Sexting & Sex Education & Safety

This post is copyrighted 2009, by Julian Real. All Rights Reserved.

Sexting turns us into flattened out non-human beings. The images can turn us on because we live in a society that says being three-dimensional, being authentic, being unique, is not sexy, and being "a thing", an image, for someone to possess is hot.

Digital technology that allows sex to be flattened out promotes the idea that people are things, are not of much worth, and are certainly not worth as much as the digital technology itself.

Sexting: digitally sending graphic sexually explicit images or words often from cell phone to cell phone, sometimes among friends, acquaintances, or people one would like to hook up with.

The general popular media is stupid about sexuality, and pornography is completely idiotic on the subject. School system leaders are ridiculous if they think kids are not having sex, or will not have sex before adulthood.

Among many other lessons, boys and girls need to be taught how to use a condom. At least if not more important than that, people must be taught how to respectfully initiate sex, and how to stop sex from continuing once it has started. If you don't know how to stop it, you're not likely giving free consent to everything that is going on. If you're not safe to stop it, do your best to avoid getting into situations where it is started. (I know this is not always possible, especially if one is being sexually abused at home.)

Learning that performing oral sex on boys is only fun and always safe is a lie. Learning that you will feel better about yourself by giving a boy a blow-job is a lie. Learning you don't have to have sex with boys is an important lesson to learn. Girls often find deeper pleasure with other girls. And when that happens, it's not supposed to be recorded for boys and men to watch. That "lesbian sex" is seen as something that should exist for men, is an idea men have that is completely stupid and self-centered.

I don't think girls find self-worth by giving boys head. I can tell you I never did. I liked pleasing other men, but didn't know how little I thought of myself while I did so, and how much of myself I'd be willing to give away to make a man feel good.

If girls who are coerced into performing oral sex on a boy are lucky, they may learn how they feel about giving boys head--and many women I know have grown up to realise they don't like it at all. Some do like it. A few like it a lot. The few that like it also like receiving oral sex, a lot.

What a girl who performs oral sex on boys is likely to learn, that is false, is that sex must be all about the penis and all about giving males pleasure. Boys often want girls to be a substitute for their right or left hand, a simple means of reaching orgasm, not a sharing of feelings between two people. Boys use girls sexually. Not always, but often. Sometimes girls use boys too. But boys also often sexually abuse girls because they have the power and desire to do so. This means that in any sexual interaction between a girl and a boy, the girl or boy may end up feeling used, but the girl, if she's smart, knows she could also be in serious danger. For this to not be the case, every person would have to respect themselves, know what respectful sex looks like and feels like, and practice only that when being sexual. Needless to say, we're not there yet.

Given that in many parts of the world, most of boys' and girls' sex education is actually learned in front of a computer monitor bombarding viewers with images of pimped, raped, and drug-addicted women, it is not likely that material is going to teach us much about respectful sex, the many conflicting or confusing emotions one has during sex, and how to make healthy choices about how to express one's desires.

Pornography and pornographers teach people how to have good sex in the sense that McDonalds and KFC teach us about good nutrition. (Um, they don't.) Industry-made, corporate pimp-produced, and mass marketed pornography does teach us about sex and makes things into sex that weren't sexy before, by combining the experience of sexual arousal with repetitive viewing. It also teaches us how to have sex that requires a person to not be a complex emotionally unique human being. It doesn't teach us that caring fun should be mutual, that mutuality should be desirable, that sexual acts need to be consensual, or that pleasure need not be linked to the gross objectification and degradation of real human beings, turned into images. Pornography does teach us (over and over and over again) that women like being forced to have sex, or that women want sex so much they'll do anything, including being completely degraded, to get it. What pornography teaches boys and girls is that being a pimp is good, and that being a whore is inevitable. That no girl is ever a whore, no matter how much she has had sex, is not something pornography or Abstinence-Only programs want you to know. Pornography wants you to think that a lot of their brands of sex is good. Abstinence-only programs want you to think that their rules are right.

If you believe, deep down, that digitally or surgically altered body parts are desirable, that they make a person sexier, you have been sufficiently brainwashed by pimps and surgeons who make a lot of money marketing this inhumane idea. I recognise that for some transgendered people, surgery is desired, but not so someone else can think they are sexy. Some transgendered people, not all, desire some forms of surgery because it makes them feel more like themselves. There's a big difference between doing things to bring ourselves closer to who you are, deep down, and doing things to make others find us more desirable. Intersex people often have the opposite problem: decisions are made for us, usually when we are very young, obviously without our consent, about being surgically altered even when it is not medically necessary. This is a gross violation of our bodies. We learn a lot of things about gender and sex, and most of it is not healthy or useful.

What pornography and Abstinence-Only "sex ed programs" have in common is that they are each extremely anti-sex while deceptively claiming not to be. (If you are interested in reading more about how Abstinance-Only programs fail teens, click here.)

Our bodies can experience lots of kinds of pleasure, under safe and respectful circumstances. The sex that is had in heterosexual marriages can be and often is, boring, awful, and assaultive. When that's what sex in marriage is, it's not good or "holy". Heterosexual marriage does not come with a guarantee that sex, or married life beyond sex, will be respectful, healthy, or safe. Sex with men who act as if women (or other men) are objects or things to be controlled and used, or worse, is not good for anyone. It erodes self-esteem, destroys self-awareness, and makes people believe that they should be treated, or treat themselves, like images--flattened out non-human beings.

Sexting turns us into flattened out non-human beings. The images can turn us on because we live in a society that says being three dimensional, being authentic, being unique, is not sexy, and being "a thing", an image, for someone to possess is hot.

But you don't have to be able to see to have good sex. You don't have to be able-bodied either. What you have to be is present, self-aware, and empathic. You have to care if someone is being hurt or is being made uncomfortable. You have to know how to tell someone is uncomfortable or being hurt when they don't say so out loud. You have to know that sex is not an obligation, or a healthy route to becoming popular, or a successful way to gain self-esteem if you feel worthless.

Digital technology that allows sex to be flattened out promotes the idea that people are things, are not of much worth, and are certainly not worth as much as the digital technology itself.

When you create an image of your physical self inside a piece of digital technology, you become something that is less than who you are. You become one thing among many, a two-dimensional image in a cyber-universe of these same kinds of images. You become a tiny slice of who you are. Your wholeness as a human being, greater than just your gender or sexuality is sliced up when you make yourself into a flat image. Human beings are naturally designed to not look or be exactly like anyone else. If you believe in God, that's what God created: uniquely valuable fully human beings. When you are collapsed into a picture that tells the receiver "This is who I want to be for you and this is what I am for" you rob yourself of the opportunity to share the wholeness of yourself with another person. You become a product. You become something that can be digitally passed around and looked at as if you didn't have a history that includes complicated feelings and changes in mood or opinion. If you've ever felt regret after doing something sexual that made you feel like less than all of who you are, that's one very good reason not to turn yourself, forever, into a flat thing.

There's also a very dangerous assumption in Abstinence-only messages, that is also in pornography; that assumption is that kids are only sexually approached by other children, and that teens only approach other teenagers. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, three different times before the age of thirteen, I can tell you that adults seek out children and teenagers for sex, and that those adults don't give a damn about who you really are. They are well-versed in talking to you like they care about you but underneath it all what they want is selfish and destructive. What they want is for you to make them feel good, for you to give them pleasure, for you to exist for them. We exist for ourselves and each other collectively, not for any one adult or individual. And any adults who make other people, of whatever age, feel like they exist only for them are emotionally messed up human beings to be avoided.

I know far too many other survivors of incest, child rape, child sexual assault, child molestation, traumatic fondling and kissing by a drunk, stoned, or soberly abusive relative or adult friend of the family. Because that was my introduction to sex, I didn't think much of myself. I thought I was dirty and bad to the core because bad, dirty things were done to me. I thought I couldn't be whole. I thought I existed to be used, or to use other people.

No one has to have sex, and no one should be made to have sex. And, sex can be enjoyed alone. If you can't enjoy sex alone without using images of flattened out people, find out why. If you have a choice, break the habit. The idea that we need images to have sex is sold to you by pimps and predators; they want us to believe that having sex is best or most sexy when someone is turned into a thing. If you believe this, and especially if you are the one making someone into a thing in order to experience sexual feelings, consider the cost to your own and others' humanity of having learned that lesson.

Most predators don't behave like strangers. They look like daddy, or an uncle, or brother, or grandfather. They look like a church priest, a family doctor, or a neighbor you've known since you were very young.

Here is a link to one National Sex Offender Registry. Check and see if anyone who is around you is on this list. MySpace is a breeding ground for sexual predators. Keep your page set to private, and make it available only to only those you have known, and can trust, in non-cyber life.

Know that once you become a flattened thing to be used, adult sexual predators can and will try and get those images of you. And they may try and find you to take more images, or to take more from you than anyone has the right to take. I was lucky that I was abused at a time before there were cell phones with cameras. I am sure the married heterosexual man who sexually assaulted me, and possibly my other abusers as well, would have documented my worst moments alive. And if they had done so, they'd be out on the Internet, impossible for me to collect and destroy. Part of my life, a a very personal part of who I am, would increasingly not belong to me if the perp had one of those cameras. I'm glad he didn't.

We cannot control all of what happens to us. One thing we often can control is whether or not we turn ourselves into a thing.

On Being a White Jew in Racist Amerikkka: comments and discussion

The image to the right is the cover of a book recommended to me. I have not read it, and am concerned and troubled by its title. It reinforces the idea that "Jew" = "white" or perhaps "off-white" which very effectively invisibilises Jews of color inside and outside the U.S. Now, on with the discussion.

Valerie, a frequent visitor to ARP, and I have been engaging in a discussion elsewhere on this blog that I believe ought to have its own space. I feel this way particularly because the comments have existed only, until now, under an initial post that is primarily about women of color and the Academy. As the comments there thus far are not centrally focused on the politics, experiences, or perspectives of women of color and women of color's presence in the Academy, I'd like to keep comments there open to such a discussion.

Meanwhile, there is a much needed on-going discussion traveling around the U.S. and abroad, including here at the moment, about the degrees to which being Jewish and white can be or is the same thing as being Gentile and white, structurally, institutionally, historically, culturally, and especially politically. As should be clear, not all Jews are of Eastern (or Western) European descent primarily or at all. There are Jews of color, of all colors, across the globe in every continent. With that, I'll post the comments, including the newest ones, below.

Valerie wrote:
As a Jew, I have to say that neither my parents nor I have ever felt anything other than White. I'd feel like a bit of a poseur trying to claim anything like the oppression of WoC.

Sorry to be so persnickety on your blog. I really do appreciate your writing, and this really was a pretty brilliant entry.


Julian responded:
Hi Valerie.

Thank you for bringing up this issue! I *really* welcome and appreciate your comment, and, just to be clear, persnickety remarks are very welcome here! No apologies are necessary. : )

Speaking now from my own experience, I've met many white Jews from and beyond the U.S. who do not consider themselves to be white. And as a U.S. white Jew, I strongly disagree with them about this, in terms of how race is and has been defined and enforced in the United States and most of white supremacist Europe for one to two hundred years. If "we" are in nations whose ruling population has distinguished races with terms such as Black and Colored and White (think white South Africa), I believe the Ashkenazim fall into the white category unambiguously! Then again, I've never set foot in the white areas of South Africa.

What constitutes being "of color" (racially, ethnically, and politically) varies widely; some people of color and whites include white folks in the population termed "people of color"; I do not.

Unlike you, I have felt something other than white as a U.S. citizen: the historically white supremacist ads by Abercrombie and Fitch have no use for me, for example; "All-American" is rarely a Jew of any ethnicity or race, if being Jewish is identified as such in their ads.

I think the experience of Jewishness as it pertains to being white, among the Ashkenazim only, is very varied. There are places I know of where homophobia, anti-Black racism, and anti-Semitism/anti-Jewish bigotry are each strongly and virulently held and expressed among heterosexual Gentile and/or Christian white boys and men against those who are perceived of as "other". (They don't tend to view any girls and women, including white ones, too favorably either.)

Any neo-Nazis or Klanspeople I run into are not likely to regard me as white, and could beat or kill me because I'm not their idea of "white". Of course being gay also does nothing for my level of "acceptability" with those folks.

The Ashkenazim, as well as the Sephardim and the Mizrahim were all found to be "[not-white]non-Aryan" under European Nazi rule--at least as Nazis ridiculously while lethally defined the term "Aryan". Neo-Nazis still consider any Jew to not be white, or to be "impure". As if any white person is pure! (Again, don't get me started!)

Any Jew in the U.S. of entirely European descent (let's say north of Spain), particularly of Eastern European descent, I regard as white, in terms of race-related privileges and entitlements as I understand and experience them.

And, also in my experience, U.S. white Jews do not collectively have the standing, status, or level of entrenched occupational presence or colonising and controlling white supremacist force that Gentile whites do, particularly those Gentiles of Western European Christian descent. In Israel, yes. In the U.S., no. I see Israel, among other things, as an increasingly violent white male supremacist State. (And the Jews there are not comparable to white U.S. Christians, in any historical or political reality.)

Even given all that, I personally and politically consider the U.S. Ashkenazim, generally speaking, to be racially white. But not so the Sephardim or Mizrahim, inside or outside of the U.S.

I think those of us who are raised and treated by non-Jewish whites as whites who "happen to be Jewish" (don't get me started!), should own that albeit ethnically marginalised privilege. And, of course, Jewish folks do not often occupy one ethnic, political, racial, or cultural location. Some Ashkenazic Jews I have known have last names that have been anglocised (Greenblatt to Green, for example), and are fair-skinned and light-haired enough to "pass" as white throughout their lives. For me, if they are not religious, that means they ARE unambiguously white.

In my view it works this way: if "feminist" or "profeminist" implies whiteness, that's a gross distortion of reality, even while it is reinforced by the media reporting on feminism and the Academy teaching it. If "lesbian" or "gay" is equated with being white, in white-dominated, white-controlled social circles, that too is racist. If "Jew" equals or implies white, that's just as politically problematic, as it invisibilises so many Jews around the world, including within the U.S., who do not and never did speak Yiddish, for example, and who may have no relationship whatsoever to Eastern (or Western) Europe.

I welcome more discussion about this.

Valerie replied:
You have actually made a brilliant point here. While I'm the fair-haired and pale-skinned daughter of Eastern-European atheists who made it clear that they considered their trips to synagogue a part of being "culturally" Jewish, and while there are many people with similar experiences in power, I should not speak on behalf of Sephardim or those who are more religious.

In the extremely anti-semitic environment in Texas where I grew up, I did not feel white, but since moving north, I have always felt white. Perhaps the whiteness of Jews varies according to local attitudes?

There's this great book, How the Jews Became White Folks, which sort of perfectly explains how I can feel and operate as white while my aunt does not. I haven't had any major setbacks due to my heritage, but she has had to run from genocidal maniacs to a country where she was treated as a burden and occasionally threatened with violence.

Valerie added:
I guess that what rubs me the wrong way is that many many Jews in this country who have never experienced any social role other than whiteness appear to use a legacy of persecution to conjure anti-semitism at will. They are extremely prone to doing this whenever the topic of Israeli occupation comes up, and then blythely informing me that I am a "self-loathing" Jew. The fact that I have actually had to worry about my physical safety due to my Jewishness and they have not doesn't come up, possibly because they don't want to discuss the ways in which I'm probably much more attuned to what actual anti-semitism looks like than they are.

Julian responded:
Thanks for continuing the conversation, Valerie, and for alerting me to that book. I think another important addition to this conversation is James Baldwin's classic essay on African-American non-Jews and white Jews in the U.S., found here. I think there is a core way in which we are in deep agreement and in this response I want to be sure I make that explicitly clear. What follows is a direct reply to your last comment to date.

Yes, I agree, there are many white folks in the U.S. who are also Jewish, who claim to be "not-white" because they are Jews. And to that I say "Bullshit". And I'll add that my experience alone, or my feelings about my own whiteness are not central to the discussion of whether or not I am politically racially white. I am white here. I live each day as a white person in the thoroughly racist United States of Amerikkka, which means I benefit every day from this privilege and status.

As for the experiences of Middle Eastern, Eastern European, African, and U.S. Jews in Israel, as I have never been to Israel, nor been close friends with anyone who did, I do feel qualified to engage in much discussion about this issue. I am experientially ignorant on the topic, and to pretend otherwise would likely become glaringly apparent soon enough. This doesn't mean I am without a political perspective on current events in Israel, woefully ignorant though it may be. I can say that I believe Israel is a currently behaving as a white male supremacist colonising racist State. I understand that some Jews and non-Jews argue convincingly it has always been that. If one wishes to discuss the racist conditions some Jews experience, one need only note how Ethiopian Jews are (mis)treated in Israel by non-Black Jews. The Israeli military's decimation of regional Palestinians--Israeli or not, who often have far fewer economic privileges than Israeli Jews, is further evidence of blatant injustice running rampant there. And, also, I have never lived in a country where "my people" believe themselves, correctly or not, to be regionally despised and threatened with annihilation. That "my people" includes Palestinian and other Middle Eastern Jews, must not be forgotten. Too often their stories are left out of the news reports. But the only population of Jews in the U.S. facing extinction, that I know of, are those whose race, ethnicity, and heritage is also American Indian.


I remember sending out something on white privilege, probably written by Tim Wise, who is also Jewish, btw, to some Jewish and non-Jewish white friends of mine. One white person wrote back that she never thought of herself as white before, only as Jewish; that she sided with people of color, not with white people, if such "lines in the political sand" were being drawn; such lines are not drawn, as far as I can tell, and if they are the tide washes them away twice daily.

I understood this came from how her parents framed up race, ethnically, in her home of origin--mostly in terms of past generations of people who lived elsewhere under very different circumstances. She had consciousness about race and racism in the U.S., and so it stunned me that she'd think of herself as "not-white" here, now, in this grossly assimilationist country she and I were both assimilated into. I'd met her family, knew a bit about her upbringing, including where she'd lived in this country, and none of that information led me to conclude she was anything but white here. And Jewish. Definitely Jewish too. So I want to confirm, affirm, and validate your irritation with white Jews who pretend not to be white, or who think we can claim "non-white" status here, just because we are also Jewish. This is not to say that there do not remain, globally, places where conditions exist such that being white and Jewish has effectively equaled being not-white. It comes down to the ways those particular nationally or regionally empowered race supremacists have defined and controlled the meanings of racial identity through systems of exclusion and institutions of genocide.

My own family fled pogroms, as not-yet-white Jews, not as white Gentiles, in Eastern Europe. My father was not born in this country. I was. He fully assimilated and so I grew up partly in a home that was secular, celebrating Christmas and Easter as "U.S. American" holidays. (Those occasions means had much more to do with Capitalism than "Christ", and at least as much to do with the Pagan elements subversively absorbed by the Christian churches, such as decorating trees and coloring eggs.) In any racially diverse social space it was assumed he was white. Everywhere I have lived I have been white. Everywhere I have traveled to I have remained white. Even encountering, not infrequently, anti-Jewish sentiments, stereotypes, and bigotry hasn't rendered me "less white". It may have made me feel less white. But that's not the same thing.

I'll add that there are ALSO plenty of non-Jewish white folks who ALSO claim to be "not white", sometimes due to economic or other forms of persecution. I encounter this belief most earnestly and callously among Gentile poor and working class white folks I know, but it shows up among the middle class as well, including, among the upper middle class. Only because my social circle is primarily female, some very white women have expressed to me some variation on "Oprah has far more privilege than me." This is a classic retort usually rhetorically designed to mix apples with oranges, as if me being gay and Jewish, for example, somehow means I don't also have economic, education, white, and male privileges. Whites, in my experience, are often clumsy and careless in supposing that because we are marginalised or oppressed in some other way, by gender, sexuality, or class, for example, that that means we don't still have our white privilege solidly and institutionally intact.

Related to this: a white, middle class gay male acquaintance, who was my age, once told me an overtly anti-Black racist joke--not the kind that I could "misunderstand", adding it was OK for him to tell it to me because he's gay, and it's a joke originally told by Whoopie Goldberg in a video he saw of one of her stand-up performances. Somehow, in his politically delusional mind, being white and gay meant he was also Black (?), or that gay white guys experience enough of what Black people do who are lesbian, gay, or neither to qualify us as "one people". One thing white people don't experience is being Black, and I let him know it wasn't OK with me that he shared that joke with me--no matter who originally told it, that since it was delivered from him to me, I didn't think it was funny at all, and that such an attempt to bond with me over such a bizarre understanding of "shared oppressions and permissions" would undoubtedly fail to win me over as a friend. I promptly cut him out of my life and have not spoken to him since. That I could afford do so speaks to some of my own privileges.)

But back to the issue of Oprah Winfrey having more privileges than any given white person. "Being more privileged" doesn't mean "having more white privilege" necessarily. It may mean having far more economic privilege and power, but even that is not as secure for any person of color as it is among the white rich (in the white supremacist countries I'm aware of, at least), even if the white person's wealth was largely accumulated in their own lifetime, as, obviously, was Oprah Winfrey's. Oprah must obey white supremacist rules of conduct if she is to maintain her social standing, and keep her wealth. If she insisted, against the wishes of her white producers and corporate sponsors, on doing a series of programs on her talk show about white supremacy, having guests like Andrea Smith, Marimba Ani, and Tim Wise, with her not arguing against them, she'd (and we'd) find out rather quickly how tenuous her "social standing" is among whites. If she agreed with Andrea, Marimba, and Tim that this country is currently deeply and viciously white supremacist, murderously racist, and aggressively genocidal, and that all white people participate in and benefit from this racist system, we'd see her white audience tune out, her producers be threatened to "get things back on track", and her corporate pals quickly "unfriend" her.

Second, Ms. Winfrey still faces anti-Black racism every day of her life, and can't live a day without doing so, no matter what middle class white folks think her life is like. The very fact that many white folks apparently look to her as a "humanitarian who happens to be Black" role model is founded in a deeply racist assumption about the capacity of the individual to escape structural oppression and identity, in this case as a formerly impoverished African-American woman. Too many whites--women and men--assume that Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey have "made it" into Whiteboyland just because they are rich. Sorry, not so fast.

Ms. Winfrey and Dr. Cosby are also called the n word, and she is also called the b word (among other misogynist-racist terms), routinely by bigoted whites--women and men, and by bigoted men--white and of color--across the economic and social spectrum. And those whites and men, often one and the same, get to feel superior (or not) when they do so. Regardless of how they feel hurling the n word or b word around in this way, they are exercising their white/male entitlements to do so; they are enacting their white/male privilege; they are maintaining white/male supremacist power.

Ms. Winfrey and Dr. Cosby will only "benefit" to the degrees they speak in accordance and in collaboration with corporate white heterosexual male Amerikkka. It goes without say that white some white Jews and some people of color do collaborate quite profoundly with the powers that be, no group collaborates more so than economically and sexually privileged white men. White women are marginalised and oppressed due to gender, every day, more extremely so if lesbian or poor.

An activist I know who is of color has noted how white women and men of color are in uniquely troubled places, structurally and socially. Women of color are so marginalised that they have relatively little to lose by resisting. White men are so rewarded that it is highly unlikely we will collectively organise against the powers that be ourselves. But white women and men of color are caught in a zone where the white male supremacist rulebooks offer this: "if you play your cards just right, you might be rewarded"**.

**Fine print: Rewarded as an individual, never as a group.

What I have noticed is this, and this is an observation about the coercive power of structural location, not genetics or biology. The institutional power of "whiteness" and "manhood" is neither elucidated by the Human Genome project, nor atrributable to hormones and brain structure, much as white male supremacist sociobiologists whimper on and on about how much this is the case. White men are, on the whole, hopeless. (And I welcome white men to rise up against white male supremacy in a way that is fully accountable to women of color, and please, PLEASE, prove me wrong.) Some political white women disproportionately focus activist energies against "patriarchy" and not white supremacy because they are implicated as oppressors when the focus is on white supremacy, and, just like white men, they don't, collectively, relish the idea of investigating what their privilege really means. Men of color disproportionately focus on racism, not on patriarchy, not on male supremacy, because to do so implicates them directly as structural and interpersonal oppressors of women, particularly and usually the women of their own ethnic groups.

In primarily liberal to progressive circles I have been part of, there is a certain kind of useless oppressor-guilt that results in privileged people feeling not remorseful, not non-oppressively rageful, but instead sheepish and sluggish about owning the merits of their status, as they/we benefit all the while. Among white Jews, I see this liberal guilt and sluggishness impeding own our understanding and responsible action as whites. We wish not to deal with the fact that our whiteness, like anyone else's whiteness, is a socially real manifestation of power that is unjust and deadly to people of color, some of whom are also Jewish.

Breaking the Silence: Fulfilling The Promise, by Marimba Ani

I just found this statement, this declaration, by Marimba Ani. It is linked to here:
"Breaking the Silence: Fulfilling The Promise"

[An excerpt follows:]
It is now Tuesday, November 4, 2008. Is this the final act of assimilation, accommodation, and integration? Is this how we are fulfilling our promise to the Ancestors? Has America made restitution for what was done to them, still being done to us? Is the Maafa over or has it merely morphed into another, more insidious form of genocide? Are we now experiencing a life-threatening condition of cultural AIDS in which our immune system has turned on itself? Has the Yurugu virus mutated so that it looks like us? Are we participating in our own self-destruction?

We are witnessing a time of the most blatant acts of genocide such as “Katrina” (Maafa - 2005), in which thousands of our people were slaughtered, left to die, placed in disease-producing holding pens, forcibly relocated, separated from their families and support-systems, and their (our) children “lost”, all this for the purpose of corporate profit and for the illegal misappropriation of land.

[Text by Marimba Ani; for the rest of this work, click on the title-in-quotes above the except.]
END OF POST.

Marimba Ani's Critique of Western Civilization

It is fortunate for all of us that portions of Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, Marimba Ani's brilliant book of philosophy, sociology, ethnography, ethics, and politics, is available to us online.

Below I link to those portions of two chapters from that book. It should go without say that Yurugu ought to be read in its entirety. It is my strong believe that that any literate person from the West ought to be required to read it. I believe much of men's radical perspectives on race, gender, and civilization rises out of the work and perspectives of many women including Marimba Ani. Women, particularly women of color, have been telling this truth-tale among others for centuries, only to be silenced by the white noise of Western male arrogance and aggression.

Part of that arrogance is defining Great Philosophers as people who are usually white, and always men. Part of the aggression is endemic rape and the on-going Western patriarchal colonisation and exploitation of women and girls, also called gynocide. Gynocide, the atrocity, may also include the overtly organised or seemingly random execution of women and girls by men, but does not have to include that dimension of human destruction to appropriately describe what female human beings, raised as girls and women, endure interpersonally and institutionally through white male supremacist values and behavior.

Biographical information about Dr. Marimba Ani may be found here.

An except from chapter 1 of Ani's book Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of
European Cultural Thought and Behavior may be found here. It is called "Utamawazo: The Cultural Structuring of Thought".

An excerpt of chapter 6 of her book Yurugu may be found here. It is called "Hypocrisy as a Way of Life".
END OF POST.

The Savage and the Sustainable: Part Four [of four] (Derrick Jensen)

Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1:

'There's another problem, though, that trumps all of these others. It has to do with a characteristic of this civilization unshared even by other civilizations. It is the deeply and most-often-invisibly held beliefs that there is really only one way to live, and that we are the one-and-only possessors of that way. It becomes our job then to propagate this way, by force when necessary, until there are no other ways to be. Far from being a loss, the eradication of these other ways to be, these other cultures, is instead an actual gain, since Western Civilization is the only way worth being anyway: we're doing ourselves a favor by getting rid not only of obstacles blocking our access to resources but reminders that other ways to exist, allowing our fantasy to sidle that much closer to reality; and we're doing the heathens a favor when we raise them from their degraded state of society. If they don't want to join us, simple: we kill them. Another way to say all of this is that something really grimly alchemical happens when we combine the arrogance of the dictionary definition, which holds this civilization superior to all other cultural forms; hypermilitarism, which allows civilization to expand and exploit essentially at will; and a belief, held even by such powerful and relentless critics of civilization as Lewis Mumford, in the desirability of cosmopolitanism, that is, the transposability of discoveries, values, modes of thought, and so on over time and space. The twentieth-century name for that grimly alchemical transmutation is genocide: the eradication of cultural difference, its sacrifice on the altar of the one true way, on the altar of the centralization of perception, the conversion of a multiplicity of moralities all dependent on location and circumstance to one morality based on the precepts of the ever-expanding machine, the surrender of individual perception (as through writing and through the conversion of that and other arts to consumables) to predigested perceptions, ideas, and values imposed by external authorities who with all their hearts--or what's left of them--believe in, and who benefit by, the centralization of power. Ultimately, then, the story of this civilization is the story of the reduction of the world's tapestry of stories to only one story, the best story, the real story, the most advanced story, the most developed story, the story of the power and the glory that is Western Civilization.'
[END OF PART FOUR].

The Savage and the Sustainable: Part Three (Derrick Jensen)

Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1:

'I have another problem with Mumford's statement. In claiming that the widening of communication and economic intercourse are admirable, he seems to have forgotten--and this is strange, considering the sophistication of the rest of his analysis--that this widening can only be universally beneficial when all parties act voluntarily and under circumstances of relatively equivalent power. I'd hate to have to make the case, for example, that the people of Africa--perhaps 100 million of whom died because of the slave trade, and many more whom find themselves dispossessed and/or impoverished today--have benefited from their "economic intercourse" with Europeans. The same can be said for Aborigines, Indians, the people of pre-colonial India, and so on.

'I want to reexamine one thing Mumford wrote, in part because he makes an argument for civilization I've seen replicated so many times elsewhere, and that actually leads, I think, to some of the very serious problems we face today. He concluded the section that I quoted above, and I reproduce it here just so you don't have to flip back a couple of pages: "ultimately the purpose [is] to make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered." But just as a widening of economic intercourse is only beneficial to everyone when all exchanges are voluntary, so, too, the imposition of one group's values and purposes onto another, or its appropriation of the other's discoveries, can lead only to the exploitation and diminution of the latter in favor of the former. That this "exchange" helps all was commonly argued by early Europeans in America, as when Captain John Chester wrote that the Indians were to gain "the knowledge of our faith," while the Europeans would harvest "such riches as the country hath." It was argued as well by American slave owners in the nineteenth century: philosopher George Fitzhugh stated that "slavery educates, refines, and moralizes the masses by bringing them into continual intercourse with masters of superior minds, information, and morality." And it's just commonly argued today by those who would teach the virtues of blue jeans, Big Macs TM, Coca-cola TM, Capitalism TM, and Jesus Christ TM, to the world's poor in exchange for dispossessing them of their landbases and forcing them to work in sweatshops.

'Another problem is that Mumford's statement reinforces a mindset that leads inevitably to unsustainability, because it presumes that discoveries, inventions, creations, works of art and thought, and values and purposes are transposable over space, that is, that they are separable from both the human context and the landbase that created them. Mumford's statement unintentionally reveals perhaps more than anything else the power of the stories that hold us in thrall to the machine, as he put it, that is civilization: even in brilliantly dissecting the myth of the machine, Mumford fell back into that very same myth by seeming to implicitly accept the notion that ideas or works of art or discoveries are like tools in a toolbox, and can be meaningfully and without negative consequence used out of their original context: thoughts, ideas, and art as tools rather than as tapestries inextricably woven from and into a community of human and nonhuman neighbors. But discoveries, works of thought, and purposes that may work very well in the Great Plains may be harmful to the Pacific Northwest, and even moreso in Hawai'i. To believe that this potential transposition is positive is the same old substitution of what is distant for what is near: if I really want to know how to live Tu'nes, I should pay attention to Tu'nes.
[END OF PART THREE OF FOUR]

The Savage and the Sustainable: Part Two (Derrick Jensen)

Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1:

'The first is that it presumes that uncivilized people do not communicate or participate in economic transactions beyond their local communities. Many do. Shells from the Northwest Coast found their way into the hands of Plains Indians, and buffalo robes often ended up on the coast. (And let's not even mention noncivilized people communicating with their nonhuman neighbors, something rarely practiced by the civilized: talk about restricting yourself to your own community!) In any case, I'm not certain that the ability to send emails back and forth to Spain or to watch television programs beamed out of Los Angeles makes my life particularly richer. It's far more important, useful, and enriching, I think, to get to know my neighbors. I'm frequently amazed to find myself sitting in a room full of fellow human beings, all of us staring at a box and listening to a story concocted and enacted by people far away. I have friends who know Seinfeld's neighbors better than their own. I, too, can get lost in valuing the unreality of the distant over that which surrounds me every day. I have to confess I can navigate the mazes of the computer game Doom 2: Hell on Earth far better than I can find my way along the labyrinthine game trails beneath the trees outside my window, and I understand the intricacies of Microsoft Word far better than I do the complex dance of rain, sun, predators, prey, scavengers, plants, and soil in the creek a hundred yards away. The other night I wrote till late, and finally turned off my computer to step outside and say goodnight to the dogs. I realized, then, that the wind was blowing hard through the tops of the redwood trees, and the trees were sighing and whispering. Branches were clashing, and in the distance I heard them cracking. Until that moment I had not realized such as symphony was taking place so near, much less had I gone out to participate in it, to feel the wind blow my hair and to feel the tossed rain hit me in the face. All of the sounds of night had been drowned out by the monotone whine of my computer's fan. Just yesterday I saw a pair of hooded mergansers playing on the pond outside my bedroom. Then last night I saw a television program in which yet another lion chased yet another zebra. Which of those two scenes makes me richer? This perceived widening of communication is just another replication of the problem of the visual and musical arts, because given the impulse for centralized control that motivates civilization, widening communication in this case really means reducing us from active participants in our own lives and in the lives of those around us to consumers sucking words and images from some distant sugar tit.
[END OF PART TWO]