An Open Letter To Yale's Social Justice Activists

Addressing Global Social Justice at

image is from here

What follows is my comment/reply to Kate McDermott, who authored a piece called "Putting the Gender Back in Trans/gender Awareness Week", which may be read in full at the Midnight at Yale website, *here*.

Hi Kate,

It's really a discouraging time. Because there's so much pain and wounding going on in queer community, from where I sit right smack in the middle of it.

Lesbianism has become a taboo word--practically censored out of any conversations as a legitimate identity, unless it exists to turn men on. I'm not surprised that it has slipped to second place in many organisations that were once "LGBT" but are now back to being "GLBT". This places one of the more privileged groups of men in our community at the top--again.

But given the organising around "what's in" these days, the order appears to be "TGBI" with I being intersex and virtually nothing at all done to educate anyone about it. And L for lesbian being off the list. And never mind discussion about intergender reality.

I support intersex and intergender people's rights to be free from surgical and political interventions, am in regular dialogue with intersex people and also maintain plenty of contact with lesbians and non-lesbian women who are actively working to dismantle the gender hierarchy rather than pretending it doesn't exist in a "post-feminist" era that is far from "post-patriarchal".

Trans activists, to date, won't engage in conversation with me because I'm calling us out on the misogyny and male supremacy in our ranks--as others do too, like Joelle Ruby Ryan.

The only response I've gotten is from a non-trans man who is very white and very privileged by class, education (Harvard Law), profession and ability. His only response is to call me names and think he's doing "good education work" on behalf of people who are structurally, politically positioned below him.

What I see is many young lesbian women being truly afraid of being termed "transphobic" when we're all transphobic, after all, just as all whites are racist; everyone internalises it and some, like whites, institutionally, systemically externalise it too against people of color. So now that we're all done with the name-calling--we're all "all of the above", when do we begin constructive conversation across differences about how to radically transform society which is disproportionately mass murdering female people who are Indigenous, Asian, Brown, and Black?

One wonders if anyone cares any more about the "gender" that is defined as being a wh*re for men, from birth to death. And about the "gender" that exists, structurally, politically, to take care of men; about the gender that is either socialised, coerced, or forced to do so, depending on where you live. The gender that is enslaved currently at rates unseen at any other time in human history--by traffickers, pimps, and slavers (who are predominantly men). That gender is called "woman".

I wonder why non-trans and trans activism in the so-called First World isn't allied with and supportive of all the battles being waged for sovereignty, safety, and survival by women and girls across Asia--from Afghanistan (Malalai Joya and the women of RAWA) to Iraq (including Yanar Mohammed) to India (including the efforts of Ruchira Gupta and the escaped girls and women in Apne Aap), to the struggles of women and girls across Malasia, Thailand, Cambodia, and East Asia.

Why, in your own experience, does trans activism tend to focus so much on those "evil second wavers"--Audre Lorde being one its more brilliant spokespeople addressing the utter importance of meaningful respectful dialogue across difference while taking radical feminism seriously? Why have new populations and generations of anti-feminist queer and non-queer folks begun to once again dominate the scene, treating activism to root out a deadly gender hierarchy as off limits to discuss? Neither the Right or the Left will take on the matter of ending rape and genocide. Why?

Who benefits by taking the spotlight off of how we all need to survive and challenge and stop the abuses perpetrated and perpetuated by men, white especially, class-privileged especially, with professional and political power, structurally, who actually do beat and rape trans women, trans men, who perform unneeded and unwelcomed surgeries on intersex people. Why is challenging the most powerful class of men in our region of the world, and beyond--the rich white heterosexual ones--who control all media, not seen as a social emergency that college campuses should be outraged by.

For one thing, all your tuition keeps going up and up because the richest five percent of U.S. Americans won't pay taxes due to loop-holes, including bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. They earned 80% of all the money earned across class over the last ten years. Where's the gendered connection to economic justice, to challenging capitalist atrocity that thinks taxing the poorest 50% of the population is acceptable--which will always be disproportionately female and of color, while Exxon Mobil which has had a banner year, pays no tax at all?

Whatever happened to challenging racist, capitalist heteropatriarchy to the roots of its atrocious existence? What happened to listening to women like Audre Lorde? To listening to Alice Walker--still quite alive. To Patricia Hill Collins. To bell hooks. To Catharine A. MacKinnon. To Sheila Jeffreys. All of whom take women's lives very, very seriously.

Why the veering off to avoid the rather financially large and looming white het male elephant in the room?

I've been trying to engage folks in conversation at my blog, A Radical Profeminist, and if there are any folks there who want to engage, I'm very willing. I'm an intergender male. White. Gay. Asexual. Disabled. Jewish. Survivor of lots of sexual/heterosexist/male supremacist abuse.

When do we challenge class-privileged people are able to discuss re-valuing a politically lethal form of femininity that was designed by pimps to control, exploit, and violate women, while seven year old girls are being told to dress like wh*res for Halloween? When do formerly trafficked and enslaved women--Indigenous in Vancouver and everywhere else, Asian in Phnom Penh and everywhere else, poor Black and Brown globally, get to weigh in on this matter of re-appropriating the language used against them while they are being raped by procurers and pimps?

I welcome your response.

And thanks for caring about social justice issues and for getting involved.

Julian

Radical African Feminist Patricia McFadden, on Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice

Photograph of Professor Dr. Patricia McFadden is from here.
It is a still image from this interview in Swaziland

An excerpt from work linked to later in the post:

Our starting point has to be a recognition of the need to reassert feminist agency as the most effective response to sexual violation, abuse, femicide, and all naturalised patriarchal and heterosexist patterns of behaviour that intensify the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS. Challenges to the resulting social, physiological and sexual crises must be based on our reclaiming a vibrant feminist discourse and practice.

—Dr. Patricia McFadden

I am proud and honored to make space on my puny little blog to promote the brilliant life and work of Professor Dr. Patricia McFadden. Across the globe most women who are doing great feminist work are not recognised by the West/Global North/"First" World's media—at all.

Most women—feminist, womanist, or neither—are not rich, are not white, and do not speak English as a first or second language. Most women are not professional academics or people who earn a humane income. Most are living lives at the precarious and practical intersections of gender, race, class, region, age, ability, and sexuality. Most women are socially positioned to care for other people, whether members of their families of origin, or their own children. One of the political definitional features of "being woman" is that you "take care of other people, intimately". This is not a definition of what it means to be "a man". Needless to say. To "be a man" is to exploit other people (read: women) for your own personal gain and satisfaction.

The stigmas against poor Black women's sexuality and sex anywhere in the world seem to know no bounds in the psyches and institutional practices of white men who are increasingly globalising the impoverishment, exploitation, rape, and gynocide of Latina, Indigenous, Asian, Brown, and Black women.

This means that women of color cannot be seen, really, as human beings, let alone as humane beings. Because their work is assumed to exist for others, or they are assumed to exist-only-in-order-to-disappear.

Biographical information about her life and work, from esquela de feminismo.org. (In English, Open School Feminism.)

Patricia revels in introducing herself as a Radical African Feminist who does not compromise on women’s inalienable rights—anywhere women live and struggle for dignity and integrity. Born in Swaziland over a half century ago Patricia lives and works in Zimbabwe and is based at the Southern African Political Economy Trust. Her work in the women’s movement is national and regional in addition to global work in the women’s movement on issues of Violation and Sexuality.

Patricia is a well respected feminist activist and scholar, she is presently gathering her many articles written over the past 3 decades on a number of issues impacting women’s lives and hope to publish them as a collected volume with South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts later in 2005. Her most recent work/writing /activism is focused on issues of citizenship and women’s engagements with the state on issues of entitlement and security.

Born in Swaziland in 1952, Patricia McFadden received her first degree from the University of Botswana and Swaziland in politics and administration, with economics and sociology as minors; she received a master’s degree in Sociology from Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania; and a doctorate from Warwick University in the United Kingdom (1987). McFadden has taught in many African countries. She has also taught in the United States at Cornell, Spelman, Syracuse, and Smith University, and in Europe. She served as international dean in the International Women’s University (IFU) from 1998 – 2000 in Hannover.

McFadden has worked in the African and global women’s movements for the past 30 years, writing, conceptualizing, teaching, training, advocating and publishing as editor of the Southern African Feminist Review from 1995 – 2000, and as a program officer in the Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS) in Harare, Zimbabwe, from 1993 – 2005. She also taught in the Masters in Social Policy (MPS) program offered by SARIPS for the past seven years, and was an adjunct professor on the Syracuse Study Abroad program from 1994 – 2000.

McFadden’s main areas of intellectual inquiry are: sexuality, reproductive and sexual health and rights (especially for young women), and identity, violation and citizenship for African women. She has presented numerous papers at universities, conferences and seminars internationally in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Namibia, South Africa, Ghana, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Brazil, China, Germany Ethiopia, the United Kingdom and others.

More recently she has been working as a ‘feminist consultant,’ supporting women in creating institutionally sustainable feminist spaces within Southern Africa. The most recent initiative is the establishment of a women’s leadership center in Windhoek, Namibia. McFadden says that her priority is to provide conceptual, intellectual and programmatic support to African feminists in envisioning and supporting programs that draw on the radical political energies of African women as writers and as citizens across the continent.

McFadden has taught a course on “African Feminisms in a Globalizing World.”
 

What follows next, with another excerpt and link to the piece in full, is to me, a tremendously important piece of writing. I thank Patricia McFadden for writing it and for all the work she is doing to improve the condition and quality of women's lives.

The excerpt is from Feminist Africa, a journal dedicated to "cutting edge, informative, and provocative African scholarship attuned to feminist agendas" (URL: http://www.agi.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/429/feminist_africa_journals/archive/02/fa_2_standpoint_1.pdf)

Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice by Patricia McFadden

This is the place that the HIV/AIDS pandemic has brought many of us to: the edge of the precipice of life. "Living on the edge" in terms of sexual and physical violation, unacceptably large numbers of black women all over the world face the constant threat of infection with the HI virus by males known and unknown. This terrifying existence is exacerbated by the seemingly endless spiral into poverty and deprivation for millions of women around the globe. And there is no doubt that the public debates, campaigns and health care responses generated by this deepening crisis have been underwritten by a long legacy of patriarchal and heterosexist policing of women's freedoms and rights.

Again, I thank her.

Noah Teaches Many Things: How to Fight The Systematic Oppression of Women by Men isn't One of Them

photo of Women's Liberation activists is from here

There's currently a very virulent and endemic form of liberalism in queer and LGBTIA politics (the I and the A stand for Intergender and Intersex, and Asexual) that comes with refusing to engage on matters of ant-lesbian and anti-woman political practices as defined by radical lesbian feminists, and I hope, one day, Noah will also educate himself and other people about how men oppress women, and how LGBTIA and Queer culture oppresses lesbians, internationally and within the U.S, and how lesbian feminists and radical feminists are marginalised out of existence in dominant U.S. het media and in dominant queer media, including on their websites, unless to criticise them in deeply anti-feminist ways. Because those are human rights issues of significance and centrality to our respective struggles.

I write this because Noah has been writing to me even after I expressly asked him to stop doing so. Just below is the content of his two latest bits of correspondence, submitted as comments which I won't post to the places he wishes for them to go. I'm posting them here to make a few points about how to approach people you structurally oppress, and how not to. He seeks to defend his good name while continuing to posture himself above me, as my teacher, with me as his pupil. That I never signed up for any of his classes seems to not matter to him.

Before posting this, I have taken time to find out who is his and what his primary work is because I don't wish to "other" him or do that too-easy thing of just dismissing someone because in some ways we disagree on some issues. But on he goes...

Noah has left a new comment on your post "The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Stereotypes, Transs...": 

I'm not "posturing" or "pretending"--I really am angry at your oppressive anti-transsexualism and transmisogyny.

If you can't take being called out on your privilege from the people you are oppressing, then keep your oppressive thoughts to yourself and stop trying to analyze other people's experiences when you have no clue what you are talking about.

Something else for your reading list: http://summerofourlorde.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/lordeusesofanger.pdf

Note from Julian to my readers about these two comments:
In my view Noah is behaving hurtfully and harmfully. I feel hurt and harmed by him personally and politically. This is my blog. I get to speak here. It's one of the few places where I do get to speak, actually, without my words being edited or deleted. Noah's suggestion that I should be silent, here, on my own blog, is very obnoxious, among other things like inappropriate and controlling. And his view that I should listen to him when he demonstrates no willingness to genuinely engage, but instead to preach to me and duck out, is not acceptable as a means of engagement, to me. I don't hold myself accountable to people who are privileged as he is and who are also so determinedly anti-feminist and anti-lesbian.

He recommends I read a chapter from Sister Outsider, a book I have promoted here more than he knows. He chooses to know very little, it appears. What Noah can't know, however, is that I'd read and reread all of Sister Outsider likely before he was born. I met and spoke with Audre Lorde and corresponded with her. I don't need some white guy telling me what I need to read by Audre Lorde. She and many other radical feminists have made recommendations to me. I don't really care what white males recommend to me--I've learned white males exist to exploit others and promote ourselves. So why would I care to listen to a white male when I have so many human beings to listen to who speak from positions of oppression Noah will never know, structurally? Why would I be accountable to him for anything, when I hold myself accountable to radical feminist women of many colors, globally? Who does he think he is? That's what I'm wondering. And who does he think he speaks for and represents?

To be very clear: I don't hold myself accountable to any white male supremacists who promote misogynistic and antifeminist anti-lesbians politics.

In my view, Noah, below, expresses faux respect. The most privileged people believe they can pass this off as authentic respect and regard for someone's humanity, but he can't fool me because I've seen this CRAP so much in the past that it is glaringly obvious to me when it shows up uninvited. His ways of being and engaging aren't a useful tool for engagement or coalition-building unless he understands that he needs to apologise for behaving like a big white male jerk to the person or people he has been a dick to.

As long as someone with his pedigree of privileges and entitlements continues to posture himself as superior, he isn't likely to garner much respect from me, beyond me respecting him as someone who is human as a living being. I can't respect his focus as an activist or an educator because his focus on me and his style of educating me has been dick-tutorial. And while dickhood has it's privileges, it isn't receiving my blessings. 

Below he mentions how I haven't yet explored "the difference between sex and gender".

As someone who has endured a great deal of what white het male supremacist boys and men do that destructively and exploitively displayed racist heteropatriarchal sex and gender against my body and being, some of these differences are things I know in very deep ways, beyond the bounds of intellect and essays.

Any writing anywhere that is informed by a radical lesbian feminist viewpoint, that is grounded in radical feminist experience, analyses, theories, or practices of sex or gender, is apparently anathema to him. This selective, privileged refusal of insight, tethered as it is to his rejection of radical lesbian feminisms, leaves his own understandings of sex and gender rather liberal and superficial. He also won't care or be able to learn much about either because he's already positioned himself as "the expert". Self-appointed "experts" like Noah-the-super-white-guy, ought to learn to be accountable to radical lesbian feminists of all colors who know, from positions he and I will never occupy structurally and socially, exactly what those differences are and how they manifest against women globally.

The living radical women of color I know comprehend more about these differences than Noah ever will. And so those are the people I turn to as knowledgeable. Their work over the last twenty years has advanced and deepened Audre's work, built on it, enriched it. Will he contact these women who have done this work since her passing, and be accountable to them? I suspect his ego and his commitment to liberal-to-progressive politics will not let him do that. He shows no signs of caring at all what any living radical lesbian feminists have to say about anything.

I say this based on what I have read that Noah has done with his life as well as what he has written on these subjects: I do not see Noah as someone who can help anyone radically understand much about gender and sex as long as he refuses to know how each are white and male supremacist, anti-lesbian, and anti-woman to the ground and below. To put a liberal queer political frame around each is to be woefully and willfully ignorant about each. And as long as he refuses to learn about and speak out publicly against this--how white male supremacy shapes and contorts both sex and gender into racist, heterosexist, and misogynist practices and identities--queer and not queer, and as long as he believes his perspective is above reproach or challenge from radical lesbian feminists, he's not going to learn very much about either beyond what he thinks he already knows with a form of certainty commonly found in the most arrogant of white males.

Noah has left a new comment on your post "The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Stereotypes, Transs...":

Dear Julian,

I am writing to respectfully let you know that you are oppressing transsexual people. I get the sense that you are not aware of the fact that you have cissexual privilege and have not explored the difference between sex and gender.

Cheers,
Noah

Because Noah is refusing to respect my wish for him to no longer post comments here, and has refused to engage with me privately by email, I'll post what I hope is my last post about him. To spend any more time discussing him would be to engage in something I don't much like: a form of lateral or horizontal hostility named by Florynce Kennedy four decades ago.

I could offer up a lot of information about him, including, for example, his last name and his image. I don't care to do that because he has not, himself, presented that information to me. He's presented himself here as "Noah" with a bit more info linked to that name, such as an email address. While I know his last name and what he does for work, and where he has lived, it's not for me to make that information public. Outting people's private information isn't cool in cyber- and non-cyber social environments where many of us are getting death threats, as I have, from men who probably would despise Noah too, if his work detailed their abuses of women of all colors, including queer people.

There's enough terrorism going on against feminists and lesbians and their allies in struggle. I want Noah to be safe as he pursues the work he does for anti-racist transgender rights. What I object to is people with more structural privilege than I have--not easy, let me tell you--coming to my blog to "educate me" about oppression. Noah has repeatedly demonstrated a kind of class-privileged white male arrogance and emotional aloofness, and an inability to reach out across difference respectfully and meaningfully, that is terribly typical of white men with class privilege.

He speaks to me as if I have the structural power to oppress the likes of him--or those he pretends he represents. I'm not sure what he's referring to, given that he's positioned structurally to oppress me in several ways. I'm a person with class privileges who comes out of a background of mixed class experience, whose family of origin was immigrant poor and also non-immigrant poor and working class, not middle class wealthy. He comes from a solid middle class U.S. non-immigrant background a graduate of prestigious colleges and universities, a professional with far more education-status and profession-status than I will likely ever have.

He comes here speaking obnoxiously or patronisingly to someone who is disabled, gay, asexual, intergender, radical, pro-lesbian, profeminist, anti-transbigotry, Jewish, anti-racist, white, male (who doesn't personally identify as a man but accepts women politically identifying me as such because my subjectivity ought not trump women's experiences). He shows up at my door with things to lecture me about. He comes to the door of someone who has survived a great deal, including incest, child molestation, sexual assault, and sexual exploitation, bullying, emotional abuse and neglect, mental illness in my family, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, and this ability-privileged blond, light-eyed, gentile-appearing white guy with lots of liberal arts education, lectures me about what I need to read, without even knowing much about me. He jumps to conclusions because he can't be bothered to understand my perspective. He calls me an oppressor.

He is presumptuous, arrogant, and has no clue how to approach me with any kind of kindness, dignity, or regard, except, perhaps, when he realises his other approaches were unkind and oppressive. He comes here not to ask me questions, to engage with me, but instead seeks repeatedly to condescendingly lecture me about what I need to know with his "World of Gender and Sexual Oppression According to Noah" textbook in hand.

Noah is not positioning himself as an ally of mine. And I'm not likely to consider him "feminist" or "profeminist" until such time has he prioritises publicly speak out against men's oppression of women and against anti-lesbian politics and practices within LGBTIA community. As I've written on another post, here, he's also not an enemy of mine, even while he's hurtful to me. He's not "other" than me and I don't view him that way. I initially welcomed him in as a potential ally, although he'd really have had to shake loose of his academic snobbery, and his uber-white male supremacist posturing. We're very much alike in some regards, but also quite different in others. Whether he cares to notice it or not, he is significantly more privileged than I am. So I hope he'll learn how to engage respectfully with those who he believes he can teach, as long as he learned not to arrive acting like such a dick.

He's solidly against discrimination and defamation, on legal levels. Does that include defamation, degradation, and invisibilisation of lesbian feminists, radical feminists, and radical lesbians? Aside from tokenistically teaching a few bits of writing by the radical feminist Andrea Smith, Noah refuses to utilise the wisdom and learning of forty-plus years of radical lesbian feminist writings (by women of all colors) and activist campaigns against racist heteropatriarchy. Why is that? He's not indicated much or any knowledge of the work of any contemporary radical feminist activists. Is it because when he was a student those people weren't (and aren't) taught. (I suspect that may well be the case, which isn't his fault; it's the fault of the programs and institutions where he's studied.)

How does a white male avoid taking on the issue of how to end rape? He says his work includes challenging "sex and gender". How do you section out and ignore racist and misogynistic rape as part of what constitutes gendered and sexed atrocity? In what ways does he speak out against gynocide at all? The only forms of sexism and misogyny he seems to notice and go after are those displayed by feminists and profeminists. I'd say that's specious.

I realise we all can only do so much, only study so much, only read so much, and only advocate for so much. But as someone who does deal with racism, speciesism, and anti-transgender/transsexual oppression, how do you not encounter as a human rights issue to address, "the oppression of men by women", and also not incorporate into your political work. I'm just wondering. To me, you'd have to really work at ignoring it.

Again, any one person can only do so much. While I'm for animal liberation from white het male supremacist civilisations' human consumption and abuse, it's not a focus here on my blog, not because I don't care about the issues, but because there's only so much one person can do: taking on genocide, racism, heterosexism, misogyny, patriarchy, rape, battery, Men's Rights Activists, capitalism, and globalisation, homophobic violence, anti-lesbian politics, and white het male supremacy is what this blog focuses on.

Is Noah against the gynocidal and genocidal practices which inhere in Western Civilisation? Does he support ending male supremacist violence against women? Is he pro-lesbian rights, and pro-Women's Liberation, as lesbian feminists and radical feminists of all colors define those agendas? Or does he get to pick and choose to whom he is accountable, just like all the other pro-queer (and anti-queer) white males with class privilege? It's not clear from what he teaches and addresses in his work.

This would represent a rather significant consciousness gap is his work, if it is indeed missing. It sure appears to be missing to me.

Below, readers, you can see more about the many solidly liberal-to-progressive issues Noah focuses on in his activist efforts. I wish him well with all of those. You can decide for yourself whether he is concerned about lesbians and women's liberation from heteropatriarchal societies. I see no evidence that concern whatsoever. And teaching a bit about radical feminism by promoting a small amount of Andrea Smith's work and a single essay of Audre Lorde's isn't supportive of radical transformation, it's self-promoting and liberally tokenistic.

What follows is from *here*. He is also a dedicated animal rights activist.

Animal Rights Study Group

The Animal Rights Study Group explores the intersections of animal rights and other social justice movements.

Whites Challenging Racism Study Group

Whites Challenging Racism is 10-week facilitated study group for white folks who want explore their role in bringing about racial justice.

Transgender Study Group

The Transgender Study Group examines issues facing transgender people in the context of interconnected social justice movements.

President Obama in India: Just What Was He Doing There? No Good, That's What. Read this account by Dr. Vandana Shiva

Beware the price of a handshake, when you shake hands with a U.S. President: It'll cost you more than you'd ever imagine. Image is from here.

U.S. presidents only have a few things to offer the world: self-interest is high on the list. Corporate interest is another. What the U.S. cannot and will not offer is freedom from the U.S. economy and it's standards and practices, which are gynocidal, genocidal, and ecocidal. How it is that President Obama could utter the words "Be the change you want to see in the world" (Mahatma Gandhi) with a straight face is beyond me. Globalisation is disaster, disease, and death to poor people globally. What will it take for President Obama to wake up and realise that?

What follows is from the Deccan Chronicle, and is being cross-posted here. Please click on the title below to link back to the source website.

Obama and the US corporate takeover

November 10th, 2010

By Vandana Shiva

The main focus of US President Barack Obama’s three-day visit to India was to firm up business deals for US corporations that would create jobs in the US. Trade deals worth over $10 billion were finalised, with a focus on defence, energy and agriculture. In fact, Mr Obama’s speech at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, focused almost entirely on how India owed it to the US to open its markets to US companies and agribusiness. What Mr Obama failed to mention, however, is that India has already been forced to give market access to the US in the areas of oilseeds, pulses and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) at the cost of the Indian farmers, and India’s biodiversity and environment.

India’s imports of edible oils are growing disproportionately: Since 2008, edible oil imports from the US to India have jumped 2,666 per cent and are expected to reach 9.3 million tonnes in 2010-11, while returns to Indian farmers are declining.

The flooding of domestic markets with artificially cheap imports is challenging the livelihood of local farmers and food processors. This upsurge in imports has also destroyed the rich diversity of indigenous oilseeds, including mustard, sesame, linseed, groundnut, coconut etc. The reliance on imported oilseeds can easily trigger violence and instability, as Indonesia’s food riots illustrate.

The destruction of India’s pulse diversity through the Green Revolution has led to pulses, the only proteins in a vegetarian diet, becoming completely unaffordable in most Indian households, with the US now dumping subsidised “yellow pea dal” which is no substitute for our indigenous flavoursome pulses.

US-based Monsanto’s monopoly in the Indian seed market has allowed the US corporation to harvest huge royalties through Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) while Indian farmers are pushed into debt and suicide. Two lakh farmers, mostly in the cotton belt, have committed suicide in India since 1997, the leading cause being debt linked to crop failure of the Monsanto Bt cotton, the spread of monocultures and of highly expensive, capital-intensive inputs that made cultivation economically unviable.

Mr Obama is also trying to pursue President George W. Bush’s agenda of unleashing Walmart on India’s retail economy. The argument used is reduction of waste and creation of jobs. However, Jonathan Bloom’s recently published book, American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food, puts the blame on the Walmart model for the destruction of food. India cannot afford such an expensive mistake. Further, retail generates 400 million jobs through self-employment. Instead of exporting unemployment to India from the US, Mr Obama should be importing innovative ideas of employment generation by learning from India’s small-scale entrepreneurs.

With regard to agriculture, too, Mr Obama is carrying on Mr Bush’s legacy with the Agriculture Knowledge Initiative (AKI) of 2008. At a time when the world recognises the productivity and ecological sustainability of small farmers, the US-India AKI is pushing India to adopt hazardous technologies such as GMOs and capital-intensive commercial agriculture, all of which benefit US agribusiness.

It is no coincidence that at the time of signing the AKI, US multinationals on the negotiating table — Monsanto, Walmart, Syngenta — lobbied for a change in India’s IPR laws so to claim exclusive ownership and extract royalties on agricultural inputs, leading to the creation of a stronger technological monopoly.

Instead of learning lessons from the ecological and social non-sustainability of the Green Revolution, Mr Obama is attempting to push the AKI beyond India, by making India join the US initiative for a Green Revolution in Africa.

A recent newspaper report stated that “India and the US may team up to tap farm opportunities in Africa. The proposal is a spin-off from the India-US agriculture dialogue”. Ben Rhodes, US’ deputy national adviser for strategic communication, said, “The US has been part of food security initiative in Africa, where we are trying to apply technology, innovation and capacity building to help African farmers lift their countries and their standard of living. We see great potential for the US and India to cooperate, not just within India but in African countries as well”.

The takeover of Africa’s land and agriculture by a global alliance — led by US agribusiness — is being pitched as a new model of food security. But it is, in fact, the globalisation of a failed model that creates food insecurity.

African movements have staunchly rejected the Green Revolution model for Africa: what the stakeholders want is a sustainable, inclusive and indigenous solution that increases food sovereignty — not dependency on markets, expensive chemical inputs and GMOs.

The UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, which engaged 400 scientists for four years to assess the performance of different models of agriculture, has concluded that neither the Green Revolution nor genetic engineering can offer food security. Only ecological agriculture has the potential for increasing food production.

Mr Obama — with his roots in Africa — needs to listen to the voices of his ancestors. It might also help if he spread the model Michelle Obama has introduced in the White House: Organic Gardens.

Glee: The "Never Been Kissed" Episode Takes On Anti-Butch Woman and Anti-Femme Boy Bigotry: But Does It Get A Passing Grade?

Photo of Glee's Coach Beiste, played by Dot Jones, is from here

Glee took on a subject I've not seen dealt with on television before because television completely invisibilises or mocks the reality of butch (overtly non-femme) women. It also gets to the heart a case of anti-gay bullying, which I'll discuss a bit later in this post.

Butch women are a reality of life, naturally and socially. "Femme-inity", however, is entirely unnatural and is always political. The femme-inisation of women is through values infused into every dominant social, cultural, religious, and secular institution, aided and abetted by pimps, pornographers, priests, and other preachers of White Het Male Supremacy who demand that women exist to submissively serve and pleasingly sexually service het men.

A new character this season to Glee, played by Dot Jones, is the woman who currently coaches the boys' football team. She is coaching them to success on the field. Unbeknown to her, she is being made fun off in some truly despicable and deeply hurtful ways. I'll explain.

Some of the cast regulars who are het dudes are having trouble--collectively, homosocially--with the fact that the girls they are dating "won't put out". What the girls "won't put out" is their own will and self-regard. Het boys' stereotypical sexist behavior is lived out far too often as normal patriarchal protocol. Het dudes, to varying degrees, think this sort of will and self-regard by girls and women must be thwarted and subverted, usually with coercion or manipulation, or with a knife, a gun, or a group of guys--or combos thereof. Date rape and acquaintance rape are common atrocities that young women and girls endure and sometimes survive--never being the same again. These rapes are endemic, but het men hate it when anyone uses that term (or others like "epidemic" or "systematic" or "routine") to describe what het men do to women and girls that the dudes consider normal and acceptable behavior (when dudes do it to girls and women, that is). "Endemic" makes the practice sound, you know, NOT GOOD. COMMON. CRIMINAL, even.

To determine if something is harmful and endemic in society, as a social-political problem--as something that shouldn't exist--we need only imagine a world in which the exact same thing was done by women callous and strong enough to overpower, or drug, teenage males and males in their early twenties and rape them. If the gross physical violation of het male bodies was accomplished in such a way as to torment, terrorise, and traumatise the males to the point that one in four het males who were attending college was sexually assaulted during their time there, we can rest assured that men's rights activists would be up in arms about it. They'd be marching in the streets. They'd be posting all kinds of pages on Facebook protesting it's occurrence. They'd also likely proclaiming women to be "haters and oppressors" of men for treating men like they were inhuman--beasts to be tamed.

So if it were called "an endemic social problem" or "a serious threat to humanity" if it were done to het men, then it is also "an endemic social problem" when done to females of any age. But men don't see things this way, because they see rape as natural, normal, and inevitable. If they didn't see rape this way, they'd stop each other from committing it. Instead, the promote it and protect their rights and entitlements to do it.

Glee would be accurately accused of promoting date- and acquaintance-rape of girls by het boys, of women by het men, if they showed what many het guys endemically do to girls who "don't put out". This was the term used on the show this evening. The boys are, you know, "frustrated" because the girls "won't put out". So they (I mean the show's writers) concoct this storyline wherein the flamboyantly, "in-your-face" straight guys agree to fantasize about the woman coach, nicknamed "The Beast", if while making out with their female dates or girlfriends they get too aroused. It's their alternative to taking a cold shower. The cold shower would mean they aren't making out, so they apparently prefer this penis-withering technique because it allows them to still make out with girls while drawing up images of "The Beast" when necessary to not reach orgasm and feel all embarrassed. (Yes, this is the society many of us live in. Guys really do behave this way. Or worse.)

Why do they call the football coach The Beast? Because, in our heteropatriarchal society, a woman is either a beauty or the... yeah. You got it. The point of view is always het men's or anyone who supports het men's woman-hating values on the subject. The primary authority to name the standards belongs to het men. And his rules go as follows: butch = lesbian. Lesbians are very bad because they don't need men to be fulfilled. The only kind of lesbian who is not bad, is the lesbian who is not butch, which means, in the het male imagination, she may exist for het men to fantasize about or to rape, in which case she's femme-inised and now "good" for something--rape and het men's fantasies of watching two women "put out" for him. Het male culture is almost too fucked up to believe.

"The Beast" does have another rarely used name on the show: Shannon Beiste (conveniently last-named so it can be pronounced "NOT THE BEAUTY"). Shannon finds out from Will, the good, white, het, non-femme male teacher of the Glee club, that they het dudes are thinking about her this way. Why he felt it necessary to tell her and hurt her is a bit beyond me. He's supposed to be relatively smart in this show. In this case, not so much. He's cruel. And she's deeply hurt.

And then Will feels bad, and he tells two of the het dude Glee singers that they need to stop the practice of misusing her--even privately--in that way. That scene was cool. Het guys rarely get called out on doing anything wrong if what they're doing wrong is "private" or "only in their imagination". What Will notes, accurately, is that just because something is only done in fantasy or in private, it can still be ethically reprehensible, wrong, and socially harmful as well as oppressive. Will has to remind these fools that behaving this way demeans a real human being, an outcast like them because they're in Glee club. Dots need to be connected for these guys to become anything resembling "empathic" because clearly they don't have the humanity to get what's completely fucked up about doing what they're doing--not only to the football coach, but to all women, including to their girlfriends.

Reinforcing the idea that "ugly females are worthless, and pretty females are worth raping" is one that het men carry around privately and present socially. They present it by insulting all women in various ways. Their reinforce it by committing rape against "pretty" girls and "ugly" girls, and any girls and women they want to control and degrade, or punish, or terrorise. And men, generally, want this to happen to all girls and all women so females will be more compliant, fearing what men might do if the girls and women don't do as they wish.

"Won't put out", in the het dude's dick-tionary, means:  the girl or woman won't "pull out my dick and 'let me' stick it in a female orifice". Het dudes have less technical language for some of these phrases. They might, for example, say, "She won't let me 'bone' her." Or, "She won't let me have any fun." Or, "She won't let me have my way with her." Because for het dudes who carry around attitudes like this--attitudes promulgated and promoted in het male pornography, there is, underneath all that female resistance, a belief that what the dudes want to do ought to be done. That if a dude is so very kind as to not just rape her the first time he wants to penetrate her body with his dick, he's going to have to be considered "considerate" if he rapes her on the tenth date, because he had to suffer ever so terribly on dates one through nine. Het dudes have a stupid term for this kind of discomfort--it's called "blue balls".

Blue balls refers to a certain kind of blood-congestion in the testicles. It's what het dudes have told girls they "suffer from" if the girl "won't put out"--it's a form of emotional coercion and gross political manipulation, but, again, het guys consider it okay to pull THAT out, that predatory, perpetrating ploy, because when it comes down to it, it's all about the guy's needs, isn't it? I mean, don't forget, she's there to service him, right? (Wrong.) Any guy that tries to manipulate or coerce a girl or woman by evening mentioning the term "blue balls" should have his balls blown... off.

So Coach Shannon Beiste decides to quit, because she is being so demeaned and mistreated in ugly, ugly ways by the het boys who are generally considered "cute" by girls. When guys behave in truly ugly ways they can be thought of as cute or "hot". When girls behave in ugly ways they are called either the b word or the c word by guys.

Will convinces the guys to sort of woo her back, as he does first by graciously offering her a first kiss. This scene is supposed to be moving. He's being magnanimous, after all. He's "willing" himself to see her as so human, so very human, and also female, that she should be kissed by a hot guy like himself. Because were he just some ugly prick of a guy, him kissing her wouldn't be registered by the viewing audience as "sweet". Will's a great guy--he'll kiss a butch woman and feed her lines that are intended to convince her she's not really butch--she's "beautiful" and this is what is grossly heterosexist about the show--that a woman STILL has to "pretty" (you know, like when she 'smiles'), in order to be "attractive" (to het dudes). This is so very, very messed up that one must assume this show is written only by men and never, ever by anyone who is conscious of the harm and brutality--and ugliness--of heteropatriarchal beauty standards. It's not that I think women writers would necessarily do a better job of it--they'd be fired if they wrote a storyline that cast a butch woman as attractive BECAUSE she's NOT femme-inised, even when smiling.

What the show portrays with some honesty is the real pain girls and women are in who are considered "unattractive" socially by men. I've known women in my life who are not femme-inine, by choice or not. And the contempt shown to them by het dudes and too often also by gay dudes, is palpable and enough to make you sick. Again, it's the guys who are ugly here, not the women.

Another ways guys can be ugly is by being homophobic bullies. A character is focused on within the same show--the main bully of Curt, the only out gay student at the high school. He's white, thin, and sometimes feminine. So he's hated, because femininity is hated, regardless of who displays it. It's hated in various ways if the effeminate person is female. But when the male is feminine, it's hated by shoving Curt repeatedly into a hallway wall of lockers. Curt realises no one at the school is really going to do anything to stop this--they will keep their school a physically and emotionally unsafe space for queer youth. They will remain oblivious to the damage they are doing by not doing anything to stop thugs like this big brute.

What is commonly known by anyone who tracks the lives of anti-gay bullies is that they are all repressing their own homosexual feelings. You can know who is a "homosexual" male in a grade school or high school or college one of two ways: the student is out as gay, or the student bullies gay or feminine males. So, just so ya know, thug-boys, you're outing yourselves every time you call a kid a "f**got".

Curt travels to another school--an all boys private school, which in the U.S. means "expensive". Curt's dad is widowed and working class. They don't have money for anything other than free (public) high school. But while visiting he meets Blaine, who is gay, out, and living in a school environment that has a zero tolerance policy for any form of oppressive bigotry or bullying. Why it is all grade schools and high schools and colleges don't have this policy is because the schools don't really want anything resembling equal treatment of citizens. Parents and school board adminstrators, like the fascistically anti-gay now-resigned school board official Clint McCance, don't want lesbian and gay students to feel safe or be welcomed as equals anywhere. They want them to not be lesbian or gay. And so as long as schools are hostile to lesbians and gay males, they hope they will get their way. If the suicides among lesbian and gay youth continue at high rates, these parents and school administrators might find that their dream comes true.

Curt can barely believe his eyes--an actual high school where being gay isn't stigmatised and seen as a cause for being punished and pummeled. There's some sublte classism in this storyline, which implies that rich kids' parents and their school officials "get it" that homophobia hurts and kills and is just plain wrong, but less rick kids' parents and school officials aren't really capable of getting that message.

But Curt is befriended by Blaine, who keeps texting him to have courage. He wants Curt to call out the bully. Curt does. And when the bully basically runs away into the locker room, Curt follows him to demand to know WTF is going on. Not surprisingly--if you're one of us gay males who are propositioned by former high school bullies--the thug plants a big ol' kiss on Curt's lips. This is a violation of Curt; it is also, tragically, his first kiss. Together Blaine and Curt try and convince the thug that it's normal to be confused about being gay, but the thug isn't quite ready to come out--he certainly knows how mean guys can be.

What this show teaches us is that white guys who are handsome save the day each and every time. They show love, or facsimiles of it, to butch women or to gay boys, and those males' lives are richly transformed so that those who receive that golden whiteboy touch can be healed and transformed into self-respecting, self-loving individuals. Girls and women cannot similarly transform girls and women, on television. In real life, yes. But not ever on television--that power must belong only to statused males: white, thin, handsome, able-bodied, and not at all femme.

photo of "Curt" on Glee, played by Chris Colfer,  is from here

I am eager to see how Curt's relationship with Blaine develops. It's kind of too bad that Blaine has to be a white guy. But given how race and class in the U.S. intertwine in strange and strangulating ways, it might come across as implausible for a very dark-skinned non-white student to be found at a rich private school for boys. And Glee will only go so far in breaking down any stereotype, as was discussed in more detail in *this post* from last week.

This storyline with Kurt would have probably empowered me to take more action against my bullies back in the day. (But I sure as hell hope none of the ugly pricks would've kissed me if I confronted them.) Even with all the stereotyping, I love Glee. I really do. I'm a TV addict from way back when The Partridge Family was on Friday nights. Give me some good pop songs performed well and I'm a happy camper. I'd be a happier camper if programs did away with all stereotypes, but I've learned not to expect any more than I get from corporate pimps who won't promote anything that can't be commodified, stereotyped, and sold.

I remember a Partridge Family episode that actually mentioned "radical feminists" and of course they were portrayed as man-haters, not woman-lovers. Yeah, we've come a long way, baby. Now radical feminists aren't ever mentioned at all.

It's Reigning Men! And that's not all...

cartoon is from here at PhotoBucket

It's also reigning other male supremacists who are drowning out lesbian human rights and Women's Radical Liberation. The Self-Appointed Misogynistic Trans Spokespeople state that we must agree with them that "Woman" is not what radical feminist women know political womanhood to be.

Given a recent non-exchange with Noah, a transgender-identified person who came here arrogantly posturing as THE spokesperson for a group (of which I'm a part) that has no central political strategy or position on what transgender means or is, I'd like to note that now is a particularly challenging time for Women's Liberation in part because of the Liberal Queer politics of alleged gender ambiguity.

Not only is Women's Liberation threatened, as it always has been, because of the on-going and unrelenting force, terror, propaganda, and crushing oppression coming down from the Religious Right and Secular (Less-Right) Liberals in the West, but due to intensely self-protective and utterly walled-in, well-bolstered patriarchal practices in quasi-Queer society. What with liberalism replacing radicalism as a general viewpoint on gender, all manner of pro-patriarchal theories and practices continue to hold radical theories and lives in an invasive vine-like vice-grip, choking the life out of radical lesbian feminist theories and practices of challenging heteropatriarchal atrocities, institutions, and values to the roots. The roots are thickening and swelling with the help of something called Dominant Queer Politics which looks a lot like what all the other movements for assimilation-without-transformation look like: "Same CRAP, Different Day".

We are dutifully instructed to ignore everything Sheila Jeffreys ever wrote because she's a transphobe. Never mind her book detailing all the ways Contemporary Western Queer culture is virulently anti-lesbian and anti-feminist. Who cares about lesbian rights any more? It's all Queer here all the time. Get used to it. There's no room for the Lesbians at the Queer Culture Inn unless you were assigned male at birth. Who the hell wants radical feminism, anyway? Not the rapists, pimps, and batterers. And now, not the Liberal Queer activists and their non-appointed spokespeople either.

So intensely defensive is a certain trans position among anti-lesbian anti-feminists, that no dialogue is possible--only evangelically self-righteous reprimanding and scolding of us poor ignorant queer folk as if the rest of us, trans or not, intergender or not, intersex or not, women or not, are just idiots in need of trans-Salvation.

I reject as pro-status quo and inhumane any politic that not only refuses respectful engagement--as determined by all parties, not just one--but that consistently refuses radical critique of its own premises, practices, campaigns, and values.

Anti-lesbianism has always been intense. I just never expected Queer community to become so virulently homophobic and lesbophobic, all in the name of the irresponsible and completely unaccountable dictates and directives of these self-appointed Grand Masters of All Matters Having To Do With Gender.

Liberal Queer Politics, including some expressions and manifestations of Trans Politics, has become just one more threat to Women's Liberation and Lesbian Feminist struggles by demanding that Women/Wimmin deny their own experiences and political location as people who are targeted, stigmatised, and injured from birth to death due to the political meaning imposed over and into their bodies. This is not biological determinism or essentialism--it is The Master's social-political theory-in-practice, enforced in interpersonal and institutional spaces, cyber and non-virtual. To be named and stigmatised as a wh*re from birth (meaning, to be raised as a girl who is raised to be a woman) is not an experience shared by anyone identified as male at birth. To be targeted disproportionately for forced intrusion into your genital area is not something people assigned male at birth have to contend with from day one and are assumed to exist to accommodate, welcome, want, and desire. "Women", from the radical feminist viewpoints I'm aware of, are a class of people who are required--upon penalty of death--to accommodate, appease, appeal to, appreciate, applaud, give access to, and approve of men, male supremacy, and anyone with structural male privileges for a portion or all of one's life. A sublime expression of male supremacist privilege is the entitlement to deny to women that you possess it. Some trans people who were raised with some male entitlements claim they too are women, using their male privilege to drill the point home.

To be so abused and devalued from birth to death, for being seen and treated as "not male" is indeed part of a very specific political process and form of oppression, of making human beings female, girl, and woman, by marking, mass marketing, and invading their bodies and terrorising their minds in some very specific ways.

Among trans bloggers there is, you will find, absolutely no agreement about whether being transgender is a biological condition or an entirely social-political one. There is no agreement about what intergender means; whether "transsexual" is a helpful or hurtful term; whether misogyny is rampant among prominent transgender activists. Nor is there an agreed upon process, ethic, or approach for how to resolve any of these matters through respectful discourse and accountable activism (accountable to radical feminist female-assigned-at-birth women/wimmin). What there is, is a kind of new bully in town: the pro-trans bully who is especially intimidating because they've claimed the right to exclusively tell the rest of us who is and is not a bigot, or a transphobe--including those of us who are transgender and intergender.

Among these self-appointed online spokespeople is Noah, who won't listen to anyone who doesn't first agree to check their own radical political views at the threshold, when it is this viewpoint that gets us to challenge heteropatriarchy in the first place. Radical feminism is many things--not one--and one of the things it is and always has been is self-interrogating. What you have when you organise around beliefs that cannot be challenged without being accused of being a bigot or an oppressor is this: a cultural cult of theory and practice. This cultish nature is revealed in the profoundly defensive posturing and reactionary vitriol that comes at anyone who dares challenge these few undemocratically positioned spokespeople. How wonderful for them they self-elect into a life term of being so arrogant and unaccountable to anyone else--especially those they structurally oppress, like female-assigned-at-birth lesbian feminists.

How convenient for dominant-class heteropatriarchs that a relatively new and marginalised while vocal group on the scene--these specific trans bloggers and activists (certainly not all trans bloggers and not all trans activists)--can challenge female-assigned-at-birth women to stop claiming to be "women"; can call any woman who doesn't identify as "cis" to be an anti-trans bigot; and who don't really ever seem to notice how incredibly elitist trans-specific lingo can be and is for most people. Most of us who speak English as a first language, or not, won't and can't even know what the fuck is being said because the terms have no set meaning, in good keeping with the shoddy, mis-appropriated pro-modern, post-modernist fashion that is used to argue the gender-fluidity of a system that is known for its utterly unfluid and stone-crushing effect on female-assigned-at-birth women's lives.

How extraordinarily privileged this group is showing themselves to be with no regard or respect for accountability at all. It's their way or the highway. And the highway is already bloodied with the roadkill of women's bodies maimed, murdered, and tossed out of the vehicle by men who won't ever be challenged by these elitist trans-spokespeople to call themselves "cis"; the male-assigned-at-birth men who stay men-without-prefix get a pass because the misogynistic target of these trans-spokespeople is women--radical feminist women, lesbian separatists, radical lesbian feminists--who govern no states, make no laws, rule no countries, control no institutions, own no media, lead no major religions, and dominate no social spaces except two that some trans people insist, demand, sue, and shove their way into, so as to gain access, regardless of how aggressive, hostile, violating, and triggering it is for the lesbian women who wish to only be with other lesbian women for a few days once a year at most.

The Politics of Patriarchal Liberalism and Individualism never stopped reigning, but now it also reigns in places in the West that once had a radical feminist presence. Say good-bye to all of that. With plenty of assistance from liberal academic programs (that don't do shit to end rape or racism, genocide or gynocide), pro-misogyny, woman-violating trans political practices rule, in the minds and behavior of far too many.

How arrogant, how white het male supremacist, these spokespeople present themselves as being, denying it while they put down everyone who has the unmitigated and anti-patriarchal gall to "disagree". So much for coalition-building across difference.

Noah, if you wish, go build your isolationist arc and collect upon it all those you deem worthy of speaking to you. It is clear you don't wish to be challenged at all. You've cast your lot with neoConservatives, neoLiberals, Libertarians, and Capitalists. Enjoy the party of your choice.

You're not my oppressor but you're also not my ally. I wish you well and support your human-rights-for-all-transgender-people campaign. But because you promote such anti-lesbian and anti-gay practices--denying us the right to claim people in our herstory and history, protesting the right of lesbian-identified women to congregate amongst themselves, please steer clear of this radical profeminist intergender gay blog's project to support the dismantling of the dual-gender hierarchy to below its foundation. Debris will be falling from above and the ground beneath you may be crumbling, if those of us engaged in this struggle have any success.

And Noah: the unicorns are gay and the leprechauns are lesbian. Lola was a gay man. Teena Brandon was a Lesbian woman. That's one view that is just as valid and unbigoted as any other. Find other people to misappropriate from Lesbian herstory and Gay history. You might start with those who self-identify as transgender: we are what we call ourselves--isn't that your politic?

Radical Feminist Lesbian women in the thousands and Radical Profeminist Gay males (intergender or not--all three of us--if that), will continue to wage our own struggles for liberation while you stubbornly remain unwilling to respect our methods of surviving sexually and socially, as the Lola's and Teena's of the world did and do. You're not working for our liberation when you add heaping portions of lesbophobia, misogyny, white male supremacy, heterosexism, and homophobia onto our lives. I cast my lot with radical lesbian feminists over 25 years ago and nothing you're promoting or anything about the way you're behaving is leading me to regret that decision. On the contrary, you've shown yourself to be a supreme patriarchy-protector among patriarchs who want you dead.

Make what you will of gender in your liberal and quasi-essentialist ways. You'll have plenty of support from the already reigning men, who despise you because you socially and liberally transgress the status quo, not because you seek to radically politically transform it.

image is from here

P.S. Your comments are no longer welcome here. You've violated several of the comment policies as it is. Farewell sibling in the struggle. Bon voyage as you ride your elitist, anti-feminist arc. I wish you safe passage.

DIGNITY: RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, 10 November 2010, 6:30pm - 9pm, Urban Zen Center, NYC

With thanks to Brenda Norrell, this is cross-posted from Censored News, *here*.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Owe Aku in New York Nov. 10: Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples


Lakotas join Amnesty International and Cultural Survival in New York
Censored News
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com

Download or print poster at:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/41451888/DIGNITY-Invitation

Owe Aku International Justice Project will participate in a panel discussion at the Zen Center in New York's Greenwich Village that is being co-hosted by Amnesty International, Cultural Survival and the Zen Center. The subject of the evening is to raise awareness of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigneous Peoples currently being "reviewed" by the State Department of the United States, one of two nations in the world to have not endorsed the Declaration. The community is invited for free - see the invitation for information and to rsvp. Owe Aku IJP looks forward to seeing a good turn out from New York's Native community.

Owe Aku International Justice Project
invited to particpate in
"DIGNITY: Rights of Indigenous People."
Wednesday November 10th from 6:30 to 9 PM
Urban Zen Center - 711 Greenwich Street

A panel discussion on the specifics of the Declaration, the importance of human rights, and the need to preserve Indigenous wisdom and customs.

Hosted by Urban Zen and Cultural Survival

Panelists Include:

• Elsa Stamatopoulou, Former Chief of the Premanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations
• Larry Cox, the Executive Director from Amnesty International
• Les Malezer, Native Australian of the Gabi Gabi Community, General Manager for the Foundation of Aboriginal and Islander Research Action
• Kent Lebsock, Lakota, Director, Owe Aku (Bring Back the Way) International Justice Project

PLEASE NOTE: The Native and Indigenous communities are invited to attend that evening as the guests of Urban Zen and Amnesty International.

Those wishing to attend should RSVP at RSVP@urbanzen.org. For more information, a detailed schedule of events, or to register, please visit www.urbanzen.org or call 212.414.8520.
Kent Lebsock
Coordinator

Owe Aku International Justice Program
oweakuinternational@me.com