Is MTV Going Radical in 2011? A Response to Jessica Yee, in Support of Naming the Truth about the White West's Commitment to and of Genocide

image from MTV site may be found here

I posted the following after reading about an awesome cultural activist group, A Tribe Called Red, *here* at Racialicious. Apparently, MTV has taken an interest in promoting what they are doing to raise awareness about the disgusting levels of cultural appropriation (gross exploitation and theft) of Indigenous ways, known to be common practice among white nations. I agree with Jessica's critique of MTV. And I want to put more flame under MTV's buttocks. There's no way they'll promote anything like "cultural appropriation" as a problem if they also call it what it is: a racist patriarchal colonialist practice of genocide.

This is what MTV, the pro-exploitation reality TV network (formerly video channel), is saying about A Tribe Called Red. After that, is my comment. Please click on the title below to link back to MTV's blog.

Canada’s A Tribe Called Red Really Goes Native

By: Beverly

Ottawa, Canada-based Native American audio/visual collective A Tribe Called Red are remixing  pop culture from a first people’s perspective and it’s as right on and brilliant as a fashion shoot with emaciated European models in war bonnets is ignorant and lazy.

A Tribe Called Red Vimeo screen grab.

There are a fair number of young Native American writers taking to the web to explain all the ways that freely borrowing the cultural symbols of indigenous people — or bastardized fantasy versions thereof — is richly and complexly lame. Native Americans re-appropriating said pop culture images to make sick videos that go with even sicker dubstep remixes of tribal drum circles and stuff like “I’m An Indian Too” from Annie Get Your Gun is sort of the rad non-text version of those writings.

It’s so rad, in fact, that Diplo will probably post about you on his blog if you do it, but only if you do it as well as DJ Shub, DJ NDN, Frame, and video artist Bear Witness do. There’s also this second Native North American music post on the Mad Decent blog featuring A Tribe Called Red’s Electric Pow Wow Mini Mix. Electric Pow Wow, incidentally, is also the name of the crew’s monthly party.

Check out this Jim Jarmusch-sampling video by Bear Witness for DJ Shub’s “Electric Pow Wow Drum”:

Electric Pow Wow Drum from Bear Witness on Vimeo.


Oh, and before you go, check the video for the remix of the Diplo track “Riddim”:

Pow Wow Riddim from Bear Witness on Vimeo.

*          *          *

This is what I wrote as a comment at Racialicious.

I hope MTV will also note the obvious: the U.S. is committing genocide, still. And genocide across North America, and across the globe, is being willfully executed by corporate business, corporate media, and white het male supremacist military powers.

I network with Indigenous activists globally and what I am hearing goes way beyond cultural appropriation. It’s about land theft and refusal to return land to the people it was stolen from, it’s about the maintenance of poverty as a condition of living, it’s about poisoning the Earth, it’s about poisoning human beings. It’s about forced relocation and maintaining homelessness and loss of homeland as a condition of life. It’s about mass murder also but genocide isn’t only murder of human life as so many whites insist. It’s about the systematic destruction and erasure of human life, human cultures, human societies, and human history. It’s about burying corporate atrocities along with traditional ways of living, leaving no marker, no grave.

To not name it “genocide”, when speaking about what the White Het Man is doing to Indigenous Peoples in North America, is to render gross atrocity invisible. I hope we all start naming GENOCIDE wherever we see it, experience it, feel it, or witness people we love spiritually or physically die from it.

So many whites in the U.S. I know will go on and on and on and on about how awful Israel is behaving toward (read: against) the Palestinian people of the region for occupying land, relocating people, and committing mass murder. And, Israel is being utterly Western white male supremacist in doing this: nothing about their strategies of oppression are other than white-euro masculinist. (This is to say: it’s not a JEWISH thing that the Israeli government is doing.) Why don’t those same U.S.ers speak out against what THIS government, Christian-dominant since inception, is doing HERE and abroad to Indigenous People?

I'll add this, which wasn't part of my comment @ Racialicious:

Why are U.S. anti-racism liberals and progressives so fucking quiet about the genocide white U.S.ers benefit from materially, if not spiritually, every damn day?