So look, David: Chinese people eat weird food. There is a saying that “Chinese will eat anything with its back to the sky,” and another that says “Chinese will eat anything with legs but a table and anything with wings but an airplane.” These are Chinese sayings, I might point out — a sign that Chinese aren’t exactly unaware that the “delicacies” that send prim Westerners to their fainting couches are a little off the beaten path.

But Chinese are far from the only culture that eats weird food, and fuck, given that you’re from North Carolina, have you looked at what American Southerners traditionally eat? No? Chitlins! Possum! Muskrat! Bull testicles! Oh wait, you’re from suburban Raleigh, so probably not, given that most of the more exotic dishes in Southern cuisine, like in many culinary traditions, was the offspring of necessity — invention midwived by destitution. If you’re hungry enough, rodents will start to look tasty, as will chicken claws, stray innards and balls. And once you’ve eaten them long enough, all these things evolve into nostalgic signifiers — especially after you’ve pulled yourself out of poverty. They go from things you have to eat all the time to things you choose to eat once in a while, to remind yourself you don’t have to eat them all the time.

And this is what’s truly ugly about your piece, David: For someone who’s spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your essay is unpleasantly blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want, and that many people, like the peasant family you had such a bad experience sharing a meal with, continue to subsist on an annual income that’s a tiny fraction of what a sophisticated awesome American literary superstar like you loses in his sofa. And in a country of 1.3 billion people, even having braised pig’s stomach to occasionally go with your daily rice is a fucking luxury.

–From David Sedaris Thinks Chinese People (and Food) Are Repulsive, Which Makes Me Sad, Because I Used to Like David Sedaris

There have been thousands of words written about Stockett’s skills, her portrayal of the black women versus the white women, her right to tell this story at all. I won’t rehash those arguments, except to say that I found the novel fast-paced but highly problematic. Even more troubling, though, is how the structure of narratives like The Help underscores the failure of pop culture to acknowledge a central truth: Within the civil rights movement, white people were the help.

The architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American. Many white Americans stood beside them, and some even died beside them, but it was not their fight — and more important, it was not their idea.

This isn’t the first time the civil rights movement has been framed this way fictionally, especially on film. Most Hollywood civil rights movies feature white characters in central, sometimes nearly solo, roles. My favorite (not!) is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, which gives us two white FBI agents as heroes of the movement. FBI agents! Given that J. Edgar Hoover did everything short of shoot Martin Luther King Jr. himself in order to damage or discredit the movement, that goes from troubling to appalling.

Why is it ever thus? Suffice it to say that these stories are more likely to get the green light and to have more popular appeal (and often acclaim) if they have white characters up front. That’s a shame. The continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step toward justice that this nation has ever known is infuriating, to say the least. Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn’t need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them.

–Martha Southgate, The Truth about the Civil Rights Era

So Richard Dawkins is an asshat. Anyone surprised?

Here’s the comment he left on a thread that discussed sexism:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

And here’s a brief roundup of what people are saying about it.

The Atlantic Wire:

Several comments, including Watson’s own, hit on exactly what the fight’s about. Dawkins has every right to dismiss Watson’s story and to argue that she was not in a high risk situation. But his attempt to prove how insignificant Watson’s story was by comparing it with the much worse scenario of a Muslim woman’s daily life hurts his argument. The fact that something worse is going on somewhere else does not diminish whatever may be happening here. Also, as Watson points out, Dawkins is admired widely for work criticizing creationism and denouncing the use of religion as an excuse for repressing women in particular. To defend only some women from misogyny and not all, she and others argue, is hypocrtical. (sic)

Shakesville:

Again, he implies that “Muslim women” and “American women” are mutually exclusive groups; again, he implies that American women do not “suffer physically from misogyny,” nor are their lives “substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny.”

What Tami Said:

High-profile and influential men, like Dawkins, who use their status to minimize sexism in the West, deny the lived experiences of women, and advance the stupid thinking that all Western women are both white and privileged, poison a well already rank with gender bias. Men like Dawkins who sneer at Western misogyny make Western women’s lives more difficult, including women like Watson who are atheists. So, why should Watson and other women continue to hand Dawkins their money and support, and prop up his influence, when he thinks they’re all a bunch of whiny bitches who should be satisfied getting sexually harassed because somewhere (in those bad, brown, Muslim countries) a woman has it worse?

Lots of people have said lots of things about this, rightfully calling out Dawkins’ male privilege and pointing out that the “there are bigger problems” argument is derailing and silencing.

But very few of these posts have touched on Dawkins’ use of Muslim women specifically. And that’s where we come in.

Richard Dawkins is an atheist, and as an atheist, he believes that organized religion is harmful for women. There are plenty of religious and non-religious thinkers who can level-headedly make the case that organized religions use rooted patriarchal norms to oppress women and often works against their own ideals, but Dawkins is not one of those people. Dawkins uses the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman and gives little regard to how his politicized views are received by Muslim women.

So no one should be surprised at his comment above.

But that’s doesn’t make it okay. Dawkins’ comment trades in stereotypes about Muslim women “over there.” Does female genital mutilation happen? Yes. Are women not allowed to drive cars in Saudi Arabia? Yes. Is stoning a thing? Yes. But is Dawkins’ use of these acceptable? No.

It’s unacceptable for Dawkins to make sweeping statements like this because he attaches loaded terms like “female genital mutilation” and “stoning” to a huge, worldwide term like “Muslim women,” and attaches these things to Islam itself, ignoring outside cultural, economic, and social influences. Making blanket statements about FGM and stoning and driving attaches these to all of us, and contributes to the Oppressed Muslim Women stereotype. And you know what that stereotype has done to help us? Nothing.

It’s also just as silencing to female Muslim activists “over there” who are dealing with these issues, and other important ones, such as campaigning for the right to vote, pass their citizenship to their children, or keep custody of their children after divorce. Dawkins is injecting Muslim women “over there” into an issue that concerns us as well (sexual harassment and sexism in belief systems), but uses us to derail this issue.

And what is Dawkins doing to actually help the Muslim women he claims are “mutilated with a razor blade[s],” and “not allowed to drive a car,” and “stoned to death”?

NOT A DAMN THING.

So kindly shut the fuck up, Richard Dawkins, and stop using us as foot soldiers in your crusade against organized religion. We’ll be fine without you.

The more you read about Antonio Mendez, the more his exploits make Burn Notice look like Get Smart: the Colorado native who grew up in a single-parent household went from answering a random want ad to a 25-year career in the CIA as an “espionage artist,” specializing in helping assets get out of tough situations.

“I would say the whole thing was like James Bond but even better. I was involved in Moscow creating tradecraft, knocking the socks off the KGB,” he told Open Your Eyes magazine in 2008. “If you are surrounded by an army of that kind of counterintelligence and you can still do your business, Bond doesn’t even get close to that.”

Mendez went on to write two memoirs about his experiences in the field. But his most celebrated operation, an extraction of six U.S. diplomats from Iran in the first days of the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeni, was the subject of a 2007 article in Wired Magazine. As Joshuah Bearman wrote, this particular plan would take a more cinematic turn – literally – than the usual covert actions: Mendez actually created a fake movie production.

To build his cover, Mendez put $10,000 into his briefcase and flew to Los Angeles. He called his friend John Chambers, the veteran makeup artist who had won a 1969 Academy Award for Planet of the Apes and also happened to be one of Mendez’s longtime CIA collaborators. Chambers brought in a special effects colleague, Bob Sidell. They all met in mid-January and Mendez briefed the pair on the situation and his scheme. Chambers and Sidell thought about the hostages they were seeing each night on television and quickly declared they were in.

Mendez knew they had to plan the ruse down to the last detail. “If anyone checks,” he said, “we need that foundation to be there.” If they were exposed, it could embarrass the government, compromise the agency, and imperil their lives and the lives of the hostages in the embassy. The militants had said from the beginning that any attempted rescue would lead to executions.

In just four days, Mendez, Chambers, and Sidell created a fake Hollywood production company. They designed business cards and concocted identities for the six members of the location-scouting party, including all their former credits. The production company’s offices would be set up in a suite at Sunset Gower Studios on what was formerly the Columbia lot, in a space vacated by Michael Douglas after he finished The China Syndrome.

Bearman’s article chronicling Mendez’s faux production, Argos, has now been adapted into a screenplay of the same name, to be produced by George Clinton’s Smokehouse films and directed by Ben Affleck. Great opportunity for a Latino actor, right? Well, according to Variety magazine, Affleck’s already found the perfect leading man:

Yup. Himself.

Given Affleck’s much-hyped involvement in the Project Greenlight series years ago, where he helped make the career of fledgling directors, it’s disappointing to hear he won’t take the same chance with a Latino actor for Argos. As shown on the graph at right, taken from a 2006 study by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, shows that only Latino actors are requested only 5.2% of casting breakdowns, and get 1.2% of lead roles. Unless Affleck and company reverse course, Argos could go down as a missed opportunity on par with 21, which erased the real-life Asian-Americans who inspired the film in favor of “more marketable” white leads.

Thanks to reader Mike G. for the tip and the links!

When the news broke that the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was a hoax, I wanted to read a bit more about exactly what happened. The Washington Post notes:

And Sunday, the truth spilled out: The gay girl in Damascus confessed to being a 40-year-old American man from Georgia.

The persona Tom MacMaster built and cultivated for years — a lesbian who was half Syrian and half American — was a tantalizing Internet-era fiction, one that he used to bring attention to the human rights record of a country where media restrictions make traditional reporting almost impossible.

On Sunday, MacMaster apologized on the blog. “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground,” he wrote. “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

MacMaster, a Middle East peace activist who is working on his master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote that he fictionalized the account of a gay woman in Syria to illuminate the situation for a Western audience.

Essentially, this MacMaster fellow is Peggy Seltzer for the Arab Spring. (And, insert plot twist – LezGetReal, the blog that encouraged “Amina” to tell “her” story was ALSO run by a white man claiming to be a deaf, lesbian, mother of two.)

But the why of this intrigues me. While news organizations are in a tizzy about what this means for using blogs as sources, what I want to know is how the media environment got so skewed that fictionalized accounts by white writers get more media attention than actual accounts by people of color?

Reader Kat sent through this item from KABOBfest called “The Politics Behind the Role Play”:

More than just speaking for Syrian activists, or Syrian women, or Syrian lesbians, as so many righteous liberal Westerners “interested” in the Middle East so often do, Tom MacMaster, in his own words, “created a voice,” and in doing so redefined what representation means for Arabs in western media – we call it ventriloquism. In creating the “dummy,” Anima, through the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, MacMaster became the mouthpiece for an entire class of Syrian people while denying Syrians (activists/women/lesbians/all of the above) the right to a voice in an already one-sided global media.

In this violent act of representation in which language and meaning was appropriated, MacMaster detracted from the stories of REAL Syrians who risk their lives daily in opposition to the dictatorship of the Assad regime. Not only did the attention received by MacMasters fake blog rob Syrians of their own voice, it put them in danger in a very real way.

The entire Kabobfest piece is worth a read, but this part, in particular, cuts to the heart of the issue:

One shouldn’t need the sensationalized fictional narrative of a lesbian Syrian woman to affirm the rights of Syrian demonstrators who are being brutally repressed by their governments. But if the goal is to arouse emotion and entertain, then MacMaster has succeeded in proving that the truth about Arabs comes secondary to Western perceptions and feelings towards them.

I wonder how did Gay Girl in Damascus amass such a following, while other activists and bloggers did not? Probably for the same reason Peggy Seltzer’s memoir was a literary darling until they discovered it was fictional, and why a young white able-bodied male college grad could make headlines by explaining that poverty isn’t so bad after all. Writing from a white western perspective confirms a white western perspective. Or to put it more simply, like recognizes like. Clearly, people were able to find Syrian activists, writers, and bloggers to go on the record about this in the aftermath – where were their voices before?

This whole drama hearkens back to the enduring issue of diversity in media. Most people can see, visually, the lack of racial/ethnic diversity and a failure to incorporate women into the higher echelons of news and culture institutions. But the problem runs far deeper than that. Who do we consider an expert? Frustration is the only word that came to mind when the news coverage of the MENA region started and television networks could deliver me nothing that wasn’t filtered through a white man over the age of fifty (and in some cases, someone who may have directly contributed to the cause of the unrest). How can we adequately frame issues from around the globe without featuring voices from around the globe? Traditional news has always been about selection – what a roomful of men thought the world needed to know about. When I interviewed Derrick Ashong from Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, he mentioned:

Ashong pointed out that media has traditionally been a top down kind of business, where a handful of people were expected to curate what was newsworthy for the masses.

“If I turn on CNN, I won’t hear anything about [what's] going on in Africa unless there’s a conflict to be covered or a tragedy. As a person born in Africa, that’s unacceptable to me. It isn’t that there’s no news being created, it’s just that we won’t hear about that news.”

We have come to a sad state of media affairs when fictional creations receive far more attention than those actually putting their lives on the line, and that the stories of “others” are only worth telling once they have been co-opted.

—

Further Reading:

“The story of a gay girl in Damascus or, a straight guy in Edinburgh” [Daily Maverick]
Doree Shafir on White Intellectual Norms Post-Seltzer [The Doree Chronicles]
Daniel Nassar on “The real world of gay girls in Damascus” [The Guardian]
Liz Henry on Amina and Fictional Blogging [Composite]

The May 2011 cover girl for ESSENCE magazine this month is none other than one Wendy J. Williams, the woman the Black gossip blogs love to hate and misgender.

Like I’ve said in previous posts on this subject, some of you Black folks need to buy a vowel, pick up a science book and get a clue that transpeople exist in all colors and sizes and aren’t going anywhere.

Note for the ignorantly clueless:  Some of my transsisters are petite size 8 pump wearing fashion divas, so don’t get it twisted..

We are all blends of genetic material and characteristics from mommy and daddy.   A little less testosterone in the womb and some of you so called ‘men‘ attacking Wendy would be rocking her dresses and pumps.

You also need to get a clue that it’s not cool to do what whiteness has done to the images of Black women for centuries and participate in the denigrating of the mothers of humanity. It’s even more repugnant to me as a proud African descended transwomen to see Black people (or alleged online Black people) deliberately misgendering Black women they don’t like.

But some of you are too stupid or insecure about your own gender identity and sexual orientation issues to get that point.

Cue transphobic BS from Bossip in 5…4…3…2…1…

Y’all can hate on Wendy and hurl transphobic slurs at her all you want, she’s got more money in her bank account than you pathetic losers hiding behind your computer terminals misgendering her.

Photo Credit: TransGriot

Remember this?

Toni Bond Leonard, President/CEO of Black Women’s Reproductive Justice BWRJ), said this about it (from RH Reality Check):

“The groups behind these heinous attacks upon Black women care nothing about Black children or the Black community. These are some of the same groups who fought against healthcare reform and oppose government safety net programs that would directly benefit Black women, our families and our communities.”

“This billboard and the twenty-nine others they plan to erect are offensive to Black women and the Black community, overall. We saw them cowardly placing the billboards in the dark late last night. These billboards are painting an abhorrent image of Black women as perpetrators of a plan to eradicate the future Black race.”

“That they would place these billboards in the Black community with such a despicable lie is reprehensible. It also must not go unnoted that they placed the billboards on the side of a building facing a vacant lot filled with garbage and broken glass. This only further shows their disrespect for Black women and the Black community that all they could think to do was put up billboards telling us Black women are preventing future leaders from being born. What about highlighting the need for economic resources to remove garbage-filled lots in urban areas and creating safe communities.”

And, according to BWRJ, Life Always, the anti-choice group who placed these billboards around Chicago’s South Side,  is backed up by the same funders who are down with Sarah Palin. o_O

Akiba Solomon, in her analysis of the Chicago anti-choice ads, writes on how artist Stacey Muhammed re-imagines them:

(The small print says: “Police terrorism, incarceration, medical apartheid, miseducation, poverty, racial profiling.)

As well as this:

(The copy: “The most dangerous place for an African American is in a world that criminalizes its mothers.”)

Then, thanks to a tip from reproductive-justice advocate extraordinaire Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, we heard that Chicago Tribune reports on a group–who wanted to remain anonymous beyond identifying as “social workers and community members”–who felt like this about those ads:

This sign says, “In 21 minutes this sign should be gone.” Another sign from the protesters said, “Abort Racism.” Chicago Tribune’s Megan Twohey writes that one blew away.  Unfortunately.

Photo/image credits:  Life Always; Stacey Muhammed/Colorlines; Heather Charles/Chicago Tribune

By Arturo R. García

The main character and narrator of the story. Katniss is slender with black hair, grey eyes and olive skin. She is sixteen years old and attends a secondary school somewhere in Appalachia, known in the book as District 12, the coal mining sector. She is often quiet and is generally liked by District 12′s residents, mostly because of her ability to provide highly-prized game for a community in which starvation is a constant threat. Katniss is an excellent hunter, archer, gatherer, and trapper, skilled just like her deceased father. She and her father shared singing ability, too. Since his death in a mine explosion, which killed Gale’s father too, Katniss has been the sole provider for her family, a role she was reluctantly forced to assume at the age of eleven when her mother’s grief overcame her ability to function. Katniss is surprised when her sister is chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, and willingly steps forward to take her place out of love.

- Character profile for Katniss Everdeen, via Goodreads

Does that description – more specifically, that physical description – sound like it matches Jennifer Lawrence, pictured above?

Only in Hollywood.

It was announced yesterday that Lawrence, coming off an Academy Awards nomination for Winter’s bone, had been chosen to play Katniss in a film adaptation of The Hunger Games, the first story in a three-book series that sees the character become a folk heroine, then a revolutionary leader, in a post-apocalyptic North America.

According to Racebending.com, Katniss’ skin tone is of specific interest to her character’s backstory: she shares that description with other residents of The Seam, an impoverished area in the Appalachian district where she lives. Among them is her father, a mixed-race miner. By comparison, her mother and sister stand out in the community of the Seam precisely because they are blonde and white-skinned. Which makes Racebending’s conclusion nothing short of accurate:

Given this story takes place hundreds of years into the future, Katniss is almost definitely of mixed ethnicity–making her one of very few protagonists in young adult fiction who would be considered biracial or multi-ethnic by “real world” standards.

Of course, as Marissa Lee notes, Paramount Pictures, which is financing the film, stacked the casting deck right off the bat, saying candidates for the role, “‘should be Caucasian, between ages 15 and 20, who could portray someone ‘underfed but strong,’ and ‘naturally pretty underneath her tomboyishness.’”

Director Gary Ross justified the choice to Entertainment Weekly by saying the series’ author, Suzanne Collins, gave him her blessing:

Suzanne had no issues with Jen playing the role. And she thought there was a tremendous amount of flexibility. It wasn’t doctrine to her. Jen will have dark hair in the role, but that’s something movies can easily achieve. [Laughs] I promise all the avid fans of The Hunger Games that we can easily deal with Jennifer’s hair color.

Whether the series’ fans respond as positively has yet to be seen. If Paramount and Ross aren’t careful, they might have another Airbender mess on their hands.

Meanwhile, the updated version of Red Dawn, the 1984 action-cult “classic” is getting another update, this time behind the scenes: The Los Angeles Times reported that the remake, which was to feature China as the invading force in place of the original Soviet Union, will now cast China as a smaller player in a coalition led by North Korea, with digital trickery being used to minimize the Chinese threat.

But don’t go thinking this decision is based on an outpouring of sympathy toward the Chinese people by MGM. The studio, which has had the film on the shelf while sorting its’ financial affairs, is hoping the switch will make the new Dawn easier to sell in the increasingly-important Chinese film market:

A number of Hollywood studios are deepening their business ties to the world’s most populous nation. Disney is building a theme park outside Shanghai, Sony Pictures co-produced the recent “Karate Kid” remake with the government-affiliated China Film Group, and News Corp.‘s Fox International Productions recently made the Chinese-language hit “Hot Summer Days” there. Even independent studios like Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment will release their films “Killers” and “Red” in China in coming months.

Dan Mintz, whose DMG Entertainment is a leading producer and distributor of movies in China, said the “Red Dawn” story dramatizes how Western companies can fundamentally misunderstand how the nation works. If the picture had gone out without redacting the Chinese invaders, he said, “there would have been a real backlash. It’s like being invited to a dinner party and insulting the host all night long. There’s no way to look good…. The film itself was not a smart move.”

Mintz, who met with the producers of “Red Dawn” to offer some suggestions on how they could proceed, said that doing business in China requires a partnership approach. “The more you reach out, the better your relationships will be,” Mintz said. “This is bigger than a single film.”

So, a movie about Communist invaders is being edited so as to not offend a Communist nation. Instead of WOLVERIIINES, maybe the battle cry in the remake should be IRONYYYYYYYY!

Top image courtesy of Celebrity Pictures

Watching black folks on Twitter tells no more about African American culture than watching the forums at Salon or Gawker reveals about white culture. Sure, among certain Twitter groups, black folks relax and use vernacular and call on experiences that are unique to us. But attempting to assign deep cultural meaning to trending topics like #hoodhoe is a reflection of racial bias. We do ourselves no favor by buying into the thinking that topics like this and #itaintrape reveal something particularly significant about black people. Don’t get me wrong, these memes are misogynist. But anyone who has spent more than two seconds online knows that misogyny and sexism are everywhere–a reflection of American…no…world culture, not that of any particular race. Consider the deeply sexist conversation surrounding the Julian Assange sexual assault accusations and the trolling on the #mooreandme hashtag. These were hardly driven by black Twitterati.

If some white people are amazed at what black folks do on Twitter, it is a sign of their own ignorance and prejudice. Williams laments that on the anniversary of the disaster in Haiti, the #haiti hashtag peaked at number 76 on the Twitter trend list, far below a slew of vulgar and sexist tags. But are black people solely to blame for that? Were all the white people on Twitter discussing Haitian relief efforts? Why should black people be more or less ashamed of the idiots among us than people of the majority culture? Why should silly and profane Tweets written by black folks hold more weight than the equally silly and profane Tweets written by everybody else?

I, for one, refuse to be burdened with the actions of @lilduval, some dude I’ve never heard of who created the  #itaintrape meme, nor those of @slimthugga, who waxed yesterday about sleeping with white women in honor of MLK Day.

~~Tami Winfrey Harris, “Rejecting the Notion of “Black People Twitter“

Image credit: Boing Boing (via Portfoli)

By Arturo R. García

This is nominally a day of celebration, of rememberance for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. But some folks just can’t leave well enough alone.

It started in Greeley, Colo., earlier this month: radio station owner and school board member Brett Reese began using his media platform to read a listener’s letter calling King a “sexual degenerate,” an “America-hating communist” and a “plastic god.” Reese told a local news station he aired it – at least twice a day, and as many as four – after “doing fact-checking.”

And yet, as Talking Points Memo reports, somehow Reese’s efforts at “journalism” still left him surprised to find out that the three-year-old letter had been posted on a site run by a white supremacist group. Reese also apparently hasn’t commented on how he could verify that King was either a deity, or made out of plastic. But, if finding out news that the key to this rather desperate plea for attention originated with a bunch of racists hasn’t stopped him from airing the letter, I suppose we can’t expect much else from him to make sense.

Such as his insistence on bringing a gun to school board meetings because of “death threats.” Ironically, the Associated Press reported that Reese had to stop doing so following a restraining order placed upon him for allegedly threatening to “have a shootout” with a rival station.

If there’s one positive aspect to this situation, it’s that Reese (seated in this picture) has solidified his status as a fool both within the board, which voted 6-1 to distance itself from his tactics, and within his own town. If he wanted an expose, he surely got it – exposing himself as one more cynical race-mongering “shock jock.” In other words, he’ll probably be trolling around the Foxosphere within a year.

*******

The mock outrage continued in Maine, where new governor Paul LePage not only refused to attend an MLK event hosted by the local NAACP, but behaved as if it were a patriotic act to do so:

“They are a special interest. End of story…and I’m not going to be held hostage by special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they’d like about it,” said LePage.

LePage has an adopted son who is from Jamaica.

When a reporter from another television station asked LePage if his non-participation is more than one instance, and rather a pattern, he replied, “Tell ‘em to kiss my butt. If they want to play the race card, come to dinner and my son will talk to them.”

LePage’s rhetoric had his people in damage-control mode, citing prior commitments, and his speaking at prior MLK events while serving as mayor of Waterville. Which would be easier to understand if LePage hadn’t reacted aggressively toward the NAACP in the past: LePage accused the group of wanting him to speak exclusively to black prisoners at the Maine State Prison, according to WCSH-TV. Unfortunately for him, his account was refuted not only by state NAACP director Rachel Talbot Ross, but by a corrections official who said she “would be surprised if the prison would be allowed an event that was only for black inmates.”

For her part, Ross told the Portland Press Herald:

“We don’t want to misinterpret his intention, but the message we’re getting is that we’re not welcome and we’re not part of the Maine he’s preparing to lead for the next four years,” said Rachel Talbot Ross, state director of the NAACP and president of the NAACP’S Portland Branch.

Ross said LePage will be recognized Monday, the MLK holiday, during a march and rally for racial equality and economic justice on the steps of Portland City Hall. Participants plan to create a “welcome basket” that will be delivered to the new governor, including another request to meet and discuss concerns in a respectful, transparent and meaningful manner.

“This isn’t going to be a political throwdown,” Ross said. “We want to find a way to have a civil, respectful discourse on these important issues. We all want Maine to be the best it can be. We’re asking for help in understanding where we fit in and how we can take part in the process.”

*******
And in Washington D.C., a moment of tribute toward Dr. King seemingly turned into an attempt to ret-con his philosophy, when Jeh C. Johnson, the U.S. Defense Department’s general counsel, said MLK would support the current U.S. offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” Johnson said.

Johnson claimed US service members are helping the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, noting that Dr. King spoke out in favor of acts of kindness.

“I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes,” Johnson said, adding that the “dangerous unselfishness” of the troops would make Dr. King proud.

In a release, the department noted that Johnson attended Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, with his oldest son, Martin Luther King III. Which, one would think, would make Johnson even more aware than the media about Dr. King’s 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam War:

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 19541; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

What Johnson was trying to accomplish is unclear. But maybe he should leave the re-interpretation of Dr. King’s words to the professionals (even if said re-interpretations can sound NSFW):

Thanks to Elton for the tip on the LePage story. Video courtesy of The Huffington Post
Top image courtesy of Life Magazine

There’s been a lot of buzz amongst friends and colleagues about the film Reel Injun. The title itself says a lot. “Reel” —a reel of film—and “Injun”—a derogatory word for Indian—but the title also points to what is missing from film and from children’s and young adult literature: real Indians.

Saying the phrase, “real Indians”, makes me cringe. First, it is the year 2010, and we—people who are American Indian—encounter people who think we were all wiped out by enemy tribes, disease, or war.  Or, people who think that in order to be “real Indians” we have to live our lives the same ways our ancestors did. Course, they don’t expect their own identities and lives to look like those of their own ancestors… In principle, we are a lot like anyone else. We have ways of thinking about the world and ways of being in that world (spiritually and materially) that were–and are—handed down from one generation to the next. Though we wear jeans and athletic shoes (or business suits and dress shoes), we also maintain clothing we sometimes wear for spiritual and religious purposes. Just like any cultural group, anywhere.

Second reason “real Indians” makes me cringe is the word “Indians”. We use it. In fact, I use it in the title of this blog. But I know it references all the indigenous nations and tribes and bands and communities and pueblos in the United States, all with unique ways of doing things.

That said, I want to talk more specifically about the trailer.

Watch Clint Eastwood say he wanted real Indians but couldn’t find one. I wonder where he looked?

Watch Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre say it is funny to watch white people playing Native roles. The trailer shows a series of them: Anthony Quinn, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Daniel Day Lewis, Chuck Connors, Burt Reynolds, Boris Karloff, Sylvester Stallone, and, William Shatner…  All of them playing tough, savage, or tragic Indians. Watching them do it, as someone who is Native, can be hilarious, but only if you know more about who we are.

Filmmaker Jim Marmusch Jarmusch notes that John Wayne signals a moral standard of what it means to be American. His remark is followed by a clip from one of John Wayne’s movies, where he is shown kicking someone. That clip may be from The Searchers, a film hailed by many as a critique of racism.

Then there’s a critique of Dances With Wolves….

Though I’ve not had the opportunity to see the film, I love what I see in the trailer, and I think anyone who works with children’s literature ought to see it! I think it holds great promise for helping critique portrayals of American Indians in the books we give to children.

Visit the website for Reel Injun and find out when and where you can see it.

Compiled by Site Lead Arturo R. García

Recently M. Night Shyamalan, director of The Last Airbender, provided another lengthy response, though not by name, to the concerns raised by the Racebending campaign. While it’s good to read both sides of the story, of course, it’s unfortunate we never got to see the issue discussed in the most fitting manner: a public debate. As an experiment, though, here’s Shyamalan’s comments laid out alongside some notable posts about the film’s casting issues by Q. Le, Gene Luen Yang, Angry Asian Man and Derek Kirk Kim.

Q. Le: Perhaps the greatest offense that the “heroic” characters are portrayed by lily White actors while the “villainous” characters are portrayed dark-skinned Indian actors in lieu of the fact that all the characters have distinctly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and Inuit characteristics regardless of their “good” or “badness.”

M Night Shyamalan: Well, you caught me. I’m the face of racism. I’m always surprised at the level of misunderstanding, the sensitivities that exist. As an Asian-American, it bothers me when people take all of their passion and rightful indignation about the subject and then misplace it. Here’s the reality: first of all, the Uncle Iroh character is the Yoda character in the movie, and it would be like saying that Yoda was a villain. So he’s Persian.

And Dev Patel is the actual hero of the series, and he’s Indian, OK? The whole point of the movie is that there isn’t any bad or good. The irony is that I’m playing on the exact prejudices that the people who are claiming I’m racist are doing. They immediately assume that everyone with dark skin is a villain. That was an incredibly racist assumption which as it turns out is completely incorrect.

Gene Luen Yang: … but then how do you explain the original casting calls, which clearly indicated a preference for white actors from the get-go?

Shyamalan: There are four nations, and I had to eventually make a decision about what nationality each of them are. What happened was, Noah Ringer walked in the door – and there was no other human being on the planet that could play Aang except for this kid. To me, he felt mixed race with an Asian quality to him. I made all the Air Nomads mixed race – some of them are Hispanic, some of them are Korean. Every monk you see in a flashback, in that world, are all mixed race because they’re nomadic. I felt that really worked as a culture. OK, so that’s one-quarter of our world population. The second group is the Fire Nation; when Dev was cast as Zuko, I said, OK, I have to cast an Uncle Iroh that looks like his uncle. We’re going to go from Indian/Persian to Mediterranean, all that group with all its darker colors including Italians.

So now we’re at one-half of the population of the movie which is not white. Moving on to the third group, which is the Earth Kingdom (which is the biggest kingdom in this fictional world): I liked a bunch of the people who happened to be Japanese, Korean, Philippine, so I decided to make the Earth kingdom Asians. Now we’re at three-quarters of the world. Now I have the brother and sister left. If you don’t have an edict of “don’t put white people in the movie” then the Water Tribe can be European/Caucasian. So that’s how it ended up.

Angry Asian Man: But this is not about a bunch of fanboys being upset about how you’ve messed with their favorite cartoon. This is about an absolute failure to acknowledge and understand the broader context of race and representation, and how it’s being played out, once again, in this movie — a project many believed would be an unprecedented opportunity for Asians in a major Hollywood project.

Shyamalan: Here’s the irony of the conversation: The Last Airbender is the most culturally diverse movie series of all time. I’m not talking about maybe one Jedi, maybe one person of a different color – no one’s even close. That’s a great pride to me. The irony of this statement enrages me to the point of … not even the accusation, but the misplacement of it. You’re coming at me, the one Asian filmmaker who has the right to cast anybody I want, and I’m casting this entire movie in this color blind way where everyone is represented. I even had one section of the Earth kingdom as African American, which obviously isn’t in the show, but I wanted to represent them, too!

And I fought like crazy to have the pronunciation of the names to go back to the Asian pronunciation. So you say “Ahng” instead of “Aaang” because it’s correct. It’s not “I-rack,” it’s “ee-Rock.” I’m literally fighting for all this. And who’s getting blamed? ME! This is incredible. And so it’s infuriating, this stigmatization, that the first word about the most culturally-diverse movie of all time is this accusation. And here’s the irony of it, this has nothing to do with the studio system. I had complete say in casting. So if you need to point the racist finger, point it at me, and if it doesn’t stick, then be quiet.

Derek Kirk Kim: Everything from to the costume designs, to the written language, to the landscapes, to martial arts, to philosophy, to spirituality, to eating utensils!—it’s all an evocative, but thinly veiled, re-imagining of ancient Asia. (In one episode, a region is shown where everyone is garbed in Korean hanboks — traditional Korean clothing — the design of which wasn’t even altered at all.) It would take a willful disregard of the show’s intentions and origins to think this wouldn’t extend to the race of the characters as well.

Shyamalan: Whenever we’re on set, it’s crazy, I love it. We’re in our cafeteria, it looks like the United Nations in there! And you’re not supposed to be thinking about this because it’s so diverse. And again, this is what really frustrates me, when we get to the second movie (hopefully), since its based in the Earth Kingdom, suddenly the movie will seem entirely politically correct Asian, and the accusers will feel like they won. YOU DID NOT WIN! YOU DID NOT WIN! That’s not what happened, you were wrong. As you can tell, it’s a frustrating thing. Look at the movie poster with Dev Patel in it. I’m not understanding … he’s not politically correct? I could go on for half an hour on that subject … in the end it’s like that saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Angry Asian Man: Okay, so you can’t definitively argue that anyone on Avatar’s anime-inspired fantasy realm is actually “Asian.” But all signs certainly point there. I never really watched show, but I always assumed those were Asian kids doing the martial arts. I’m willing to bet if you showed the cartoon to anyone, it’s likely they’d come to the same conclusion.

Shyamalan: At the basis of this, a fascinating thing, it didn’t even occur to me until the first mention of this came up: The art form of Anime in and of itself is what’s causing the confusion. The Anime artists intentionally put ambiguous features on the characters so that you see who you want to see in it. It’s part of the art form. My daughter looks identical to Katara; I saw my family in that series when I was watching it, I saw them in the faces. I’m sure that every household feels the same way in that they see their own families in them. It’s a fascinating thing about how people perceive it. If there’s an issue with why Anime does not put particularly specific Asian features from the PC Asian types that people think should be there … take it up with Anime animators. It has nothing to do with me.

Coming up tomorrow: Michael Le from Racebending on why this issue matters.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting New Orleans for the very first time.  Having grown up in South Florida,  the city by the river was intriguing, but not as big a draw for me as the metropolises that grace the Eastern seaboard. Going to New Orleans – with its similar swamps, oppressive torpor, casual appropriation of local Native American culture, and alligator jerky – sounded about as appealing as hanging out with a rowdy, sweaty cousin. However, years of being regaled with tales of every manner of fun that could be had in the Big Easy had intrigued me. NO ONE comes home without an epic anecdote.  More than one jaded and well-travelled New Yorker in my circle got that faraway look in their eyes talking about New Orleans.   My recent desire to explore the regional diversity of Southern cultures (I blame True Blood) and shake off some one-horse-town dust pretty much sealed the deal.  So, with a deep breath and a few mouse clicks, I was ready to go.

And New Orleans didn’t disappoint. From the start, I was smitten: by the architecture, the streetcars, the museums, the sweetness of the regional drawl, the overpriced souvenir shops, the heavenly food, the decidedly French celebration of debauchery, and (sweet merciful McGillicutty!) the take away cup.  By the second day of my trip I was calculating moving and living expenses. (Really. I was.)  These were the thoughts that danced merrily in my little tourist head as I strolled down Chartres Street on my way from viewing the grounds of the Saint Louis Cathedral.  I was feeling better than I had in weeks, maybe even months.  So I was most unprepared to meet one resident of New Orleans who I would not soon forget.

This is Nola Mae.

Nola Mae is the “flagship” doll of the Big Lips: “The Better To Kiss You With”  New Orleans Doll Company collection by New Orleans-based artist Jamie Hayes. The Big Lips dolls, which are “inspired by Nola Mae”, come in a range of flesh and hair tones. They all feature large round eyes and brightly colored outsized lips, sometimes with teeth.  There are brides, grooms and even tux boys.  Hayes, who counts Vincent Van Gogh among his influencers,  favors unusual designs and exceptionally bright tones and shades in all his work.  His unique style lends itself beautifully to just about anything with a Mardi Gras theme.  The sense of childlike whimsy evident in the prints almost made me smile.

Almost.

To make sure I wasn’t imagining this upsetting showcase of non-malicious racism*  I decided to get some outside feedback.   I attached a picture of the Nola Mae doll and sent it via IM to a friend who I value for his cool-headed objectivity. His response:

Him: WHAT THE FUCK

Him: Where did you find that at

Me: Yeah…

Me: At a gallery.

Him: was it a Klan gallery

Him: that’s some racist shit

Him: is this something you bought

Me: ROFF! No, an artist here makes them.

Me: And get this: dude is colorblind. So I feel like an ass for feeling like this is kinda really racist.

Him: bullshit

Me: No, he is. He can’t see color.

Him: BULLSHIT

Me: It’s really bugging me.

Me: I don’t want to think about it while I’m trying to enjoy my stay here.

Him: knock something out when you get home

Him: DAMN that’s racist

Although I agreed, it would have been facile for me to dismiss some of these works as deliberately racist.  I decided that it was a good idea to see what I could learn about the man behind Nola Mae.

Hayes’ simultaneous assertion of color blindness and admission of being “a bit of a fibber” notwithstanding, I do think that subconscious, non-malicious racism is responsible for the more racially troubling visual elements of his work. Hayes, a son of New Orleans, in all likelihood grew up with these images all around him, on products and in advertisements.  Hayes may have absorbed – but never bothered to critically examine – these images.  So while Hayes genuinely may have no clue as to where his inspiration for Nola Mae came from, I think I have some idea.

With her large round eyes, exaggerated lips and beribboned braids, Nola Mae is a textbook example of the classic pickaninny caricature, our very own stateside version of the Golliwogg.  There’s even an accompanying children’s book cataloguing her adventures. (I couldn’t bring myself to buy the book, not even for research.  Apparently, Nola Mae does three special things in it, and if those things have anyting to do with singing, dancing, or chicken and watermelon, my head will explode. It’s worth noting that, per Hayes himself, Nola Mae came years before the book.)  I wasn’t surprised to discover that the Big Lips and Voodoo dolls are  best-sellers. I heard more than one coing visitor describe the dolls as “adorable”  and ”precious.”  An interesting and telling theme that has coalesced around the pickaninny is the idea that these images - grotesque, dehumanized and occasionally sexualized images of Blackchildren - are “cute.”   Not offensive, not racist, not disturbing and unwholesome.  Cute. Similarly “quaint” and “charming” postcards with images of Mammy, Tom and Rastus litter just about every souvenir shop in the French quarter, and according to one of the store owners I asked, they’re quite popular with tourists.**

The fact that there has been a healthy market for the consumption of these images since their inception almost two centuries ago belies declarations  of  a “post-racial” modern society.  What has emerged instead is a diabolically sophisticated narrative that combines tenets of  “color blindness” and “tolerance” with post-racialism.  The result: a system of rhetorical gaslighting that permits individuals to indulge in the most blatant kinds of old-school racism  while simultaneously denying its existence. Postcards featuring stereotypical depictions of Black women, men and children aren’t racist, toxic and harmful; they’re “cute” and enjoyable, a nice takeaway for nice hard-working folks who probably voted for Obama, and might even have a Black friend.

The more things change…

*I define non-malicious racism as unintentional, subconscious, and/or non-violent racism. This isn’t to suggest that its effects are neutral – they clearly aren’t.

** The owner I spoke with also informed me that, while her store doesn’t carry “lynch” postcards, they are often requested by tourists.  Read more about them here.

Immigration may be a deeply divisive political discussion, but there’s one point upon which everybody from Barack Obama to Jan Brewer seem to agree: America’s southern border is a lawless, violent land. The guns have followed the premise. Obama has beefed up border cops, sent in National Guard troops and launched unmanned drones—all that’s missing are the Marines, for now.

Increased violence has predictably followed the increased militarization. Two border patrol encounters in the past two weeks have ended in the deaths of unarmed civilians, sparking outrage from Mexican authorities and immigrant rights groups who say that Border Patrol officers routinely use excessive force.

On June 7, a 15-year-old boy named Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca from Juarez, Mexico, was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent at Puente Negro, an international bridge that joins El Paso, Texas, and Juarez. On May 26, a Border Patrol officer at the San Ysidro, California-Tijuana border shot a 32-year-old man named Anastacio Hernandez with a stun gun. The San Diego County coroner has ruled his death a homicide.

Attorney General Eric Holder called the deaths “extremely regrettable,” and the FBI formally initiated a civil rights investigation on Friday into the teen’s death in Jaurez. Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar told The Hill newspaper that his subcommittee may investigate as well, but also conceded, “As you have more presence of Border Patrol and other federal officials on the border, you’re going to probably run into more types of incidents like that.”

Largely quiet on the “incidents like that,” however, are the elected officials who have spent the year drumming up reports of border violence to create political space for anti-immigrant policy.

When Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB1070 into state law in April, she described the border as a lawless, violent war zone. “Our international border creeps its way north,” she warned. “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels.” Last week, a Louisiana sheriff—St. Bernard Parish’s Jack Stephens—justified harassing immigrant oil spill workers by asserting that “illegal aliens” were posing as workers to set up gangs in the area.

National Democrats and Republicans alike have echoed the local officials. President Obama implicitly acknowledged the supposed dangers of life at the border when he announced in May plans to send 1,200 National Guard troops and an extra $500 million to the border. That’s not nearly enough for electioneering Sen. John McCain, who has wedged funding for 6,000 more border troops into the Senate’s pending defense authorization bill.

The same week Obama announced his troop increase, Texas Sen. John Cornyn—who wants to redirect $2.2 billion from the stimulus for border security—wrote in an op-ed: “Our porous border endangers every American, yet Washington refuses to make border security a priority.” When reporters pressed Cornyn in a phone conference about the violence he so feared, the senator got stuck. “As far as the Texas border is concerned, to my knowledge, we have not had spillover violence, per se,” he told reporters. It was actually “the threat of potential spill over violence,” he later clarified.

More accurately, it’s the perception of that violence. Because the realities simply do not support the rhetoric about public safety in border states. As ColorLines’ graphic illustrates, crime in key cities near the U.S.-Mexico border is on the decline—just like it is all over the country.

The murder rate in San Diego, Calif., dropped by 25 percent last year. Phoenix’s decreased by 27 percent. El Paso saw a 29 percent drop in murders, bested by Tucson, Ariz., which saw a 46 percent decline in murders. The national murder rate went down just 10 percent from 2008 to 2009.

When it comes to violent crime more generally, all four of these border cities hover around four to six violent crimes per capita, just under the national average of 6.6.

“[Politicians] are creating the artificial reality that the border is out of control, that it spills over. None of that is true,” says Fernando Garcia, the executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. “We have a very sustainable sense of security in the community, good relations with local law enforcement.”

“There is a perception of the border that whatever ails the U.S. as a country has to come from the outside rather from looking internally,” adds Maria Jimenez, an immigrant rights organizer who works with America Para Todos in Houston. The expectation that more militarization will make the border safer is “unfair to Border Patrol and Customs people, too,” Jimenez says.

The national debate around border security is a classic case study in the ways that a twisted narrative can consume the less dramatic picture of reality. And in so doing, allow politicians to move policy that does not help the communities it’s supposed to protect.

Indeed, under Obama’s watch, the country now has a record number of Customs and Border Protection officers. Immigration enforcement spending has skyrocketed from $8 billion in 2008 to $11 billion in 2010.

“How come we need the National Guard?” asked Garcia. “We look around, it’s not true. However, it seems that the president and McCain, they have this macho pro-law enforcement attitude. It is really unfortunate, how they are playing with our communities.”

By Guest Contributor Shannon Joyce Prince

Note: The Houston Zoo uses the term “pygmy” and specifies no particular so called p*gmy ethnic groups.  According to the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee, “This term [‘pygmy’]is used by some communities and organisations, but is considered pejorative by others.”  When I first began writing about the Houston Zoo it was my research-based understanding that as there is no one word that names all the African ethnic groups racialized as “p*gmies” the term wasn’t offensive when speaking of the groups collectively while the names of the different ethnic groups should be used when speaking of them in particular.  In my writings on the Houston Zoo I continue to navigate this issue. Since some communities consider “p*gmy” to be pejorative, I use an asterisk when employing the word when not quoting another source.  When speaking of a particular ethnic group, I use the group’s name, clarifying that the group is labeled as “p*gmy.”  When speaking of the ethnic groups collectively I refer to them as labeled as rather than as being “p*gmy” as I have never been able to find a comprehensive list of all the ethnic groups.

The Houston Zoo has proudly announced a new project, The African Forest, which is set to open December 2010 if we don’t halt it.  According to the Zoo’s website, The African Forest is not just about exhibiting “magnificent wildlife and beautiful habitats.  It’s about people, and the wonderful, rich cultures that we all can share.”  Actually, The African Forest is about exhibiting and teaching inaccurate Western conceptions of African indigenous cultures in a place designed to exhibit and teach about animals.  The African Forest is also about displacement in the name of conservation.

Fairs, exhibitions, and zoos that showcase, market, or teach about Africans and other non-white peoples as though they were animals are called “human zoos.” Only non-whites are exhibited as or alongside animals. Human zoos allowed and still allow targeted non-whites to be redefined as animals in Western, European, or First World spaces in order to justify white past, current, or planned mistreatment of non-white peoples in the non-white peoples’ homelands.

According to the Zoo’s website, The African Forest includes an “African Marketplace Plaza” selling gifts from “from all over the world” and offering dining with a “view of giraffes;” a “Pygmy Village and Campground” showcasing “African art, history, and folklore” where visitors can stay overnight; “Pygmy Huts” where visitors will be educated about “pygmies” and “African culture,” hear stories, and be able to stay overnight; a “Storytelling Fire Pit;” an “Outpost” where visitors, while getting refreshments, will view posters “promoting ecotourism, conservation messages, and African wildlife refuges;” a “Communications Hut and Conservation Kiosk” where “visitors will use a replicated shortwave radio and listen in on simulated conversations taking place throughout Africa;” a “Rustic Outdoor Shower” representing the fact that the fictional “Pygmy Village” “recently got running water” where children can “cool off;” a section of the “Pygmy Village” where children can handle “African musical instruments and artifacts;” and “Tree House Specimen Cabinets” that showcase “objects, artifacts, and artwork.”[i] (This information is difficult to find on the Zoo’s website, so use the web addresses at this endnote if you want to look it up.)

The African Forest is problematic for several reasons.  For example, Africa is not a monolith.  Africa is a continent of fifty-three nations and even more cultures.  So while one may speak of a Ugandan forest, Yoruba marketplace, or Xhosa culture, Africa is such a diverse continent that the idea of, for example, an “African marketplace” is meaningless.

The Zoo’s website specifies that “The African Forest” is really the “central African forest,” but beyond the fact that Africa is not a monolith, central Africa is also not a monolith.  Central Africa contains Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Rwanda.  Therefore, it’s problematic that in a website video the Zoo refers to “the culture of central Africa” as though there were only one.  (Furthermore, the Zoo doesn’t bother to name the village it’s creating a Baka, Mbuti, Twa, etc. village.  But as the Zoo is educating its visitors that all Africans are the same and all central Africans are the same, perhaps all so called p*gmy groups are the same, too.)

The ironic part of representing all Africa in the context of the central African forest is that certain aspects of both Africa in general and central Africa in particular are conspicuously absent from this “everything but the kitchen sink” approach.  For example, why are the large cities, skyscrapers, boutiques, and movie theaters of Africa missing while The African Forest shows off the village that just got running water?  I am emphatically against the idea that there is anything less modern about a “Pygmy hut” than a glass and steel tower, but the Zoo is only showing aspects of Africa that fit Western stereotypes of “primitivism.”[ii]

I said earlier that non-white peoples are the peoples deemed worthy of being placed in the zoo – but whites place one particular people in the zoo more frequently that any other – so called p*gmies.  If Africans in general are seen as being exotic, less than human, and physically different from whites, those labeled as p*gmies are viewed as Africans par excellence.

What’s particularly chilling about the frequency with which so called p*gmy culture is placed in zoos is that people labeled p*gmies, like Jewish people, are victims of genocide.  Up to fifteen million people, including six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed in the Holocaust, and up to fifteen million so called p*gmy and other black Congolese men, women, and children were killed under King Leopold.  Both Jews and so called p*gmies, at the time of their holocausts, were being compared to animals to justify their treatment, and so called p*gmy culture was being exhibited in zoos – p*gmy-labeled culture is still being exhibited in zoos.

The Southern Poverty Law Center states that racist websites “offer a window into some of the most important ideological and other discussions going on in the racist movement.”[iii] Members of Stormfront, a major neo-Nazi/white supremacist forum, liken blacks to all manner of non-human primates and other animals, and it is frequently said that we belong, of all places, in the zoo.  Special opprobrium is directed at Africans, and, naturally, so called p*gmies.  On Stormfront threads members celebrate historical and contemporary human zoos.[iv]

So what does the Zoo explicitly say about The African Forest and Africans?  1) The Zoo says on its website, “The African Forest will transform the way Houstonians view the world providing visitors with a glimpse into the remote forests of central Africa and the distinctive people that call it home. By understanding and appreciating the challenges these people face, we will be better equipped to work with them to preserve our fragile world and to make it a better place for future generations.”[v] 2) A spokesperson for the Zoo stated in the Houston Chronicle, “This delves into habitat; conflict between man and the wild.”[vi] 3) The Zoo also said in its description of The African Forest that the project contains an “Outpost” where visitors, while getting refreshments, will view posters “promoting ecotourism, conservation messages, and African wildlife refuges.”

4) Finally, the Zoo’s blog states, “To that end, the Houston Zoo’s conservation efforts will focus on developing wildlife, habitat, and human community support programs in central Africa in 2010…There are also few national parks and protected areas on earth where humans did not co-exist with wildlife before these park boundaries were put in place. And there are even fewer places where the decision to designate a protected area does not somehow intimately affect the human population living around its borders.

“If the ability for native people to coexist with their habitat is taken away from them without offering a sustainable solution, then wildlife and habitat conservation efforts are bound to fail…

“Model community initiatives lead to socioeconomic and conservation gains by establishing and strengthening alternative community initiatives for sustainable development which can be compatible with the long term conservation of local natural resources…”

There’s so, so much egregiously wrong and wrongheaded in the Zoo’s discourse on Africans that it’s necessary to analyze the Zoo’s words piece by piece.

Let’s start with the Zoo’s first quote which basically exhorts visitors to take up the White Man’s Burden.  Africans have millennia of knowledge on how to care for their environments, but we’re the ones in the position to tell them what to do.  The Zoo states that the reason we should learn about central Africans is so that we can understand Africans’ challenges and help them.  The only reason to learn about African cultures is to control them.

The next problem with that quote is that it is gallingly hypocritical.  Is it primarily Africans or Westerners who own polluting industries, mining industries, the corporations that use the resources that are mined, and the corporations that create toxins – all of which threaten the well-being of animals and people alike?

The hypocrisy of the Zoo’s quote is tied to the fact that when Western entities decide they want to “help” the environment or animals, too frequently they do not change their own behavior but rather declare they are helping by dominating Africans’ and/or indigenous peoples’ lives and behavior.  In “Reflections on Distance and Katrina,” Jim Igoe of Dartmouth College[vii] tells how Tanzanians are being displaced by “networks of private enterprise, NGOs, and government officials.”  He says, “Exxon Mobil is also sponsoring part of conservation interventions initiated by the African Wildlife Foundation” which meant that “local people targeted by this intervention are being encouraged by the African Wildlife Foundation and the Tanzanian government to enter into agreements and sign things that they don’t fully understand.”  This “transforms these landscapes from peopled landscapes to those dominated by wildlife, which has made them attractive to private investors at the expense of locals.  It also provides Exxon Mobil, and many other corporations that sponsor conservation interventions, with tax breaks and a valuable green public image enhancement.”

Instead of respecting African sovereignty, human zoos perpetuate the myth that non-whites don’t mind being dominated.  The Houston Zoo’s website describes the various ways in which the Zoo and Zoo patrons can “help” indigenous Africans to protect wildlife, but just as non-white peoples resisted imperialism in the past, they continue to resist the West’s imperialist environmental practices – including those promoted by the Zoo.  I’ll delve into that further in a moment, but first, please refer to the second quote.

The African Forest dares to teach Zoo patrons that indigenous Africans are in conflict with wildlife, but falsely claiming that indigenous Africans harm animals is a well known tactic to violate their human rights and drive them from their traditional lands – often in cahoots with organizations such as the World Bank, NGOs, and corporations.  Let’s look at the culture The African Forest is exhibiting – so called p*gmies.  The Batwa, a so called p*gmy people, according to tribal rights group Survival International, “had lived for generations before and after 1930 without destroying the forest or its wildlife, and even had historical claims to land rights… Despite legal provision for Batwa to use and even live within the national parks (Ugandan Wildlife Statute, No. 14, 1996, sections 23-6) they remain excluded from them. Access to the parks… is negotiated through ‘multiple use committees’ which include almost no Batwa representation. This exclusion is encouraged by the stereotype which represents the Batwa as destroyers of the gorillas. In fact, however, Batwa do not eat gorillas, and they have coexisted with them for centuries….[viii]

Survival International also notes “the Aka, like all of the ‘Pygmy’ peoples in Central Africa, are under threat. More and more of the forest is being depleted by logging companies, while huge areas of good forest have been turned into parks or wildlife reserves that are guarded by armed thugs who beat up the Pygmies and drive them out of their ancestral hunting grounds. And yet the Pygmies are the real guardians of the forest. As their proverb explains: ’We Aka love the forest as we love our own bodies’ ” (italics mine.)[ix] To learn more about so called p*gmy and other African and indigenous peoples’ views on conservation see this endnote.[x]

Now refer to the third quote.  Let’s examine ecotourism first. According to Lee Pera and Deborah McLaren,[xi] tourism “has been promoted as a panacea for ‘sustainable’ development. However, tourism’s supposed benefits … have not ‘trickled down’ or benefited Indigenous Peoples. The destructiveness of the tourism industry … has brought great harm to many Indigenous Peoples and communities around the world…”

They say, “It is no coincidence that those who have lost their lands or have no market for their crops are forced into service-sector employment in the tourism industry and are increasingly dependent on the whims of the global market and the corporations which run it” (italics mine.)

McLaren adds, “Global tourism threatens indigenous knowledge and intellectual property rights, our technologies, religions, sacred sites, social structures and relationships, wildlife, ecosystems, economies and basic rights to informed understanding; reducing indigenous peoples to simply another consumer product that is quickly becoming exhaustible” (italics mine.)
Georgianne Nienaber writing for central African (Rwandan) newspaper The New Times states, “Finally, the detritus of ‘civilization,’ in the form of excrement, garbage and detergents, is discharged into the once pristine environment…  The story of tourism in Africa causes one to weep. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe the story of tourism is a tragedy in which western businesses sent most of the money back home to the colonialist developers… Foreign workers held the most lucrative management positions (Pera and McLaren, Globalization, Tourism and Indigenous Peoples: What You Should Know About the World’s Largest Industry, www.planeta.com), reducing the local ‘service providers’ to little more than slave labour…”[xii]

A paper published by the Forest Peoples Programme in conjunction with the United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda – the Batwa people’s own organization – quotes a Mutwa (so called p*gmy) as saying, “Don’t mix us with other people, leave us separate and help us.”[xiii] It’s odd that The African Forest plans to promote ecotourism as a way to help Africans and African wildlife despite how devastating some Africans, specifically central Africans and so called p*gmies, and allies of indigenous people find the industry for Africans and African wildlife.

Now let’s examine the last two things the “Outpost” in The African Forest promotes: “conservation messages and African wildlife refuges.”  Conservation in Africa and the creation of wildlife refuges on the continent are notorious for the frequent creation of “wildlife refugees.”  That means that African governments, with the help of Western businesses and NGOs, violate the human rights of Africans, decide they have no right to their traditional lands, and literally make them refugees alongside, for example, refugees of war.  In other words, in Africa it’s common for conservationists to create refuges to conserve wildlife by simply kicking Africans out.

Five of the world’s most important wildlife conservation organizations are guilty of stealing land from indigenous people and making them refugees: World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society, and the World Conservation Union.[xiv] The aforementioned African Wildlife Foundation is yet another conservation organization that steals land from indigenous people.  As I noted earlier, the African Wildlife Foundation partnered with Exxon Mobil to displace Tanzanians.  An employee representing Exxon Mobil Corporation is on the Houston Zoos’ Board of Directors.

Exxon is known for the Valdez Oil Spill, the Brooklyn Oil Spill, and the Greenpoint Oil Spill, and despite its eagerness to support the Houston Zoo and create a wildlife refuge in Tanzania, the company is currently harming endangered gray whales.  If its crimes against nature weren’t enough, the company is currently being accused of sharing responsibility for ” Indonesian Military Killings, Torture and other Severe Abuse in Aceh, Indonesia” such as rape and murder according to the International Labor Rights Forum.

An employee representing Shell Downstream, Inc. is another of the Zoo’s board members.  Royal Dutch Shell is a multinational petroleum company notorious for committing crimes against humanity, abusing African indigenous people, torturing people, and poisoning the environment.  This is the company that is widely believed yet never has admitted to helping facilitate the execution of legendary environmental and indigenous rights leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other indigenous Ogoni Nigerians who protested the theft of Ogoni land for oil extraction.  (Exxon settled for millions to the victims’ families.)[xv] The company was condemned by the Nigerian High Court and activists as recently as 2005 and 2008 for “violating the constitutional ‘rights to life and dignity.’ ”  Shell, in addition to its other crimes against human rights, creates conservation refugees.[xvi]

And lest I forget, one of the Zoo’s donors is Chevron.[xvii] As you might expect, Chevron also makes indigenous people conservation refugees.[xviii] Furthermore, Chevron is currently being sued for 27 billion dollars by an indigenous Amazonian community whose rainforest was polluted by the corporation’s oil-drilling.[xix]

The conservation refugee problem is so bad that, according to Martha Honey, in her book Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, conservation refugees “are roughly estimated to number between 5 millions and tens of millions of human beings.”    Beyond the fact that making people refugees in the name of conservation is evil – it doesn’t even help conservation.  As Mark Dowie says in Paradigm Wars, “More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a ‘protected’ land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline…  90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas.  If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the most counterproductive thing we can do is evict them.”[xx]

Refer back to the Zoo’s fourth group of quotes.  The Zoo freely states that indigenous people’s right to coexist with their habitat is being “taken” from them.  And, as can be expected, they promise to offer a consolation prize.  But what do “sustainable solutions” for indigenous people often mean?  As Jim Igoe says, after being made refugees in the name of conservation by one of the Zoo’s donors, Exxon Mobil, Tanzanians were then told “their only way out of poverty is to become junior partners in conservation-oriented business ventures on grossly unfavorable terms.”  This treatment is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to treatment of conservation refugees according to Mark Dowie.

Stephen Corry, the Director of Survival International, says of the situation of conservation refugees, “What is happening to these people is not some kind of inevitable doom; it is a crime, and must be resisted.”[xxi]

So let’s sum things up: The Houston Zoo, which is funded by corporations notorious for destroying the environment, harming wildlife, violating human rights, and creating conservation/wildlife parks by making Africans and other indigenous peoples conservation refugees, is creating a human zoo called The African Forest that supports and promotes the creation/continuation of conservation parks and the attendant displacement of Africans.  This paper was not meant to be a journey through historical and present day manifestations of prejudice, but a call to action.  Please consider opposing The African Forest, human zoos, and the creation/perpetuation of the conservation refugee crisis in one or more of the following ways:

1.    Tell the Houston Zoo you are against The African Forest human zoo and the creation of conservation refugees as well as the continuation of the conservation refugee crisis by contacting the Houston Zoo here: http://houstonzoo.com/contact/.  Tell the Houston Zoo that you will boycott zoos that host human zoos and/or make/keep Africans conservation refugees.  If you have an affiliation, credential, or detail about yourself you feel is relevant, feel free to mention it i.e. a university you work for, a social justice group you work with, being indigenous (black or not), African, or of African descent, being a parent or educator, etc.  Be sure to send a copy of your message to nohumanzoo@yahoo.com so that we have a record of your letter in case the Zoo doesn’t respond and to prevent the Zoo from deciding to claim that no one is protesting.

2.    Send your name and, if you want, affiliation to nohumanzoo@yahoo.com if you want to be put on a petition stating, “We, the undersigned, do not support The African Forest human zoo, the creation of conservation refugees, or the continuation of the conservation refugee crisis.”

3.    Raise awareness about The African Forest through your website, blog, email list, livejournal, twitter, etc. and encourage others to write the Zoo and sign the petition.

·       Please be aware that, naturally, the letter you send or your signature on the petition may be made public.

·       The original version of this paper is thirty nine pages long and has much more information.  If you would like the full version of this paper email nohumanzoo@yahoo.com.

Thank you so much for your help!

[ii] Some might argue that features of urban life wouldn’t be appropriate to include as urban dwellers do not live in harmony with nature.  That argument ignores the fact that The African Forest teaches the lie that rural indigenous Africans in fact don’t live in harmony with nature either.

[iii] http://www.splcenter.org/search/apachesolr_search/forums

[iv] http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=480150, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=317405, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t210716/, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t210993/, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t409931/

[v] http://www.houstonzoo.org/en/photos/albums/v/63

[vi] http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/breaking/6551657.html

[vii] At the time his paper was written, he was affiliated with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

[viii] http://www.survivalinternational.org/material/20

[ix] http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/93

[x] http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/conservation/uganda_review_cbd_pa_jan08_eng.pdf, http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/conservation/bases/p_to_p_project_base.shtml#english, http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/ifi_igo/wb_ips_uganda_may00_eng.shtml, and other resources on http://www.forestpeoples.org/index.shtml

[xi] http://www.planeta.com/planeta/99/1199globalizationrt.html

[xii] http://www.nextbillion.net/news/ecotourism-greedy-lover-or-savior

[xiii] http://www.forestpeoples.org/documents/ifi_igo/wb_ips_uganda_may00_eng.shtml

[xiv] Conservation Refugee by Mark Dowie

[xv] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8090493.stm

[xvi] http://commonsblog.org/archives/000578.php

[xvii] http://www.houstonzoo.org/donors/

[xviii] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/161/

[xix] http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9EPOS7O0.htm

[xx] Again, in the interest of keeping this long essay from being any longer than necessary, I encourage those wanting more information on conservation refugees to read Mark Dowie’s work in Orion Magazine, and his book Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples.

[xxi] http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/93

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Ed note: a version of this piece appeared at Stuff White People Do

Reader Johanna sent us this ad:

and kindly typed out the copy for us, which says:

Discovery is a fearless pursuit. Certainly, this was the case when the Vikings, the first Europeans to reach the new world, landed at L’Anse aux Meadows. While it may only be a three-hour flight for you, it was a considerably longer journey a thousand years ago. But it’s a place where mystery still mingles with the light and washes over the strange, captivating landscape. A place where all sorts of discoveries still happen every day. Some, as small as North America. Others, as big as a piece of yourself.

Ok, so we get that Newfoundland-Labrador Tourism is speaking more of discovery in terms of the self/Oprah kind here, not the Columbus kind. But as Johanna notes, there is still something off-putting about fusing the notion of colonisation with pop-psych finding yourself, and that fact that the land is so strange and sparkly.

This ad seems to encapsulate two of the ways that North America cleanses the story of its origin, refusing to acknowledge that our nations are founded on genocide.

The first: calling the Europeans’ arrival in the Americas “Discovery,” rather than Colonisation or Genocide. You can only call their arrival “discovery” if there weren’t any humans here who had already discovered the land. And if you think about, that’s the implication: it was a discovery, because the people who were already here were not considered human by the Europeans.

Ronald Wright puts it best in his fascinating book Stolen Continents, which tells the story of the conquest of the Americas through the eyes of the indigenous people who experienced the catastrophe of European arrival. This excerpt is from the prologue:

When I interviewed people for the final chapters of this book, I was told by Dehatkadons, a traditional chief of the Onondaga Iroquois, “You cannot discover an inhabited land. Otherwise I could cross the Atlantic and ‘discover’ England.” that such an obvious point has eluded European consciouness for five centuries reveals that the history we have been taught is really myth…Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that resonate with a culture’s deepest values and aspirations…those vanquished by our civilization see that its myth of discovery has transformed historical crimes into glittering icons. Yet from the West’s vantage point, the discovery myth is true.

The second: Speaking of the land – or indigenous people, or their culture – as so mysterious and spooky.  Indigenous people and the “uninhabited” land are often portrayed as “mysterious” and “unknowable”…as if they are strange alien creatures who aren’t living side by side with everyone else and just trying to get by. Romanticising and mystifying the people and their culture is dehumanising, as if we’d prefer to encounter them in museums rather than on the street. They’re really not that mysterious. Just go to the library. But rather than learn about the real lives of the real humans who lived on the land before us – and how their modern descendants deal with the horrible legacy of colonisation – we’d rather speak wistfully of dream catchers and the majesty of their wild landscapes.

No thank you, Newfoundland.

That panic is rooted in the sense that too many professional women (of any race) not getting married means too many people pushing back on sex-based pay disparities in the workplace. It means too many people questioning the logic of tying health care benefits, property rights, hospital visitation rights, etc. to marriage. To me, these articles and “news” programs are being published and broadcast in an effort to stem this coming tide. And those of us black women who feel offended and mischaracterized by the media onslaught should take this as our cue to claim our rights and our rightful place as trailblazers in the 21st century reconfiguration of family and adulthood.

Rather than take the bait and feel terrible about ourselves when some media outlet tells us we’re both cause and victim of an “epidemic” or “crisis” in the black community, let’s assert that we are grown-ass human beings, and thus deserving of the same social, economic, civil and political rights that married people can access.

A vocal segment of the LGBTQ activist community has been making this argument for a while now. People like Kenyon Farrow, Jasmyne Cannick and Yasmin Nair have long been arguing that rather than making marriage the be all end all, we should be supporting each other in creating custom-made families that work for us. They’ve pointed out the folly of fighting to mimic and reproduce the patriarchal, nuclear families that continue to be held up as the only legitimate model in this country. These writers argue – and straight, unmarried black women would be smart to join the chorus — that rather than focusing on getting more people married, we should be de-linking human rights from marriage and creating space for a broader acceptance of the cobbled together, nontraditional families that many of us came up in. I know I’m not the only one who was raised by a thoroughly capable single parent and the family members she kept close to make sure I was surrounded by love and good care at all times. My family has never been illegitimate.

So where have we been while this segment of the LGBT community has been crafting the arguments we need to be firing off to Essence every time they let Steve Harvey ruminate on how much we should hate ourselves? While segments of the gay community are planning for a time when non-sexual domestic partner benefits are available nationwide, why aren’t those of us who still don’t quite get how marriage would enrich our lives spiritually, romantically or materially supporting that fight? Even if we do think we might want to marry some day, why not join forces now with people like Farrow and Cannick as they argue for the kind of movement that would benefit us just as much as it would benefit them?

–From Unmarried black women: “We’re here, we’re fierce, get used to it.”, full post available at Feministing

No one likes to be pigeon-holed into any kind of stereotypical box, but the long history of colonization and oppression of Indigenous people has shoved us so far from mainstream public view (and blogosphere, I might add) that it’s no wonder there exist these warped, outrageously wrong ideas about who we are. No, we don’t all live on reservations (more than 140,000 urban Natives live in LA alone!) and yes, we are currently one of the fastest growing populations. With over 750 First Nations in (what we now call) the United States and Canada alone, it’s unrealistic to think that we’re all the same. Well I’m here to make the record clear, and encourage you to fiercely challenge what you think you already know.

For further insight, a great film has been produced by Cree director Neil Diamond I highly recommend to check out called “Reel Injun” about the portrayal of the “Hollywood Indian”.

From the Planet IndigenUs event in 2008 “More than Bows and Arrows” which explored historical Indigenous misconceptions and stereotypes through Aboriginal artist responses to these false identities.

So since we are following directly on the heels of the Ke$ha and Juliette Lewis hot appropriation messes, here are 5 myths about Native culture you really oughta know about (and if you ever run into them – do spread the word about this):

1) We’re Indians
That great discoverer Christopher Columbus made one of the biggest mistakes in history, and it has forever shaped how Native people are forced to live around the world. Thinking that he had arrived in India (when he was actually in Haiti), when Columbus first saw the Arawawk people, he called them Indians, and voila, that name has since stuck on our people like glue. Even though they probably figured out this blunder within hours, today we still have government institutions like the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs where I still have to register for my Indian Status Card to prove my racial identity.

“Aboriginal” is a term generally used in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and in Canada it denotes three distinctly different groups of Indigenous peoples: Indians (or First Nations), Métis, and Inuit. There is a HUGE amount of diversity between the three groups; many argue that they are in fact lumped-together categories instituted and separated by the government. “American Indian”,”Native American”, “Native Hawaiian”, and “Alaska Native” are terms generally used in the United States and not EVERYONE is okay with them either.

2) Only men can be chiefs
Something mainstream feminism has not done a good job of remembering is that feminism is rooted in Indigenous culture. Many of our societies were matriarchal and/or matrilineal, and women held significant positions of power. In fact the two chief system, with both a man and a woman leading, was not uncommon and is reflective of one of our principal values of balance (and equality!). Although you’ll probably never see this in any Disney movie, where I come from the men are supposed to wait for the women to reach consensus and give direction before they can decide what to do with our land.

3) Teepees and totem poles mark where we live
My relatives in the Haudenosaunee (or what you might know as Iroquois) culture are often offended by this mass assumption, since this is actually only true for most Plains Indian tribes; like the Cree and Dakota. We lived in longhouses made of wood, and definitely not all of us made totem poles.

4) All Natives have brown (or red!) skin
This is an interesting one because for some reason, people still expect to be able to tell my ethnicity just by looking at me. While I myself have darker skin and long black hair, I have several Native friends and relatives who appear “white” or have blue eyes that have to constantly fiend off these automatic racial labels. Natives come in all colors, shapes, and sizes and my advice is just to treat people like human beings. We believe we’re all related anyway.

5) Casinos and cigarettes mean we must be rich
One of the most outrageous claims I’ve heard a few times from some non-Native people is, “Well, we went to your casino, so that’s our contribution to your people.” WTF?! Yes we might have establishments like smoke shacks, casinos, or other gaming industries on our territories, but that certainly does not mean we all benefit from them, or that all the proceeds go directly to much-needed services for our people. The reality is that the government regulates everything we do; and we’re still reeling from 500+ years of colonization. Most of these industries are struggling just to break even, while more than 50% of the children in our communities live in poverty.

Oh and if you need a crash-course on the genocide of Native people in America – be sure to watch the Canary Effect produced by the Bastard Fairies. It basically does a good job of summing it up from then until now in about an hour’s time.

If we do our work well, we should expect similar attacks and know that long track records won’t protect us.

Just days before the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, a fellow activist sent me a link to a video posted by the anti-choice group Bound for Life.  I was vaguely familiar with Bound for Life from having seen their members at protests, signature red tape marked with the word “Life” fixed to their mouths.

The video promoted an action that Bound for Life participated in at a new Planned Parenthood clinic being built in Houston.  The spin for this specific protest caught my attention.  The angle – that reproductive health care providers are organized to increase abortions by people of color in a plot to commit genocide for profit – has been in play by anti-choicers for years.  That theory has been, is now, and will always be insultingly paternalistic in its assumptions about women of color seeking reproductive health care.  The allegation is also picking up steam this Black History Month.

The first time I watched the video I was struck by the theories promoted through it – that communities of color are tragically ignorant of some long standing genocidal plot and desperately need organizations like Bound for Life to come to educate us, that the size of a reproductive health care clinic is in some way connected to it’s intended scale of abortion services and that the location of that clinic (in communities of color) is proof of some long standing genocidal plot.  Bound for Life isn’t alone in putting forth these arguments.  Anti-choice groups recently put up billboards in Georgia claiming that Black children are an endangered species and other organizations, like The Radiance Foundation, target religious people of color with the same anti-choice message; their stated goal being to illuminate, educate and motivate their audience.

The fallout from this rhetoric is hard to measure, but I’ve heard of the black genocide conspiracy for years.  I am an activist in my home city of St. Louis Missouri and many of the young women of color I work with are aware of the rumors and ask questions about them.

In Missouri, where young people are often denied access to medically accurate comprehensive sex education in public schools, rumors can often be taken as fact.  In my volunteer work I have met young women who thought drinking a certain soft drink would either prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections; others who have heard that contraceptives give users HIV; and some who were convinced that the withdrawal method protected them from sexually transmitted infections.  In the absence of knowledge, dangerously inaccurate information reigns supreme without challenge or correction.

It is in that knowledge-vacuum that the black genocide conspiracy hopes to set up shop, with hopes to take advantage of the fruits of anti-choice labor that has systematically removed sex education from sex education. It’s more than ironic that anti-choicers–who work strenuously to deny to medically accurate sex education and prevention programs to young people of color–are now trying to rally communities of color through a pseudo-community education program built on the myth of black genocide.  It’s far more than ironic…it’s shameful.

As a woman of color and a reproductive justice activist, I am appalled each time I hear the black genocide rap.  Quotes by Margaret Sanger are tossed out as if she were a prophet, as if reproductive choice a religion, and as if pro-choice activists were fundamentalists bent on staying true to Sanger’s words as a person of fundamentalist faith would to the word of God.  In reality, Margaret Sanger was a person whose work paved the way for legal access to contraceptives in this country.  Sanger’s personal beliefs on eugenics were and are wrong and do not hold any place in the mission of reproductive justice or reproductive health care providers.  We do not associate the Ford Motor Company with anti-semitism, despite the well documented history of it’s founder Henry Ford in collaborating with Nazis and we should not associate contemporary reproductive health care providers or the reproductive justice movement with eugenics because of some views expressed by Margaret Sanger.

But the truth has little to do with the black genocide scare tactic.  The truth is that reproductive health care providers open clinics to provide access to the full range of reproductive health care services in communities that need safe and affordable health care.  Those services include yearly cancer screenings, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, education on how to prevent sexually transmitted infections, education on how to prevent unplanned pregnancy and abortion counseling and services.

The truth is:

Clearly there are a lot of health-care related reasons why reproductive health care providers seek to provide services to communities of color.

Women of color are not children unable to make health care decisions, our children are not a species on the brink of extinction through an organized genocidal plot and justice is found when a people are unbound and empowered by medically accurate knowledge rather than dogma.  This Black History Month, despite well-produced marketing campaigns designed to spark fear and perpetuate myths, we must recommit ourselves to the struggle for reproductive justice in our communities.  Now, more than ever, we need to address the realities on the ground and reject the conspiracy theories being shouted by the anti-choice mob.

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Photo from Feministing