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

Month: October 2015

Hundredth verse, same as the first: Talking mental health after mass shootings

We’re now almost four weeks out from the shooting at an Oregon community college that killed nine people and injured ten more, and we know what that means: We can now stop “caring about mental health care” without guilt. Time heals all weaknesses in the mental health system, and while it becomes a subject under great scrutiny whenever a gunman commits a mass shooting, the passage of time, and the accompanying passage of fear, washes away those concerns pretty effectively. (Until the next shooting, of course.) And it happens isn’t because we manage to effectively address all of our problems in the interim but because discussions purportedly focused on Improving Mental Health Care are actually all about Protecting The Good People From The Crazies.

Color me unsympathetic

Wealth therapy. I kid you not. Here are some choice quotations from the therapists in question:

Often, I use an analogy with my clients that coming out to people about their wealth is similar to coming out of the closet as gay. There’s a feeling of being exposed and dealing with judgment.

Sure. Except for the risk of violence, the loss of rights, the weight of years of hatred. It’s just like coming out as gay.

Sometimes I am shocked by things that people say. If you substitute in the word Jewish or black, you would never say something like that. You’d never say – spoiled rotten or you would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealth holders.

I just can’t even. I can’t even with this nonsense. The super-rich do not have a history of oppression and persecution. They don’t have a contemporary risk of being gunned down in the street by agents of the state who walk away unpunished.

I’m not saying rich people can’t have problems. The death of a loved one, parents’ divorce, a broken heart; these things can and will happen to anybody and everybody, including rich people. But they are not an oppressed group. By fucking definition. And I don’t have much sympathy with their feeling that it’s unfair for them to have to pick up the tab at a restaurant. From each according to their abilities, jerkface.

So, this is clearly absurd. But I do think it’s an example of what happens when we talk about “diversity” or “multiculturalism” but don’t talk about power. Diversity is the easy part. Who doesn’t want a rich variety of people in their school or workplace or life (well, a lot of people, it seems, but bear with me)? But when we empty the discussion of the varying amounts of power some groups have held at the expense of other groups, when we make all groups of equal weight, this is what we get: a rhetoric in which rich people are compared to Jews or black people. You can have a classroom with 30 people in it, and 2 black kids, 1 kid of Indian descent, 1 Native kid, 1 kid of Korean descent, 2 Jewish kids, 1 kid of Saudi descent–and hey, what a rich and diverse group of backgrounds! What great photos you can take for the school’s brochure! Never mind that 22 of those kids are white Gentiles! Or that, say, all but two of them (I don’t care which two, take your pick) are from super rich families! We’ve got diversity!

And that, in my opinion, is why “diversity” is in fashion and, say, “integration” is not. Because diversity is easy to achieve with just a handful of cosmetic changes. Diversity doesn’t care about power dynamics or history or contemporary circumstances. Something like integration, on the other hand–if your commitment is to integration rather than just diversity, you can’t just recruit a few brown faces here, a couple of scholarship kids there. For integration, sustained integration, you have to look at systemic changes, you have to examine how and why you’re so white and rich in the first place. Your ridiculous equivalences about how it’s no more acceptable to make insulting generalizations about rich people than it is about Jews or black people (I CANNOT EVEN) fall apart when you talk about integration, when you talk about power. So don’t be fooled by “diversity.” Diversity’s fine. I’m not opposed to diversity. But it’s not the real deal, either.

Quick Hit(s): Indigenous Peoples Day

Not that it makes up for centuries of colonization and genocide, but more and U.S. cities are choosing each year to officially make the second Monday of October a celebration of the indigenous people of their region, and not of the deplorable individual credited with “discovering” them.

Disappeared children

Tomorrow is Columbus Day in the United States. Christopher Columbus was a sadistic, murderous slaver, and that’s all I have to say about him.

I’d like instead to talk about the women, the Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the children they searched for. A military junta ran Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and, as detailed in this NYT article, disappeared, tortured, and murdered 10-30,000 people it called “terrorists,” as defined by the junta: “One becomes a terrorist not only by killing with a weapon or setting a bomb, but also by encouraging others through ideas that go against our Western and Christian civilization.” They also made a concerted effort to kidnap the children of dissidents and give them to those loyal to the junta to raise; the junta murdered their parents, sometimes keeping the mothers alive long enough only to deliver (and with my own birth experience so fresh in my mind, I am having a visceral reaction, shaking and tearing up thinking about it, about my son taken from me). About 500 children were taken.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began protesting silently, wearing white headscarves and carrying photographs of their disappeared children, marching across from the presidential residence. Within a year, hundreds of women had joined the protests, garnering international attention during a time when fear of any public opposition had silenced so many. Members of the group were abducted, tortured, murdered, but the protests continued.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are a group devoted to finding the lost children and reuniting them with whomever remains of their families of origin.

It’s a horrifying, depraved series of events. And as tonight shades into tomorrow, let’s not forget the children taken from their parents and brutalized in an attempt to erase their past and their identities: I am talking, of course, about the American Indian Boarding Schools deliberately run to eradicate American Indian cultures through the 1970s. Parents were required by law to “educate” their children and coerced into sending their children away, food rations and supplies withheld until parents consented. Many children were separated from their parents and cultures throughout their entire childhoods. Parents were not allowed to remove their children from the schools. Children were abused, suffered, and died. In a 1928 report, Native Nations children were found to be dying at six and a half times the rate of other children.

Taking children has long been a tactic of torture toward poor people (parents entering the poorhouse in the nineteenth century) were separated from their children), PoC, and political dissidents. And it’s a feminist issue. The NYT article talks about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but it’s also a reproductive justice and reproductive rights issue. The ability to bear and raise children in safety and peace regardless of wealth, race, and political creed is a women’s rights issue.

By the way, the US has yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, because this country.

Boring, technical post about winter Feministe series…

As noted earlier this week, posts and comments have waned and waxed in regularity as of late, for various reasons. One is that most staff are part-time, with a predictable decrease in commenting activity as a result – no shock there. But a more structural reason, as both commenters and commentators have pointed out, is the nature of blogging in recent years. Most activity now takes place on blogging platforms, i.e. daily aggregators like BuzzFeed and Gawker, rather than on individual blogs. As winter approaches, we can’t promise more frequent posts – but we can promise more regular ones, based on this tentative roadmap for winter…

If your cause is solid, you shouldn’t have to lie about it. (Yeah, there’s more video.)

When I was little, in our house, lying was basically the worst offense you could commit. Honesty was a huge thing then, and it remains a huge thing for me now. That’s one reason all of these attacks on Planned Parenthood have been especially heinous to me — the lying to get undercover footage, the misleading editing to create violations that were never committed, the video Carly Fiorina lied about seeing. And now there’s more footage, more Carly Fiorina was right! footage, showing an abortion, unless it doesn’t, but no it totally does, or at least it looks like an abortion, but okay that’s not important because Planned Parenthood is evil.