Monday, May 16, 2011

To Righteous White People Concerned With Human Population Control: It's already happening for many people who aren't white

image is from here
One of the things that enrages me is hearing white people arrogantly and smugly discuss the need for "people, everywhere" to practice birth control, to monitor population growth, and to be responsible with birth-rates. It is almost always whites in the "First World" who I hear doing this. They remind "the world" that there's a population problem, as if people around the world never gave it a thought. As if the people who are most crowded in urban areas never thought to consider that "live birth", "child-rearing" and "population" are linked. As if what poor people need is a good sex education class.

What is often left out of the allegedly wise guidance from whites (condescendingly misogynistic, classist, and racist is more like it) is how, for many people who are not white, the human population is being drastically reduced by many factors: the White (Het) Man's wars against people of color, for example, most evident against Asian, Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations--if you know which news to seek out, or if you are not white and are living in the places where people are being destroyed or damaged by combinations of heterosexism, misogyny, classism, Western-white imperialism and colonialism, and other forms of racism.

If you track where Western (including US and European) weapons of mass destruction end up, you'll find that most of them end up in places that are not white-majority. And this is intentional and deliberate: it's called "population control" imposed against Brown and Black people by the White Man. The planting of profoundly toxic, lethal, nuclear waste near reservations is another form of population control. So too is the well-organised machinery of poverty combined with racism and misogyny.

With that as an introduction, I will close this post with this horrific news, which is only "new" news if you're not living the genocidal and gynocidal grief already.What follows is from Indian Country Today Media Network. Please click on the title just below to link back. And if you're white, please stop talking about the need for "population control" in truly racist ways, as if Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people can't figure it out without your "guidance".

Inuit Stillbirth Rate Triple that of Canada’s Mainstream Population 

By ICTMN Staff May 13, 2011
RSS 
The high stillbirth rate among Inuit people is cause for concern, though not entirely because of the numbers themselves, according to one health expert. 
The rate—triple that of the general Canadian population—is troublesome because of what it symbolizes: a lack of aboriginal child health care overall, said Catherine Curry, senior program officer at the Inuit Tuttarvingat Centre, the branch of the National Aboriginal Health Organization that addresses Inuit health and wellness issues. 
Nevertheless, the statistic itself is sobering, the medical journal The Lancet reported in April, according to Postmedia News: In 2009, 3.3 Canadian babies of every 1,000 were stillborn, but Inuit communities were found to have triple that rate. Curry, who has studied Inuit maternal health care in northern Canada, told the news service that poor access to prenatal health care may not only contribute to a higher stillbirth risk but also puts children in general at risk. 
“Many Inuit babies are born alive and need to be healthier,” Curry told Postmedia News. 
“Generally many public health factors and insufficient prenatal care impact infant-mortality rates. Prenatal care can mitigate a lot of those factors.” 
The remoteness of many Inuit communities also plays a role (many do not have midwives on hand, and women must travel or see a series of practitioners), as do violence, poverty and substance abuse, she said. 
The Lancet study was its Stillbirth’s Series, and 69 experts from 50-plus organizations in 18 countries contributed to a worldwide portrait of the unique tragedy. Globally 2.6 million third-trimester babies are stillborn, the Lancet said.


2 comments:

  1. I've long since had the same belief about the passive aggressive, indirectly spoken by still very well heard and understood, genocidal set. I myself understand that I'm a survivor of an attempted , ongoing attempt at genocide. My favourite is when supposedly well meaning people explain that racism will be over when everyone is a nice shade of mocha, not too white, not too dark. Just in between. In a place like Toronto, supposedly a multicultural hub, the cult of the mocha as evolved universal leaders who have heightened awareness just by being born in the skin they're in, is stifling. For me this approach to dealing with racial domination is completely predicated on the belief that everyone who looks like me or darker will have to be wiped off the face of the planet before anyone can truly draw a breath free of racism. That makes me feel very, very afraid for myself, for my children and for other obviously, clearly dark/er black people, for anyone who cannot pass as something that makes people stop of sort of go...are you mediterreanean...some sort of mix...how fascinating. To be clear, this is me saying that the belief, not actual people who are biracial or mixed raced, but what their existence can be iconically understood as, how their very existence can be twisted by those with white privilege and power, is very, very insane and oppressive. It's a murderous belief system completely grounded in white supremacy.

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  2. Thank you, Dark Daughta, for identifying some of the truly egregious ways this genocidal perspective is exercised against the spirits and bodies of whole classes of people who will never be mistaken for white by whites.

    Most people I know who are descended from people who are European and also who are Indigenous, Black, or Brown, get this question from whites--always from whites--usually with the intention and always with the effect of positioning themselves above (and against) the person being interrogated. The question goes like this: "What ARE you?" It's generally asked with great inquisitiveness, as if disgusting levels of smiley-faced curiosity make the question more palatable and less insulting. And they don't mean "What's your astrological sign?"

    Yes, whites are obsessed with being on top of any and all racial hierarchies, which when whites are present, they dutifully maintain.

    Many whites seem to think the days of anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-Indigenous genocide and Nazi values and aesthetics that exist to maintain racial social control and destruction are long past. As you describe, this is not at all the case.

    I so appreciate you sharing your own experiences of this level and manifestation of gross racism. And I'm sorry you have to experience it.

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