didn’t bother reading the article because I felt like the wounds from last year were a little too raw for me to willingly subject myself to stories about why others like me may have been driven off. Halfway through the year when I was processing the notion of the education system being corrupt and failing to serve Black and Brown students, I posted a rant on Facebook. In it, I reflected on nearly 9 years in the education field and the experiences it took to get there. I specifically recalled going to grad school with people who made sweeping generalizations about Black/ Brown communities and consequently stereotyped their students as well. I remember smoking cigarettes after classes with fellow students of color lamenting the fact that some of the people in our Ivy League program were already in positions of power in schools full of Black children. I remember how proud they seemed of themselves for taking on the work of “fixing“ kids and schools, despite the lack of desire to fix their own racist viewpoints, language, approaches, etc.

Like last year, I brushed it all off over happy hours. I was still hopeful then. I thought that I could teach Black and Brown youth in a way that centered them, their stories, their beauty, and their lives. I did not consider that those grad school classmates who thought so little of us, and that people who shared their ideas, were already running the system and starting the charter schools. I did not consider that fighting for my kids essentially meant fighting against these people. It was a battle I was unprepared for when I first started teaching in 2007. It is a battle I expect to fight for the rest of my life. Though the new hope is to one day do it within an institution that is willing to take on the fight with me. This would save me from a career of holding my tongue until I get to half-priced drinks with other teachers of color who have learned that silence is the only way to stay in the ring.

#boutdatrethinklife respecttheyouth nolaed giveusfree freethemind education4liberation

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beansnobeef · 8 years ago

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7 layer burrito review

This is probably the closest taco bell comes to a hip modern burrito joint type burrito, rather than meat and cheese tubes. It’s also one of the oldest vegetarian items on the menu, somehow ostensibly healthy, as my mom would urge me to eat it instead of a bean and cheese tube. As an adult though I can tell you sour cream and guac are not actually all that much healthier for you than beans and cheese. This burrito is delicious, though. Yer mileage may depend on how much you like guac, but dang if this whole flavor profile doesn’t come together real well. It’s an underrated mainstay of the regular menu of Taco Bell.

I’ve been reading stuff by people “on the left side of the spectrum” who decry “SJWs” for being too crazy/out there/too far left. The folks saying this are generally trying to be sort of in that reasonable center position because going further left looks too tenuous and liable to lose you friends amongst people who are not also that far left. (because at the end of the day personal politics are more about what kind of social acceptance you want from which peers rather than anything like “principle” or an actual reasoned belief in how the world should be) A lot of the time when you interact with these folks they’ll delegitimize your social justice arguments as shrill. They’ll point out the hypocrisy in decrying child labor on an iPhone (which is irrelevant to whether or not child labor is bad or good). They’ll just flatly contradict statistics or demand and ignore evidence or try and deflect criticism by claiming their statements weren’t serious. Anything at all to avoid facing the criticisms head-on through argumentation or consideration.

And why would they? Most folks aren’t equipped with a strong critical thinking skillset. They’re not in the habit of rationally examining any part of their lives, let alone political statements. This isn’t a weakness in their ability or morality, at the end of the day rationality is wildly overrated and basically unnecessary to function as a human being. Most of the ideologies based around idolizing rationality only do so from the basis of the glamor that has inexplicably accrued to nerd-dom.

(It’s not actually inexplicable and has a lot to do with the development of new and very profitable technologies creating an advantage for the white men who helped enriched the old money folks who hired them, creating a feedback loop where these dudes have the most disposable income and thus cultural production geared toward them is advantaged, mostly in the form of heroic or power narratives that glamorize being a white male nerd throughout the 80s and 90s and 00s and 10s)

Actual rationality is scarce, unnecessary, and uncool (robotic, ahuman, unempathetic, cold, cruel, callous, etc) in most contexts. Is this a weird idea? I think it’s definitely something to consider. We live in a world where it’s basically impossible to change other people’s minds through rational debate and because we glamorize rationality this is treated as a sort of tragedy. The douchebag who runs the Oatmeal just did a really long comic about it. But like, think about the premise of these sort of sentiments. Rationality is good and awesome and separates us from the animals and lets us build jetplanes and basically a lot of these things are coterminous with “Science” as an idea. But at the end of the day think about it. What is the actual use value of rationality? Do you really need it in your day to day life, building arguments and justifications for why you eat or sleep or poop at any given moment? Do you need to be rational to gain power or influence in society? If we are living in a society built by irrational people using irrational means to gain power, what good is rationality? And if it is not that useful, why would people use it? They do not.

But that’s a little far afield here, back to the SJW thing. A lot of that comes back to folks not wanting to address the enormity of white supremacy or the relentlessness of transphobia. It’s not the arguments that scare them as much as the fundamental change that would be necessary to address them. The complete upheaval of their society and their worldview. More often than not a redress of their character, of their social habits, of their aspirations and goals and fears. A complete destruction of their present identity as beneficiaries of interlocking systems of oppression. It’s not a small thing, and it’s not an easy thing. I believe, and many others believe, it’s the Right thing to do.

At the end of the day, though, the personal benefit of maintaining a status quo outweighs conforming to an external moral code that causes literal self-harm, at least until we can create the social conditions where it’s more advantageous to follow that moral code than not. No amount of pointing out how fucked up of an individual you are for failing to give a shit about those around you will actually make you give a shit about those around you, that’s just something you have to come to in your life. A friend of mine accused me of being nihilist because I have a pretty bleak outlook on this, but honestly I don’t believe in free will and I think worrying too hard over vast systems in which you have no agency does no benefit to yourself. My advice is as always, love your friends and enemies and love yourself. Do what feels right to you. Express yourself completely. You might be a horrible person. I might be a horrible person. It happens. We’ll all be dead soon, and forgotten soon after that. That’s rationality with a little bit of sentiment mixed in. Awful, right?

#review #Taco Bell #vegetarian #7 layer burrito #rationality

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96thdayofrage · 3 years ago

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Because Black people don't exist as a monolith, relationships with each other are mostly defined by common experiences. Arguably, no communities within the Black diaspora have exhibited animosity between themselves than Africans and African Americans. To understand the friction between these communities is to closely examine white supremacy as a culprit. White supremacy is a system, or power structure, established to prioritise the feelings, interests, care, attention, and prosperity of White people even at the expense of other racial groups.

Its role in colonisation, violent capture and forceful removal of native Africans from their homelands is well documented. In truth, a significant number of African Americans today would have remained in Africa were it not for the disruptive event of the transatlantic slave trade. And although this has since been abolished, it has left internalised racism as a by-product for Black people to grapple with. To stay in context, Black Americans and Africans.

Source Of Tensions

African immigrants in America not only have to navigate systemic racism, but also microaggressions within African American spaces. But the migration regime that has enabled Africans to arrive in America to seek education, economic opportunities and others was made possible by the Civil Rights movement.

''I don't think this represents how all Black Americans think but I think the reason for this tension between Africans is that some Black Americans feel African immigrants come to America to take away opportunities,'' says Chanel Johnson, a Black American residing in Baltimore, Maryland, ''We are talking about opportunities in colleges that award scholarships and other educational or welfare packages to Black immigrants to thrive. We are also talking about opportunities away from academia. I also think dealing with racism and discrimination as Black Americans is pushing some of us to see how we are neglected and impoverished by the system.''

Although the friction between Black Americans and Africans predates social media popularity, a platform like Clubhouse for instance, is showing how this discord is ever-present. The voice-only app launched last year to massive reception, allowing for real-time conversations. Along the line it has produced xenophobic attitudes, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and antisemitism. Black Americans and Africans are no different when it comes to propping up long-held sentiments against each other.

''This in-fighting is such a regular theme on Clubhouse that whenever I enter the app and see no room with an inflammatory title targeting Africans or Black Americans, I always think something is wrong,'' shares Nigeria-based Tracy Imafidon. ''I have been in a room where a Black American man was openly xenophobic towards Nigerians and said we always cause problems wherever we go, even in America. On the contrary, Nigerians are doing well for themselves in America and becoming successful, whether it is school or work. And maybe this is what is eating Black Americans up? On the other side, I have also witnessed Nigerians and Africans be rude and uncouth towards Black Americans, using police brutality against them.''

Before Clubhouse, these kinds of interactions existed on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly enough, anything can act as a trigger. The cultural meltdown around the release of Beyoncé's Black Is King visual album last year, where Africans criticized it for flattening various African experiences pitted them against Black Americans. Or even this tweet that proclaims Black American culture as the blueprint for other Black cultures.

Common Struggles Much?

Despite the differences in realities that Black groups have, the news cycle has shown how Black people around the world and their political struggles are intersecting across white supremacy, imperialism and capitalist exploitation. The establishment of the police system during colonialism and slavery was primarily to subjugate people and protect capitalist interests. With anti-police brutality movements like Black America's #BlackLivesMatter and Nigeria's #ENDSARS, Black people are finding commonalities in their struggles.

Chris Edeh, a Nigerian-American currently residing in the UK, is more curious about solutions. ''What I have noticed about these divisions is that you don't actively need White people to divide Black people. We as Black people have internalized what white people have said about us and we use it against each other, and this is why we should embrace Pan-Africanism and read the works of Pan-Africanist thinkers. This doesn't mean we should ignore our differences. There are different groups of White people, but history shows how they had one thing in mind — capitalist expansion and accumulation of wealth via slavery and colonization. Likewise, Black people need to be united for the goal of liberation. I'm talking about having a Pan-African consciousness.''

Not all Black people subscribe to Pan-Africanism, an anti-slavery and anti-colonisation movement formed in the 19th Century and built on the premise that people of African descent should be in solidarity to achieve common goals. And while Pan-Africanism pushed for the liberation of Africans and those in the diaspora, the era of independence installed African dictators who once espoused Pan-African ideas but still went ahead and oppressed their own people. It's also why Pan-Africanism failed to deliver socio-economic prosperity for Africans.

''I don't believe in Pan-Africanism as the approach to address issues within Black communities,'' argues Joan Agyapong, a Ghanaian feminist living in Accra. She adds: ''Africa itself is too polarized and there's also the need for the continent to decolonise or break away from colonial notions that have been instilled in us. What I will recommend for individual Black communities is to continue to build enough political and revolutionary power to combat its issues on small levels. And you know what? It's already happening. We all in Ghana admired the END SARS movement in Nigeria and what it sought to achieve. I think it's rather lazy to suggest Black universality as a revolutionary praxis when today's Black realities contain more nuance than before.''

The existing tensions between Africans and Black Americans can also be seen through the lens of American exceptionalism and imperialism. America as a global power wields much cultural and political clout that it provides a ready infrastructure for Black Americans to be hyper-visible than other Black groups. Unwittingly, their experiences and culture is framed as a kind of 'superior Blackness,' filtering into their interactions with others on the Black spectrum. At least, mutual respect and understanding are necessary for Black Americans and Africans to co-exist courteously.

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radthursdays · 7 years ago

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#RadThursdays Roundup 06/15/2017

A frowning child holds up a postcard that reads, "White supremacy is killing me". Source.

Issues

Fighting Words: "On May 26, 2017, white supremacist Jeremy Christian allegedly murdered two men and maimed another as they attempted to defend two women he took to be Muslim from his abuse on Portland public transit. Days later, appearing in court, Christian roared out the same refrain that conservatives and far-right agitators alike have been repeating online for years: Racist violence is free speech. 'Get out if you don’t like free speech,' he howled. 'You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.' Words have consequences. What was surprising was not how precisely a bloodthirsty criminal can echo the language employed both on racist reddit forums and by milquetoast liberal commentators wondering whether left-wing student activists aren’t the real fascists after all. What was surprising was that anyone at all was surprised. Where did you think this was going to end? When you start telling people that standing up for racism and bigotry makes them brave free speech defenders, they’re going to believe you, and they’re going to act on it. Two men are dead in Portland, and their murderer believes himself a hero. Internet, take a good look at your boy."

Three Thoughts on Emotional Labour: "Acknowledging the ways that emotional labour goes unseen and uncredited is important. We need to name the exploitation and devaluation of this important work. At the same time, the acknowledgement that emotional labour is frequently exploited has translated into a belief that emotional labour is inherently exploitative. As a femme who frequently performs emotional labour, both in my personal and professional life, I do not appreciate my important, needed, complex skill set being framed as something that is necessarily oppressive to me. I do not appreciate the suggestion that I am somehow being tricked into doing the hard and necessary work that is deeply important to me. This discourse devalues emotional labour. So, instead of assuming that emotional labour is necessarily and inevitably exploitative, can we consider how we might accept emotional labour ethically?"

Anti-Civilization AMA: Interesting AMA from a few anti-civ anarchists that address some of the most common questions around transphobia and ableism, along with questions about gardening, cities, asteroids, and more. "First, I would say that a huge amount of illness and disability is a product of civilization […] Second, a huge amount of folk medicine has been lost and nearly wiped out by specialization and the division of labor. I think the technocratic medical establishment, broadly speaking, is a symptom of and producer of deskilling and dependence. […] Third, I think a critique of the medical establishment is important for keeping our perspective of its value in check. […] Fourth, a huge part of the reason we need specialized care for certain groups like the elderly, sick, and disabled is that most people do not have the time and energy to care for those to whom they are close and do not live with them, and moreover because many people do not have close ties and so need to seek care from specialists. […] Fifth, as regards trans people, I am not trans myself and do not claim to know that experience (or anyone else's experience) except by inference; but I am or have been close with a number of people who identify as gender non-conforming in different ways and have talked with them at some length on these topics. Some have told me that they think some significant part of their gender dysphoria is a result of the intense imposition of gendered ideology that has always characterized civilization, and that they might feel it less intensely in a very different world."

People lie on the ground outside the Wisconsin capitol holding tombstones above them as part of a die-in to protest the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The tombstones list various reasons for death: "Pre-Existing Condition: Being Female", "Pre-Existing Condition: Cancer", "Cut From Medicaid", "Couldn't Afford Premium", "Suicide: Mental Health Coverage Optional", "Pre-Existing Premium Too High", and "One of the 24 Million". Source.

Women in Refrigerators

eyes I dare not meet in dreams: Short story by Sunny Moraine. "At 2:25 a.m. on a quiet Friday night on a deserted country road in southeastern Pennsylvania, the first dead girl climbed out of her refrigerator."

Women in Refrigerators: "'Women in Refrigerators' can refer to three different pages on TVTropes: Disposable Woman: A female character, who is present in the story just so that she can be attacked. Her attack spurns the story forward, and that's all. Stuffed into the Fridge: A character is killed off in a particularly gruesome manner and left to be found just to offend or insult someone, or to cause someone serious anguish. Women In Refrigerators: The original website, created by Gail Simone, documenting the disproportionate tendency of female characters in comic books to be brutalized."

Short Business: "Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams" by Sunny Moraine: "Moraine's creepy short story is taking on that most despised of tropes - fridging the ladies. Fridging is the practise of killing a character (usually a female, non-binary, chromatic or LGBTQ character, and including characters that have intersectional identities) in order to further a plot. Characters are usually fridged in order to give a male character (generally a cisgendered, straight and white male character) the motivation to pursue a goal or embark on a quest. Stories that hinge on an instance of fridging also tend to focus on the male character's emotional pain and desire for revenge rather than the life, feelings or pain of the character who gets fridged."

A smiling Black woman poses with her sign that reads, "Pay Me Like A White Man!" at the Women's March in Washington, D.C. back in January. Source.

Direct Action Item

June 11th was the International Day of Solidarity with Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. "Each year, June 11th serves as a day for us to remember our longest imprisoned anarchist comrades through words, actions and ongoing material support." Prisoner support is important, under-acknowledged work. What can you do to help? From regular correspondence, being on a support team, and fundraising to sharing prisoners' stories and words, putting up flyers, and writing one-off letters, your imagination—and unfortunately, prison correspondence restrictions—is the limit!

A large billboard displays a quote by Robert Jones: "We can disagree and still love each other—unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist." Source.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

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fetus-cakes · 8 years ago

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a friend of mine linked this interesting article: How French intellectuals ruined the West and it has some interesting ideas but I need to nitpick at a few things

“This, along with Foucauldian ideas, underlies the current belief in the deeply damaging nature of “microaggressions” and misuse of terminology related to gender, race or sexuality.” Is she suggesting that microagressions are not deeply damaging? Or that the language used to discuss gender, race or sexuality does NOT affect the politics of the discussion at hand, sometimes even making the argument itself aggressive?

“we are at a unique point in history where the status quo is fairly consistently liberal, with a liberalism that upholds the values of freedom, equal rights and opportunities for everyone regardless of gender, race and sexuality.” This is highly subjective depending on who and where you are! In response to this, I’m just going to copy a status written by a transgender woman living in Oregon: “But think of the time we exist in. Where fascists have full backing of the cops to beat people on the streets with impunity, where women’s health is being attacked simply out of violent misogyny to the point where almost every form of health care for women is being threatened, and where the right-wing is getting more and more violent and dangerous and powerful while the attempts to be kind and compromise have only made the problem worse because the fascists interpret that as weakness and have openly stolen elections and given rise to a whole resurgence of literal nazis happily sieg hieling across America.” These two women are literally talking about modern times in the same country!

“Freedom of speech is under threat because speech is now dangerous. So dangerous that people considering themselves liberal can now justify responding to it with violence. The need to argue a case persuasively using reasoned argument is now often replaced with references to identity and pure rage.” Speech has always been dangerous. Speeches about how black people are shiftless criminals, Muslims are violent sexist terrorists, trans women are child rapists are dangerous. Yes, we have to watch ourselves not to censor others just because we catch a whiff or a hint of opposition. At the same time I see nothing wrong with censoring racist, white supremacist speeches done in public places by drowning them out with megaphone noise. Is this the violence she speaks about? Or is she talking about people vandalizing and setting the Free Speech bus on fire? Because that bus was literally a tool to spread hatred and misinformation around, stopping it was an action that benefited everyone. Extreme yes, but also justified. I know saying “the end justifies the means” is a dangerous thing to say, because it can easily slide into becoming oppression. It’s something important to watch out for. However, I don’t think it’s NEVER appropriate, I’m just not that hardcore of a pacifist.

“Despite all the evidence that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia are at an all-time low in Western societies, Leftist academics and SocJus activists display a fatalistic pessimism,” Again, highly subjective and a tad too optimistic in my opinion (this piece was published March 27 of this year, post-US election and post-all the shitstorms that came of it). There is truth here in that people tend to focus on the negative and that the negative tends to make bigger news than the positive. THAT SAID I’m really doubting that “all time low” when in the US and Europe literal white supremacy parties are getting a lot of political traction. Heck, I’d say the way that the US election and Brexit happened was due to xenophobia. What’s the reality then?

“In South Africa, the #ScienceMustFall and #DecolonizeScience progressive student movement announced that science was only one way of knowing that people had been taught to accept. They suggested witchcraft as one alternative.” I thought we were talking about Western postmodernism here? And this statement has been heavily condemned by African scientists and scholars, some of them even the students at the event! Also one person/group going to an illogical extreme doesn't mean the entire movement is invalid. This reminds me of the BLM activist who suggested we phase out the police entirely: an very reactionary and implausible goal; but that doesn't negate the fact that police brutality is highly racialized and that's a big problem. Racist bias in science and medicine are a problem too.

“I encountered the same problem when trying to write about race and gender at the turn of the seventeenth century. I’d argued that Shakespeare’s audience’s would not have found Desdemona’s attraction to Black Othello, who was Christian and a soldier for Venice, so difficult to understand because prejudice against skin color did not become prevalent until a little later in the seventeenth century when the Atlantic Slave Trade gained steam, and that religious and national differences were far more profound before that. I was told this was problematic by an eminent professor and asked how Black communities in contemporary America would feel about my claim. If today’s African Americans felt badly about it, it was implied, it either could not have been true in the seventeenth century or it is morally wrong to mention it.” Problematic does not mean “it shouldn’t exist”, it means “you need to examine this more closely and critically to make sure it passes muster”. Studying racism and colorism and how attitudes towards black people have fluctuated across the ages is actually important work!, but you do have to watch out with how you present and phrase things. And I think you’re reading too much into that implication, because I get the feeling most non-Shakespearean scholars would find that tidbit fascinating.

“The rise of populism and nationalism in the US and across Europe are also due to a strong existing far-Right and the fear of Islamism produced by the refugee crisis.” I agree with this, but it seems in contradiction to the earlier bit about how such things are at an all-time low.

“The Left is not responsible for the far-Right or the religious-Right or secular nationalism, but it is responsible for not engaging with reasonable concerns reasonably and thereby making itself harder for reasonable people to support. It is responsible for its own fragmentation, purity demands and divisiveness which make even the far-Right appear comparatively coherent and cohesive.

We must address concerns about immigration, globalism and authoritarian identity politics currently empowering the far- Right rather than calling people who express them “racist,” “sexist” or “homophobic” and accusing them of wanting to commit verbal violence.” So we should address these concerns, but not identify the root cause? We can acknowledge and validate people’s concern while still pointing out that these ideologies were borne from prejudice and hatred. This last bit seems overly concerned with white fragility: we can tell people they’re wrong, but if they call them racist the whole argument gets shut down. If this is the problem, what solution is the author suggesting? That we tiptoe around the feelings of the people who are (ignorantly or not) espousing harmful ideas?

#long post #politics #identity politics #postmodernism #fetus talks

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants…use to destabilize radical movements….Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles.

– Courtney Desiree Morris, “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements”

How is it that revolutionary libertarian fervor can exist so harmoniously with machismo? It is far too easy in this instance to say that “it is hard to locate our tormentor. It’s so pervasive, so familiar. We have known it all our lives. It is our culture.” Because…the essences of liberty so illustriously espoused by these people have not extended their definition of freedom to their sisters.

– Ruby Flick, “Anarcha-Feminism”

The relationship between anarchism and feminism is a peculiar one. Though there has been exponential interest in anarchist movements, theory, and studies in the past twenty years, this increase has not necessarily lead to an expanse of writing or theorizing on the relationship between anarchism and feminism. While feminism has become a deep enough concern that most contemporary anarchist texts make mention of it in one way or another, there have been very few texts dedicated solely to this question. The most prominent among them is a new expanded edition of the formative collection, Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader.

Though many online articles and pamphlets from women and queer people, as well as myriad personal accounts and reports, insist that feminism is necessary in anarchist movements, the crushing reality of gendered violence in radical antiauthoritarian communities has yet to be adequately addressed.1 How might our approach to the relationship between anarchism and feminism be related to the continuing problem of gendered violence within radical communities? And how might we re-envision it in creative, productive ways?

(Art by N.O. Bonzo)

Let us slow down a minute, though, and be clear about some terms. At the crux of this discussion is the presence of gendered violence in radical communities in the US. “Radical communities” is a relatively loose term for interactive spaces of the radical Left committed to antiauthoritarian organizing methods and ideas.2 Sometimes, these are intentional groups of people organized around a particular geographic location; sometimes, they might be virtual spaces where people come together to discuss particular issues or political tendencies. Unfortunately, the problem of gendered violence is widespread enough in a variety of communities organized around radical antiauthoritarian politics that we can see similar forms of it operating despite widely varying locations, intentions, and histories.

“Gendered violence” includes a range of forms of violence exercised in order to enforce the gender binary (and the structures of power from which it is formed), the most prominent examples being sexual and domestic violence, sexual harassment, and discrimination on the basis of gender identity, gender expression, or sexual preference. Taking as central the work of many feminists of color, we should work against the notion that this is strictly a form of interpersonal violence and reiterate at the outset that gendered violence is a form of systemic violence that is directly and intimately bound up in other institutionalized forms of violence, including capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism.3 Of particular concern is how contemporary approaches to the relationship between anarchism and feminism normalize gendered violence within radical communities that are created in order to confront structures and institutions of oppression.

Perhaps one of the strongest contentions that prevent a critical engagement with the reality of gendered violence in radical communities is the simple fact that these spaces do not exist in an insulated place apart from mainstream society. This fact is often upheld as an explanation for the presence of gendered violence in radical spaces, since coming into such a space does not immediately undo dominant types of socialization.4 And this is fair enough, since it does help reckon with the presence of overarching structures of institutional and interpersonal violence in spaces meant to confront them. However, we run into trouble when this logic becomes an excuse rather than an attempt to take a truly radical approach, or one that seeks to understand where and how it is rooted. Because, while it is true that these communities do not exist outside of those dominant forms of social organization, this reasoning does not account for the fact that these communities are supposed to be grounded in radical commitments that would begin to eradicate these forms of violence, rather than enable them.

To gain a sense of the prevalence of these forms of violence just talk to most any non-cis male of any radical community and you’ll likely hear an unending series of stories that run the gamut of violent behavior, from everyday microaggressions, including misogynistic and transphobic comments, to outright acts of physical and mental abuse.

(Art by Remedios Varo)

These attitudes and practices become normalized using the logic and language of radicalism. For example, we can look to the particular ways hypermasculinity prevalent in radical spaces mutates the promotion of direct action into a valorization of violence.. We can also see how a lack of community-based accountability processes, combined with pressure not to disclose abuse and assault to other community members, local antiviolence organizations, or state agents, creates conditions where there are no ramifications for gendered violence.5 And even when there are accountability mechanisms, cis men often function as gatekeepers which create accountability processes in which those who are most harmed by gendered violence are not in control of the structures used to address it. In each of these examples, we can see how radical ideals provide spaces for gendered violence to flourish rather than reducing its negative impacts.

So what does this have to do with the contemporary relationship between anarchism and feminism? The reality of gendered violence in radical communities seems to be one of the most salient questions that an engagement with feminism should help anarchism address. However, it is one that is often cautiously ignored or rerouted to more hushed, private discussions to be had internally within particular organizations. Perhaps in a world that can be hostile to anarchism itself, it can feel dangerous to talk about the problems within our communities for fear of providing fodder to critics. However, it is infinitely more dangerous to ignore the continued challenges of those of us who experience and witness not only the effects, but the perpetuation of heteropatriarchy within radical communities, especially since ignoring the problem ends up adding weight to critiques that suggest anarchism is incapable of providing real-world solutions to broad-based problems of domination. This trend might also be replicated in contemporary theoretical approaches to anarchism and feminism.

There are three overarching trends in discussions of anarchism and feminism Here I emphasize the benefits of each while suggesting various limitations. These approaches include the genealogical approach, the equivalent approach, and the exchange approach. The typical approaches have helped us better understand the history of feminist anarchists and anarchist feminists (the genealogical approach); the traits and practices that are shared by them both historically and today (the equivalent approach); and what might they be able to learn from each other (the exchange approach). However, these approaches have prevented us from addressing a crucial question that underlies the continued push for feminist praxis in anarchist spaces: how do misogyny, heteropatriarchy, and transphobia become normalized within anarchist theories and practices?8 Each fails to pay attention, however, to one of the most significant advances in feminist scholarship of the past twenty years: the employment of feminism as a critical methodology and praxis; that is, as a body of work that enables us to contend with the ways in which gendered and sexualized forms of institutionalized violence are not only intertwined with, but incorporated into, a variety of social, political, and cultural structures and spaces. This method is based on the work of feminists of color who have consistently demonstrated the necessity of this approach, using it to apprehend feminism itself.6

Understanding the structure of the dominant approaches is essential here because it helps answer the question not only of what the relationship between anarchism and feminism is, but why it has historically taken these shapes. That is, what questions has the conversation surrounding the relationship been seeking to answer? That is, how are these structures supported within anarchist spaces, using anarchist logics, rather than just as imports from mainstream society?

The Genealogical Approach

One of the most popular methods of approaching the relationship between anarchism and feminism is the genealogical approach. In this approach, the focus is on establishing a history of anarchist feminist thinkers, often presented chronologically. While each version of this approach may vary in what politics it highlights in its survey of thinkers, what they have in common is the goal of creating a distinct history of anarchist feminist thought. This genealogy provides the architecture for popular engagements, such as the collection Quiet Rumours, which features writings from anarchist feminist thinkers spanning the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.8

In her chapter of The Anarchist Turn, entitled “Of What is Anarcha-Feminism the Name?,” Cinzia Arruzza employs this genealogical model in her attempt to articulate “the peculiar aspects of the critique of women’s oppression” in early anarchist feminist texts in order to establish how “these aspects coalesce to produce an original view that anticipates Second Wave feminism.” Here, Arruzza lays out the genealogy of anarchist feminist thought, moving from late 19th century writers Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre to mid-twentieth century writers like Carol Ehrlich, Peggy Kornegger, Lynne Farrow, and Marian Leighton, ending in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century influences of poststructuralist feminism, queer theory, and ecofeminism.9

Understanding this genealogy has proven important for understanding anarchist feminism as a distinct and (relatively) cohesive theoretical tradition, especially since this genealogy provides a formulation that exists alongside and within the history of anarchism, rather than arising as an ancillary concern. In the best case, this approach is useful in that it helps to establish a history of thinkers who understood how deeply intertwined gendered and class violence were in the time that they were writing. This is important in that it helps demonstrate that the question of gendered oppression has been a part of anarchism for at least a century, rather than a contemporary development. In the worst case, however, this approach is used to dispel any criticism of misogyny or heteropatriarchy in anarchist spaces or history by holding up particular individual anarchist feminists as tokens.10 Instead of using the history of anarchist feminist thinkers to argue for considering gendered oppression as a central concern, this latter case disposes of the need for such a discussion by replacing a concerted effort to understand the intersections of gendered and class systems with a representational model of integration that effectively denies the existence of such systems in the first place.

Of course, this is not to argue that we should do away with this approach simply because there are people who abuse it in order to neglect the material effects of gendered and sexualized hierarchies. Rather, the slippage between the best and worst case scenarios highlight a structural problem in the approach itself that prevents it from adequately articulating an inherent opposition to the gendered and sexualized hierarchies upon which misogyny and heteropatriarchy depend. That is, both in theory and in practice, the approach of laying out a genealogy does not intrinsically work against the presence of gendered and sexualized hierarchies within contemporary anarchist spaces. Instead, it provides a genealogy of critiques of dominant society from an anarchist feminist perspective that can be mobilized to direct attention away from self-critique.

In this way, a genealogical approach is not effective for addressing sexual violence in contemporary radical communities. This is for reasons that affect both the structure and content of anarchist feminist history, as well as its influence on the contemporary moment. In the simplest terms, this is a matter of direction. The genealogical approach, in both structure and content, often places anarchist feminisms alongside anarchism more broadly, looking out.11 Thus, the history provided by the genealogical approach provides a grounded historical analysis of how anarchist feminist writers have critiqued the gendered and sexualized stigmas of dominant society. However, it doesn’t necessarily help us understand the legacies of sexual violence in anarchist communities or how people have resisted them. Nor does it help us understand how hierarchical structures have become normalized within those spaces to such an extent that they continue to be a prominent issue in communities that profess a rejection of the structures through which such violence in constructed and maintained.

The Equivalent Approach

The limitations of the genealogical approach are, in some ways, mirrored in the equivalent approach that became popular in the mid-twentieth century. Exemplified by Peggy Kornegger’s 1975 pamphlet “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” the equivalent approach articulates the relationship between anarchism and feminism as one of interchangeability. As Kornegger famously argued, “It is my contention that feminists have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years.”12 Lynn Farrow echoed this sentiment the same year when she argued that “feminism practices what anarchism preaches,” as did Marian Leighton the next year when she argued that “the refining distinction from radical feminist to anarcho-feminist is largely that of making a step in self-conscious theoretical development.”13 We can see expressed in these examples differentiated expressions of the same core values and practices.

This approach has proven important for emphasizing the theoretical consistency across the rejection of hierarchy by anarchists and the rejection of heteropatriarchy by feminists. In this way, the equivalent approach attempts to preclude the existence of a nonfeminist anarchism while also arguing that women are particularly well-positioned for anarchist practice, echoing developing articulations of a Marxist feminist epistemology that arose a few years later in the early 1980s.14 Kornegger described feminists of the time as “intuitive anarchists” which, according to her, put “women in the unique position of being the bearers of a subsurface anarchist consciousness which…can take us further than any previous group toward the achievement of total revolution.”15 This approach, then, attempts not only to highlight a theoretical equivalence but also to articulate the practical results of such a theoretical intervention. The danger of this approach, however, is related to its most important contribution—the preclusion of the existence of a nonfeminist anarchism. By articulating anarchism and feminism as equivalent, this model prevents an engagement with anarchism using a critical feminist lens that aims to expose the practical affinities that anarchists have found between anarchism and heteropatriarchy, leading to its continued presence in anarchist spaces.

The limitations of using this approach in order to attend to the sustained existence of sexual violence in radical communities are similar, then, to those discussed in terms of the genealogical approach. Again, this method doesn’t allow for an understanding of anarchism as a space where, for whatever reasons, the social, cultural, and political bases for sexual violence remain intact, reified by radical principles. It’s not that these reasons are not important, but rather, they are hidden by this approach; as a result, we lack a substantial body of work that helps understand what these reasons are, where they come from, and how they are maintained. In this approach, feminism and anarchism are enacted as equivalent forms of radical resistance, divesting from feminism its critical possibilities.

Foregrounding equivalence, rather than the critical potential of feminism for anarchism, this approach to anarchist feminism creates the illusion that anarchism and feminism are inherently synonymous. Though this approach has been important in emphasizing the similarities, it also prevents the use of feminism as a critical lens through which to assess how heteropatriarchal structures become normalized within anarchist theory and practice. This critical feminist assessment of anarchism seems essential to understanding how sexual violence proliferates not only in radical communities, but also through the actions of radical people, including those who are sincerely committed to nonhierarchical and antiauthoritarian principles. It is not enough to simply argue that sexual violence committed by radical people is merely a result of a continuing infection of dominant ideas that bleed into radical communities. Rather, we must be honest about the fact that, for many of these people, the violence that occurs may not, to them, seem out of line with their radical principles.

The equivalent approach precludes this type of inquiry by articulating anarchism and feminism as not only theoretically unified but also inherently synonymous in practice. What is more, this approach also precludes a more developed discussion of how certain forms of feminism also end up reifying structures of oppression, ranging from radical feminist investments in transphobia to liberal feminist investments in the state.14 Within the equivalent model, feminism becomes synonymous with a very particular rendition of radical feminism. Such an approach hinders our ability to critically assess feminism as well as anarchism, preventing us from seeing a fuller picture of how certain forms of feminism have been, and continue to be, complicit not only with state power and capitalism, but also with gendered violence.

The Exchange Approach

The attempt to rectify this limitation is central to the exchange approach that characterizes most of the contemporary writing on anarchism and feminism. In recent years, numerous writers have attempted to account for the diversity of feminist thought in their discussions of the relationship between anarchism and feminism. Articles like J. Rogue and Deric Shannon’s “Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality,” and Abbey Volcano and J. Rogue’s “Insurrection at the Intersection: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Anarchism,” destabilize this monolithic engagement with feminism in order to emphasize the work of feminists of color. For instance, drawing on the notion of “intersectionality” first named by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, Shannon and Rogue argue that “anarchists could learn a lot” from feminists of color, especially “about the importance of addressing the needs of ALL sections of the working class and their attempts to check the tendency of the Left to ignore or dismiss the concerns, needs, ideas, and leadership of people living in the dangerous intersections of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.”

Drawing on the work of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a “national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and our communities through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing,” Rogue and Shannon bring the critiques that feminists of color had of white liberal feminism to bear on contemporary anarchism. Similarly, Volcano and Rogue use the example of radical approaches to reproductive freedom to demonstrate why anarchists must incorporate an approach to feminism that recognizes the multiple ways that “capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy…have required control over bodies”—a control that has been differentially enacted upon the bodies of women of color and queer folks. Echoing the work of feminist writers Andrea Smith and Dorothy Roberts, Volcano and Rogue argue for “an anarchist intersectional analysis of reproductive freedom” that can account for the differential ways that people experience both the restrictions of their reproductive freedom as well as the structure and content of their movements to fight against these restrictions.16 In both of these cases, contemporary anarchist writers attend to the important interventions of feminists of color in order to reconfigure the approach in a way that recognizes not only the diversity of feminist thought, but also the critical potential of feminism as well.

(Art by Remedios Varo)

However, there is also an important limitation to the exchange approach. In particular, this approach is often predicated on the idea of a bidirectional exchange enabled through a process of synthesis. As Rogue and Shannon put it, “We firmly believe that this learning process is a two-way street.” Because of this, they argue that “when synthesizing our practice to include these concerns raised by feminists, feminism could stand to benefit from learning from anarchism as well.” This method is echoed in Volcano and Rogue’s article, which attempts to use a synthetic method to develop an “anarchist intersectionality,” as well as in the collection Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, the introduction of which is titled “Queer Meet Anarchism, Anarchism Meet Queer.” In these formulations, the presumption is not only that anarchism needs feminism, but that feminism needs anarchism, as well. And, of course, there are many instances in which this seems to be the case—for instance, in the case of trans-exclusive feminism or in schools of feminist thought that look to the state for liberation, and which see advanced class status as an indication of progress against gendered oppression.17

However, this element of the exchange approach is limited in its implication that feminisms of color, in particular, require the influence of anarchism. Rogue and Shannon argue that “anarchism can provide a radical base from which to critique liberal interpretations of intersectionality,” as well as “a critical analysis of the state.” But it is not clear why feminists of color would need anarchism to provide a “critical analysis of the state,” as Shannon and Rogue note, when such an analysis is often central to the feminism they espouse. For instance, INCITE!, the organization from which Rogue and Shannon draw their analysis, is expressly antistate, arguing for an understanding of sexual violence that views it as one example of statist violence enacted through systems of colonialism and militarism.

What is more, while anarchism is grounded in a political method of prefiguration that moves beyond a critique of the state in order to envision social organization outside of nation-states, there has been no engagement with Native thinkers that moves beyond their inclusion in lists of ethno-racial groups. Compelling alternatives to the nation-state exist throughout hundreds of Native tribes and nations on this land, who demonstrate alternative modes of social organization prior to the establishment of the US nation-state in particular, as well as the nation-state structure in general—modes which continue to this day, as Native peoples enact and fight for sovereignty and self-determination.18 What each of these examples demonstrate is not that there is nothing that Native feminists and feminists of color have in common with anarchists (or that there may not be people who see themselves as part of both groups) but rather that Native feminists and feminists of color have historically come to their own critiques of the state and capitalism, as well as visions for alternative methods of social organization, through different genealogies than those of anarchists. That is, though not all feminists of color and Native feminists have offered an anticapitalist and antistate analysis, there are certainly enough that it remains questionable that these thinkers would need to turn to anarchism for these critical analyses. Because of this, any approach to anarchism and feminism should affirm these differing genealogies, concurring with the insistence of Native feminists and feminists of color that they can explain and resist their own oppression best on their own terms.

The limitations of the exchange approach for dealing with sexual violence within radical communities stem from a lack of this affirmation, grounded in the misassumption of a bidirectional exchange between the two bodies of thought. In the simplest terms, we cannot assume that feminists, particularly Native feminists and feminists of color, must be required to take something from anarchism in exchange for their critical interventions. Sexual violence is a problem that, regardless of politics, is predominantly perpetrated by white men and has the strongest negative impact on women and queer folks of color.19 This is a problem that is often replicated in radical communities and, in our attempt to better articulate the relationship between anarchism and feminism, we can’t ignore the presence of this unequal relationship. That is, because sexual violence in radical communities disproportionately affects women and queer folks, especially those of color, we can’t assume that intellectual exchange between feminism and anarchism, a body of theory that is still dominated by white male thinkers, should be bidirectional either. This isn’t to say that anarchism has nothing to offer feminists, necessarily. Rather, we would need to be very clear about what it is that anarchism brings to the table that hasn’t already been put forward by women of color and Native women critiquing mainstream feminism. As it stands, it isn’t clear what this intervention would be.20

(Art by N.O. Bonzo)

Conclusion

Attending to a different framing of the relationship between anarchism and feminism is paramount because of the very real, material effects that sexual violence has on particular populations within and without radical spaces. This is a need that continues to be reasserted, as instances of sexual and gendered violence seem to be woven into the fabric of radical resistance in the US. As Morris notes, “Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations.” This is both because it enables certain members of radical communities to enact violence on others with impunity, and because it enables agents of state repression, such as informants, to exploit those weaknesses as well. Luft makes a similar observation in her piece, “Looking for Common Ground: Relief Work in Post-Katrina New Orleans as an American Parable of Race and Gender Violence,” highlighting how instances of gendered violence in a particular radical community pushed a foundationally antiracist organization to mutate the logic of their radical politics in ways that are “almost generic” as a “discrete example of sexism and violence.”21 Both emphasize the detrimental effects not just for survivors, but also for the movements of which they are a part. As Morris notes, “Radical movements cannot afford the destruction that gender violence creates,” because “if we underestimate the political implications of patriarchal behaviors on our communities, the work will not survive.”22

Each approach is predicated on the question of how we might consider anarchism and feminism together. The result is that each attempts to articulate the positive connections between these two bodies of thought: the genealogical approach attempts to highlight individual thinkers throughout history who have built the anarchist feminist tradition; the equivalent approach argues that anarchism and feminism are not only similar, but synonymous; and the exchange approach suggests that anarchists and feminists must come together to create a synthesis of the two that is grounded in principles of bidirectional influence. Each of these approaches has provided useful contributions, both theoretical and practical. However, we need to move beyond these approaches to ask the more complicated question that undergirds the persistence of gendered violence in anarchist communities: what is the relationship between anarchism and heteropatriarchy, misogyny, and transphobia?

Addressing this question requires understanding feminism as a method or praxis through which to practice self-critique, rather than only as a body of analysis. Though self-critique is not entirely absent from Leftist movements, few have integrated it as an intrinsic part of the movement as deeply as feminist movements of the past 40 years. In a recent interview, Black anticapitalist feminist bell hooks discusses this as a core reason for her continued identification with feminism, despite its problems:

My militant commitment to feminism remains strong, and the main reason is that feminism has been the contemporary social movement that has most embraced self-interrogation. When we, women of color, began to tell white women that females were not a homogenous group, that we had to face the reality of racial difference, many white women stepped up to the plate. I’m a feminist in solidarity with white women today for that reason, because I saw these women grow in their willingness to open their minds and change the whole direction of feminist thought, writing and action. This continues to be one of the most remarkable, awesome aspects of the contemporary feminist movement.23

For hooks, this is one of the core elements of feminist praxis that makes it distinct from other radical Left movements and thought. It is this vision of feminist praxis that is missing from the approaches that I described above.

To be sure, emphasizing the contradictions of a nonfeminist anarchism, or one that does not recognize the fight against gendered structures of oppression in its rejection of hierarchy, is a necessary project. Likewise, so is emphasizing the places where these bodies of work intersect. However, such work does not help us understand how those structures become manifest in radical communities, using radical political logic and language. As Ruby Flick points out in one of the epigraphs to this piece, it is too easy an answer to merely say that gendered oppression, including gendered violence, in radical communities is only a result of their presence within a system where heteropatriarchy is omnipresent. Rather, we must ask the more difficult question of how we can come to terms with not only the presence but also the tacit sanctioning of gendered violence that is enabled through our failure to address how it becomes rooted and reinforced using radical principles.

This question is much more difficult both to accept and to address. It’s an uncomfortable question, because it requires that we critically assess anarchism and its limitations—something that can feel very dangerous in a world where anarchism carries such negative connotations and is often misrepresented in truly disfiguring ways. The title to this piece, “Coming to Terms,” is used to invoke the process of addressing this question because it underscores two related practices that are essential to developing a transformative approach to anarchism and feminism that is capable of addressing the persistence of gendered violence in radical communities. First, we must come to terms in the sense that we must acknowledge the presence of gendered violence in the particular forms that both its exercise and its defense take in radical communities. This first coming to terms might be understood as a form of mourning, a time to be vulnerable in recognizing the limitations of our practice so far. Second, we must come to terms in the sense of developing new terms for engaging the relationship between anarchism and feminism. This second coming to terms might be understood as a form of architectural rebuilding, a time to create a new foundational structure from which to develop the discussion itself.

Both of these forms of coming to terms are important. Though it might feel risky to engage in the type of self-critique that makes anarchism vulnerable to outside condemnation, avoiding it is even more dangerous. We risk turning our backs on those in our communities who are most affected by the forms of violence we seek to dismantle; we risk ignoring the contributions of those who come to similar analyses of power from different genealogies and histories than ours; and we risk attempting to create equal relationships through ideology, rather than through material changes in people’s everyday lives. With this in mind, this piece is not an answer to the question of how to deal with gendered violence in radical communities. Rather, it is a gesture toward possible approaches, both intellectual and practical, through which we might enable ourselves to struggle together in finding new answers.

Theresa Warburton lives on Lummi/Coast Salish territory in Bellingham, WA where she teaches US Multiethnic and Native literatures as well as Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has been involved in a number of community projects that focus on indigenous sovereignty, reproductive freedom, prisoner support and prison abolition, and working towards new models of addressing sexual and domestic violence. Both her organizing and intellectual work focus on exploring how better attending to the literary interventions stemming from indigenous sovereignty and US/Third World feminist movements can help to realize the radical potential of anarchism in the contemporary moment. She has big dreams but small hands, so is always looking for people with whom to build. She is a past recipient of an IAS writing grant.

#anarchism #feminism

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