Dear Occupy San Diego,

We, the All Peoples Revolutionary Front, have been intrigued by the developments of Occupy Wall Street and the way this action has compelled many around the world to engage in public protest. While acknowledging the ways in which our struggles converge, we must articulate the ways in which our struggles diverge. We continue to observe brutality in the legacy of capitalism, a system that relied upon the enslavement of African and Caribbean peoples, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the violent seizure of lands for colonial profit. Economic exploitation of labor and resources is only one process of continuing colonization that disproportionately impacts communities of color and third world peoples. Our struggle for self-determination in the present moment contributes to the histories of resistance that began long before us.

APRFront is a collaboration of all abilities, generations, genders, gender non-conforming, sexual orientations, indigineity, race, ethnicities, cosmologies, faith and spiritual practices, and identities. We are a constellation of collectives involving students, activists, community organizers, artists, educators, justice advocates, and all those who engage critical knowledge to inform political struggle. APRFront identifies with a diverse range of practices, including Social Justice Education Pedagogy, anti-oppressive movement building, critical consciousness development, and privilege-checking strategies. We acknowledge all levels of education in our coalition, and welcome folks with a willingness to learn, teach, and engage in the different political ideologies of revolutionary liberation such as socialism-marxism-womyn of color feminism, intersectionality, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and zapatismo. We realize these terms and ideologies may not be immediately accessible, but we will provide explanation to those who desire to learn and practice our methods. While we believe in education, we also believe that part of our self-determination is not having to fully disclose our identities and the practices we study in every public statement we make to “Occupy” movements.

We recognize the necessity and strategic importance of visible demonstrations which movements for social change rely upon, understanding that our struggle continues the legacy and knowledge of critical consciousness in direct action. We are concerned that Occupation is a romanticized and idealized form of activism, one that does not consider what must follow civil disobedience in the long-term. We envision the sustainability of organizing within our communities and collective contribution to accountable leadership, involving structured consensus-based decision making through the guiding power of the masses. Within this framework of self-determination, the colonizing language of Occupation does not translate. Because this land called “San Diego” has endured centuries of colonial conquest and domination at the expense of Indigenous Kumeyaay peoples, APRFront cannot support, endorse, or conscientiously mobilize in solidarity with the concept of Occupation. Our level of engagement with Occupy San Diego serves the purpose of claiming space for people of color and articulating the movement to decolonize on a local and global scale.

When we imagine decolonization, we do not make demands of those in power or those who are behind Occupy movements; we create power and frame the alternative. We envision our autonomy and our destinies to be liberated from government dictation, intervention, and colonization. This does not mean “inclusion” and token representation within existing systems of oppression, but an elimination of the systems themselves. It is neither our desire nor our intention to simply reform the colonizing structures of capitalism and white supremacy, but to dismantle them and create the terms of our existence. We understand why Occupy San Diego is meaningful to local activists–veterans and newcomers alike–but it is not our vision. Cherokee scholar Andrea Smith writes: “On one hand, it is necessary to engage in oppositional politics to corporate and state power by taking power. Yet if we only engage in the politics of taking power, we will have a tendency to replicate the hierarchical structures in our movements. So it is also important to ‘make power’ by creating those structures within our organizations, movements, and communities that model the world we are trying to create.” It is the uncritical nationalism of Occupy movements, often expressed in the spirit of “taking ‘our’ country back,” that indicates to us a taking of existing power and a perpetuation of oppressive systems. If we return to the “revolutionary” moment of “America,” we must also return to slavery, genocide, and the total monopoly of white male supremacy.

We have an understanding of revolution that does not conform to the US colonial model; our revolution continues in solidarity and dialogue with slave rebellions and Black Power, Indigenous resistance and zapatismo, Arab and African uprisings, queer and womyn of color organizing, Third World Liberation movements, and all peoples movements that have battled colonization and imperialism. APRFront is a people of color-lead coalition allowing white identified anti-racists and activists, who challenge internal and structural white supremacy, to play a supporting role. We find the dynamic of this model to be crucial to self-determination, revolution, and social change. We are also conscious in ensuring that our leadership is not only intentionally people of color-lead, but that gender non-conforming people, cis-gender, and queer womyn of color assume leadership roles. It is important to emphasize the radical political education and diverse identities folks bring to this coalition, rather than placing the emphasis on skin color alone. It was Critical Race scholar George Lipsitz who said “white supremacy is an equal opportunity employer,” meaning the practice of whiteness is not exclusive to folks with white skin. Further, we recognize white supremacy and racism as structures that exist and operate beyond individual violence and interpersonal conflict. We do not believe social justice has been achieved with one individual of color in a position of power, whether they are occupying the highest station of the white house or occupying the surrounding environment.

APRFront recognizes the need for leaders, but we make the distinction between leaders who are chosen, cultivated, and sustained by the people, and leaders who are upheld by oppressive governance, state regimes, and dictatorial power. We are following the journey of the Civil Rights movement, and by this we mean the interconnected and enduring struggles of Chicano Resistance, the Philippines’ People Power movements, the American-Indian movement, the Cuban Revolution, Third World Feminist movements, and others. We do not perceive the Civil Rights Movement in the US to be a temporary historical event that began and ended with the dynamic of Black vs. white, but a globally interconnected and persistent struggle for self-determination. We believe we must organize beyond the superficial language of multiculturalism and diversity into the organizing work of dismantling white supremacy. Although we respect the work that is being done by our fellow community members in Occupy, it is our position that committees and/or caucuses of color within Occupy movements reinforce structures of white supremacy. The relegating of people of color to the secondary and supporting roles of working groups, committees and/or caucuses creates a hierarchical design in which whiteness is again privileged and enforced through what is described as “leaderless” organizing.

APRFront works for collective agency in community empowerment to disrupt and subvert the focused individualism of capitalist greed, imperialism, globalization and all other forms of white supremacy. In the spirit of movements like the Third World Liberation Front and the solidarity movements built amongst the Filipino-American and Mexican-American farm workers in 1965, we were inspired to form the APRFront coalition. We visualize a radical people-of-color led movement to be organized and structured with a revolutionary leadership that directs, coordinates, and strategically develops the revolutionary process while making power and building a new vision with the consensus of the masses. Part of people power is having multiple leaders from local, national, and global movements with a selfless passion for revolution and a deep devotion to the masses, as well as a strong understanding of strategic tactics needed to work with the masses and pave the road to revolution in line with our vision. We must also have leaders who challenge the internalized colonization embedded within our educational institutions that reproduces inequity by controlling access to social mobility based on race, immigrant status, and class.

When we reflect on the “leaderless” approach of Occupation, we find no space in which to honor our leaders of movements for radical change, and the masses that made their work possible. Although iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr. inspired many Blacks, there were multiple unsung local leaders that built and sustained the movement. It was Black womyn leaders like Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson that led the bus boycott before King led the Montgomery Improvement Association. It was the work of other womyn of color leaders like Dolores Huerta who played a huge role in farm worker organizing which eventually led her to co-founding the United Farm Workers with César Chavez, Philip Vera Cruz, and Larry Itliong. Gabriela Silang is another important figure who lead an uprising in the Philippines against the Spanish imperialists, after her husband Diego Silang, who was the original leader of the movement, was killed. While there is more than one leader in mass movements for decolonization, it is important to realize that many leaders are also womyn of color who are often forgotten and unnoticed. The erasure of these herstories is one historical example of how patriarchy manifests, and a contemporary example concerns men, particularly white men, monopolizing Occupy movements and denying the voices of people and womyn of color.

As a solution and community-based effort, APRFront exercises deep organizing as an essential part of revolution and mass movement. Deep organizing can be attributed to our internal coalition practices and the everyday work folks within our communities do to mobilize and educate our people: from the service workers who maintain our public spaces to the young teens who advocate transforming their gang community-family into social action, from the elders that make us meals and ensure we are well nourished to the Pelican Bay prisoners on hunger strike. We continuously work to embody the practice of acknowledging those within our movements who are behind the scenes contributing work that is often unrecognized. It was Ella Baker, an important Civil Rights leader who said, “I would rather pass the water to people marching, than hold the picket sign in the march.”

APRFont struggles with the apparent high expectations within Occupy San Diego for communities of color to be present and consistently active with Occupation; however, this expectation fails to adequately address the reality of racial profiling, police brutality, the corrupt criminal justice system and the threat of deportation for both citizens of color and undocumented peoples. When considering issues of movement safety and participation in Occupy demonstrations, we understand the racial distinction between experiences with law enforcement in everyday situations and civil disobedience. While the theoretical purpose of law enforcement is to defend constitutional rights and humanity, this has been and continues to be untrue for communities of color. We’ve witnessed the unjust capital punishment in the legal lynching of Troy Davis which is deeply connected to the increasingly privatized prison industrial complex. Corrupt corporate greed is not exclusive to Wall Street: Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group and Management and Training Corporation have made incarceration a profitable business, intentionally creating a system that imprisons people-of-color and specifically undocumented peoples to serve as present-day slave labor. We are not all protected equally by the police or paramilitary forces.

While we value protest as an integral part of revolution, we understand that we must also continue forth with long-term planning and deep organizing practices. It is imperative to acknowledge that many people of color will be hesitant to attend Occupy demonstrations, while others are not at the capacity to be present due to poor health, being caretakers for their families, and/or just trying to survive everyday life. We also recognize that essential activism exists behind the gaze of the media and outside the realm of public visibility. All Peoples Revolutionary Front understands and encourages deep organizing, for it is the practice of taking care of each other, our families, our communities and the lands we live upon that contributes to a sustainable movement. While affirming our own present-day skills and knowledge, we organize in honor of our ancestors as an intentional practice to remember our histories, for they are often erased by white supremacy in popular movements. We have learned from our ancestors that a true mass movement can only be led by genuine revolutionary leaders. We also acknowledge that we have multiple leaders but we will not survive or succeed without the help of the people who organize, protest, and perform the same work. APRFront understands that without the masses, leaders would be nothing. And without sincere leaders, the masses would not be able to arrive at liberation. Leadership, the masses, and the vision are inseparable. They must be accountable to each other and must work in tandem in order to create a united front for true revolution. This is the movement in which we embrace, this is the movement in which we strive to become. This is the vision we seek.

We believe that intersecting legacies of injustice must be understood and brought in to dialogue in order to inform our movement. The colonial creation of Wall Street is evidence that an occupation has been taking place long before protesters in Zucotti park arrived. In the late 1600s, the Dutch colony located in the land presently called “New York” became the site of a fortification built under the direction of the Dutch West India Company with the labor of enslaved African peoples. Settlers erected this wall on Indigenous Lenape land to specifically prevent these peoples from “attacking” the land they originally inhabited. Manna-hata, meaning “island of many hills,” was the Lenape term converted to “Manhattan” when translated into English. The stolen land surrounded by colonial borders would eventually translate into English as “Wall Street.” Through neocolonial control, occupied cities and countries terrorized through war and illegal settlements continue to exist in the contemporary moment. Whether it is the militarized occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the armed imposition of US forces in Libya, US government intervention in the affairs of the Philippines, the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the apartheid wall of the West Bank, or the violation of international law and false “statehood” voting which led to the colonizination Hawaii, these geographies endure human rights abuses within systems of imperialism and conquest.

On the eve of the renewed police violence in Oakland, it is even more apparent that we must work towards a new vision for a socially just society and continue to engage in a process of decolonization and anti-oppression practices. This entails acknowledging that our current institutions have systematized inequality, oppression, and exploitation of people of color for the benefit of capital gain, expansion, and power. We cannot afford to reproduce the same system that is the root of our oppression if our intention is revolutionary liberation. Rather, we must be critical about our potential as agents of transformation and recognize ways that we further the oppression of people of color and Third World peoples.

In the strength of “making our own power”, All Peoples Revolutionary Front has organized our own National Call to Action titled “Rise & Decolonize! Let’s Get Free” on November 18, 2011 at 5:00 pm. We invite all those who have a genuine willingness to engage and listen to attend our solidarity rally, and become an ally to people of color in continuing the work of decolonization.

We welcome other communities of color to organize in solidarity with us on November 18th to affirm the decolonization of all Occupy movements.

Isang Bagsak,
All Peoples Revolutionary Front

The Occupy Wall Street protest has become a matter of debate in Indian Country. Some have chosen to be included under the slogan – “We Are The 99%; others, like me, have chosen to be excluded from the 99%. Many of those who support it have come up with their own slogan – DECOLONIZE WALL STREET. I simply don’t believe that the indigenous nations on Turtle Island are a part of that 99% equation, let alone that the Occupy Wall Street movement is about decolonization.

One protester, Brendan Burke, said: “Everyone has this problem. White, black. Rich or poor. Where you live. Everyone has a financial inequity oppressing them.”

I assume from his statement that Burke only sees things in white and black. Apparently he is color blind when it comes to red and the brown. As far as financial inequity is concerned, we, the red and the brown peoples of the Americas, have suffered financial inequity ever since the oppressors first invaded our shores. Financial inequity – perhaps better termed as socio-economic inequity – began with the subjugation of our lands through treaties. Annuity payments were often late and were never the amount negotiated under the treaty. Supplies and food rations that were part of annuity payments were often appropriated by Indian agents and resold for higher prices.

The tragedy at Gaa-mitaawangaagamaag (Sandy Lake) exemplifies the socio-economic inequity of annuity payments. In the fall of 1850, nineteen Anishinaabeg bands from Wisconsin journeyed to Gaa-mitaawangaagamaag for annual annuity payments and supplies. The annuity payments and supplies were late and the people had to wait until early December before they received limited sums of money and available supplies. Trying to survive on spoiled and inadequate government rations while waiting for the annuities, 150 Anishinaabeg people died from dysentery and measles at Gaa-mitaawangaagamaag. Two-hundred and fifty more, mostly women children and elders, died on their way back home to Wisconsin. This is but one example of the economic inequity that has been part of the indigenous experience in the United States.

One of the things that the Occupy Wall Street organizers have repeatedly stated is that the inspiration for their protest is the Arab Spring movement. If this is the case, one may ask how did the indigenous peoples of the Middle East fare from the Arab Spring?

On September, Daniel Gabriel, the SUA Human Rights and UN NGO Director, stated: “While the media focuses all its energy on the Palestinian search for Statehood and the ‘Arab Spring’, it is the reduced indigenous populations of the Middle East who continue to lose out. Time and time again, the world demands justice, democracy and freedom in the Middle East, but it fails in its obligation to demand the same for the minority groups like the Arameans. Today we barely survive in our homeland. But tomorrow we may silently vanish from existence. The SUA pleads with the global bodies such as the United Nations and the world community and media to prevent this imminent tragedy from happening.”

If the Arab Spring didn’t flourish for indigenous peoples in the Middle East, how can we expect it to flourish here?

If the indigenous peoples in the Middle East are barely surviving in their homelands, can we expect the Arab Spring inspired movement on Wall Street to lessen the oppression in our homelands? Will the actions on Wall Street abate our youth crisis, our teen suicide rate, our domestic and sexual abuse, or our alcohol and substance abuse in Indian Country? Will it heal our broken families and communities? Will Wall Street stop the rape and plunder of Mother Earth by the mining, oil and energy interests? Will it halt the ecocide, ethnocide, lingocide, and genocide of the indigenous peoples in North America? If Gabriel’s words offer any insight, then our historical trauma will not lessen but increase. It will increase in the present generation to the Seventh Generation – and beyond.

Then there is the matter of decolonization. The question is – the decolonization of what, of whom? How can decolonization be a part of the process if the occupiers are occupying occupied land?

Perhaps the most notable feature of the Occupy Wall Street movement is its lack of diversity. According to columnist Michelle Malkin: “When Occupy Wall Street activists call themselves the ‘99 percent,’ it turns out they mean 99 percent non-diverse (by their own politically correct measurements). It’s as pale out there at Camp Alinsky as MSNBC’s prime-time lineup or the New York Times editorial board. Not counting the cameos by Jesse Jackson and Cornel West, that is.”

The dominance of a white majority involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement explains why decolonization isn’t included in the proposed list of demands issued on September 3. The list of demands includes 1.) Separate Investment Banking from Commercial Banks; 2.) Use Congressional authority to prosecute the Wall Street criminals responsible for 2008 crisis; 3.) Cap the ability of corporations to contribute to political campaigns; 4.) Congress pass the Buffett Rule, i.e., fair taxation of the rich and corporations: 5.) Revamping Securities and Exchange Commission; 6.) Pass effective law to limit the influence of lobbyists; 7.) Pass law prohibiting former regulators to join corporations later.

Where in this proposed list of demands is there anything remotely connected to decolonization? At its core, Occupy Wall Street is about corporate greed, financial accountability, and economic inequity. It’s about a change in the system, although, as Gabriel points out, an Arab Spring doesn’t bring change to the voices of the indigenous. If change is the basic tenant of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then this change should not be the exclusion of indigenous populations in the United States, rather, change should in inclusive.

According to Raul Garcia “The struggle for a fundamental socio-economic change is not separate to the struggles of the Indigenous people. For if we want to have a humane and just society we need to deal with the issues that affect all people. In order to have fair and humane society it shouldn’t be just about money.”

As Garcia points out, the Occupy Wall Street movement is, at the present time, about money. The core message seems to be that corporate America and the wealthy needs to share the profits. Certainly, one can’t argue with that. But the question is – how are those profits made? The profits of the wealthy are made through the industries they own. These industries fuel and generate profits. And they create jobs and programs.

The mining, oil, and energy industries generate enormous profits. And those profits come at a cost to Indian Country, to say nothing of the environment in general. The new Indian Wars is about the opposition to ecocidal legislative policies and industries that endanger our homelands and our Mother Earth. Part of the struggle is trying to rise above the marginalization that began with colonization and continues through the corporate policies of the mining, oil, and energy industries.

According to Brenda Morris, ”Marginalization is as much a result of colonialism as it is corporatism. One is social, the other economic; I question the competence of the Occupy Wall Street movement to bring about fundamental socio-economic change – at least directly. Rebellion does not necessarily equal revolution. From the indigenous standpoint, while it is true that the struggle does not and cannot exist in a vacuum, it must not allow itself to be subsumed by a movement that, to date, has shown little – if any – recognition of it, let alone respect for it.”

As evidenced by their proposed list of demands, the Occupy Wall Street movement has no intentions of recognizing indigenous concerns or demarginalizing indigenous peoples in the United States. And that’s because the mindset of the majority of occupiers is an intergenerational extension of a colonized mindset. In her Foreword to The New Resource Wars, Winona LaDuke provides insight into the colonized mindset. Regarding “Industrial society, or as some call it, ‘settler society,’” LaDuke writes:

In industrial society, ‘man’s dominion over nature,’ has preempted the perception of Natural Law as central. Linear concepts of ‘progress’ dominate this worldview. From this perception of ‘progress’ as an essential component of societal development comes the perception of the natural world as a wilderness. This, of course, is the philosophical underpinning of colonialism and ‘conquest.’”

This way of thinking is also present in scientific systems of thought like ‘Darwinism,’ as well as in social interpretations of human behavior such as ‘Manifest Destiny,’ with its belief in some god-ordained right of some humans to dominate the earth. These concepts are central to the…present state of relations between native and settler in North America and elsewhere.

The “settler society” that LaDuke refers to isn’t from the historical past. It is present in non-indigenous society today. It is the mentality of this “settler society” permeates the mindset of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their demands aren’t about decolonization. Rather, their demands are about wanting a share of the profits, profits that come from the rape and plunder of the earth and our indigenous homelands.

This isn’t to say that the Occupy Wall Street movement lacks merit. Economic inequities, corporate greed, the mortgage crisis, the unequal distribution of wealth are legitimate concerns. But those concerns have nothing to do with neither decolonization nor environmental justice. As such, the 99% slogan is not inclusive of the myriad of environmental problems that plague both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in the United States.

Wendy Makoons Geniusz writes: “Because of the colonization process, many of us no longer see the strength of our indigenous knowledge. Our minds have been colonized along with our land, resources, people. For us Anishinaabeg, the decolonization of gikendaasowin (Anishinaabe knowledge) is also part of the decolonization of ourselves.”

Geniusz points out that biskaabiiyang means to “to return to ourselves, to decolonize ourselves.”

For many of us, biskaabiiyang is a lifelong process. It is a journey to heal our traumatized inner spirit of the historical past and the historical present. For many of us, our involvement in the struggles our communities and our homelands face is a part of that healing journey. From this prism, the Occupy movement can be viewed as recognizing the national trauma endured under Corporate America. But it isn’t about the biskaabiiyang of the American people. Rather, it’s about the collusion of corporations and the government to keep us under the yoke of economic inequity and the public’s demand for reformation of a corrupt capitalist system that has infested the world under the umbrella of globalization. And it is the reformation of this system that has led to the present movement of people on the streets of America.

However, should any kind of reformation occur, indigenous peoples will undoubtedly continue to be marginalized and their natural resources exploited. And, as before, we will continue our struggles in the shadows of democracy.

We will need to do this lest we silently vanish from existence.

I also need to mention that New York City is Haudenosaunee territory and home to many other First Nations. Waiting to see if that’s been mentioned anywhere. (Author’s note: Manhattan “proper” is home to to the Lenape who were defrauded of the island by the Dutch in 1626 – see more from Tequila Sovereign).

Not that I’m surprised that this was a misstep in organizing against Wall Street or really any organizing that happens when the “left” decides that it’s going to “take back America for the people” (which people?!). This is part of a much larger issue, and in fact there is so much nationalistic, patriotic language of imperialism wrapped up in these types of campaigns that it’s no wonder people can’t see the erasure of existence of the First Peoples of THIS territory that happens when we get all high and mighty with the pro-America agendas, and forget our OWN complicity and accountability to the way things are today – not just the corporations and the state.

Let me be clear. I’m not against ending capitalism and I’m not against people organizing to hold big corporations accountable for the extreme damage they are causing.  Yes, we need to end globalization. What I am saying is that I have all kinds of problems when to get to “ending capitalism” we step on other people’s rights – and in this case erode Indigenous rights – to make the point. I’m not saying people did it intentionally but that doesn’t even matter – good intentions are not enough and good intentions obviously can have adverse affects. This is such a played out old record too, walking on other people’s backs to get to a mystical land of equity.  Is it really just and equitable when specific people continue to be oppressed to get there? And it doesn’t have to be done! We don’t need more occupation – we need decolonization and it’s everyone’s responsibility to participate in that because COLONIALISM AFFECTS EVERYONE. EVERYONE! Colonialism also leads to capitalism, globalization, and industrialization. How can we truly end capitalism without ending colonialism? How does doing things in the name of “America” which was created by the imposition of hierarchies of class, race, ability, gender, and sexuality help that?

I can’t get on board with the nationalism of  an “American” (or now “Canadian!”) revolution – I just can’t.  There has been too much genocide and violence for the United States and Canada to be founded and to continue to exist as nation states.  I think John Paul Montano, Anishnaabe writer captured it quite well in his “Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street Activists”:

I hope you would make mention of the fact that the very land upon which you are protesting does not belong to you – that you are guests upon that stolen indigenous land. I had hoped mention would be made of the indigenous nation whose land that is. I had hoped that you would address the centuries-long history that we indigenous peoples of this continent have endured being subject to the countless ‘-isms’ of do-gooders claiming to be building a “more just society,” a “better world,” a “land of freedom” on top of our indigenous societies, on our indigenous lands, while destroying and/or ignoring our ways of life. I had hoped that you would acknowledge that, since you are settlers on indigenous land, you need and want our indigenous consent to your building anything on our land – never mind an entire society.

I will leave you with this new art piece from Erin Konsmo (also pictured above), our fabulous intern at The Native Youth Sexual Health Network she created on “OCCUPY: THE GAME OF COLONIALISM”.  Hopefully you get the picture now.

Mother Jones recently published “My Summer at an Indian Call Center,” which looked at the other side of the “these people are stealing our jobs!” outsourcing scenario. It was written by Andrew Marantz, an American who spent a summer in India and took a training course for call center agents, and focused on his experiences during this training and his views of the industry. Some parts were interesting, such as the strange and amusing anecdotes from his cultural training bootcamp, and it provided a much needed counter to the idea that the current system of globalization brings greater happiness and prosperity to everyone.

Points like this were particularly insightful:

Call-center employees gain their financial independence at the risk of an identity crisis. A BPO salary is contingent on the worker’s ability to de-Indianize [16]: to adopt a Western name and accent and, to some extent, attitude. Aping Western culture has long been fashionable; in the call-center classroom, it’s company policy. Agents know that their jobs only exist because of the low value the world market ascribes to Indian labor. The more they embrace the logic of global capitalism, the more they must confront the notion that they are worth less.

But its critique was ultimately limited, full of over-generalizations, and at times contradictory. Below are four reasons I found it so, and why I would hesitate to recommend this article.

(1) Near the beginning of the piece, Marantz quotes a 2003 Guardian article which states: “The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.” It’s factually correct that this is a marketable skill, but by labeling it the most marketable skill the article is overreaching. It also fails to make a distinction that few Indians overlook. Namely, that there’s very little money that a middle class urban Indian can earn by slipping into the identity of, say, a villager in Orissa, or a farmer in rural Nigeria. The marketable skill is the ability to slip into an affluent Westerner’s identity.

By itself, this is a small omission and overgeneralization, but there are similar ones throughout this article, forming a pattern indicative of a lack of awareness or concern for the underlying hierarchies that govern many aspects of a call center employee’s life, as well as a lack of nuance.

(2) The most interesting, as well as most questionable, parts of the article were those which talked about the cultural training call center agents are required to undergo. In this training, Marantz says,

trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture” — which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one.

While in this instance learning “international culture” is obviously corporate doublespeak for “If you sound too Indian, you’ll be fired,” to claim that there’s no international culture seems similar to the claim that white people have no culture, especially in its glossing over of underlying hierarchies. The point of this culture training, it must not be forgotten, is to give the Indians at these call centers names, accents, mannerisms, and cultural signifiers that help them to pass for Westerners, to circumvent the “protectionism” instincts of the callers. This isn’t a melding of two cultures into something no one is familiar with; it’s the attempted erasure of one to avoid instigating the anger and scorn of those from the other.

Furthermore, to say the signifiers of this “international culture” are recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one is to imply that the playing field is equal, that there’s no hierarchy in the making of said signifiers or in the awareness/consumption of them. It glosses over the history of colonialism as well as current economic inequalities, and implies something that’s partly disproven by the author’s own experience: that an American, walking into a call center recruiting office, would have the same chances of being hired as an Indian.

Marantz further exacerbates this by characterizing call centers, where Indians are pressured to pass as Westerners, as “one of the largest intercultural exchanges in history.” And the unacknowledged irony is that in this globalized world, it’s Westerners such as Marantz — who have spent a semester in Nepal, or gone through some call center training, or have had their jobs outsourced — that largely define for international culture what it means to be an Indian call center agent.

(3) The author makes statements that seem factually questionable, such as the following:

Every month, thousands of Indians leave their Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns to seek work in business process outsourcing, which includes customer service, sales, and anything else foreign corporations hire Indians to do.

Most workers in the BPO industry, of which call centers form a part, are not from Himalayan tribes or coastal fishing towns, but are “urban English-speaking youths“. One of the prerequisites of working at call centers, as Marantz himself states, is complete mastery of English, which is difficult to achieve in most schools to which Indians from Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns have access. Here, it seems like Marantz is trying to shove the lives of call center agents into a certain assimilation narrative — ambitious young men leave their traditional communities to make a name for themselves in (increasingly Westernized) cities, and in the process lose their identity — whether or not all the facts fit.

There are two other problems with this. The first, to paraphrase Charles Ramirez Berg, is that this assimilation narrative endorses the very system it sets out to criticize, because the only happy ending sends the ethnic/non-Western Other back to where he began, leaving him to cope with the negligible opportunities that exist for him there. The second is that it presents an oversimplified, binary view of the world. This is also evident in other parts of the article, where Marantz makes quite sweeping generalizations. For example, when describing a call center trainee, Marantz writes, “Growing up in rural Haryana, Nishant got his picture of the world from grainy Sylvester Stallone movies on a neighbor’s TV. Like all the boys in his village, he dreamed of living in California.”

For many young men and women, particularly those living near poverty, globalization has displaced nationalism as an ideal. For them, success is defined not in climbing local hierarchies, which can be quite rigid, but in bypassing them entirely and reaching affluence by finding work abroad. That said, I would have suspected at least one or two of the boys in Nishant’s village to have dreams of becoming, say, world famous cricket players, professions that would not require living in California. That Marantz doesn’t makes me wonder at the absoluteness of his perceptions.

And from parts such as this –

Twenty years ago, before India opened its markets to the world, career prospects were bleak. Men might have been laborers or government workers, but even the most ambitious women often gave in to social pressure and stayed home.

– it’s clear that Marantz sees pre-1991 India as having almost nothing to offer ambitious men and women. That this statement ignores doctors, businessmen, professors, etc, is perhaps belaboring the obvious. What is also questionable is the implication that the last twenty years have brought nothing but progress. For while it’s true that middle and upper class urban Indians, on average, have become more affluent in this time period (and not always, or even mainly, by adopting Western identities, even in the BPO industry, despite the impression this article gives), the same can’t be said for others. When India bowed to international pressure and began opening its markets, some of the largely ignored consequences were greater income inequality, increased poverty, currency shocks, food insecurity, and a “crisis of extinction” faced by small rural farmers.

(4) The concluding paragraph of the article comprises the main reasons that I’m hesitant to recommend it. It begins:

In a sense, Arjuna is too westernized to be happy in India. He speaks with an American accent, listens to American rock music, and suffers from American-style malaise. In his more candid moments, he admits that life would have been easier if he had hewn to the traditional Indian path.

As stated above, I believe that this article contains a much needed — though limited — critique of the justifications of global free market capitalism. However, it often implicitly and explicitly reiterates the same essentialist East/West binary that such justifications rely on, the worldview that the East is conservative, traditional, stagnant, and ultimately (and deservedly) powerless against the dynamic, modern, independent, and ruggedly individualistic West. The statement that Arjuna is “too Westernized to be happy in India” contains an unthinking reliance on this East/West dichotomy — which is also present in the statements quoted above — and works to undermine Marantz’s critique of Western-style free market capitalism not being the path to happiness and prosperity.

I know of desis who were born and brought up in America who are now living quite happily in India, as well as Indians who are unhappy with their “traditional Indian” path and those who are happy with their “modern Western” one (I put these in quotes because I would be quite curious to know the exact criteria that distinguish a traditional Indian path from a modern Western one). The crucial difference, it seems to me, isn’t the degree of Westernization, but the available career opportunities. And however lucrative call center jobs might appear in the short-term, in the long-term such jobs are physically- and emotionally-demanding career dead-ends.

From the facts stated in the article, it can be inferred that Arjuna is highly educated and comes from a relatively privileged family. The problem isn’t that such a person became too “Westernized to be happy in India,” but that even with all his education and privileges, there were few options available to him. All that he — and hundreds of thousands of other Indians — have to show for their efforts are graveyard shift call center jobs that leave them physically and mentally disconnected from the world outside. Jobs where they’re required to speak English even among themselves, where they must take timed bathroom breaks and don’t have the freedom to step outside, where they’re minutely judged on their ability to pass as those more valued in global hierarchies and passively endure whatever abuse the customer throws at them. And the problem is that these are some of the people who are considered globalization’s success stories, and the hardships others face — those, say, from “Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns” — are generally greater and far more pressing.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

Near the end of my video interview with Daniel Heath Justice (above) for this special week Celebrating Queer Indigenous Voices I asked, “… anything we’ve left out?”

“There’s a lot we’ve left out,” said Justice.

True!

Although we had a table full of books we failed to mention Queer Indigenous writers from around the world. And I’m embarrassed to say that I did not mention an Indigenous, brown, queer woman who helped pave the way for a brown boy like me: Gloria Anzaldua. She was a Mestiza, Xicana who made an impact on the literature world and changed the way Indigeneity is seen, thought, read, written, and lived.

R.I.P Gloria.

Justice and I focused on Indigenous writers such as Chrystos, Paula Gunn Allen, Gregory Scofield, Beth Brant, all amazing writers who are Indigenous to Canada and the United States.  A great interview (it’s always a pleasure chatting with Daniel) and resource for people, Justice was absolutely right: we left a lot out.

In comes Yellow Medicine Review: International Queer Voices to expose readers to a more broad canon of queer Indigenous writing.

Edited by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran, the cover alone lets you know you will be reading writers from Turtle Island (the Americas) and abroad. Three beautiful Polynesian women grace the cover, smiling, welcoming you to open the pages of one of the few literature journals celebrating Indigenous queerness on the page. Three shells float above their heads. I can hear the ocean just by looking at them. I feel calm, and a reassurance that this journal will teach me many things in a loving way.

The introduction is one unlike many: poetic, warm, welcoming, leaving you wanting more. Bodhran writes in English and Spanish (the two biggest colonial languages on Mother Earth) and he acknowledges his ancestors and relations and new family in the text.  Included in the intro is the actual call for submissions followed by his response:

“Our kinfolk from around the world respond, offer me fabric, offer me fiber.  Say: Weave with this.  Weave with me.  And we weave.”

The basket woven for the special issue holds stories from Canada, United States, Hawaii, Guam, Tonga, Australia, Palestine, New Zealand, Samoa, and the continent of Africa. (Yes, Africa is a continent, made up of 53 countries, inhabited by different peoples who live different cultures and speak different languages. It’s not a country with one group of people the way everyone describes it).

There are poems, short stories, plays, essays, letters, songs, and blog entries.  It’s a mix that keeps you engaged through variety and good writing.

The art of letter writing is one that is dying and one that I appreciated being featured in the journal.  Sadly, emails, texts and tweets have become the preferred way of communication.  A snail-mail letter writer myself (I’m looking for new pen pals!  Don’t be shy.), I feel there is still nothing like holding paper in your hand and reading someone’s carefully thought out words.

Aborigine Elder Noel Tovey of the land now known as Australia writes a letter to the Prime Minister: An open letter to the PM, (p. 202).  Written January 14 2009, Tovey was born in 1933 and is one of the Stolen Generations in Australia.  Wrongfully incarcerated for “The Abominable Crime of Buggery”, essentially being queer and having relations with folks, Tovey survived many hardships and wants to see those hardships end for others:

As an older Indigenous man is who is also gay, I am deeply concerned at the suffering of gay elderly people, who, like me, have experienced severe trauma in the past due to the ignorance of those around us.

I have grave concerns about the “same sex equal treatment” reforms and the way in which these compound the suffering of elderly gay, Including Indigenous people. Elderly gay people are from a generation that preceded civil rights and they were subjected to shock treatment, lobotomy, and other horrors.  They hid from view and remain mostly hidden today.  Nevertheless, they are elders of our gay community who deserve protection.

While reading the letter I was again reminded why our Elders are so important to us. The bravery, humility, and love in Tovey’s words come through with every paragraph.  A short letter, you learn something with every sentence.  Tovey shares who he is, where he is from, what he has lived, and his desires for a better future for his people.  And he is not barking like so many activists tend to do.  Tovey writes clear, calm, and with confidence.  His letter is one to be referenced, studied, and used as a spark for future letters to many so called leaders around the globe.

Tonga writer Loa Niumeitolu’s Prison Notes, an essay followed a letter to a friend in prison, gets you thinking about incarceration and those who are incarcerated.  With so many peoples who have colonial histories behind bars it’s an important piece.  For example, in Canada 25% of the prison population is made up of First Nations Peoples who are 2% of the overall population.  Some Canadian provinces see 70% of the prison population made up of First Nations, Aboriginal, and Metis peoples.

Do you see a problem here?

In My First Visit to San Quentin Prison, Niumeitolu writes of Samoans, Tongans, and Cambodians doing time in the famous prison often written about and featured in films.  She lets the reader know that it’s not only Latinos and African Americans who are incarcerated.  There are many different faces of colour with colonial histories living in these neo-colonial extensions of slavery.

It’s Niumeitolu’s questions and insights that really make an impact:

The issue of incarceration does not begin only when you’re in lockdown or, as the brothers at San Quentin know so well, it doesn’t end after you’re let out.

Where do our prisons begin?  What leads to the making of a prison?  How am I contributing to the creation of a prison and the criminalization of people—women, men, and children?

We each have to stop contributing to the building of prisons, the making of something to be so different and separate from something else, that one can be said to be good and the other bad.

Niumeitolu offers a different way of thinking.  She is out of the black and white box, no wehere near it, actually.  Her questions are important.  What is missing are suggestions for alternatives.

In many cultures names are important.  Whether it’s the name of a person, place, story, there is meaning behind a name.  Jennifer Lisa Vest (Seminole, African American, and German) takes you back in history through many names and leaves you knowing why she has the name she does.  A four page poem is all Vest needs to take you on a ride spanning hundreds of years.  Her poem Names (p. 28) is a call to action, a lesson in history, and reason for recognition.  Vest sings to you.  From start to finish you are with her; eyes opening, breath pattern changing, smiles formed, mouth open leaving you in awe.

Reading Names reminds me of why I am a poet and why poetry matters.

Although there is much more to be written of in this 300 page journal I feel it fitting to sign off with some of Vests words.  She writes of a North American experience but it is one that Indigenous peoples around the globe can identify with.  Read the knowledge in Vest’s verse, hear the power in Vest’s voice, and remember that International Queer Voices are here to stay and be read as well as heard:

But they could not defeat us

so they called us savages

Could not baptize us

so they called us heathens

Could not find us

so they called us wiped out

Could not understand us

so they called us mysterious

Could not educate us

so they called us backwards

Could not convince us

to learn their language

so they called us

hostile, shy, afraid

Vest continues her history lesson:

When they got tired of fighting us

we became a legend

They spent hundreds of years

Trying to find the

Last Unconquered Indians

Sent in the army

Government surveyors

Sports fisherman

Anthropologists

Missionaries

But we were untrackable

And intractable

When found

We cost the government

and embarrassment of riches

and white men

Vest ends with a verbal punch to the colonial throat:

We say

Before you left Spain in Search

of your splintered self

We were here

Before you realized England

Was cramped and dirty

We were here

Before you left France

For your piece of the pie

We were here

Before you tried to carve a nation

out of your expatriation

Before you defined your red-blooded

American selves

In terms of our absence

We were here

A few weeks ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote an op-ed claiming that feminism’s work in the West is “mostly done” and that’s it’s time to take feminism “overseas” to Muslim women.

We disagree.

Diana: Where do you begin in tearing apart Jonah Goldberg’s “Talking feminism overseas?” I can almost see Gayatri Spivak shaking her head as she waves her finger back and forth, saying as she has before, “white men saving brown women from brown men.”  So much for novelty in the discourse surrounding “third world women.” Can someone please throw something new at us?!

Azra: I’ll admit, after reading Jonah Goldberg’s article, I had to read it again (unfortunately), as I considered the chance that it was an excellent piece of farce. If only that were the case …

Sara: Oh, please, Jonah. Feminism is hardly a completed project in the United States. Who hasn’t ratified CEDAW yet? Measuring access to rights by national boundaries is problematic for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the oasis of equality that Goldberg mentions is a myth, and really only applies to certain groups. The rights of women change according to socioeconomic factors and race.  Drawing empowerment or access to rights through national boundaries or groups pushes injustice into invisibility. Saying that the “work is done” is a flat-out insult to the work of modern American feminists.

Azra: Is feminism over in the United States? I think there are other women who have more eloquently addressed this assertion before. But I will say a few things: 2/7 LA Times Oped columnists are women. In 2011, 16.4% of US Congress members are women—irrespective of their political leanings. As for health outcomes, women are more susceptible to experiencing mental health conditions than men and are more likely to die of heart disease than men in the United States. The situation is even direr if you are a woman who also belongs to an oft-marginalized group—be it based on religion, sexual orientation, or race.

Fatemeh: And we haven’t even talked about the rates of violence against women in the U.S. Does he honestly think that feminism in the U.S. is just about getting a college degree and making as much money as a man? What about the endemic rates of domestic violence, rape, and harassment?!

Azra: Neglecting to look at how women in the United States are disadvantaged due to societal expectations seems to have become increasingly en vogue over the past few years.  As Americans look abroad to countries undergoing massive political change and conflict, some have condescendingly appointed themselves cultural experts of international gender relations—with a particular interest in Muslim women’s lives. It’s an excellent way to overlook social inequalities American women face here at home and instead look at an “other “ (and hence worse) social inequality faced by Muslim women.

Sara: I do not deny the lack of protection that many Muslim women abroad have, and how religion and culture are used to abuse the rights of women. The fight for equality is not the fight for an “enlightened outsider,” but rather based on giving the right tools to those who want to fight injustice in their communities. At the end of the day, what is most important is to protect the rights of individuals. What really matters is not what faith women practice, or outsourcing Western feminists to save “poor Muslim women,” but actually giving women the tools to fight for their own rights, as defined by themselves.

Diana: Goldberg’s narrow construction of Muslim women as segregated and subjugated through a few cited cases undermines the work that Muslim women overseas are doing for themselves. The reality he overlooks is that women’s equality is already a battle being fought in foreign lands by those women. This fight is so specific to these women that only they have the power to authoritatively negotiate matters of agency from within the framework of existing cultural, social and religious norms, which bear some value to these women, despite the constant scorn heaped on them.

Azra: I’m not sure why Mr. Goldberg doesn’t just come out and say that he means exporting his version of feminism to Muslim women abroad. Because in almost every paragraph following his declaration for exportation, I read some reference to how Muslim women needed to be saved from the specter of sex-crazed, violent Muslim men.

Fatemeh: As if all Muslim women “over there” are cowering in the shadows and waiting for someone to come save them. Ugh.

Diana: Goldberg, don’t tire us with clichéd rhetoric, stop recycling Laura Bush’s campaigns, and please stop stealing the oomph from “behind the veil.”

Azra: God forbid these women—no, ANY woman—be subject to Mr. Goldberg’s definition of feminism.

Around April Fool’s Day, I got this tip from friend of the blog Christina:

So, (queer) (Latina) DJ VenusxGG got in a Twitter fight last week with well-known but kinda slimey bass producer/DJ Diplo. Venus accused Diplo of being imperialist in his appropriation of musical forms (something he’s been accused of lots of times) and it ended up as a pretty entertaining/interesting public discourse for the bass community.

THEN today, XLR8R (another big bass magazine) decided to tap this for their April Fools joke…except they got Angela Davis involved. Kinda sloppy.

According to Fader’s Naomi Zeichner, who documented the tweet stream, the twitter fight began after Diplo came into one of their parties and began recording part of a set on his cellphone. @Ghe20Goth1k’s issue is extremely clear:

I told @diplo to stop and he was embarrassed by now we won’t get ant [sic] credit and he keeps making $$$ I can’t pay rent lol

Now, apparently DJ Diplo has developed a reputation for cultural appropriation – a term we’ve discussed often here, without much resolution. Since culture, by nature, is fluid, it is difficult to pinpoint when an homage or inspiration ends and appropriation begins. Diplo is best known for taking the sounds of other cultures and presenting them as hip consumables for a western audience. He rose to prominence alongside collaborator M.I.A. – and interestingly enough, even that story was steeped in appropriation of the work of a woman of color to advance his own ends. Despite being friends, Diplo (née Thomas Wesley Pentz) revealed to Drew Tewksbury:

“With M.I.A., we made a pop song totally by accident,” Pentz says. “We didn’t aim to have a big record. But she’s so cool, and that resonated with people.” He loaned a baile funk beat for her song “Bucky Done Gun” and got much of the credit for producing the whole album, which he says isn’t exactly the truth. “Back then, I told people that I produced [Arular], to get them to know who I was, but that was a total lie,” Pentz says.

Just another Diplo hustle.

M.I.A. didn’t seem to mind at the time, but presaging her second release, Kala, she set the record straight about Diplo’s participation. The media deemed Diplo the “mastermind behind M.I.A.,” but she says he had little to do with Arular. When pressed to name a chief collaborator, she credited Switch.

However, the idea that Diplo was the mastermind behind Arular clearly began to grate on M.I.A. In an interview with Pitchfork she calls out the racist, sexist, and cultural assumptions being made:

M.I.A.: Yesterday I read like five magazines in the airplane– it was a nine hour flight– and three out of five magazines said “Diplo: the mastermind behind M.I.A.’s politics!” And I was wondering, does that stem from [Pitchfork]? Because I find it really bonkers.

Pitchfork: Well, it’s hard to say where it originated. We certainly have made reference to Diplo playing a part on your records, but it seems like everyone plays that up.

M.I.A.: If you read the credits, he sent me a loop for “Bucky Done Gun”, and I made a song in London, and it became “Bucky Done Gun”. But that was the only song he was actually involved in on Arular. So the whole time I’ve had immigration problems and not been able to get in the country, what I am or what I do has got a life of its own, and is becoming less and less to do with me. And I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can’t have any ideas on my own because I’m a female or that people from undeveloped countries can’t have ideas of their own unless it’s backed up by someone who’s blond-haired and blue-eyed. After the first time it’s cool, the second time it’s cool, but after like the third, fourth, fifth time, maybe it’s an issue that we need to talk about, maybe that’s something important, you know. [...] I don’t want the whole interview to be about this, I just really wanted to be like ‘look, if anyone’s going to get credit for helping me produce this album, it was me and Switch who co-produced this album.’ Diplo has got two tracks on there, Timbaland’s got one track, Blaqstarr’s got two tracks, but the rest of it, the bulk of it, is built out of me and Switch. And if I can’t get credit because I’m a female and everything’s going to boil down to ‘everything has to be shot out of a man,’ then I much rather it go to Switch, who did actually give me the time and actually listened to what I was saying and actually came to India and Trinidad and all these places, and actually spent time on me and actually cared about what I was doing, and actually cared about the situation I was in with not being able to get into the country and not having access to things or, you know, being able to direct this album in a totally innovative direction. I was just kind of taking what I was given, and took the circumstances I was put in. And I wanted to make the most of it. And the only person that believed in it was Switch, and he gave me the freedom to have the space and have thinking time and have the experiences or whatever and came and shared them with me.

Pitchfork: I’m a little surprised by what you’re saying, not because I don’t agree with it, but because, in a way, you seem to be ceding or maybe even resigning the marquee to Switch out of frustration. All of this attention has been put on someone else in helping you make this record, and I completely understand why that would be upsetting, but at the end of the day, no matter who produced the tracks, it still says M.I.A. on the spine of the record packaging.

M.I.A.: That’s what I’m saying. There is an issue especially with what male journalists write about me and say “this MUST have come from a guy.” I can understand that, I can follow that, that’s fine. But when female journalists as well put your work and things down to it being all coming from a man, that really fucks me up. It’s bullshit. I mean, for me especially, I felt like this is the only thing I have, and if I can stick my neck out and go for the issues and go through my life as it is, the least I can have is my creativity. And I think that’s probably the stupidest thing about it. I wish somebody did conjure the spirit out so I can change that, and now I’m going to spit some politics, I was going to be like this… fucking… whatever, the thing that I was, I wish that somebody did conjure it out. But I’m not going to give that credit, whatever my life is and whatever my lifestyle and whatever people in Sri Lanka feel is right, like somebody masterminded it. You know what I mean? I think that’s bullshit.

But that interview was back in 2007 – and in the last few years, Diplo and M.I.A.’s careers have taken huge bounds in different directions. Diplo has been on a rising trajectory – which has left a salty aftertaste in the mouths of those who perform or create similar music, but don’t get the same kind of props. So when Venus Iceberg X notes that she isn’t getting going to get credit which means Diplo gets paid and she can’t pay rent, she’s talking about that opportunity cost. Interestingly enough, it seems that quite a few people are paying that cost. Fader, in an article called “Diplo Cannot Keep You Out of the Poorhouse”, discussed the fortunes of Maluca, another artist associated with Diplo’s Mad Decent Family:

A couple years ago, Diplo met Maluca (bka Nathalie Yepez) at a karaoke night at 205 Club in New York. They dated for a while, and when they broke up she played him the music she’d been working on and became a part of his Mad Decent family. She released a song with Mad Decent and a mixtape on her own, hung out at the mausoleum in Philly and helped clean it up.

Last week in Sally Singer’s revamped T Magazine, Maluca bemoaned that in spite of her high-profile affiliations (she just toured with Robyn, who commissioned plenty of Diplo production for her Body Talk albums), she’s hard for cash. She told Marcus Chang that, “It can be really expensive for an opening act. I had to pay for my travel, my manager came with me, who helped out with a lot of the expenses, but obviously I have to reimburse that money eventually. I got paid a performance fee, but it didn’t cover the costs for renting equipment, DJ, hair and makeup, my outfits.”

She’s dropping a series of Wepasodes dealing with being “fly on a budget” – recreating ODB’s food stamps run, explaining that she’s an unsigned artist and the costs associated with promotion aren’t always recouped. Juxtaposing images of her walking catwalks at fashion shows with her swiping her EBT card, Maluca tries to paint a picture of the decidedly unglamorous parts of a high profile career:

Maluca: Yo, it’s rough out there. People think because you’re on magazines, because you work with this producer or that producer, you got money – I ain’t got no money! I got four dollars in my pocket, I live with my mom…and I want you to see, what its really like, out here in the real world.

So maybe Venus Iceberg X is right in not trusting that an association with Diplo will lead to massive checks. But she takes the issue one step further – and calls Diplo out on imperialism:

Diplo (in red) starts saying some interesting things – calling himself an ally to Venus, and then inferring he doesn’t fit into racial or cultural categories (#columbusneedsapassport – we need to revisit that at some part):

It’s a fascinating conversation, complicated by a lot of factors. Race is one, but cultural imperialism, positioning, and authority also arise. This situation could be explained by the mercurial whims of the music industry – what propels some artists into the collective consciousness, while allowing other, equally talented artists to stay stuck in the cultural kiddie pool? Part of it is timing, part of it is management of brand and funds – and part of it is our societal structures that ascribes authority to certain groups of people over others. When we talk about cultural appropriation and musical imperialism, we’re ultimately asking who gets to be the arbiter of what is cool. Baile funk was doing its own thing pre-Diplo – but did it only make it to the States because there was a white face to make the sound more acceptable?

DJs are always tapping influences to create new soundscapes – it’s a part of the business. But the structural inequalities that manifest in the music industry, in many ways do have a common root: the violence of revulsion. Minh-ha was discussing blackface, when she explained it “highlights the privileged universal empty point that white bodies continue to occupy even in this so-called postracial moment, and in so doing, it positions racial difference against whiteness, as the other to whiteness” – but that could just as easily be applied to Diplo, despite his simultaneous embrace and rejection of his own whiteness and what that means in terms of cultural positioning. Would Diplo be Diplo if he wasn’t white? Are artists like Maluca and Venus Iceberg X struggling because people aren’t feeling their music without a white lens to make it safer? Racism and cultural imperialism are not the sole controlling factor for success and failure in the industry – but it would be disingenuous to pretend they aren’t a persistent bass line.

Wendi has more on this, but I want to end by pointing out how even trying to have conversations like this in the music industry can lead to marginalization. For their April Fool’s Joke, XL8R ran this post (snatched from the Google Cache):

Angela Davis Taps Ghe20 Gothik’s Venus X as a Guest Lecturer

* Words: August Howard

Earlier this morning, legendary political activist and celebrated scholar Angela Davis announced an upcoming two-day conference entitled Never Stop: Revolutionary Tactics in a Postmodern, Pansexual Society. Scheduled to take place on April 22 and 23 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Never Stop will be kicked off by a special keynote address from Venus Iceberg X of NYC’s Ghe20 Gothik party. Says Davis, “Venus X is truly an incredible young woman and a touchstone for her entire generation. During my time working with the Black Panthers, the Communist party, and various other political movements, we certainly struck some blows on behalf of the oppressed masses, but Venus’ pioneering usage of hardstyle, screwed Top 40, YouTube rips, and animated GIFs is truly sticking it to ‘The Man’ and taking the struggle to another level.”

Venus X was similarly effusive in her praise of Davis. “Angela Davis is, like, mad cool. She was the founding member of the #BadGirlsClub, ya know? I also heard she totally loves vogue house.” As for the content of her upcoming speech, Venus said that she plans to tackle a variety of issues. “I already STR8 blew up the spot on Diplo a.k.a. Columbus Part II on Twitter, so U know I’m not about 2 hold back. #GAMECHANGER. I might be broke because of all the str8, white, imperialist, racist, and sexist pieces of shit out there, but the system can’t silence me anymore. Thanks 2 me and my crew, ppl are finally starting to #WAKEUP.”

Plans for the keynote address to be livestreamed by the FADER were still being confirmed at press time.

Commenter Diane E wrote:

Diane E.
Wow- this is pretty disrespectful- goes beyond april fools’ for sure. But now we see how all the privileged white boys own shit and stick together in all facets of the industry!!! even the ‘indie’ ones!!! Educate yourselves with some Audre Lorde before you go mix some cumbia and ‘neo-baile’ css funk for all your hipster fans to watch and not dance to! #neoculturalimperalists

(Image Credits: Bao Nguyen via Brooklyn Vegan, Diplo/Venus twitter images via Fader)

In 2007, women from the Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic took part in the annual 8th of March demonstration in support of women’s struggles. At that time, the American campaign against Iran had begun. We decided to march behind a banner that’s message was “No feminism without anti-imperialism”. We were all wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs and handing out flyers in support of three resistant Iraqi women taken prisoner by the Americans. When we arrived, the organizers of the official procession started chanting slogans in support of Iranian women. We found these slogans extremely shocking given the ideological offensive against Iran at that time. Why the Iranians, the Algerians and not the Palestinians and the Iraqis? Why such selective choices? To thwart these slogans, we decided to express our solidarity not with Third World women but rather with Western women. And so we chanted:

Solidarity with Swedish women!

Solidarity with Italian women!

Solidarity with German women!

Solidarity with English women!

Solidarity with French women!

Solidarity with American women!

Which meant: why should you, white women, have the privilege of solidarity? You are also battered, raped, you are also subject to men’s violence, you are also underpaid, despised, your bodies are also instrumentalized…

I can tell you that they looked at us as if we were from outer space. What we were saying seemed surreal, inconceivable. It was like the 4th dimension.  It wasn’t so much the fact that we reminded them of their situation as Western women that shocked them. It was more the fact that African and Arabo-Muslim women had dared symbolically subvert a relationship of domination and had established themselves as patrons. In other words, with this skillful rhetorical turn, we showed them that they de facto had a superior status to our own. We found their looks of disbelief quite entertaining.

Another example: After a solidarity trip to Palestine, a friend was telling me how the French women had asked the Palestinian women if they used birth control. According to my friend, the Palestinian women couldn’t understand such a question given how important the demographic issue is in Palestine. They were coming from a completely different perspective. For many Palestinian women, having children is an act of resistance against the ethnic cleansing policies of the Israeli state.

There you have two examples that illustrate our situation as racialized women, that help understand what is at stake and envisage a way to fight colonialist and Eurocentric feminism.

— Houria Bouteldja, spokeswoman for the PIR (La Indigènes de la République) speaking at the 4th International Congress of Islamic Feminism, in Madrid, 22 October 2010

(Hat Tip to Huimin)

Our multi-talented homegirl Jessica Yee just edited and published her first anthology.  Called Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, Yee and her contributors (including myself and Andrea Plaid) keep it raw by illuminating the some of the issues people of color (particularly Indigenous people) encounter when entering feminist spaces.  In honor of International Women’s Day, we are going to share short excerpts of some of the essays in the book.

Jessica Yee: “Introduction”

[W]e’re not really equal when we’re STILL supposed to uncritically and obediently cheer when white women are praised for winning “women’s rights,” and to painfully forget the Indigenous women and women of colour who were hurt in that same process.  We are not equal when in the name of “feminism” so-called “women’s only” spaces are created and get to police and regulate who is and isn’t a woman based on their interpretation of your body parts and gender presentation, and not your own. We are not equal when initatives to support gender equality have reverted yet again to “saving” people and making decisions for them, rather than supporting their right to self-determination, whether it’s engaging in sex work or wearing a niqab.  So when feminism itself has become it’s own form of oppression, what do we have to say about it? [...]

[I']ve lost count the amount of times I’ve been asked by others and asked the question myself, what is now the main title of this book, “But what is feminism, for real?”

The responses I received when putting this very question out there to create the book demonstrated resoundingly that people did want to talk about this notion of “the academic industrial complex of feminism” – the conflicts between what feminism means at school as opposed to at homer, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that will never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger and frustration of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

Krysta Williams and Erin Konsmo: “Resistance to Indigenous Feminism”

E & K: What does it mean for an individual to be considered “liberated?”  What does it mean for indigenous communities to be “liberated?”  I think the pictures we think of as Native women are very different than the end goals expressed in a lot of feminist literature.  In other words, there needs to be more space given to community-based solutions and the hard work that everyone, especially women in our communities do every day.

In academia (and in general) there’s still the problem of tokenism.    Including one article or person of colour, or Indigenous person into feminist curriculum is not enough.  This needs to be fully integrated into all women’s studies curriculum (which is still inherently racist).

E: One crucial element that non-Indigenous academia needs to accept is that no matter how much you read the journals of Columbus, a Native Chief, or through interviews of Native people, you do not have the blood memory that we have within us.   Sorry, if this ruins your PhD on Native people but you don’t have the blood memory experiences that I do and so the internal “validity” of your research will never compare!

K: Internal validity has never been so literal…It also needs to be said that including folks after the fact just doesn’t cut it.  White supremacy exists within institutions and this can’t be changed  by just putting Indigenous bodies in chairs.  There are structural changes that we have been calling for since forever!

Shaunga Tagore: “A Slam on Feminism in Academia (poem)

your ideal graduate student is
someone who doesn’t have to experience community organizing
because you’ve already assigned them five chapters to read about it

your ideal graduate student is
someone who can’t talk about positionality or privilege
without referencing some article

your ideal graduate student is
rich enough
white enough
straight enough
able-bodied and -minded enough
to be given luxury of enjoying sitting in a corner reading 900 pages a week
(with their fair trade starbucks coffee in hand and their lulu lemon track pants on ass)

your ideal graduate student
IS NOT ME

so WHY did you let me through these doors in the first place
if you were just gonna turn around and shove me out?

to fill some quote for affirmative action?
to appear like a progressive program without putting in the effort of actually being one?

Latoya Peterson: The Feminist Existential Crisis (Dark Child Remix)

(If) I think (about gender, access, and equality), therefore I am (by definition, a feminist).

It should all be so simple, right? But in the immortal words of Lauryn Hill in “Ex-Factor:”

but you had to make it hard/loving you is like a battle/and we both end up with scars 

tell me who I have to be/to get some reciprocity

To accept an identity as a “professional” feminist is to accept the layers of baggage associated with the label feminist. Added to the class and race parcels I carry, I find myself changing into Erykah Badu’s metaphorical bag lady – even while I’m trying to let it go and let love heal some of these wounds. If I make my living unpacking racism and sexism, why willingly take on more?

But one thing is clear – the culture of professional feminism is crowding my space. [...]

Now, it’s always a different world than where you come from. But this was way different. It was wealthier, whiter, full of events and fetes and conferences. It was earnest. It was aware. But not too aware, since I always felt like I wore the cloak of the outsider. I’ve made a lot of wonderful friends through feminism, and got to meet so many more amazing women, and yet I always had this feeling that I still hadn’t quite landed where I was supposed to be. It was as if I was on this path, but it was leading away from where I was trying to go. Somehow, I always ended up feeling isolated.

Louis Esme Cruz: “Medicine Bundle of Contradictions: Female-man, Mi’kmaq/Acadian/Irish Diasporas, Invisible disAbilities, masculine-Feminist”

I write this to you, making something beautiful in this shared space between us, making it difficult for invasion to take root here. When we recognize each other, it is easier for both of us to relax.  We build what Lee Maracle, recognized Sto:lo author, describes as the golden rainbow between us.  Maracle says that when we build this arch, we are actively resisting invasion because no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. [...]

Two-Spirit people are not allowed to participate in societies as our full selves and then we are shamed and blamed for the ways we are hurt by this.  When people say that a space is “women-only” they are assuming that women are always sensitive to each other’s needs, are always able to understand each other’s experiences, these experiences are always the same, and women are not violent.  Explicitly, this says all women are safe; all men are unsafe.  The inclusion of Two-Spirit people in women only space is arbitrary, shifting with who has the power to define the space.  This person in power is rarely Native.  From what I have seen, women who parade feminist ideals are the ones who decide who experiences gender-oppression.  Two-Spirit people can talk about our oppression only when it parallels women’s experiences.   When our lives get too complicated we are judged, ignored, punished, humiliated.  Whether it’s women-only or men-only space, the naming of a space as only one gender encourages invasion and conquest because they don’t allow people to be the complex creatures we are.  This pushes Two-Spirit people to the margins simply because we are not one thing or another.  We need liberation from the confines of gender baggage, too.  This parallels the larger call from Indigenous sovereignty movements asking for our Native Nations to be seen as distinct, sovereign entities.  We are necessarily unique and complex for a reason.

Ghadeer M. (of the AQSAzine Collective): “A Rant: Ya si sayed”

Insecure about your power, hungry for more, you throw a fit, feet in the air and scream out loud hoping to drown out the voices of objections, questions, and inquiries.

Listen to me – no longer will you allow yourself to tell me what to do.  What to cover or not cover, what messages my body will carry for you.

Things are going to change around here.

And I know that you are afraid, and that your violence only foster because of shame of your own mistakes.

But so you should be…

Tremble and quiver from the thought of your cold fate approaching you.

Then sit still and surrender as chaos from soles rubbing on pavements and streets turn into rubble and settle lightly on the shoulders of your pride.

Alone and desolate…like all captured kings.

Dethrones, de-powered. Ropes cut through your throat.

You’ve lost.

Because I’m woman – and I do what I want.

 

Shabiki Crane: “Pride from Behind”

[...] I was truly “done” with women’s studies after my professor announced to the class that when white women like Britney Spears presented themselves in a sexual manner it was because they were asserting their sexuality; however when black women, like Beyonce did, they were simply being puppets and degrading themselves.  I couldn’t understand the way that both images wouldn’t invoke the same reaction regardless of whether it was seen as empowerment or degradation, but why not the same? I saw two women singing, shaking, shimmying and to my horror, recognized it would never be the same.  It just reiterated the feelings of dis-empowerment I had harboured throughout the years of my life.

Feminism dictates that women deserve to be equal to men; but the truth is it’s telling us that some women are more deserving than others.

Megan Lee: “Maybe I’m Not Class-Mobile; Maybe I’m Class-Queer”

The current model of “class-mobility” reinforces separatism and a class-hierarchy because it posits that in order to escape oppression, one must become an oppressor – and universities do not merely mediate the boundary between professional and laborer, they teach the body of knowledge, the worldview, the values that mark a person as professional, as “belonging” to the middle- or upper-class.

Universities teach us to renounce our sense of identification with the poor; they teach us this by mainly ignoring the existence of poor people  and by treating us as “other” when we do become the subject of discussion.  Universities teach us not to care too much, because it will undermine our professional role.   Universities teach that we are separate from where we came from, that we are “qualified” (which suggests our families and peers are not), that we are justified in having power over people, in speaking for the subjects of our study.  Universities teach us that we are “too good” to wait tables and clean houses, with the implication that those who do those jobs are “not good enough” to deserve better.

Poor people tend to see university as a way out for their kids, but university is also a way in to the class of people whose success is premised on the oppression of the poor.  [...]For a kid to become educated meant that he or she would live an easier life that was premised on the oppression and invisibility of the very communities s/he came from.  This left a foul taste in many mouths.

I have had that foul taste in my mouth for years, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the taste of injustice – of being forced to choose between the indignity of remaining poor and the ethically repellent strategy of privilege seeking.  To a poor kid who has the chance to go to college or university, participating in an institution that she identifies as oppressive (either before attending or in the course of her education) might seem like the best choice with regards to her survival, but it is a conflicted survival.

Andrea Plaid: ” ‘No, I Would Follow the Porn Star’s Advice’: A Case Study in Educational Privilege and Kyriarchy”

I could have easily benefited from the feminist-academic complex.  I concentrated on women’s studies as part of my liberal-arts degree and my Independent Study project when I was getting my master’s degree in library science – since writing a master’s thesis was not an option at the time – was on founding and operating a sex-positive library, though I did not specifically study sex as an undergraduate or graduate student.  The fact that I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree allows me to be taken slightly more seriously because they signal that I know certain “privilege codes and signals” gotten from about seven years of beyond high school education, like knowing about or having “the right” books on my bookshelf or in my e-reader (Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, anything and just about everything by bell hooks, some Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein, etc.), having seen or heard about the “right” movies (anything Pedro Almodovar and Mira Nair, Outfoxed, Matrix, etc.) and the “right” music (usually some form of “alternative” hip-hop, rock, and country).  It also means I know the “right” places to meet other like-minded educated people offline (coffee shops, poetry readings, film screenings, panel discussions, galleries and museums, and so on.) In other words, my stating that I’m degreed lets others know that I’m the kind of “culturedness” that only a bachelor’s and master’s degree “can give” (translation: “can pay for” – which, really, is what educational privilege is welded with and signals)…and if I wasn’t exposed to these things, I can damn sure learn it quickly because I know the “right” places to go find such things, including the “right” Internet sources and from those adjunct and tenured types.

The linchpin in all of this and what I’m signaling to others by my degrees is that I’m capable of talking about complex ideas and issues, like the various schools of feminism, because I’m trained to do it, based on the “virtue” of the “right” knowledge and furthermore, take my complex notions to “the masses” who need to hear it and embrace it as part of their lives.  (This notion is one of the rawest forms of educational privilege.) Because that, from what we’re told in these social-class incubators called four-year colleges and advanced degrees, is the great responsibility that comes from the great advantage – and promise – of being an “educated person.”  The more subtle lesson passed to us in college is The Degreed are the only ones worth listening to – the more degreed, the more you’re worth listening to, because you’re an “expert” due to all those years of studying.

Robyn Maynard: Fuck the Glass Ceiling!

[L]et’s examine [the word] ‘marginalization.’ I’ve always felt wary about the community sector’s use of the word ‘marginalized populations’, but I didn’t always understand why I felt it was so dubious.  Now I do: ‘exploitation has always been a better term that ‘marginalization’, because where marginalization just means that people are pushed into, or exist already in, the margins of society, it doesn’t explain how or why.  The process of marginalization isn’t intrinsic to the meaning of the word, and ‘margins’ seem to pre-exist, as a natural location for people to inhabit in a society,  It seems like something that just accidentally happens, and needs to be fixed by pulling people into some kind of imaginary ‘centre,’ which I imagine is meant to be the middle class or something to that effect.  It is a watered down description of the extreme hardships and daily violence experienced by those living in extreme poverty and facing the harshest realities of racism in our society, and it also disguises the reasons for why it takes place. [...]

The ever-decreasing ability for the poor, racialized, and Indigenous to access the basic food and shelter needs that ‘marginalize’ people is not addressed and ‘marginalization’ seems to be a phenomenon that just is. The word ‘exploitation’ is clearer. The process of exploitation is inside of this word, it contains, in its definition, the fact that somebody is being exploited for the benefit of somebody else; it is describing a relationship.  And this makes it easier to understand what is meant in stating that the status of racialized, Indigenous, and immigrant women today is ‘structural.’

 

Interested in reading the rest of the book? You can order Feminism for Real here.

TR: What role would you like the U.S. to play?

NS: I don’t expect the power or support or interference of anyone, of any government. We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism. Obama is a pragmatic person and thinking of the interests of his country; I understand this. But now he is confused: One minute he supports Mubarak, one minute he doesn’t; one moment he is afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood, the next he is not. Now I believe in the people of Egypt only, I depend on the people of Egypt only.

~~Excerpted from interview with Rebecca Walker at The Root. Read the rest here.

Image Credit: myhero.com

The canopy walkways of Kakum National Park

By Guest Contributor Eccentric Yoruba, cross-posted from Beyond Victoriana

Our next guided tour was to the Kakum National Park and Cape Coast, which is home to several colonial castles. Once more we woke up really early in the morning and got into a bus with other Nigerians and off we went on our two hour journey to Kakum. The national park is famous for its canopy walk, which has several hanging walkways above a thick forest. Apparently, some people find the canopy walk challenging and cannot go through it, that is totally understandable. It took a while walking through the forest until we reached the walkways. One by one, we were guided to them, but not before we were warned not to swing the walkways and to refrain from such behaviour.

There are seven canopies in total. I took the shortcut, which means I walked through only three. “Are you scared?” one of the men– presumably a safety guide–asked me when I turned left for the shortcut.

“Yes, I am absolutely frightened,” I replied even though I had a huge grin plastered on my face and had paused to take a picture a few moments ago. As I walked hastily through the shortcut, I heard the man say behind me, “You’re lying.” In front of me a little girl was crying while her mother told her not to be scared: “We’ll soon reach the end.” I felt sorry for her.

Part of the reason I had chosen the shortcut was because I wanted to see Cape Coast. To be honest, I was dreading it at the same time because I’d heard stories; of the slave dungeons and the Door of No Return, of people breaking into tears while there, and I wasn’t ready to be caught unawares by several strong emotions and end up crying in public.

All I wished for was that my camera wouldn't fall tumbling down

In the end, of our Nigerian tour group it was only my mum and I that took the shortcut so we had to wait and wait for the others. The journey to Cape Coast wasn’t too long and I knew we had reached our destination when I was pointed to a castle that stood atop a hill. That castle was Elmina Castle, but we were going to Cape Coast Castle.

We had a brief tour of the museum within the building first. The museum was dedicated to the Cape Coast Castle: how it was built, what materials were originally used to build it and the ones used to renovate it, etc. Next was the tour and by the point I was already getting impatient; I wanted to leave. I guess one might say that I found it a bit uncomfortable, the way tourists were about taking pictures of everything in the castle. I personally did not take any pictures of the Cape Coast Castle. I found its view of the ocean breathtaking, though, so I did take pictures of the ocean and the beach. In those pictures, the cannons still ended up making an appearance.

The tour began with our tour guide talking about how African chiefs sold people to the Europeans as slaves. He described how the slaves were washed and oiled so as to appear healthier and attractive. The guide then talked about how the most rebellious male slaves were punished by being locked in a room with no light or windows, after which he told every single tourist to enter into the room. I entered and came out almost immediately because of the impatience I referenced above.

There were a few people complaining about the smell of the room. “It is dark here why do we have to stay in here all together?” to which someone replied, “It is to appreciate what they went through.” And my head exploded: Appreciate? Really? Even if they locked us all in there for a day, we still wouldn’t know what it was like to be a slave. You’re tourists who paid for a vacation, what can you appreciate? And why use the word anyway?

The view of the ocean at Cape Coast Castle, with the cannons jutting out beneath.

Next were the male dungeons. There was little to no light in the dungeons with the only air coming in from really small open squares (I can’t even call them windows), high above in the walls. The guide explained to us the filthy conditions of the dungeons, how previously the human waste stood at 6 feet high. And people kept on taking pictures, a blinding flash here and there “to preserve the memories.” And I wondered what sort of memories they wanted to preserve. In my opinion more than half of the people that see/saw Cape Coast Castle and take pictures end up pushing the horror of slavery to the back of their minds. It is just an amusing tour–I mean, people do talk about it but they are not angry or baffled.

I remember a colleague from work went to Ghana and came to my office to tell us about his journey. He had taken the Cape Coast Castle tour yet all he told us was how the governor used to select the finest women and rape them. He mentioned that he thought it was ironic that the castle had a church while all these atrocities were happening, and he also told us how a woman, an African-American, told off a bunch of white tourists for taking pictures at the Cape Coast Castle. He thought she was over-reacting: “Why was she so angry, they were just taking pictures.”

We were shown the graves of some guy and an English couple (later on that day, my mum would tell me how she read somewhere that Zimbabwean officials stated that they were going to exhume all the bodies of colonialists and send them to their respective countries). In the female dungeons we were told how the English colonialists raped female slaves. Apparently if a female slave became pregnant she would be spared the journey across the Atlantic and given a house. She would also be made a mistress. “That is how today we have Ghanaians with surnames like Johnson, Williams and the like,” the tour guide explained. I had always assumed those names were ‘slave names’ who knew they had an European ancestor? One woman told me the better option was to keep a rapist’s baby, “It is better than being sent to work as a slave in a foreign land.” I preferred that the choice not be limited. There should not have been such de-humanisation in the first place.

The guide led us to “the Door of No Return.” Now it is a door, but back in the day it was a hole that the slaves had to crawl through. It was from this ‘door’ that slaves were loaded unto ships bound for the Americas. “See how our ancestors were forced to go there and here we are struggling to get American visa.”

Our guide showed us that there was also a Door of Return now that descendants of slaves have the ability to return to land their ancestors were taken away from. The tour continued through the church (which has since been transformed into a library), the governor’s room, and the room that used to house the auction where slaves were bought and sold. We had reached the end of our tour.

I walked into one souvenir shop in the castle and struck a conversation with the salespeople there. There was a man with an really nice smile with a penchant for Jamaican slang and the Muslim girl eating fufu and pepper-soup. While on the cruise earlier on my holiday, the Nigerians on the table I sat at had commented about how I looked Ghanaian, so I took to asking the Ghanaians what they thought.  The guy with the nice smile said I didn’t look Ghanaian because my body was fresh! I think he was referring to my skin tone. I related this his colleague who shook her head and said, “You’ve really embarrassed us! How can you say Ghanaians don’t have fresh skin?” She told me I looked like her cousin.

I bought two books at the store: Girls’ Nubility Rites in Ashanti by Peter Saprong and A History of West Africa 1000-1800 by Basil Davidson. I stayed at the store to chat with them because they were amusing, but soon I had to return to the bus.

Move out of my picture damned castle!

In the bus while drinking bottles of malt, the usual comparisons began: “Look at how excellent this tour is. Nigerians could do the same, we have history.”

To which my jaw connected to the floor. Some idiot once claimed that Africa had no history prior to colonisation, only darkness, and to my horror, people actually believe this. How can a Nigerian be happy claiming that colonial castles are “history”? No, they are not. Colonialism only forms a part of African history, but somehow this is irrelevant.

“There is a castle in Badagry…Lagos. We can do this in Nigeria too.”

The debate spiraled into other topics: “What I want to know about is those Africans who sold their own people, what about them?”  and me in my wee voice had to say, “Why is it that slavery is associated with black people and Africa? White people were slaves too but that is conveniently forgotten.” When I tried to speak up on how we have much older history than those colonial castles in Badagry, however, my voice was drowned out.

I wondered where the pre-colonial Ghanaian tourist sites were. Our guide at the Cape Coast Castle mentioned how the name “Ghana” is from the ancient Kingdom of Ghana which is nowhere near modern Ghana. So knowing the Kingdom of Ghana and all its history (which I do) is not the same as knowing the history of modern-day Ghana. Still, I’m sure that Ghana has its own kingdoms and such. I’m sure there are historical monuments out there, but I know nothing of them. At least now I’ve been moved to add them to my banks of knowledge.

By Guest Contributor Eccentric Yoruba, cross-posted from Beyond Victoriana

Dandyism and the Black Man

A dandy is a man who places extreme importance on physical appearance and refined language. It is very possible that dandies have existed for as long as time itself. According to Charles Baudelaire, 19th century French poet and dandy himself, a dandy can also be described as someone who elevates aesthetics to a religion.

In the late 18th and early 19th century Britain, being a dandy was not only about looking good but also about men from the middle class being self-made and striving to emulate an aristocratic lifestyle.  The Scarlet Pimpernel is one of literature’s greatest dandies; famous historical dandies include Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron.

These days the practice of dandyism also includes a nostalgic longing for ideals such as that of the perfect gentleman. The dandy almost always required an audience and was admired for his style and impeccable manners by the general public.

The special relationship between black men and dandyism arose with slavery in Europe particularly during England’s Enlightenment period. In early 18th century, masters who wanted their slaves to reflect their social stature imposed dandified costumes on black servants, effectively turning them into ‘luxury slaves’. As black slaves gained more liberty, they took control of the image by customising their dandy uniforms and thereby creating a unique style. They transformed from black men in dandy clothing to dandies who were black.

This style also served to differentiate black dandies from other dandies, most notably, the Macaroni dandies whose fabulous style of dress was thought of as obscene.

One of the pioneers of black dandies in England was Julius Soubise, a fencing master, poet and actor who was once owned by the Duchess of Queensbury. Julius Soubise would appear at London’s high society venues wearing “red-heeled diamond-buckled shoes and buttock-skimming breeches”.

This type of style evolved and hopped continents from London to Harlem, which during its famous Jazz Age adopted the zoot suit. The zoot suit marked the evolution of black dandyism in the 1930s. The “zoot” from the zoot suit came from the term in jazz culture that described anything performed in an extravagant fashion. Jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway sported zoot suits and the suit itself became central to any dandy’s wardrobe.

Though today the most famous black dandies are Americans like Andre 3000, black dandyism can also be found in other parts of the world. In particular, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there currently exists a subculture of elegant gentlemen who spend their last dime on looking good and live under strict moral codes.

Those of us who grew up listening to and watching music videos from the DRC are quite used to seeing the expensive-looking and multi-coloured suits worn by Congolese musicians such as Koffi Olomide. Yet most of us did not know about the entire subculture that revolves around looking exquisite. May I present La Société des Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants or in English: the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance.

As that is a mouthful so it is just SAPE. “Sape” comes from a French slang that means “dressing with class” and the term Sapeur is an African word that refers to someone that is dressed with great elegance. The Sapeurs as the name suggests are elegant and stylish men from Congo who roam the streets of Brazzaville and Bacongo in Western suits and usually with cigars, and the occasional pipe, between their lips. These are men who are so obsessed with looking good and designer clothes that they sometimes place more importance on clothes than anything else.

A look at the history of the SAPE

The first Grand Sapeur was G.A. Matsoua, who in 1922 was the first Congolese to return from Paris dressed entirely in French clothes. While it is not entirely clear where exactly the SAPE movement started from, it appears to have been heavily promoted by Papa Wemba, a pioneer soukous (African rumba) musician who in the 1970s began upholding the Sapeur culture as a set of moral codes with heavy emphasis on high standards of personal cleanliness, hygiene and smart dress among Congolese youths regardless of societal differences.

This moral code, however, also had a political motive. Papa Wemba initially introduced the culture as a challenge to the strict dress codes that were imposed by the government at that time who effectively outlawed Western styles of dress. In 1974 after the DRC had recently come out of colonisation and had gained its independence from France, the government lead by Mobutu Sese Seko banned all European and Western styles of imported clothing in favour of a return to traditional African clothing. Papa Wemba challenged these strict dress codes by insisting that it should be a pleasure rather than a crime to wear clothes from Paris and by setting an example for impressionable young men by dressing outlandishly. At this time, the culture also was heavily associated with music, since Papa Wemba supported young talented musicians such as Koffi Olomide.

Sapeurs held European haute couture as a religion which was practised in absolute serious. There were special Sapeur dances held and even manifestos and codes to govern the lives of Sapeurs. Some of these codes include 10 ways of walking in order to show off clothes to the best degree, and the strict three colour code where the maximum number of colours that can be worn should be three.

At the height of his success, Papa Wemba had established a “village” comprising his family home and the surrounding streets in which the strict Sapeur code was enforced. Youths and musicians visited this village to acquire cool points while Papa Wemba reigned as “chief”. All other sorts of positions exist among the Sapeurs such as “high priest of cloth” and “chancellor of designer labels” positions which are based on personal flamboyance and the size of expensive wardrobes.

In typical dandy fashion, the Sapeurs consider themselves artists and are respected and admired in their communities. Sapeurs are typically invited to events such as weddings to add a touch of elegance to special occasions. Yet quite uncharacteristic is the Sapeur’s code of conduct, being a Sapeur is not only about dressing and looking amazing, it is also about impeccable manners. It is about style, it is about gestures that differentiate one Sapeur from others.

For example, the cigar which is the ultimate symbol for the Sapeur is considered to give added value to the outfit. While some Sapeurs never smoke their cigars, those who do are required to ask their neighbours if it is okay for them to light their cigars even though they may not be in a non-smoking area.

The dark side to this movement is the lengths some Sapeurs go and have gone through to get their expensive designer clothes. Some have resorted to illegal means to obtain their suits while others have spent time in jail. The infamous Papa Wemba also spent jail time for bringing people into Europe illegally to buy clothes by having them pose as his band members.

While reading about Sapeurs elsewhere online, a lot of emphasis seems to be placed on the fact that most of the men who are part of this subculture come from very impoverished communities. There is lot of talk on just how far these men go in order to buy an expensive suit and how the SAPE is a form of escapism for “poor downtrodden African youths”. The discrepancy between the elegance and style that make a Sapeur and the poor conditions of living are shown as a clash of worlds.

This sort of thinking rubs me the wrong way. I personally believe the Sapeurs are awesome and this is not limited to the steampunk vibe I got from looking at images of Sapeurs. However, whether you believe the Sapeurs are nothing but extremely materialistic young men or you accept that they are artists who strive to crave their identity through fashion, I think we can all agree that they do so while looking great.

For more information, click on any of the linked images above. Also, check out this great photo essay, The Congolese Sape by Hector Mediavilla.

By Special Correspondent Jessica Yee

Does anyone ever wonder when “Columbus Day” will no longer be a nationally “celebrated” holiday? I mean really and truly – when do y’all think that will happen?

In my opinion, it’s not as if the information does not exist out there which explicitly states that no, Columbus was never even near the continental mass of what’s now known as “America”. The “great” navigator that he was didn’t even know where he was going and never washed up here – ever.

What he did do with the full backing of the voyage was ensue genocide, apartheid, and colonization – all whose affects are deeply entrenched in existing assimilative federal policies, hierarchical societal structures, and the realities of Indigenous communities here and around the world.

Several movements have reclaimed this day to be “Indigenous Peoples Rights Day” as well as “Reconsider Columbus Day” (in Canada it’s Thanksgiving although my friends call it “Thanks-taking” or “Thanks-genocide” because no matter what you call it- it’s still wrapped up in the pilgrims/Indian/discovery of America falsehood and no one gets bonus points in my book for thinking of a polite way to detract from the truth).  Today in Oneida where I live and work part-time we have organized our own “Indigenous Rights Day Oneida – Reconsider Columbus Day”. And in fact for many Indigenous nations this was always the time of the year to honor the harvest. South Dakota has also renamed the holiday as “Native American Day” along with a few cities in California who have taken it back as “Indigenous Peoples Day” as well as other Native American tribes throughout the country. Much respect to anyone who takes this day back for what it truly means to them.

Yes I know the history texts and whatever else mainstream don’t tell you about who Columbus was and what he symbolizes today – but at a certain point of shouting, screaming, ranting, raving, and organizing about what really happened in 1492 from the usual suspects – the work needs to be taken up in a more concerted effort by others who DO know (or want to know or could know) to do the truth telling. I’m a lot more concerned about Indigenizing efforts within our own communities because I think all the time about what it really means for us as living, breathing Indigenous people today that a day like this would still be purposely “celebrated” on so national a level.

So what are you doing this Columbus/Thanks-taking day? And where is our community accountability to tell the truth?

By Guest Contributor Adrienne Keene, cross-posted from Native Appropriations

I was waiting for my connecting flight at Chicago O’Hare, and spotted this advertisement on the opposite side of our gate. Close up on the text:

It reads:

“Chicago is the Potawatomi word for onion field. Apparently, the Potawatomis didn’t have a word for global business center.”

This is an example of the use of Indigenous language and imagery that many people wouldn’t think twice about, or find any inherent issues with. But let’s look at this a little deeper:

• The use of past tense. It’s not “The Potawatomis don’t have a word for…” it’s “The Potawatomis didn’t…” Implying that the Potawatomi no longer exist or are using their language.
• The implication that “Indians” and “Global Business Center” aren’t in congruence. Which is assuming that Natives are static, unchanging, and unable to be modern and contemporary. “Potawatomi” and “Onion Field” are fine together, because American society associates Indians with the natural world, plants, animals, etc. But there is definitely not an association between “Potawatomi” and “Global Business”.

But, in reality, of course Potawotomis still exist today, are still speaking their language, and do have a word for Global Business Center (or multiple words…).

Language is constantly evolving, adapting to new technology (remember when google wasn’t a verb?) and community changes. I remember reading a long time ago in one of my Native studies classes about the Navajo Nation convening a committee to discuss how one would say things like “computer” or “ipod” in Navajo language, in an effort to preserve language and culture and promote the use of Navajo language among the younger generation.

In fact, here’s an awesome video of a guy describing his ipod in Navajo, complete with concepts like “downloading” (there are subtitles/translations):

To imply that Native peoples wouldn’t have the ability to describe a “Global Business Center” reeks of a colonialist perspective (we must “civilize” the savage! show him the ways of capitalism and personal property, for they know not of society!). Native peoples have been trading and communicating “globally” for centuries, long before the arrival of Europeans.

Thanks, Chicago, for giving me one more reason to strongly dislike your airport, because all the canceled flights, lost luggage, overnights in airport hotels, and 10 hour delays (all true stories) weren’t enough.

(Thanks to Hillary for taking the picture, since my sidekick pales in comparison to the iphone)

Most of the time, I’m like just about everyone else in at least one way — I don’t much care who occupies the position of “Alabama Agricultural Commissioner.” In fact, I didn’t even know such a position exists. But then I saw a couple of ads for Dale Peterson, a current GOP candidate for Alabama Ag Commish. Peterson’s ads immediately register as very, very “white” to me, and now I’m trying to count the ways.

Among the most obvious appeals to conservative white voters here is the nostalgic evocation of the Independent (White) Cowboy Myth. If you say “cowboy” to most white Americans, they’ll immediately think of a hat-wearing, horse-riding white man. And yet, as Mel at BroadSnark explains (in a post on “White America’s Existential Identity Crisis”), real cowboys weren’t actually all that white, nor all that independent:

There is a certain segment of the American population that really believes in the American foundational myths. They identify with them. They believe that America was built by a handful of white, Christian, men with exceptional morals. Their America is the country that showed the world democracy, saved the Jews in World War II, and tore down the Berlin wall.

These people have always fought changes to their mythology. They have always resented those of us who pushed to complicate those myths with the realities of slavery, Native American genocide, imperial war in the Philippines, invasions of Latin American countries, and secret arms deals.

And we have been so busy fighting them to have our stories and histories included in the American story that we sometimes forget why the myths were invented in the first place.

No myth illustrates the slight of hand behind our national mythology quite like the myth of the cowboy. In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Peterson’s follow-up ad is even, um . . . better?

As Mel goes on to explain,

Read Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas and you will get a very different picture. In reality, the first American cowboys were indigenous people trained by the Spanish missionaries. In reality, more than 30% of the cowboys on Texas trail drives were African American, Mexican, or Mexican-American.

And cowboys were not so free.

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs. Many did not even own the horse they rode. Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la “Bonanza”). The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

I think Dale Peterson (or rather, his handlers) may also be consciously echoing Ronald Reagan’s cowboy persona. In turn, Reagan may have been consciously echoing another rough-and-tumble political poser, Teddy Roosevelt. In all three cases, a white male politician evokes a myth that seems even more “white male” than the man himself. And a crucial part of that white myth is the direct exclusion and erasure of non-white people.

In her book-length study of Roosevelt’s self-fashionings (Rough Rider in the White House), Sarah Watts explains the political reasons for periodically dusting off and deploying this hoary white-male myth — it’s a recognition of, and pandering to, ordinary white-male American anxieties, anxieties that still exist today:

Roosevelt emerged as a central purveyor of the cowboy-soldier hero model because he more than any man of his age harnessed the tantalizing freedom of cowboys to address the social and psychological needs that arose from deep personal sources of frustration, anxiety, and fear. More than any other he sensed that ordinary men needed a clearly recognizable and easily appropriated hero who enacted themes about the body; the need for extremity, pain, and sacrifice; and the desire to exclude some men and bond with others. In one seamless cowboy-soldier-statesman-hero life, Roosevelt crafted the cowboy ethos consciously and lived it zealously, providing men an image and a fantasy enlisted in service to the race-nation.

In keeping with changing models of masculinity . . . mass-circulation magazines began to feature a Napoleonic “idol of power,” a man of action who used iron will and “animal magnetism” to crush his rivals and dominate nature. Biographers of plutocrats and robber barons encouraged readers to envision themselves in a social Darwinist world of ruthless competition where character alone appeared effeminate and sentimentalism dangerous. Earlier notions of manliness had counseled reason over passion; now the hero must unleash his “forcefulness.”

Enter a new type of charismatic male personality after 1870, a cowboy-soldier operating in the new venue of the American West on sheer strength of will and physicality. Eastern readers instantly recognized him as more masculine precisely because he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

Writers pitched the cowboy ethos against Christian values of mercy, empathy, love, and forgiveness, against domestic responsibility and the job demands that complicated men’s lives and dissolved their masculine will. The cowboy was not interested in saving souls or finding spiritual purity or assigning meaning to death. His code of conduct arose as he struggled against the overwhelming wildness of men and beasts and carved out a prairie existence with guns, ropes, and barbed wire. Readers suspended ordinary morality as they fantasized about life at the margins of civilization and sampled forbidden pleasures of taming, busting, subduing, shooting, hanging, and killing.

In addition, and more to the (“swpd”) point, the falsified racial identity of this ideal cowboy-soldier effectively erased the fact that demographically disproportionate numbers of “cowboys” were not white.

“Many real cowboys were black ex-slaves, whereas the Hollywood heroes were always white.”
Nat Love, African American cowboy, 1876

At the same time, the cowboy myth was imagined in opposition to darker, dehumanized Others. Whitened cowboys of yesteryear were lauded in Roosevelt’s time for having helped to vanquish Indians, of course. However, as Watts explains, a growing nostalgia for antebellum Southern plantation life, including the racial control it represented, also helped fuel the collective desire for such a virile, specifically white ideal:

Northerners adopted a more sympathetic view of Southern white manhood, one in which Southern elites came to be admired for their racial acumen. Northerners abandoned critical views of slavery for nostalgic reminiscences of plantation life in which white Southern men had effectively managed a racial society, keeping blacks where they belonged and protecting white women’s virtue. In the theaters, novels, and traveling shows of the 1890s, popular themes of happy plantation slaves reflected Northern acceptance of the Southern white view of race and the Jim Crow limitations on suffrage, mobility, education, and economic life.

Even if many, though not all, Northerners drew the line at excusing lynching, Silber observes, they nevertheless accepted the idea that Southern white men lynched black “rapists” in the attempt to prove themselves men. Concerns about protecting Southern womanhood reflected Northern men’s anxieties about promiscuous sexual behavior and the preservation of women’s proper sphere. Finding a common ground of white manliness among former enemies . . . helped Northern whites to “cast African-Americans outside the boundaries of their Anglo-Saxon nation,” to romanticize Southern notions of chivalry, and to justify turning Southern race relations over to Southern whites entirely.

Born into a wealthy Eastern family, Teddy Roosevelt was a physically weak and asthmatic child. When he joined the New York state assembly at the age of twenty-three, Roosevelt struck others as “unmanly.” As Watts also writes, “newspapers and his fellow assemblymen ridiculed his ‘squeaky’ voice and dandified clothing, referring to him as ‘Jane-Dandy,’ ‘Punkin-Lily,’ and ‘our own Oscar Wilde.’ . . . Duly insulted, he began to construct a new physical image around appropriately virile Western decorations and settings, foregrounding the bodily attributes of a robust outdoorsman that were becoming new features in the nation’s political iconography.”

In a move reminsicent of George W. Bush’s brush-clearing photo-ops on his own “ranch,” the young Roosevelt moved to the Western frontier, in order to “harden” his body, but also to wear a series of conspicuous, meticulously detailed frontier costumes. Like the younger Bush, Roosevelt also bought a ranch, apparently for similar self-staging purposes (it’s worth noting that the retired George W. Bush now spends most of his time in a suburban home outside of Dallas; he rarely visits his ranch anymore, and if the New York Times is right, when he does, he spends most of his time there riding a mountain bike instead of a horse).

Teddy Roosevelt posing as a cowboy (at the age of 27)

As Watts writes of this photo,

In 1885, returning East after a bighorn hunting trip to Montana, Roosevelt had another studio photo made. This time he appeared as a self-consciously overdressed yet recognizable Western cowboy posed as bold and determined, armed and ready for action. “You would be amused to see me,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in 1884, in my “broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” To his sister Bamie, he boasted, “I now look like a regular cowboy dandy, with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style.” Only the fringed buckskin shirt remained from his Leatherstocking outfit.

Buckskin, he said, represented America’s “most picturesque and distinctively national dress,” attire worn by Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and by the “reckless, dauntless Indian fighters” who led the “white advance throughout all our Western lands.” Buckskin and whiteness notwithstanding, this 1885 image still seems forced, and his attention focused on the costs, accoutrements, and style of cowboy life. He does not even wear his glasses, without which he could see only poorly.

All of which makes me wonder just what kind of man Alabama’s Dale Peterson really is, behind the pose of that everlasting, gunslinging, and white cowboy myth. The pose he’s striking in cowboy drag just seems so obviously that — a pose, and a mighty forced one at that.

Nevertheless, claims are now being made that Peterson actually is that cowboy. As Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., the writer/director of Peterson’s ads, explains,

“I decided to stick him on a horse, give him a gun, and make it a John Wayne movie. . . . Some jerks are saying, ‘Oh, it makes us look like rednecks!’ Well, maybe in New York you wouldn’t make an ad like that, but this is Alabama, and here, people ride horses and shoot guns.”

When Peterson saw the ad, he “loved it,” Ehlinger says.

“Because I was basically doing a portrait of him,” he explains. “Not a campaign ad, but a portrait.”

To which I can only say . . . O RLY?

Reader BW sent in this op-ed published in the New York Times, which argues that the world should stop recognizing certain African nations. Pierre Englebert, of Pomona College, believes this will end many of the problems on the continent:

[F]or the past five decades, most Africans have suffered predation of colonial proportions by the very states that were supposed to bring them freedom. And most of these nations, broke from their own thievery, are now unable to provide their citizens with basic services like security, roads, hospitals and schools. What can be done?

The first and most urgent task is that the donor countries that keep these nations afloat should cease sheltering African elites from accountability. To do so, the international community must move swiftly to derecognize the worst-performing African states, forcing their rulers — for the very first time in their checkered histories — to search for support and legitimacy at home.

Radical as this idea may sound, it is not without precedent. Undemocratic Taiwan was derecognized by most of the world in the 1970s (as the corollary of recognizing Beijing). This loss of recognition led the ruling Kuomintang party to adopt new policies in search of domestic support. The regime liberalized the economy, legalized opposition groups, abolished martial law, organized elections and even issued an apology to the Taiwanese people for past misrule, eventually turning the country into a fast-growing, vibrant democracy.

In Africa, similarly, the unrecognized, breakaway state of Somaliland provides its citizens with relative peace and democracy, offering a striking counterpoint to the violence and misery of neighboring sovereign Somalia. It was in part the absence of recognition that forced the leaders of the Somali National Movement in the early ’90s to strike a bargain with local clan elders and create legitimate participatory institutions in Somaliland.

Englebert believes derecognizing nations would go like this:

The logistics of derecognition would no doubt be complicated. Embassies would be withdrawn on both sides. These states would be expelled from the United Nations and other international organizations. All macroeconomic, budget-supporting and post-conflict reconstruction aid programs would be canceled. (Nongovernmental groups and local charities would continue to receive money.)

If this were to happen, relatively benevolent states like South Africa and a handful of others would go on as before. But in the continent’s most troubled countries, politicians would suddenly lose the legal foundations of their authority. Some of these repressive leaders, deprived of their sovereign tools of domination and the international aid that underwrites their regimes, might soon find themselves overthrown.

Reading the article struck a few chords with me. I’m not particularly well versed in the issues facing various nations. I read Arise and check for news about telecoms and major political/technological/cultural innovations on the continent, but that doesn’t really provide a solid foundation for post-colonial political deconstruction.

However, a few questions linger in my mind:

1. The argument seems to be applauding the death of old school colonialism, but into the rise of a neo-colonialism. Expelling various nations from the UN, cutting off aid, and withdrawing embassies are major moves – so who gets to define failed states? Is it by military coup or by suffering of the people?

2. I have yet to see these arguments made about destabilized regions in other areas of the world. Is Africa being singled out, or am I missing some critical discourse around places like Kyrgyzstan?

3. I am not finding a lot of critiques (or engagement, really) of Englebert’s work. (There may be some in French, which I am not fluent in. However, since a few of his works were translated into French, it is entirely possible there is another dialogue going on.) Much of his writing is locked behind scholarly paywalls and/or textbook priced. The book he is currently promoting, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow, is sixty-five dollars in paperback form. However, in an op-ed for The Christian Science Monitor, he suggests the societal ills plaguing the Democratic Republic of Congo could also be solved by forgoing typical government solutions and instead bypassing the state:

Congo presents Mrs. Clinton with the most daunting challenges and greatest opportunities of her seven-country trip to Africa. Yet outsiders have too often made things worse by cajoling and rewarding rapacious politicians and soldiers, reinforcing rather than abating the authority of a criminal state. Recent UN-supported operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels, for example, have encouraged the deployment of unpaid and poorly trained soldiers who loot, rape, and terrorize more than they protect.

Although Clinton will speak against “gender-based violence,” and Congress has approved a $15 million project for a “professional rapid reaction force” of Congolese trained in “the fundamental principles of respect for human rights,” this is unlikely to achieve much. Soldiers terrorize because they, like other state officials, benefit from near total impunity; they steal because their officers and politicians hijack their pay; and they rape because it is an easy way to control and dominate civilians.

It is only by exposing and stopping the scam that Congo’s tragedy will end. The more we contribute to rebuilding the state, however, the more we inadvertently restore authoritarianism, domination, and predation, features that have characterized Congo since its creation by Leopold II of Belgium in 1885. However failed a state Congo might be, Clinton must avert uncritically embracing its rebirth.

Englebert seems to share a similar philosophy as Dambisa Moyo (author of Dead Aid), by believing that reducing direct aid will force many governments into self-sufficiency. However, when I read critiques of the West (and some of the East) from a global South perspective, one of the recurring ideas is that developing nations are a petri dish, a place where theorists experiment with the people on the continent paying the price. Is Englebert’s proposed solution more of the same?

Your thoughts, readers?

Reader Nancy L sent in an article from the New York Times with an opening that made even this jaded activist do a double take:

RESTINGA SÊCA, Brazil — Before setting out in a pink S.U.V. to comb the schoolyards and shopping malls of southern Brazil, Alisson Chornak studies books, maps and Web sites to understand how the towns were colonized and how European their residents might look today.

The goal, he and other model scouts say, is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success.

So this is how we’re going now? What is this, the hybrid vigor myth on speed?

The smartly-written article takes an interesting turn – while the models associated with Brazil are overwhelmingly white, the country is beginning to embrace nonwhite women who fit their standards of beauty. And yet…

Despite those shifts, more than half of Brazil’s models continue to be found here among the tiny farms of Rio Grande do Sul, a state that has only one-twentieth of the nation’s population and was colonized predominantly by Germans and Italians.

Brazilians are equally perplexed:

The pattern creates a disconnect between what many Brazilians consider beautiful and the beauty they export overseas. While darker-skinned actresses like Juliana Paes and Camila Pitanga are considered among Brazil’s sexiest, it is Ms. Bündchen and her fellow southerners who win fame abroad.

“I was always perplexed that Brazil was never able to export a Naomi Campbell, and it is definitely not because of a lack of pretty women,” said Erika Palomino, a fashion consultant in São Paulo. “It is embarrassing.”

The article is interesting, both for its look into the fashion industry and the strange focus on sites of colonization as portals for beauty scouting. But the whole situation does make me wonder who is responsible for upholding white standards of beauty. This article, I believe, makes a strong case for those who control the images of beauty, and how their preferences can dictate the idea of what is sellable. However, they always throw their decision at the feet of consumers – but who conditions what consumers see as beautiful?

The Racialicious inbox received a very honest email from a writer currently enrolled in a creative writing program, with reference to the book Ms Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum.  Bynum waits until late in the book to reveal that Ms Hempel is a mixed race person of colour. This raised all sorts of queries for our questioner:

…when I write fiction, I write white characters.  When I read fiction I read them as white characters unless/until I am expressly told otherwise.  This feels like an ignorant move on my part but at the same time, I feel that that’s what I do because I am white, and that people of other ethnicities read fiction as their ethnicity (or perhaps not, since the field is dominated a lot by dead white guys, but that’s another issue), and they write characters as their ethnicity…

Which I suppose eventually comes to this question: am I to assume that a writer of color is writing stories about people of (their) color?  Am I to assume that the black woman in my class is always writing about black people?…[That] the gay writer is writing about the gay experience, or gay relationships? Was I supposed to assume that Shun-Lien Bynum was writing about an Asian character because her name is Asian?… (See how much of an ass I sound like right now?)This feels like a form of discrimination or stereotyping.  Why should I assume that just because a person is black that they’re going to write about black characters?  Do people of other races assume that white writers are always writing about white characters?  Or is that what we’re supposed to do, as writers and as readers?
…
I’m sure it’s obvious that I’ve been in a sort of bubble with this issue.  In my undergrad, there were only 2 nonwhite students in the creative writing classes I took, and in my MFA program there is only one.  It seems to be an issue that we skirt around in workshop, for fear of offending someone, perhaps…

This questioner had the fortune (or misfortune) of sending this to me: in case you didn’t already know, when I am not crusading on the internet, I too am a graduate student in a creative writing program.  Here are some amended excerpts from the earful and a half I sent back to our questioner:

As for your question: should we assume that all writers of colour are writing for themselves?

All writers have audiences that they are writing for, and it becomes evident who their audience is as soon as they get going. But because much of Great American Lit is written by white writers who are white-centric, much of Great American Lit is written for white folks. So the assumption grows that all audiences and all characters are white – sometimes readers are surprised when they realise all along they have been reading a nonwhite book.

I would say many white writers are not conscious that they are writing for a white audience, just as often in the media the word “everyone” or “regular American” or “the people” means (middle class, hetero, cisgendered, abled) white people. I have to disagree with your (qualified) assertion that generally readers will just assume that the character is of the same ethnicity as them. Rather, many readers of colour are hyperconscious of the fact that a Great Book is not addressed to them; for many of us* learning to appreciate literature requires an extra step that is not there for white readers: we have to learn how to find ourselves in work that may sometimes actively exclude us.

Sidebar: I tend to have very little patience with white readers who tell me they didn’t like a piece of lit of colour because they felt it “didn’t speak to them” or “it made them feel bad.” Readers of colour learn the contortions necessary to be able to take part in Great Literature which may, in its whiteness, act as if we do not exist. Considering the amount of daily work this requires, I don’t think it is too much to ask of white readers that they twist their heads around every now and then to try and meet literature of colour where it is.

But back to your question: the fact of the matter is that all writers write, consciously or not, for a particular ethnic audience. When you go to read a book, don’t assume who the audience is either way. It should become clear soon enough who the book is for. In any case I would try to avoid pigeonholing writers of colour in general; read our books on their own terms, just as you would any other book.

Which brings me to my next point – I think it’s vital to recognise that there are things we will simply not understand when we read books seeking to tell an ethnic experience that we ourselves do not share. I am not saying we will not get the book altogether. Rather I am saying there are aspects we will not understand. For example, I really loved Drown by Junot Díaz.  But I am very happy to acknowledge that as a mixed race middle class Chinese woman from Toronto, there are lots of things in his stories – which are very proudly Dominican American or even Dominican New Jerseyian – that are over my head. There is still much in his work that thrills me; I think Diaz is a particularly generous and inclusive writer. But I think it would be disrespectful, arrogant and honestly colonising of me to insist that I can totally understand the book, just by virtue of my superior reading abilities. No matter how many Spanish dictionaries I have, there are things in his stories that will elude me. And I think that is his intention.

In other words, it is totally untrue that all the secrets of a story will become available to you if you read hard enough. I had a creative writing instructor speak of “owning stories”: his theory was that if we read a story enough times and with enough of a critical eye, we would “own it.” I think that idea is problematic – there are many things that are not available to us, simply because of the narrowness of our own life experiences. Which is fine – just read books as the person that you are. Writers are not asking anything more of readers usually. But to assume that you can understand everything about a story, especially when it is not written specifically for you, can be a symbol of entitlement, a refusal to accept that many politically marginalised writers write things into their stories that are only for their own people.

You see the flip of this in how some white writers approach the writing of characters of colour, without humility, and with the insistence that they should be able to write whatever they want, as long as it is within their ability. But this is entirely about something other than ability. Speaking for a character of colour in a culture that often silences actual people of colour is a political act (whether or not that is the intention of the writer) that can be totally botched, if you do not recognise that as a white writer there are spaces in a life of colour that you simply can’t understand.

The bottom line for me, is to just be conscious of the fact that you’re white. And that white writers are white. And that all writers that write about humans are writing ethnic concerns. And I think it’s very important for writers and teachers of writing to be able to fess up to that: all writing is racial, all writing is political. All choices on a reading list are political. As a Racialicious reader I am sure you have heard before that race is invisible to (some) white folks because it is not a barrier to them; but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Let me close with a Junot Díaz quote about the faux colourlessness of American literature. I just can’t get enough of this guy:

We’re in a country where white is considered normative; it’s a country where white writers are simply writers, and writers of Latino descent are Latino writers. This is an issue whose roots are deeper than just the publishing community or how an artist wants to self-designate. It’s about the way the U.S. wants to view itself and how it engineers otherness in people of color and, by doing so, props up white privilege. I try to battle the forces that seek to “other” people of color and promote white supremacy. But I also have no interest in being a “writer,” either, shorn from all my connections and communities. I’m a Dominican writer, a writer of African descent, and whether or not anyone else wants to admit it, I know also that Stephen King and Jonathan Franzen are white writers. The problem isn’t in labeling writers by their color or their ethnic group; the problem is that one group organizes things so that everyone else gets these labels but not it. No, not it.

*Clearly this is not true for ALL readers of colour. My dad, for example, couldn’t care less what race the protagonist of the new Lee Childs book is. But this is true for me, and I have heard many readers and writers of colour say the same.

This post is inspired by Sarah Scaturro‘s comments to one of my previous posts about the Black Fashion Museum Collection. In her comments, she mentions the Save Our African-American Treasures program, which she describes as “an Antiques Roadshow (minus the price appraisal) type of event” that travels to different cities to discover, preserve, and celebrate the material cultural histories of African Americans.

One of the reasons I was so intrigued by this program is precisely because it doesn’t operate through the heritage capitalist logics of the Antiques Roadshow on PBS. From what I can tell, the Save Our African-American Treasures program is primarily a conservation effort and not a public display of one’s vested interest in the heritage of Americana. It’s the Forest Gump-like display and valorization of what I can only describe as “heritage capitalism” by the predominantly white appraisers and guests that irks me about the Antiques Roadshow. (Why is there so little scholarship on the Antiques Roadshow‘s circuits of commodities, capitalism, and racial citizenship?)

I began watching the Antiques Roadshow on and off just a couple of months ago. What I found amusing about the show is the guests’ reactions to the appraisals of their family heirlooms – you can tell when someone is genuinely surprised or disappointed with the estimate and when they’re feigning surprise. Also funny (to me, at least) are the various stories guests tell about how they or their families acquired these objects. Most are pretty quotidian stories about unexpected discoveries at yard sales, thrift stores, and estate sales but some are really grand narratives about their genetic linkages to American founding fathers, European royalty, and a motley crew of adventure-seeking, risk-taking, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, off-the-beaten-path family relatives who acquired Persian rugs, Chinese Ming vases (always Ming era), French antique jewelry, and Native American dolls in their world adventures. I have to admit that I get a little giddy when the appraisers myth-bust these stories. There was an episode devoted to family myth-busting, if I remember correctly.  Actually, Marie Antoinette never owned this hair comb set you inherited from your great-aunt. It’s likely a reproduction made in the 1940s in Watertown, New York.

Other than the human interest aspects of the show, I never found it that interesting. (It’s probably because I wouldn’t know a Biedermeier from an Oscar Meyer, as Martin Crane put it in the Frasier episode featuring the Antiques Roadshow called “A Tsar is Born”.) But my casual disinterest turned into a serious criticism of the show when I caught this recent appraisal of a Tlingit (indigenous people of Alaska) bowl and ladle.

The guest narrates a valiant story about Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood (the great-great-grandfather of the guest),who was on a “scientific expedition” to the Sitka area of Alaska in the spring of 1877 when he somehow came upon this bowl and ladle. The guest is unclear on the details: “And I don’t know specifically if he was given these or if he may have bartered something.” (That these objects might have been stolen is not a possibility imagined by the guest but one that I immediately considered.)

(Note the partial image of Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood decked out in classic imperialist garb.)

After her story, the appraiser fills in the details about the history of the bowl and ladle telling her and viewers, “These would have been considered family heirlooms of the Tlingit people.” “These objects are alive in the Native consciousness.” “It’s as rare as can be. It’s a Native American masterpiece.” The guest nods and utters a few “wow”s while she listens. (Meanwhile, I’m screaming, Give them back! Give them back!)

The excitement builds, reaching the climactic event: the actual appraisal. “The mountain sheep horn ladle at auction would sell in the range of about $75,000 . . . at auction this bowl would realize easily in the $175,000 to $225,000 range.”  Overcome with emotion about her cultural-capital inheritance of the spoils of history, she responds thusly:

The guest’s facial gesture projects a self-satisfied smugness that exemplifies the privileges of heritage capitalism. Hardly concerned about verifying how someone else‘s rare “family heirlooms” and “masterpieces” came into her family’s possession, she’s simply thrilled to have them.

More important than the monetary value of these objects, is the wealth they materially signify: the wealth that comes from centuries’ long and continuous accumulation of property and assets, the emotional and physical security and entitlements such property and assets enable, and the ability to pass down to future generations the socioeconomic status that inheres to such property and assets. This wealth secures and reproduces, as George Lipsitz explains in his book with the same name, “the possessive investment in whiteness.”

Whiteness is more than a racial identification; it’s a racial inheritance of a history of privilege, property, and opportunity secured by and through heritage capitalism. More still, “the advantages of whiteness,” as Lipsitz asserts, “[are] carved out of other people’s disadvantages.” In situating the bowl and ladle within her family history in the context of a public television show, these objects become public objects of a particular heritage of whiteness. Their public display publicly recognizes and reaffirms this racial narrative of American heritage – one that depends on the historical and ongoing disadvantaging of Tlingit people and their descendants. The significance of the bowl and ladle to the Tlingit are contained and limited to the ways their exotica adds to the wealth of the guest’s inheritance, to the way they help to accumulate further the possessive investment in whiteness. Through the  Antiques Roadshow, “the structural and cultural forces that racialize rights, opportunities, and life chances in [the U.S.]” are sentimentalized as heritage and secured as natural (Lipsitz).

Such appropriations are not external to fashion. Mimi’s compilation of blog posts addressing “native appropriations” in so-called hipster fashions as well as the numerous comments we received about this issue bear this out well. The bowl and the ladle at the Antiques Roadshow, like the feather headdress at Urban Outfitters, are put into the service of  “materializing,” in Philip Deloria’s words, “a romantic past” forged by a long and persistent tradition in America of “playing Indian.” This tradition, Deloria reminds, “clings tightly to the contours of power” to create a national subjectivity of whiteness constituted through racially gendered and classed “contrasts.”

The recent addition of clothes as a category of antiques explored on the Antiques Roadshow makes alternative programs like the Save Our African-American Treasures program all the more important for materializing non-dominant histories and for articulating a radical politics of vintage. (Mimi’s already begun this project in her series of posts organized under the category “Vintage Politics!)

If you’re interested in watching the fashion appraisals on Antique Roadshow, look for episodes in which appraiser of antique clothing, lace, and textiles Karen Augusta appears.

Cecil Rhodes is a name that has and will perhaps continue to inflame passions around the world. It was therefore interesting to me that some of the recurring comments following an article written by Abdulrahman El-Sayed weren’t so much based on the content of his writing, but on his status as a Rhodes scholar aspiring to work in public health policy.

As a fellow Rhodes scholar and an African woman, I frequently get asked why, in the face of Rhodes’s bloody and destructive quest to subjugate an entire generation of my people, I would accept money from a trust set up in his name. Why would I study at a university whose history is so intertwined with the legacy of colonial oppression, in a country that has never truly made peace with the atrocities perpetuated in the name of the empire?

In my opinion, the legacy of the Rhodes scholarships speaks to the heart of the legacy of empire in general, and the short answer to all the questions raised above is: it’s complicated. For many Africans, accepting any perceived largesse derived directly from the proceeds of colonialism is an agonising process. I very nearly didn’t. I genuinely believe that the legacy of colonialism is to blame for so many of the woes facing the African continent today, and that former colonising countries can and should do more to address the global inequality that was built on the backs of slavery and colonialism.

Nevertheless, what’s the alternative? When I graduated, I had planned to take 10 years off – and this was the optimistic estimate – to work and save up to do a master’s degree. There is no other way on this earth that I would ever have been able to afford to come to Oxford without this scholarship. Would it have served Kenya better if I hadn’t accepted this scholarship? In the one year that I’ve been here, I’ve met and talked with Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen about his position on entitlements and how this relates to development policy in Africa; discussed the quantification of fear in the planning of organisations working in conflict regions with former UN special representative to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi; I’ve questioned the chief financial officer at Google, Patrick Pichette, about his company’s policy in Africa. Would any of these things have been possible if I hadn’t been at Oxford?

As an education activist myself, I recognise that the monopoly universities in the west have on quality of education is, in part, derived from perpetuating inequalities in access to information, cornering the market on high-quality facilities and pricing universities in the developing world out of the market for quality educators. Would my turning down this scholarship have done anything to address these structural issues? Or am I better placed to understand these issues more and work towards addressing them now that I know first-hand how the system works?

This relates the question of what being a Rhodes scholar really involves. I assure you that it is not the same as receiving a blank cheque at the end of every month. Many of us arrive in Oxford with the expectations of families, friends and some even entire countries piled upon our shoulders. That level of expectation can be all at once enthralling and frustrating.

Just ask Myron Rolle what it’s like to have ESPN follow you around for one day, asking you if accepting the scholarship spelt the end of your career as a professional American football player. Or another scholar what it’s like to run a charity based in Sri Lanka, primarily funded in the US, while studying full time in Oxford. Or another, who’s looking into developing technology that would revolutionise the way disabled people in India are able to access information, what it’s like to wonder if the technology will translate in India. Or ask yours truly, the first woman in her family to graduate from university and start a master’s degree what it’s like to choose between doing a DPhil and starting your own organisation or finally getting a real job.

Every decision you make suddenly takes on a weight that you had previously never ever had to consider. For me, being a Rhodes scholar is not a mark of accomplishment. It’s a step towards something bigger, a platform from which I can launch into bigger and better things in the future. It’s a comma, not a full-stop. But it’s also a responsibility. A recognition that so much has been given to me and so much more will be expected of me.

One of the best answers to the original question was given by one of the wonderful students that I met when I arrived. When asked why she accepted the scholarship, she said: “Cecil Rhodes had no intention for us as black women to ever see his money. I can’t think of a better way of saying fuck you than taking it.”

This article was reprinted with permission.

(Image Credit: 1913 Religious Map of Africa from University of Texas)