White-centrism, Profeminism, and Transgender Politics

image of white hand holding the globe is from here

[T]hose of us who are transsexual feminists, and especially those of us who transition as adults (I was age 22), are likewise in certain ways "younger sisters or nieces" of women who have lived their whole lives as female. The "cis/trans" binary idea is very harmful because it seeks to reverse this natural order of respect and status where newcomers honor our more experienced elder sisters. And this kind of AFAB-phobia can, in effect, recreate aspects of the patriarchy. For a woman to have many years of experience in a given position, and then be asked to train a new man who gets the promotion she deserves, is a pattern women who are AFAB may feel is at least approximated when a new transsexual woman in a group who has only recently transitioned becomes an instant "expert" on the feminist movement. 

                               -- Margo Schulter

What follows is an exchange between white transsexual lesbian and feminist, Margo Schulter, and my white self. I'll put my text in italics. It picks up from a longer exchange in the comments section of this post, "Is John Wrong? On Andrea Dworkin, Sex Difference, and Gender Dominance".


Margo begins her responses to comments in the prior post with this quote:

"Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression." --Audre Lorde

In continuing this dialogue, I would like warmly to accept your invitation to focus more on Women on Color, intersectionality, the ethics and methodology of a woman such as Patricia Hill Collins or bell hooks, and also the need to avoid misleading racial analogies applied in either direction to the Turf Wars. There are some very powerful Indigenous and other non-European models that can be applied to the relationship between women who have lived their whole lives as females (including some intersex women), and women who for some part of their lives have experienced both a measure of male privilege and trans oppression. I'm not saying that there's any exact precedent on this that I know, although I have heard some stories about one Indigenous Nation which, if true, would much fit my sense of sisterhood and justice.

As a first step, I think that we need to follow Audre Lorde's advice on not scoring "oppression points," as you call them, in any direction. Let's not verticalize the Turf Wars, which involve horizontal hostility between sisters, into a conflict where one side has the equivalent of white privilege, and the other is in the position of Women of Color. Such an analogy, whether it's the "cis/trans" binary and "cis privilege" misconception all too popular in the trans community, or the "any transsexual woman should be suspected of expressing male privilege the rest of her life" misconception that has harmed feminism for over four decades, divides sisters and interferes with recognition of mutual vulnerability and the need for mutual aid.

So, to follow Audre Lorde, within the Lesbian community I am a transsexual, and within the trans community I am a radical Lesbian feminist. Any attack against transsexuals is a Lesbian feminist issue, because I and many other transsexuals are part of the Lesbian feminist community. Any attack on Lesbian feminists is a transsexual issue, because many Lesbian feminists are transsexual.

Let's now focus a bit on race; then on special vulnerabilities of women who are AFAB or trans; and then on feminist process and some uplifting models from Women of Color.


Hi Margo,

Thank you for your openness to engaging on these issues. :) I'll respond comment by comment, rather than posting all your comments together, to keep my responses in closer proximity to what I'm responding to.

I can't take credit for "oppression points"; it is not a term I use to point out problems with ranking oppression. But I know what you're referring to in this context.

For me, a more useful way to understand ourselves intersectionally is in terms of our structural locations and our political positions, which necessarily include what forms of institutional power we have access to and which privileges we benefit from and enjoy. See for example, this post, which informs how I understand various methods for addressing sexual slavery, trafficking, brothel-keeping, what you term sexage work, and pimping and procuring: The Life without Privilege: the Inhumane Consequences of Pro-Prostitution Politics, part 1.

When in my early twenties, a (wo)mentor, a white feminist and lesbian, pointed out that in something I wrote, I made references to two groups: "people" and also to "Black people". Her point, brought to my attention in a way that was very impactful without being shaming, was that identifying people in this way simultaneously falsely universalises and problematically invisibilises whiteness. It was one of those paradigm-shifting moments where the privilege of my whiteness to not name my race was brought suddenly to my consciousness. I have thought about that a great deal since then. The problem my mentor named has continued to exist in white writing and theory-making. Let us consider the following book titles: Sexual Politics (Kate Millett) and Black Sexual Politics (Patricia Hill Collins); Feminist Thought (Rosemary Putnam Tong) and Black Feminist Thought (Collins).

To what extent is Millett's book "White Sexual Politics", and Tong's book "White Feminist Thought"? The question is easy to answer: both books only deal with or strongly center white writers, theorists, and worldviews. Except one chapter in Feminist Thought titled "Women of Color Feminisms".

This is a critique, Margo. You wrote:

"So, to follow Audre Lorde, within the Lesbian community I am a transsexual, and within the trans community I am a radical Lesbian feminist. Any attack against transsexuals is a Lesbian feminist issue, because I and many other transsexuals are part of the Lesbian feminist community. Any attack on Lesbian feminists is a transsexual issue, because many Lesbian feminists are transsexual."

I understand and respect the point with two caveats. 

1. I'm arguing that to follow Audre Lorde you and I must not invisibilise our race when we write about ourselves. So, within Lesbian community, you are a race-privileged transsexual, and within the trans community, you are a radical white Lesbian feminist. I have thought many times about whether I should retitle my blog, "A Radical White Profeminist".

2. I want us to come to consensus about what constitutes "an attack", because we know, online, it is used to describe both shaming and derisive verbal assaults, doxxing, criminal threatening, and reasoned critique. I don't welcome the first things on that list, but militantly want to protect spaces that welcome reasoned critique, even if it 'threatens' core values and worldviews by those in the conversation. I mention this because in most white trans-friendly spaces, what is not considered friendly is digging deeply into some issues, such as the presence (or not) of male (or white) privilege and male (or white) supremacist power. As a radical, I reject making some subjects verboten, as a condition of acceptance. I agree that there are more and less appropriate spaces for some conversations, and I hope to respect those if the boundaries are set by those I structurally oppress. I hope not to respect them if set by those who structurally oppress me, or women of any color. Specifically, I see the avoidance of challenging white and male privilege as one structural form of violence against women of color. So desiring to be inclusive, if that means including women of color, must demonstrate a commitment by people with either white or male privilege, to naming and confronting each.


Margo continues:
At this point, I'd like to get into race, and explain why I often call myself a Second Wave Feminist, even while recognizing that the term does have a certain white bias. The fact that I recognize Frances M. Beale, who wrote in the late 1960's on the "double jeopardy" of being Black and female, the peerless Flo Kennedy whom you recently honored here and I once got to hear speak in San Francisco in the mid-1970's, Pauli Murray of the Harlem Renaissance tradition, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective as all at the center of the Second Wave doesn't mean that it's not a white-oriented way of viewing hirstory.

The question arises: "If the First Wave ended with the gaining of the vote in the U.S.A. in 1920, what about Bessie Smith or Eleanor Roosevelt or Frances Perkins or Rosa Parks or Ella Baker? What about the Black Lesbian culture that thrived through `race records' and the like long before Olivia? Is it really fair to see the whole era of 1920-1963, if we take Betty Friedan's _The Feminine Mystique_ as the start of the Second Wave, as a vast wasteland or blank slate of patriarchy unresisted? Even from a Euro-American view, Ruth Herschberger published the radical feminist _Adam's Rib_ in 1948, and Simone de Beauvoir _The Second Sex_ in 1949."

The reason I identity as Second Wave, as parochial as it is, is to affirm that there were and are radical Lesbian feminists of this era, transsexual and also AFAB, who believe in equal sisterhood, and reject both transphobia and also what I might call AFAB-phobia (with the term "cisphobia" in air quotes tempting, because AFAB-phobia is based on the misconception of "cis privilege"). Make no mistake: either AFAB-phobia or transphobia is destructive, unsisterly, and antifeminist. So is for someone inside or outside the women's community to propose that this or that sister be "decentered" because of her birth assignment.

Many trans people, AFAB as well as AMAB, assume that the 1970's, at least among white feminists, were an era of universal transphobia. I'm delighted when I can change some minds. And the erasure of transsexual Lesbian feminists from some Lesbian feminist accounts of those years by women who rightly resist AFAB-phobia but not the other side of the equation, is something I want to do my part to correct in fighting AFAB-phobia.

But let's get into Women of Color and better ethics and models for feminism.

I continue:

I'll admit this right off, although many who have engaged with me at length already know this: I'm annoyingly, compulsively picky about how language is used. So "let's get into Women of Color" is, for me, a very problematic way to introduce a discussion of the meaning--the reality--of our whiteness and how to center the experiences of Women of Color.

I prefer to identify myself in terms of my politics, rather than when I came into the movement for women's liberation. So, I'm anti-colonialist, pro-Indigenist, and I believe in challenging and eradicating all expressions of male and white supremacy and privilege, including my own. Identifying how and in what ways white and male supremacy are structurally, behaviorally, or philosophically 'active' in a social or interpersonal space is very important to me. 

To respond further to your comment, I think the terms "AFAB" and "AMAB" are problematic and participate in a liberal, post-modern, pro-colonialist, patriarchal discourse. How?

One of the themes of liberalism and post-modernism, in white male supremacist societies, is to reduce matters of structural power and violence to matters of discourse, terminology, and identity. So, the issue of being treated as male, targeted as female, or stigmatised as intersex is replaced with the matter of being identified or assigned male, female, or intersex. This is, for me, linguistic slight of hand, not the Radical Feminist kind.

Does acknowledging the reality of intersex experience mean we must give up a radical and profeminist analysis of Liberalism and Postmodernism (and Modernism)? I hope not. Can we acknowledge the experiences of intersex people and also center a critique of whiteness and male supremacy? I have yet to see that work done. So, that is before us (collectively).

As for white or male supremacy, some of its power comes from its [Modernist] reliance on the Objectivity of Western science to authenticate Truthful Reality. This is called "Essentialism" by Radical Feminists, and by Postmodernists, and by a small group of trans* activists. However, most trans* and queer activists, in my experience, rely heavily on 'essentialism' to even make their arguments. How is it not essentialist to state, "I am a man because I feel like a man"? A radical and profeminist view would interrogate this as follows:

To prioritise the state of being a man to a feeling or internal condition, to a seemingly asocial psychic subjectivity, is to do something radically different than locating manhood as a structured, institutionalised reality that is constructed through coercion and force, not feelings and choice. 

A radical and profeminist view would be, "We are men if we are empowered and encouraged to be sexually dominant and get social status from such dominance." So, if I oppress women and it is considered either natural or appropriate for me to do so (within male supremacist ideology and history), that is what makes me 'a man'. If I do not oppress women, I am not, behaviorally speaking, 'a man'. However, being 'a man' isn't only a matter of behavior. It is a matter also of social-structural meaning. If I am experienced as a man in a parking garage and am also following a woman, that woman will feel less safe than if I appear to be and am a woman.

So, does her subjective experience of me matter as much or less than mine? The Radical and Feminist answer ought to be: hers. And if I'm a transwoman who is still experienced as a man, that ought not disqualify her feelings for consideration. In the real world I live in, if a nontrans woman experiences the actions of a transwoman as male supremacist, that is considered transphobia or transmisogyny: end of consideration. I have *never* experienced a white transwoman, transsexual or not, own and name her male privileges or entitlements, to whatever extent each exist, from whatever portion of life they were obtained. And as refusing to own or name white privilege is one form of white supremacy, refusal to name male privilege is a male supremacist act.

There is a call by pro-trans activists to de-prioritise what nontrans girls and women experience (and why), and instead respond and engage based only on the trans person's subjective identity. This requires major dissociation from radical and feminist knowledge of patriarchy and how it works. This is what I see validated, among other things, in the quote of yours I open this post with.

To call on all profeminist activists to prioritise the eradication men's violence against girls and women, to disappear rape culture, is to make room for people to be male, female, or intersex without the abusive and terrifying overlay of male supremacy and female subordination. To call on radicals and profeminists to be silent about white or male supremacy's presence in trans*-inclusive spaces is to be anti-radical and anti-feminist. I'm wondering if you agree with that.


Margo continues:
There's a powerful story from the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations, literally the "Longhouse" with the different Nations as the "hearths" of that larger confederation joined under the Great Law of Peace. Women play a central role in the life and governance of the Haudenosaunee, and women coming from lives either of African slavery or oppressive sex servitude within the Euro-American community have found refuge in the Haudenosaunee. The Euro-American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage was in the later 19th century adopted into the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) Nation, in recognition of her faithful allyship.

Originally the Five Nations, the Haudenosaunee in 1722 accepted a new member: the Tuscarora Nation, which had suffered much harm because of the European invasions and Turtle Island genocide, and sought inclusion. In keeping with the Great Law of Peace, they indeed were accepted, but as the "younger nephews" (or should we say "younger nieces" also?) of the Haudenosaunee. The Great Law of Peace itself cautioned that those who had not grown up under this Constitution would not be fully familiar with it, and so should enjoy full acceptance and inclusion, but also a certain juniority, one might say.

In my view, those of us who are transsexual feminists, and especially those of us who transition as adults (I was age 22), are likewise in certain ways "younger sisters or nieces" of women who have lived their whole lives as female. The "cis/trans" binary idea is very harmful because it seeks to reverse this natural order of respect and status where newcomers honor our more experienced elder sisters. And this kind of AFAB-phobia can, in effect, recreate aspects of the patriarchy. For a women to have many years of experience in a given position, and then be asked to train a new man who gets the promotion she deserves, is a pattern women who are AFAB may feel is at least approximated when a new transsexual woman in a group who has only recently transitioned becomes an instant "expert" on the feminist movement.

Respect for seniority-juniority among sisters can often be implicit, and transsexual women can bear it in mind even if our trans history is not known in a given group. It can function as a kind of self-restraint, a desire to keep feminist process balanced (of which more a bit later).


I love the commitment to visibility and respect for historically subordinated and oppressed people implicitly and explicitly stated here.

I also want us--and whites generally--to engage in the effort necessary to understand how our whiteness and colonialist patriarchy impacts Indigenous people in and beyond our home regions, today. 


Another story involving the Haudenosaunee, and more specifically the Kanienkehaka Nation, may give a clue as to how Indigenous values may help to resolve the AFAB/trans question within radical feminism in groups which do wish to include both types of women.

A story I learned some 25 years ago tells how a European women served as a domestic servant in the colonies, sometime around the middle 18th century, and suffered much abuse. She managed to seek refuge with the Kanienkehaka Nation, and due course was made an adoptive member. There the idea of abusing a woman was unknown, with 19th-century feminists like Lydia Maria Child noting how rape was likewise unknown in many Indigenous Nations. This assimilated woman had the right to own her own property, in the context of a communal as opposed to predatory and capitalist society, and so found safety and happiness in her new community.

However, the Great Law of Peace suggests that as an acculturated rather than natal member of the Kanienkehaka, she may have been excluded from some constitutional responsibilities, since she had not grown up under this Constitution and had an opportunity to learn its different aspects through lifelong experience. For example, she may not have shared in the responsibility of women to choose and sometimes impeach male leaders or diplomats. However, she was embraced as a woman of her new people, and expected to follow the Great Law of Peace to which she had given her allegiance.

Is not this Indigenous wisdom a beautiful parable for how women who have lived their entire lives as women, and transsexual women who seek refuge with our elder sisters, should relate in sex-class solidarity? The relationship is one of mutual caring, of all for one and one for all, which at the same time recognizes that women who are AFAB have a perspective from which transsexual women should learn as younger sisters.


I am called to find out how such caring is impacted by colonialist white male supremacy: how does the trauma and terrorism faced by specific groups of women shape a capacity for mutual care? How much does economic advantage matter? Margo, what I hear is that the contempt and marginalisation that is enforced and maintained against Black women is fierce; how does white, pro-radical profeminism address this or take this into account? Where does misogynoir live in white radical profeminist movements? Are we able to identify it, or is it left to Black women to name it? Can we name our anti-Indigenism, or is that left to Indigenous people?

I am again drawn to wonder how that hirstory plays out today. And, rather than seeing Indigenist and Aboriginal societies as being good examples of how to do feminism, for whites, how can whites fight for an end to genocide of Indigenous People? How can whites centralise and actively support Indigenist, Black, and Brown women's agendas for their own liberation? And, which whites will choose this as a priority? Which white trans* women? As is the case with white gay men, will white trans* people also prioritise ignoring their whiteness and male privilege over naming and being responsible with it? 

Another aspect of feminist culture in the late 1960's and early 1970's which has had great influence in peace and other social movements since also has Indigenous roots, borrowed by mainly white feminists to deal with a problem that arose between women who were AFAB, although transsexual women are susceptible to this also. That is the problem of unequal participation, when one, two, or a few women (often with white, class, and academic privilege) can mostly dominate the conversations and decision-making process of a group.

This occurred in the early years of radical feminism, both in larger organizations and in the small consciousness-raising groups that were at the heart of the movement. Feminist process borrowed from the traditions of various Indigenous people, to encourage less privileged or articulate women to speak and be heard. An object might be passed from speaker to speaker, and a self-awareness cultivated of how many times one had spoken, as compared to others in the group (and especially the quieter ones!).

Feminist process can be an especially important self-discipline for those of us women, AFAB or trans, who have been fortunate enough to escape or overcome the usual "female disempowerment training" that anyone raised a girl is likely to endure in patriarchy. Jo Freeman or "Joreen," one of the founding members of Radical Women of New York, nicely draws a portrait in 1968 of what we may call an empowered woman that fit some AFAB feminists then and now, as well as many trans women who are spared AFAB disempowerment training:
https://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/joreen/bitch.htm">

Around this same era, Martha Shelley of Radicalesbians wrote her "Confessions of a Pseudo-Male Chauvinist," and I recall that her description of her experience as a Butch Lesbian, and elements of internalized sexism, often fit my experience as a transsexual Femme Lesbian. So feminist process is a tool that keeps balance in a group where some women are by socialization, experience, white privilege, academic advantage, or temperament "empowered" in ways that might lead to imbalance or unequal participation. And, as Joreen suggests, women with this kind of style (whether we are AFAB or trans) might also form affinity groups where we can learn from each other.

I am uncomfortable with whites incorporating what we wish, what we need, or what we desire, from Indigenous societies, without that being mutual and reciprocal. Unless such 'borrowing' is both, it is colonialist and patriarchal: it is part of the genocide, not part of honoring Native people. Also, how does dominant [white, male supremacist, colonialist] trans* discourse and activism exploit and distort Indigenist understandings of gender for its own ends? This is an important question for me. I've seen whites post things in white-dominant groups about Indigenist people--for the use and alleged betterment of whites. Never as a way to draw attention to what we do that is problematic and racist; but only as white supremacist action to benefit whites by further exploiting Native ethnic groups.

There is a good critique of the liberalism of Jo Freeman in the book, [Mostly White] Feminist Thought. Perhaps we can pursue that in a later exchange.

To move beyond aberrations such as the misconceived "cis/trans" binary, and also the idea that when women who are AFAB and trans harmoniously cooperate (as in the Olivia Collectives during the mid-1970's) the AFAB members of a group are somehow "caring for men" rather than for their transsexual sisters, Indigenous tradition can again help in moving us beyond an "Oppression Olympics" mentality in either direction.

An Indigenous woman in a discussion on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (Michfest or MWMF) pointed out that a tradition like those she knew would look at circumstance and need in a situation where newcomers desired to share a group's territory, for example as refugees from some natural disaster. Here I should emphasize that for me, attending Michfest (2000 miles away) was not Andrea Dworkin's "primary emergency," nor even a 100th-rate emergency, so to speak! But this woman explained how the Indigenous approach she knew would look compassionately at the needs and intentions of newcomers.

An important factor favoring the inclusion of transsexual women in the women's and Lesbian communities in general -- as opposed to every women's or Lesbian group! -- is that transsexual women make up less than 1% of women, and also face great oppression from patriarchal society while often sharing many of the same ongoing oppressions as other women, although not the special oppressions of AFAB socialization, and also the reproductive vulnerabilities of most AFAB women through much of their lives. If the number of women who are AFAB or trans were about equal, the political and ethical questions might be a bit different.

To say that transsexual women need feminism, and need to make our contribution to feminism in a way which takes advantage of the special perspectives we can bring but also our relationship of juniority to women who have lived their entire lives as female, does not mean that we or any other women need to be present in all women's and Lesbian spaces at all times! No woman can rightly make that demand. Rather, we can look to the wisdom of Lisa Vogel, founder of Michfest, in 2006, who reaffirmed Michfest as an AFAB-only space while affirming the value of "spaces that welcome all who define themselves as female." She declared that "we stand shoulder to shoulder as women," with women who are AFAB or trans being alike "part of the larger diversity of the womyn's community." That is the unity in diversity that can help end the Turf Wars.

It strikes me that if 1% of women are transsexual, the privileging and centering of their subjectivity over that of nontrans women could scarcely be called anything but male privilege or 'trans guilt'. I'm wondering what your response to that is.

Also, overall, a critique of some of the above is that we whites still see Indigenous women in terms of how they may be of benefit to us. Put another way, does that "Indigenous approach" necessitate that whites look compassionately at the needs and intentions of Indigenous people? In my experience, our colonialist entitlements and privileges are rarely examined and never decentered: this is our work. Also, to the varying extents they exist, our male privileges and power is rarely named as such, and so, in fact, is rarely named period. Not only that, but pro-trans* people argue it is transphobic to do so. I have experienced this so many times from white trans women and have found almost no exceptions to the rule, of whiteness.

Julian, you also raised a very important point that bell hooks addresses in _Ain't I A Woman: black women and feminism_ (1981). I agree that it's an open question just what "primary" means in Andrea Dworkin's "primary emergency." Michael Walzer writes of "supreme emergency," meaning a threat so extreme that it might justify violating the normal laws of war, for example; maybe this is a mark of Eurocentric discourse. And to me, "emergency" is quite enough, or, as bell hooks puts it elsewhere, "what is important at a given point in time."

But I agree with you and bell hooks that intersectionality applies in situations of great stress and danger, as she quotes Sojourner Truth, speaking in New York in 1867: "[T]here is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored woman; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before." (_Ain't I A Woman_, p. 4). Interestingly Truth, an activist for Black Liberation and Women's Liberation and the abolition of the death penalty, spoke a century before the founding of Radical Women of New York in 1967 which marked a landmark moment in the modern radical feminist movement.

One larger message of Sojourner Truth is that we can and must recognize each other's emergencies and needs, even while joining in solidarity. Thus if a women, AFAB or transsexual, is expressing patriarchal attitudes or exercising "power over" rather than "power with" in a women's group, feminist process should call this out. If a nonbinary person like Cerien is having their needs neglected, every radical feminist should consider this "our" issue and priority also. The current abortion situation in the State of Texas, USA, is likewise a rightful priority for every feminist woman, whether or not she has herself experienced menstruation or pregnancy.

It is possible to appreciate Andrea Dworkin's powerful insights while also applying the wisdom of Sojourner Truth, bell hooks, and also Audre Lorde: emergencies of different groups or subgroups, like oppressions, do not have any hierarchy. But cooperation, solidarity, and mindfulness of vulnerabilities and immunities can promote the feminist ideal of mutual aid, as opposed to the patriarchal pattern of privilege and servitude.

You have done a nice job of noting some significant contributions made by some women of color to euro-white feminist practice. What is needed here is the writings that call on those of us who are white to examine and check our whiteness. Audre Lorde and bell hooks have both written about this quite a bit. It is common for whites to quote Audre when it suits us, but rarely to do so when it makes us uncomfortable--when she is calling us out on our racism. What must end is the perception of ourselves as somehow unraced or unaffected (whether negatively or positively) by colonialist white supremacy.

The Seven Deadly SINS of the Anglo Turf Wars

Africa-centering global map image is from here

A work in anti-progress.
Constructive radical feedback welcomed.

The most dangerous and deadly seven political realities (SINS) within CRAP, aka The Anglo Turf Wars

1. Genocide of Indigenous Peoples
2. Gynecide/Femicide
3. Misogynoir/misogyny
4. Sexual Trafficking of children and adults
5. Militarised cultural colonialism, particularly white USUK-led
6. Global West and North's hoarding of natural, capital, and human resources; accomplished through sexual, chattel, and wage slavery
7. Ecocide

________________________

Glossary:

Amerikkka: The United States of America.

Black:
1. racially despised, diasporic African people. (Within Africa, people generally have various national and ethnic identities.)
2. Aboriginal People in Australia.

CRAP:
1. Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy: the increasingly globalised governing political and philosophical paradigm of the West.
2. Enforcement of capitalist white male supremacy.
3. Portrait of USUK cultures and ideas as 'progressive' pinnacles of human evolution, maintaining English as a primary language.

Ecocide:
1. the mass extinction of plant and animal species and ecosystems.
2. the murder of Gaia.

Eroticism: See Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, by Audre Lorde.

Femaled (adjective, verb): [referring to humans] made sexually vulnerable, accessible, and compliant.
--In this usage, it does not refer to anatomical or physiological features, in or beyond humans.

Genocide: the eradication or destruction of a people--their culture, economy, and sexuality--through mass murder, enslavement, incarceration, cooptation, possession, removal or denigration of identity, theft of land, and banishing of languages.

Gynecide:
1. a combination of agendas and actions that subordinate, enslave, and mass murder femaled people, by intention or effect, individually, culturally, and regionally.
2. The physical and psychological possession and control of people deemed dangerous and threatening to male supremacist rule and authority.
3. Also termed Femicide.

Indigenous Peoples:
1. the Native, Aboriginal, or First Nations people of any region.
2. The people whose homeland (or region) was established without the use of genocide and land theft.
3. The people of color who have faced imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist extinction for 500 years.

Maled (adjective, verb):
1. people structurally positioned to oppress patriarchally femaled people.
2. human beings who, unnaturally, make it their practice to render others sexually vulnerable, accessible, and compliant.
3. as applied to a group, the people who unconsciously or not, by intention or effect, actively co-maintain male supremacist systems and institutions; they do so as the primary beneficiaries, as those atop that particular sexed hierarchy.
--In this usage, it does not refer to human anatomy or physiology.
See also, "white-maled".

Misogynoir (noun):
1. misogyny specifically directed at Black women and nonbinary people who are seen as femme or feminine.
2. Assumptions and agendas, in theory and practice, that decenter or eliminate Black women and girls to the benefit of CRAP and USUK.
3. Antiwomanism.

Misogyny (noun):
1. hatred of and toward women.
2. contempt for anyone who femaled, and who is seen, by men, as femme, effeminate, or too feminine.
3. It is also directed at women for being too masculine, butch, or not feminine enough--with each of those three categories being distinct.
4. Antifeminism.

Sexual Trafficking: owning, selling, and renting human beings in ways that female them, usually across territories.

Sexuality: the economic, cultural, social, and psychological means through which people are maled and femaled.

SINS: social, institutional, naturalised subordinations.

USUK: the combined colonial force of white British and white Amerikkkan people.

White-maled (verb):
1. Socialised and structurally positioned to oppress white women and people of color.
2. Reflecting or enforcing white male supremacy, as in white-maled literature. (Accomplished by narrowly and unconsciously or uncritically operating within USUKian or CRAPpy paradigms and philosophies to the detriment of everyone oppressed by USUK.)

________________________

Understood this way, many social conflicts are interlocking and overlapping. Most anti-status quo campaigns reinforce some of these political projects, even while they may also intend to challenge them. We are called to compassion, accountability, and responsibility for being caught up, without natural cause, in each other's oppression while we seek liberation. On their own, liberal reforms to CRAP are deadly for the global majority of girls and women who live with fewer privileges and access to resources than do most whites and men.

________________________

Parenthetical points:
There are no revolutions in CRAP or USUK without the centering of radical activism led by women of color globally.

Not addressing the core paradigm problem is deadly, as identified by Vandana Shiva here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/8/a_debate_on_geoengineering_vandana_shiva

Intersex and nonbinary people ought not have to be conceptualised as intermediate, in between, or in need of alteration, whether surgically or psychiatrically. We are who we are.

The term gender, masculinity, femininity are so widely naturalised and misunderstood in CRAP. Indigenous and less colonialised people, at least historically and sometimes presently, have economically, culturally, spiritually richer traditions. USUK forces reduce those terms to something that is understood to be primarily personal, God-given, natural, beyond science, and not born of politics and economics.

We are dangerously, epistemically limited by the English language.

Cis and trans, re: gender, become deeply politically problematic in the view of this blogger.
See, for understanding of the terms: http://trans-fusion.blogspot.com/2015/06/cis-gender-ipso-gender.html

Racial bigotry, prejudice, intolerance are mistaken as comprising the problem of racism in a white liberal State. The problem is colonial white supremacy. As described so well and so radically by Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism creates race, not the other way around.

As was argued most recently in a group I am in, John Stoltenberg noted the same is true with sex and sexism. Many feminists have made this point over the decades.

In this view, whiteness, non-whiteness, maleness, and femaleness, are systematised, policed and self-policing actions-in-being more than they are anything else. To take offense to being termed 'white' and 'maled', for example, is to have ego-personified concepts that are structural, not natural. I see anti-racist, anticolonialist, Indigenist, Feminist, Womanist, and nonbinary people's activism as the resistance and challenge to those actions.


Partial Reading list:
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse; Letters from a War Zone
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
bell hooks, all titles
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State; Are Women Human?
Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An African-centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Black Sexual Politics
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Vandana Shiva, all titles
Winona LaDuke, all titles

Further reading and viewing:
Cleansing ourselves of european concepts, Marimba Ani:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvZ-en9oiqo

Indigenous Feminism Without Apology:
https://prezi.com/2c1rycwvalrq/indigenous-feminism-without-apology/
(With this link about the controversy over Andea Smith's claim of Cherokee heritage:
http://moontimewarrior.com/2015/07/01/no-andrea-smith-is-not-the-native-american-rachel-dolezal/)

Geoengineering, paradigm challenge by Vandana Shiva:
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/23/vandana_shiva_winona_laduke_desmond_dsa

Indigenist Feminist Reading list:
https://unsettlingsettlers.wordpress.com/suggested-readings-and-resources/

Radical Women of Color reading list:
http://mylifeasafeminista.tumblr.com/wocfeministtexts

Science as Mythology:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://ecophilosophy.org/articles/011101_science.html

Dr. Vandana Shiva interviewed by Robin Morgan, on rape and globalization

As a kind of personal-political preface to the interview that follows, I'd like to explain why it is I find the exchange so significant.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my blog that I strongly believe women of color are the global leaders in feminism, as well as regional and national leaders in many places, and ought to be regarded as such by whites and men. Typically, men and whites ignore, silence, marginalise, appropriate, and take credit for the activist work women of color do.

If you take the spotlight off the courageous leadership work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., you see a lot of Black women in leadership throughout the 20th century in the U.S., working very hard, at great cost, to free African Americans from the blight of white supremacy while also addressing sexual politics and male supremacy. Black men's work against racism has been substantial and has also tended to de-center or invisibilise Black women's insights, analysis, and activism. White women's feminist work against sexism and male supremacy has been substantial and ground-breaking in countries where white women live. And it has been a challenge to get the whiteness of the work de-centered or even consistently identified as race-privileged.

My own family background led me to be particularly concerned about sexual violence. For several years, I was drawn to a few white feminist writers who focused on that issue intensely but usually non-intersectionally, and without radically and thoroughly identifying the whiteness in their work. At the same time, thanks to a white lesbian feminist mentor, I was introduced to the work of many womanist and feminist writers of color, mostly from North America and the Caribbean. My own awareness of the work done by women of color outside of white-ruled or white-colonised nations was minimal. Over the last few years I have tried to make this blog a space where voices, perspectives, and commitments to radical social change by women of color are highlighted not footnoted; where women of color are centralised not marginalised.

I do this in part because of once mistakenly determining white work to be the most radical; this was done in part because whites who use the term 'radical' don't identify lack of awareness of their whiteness as anti-radical. This was consistently challenged by radical women of color writer-activists as anti-revolutionary, racist practice. I also noticed far too many white-edited, white-dominated anthologies of activists where women of color got a special chapter on women effected by racial hierarchies (as if white people aren't fundamentally effected by white supremacy and racism), but were rarely invited or expected to speak on behalf of all women. I've seen white pro-radical and feminist websites where the work of women of color is barely mentioned and where white women routinely speak for all women. I've seen gatherings led by whites who pretend they are inclusive and safe for women of color.

Writings and activism which centers the humanity of women is generally and typically regarded by men as being too narrowly about women. Men's writings about only-men or mostly men has been historically regarded by men as about all of humanity, or the segment of humanity worth doing justice work for, or about all people of a particular race; it is rarely-to-never seen as "too narrow in scope", too much about men, too ignorant about women, when reviewed by other men. When men recount the contributions by women to the men's human struggles for justice, women have too often been ignored or footnoted. And when men focus on women, the gaze is often objectifying and the attitude patronising.

It appears that whites and men will not easily regard women of color as fully human with perspectives that whites and men ought to pay attention to, prioritise, privilege, promote, and regard as foundational and central to understanding humanity on the whole.

I have come to the conclusion that women of color, as a global and regional majority by gender and the most diversely raced women on Earth, hold the most complex, radical, sophisticated, and revolutionary views on race, gender, and everything else. This doesn't mean I don't still look to white women and men of color for useful analysis and insight. It means I no longer center and privilege their voices and perspectives.

Vandana Shiva is, for me, a profoundly important world leader on matters of feminism, environmental/Earth justice, global economics, and holistic and humane sustainability. Robin Morgan is a U.S.-based white feminist who has dedicated many decades to the struggle by and for women against men's global woman-hating and woman-subjugating violence. I hold both women in very high regard and was delighted to find this exchange between them recently online.

You may go here, to The Women's Media Center online, to return to the source website. You may stay connected with their efforts here: Follow @womensmediacntr

Economist and ecofeminist Dr. Vandana Shiva addresses the root causes of violence against women. 

Dr. Vandana Shiva—The New Delhi Rape and Globalization

By Robin Morgan | February 11, 2013

Dr. Vandana Shiva, economist, environmentalist, and feminist, spoke of the public outcry in India and how the devaluing of women in a global economy set the stage for the New Delhi rape. Adapted from a conversation broadcast last month on Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan.

Robin Morgan: In a feminist analysis certainly, everything is connected to everything else.  You recently wrote a stunning piece about the ghastly gang rape in New Delhi and the subsequent demonstrations and how violence against women and the economy were all connected.  I’d love you, please, to talk about the points that you raised.

Vandana Shiva: I’ve been working on how the economy’s changing—globalization, free trade, WTO, the structural adjustment. I’ve made the connections between those purposes and what happens to women in what is called the New Economy. They even call it the Emerging Economy, as if a 10,000-year-old civilization emerges only when it is locked into corporate globalization.

The first level at where violence against women begins is in the very defining of the economy.  Economy means household.  It is what women define both inside the physical households, but also the world, inside the planet as the household.  As long as the principles of management came out of that, they focused on sustenance, livelihoods, mutual giving—of course, within the typical patriarchies all our societies have had.

[With] free trade globalization, the first thing they do is knock out that major sector of women’s economy and, as Marilyn Waring has written in If Women Counted, install a production boundary to calculate growth.

The Gross Domestic Product grows every time you can pull something out of nature and something out of women customers’ economy, which means every time you destroy nature and women’s livelihoods, and production, and creativity, you can call it growth.  It’s created to mobilize finances for the war, and it becomes the dominant number imposed on our world.

I’ve been appointed by the King of Bhutan to an expert group we’ve created because Gross Domestic Product is the wrong measure.  The King of Bhutan said we should be looking at the well-being of our people to measure Gross National Happiness.

At this time, growth measured as Gross Domestic Product is already collapsing world-wide. It collapsed with Wall Street.  It’s collapsing in Europe right now in front of our eyes. and it will collapse in India after a few years.  How long can you sustain an eight or nine percent growth that excludes women as the primary backbone of the economy? That is the first violence.

The second violence is in terms of decision-making and politics.  In so many debates in India we hear, “Oh, we can’t have politics in economics.” But every time they make a decision within a patriarchal model of the economy, it is politics.  It’s politics that basically says, “Only corporations count, only the powerful count, and we’re going to mutate democracy from being, “By the people, of the people, for the people,” into being “By the corporations, of the corporations, for the corporations—and the powerful.”

The convergence of economic and political power further excludes women, but it also creates a class with immunity and impunity, which can do all levels of violence, change laws, and remove protections. There’s rape at every level—rape of the earth, rape of our resources, rape of the economy, and rape of women, which is what this drastic, dramatic tragedy has woken up India to.

Then there are other levels of violence because displaced people are more vulnerable.  I was asked by the National Commission of Women to grapple with what globalization was doing to women in India, in terms of two key factors: water, and food and agriculture. At public hearings around the country, whether in Calcutta or down south, women would speak out boldly about how sexual violence has increased and made them more vulnerable as they were being made economic and ecological refugees.

That is at the very foundation of this new liberal model: everything is a commodity.  Everything is property.  Everything has a price and nothing has value. Added to the traditional patriarchies of societies, that's created what I call a super-virus of patriarchy. When two viruses hybridize, they start to kill.

Basically it’s a bit like climate change.  We’ve had cyclones, but Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy present a different level of violence.  Of course, we know that this is contributed by climate change. We need to start looking at how an economy based on patriarchal fictions—and the corporation is the biggest patriarch in our lives to come—how this patriarchy is combining with traditional patriarchies to unleash even larger violence, both the kind we see on the streets of Delhi and the economic kind, the violence of robbing you of your home, of your foundation.

Our prime minister said recently, it’s these loose-footed migrants that are part of the problem. Because the Delhi rape involved migrants at both ends. The rapists were all living in slums in hugely brutalized conditions, thinking that brutalization is the norm.  The poor girl's father had sold his land because farmers aren’t being allowed to make a living.  Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide.  The rest are hanging on the margins of existence.  He moved to Delhi to load luggage at the airport to be able to survive and send his children to school.

The prime minister just called them loose-footed migrants creating problems. I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, they are a product of your policies.  They are refugees of your economic policies.”  None of these—economics and culture and society—are insulated silos. The patriarchal economic model is becoming the dominant force in our society.  Societies have been reduced to the economy.  Economy has been reduced to the market.  The market has been reduced to what is controlled by finance, capital corporations.  And if all you show is women as commodities, selling other commodities, those images start to further distort already damaged brains.

RM: Isn’t it amazing, Vandana, how when you put something in context—the background of the victim and for that matter of the perpetrators—it changes? Also, I'm reminded of your colleague Ruchira Gupta who wrote a piece in which she pointed out that the commodification of women by the rampant growth of pornography and prostitution sends the message that, in fact, this is what women are for. She connects that to the apparently quite dramatic rise in rape in India.

VS: Hugely dramatic.  Eight hundred percent since the ‘70s and more than 250 percent since India’s economy, was as they say, made "more open" [with globalization]—more open to more violence against women.

RM: From where I sit here in New York, it seems heartening that women in numbers never seen before and accompanied by men as well have been on the streets in not only Delhi but across India.  They haven’t quite made the connections you’re making, but they are on the move protesting violence against women.

What can we do to turn the enormity of this around?  It’s always for example, blown me away, that a woman who is, say, in her fifteenth hour of labor, straining away—the doctor and the nurses and the anesthesiologists are all productive because they are wage labor, but the woman who is actually giving birth is not considered in a productive act.

VS: I think that is the foundational error. Everything that replenishes is treated as not producing at all and everything that’s degrades, everything that depletes, is treated as production.  I call it the creation boundary, which has given us the fiction of growth and the Gross Domestic Product—that destructive acts are creative acts of produce. The really creative acts of nature—of women in their tremendous diversity and amazing ability to juggle 50 jobs, 50 responsibilities—their whole society and economy are treated as unproductive. That, I think, is the most important shift we need to make.

As you know Robin, I come from the part of the Himalayas where it's recognized that women are the main productive force. They go out in the forests [to work] and there's nothing like the rape [that occurs] when you come into the plains where women are no longer considered productive. When I, with my sister, Dr. Meta Shiva, was studying female feticide, we realized that the map of high growth in the patriarchal measure are the same zones with the high levels of extermination of girls—fifty million girls haven't been allowed to be born in the last few decades.
The response in Delhi is beautiful for a number of reasons.

The first, that the younger generation has come. The younger generation was absent from social movements, especially the middle class because they were getting it so good with globalization—the IT jobs that moved to India. They were all seeing themselves as individual consumers, so society did not matter to them. But this rape reminded them that it could have been them coming back from their IT farms, from their phone call service centers.

The second difference is, while we have had a feminist movement in India for a long time, it was only the women. The beauty now is, young men joined. It was a young man who was defending this girl in that bus.  I think for the first time, there’s this new generational solidarity that’s emerging. Those very gutsy young people who are being beaten up and sprayed with tear gas and water canons realized that the state has become militarized. The state itself is a patriarchal institution. It will take time. There will be the hysterical voices saying death sentence, death sentence! But new connections have started to germinate that are really going to make a serious change.

RM: That’s very encouraging.  When you look at the global scale of things, I confess that I look to women not only because we are the majority and that permits more peaceable and more, how shall I say, witty and ingenious new strategies, but also because there’s no area that isn’t a women’s issue.  We spill over into everything if the connections are made.  I definitely see the global women’s movement as the politics of the 21st Century.

VS: We are really living through a period of collapse of all kinds in the patriarchic system.  The collapse of the financial economy they’ve built, a collapse of the eco-systems they have raped.  The UN has recognized that 90 percent of eco-systems are on the verge of collapse, if not already collapsed.  In this period, it’s the creative principle which women bring to bear for the simple reason that they were left to look after the real stuff of life, the goals that really mattered.  So they bring both another world view, another mindset, and other capacities, other skills—which is why I run a grandmother’s university at the new school I created in Dehradun called the Earth University.

RM: I love it.

VS: Ghandi always said a prayer, “Make me more womanly.”  If there is going to be a future for humanity, it will have to be a womanly future. I go to Europe and young men will bring me my books [to sign] and say, "I'm an ecofeminist, Dr. Shiva." That to me is a major, major shift. A shift to a creative economy where women start defining and playing the leadership role but others recognize that there has to be a mind shift.

RM: Whenever I talk to you, I feel both incredibly depressed because one is made yet again to realize the severity of the situation and at the same time, incredibly optimistic because I get from you a validation of everything that we’ve been trying to do and will do more and even better and with more people involved in the future. 

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your wisdom and your perceptions and for everything that you do.

VS: And Robin, I want to thank you for your vision and leadership and your love.

Once again, to link back to the source website, please click *here*.

Ten Thoughts on the Current Conflicts Between RadFem and Transgender Activists

photograph is from here

[Note: this post may also be read *here* on Tumblr.]

Keywords for this post could include "Sheila Jeffreys" and "RadFem2012", although the post is about issues beyond any one activist and that single event. Nonetheless, for some of the most current discussion serving as partial background for what follows, please see *here* and *here* (each at The Guardian).

1. I strongly believe female women ought to able to organise politically in social spaces free from harassment and interruption from male men, and from males who don't identify as men, and from transgender and transsexual-identified people, and from queer-identified and male-identified people who are anti-radical and anti-feminist. To the female women who are attempting to do so: Good luck with that.

2. The current conflict between RadFem-identified women and transgender-identified people is glaringly white. As far as I can tell, the spokespeople for both groups are white with other structural advantages too; they appear to represent white-majority and white-dominated groups. Nowhere are the experiences of women of color and trans people of color centered. This means that it is likely that only white ways of resolving conflict will be employed and that other-than-white ways of resolving conflict will be avoided and ignored.

3. "RadFem" is not a synonym for Radical Feminism or Revolutionary Feminism, if Radical and Revolutionary Feminism, in and also beyond the U.S., is centrally (read: not peripherally, parenthetically, or through footnote) the work of activists and authors including Flo Kennedy, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Andrea Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, and hundreds of other radical, womanist, and feminist women of color. "RadFem", as far as I can tell, is a term owned and promoted by an exclusively white group of female women. Such exclusive whites-only and/or white-dominated organising functions to maintain white supremacy even as it seeks to eradicate male supremacy.

4. "Transsexual" and "Transgender" are anglo-centric, white-centric terms and ways of dealing with a white male supremacist sex-race hierarchy based on the subordination of girls and women to everyone else. The analysis and practices that come from white transsexual and transgender activists often minimises or overtly ignores male and white supremacy while promoting liberal ideas and theories about sex and gender. Overall, white transgender theory and practice is, in my view, anti-radical and anti-revolutionary. Its theorists and spokespeople refuse to put women of color--many of whom do not embrace terms like "transgender" or "radical feminist"--at the center of their theories and practices. Many women of color who resist euro-/anglo-/white supremacy and Western cultural imperialism have their own understandings and experiences of gender and resistance that are not linguistically (or otherwise) existent in the white trans and non-trans imaginations.

5. White het male supremacist societies, such as many in the West, are dominated by liberal and conservative economic and social philosophies and value systems. In such systems and societies, there are two fundamental and ruthlessly enforced rules or codes of conduct:

• female girls and female women are supposed to exist in service to everyone else of every age. This includes being accessible, accommodating, acquiescent, appeasing, pleasing, arousing, submissive, silent, subservient, and subordinate.
• people of color are supposed to be of service to whites across sex. This includes being the opposite of "uppity", being respectful to whites in ways whites determine to be respectful, not being threatening, and being submissive, silent, subservient, and subordinate.

A third rule is that whites and men ought never be fully or consistently accountable to women of color. If it appears to happen it will be accidental or in service to maintaining white control and male power.

6. There is a map of gender that whites have constructed and live by. It is a map detailing various routes of conquest and access into the lives of females of all ages, including girls and women across region, race, and age. It is a map of how to be a male man, which posits "man" as the opposite of and in a supremacist position over everyone female and feminine, as male men define and enforce such terms. It is a map of how to be white while ignoring the meaning and power of whiteness, including in progressive and radical white groups. It is a map that currently while marginally allows for the existence of transsexual and transgender people. But beneath that map are other, older maps. If you peel away or scrape off the surface map, you may find these older maps with other languages and ways of being. There are also contemporary social spaces where people of color are redefining and re-inventing non-white ways of being gendered without ignoring or minimising the power and prevalence of white and male supremacy. The disruption and interference, both psychically and physically, perpetrated by whites and men over and against female, intersex, and other people of color is so ever-present as to be unremarkable and unnoticeable by whites and men.

7. In many of these current debates, what female girls of color experience globally is ignored or unknown. How heterosexualised white and male supremacy, Western cultural imperialism, globalised corporate capitalism, and formal and covert militarism each impact the lives of girls of color is not consistently centralised in the theories, policies, and practices of whites who claim to be fighting for liberation. When girls of color are mentioned, it is usually to make points that (consciously or not, intentionally or not) either reinforce the rampant white supremacy in liberal and radical political struggles by and for whites, or reinforce the ruling male supremacy in conservative and orthodox political systems by and for men.

8. Right now, there are non-trans female people of color, and trans people of color, and third gender, and other-than-trans, and other-than-cis-gender people of color who do not see or experience each other as "the  enemy" and who work together on small-scale and larger-scale liberation projects against the many forces that seek their invisibilisation and destruction.

9. I support female and intersex women and trans people of color being centrally involved in all revolutionary liberation struggles in ways that they determine to be politically viable and mutually respectful. Indigenous and non-Indigenous women of color are organising and sustaining most liberation struggles around the world. Far too many whites and men ignore them or try to subordinate and silence them, ignoring the destruction, disappearance, and deaths of girls and women of color, by murder and other means, including in the midst of very contentious debates between RadFem-identified whites and transsexual- and transgender-identified whites.

10. If your own liberation work doesn't name, address, and consistently centralise the many economic, sexual, and raced hardships and horrors that over-determine and destroy the lives of millions of girls and women of color globally, and if your own civil rights and human rights work doesn't employ the survival strategies and revolutionary values and practices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activist women of color, why doesn't it?

Male Supremacy, White Supremacy, and Heterosexism: what's missing from this list of oppressive forces?

image of book cover is from here

As I consider the movements organised to oppose and eradicate each of the above forms of grotesquely inhumane power, I am reminded that something is missing. Even if we work to end white and male supremacy and heterosexism, we are left with a world of industrialised and post-industrialised citizens who won't necessarily hear, comprehend, or respond to the activism of Indigenous People. Indigenism, when centered on women's experiences, offers a worldview that necessarily takes on white and male supremacy, and globalised Western economic and cultural imperialism.

It is the anti-oppression work that cannot divorce human rights from land rights, or destruction of people with destruction of the Earth. Indigenous People live on smaller and smaller portions of land, increasingly possessed and pillaged by white male and corporate power-brokers. A few years ago the call to Indigenist consciousness rang loudly in my head and I see how easy it is to let that echo fade. My world, my daily life, isn't obviously tied in obvious ways to the struggles of Indigenous people either regionally or globally. At least not as I experience my world of relative economic security, white-centered and white-dominated living, and heteromale supremacist values and expectations. My world is a world in which whites fight for land, and once possessed it is never relinquished. It is a world that uses science and spirituality differently, towards different aims. It is a world in which conceptions of gender and ethnicity are often considered matters of individual choice, not structural, social imposition.

I am beginning to question how and to what degree discussions of gender identity, when divorced from the politics of race, class, and region, locates the arguers' positions as anti-Indigenist. Among very socially and environmentally advantaged people, the practice of isolating forms of oppression is typical: one may fight for queer rights, for women's rights, or for the rights of the working poor. But often enough each of those struggles entails demanding or achieving access into a dominant society that is hell-bent on destroying every Indigenous person on Earth who isn't willing to divorce themselves from their own ethnic and ancestral traditions.

We know that the "kinder, gentler" version of genocide is, rather than committing mass-slaughter outright, to demand that Indigenous people give up language and land, among other things. And to assimilate into usually white supremacist society. White male-ruled nation-states are, without exception, anti-Indigenous: genocidal and ecocidal.

The white men who pride themselves on taking a "radical" stance on The Environment are notoriously misogynistic, racist, classist, and Western-focused, seeing land as something for white men to control, even if the effort is to "liberate" the land; white male environmentalists are known for taking on Indigenous People, framing the latter as the exploiters or heartless ones, and white men as the moral saviors of the Earth. For decades, I have seen how whites and men are famous for not being accountable to Indigenous women activists.

As a "First-worlder", I know that my concerns will tend to be myopic and self-centered. This is often enough true for me as a white person and as a male also. After all, the conditions most people live in are not the conditions I live in. I have to venture out of my tiny, powerful scene and myopic worldview to get to know people living with traditions and threats viscerally, experientially unknown to me.

I have posted about this before, but here again is an important piece of writing about the need to center Indigenous women's lives and work in social justice movements:

http://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/indigenous-feminism-without-apology/

If you want to see a good example of how a "First World" activist refuses the perspective and worldview of a "Third World" activist, watch (and read) this:

Part 1:
http://youtu.be/3BcVxgW-vO8

Part 2:
http://youtu.be/pPue0Gq4JmE

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Gwynne Dyer — he’s author of Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats — and Vandana Shiva joins us, an Indian environmentalist, scientist, philosopher, global justice activist and eco-feminist, a longtime critic of genetically modified crops and the system of corporate-driven agriculture and neoliberal globalization that’s privatized natural resources and impoverished farming and indigenous communities across the Global South.
Well, we’re talking about geoengineering. You just came from giving a speech last night at St. John the Divine. What are your thoughts on geoengineering, Vandana Shiva?
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, three thoughts. The first is, it is the idea of being able to engineer our lives on this very fragile and complex and interrelated and interconnected planet that’s created the mess we are in. It’s an engineering paradigm that created the fossil fuel age, that gave us climate change. And Einstein warned us and said you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them. Geoengineering is trying to solve the problems with the same old mindset of controlling nature. And the phrase that was used, of cheating — let’s cheat — you can’t cheat nature. That’s something people should recognize by now. There is no cheating possible. Eventually, the laws of Gaia determine the final outcome.
But I think the second thing about geoengineering is, we’ve just had the volcano in Iceland, in — yes, it was Iceland. And look at the collapse of the economy. And here are scientists thinking that’s a solution? Because they’re thinking in a one-dimensional way. It’s linear, issue of global warming, anything to do global cooling. I work on ecological agriculture. We need that sunlight for photosynthesis. The geoengineers don’t realize, sunshine is not a curse on the planet. The sun is not the problem. The problem is the mess of pollution we are creating. So, again, we can’t cheat.
And the final issue is that these shortcuts that are attempted from places of power — and I would add, places of ignorance — of the ecological web of life, are then creating the war solution, because geoengineering becomes war on a planetary scale, with ignorance and blind spots, instead of taking the real path, which is helping communities adapt and become resilient. That’s the work we do in India. We save the seeds that will be able to deal with sea level rise or cyclones, so that we have salt-tolerant varieties. We distributed them after the tsunami. Last year we had a monsoon failure. But instead of sending armies out, we distributed seeds. And the farmers who had seeds of millets had a crop. The farmers who were waiting for the green revolution chemical cultivation had a crop failure. So building resilience and building adaptation is the human response. It’s the ecological response. And we don’t have to panic. The panic and fear is coming out of ignorance.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about the — something you’ve talked about quite often: the global land grab that is going on around the world by countries fearing the scarcity in terms of their food products, going out and grabbing other countries’ lands. Could you talk about that?
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, you know, my last book, Soil Not Oil, I talk about the fact that, you know, the oil culture has given us climate change. And if we continue on that same paradigm, the only next step is eco-imperialism: grab what remains of the resources of the poor and take it to create insularity and a false defense of security, because the planet is interconnected, our lives are interconnected. The rich cannot isolate themselves in islands of defense against a planetary instability. The other option is earth democracy, as I talk about it. Now, those who have power, those who have money, and those who are driven by greed and injustice, are now seeking to grab the lands of the poor. It’s happening on a very large scale in Africa. It’s happening in India. The World Bank is promoting it, because there’s this very false idea that large-scale farms will help us with food security, when all the detail is showing smaller farms produce more food, so if you have to be food secure, you’d better be small. Diversified farms can deal with climate change much better, because if one crop doesn’t do well, some other crop will do fine. And the monoculture of large farms will be more vulnerable to climate collapse. And, of course, the biggest issue is half the world farms, you can’t rob them of their livelihoods.
Forget the running out of water and climate wars related to water wars. You’re going to have — you already are having in India, as a result of the land grab, in this case more for mining and industry, what we are seeing is a war within. And Operation Green Hunt has been launched by the government in order to clean out the lands to be able to grab the lands on behalf of corporations. We talked about the Kashmir crisis and the shootouts. But those scenes are taking place in every remote tribal area today. And that issue of war for resources, that as long as you’re powerful, you have the right to grab anyone’s resources, and you have a right to use all kinds of illegitimate violence, that militarized mindset that I say comes from capitalist patriarchy, is really at the root of so many of our problems, which is why we need to feel at home with nature, and we need to recognize that the resources of the earth belong to all, have to be shared. And the land rights of the poor defenseless indigenous person and the peasant is the biggest peace initiative of today, and it’s the biggest climate insurance of today.
AMY GOODMAN: Gwynne Dyer, define and defend geoengineering, and tell us which governments are engaging in it.
GWYNNE DYER: Well, first of all, Vandana and I agree about 95 percent.
VANDANA SHIVA: We agree about the problem, that there is a problem.
GWYNNE DYER: Yeah, yeah. We agree about the problem, and I don’t disagree with any of her solutions. But I don’t think they’re going to happen in time, if we do not intervene directly, as well, to avoid a massive human dieback in population. We are heading for the brink very fast.
VANDANA SHIVA: But your solutions commit the planet to a massive dieback.
GWYNNE DYER: I don’t — I don’t agree with you. Holding the temperature down is an intervention. It’s an intervention that’s intended to be temporary. It wins you time to get your emissions down. The goal is still to get the emissions down. And many other goals that you and I would agree upon are attainable, but only with time. And we don’t have the time. We are going to be — the last report out of the Hadley Center suggested, on current track, we are four degrees Celsius hotter, average global temperature, by 2060. It’s only fifty years.
VANDANA SHIVA: But Gwynne, every one of your solutions is further disrupting the web of life, which is the problem. The problem is not warming and cooling. We can survive. The planet can survive that.
GWYNNE DYER: Oh, of course, it can. But not all of us.
VANDANA SHIVA: Yeah, but the problem —- not all of us, but the problem is the -— geoengineering is an experiment. It is not a solution.
GWYNNE DYER: No.
VANDANA SHIVA: And you cannot experiment in such a violent way without full assessment of the impact. And as I said, just the simple thing of blocking the sun rays is a problem for the planet. It’s a problem for humanity.
GWYNNE DYER: You’re talking one percent. I mean, you’re talking about one percent of solar radiation.
VANDANA SHIVA: No, but the iron filings? Iron filings being thrown into the ocean?
GWYNNE DYER: I don’t like iron —- that’s ridiculous.
VANDANA SHIVA: Or reflectors in the sky, or artificial volcanoes. But that’s geoengineering. Every one of them, if the solution is looked at, all its spinoffs, in a full ecological way, and a full social impact of what does it mean. And the most important thing is, it’s undemocratic. I think the crisis of the climate is so serious that people need to be involved. The problem of geoengineering or genetic engineering is a bunch of experts sitting with a bunch of corporations saying, "We’ll decide on behalf of the people."
GWYNNE DYER: Vandana.
VANDANA SHIVA: That’s part of the problem.
GWYNNE DYER: Yeah.
VANDANA SHIVA: And that’s why I really respect Evo Morales.
GWYNNE DYER: Well, I’m -—
VANDANA SHIVA: He called the people of the world after the collapse of Copenhagen, and so the people of the world will decide the solution.
GWYNNE DYER: OK, the people of the world will not decide. You know that, and I know that. This is not —-
VANDANA SHIVA: But they are deciding.
GWYNNE DYER: I haven’t noticed yet.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, there’s a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that came out of that amazing gathering, that we need to shift to an earth-centered paradigm -—
GWYNNE DYER: I’d love to believe this.
VANDANA SHIVA: — rather than an arrogant, narrow, reductionist, mechanistic, science expert-based paradigm.
GWYNNE DYER: Do you know what will happen? Do you know what will happen —-
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to interrupt for a second -—
GWYNNE DYER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — to say, Gwynne Dyer, if you can explain —- I don’t even think most people understand what geoengineering is.
GWYNNE DYER: OK. Geoengineering is short-term interventions to avoid a climate runaway disaster, in order to give us more time to get our emissions down, which, in themselves, will cause a runawa, climate disaster if we simply allow them to go ahead. Without geoengineering, you hit that disaster in less than fifty years. And you probably need more than fifty years to get your emissions down. Now, first of all, obiously, you’ve got to do the experiments. You’ve got to figure out are there horrendous side effects you don’t want to do. But if you don’t do this, you know who dies first? It’s the people in the tropics and the subtropics. Not up here. We watch you die on television.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Can I ask you, in terms of geoengineering, what companies or what governments are now promoting this as a potential solution?
GWYNNE DYER: We still don’t have any official government commitment to it anywhere.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What companies are investing in it and developing it?
GWYNNE DYER: Companies are investing in a couple of marginal things that, frankly, I don’t believe have any credibility. Vandana mentioned iron filings chucked into the sea. Well, I don’t think that’s actually -—
AMY GOODMAN: What does that do?
GWYNNE DYER: Well, the idea was you cause blooms of algae, which will then die, and as their bodies drop to the seabed, embed carbon in the seabed, and take it out of the atmosphere.
AMY GOODMAN: And volcanoes, what are they?
GWYNNE DYER: Well, the volcano, the idea is that big volcanoes, when they explode, put sulfur dioxide, large amounts of it, into the stratosphere, where it stays for a couple of years, because it doesn’t rain up there. The particles stay, and they reflect enough sunlight to lower the temperature of the earth.
AMY GOODMAN: And seeding the clouds?
GWYNNE DYER: Seeding the clouds is make them more reflective, spray up some sea water into low-lying clouds, and they’ll reflect a little bit more incoming sunlight than they did before —-
AMY GOODMAN: And what else?
GWYNNE DYER: —- and lower the temprature. The other proposals — I mentioned, you know, paint the hollow roofs green —- or white, but I think that’s probably a one-time solution.
VANDANA SHIVA: And I wouldn’t object to that.
GWYNNE DYER: No, I wouldn’t object -—
VANDANA SHIVA: What color you paint, it doesn’t really matter.
GWYNNE DYER: Yeah, yeah. There’s a new one that’s come up recently. A fellow at Harvard suggested that you could actually begin with rivers and resevoirs, but put rather microscopic scale bubbbles into the water, which would whiten it. In other words, you know, it would reflect more sunlight than normal dark water does, without actually changing the quality of the water.
AMY GOODMAN: And as Juan asked, the corporations involved?
GWYNNE DYER: In none of these cases so far are there corporations involved. This is coming out of the scientific community. They’re looking for —-
AMY GOODMAN: Is it also coming out of the Pentagon?
GWYNNE DYER: —- links with both the Pentagon, I think, and the scientific community, and with corporate funding. But the initiatives are coming out of the scientific community. The scientific community is scared and desperate. I mean, there’s an undercurrent of panic in most of the interviews that I held with the scientists.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Vandana, Gwynne’s argument that there’s just not enough time to talk about the people-oriented solutions you’re talking about?
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, the first thing is, there’s never enough time, but you have to find the solutions. And to use the excuse of immediacy and urgency to take the wrong action is not a solution. In terms of time, we do orgaic farming, and again, in my book Soil Not Oil, we’ve shown that a localized ecological biodiverse system of farming could solve 40 percent of the climate problem, because 40 percent emissions are coming from food miles, nitrogen oxide emissions, cutting down the Amazon forest, all linked to a globalized industrialized food system. Tomorrow we can do that. In three years’ time, all of the world’s farming could be ecological, absorbing the carbon dioxide and putting fertility back in the soil. It’s not a fifty-year experiment. It’s an assured, guaranteed path that has been shown to work.
And it does three things for you. It reduces emissions, while increasing food security and food productivity and increasing water security, because soils rich in carbon and organic matter are the best reservoir of water. But I want to just mention — actually, there’s — just as there are a group of scientists who are panicking because of their reductionist approach —- I’m a scientist. The reason I do ecology today is because I realize science was just shrinking in terms of the knowledge an individual gets in a particular stream. And so many of the narrow expertise is where you’re getting this panic, because they don’t know there are other solutions. I’d love to take some of your geoengineering friends from the scientific community to our farm, to show here’s a solution that works in the short run, in the immediate run. But there is an organized movement now -—
GWYNNE DYER: I don’t think —- I don’t think that they -—
VANDANA SHIVA: I want to mention this.
GWYNNE DYER: Yes.
VANDANA SHIVA: There is a movement against geoengineering called HOME — Hands Off Mother Earth —- citizens telling irresponsible scientists, arrogant in their path, hands off mother earth.
GWYNNE DYER: Look, your solutions are good. They will work. And if you were the dictator of the world and could impose -—
VANDANA SHIVA: Which I would never be.
GWYNNE DYER: No, but let me finish. Let me finish. If you were the dictator of the world —-
AMY GOODMAN: You have ten seconds.
GWYNNE DYER: —- and could change land ownership patterns in the United States, like that, you could have it all done in three years.
VANDANA SHIVA: It’ll happen.
GWYNNE DYER: You can’t do that.
VANDANA SHIVA: No, it will happen.
GWYNNE DYER: Not in three years. Not in thirty.
VANDANA SHIVA: The young people will. They are ready to make change.
AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. Vandana Shiva, her books — well, among them, Soil Not Oil. And Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats.