This blog exists to support liberatory collectivist activism that seeks to uproot patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. It also acts to center the experiences, theories, and agendas of radical and feminist women of color.
I've listened to enough about post-structuralism and post-modernism and a few of its spokes-euro-men to know that labeling something as "post-" doesn't mean "after" as much as it means "inclusive of a critique of". So post-modernism isn't simply a period of time that is no longer modern, but it is a period in which modernism becomes identifiable as a philosophical-cultural-political set of ideologies, values, and conditions set into society but shaken into awareness of what it does through post-modern cultural and social-political analysis and activism.That most critiques are well-contained, "discursively", by and within the Academy is a major problem to me. And, that it is too often raced and global elites who comprise the authors of the new Canon, is also a serious concern.
France's white gay male philosopher of social power, Michel Foucault, conceptualised the episteme, which, as I understand it anyway, refers to the body of knowledge that is knowable at any given time, in any given era. So, for example, it is common among those of us who critique patriarchy to note when reading a man's sexist writings, "Well, he didn't live in a time where a feminist critique of patriarchy existed so he wouldn't be likely to even know how deeply patriarchal ideologies, values, and conditions were shaping his own work." There's an assumption there that without critiques of the societies we live in, we are limited in what we can do about their oppressive elements and practices, in part because we can't adequately name them. Naming "patriarchal harm and atrocity" as such, is terribly important if we're going to try and stop it.
What often turns out to be true, however, is that there were various forms of what is now called "feminist" consciousness and critique in those times that men wrote their sexist work, but the men never bothered to care enough to read or listen to the women speaking out.
I offer the above only to say that I get that "post-feminism" isn't, strictly speaking, "anti-feminist" although from my own perspective it is functionally and effectively anti-feminist. This is to say, post-feminist authors don't identify, generally, as anti-feminists. But the lack of sustained attention of what to do to challenge and end patriarchal hierarchies and harm, shifting instead to focusing on the problems of feminism, means that patriarchy is allowed to live another day, year, century, or millennium, assuming capitalist patriarchies don't murder all Life on Earth in the mean time.
What some post-feminists I'm aware of seem to want us to believe is that post-feminism is feminism with a perspective on and more expansive critique of itself--of feminisms of the past and perhaps also the present. What is, for me, tremendously problematic with this view, is the assumption that feminism has ever existed in any linear fashion, within one cultural tradition, as one thing, or as one main trunk with a few major branches, all of which can be discussed in a few volumes of academic writings, organised neatly into chapters covering various periods of time, so that "We know where we've been and where we're going" in this project of "making a better feminism".
I'm summarise my problems with such a view.
Feminism isn't one view, one perspective, or one movement.
It doesn't exist in one culture, one era, one society, or, even, in one hemisphere of the globe. Even social change movements termed "Radical Feminist" aren't one thing, arrived at by a few key activists collectively agreeing on the point of view they'll all promote. White women such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, Janice Raymond, Sonia Johnson, and Catharine MacKinnon NEVER got together ever, and never agreed on what "The [White] Perspective" on patriarchy ought to be, or, even, that there was only one kind of patriarchy. Some of those white women agreed on some things. And during that time there were many activist women of color doing work on multiple fronts, not *just* on issues impacting *only* women which doesn't make that work "non-feminist" unless you define feminist work as focusing only on women. But what if white women's activism only focuses on white women, ignoring or marginalising the oppressive realities women of color live with that are more complex if only because women of color are oppressed by three groups (men of color, white women, and white men), not one? Is that work "radical"? Who gets to decide the answers: only elite academics?
Even if we pretend a lot of those white women did agree with each other, they could only, at best, represent U.S. liberal white feminism or U.S. radical white feminism. Because prior to and concurrent with white feminism were other feminisms within and outside the U.S., many of which were and are far more radical than the U.S. middle class white kind is capable of being. Black feminisms including Womanism and economic justice work that wasn't always identified as "feminist" even while being led by Black women directing focused campaigns against male control of them and their housing, Indigenous feminisms which aren't always called "feminism", Latina, Asian, and Arab feminisms aren't part of "the Western Academic Canon" of the radical feminism that is white but dares not speak its color.
Andrea Dworkin, for one, was quite critical of any white feminism that didn't have consciousness about and a radical critique of how whiteness and class privilege impairs feminist revolutionary action and theory. Too many other white feminists, and most white anti-feminists have seemed to me to be content with ignoring, invisibilising, or denying the whiteness, Westernness, and class privilege of their work, and "other-ising" the work of feminists of color.
For me, for some time, radical feminisms of color have been "feminism" with white feminist perspectives informing and adding to those views, NOT the other way around. I don't--any longer--see radical white feminism as THE radical feminism which must be contended with, or addressed, or placed front and center in any and every discussion about feminism. I deeply appreciate Patricia Hill Collins work Black Feminist Thought for not believing such intellectual and activist work has to be posited only or primarily as a response to white feminist thought.
Now, if feminists do this, can you even imagine how wrong patriarchs are about feminism? They're so very wrong about it that they seem quite content to promote "all feminism" or "all radical feminism" as about twenty "misandrist" quotes and trying to convince the readers of YahooAnswers and other discussion sites that "those quotes" are the heart and soul of feminism, without ever noticing that the quotes are wrong, from fiction, or, at least, ALL WHITE.
A crucial shift in feminist movement was when the U.S. Academy decided Women's Studies meant primarily studying feminism, not critiquing patriarchy. I remember the shift. The U.S. Academy has never been particularly interested in promoting anti-patriarchal activism, especially radical, revolutionary activism. The Academy may, from time to time, be content to study some contained era of activism organised around a particular issue, such as achieving the vote for women, often giving it a numbered "wave". But where in the Academy are the courses teaching women, men, and the rest of us how to actively resist patriarchal atrocity and work to overcome its institutions, systems, and interpersonal ways of being?
This isn't to say that feminist theorists and activists ought not be self-critical. It is to say they're rarely to never UNcritical of their own feminisms. Imperfectly, like every other theoretical framework or ground of activist resistance, feminism, as a response to patriarchal abuse and ideology, has maintained a critical perspective both on patriarchy and on itself. Unlike patriarchs. The anti-feminist dudes pretend to not notice there is such a thing as patriarchy and are far too often politically determined to make feminist movements seem absurd and unnecessary so that boys can still be men in the most masculinist sense.
Antifeminists' most common mistake (or conscious conceit) is to posit "Feminism" or "Radical Feminism" as one thing. The one thing they often assume it is is white.
Where post-feminists can sing in harmony with anti-feminists is in pretending that things like "colonised women of color's critique of racist patriarchy" hasn't been occurring all along. Historically and presently, radical women of color's work is not primarily something that has emerged in response to white women's feminism (that left women of color out). If professors in the Academy want to pretend that feminism was initially white and only then came under appropriate scrutiny and critique from women of color for making white women's views central to the analysis of "woman-in-patriarchy", well, they can do it. Within some white-majority and white-dominated communities, this did occur: women of color did challenge white writer and activists. But their anti-racist feminism didn't only exist to challenge white women; it has also challenged white men and men of color too. Feminism's various roots and branches, past and present, have always resided and strengthened in populations of women of color. Whether or not the racist elites of various Academies wanted to pay attention to those political activists and social analysts is another matter.
The word "censored" has replaced "adult" on Craigslist's services list.
In this video, Malika Saada Saar of The Rebecca Project for Human Rights and girls who have been trafficked by pimps and made available for rape on Craigslist speak out:
Craigslist cannot seem to accept that eliminating a link allowing human trafficking isn't a matter of "protecting free speech" as much as it's a matter of protecting the human rights of trafficked people from pimps and other predators, including procurers and consumers of trafficked humans.
How callous and privileged do the owner, executives, and administrators of a company have to be to accept as inevitable the practice of human trafficking and sexual slavery? How callous and privileged do they have to be to see it as a speech right to have access to trafficked people? How is that a primarily or most pertinently matter of speech? (And whose speech matters here, anyway?)
Is "protecting men's right and access to rentable or purchasable human beings for gross sexual exploitation and rape" really a right located and contained within the First Amendment? Is making human trafficking more difficult to accomplish and advertise most importantly an issue of some people being silenced? And within what ethical framework do we come to the conclusion that pimps and procurers' speech is more important than trafficked people's right to not be silenced by rape and other gross sexual abuse?
That Craigslist callously placed the word "censored" over its "adult services" link is not an indication to me that they "get it" about trafficking at all. First, it's disingenuous of Craigslist administrators to pretend that their point of upset is on the level of limits placed on allegedly "free speech". If it weren't for the fact that there "adult services" formerly termed "erotic services" was earning them a third of their annual profits, they wouldn't be so patriarchally pissed off to begin with. A "censor" is a State act, not an act of protest. People organising to protest human trafficking happening with Craigslist's participation isn't censoring of or to them. It is asking them to be accountable to what they are doing, and not pretend it is "adult" when children are involved or "erotic" when rape is involved.
Why the claim to being victimised by State censors (i.e., being "censored") when attorneys general wrote a request asking them to remove a service that requires child rape, sexual slavery and trafficking of women? How does the expression of speech by attorneys general and many public human rights advocates amount to an act of silencing Craigslist. They could have said "No" of course. There's no reason that couldn't have been their response, in "speech". That they elected to remove the link is something they can be responsible about or pass off as something they were somehow forced to do.
I am reminded of how attempts to hold battering husbands accountable and prevent them from obtaining on-going access to those spouses and children they abuse is posited by their activists and attorneys as "invasions of their rights", as if it ought to be considered a right to batter and abuse. In what ethical paradigm? A patriarchal one, perhaps. But in context of respecting the rights of all humans to be free from economic and political coercion and force leading directly to ones entrapment in systems of gross sexual abuse, the speech that ought to be seen as in need of protection is that of the raped and trafficked, not of the rapists and pimps.
Craigslist's "adult services" has been a portal through which predators access children so that the adults can rape the child. In a land ruled by the values of pimp-speech, wouldn't that be more appropriately be termed "child services"?
Does disingenuously denying the existence of child rape make something "adults-only"? I don't think so.
That extremely profitable part of their business used to be called "erotic services" until people complained that that language was misleading. What, after all, is erotic about human trafficking? And if human trafficking is your idea of "eroticism" does that mean you should be "free" to engage in "erotic activities"? I'd say no, if the rights of the trafficked matter as much as the rights of the pimps and procurers.
I wonder if sexism-positive liberals will make the case that sexually violating and traumatic acts that only occur due to human beings being systematically and internationally trafficked are "victimless" the way they do about "prostitution". If "prostitution" requires trafficking and rape, pimping and procuring, how does such activity not involve victimisation?
What pimps and procurers want us all to believe is that SOME class of children and women WANT to be trafficked, pimped, raped, and otherwise sexually exploited and abused. Their moral argument is that depriving that class of people the right to do what they are, according to pimps and procurers, on the Earth to do, is to limit their freedom. In what ethical universe is it a form of freedom for some classes or populations of people to be raped and enslaved?
To follow the logical phallusies of pimp-speech, one arrives at a peculiar place in time and space where being a slave is an act of volition not violation, agency not aggression, will not warfare, and discretion not domination. Only through the political prism of entitled and protected predation does one conclude that abolition work amounts to acts of censorship.
I reject pimp-speech--a coercive call to be a sexual slave in conditions where not being a slave results in gross deprivation of means of survival or death--as existing to liberate anyone. I reject Craigslist's claim that they have been censored as not only erroneous, but egregiously self-serving, by pretending that prostitutes' and pimps' speech is even the issue here. The issue is they want that third of their profits, annually. Why can't Craigslist's "spokespeople" exercise their responsibility to speak honestly about their wish to continue to allow human trafficking for the primary purpose of making money for pimps, with themselves as one of the pimps?
Why have they been "censoring" themselves from speaking the truth about what they have been doing in order to make money at great cost to girls' lives?
What follows next is from *here*:
Rebecca Project on CNN
Craigslist's shame: Child sex ads
by Malika Saada Saar, Special to CNN
Source CNN
Editor's note: Malika Saada Saar is the founder and executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights. The Rebecca Project is a nonprofit organization that advocates for justice, dignity and policy reform for vulnerable women and girls in the United States and in Africa.
(CNN) -- Last month, two girls trafficked for sex through the website Craigslist wrote an open letter to its founder, Craig Newmark, pleading with him to get rid of the adult services section, where sex ads are placed.
"I was first forced into prostitution when I was 11 years old by a 28-year-old man," "M.C." wrote. "I am not an exception. The man who trafficked me sold many girls my age, his house was called 'Daddy Day Care.'
"All day, me and other girls sat with our laptops, posting pictures and answering ads on Craigslist. He made $1,500 a night selling my body, dragging me to Los Angeles, Houston, Little Rock -- and one trip to Las Vegas in the trunk of a car. I am 17 now, and my childhood memories aren't of my family, going to middle school, or dancing at the prom. They are making my own arrangements on Craigslist to be sold for sex, and answering as many ads as possible for fear of beatings and ice water baths."
No one from Craigslist responded to M.C.
According to the most recent Department of Justice statistics, an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 children are sold for sex every year in the United States. Most are from 11 and 14 years old. Try for a moment to imagine your fifth-grade child, niece or sister, sold for sex.
If you live in a city, imagine that happening within one square mile of where you are right now. New York, Ohio, Georgia, Oregon and California have among the highest rates of trafficked teens. And it turns out that the best-known online trading post is not some sleazy child porn website, but the ubiquitous Craigslist, where you shop for cars, clothes and musical instruments.
Law enforcement officials and anti-trafficking organizations have repeatedly asked Craigslist to rein in its sex ads in an effort to stop the selling of children for sex.
Craig Newmark and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster have made some efforts to screen the site for children sold for sex and cooperate with law enforcement investigations. But for the most part, they have ignored such pleas, maybe because they just made an estimated $36 million in profits from these sex ads in the last year alone.
While Craigslist has made selling children a virtual stop-and-shop for predators, it alone doesn't by any means account for the explosion of child trafficking. Prostituting children has become a growth business for all sorts of criminal elements because it is hugely profitable and virtually unprosecuted.
The U.S. government annually spends 300 times more money to fight drug trafficking than it does to fight human trafficking, and the criminal penalties for trafficking cocaine, for example, are 20 times greater than the criminal penalties levied against those who buy and sell girls.
Although the government estimates hundreds of thousands of children have been sold for sex, only a few hundred of the pimps who victimize them have been prosecuted. Almost none of the "Johns" are prosecuted.
Let's be clear. The men who purchase girls for sex are no different from men who snatch children off the street for sex. Both are rapists. Period.
Whatever the circumstances, no child wants to sell her body to a stranger. In fact, no child is permitted to sell her body -- the law says they can't consent.
Yet arresting these perpetrators of child rape is rare, and prosecution is even rarer, according to the international anti-trafficking organization Shared Hope. Actress Demi Moore, who has vigorously joined the campaign against trafficking girls, calls it America's "dirty little secret." And it's true that while we applaud efforts to end trafficking in Cambodia or India, the similar plight of disadvantaged girls in this country is routinely ignored.
Changing this shameful situation requires three things:
First, the commitment of state and local governments to prosecute the men who buy and sell underage girls for sex to the full extent of the law. Those laws exist, yet they are rarely enforced.
Second, residential treatment must be available for girls rescued from trafficking, where they can feel safe and begin to heal. This will require recognizing that the sexual exploitation of underage girls is a human rights issue, as we have already done when it involves young girls in the developing world.
Third, Craigslist should set the industry example and shut down the adult services section until it can create a comprehensive surveillance and monitoring system that ensures children are not being bought and sold for sex.
You can do that, Craig. It might not stop child trafficking, but it will save many children like M.C. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Malika Saada Saar.
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For more on the project of the video-makers visit The Rebecca Project website.
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What follows is from The New York Times. Click on the title to link back.
SAN FRANCISCO — Craigslist, by shutting off its “adult services” section and slapping a “censored” label in its place, may be engaging in a high-stakes stunt to influence public opinion, some analysts say.
The word “censored” has replaced “adult” on Craigslist's services list.
Since blocking access to the ads as the Labor Day weekend began — and suspending a revenue stream that could bring in an estimated $44 million this year — Craigslist has refused to discuss its motivations. But using the word “censored” suggests that the increasingly combative company is trying to draw attention to its fight with state attorneys general over sex ads and to issues of free speech on the Internet.
The law has been on Craigslist’s side. The federal Communications Decency Act protects Web sites against liability for what their users post on the sites. And last year, the efforts of attorneys general were stymied when a federal judge blocked South Carolina’s attorney general from prosecuting Craigslist executives for listings that resulted in prostitution arrests.
“It certainly appears to be a statement about how they feel about being judged in the court of public opinion,” said Thomas R. Burke, a First Amendment lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine who specializes in Internet law and does not work for Craigslist. “It’s certainly the law that they’re not liable for it, but it’s another matter if the attorneys general are saying change your ways.”
Attorneys general and advocacy groups have continued to pressure the company to remove the “adult services” section. A letter from 17 state attorneys general dated Aug. 24 demanded that Craigslist close the section, contending that it helped facilitate prostitution and the trafficking of women and children.
The “adult services” section of Craigslist was still blocked in the United States on Sunday evening. “Sorry, no statement,” Susan MacTavish Best, Craigslist’s spokeswoman, wrote on Sunday in response to an e-mail message.
Analysts said that if the block was a temporary statement of protest, it could backfire because of the avalanche of news coverage that the site had received for taking down the ads.
“I’m very convinced that this is permanent, even if it was not their intention to make it permanent,” said Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the Advanced Interactive Media Group, a consulting firm that follows Craigslist closely. “I think it will be difficult, if not impossible, for them to go back and reopen that section without really running into a buzzsaw of negative publicity and reaction.”
Attorneys general in several states said they had so far been unable to get any information from Craigslist.
“If this announcement is a stunt or a ploy, it will only redouble our determination to pursue this issue with Craigslist, because they would be in a sense be thumbing their nose at the public interest,” Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general who has headed the campaign against Craigslist, said in an interview by phone on Sunday.
Mr. Blumenthal said Craigslist’s outside lawyer had been in touch with his office, but that the lawyer had not clarified whether the shutdown of the section was permanent, or said when Craigslist might make a statement.
Even though courts have said that Craigslist is protected under federal law, Mr. Blumenthal said part of his mission was to rally public support to change federal law.
“Raising public awareness is extraordinarily important, because it increases support for changes in the law that will hold them accountable,” he said. “Their view of the law, which is blanket immunity for every site on the Internet, never has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court, and I think there is some serious doubt.”
Richard Cordray, the Ohio attorney general, said in an interview by phone on Sunday: “We’re taking it at face value. I think it’s a step forward, maybe grudging, in response to the efforts of the attorneys general.”
But Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, was more skeptical about Craigslist’s intentions. “Certainly because of the way they did it,” she said, “it leaves an open question as to whether this is truly the end of adult services on Craigslist or if this is just a continuing battle.”
For a site that prides itself on being a neighborly town square, Craigslist has been increasingly pugnacious in response to its critics.
Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive, has written screeds on the company blog explaining and defending Craigslist’s efforts to combat sex crimes, including manually screening sex ads and meeting with advocacy groups.
“Craigslist is committed to being socially responsible, and when it comes to adult services ads, that includes aggressively combating violent crime and human rights violations, including human trafficking and the exploitation of minors,” he wrote last month.
But he also uses the blog to lash out at eBay, an investor and a competitor that also has a sex ads service, and Craigslist critics and reporters who question Craigslist’s actions on sex ads.
Last month, Amber Lyon of CNN reported about sex ads on Craigslist and questioned Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and who is no longer a manager at the company, outside a conference where he spoke about a different topic.
In a blog post addressed to Ms. Lyon, Mr. Buckmaster responded: “There is a class of ‘journalists’ known for gratuitously trashing respected organizations and individuals, ignoring readily available facts in favor of rank sensationalism and self-promotion. They work for tabloid media.”
And he wrote a sarcastic post titled “Advocate Indeed” in response to a television appearance by Malika Saada Saar, executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a nonprofit group that has urged Craigslist to shut the sex ads section.
Though sex ads on Craigslist are the most salacious example of the debate over free speech on the Internet, it is a battle being waged across the Web. Yelp, the review site for local businesses, has been repeatedly sued by small businesses for what its users write. The suits have been dismissed by courts citing the Communications Decency Act or withdrawn by defendants once they learned about Web sites’ immunity, said Vince Sollitto, a Yelp spokesman.
Some Internet law experts say the issue strikes at the heart of free speech. “For the government to intervene in Internet communication, it has to do that very carefully,” said Margaret M. Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University in California. “The ultimate goal, public safety, is really important, but these are venues of free speech communication. They’re not conspirators in crimes.”
The erotic services categories are still accessible on Craigslist sites outside the United States, and the personals section of the site is still active. Craigslist has said that if it takes down the “adult services” section, sex ads will simply migrate to other parts of the site.
Doubts about whether the block on the sex ads section is permanent are fueled by the prospect of Craigslist losing a significant amount of money. The ads, which cost $10 to post and $5 to repost, are expected to bring in $44.4 million this year, about a third of Craigslist’s annual revenue, according to the Advanced Interactive Media Group.
Still, it is difficult to predict the motives of the company, which employs about 30 people and operates in a quirky, opaque and at times petulant manner.
“It would surprise me if they didn’t try to find a workable solution to reintroduce some of that income,” said M. Ryan Calo, a senior research fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “Although, that said, Craigslist is not your typical company in the sense that it doesn’t seem to be exclusively motivated by profit.”
image of Samira, a Iraqi-Palestinian Muslim woman with her partner Edit, an Argentinian-Israeli Jewish woman is from here. They appear in the documentary film Zero Degrees of Separation
A few facts get muddied in many discussions about what is generally termed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Here are some of those facts: one can be Jewish and Arab. The Mizrahim are Arab Jews. Their language is often a combination of Hebrew and Arabic, as the language of the Sephardim is often a combination of Spanish and Hebrew, as the language of the Ashkenazim is often a combination of German and Hebrew, or Yiddish.
There are Palestinian Jews. There are Palestinian Arabs who have been forcibly removed from Israel, but who are, in fact, just as Israeli as any other Israeli citizen. To be Muslim doesn't tell us much about whether one is Arab or not Arab. Being Arab is not synonymous with being Muslim, nor is being Palestinian.
The people of the land of Palestine and the people of the land of Israel are of the same people, historically. This was the case, generally, until the Middle Eastern people of the region were invaded by a displaced and terrorised people, likely to die if not let in: European Jews in the era of WWII. The problem with accepting into the land so many Europeans was two-fold.
1. It made the population whiter, and brought with it an ideology of white supremacy, which has since taken root producing a deeply racist state called Israel.
2. To bring into a land mass so many non-Arab people means many non-Jewish Arab people had to be displaced, forcibly, out of Israel. This is what happened to non-Jewish Palestinians.
The current conflict is not mutually terroristic. Israel has resources Palestine does not have. Israel occupies Palestine, not the other way around. Palestinians, generally, are poorer people than Israelis. And given that so many white Jews have moved to Israel in the last sixty years, class, race, and ethnic hierarchies are now infused into the political landscape, along with misogyny and heterosexism.
If it were possible, a far less violent solution would have been to find land--I don't know where; in Switzerland, perhaps?--to make a safe zone for the persecuted Jews of Europe. The land of Israel has significant meaning for Jews, but so too does it have religious meaning for Muslims and Christians.
The issue at hand is not what could have happened, but what is happening now and how best to resolve it without pursuing on-going bloodshed and occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government's military forces. At issue, now, is liberating Palestine and Palestinians from Israeli occupation and terroristic activities.
Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, are, in fact, often part of the same families. Jews and Muslims who are Arab are involved in intimate relationship and always have been. "Whiteness" does not belong to the region, and has no place in the region. How to transform Israel into an anti-Apartheid, anti-racist, pro-Muslim, pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, pro-Jewish State is one challenge before us.
U.S. radical feminist Flo Kennedy coined the term "horizontal hostility" to describe the phenomenon of oppressed groups continually fighting each other rather that addressing those who oppress them all. U.S.-Caribbean radical feminist Audre Lorde spoke eloquently of the Master's Tools, and how they will not likely construct anything other than a Master's House.
Audre Lorde used the metaphor of the masters tools not being able to dismantle the masters house to explain why racism could not be used to fight sexism. Unfortunately, no one told many of the scholars who attended the recent Yale conference Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity. In no case can one oppression effectively or ethically used to combat another, but particularly in the case of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, where one is threatening to take the place of the other.
Among the many anti-Arab and anti-Muslim speakers was Itamar Marcus, a member of the Israeli settler movement who offered a keynote speech on “The Central Role of Palestinian Antisemitism in Creating the Palestinian Identity.” The title alone reduces an entire people and its history to irrationality and hatred; worse, it was but one of dozens of talks with a similarly problematic theme.
It is hard to imagine any other conflict where Yale would allow a front line and privileged member of a conflict to hold forth on their opponent. Would Yale invite Chinese settlers in Tibet to hold forth about the inferiority and irrationality of Tibetans? Members of Sudanese militias to criticize the perfidity of people of Darfur? Salahi gives several other examples of speakers’ problematic past records and then points out to the larger problem.
The center’s failure to adhere to consistent anti-racist principles makes it vulnerable to the charge that it is motivated by a political agenda. Indeed, many of its speakers hailed from partisan, right-wing, pro-Israel organizations including NGO Monitor, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Palestinian Media Watch — not to mention the Israeli government. In addition, many talks functioned as apologia for recent controversial Israeli actions, including an attack that killed nine civilians on a humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza this summer that one speaker called “the Jihad flotilla.”
Using Arabic terms as a slur does not seem like an effective way of combating Anti-Semitism, to say the least, but hardly surprising from this crew. And neither is their rigid view of acceptable Judaism.
In addition, speakers at times seemed to conflate anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Semitism. For example, in a plenary about anti-racist Jewish critics of Israel titled “Self Hatred and Contemporary Antisemitism,” Richard Landes’ speech asked, “What Drives Jews to Loathe Israel Publicly?” as if those dissidents’ claims were based not on merit but on some pathological psychosis. Landes and others were not speaking about radical organizations but rather reputable human rights organizations, prominent Jewish dissidents and international student activists — exactly the kind of people a center purporting to fight bigotry should celebrate.
Instead Jews who differ from these groups view of Israel are marginalized and their Judaism question.
the same logic, inverted, often provides a pretext for racist ideas about Jews around the world, for those who imagine that Jews, no matter where they are or what they say, form a monolithic body that can be blamed for Israel’s actions.
Of course, Arabs and Muslims are the primary targets of Islamophobita, but Salahi also realizes the cost to Jews of this kind of mindset.
While the center’s failure to abstain from inflammatory anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric is offensive and dangerous, the real tragedy is its failure to recognize that a successful and principled stand against anti-Semitism requires a principled stand against all kinds of racism, including anti-Muslim/anti-Arab bigotry in America and anti-Palestinian racism in Israel.
So Jews who have differing views on Israel cannot count on these self appointed fighters of anti-Semitism, We would not be welcome at such a conference, and such bigotry will not protect us. Fortunately we have allies like Salahi who we can partner with to fight both our oppressions together.
Do only hard-line Zionists care about anti-Semitism? No, not really. But the study of anti-Semitism has gravitated in that direction because it has been taken over by Israelis and Zionists, and is supported mostly by hard-line Zionist money. Sorry to be blunt, but I can think of no other explanation.
Who, exactly, is the U.S. defence department defending? What it tells us is that it is fighting terrorism--searching, scouring the globe for those awful terrorists who have no regard whatsoever for human life; terrorists who would commit atrocity without thinking twice about it. The Pentagon tells us it is in the business of rooting out this level of grotesque and inexcusable inhumanity.
But when we examine the evidence of what the Pentagon does and doesn't consider criminal, we are led to a different conclusion about is function. The new answer appears to that the Defence Department defends terrorist rapers of children and women, and terrorist murderers of people of color who live in countries our troops militarily occupy. So the Pentagon, in other words, is pro-terror, pro-violence, and pro-violation unless or until a rich white het guy who works for the U.S. government is murdered by someone other than the U.S government. (Because when the U.S. government's military murders its own soldiers, that is called, perversely, "friendly fire".)
Only to someone in tremendous denial does the fact that the Pentagon is in the business of genocidal slaughter and serial rape come across as implausible. Denial is a fundamental value, however, in a society that thrives on such abuse and deems it "necessary" for maintaining "democracy" and "freedom" (for a few rich white het men).
What are the military's rapists and rape-defenders' public reasons for participating in networks of child sexual slavery and trafficking? What governing principles are being defended when rapers and consumers of rape are defended and deemed innocent of committing any crime?
Why, if the U.S. government is genuinely against the practice of rape and child sexual assault, would the crime of possession of child pornography be overlooked by prosecutors working within the U.S. Defence Department? Why, also, are street prostitutes, poor Mexican migrant workers, U.S. Muslim citizens, and Black adults driving cars down public roads all stereotyped and flagged as criminals and terrorists? To state outright that there's a racist, classist, misogynist, and child-hating "double standard" doesn't begin to describe this travesty.
Tragically, this behavior by rich and powerful white het men is entirely consistent with the unprofessed not-so-public values of the Pentagon. Not only do their employees and contractors value and profit from the murder of innocent and generally poor people of color. They also value treating human life (that is not that of the few white rich and powerful white het men) as if it is worthless. Thus these elite predators treat as acceptable the possession of photographic evidence of child rape. Child pornography is, when it exists in computers, electronically purchased evidence which, in and of itself, is a crucial and additional part of the crime committed. To rape is child is one kind of heinous act. One might, if humane, make a case that it is an act of terrorism. To record the rape and mass distribute the violation of the child is an exponential expansion of the violation and loss of control of the children so raped.
People who are not elites--whether U.S. male soldiers, female U.S. soldiers routinely raped by those male soldiers, civilians sexually and otherwise assaulted and traumatised in countries occupied militarily by the U.S., or trafficked and incested children--apparently exist to be used, violated, terrorised, and thrown away. Welcome to the actual ethical standards and practices of the employees and employers of the U.S. armed services: pro-terror and anti-freedom.
I found what follows at the following site/link:
MSTnews: Your online resource for everything about Military Sexual Trauma
Pentagon declined to investigate hundreds of purchases of child pornography
A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department — including some with the highest available security clearance — who used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated only a handful of the cases, Defense Department records show.
The cases turned up during a 2006 ICE inquiry, called Project Flicker, which targeted overseas processing of child-porn payments. As part of the probe, ICE investigators gained access to the names and credit card information of more than 5,000 Americans who had subscribed to websites offering images of child pornography. Many of those individuals provided military email addresses or physical addresses with Army or fleet ZIP codes when they purchased the subscriptions.
In a related inquiry, the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) cross-checked the ICE list against military databases to come up with a list of Defense employees and contractors who appeared to be guilty of purchasing child pornography. The names included staffers for the secretary of defense, contractors for the ultra-secretive National Security Agency, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the DCIS opened investigations into only 20 percent of the individuals identified, and succeeded in prosecuting just a handful.
The Boston Globe first reported the Pentagon’s role in Project Flicker in July, citing DCIS investigative reports (PDF) showing that at least 30 Defense Department employees were investigated.
But new Project Flicker investigative reports obtained by The Upshot through the Freedom of Information Act, which you can read here, show that DCIS investigators identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online. Astonishingly, nine of those had “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information” security clearances, meaning they had access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. All told, 76 of the individuals had Secret or higher clearances. But DCIS investigated only 52 of the suspects, and just 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography. Without greater public disclosure of how these cases wound down, it’s impossible to know how or whether any of the names listed in the Project Flicker papers came in for additional scrutiny. It’s conceivable that some of them were picked up by local law enforcement, but it seems likely that most of the people flagged by the investigation did not have their military careers disrupted in the context of the DCIS inquiry.
Among those charged were Gary Douglass Grant, a captain in the Army Reserves and a judge advocate general, or military prosecutor. After investigators executing a search warrant found child pornography on his computer, he pleaded guilty last year to state charges of possession of obscene matter of a minor in a sexual act in California. Others included contractors for the NSA with Top Secret clearances; one of them — a former contractor — fled the country after being indicted and is believed to be in Libya.
But the vast majority of those investigated, including an active-duty lieutenant colonel in the Army and an official in the office of the secretary of defense, were never charged. On top of that, 212 people on ICE’s list were never investigated at all.
According to the records, DCIS prioritized the investigations by focusing on people who had security clearances — since those who have a taste for child pornography can be vulnerable to blackmail and espionage. The documents show that the probe then concentrated on people who had been previously suspected of or convicted of sex crimes, or had access to children as part of their Defense Department duties. But at least some of the people on the Project Flicker list with security clearances were never pursued and could possibly remain on the job: DCIS only investigated 52 people, and 76 of those on the Project Flicker list had clearances.
A DCIS spokesman didn’t return phone calls. But the agency’s own documents obtained via The Upshot’s FOIA request indicate that the decision to press investigations forward hinged largely on questions of the resources available to the investigators. “Due to DCIS headquarters’ direction and other DCIS investigative priorities, this investigation is cancelled” is a common summation in the files.
A source familiar with the Project Flicker investigations — who requested anonymity because public disclosure could jeopardize this person’s job — confirmed that departmental resources, and priorities, were decisive factors in letting inquiries lapse.
DCIS is primarily tasked with rooting out contractor fraud and investigating security breaches; its 400 staffers were already plenty busy before Project Flicker dropped 264 more names onto their caseloads. And child pornography investigations are difficult to prosecute. Many judges wouldn’t issue search warrants based on years-old evidence saying the targets subscribed to a kiddie porn website once.
“We were stuck in a situation where we had some great information, but didn’t have the resources to run with it,” the source told The Upshot. Many of the investigative reports obtained by The Upshot end with a similar citation of scarce resources:
Of course, other federal agencies, including ICE and the FBI, may have prosecuted some of the Project Flicker names the DCIS ignored. But that’s unlikely, given that some of the DCIS investigations were closed due to lack of cooperation from ICE.
In one case, involving an Army Reserve corporal in the Pittsburgh area, a DCIS agent expressed exasperation after repeatedly trying to get ICE to collaborate with him on the investigation: “Based upon the complete non-responsiveness of ICE … it is recommended that [the] matter be closed.”
As for the 212 Project Flicker names that DCIS didn’t investigate, the source familiar with the investigation said there was no systematic effort to inform their superiors or commanding officers of their suspected purchases of child pornography.
I am about as far from a fan of neocons as it gets. I think they are wannabe fascists and I hope to never see U.S. politically active U.S.ers get any more fascistic. But the neoliberals are not proving themselves to stand for anything significantly different, with a few notable exceptions, like wanting to protect Roe v. Wade.
What we have in a president is a figurehead, and I'm increasingly disillusioned with what that figurehead stands for, or is a symbol of. At first, no matter what he accomplised in his four years--maybe his first four years, I felt he would at least be a symbol of a crack in the concrete of white supremacy in the U.S. But even that is not so certain any more, from my white point of view, anyway. I don't know how African American children see him, but imagine he is a symbol of a kind of hope for their own futures that Black children, especially boy children, didn't have life before he was elected. That said, he is behaving like an Empire-adoring racist genocidalist. And that's entirely "white male supremacist" behavior. So there's no applause from me as he promotes capitalism, the delusions of something bantered about as a [class-privileged white male] workers' "American Dream", and the demonisation of "terrorism" from people off our shores while refusing to identify this country as a Terroristic Nation seeking Globalised Empire--by any and all means necessary.
I realised a while ago that President Barack Obama was not really a free leader of a free country. This country and its leader are held hostage by the will and whims of corporate and military leaders and institutions so foundational to what this country really stands for, that there's not much likelihood he will even challenge their premises or practices. He is not "in charge" of our foreign, economic, or health care policy, any more than G.W. Bush was. He offers no plan for halting sexual slavery or trafficking of human beings for the purposes of gross exploitation and violation by disproportionately white het men. He won't speak about what this country is doing, today and tomorrow, and next week and next year, to destroy American Indians. He won't do anything to end rape, battery, or the generalised, normalised domination of women by men. He won't discuss the problem of incest, let alone pass laws against predatory sexual perpetrators having custody of their own children. He presents himself as a warrior, but not "the Audre Lorde kind".
What follows is from The Huffington Post. Click on title to link back.
Author, "They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons"
Posted: August 31, 2010 09:07 PM
It's hard not to examine President Obama's speech on Iraq and the economy without experiencing a sinking feeling. Obama employed a number of nautical metaphors about sailing through turbulent seas and storms in his speech, but even he seemed a little queasy about it all. Nothing could have made clearer the extent to which he remains a hostage of the Bush era, both in domestic and foreign policy. His speech did not chart a path to the future but remained mired in the past.
Obama declared, "We have now been through nearly a decade of war. We have endured a long and painful recession. And sometimes in the midst of these storms, the future that we are trying to build for our nation -- a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity may seem beyond our reach." But it is simply not the case that we have endured a long and painful recession. The truth is that America continues to endure it.
The same goes for Iraq. Despite the president's pretense that combat is over, or at least that the war is, or that something has ended (it's not really quite clear what), Iraq has no government. Were the remaining 50,000 American troops to exit, Iraq would almost surely be engulfed by civil war, which could happen anyway. Meanwhile, the GOP is pretending as though everything is hunky-dory in Iraq and George W. Bush should get all the credit.
Perhaps Obama will recover his footing in the coming weeks and go on the offensive. But for the moment, he remains an easy target for the GOP. A sagging economy and endless war abroad are unlikely to revive America's or his fortunes.
image of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in NYC is from here
Note: this post was revised on 3 September 2010 ECD.
A woman in Canada asked me what my feelings and thoughts were about the matter of the Islamic Community Center being built in the same section of Manhattan as the site where the Twin Towers fell.
This is my answer:
I'll speak to the issue of the Islamic Community Center being built within a few blocks of what is termed "ground zero". This is basically being addressed to those people who think the Community Center shouldn't be built.
First, I don't think the problem with the U.S. is one of being insensitive to people with power. The problem with the U.S. is its rather grossly destructive insensitivies to people without power, to the oppressed, and to marginalised people. The problem with the U.S. is its racism, misogyny, heterosexism, xenophobia, and its genocidal brand of capitalism.
A few members of a small terrorist group arranged to fly planes into several areas, primarily the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. These few people have been determined to not be part of al-Qaeda even if they got some training with al-Qaeda. (Please keep in mind many "terrorists" abroad are trained by the CIA, but that isn't assumed to make the operatives of the U.S.'s terrorism industry.) Their goal was never to collapse the buildings. That the towers collapsed as they did was due to faulty metals used in the construction. A collapse shouldn't have happened by a fuel-loaded plane flying straight into the higher side of it. Al-Qaeda, in other words, didn't topple the Twin Towers. They poked holes in them, and in the Pentagon, killing themselves and 3000 innocent others to make a political point--in a terroristic way--about the harm the Twin Towers and the Pentagon are doing to people around the world, and specifically in Central Asia. That harm was and is also real, and the Twin Towers were designed to do the kind of business that, given ample time, callously and horrifically kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people as well as the planet.
So, let's assume that things had gone as they would have if the buildings had been appropriately built. There would have been terrifying scenes of destruction and horror: explosions, fire, smoke, debris, and deaths. The event would have been traumatic for the city, no question. But the mass media didn't just cover the trauma to the city; in addition, it immediately concocted and has never stopped building on a xenophobic narrative about Islam vs. the anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, Christian U.S. that has enabled the U.S. military, run by the Pentagon, to engage in two terribly corrupt years-long wars in two countries: Iraq and Afghanistan. So far the U.S. military, with NATO forces, has mass murdered, raped, and otherwise terrified, bludgeoned, and butchered hundreds of thousands of people abroad. This has been generating incalculable amounts of explosions, fire, smoke, debris, and deaths--easily thousands of times as much of each as was caused on Sept. 11 by those who once got some training from al-Qaeda. The phrase "an eye for an eye" seems inadequate to appreciate the horror of what the U.S. has unleashed in Central Asia. "A million bodies for 3000 bodies" is more like it. The death toll is complete in NYC; it's still running higher and higher in Central Asia and the vast majority of those killed, contrary to Western media reports, are not U.S. troops.
So, again, the problem here is that the U.S. is a bully State, attempting to expand its religiously Christian and secular Empire across the globe--one which is deeply racist, misogynistic, heterosexist, imperialistic, colonising, genocidal, and ecocidal. THAT'S the problem with the U.S. prior to, during, and following "9/11". But the U.S.'s genocidal programs are not discussed as such in the media. The genocidal programs are discussed instead as matters of freedom and democracy, and of self-defence and protection from "terror". And that's all horseshit, because the U.S. is THE global terrorist. We do not protect people from terror: we inflict terror on people, including upon millions of women in the U.S. through accepted and protected practices of battery, rape, trafficking, and slavery by men who are pimps, husbands, boyfriends, and fathers. Al-Qaeda is puny by comparison and the few people who bombed the buildings and land in the U.S. are microscopic. That said, a microscopic group of flyer-bombers and the puny anti-U.S. imperialism network called al-Qaeda did, over several years, organise and implement several terroristic anti-Western activities. Regardless of who you assume they were representing, a few people did fly a few planes into some key buildings in the U.S.: precisely the buildings that are building a corporate and quasi-Christian Empire of terror across the globe. But patriarchal atrocity counts as terror too, if women are human, that is.And despite U.S. media's insistence that we are in Iraq and Afghanistan to liberate women there is just plain wrong. Dead wrong. U.S. men rape women there and they rape women here. There has been an undeclared war against women for quite some time, and the U.S. has never seriously considered stopping the central forms of violence against women that structurally subordinate them to men.
And let's not forget: the U.S. has genocidally been at war against Asia for at least sixty years: from bombing Japan, to war in Korea, and on to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and on to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, with mumblings about a return visit to Korea. There have also been less noted U.S. terroristic campaigns in Lebanon and Saharan and Eastern Africa.
Operation Enduring Freedom's long-term investors, like Dick Cheney and David Petraeus to name but two war-mongers, want their dividend checks to flow, regardless of how much blood out-flows to generate their income. The U.S. has also been waging war against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people across the Americas for hundreds of years--in the last few decades that has been especially active in the Caribbean and across Central America including but not limited to Grenada, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The U.S. government's economic, cultural, and political genocide against American Indians is on-going, to this day and well into tomorrow. One wonders how much "freedom" the world can endure from the U.S.'s globalised military, pseudo-Christian values, and corrupt economic systems.
Given all that, how does "the issue" become an Islamic Community Center getting built downtown in NYC? It's a non-issue, as far as I'm concerned. The U.S. mass murdering Afghan citizens, while pretending to exit a corrupt and completely immoral war in Iraq. With tremendously cynical fanfare, it claims "an end" while leaving troops in place and only after training people to do the same evil things the U.S. has been doing there for the last many years. For example, the U.S. has placed in power one of the people who oversaw the horrors of Abu Ghraib. There's no plan to exit Afghanistan, even while Malalai Joya and many others proclaim the U.S. presence there to be unequivocally rapist and racist. I'm sorry to say, we are not a peace-loving or anti-terrorist nation.
If our morality and ethics are determined by our publicly denied and officially unacknowledged shameful actions since this nations' inception, we are also not a nation of outstanding morals and principled ethics nor are we even one that values democracy or freedom. We are, rather, a country founded on slavery, genocide, and rape that has no intentions, policies, or plans to stop committing any of it. How is it, then, that the so-called axis of evil never includes the U.S.?
So who is publicly outraged about a Mosque? Various white Jewish and white Christian citizens who witnessed or were impacted by the bombing of buildings with planes and many other horrific things that happened downtown on Sept. 11, 2001. Without question, there should be a permanent memorial at the site of the former Twin Towers, remembering those who died--those of many ethnicities and faith traditions.The surrounding neighborhoods cannot and ought not be "Mosque-free" any more than they can or ought to be Church-free and Synagogue-free. That makes no sense of what happened on Sept. 11th and goes against all of what the U.S. pretends to be. Even with hypocrisy being a central value in this country, we cannot hide from the fact that all of the U.S. is engaged in overt and lethal anti-Muslim terrorism.
Al-Qaeda-trained 9/11 assassins and al-Qaeda generally cannot be considered, in any meaningful or honest way, to be the sole practitioners of a kind of terrorist activity that is morally or qualitatively different from the kind we produce and protect our right to inflict on the rest of the world. To pretend "those" terrrorists are more callous, cruel, or terroristic than U.S. military and paramilitary forces would be to engage in a form of denial and delusion that ought to send shivers up and down all our spines. Also guilt and shame.
What the U.S. government wants the collective white "us" to do, is to continue to scapegoat groups like "Muslims" (most of whom are Indonesian, not Central Asian), and "Mexicans"--and Americans--many of whom are rudely being escorted off the very same land that was stolen from them by our government. This scapegoat strategy keeps that glaring light of responsibility and accountability off of that very white and culpable "us". It is imperative to continue this ethnic shell-game strategy because the U.S. has no moral leg or legitimacy to stand on regarding any matter of "sensitivity".
The U.S. needs scapegoats so that it never has to morally or politically contend with the fact that it is the bully nation of the world, is unrepentantly pro-genocidal when it comes to people of color, is misogynistic and heterosexist to the core of its being, and is set up to manufacture and exploit tensions between and among oppressed people that can be sensationalised in media that continue to keep the spotlight off what white Christian straight men are doing in the U.S. and abroad to colonise, terrorise, enslave, and kill people--all in the name of the their one true lord and savior. Should this lord make a return engagement, may he kick the asses of every U.S. Christian white het man who was arrogant enough to think this country--allegedly his--and his bombastically condescending corporate religion stands for anything resembling human decency or the glory of G-d. For the victims and survivors of that environmentally, politically, religiously tyrannical and caustic crusade, the whole of the planet is "ground zero". Shall Christian churches, then, not be allowed anywhere on Earth?
All of this is to say, there are more important matters at hand than the issue of whether or not an Islamic Community Center is built in downtown Manhattan. And it's about time the vocal critics of "the mega-mosque" being built there started dealing with those matters with the passion currently being demonstrated in the financial district of New York.
portrait of the three stars of the Best Picture for 1980, Ordinary People is from here
Minor revisions done on 3 Sept. 2010.
This is a story about two movies, a secular and a religious philosophy, a few disasters, and a call to consciousness.
The first movie I'll get to momentarily. The second movie is Beautiful Ohio. I won't spoil the films for you; each holds secrets. What I'll discuss is another element in each film that is secretive while also so glaring as to require sunglasses, but I doubt the people in the film--knowing they do represent people in life--realise just how glaringly white male supremacist they are being. This secret is not "the point" of the movie, exactly. Most movies about white middle class U.S. heteropatriarchal families do not usually have much to say, critically, on the subject of being the way they are that is in denial that they are a certain way. The whiteness is usually unidentified as a racial issue, for example, and the heterosexuality is presented as normal and natural. So too capitalism's suburban sprawl is seen as just how it is--an inevitable and sort of good progression from life lived far more rurally and more condensed into major cities.
My mind flashes to another film in this genre: Light-Hue-Man-Ism cinema, let's call it. This one was well-represents the genre and it is called Ordinary People. Both films take place in the 1970s, in very white and very suburban areas of the U.S. Both feature non-lesbian, non-gay marriages as normal, legal, and good things. Both stories revolve around two sons. Both posit being educated in the ways of the dominant Western World as unambiguously "good" and "moral" and "right". Both were directed by white het men who came to prominence as actors: Robert Redford and Chad Lowe. Chad's film got considerably less fanfare, and won no Oscars but Chad did win for Debut Director at the Sarasota Film Festival, and one of the actors, Michelle Trachtenberg won there for Breakthrough Performer. All the major lead and supporting actors in Ordinary People won one award or another--whether an Oscar, a BAFTA, or a Golden Globe, but it also won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture of 1980.
Who are these Ordinary People? They are white, heterosexual, middle to upper middle class U.S. citizens who are not immigrants and whose parents were not likely immigrants either. Probably not the grandparents either. They likely are the en-lightened offspring of slavers or genocidal land-thieves. The premise of the movie--a film I quite like, by the way--is that even ordinary people carry unreachable pain and deep wounding: relatively wealthy, socially dominant white people suffer, often silently. (Yes, their suffering is the stuff of Art in the West, whereas the suffering of poor people of color is not, unless to be exploited to make money for rich white men. There are different kinds of silencing. The pain of white people isn't silent, really. The pain of people of color, in the West, most certainly is silenced.) What isn't quite articulated by the film is how class and race along with sexuality, gender, and geographical history create constellations of isolation and insecurity--huge psychic spaces filled with insecurity and secrets. The audience member is made to contemplate--ah, yes: the well-to-do white people do, indeed, suffer? And I reply: how could they not? They are human, after all. And their ways of being human invite particular kinds of suffering just as destroying ecosystems invites certain kinds of "natural" disasters.
So the simple humanistic answer to why they suffer is: "Of course they suffer. They suffer because they are human." But a more profeminist, pro-Indigenist perspective might note WHY they suffer as they do.
To approach an answer we must ask: what kinds of humans are they? Despite the title, they certainly aren't generic people--people without a race or class location. They aren't people without a geographical zone which they inhabit but was stolen from other people who were either displaced or mass murdered. They aren't people without religions and new, practically infantile cultures that value "progress" for white men and whatever for everyone else.
These Ordinary People are people living inside several white men's ideas, turned with great force and will into "civilisation". They are living with what some white men have posited as the good society. "Great" white male philosophers, with thousands upon thousands of slaves and other exploited labor--including, notably, their wives, have constructed a social reality to reflect and amplify their white male supremacist values which are called humanistic: pro-human. But most humans don't benefit from the systems created, and genocide and slavery are necessary to manufacture the society, so exactly whose humanity is humanism designed to support? I'd argue ultimately, no one's at all. But, it won't devastate richer white people living in the First (Last) World, as much as it will poorer people of color living in the Third (Original) World.
Humanism, acted out, is especially dangerous to women because it posits "man" as its center and frame of reference. And while "man" is seen to be universal, and inclusive of all genders, it never really is that; what "mankind" always is, if it values patriarchal ways of being, is unkind to women. These two films portray women in various ways--perhaps most notably as middle-aged mothers who are not apparently sexual, and as young objects of heterosexual male desire who are not mothers. White male writers really do have a rather difficult time of imagining women as anything else: neither mother nor potential girlfriend of a guy. White men are written into cinema as virtually everything one can be, including impersonators of non-trans women:
The supposedly generic "man", at the end of the day and the beginning of another, is usually quite white and chronologically grown up. His ethnically and culturally specific ways of being are promulgated and promoted as "universal" and "natural" or, if not natural, then how a sky-god willed "man" to be. If not from god then according to white man-made laws, or customs--but always using ceaseless force--whether seen or unseen, both public and private, individualised and class-inflicted. The bulk of the force is directed by men against other men, against women, and against children.
Humanism, as a philosophy, is intended to support these beliefs: white het men speak for everyone; they speak for everyone better than anyone else; they think and feel things that are "just human", not raced, not gendered, not classed if he's middle class; his sexual orientation doesn't have to be introduced or explained to the viewing audience; and even when he is particularised to a certain time, in a certain place, among certain conditions, such stories rarely investigate the premises of his race, gender, and sexuality as unnatural regardless of the fact that those aspects of his being are continually constructed, unstable, and a source of insecurity shored up through racist heteropatriarchal practices.
These entirely non-generic humans, in fact, live on land that has been devastated for many of the same reasons that land has been devastated in Haiti and Pakistan, and across the U.S., including along the Louisiana coast, five years ago and also within the last several months.
Five years ago we remember an event called "Katrina" but the story isn't really about a hurricane and it's sure not about a woman, or even Mother Earth-Gone-Wild. It's about how very white and very grown men called civil engineers, politicians, and ecocidalists conspired, in order to make gobs of money, to destroy an ecosystem--the wetlands, and also build into New Orleans a straight pathway into the city for any hurricane to enter. It's about the way class and race and geography intersect, to place vulnerable people in vulnerable areas of land that has been destroyed to varying degrees by developers who don't give a shit about Indigenous people, Indigenous Ways, or the land, water, and air. What they care about is profit, money, financial riches. In Pakistan, trees--hundreds of acres, too many to count, have been ripped off the Earth, leaving soil to be loose, ungrounded, so to speak. When water comes rushing in or pouring down, mud can slide and kill people. The French industrialists cut down most of Haiti's trees, so that soil eroded and land was more vulnerable to high velocity winds. Various forms of colonisation, invasion, and globalisation have kept Haitian people largely materially impoverished. Dwelling structures for human living were weak and large storms could tear them apart easily. France could have offered reparations, including by repairing housing, making it significantly more storm-sturdy. It just wasn't a priority for the white French elite. For Haitians to call for reparations is to hear this phrase in decidedly Parisian French in response: Parler à la main, or Speak to the hand.
None of these "natural disasters": most recently in Pakistan, and also in the Gulf of Mexico--in 2005 and in 2010, and also in Haiti earlier this year, were reportedly victimised by wind and rain and mud. They were made victims due to some white grown men deciding that destroying ecosystems and relocating people there was a good thing to do. There, where the ecosystems once functioned well to deal with storms. There, where Indigenous people once lived in far greater numbers, but with the land--within not without the ecosystem. Within the ecosystem, not without the ecosystem. We cannot live without nature's ecosystems. I know, it's hard news to hear. But it's the truth.
European philosophers, the many incarnations of the Great White Men, are posited variously as geniuses or fools but they are all paid attention to--seen as having something important to say, about the human condition. What humanism fails to note is how humans are part of ecosystems--whether imperial, colonial, genocidal, and corporate land-barons like it or not. We are part of them even when we think we are not. When we destroy them, the destruction visits the place that once was a functional ecosystem. Death and destruction to lots of people is what is inevitably going to happen when you pretend, as so many Great White Men do, that we can control the Earth and make "it" ours. European white men, quite uniquely, but not alone, have organised societies in the last many hundred years as if the Earth is THEIRS, as if IT belongs to THEM, rather than us belonging to the land, sea, and air. This is also a form of misogyny, as "man" insists on mistreating the Earth as some thing to be conquered, dominated, controlled, and violated.
Small scale farmers of many colors had and still have a kind of respect for the land that white agribusiness-men scoff at and call old-fashioned and passé. What will be passé in the not-too-distant future, are all societies based on the premise that humans control the Earth. This is to say: the Earth will win. Why? Because humans cannot live without healthy air, clean water, trees, and soil-covered land. And Great White Men, with their Great Philosophies, and their Great Science, and their Great Religions will not be leaving this lowly Earth, possibly for some skyward heavenly eternal paradise as some white politically conservative Christian Evangelicals proclaim.
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Let's see what some Great White Christian (presumably heterosexual) Men have predicted about this event called The Rapture (which references something called "The Second Coming of Christ"--which of course presumes he made an appearance some time in the past). From Wikipedia:
1844 - William Miller predicted Christ would return between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844, then revised his prediction, claiming to have miscalculated Scripture, to October 22, 1844. The realization that the predictions were incorrect resulted in a Great Disappointment. Miller's theology gave rise to the Advent movement. The Baha'is believe that Christ did return as Miller predicted in 1844, with the advent of The Báb, and numerous Miller-like prophetic predictions from many religions are given in William Sears book, Thief in The Night.
1977 - William M. Branham predicted in 1962 that the Rapture could take place by 1977.
1981 - Chuck Smith predicted that Jesus would probably return by 1981.
1988 - Publication of 88 Reasons why the Rapture is in 1988, by Edgar C. Whisenant.
1989 - Publication of The final shout: Rapture report 1989, by Edgar Whisenant. More predictions by this author appeared for 1992, 1995, and other years.
1994 - Pastor John Hinkle of Christ Church in Los Angeles predicted June 9, 1994. Radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted September 27, 1994.
2011 - Harold Camping's revised prediction has May 21, 2011 as the date of the rapture.
2012 - The Mayan Long Count calendar ends a 5125-year cycle on December 21, 2012. Some Christians such as Jack Van Impe have associated [read: exploitively appropriated] this event with the Second Coming of Christ.
2060 - Sir Isaac Newton proposed, based upon his calculations using figures from the book of Daniel, that the Apocalypse could happen no earlier than 2060.
I'm going out on a limb--a bit, fat, thick limb attached to a gigantic tree, whose trunk is eight times the width of that limb and whose root system branches out far and deep, that White Christian Religious and Secular Humanist Het Men are generally wrong about most things. Don't tell them that or they'll wig out. Seriously--they'll get all freaky on your ass. But, well, they are wrong a whole lot. About a whole lot of things: like how to live, what constitutes ethical behavior, how civilisations should be organised relative to the land and sea and air they occupy, generally with the help of generals and a giant military, and also plenty of slaves.
Of the many philosophies sold in the U.S. that appears, on the surface, to be good, moral, and just, secular humanism ranks highly among people who consider themselves good liberals. The fact that secular humanism or religious monotheism are necessarily devastatingly deadly, for humans and the Earth, I think is a point one ought not miss. Again, I'm out on a limb here.
But while here I'll add that it's about time we started re-invigorating older Indigenous, Gaia-centered, and woman-centered philosophies that understood we belong to the Earth, not the other way around. Because the Christian and Scientific white dudes are really fucking shit up. A lot. And they're planning to invest a shitload of bucks to do it some more.
The light hued people really love their philosophers--religious and secular, theological and scientific, whether they know it or not. But some "well-educated" white folks really demonstrate this adoration. In the film Beautiful Ohio, a young white male "genius" is held as very "special" but not "special" as in having special needs; not disabled, in other words. And all those humanistic white male philosophers--not so much the religious ones, in this film--are treated and regarded as saints. Math, itself, is a pathway to bliss and wonder. (Never mind the Earth and its surroundings.) Watch the film and notice how reverently those Great White Men are spoken of, quoted, and re-quoted ad nauseam. And watch for the surprises in the film, too. I won't spoil it for you. I liked this movie also. I'm kind of a sucker for movies about dominant society's ethnically paler people with a very strange way of living on Earth.
image of the two brothers in Beautiful Ohio is from here
image of cover of DVD, Beautiful Ohio, is from here
