U.S. Thanksgiving: What's to be grateful for? Genocide? Think about THAT while passing the BLOODY cranberry sauce

What follows is from here. 

November 27, 2003

First Genocide, Then Lie About It

Why I Hate Thanksgiving

By MITCHEL COHEN
With much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh and others whose names have over the years been lost.--MC

The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.

Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:

"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy -- the regime of death -- was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle Island."

You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:

"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them "as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."

Columbus returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus's men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people were murdered between 1494 and 1508.

What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.

The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children there.

In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed to death.

By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived.

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.

Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.

In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again.

The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity.
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one million.

The way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually, making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything, whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.

There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything -- even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people -- a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps.
"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think it would be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so slaughtered them.
These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in their New World. He taught them how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as the First Thanksgiving.

My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they -- and those of us who are not Indian as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.

Let's look at one example of the Puritan values -- which were not, I repeat, the values of the English working class values that we "give thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.

In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist nation-state.

The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality -- the vision of communal society that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners -- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened -- householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist's house was trashed.

Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should "keep their wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty.

Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their lands they had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism -- were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a place to put their Maypole.
Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation Front).
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home as well.

Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.

The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall.

The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit." They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!

Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days, jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.
On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute -- always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were responsible for the engagement."

In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.

Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.

First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this "holyday" commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor.

Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and they will be the new Indians.

Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA,, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition and the Brooklyn Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
In memorium. Lest we forget. The First Thanksgiving
From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996

The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.

"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.

"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building," he said.

Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.

"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."

Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.

Weekend Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003

Men's Sexual Violence Against Women in Systems of Prostitution: statistics and one more ugly story about what heterosexual men do, as heterosexual men who believe they have 24/7 access to rape(d) women's bodies

Just click on the title below, for the whole disgusting story, which I'm linking to, as I don't think this story even should be told on a man's blog. Thanks again, Cara, for making the TRUTH about men and rape known. Before reading on, please familiarise yourself with the stats (here) on men's sexual violence and gendered violence against women in systems of prostitution.

U.S. Sailor Acquitted of Rape, Despite Admission of Physical Force

Filed Under Australia, International, courts, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, sex work, violence against women and girls  | Posted by Cara |

Trigger Warning for rape apologism and graphic descriptions of sexual violence

In Sydney, a U.S. sailor has been acquitted on charges of raping a sex worker who told him to stop — even though he admitted, in court, to using a “lock down maneuver” to pin her to the bed.

Pauli Murray: Celebrating Her Life (she was born 99 years ago this month)

 [image is from here]

Hurray for the archivists! Her autobiography is linked to below. What follows is from here:

Anna (Pauli) Murray was born in Baltimore on 20th November, 1910. Her mother, Agnes Murray died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1914. Her father, William Murray, was a graduate of Howard University and taught in a local high school. He suffered from the long-term effects of typhoid fever and eventually was confined to Crownsville State Hospital where he died in 1923.

Anna and her five brothers and sisters were raised by relatives in Baltimore. Eventually she went to live with her aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald, a school teacher. After graduating from Hillside High School at the head of her class, she moved to New York City. Murray attended Hunter College and financed her studies with various jobs. However, after the Wall Street Crash, unable to find work, Murray was forced to abandon her studies.

In the 1930s Murray worked for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and as a teacher in the New York City Remedial Reading Project. She also had articles and poems published in various magazines. This included her novel, Angel of the Desert, that was serialized in the Carolina Times.

Murray also became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1938 she began a campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina. With the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) Murray's case received national publicity. However, it was not until 1951 that Floyd McKissick became the first African American to be accepted by the University of North Carolina. During this campaign she developed a life-long friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.

A member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Murray also became involved in attempts to end segregation on public transport and this resulted in her arrest and imprisonment in March 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Virginia.

In 1941 Murray enrolled at the Howard University law school with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer. The following year she joined with George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Members of CORE were mainly pacifists who had been deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. The students became convinced that the same methods could be employed by blacks to obtain civil rights in America.

In 1943 Murray published two important essays on civil rights, Negroes Are Fed Up in Common Sense and an article about the Harlem race riot in the socialist newspaper, New York Call. Her most famous poem on race relations, Dark Testament, was also written in that year.

After Murray graduated from Howard University in 1944 she went to Harvard University on a Rosenwald Fellowship. However, after the award had been announced, Harvard Law School rejected her because of her gender. Murray went to the University of California where she received a degree in law. Her master's thesis was The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment.

Murray moved to New York City and provided support to the growing civil rights movement. Her book, States' Laws on Race and Color, was published in 1951. Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), described the book as the Bible for civil rights lawyers.

In the early 1950s Murray, like many African Americans involved in the civil rights movement, suffered from McCarthyism. In 1952 she lost a post at Cornell University because the people who had supplied her references: Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Philip Randolph, were considered to be too radical. She was told in a letter that they decided to give "one hundred per cent protection" to the university "in view of the troublous times in which we live".

In 1956 Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, a biography of her grandparents, and their struggle with racial prejudice. In 1960 Murray travelled to Ghana to explore her African cultural roots. When she returned President John F. Kennedy appointed her to his Committee on Civil and Political Rights.

In the early 1960s Murray worked closely with Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King but was critical of the way that men dominated the leadership of these civil rights organizations. In August, 1963, she wrote to Randolph and pointed out that she had: "been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions."

In 1977 Murray became the first African American woman to become a Episcopal priest. Pauli Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on 1st July, 1985. Her autobiography Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage was published posthumously in 1987.

The Adolph Award (for White Heterosexual Male Supremacist Insanity and Delusional Behavior) goes this month to...

1 JAN. 2010 UPDATE: Rick Flashman has contacted me stating the information I found online  about him is false and was posted by an impostor. I await hearing back from him with more information on how and when this happened, and by whom. So let's press pause on naming the recipient of this award for now. I'll find some of the other candidates, who clearly speak in their own names about themselves. Sincere apologies to Rick Flashman, and again, I look forward to hearing back from him with more information about who made those initial connections. Consider them FALSE here until further notice.

Rick Flashman, who considers Marc Lepine some form of "masculist" hero. (Note: the link on Marc's name above takes you to detailed information about him committing his overtly antifeminist and gynocidal atrocity at a university in Montreal, Canada on 6 December 1989, ECD.)

Perhaps a small replica of Rick should just be dipped in bronze. And then we could replicate his bronzed mini-being as "The Adolph Award"!

There were so many runner's up this month. So many contenders for this award. Too many, in fact, to give a dishonorable mention to each of them here. There will likely always be too many contenders for this award, of course, until such time that racist heterosexist patriarchies die of their own foul immorality, political crimes, and intellectual stench.

It's this quote and graphic that brought Rick Flashman [someone, an as yet unidentified coward] the first ever Adolph Award:

Below, I'm just showing you the date and title of Rick's [someone's] stupid-ass absurd piece of writing that goes with the graphic above. Need he say or do any more to deserve this award? Not in the estimation of this year's millions of voters.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

MARC LEPINE: HE DID IT OUT OF LOVE

By Rick Flashman 

Hey white men? What's up your arsenal?

How familiar is this sort of image, just below, to you? You've seen it a lot before? Stuff like it? When have you ever seen an image like the one above in which the people with virtually all the weapons were women of color, and the one being assaulted was a white man? Just curious. Rent Born in Flames and begin imagining it. And please keep this in mind. What happens in the photo below happens every day on Earth, by white men against women of color, in one form or another. Women of color "retaliating" or organising militantly against white men: it's just in the imagination--the fearful imagination of white men. Do you understand the difference between what's actually happening in the world and what isn't? I hope so. And I hope you're working, if a white man, to end what it is that white men do, globally, without accountability to anyone.

[image of U.S. white cops with all manner of weaponry, including the misuse of GERMAN shepherd dogs, being used to terrorise, dominate, subordinate, oppress, and control African Americans was found here]

The most common "native" language is Mandarin Chinese. English is a distant third. [source cited below]

I write in a minority language but one that the white speakers of it believe is "international". I am part of a gendered class of people that is less than half of the world's gendered populations. My race, whiteness, is shared with approximately 8% of the world's population, depending on how such things are measured. But, regardless of whether whites are 5 or 15 percent of the world's people, we are, needless to say, a minority.

White English-speaking men are a small minority in the world, yet no other group seems to have managed the ego and force necessary to try and get the world to believe "WE ARE IT: THE definition of HUMANITY!" We aren't "IT" if by "it" we mean representatives of the world's population, of the languages spoken in the world, of the gender most alive on Earth. Minority, minority, and again, minority.

One of the most effective means of maintaining an oppressive system or set of systems is to make sure that, structurally, there are no mechanisms, no means, and no value placed on holding white men accountable to what we do, both one-to-one, in small and large groups, organisationally, or institutionally, to women of color around the world. Nor are we made to be accountable to, to answer responsibly to, what women of color have to say to us about our oppressive ways. We can just play our white music, or our awesome World Music collection, and call it all good.

Do you know, in twenty-five years, how many white men I've met who are "well-read" (as white "educated" men define that term) in radical feminist writings by women of color? Maybe three.

That's THREE in twenty-five years. Consider that for a moment. How many white men are well-read in what white non-feminist, racist men have written? In my personal experience, hundreds.

And I tend to hear about such white men, where and when they show up in society. (I'm in that loop, more or less.) I'm aware of both Robert Jensen's and Derrick Jensen's good work, for example. (No, they are not related.) And I can't even say that Derrick is "well-read" in radical feminism. But I can say he listens to radical women with an open heart and mind.

What does that tell you? It should tell you a lot, not the least of which is that white men don't care to know much about the world unless we've said it and written it down, no matter how fucked up our views of the world, no matter how utterly egotistical and delusional our views of ourselves are.

A function of being privileged, as James Baldwin and so many others over time have noted, is that those of with a particular positioning as oppressor get to be as in denial about the effects of what we do as we wish. If a woman of color calls us out, for example, we can shrug it off and call her all the names we have not stuck far enough up our WMS arsenal.

Through what means do women of color have of holding to account white men for the atrocities we do? What happens if individual women of color request we get out of their way, leave them alone, stop talking, stop coming onto them, stop assuming all WOC are prostitutes, stop assuming all WOC exist to do is serve men, and white men in very particularly misogynistic ways that reside in the white heteromale supremacist imagination. The WHMS imagination, tragically for the world of women, is not kept interior--it is not held only in the mind, privately. It is, rather, projected, displayed, acted out, enforced institutionally against women of color in every horrific way imaginable.

What white men do to women of color in pornography is just one example. I won't be linking to those WHMS human rights abuses any time soon. That alone would be enough to convince anyone that, clearly, there are no systems of accountability in place, no laws, no customs, no practices practiced by white men to call out, shut down, and stop our oppression of women of color by white men.

John Perkins, who is not well-read at all in radical feminism, and who holds to some fairly sexist/misogynistic views about such things as "the feminine" and women's role, does at least detail accounts of how white male power works, globally, against the interests and bodies, against the cultures and civilisations of women of color. Robert has a clear understanding of what's fucked up about whiteness and manhood as it expresses itself in a white male supremacist society. Derrick gets the connections between how women of color are treated and ecocide.

There are a few white men whose writing I find valuable. But there's one thing white men can't tell me about: the experiences of women of color as experienced by WOC. Only women of color can do that. Only women of color can write out their lives, tell their stories, analyse their experiences, including the societies in which they live and die. White men cannot do this. White women cannot do this. Men of color cannot do this.

So, given that, why don't more white men read what radical feminist women of color have to say? What don't more white men read novels and essays, if not also non-fiction work and plays, by women of color?

Can at least one white man reading this answer that question, please.

I didn't read the writings of women of color because I'm a white man, to be clear. I read it because my feminist womentor, a white woman, gave me a reading list that included a lot of writings by women of color. That's when I learned about the Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, which is linked to on the lower right of this blog. That's where I learned about Barbara and Beverly Smith, Gloria Anzaldua, and so many other women of color. And what I realised is that white women's experience doesn't explain what women of color experience. There's some overlap, of course, as there is among all humans who are having human experiences, among all women who are having human experiences as women in patriarchies. But what women of color have to say, collectively, in my view, in my experience, is THE source of something white men are fond of calling TRUTH: political truth, intellectual truth, emotional truth, spiritual truth. But white men seem incessantly to insist that such TRUTH is not knowable unless "discovered" or "revealed" to one or many white men. So what god is can only be taught to us in the West by white men, by white men's writings. By white men who mistranslate language, who don't understand things, who are largely ignorant about what most of the world's human beings is EXPERIENCING. Please think about that for a moment.

We know a few things, us white men, don't we? We know, for example, that one out of every five human beings on Earth is Chinese. (The single largest ethnic group on the planet by far is Han Chinese, which represents 19.73% of the global population. Source: a white male run place called Wikipedia, here.) We know that over half the world's human population is female, not male.

Here's some more info about the preponderance of white people, women and men, in just three countries that have lots of white folks. (Keep in mind half, at least half, are NOT men.)

Argentina

Main article: White Argentine

Argentina, along with other areas of new settlement like Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the United States, is considered a country of immigrants where the vast majority originated from Europe.^[44] According to different estimates, white Argentines make up anywhere from 86.4%^[45] to 97% of Argentina's population, or around 39 million people.^[46]
Most immigrants came between the mid-19th century and World War II. Nearly half were from Italy,^[47] and almost one third from Spain. Poland, France, the Ottoman Empire (chiefly Christian Lebanese, Syrians, Greeks and Armenians), Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Portugal made up the other eight top sources of immigrants. Switzerland, Belgium, United Kingdom, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States were the next largest. European Jews were among the Eastern European arrivals.
Argentine censuses are conducted on the basis of self-identification. According to the last census, 95% of Argentines identify as white.^{[48][verification needed]}
Criticism of the national census state that data has historically been collected using the category of national origin rather than race in Argentina, leading to undercounting Afro-Argentines and mestizos.^[49] Africa Viva (Living Africa) is a black rights group in Buenos Aires with the support of the Organization of American States, financial aid from the World Bank and Argentina's census bureau is working to add an "Afro-descendants" category to the 2010 census. The 1887 national census was the final year where blacks were included as a separate category before it was eliminated by the government.^[50]

Australia

Further information: European Australian

From 1788, when the first British colony in Australia was founded, until the early 19th century, most immigrants to Australia were British and Irish convicts. These were augmented by small numbers of free settlers from Britain, Ireland and other European countries. However, until the mid-19th century, there were few restrictions on immigration, although members of ethnic minorities tended to be assimilated into the Anglo-Celtic populations.
People of many nationalities, including many non-white people, emigrated to Australia during the goldrushes of the 1850s. However, the vast majority was still white and the goldrushes inspired the first racist activism and policy, directed mainly at Chinese people.
From the late 19th century, the Colonial/State and later federal governments of Australia restricted all permanent immigration to the country by non-Europeans. These policies became known as the "White Australia policy", which was consolidated and enabled by the Immigration Restriction Act 1901,^[51] but was never universally applied. Immigration inspectors were empowered to ask immigrants to take dictation from any European language as a test for admittance, a test used in practice to exclude people from Asia, Africa, and some European and South American countries, depending on the political climate.
Although they were not the prime targets of the policy, it was not until after World War II that large numbers of southern European and eastern European immigrants were admitted for the first time.^[52] Following this, the White Australia Policy was relaxed in stages: non-European nationals who could demonstrate European descent were admitted (e.g. descendants of European colonizers and settlers from Latin American or Africa), as were autochthonous inhabitants of various nations from the Middle East, most significantly from Lebanon. In 1973, all immigration restrictions based on race and/or geographic origin were officially terminated.

United States

See also: White American and Definitions of whiteness in the United States

The current U.S. Census definition includes white "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa.^[108] The U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation describes white people as "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa through racial categories used in the UCR Program adopted from the Statistical Policy Handbook (1978) and published by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce.^[109]
The cultural boundaries separating white Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing. According to John Tehranian, among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Hispanics, Slavs, and Greeks.^[110] Studies have found that while current parameters officially encompassed Arabs as part of the White American racial category, many Arab Americans from places other than Bilad al-Sham feel they are not white and are not perceived as white by American society."^[111]
Professor David R. Roediger of the University of Illinois, suggests that the construction of the white race in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slave owners from slaves.^[112] By the 18th century, white had become well established as a racial term. The process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over pursuit of citizenship. The Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person". In at least 52 cases, people denied the status of white by immigration officials sued in court for status as white people. By 1923, courts had vindicated a "common-knowledge" standard, concluding that "scientific evidence" was incoherent. Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a "performance-based" standard, relating to religious practices, education, intermarriage and a community's role in the United States.^[113]
In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of India were not "free white men" entitled to citizenship, despite anthropological evidence in "the extreme northwestern districts of India"^[114] there is present the "Caucasian or Aryan race"^[114] with an "intermixture of blood"^[114] from the "dark skinned Dravidian. [source for the above info on whiteness and population: here]

The CIA lists ethnic groups accordingly, and we can note that they use the racist term mulatto, and that any militarised government in the West is tracking this information to be able to maintain white male supremacist control of as much of the world as possible. Keep in mind, race is a political term, not a "natural" one, or even a "cultural" one.

What do we know about the populations of people by the primary language spoken?

World Diversity Patterns

There are more than 6.5 billion people in the world today.  Nearly 2/3 of them are Asians living on less than 1/3 of the land.   Only about 5% of the world's people live in North America.

GEOGRAPHIC REGION	POPULATION	PERCENT   OF WORLD
Asia	3,518,000,000	56.4%
Africa	839,000,000	13.5%
Europe (including nations that     were part of the Soviet Union)	803,000,000	12.9%
Latin America and Caribbean	539,000,000	8.7%
North America (U.S. and Canada)	320,000,000	5.1%
Near East	179,000,000	2.9%
Oceania (Pacific Islands)	32,000,000	.5%

Source: Global Population Profile: 2002, U.S. Census Bureau 2004

Just how many different societies, cultures, and ethnic groups make up the world's population is not certain.  This is due, in part, to the fact that these social entities are not always distinct enough to clearly warrant their being considered as separate groups.  For instance, Canada and the U.S. are separate nations but culturally and linguistically similar almost to the point of not being distinguishable by outsiders (except for French speaking Quebec Province).

Contributing to the problem of counting the number of societies, cultures, and ethnic groups is not only the overlapping nature of many of these groups but the fact that they are now changing rapidly as mass media and relatively inexpensive long distance travel increasingly blur cultural differences.  We are experiencing culture change on a scale and at a pace that is unprecedented in human history.

A good indication of cultural survival is the continued use of traditional languages and dialects.  People who are unable to readily communicate because of language differences are more likely to maintain cultural differences as well.  Linguists estimate that the world's peoples speak 5000-6000 languages.  The most common "native" language is Mandarin Chinese.   English is a distant third.

Spoken as "Native" Language		TOTAL sPEAKERS
1.	Mandarin Chinese	874,000,000
2.	Hindi (India)	366,000,000
3.	English	341,000,000
4.	Spanish	322-358,000,000
5.	Bengali (India and Bangladesh)	207,000,000
6.	Portuguese	176,000,000
7.	Russian	167,000,000
8.	Japanese	125,000,000
9.	German (standard)	100,000,000
10.	Korean	78,000,000

Note: If the 15 major variants of Arabic are considered one language, Arabic is the 6th most common language in the world having 198-201,000,000 native speakers. Source:  Ethnologue Volume I: Languages of the World, 14th ed. (2000).  These statistics are only rough approximations in most cases.

While English is not spoken as a native language by the largest number of people, it is the most world wide in its distribution.  It has become the second language of choice in most countries.  About 1/4 to 1/3 of humanity now understand and speak it to some degree.  As English and a few other major languages grow in popularity and as cultural diffusion accelerates, many of the languages of smaller ethnic groups are dying.  As many as 1/2 of the languages in the world are no longer spoken by children.  This is a major step in the direction of language and cultural extinction.  The languages that are becoming extinct are not doing so because they are "primitive" or unable to allow adequate communication.  They are dying because their speakers find it more useful to speak other languages.  This is largely a result of the growth in influence and power of nation states over their indigenous minority populations and of the increasing globalization of our economies.  The culture homogenizing effect of mass media should not be underestimated either.  Much of the television programming viewed around the world originated in Western Nations.  It is startling to realize that the most popular television shows world wide in recent years have been stereotypical American sitcoms such as "Will and Grace" and "Friends."

The rapid global growth in the importance of the English language and of Western culture (especially American) has not been as straight forward and simple as it initially may seem.  Cultural traits have not only diffused from the Western Industrial societies to the rest of the world.  They have gone the other way as well.  American society, culture, and language have become far more diverse.  For instance, English now contains words from more than 240 other languages.  In less than a generation, the cultural influences of Asia and Latin America especially have dramatically changed life in the U.S. and Canada.  This has been particularly true of the food preferences in urban areas.

Countering these rapid globalization trends in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the dramatic resurgence of tribalism.  [As named by whom? It's an English word, right?] While many small indigenous societies are disappearing into national societies, many larger ethnic groups are violently reasserting their presence and even independence from the nations that they have been integral parts of until now.  The breakup of Yugoslavia into ethnically "purified" areas in the 1990's is a prime example.  Similar "tribal" reemergences have occurred throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.  Tribalism also recently has spawned genocidal conflicts in Africa, especially in Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Congo. [source: here]



I leave y'all with this piece of completely non-feminist analysis about us whiteboys--who the author below prefers to refer sexistly refer to as "white people":

Comparing People to Hitler
By: Isaac “Absent” Amirian
Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation- especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.

Comparing people to Hitler is an easy way for white people to get a strong point across to the less enlightened, or the insufficiently white. Everyone knows who Adolf Hitler was. And everyone knows that Hitler was very, very bad. Therefore, if a white person really, REALLY, doesn’t like something or someone, he or she may angrily say something to the effect of, “This is exactly the same kind of thing that Hitler used to do!” accompanied by varying levels of profanity based on blood-alcohol content. No matter what your gut reaction may be at that point, do not disagree with that white person. Otherwise, well, you love Hitler.

This time-tested white-person maneuver may seem so awesomely useful to you that you are tempted to go out and try it right now. Not so fast. White people have spent the last 30 years perfecting this technique. There are cultural guidelines.

It’s also critical that you avoid the fatal mistake of getting creative and comparing people you don’t like to other evil dictators, such as Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro. With few exceptions, white people are actually fond of almost any dictator not named Hitler, and your remark that “this is just like something Mao Zedong would do” will be met with blank stares and possible social alienation. This is because, with the exception of Hitler, oppressive dictators share a passion for many of the things white people love- such as universal health care, conspiracy theories, caring about poor people while being filthy rich, and cool hats. Stick to the script and compare things you don’t like to Hitler, and Hitler alone.

Now, like most reasonable people, you might find this strategy distasteful, and even a bit disrespectful, since after all, Hitler was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, and probably doesn’t have that much in common with Pat Robertson, in perspective. If you prefer to avoid hearing or using the Hitler technique, we recommend you speak in soothing, affirming tones around angry white people to prevent the phenomenon from manifesting, and change the subject tactfully. To something that doesn’t involve George W. Bush. [source: here]

Or, to update, that also doesn't involve Barack Obama. Or Hillary Clinton. Or any white person or person of color with a progressive to radical political agenda and perspective. Or to any feminist. Or to any Black Nationalist.

Because, really, it is the White Nationalist men who really, truly, DO worship Adolph Hitler. Really. I'm not kidding. And they think women have their place serving white men. Really. White Nationalists tend not to be class-privileged. And there is a theory that because poorer and working class white males don't grow up with the esteem and "sense of self as of value" that white class-privileged men grow up with, they channel that lack of esteem, that pain, into an obscenely huge investment in being WHITE--not the liberal kind. Also in being MEN--not the gay kind.

But from whatever class background, with whatever levels of white male institutional "education" white men have the audacity to demonstrate such profound ignorance, in the guise of intelligence, no less!, in stating that any feminist, any one, is "like a Nazi". (Without, you know, being completely embarrassed no less!) Geesh. On the whole, what is the evidence that white class-privileged "educated" white so-called "intelligent" men care about what is happening in the world to the majority of people who live in that world? Where is the evidence of white men stopping other white men from committing atrocities to women of color worldwide. Send me the links to the groups' websites, please. I'll link to them. ALL of them. As long as it is their policy and practice to be fully accountable to feminist women of color.

Hammering Out Justice and Freedom: The White Man vs. James Baldwin in Take This Hammer

[this image of James Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine's 17 May 1963 ECD issue, is from here]

When James Baldwin speaks of "America" he is using the term most used often by many people to describe "The United States of America". It's the term that was, and is still today, used by many people to refer to this strange land that, as Andrea Dworkin once noted with stunning accuracy, has "no memory and no mind". Neither Baldwin nor Dworkin ever wrote about this country from a white heterosexual male conservative or liberal point of view. Andrea was a white Jewish radical feminist lesbian raised in a predominantly working class neighborhood of New Jersey. James was an African American boy, later a gay man, who was raised poor in Harlem in NYC. (For an utterly brilliant analysis of many aspects of James Baldwin's work, please read the "Communion" chapter in her greatly misunderstood and incredibly important book, Intercourse. For those who can afford to buy it, please try and get a copy or that tenth anniversary edition, as the twentieth anniversary version is being boycotted. To those who cannot purchase it, the tenth anniversary edition is most likely available through the interlibrary loan system across the U.S., if not also in other countries. To know why there is a boycott of the latest edition, click here.)

New York's harbor was an entrance point not only for people from Europe to come here to colonise and destroy this land, forging it with great violence into the United States, but was later a place for European immigrants to come to escape atrocities unfathomable to the new arrivals. What had been done here against African slaves and American Indians, was already wiped from the history books, or was told in such ways as to make slaves grateful, and Indians savage. But there has never been anyone more savage than the white man, and no Indigenous person could even attempt such savagery.

Born on August 2, 1924, Baldwin left this country for a good many years beginning in 1948, to escape the racism and homophobia that ran rampant across this land. He returned in 1957 to get involved in the struggle for Black Civil Rights.

All the quotes that follow were found  here.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. --James Baldwin

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned. --James Baldwin

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him [or her], and a child cannot afford to be fooled. --James Baldwin

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field. --James Baldwin

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. --James Baldwin

There's so much in Take This Hammer to analyse, appreciate, and apply to contemporary misogynistic Amerikkka. (I have three primary ways to refer to this country in writing: the U.S., Amerikkka, and "The United Rapes of Amerikkka".) The term America, to me never means only the U.S., as people from Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, and Argentina are all equally American. That is has been used by the white founding fathers to mean only the U.S. speaks to the arrogance of those white heterosexual men, living on land that never legitimately belonged to him.) There's so much for this radical profeminist (yours truly) to listen to and learn from. I wish there were more conversation between Baldwin and young and older women in it (there are bits, but they are brief indeed). But the footage is what it is and we cannot know that he didn't spend more time speaking with women; we only know this is how the editors thought it could be presented to a television audience. Most of his dialogue with women may well have ended up on the film editor's cutting room floor. James was not a man to see women as less human than men, which is obvious if you've read his novels. He portrays women with more complex humanity and political insight than any other male novelist, essayist, and playwright I know.

Be that as it may, what this film is reveals a great deal about oppression, how it works, what it does, how it impacts individuals who are part of a socially despised and politically subordinated group, and why morale is never ever an individual matter. It is always social and political, however personal it may also be. This is so whether we're speaking of the morale of women being structurally and intimately dominated by men; people of color or whites enduring and resisting white supremacist discrimination and invisibilisation; lesbians and other queer people or heterosexuals negotiating stereotypes, stigmas, and a lack of civil rights nationally; the poor enduring a country in which the rich are the greatest recipients of welfare (corporate welfare); in a capitalist state; Indigenous nations and people always facing genocide on lands stolen and colonised by white men; or Muslims and Jews being discriminated against and targeted for violence by white Christian men and boys--and all combinations thereof.

It's the sites of intersection and the overlapping of ways of being oppressed and oppressor that I think become especially truth-telling in a political climate where one issue and one vantagepoint tends to take center stage, as if everything else isn't also, always, going on too. So, for example, a working class Black woman in the U.S., some of whose heritage goes back to England and France as well as to the slaves as well as American Indians, due to white men raping each: what is her single issue? What is the single issue of any white middle class gay man who is part of a white settler country that Indigenous people are appropriately trying to reclaim? What about the white heterosexual woman who is being battered by her white husband, raising two children--a girl and a boy--from a previous marriage whose father was African American? How does she raise those children to know who they are in this country, while figuring out how to survive each day with a terrorist who threatens to kill all of them should she leave? And what of an elderly disabled Chicana woman who lives alone in an apartment in a white-majority city that won't keep sidewalks clear in the stormy winter months? What is the single issue for a homeless transgendered teenager who is drug-addicted and economically and psychologically trapped inside a system of prostitution and pornography, whose pimp takes most of the money, leaving them only with enough to buy drugs?

While people do not ever really live single-issue, single vantagepoint lives, urgent necessity may force--as class and race privilege often will allow--a person to prioritise one issue and perspective only. The battered woman may prioritise her need to escape over where she raises her children so that they are among people who can teach them how to survive in a white supremacist country. The gay white man think "gay rights" [not trans rights, not lesbian rights] is THE issue, never bothering to notice how his male, white, and class privileges make him ignorant of and callous towards the people fighting to take back their homeland.

There are many overlapping issues lessons in this footage of James Baldwin visiting a predominantly African American section of San Francisco, to speak with the people there about the condition of their lives, their experiences of The White Man, and what forms of survival are possible while living under WHM supremacy. "The Man" has always been white in this country, and the white man has always been straight--or at least heterosexist, racist, misogynistic and classist as hell. Baldwin is not there to discuss matters of sexual orientation, though he was most certainly an openly gay man when he visited the city. But, as you may well know, the predominantly gay male parts of town have never been the Blackest parts of town, and wealthy white gay men have made sure that will not ever be the case, as long as they live in The Castro.

Simplistically white liberal minds will not likely be able to hear or understand what James Baldwin is talking about. White conservatives won't bother to listen to him, period. Even white progressives may make some very simple mistakes in comprehending what Baldwin and the people of San Francisco are discussing.

One likely liberal misread would sound like this: "the way those Black folks speak about 'The White Man' is racist and misandrist". To say this, let alone believe it, is to be willfully, seriously, and irredeemably trapped in the illusions of the privileged, who are so very fond of professing "all people should be treated the same" or "feminism has succeeded" or "Blacks now have it good: we have a presidential Black family in the White House, after all". And that proves what, exactly? That white men don't rule this land? They do, while Barack Obama figures out how to work with the majority white Senate and Congresspeople to pass legislation that will likely do very little to shift this country away from its odd obsession and sadistic infatuation with wealth and white supremacy, its condescending "Christian" faith in heterosexual male power in secular and religious laws and customs. Regardless of the color of the man who is presently president, the U.S. government, on the whole, will not do a goddamned thing to change the power structures that Amerikka is built on.

These structures are no less in place due to Obama winning the election in the fall of 2008, and they are maintained with enormous force by white conservatives and the white liberals who wish to believe--against all evidence--that we live in a just land that cares about its citizens. Liberals, at least, tend to recognise our xenophobia, our racist and classist wars against nations of color, but only if off these shores. The racist, classist, gynocidal and genocidal war against American Indians remains some footnote in history in the white liberal imagination.

Our atrocities are generally invisibilised as such no matter how frequently or systematically the force of the oppressor comes down on the oppressed who wish to live in freedom. It takes a lot of effort, to say nothing of ignorance, to hold to ideas of what "America" is, when such ideas never were part of what constructed this country. And few, if any, white men have been willing even to own what this country really stands for and is, in the sense of naming it accurately, detailing the violence done, to whom and by whom.

The White Man exists, but only in a deadly manner of speaking. He exists politically, but not humanely. He rules this country with force as surely as adult disciplinarians rule children with the strap. And neither oppressed child nor oppressed adult wishes to be treated in this way, as a thing, owned, possessed, and ordered about by conditions that are beyond any individual's control. It is not just that The White Man is totalitarian and domineering. He is also delusional, ignorant, egotistical, defensive and offensive. His sense of self requires the subordination of others to be what it is. He doesn't exist unless all women, and men of color, are oppressed by him. He can't know love or empathy or compassion because he cannot see people as human beings because he is barely one himself. He can only see them through his White Man distortions and deceptions, stereotypes and stigmas. He perceives by projecting his inhumanity onto those he believes are inferior, never caring to note that no one could be as inhumane as he is.

His perverse position of power is held in place with forces seen and unseen. There is no meaningful consolation or redemption in being an oppressor, except that one doesn't have to experience what those s/he oppresses institutionaly. The oppressor's humanity is atrophied, ghostly and garish, because s/he will not own what s/he does and what it means that s/he does it.

As a white man, knowing what I am and what my people do in the name of being willfully and unwittingly white, in the effort to bolster some straight idea of manhood, I have learned to listen most carefully to two groups of people, who overlap significantly in many regards, primarily by existing as the same people. Women, and people of color. Each group is oppressed for being what it is supposed to be in the imagination of the white man. The African American is seen as the n*gger. The woman is seen, among other things, as the wh*re. And each group has to bear the brunt of the white man's projections and resist taking in anything he has to say about them. This is hard in a country that offers so little to so many, and so much to so few. And so it is to women of color to whom I most turn for the deepest truths about who they are and who I am--about what it means to them to be human, and what it means that I with my people, are grotesquely inhumane, some horrid combination of both n*gger and wh*ore. These two terms best describe white straight men, even while they greatly and bitterly resent knowing this about themselves, and will do just about anything, commit any atrocity, to prove that they are not either. One day white men will wake up to what we do, and we will know the whole ugly truth about ourselves. On that day, and not until that morning's sun rises, there will be a new kind of hope for humanity.

Before viewing, I welcome you to listen to this one song. It is about what to do with a hammer, should you find one in your hands.

Take This Hammer will hopefully be discussed here for a while.

Please note that just under the video's frame, there is the option to view the film with or without captions. These captions are largely accurate but not entirely so; there are moments identified in them as "[inaudible]" when, if you are a hearing person and listen carefully, you can usually discern exactly what is being said.

I hope you get a lot out of viewing this amazing program that aired on National Educational Television in 1964.  It might just as well have been filmed last week: Take This Hammer. I hope we collectively use it wisely to create more justice and freedom for all.

[An addendum, written 23 Nov. 2009: As Dog16arma notes below, one need not watch this footage to learn about oppression. There are plenty of women of color whose work reveals the intricacies and entanglements of many forms of oppression, including the brutality, interpersonal and institutional of men's war against women.]