In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: October 2014

Quick publicity: Detroit Water Project

If you’ve been following US news recently, you have probably read about Detroit Water and Sewage shutting off water to thousands of homes, some of which owing as little as two months’ worth of bills.  It’s a perfect storm of right-wing class and race war–we’re talking about largely impoverished, mostly black people.  For some unimaginable reason, water has not been shut off to any of the delinquent corporate accounts, even though they owe around 30 million dollars.

So there are thousands of homes in a city in the US in which people cannot flush the toilet, or wash their hands, or even get a drink of water.  And children’s welfare authorities have the right to take children whose homes do not have running water.  What does this have to do with feminism?  Well, feminism is either a social justice movement or it’s not–either the needs and priorities of women without water are the needs and priorities of feminism..or we’re just a special interest group catering to the needs of the middle class and white.

This kind of attack on poor communities, on black communities strikes at the vital work generations of women have done to maintain and nurture those communities’ strength and resistance to racist exploitation and oppression.  So I want to link to two sites.  One, the Detroit People’s Water Board, co-founded by Charity Hicks, whose water was shut off at 6 one morning, does political advocacy work.  The other, the Detroit Water Project, is a direct help site–you can make a donation that goes toward paying off somebody’s water bill so they can have their water turned back on.

I swear, this country would commodify air if it could, and smother those who couldn’t pay the bill.

The Good2Go sexual consent app: Oversimplifying consent so you don’t have to

In all the discussion of sex and consent — and there’s been a lot of it, and it’s not all recent, and unfortunately it doesn’t change all that much for all that the debate is pretty much constant — a recurring theme is the idea of somehow recording consent and negotiating it in an official context to avoid any confusion. Now, a smartphone app is available to address that. Available for iPhone and Android, the Good2Go app encourages prospective sexual partners to assess consent — electronically — before embarking on their sexual adventures.

Poisoning Black Children

Edited because, I’m sorry, I forgot TW: medical racism and exploitation, child abuse.

 

I just want to make sure that we’re all aware that twenty years ago, decades after the Tuskegee syphilis “experiment,” scientists affiliated with Johns Hopkins partnered with slumlords in order to deliberately cause lead poisoning in black toddlers from impoverished families to experiment with cheaper methods of cleaning up lead paint.

I first read about this three years ago, when the parents filed a class action suit.  I couldn’t think about anything else for days.  I couldn’t sleep.  These scientists deliberately poisoned children.  They lured families in with unusually low rents.  They monitored the kids’ blood lead levels.  And they didn’t do anything to help when those levels climbed and climbed.

This “study” passed Johns Hopkins board of ethics.

When I first found about this, I maintained that if one of these parents decided that a civil suit was bullshit, and instead decided to cut the throats of each and every person with knowledge of what was happening–including that damn ethics board, I would raise money for a legal defense, or a plane ticket to a country without an extradition agreement.  Because this is one of the most horrifying things I can imagine.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be one of those parents, having tried and tried to what was best for my family and  children, and then to find out that I had been bamboozled, that I was complicit in my own child’s poisoning, all so slumlords could save a few bucks.

Black people, poor people, Native Americans, have real reasons for being suspicious of US medical care.  Centuries of being experimented on–of having one’s children experimented on–will do that.

As far as I know, the case is on-going.  I can’t find any reference to a verdict.