What is wrong with this picture?

1.)   He is the President. She is being disrespectful. As hell.  Period. Point Blank. End of Discussion.

2.)   White privilege conditions white people not to see white rage. However, it makes them hyper-aware of Black threat.   Newt Gingrich is white rage personified. And for it, he gets loads of applause.  So is Jan Brewer, but usually we think of white rage in masculine terms. Gender stereotypes condition us not to see white women as being capable of this kind of dangerous emotional output. We reserve our notions of female anger for Black women. Such hidden race-gender logics allow Brewer to assert that she “felt threatened,” even though she was trying to handle the situation “with grace.”

Now look back at the picture: who is threatening whom? Couple white rage with white women’s access to the protections that have been afforded to their gender, and you have something that looks ironically like white female privilege. Yes (yes, yes), the discourse of protection is based upon problematic and sexist stereotypes of white women as dainty and unable to care for themselves, and yes, these stereotypes have caused white women to be oppressed by white men. But remember, gender does not exist in a racial vacuum. It is performed in highly racialized contexts, and history proves that what constitutes oppression for white women in relation to white men, dually constitutes privilege for white women in relation to Black men. (I’m not spoiling for a fight today, so anybody who feels uncomfortable with such assertions should probably go read some Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics and then try again.)

What I know is this: 100 years ago (less than, actually) a Black man even standing that close to a white woman would’ve gotten him lynched.  (Seriously, I just discovered that even accommodationist Booker T. Washington was beaten in New York in 1911 for talking to a white woman.) And I know that if a Black woman had wagged her finger at Bush II or even Bill Clinton, we would have seen her faced down, handcuffed, with Secret Service swarming. When your race and gender grant you opportunities to be treated with dignities that others don’t have or conversely, to heap indignities on those people, that is what we call privilege. Deal with it.

3.)   Unchecked white rage has always been dangerous for Brown and Black folk in America. Jan Brewer’s Arizona is not safe for Brown people and by implication, not safe for Black people (Presidents included). Not only has she terrorized and racially profiled immigrant communities, but she has gutted one of the model Ethnic Studies programs for high school students in this country.  If there were ever a time for Black and Brown solidarity, it is now. And hell, lest we forget, Arizona is not even safe for white women. It is the vitriolic racial climate that Brewer’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino policies have helped to foment that led to the violence against Gabby Giffords.

(It’s amazing what different stories these two pictures tell.)

4.)   This picture demonstrates something important. The logic of racial supremacy dictates that white people are most comfortable when people of color do the affective labor involved in maintaining white supremacy. (No disrespect to Gabby Giffords: of course, I don’t think this hug shared between colleagues supports white supremacy. But this kind of bodily connection is important for humanizing Black public figures, and it is the logic of that which I’m getting at.)

Historically, it was not enough to be placed in positions of servitude; affecting an attitude of subservience was also critically important.  Failure to be deferential could get you killed, even if you were doing the tasks at hand. The term “uppity Negro” hasn’t always been a slogan to rock proudly on a t-shirt.  Something happens when Black and Brown folks decide that we do not exist in the world to make white people comfortable. And white folks feel it.

This is why a movie like The Help so powerfully resonates with White America, and with countless facets of Black America as well.  The affective labor of white supremacy prefers Black people in certain postures, like for instance dishing out hugs and words of affirmation to  little white girls who will become white women that they, indeed, “is smart, is kind, is important.”

As if the world would ever teach anything different. The effect of such labor is powerful: white America feels more comfortable with the disturbing realities of racism, and Black people can convince ourselves that our humanity, and indeed, our struggle is being acknowledged.  Even her well-deserved Oscar nomination has not convinced Viola Davis of such ridiculousness. (And um, would someone help Charlize Theron get a clue?)

5.)   Finally, I just have to say it: If Jan Brewer and any other bad-ass wants to leave here with the fingers and toes they came here with, I would suggest they keep their hands to themselves. Because frankly, I wish a*&%$# would wag a finger in my face… Kudos to the President for keeping his cool.

CeCe and several friends, all black, were walking to the grocery store on June 5th, 2011 when white adults standing in the patio area of a South Minneapolis bar started screaming racist and transphobic slurs at the youth. CeCe, who is only 23 years old, approached the group and replied that she and her friends would not tolerate hate speech. In response, one of the white women said “I’ll take you bitches on” and smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. The broken glass sliced all the way through CeCe’s cheek. A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.

CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.

These statistics are the result of the all of the ways that transgender people, especially transgender people of color, are denied access to the resources and opportunities that we need to live healthy lives free of violence, discrimination, and oppression. Transgender people consistently experience high levels of harassment in school, extreme levels of unemployment due to discrimination and lack of education, denial of competent medical care, inability to change identification documents, and disproportionate violence and harassment. Nevertheless, for generations transgender people, especially transgender women of color, have been at the forefront of movements against police brutality, white supremacy, economic injustice, and for queer liberation and gender self-determination.

CeCe is one of these leaders. She is the everyday hero that is the college student, working her way toward the career of her dreams. She is a femme icon, reminding her many friends and loving community that it’s never the wrong time to look fabulous, even as she is unjustly held in jail and awaiting trial for unwarranted charges. She is the center of a growing community of supporters in Minneapolis and nationally, inspiring action and solidarity in our joint struggles to (in her words) “be able to help and comfort someone who is unsure about his or her own sexual identity and preference…eliminate people’s fears of being victims of hate crimes and domestic violence…[and] help someone to accept and be comfortable as whomever they choose to be.”

Today, we are faced with the opportunity and the obligation to challenge racism and transphobia. Locally, we have and will continue to support CeCe every step of the way- from ensuring she has access to hormones in jail to packing the courtroom at every one of her hearings. Nationally, an increasing number of support groups and individuals are following CeCe’s case and demanding that Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman drop the charges against her. In Minneapolis and the rest of the country we aren’t only watching Freeman; we are standing up beside CeCe, a leader in our community, and waiting for him to do the same.

For more information and new developments: http://supportcece.wordpress.com
To tell Michael Freeman you support dropping the charges against CeCe
call: 612-348-5561
email: citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us
fax: 612-348-2042

#rapeculture hurts everyone. The same rhetoric VSB spouted is used in court to make sure less than 20% of all rapists do time.

Say what?

Turns out, Damon (a.k.a. The Champ) decided to create a really flip response to Zerlina Maxwell’s Ebony.com piece “Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped.” Despite Maxwell writing lines like these:

Our community, much like society-at-large, needs a paradigm shift as it relates to our sexual assault prevention efforts. For so long all of our energy has been directed at women, teaching them to be more “ladylike” and to not be “promiscuous” to not drink too much or to not wear a skirt. Newsflash: men don’t decide to become rapists because they spot a woman dressed like a video vixen or because a girl has been sexually assertive.

How about we teach young men when a woman says stop, they stop? How about we teach young men that when a woman has too much to drink that they should not have sex with her, if for no other reason but to protect themselves from being accused of a crime? How about we teach young men that when they see their friends doing something inappropriate to intervene or to stop being friends? The culture that allows men to violate women will continue to flourish so long as there is no great social consequence for men who do so.

Damon still decided to write his piece, essentially asking this question:

But, why can’t both genders be educated on how to act responsibility around each other? What’s stopping us from steadfastly instilling “No always means no!” in the minds of all men and boys and educating women how not to put themselves in certain situations? Of course men shouldn’t attempt to have sex with a woman who’s too drunk to say no, but what’s wrong with reminding women that if you’re 5’1 and 110 pounds, it’s probably not the best idea to take eight shots of Patron while on the first, second, or thirteenth date? Yes, sober women definitely get raped too, but being sober and aware does decrease the likelihood that harm may come your way, and that’s true for each gender.

It seems as if the considerable push back again victim-blaming has pushed all the way past prudence and levelheadedness, making anyone who suggests that “women can actually be taught how to behave too” insensitive or a “rape enabler.” And, while the sentiment in Maxwell’s article suggests that victim-blaming is dangerous, I think it’s even more dangerous to neglect to remind young women that, while it’s never their fault if they happen to get sexually assaulted, they shouldn’t thumb their noses to common sense either.

Damon’s already (somewhat) apologized and been raked over the coals by folks on his site, Twitter, and Tumblr.

So my goal in writing this piece isn’t to hold him accountable–that’s already gone on. My goal in writing this is to answer his question. And since I recently gave a talk at Swarthmore on rape culture, I just so happen to have a bunch of examples and facts right at my fingertips.

First, the primary premise is flawed.

Damon seems to think that reinforcing to men that circumstances and consent are different things means that we are also letting women off the hook for reckless behavior. However, most men aren’t privy to all the rape prevention tactics women employ everyday, as a matter of course. (For the purposes of this discussion, the framing will be around cisgender, heterosexual men and women, though we are not the only people impacted by this type of thinking and this type of violence.)

I could share stories about being told from the time I started going out to always cover your drink with a napkin, never be alone after dark, always have your keys out in case of an attack, to never be alone with a guy you don’t know. I was also told not to open the door for boys I didn’t know, but in my case, it was the boy you kind of know that gets you. But I digress.

We could tell our stories all day, but where’s the data? When I presented at Swathmore, I ran a little experiment based on a question I had. How do men talk about rape? So I took it to the newsstands.

Cosmopolitan Magazine is best known for it’s unrelenting focus on sex tips, meeting men, and the ubiquitous “75 new ways to make him pop!” feature. However, in each issue, Cosmo always has something on rape prevention. Since they are the most popular magazine sold on college campuses, they just rolled out an initiative on stopping campus rape, encouraging their readers to lobby their schools and Congress for changes. If you search the content on the Cosmo website, a search for rape pulls up 24 action oriented articles–however, that is misleading as the majority of Cosmo’s content in magazine exclusive, so a lot of their monthly features aren’t in there. I’ve been reading Cosmo since I was 17–if they run one article on rape prevention each month (and sometimes, they run two), I will have consumed 132 of them. And that’s just Cosmo. Other major women’s magazines, like Essence, Marie Claire, and Glamour also cover rape, but not with the same frequency as Cosmo.

In my talk, before I got into the rape-culture nitty gritty, I asked students to consider a scenario:

[A] spends a late night drinking heavily at a bar. After going a few rounds [A] meets a group of people that includes [B]. [A] continues to hang out with the group for a while, drinking more and more. Later, [A] ends up with [B] alone. [A and B] are both dating other people. Something went down – but [A] was so drunk [A] doesn’t remember exactly what happened. Neither does [B].

I asked who was at fault. There are no easy answers. If I say A is female, a lot of people responding to Champ’s post might have said that she needed to take responsibility for drinking so much. But what if I say A is male and B is female?

This is the rape story in Details, about a guy named Kevin Driscoll who was brought up on rape charges. He’s the person I condensed into the A story.

As he was packing the car, Driscoll got a call on his cell phone. “I don’t know if you know who this is or not,” the caller said, “but, um, this is the girl from the other night.” He remembered her as the pale brunette with the big smile he’d picked up two nights earlier at the Tumble Inn, a dive bar a couple of miles from his home in Redmond. They talked for a few minutes. The woman said she was in a relationship and was freaked out about contracting an STD. Driscoll assured her that he was clean but promised he’d get tested again. “Like, why didn’t you just stop, like, when I was trying to tell you no?” she casually added. “Well, you didn’t say no,” he responded. Soon the woman wished Driscoll a good day, and he hung up, perplexed. He got everyone in the car and started to drive, but he didn’t get far—a police car pulled him over a few blocks away, in front of Pappy’s Pizzeria. Moments later, four more squad cars appeared. The officers, their hands on their guns, ordered Driscoll and Dunn out of the car. One took Driscoll aside and told him he’d have to come down to the station. Driscoll asked for a minute to talk to Dunn, who was getting visibly upset. “That cop told me you beat some girl to death and raped her,” Driscoll recalls her screaming as he walked toward her. “What the fuck is going on?!”

And so began Kevin Driscoll’s nightmare. Charges of first-degree rape—three counts. A very public humiliation. Two trials. And the loss of just about everything he valued in life. After two years, Driscoll was acquitted of all charges—when the not-guilty verdict was handed down, each of the jurors shook his hand—but to him that’s no more than a footnote to the fact that he will forever live under a cloud of accusation, a pariah. Last Halloween he ran into two friends who hadn’t spoken with him since he was taken into custody. “I heard everything worked out for you,” one had said. “Yep, that’s what I heard too,” Driscoll said.

“You didn’t say no” is not a “yes.” And somehow I doubt that people tsk-tsked Driscoll about taking responsibility for how much he was drinking and going home with people he didn’t know. That’s almost exclusively reserved for women. Ultimately, a jury decided to clear Driscoll of the charges–but reading that story as a feminist, I wonder what kind of messages Driscoll received about rape and consent. (Not to mention fidelity.)

Moving on from Driscoll, the crux of my talk was that pop culture helps to normalize rape culture by painting problematic behavior as okay, and even laudable or romantic. Case in point: The Twilight Series. There’s a lot of questionable content in there, that has been discussed for years and years at this point. But it is fascinating to contrast a scene that made it into the movie and the book.

You know what’s so bad about that scene? Besides the fact that you have a man literally forcing himself on a woman (just not with his penis)? The one in the book is actually worse!

Why is she using the type of tactics that rape survivors describe to escape from the situation to talk about this kiss?

But Jacob is still one of two heroes, and he and Bella go on to share a consensual kiss later in the series.

Films and books aren’t the only places where rape culture is normalized.

It also occurs in music videos. In the talk, I illustrate these points with clips from Byron Hurt’s Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and from Sut Jhally’s Dreamworlds 3. (Some images NSFW.)

Sut Jhally takes a multi-genre look at how rape culture is encoded in our society, with seemingly innocuous choices in music videos. While Jhally makes powerful points by just stripping away the sound, but he really drives the point home at 4:12, where he contrasts the images of women being assaulted in Central Park with popular music video tropes.

To expand on an earlier point, here’s the full Limp Bizkit video:

At this point, people who haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through rape culture will be screaming. “All men aren’t like that!” Yeah, most of us are aware of that. But it only takes one to change how you approach other interactions forever. It only takes one to destroy your trust in the inherent goodness of other people. And it only takes one to fuck up your life.

The men reading this probably aren’t that one guy. (Then again, you could be…to someone else.)

But most of us have already met him.

Women are told, over and over again, that it is their responsibility to keep themselves safe. And in the event that you fail, rape culture will ensure that people will blame you for dropping your vigilance, while directing little, if any attention to the person who actually acted without consent. And this is why we started shifting the conversation to speak to men directly.

Because all the words aimed at us still aren’t keeping us safe.

By Arturo R. García

Over the past month, this video, “It Did Not Start With Stonewall,” has been picking up steam online – we first saw it on Elixher – which is curious, given that it was originally uploaded in 2007. In the clip, a group of black women offers perspectives on life in the LGBT community in New York City in the era surrounding the seminal Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.

But it cuts off just after the three-minute mark, leaving people wondering where it came from – and whether there are more interviews like these out there. Racialicious contacted the person who uploaded the video Wednesday night, so we hope to have an update soon. In the meantime, the transcript to the video is under the cut.

We paid an awful lot of dues so that the younger people of today can feel the freedom to walk along holding hands. It did not start with Stonewall.

They used to have something in Harlem called Funmaker’s Ball, and they would do that every Thanksgiving. And we would go to the Funmaker’s Ball, and that’s really when the cops would be nasty,’cause the gay guys would come and dress up like women, and people would come in and enjoy themselves, and they’d stand outside and get the guys as they came out,
and the women sometimes, and arrest them.

When we were younger, uh, because we did not have any role models, uh, roles were defined, people were into playing roles,
and people dressed and acted out whatever role that they, found, that they were suited for. And it was a law at that time
that you had to wear 3 pieces of female clothing, or else they would uh take you to jail for impersonation.

During this time of Stonewall, I was not living in New York at the time. And, so I missed that. But I had been involved in many raids and harassment by the police in my own community. We had a very viable black lesbian and gay community
in different, not only in Harlem, but in Brooklyn, and in The Bronx, and I can’t say too much for Queens and Staten Island
because they’re a foreign country.

And what happened was, that the bars downtown weren’t making money. And someone discovered that there was a lot of money being spent in Harlem. And in other black communities. And they systematically either burnt them down, closed them down or they started having a lot of problems with police, for different violations and stuff and things like that.
And as bar after bar and club after club closed down, clubs in The Village that years prior did not welcome the citizens of these neighborhoods – Bed-Stuy, and South Bronx, and Jamaica and Harlem – they let you in and took your money, but they still did not treat you any better. Until the current lesbian and gay community acknowledges that there were contributions made by other lesbians and gay men of all colors, to the freedom of lesbians and gays prior to Stonewall, there will always be some…[cuts off]

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

Mythili Rajiva is associate professor of Sociology at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on girlhood, the Canadian South Asian diaspora, and racialized identities. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Canadian Review of Sociology, Girlhood Studies and Feminist Media Studies. She is the co-editor of Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder.

BCP: Why a book on Reena Virk?

MR: The idea of working on the case had been in my head from about 2004 onwards, maybe because of a shift in my own identity from being a graduate student just starting a ph.d. in 1997 to where I was in 2004, finishing my thesis. I think it was Salman Rushdie who once said that the journey creates us; writing a thesis on South Asian Canadian girls’ experiences of racism in adolescence made me realize how much I cared about social justice issues.

The case had always haunted me, but up to this point, it had been at a visceral level. When I started analyzing it through the scholarship on racism and identity that I’d read for my thesis, I realized the case mattered to me deeply, both at a personal as well as a political level. But when I started doing research, I found very little academic work.

What little there was, was excellent, and informed much of my thinking around the topic; but the scholars who were offering a more complex and critical reading of the case seemed to be writing into a void, as if no one was listening. It seemed even stranger to me that such a highly publicized case would not be taken up at the very least by criminologists or other researchers in a more sustained fashion. But it wasn’t. Before we published this collection, the only book available on Virk’s murder was Rebecca Godfrey’s True Crime novel, which, as a couple of authors in our collection point out (see Atluri; also see Byers), offered a problematic re-telling of the story.

So I was reading this great scholarship, and wondering why there wasn’t more, and then I met Sheila and we talked about doing some kind of project together. I decided that we needed to encourage more critical scholarship on this case, a next generation so to speak, and even more crucially, we needed it not to disappear from public view, as most academic work does, in a single article in a journal or book. I initially considered a special issue in a journal, but this didn’t seem to offer enough scope, especially since I felt that anything written on the case would have to locate itself in relation to the earlier material. I wanted to bring both the existing and new material together; I think like any solidarity movement, there’s strength in numbers. People are more likely to pay attention to a bunch of people yelling about something than one person, right? So that’s where I got the idea for the book, and then all I had to do was talk Sheila into it, which wasn’t that hard!

BCP: What was the process in putting this book together?

MR: Once we decided we were going to do a book, and that it was going to be an anthology that included the existing material, we got in touch with the scholars and asked if they’d be willing to have their work included as reprints. I have to say that they were incredibly gracious and very supportive of the project from the beginning. Then we sent out a call for papers on the internet, on both social activist and scholarly websites. We got a lot of responses, and some great abstracts, and for awhile we were worried that the project was getting too big.

However, like with any project, life happens; not everyone who originally signed on was able to complete but we were really pleased with the final chapters. Our job as editors was to shape the process and guide the work along, but our contributors really made the substantial contributions.

BCP: How long had you been thinking about ReenaVirk before the book came about?

MR: As I’ve already mentioned, the case had been in my head since it first happened, kind of like those terrible stories you hear and no matter how much you try to excise them from your mind, they linger. It was also a personal thing. My thesis subject was on South Asian girls and racism, and I was a South Asian Canadian girl who had experienced racism in childhood and adolescence, in the form of racial epithets or having “friends” make racist comments or jokes around me.

Obviously, though painful in their own way, I’m not saying that my experiences are comparable to Virk’s, but I think it’s important to point out that they’re on a continuum of racism that people of colour have experienced and continue to experience in our supposedly tolerant and multicultural country. The book is about making links between the ordinary everyday experiences of racism and the more serious acts of violence against people of colour. So I was personally invested in the case, from the beginning.

BCP: Who, or what, are your influences and reasons for doing this kind of work?

MR: That’s tough because there have been so many. But I could name a few scholars that have given me a theoretical lens through which to interpret my own struggles with belonging, as a racialized minority girl growing up in a primarily white society.

Frantz Fanon’s moving work on the pychic violence of racism; Homi Bhabha’s writing on the “unhomeliness” of the immigrant experience and the trauma of the ordinary: when who we choose to love, where we are allowed to sit, what streets we are allowed to walk down etc. become points of political contestation; Chandra Mohanty’s beautiful call to arms, “to make feminist analysis dangerous to empire”, which I sincerely hope is part of what we’ve done in this book; and queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s work, especially her post 9/11 writing, where she asks what role grief plays in the service of the national imaginary; why we grieve for some lives but not others, and how we might conceive of a politics of grief that does not justify violence, and retaliation but instead recognizes the mutual vulnerability that constitutes us all as human beings, that we are all capable of being injured and committing injury. According to Butler, “the struggle against violence accepts that violence is one’s own possibility.”

An ethical stance in the world is, therefore, about recognizing one’s own rage and then seeking to limit the injury you might cause through this rage.

BCP: The book is raw at some points, challenging, honest, and stimulating. What are you as co-editor trying to convey to your readers with these 9 selected essays?

MR: So many things but I guess, overall, I want readers to re-think the discourse of violent girls on the playground perpetuated by the media and certain “experts”. Instead, I would like them to think about how Reena’s life and death are a troubling reminder of the racism that pervades Canadian culture, as painful as that may be to acknowledge.

When “we”, which is to say, members of the dominant group (white, Christian middle class, Anglo Canadians), view certain groups as “immigrants” regardless of how long the community has been in Canada; when we see brown or black skin as the opposite of “Canadian”; when we construct certain communities as having barbaric cultural practices without looking at our own social problems, we create an “us” and “them”, with the former being constructed as superior. It’s a seamless transition then to treating those we think don’t really belong as second class citizens. And this sense of superiority is false anyway.

The Canada that we think we know through our mythologies (“the true north, strong and free”, the peacekeeper, the multicultural democracy), is a nation founded on the brutal exploitation and marginalization of indigenous peoples, built through the labour of many migrant groups, not just French, English or European, but people of colour, some of whom paid the high price of alienation, explicit state racism and even violence and death. This history has to be acknowledged so we can have a radical revisioning of what makes someone a “real” Canadian.

BCP: How long were you working on your essay “The Killing Season: Interrogating Adolescence in the Murder of Reena Virk”? Can you briefly give the crux of it?

MR: I wrote and presented a draft of the paper in the fall of 2005 at a conference on child rights, so the final chapter was a long time in the making and went through several iterations before it was published in the book. The main argument is that the Canadian media’s ubiquitous descriptions of growing girl violence and the refusal to ask whether social relations such as race, gender, class or sexuality played a part in the murder, were influenced by a discourse on adolescence pervasive in North America.

So, when incidents like the Virk murder take place, we have a moral panic where people talk about girls becoming more violent and adolescents in general being out of control with boredom, hormones and a lack of moral subjectivity. This really pathologizes teenagers, as if they are the only ones capable of bullying, aggression and murder.

Last time I checked, adult society was winning that competition, but this reality gets erased systematically in news coverage. The teenagers involved in the case were treated as if they symbolized the degeneration of youth in general. But who raises youth? Who schools them? Who offers particular media frames and images up to youth that tell them who belongs for what reasons? Who implicitly encourages the social and peer hierarchies that develop so strongly in adolescence? Adult society does, and then it wants to blame young people as solely responsible for violent behaviour.

For example, children and adolescents don’t learn racism in a vacuum. Sure, children identify differences among themselves at a very young age, but at what point do they realize which differences are important and which are not? They learn it from parents, teachers, larger culture and peers. They pick up very quickly that adult society values certain people and not others, and then they create their own social hierarchies that are partially informed by larger social relations. But this can’t be acknowledged at a societal level, because then we would have to say we are actually not doing a great job of raising children who see others as equals, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality or ability. In the Virk case, this played out in the media’s refusal to acknowledge racism as even a possible motive. The handful of times that racism was raised in either tv or newspaper articles, it was immediately dismissed, as if it was impossible that these white kids could be racist. They could be vicious, murderous and without remorse, but not racist, because of course, then that might mean that the larger adult society that they were learning their values from, was racist too.

BCP: While reading the book I had to put it down several times because of them descriptions of the murder and the horrific way the media represented the case. Was writing and putting the book together a painful experience?

MR: Yes it was a very painful experience. I didn’t realize how hard it would be when I started.

I was reading and watching all the media, and encountering the brutality that characterized the case. I think being forced to live day in and day out with a recognition of the horror that people are capable of inflicting on one another left some scars. On the other hand, I think that my reaction also speaks to my own first world, middle class privilege. My life is, and has always been, far removed from contexts of brutal and violent domination; I know that a significant portion of the world, including people in Canada, are not so lucky. Violence is simply a daily part of their lives.

So the case threatened my comfort zone, and that is a good and necessary thing for people with any kind of privilege to experience. I felt a similar wrenching at the end of the project.

Alongside a pride in the work and relief at its completion were worries about whether I had ever had the right to embark on this project, and whether it was fundamentally exploitative – stealing Reena’s voice, as it were. I spent a lot of time thinking about this as we wrapped up the introduction to the manuscript as well as a lot of time interrogating my own privilege in relation to Reena. I think none of that is particularly surprising; it’s a form of survivor guilt for those of us whose identities are not simply fashioned through the myth of the western liberal subject. Women, racial, sexual or other minorities, those people who belong to marginalized groups, are always seen and see themselves as something more than individual selves. Their “I” is always linked to a “We”.

In my case, being second generation and South Asian, and experiencing racism growing up, was what made me feel a connection to Reena Virk, a sense that this could’ve been me. But part of my discomfort stemmed from the fact that alongside my marginalization, I had certain forms of privilege that Reena didn’t have access to and, so, in another sense, maybe it couldn’t have been me. I think it’s both my marginality and privilege that pushed me to do this book in the first place, and it’s where I think real social change has to take place. It’s not enough to focus on the forms of marginality we encounter as individuals or groups. As black feminist scholar bell hooks points out, we also have to acknowledge and surrender our own privilege and participation in forms of domination, if we want to change the world.

BCP: What was most disturbing to me was the fact that Reena was not only erased in books and media, as was race, and Reena was not being mourned. The focus, and sadness, was that white girls were on a social decline as opposed to a young Brown woman being killed by such girls and a boy.  What disturbs you most about this case?

MR: I think you’ve summarized exactly what I find most disturbing. Whenever I saw or read media reports on the case, I would feel so angry. While Virk’s image appeared repeatedly, and her tragic story was re-told, it was always through a politics of pity; she was presented through a framing that implicitly constructed her as an Other; as not belonging to Canadian peer culture because she didn’t look like a “normal” girl. She was killed because she failed to fit in. For myself, and I think many other subjects who live their marginality through their embodiment ( racialized, transgendered, poor or differently abled bodies, to name a few), it was pretty easy to read the code behind this hegemonic storyline: she wasn’t thin, white, middle class, heteronormative, she wasn’t the ideal Canadian girl. But the media simultaneously used these images and storylines and yet refused to ask if there might be a problem with the ideal itself; that maybe a lot of Canadian girls didn’t “measure up” to this standard. That maybe the standard was racist, homophobic, elitist and ableist. They never asked if there was a problem with the ideal, just as they never explored whether a group of mainly white girls viciously beating up a Brown girl might raise some serious doubts about our success in fostering racial equality among children and adolescents, let alone in adult society.

BCP: Do you teach this case at your University? If so, what do you make sure your students get from your work? And how do you get them to understand the brevity and complexity of the case? How do white female students respond?

MR: I have taught the case a little bit recently as the manuscript was wrapping up. In some ways, I think I was too close to it, and living with it for a good four years made it kind of an obsession. I needed to have spaces where I could teach and think about other forms of oppression otherwise my concerns with social justice would’ve shrunk to this particular case. Some of the class discussions that did take place were difficult; like most Canadians, the students were horrified and felt very sad that this could’ve happened, but they wanted to keep it at the level that the people involved must’ve been monsters, rather than the murder being an inevitable, if extreme, consequence of both the history and contemporary reality of racism in Canada. The focus was often on whether or not the girls involved in the beating or its witnessing had ever said anything racist, because if not, clearly racism was not an issue.

The fact that Virk was an outcast, at least in part because she was brown, was something many students didn’t want to see. For some white female students, they pointed out that even among white girls, there is a lot of “mean girl” behaviour if a person doesn’t fit in in terms of looks, weight or clothes.

The Virk case for them was another example of this, rather than anything to do with racial belonging. One way I tried to get them to complicate this was to ask if there is an ideal girl image to which Canadian girls aspire. There was often a general consensus that there was, and then I would ask them to describe this girl as she appeared in their minds. After the descriptions, I would ask them whether the fact that this ideal girl was always white, often blonde, thin, middle class and heterosexual, told us anything about how difficult it might be to fit in if you couldn’t meet some or all of those standards.

I think this type of exercise was helpful, because some students did begin to see what I was trying to get at.

BCP: To me, Reena Virk was first a face without a name and later a name without face. That might be the case for many people. Why is there no picture of Reena Virk in the book?

MR: The media continually flashed one particular picture of Virk over and over again. We thought about using this picture maybe as a cover, but almost immediately felt that it would sensationalize the book. Many people are familiar with that picture, but we didn’t want to “sell” the book in this manner. We also did not want to use the picture because it seemed to us that Reena’s appearance was the focus of media attention and the implicit reason given for why this happened (she was awkward, a misfit etc.), yet this was not accompanied by any explanation of what she didn’t fit into. We wanted to move away from this line of thinking to focus on the systemic issues in the case.

BCP: Does the Virk family know about the book? Do the killers? Media and authors critiqued in the book?

MR: I don’t know whether or not the family knows. We thought about contacting them initially, but we also felt that as an act of scholarship, we needed it to be honest in ways that might not have pleased Reena’s family. I also don’t know whether or not Warren or Kelly knows about it. The mainstream media has, for the most part, ignored the book, which is not unusual for an academic book. Of course, given that it’s a searing critique of their hegemonic “take” on the case, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why they’re not interested. But it’s hard to say.

Watch a roundtable discussion on the Reean Virk case with Rajiva’s co-editor Sheila Batachary, book contributor Tara Atluri, and community member Mandeep Kaur Mucina.

I don’t feel safe in Seattle.

Specifically, I don’t feel safe in public.

I love this city. Its many neighborhoods, the “little” big city vibe with a more laid-back pace of life. The expansive mountain ranges and views of ocean waters. Housing so dense it is seemingly stacked on hill after hill of pavement and grass. The skyline at dusk and twilight, travelling both north and south on the I-5. It is unrushed and easy, yet there is some nameless vibrance to this place.

Of course, I’ve been here just shy of 8 weeks.

I’m still a rookie, but I am a maverick of emotion. I don’t feel safe here.

The dueling intersections of my social identities: race, class, gender & age have forged a path of extremely unpleasant, unwelcome events at a rate that I have never experienced in my entire life. Here are the facts, the need-to-know-to-get-it information:

I am black. I am a young woman in my early 20s, but I am frequently presumed to be younger. This is important. I am living below the poverty line.

That is a recipe for disaster.

In the past, I discussed my experiences regarding the language of race while living in Europe. I had just come home, a recent college graduate, and I wanted to enact social justice work on a larger scale: I applied for AmeriCorps. My AmeriCorps experience thus far has been amazing, but we are not paid well. In fact, our pay is not technically a salary; it is reported as a “living wage” because it is so low. So living in Seattle, I am poor. Looking for housing on a minuscule budget is difficult, thus I ended up in the deepest south neighborhood, Rainier Beach. Housing is significantly cheaper here and unsurprisingly, there is a very high concentration of black residents.

This is how the story begins.

My job is in the center of the city, an hour away by bus. The bus stop was a 10-minute walk from my house. Less than half a mile. I lived in Rainier Beach for 4 weeks. From the moment I stepped foot outside my door I became prey to the men, specifically black men, of the neighborhood. Whistles, shouts, catcalls, offers for rides twice [once while I was on the phone] occurred every single day. It was so mind-boggling that I started keeping a sexual harassment diary; it was cathartic to examine the harassment and muse on how it reflected larger cultural values of power relations and young black women marginalization. We are the 1%.

All those womanist musings I read about my objectification and debasement, suddenly I was egregiously living them week to week.

Being a black woman, my body is not my own, I am inviting attention by casual dress, I should be grateful for positive attention to my appearance, I am self-righteous [i.e., a bitch] to condemn “natural” male reaction to feminine wiles.

These things are true; they can be placed in a cultural context and analyzed every which way sociologically. It is difficult to be cerebral about experiences that are not abstract. And so I attempted to remedy the situation. I literally began policing my dress: the baggier pea coat instead of the funky, plaid, slim-fitting blue one, the loose-fitting cords instead of the slightly tighter business casual pants, the converse sneakers instead of the riding boots that “clicked” when I walked.

To no avail, it did not abate. I wryly noted that these men were especially verbal with their unwanted commentary: “you are looking gorgeous today, sweet thing!,” “when you know you are working it you know you are working it – I know you know!,” and my personal favorite, shouted out a frantically unrolled window: “you don’t have to walk in the rain!”

As soon as my hour-long ride ended and I entered the campus of the high school where I work, my role as open-invitation free-for-all do street wench ended. I was viewed through a different lens: for those who knew me, the idealistic young newcomer and for the majority unfamiliar staff, a student. Without makeup [and sometimes even with] I was mistaken for a student very frequently. I was asked for a hall pass or questioned why I was in the photocopy room.

This abrupt shift threw me for a mental loop: I am a young woman, a teen to many inside of the school, yet out there [public spaces] so many older black men view me as a sexual conquest. I work with young men and women of color and it sickens me to imagine what the girls are subjected to walking down the street – and similarly, what our boys are being taught.

And still, I feel unsafe. The incidents escalated today.

Walking the 10-minute trek to the bus stop, I hurriedly put in my iPod buds, often a welcome refuge to hearing the absurd and searing comments of men. Not soon enough. I heard a yell, and against my better judgment I looked up and saw there was a car stopped on the road across the street and the window was down: “do you need a ride, baby?” a young black man, perhaps around my own age, called.

I did what women have long been taught to do: I turned my head and ignored him.

And then I felt extremely unsafe. He abruptly swerved across the road, seemingly right toward me, changed directions, and drove off at top speed. My heart was beating out of my chest, every hair on end.

I felt so unsafe. I anxiously cowered in the bus stop shelter, waiting for my ride.

Fast forward to a few hours later, I am with a young white male friend leaving Target. We are casually chatting, laden down with our purchases. At the cross walk a bedraggled black man appears from nowhere and says, “Damn how is it that all the fine black women are with white boys?” We are both stunned. My friend says “What?” in a terse tone and I begin laughing – half out of nervousness and half because I want him to know that he will not incite my anger. “Yeah how is it that white boys are getting all our fine black women – and who are you? And you think it’s funny, huh?’

His eyes are so cold. His voice rings volumes of rage and genuine bewilderment. He is shaking his head.

Suddenly the white hand is flashing and we cross the street. Our harbinger is angrily walking the other direction, grumbling. My friend is shaken – race is rarely visible to him and perhaps on another level, he felt unsafe too.

We immediately begin rehashing and I stare across the street – the man is looking at me and waves – fuck you I murmur under my breath and gaily wave back, smiling.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

As a black woman, it seems that my primary romantic responsibility is the preservation of black relationships. Never mind that the majority of black women do not date outside of their race, far fewer than black men. I am first and foremost to be evaluated on my appearance. I cannot break racial and gender mores by walking down the street with a white male friend.

Until now, I have seldom walked public spaces alone, so frequently. I have never ridden the bus so frequently. I have never lived on such little pay. I have never felt so unsafe.

Seattle has earned a reputation for being a progressive city, although the history of this city belies such a notion. In a 2005 nationwide study, Seattle was ranked the 17th most Liberal city in America. There is inexorable evidence of Seattle’s commitment to maintaining its liberal reputation: the most happening neighborhood in the city, Capitol Hill, is also the mecca of the gay community, it is majorly promoting an electric car initiative, and people wear flannel and those foot-shoes everywhere.

In actuality, Seattle is no more or less racially progressive than any other town I have lived in. Again, my social identities greatly impact my perspective. I grew up in a half-black half-white forgettable city in Michigan. It was very segregated by neighborhood and is currently undergoing gentrification. I went to college in Ann Arbor which hosts an annual event called Hash Bash, very liberal, and very college town-y. I received much less sexual harassment walking around campus but this may be because there were students literally everywhere, and not many seemingly feckless men sitting around, leering at young women.

Even if it is merited, do not mistake this article as an attack on [black] men who think it is okay to harass women, or young girls who looks like easy targets. I often wondered angrily “don’t they have something to do?” as I walked past Walgreens toward school, through the Central District. It is no longer the “ghetto” that locals claim it once was. It, like Rainier Beach, is undergoing extensive gentrification. Amidst the pastel-colored condominiums and new Quizno’s eateries, there are so many unemployed, almost 9 percent throughout the city. Since joblessness historically affects black males double the rate, probably around 18% of black men are without substantial employment. There is something demoralizing about the oppression of being without work when you have the motivation – I wonder how this transforms into demoralizing young women? I mean honestly, do they think that we enjoy it?

Even though they have terrified me, alienated me, marginalized me, I cannot hate them. To place it in context engenders empathy where resentment does not easily fester. Instead, I can acknowledge this pain without devaluing the pain of such pernicious attacks. This is an essay about a far too often ignored topic: street harassment.

This post is for the young, black women who have experienced far worse for far longer. This is the validation of an experience, sexual harassment, that is belittled and normalized to the point it is necessary to explain in great detail why and how it is so harmful [for my friend on the car ride home]. This post is not an attack on black men. It is important to place identities into context: the fact that I am a young black women being harassed by solely black men since my arrival, especially middle-aged black men, is significant. It is troubling, but necessary to acknowledge.

Since I have moved these incidents have reduced dramatically; my new neighborhood is predominantly upwardly mobile Asian families. The ride is 15 minutes. As of today, I am decidedly focused on new responses to sexual harassment – not simply ignoring it.

I want to invite young women of color to share their own stories of sexual harassment by strangers. My first memory of this is the 7th grade, I was 11 years old. He was a boy who ‘liked me’ and he touched my butt as I walked past him in the halls. There is no doubt that stories likes are rarely told: perhaps indignantly told to a friend, only to be dismissed or blame-shifted.

How does this affect your relationship to public spaces and what responses have you developed? Not necessarily in the moment either, but perhaps afterward. What is your coping mechanism?

There are initiatives designed to that uplift and redefine young’s ideas of masculinity, programs that decry harmful treatment of women. Still, we live our lives unprotected from sexual harassment every day. If Seattle is truly one of the “Best Cities for the Next Decade”, I’d like to feel safe standing next to a bus stop.

It is literally my job to empower and encourage black youth. At work, I feel positive and useful, I am making amazing emotional connections and learning from the kids I am meant to mentor. I feel strong. But the moment I step outside of the school, I feel unsafe. I have much to learn and a year-long contract. This is my first step toward security.

The framing of cases is so important, as it shifts judgements in the court of public opinion. Since Diallo has chosen to step forward as the accuser (perhaps in response to the media backlash around her life and reputation), news outlets have clamored to get the scoop. Newsweek published an exclusive interview a few days ago, with some telling language:

“Nafi” Diallo is not glamorous. Her light-brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened, and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure. When her face is in repose, there is an opaque melancholy to it. Working at the Sofitel for the last three years, with its security and stability, was clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have, after years braiding hair and working in a friend’s store in the Bronx as a newcomer from Guinea in 2003.

Only in cases involving rape or assault is how the victim appears a subject for commentary. This is part of rape culture, the idea that we have to evaluate the attractiveness of a person alleging assault along with the other facts in the case. Melissa McEwan so succinctly put it, rape is not a compliment. Neither is sexual assault. Yet time and time again, we see people accused of sexual assault, abuse, or rape try to weasel out of it by saying that they weren’t attracted to the person in the first place. (We see you, Albert Haynesworth.) It’s disturbing to see reporters play into the same idea. This is why feminists continually stress that rape is a crime of power, not desire. Rape is not related to the attractiveness of the victim. Rape occurs because one party does not consent to a sexual encounter, but they are forced into it anyway.

Also, that first discussion of “clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have?” It sets the stage for more prejudical plays on class, race, and immigration status later in the piece.

Diallo is about 5 feet 10, considerably taller than Strauss-Kahn, and she has a sturdy build.

This inclusion is also somewhat perplexing. The idea that she’s sturdy and tall again introduces the idea of doubt to her story, which falls into another common trope about rape and sexual assault cases – why didn’t the woman just fight him off? Interestingly, the authors do not bring up the fact that generally, most jobs don’t allow workers to assault guests, even if the guests are violent. And, in the moment, there are many different ways people will react to being assaulted, particularly if the first act of violation has already begun. This portrayal of Diallo also subtly plays on the idea of fragile, thin, small victims as the only real victims – and goes hand in hand with the idea that black women are “unrapeable.”

DNA evidence in suite 2806—the result of all that spitting that mingled the maid’s saliva and Strauss-Kahn’s sperm—makes it virtually impossible to deny there was a sexual encounter between DSK and Diallo. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers raised the possibility early on that it was consensual and have left it to others to speculate about the circumstances under which that might have been the case: that Diallo expected money that she did not receive, or that the sex got rougher and more aggressive than she would accept. The New York Post published stories attributed to an anonymous source that claimed Diallo was at least a part-time prostitute. Her lawyers, Kenneth Thompson and Douglas Wigdor, are now suing the Post, saying the story is false. The newspaper stands by its story.

When crime, power, and scandal combine, there is always the idea that the more powerful person is being set up by the person with the least amount of power. And, commonly, the victim in sexual assault and rape trails finds themselves subjected to invasive probes about their own sexual background, mental health history, and any other improprieties. For Diallo, her background as a new immigrant to America increases the amount of scrutiny she is subject to:

In her interview with NEWSWEEK, Diallo didn’t disguise her anger at Strauss-Kahn. “Because of him they call me a prostitute,” she said. “I want him to go to jail. I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money.” She said she hoped God punishes him. “We are poor, but we are good,” she said. “I don’t think about money.”

Perhaps. But on the day of the incident, by Diallo’s own account, she made two telephone calls. One was to her daughter. The other call was to Blake Diallo, a Senegalese who is from the same ethnic group but no relation. He manages a restaurant, the Cafe 2115 in Harlem, where West Africans gather to eat, talk, politic, and sometimes listen to concerts. Nafissatou describes Blake as “a friend,” and one of the first things he did for her after the incident was to find her a personal-injury lawyer on the Internet.

All of her associates are heavily interrogated, as were her tax statements…and her application for asylum:

In late 2003 Diallo applied for asylum. Because she had suffered genital mutilation as a child, and doctors confirmed that fact in a medical report, she probably would have qualified for asylum in any case, given current law and practices. And she insists she was raped after curfew by two soldiers. (This is not unheard of in Guinea. In 2009 soldiers conducted mass rapes and killed as many as 160 people in a Conakry sports stadium, according to human-rights organizations.) But bad as the realities were in Diallo’s homeland, she admits the account that she gave the U.S. government on her asylum application was heavily embellished. Her fictionalized narrative worked to get her a green card and allow her to bring her child to America. But her past misstatements may make it impossible to win a criminal case against DSK based on her testimony.

The only saving grace in this situation is that DSK has also had a long public life, punctuated with “situations,” improprieties, one inappropriate (and mostly, but not fully, consensual) relationship with a subordinate that put Strauss Kahn on trial as well. Normally, only the accuser is interrogated, with past indiscretions held up to light – but Strauss Kahn is receiving an equal grilling in the press.

It is always difficult to fairly represent all sides of painful matters like assault or rape. It is especially fraught since no one can truly know what happened except for the people involved, and juries and arbitrators are trying to weight highly subject evidence. But it is disturbing that the deck is stacked so hard against victims of sex crimes – particularly when those victims are women of color. Jamie Leigh Jones, who just was dealt a crushing decision in her lawsuit against KBR and the contractors she accused of rape, was initially believed and had powerful support from many corners, including the media. The Latina girl in Texas who was gang-raped did not have that same support. The article written was heavy on victim blaming, prompting the NYT to apologize for the “lack of balance”. And here again, Newsweek has subtly framed Diallo as guilty by employing the usual tactics of rape culture and the usual stereotypes about class, immigration, and women of color.

By Arturo R. García

According to some of my fellow geeky bloggers, the woman in the picture above is a victim.

That’s the new Miss USA, Alyssa Campanella, who some people are seemingly rushing to induct into the “scene” because of some comments she made in this interview:

Campanella expresses her love for shows like The Tudors and Camelot, and says she was a “science geek” in high school, which is commendable. I don’t question her fandom. But interpreting her statements as some sort of victory for fandom in general not only appropriates her words, but strikes me as vexing for a number of reasons.

First is the fact that this interview was only aired because of Campanella’s participation in an industry promoting an exclusionary body standard, an industry that tacitly encourages parents to exploit their children in hopes of “moving up the ranks” to reach her level. Campanella was on this platform to begin with because she’s trafficking in privilege. If she were a plus-sized woman, a transgender woman, or a woman of color, it would be much less likely for us to even hear the name “Alyssa Campanella” in this setting.

In Campanella’s case, her geekdom will more than likely be framed as a way to make her “exotic” to certain advertising demographics – and make no mistake, she is not there because she enjoyed studying biology, or chemistry. She is there because of her body, and people who do not have her kind of body, or the cis-male equivalent, are Othered by many of the people who both control events like Miss USA or watch it. That is privilege, and while recognizing that doesn’t excuse any rationalization for insulting her, neither is it evidence of “jealousy” or “self-loathing” when discussing that privilege.

At this point I’d like to make a couple of key distinctions: it is sexist when people only accuse female celebrities of “pandering” to geeky audiences. There’s little evidence that male actors and performers aren’t scripted to declare “relatability” any less than their female counterparts; male celebrities have their own set of stereotypes and corporate messages to live up to. But it’s also problematic to equate skepticism regarding declarations of “geeky cred” by celebrities of any gender with the street-level harassment many women have reported at conventions or at comic-book shops.

The factors behind that harassment go beyond the individual misogynous acts or attitudes practiced by their attackers. It’s the encouragement of that mindset by many of the companies supplying our geeky products. When DC Comics tells retailers it plans to continue to target the 18-to-34-year old male demographic, despite promises of a “new, diverse DC Universe,” that fuels the narrative depicting fandom as an all-male fiefdom. That attitude should be questioned by geek media at every turn, not only at the storefront, but at the corporate level.

When DC promotes hyper-sexualized character designs like the new one (shown at right) for Harley Quinn, or allows writers like Judd Winick to emphasize that titles like Catwoman will be “sexy,” while marginalizing female creators, that sends a message of exclusion to anyone who is not a white cis-hetero male, and it perpetuates the corporate-driven perception that women who look much like Campanella are only valued at all because they’re handy props to entice customers to buy their products.

The fact is, geeky women are not, and have never been “Unicorns.” Despite what advertisers want you to believe, women have always been involved in fandom, be it as creators, critics, cosplayers and consumers, of all body types and ethnicities. Want proof? Here’s a picture from Newsweek, taken at an early Star Trek convention, along with the caption, emphasis mine:

In the early conventions, a majority of attendees were women, [costume designer Angelique] Trouvere says. Because of that, more men started to attend, and today convention audiences are usually evenly split along gender lines.

Despite that fact, businesses haven’t just been ignoring female consumers, they have been telling their clienteles that “hot girls” can’t be geeky, and telling them that geeky women have to be “hot” for their opinions to matter, or to be taken seriously as characters across the media spectrum. Movies like She’s All That and television shows like The Big Bang Theory depict female geekdom as something that is Not Normal, something they must be “cured of” before they can be accepted into society at large.

And make no mistake, a lack of acceptance is part of the real-life experience for many geeks, both male and female: in some of the threads involving the debate over “hotness” and geekdom, people have mentioned being mocked, harassed or outright bullied by schoolyard peers. But seemingly at every turn, people who discuss being bullied are told to “grow up” or to “get over high school.” As if bullying doesn’t really do anyone any harm. Just tell that to the parents of this anonymous child in Lakeside, Calif.:

“My prevailing thought when I wake up in the morning is, ‘I don’t want to find my son hanging from the rafters,’ ” said the mother of a Lakeside middle schooler who has been bullied for three years. She asked that her name not be used for fear of further assaults on her son.

He has been punched, slapped, hit with rocks, called names. Asked about transferring to another campus, he declined. What if the same fate — or worse — awaited him there?

“And why should he have to leave?” his mother asked. (The students and parents interviewed for this story asked that their names not be used for fear of further assaults.)

Or tell that to the mother of 17-year-old Tyler Long in Murray County, Ga.:

“They would take his things from him, spit in his food, call him ‘gay, faggot’,” Long said. “One day to the next, it was continuous harassment from the other kids in the classroom.”

His parents said they complained to school authorities about the pattern of bullying early on, but no action was taken.

“‘Boys will be boys’,” was the response Long said he got from school officials. “‘How can I stop every kid from saying things that shouldn’t be said? What do you want me to do Mr. and Mrs. Long? I’ve done all I can.’”

Is death now the litmus test for bullying? At what age does the “Get Over It” caucus believe bullying becomes “official”? Would these people also tell women who like Star Wars but are not “hot” to “get over it” if they’re sexually harassed at conventions, or while playing games online?

I know friends who were pelted with pieces of meat by schoolmates, years before any PSA campaign was there to tell them “It Gets Better.” In my own experience, I was able to avoid physical harm because a) I was fortunate enough to develop a circle of friends with some of my fellow Honors students and b) I showed just enough athletic ability in phys-ed classes and pick-up games in the playground to not receive much more invective than to be accused of “acting white” because I was a good student.

That was a privilege that I worked for, sure, but it was privilege just the same. Other people were not as fortunate, and there are kids out there today who will continue to be subjected to the same stereotypes older geeks were regarding gender and body identity, only through many more media outlets. These problems will not automatically start to disappear because an actor or popular musician tells a breathless interviewer he or she is a gamer, regardless of intention.

All of which is not to say that celebrities or “hot” people can never be members of the community. In calling herself “a history geek,” Campanella herself seems to fit the definition of a geek ally: she has some geeky interests, and she believes in evolution (thank goodness), but it’s not like she chose to cosplay Wonder Woman for the swimsuit competition, either. There might be some common tastes between some celebrities and their fanbases. But, again, barring any evidence to the contrary, there’s experiences common – not unanimous, but common – to this subculture that they did not go through. A star watching The Tudors doesn’t make him or her a “bandwagon jumper,” but it also doesn’t mean he or she can automatically empathize with a non-famous woman who’s treated coldly or ignored by her local comics retailer, or a non-famous man whose geekdom, while acknowledged “without complaint,” is painted as “less of a man” because of it.

Acknowledging that disconnect doesn’t make either side a bad person. That’s often a good starting point for newcomers to learn, and for day-to-day members to share their stories. That’s one way communities strengthen their ties. But it takes effort on both sides.

As rosasparks pointed out (via our own AJ Plaid) on Tumblr:

Perez Hilton may be a gay man, Lady Gaga may be an out bisexual woman but their identities alone do not make them awesome members of any particular tribe.

I am a bisexual woman of color. I don’t get a cookie, a medal or even a high-five. Not because of identity alone, because I hope my actions and contributions to society speak louder than my identifying markers.

If I act like shit, say horribly hateful and ignorant things, I’m not doing anyone any favors, myself and whatever tribe I belong to, nor does it reflect well on my ‘tribe’.

Come on. It’s absurd to assume that one’s self-identified ‘group’ makes them somehow an ally or a responsible member. That’s bullshit. We’re all required to be more than our ‘titles’.

F-CK THAT.

And there is nothing wrong with being an ally; people like Tim Wise do valuable anti-racist work from that position. When celebrities participate in campaigns like “It Gets Better,” it’s a gesture of support and empathy that deserves credit. But that is different than just saying, “I like [x] television show” – it’s people doing work for the communities they’re supporting. Even then, I don’t think Wise would argue that his work as an ally disqualifies him from his white privilege.

Recognizing that distinction, and the fact that many of the industries of choice for celebrities have played to insecurities and biases defining millions of people – geeky or not – as falling below a set of money-driven “standards” is self-awareness, borne of individual experiences that cannot be trivialized just because corporate America tells us geekdom is “chic” right now. And Campanella is the latest example of someone who is in a position to become a valuable ally, if she chooses to. But that takes more than telling us she’s a fan. Without that acknowledgement, any claim of “empowerment” is really an argument for privilege. And no celebrity, male or female, needs our help with that.

Saw “Man Down” by Rihanna. Every victim/survivor of rape is unique, including how they THINK they’d like justice to be handed out. During my rape I tried to shoot my rapist, but I missed. Over the years I realized that killing my rapist would’ve added insult to injury. The DESIRE to kill someone who abused/raped you is understandable, but unless it’s self defense in the moment to save your life, [it] just ADDS to your troubles #mandown. I repeat, SELF DEFENSE to save yourself/protect yourself, I’m ALL for. Otherwise victim/survivor taking justice into your own hands with violence equals more trouble for you!! The “Man Down” video did a GREAT job of getting the entire world talking about rape. I hope that leads to healing and prevents rape.
- Via The Root

Not that I know of anyway – no one’s said that to me in my face. I don’t even know if I’ve been called a harlot or a whore or any other synonym for a loose promiscuous woman.

People don’t often tend to associate me with sexuality, at least when they just see me and don’t really know about what I get up to. “Unattractive” or “ugly” would probably be more common insults, asides from “you Bangla”.

But the biggest reason though is because I spent all my life in a society and culture where people didn’t even talk about sexuality. That thing about how women are sexualised in society through ads and media and all that? Not where I came from! You were meant to be pure, innocent, untouched, sweet…”sweet” was actually a word that got used a hell of a lot as a compliment, come to think of it.

If you wanted to denote someone as slutty, trashy, harlot-like, you know what you’d call them?

Sexy.

Yes, that trait people in the rest of the world spend tons of hours and dollars achieving? That buzzword in company mission statements? That marketing aim? Undesirable. You’d get it in a sneer from your school classmate, that admonition from your boss, that behind-the-back bitching from the neighbours – all for wearing a tank top or having your hair out or putting a strut in your walk. People knew that in some contexts it was meant to be positive, which made the word a double-edged sword; if you accepted the word as a compliment, you were proving how degrading you are, and deserved the insult.

Here’s an example of how intense it could get: Sometime in the mid 90s, some lad mag classed Malaysian pop superstar Siti Nurhaliza as one of their sexiest women. Now Siti is massive popularity-wise – when Britney Spears first got started people were trying to match up their potential careers! She’s likely still going and won’t stop for a while. So she’s a very big deal in Malaysia – even if you don’t follow her music (pop-Malay-folk ish) you still followed her career one way or another.

She had to release a press statement declaring: “I’m not sexy!”

The Western-eduated folk found that amusing and pointless, but the “sexy” declaration was really a potential career-breaker for Siti. She was the epitome of Malay femininity, which meant she was supposed to be well-mannered, poised, clean, polite, family-friendly. Accepting any level of “sexy” inferred that she was a wild child, a rabble-rouser, loose morals, had no respect for culture or elders, no shame or dignity. And that just would not do.

Shame and dignity. Two words that get used a lot to suppress sexuality.

As I mentioned, there’s not a lot happening in Malaysia sexuality-wise (which is a bit surprising considering birth control is over-the-counter and apparently Malaysian abortion laws are a lot more liberal than some American cities) or even physically (PE is a joke). No one will talk about it, plans to introduce a sex ed curriculum keep getting stalled, and if you want to ask the only answer you get is “don’t think about it”. How are you going to learn anything about good consent or owning your bodies or good vs bad touch if you weren’t treated as someone with a body to begin with? You were just a brain, there to get good grades, don’t worry about the rest of you.

That was certainly my experience – I had to get my sex ed from books and CD ROMs and the Internet, and somehow I managed to get enough to know that it could lead to unwanted pregnancies or STDs, was messy and icky, and my paranoia made me feel that I would be that rare 0.01% who’d get sick & pregnant even with a condom AND birth control AND a lesbian or something strange like that, so I ended up going asexual most of my life. What’s the worry anyway – there’s the rest of the world!

Then I got Mark The Boyfriend and suddenly got to find out for myself what the big deal was. And it was great! Physicality was awesome! A few years later, after finishing uni and dealing with some personal changes, I found the space and courage to really take on my sexuality – andboy what a ride that’s been! I found a love for eroticism in performance (art is my kink!), embraced the display and enjoyment of my body, spent time reconsidering and reconciling the differing (sometimes conflicting) paradigms I learnt about sex, love, relationships, intimacy, friendships. There were down times too – being assaulted, having hearts broken, still not being completely capable to communicate what I would like without holding myself back nor imposing myself on others, not feeling strong enough to speak up for my own boundaries because I’m so used to “be accommodating!”.

All of that I’ve had to do pretty much on my own – not completely alone, because there were the burlesque classes and the lovers and the discussion groups and the art directors and so on. But I did have to build my own definitions of sex and intimacy and relationships and so on, having not found too many that resonated with me and my experiences. And yet I could not find support from the culture of my origins, from myfamily.

“Don’t you have any shame?!”
“Why are you giving up your dignity!?”
“Why does Mark let you do this?!”
“Can’t you change your passions and give this up?”
“Why are you bringing shame onto the family?”

It’s never just me. What I do affects my family, my culture, my background. I am seen as a representative, a synedoche, a microcosm. Even if my parents have been long dead I’ll likely still have my actions be considered as that of XYZ’s Daughter, rather than that of my own agency.

And it is this self-same agency that has led me to passionately embrace causes like SlutWalk. The agency that marks the fact that my body is my business, that it’s not owned by or representative of anyone else, that I have every right to seek & build support for my body my way.

I do have a sexuality, I do have physicality, I am sexy damnit. And that is not a shameful thing, that is not a loss of dignity. It’s reclaiming ownership of what is rightly mine from the start – and making a stand to assert that no one has the right to abuse, insult, malign, harm, or attack anyone AT ALL, including me, for making our own damn bodily choices. Even if they are the slut-version of Voldemort. Even if they are “cheap STD-infected hookers”. Even if they’re not sexy. Even if they are sexy.

No ifs, no buts, just NO.

My body, my business.

Image credit: yegslutwalk

By Guest Contributor Crunktastic, cross-posted from The Crunk Feminist Collective

Today, we had initially planned to bring you a review of the new groundbreaking book Hey Shorty: A Guide to Combatting Sexual Harassment in Schools and on the Streets. And you can read it here. But in light of the SlutWalk movement that broke out in Toronto earlier this year and the embrace of the movement in U.S. feminist mainstream over the last few months, I would like to add a few more thoughts to the discussion, in light of recent and much-needed calls on the part of feminists of color for a much more critical race critique in the SlutWalk movement.

SlutWalk Toronto started as an activist response to the ill-informed, misguided words of a Toronto police officer who suggested that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Women in Toronto were enraged and rightfully so, and SlutWalks have become a way to dramatize the utter ignorance and danger of the officer’s statements. And on that note, I fucks very hard with the concept and with the response, which is creative, appropriate, and powerful.

What gives me pause is the claim in SlutWalk Toronto’s mission statement of sorts that because they are are “tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result,” they are reclaiming and reappropriating the word “slut.”  Um, no thank you?

Here’s the source of my ambivalence: as I read the mission statement, I was struck by the righteous indignation these women had over being called slut. While that indignation is absolutely warranted, it also feels on a visceral level as though it comes from women who are in fact not used to being fully defined by negative sexual referents.

Perhaps my cynicism reflects my own experience as a Black woman of the Hip Hop Generation in the U.S., or a Black woman who’s a member of the Western World period. It goes without saying that Black women have always been understood to be lascivious, hypersexed, and always ready and willing. When I think of the daily assaults I hear in the form of copious incantations of “bitch” and “ho” in Hip Hop music directed at Black women,  it’s hard to not feel a bit incensed at the “how-dare-you-quality” of the SlutWalk protests, which feel very much like the protests of privileged white girls who still have an expectation that the world will treat them with dignity and respect.

The first activist response I ever heard to such mistreatment was Queen Latifah’s 1993 Grammy-winning song, “U.N.I.T.Y.”

It energized a community and opened a space for much needed conversation. But sisters did not line up to go on  symbolic, collective ho strolls. And for good, and I think, obvious reasons.

So maybe the best way to deal with the debates about re-appropriating the term “slut” is the way I deal with the whole n-word debate. As a Black person, who occasionally uses the n-word (with an ‘a’ on the end), I am admittedly ambivalent about whether or not the use of the term among Black people really does constitute a reappropriation. I’ve heard and read most of the arguments, and I remain…ambivalent but generally think the word is unproductive. That said, I balk at older Black folks who act as though the Hip Hop Generation are the first Black people to toss the word around. Read any 19th century Black literature and you’ll know different. What I’m clear about, however, is that to use or not to use is a decision that  lies solely within Black communities. White people simply don’t get a say; the word is off-limits to them. Black folks have surely won the right, long held by white folks, to struggle and determine amongst ourselves how we will refer to and define ourselves. Period.

For me, so it is with the word slut. It is off-limits to me. But for those who have been shamed, and disciplined, and violently abused on the basis of its usage, they have the prerogative to determine whether to reclaim or not to. As a word used to  shame white women who do not conform to morally conservative norms about chaste sexuality, the term very much reflects white women’s specific struggles around sexuality and abuse. Although plenty of Black women have been called “slut,” I believe Black women’s histories are different, in that Black female sexuality has always been understood from without to be deviant, hyper, and excessive. Therefore, the word slut has not been used to discipline (shame) us into chaste moral categories, as we have largely been understood to be unable to practice “normal” and “chaste” sexuality anyway.

But perhaps, we have come to a point in feminist movement-building where we need to acknowledge that differing histories necessitate differing strategies. This is why I’m somewhat ambivalent about accusing my white sistren of being racist. If your history is one of having your sexuality regulated by the use of the term “slut” for disciplinary purposes, then SlutWalk is an effective answer.

What becomes an issue is those white women and liberal feminist women of color who argue that “slut” is a universal category of female experience, irrespective of race. I recognize that there are many women of color who are participating in the SW movement, and I support those sisters who do, particularly women who are doing it in solidarity and coalition. But rather than forcing white women to get on the diversity train with regard to the inclusivity of SlutWalk, perhaps we need to redirect our racial vigilance. By that I mean, I’d prefer that white women acknowledge that they are in fact organizing around a problematic use of terminology endemic to white communities and cultures.

In doing so, this would force an acknowledgement that the experience of womanhood being defended here–that of white women– is not universal, but is under attack and worthy of being defended, all the same.

Perhaps, also, if white women could recognize SlutWalk as being rooted in white female experience, it would provide an opportunity for them to participate in coalition and solidarity with similar movements that are inclusive and reflective of the experiences of women of color.

One example is the Stop Street Harassment movement– a multiracial movement that has led to “Stop Street Harassment” campaigns throughout the U.S. and abroad. It is that movement which is the subject of Hey Shorty!  This movement, too, works from the premise that streets and schools should be safe for women, but it recognizes that challenges to that safety while similar in some respects, can differ across race and class. And as I said, earlier, different histories necessitate different strategies. In that regard, I don’t think sisters will be lining up to go on a symbolic “Ho Stroll” anytime soon.

We’d like to hear from you. What are your feelings on these two movements and the connections and divergences between each?

By Guest Contributor Simba Rousseau, cross-posted from Her Blueprint

Threatening emails, phone calls, constant surveillance by secret police and eventually prison couldn’t dissuade Randa, an Algerian transsexual and pioneer in the Arab world’s gay and transsexual movement, from going public with her life story.

“I returned home to Algeria from my last trip and that’s when the threats to imprison me started,” says Randa, who received initial threats via email and phone. “As a method of intimidating me, they started sending articles about me to my family, and they would show up at my workplace. Once, while being stopped at a checkpoint, one of the officers grabbed me in the car and told me that he could arrest and rape me and no one would know about it.”

Convinced by influential members of Algerian society, two of Randa’s friends were forced to present her with an ultimatum. Leave the country in ten days or things will get worse.

Ten days is not a long time, but as luck would have it, a feminist organization in Lebanon found out about Randa’s situation and offered to assist.

“I don’t regret speaking out because in the end I realized that the reason they were doing all of this was because they were scared. I managed to shake up their system and this is why they were lashing out at me,” she said in an interview with Her Blueprint. “Of course it was driving me crazy, and I knew that if I didn’t leave the country they would kill me. I decided to continue addressing the situation of LGBT in Algeria outside the country and accepted the offer to go to Lebanon.”

However, Randa’s troubles were far from over.

Once in Lebanon, Randa caught the attention of the Lebanese secret intelligence. One day while going to the General Security (Lebanese immigration), she was informed that she was under investigation because she shared a birth name with a man who had skipped out on military service. It seemed to be an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, though Randa believes the Algerian embassy in Lebanon was responsible for having her detained.

Randa, who had been living as a woman for years, was forced to dress in men’s clothes and confined to a cell alone in the men’s section of Adlieh prison.

Adlieh, a former underground parking lot turned detention center, houses thousands of migrants and refugees and is infamous as a harsh and inhuman detention center.  Human rights advocates have long called for the closure of Adlieh due to its inhumane treatment of inmates. Most detainees languish underground for years until they’re deported or until rights groups are informed of their whereabouts.

Randa was one of the lucky ones. She was able to send a text message to friends letting them know that she had been arrested. “It was a miracle that I got the call that I was going to be released. Almost 99% of the prisoners are deported. They kept me in the prison for over 60 days because they were trying to figure out any way to deport me,” says Randa.

Once Randa was released, she decided she had to take the opportunity to share her life story. By publishing a memoir, Randa hoped to gain closure around her experiences in Algeria and humanize the Trans experience, which remains a taboo topic in most Arab countries. Her biography, Memoirs of Randa the Trans, which is based on a series of interviews with her, was written by Lebanese journalist Hazem Saghyieh and is likely the first book of its kind to be published in Arabic.

Speaking to Her Blueprint, Randa says, “I wanted to say to the world that Trans people exist. We have dreams, feelings, pain–just like everyone else. Our suffering is that we’re treated like monsters and people think that we are just looking for sex.”

So how did Randa become the voice of the Algerian Trans community to begin with? Like the recent political revolution in Egypt, it began with the Internet. In a conservative Muslim country like Algeria, where the penal code and society severely condemns the LGBT community, Randa faced severe difficulties. Oppressed by her family, bullied at school and abused whenever she would tell her mom that she was a girl trapped in a male body, Randa decided at the age of fifteen that someone needed to address the issue of LGBT in Algeria.

“When the Internet arrived to Algeria it gave me an outlet to speak, so I started a personal blog writing about different issues I was facing. Then it started to take on a life of it’s own,” says Randa. “People around the world started coming to my blog and it became a reference for individuals to learn about issues concerning the LGBT community in Algeria.”

Although living in Lebanon as a transwoman has been easier than it was for her living in Algeria, discrimination and harassment still exists. As a certified nurse, finding work in her profession or landing any kind of respectable job has been a daunting task.

However, for Randa the bulk of the discrimination she faces in Lebanon is within the LGBT community. “Within the community you have this hierarchy of the gay male, then the feminine male, then the lesbians and then the lesbians are categorized according to their look and then there are the bisexuals and then the trans,” she said. “Of course there is also the class issue that also plays a role in dividing the community.”

By Guest Contributor Ethar El-Katatney, cross-posted from Muslimah Media Watch

I lived through a revolution. I saw my 21-year-old brother holding a gun. I slept with a knife under my pillow. I have a close friend who was shot and is now blind in one eye.

I was lucky. I didn’t have thugs break into my house. I wasn’t tear-gassed. I wasn’t shot at. But I have friends who were. I have friends who have friends who died.

And compared to the revolutions going on in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Libya, Egypt was lucky.

Today I heard a new song by Sijal Hachem, a Lebanese singer I’d never heard of before.The lyrics are a man complaining about his nagging, materialistic wife, who wants pearls and cars while he only has flowers to give her—nothing new. Here’s a sample: (Arabic lyrics here)

You nag and nag (Raise your voice)
My heart and soul [are tired] of your nagging (Raise your voice)
If people were able to build the Great Wall of China
Then I can shut you up and not hear criticism

Chorus:
Enough. Enough nagging. Enough
Your nagging makes my livelihood disappear
I’m killing myself
I work day and night

I wouldn’t have given it a second thought if I’d heard it on the radio. But I was watching the music video, which features women as sexy riot police standing in formation behind barbed wire as men charge them:

For a while after, all I could do was sit there with my jaw hanging open.

“No,” I thought. “I must have misunderstood. Surely the song isn’t equating men standing up to their nagging wives with people revolting against dictatorships? Surely it isn’t sexualizing state security and torture? Surely is isn’t capitalizing on the revolutions in such a demeaning and infuriating way?”

I’m still in shock that out of the dozens of people who must have worked on this music video, not one person thought that it was perhaps a bad idea.  Not one person thought it was insulting to the memory of the thousands of people who died and are still dying around the Arab world? To the thousands upon thousands of people who are tortured in state prisons?

The imagery in the music video is disturbing on so many levels. To see scenes we witnessed in real life paralleled in a music video—of barbed wire, billowing smoke and burning tires and paper; of groups of men wearing masks to protect themselves from tear gas while holding sticks and rocks; and of state security standing in rows and hosing protesters standing peacefully with gallons of water—makes me shiver involuntarily. It was real, it was horrible, and it was traumatic.

Before the revolution, before I saw burned out trucks in front of my eyes, a similar image on television wouldn’t have provoked a blink; we’ve become desensitized to imagery of war, of human suffering.

The video associates the imagery of war with sexy women in short shorts and stockings, gyrating, stripping, and pouting. Let’s sexualize torture. Let’s replace the imagery of men beaten by state security until they no longer resemble human beings with the idea of sexy state security rubbing against prisoners to get them to talk.

And let’s degrade the calls of the revolution. Let’s have the men in the music video shout what all the youth in the Arab world are shouting now: “Enough, Enough!” Let’s have the scene in 3:06 look exactly like it did in real life. Let’s throw in the Palestinian scarf for good measure. All the better. Because, you know, men revolting against their wives is serious business.

This video was not produced a long time ago.  It was released last month, right in the middle of the Arab Spring. But, hey. The revolution has been televised. Why not merchandized and sexualized?

By Guest Contributor Harsha Walia, cross-posted from Rabble.ca

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
— Audre Lorde

Since April, when thousands marched in a Slutwalk in Toronto in response to a police officer telling students that the best way to avoid getting raped was to avoid dressing like a ‘slut’, Slutwalks have spread across cities in Canada and the US to the UK and Australia. Accompanying this global surge has been a myriad of controversies about the term ‘slut’ as well as questions about who was being left out from this new movement.

I share many of these concerns.

Slutwalk – in its slick branding – runs the risk of facilitating the dominant discourse of ‘liberated’ women as only those women wearing mini-skirts and high heels in/on their way to professional jobs. In reality, capitalism mediates the feminist façade of choice by creating an entire industry that commodifies women’s sexuality and links a woman’s self-esteem and self-worth to fashion and beauty. Slutwalk itself consistently refuses any connection to feminism and fixates solely around liberal questions of individual choice – the palatable “I can wear what I want” feminism that is intentionally devoid of an analysis of power dynamics.

Historically, this has come at a great cost to low-income women and women of colour who bear the brunt of institutionalized sexism – from lack of access to childcare and denial of reproductive justice to stratification in precarious low-wage work and disproportionate criminalization. In the post 9/11 climate, the focus on a particular version of sex(y)-positive feminism runs the risk of further marginalizing Muslim women’s movements who are hugely impacted by the racist ‘reasonable accommodation’ debate and state policies against the niqab. This marginalization has, at least in part, been legitimized through an imperialist feminist discourse that imposes certain ideas of gender liberation and perpetuates the myth that certain cultural/religious identities are inherently antithetical to women’s rights.

According to Nassim Elbardouh, a community organizer and Muslim woman who grew up in Saskatoon, “Though I support the tremendous effort, I didn’t go to Slutwalk because rather than focusing on lack of consent in sexual assault, there seemed to be a message that I have heard since I was a young girl – that I am only a feminist under the White gaze if I dressed and behaved in certain exposing and forward ways. People need to realize that being ‘scantily clad’ is not the only patriarchal excuse that victimizes women. Sexual assaults against Muslim women are often minimized in our society because Muslim women are perceived as repressed, and therefore in need of sexual emancipation. I would much rather have attended a ‘Do Not Rape’ Walk.”

On the use of the term ‘slut’ itself, while I appreciate that others feel differently and there is an argument to be made about transgressing the social boundaries defined by the term ‘slut’, I personally don’t feel the whole ‘reclaim slut’ thing. I find that the term disproportionately impacts women of colour and poor women in order to reinforce their status as inherently dirty and second-class, and hence more rape-able. The history of genocide against Indigenous women, the enslavement of Black women, and the forced sterilization of poor women goes beyond their attire. It is a means of gender control that is embedded within the intersecting processes of racism and colonialism. As long-term activists with Incite Women of Color have pointed out, the experience of women of colour with violence and victim-blaming is not only quantitatively different (i.e. increased) but is also qualitatively different.

Racist and sexist terminology like ‘squaw’ continues to particularly demean Indigenous women living in poverty. The systemic ideology that upholds the colonial disposability of Indigenous women’s bodies and lives has normalized the tragedy of thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women across this country. As a Manitoba Judge stated during the inquiry into the death of 19-year old Helen Betty Osborne “the men who abducted Osborne believed that young Aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification.”

One of the organizers of the Vancouver Slutwalk admitted in a Tyee interview that many marginalized women did not feel comfortable marching: “We will speak to the fact that we need to recognize that there are groups that are more affected, who will not be as strongly represented at this march as they should be.”

Having said all that, it might be surprising, then, to know that I did march in Slutwalk.

I attended for the simple reason that I am committed to ending victim-blaming. The Slutwalks in Toronto and Vancouver came out of the specific contexts of comments by police officers in Toronto and Saanich that were reinforcing to young women about how to avoid getting raped. In Manitoba, Judge Robert Dewar commented that a young Aboriginal rape survivor acted “inviting”.

Even though I did not march under the banner of ‘sluthood’, I marched to mark the unceded territory of women’s bodies. I marched because language is a weapon yielded against the powerless. I marched because rapists causes rape and sexual assault can never be justified. I marched to end the policing of women by other women. I marched because that day, though understandable, I happened to be tired of the Left ruthlessly eating itself alive. I marched in defiance of right-wing pundits like Margaret Wente to make visible the staggering reality of rape and violence against all women in so-called civilized countries like Canada.

By the time Slutwalk hit Vancouver on May 15, the debates had already been raging for weeks. I expected to see only a handful of women of colour, mothers and children, older women. I was surprised at the actual diversity on the streets, not captured by photographers seeking sensationalist images of bras and fish nets. There was no attempt to recruit everyone into one uniform vision of feminity, nor was there an overarching romanticization of “sluttiness”; sexual autonomy was being self-determined by each participant– as one placard read ‘Whether scantily dressed or fully dressed, clothing does not equal consent’. Most heartening was the significant number of teenagers, who are perhaps most pressured against affirming consent and are most impacted by self-shame and victim-blaming, and supporting their voices on the street was a critical gesture of solidarity.

While Slutwalk may like to present itself as a movement, I would argue that it isn’t. Rather, it is simply one part of a broader movement to end violence against women. Similarly, my reflection is just that – one person’s rant in a wider spectrum of opinion. It does not (pejoratively) imply that I am a “sister who fell for Slutwalk”, nor does it imply my uncritical endorsement. As Berthold Brecht said “In the contradiction lies the hope.” Whether or not Slutwalk is around, there are hundreds of thousands of us, who continue to live and organize everyday to eliminate heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism.

Photo courtesy of CNN

Yep, I–along with sexpert and Racialicious booster Twanna Hines–will talk about sexing it up and street harrassment at the Museum of Sex in NYC tomorrow .  (Yes, we have a museum devoted to sex in NYC. Pick up your jaw. )  If you’re in the city, please come…no pun intended!

The Right to be Sexy in the Bedroom and on the Street!
The Museum of Sex
233 5th Avenue, 27th Street
New York, NY
7:30-9:30pm
(Suggested Donation $10)

We have a right to look as sexy as we want, with no repercussions! When our bodies and sexuality meet activism, we can take back control and turn victimization on its head.

Join us on April 21st for a screening of The Line at the Museum of Sex’s subterranean locale. Sip elderflower cocktails at the sleek Laboratory/Bar space and join a post-film discussion with sultry panelists discussing sexuality rights and activism. Panelists include Emily May of Hollaback! Twanna Hines of Funky Brown Chick, Andrea Plaid of Racialicious, Tara Ellison of Third Wave Foundation and NOLOSE, and Nancy Schwartzman, director of The Line.

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Your Panelists

Nancy Schwartzman is the director and producer of documentary films The Line (2009) and xoxosms (April 2011 release), as well as the director of The Line Campaign, a multimedia campaign to promote sex-positive dialogue about relationships, sex, and consent.

Emily May is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Hollaback!, a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology, fighting against the notion that street harassment is culturally acceptable.

Twanna Hines is is a Manhattan-based writer and sexual & reproductive health / rights advocate, hailed as one of “the internet’s sultriest sharers” by the Village Voice, details about her rendezvous have been printed in Glamour magazine and she has made media appearances including on CNN, NPR and Gawker.com

Andrea (AJ) Plaid has the distinction of being the first Sexual Correspondent for Racialicious, the award-winning blog on race and pop culture. Her work on race, gender, sex, and sexualities has appeared at Change.org, Bitch, and Library Journal and her posts have been republished at Penthouse.com, Colorlines, BlogHer, and New American Media. Andrea’s writing also appears in the just-published anthology Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee. She has been quoted in Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. She has lectured at John Jay College of Criminology as well as participated in Harvard’s Feminist Coming Out Day 2011 as a guest panelist. She also owns an eco-friendly safer-sex kit company, Freak Kits. Andrea lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Tara Ellison is the Deputy Director of the Third Wave Foundation and a board member of NOLOSE, a fat queer and trans organization. Among other types of activism and advocacy, Tara has also been blogging about things like race, class, gender, activism, sex, and sexuality for a decade.

Photo Credit: High Street Heels

By Guest Contributor Renina Jarmon (M.Dot) cross-posted from New Model Minority

So I have been thinking of Nate Dogg in general but rap music in particular and the difference between how I as a Black woman and how White men relate to rap music.

While I understand that sexism and patriarchy is systemic, that we LEARN and are taught how to be “men” and “women,” how to be racist, how to be sexist as well as  how to Love, how to forgive.

What I am getting at is, to be crude, we don’t pop out of our mommas knowing how to be men and women, we are taught from infancy on through blue and pink clothing,  girls being told to sit a certain way that is lady like, boys being told crying is weak, and not manly etc.

I also know that there are several structural things impacting the lives of Black men and women such as archaic drug laws, mandatory minimums, three strikes, the underdevelopment of public education, gentrification, police who shot and kill Black people with impunity, and the lack of good grocery stores in working class and low income neighborhoods. All this shit matters.

Culture matters as well. Culture meaning,  music, books, websites and films.

Culture is hegemony’s goon.

Which brings me to Nate Dogg. The recent coverage of his death clarified for me why some issues that I have thought of about rap music but didn’t have the language to articulate.

I am a little troubled over how White mens investment in Black mens misogyny in rap music isn’t interrogated. And how that shit impacts me and the women who look like me.

Society is organized by and for men.

And our lives in the US are hyper segregated racially.

By and large Black people don’t live around White folks, so most White men can experience the pleasure of singing “and you even licked my balls” in the comfort of their cars, homes and apartments, whereas a young Black man said to me nearly two years ago on 125th street that he wanted to “stick his dick in my butt.”

On the street, in broad daylight.

That shit was so absurd I thought HE was singing a rap song initially. No, he was talking to me.

Consequently, largely, White men are  not subjected to the kinds of violence and sexism that is sung about in the songs that Nate sang the hook on. As a Black woman, I am.

As a woman, as a Black women who Walks like she has a right to be in the street, this means my ass is toast.

For example, there is an officer in my neighborhood that harasses me so f-cking much that I am now on a first name basis, Peace to Officer Anderson. Typically he stops me because there is apparently a 11pm curfew in DC for children under 18 on week nights. He normally asks me from his car, “Hey, how old are you.”  Dead ass, the second time he did it, I responded saying I was grown. o.O

After the third time, I was like “Mr. Officer whats your name because this is either the second or third time you have asked me that, and seeing as we are going to keep running into each other, I thought we could just on speaking terms.” He smiled. Doesn’t MPD carry 9mm’s too? Sassing officers of the state who carry legal weapons?  Ummhmm. And, he told me his name.

My clarity on this issue came about after I read a excerpt of a post on NPR about Nate Dogg by Jozen Cummings. He writes,

“There’s also “Ain’t No Fun (If The Homies Can’t Get None),” a song that was never chosen as a single from Snoop Dogg’s debut album, Doggystyle but has become a favorite for many DJs trying to work a room. The song is a tour-de-force of misogynistic lyrics, but only Nate Dogg can make a verse about dismissing a one-night stand sound so sensitive and endearing.”

“Remembering Nate Dogg, Hip-Hop’s Hook Man”

by Jozen Cummings, NPR.org,  March 16th, 2011

(via beatsrhimesandlife)

Then I reblogged and responded on tumblr saying:

In some ways, Cummings comments re Nate Dogg remind me of why I think The Chronic and Doggy Style are the Devil, in terms of rap music. Men in general and White men in particular have a different relationship to the kinds of violence that I am subjected to as a Black woman who WALKS like she has a right to be in the street. Shit…two weeks ago I told two dudes to kill me or leave me alone. Dead ass. This ain’t for play. This is our lives.

Have you ever thought about White men’s investment in rap lyrics by Black men that are hella outta pocket?

I went to look for Cummings racial identity and I learned that he is African American, Japanese and Korean, so I am not saying that he is White. What I am saying is that his writing about Nate Dogg’s misogyny reminds me of how when the misogyny bomb is dropped, people who look like me tend to get hit with hella sharpnel. Whereas White men get to live out their thug fantasies singing along with Nate “And you even licked my balls.”

The Chronic and Doggystyle are sonically genius, however, did they up the ante on allowing White men and even some Black ones live out their Black sex fantasies?

Do you see the connection between Black women and White men that I am trying to make, why or why not?

By Guest Contributor Renina Jarmon (M.Dot) cross-posted from New Model Minority

This one is for Afrolicious and the notion of Appophenia.

Last Saturday on the way home on the metro platform I was tired.

I had been dancing. Bier was consumed. I spent the afternoon reading, and the evening posted up with my friend All Spirit and then the night dancing.

All Spirit bounced early, and he was my ride so I darted home on the metro. Looking back I should have asked another homie for a ride home.

I am walking on the metro platform and these two young Black men, are eyeing, me, saying something and if you know me you know I always trust my intuition. Full stop.

My intuition told me that I wasn’t safe and that I needed to act.

So rather than go back and for with these cats because it is late,  and I still needed to get home, and the platform was relatively empty,  I say to him “Aye blood, I’m from East Oakland California, either kill me or leave me alone.”

Even as I type it, I still can’t believe that it came out my mouth.

One of the dudes was like she from Oakland. She from Oakland and kinda let me be.

The other one took it personal as a threat. He left me alone, but there were was definitely a threat of violence in his body language and his words.

Whatever my fate was that night, I was ready.

I am so sick and tired of being treated like shit because of what is between my legs.

I felt uncomfortable the next day about what I had done, so I called my brother.

I mean, I understand full and well that things could have escalated. However over the last 3 months I have had these public interactions with Black men challenging, with the explicit threat of violence, my right to be in public.

So I called my brother to help me get some context. He told me that you never know what you are going to need to do to stay alive in a situation. Sometimes it is being silent, sometimes it is setting someone straight from the gate. After he said this, and related a similar experience that he had around standing up for himself when someone threatened him, I felt better. Still uneasy but better.

This street harassment+gendered violence experience also has me thinking about Charlie Sheen.

One of the reasons why I take all of these Charlie Sheen tweets so serious is because he beat his ex wife, and because he is imploding right in front of us.

The whole time I have been trying to think about how to write this post I have been watching the discourse around Charlie Sheen.

Men, Black men and White men can joke and shit about how Charlie and what not is funny, but as a Black woman, trying to get from point A to point B, who demands to be treated like a human being, violence or the threat of violence is a real part of my day to day existence.

Nothing Charlie says is funny because that man speaking to me that way on the train platform was not funny.

It really is out of pocket that I have to damn near be ready to die just to assert my humanity after dancing to Prince all night long.

Pow.

Street harassment as a public health issue?

Can you believe I said it?

Is it time for me to leave the city?

As soon-to-be-former UCLA student Alexandra Wallace packs her stuff and leaves the university due to fear for her life, I’ve watched how some people and the press reacted to her.  As Colorlines and other blogs noted, combating her anti-Asian racism with life-threatening misogyny really wasn’t the best social-justice idea:

Nor combatting racial stereotypes with…racialized sexual stereotypes:

and

Or even having a “yeah, you’re racist, but I’d still fuck ya” vibe, a la the guitar-strumming crooner, in an otherwise witty comeback song:

As blogger and GRITtv ‘s senior writer/web manager Sarah Jaffe said, the move of some Asian American men who “stereotypically not seen as sex objects, putting the white woman in her proper place AS sex object or, ‘Shut up bitch, you’re just there to be fucked’ in essence…”–which the Black woman expounds on in her clip–is just a kyriarchal pile-on.

I do believe is Wallace could have been criticized in terms of one of the most taboo—yet most needed—conversations: white female privilege.

Of course, when this phrase is put into the public square of ideas, quite a few white women, both feminist and non, will storm in with their vociferous exceptionalizing  to this privilege—more specifically, how their individual selves are the exceptions to this because of mitigating identities and circumstances: they aren’t able-bodied; they don’t fit the blonde-and-blue phenotype; they aren’t slender and/or or buxom; they are poor or come from poverty; they are not educated and/or hipsters; they are in interracial relationships; so on and so forth.  Usually, the exceptionalizing derails the conversation into silence.  But for a person without that privilege, especially if the privilege is based on that person’s degradation or erasure, the mitigated advantage is still an advantage.  The mitigation(s) shape(s) the privilege as that of gradation, not kind. 

But, as Audre Lorde said, silence doesn’t protect … in this case, the privilege getting read.

So, if I had to unpack the White Female Privilege, it would look something like this (and I’m citing and paraphrasing heavily from Alienation, Peggy McIntosh, Mary Dee Wenniger, Nsenga Burton, and ballgame, and this list isn’t exhaustive):

• Can benefit from their association with white men as a wife, daughter, sibling, and mother.
• Have all their faults and flaws into perfect imperfections.
• Easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring women like them.
• Can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer any communications without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of their race.
• When told about our national language or about “civilization,” they are shown the people of their color made it what it was.
• Can turn on the television, open a newspaper, or go online and see people of their race widely represented.
• Can remain oblivious of the language and of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in their culture any penalty.
• Are feel free to exhibit a wide range of emotions, from tears to genuine belly laughter, without being told to shut up.
• Can use the “sheer fear of tears” to their advantage. (Sarah Jaffe calls this “White Lady Tears.”)
• Are not compelled by the rules of their gender to wear emotional armor in interactions with most people.
• Are allowed to be vulnerable, playful, and “soft” without calling their worthiness as a member of their race being called into question.
• Are seen as the embodiments of value and purity and, due to their phenotypes (especially if it’s close(r) to the blonde-and-blue-eyed ideal), be considered worthy of protection—including having nations go to war over this purity and piety–and instantly become the objects of universal desire.
• They are seen as the default and the ideal embodiment of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness.  This idea(l) is replicated, despite the efforts of visual diversity, in all form of media, from paintings to plays to porn.

But don’t just take my word for it. As a couple of people pointed out on Tumblr a while ago:

we here on tumblr have found every single way imaginable to admire white girls. soft white girls, fat white girls, dreadlocked white girls, naked white girls, bicycling white girls, hairy white girls, clean white girls, white girls in shower, white girls catching butterflies, white girls cooking, white girls cooking naked, white girls with babies, white girls with kittehs, white girls with tats, white girls in catholic school girl dresses, white girls with hippy clothes….what fucking other ways in heavens green earth and jesus can we find to admire white girls?

… and yet i still see a whole lot of “admire my hotness” white girl shit. and a whole lot of it involves white girls appropriating ish and acting innocent while doing it.

Or, in Wallace’s case, post a virulently anti-Asian rant (complete with her “innocent” claims of having hometraining and how her rant isn’t about her “Asian friends”) on YouTube then fauxpologize with some nonsense about “not knowing what possessed her to do it.” To that, I’ll say here what I said in a comment section regarding this: “At some point, even the Devil would roll up and say, ‘That one’s on you, homie.’”

And what’s on her is her unchallenged white female privilege.  To me, Wallace’s tirade pivots on Jaffe calls the Sarah Palin Thing, “where you can say more outrageous shit because you’re a pretty white lady.”  Wallace visually presents as the physical and sexual ideal of the “all-American” blonde white girl-next-door doing something so not-PC, the “pretty white lady” who thinks she can get away with this verbalized racism—which Wallace attempts to get across as some sort of racial “truth-telling”–because it would be more “palatable.”  I also wonder if she thought—since she seems to deeply believe in some anti-Asian stereotypes, like they function in “hordes” bent on “taking over” her beloved UCLA with their familial “ways”—that Asian Americans wouldn’t push back because of the stereotype of their being “quiet.”   (She found out quite differently.)

Combine all this with, at the time, what Wallace may have perceived as having a platform for more of her racist views due to her newfound “internet fame” with her first clip and the revealed bikini photos—her father admitted on his Facebook page that she was creating a vlog of similar rants–probably reinforced something Arturo observed about the photos: “After all, there’s a certain sector who’s perfectly willing to forgive/accept her views because she’s ‘hot.’”  Again, Wallace found out quite differently, with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block speaking against it in a video as well as in an email along with other people responding to it with sometimes life-threatening viciousness.

At this point, though, this particular saga seems over: even though UCLA stated Wallace was within her free-speech rights as a student, she is gone.  But that doesn’t mean that white female privilege left with her.

Image courtesy of You Offend Me, You Offend My Family

When I first started in EMS, I was struck by how many domestic violence calls we got. Within weeks, it became a regular part of the night, just another bloody dispute amongst the asthma attacks, strokes, shootings etc.

I’d like to say there was a moment that shook me out of complacency – the woman whose father had beat her so badly she couldn’t open her eyes but she still wouldn’t go to the hospital or press charges, the decayed body of a nameless girl we found wrapped in trash bags in the backstreets of East New York – but revelations don’t usually come in single sudden bursts. It was a slow and painful movement towards recognizing that the everydayness of men’s violence against women, the sheer normalcy of it, is the most insidious, dehumanizing part. That something must change.

They say that understanding privilege is a process much like accepting death – you cycle through a haze of stages from Denial to Bargaining to Blame and finally Acceptance. But of course, nothing’s ever that linear. As the ugly truth about what men do played out in my ambulance night after night I got angry, I tried to separate myself from all that mess by holding tight to some concept of being a “good man,” I tried to invent some perspective that would make it all a little more okay, make it make sense, rationalize it. My social scientist side kicked in and tried to fit it into some theories that’d water down all that blood but I kept going in circles, bouncing between all the stages, overlapping a few at once and getting nowhere.

Acceptance came when I finally shut up and listened to what women around me were saying, what they’d always been saying, what my own life was telling me: that the physical, mental, spiritual violence that men commit against women is so wrapped in the fabric of society that it seeps into our subconscious, poisons our relationships to each other and ourselves. It’s a matter of life and death, not just because of the enormous amount of men that kill women every year but because of the lethal fallout of the patriarchal mindset, which asks us to make insanely unhealthy choices in the name of ‘manning up.’

Even though it’s the last stage, Acceptance is only the beginning of the struggle. I finally got to a point where I could put words to my process, make some more sense of privilege and responsibility than just being speechless or awkward, move forward. Fell into a collective of like-minded people of color working on intersecting oppressions – true, brave hearted people that I learned along side, laughed with and argued with and stayed up all night unfurling crazy plans with – and we started doing workshops in schools, churches and community organizations around Brooklyn.

We used the Gender Box exercise that they outline in Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which looks at the way we play out stereotypes even today and what forces keep us in those boxes. We broke down how male privilege plays out on institutional and interpersonal levels and how white power plays on images of manhood to turn us against ourselves. We taught in Riker’s Island and the District Attorney’s office, spoke with judges, doctors, business people, priests and gangmembers, but mostly we worked with young black and brown kids, and this is what i learned:

Despite what we’re told, people are hungry to talk about how privilege and power keeps us apart and holds us back. Young men know what’s going on, feel the strain of what they’re supposed to be, but our institutions won’t give them the language of how to talk about it, how to make sense of it, how to survive. What we’re left with is locker room banter and bad tv, an epidemic of crap media culture telling us how to be who we are.

This is what I believe: in our heart of hearts, men are not the monsters we’ve allowed media to make us. We are infinitely wiser, more compassionate and more complex than that. Fighting against gender violence really means ending patriarchy, which for men means finding that place beyond what we’re told we’re supposed to be, beyond “manning up,” and becoming what we really are.

The following day, I attended a workshop about preventing gender violence, facilitated by Katz. There, he posed a question to all of the men in the room: “Men, what things do you do to protect yourself from being raped or sexually assaulted?”Not one man, including myself, could quickly answer the question. Finally, one man raised his hand and said, “Nothing.” Then Katz asked the women, “What things do you do to protect yourself from being raped or sexually assaulted?” Nearly all of the women in the room raised their hand. One by one, each woman testified:

“I don’t make eye contact with men when I walk down the street,” said one.
“I don’t put my drink down at parties,” said another.
“I use the buddy system when I go to parties.”
“I cross the street when I see a group of guys walking in my direction.”
“I use my keys as a potential weapon.”

“I carry mace or pepper spray.”
“I watch what I wear.”

- From “Why I Am A Black Male Feminist”

Image courtesy of The Root