Declaration by AWAN members Cherry Smiley and Fay Blaney at Women's Worlds, 6 July 2011 ECD

image is from here

Non-Profit Organization · Vancouver, BC, Coast Salish Territories

All that follows was found on Facebook. I post this in alliance with and support for AWAN, Cherry Smiley, and Fay Blaney. Thank you for all your hard work!

Declaration presented by AWAN Members Cherry Smiley & Fay Blaney at Women's Worlds 2011, July 6, 2011

by Aboriginal Women's Action Network on Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 8:47pm

As Indigenous women living on occupied territories now known as Canada, who have survived over 500 years of attempted genocide, we declare:

1. We, Indigenous women, will not allow anyone or anything to break the ties that bind us. Despite the  impacts of colonialism - the racism, sexism, poverty and violence that pervade our lives and communities, working to divide us both inside and out - we are profoundly aware of our connected ness to each other as women, to our ancestors, and to our lands. No man, men, or external force will ever ultimately sever these ties.

2. Our analysis of prostitution as a form of violence against women and as a system of colonialism is the result of over five centuries of resistance stories, stories told to us by our Grandmothers, who have retold the stories of their Grandmothers, who have retold the stories of their Grandmothers. This analysis is based on our own life experiences, on the life experiences of our mothers, our sisters, and all our relations. It is based on theory and knowledge constructed collectively by Indigenous women.

3. Purposeful legal tolerance of prostitution and pornography, as with the Indian Act and the residential school system, was and is an external colonial system imposed on Indigenous women and girls in continued attempts to harm and destroy us.

4. We, Indigenous women, reject the racist assumption that prostitution was ever part of our traditional practices. We denounce the idea that we are objects to be bought and sold.

5. We, Indigenous women, reject the capitalism that has resulted in the theft and destruction of our homelands and our environment. We reject the International capitalism and greed that also drives the “sex industry”, an industry that regards Indigenous women and girls as objects to be sold at the highest price, should we survive the transaction. We reject the colonial terminology of “sex work”, as it hides the racist, sexist, and classist realities of prostitution. “Sex work” masks the violence that our sisters struggle against on a daily basis and repackages that violence as a form of freely chosen labour.

6. We, Indigenous women, reject the imposition of patriarchy, which has had devastating and deadly effects for Indigenous women and girls. We face male violence within our own families and communities, and often we are pushed out of these very communities seeking safety. We are forced to migrate into cities where we continue to face physical, emotional, and sexual violence at the hands of men, including at the hands of johns, pimps, brothel owners, and traffickers. We demand a return to our traditional values that place women and girls in high esteem.

7. The Nordic model of state policy will give Indigenous women and girls the best chance of not only survival, but life. This model includes law reform that criminalizes the male demand for paid sex and decriminalizes prostituted women, offers comprehensive social programs to all women and girls, and educates the public about prostitution as a form of male violence against women and girls.  We, Indigenous women, believe this model encourages true social change that works in our interest.

8. We, Indigenous women, reject the total decriminalization and/or legalization of prostitution as an acceptable solution to sexual violence. The total decriminalization and/or legalization of prostitution only encourages the racist and deadly male demand for access to the bodies of women and girls, with Indigenous women and girls being disproportionately targeted.

9. We, Indigenous women, reject the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist male perception that our sole worth is as sexual objects. We recognize that prostitution and pornography, incest, physical and sexual assault, and murder exist on a continuum of male violence and hatred toward Indigenous women and girls. The tragic outcome of that hatred is the over 580 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.

10. We, Indigenous women and girls, have survived over 500 years of attacks on our cultures, our bodies, our lands, and our lives.  We refuse to abandon our future generations to the colonial sexist violence that is prostitution and we demand an immediate end to the male demand for paid sex.


*All Indigenous Women - First Nations, Inuit, Metis - who are in agreement with this Declaration are invited to sign on as individual endorsers or organizations.  You can contact us at awan.bc@gmail.com to do so.*


**Update: Due to demand we are compiling a solidarity list for non native women and orgs to sign in support of the declaration**

To Hugh Hefner: Old Pimps Don't Die, You Just Keep on Pimping

photo of Hugh Hefner with three young extremely white women is from here

Above, Hugh demonstrates, in action, his racist, heterosexist, misogynist values. He surrounds himself only with the most narrow understanding of female people. Apparently, if you're not Aryan-looking and made up in CRAP-loaded ways, he doesn't want to know you. And even if you are Aryan-looking and made up in CRAP-loaded ways, he doesn't want to know you, he wants to sexually exploit and domineeringly control you.

If you're looking for ageist jokes about an elderly man's penis and Viagra, you've come to the wrong place. This post is about the alleged humanity of Hugh Hefner, not his age or genital functioning.

As Mark Twain said about reports of his demise, rumors of Hugh Hefner's death recently have been greatly exaggerated. What cannot be exaggerated is the extent to which Hugh, over more than half a century, has made US society a far more classist-racist-misogynist society, promoting ideals of women's beauty that has been so horrifically harmful that he ought to be charged with crimes against humanity—the humanity of women, and girls.

To an alarming number of white men, he is seen as a hero; to liberals he is also seen as a fighter of civil liberties and human rights—claims of his humane humanity have also been greatly exaggerated. Not too long ago his soon-to-be wife, Crystal Harris made what some viewed as a surprising decision: she elected to not wed and also dump Hugh Hefner. If anyone doubts the wisdom to be found in women who appear to be what Hugh insists women must look like, let it be noted that before she signed away her rights to self-possession, she got the hell away from this controlling, domineering, manipulative, oppressive play-prick. Hugh is to human rights what B.P. is to environmentalism and what General Petraeus is to the Peace Movement.

On Piers Morgan Tonight, last night, he put forth the nonsense that we can't really know why she dumped him. We can: he was an oppressive, misogynist prick. No, she's not likely to say that on television or in print media. He thinks a case can be made for them not having much in common intellectually. Perhaps: while a successful business-man, he's not especially smart at relationships or anything else that doesn't have to do with his own ego, his compulsively racist-sexist-heterosexist value system, and the bank accounts he has due to profiting off of those values-in-action. Hugh isn't just a pimp; he's also a filthy white supremacist, and an anti-Lesbian activist, and a virulent misogynist.

Hugh is not a lonely man; he makes sure his economic clout and social stature keep women around—women who would not likely know life without economic woes without him. I doubt they are anything resembling economically free while living under his roof—by many accounts he is so controlling that he wouldn't let anyone else co-own his money, not even a spouse.

He brought with him to the program, to wait for him backstage, two “new loves”--both blond, both young--briefly referred to by only their first names as if they were his daughters: one woman has been a girlfriend for a couple of years. Hugh made polyamory into a lifestyle well before it took off in progressive queer community. His brand of polyamory is insistently WHM supremacist. So when I say things like “polyamory” and “monogamy”, what I mean is possession and oligarchy.

Hugh believes liberalism is a solidly good ideal. But when it comes to him hoarding male supremacist power he's entirely conservative.

He says he wanted to give Crystal “what she wanted” by marrying her, but if she wanted freedom and economic independence, he wasn't likely to support her having either. He speculates she had another man, as if this is a reason to not marry—clearly for Hugh it's not a reason—he's never been monogamous. He says “I never played shady. I've always been who I am.” Yes, a pimp. But I doubt he ever tells anyone that's exactly what he is—to the core of his being. Nothing he's done with his life was not done to serve himself.

Hugh and Piers sat together speaking about politics, the kind organised around elections, not erections. Piers remarked: “Like everyone, I'm sure you've been through a very tough time in the last couple of years.” Huh? Right, Piers: most folks live in their own mansion, have plenty of access to health care, and have enough social-sexual capital to sell women and his own image.

Hugh got in a xenophobic slam against China's economic power, and at least Piers reminded him capitalist China's values are largely [US] American. What could Hugh say: he agreed.

He said he didn't think Casey Anthony acted like “an innocent person”; I'd argue it takes one to know one. I don't mean that Hugh is a murderer of children. I mean he has done gross harm to children—far more children than Casey Anthony ever could. Yet she will continue to be demonised as evil, while he got a film made about him proclaiming him a great human rights activist. This could only be true—well it could never be true—but it could only be proposed as possible truth if we pretend girls and women are not human deserving of the human rights fought for by groups like Amnesty International—not that they have a great record on fighting for rights for women against patriarchal atrocities. He once refused to do a pictorial of Vanessa Williams, a former Miss America, because he knew it would ruin her career. He pretends to actually care about women by stating insincere things:

"They clearly weren't authorized (by Williams) and because they would be the source of considerable embarrassment to her, we decided not to publish them," Hefner told PEOPLE in 1984. [source: here]

He hasn't given enough thought to how perpetuating heteroracist-sexist standards of exploitative femininity harms Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women and girls, I guess--as well as white women and girls. When asked if he thought of Playboy as exploitive, he unsurprisingly, if bewilderingly, said “I don't”. Fortunately Piers reminded Hugh he has his own moral compass on such things. Well, a pimp's moral compass that is not quite only his own. Hugh has a new show, The Playboy Club, coming onto US television this fall; it will likely attempt to airbrush or Photoshop the heterosexism and racist-misogyny of the time and re-present them as forms of liberation for young blond white het non-Jewish, non-Muslim women. The program Mad Men deals with the same era and economic culture, but has reportedly attempted to show sexism as sexism, not freedom.

At the end of the show, Piers misogynistically verbally welcomed Hugh to go off-stage to the “comforting bosoms” of his two girlfriends, who had been shown a few times through the show, never allowed to speak. Hugh chuckled in a unsurprisingly creepy way—these are women who are not yet old enough to be the average age of his own children.

"War on the Earth": When Men Treat the Earth Like a Woman To Be Dominated and Abused; Like Whites Treat People of Color; Like the non-Indigenous Treat the Indigenous

photo of Vandana Shiva is from here

All that follows was found at Z Communications, *here*. I welcome the day when men at Z Mag and Z Communications, and AlterNet, and all progressive white male supremacist media, identify "patriarchal abuses" and "male supremacy" as forms of war and destruction; I challenge David Barsamian specifically to do so. Consider this understanding of our global problems put forth by him:

There are multiple crises facing the planet. They're fairly obvious, and are interlinked: climate change, food, and the economic/political crisis.

What is the 'gender' of that economic and political crisis? Which gender rules the most powerfully destructive countries on Earth, internationally? Who is in charge of institutional financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank--women or men? In what ways do economic forces resemble the values and practices of male supremacist forces? Why are most of the world's poor female? Why are most of the world's females poor? We see these questions being taken on by Marilyn Waring, in her work such as If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, and Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth.

I also hope all pro-feminist and radical anti-racist whites pay attention to the many forces that are killing women around the world, other than patriarchal atrocity and male supremacy as privileged whites experience it. We cannot make sense of the complexities of the world with a single-issue analysis. Nor can we effectively organise against them with a single-issue agenda; this doesn't mean making women less than front and center in the sphere of concern; it does mean listening to women everywhere, not just the most privileged ones, when figuring out how best to resist and rebel. See the work of Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, such as in Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization. 

War on the Earth

David Barsamian interviews Vandana Shiva

By David Barsamian

June 2011

Vandana Shiva provides an international voice for sustainable

development and social justice. She's a physicist, scholar, social

activist, and feminist. She is director of the Research Foundation for

Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi and a

recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize.

She is the author of many books, including Water Wars, Earth

Democracy, and Soil Not Oil.

BARSAMIAN: On receiving the Sydney Peace Prize in November 2010, you
said, "When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and
Afghanistan, but the bigger war is the ongoing war against the Earth.
This war has its roots in an economy which fails to respect ecological
and ethical limits." Tell me more about this war.

SHIVA: This war is being fought, for example, in India across the

country, wherever there are minerals, which happens to be where there

are forests, which happens to be where tribals live. And it's fueled

by the very investor-speculators who brought down the world economy.

Huge money is to be made out of iron ore and bauxite mining. And then

to push consumption, to use more and more of these nonrenewable

resources.

India until 20 years ago never had landfills. But our laws are now

saying they want us to move from 1 kilogram of aluminum use to 15

kilograms per capita of use. Fifteen kilograms multiplied by a billion

Indians means that every mountain will have to be mined, every forest

will have to be destroyed. This generates war against nature because

it devastates ecosystems. But it's also a war against people, because

every human right must be violated, and a war economy, in a real

sense, has to be created.

You say that the war against the Earth begins in the mind. How does
that happen?

The moment you take an Earth in which systems are mutually supporting,

in which forest systems create the weather systems and create the

water systems, where the soil gives us the food—a reductionist,

mechanistic worldview chops up that interconnected nature. That

chopping up, reductionism, is the beginning of the war in the mind.

And this "eco-imperialism," as you call it, has its roots—are we

talking a couple of hundred years now?

All of this was a synergy between colonialism, a conquest of the

South, and defining the people of the South as if we weren't fully

human. A conquest of nature through redefining nature as dead, inert,

manipulable matter. And it was a conquest over the feminine aspect of

every society. The witch hunts were part of it in America and in

Europe because what was being hunted was not women who were witches,

but holistic knowledge and expertise by women. This triple

colonization is really only a few hundred years old, and it has

reached its limits. But those who gain from it, whether its power or

its money would like to push that limit a little longer by

commodifying every aspect of nature.

There are multiple crises facing the planet. They're fairly obvious,
and are interlinked: climate change, food, and the economic/political
crisis.

The interconnections have actually just intensified in the last two

years. We see the financial crisis that created the unraveling of the

economy. Ordinary, hard-working people are paying the price, sometimes

with their lives.

The financial crisis, then, is linked to the energy crisis, because a

fossil fuel-driven economy can only carry on its path of growth by

converting the living earth into oil rather than finding an

alternative economy based on nonrenewables, and they would like to

take renewables and turn them into nonrenewables. The biofuel grab is

part of it. And that biofuel grab is leading to the land grab in

Africa. All of this is also creating the climate-induced catastrophes,

which are then feeding back into food insecurity. So 2010 saw forest

fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, flooding and then cyclones in

Australia—after about six years of an intensive drought.

Meantime, that same financial gambling game is speculating on food as

a commodity, driving up food prices, which is a big issue in Indian

politics. Recently, nine opposition parties came together to fight the

price rise. We are tied up in these interconnections of a vicious

cycle, where each crisis feeds the other crisis. And bio-imperialists,

who want to use the planet's resources for their own gain and

extension of their power, now use the crisis they have created to say,

"Okay, let's grab Africa. Let's grab the farmlands of India. Let's

grab the last mineral. Let's commodify every bit of food and grain on

this planet," never answering the question, "What happens to 80

percent of humanity?"

The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization said food prices in 2010
were the highest in history.

In 2008 there was a spike in food prices and 2010 has gone beyond that

because 2010 has been a combination of real scarcity due to climate

catastrophes, along with the artificial scarcity created by

speculation. And when you have two forces driving prices upwards, and

they are structural, that is why any government who says, "Oh, next

month the weather will be fine" or "the harvest will come," is not

realizing two things. One, industrial globalized agriculture as well

as other fossil-fuel-driven systems have given us climate chaos. It's

not a future issue, it's not a future debate of what will happen in

100 years. People are dying today. The second thing they don't realize

is politicians still try and respond to these crises as if they're

living in isolated nation states, when they themselves have signed a

WTO agreement interlinking the global food system, which means a

problem in one part of the world gets transmitted to the rest of the

world—whether it be a speculation or climate damage.

You mentioned Australia—drought, floods, cyclones. Is extreme weather

an anomaly or is it part of a pattern we're going to see more of?

Climate chaos, as I call it, is a pattern. That's why I am reluctant

to use the words "global warming," in which case you get one snowstorm

and the climate skeptics say, "Oh, this is global cooling? Didn't we

tell you?" As if all the time the temperature will be rising

everywhere rather than what the climate scientists say, average

temperatures across the planet are rising. The second is, when you

talk "climate change," you get other climate skeptics saying, "Oh, we

just adapt to it. And Swedish beaches will become like the tropics, so

isn't that wonderful?" Or "England will get warmer and will now grow

grapes and will become wine country." That kind of stupidity does not

take into account that the same England also gets a snowstorm and gets

stalled for two weeks because they are not a heavy snow country and

have none of the equipment to clean up Heathrow airport.

A large number of Americans seriously doubt there is such a thing as
global warming and climate change. You've studied the issue, you're a
scientist. Is the science solid?

There are reasons why we have to take climate science seriously. It's

not just one or two scientists or single discipline. The

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, is a

multidisciplinary group of 2,500 scientists. Never in the history of

humanity have 2,500 scientists, trained in different aspects of the

environment, resources, the planet, the climate, the atmosphere, put

together their collective expertise from 1988 onwards.

Every ecosystem with an additional burden will have a different

behavior. A river with too much pollution becomes a dead river. An

atmosphere with too much pollution will start having different

patterns, too much snow where there should be no snow, and no rain

where there should be rain. All of this unpredictability needs to be

seen as a phenomenon that people are living through.

Mining issues are key in India. There is the Niyamgiri Mountain issue

in Orissa in eastern India. You've been there. Talk about that and why

it is significant and the push-back and resistance from the people.

They talk of something called the India story. And the India story is

a high-growth story built on the outsourcing of software, creating

Silicon Valleys in Bangalore. But the untold part of the India story

is the outsourcing of pollution and resource extraction. So while most

aluminum and steel manufacturing has shut down in Europe, the U.S.,

and Japan, the consumption of all of these items is being pushed even

further with everything that makes this global economy run. Aluminum

is vital to it. Bauxite is the raw material for aluminum.

Vedanta, a UK-based company owned by an Indian, wanted to mine a

mountain called Niyamgiri, which means the mountain that upholds the

sacred law. Niyam means the law of the universe and giri means

mountain. The most ancient tribes of the Dongria Kondh have been

living on this mountain since the beginning of their own memory.

They've resisted the bauxite mining. In spite of it, Vedanta managed

to set up a refining plant and a smelter in the valley and further

downstream. Because of the protests, they were never able to get to

the bauxite, even though the courts and the Ministry of Environment

were manipulated.

The interesting thing is there is another plant in Orissa which is

called Posco. It is a Korean steel plant, but our research shows it's

actually owned by Wall Street. The majority of shares are owned by

Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. The World Bank forced the privatization

of this plant in the Southeast Asia financial crisis. They want 4,000

acres of the coast with a captive port and parkland. Then, of course,

they want mines. Most of the iron ore they mine will go straight out

to Korea and China. Some will be processed in an export zone, also for

export.

Tell me how rivers can be sold.

Both aluminum and steel making are highly energy-intensive and

resource-intensive processes. They are extremely water-intensive

processes. Entire rivers are being rerouted for steel and aluminum

making. The River Shivnath in Chhattisgarh is flowing through tribal

areas. We use our rivers to go down and wash our clothes, to bathe.

Our buffalos and our cows go to the river. The river recharges all of

the groundwater around it. The River Shivnath, 22 kilometers of it was

privatized, to bring water to Jindal's steel plant. In order to

privatize it, people could not access the river water, they could not

access the groundwater in their own fields and wells.

It's very much like the privatization of water in Bolivia where, when

Bechtel faced resistance, they said, "You can't have this water on

your roof, you can't take water in your well." And the Bolivian people

said, "So you now own the rain and you own the groundwater?" That's

what the people of Chhattisgarh said. That project had to be

cancelled. This was a direct legal transfer of a river to a private

company.

De facto privatization is happening everywhere. When you look at

Vedanta, their aluminum factory has totally rerouted the Indravati

River that flows southward, moved it northward, had it dropped into a

river called Hati Tel River to then service this huge aluminum

smelter. The Tatas, when they expanded their Jamshedpur factory, put

dams on two tributaries of Suvernarekha River, and that was 100

percent water for Jamshedpur. We fought the privatization of Delhi

water, which was going to bring water up into the Himalaya from the

Tehri Dam, and Suez was going to then sell it at 10 times the normal

price that we pay for water. So whether it's for a city or a steel

plant, an aluminum plant, they're such thirsty projects that they have

to steal water from people and from nature.

But this other story of the emerging economy, the giant with 9 percent

growth, is a joint construction of the Indian elite and the global

elite. The global elite, of course, spun the globalization story. The

global elite need the success of the model of globalization, of free

trade, of corporate-driven economies. They have to constantly sell

that.

They first tried to sell it through the Southeast Asian countries. You

remember there was a period when the East Asian tigers and the dragons

were the poster children of globalization. In 1997 that collapsed. The

West was its own poster child. After 2008 that collapsed. So if that

fake story of globalization and corporate control has to continue,

they've got to have some poster child. And they're hanging desperately

to the India of today, with its rising billionaires, but constantly

more and more impoverished people. We have some of the richest people

in the world today: the Ambani brothers, the Mittals, and Anil Agarwal

sitting in England. They are using the India story as a subcomponent

of the globalization story.

But nobody tells the story that this has pushed half of Indian

children to severe malnutrition, that every fourth Indian is today

hungry. That the land wars are being fought between the poor, who want

to defend their quarter-acre land, against the richest of these

people, who are engaged in a big land grab.

You also talk about agriculture and militarized language.

The Copenhagen Treaty agreement on climate change should have brought

us to the next level of legally binding agreements to bring down

emissions because the Kyoto Protocol period was running out, climate

catastrophes were getting worse, and something needed to be done.

Instead, President Obama came, bullied four other countries—the so-

called rising powers of China, India, South Africa, Brazil—and signed

this Copenhagen Accord, which is a non-accord in terms of legally

binding commitments.

The world is waiting for another paradigm, another worldview, another

way of centering our lives. The West needs it because their economies

are collapsing. The South needs it to prevent their economies from

being totally wiped out, because I believe it's cultures that define

their rights through the Earth that have the strongest struggle even

for their own rights. I've seen it with every land movement.

Is there a connection between capitalism and environmental

degradation?

There is a very intimate connection with the rise of capitalism and

the plunder of nature, because capitalism located wealth in capital,

which is just a construct. It's in human imagination. And it gave

power to those who owned capital to then start owning the resources of

the Earth. The privatization of rivers, the privatization and

patenting of seeds (the basis of my work in Navdanya) the

privatization of the atmosphere for emissions trading, all of these

privatizations are defending the rights of capital and allowing

capital to expand its control, because capital is an abstract.

Given the urgency, it seems to me individuals are limited in what they

can do and that collective action is required.

Individuals acting consciously as members of society and collectives

is what we need. The two things we need that everyone can do are,

first, a shift in the mind. If these wars are wars in the mind, then

the place to make peace is in the mind, peace with nature and peace

with each other. Creating living economies, a movement we've tried to

build through Navdanya here, local living economies, but a movement

that's very strong in the U.S., is something people can start engaging

in today. If they don't, they will have nowhere to turn to. Our

calculations show that even though global corporations have the power

to reach the last resource, they only have the power to generate

employment for 3 percent of humanity. You can't have a system where

100 percent of resources are owned by probably 15 to 20 corporations,

and 3 percent are hired for them to do the stealing of the planetary

wealth. So you need to have other ways for people to look after

themselves.

You cannot do that individually. You can begin the shift in your mind,

but framing other economies and framing other ways of structuring

society has to be a collective enterprise, because what was killed by

the privatization of the economy was a very collective identity, the

identity that we are interconnected. And Margaret Thatcher saying,

"There is no society, there is only individuals," is part of that

market individualism of atomizing us, making us lonely, isolating, and

telling us we have nowhere to turn.

Just like Evo Morales removed the censorship on the rights of Mother

Earth, India is a civilization based on the recognition of the Earth

as a living system, as our living support, and peace with the Earth as

our duty.

This ancient prayer has always been my inspiration. It is from the

Bhoomi Sutra of the Athara Veda. And it says:

May there be peace with space and the skies,

Peace with the atmosphere,

Peace with the waters.

May there be peace with the earth.

May there be peace with the herbs, the plants, the trees.

May all the divine beings pervade peace.

May the peace that pervades all creation

Be with you.

When is Critique seen as "Attack" and when is an Attack not seen as such?

image is from here

It has come to my attention that some people may view my challenge to the white women of Rad Fem Hub as "an attack". I find this understanding (or experience) of my actions as worthy of some discussion and care, in part because it is not my intended practice here or offline to "attack" women in any way. I'm surely capable of attacking women in text, or of shaming women, coming down too hard on women, displacing my anger at whites on a few white women, being condescending or arrogant, and so on. I make no claims that I cannot be oppressive in sexist ways (and I don't think my intention is what matters most). I make the opposite claim, actually: I am structurally positioned to do so quite easily, just as I am positioned to be oppressive to people of color: women, men, intersex, and trans.

White radical lesbian feminist critiques of white, class-privileged, trans politics isn't, necessarily, an "attack" against trans people or a fear-based reaction. To position all critique as only an attack, as only transphobic, is to make thoughtful, engaged discussion across difference almost impossible. Sometimes radical lesbian feminist critique of privileged trans people's political objectives is a thoughtful, important critique. Sometimes it's a series of grossly racist/classist generalisations rooted in profound ignorance of who trans people are, however. White, class-privileged trans people's critiques of radical lesbian feminism are not always "an attack" but they can sometimes be grossly anti-radical and anti-feminist, as well as anti-lesbian and pro-status quo.

My point in the recently published and revised challenge to Rad Fem Hub is to note the ways that the white women there, and beyond that site, are also structurally located to be oppressors to women of color--and to men, intersex, and trans people of color too. I don't see how noting this in a blog post constitutes 'an attack' but I am open to hearing from any women in email or through comments here to the blog if they believe or experience my actions are an attack against some white women.

As I consider all the times the term "attack" is used when a critique takes place, what I notice first and foremost is that challenges to the status quo are almost always regarded as an attack, from the point of view of the privileged; men feel "attacked" by radical feminists, for example; whites feel attacked when white privilege, power, and entitlements are called out. There's no way to challenge whiteness or manhood without some members of each group--or many white men who are part of both groups--expressing to the world that they are "under attack". Meanwhile, everything that white men do that is an assault, a violation, an abuse, an act of terrorism, against women across race is never portrayed by those men as "an attack" or as "acts of terrorism".

Indigenous people defending their land is seen as "an attack" on white society. White society's on-going genocide against Indigenous people isn't discussed or even acknowledged by whites at all.

White America is portrayed by corporate media as perpetually "under attack" by Central Asian Muslims. The truth of the matter is that Central Asian Muslims are grossly under attack by the US and NATO forces. Quite literally and not at all figuratively, "under attack". As in bombed, invaded, and occupied.

Men do, in fact, in practice, not in theory alone, assault, attack, subordinate, dominate, and terrorise women in egregious and horrendous ways. Women do not do this to men except rarely on the interpersonal level. Nonetheless, men proclaim, ceaselessly, how often they are attacked by women.

Whites do, in fact, in practice, not in theory alone, assault, attack, subordinate, dominate, and terrorise people of color across gender and class. There's are no such systems or structures in place in the West for whites to be victimised by people of color, despite how victimised and threatened whites say we feel when we encounter people of color who want to be treated as the fully human beings they are.

Fundamentalist Christian hets proclaim the threat to their lives that lesbians and gay men legally marrying, or practicing our sexuality openly, represent to them. I'd say they ought to consider how their arrogance, obnoxiousness, condescension, domination, and terrorism of queer people threatens our lives.

I hope the double and triple standards are apparent. When Black women speak up against whites and men, what I see is that they are swiftly demonised and regarded as emotionally unstable, dangerous, and a threat to all humanity, if not also the world as a whole. The outspoken Black woman appears to be seen as just slightly less (or more) dangerous to the world as, say, nuclear power plants in a process of melting down. We may wish to note that government and corporate leaders are notorious for downplaying the harm of such reactors, while up-playing the alleged danger-to-dominant-society of Black women with a critique of that society.

As a male, I am positioned to easily oppress or assault women. That's why I work so hard not to. And I worked very hard to make sure my language, tone, and content, while hopefully deeply challenging to all the white women at Rad Fem Hub, was not condescending, dehumanising, aggressive, obnoxious, or otherwise oppressive to the women there.

It would be a sorry state of white supremacy if white males could not call out white women's racism. It would mean that only white women are capable of doing so unabusively. And given that it is my long-standing experience that white women will not and often (for many reasons) can not call out other white women on their blatant or less obvious racism and white supremacist standards and practices, I'd hate to think that the burden of the task must fall to women of color--or, even, to men of color, who surely will be accused of being sexist and misogynistic if they call out a white woman. On a similar structural note, I've seen how men of color willfully and obnoxiously refuse to listen to anything white women have to say about men's sexism and misogyny, as if the white women aren't women at all, but are only white.

It appears too often to also be the case that in the minds and actions of white women, women of color are not women, but are, instead, a kind of man. The power white women displace and project onto women of color is often power only possessed by whites and men. As far as I can see, across the globe, no groups of women of color hold such power, structurally, systemically, or institutionally.

One version of my address, my letter, to the white women of Rad Fem Hub went into some detail about the history of racism among white radical feminist women towards radical feminist women of color. It's a very painful and awful history indeed. I edited most of that out as I didn't want to drift too far away from the primary challenge: to ask and recommend that the white women there deal with their whiteness in more conscientious and apparent ways, on their new blog and in their own lives beyond the blogs they are part of. I bring that challenge to them because I've seen white women and women of color challenge several of those white women and how defensive and in denial the white women get in response, often considering the challenge to be "an attack".

If the challenge to you is for you to interrogate your own positions of power over others, I'd argue that's not an attack unless the challenger is assaulting you or pretending you're not a human being. I welcome knowing where and when I assaulted anyone who has less structural power than I do. I generally attempt to respectfully make make amends when this happens. My challenge to the white women at Rad Fem Hub is no exception. I hope to hear from them if they feel comfortable engaging with me.

And if anyone is flagrantly anti-feminist, racist, heterosexist, or anti-trans, I'm likely going to speak up about it. Hopefully responsibly and respectfully to all concerned, with awareness of how I am politically/structurally positioned relative to those I am critiquing.

When White's Not Right: A Substantive Challenge to the White Bloggers at Rad Fem Hub

image is from here

Revised and edited on the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th of July 2011. With apologies for the on-going changes. Dear women at Rad Fem Hub, I write to you with congratulations and concern. First, I am impressed to see so many women bloggers come together declaring yourselves unapologetically radical feminist, putting forth a woman-centered and woman-first politic and practice. My concern is with the significant white-centeredness and unacknowledged white supremacist entitlements and privileges put forth by the white members of the group. Not just that, but the radical political meaning of whiteness and the real harm it causes to women of color around the world, isn't discussed on your blog, at least in the places I visited. If such a critique of whiteness is present, I surely welcome you to alert me to where that exists. Given how many white women you have as part of the group, I was hoping that some of you would make identifying and calling out racist-misogyny a focus or at least a part of the political practice there so that other whites who come to the blog as a central source of information about radical feminism will have a good example of how this is done responsibly among whites. In my experience, whites rarely bring to one another's attention how our whiteness shows up in racist-misogynist ways in our perspectives, values, and practices. It is my genuine hope that this letter is received by you not at all as an attack or as an act of aggression, but as a statement of concern and challenge brought forth with the desire to see more accountability among whites and less burden on women of color to call out white racism. I'm very open to discussing this matter of white dominance, white exclusivity, white supremacy, and white- and euro-centrism that I see existing structurally at Rad Fem Hub. (You of course may disagree that some or any of that is present; I'm willing to publicly put forth why it is I've come to that conclusion and if you're unclear about anything that follows, I'll do my best to be clearer and appropriately responsive in ways that further explicate my statements.) I hope you will address writings by women--of color and white--that I didn't see linked to or referenced on your blog's resources pages. If they are new to you, please take to heart and mind what they say, so that your politics and practice might indeed be radical with regard to race. As it currently exists, what I see on your blog is liberal to conservative with regard to race. For this reason, I don't know any Black or Brown radical feminist women of color who would want to join such a white-dominated, white unconscious, and white-protected space.  Black, Brown, and white radical feminist writers I hold myself accountable to or regard as significant feminist theorists and practitioners have presented a very clear and cogent critique and analysis of white supremacy as it is manifest in white radical and feminist discourse and other behavior. Two of the women I got to know through their posts as bloggers, who have brought forth a critique of white privilege and entitlements showing up in white women's spaces or in white women's writings are brownfemipower, formerly of La Chola and currently the host of flipfloppingjoy, and dedgurl of The Vagina Conspiracy. Bev Jo, a long-time white radical Lesbian activist and blogger has also clearly articulated what's white supremacist and oppressively misogynistic about white racism in feminist spaces. I have read her challenges on some of your individual blogs; she has also courageously challenged some of you on anti-Lesbian and heterosexist practices. I appreciate the work of all of these women. Over the last thirty years, I have only encountered a small number of Western white radical feminists who have carefully examined what their own whiteness means. Perhaps the best known and most published of these women is Marilyn Frye, who has written explicitly on this subject. I hope you will consider including her excellent books of theoretical essays, The Politics of Reality and Willful Virgin, in which she discusses whiteness, in your reading resources list. While you do recommend one of Audre Lorde's books of poetry, Cables To Rage, I was saddened to not see listed her extremely important and classic radical lesbian feminist book of essays and speeches, Sister Outsider. Several of those writings are excellent learning resources for white women. I'll link to those at the end of this letter. I'm concerned that you also made no mention of the books by the extraordinarily prolific radical feminist bell hooks. She has written a great deal on the subject of white women's racism being an obstacle to women's liberation. Her first book on this subject was Ain't I A Woman? Her writings cover so many topics relevant to radical liberation struggles across gender, race, and class. I hope you get to read a lot more of what she has put forth for serious consideration. *Here is a link* to many of her books. I also recommend adding the work of Andrea Smith, an Indigenous radical feminist. A book that greatly impacted me was Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. In Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, Pearl Cleage deals superbly with interpersonal politics and the importance of whites and men maintaining a posture of listening, not defensiveness, when challenged on racism or sexism by women of color.  Of all the many radical feminist books that are available in English for white women to learn about and be responsible with their white power and privileges, not one book, essay, or speech makes your recommended readings and resources lists. This deeply concerns me because without such perspectives and challenges white radical feminism stays stuck in a tradition of entrenched white-centrism which while not always intentionally harmful, is always effectively oppressive in misogynist-racist ways. I'm curious to know if you believe the white-only or white-majority lists you promote speak for all women and to all women's struggles in patriarchal societies? Is this form of white supremacy something you are wanting to perpetuate? Regardless of matters of intention or oversight, it is unacceptable and not at all radical in my view, if women of color matter to you as women.  For an astoundingly superb understanding of whiteness and white supremacy, I strongly recommend all of you who are white at Rad Fem Hub reading Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, by Marimba Ani, which has one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated analyses of euro- and white-centrism of any book written in English. I also recommend that you list the many books of the radical and feminist writer-activist Angela Davis, including the feminist classic, Women, Race, and Class. More of her books are listed *here*. Vandana Shiva is a radical feminist whose books, in my opinion, ought not be ignored or passed off as something other than radical feminist. Whether or not she identifies as a radical feminist, I truly believe radical feminism needs her contributions of experience, perspective, and values, in order to thrive and address the many problems killing women. *Here is a comprehensive list of her many books*. Do you see your own unacknowledged and unexamined collective whiteness—among those of you who are white—as a significant political obstacle to radical revolutionary action and community-building? How could it not be a seriously oppressive obstacle given that whiteness-in-action is always an obstacle to liberation for women of color? I entirely respect you setting up your blog to be woman-only. I wish there were more woman-only spaces on- and off-line and in an era when women's space is disrespected by so many people, I will defend your right to create woman-only spaces as you define them. I therefore welcome you to visit me here on my blog, to discuss how white feminists historically and presently practice conservative to liberal racist-misogyny. I welcome engaging with you on the matter of whiteness and how white-majority spaces regulate what can be expressed within them, just as majority-man spaces determine what women can say and do there. I believe that the very fact of being white-majority and white-centric means that many radical feminist women who are not white are not likely to feel at home at Rad Fem Hub. Does that concern you in terms of your own collective objectives for the kind of space the blog is and will become? In my experience, as long as any blog or social space is unaccountably or unconsciously white-dominated, white-led, white-majority, and white-centric, it cannot be effectively radical and revolutionary. One of the first radical feminists who drew my attention to this was a woman I know many of you admire, Andrea Dworkin: you can read her challenge to white, class-privileged women in the introduction to her 1974 book, Woman Hating. There she discusses the exemplary revolutionary feminism of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, noting that revolutionary feminism will not succeed if white and middle class women do not contend with and responsibly negotiate the power of their privileges. I'm wondering if you believe that the forms of unacknowledged whiteness that are replicated at Rad Fem Hub are any less oppressive, hurtful, and lethal to women of color than men's male supremacy? Marimba Ani and many other radical women detail how whiteness, including that practiced by white women, is very destructive. It's not that I think your blog is in any way lethal to anyone; it's that I think it participates in a history of unconscious and/or willful white behavior that is very harmful and exclusionary to women of color and racistly possessive of the term "radical feminism". It's those structures and practices, globally, that are indeed grossly oppressive and commonly lethal. I hope you will consider making your blog a place where those structures and practices are not present. It seems to me that one of the ways for those of us who are white to invisibilise and deny the racism so often embedded in white radical feminism is to only take up issues that appear to be free of it. For example, your blog may appear to some privileged folks to not be overtly racist and classist; I'd argue these forms of oppression are blatantly present in the views you present to the readers. Narrow, while importantly anti-patriarchal, views of prostitution, pornography, and some forms of heterosexist sexuality may be discussed at (or linked to from) Rad Fem Hub without recognising how the discussions themselves are imbued with and shaped by white and class privilege and entitlement. When we who are white and class-privileged deal also with immigration, economic class warfare, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, and globalisation, there is a greater opportunity to witness ourselves as the structural and institutional oppressors of women of color internationally. If and when prostitution, pornography, some trans politics, and PIV sex are spoken about, discussed, analysed, and challenged only on the grounds that they perpetuate patriarchal oppression of women-unraced, we lose both the opportunity to know how women (and trans people across gender) of color have different experiences of those oppressive systems and practices and how white women have their own experiences as well. What tends to happen a lot in white radical feminism is that the white experience gets turned into a "human experience" as if whiteness isn't particular and partial in its political location. We have all seen how many times white het men frame up their sexed experiences as "human experience, ungendered". Obviously the point isn't that whites and males aren't fully human; it's that whites and males are not all humans and ought not speak as if we are. Another way I've heard white women dismissing and discarding any radical feminist theory and analysis that is white-critical is to turn away from an intersectional understanding of oppression and to view intersectionality itself as entirely located within a seemingly unraced liberal academic post-modern politic. In my view, such a (de)valuation is blatantly and unabashedly white supremacist, anti-radical, and anti-feminist, if the intersectional work being turned away from belongs to women like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and bell hooks, to name just a few US radical feminists. I hope you support intersectional analysis at your blog. If you do not, could you please explain why you don't. If you do, can you please explain why no texts utilising this analysis appear in your recommended reading list? Why, for example, doesn't the excellent and tremendously important philosophical and sociological work of Patricia Hill Collins not make your list? I believe Black Feminist Thought and Black Sexual Politics ought to be on any radical feminist reading list. And it seems to me that any white, class-, and education-privileged English-speaking women who identify as radical feminist have no excuse if they are unfamiliar with the works of Lorde, Walker, hooks, Collins, and so many other US and international feminists who are both intersectional and radical, and not at all "post-modern" in the sense in which that term and tradition is critiqued by some radical activists. You also don't appear to acknowledge radical feminism's past and on-going debt to Indigenous feminists. The blog in its current form appears to firmly hold to a white- and euro-centric view that radical feminism rises primarily out of European Marxism. Do you see how erroneous and racist that is, given that most women's lives are not historically rooted in Western political philosophies or conditions? I recommend directing your readers and colleagues to read Sally Roesch Wagner's history of white appropriation of Indigenous feminist practice in her book, Sisters In Spirit, or to Andrea Smith's "Without Bureaucracy, Beyond Inclusion: Re-Centering Feminism". I'll close by recommending some of the writings of one of the women who is most responsible for shaping my understanding of deeply ethical, woman-loving radical feminism: Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter To Mary Daly", and "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism", and "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference", which may be viewed *here at Google Books*, in the astoundingly brilliant radical lesbian feminist text, Sister Outsider. From the latter essay: “…white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.” I look forward to your answers to these questions, and to hearing your own questions and concerns. I wish you well. In the struggle, Julian with dedgurl

Women's Worlds 2011: 800 march on Parliament for murdered and missing Indigenous women

This is what racism plus misogyny means (from the article that follows):

According to Statistics Canada, Indigenous Canadian women are five times more likely to die of violence than other women.

All that follows is from *here* at rabble.ca news.

Women's Worlds 2011: 800 march on Parliament for murdered and missing Aboriginal women

By Elizabeth Pickett

| July 6, 2011

Women's Worlds 2011 is a major international conference taking place in Ottawa-Gatineau from July 3 to 7, 2011. It is 'a global convergence to advance women's equality through research, exchange, leadership, and action' with speakers and performers from a diversity of backgrounds and countries. rabble.ca is proud to be the exclusive online media sponsor.

The Aboriginal Women's Leadership Circle, a volunteer advisory body comprised of Aboriginal [First Nations, Inuit, Métis] women, collaborated within WW 2011 toward the development of wide-ranging thematic and artistic content.

The Opening Ceremony on Sunday night featured a celebration of Aboriginal culture while Monday night's "Indigenous Feminisms Rock," entertainment followed by a two-hour talk-show-style conversation led by Jessica Yee of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network. The show featured special guests Lee Maracle, award-winning author and artist, Qwo-Li Driskill, a poet, author and Two-Spirit Queer activist, and Andrea Smith, co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. This event provided the lead-in to a march on Parliament Hill on Tuesday.

Eight hundred feminists from the congress marched to Parliament Hill in solidarity with their missing and murdered Canadian First Nations sisters. Among the marchers were women from the U.S., Denmark, Norway, Sweden, South America, Latin America, Thailand and southeast Asia along with Indigenous women from territories across Canada, all were demanding that the federal government and all citizens continue to confront and investigate the disappearance of First Nations women and girls.

The march was led by the Nemisak Singers playing traditional hand drums and welcomed to Algonquin territory at Parliament Hill by Algonquin Nation Elder Bertha Commanda. Ms. Commanda gave a brief history of the Harper government's egregious treatment of "Sisters in Spirit," a project of the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) that laid the groundwork for research into the disappearances and deaths of close to 600 women and girls across Canada over the last three decades.

Sisters in Spirit compiled a database showing that 153 women went missing between 2000 and 2008 alone. Late last year, Conservative MP Shelly Glover, the parliamentary secretary for Indian Affairs, declared the project "finished" and focused a new $10-million national strategy to deal with murdered and missing women cases on police initiatives, denying further funding to Sisters in Spirit or any other indigenous women's group. A new national police support centre for missing persons and unidentified remains will not be up and running before 2013. It is not known what will happen to the data collected by Sisters in Spirit but it seems likely that it will be merged with data of all missing Canadian women, thus erasing the significance the of extremely high numbers of missing Aboriginal women and girls.

Commanda told the gathered women that First Nations women would now require non-government money to preserve and add to the database and to undertake private investigations of cases of missing women and asked us to join in urgent fundraising initiatives.

Laurie Odjick, mother of Maisy Odjick, a young Aboriginal woman who disappeared in 2008, also spoke to those gathered about her struggle for assistance in finding her daughter and vowed to fight on in Maisy's name on behalf of all missing and murdered indigenous women. Jeannette Corbiere Lavell (President of NWAC) offered a passionately critical history of the Harper government's indifference to the specific issues facing First Nation women and the government's intransigence with respect the importance of the continuing contribution of their mothers, sisters and brothers in efforts to stop the violence, to repeated applause and chants of "shame" from the crowd.

Following Corbiere Lavell's remarks, the crowd observed a moment of silence, followed by words from Elder Jo MacQuarrie of the Metis Nation of Ontario.

NWAC is calling for a national action plan to deal with the issues raised by the work of Sisters in Spirit while Battered Women's Support Services, also participating in the Congress and the march, is calling for a national inquiry or Royal Commission. However, Canada's status of women ministers, having just concluded their annual meeting in Gatineau, Quebec, declared their solidarity with Aboriginal women but failed to call for a national action plan on the issue. CBC News reported that federal Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose stated that "this is an incredibly unsettling and difficult issue for all of us in Canada to deal with, across the country. There are hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women." However, she added "governments at all levels are already doing a lot."

Amnesty International Canada says that Canadian police forces and governments have done little to prevent the long understood pattern of racist violence against Indigenous women and has stated that "[all] levels of government should work closely with Indigenous women's organizations to develop a comprehensive and coordinated programme of action to stop violence against Indigenous women."

According to Statistics Canada, Indigenous Canadian women are five times more likely to die of violence than other women.

Elizabeth Pickett is an internet-based feminist freedom fighter, a mother, a grandmother, a blogger, and a poet, seething in Whitby, Ont.

A Relatively New Radical Feminist blog!!! With thanks to Christina, the Angry Fem

image is from here

It is with great pleasure that I introduce my readers to a new blog, Christina the Angry Fem, that I am so glad to see added to the many radical feminist blogs out there. The host is a wonderful, fierce woman named.. can you guess? Christina. I call her "friend". I want to direct you to her series on South Africa, here:

Racist and Sexist White Afrikaner Males, The Real Threat to SA - Part 1

Racist and Sexist White Afrikaner Males, The Real Threat to SA – Part 2

Racist and Sexist White Afrikaner Males, The Real Threat to SA – Part 3

 

And I encourage you to read and respectfully comment on all of her other posts thus far. 

Keep telling it like it is, Christina!!!!!! 

image is from here