Recently in Women of Color Category

Really interesting choice, huh? I covered that she would be in Glamour on Tuesday, but didn't discuss that they had made her Woman of the Year.

Glamour Magazine chose her as one of their "Women of the year." Although the article does not go into depth about her experience of domestic violence or any treatment she may have received, she does openly discuss the shame and isolation she endured...

...Many women who have suffered from domestic violence also feel that same sense of loss and loneliness. The shame women feel from choosing an abusive partner and feeling that they "allowed" it to happen can also contribute to not seeking help. Sometimes when women do reach out for support from their families or friends, they feel judged and retreat more.

Women who find themselves with abusive partners typically do not have media hounding them day and night after their abuse is reported to authorities. They also do not have the public scrutinizing their involvement and reactions.

I can understand that Glamour chose to do this because it brings to light the issue of violence against women, but it seems a little soon and potentially exploitative of her story. As the article asks, I have to wonder if this was her choice and part of her healing process or created by her PR team to support her upcoming single? And hours before her 20/20 interview tomorrow, MTV is airing an interview with Chris Brown. The media spectacle of it does give me pause.

In other news, his new tour is doing lousy. Wonder if it is connected to his "anger issues?"

In response to the constant objectification of women, the recent gang rape of a 15 year old girl in Richmond, CA, the unjust incarceration of Sara Kruzan and even the highly publicized violence faced by Rihanna, conscientious rapper and activist Jasiri X has put out a track that discusses the injustice and inhumanity of these crimes.

Love it. Lyrics after the jump.

An organization that is near and dear to my heart, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, is turning 15 this year! In honor of this milestone, they're throwing a Quinceañera, a fifteenth anniversary celebration that is a Latino tradition for young girls. It'll be a fun twist on this traditional ceremony.

NLIRH was my first job out of college. It was a kind of a college-student-gets-dream-job situation. I like to think it was fate actually, but I had learned about NLIRH at the March for Women's Lives in Washington, DC and was so psyched to see an organization that brought together two things I cared about deeply: the Latino community and reproductive rights. I was beyond excited when they offered me a job as an organizer there.

The staff and activists affiliated with NLIRH taught me about reproductive justice, taught me how to be an organizer, how to work in immigrant communities, how to work in an office. I feel so grateful that my first experience in the non-profit world was an organization staffed and run by young Latina women. I have always felt supported and nurtured by the organization and it's values. I still work for them now, three years later, but in a more limited (and not full-time) capacity as their E-Communications Manager.

I'm excited to be able to celebrate NLIRH's Quince at the fantastic event they are putting on in a few weeks. There will be amazing food, Latin music, and awards presented to some amazing activists and leaders in the Latino community. It's on October 7th in Washington DC at the Museum of Women in the Arts. It's a fundraiser, so tickets aren't cheap--but trust me when I say it's a seriously worthy organization.

If you're interested in attending (or supporting the organization with a donation), the details are here.

I had to post a link to the new movie, Precious:

I am halfway through Push, the book by Sapphire that the movie is based on. It is not often that so many issues women face are embodied in one character. From racism, sizism, sexual violence, domestic violence, welfare issues, colorism, ablism, and many, many more -- this is the ultimate feminist primer! I am not quite sure what to make of how Precious' mother's character, played by Mo'Nique, is being framed as the "monstrous matriarch." On one hand, giving her villainous character, it seems fitting. On the other hand, what does it mean that the black single mom has once again gotten this branding? This is especially interesting considering the villainous male characters in the story that seem conspicuously absent from this trailer.

On another note, I posted earlier this week about Tyler Perry. He is serving as an executive producer of this film, alongside Oprah. Again, I think we can log some progress points for Perry on this one. It will be important to see what, if any, the trade offs will be.

But, after all, I'm just a cautious optimist. Preliminary thoughts?

Josh Phillips and Rachel Griffin make one heck of a team. The pair met at Central Michigan University, where they were both members of Sexual Aggression Peer Advocates, CMU's sexual assault education and prevention group. Today, they're taking the mission of that group off campus and all over the country.

Dr. Griffin is an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University. Griffin's written works, including her doctoral dissertation, address the intersection of gender and race.

Phillips is the founder of East Coast Walkers, a group of CMU students who, in the summer of 2008, walked from Miami to Boston to raise awareness about sexual violence. His book about the experience, 1800 Miles, comes out this fall. The Walkers blogged about their trek along the way, and one entry, written from South Carolina, filled me with hope:

"Something remarkable keeps happen on this trip: our restaurant bills disappear. We will stop in a small mom and pop diner, the waitress will undoubtedly inquire what we are doing, and an eavesdropping patron will sneakily pay our tab as we devour whatever food is on the table. It must be magic..."

It's not magic, but something better: it's a sign that Phillips, Griffin and the East Coast Walkers are not alone in wishing and working for an end to sexual violence.

Phillips and Griffin regularly team up to speak about sexual violence, and to teach workshops on awareness and prevention. Their team approach works well, Griffin says, because when they're addressing a crowd on the topic of sexual violence, "there are people who can hear Josh who can't hear me and vice versa."

And now, without further ado, the inaugural Feministing Five, with Rachel Griffin and Josh Phillips.

Who said there is no feminism in hiphop?

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.

According to a report by Catalyst entitled Women of Color in U.S. Law Firms, more than 75 percent of women of color will leave their employer within five years because of job dissatisfaction stemming from "complex barriers," including:

* A greater sense of "outsider status" and limited growth opportunities.
* Racial and gender stereotyping and more feelings of sexism in the workplace compared to
white women.
* Lack of access to high-profile client assignments and important client engagements.
* Missed opportunities for candid feedback.

The study is the fourth and final in Catalyst's Women of Color in Professional Services Series "examining how the intersectionality, or combined identities of gender and race/ethnicity, puts women of color at a unique disadvantage in the workplace."

I wonder if some of our readers want to speak to their experiences within law firms? I have a hunch we have more than a few legal minds within the feministing community and I'd love to hear your reactions.

Naomi Sims, who died over the weekend, has been identified in the media as the "first black supermodel" - largely because of her appearance on a 1968 cover of Ladies' Home Journal.

But Robin Givhan at The Root says the supermodel label does Sims a "huge disservice."

That wasn't Sims. She was not known for her strut or her attitude or for throwing any sort of communication devices at the help. And her relatively short career of only about five years preceded the 24-hour news cycle when a model's love life or her various temper tantrums could be cocktail chatter.

Appearing on the cover of Ladies' Home Journal--and Life magazine, too--was not some esoteric coup noted only by the fashion-obsessed. It was a cultural revelation. Sims pushed black beauty into the mainstream in a way that was more provocative and resonant than a million "black issues" of Italian Vogue.

Sims was also a successful businesswoman with a line of wigs aimed at African-American women. She was a model-turned-entrepreneur long before Tyra Banks ever uttered the word "fierce," long before Banks was even born.

For more on Sims, check out this post from Shark Fu.

This is awesome. 15 year-old Kimberly Anyadike of Los Angeles flew across the country in 13 days (making about a dozen stops) with Levi Thornhill, 87, who served with the Tuskegee Airmen.

Via Jezebel.

News outlets are reporting that Obama will nominate Regina Benjamin for the post of surgeon general. The announcement is supposed to come in a few hours, in the midst of the first day of hearings for another somewhat controversial women of color appointment, Sonia Sotomayor.

About Benjamin (via McArthur Foundation):

Regina Benjamin is a rural family physician forging an inspiring model of compassionate and effective medical care in one of the most underserved regions of the United States. In 1990, she founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic to serve the Gulf Coast fishing community of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a village of approximately 2,500 residents devastated twice in the past decade by Hurricanes Georges, in 1998, and Katrina, in 2005. Despite scarce resources, Benjamin has painstakingly rebuilt her clinic after each disaster and set up networks to maintain contact with patients scattered across multiple evacuation sites.

At first glance her work sounds pretty amazing, and I think it's awesome to be elevating someone who has worked in on the gulf coast.

More at Salon.com

I wish I was shocked by this.

A prominent South Carolina Republican killed his Facebook page Sunday after being caught likening the First Lady to an escaped gorilla.

Commenting on a report posted to Facebook about a gorilla escape at a zoo in Columbia, S.C., Friday, longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass wrote, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."

When taken to task for the racist comment - and after killing his Facebook page - DePass said, "I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest."

Yeah - ha fucking ha.

Via Michelle Obama Watch.

Marilu Morales has filed a federal lawsuit after being allegedly shackled while giving birth at Cook County Jail in Chicago.

...Morales was eight months' pregnant when she was incarcerated in April 2008, according to the lawsuit. It could not be immediately determined on what charges Morales was being held.

When she went into labor three days later, she was taken to Stroger. A sheriff's deputy shackled a hand and foot to the hospital bed, the lawsuit alleged.

Morales was in labor for four hours before a physician ordered the deputy to remove the shackles shortly before she gave birth, the lawsuit said. The shackles were allegedly put back on immediately after the baby was born.

This is the fourth lawsuit that Flaxman has filed against Sheriff Tom Dart's office regarding a pregnant prisoner had been shackled while giving birth. Unbelievable.

Related posts: Judge jails HIV positive woman to "protect" her fetus
New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

Moderator Isobel Coleman begins by pointing out that there is some controversy over the title of the panel itself. She asks: "Is this a new agenda? Who's agenda is it?"

The first panelist to speak is Lamia Karim (pictured right), from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She speaks to all of the various human rights discourses, many of which she obviously doesn't think are complex or ethical. "What I am most interested in is grassrooots, indigenous, human rights movements organized, not around an individual human, but much more on a group rights basis.This is taking up these rights discourses but trying to renegotiate with the realities on the ground."

"As feminists we need to really go beyond the rhetoric of the empowerment of women and ask carefully, 'What does it take to empower women? Is money enough? What does it mean to give women access to capital without giving them skills training?' This is the Grameen Bank model--based on neo-liberalism."

Larnia has a book coming out through UC Press in spring 2010 which she describes as "a radical critique of this model, this particular model. I wanted to put it out there because this has become a very innovative way of framing how women, especially in the global south and very poor women, can be economically and socially empowered." Can't wait for that!

Isobel turns to Jill Lester next, who is the ED of The Hunger Project, to ask her what her reaction is to the radical critique of micro lending.

"Unfortunately, I think we're going to be in violent agreement." [audience laughs]

"The Hunger Project believes in an integrated approach to poverty. Part of that is having a micro finance facility. We ask the community to form a micro finance committee of 100% women to set their own agenda."

Next up is Radhika Balakrishnan (pictured left), of the Marymount Manhattan College:
"Rather than talking about the crisis as if it something that fell from the sky, we're calling it the 'manufactured crisis,' caused by deliberate changes that the government made in the regulatory framework."

"We're trying to turn human rights around on them. You want to oppose human rights all over the world? What about the human right violation right here. What about the TARP legislation? There's no transparency. That's public money. This is our institution. Therefore there's a human rights obligation on the state."

Cynthia Enloe (holy amazing) jumps in as the pinch hitter:

"One has to be able to think analytically in order to act. I've hated the theory-practice divide. It's stupid. Anyone who acts, especially if you try to act collectively, if you try to mobilize beyond your best friend, it means you've done some causal thinking. You are an analyst. Out of your action come new analytical understandings. It works and you think why did it work? Or it didn't and you have to go back to the drawing table. We are all analysts. We are all thinkers who think thinking matters. Thinking is in handshake with action."

"If we've learned something from feminist thinking from around the world, it is that you have to think big in order to think small--the guys say that of course--but you also have to think small in order to think big. It works both ways and it's really one of the great strengths of feminist thinking for action."

"We are at a moment now where we've got a pool of schools and an understanding of what needs to be acted upon, some people call it an agenda, and we are at a moment, not just because we have a new president of one country, not just because the institutions of capitalism are wobbly (they're not as wobbly as we'd liked)."

"We really are at a moment amongst all of us, and I mean all of us who aren't in the room, where we have the capacity to think as if it matters and the capaity to know what needs to be acted upon. This is a very, very exciting moment. We shouldn't let cynicsm let that moment pass."

"Think as if it matters and then act as if it affects our thinking."

Last week, I wrote about Quinta Layin Tuleh - a 28 year old woman from Cameroon sentenced to 238 days in federal prison because she is HIV positive and pregnant.

Today, Margo Kaplan from the Center for HIV Law and Policy has a piece on RH Reality Check analyzing just how terrible the judge's decision was.

Judge Woodcock's decision ignores the complex factors involved in a pregnant woman's medical treatment decisions - as through being HIV positive makes one incapable of reasonable decision-making - and glibly equates being HIV-positive and pregnant with committing a crime. When reading the sentence, he makes clear that his sole reason for keeping Tuleh in prison was that she was HIV-positive and pregnant, and that, had she been pregnant and not HIV-positive, he would release her with time served. He reasons that he could keep Tuleh in jail "to protect the public from [her] further crimes."

...While some states do, indeed, criminalize HIV exposure, Judge Woodcock does more than this - he imprisons a woman for the mere possibility that she might transmit HIV in the future. His reasoning essentially criminalizes being HIV-positive and allows the state to jail anyone with HIV simply because they have HIV and are capable of transmitting it to another. It classifies anyone with HIV as a threat to society who can be incarcerated at the whim of the state to protect public health.

Make sure to check out the whole piece, Kaplan does a great job linking the paternalism, discrimination and misogyny that are so rife in this case.

From the Bangor Daily News:

A woman from the African nation of Cameroon could give birth in a federal prison because she is HIV-positive.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock last month sentenced Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, to 238 days in federal prison for having fake documents. Woodcock said the sentence would ensure that Tuleh's baby, due Aug. 29, has a good chance of being born free of the AIDS virus.

"Judges cannot lock a woman up simply because she is sick and pregnant," said Zachary Heiden, legal director for the Maine Civil Liberties Union.

"Judges have enormous discretion in imposing sentences, and that is appropriate. But jailing someone is punishment -- it is depriving them of liberty. That deprivation has to be justified, and illness or pregnancy is not justification for imprisonment."

Yet that's exactly what Woodcock did - using the paternalistic justification that he is looking out for the best interest of Tuleh's unborn child, who he apparently thinks will benefit from the stellar prenatal care given in prison.

"My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant," he said at Tuleh's sentencing, "and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she's carrying. I don't think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.

"If I had -- if I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person," Woodcock said, "I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm."

I agree with Jess: I fail to see how Tuleh's inability (if that really is the case) to procure affordable, decent healthcare is an "assault" against her fetus, rather than the system's assault of Tuleh. And of course, one wonders if Woodcock's decision would have been the same had Tuleh been from Denmark or Italy, not Cameroon...though you don't have to wonder long. (70% of cases involving prosecuting pregnant women are brought against women of color.)

For more information on the U.S.' long history of persecuting pregnant women (and what you can do about it) check out the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Women and Prison project, and the Rebecca Project for Human Rights.

Related posts: New report: Mothering in Prison
Woman gives birth in jail cell, alone
Bureau of Prisons bans shackling pregnant inmates
Critical Resistance: Prisons as a Tool of Reproductive Oppression

NY Times: A Judge's Own Story Highlights Her Mother's

What Tami Said: Sonia Sotomayor: How did she get in here? Or...The more things change; the more they stay the same

Think Progress: G. Gordon Liddy On Sotomayor: 'Let's Hope That The Key Conferences Aren't When She's Menstruating'

Feministe: Racism, Sexism and Sotomayor, in a few easy-to-read bullet points.

Post Bourgie: A word on empathy

F.R.I.D.A.: "On the Bench, With Fairness and Empathy"

Broadsheet: Sotomayor and abortion

RH Reality Check: Fair and Balanced: Weighing Sotomayor's Opinionse

Slate: Republicans won't beat Sonia Sotomayor by attacking her as too darn human.

Gender & Sexuality Law Blog: "Justice Sotomayor" - A View from Columbia Law School

What's the best thing you've read so far on Sotomayor's nomination?

Also, I know there's been a lot of non-Supreme Court news this week, too. What have you all been reading and writing?

Today Obama announced his pick to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor. Conservatives are already calling her a "judicial activist."

Conservatives argue Sotomayor has a "hard-left record" and believes that judges should consider experiences of women and minorities in their decision-making.

Sounds pretty awesome to me. Although the road to confirmation is likely to be rocky, I hope Sotomayor is indeed confirmed. I was also heartened to see that all of the names on Obama's short-list were women. Yes, Sotomayor's record and experience should be first and foremost when we discuss her as a possible justice, but her identity is not insignificant. I'm looking forward to returning to an era of two women on the court -- because it's pretty damn appalling that "consider(ing) the experiences of women and minorities" is not something we expect of all members of the current Court.

For more on Sotomayor's legal opinions, SCOTUSblog has a detailed rundown in four parts: I, II, III, IV.

(Again, we're at our retreat right now, so sorry for the brevity. More on Sotomayor and her record to come...)

And this report tells us why. Some interesting tidbits via New America Media,

The result shows that women immigrants' main challenges are helping their children succeed and keeping their families together. The obstacles are formidable. 79% of Latin Americans, 73% of Vietnamese, 70% of Korean and 63% of Chinese acknowledged speaking little or no English. They also confront anti-immigrant discrimination, lack of health care and low-paying employment.

Bendixen said that this is something that shakes the perception that immigration is always about economics and dollars. In fact, many of the women start out in low-paying jobs even though they may have held professional positions in their home countries. In the United States they might work as a hotel maid, waitress, house cleaner and textile worker.

These results indicate that women may be putting devotion to the well-being of their families ahead of personal job status and pride in choosing to emigrate.

Also, on the racist assumption that women immigrants are somehow submissive, not only to the men in their families but also in the work environment,

Among other findings the poll showed that their roles change within their households. The overwhelming majority--Latin American (81%), Chinese (71%), Vietnamese (68%), African (66%) and Arabic (53%)--said they had become more assertive at home and in public after coming to the United States.

"We cannot assume that they are submissive back in their countries. They come from smaller towns where you are very close to your family, they want to make sure everyone is okay. And when they get here, they also want to make sure they have a better living. Sometimes they face domestic violence, but that also happens here in the United States," said Silvia Henriquez, Executive Director for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

We are happy to announce the launch of ¡PRESENTE! an online organizing effort to support and make powerful voices of the Latin@ community. From their introduction letter,

Our goal is to create a broad-based online community of Latinos and our allies strong enough to make the United States honor its promises and protect our people. We're starting with immigration, but we won't stop there--we'll provide you with ongoing opportunities to make change on the issues that most affect our communities.

Get more information here and retweet and re-post widely.

via Nezua.

Today Congress will unveil a new bust of Sojourner Truth in the U.S. Capitol. She's the first black woman to be honored there. This is a far cry from the last time Congress proposed "honoring" a black woman, Melissa Harris Lacewell writes:

It is important to remember that Truth is not the first black woman for proposed to be enshrined on federal land. In 1923, Mississippi senator, John Williams proposed a bill seeking a site for a national Mammy monument. The Richmond, Virginia chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was prepared to pay for the statue, which would stand on federal land "as a gift to the people of the United States . . . a monument in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South." The statue would have been in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, which had just been dedicated a few months. The "mammy bill" passed the Senate in February 1923 just weeks after the Senate defeated the Dyer anti-lynching bill. In other words, even while refusing to protect African American citizens from the domestic terrorism of the lynch mob, the Senate referred the mammy monument bill to the House of Representatives.

Whenever I am in Washington, DC I try to imagine the psychic assault I would suffer if I had to walk past a granite mammy statue while on the National Mall. Thankfully, fierce and prolonged resistance to the mammy monument undertaken by the black press, black women's organizations, and ordinary citizens kept this horrifying possibility from being reality.

Black women's organizations defeated the mammy memorial nearly 100 years ago and today they are largely responsible to raising up the bust of Sojourner Truth. The National Congress of Black Women, Inc. (NCBW) worked tirelessly to cultivate donors and supporters for this cause. Because of their efforts, instead of a monument to the mythical figure of a happy, faithful, feisty, loyal black woman slave, America will today memorialize a dedicated, serious, freedom-fighting black woman. In commemorating Truth the nation invests in remembering the deeply human and complicated stories of the lives of black women.

Wow. Certainly puts today's milestone in a whole new perspective, doesn't it?

UPDATE: Clip of the unveiling via Jack and Jill Politics.

(I am not writing a transcript for this, but basically every man that interacts with this woman in the work place calls her a different derogatory term)

And why is it on a Tuesday? Because it is by Tuesday that women catch up to the wages earned by a man from the previous week.

via National Committee on Pay Equity.

Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men's and women's wages. The day, observed on a Tuesday in April, symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. (Tuesday is the day on which women's wages catch up to men's wages from the previous week.) Because women earn less, on average, than men, they must work longer for the same amount of pay. The wage gap is even greater for most women of color.

Jon Henner at Open Salon is putting together stories, blog posts, artwork, etc. on the impacts of equal pay. You can go contribute your story.

Immigration reform is back in the news. I asked Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founding executive director of Voces de la Frontera based in Wisconsin, to help explain the latest developments.

Here's Christine...

I stumbled across the Annual Asian Women's Blog Carnival via Hyphen and it is a must-read selection of pieces by Asian women. This year's focus is on identity and is an extensive selection of posts about shattering cultural stereotypes, racism and other issues that affect the lives of Asian women.

Check it out now and give them some comment love as this is a very important and exciting new carnival.

Chris Brown's alleged violence against Rihanna has sparked intense debate and discussion about these celebrities.

I decided to ask Traci C. West, PhD, a professor of ethics and African American studies at Drew University's Theological School, for some perspective on the violence and the public's reactions. She researched the historical legacy of violence against black women for her book, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics.

Here's Traci...

Today, Kai Wright has a great piece in The Root about Lorraine Hansberry -- and how "she engaged both a personal and a political search for sexual freedom and articulated a still-urgent understanding of its relationship to gender equality." Kai writes,

It's unclear whether Hansberry would have called herself a "lesbian," primarily because she and others were still in the process of developing the concept of such a clearly defined sexual identity. But she dated women and, more strikingly, joined the country's first-ever lesbian political organization, the now-defunct Daughters of Bilitis, at a time when doing so made you a target of federal law enforcement.

After joining the group, Hansberry wrote a series of provocative letters to two gay journals. Daughters of Bilitis began publishing its journal, the Ladder, in 1956. Hansberry chimed in to it in May and August of 1957, while she was writing A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry is known for her drama, but she was a prolific political writer and speaker, dating back to her early 1950s activism and editorial work for Robeson. And in her essay-length 1957 letters to the editor, she challenged members to consider the feminist case against homophobia.

"I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced," Hansberry wrote in one letter, explaining, "There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma."

As Adam writes over on TAPPED, A Raisin in the Sun is a play that most of us read in school. It's undeniably a classic. But that's not all Hansberry wrote. We remember her for her anti-segregation activism and anti-racist writing, but not so much her bold statements (oh, and you better believe they were bold!) on gender inequality and homophobia. As Adam puts it,

When Hansberry was taking on the evils of segregation and "we just want to be left alone" white racism, we applauded, but when she started talking about "homosexual persecution" we stopped listening.

Props to Kai for getting us to listen.

There were thousands of demonstrators this past Thursday outside of California's Supreme Court as justices weighed in on whether voters' decision to re-ban same-sex marriage in the state last November was a denial of fundamental rights or whether it's in the people's power to amend the state constitution.

But Prop 8 isn't the only issue facing LGBT communities. Ongoing battles across the nation continue for LGBT rights -- hate crime recognition, adoption rights, immigration and asylum rights, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to name a few. Kim Ford has been an LGBT rights activist for more than 15 years, has worked extensively with community groups of color in New York City, and knows first-hand the myriad of everyday issues LGBT communities face. Here's Kim...

Rumors are out that Chris Brown and Rihanna might have gotten back together. Whatever Rihanna does will be judged by everyone, but the reality is she is doing the best she can and the fact that this is a media spectacle makes it unusually trying I am sure. Jaclyn Friedman at the Yes means yes blog tells us what it doesn't mean if they do in fact get back together and let's just say it doesn't mean that Rihanna is "stupid" "should know better" or "doesn't know what is good for her."

It doesn't mean she is stupid. Leaving an abusive partner is hard - really, really hard. Some studies have shown that it takes an average woman 4-7 tries before she can leave her abuser for good. Why? Because abusers aren't transparent assholes all of the time. They can be very manipulative, and most of the time will wear down their partner's self-esteem quite thoroughly long before they start with the physical violence. They're also often charming and can be very loving and doting and romantic when they're not being violent. They can talk real pretty about what they've learned, how sorry they are, how they're going to change, how they can't change without the help of their wo/man. And of course, we want to believe that we haven't been so blind in choosing a partner for ourselves.

Go read the entire post, it is very important and flies in the face of all the bullshit that is going to come out about Rihanna's choices, along with the reality that it will not be her fault if she is assaulted again. And then circulate widely. We need to reframe the way we talk about women that have been victim to domestic violence.

And, no Kanye, we can't give Chris a break.

Related:
Black women's bodies, voyeurism and Rihanna
Beyond Chris Brown and Rihanna: An interview with Elizabeth Mendez Berry
The media reminds us, famous women have no right to privacy.

And it took a white director to make sure we got there! OK, OK, I will try to be less cynical. I know, I should be totally psyched that Slumdog Millionare won so many Oscars, including best picture. Any visibility for South Asians is good right?

Right. And wrong. I personally didn't think Slumdog Millionare was an Oscar worthy movie. I thought it was creative, beautiful, interesting and had a great soundtrack, but I didn't understand how it was Oscar worthy. Where was the complexity of the characters? Where was the deep cross-cultural analysis that helps us understand the South Asian condition? Where was there any agency displayed in the character of Latika? How did this story help the plight of the South Asian national citizen outside of reinforcing stereotypes of India?

I guess I have more questions than I have answers. And the questions I ask were certainly not the ones considered by the Academy in choosing this film. To be clear, I loved this movie and I saw it twice. The second time I brought my family, and my father a staunch Indian nationalist, hated it. He didn't like the way it portrayed India. I do not hold the same politics as my father and I felt that it actually held more truth about poverty and corruption in India than we would like to admit. But once you sift through the amazing imagery, adorable kids and soundtrack you are left with a coming of age story, only the story is not really for Indian audiences.

And despite its attempt at a narrative of social progress, Slumdog reinforces that which is hopes to ameliorate. Mitu Sengupta has an excellent piece up at Alternet about the policy implications of films like Slumdog Millionare that lump together the stereotypes of the poor.

It is ironic that "Slumdog", for all its righteousness of tone, shares with many Indian political and social elites a profoundly dehumanizing view of those who live and work within the country's slums. The troubling policy implications of this perspective are unmistakeably mirrored by the film. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all "solutions" must arrive externally.

After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal, a Christ-like figure, in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks to sheer, dumb luck, or rather, because "it is written." Is it also "written," then, that the other children depicted in the film must continue to suffer? Or must they, like the stone-faced Jamal, stoically await their own "destiny" of rescue by a foreign hand?

Go read her whole piece, it gives a vastly different view on the film than what has been discussed in the mainstream media.

Finally, as a feminist, I had a really hard time with the character of Latika. I understand that in Boyle's imagination, Latika was like any third world woman. A helpless victim that can't speak up for herself and stays in an abusive relationship, until she is saved by another man. Outside of oversimplifying the complex ways that women of color experience AND resist violence within their own communities, it reinforces stereotypes of helpless third world women. I must say, I tried to ignore this plotline in the beginning. Perhaps if I thought about it too much, I would come out against a film that is supposed to "help" my people or because I just wanted to enjoy something for once without the nagging reality that this story doesn't make sense without the depiction of a violent patriarchy. But the unfortunate reality is that in order for South Asians to make it into the mainstream, they have to cater to the lowest common denominator of universal experience. And that is of course one where women have no agency, especially in the context of the third world. I mean that is why we are fighting all these wars right? To save women!

So yes, of course I am excited that Slumdog did so well at the Oscars. It makes me happy that all these South Asian actors are in the spotlight along with the genius of AR Rahman and MIA. However, it is only one step and we must resist the desire to homogenize the Indian experience that we know so little of in actuality, based on a fictitious film directed by a white man.

I suppose it is asking too much that when we cover the politics of complicated artists such as M.I.A., we not call them terrorist. In last week's NYTimes Thomas Fuller calls her politics "dissonant" and implicates her with supporting a well-known "terrorist" organization. Being a transnational feminist is exhausting since you have to problematize everything with quotations. Ha!

Let me not pretend I know any more about the conflict in Sri Lanka than you do or this reporter. But, in general, when a group is marked as "terrorist" by Europe and the United States, I read that implication with a grain of salt, feeling the need to hear both sides of the story. It has been a long time since we have actually waged a just war and have frequently labeled groups fighting for their own land, rights, freedom and resources as terrorist. This is not to suggest that the Tamil Tigers, who Fuller claims that M.I.A. supports, haven't been ruthless in their tactics, but to ask us to read both sides of every story.

And perhaps all of this would be more serious if M.I.A. were a politician, not a recording artist, but I can't help but see irony in implicating a woman-that performed on stage at the Grammies 9 months pregnant, has made clearly feminist statements about the recording industry and its sexism and has discussed intersectional identities within the context of Eurocentrism-with support of "terrorists." M.I.A. already pushes the average viewer out of their comfort zone, calling her a terrorist empathizer is the next logical step.

Would a white male folk singer be labeled the same if he were to show direct or indirect support for an international cause? Is M.I.A. only legible as an "other" because she is foreign and South Asian? Can she not have complicated political analysis without being implicated in supporting terrorists? I mean, seriously.

Boondoggle has more.

UPDATE: More from Amnesty International on M.I.A. and her criticism of the Sinhalese government and how this criticism does not make her a supporter of the Tamil Tigers. Furthermore, this assertion has led to a decrease in the attention genocide in Sri Lanka is getting from the international community.

I really just love her.

"Excuse me miss?"

You have probably heard about this, but pop-star Chris Brown was arrested Sunday night for allegedly attacking a woman. He is currently out on bail. At first there was speculation as to whether the victim of the attack had been his girlfriend Rihanna. Most newspapers protected her identity as they would any victim of domestic violence. The LA Times decided to run her name as the victim of the crime.

R&B singer Chris Brown has been booked tonight on suspicion of making felony criminal threats in connection with an incident involving his girlfriend, pop singer Rihanna, according to Los Angeles Police Department sources familiar with the case.

Is it OK that they ran her name? Celebrity culture currently thrives on depicting the stories of women's demise. We have seen this with Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears, among others. There is an obsession with making spectacle of women. So, all the more reason to keep her name out of the initial press materials.

On the other hand, Rihanna is really famous and one would hope that she has the resources and support to deal with a situation of domestic violence. She is a model to young women and they are affected by how she responds to this problem. This is a tremendous amount of pressure for anyone, let alone a young woman who is a victim of domestic violence. So it is the double edged sword of fame. She has the power and influence to make a statement, get the help she needs and take whatever legal means she needs to. But what if she doesn't want to? What if she doesn't have the support she needs? There is a strong possibility she will be demonized by the media as well. When the mainstream media covers domestic violence, it is generally not on the side of empowering women, but instead how the legal system victimizes men.

I had a conversation on my facebook about this with some of my friends and one of them said, "what if she doesn't want to be the posterchild for DV?" I think this is an apt point. What if she doesn't want to become the spokesperson for this issue? Is it already not traumatic enough about what happened, let alone have it happen in front of millions of people watching?

I think this so sad for a variety of reasons. Rihanna is a model for young women of color who statistically have a close relationship with violence in their communities and historically a lack of access to resources. Chris Brown is a role model for young men of color. What do we tell our youth when our stars are plagued by the same realities they face in their homes? This startling example lets us know that it doesn't matter how successful you are or how rich you get, you can still be a victim of a violent assault at the hands of a man. I am almost scared to see how this will play out in the media.

via HuffPo.

A NYTimes article this weekend touched on the issue of Latina women and self-induced abortions.

The pills were misoprostol, a prescription drug that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for reducing gastric ulcers and that researchers say is commonly, though illegally, used within the Dominican community to induce abortion. Two new studies by reproductive-health providers suggest that improper use of such drugs is one of myriad methods, including questionable homemade potions, frequently employed in attempts to end pregnancies by women from fervently anti-abortion cultures despite the widespread availability of safe, legal and inexpensive abortions in clinics and hospitals.

This is not a new phenomenon. It's been written about before, including by our very own Ann Friedman, a few years ago in Mother Jones. My organization, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, has also been working on this issue for a while. The story is the same; immigrant women choose these do-it-yourself abortions for financial reasons, or out of fear of telling their family members, over safer procedures in clinics and hospitals.

It's also not news that regardless of the abortion climate, women will do what they need to do to get access to the procedure. When abortion was illegal, women went to great lengths to help one another find abortions other ways, including really unsafe ones.

It isn't all that different now, particularly for women who can't afford abortion procedures (averaging around $280 at the bottom of the scale). Thanks to the Hyde Amendment, women on Medicaid and Medicare can't get their abortions covered like any other medical procedure.

I think in some ways it's exciting that there are drugs and technologies that could allow women to be in control of their own abortion procedures, that could allow them to experience them in the privacy of their homes. But these should be choices women make, not compromises because the other options are out of reach.

It wasn't so long ago that Duanna Johnson was murdered in Memphis. Now, in the same city, Leeneshia Edwards was shot - she is the third transwoman to be shot in Memphis in the last six months.

Renee notes that in the small number of articles that have covered the shooting, all mention Edwards' involvement with prostitution, "as though this somehow justifies the violence that has occurred."

We are given no relevant facts about her life other than that she is a trans woman of colour and that she has been associated with prostitution. Can anyone's life be so minimized in this way. It is as though these aspects alone made up her entire identity. We are meant to think of her as soiled, and beyond redemption. By reporting her attack in this way without explicitly victim blaming the media has reduced her to a two dimensional being; and therefore less likely to illicit any form of empathy or emotion.

Edwards - who was shot in the jaw, side, and back - is in critical condition.

For more information and ways to take action, check out the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition.

Latoya has a new series up at Racialicious, "The Things We Do to Each Other/The Things We Do to Ourselves" about the ways that race intersects with other movement building efforts and despite our attempts at moving to more nuanced understandings of race in America, outside of community based organizing that is explicitly anti-racist, it is rare that you see an actual centralization of race in the mainstream gay rights movement. In discussing how we as identity-based workers and folks working for policy based changes to increase rights in our communities, we overlook the ways that we marginalize other voices. In the case of the organizing and coverage of Prop 8 it was the voices and contributions of queer people of color.

I think it is safe to say that an apt parallel is the women's rights movement and its returning insistence of centralizing the voices of white women. Whether it is intentional or not, feminism frequently recenters itself around the needs and lives of privileged women, and I think this is a point to make. Feminism has dirty baggage in its tokenization of women of color and there have been many many conversations, anthologies and organizing efforts around displacing the white center for mainstream feminism. But those of us that work from the margins can only change the history and image of feminism, along with the way that it plays out in organizing efforts, so much. If the mainstream image of feminism continues to insist that feminism is for white women, how can we reclaim it for our own communities and break it down as something that is potentially useful across sectors?

What am I trying to say? That despite our attempts at including voices of color, mainstream feminism always comes back to revolve around the voices of white women and women of color are generally put in the position of token or an addition and after thought after the omission has already been made. This stems from internal turmoil sure, but it also is damaged by mainstream messaging, marketing and distribution of resources along the lines of privileged women being centralized. The theory being, well feminism has always been for white women, so isn't it just going to be like that?

This bitch has been pondering the themes represented in the comment made by Ed Rendell about Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano's nomination as Homeland Security chief. Rendell said Napolitano was a perfect pick because she doesn't have a family and can dedicate herself totally to the job.

Blink.

There's a lot to be bothered by in that but I must confess that what bothers me most is the idea that working in politics requires a lack of a life...and the unspoken belief that women with demanding lives can't work in politics.

Despite the excitement generated by Senator Clinton's presidential run, little attention is paid to the need for women to run for political office in all areas of government. I've spoken to a lot of women who have considered running for local or state office and almost all of them point to the daunting time commitments and their concerns over being able to balance that shit with the demands of their personal lives.

And many of them are single (gasp!) and have family demands that may or may not contain children (gasp again!!).

Even as I encourage them to explore the possibilities I have to acknowledge the fact that life in politics is often a major time commitment that puts serious strain on a person's work/life balance.

But we can't get stuck there.

We just can't.

We need more women in public office and that means we need to explore the challenges and work those problems out to come up with solutions that support working women everywhere rather than exclude us from representing our communities just when we need it most.

We've got lives and they desperately need to be represented in government.

So let's put our thinking caps on and get about the bitness of making that possible!

Women in playing dead for photography and fashion purposes might be considered high art or cutting edge marketing, but it is usually just a tacky excuse for sexist art and the reason it is considered avant garde is because it is offensive. That type of art annoys me.

**This images are not safe for work and are potentially triggering.**

Exotified images of women of color being tortured and images put together to play to the fantasy of "savage" with sexual overtones is actually just deeply disturbing. I am well aware that you can't curtail someone's fantasies, but I argue you sure as hell can analyze them. Women's bodies placed in native and indigenous seeming contexts where they are being dragged and eluding to torture or essentially comparing their bodies to animals to be hunted is a shocking display of colonial misogyny and woman hate. This calendar should be protested.

So this is pretty much unrelated to feminism, but I just want to start Tuesday off on the right foot with this gem from a band I got to see on Friday in their first ever US show. They are called Little Dragon and they are from Sweden and have a nice electronic neo-soul sound with lovely strong female vocals. I love new music that has yet to be tarnished by the mainstream and I was so pumped about this band, I had to share. Check em out and tell me what you think.

Happy Tuesday! What did you do over the weekend? Anything interesting?

I am not totally sure how to respond to this commentary on CNN about Michelle Obama's choice to stay at home during the presidency of Barack Obama. I don't want to be too hard on it, because I do think on one level highlighting that there are also women of color that stay at home and sometimes feel isolated and alienated so they should build relationships, well that is great. Having the resources to be a stay at home is even better. However, suggesting that you should stay home to do it for the betterment of the country and to uphold traditional values-well that is just not OK.

She makes an apt argument about black women taking care of wealthy white people's children.

From breast-feeding to bathing to rocking them, the women tended their owners' children, while not being allowed to lavish such attention on their own. Long after slavery was over, little changed in this dynamic.

It was common for black women to leave their own children at home to fend for themselves and go to work for low wages as domestics in the homes of well-off white families. As African-Americans have gotten more opportunities, a college degree has been a ticket to the career ladder. Period. Devoting full time to motherhood is considered a waste of education by many in the black community.

And while I think there is some cultural impetus for black women working outside the home, I think more times than not, it is class privilege that gives people the ability or idea to "stay at home."

Outside of the class assumptions behind the idea of the "stay-at-home" mom, I don't necessarily think that Michelle Obama's choice to stay home is a win for us women of color that are just looking for a role model to let us know we can stay at home nor does it disrupt the racist idea that only white women stay at home. I think it feeds into antiquated notions of motherhood that make her more palatable to a wide audience suggesting that yes, she disrupts the idea of the "normal" American by being black, but is as American as apple pie, by staying in the home.

via CNN.

(How can one track be so wrong and so right at the same time?)

In a culture where what a woman looks like counts more than what is between her ears, it does make a difference that the first lady is not white, but is black and therefore disrupts normative standards of white femininity. Last week controversy stirred due to a Salon article titled, "First lady got back," a tongue-in-cheek response to the Obama victory as not only for Obama, but for black women with an overemphasis on her "back" a subject of mass introspection academically and in popular culture as a culture signifier of black women's beauty and oft sexualization.

It emerged right before our eyes, in the midst of our growing uncertainty about everything, and we were too bogged down in the daily campaign madness to notice. The one clear predictor of success that the pundits, despite all their fancy maps, charts and holograms, missed completely? Michelle's butt.

Lord knows, it's time the butt got some respect. Ever since slavery, it's been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself. Emphasizing it or not separates dignified black women from ho's, party girls from professionals, hip-hop from serious. (Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds, by the way, but they're certainly considered its source. How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary, for one.)

Yes, it is imperative to push the boundaries of our racist structures that determine what is beautiful. But something about the unapologetic "booty" gazing of this piece rubs me the wrong way. Latoya hits it saying,

Reader Virigina sent in the tip, writing:

Although Erin Kaplan does make a few decent points about how black women are viewed in this culture, most of the article just reinforces stereotypes. She is defining Michelle Obama and black women in general by their butts and hair. There are so many other traits that she could have discussed.

After reading the full piece, I'm inclined to agree. I get the semi-tongue in cheek tone of the piece, but this article just feels a bit wrong for the audience. Perhaps if it was written for a magazine like Essence or Clutch, which routinely explore the issues of black women and how a lot of our politics are wrapped up in our appearance, I would feel differently about the end result.

And goes on to say, "my problem is that articles about Michelle Obama's wardrobe, booty, and mom duties are what is fit to publish, what is seen as relevant to a mass audience." I agree with what Latoya is saying here, at no point in the Salon piece is there some reflection on the fact that an overemphasis on what first ladies look like as opposed to what they think, feel and say is problematic.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Each year I am blessed to spend it with my siblings and chosen family of friends.

Oh, and the non-stop feasting is fantabulous too (wink)!

This year, with the economy in turmoil and communities bracing for layoffs, I'm beyond thankful for all that I have...not the materials things, of which I don't have many, but the relationships and experiences that make a person whole.

I'm aware that there are many in my community who lack even that. Too often we tend to view poverty as a purely money-based thing and discuss it in terms of what a person can't afford or has had repossessed. And it is important to remember those among us who will go hungry or homeless or both...and it is so very important for us to give with the knowledge that those in need are our neighbors and friends.

But being poor often makes a person invisible. Even now, when many folks who have been getting by are getting a taste of need and hunger, features on the news focus on the newly poor and segments carefully avoid featuring the women and families who were living poverty long before the economy went o shit.

With invisibility comes loneliness and isolation...depression and desperation. As someone who regularly volunteers with women in shelters I have seen the numbness a life of want inspires in too many eyes and I have also seen the power of a simple conversation...the positive impact you can have on a person simply by asking them what their name is and how they are feeling.

This Thanksgiving I hope that y'all are able to give to a food bank or donate your time serving a meal or two, but I also encourage you to see the invisible among you.

Ask them how they are doing.

Discover the person within.

We have much to be thankful for and so very much to give.

Have a blessed holiday.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

This past Saturday I joined over 1,000 of my fellow equality activists...in the bitter cold, mind you (wince)...to protest in St. Louis the passage of Prop. 8 in California.

I had worried that the cold spell would discourage attendance...it didn't.

I also worried that the crowd wouldn't be diverse...but it was.

People often prove me wrong.

And sometimes they don't.

I am the daughter of Civil Rights activists...not famous people, but two of the many everyday Americans who volunteered and risked their lives in the struggle for the protected vote and equality. Growing up, my parents made sure that their children knew that our rights were fought for...and the how and why behind those battles.

So when Missourians voted in favor of a same-sex marriage ban in 2004, I was saddened but not discouraged.

History teaches us that Civil Rights are often won in the courts and society is slow to follow.

And when Californians voted in favor of Proposition 8, I'll admit to being surprised...but I sure as shit am not discouraged.

The night before Election Day, I watched a segment of the documentary Eyes on the Prize and saw young people, older people...women and men of every race and religion...participate in social change. And their efforts provided the fuel that led to legal changes which made it possible for me to stand before that crowd November 15, 2008 and add my voice to the chorus calling for justice.

The cold spell didn't discourage attendance.

The crowd was fired up and beautifully diverse.

And we begin again...

What is reproductive justice and why is there a session at Facing Race on it? According to EMERJ, "Reproductive Justice exists when all people have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our gender, bodies, and sexuality for ourselves, our families and our communities."

This panel includes some seriously bad-ass women, Rocio Cordoba and Gabriela Valle from California Latina for Reproductive Justice and Marie Nakae from Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. are talking about the difference between a movement that is focused on choice verses one that has a justice agenda. A justice agenda takes into account the greater conditions that serve as barriers to women's control of their own bodies, sexuality and health.

Maria Nakae is talking about nail salon workers and the chemicals they are exposed to. Apparently, 11% of chemicals in beauty products are actually tested so it is a great risk to these women that are exposed to them at high rates. Furthermore, exposure to these chemicals has reproductive health hazards. To learn more about their organizing work with nail salon workers check the project POLISH.

This Veteran's Day I am remembering one of the thousands of women who served.

Pfc. LaVena Johnson was killed on July 19, 2005 in Iraq.

The cause of her death is still being questioned.

Her murder and the lack of information about it touch more than just those of us from her hometown.

As the nation pauses in remembrance this Veteran's Day let us not forget.

In our excitement over the hope inspired by our recent election...may we not lose sight of the questions still in need of answers.

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus

For more information about Pfc. Johnson and the investigation into her death visit LavenaJohnson.com.

I have never worked as hard on as many campaigns as I did in this election cycle...

...and, as I type this up, my home state of Missouri has yet to call a lot of them.

Some things never change.

But others?

Oh yes, they can (wink)!

I wish my beloved Grandmother had lived long enough to witness this. Oh how I wish that she who cast her first vote with courage and under the threat of hate filled violence in Mississippi had cast a ballot yesterday.

I wish so very much that my Father, who taught me to love politics and speak truth to power, was alive to share this moment...to speculate over the cabinet...and to debate the historical and social significance of America electing our first president of color.

But history is often bitter sweet because many of those whose work made it possible are not here to harvest the fruits of their labor.

Even as I struggle to put into words the emotion of this moment it is to generations long past that I am drawn.

To the women who organized then and now...who created the techniques that were applied so brilliantly in 2008.

To the brave people who sat when told to stand...who marched when warned to stand home...that spoke when cautioned to be silent...and to those who gave their lives to the cause of social justice.

And I am humbled that I watched the history of their creation last night.

Now, we begin.

Peace was not achieved last night.

Equality does not rain down upon the land.

The mountaintop remains on the horizon...and it is up to we the people to continue the climb.

So I shall cherish this moment and rest my tired ass feet for a spell, for we have miles upon miles yet to walk...

...and the audacity of hope to empower us.

A bitch has been working on several campaigns and I am tired as hell!

I've canvassed...phone-banked...blogged...rallied...and there is still so much that needs to be done.

Pause...consider...continue.

Yep, 'tis time for a pre-election Bitchfirmation!

Ahem.

When we're called un-American for doing what this nation's founders did by calling out bullshit and questioning those elected to serve us...

When we're called socialists by people who couldn't define socialism without a Google search an the assistance of an online dictionary if their herd mentality-based lives depended on it...

When they drop dollops of hate in the comment section of my blog as if I've lived damn near 36 years...all of them black...and never been called that shit before...

When they hang up the phone, slam the door or walk away rather than listen and debate...

For all the drama that accompanies campaign volunteering and activism in general...

Go on, y'all!

Go on with your badass volunteer, activist and advocate self!

Because living your values is not copy-writed by any political party...valuing family and community is not the sole property of social conservatives...and patriotism doesn't reside exclusively within the GOP.

Be vocal...because the blood, sweat and tears of millions were shed so that we can do just that.

Be proud...because part of being patriotic is the expectation that we the people speak truth to power.

And be fierce...because all that drama and more is why they call this a struggle.

Yes, I don't know about y'all but I needed that.

And now?

Begin again...

Through EngageHer.org and documentary film Engage Her: Getting minority women to lead and vote, founder and CEO Mable Yee is working to get women to the polls -- especially women of color -- millions are registered to vote but don't cast their votes. So why do all those undecideds get so much attention?

Just 10 days to go till the big vote for the next prez. Here's Mable...

In fifteen days Americans will go to the polls and get our vote on. A bitch adores voting...the excitement, the anticipation and the satisfaction of adding my voice to the process and making my wishes known. I teach voter education classes at local women's shelters so I also get the honor of watching young women who are particularly vulnerable to legislative drama cast their first vote.

On Election Day I will drive my students to their polling place knowing that they know their rights and what they are voting for. It sounds so simple...and yet too many of us vote against something rather than for something.

I encourage all ya'll to ask yourself why you vote and what you are voting for.

Trust a bitch, the answers will guide your decisions more than you know.

What matters to you?

And let me be clear...I'm not just talking about the presidential election. On November 4th we'll be voting for a hell of a lot more than who the next president will be.

If you don't know who your state representative and senator are look their asses up! Get to know their records and their policy positions. Call the candidates up and ask questions...research ballot initiatives so that the wording is familiar rather than a surprise. If there is a proposition on the ballot take some time and find out what is being proposed and how it will impact your life.

For all the talk about elections being popularity contests, we the people are somewhat to blame. When we fail to vote from a place of knowledge...fail to challenge and question...and walk into our polling place knowing that our ass is about to wing it, we aren't doing our job.

And our job doesn't end when the polls close.

Prepare to get your oversight on post election, because we are the ones who are responsible for holding elected officials accountable.

After the Missouri primary I dropped my students off at the shelter and was about to leave when one student asked me to wait a minute so she could show me something. She rushed back to her room and returned with a legal pad in hand. I took the offered pad and looked at the neat writing that filled it from top to bottom...she had written down her choices complete with bullet points on each candidates key issues.

When I asked her why she didn't take the pad with her when she went to vote she rolled her eyes and laughed at me.

"This is for the after part, Ms. Shark-Fu!"

Fantabulous.

The vote is when our work begins...and after the election our work must continue.

We're at fifteen days and counting, y'all.

Be ready.

Some great thought on the Latin@ vote from Mamita Mala:

From the This Is What Women Want Campaign.

Cross-posted at Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz

Today is National Latino AIDS Awareness Day.

HIV/AIDS is the third leading cause of death among Hispanic men ages 35 to 44 and the fourth leading cause of death among Hispanic women in the same age group.

In honor of NLAAD, check out Ambiente, a bilingual online Latino LGBT publication.

This video keeps putting me in tears. I have to say after yesterday's tactics by the McCain/Palin campaign that were blatantly racist, I really started to think about what this election means to myself and to the people in this country that have experienced racism and never been allowed to talk about it, had the tools to deal with it and have always been told covertly and overtly that we are inferior. You never quite fit in but then you are told you are imagining it when you experience racism. It means something to us that Obama is so close to the presidency.

It is good to see some mainstream media heads actually take it there.

I love her.

via Jezebel.

A bitch got my political canvass on this weekend on behalf of a fantabulous woman running for State Rep. in Missouri.

My feet are killing me, but it was worth the pain.

Wince.

I've discussed the need for activists to get active here before. Volunteering is a great way to live your values in your community. But volunteering for a political campaign is also a rare opportunity to learn a hell of a lot about your neighbors and fellow voters.

Whilst canvassing I met a lot of folks who had not made up their mind but who had really solid questions about the policy positions of the candidate I was volunteering for. These voters wanted to know where she stood on taxes, healthcare, education and judicial reform. And they asked about her position on reproductive choice as it applies to healthcare and education.

I returned home to soak my aching feet and ponder the day and I couldn't help but compare the voters I met during a four-hour canvass with the texture and substance of the recent vice presidential debate.

Did those voters get the answers they sought from that debate?

I think not, since the debate was a festival of non-information and well rehearsed folksy sound bites.

No, I'm pretty damned sure that the voters I met...those folks who had some damn good questions and real concerns...didn't walk away from the V.P. debate with any answers.

If anything, they walked away with more questions and a lot of concerns.

Sigh.

With both presidential tickets claiming to represent average hard working Americans this bitch thinks they'd all benefit from a few weekends of house-to-house canvassing.

We average Midwestern folks aren't as simple as the Sarah Palin's of the political world like to believe.

And you're darn tootin' we deserve a serious debate on the issues...

While I recognize that Cynthia McKinney's presidential candidacy (as the third party green candidate) is not really viable, she is still a bad ass woman and politician. I think the perspective that she and Rosa Clemente bring to the campaign is important, and gives a voice to a more radical, feminist and progressive political agenda with the hopes that some of those issues can be infused into the mainstream debate. Also, a presidential ticket with two strong women of color is just another sign that things are changing in the US political landscape. So, with that said, check out this video from McKinney talking about the economic crisis.

Hey hey Missouri feminists! The fabulous Shark-Fu will be participating in an event in St.Louis tonight:

A Girl like Me: A Conversation About Race, Beauty and Self-Image

Wed., Oct. 1, 2008 (tonight!) at 6 p.m.
Missouri History Museum in Forest Park
in the AT&T Foundation Multipurpose Room
Free!

Join us for a candid discussion about popular images, race and beauty. The program begins with a short documentary, A Girl like Me (7:08), created by high schooler Kiri Davis through the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking program.

Davis re-conducts the "doll test" used in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case and sheds new light on how society affects black children today.

Sounds awesome. Wish I could go!

UPDATE: For those who can't attend, you can watch the film online.

So for those of us Feministing gals (Jessica, Vanessa and myself) that went to school in that sleepy upstate town known as Albany we all have a special place in our hearts for Barbara Smith. One of my most formative feminist "click" moments was seeing Barbara Smith lecture at SUNY Albany when I was a young women's studies undergrad (11 years ago, eeeek, LOL).

If you have never heard of her, well she is an anti-racist, feminist, socialist activist and one of the framers of early identity politics. Frankly, her humility extends so far that she rarely gets the recognition she deserves. I am sure her constant calling out of white feminism for their inability to truly incorporate an analysis of race and class certainly has kept her on the sidelines as well.

I was pretty excited to see that Colorlines magazine (always on top of it) has a Q&A with her and what she has been up to, including running for public office. Check it out.

White Dude Knows Best! Above: Men who want to control the bodies of women they deem unfit mothers. Louisiana state Rep. John LaBruzzo (left) and Texas state District Judge Charlie Baird (right).

It's been quite a week for government violation of the bodily integrity of poor women and women of color. First, there was the judge in Texas who set "not having children" as a condition of a woman's parole. (I just linked in the WFR on Sunday, but Cara discussed it at length. Go read her post.)

And today, via several readers, comes the news that John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, wants to pay low-income women $1,000 apiece to get sterilized. Everything about this is so incredibly offensive, I don't know quite where to begin. Let's start with a quote from LaBruzzo:

"We're on a train headed to the future and there's a bridge out, " LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. "And nobody wants to talk about it."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Low-income women having children is a "dangerous demographic trend"?! Sounds like the recent round of racist propaganda we saw related to the "Demographic Winter" movie. (Film summary: You should be panicked because brown people are reproducing at faster rates than white people.) But LaBruzzo protests that he is not a racist -- he's a problem-solver!

LaBruzzo said other, mainstream strategies for attacking poverty, such as education reforms and programs informing people about family planning issues, have repeatedly failed to solve the problem. He said he is simply looking for new ways to address it.

"It's easy to say, 'Oh, he's a racist, ' " LaBruzzo said. "The hard part is to sit down and think of some solutions."

It's not as if this country has ever done a good job providing low-income women with the tools and information to make their own decisions. Programs that aim to do that have been consistently underfunded and poorly implemented. So no, we haven't tried all other options. And even if we had, his idea is still completely appalling.

LaBruzzo is correct that it's very easy to say he's a racist. Because, um, he's espousing a historically racist policy. What he clearly deems to be a new and creative solution has unfortunately been around a long time. Compulsory or coercive sterilizations for low-income women, disabled women, and women of color were extremely common up until the 1970s, and slightly less common but nevertheless occurring with regularity the the decades since. The paternalistic attitude that "certain women" cannot be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions is still an underlying theme of a lot of backwards legal and policy decisions. LaBruzzo and Texas judge Charlie Baird are part of this despicable tradition.

It is so interesting how many headlines are discussing the role of the "women's vote" in this election, as though it has never been a concern before that half the population has a brain, cares about politics and makes decisions that are thought out. I suppose we can thank the media obsession with identity politics throughout the coverage of this election for the constant over stimulation of how "women" are going to be voting. And be thankful that Hillary ran for office, bringing gender into politics in a new way. But it is important to remember, when the media says women, it is assuming white women as a voter bloc and their voting behavior. I have yet to see any substantial data breaking "women" down by race, class and/or sexuality. I probably haven't looked hard enough either, so please put links in comments.

My point being according to the latest poll I see (from Lifetime: Every Woman Counts) women are split McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden. The findings are intense:

In a Dramatic Reversal Since Late July, McCain/Palin Now Virtually Tied With Obama/Biden on Who Best Understands Women -

-- Governor Sarah Palin Pick: Solidifying Factor for Republican Women, Compelling to 55-64 Year-Olds and Married Moms, but Others Divided --

-- Nearly Three-Quarters of Clinton Supporters Have Gone Home to Obama, but Still 23% Said They'll Vote for McCain --

-- Majority of Women Believe Senator Clinton and Governor Palin Have Been Treated Fairly in the Media Coverage of the Race, but Two-Fifths Say Sexism Persists and Is Worse for Palin --

I think I have been in some kind of denial, but the polls are in fact scaring me. The voter bloc that I am not part of, even though I am a woman, is scaring me. I am constantly talking to my friends about the new Republican obsession with the "vagina vote" is dismissive, ignorant and untrue, but I am starting to realize there is some truth to it and I think we must take ourselves up with the task that much more about why the Palin/McCain ticket would be bad for the rights of women.

I am with Michele Obama, that I think it is the youth vote is going to be the key in this election. Potentially, us, young women, who I am finding are overwhelming going to support the Obama/Biden ticket. So now I am going to tell myself that they didn't take the Lifetime poll, which I think is pretty accurate.

Update: This poll is from last week so for a more updated look at the stats check here where Obama is up by about 5 points over McCain. Thanks to brklyngrl for the heads up.

Let's talk a bit about taking back words.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me about one of my nicknames this bitch would be damn near debt free (wink). I've had the nickname Shark-Fu...or some variation on that theme...since I was a wee bitch of five. And the ABB nickname was the inspiration of readers of my blog AngryBlackBitch.com. The interesting thing is that both my nickname and the name of my blog are the result of my deliberate claiming of language and words previously used against me.

Shall we?

I became the victim of a bully the first day of kindergarten and remained a steady target throughout my grade school career. There were a lot of reasons why I appealed to bullies...this bitch was one of the only students of color, my brother was well known around the neighborhood for public displays of autism and I was always good for a post ridicule cry. But when I began to experience dental drama as a result of an overcrowded mouth...well, an already miserable situation went into overdrive.

Two of my permanent teeth decided to come in where they could get in and that happened to be behind my bottom row of teeth. While my mother consulted with my dentist and the family pocketbook, my fellow students began to taunt me on the bus. When I came home...crying, of course...because I'd been called a shark my mother rolled her eyes and told me "then you need to be a shark, girl, and stop letting those fools get under your skin."

I thought about it all night and decided to give it a try. So, I spent a week researching sharks at the library and found out that they are fantabulous and fierce creatures worthy of respect not bus-based taunting. The next time a classmate called me a shark I replied with a "thank you." And damn if that didn't shut him up for a week!

The teeth eventually were pulled but I've been Shark-Fu (my sister settled on that version) ever since.

Years later I found myself gifted with a blog for my birthday and searching around unsuccessfully for a title. I thought about what I wanted to share and discuss through my blog, but that didn't inspire any title ideas. Then I thought about how people may respond to my posts and added a dash of fucking with folk's expectations and that led to the AngryBlackBitch title.

See, I realized that the women being labeled angry black bitches were pretty damned fantabulous. The label was meant to diffuse their power and shut them up...it being built on an understanding of the so-called benefits of conformity and silence that my family passed down like other families passed down good glassware.

Don't raise your voice...loud black women are threatening.

Don't use naughty language... they already think black people can't speak proper.

Don't make and maintain eye contact...you may come across as intimidating.

Try not to be so "ethnic"...you don't want to go around reminding folks through your name, accent, hair, clothing, food or music that you are different.

And, for the love of social acceptance and peace, don't get angry!

Just don't...or you'll pay a price.

Hold it in, because if you let it out they're going to you're just another...uh huh, that's right.

And then they will dismiss your point but only because you frightened them...right?

If you had only sat perfectly straight in your chair whilst wearing that acceptable outfit with oh so non-ethnic hair and spoken in low viciously proper sentences as you expressed your frustration over the wrong done to you without passion or conviction they would have listened.

Blink.

That's the pitch...trust a bitch, I've heard it my entire life...and it is, has always been and will always be bullshit.

I reject that contract even as I reclaim my anger and my bitchitude...and a bunch of naughty words that I simply adore using.

Now, I'm not saying that all y'all need to get down with it.

Some folks will never dig it and that's cool - there isn't a bitchitude mandate that I'm aware of...yet.

But for this bitch claiming and taking back language has proven to be just as empowering as embracing my inner shark...

...with the added benefit of stumping those knavish trolls who can't come up with anything else to call me in the comments.

From USCIS:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today a revised list of vaccines required for applicants seeking to adjust status to become legal permanent residents. This revision follows guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

CDC's revised Technical Instructions to Civil Surgeons for Vaccination Requirements require the following age-appropriate additional vaccinations to adjust status to legal permanent resident:

* Rotavirus
* Hepatitis A
* Meningococcal
* Human papillomavirus
* Zoster

The requirements for these new vaccines went into effect on July 1, 2008, however CDC approved a 30-day grace period for any medical exam conducted before August 1, 2008. At that time the new vaccinations, if appropriate, must be administered in order for USCIS to approve the applicant for adjustment of status.

Now this is kind of a curve ball. Jill hit on most of the important points here, about how ANOTHER barrier to citizenship status is the last thing we need, particularly when that barrier can cost upwards of $300. People tell me that this isn't particular action isn't actually a Merck ploy to get more people to get the vaccine, but rather a Bush administration immigration barrier. Like we need another one of those. Ironic, considering that conservatives were a big part of the campaign to block the vaccine mandates last year, for mostly anti-sex reasons. I guess they don't care about these things when it comes to immigrant women.

My main problem with this is that it adds another significant financial barrier for immigrant women, since the vaccine is seriously expensive and there is little funding for it. WOC PhD talks more about the history of medical abuses against women of color and her fears about the vaccine.

Thanks to Raquel for the links

I was going to tackle the issue of reclaiming certain words, but I have something else on my mind today.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

Yesterday I had dinner with my older brother. He's autistic and aphasic and vibrant and funny. My sister and I are co-guardians, which has added dealing with the mental healthcare system to our lives. It's worth it, but it is often an emotionally draining pain in the ass.

My brother is the oldest so I have never known a day without autism in my world. Having a family member with special needs is normal for me. In fact, it is normal for a lot of American families.

Just as struggling to do right by that loved one and make sure their needs are met has become normal.

Blink.

Eight years of Republicans in control of our national checkbook has resulted in a lack of funding for domestic programs and that includes residential treatment programs, community integration programs and healthcare programs.

Yesterday I looked across the table at my brother and I was seized with a pure panic over how the hell we'd function if his funding was cut one more time...if they took away other screenings the way they took away dental coverage...if they slashed transportation the way they slashed funding for job assistance which has left him unemployed for the first time in his adult life.

When I vote I need to know that the person I'm voting for will institute the kind of change that will free up funding for the programs that make society function...education, metal health and infrastructure to name a few.

I need to know that they see a role for government not just a military role.

I do not need another self titled outsider bent on starving domestic programs to death.

I need...my family needs...a fucking human being who believes in the government they seek to lead.

This shit is personal as hell to me, because mismanagement and this government's greed-based adoration of pork has trickled down like acid into my state's budget and eaten away at so many social programs that...

...oh shit, there's that panic again.

Sigh.

Ask yourself what isn't being discussed while political pundits debate Gov. Palin's eyewear or while anchors work themselves into a frenzy over the ever changing poll numbers.

Those are the issues and concerns that this woman voter is going to take into the booth with me come November.

We are all value voters.

The problem is that many of us have become too distracted by the circus to focus on what we value most.

Alfre Woodard (left) and CCH Pounder (right)

The Oscar-nominated actress Alfre Woodard talked to Premiere magazine:

Do you think African-American women are getting better roles now? You see more African-American [women] onscreen, I guess, but it's hardly anything to crow about. It's not just African-American women -- it's Latinas, Asian-American women. The film business remains the last bastion of close-minded and uncreative behavior in terms of the way we see human beings.

So it was ironic when George Clooney name-dropped Hattie McDaniel [Gone with the Wind] in his Oscar acceptance speech for Michael Clayton.
I don't remember his speech.

He was trying to show that Hollywood has always been ahead of its time.
I don't know what he meant. No other the industry is this backwards in terms of not putting the best person for the task up to the task, rather than assuming you're a specialty act. It's, "I'm not going to let Rosalind Chao play the museum curator unless it says 'Chinese-American woman,'" and then they're going to make her say, at some point, something about some noodles. That kind of bullshit.

This reminded me of something I recently heard the actress CCH Pounder (of the tv show, "The Shield," which I've actually never seen) say on NPR's Fresh Air. She told a story of wanting to read for the part of a judge, but because it wasn't written as "black woman judge," she had to fight for the chance to even audition:

My name is Shark-Fu and I usually practice the fine art of bitchitude over at AngryBlackBitch.com.

But let me tell y'all that a bitch is thrilled to be in the land of Feministing.

Shall we?

The Vice Presidential debate is going to be in my hometown of St. Louis Missouri and this bitch has been fantasizing about it for days. Not just because of my fan-based joy of being able to watch the fantabulous Gwen Ifill moderate, but because of the opportunity I'm damn sure we're going to let pass us by as these two people sweep in and sweep out of St. Louis Missouri.

Oh, how a bitch would love to have a day with them.

Blink.

I would!

Mmmhmmm, a bitch would take Senator Biden and Governor Palin on a tour.

I'd take them to my neighborhood, where public schools leave poor children behind and middle class families struggle to send their children go to private schools. I'd walk them through the grade school up the street and around the corner to meet young people and talk to them about the fucked up tests and the flawed standards...the lack of funding for what they need and the abundance of funding for what they don't need any more of.

We'd drive to the local shelter for pregnant teens where I teach women's health and voter education classes and we'd stay for lunch. They'd meet the young woman who found out how to prevent pregnancy when she became pregnant and the pregnant fifteen year old who faces motherhood alone after being denied choice and options by law.

Of course we'd have to drop by a union hall and have coffee with workers who have seen factories close and industry flee...who have seen my state's greatest export become our people.

We'd have a meeting with local law enforcement to go over the daunting crime figures...the rise in violent crime and gun violence that too many county residents expect to see in the city and too many city residents don't expect to change anytime soon.

And then I'd sit them both down and tell them in very specific terms exactly what change means to a bitch.

Lawd knows that we'll be lucky if either one of them pause for a fundraiser...some tastefully catered affair in a "good" neighborhood attended by all the right people and blah followed by blah followed by another blah.

Sigh.

But a bitch can dream...

...and hold out hope that Ms. Ifill will toss in a few questions on behalf of the masses whilst getting her moderating on.

Via the amazing New Orleans Women's Health and Justice Initiative, affiliated with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence is an update on the work they did to ensure that their clients had the support and information they needed to evacuate safely. From Shana Griffin, the New Orleans Women's Health Clinic's Interim Director:

I just want to give everyone a quick update on our coordinated effort to reach out to all Clinic patients (which took place on Thursday, August 28th and continued on Friday, August 29th), checking-in to see if people were planning to evacuate or stay, and if they needed support developing an evacuation plan and accessing needed resources to assist with the process or info on staying safe if they chose to stay.

I'm happy to inform everyone that we made over 700 calls, with 95% of them occurring on Thursday!

We reached out to 610 patients - calling everyone, leaving messages, reaching out to their emergency contacts if we were not able to get in contact with then, and making tons of repeated calls to folks who needed greater assistance.

There are more updates after the jump, as well as a couple of extra pictures. It's amazing what these women were able to do and just further highlights the inability of our government to step in and help the people of New Orleans, even during natural disasters. It seems little has changed since Katrina three years ago. This was a particularly frightening part of the crisis for me as a Latina:

Many of the Latina women we called (most don't have papers) were very afraid, stating that they didn't have anywhere to go, and needed support evacuating (mostly informational and financial). Many asked about the safety of assisted evacuation through the city given their documentation status. We informed folks of what we were told (that screening for papers were not going to be done), but made it very clear that it was not something that we could confirm.

That the anti-immigrant climate is so powerful that this would become widespread belief is scary and unbelievably cruel.

Anyone else think it was poetic justice that this new hurricane and almost crisis in New Orleans struck during the first day of the RNC?

If you want to support the work of this amazing group of activists in NOLA, go here and donate.

If you didn't listen to WBAI's Hip-Hop Takoever-Election Style this weekend, you definitely missed out. But lucky for you, we have a segment that you can listen to right here: "Politics for Goddesses Rising: Our Relevance in Election '08."

Hosted by Feministing friend jaz and Nida Khan, the show featured Rosa Clemente, VP Presidential Running Mate of Green Party and Presidential Nominee Cynthia McKinney and Kevin Powell, who is running for a Congressional seat in Brooklyn. The show takes on how women's issues are being addressed in this election; the importance of local politics and politicians, the media's lack pundits who are women of color and more...

WBAI 99.5 FM's Hip-Hop Takeover was 17 hours of non-stop hip-hop programming - but this is definitely the hour to listen to!

INCITE! needs your support in their efforts to help low-income women of color with evacuation efforts as Hurricane Gustav approaches the Gulf Coast.

Your assistance is urgently needed to help low-income women of color and their families evacuate safely if need be, stay safe for the duration of the evacuation, and return to the city as soon as possible so as not to fall prey to the pushout that has kept so many folks from being able to return to New Orleans since Katrina. Local organizers are using whatever resources and funds at their disposal to help women and their families evacuate, bond people being held in Orleans Parish Prison out, and support those who make the choice to stay in whatever way they can.

This money will go directly to supporting the hundreds of low income women of color that are the constituency of the New Orleans Women's Health Clinic.

Once again, the particular vulnerability of low-income women of color and single female-headed households (including folks with disabilities, seniors, undocumented immigrant women, and incarcerated women) has been erased in the face of disaster and overlooked in the days leading up to the storm. With few resources, facing challenges and concerns for their families of their own, INCITE! New Orleans and WHJI have stepped in to fill the gap. Please send all your support, solidarity, sisterhood and strength their way, and join us in hoping for the safety and well-being of the people who are already suffering from Gustav in Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, and willing the storm to subside or veer off safely before it strikes the Gulf Coast.

TO HELP: Click here to make a donation online (be sure to put "New Orleans" in the "Purpose" line). [Updated link.]

Or you can write a check directly to WHJI and send it to:
PO Box 51325
New Orleans, LA 70151

Lapriss Gilbert was forced to leave a federal building after a guard in the Social Security office told her that her "lesbian.com" shirt was offensive.

She said the guard, who works for a private company hired by the Department of Homeland Security, demanded that she leave the building or face arrest.

"As an African-American and a lesbian, I haven't been through one day without facing some sort of discrimination ... but this is just shocking," said Gilbert, 31.

A witness, Paul Dumont said, "For her to be told to leave was completely unnecessary, especially considering how peaceful and quiet she was responding the the security officers." In his statement to police Dumont noted that the guard's "loud, unreasonable, aggressive and angry approach to the situation almost caused chaos."

Via the f word.

Variety has recently released their 2008 "Women's Impact Report," which profiles influential women in movies, television, music, business and technology. Apparently there are only a handful of influential women of color...ugh.

The always fantastic National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum has a great interview series over at their blog Warrior Prose this week.

Can you name...

A 93 year-old Chinese-American revolutionary anti-racist activist and feminist?

A queer journalist and writer named one of the most influential Asian Americans of this decade?

A Seattle based activist involved in international and domestic human rights issues over the last 30 years?

A labor organizer and lawyer, accomplished nature photographer and poet, and author of several groundbreaking books?

A visionary trailblazer and founder and Executive Director of an internationally recognized human rights organization?

Five amazing women. Five must-read interviews. In a week long interview series, the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF) gets up close and personal with Grace Lee Boggs, Helen Zia, Cindy Domingo, Lora Jo Foo, and Mallika Dutt, prominent women leaders who continue to define and redefine leadership and inspire us all. Check it out!

Please check out this excellent op-ed from the Sunday Times about the lack of justice for women violently sexually assaulted in indigenous communities.

Some tidbits,

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show.

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes -- burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

Rapes against American Indian women are also exceedingly violent; weapons are used at rates three times that for all other reported rapes.

They pretty much say it all.

Now that is one hell of a before and after. Apparently, beauty is synonymous with "whiter."

I just took this screenshot from The New York Times website; it leads to this story from the upcoming magazine about black politics and Obama. Noticeably absent from the picture is anyone with a vagina are any women. Lovely.

(The article isn't much better, save for one quote from Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill Politics and a quick mention of Valerie Jarrett.)

Contributed by Adrienne Elyse Wallace

It's been about eight months since the murder of Tarika Wilson.

Reporting on her tragic murder, Christopher Maag of the New York Times wrote:

A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson's rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima's police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.

Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.

On August 4th an all-white jury acquitted Sgt. Joseph Chavalia. Chavalia's attorney said in response: "What kind of world would it be if we didn't have police officers...Joe was doing his duty."

Oh shit, I'm sorry - I didn't realize that killing a woman holding her baby was in the Lima, Ohio Police handbook. The fact that Chavalia was acquitted speaks volumes. His actions were sanctioned by the jury. The take away message is that it's okay to shoot a black woman holding her child. I mean the racism is apparent in the actions of the police officer and the media that covered the shooting but conveniently lacked follow up coverage. Why isn't this story important, why aren't people outraged? Citizens of Lima have spoken up - why aren't they receiving attention from folks outside of the black activist community? It seems the death of a black woman at the hands of a white police officer is fine, even forgettable - at least to twelve jurors and a slew of media outlets. However let me just say:

Tarika Wilson, I will not forget you.

Adrienne Elyse is a general badass who works in the anti-domestic violence movement by working for economic justice. She lives / works / loves in Massachusetts (which is now, officially for lovers).

An Arizona radio shock-jock named Jon Justice (oh, the irony) recently targeted Pima Country Legal Defender Isabel Garcia with a truly disgusting hate-speech campaign. Pima helped organize a protest of Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- a man known for scores of immigration raids, blocking female inmates' access to abortion, and some stupid ideas about gender. (Read more from Jenny Dreadful.) And because Garcia dared to call attention to the fact that Arpaio is doing nothing but creating racial divisions with his "narrow-minded and ignorant policies," she drew the ire of local bigots.

Radio host Jon Justice, in particular, had a really disgusting response to Pima's critique of Arpaio:

...Jon Justice posted a few offensive videos of himself with a piñata with Isabel's likeness, caressing it and making comments about "wanting to take it home with me," among a few other comments about "chorizo" and "viva la raza." Mr. Justice has since removed the video, as well as the one that followed it, which we found to be even more offensive.

Maegan la Mala distills what's going on here:

They did what they do best, spout hate, targeting Garcia, her life (because let's be real this is about life not just making a living) and her body as a Latina woman. There were calls for her to be fired and a very clear message was sent that the body of a Latina woman is fair game.

I apologize for being late to posting about this. I really encourage you to read more from the bloggers who have been covering it from the start. There are comprehensive lists at the Sanctuary and Latino Politico.

Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, a Tucson group that Garcia works with, has posted a list of ways to take action on Garcia's behalf, against this sort of ugly hate-speech.

Hanaa Rifaey doesn't sleep much. I'll let her explain why. But the next time you find yourself pissed at another policy done wrong, know that Hanaa is on it. And you can be, too. Even if it's a small step, it'll add up.

Here's Hanaa...

Ophelia at Feminocracy observes something about the language used to discuss two very similar -- and very tragic -- cases in which a pregnant woman was murdered, her uterus cut open, and the fetus stolen.

The details provided about Kia Johnson's death are gory and detailed. Words like "eviscerated" jump out at you as you read the account. They call her a corpse. They note that the foul smell emitting from the body that was in "moderate decomposition" is how they found her.

Bobbie Jo Stinnet is called a "slain mom", a "pregnant woman" who had her "womb" cut open.

Kia is an "eviscerated pregnant teen."

Yes, there were gory descriptions of Bobbie Jo Stinnett's murder published, too. But I do notice a difference in tone -- especially in the headlines -- between the coverage of her and that of Kia Johnson. I think it's less subtle when you see those headlines (all from CNN) next to the pictures of these women:

Maybe this particularly resonates with me because I work as an editor, and I see it as a heartbreaking example of why language matters. How word choice can humanize (and dehumanize). How racism can pervade what probably, to the writer of those CNN headlines, seemed like straightforward, cut-and-dried sentences.

According to the NYTimes yesterday, women are now being hit as hard as men by a lack of jobs. This is not a new phenomenon but I understand what the article is getting at. It has gotten very competitive for the jobs that remain and an inability to find sustainable work has forced women into alternatives. This is in direct contrast to the idea of the "opt-out" revolution as some have termed it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women aren't working because there aren't enough jobs.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home -- to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a Congressional study, to be released Tuesday, that follows the women's story through the end of 2007.

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.

The excuse for men is not usually that they have chosen to stay home, it is that they can't find work, whereas for women the explanation has always been she chose to stay home, not that she couldn't find a job.

For working class families the luxury of a stay at home mom has never been an option. It has in the past been an oversight of the women's movement that women merely want to enter the workforce because they have a right to. It is often that they need to.

Via.

So a reader sent along this article about a Pakistani man in Georgia that strangled his daughter because she didn't want to get married to the man they had arranged for her to marry.

The Clayton County Medical Examiner confirmed that Kanwal died of strangulation. Police recovered an iron by the young woman's bedroom doorway and a necklace on a family room table that may have been used in the killing, according to a Clayton County police report.

Authorities allege that Rashid killed his daughter because he feared that her resistance to a recently arranged marriage would disgrace the Pakistani-American family.

Sounds so simple right? He killed her because his "culture" made him. Not because he might be mentally ill or pathological. There is no denying that in basically every culture there is pressure put on women to act a certain way and especially with regard to marriage or the ownership of her sexuality. But the way that "honor" killing is discussed in the media you would think it is some normal cultural phenomena, when it is not. It is a sign of illness, culture gone awry and patriarchy at its most exaggerated.

In a ground-breaking essay, that I recommend you read if you are into theory, Leti Volpp talks about the notion of the cultural defense. One of the moments that this plays out is through the justification of violence against women as a cultural norm (usually based on racist ideas of culture).

It appears that there are two ways the mainstream US media talk about "honor" killings. The first is in a way the demonizes the horrid, brown, ugly, probably terrorist perpetrator, that is trying to hurt the innocent child like brown female that must be saved. Or making assumptions about the role of women in a given non-American culture as much more misogynist than our own and thereby engages in these forms of blatant abuse of patriarchal power that are cultural.

Neither scenario gives us much hope for how the case will go or allows for an intersectional analysis of the ways gender, culture and power play out. And when it is revolving around a violent murder of a young woman, it is very difficult to understand the nuance.

via.

This petition was inspired by the R. Kelly verdict from last week, read and pass along.

Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women

Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black community.

Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied. Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly’s absurd defense and find “reasonable doubt� despite the fact that the film was shot in his home and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us is responsible for it.

Keep reading and sign petition here.

Thanks to Kara for the heads up.

This story kinda slipped through the cracks, but apparently two Obama campaign volunteers didn't want women in head scarves to be sitting behind the podium for the picture. According to Politico.com,

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

The campaign has apologized to the women, both Obama supporters who said they felt betrayed by their treatment at the rally.

For more about why this is not cool check out the Political Poet. Laura Fokkena at PopPolitics also has a post on the issue.

(More about Obama and Muslim supporters via NYTimes.)

We have written about hymenoplasty before. It is when women undergo a surgical procedure to restore their hymen and create the illusion of virginity, including the "bleeding" that should occur on that fated wedding night. So I suppose it shouldn't be a shock that so many women in Europe are opting for this surgery in the Muslim community. In discussing the fate of one woman who has undergone the surgery the NYTimes reports,

Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the vaginal membrane that normally breaks in the first act of intercourse.

“In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.”

Hmmm, I don't know the motivation to feature this particular quote, but I think being a virgin is something that is heralded in most communities around the world, not just the Muslim community. Women are often scrutinized for their virginity and chastised, shamed, insulted, etc., if they do not have "it" come wedding night.

According to the article it has been noted that there has been an increase in the number of Muslim women wanting "certificates of virginity" because now they are in Europe and having more sex. Perhaps it is the shift in setting and through access to new norms around sexuality, but I don't buy it. I think it is a stretch to suggest that due to European influence and its supposed sexually free environment Muslim women are having more sex. That is a leap, I think they were always having sex, but working around the consequences in different ways.

Hymenoplasty is becoming common in many parts of the world. And while I think it is good to know it is happening, let's not forget the underlying message. While we might want to believe a sexual revolution happened in the Western world that the oppressed women of the world are still catching up to, it is actually untrue. Puritanical sex ethics reign supreme in many parts of the world, including Europe and the United States. And it is not about being able to have sex or not, it is the way it makes a man feel on his wedding night to know that another man has had sex with her. It is the control of female sexuality pure and simple because if she did it before she has already been used by another man, she has become property of the one before, as opposed to the one she married. It creates that inexplicable fear and anxiety that is often the basis of misogyny.

Understanding this, we do have to keep in mind that women are often put in great harm is they can't prove that they are virgins on their wedding night. We can't blame them for self-preservation.

Only in a world this patriarchal is there an expensive, painful and dangerous practice for women to undergo that will create an illusion of her virginity to indulge the male ego.

For a more humorous take the youth at YO! via yoblogger take on this topic.

The chat is over, but you can still read it. Some of it was even more upsetting to me than the original article. A number of things really pissed me off. Here’s just a quick sampling.

An example suggested to me is that women of color are subjected to pressure NOT to reproduce -- one such report spoke of long term norplant type stuff as a condition of parole. This is different from the pressure TO reproduce that is the subject of much choice energy. The women's movement must protect women of color from this particularly female oppression, if the reports I received are true.

In response to a question about reconciling feminism with “the fact that racism, poverty, etc., disproportionately affects women of color and poor women vs. men of color and poor men?”

I do not know that racism disproportionately affects women of color vs. men of color or poor women vs. poor men. It would be interesting to think about how you weigh the oppressions. Men of color are disproportionately in prison and disproportionately subject to the death penalty. [Emphasis mine, I’ll come back to this later]

And, to clarify what I thought must surely be a misstatement basically blaming black women for Clarence Thomas being on the Supreme Court, she says

Several news sources, including the New York Times reported that polls showing that black voters backed Clarence Thomas were influential in determining the vote of the southern Democrats to confirm. It is a demographic fact that more black voters are female than male.

And, one last thing. I could do this for a long time, but I’m worried about experiencing a rage blackout.

In comments about making the choice to have a family Hirshman states

the heterosexual reproductive family is a fount in inequality. I think motherhood and family should be a central concern of feminism, starting with insisting that men shape their lives with the expectation that they will bear half the burden of child rearing and home making forever.

Regina McKnight - the South Carolina woman who was who was convicted of homicide after she gave birth to a stillborn baby - has had her conviction overturned.

McKnight was the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse due to a stillbirth. Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), says that McKnight "was convicted on junk science and was not fairly represented at trial."

NAPW, who has been instrumental in bringing attention to cases like McKnight's (of which there are far too many), has the full story.

Feministe, the Oklahoma Women's Network Blog, RH Reality Check and the ACLU also have more.

(Trigger warning.) In 2003, 21 year-old Ramona Moore - a student at Hunter College in New York - told her mother she was going to Burger King down the street and would be right back. She never came home.

Moore was held in a basement a few blocks away where she was raped and tortured for four days before her captors beat her to death. The police, who Moore's mother begged for help, did nothing to find her.

Sean Gardiner at The Village Voice has a huge piece not only on the police's mishandling of Moore's disappearance - but also how it has sparked a historic racial bias case against the city.

Moore's mother Elle Carmichael is bringing forward a a civil-rights lawsuit claiming that the NYPD has a "practice of not making a prompt investigation of missing-persons claims of African-Americans, while making a prompt investigation for white individuals."

Not exactly shocking news, of course, but the case would be the first of its kind.

To prove racial bias, Carmichael's team would have to "show it's happened in a pattern of instances," says NYU law professor Paul Chevigny. And the only way Chevigny can think of to do so would be to take a large sample of missing-persons cases, identify the race of the people involved, and then determine whether there really is a pattern.

Carmichael's lawyer, Robert Barsch, is apparently attempting to do just that. He tells the Voice that he has heard from a number of black people who have also had their attempts to have police open up missing-persons investigations ignored. And he plans to point to the [Svetlana] Aronov case as a prime example of the flip side of that coin. After all, the NYPD tried harder to find Aronov's dog than they did Romona Moore. (Link added)

Tried harder to find a dog. "If this was a white kid, they would never had done this," Carmichael told Gardiner.

"I had to say to the detectives one day: 'You know, I feel the same emotions and pain as a white person.' "

Read more about Moore and the case against the NYPD at What About Our Daughters? and The Feminist Underground.

From a recent performance at The Whitney Biennial. Photo by Eduardo Aparicio.

Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, and editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (with Brian Wallis). Her work on military interrogation was selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

"In the guise of a CIA manual, Coco Fusco's provocative A Field Guide for Female Interrogators offers an unflinching look at women's role in the military and at America's use of torture in the War on Terror"-- (from the book's back cover copy).

Here's Coco...

Martha Ma is a food and media educator and producer, community chef and health counselor. She is the host and producer of "The Tasty Life," a bi-weekly television show on Manhattan Public Access channel 57, and the editor of the e-newsletter, "Eater's Digest."

Martha is also executive producer of the Food for Thought Film Festival. If you're in the NYC area this weekend, check out the last weekend of the festival at Cooper Union's Wollman Auditorium, 51 Astor Place at Third Ave. Feature films include King Corn, Black Gold, and Life and Debt. Shorts include The Meatrix I, II and II 1/2 and The True Cost of Food.

Here's Martha...

Last week the U.S. Board on Geographic Names voted to to rename Squaw Peak in Arizona for Lori Piestewa, the Hopi woman who was killed in combat in Iraq in March 2003. Cecelia notes that because the word "squaw" has long been used to denigrate Native women, the name change to honor Piestewa is especially welcome.

From a Rolling Stone profile of Piestewa:

The attack made Jessica Lynch famous. U.S. Special Forces later plucked her from an Iraqi hospital and rushed her to safety, and the media seized on the daring rescue to create a tale of American heroism and valor. But the real story of what happened in Nasiriyah that day -- and the clear warning it offered of things to come -- involves a different soldier, one who gave her life to protect her friends. Lori Piestewa, born and raised a Hopi on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, became the first American woman to die in the war, and the first Native American woman ever to die in combat on foreign soil. Only twenty-three years old, Piestewa saw herself as a Hopi warrior, part of a centuries-old tradition developed by a people who once resisted an invasion and occupation by the U.S. military -- much as the Iraqis are doing today. She went to war, but she believed above all in peace, in doing no harm to others. "I'm not trying to be a hero," she told a friend just before the invasion. "I just want to get through this crap and go home."

Sara Fajardo is a staff photographer at the Orlando Sentinel. Her photojournalism journey has taken her to many places, from local places in the States to covering the rise and fall of president Alberto Fujimori in Peru. You can see some of her photos at her website: http://sarafajardo.com/.

She's also the author of a children's nonfiction book, Enrique's Day: From Dawn to Dusk in a Peruvian City.

Here's Sara...

The amazing film, NO! The Rape Documentary is being screened tonight in Brooklyn at 7pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons will also be at the screening to answer questions and discuss the documentary, along with anti-violence activist Quentin Walcott and writer Kevin Powell. Seriously, this is not an event to be missed.

Doors open at 6:30 pm
program begins at 7:00 pm

at BROWN MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH
484 Washington Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238
(at the corner of Gates Ave. | Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY)
A or C to Clinton/Washington stop

For a Feministing interview with Aishah, click here.

Via Cecelia's new blog, Ojibway Migisi Bineshii, the Rapid City Journal reports:

A small shelter offering a temporary haven for Native American women seeking to escape domestic violence has just six weeks to find a new Rapid City home.

"We're just kind of shell-shocked," Karen Artichoker, manager of Cangleska, said.

Cangleska's Ohitika Najin Win Oti (Standing Strong Woman) shelter has lost the lease on the home it has used as a shelter for the past seven years. [...]

The shelter's original intent was to provide transitional housing for women leaving the reservation for their own safety, Artichoker said.

Over the years, a growing number of local Native American women have sought refuge in the shelter. The average stay for a mother and her children is about 19 days. The shelter always has a waiting list, Artichoker said.

You can donate to the shelter here.

In happier related news, earlier this month Pretty Bird Woman House (on South Dakota's Standing Rock Reservation) opened the doors to its new shelter! (The previous shelter was burned down last year.)

To update on last week's report that one in four girls has contracted an STD through sexual contact, I wanted to add some other feelings that are running through my head. As you may recall, I was upset that they had termed it "sex infection," (terminology they continue to use via this editorial) which I felt was misleading and made it sound pretty fucking awful. But I will say, I do believe the NYTimes was trying to do the right thing by raising awareness about an issue and informing the public.

The problem is that since there are so many assumptions about young women - and especially young women of color and their assumed sexual promiscuity - the news media has to do more to actually influence public opinion or inspire people to do something. Dismal stats just make us all feel helpless. Looking at racist and sexist policy and how that influences the behavior of young men and women to see where key interventions might be possible, might be a place to start.

The big issue for me here is that young women of color are rarely, if ever, on the cover of any newspaper. The press doesn't count the news affecting their lives as real news, so to only report about women of color when it is because they have "sex infection" feeds a racist and sexist media, that is already inundated with overly sexed images of women of color. Logic only follows that these same women have the burden of "sex infection," due to their shameful over-sexuality.

So then where do we go? HALF of the African American girls studied had contracted some form of STD. That is a staggering statistic and it is hard to blame such a clear discrepancy on personal behavior and choice. Abstinence-only policies, funding cuts and poor educational systems hit hardest among young black women. And they don't deserve it.

Please put any resources or organizing efforts on this issue in comments.

Miki Fujiwara, aka Urban Envy, is a self-employed visual artist/community activist based in New York City.

Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Miki is known to be one of the original members of the New York Tributary Art Movement. The majority of her work, mostly paintings, has been categorized as "Cultural Surrealism," often said to be in the "tradition of Cynthia Tom and Frida Kahlo."

Urban Envy's works can be seen in local galleries of New York City.

Here's Miki...

Bambi Weavil is founder and CEO of Out Impact, Inc and publisher of its online magazine Out Impact. Based in Wilmington, North Carolina, Bambi spends her days and her nights working to raise money for LGBTQ issues...while also squeezing time to write about pro wrestling and her guilty pleasure, "American Idol."

Here's Bambi...

For activists and organizers that work on issues of displacement, jobs and housing, it is not exactly news that the subprime lending situation has had a malign effect on working class women and women of color in low income communities. They are usually first in line to fall prey to predatory lenders and usually the most viable customers of such loans. According to this morning's NYT women of color in Baltimore have inevitably been the first to be effected by foreclosures.

For each of the last four years, more than half of the foreclosures in this neighborhood have been homes owned primarily by women, according to an analysis of public records by the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit community development organization.

The foreclosures threaten the neighborhood’s fragile stability. And they highlight a broader dimension of the housing meltdown: subprime mortgages, which are driving the foreclosure rate, have gone disproportionately to women.

Although this is not surprising, it shouldn't be ignored either. The trend in subprime lenders engaging in predatory lending practices have targeted low income people, making their living off ruining other people's financial lives (and I speaketh from experience). Debt has been normalized in communities of color and working class communities, it is assumed the only way you can live is in debt. The debt we are accruing, we will not pay off in this generation. The damage being done has serious long-term consequences for disenfranchised communities.

Yvette Bello joined Latino Community Services (LCS) in June 2005 and is currently serving as the Executive Director. Based in Hartford, Conn., LCS works to reduce the further spread of HIV/AIDS among the Latino community and other populations at risk, and improve the quality of life of individuals affected by HIV/AIDS.

Yvette also serves on the board of the Medical Interpreting Association of Connecticut, The Ryan White Latino Caucus, the Connecticut Association for Nonprofits board and the Mayor's Commission on AIDS.

Here's Yvette...

Sandy Shin is program coordinator at Breakthrough USA. Breakthrough is an international human rights organization that uses media, education and pop culture to promote values of dignity, equality and justice. It has two offices, one in NYC and one in New Delhi, India.

Sandy Shin has a Masters in Human Rights from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies and Sociology from the University of Albany. She was the Legal Advocate Project Director at the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault where she coordinated statewide trainings and provided constituents and the general public with services. Sandy has also been involved with community-driven social movements led by local activists employing anti-racism, anti-war ideologies.

Here's Sandy...

Nancy Northup is the President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization that uses constitutional and international law to secure women's reproductive freedom. The Center has won groundbreaking cases before federal and state courts, U.N. committees, and regional human rights bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights. Working at the state, national, and international levels, the Center has built the legal capacity of women's rights advocates around the world, working in over 45 countries.

Nancy is an attorney with extensive experience in constitutional impact litigation, criminal law, and reproductive rights advocacy. Here's Nancy....

Katori Hall is a playwright, performer and journalist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her award-winning play, "Hoodoo Love" received its world-premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre November 1, 2007. Her other plays include: "Remembrance," "Hurt Village," "Saturday Night/Sunday Morning," "The Mountaintop," and "Freedom Train."

She is a recipient of numerous writing awards including the 2007 Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, 2006 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting and Screenwriting, 2006 Royal Court Theatre Residency, 2005 Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. Recently, she was nominated for the Wendy Wasserstein Prize and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.

As a journalist, her work has been published in The Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and The Commercial Appeal.

These are just some of the highlights of Katori's career. Here's Katori...

To update from my post on Tuesday about the demolition of four housing projects in New Orleans, activists (including my homies at Ruckus--raise the roof!) yesterday stopped the bulldozers with a 30 person blockade.

via AP.

Protesters wielding bullhorns and shouting "housing is a human right" stopped demolition at a massive public housing complex Wednesday in this hurricane-ravaged city in dire need of homes for the poor.

More than 30 protesters blocked an excavator from entering the fenced-off area of the B.W. Cooper complex. It was the first of what likely will be many standoffs between protesters and demolition crews that are tearing down hundreds of barracks-style buildings so they can be replaced with mixed-income neighborhoods.

The post Katrina housing crisis is one that we know about but is failing to get as much national attention as it should. It is an ongoing problem and the structures that are supposed to be fixing up housing, providing and protecting the residents and working to "bring New Orleans back," have failed to keep their promises. New Orleans has been flooded with bad policy decisions in the last 2 years that has left thousands of people homeless.

This week has been an eventful one in New Orleans as activists fight against the city of New Orleans and US Department of Housing and Development who have plans of demolishing four public housing developments, that is 5000 units of public housing, and replace them with newly developed "mixed income" housing. Mixed income is one of those terms that sounds harmless, but really means, push out the poor, women of color and single mothers, poor families and families of color and replace them with higher income folks. The people most affected by displacement and possible demolition plans are women of color.

According to the Times-Picyune, most of the demolition plans are going ahead full force with the exception of one of the developments that the Historical Conservation Committee decided to preserve in response to activist demands.

Photo by Steed Media Service

In the 1990s, Celeste Beatty traveled Europe, Central America and Africa as an exchange student to study local beer brewing customs after perfecting duplicates of American ales like Samuel Adams. She founded Harlem Brewing Company, the maker of Sugar Hill Golden Ale (delicious, I've tried) in 2000.

Harlem Brewing recently sealed a partnership with the major distributor Manhattan Beer Distributors, which supplies 35 percent of New York City’s market. The deal is helping to get Sugar Hill Golden Ale into bodegas, supermarkets and restaurants around New York City.

A native of North Carolina, Celeste gives 10 percent of her company’s income to charity, usually to jazz organizations. Here's Celeste...

I find most conversations with people about the fetishization of Asian women mind numbing. Even when people have the best of intentions with comments like, "you can't help who you are attracted to," or "Asian women are hot," you begin to realize that often people are just trying to explain away their own or someone else's racism. Myths such as Asian women are hotter, or they are more docile and therefore better wives, are not only mythical and generalizing, but they hinge on essentialist stereotypes that silence the voices of Asian women and Asian feminists that have been shouting for years about how they are not your fantasy.

Carmen at Racialicious emailed me about this piece on Jezebel, that seems to be calling out the problematic reality that a lot of men have hard core Asian fetishes, but unfortunately ends up reinforcing the very stereotypes that reinforce this complex situation.

A bunch of economists are once again putting their decades of rigorous study to a societally optimal end and dispelling the "myth" of the Asian fetish. In studies of speed dating communities, it turned out, Caucasian men showed no racial preference at all for Asian women; in fact, male speed daters showed no racial preferences at whatsoever! To which I call, "bullshit." (Remind me to tell you about my "Asian" phone sex persona one time!) And I know because I practically am Asian that when talking about the AZNs we are allowed to talk about stereotypes without regard for the numerous and glaring exceptions out there, so here goes: there are a few reasons some dudes prefer Asian women, and it starts with the fact that they are very rarely unattractive, and they are even more rarely stupid, and they are even more rarely than that fat. They have really nice skin and they're not afraid to tell you yours looks bad.

Um, no. It is very difficult to talk about Asians as one whole group of people. There are a lot of different kinds of Asian people and sometimes, Asian also includes South Asian. And while Moe concedes that it is difficult to homogenize when there are so many exceptions, the reliance on still perpetuating the same myths that fetishizers use to justify their fetish, well that is not cool. I mean I am South Asian and you will not hear me say, "oh we are nerdy, tee hee, that is a positive stereotype, so it is OK!" Because in reality, the Indian nerd stereotype is often used to justify unfair work conditions or low self esteem in South Asians that are not "nerdy."

The fetishization of Asian women by the media, by men, by women, by Westerners, it is not just coming from a few people. It is supported by not only myths and stereotypes, but the objectification of Asian women's bodies through pornography that is focused on Asian women, the global sex trade that is disparaging in Asia and South East Asia and the culture of sexual tourism. It has somehow become OK to have racist sexual preferences, even in progressive circles. The thing is, it is usually one sided and that being white men, into Asian chicks. We are not operating in a vacuum. There is a long history of white men lusting after Asian women because of certain qualities they felt were "natural" to Asian women, qualities that make them more desirable than us loud mouth American gals.

I mean Asian women that are choosing to be with white men (even when they are racist or just into them because they are Asian) is their choice as well. I mean if they feel OK with it, who am I to say anything otherwise. But for the rest of us, that are sick and tired of white men being into us because we are "exotic," well this shit is just tired. I am not your fetish, I am not your fantasy and, yeah, I might be good in bed, but my race is not why.

Sister Outsider is the latest project of novelists, screenwriters, and entrepreneurs Elisha Miranda and Sofia Quintero who have been collaborating since 2000. They co-founded the nonprofit Chica Luna Productions and its project, The F-Word, that is working to train the next generation of women of color filmmakers.

Julia Carias is an actor, educator, filmmaker, and Sister Outsider's Director of Operations and Productions.
Among her list of works and activism, Julia co-wrote, produced and directed her first play in 2002, "Roots," a production by La Casa Latina, an organization dedicated to promoting Latino culture throughout the college community.

Here's Julia...

After graduating high school, Michelle Walker left NYC for the UK to spend years singing in renowned clubs like The Limelight and Ronnie Scott's. After moving to the D.C. area to study voice, she spent graduate school at American University, and continued her jazz studies privately with Madeline Eastman, Jay Clayton, Nancy Marano, Pam Bricker, Dena DeRose, Rhiannon and jazz vocalist Mark Murphy. Michelle also studied at the Amsterdam Music Conservatory in Holland and the Stanford Jazz Summer Workshop in Palo Alto, CA.

Some highlights of her work include opening on tour for jazz vocalists Mark Murphy, Rene Marie, Chris Botti, George Benson, Spyro Gyra, Terrell Stafford and opening for Wynton Marsalis. Michelle currently teaches privately and conducts workshops on musical performance and career management when she's not on stage. Here's Michelle...

Today people around the country are wearing red to protest violence against women of color.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons on why she's wearing red, and on an upcoming action:

I am wearing red because I am a survivor of incest and rape.
I am wearing red because I live in a City (Philadelphia) where a White Woman Judge Terri Carr Deni dropped all rape and assault charges in the case of a woman gang-raped at gunpoint. Because the woman was working as a prostitute, Judge Deni decided that she could not have been raped and changed the charge to “theft of services.� Deni later said that this case “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.�
On Thursday, November 1, 2007, in Philadelphia, there will be a Press Conference at 1pm Outside Municipal Court (Criminal Justice Center)1301 Filbert St. On November 6, 2007, I will voice my opinion to Judge Deni by voting “NO!� on her retention as Judge in the Municipal Court of Philadelphia.

I am wearing red because I am very clear that it doesn’t matter if you’re a stripper, a prostitute, a lesbian, a bisexual woman, a heterosexual woman, a single mother (especially with several children from different fathers), on welfare, a high school drop out, college educated, working in corporate America, working at a minimum wage job with no health insurance, or working in the film/music/television entertainment industry. Yes, I placed what some people would view as very different/distinct categories of women of Color in the same category because history has consistently shown me and all of us that if any of the aforementioned Black women are at the wrong place at the wrong time (which could be at any time), we, women of Color, will be left to heal our very public wounds alone.

Check out the images of women who are wearing red today, and find out how you can get involved.

A Reuters article titled, "Sexy rap videos suspected to be damaging to young girls" says:

Watching rap music videos that are overly sexy and violent can lead to alcohol abuse and promiscuity among young black girls, according to a study into sexual stereotypes in rap music footage.

Firstly, putting "sexy" and "violent" within the same category is a bit disconcerting. (Not to mention "promiscuity" and "alcohol abuse.") The actual study was even more so:

The research was based on a survey of 522 African-American girls aged 14 to 18 who were asked how often they watched rap videos, questioned about their sex lives and asked to provide a urine sample for a marijuana screening.

While obviously the media and pop culture (which does include the misogyny that exists in many rap videos) has a huge impact on girls' lives, why not focus more on their self esteem and confidence rather than their sexual activity and pot smoking? (The research method itself is pretty problematic to me as well, but that's a whole other discussion.)

Thoughts?

Filmmaker Tiona. M. has worked in the educational documentary genre and pulled up her sleeves in the non-profit arena. This time, she has two documentary films that she wants to share with the world. One is on a Black women and her two daughters, and their university experience. The other, which I interviewed her on, is black./womyn.: conversations..., which should be out soon.

Here's Tiona...

Listen to Rhodessa Jones of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women on NPR. I read Rena Fraden's chronicle of the collective, "Imagining Medea" in grad school, which was awesome; it's good to see such an amazing project get this exposure.

According to a new study, done by researchers at Wayne State and University of Michigan, black women are three times less likely to receive chemotherapy and five times less likely to receive Tamoxifen (a drug used to help treat breast cancer) than their white counterparts.

The study examined medical records from 651 women diagnosed with breast cancer at a major university hospital and cancer center in Detroit from 1990 to 1996. Of the women, 242 were white and 388 were black.

Previous studies had also shown differences in treatment rates between blacks and whites, but discerning the reasons for the differences was often difficult.

Despite previous studies having found difference in the types of cancer that black women get verse white women, it is clear that it is cultural and racial factors that motivate the difference between why white women get the treatment they need more than black women do.

Most experts were not surprised by the results of the study, but stated that figuring out why the differences existed would be difficult.

"It is sometimes very difficult to determine whether disparities are due to race or other factors," said Moy. "But in my opinion, race is a very important factor to consider."

"It is probably multifactorial," said Dr. Herbert Smitherman Jr., assistant dean of community and urban health at the Wayne State School of Medicine in Detroit. "The choices that people make are clearly a composite expression of their social and cultural circumstances, their conditions of living and the conditions of their community."

Finally, some findings that makes sense! The way you relate to you doctor is in fact different based on your cultural background. If you are distrusting of medical institutions, you may not feel comfortable demanding what you need, or engaging in a way that can fully serve you.

via ABCNews.

Staceyann Chin is a full-time artist. Writing from her experiences as a Jamaican national and a New York City resident, Staceyann has been an “out poet and political activist� since 1998. She's performed on the stages of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Off-Broadway and Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. In 1999, Staceyann took the American Amazon Slam title in Aarhus, Denmark.

Her acclaimed individual performances have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and "60 Minutes." Her poems and writings can be found in Stories Surrounding My Coming, and numerous anthologies, including Skyscrapers, Taxis and Tampons; Poetry Slam; Role Call and Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies.

In 2000, Staceyann's first one-woman show, "Hands Afire" ran for ten weeks at the Bleecker Theater. Off-Broadway Theater welcomed her second show, "UNSPEAKABLE THINGS" in the summer of 2001 before she took it to Copenhagen for a week-long run. London, Helsinki, Sweden and Norway are in line for showings. These are just some of her accomplishments.

She is currently a host on Logo's After Ellen internet show "She Said What?" and a co-host of BETJ's "My Two Cents." She's still creating and sharing. Here's Staceyann...

The Fashionista Diaries couldn't be more vapid. That's part of the fun of the show. I mean, I spent 30 minutes playing Facebook TV trivia this morning, who am I to judge?

However, this one little clip from Jezebel really got my brain going.

In it, the "naïve" white girl, Tina (who's apparently hanging out with the first black person she's ever met) discovers two earth-shattering things about black people. In case you're reading this while standing, please sit down so you don't pass out from the shock of what I'm about to share.

Exhibit A. Actual tan line on black skin.

Fact #2. Black people don't automatically want to date all other black people.
Again, poor Janjay. Tina saw a cute black guy and ran over to fetch him for her friend. Janjay, not interested, notes that Tina tries to set her up with every black guy they see. What a great friend.

I have to say, I feel Janjay's pain here. I grew up as one of two or three black kids in my grade at school, and it can be exhausting. Having to "teach" your friends about race is so isolating. For the longest time I actually felt like a freak, because how could someone you like be so ignorant about such simple things. I thought there must really have been something weird about me for it to be so confusing. It was a lot worse in feminist circles. Not that the comments were worse, but the feeling like an outsider. I became to loathe going to certain group meetings in college. Being expected to speak for all black women, or sometimes, all non-white women. Can't. Won't. The sad thing is, it still happens. And it still sucks. It sucks to have to steel yourself against the seemingly inevitable ignorance, disrespect and bigotry of your allies. And that's why it sucks extra hard when you hear that it's not a big deal. Because this shit is usually the latest in a long list of painful moments.

See, reality TV is fucking deep.

Update: To go back to the tanning thing, the reason it bugs me so much is I don't understand how anyone could think that. I mean, skin gets darker in the sun. Even if you never thought about black people tanning before, when you do, doesn't it just make sense?

By Ligia Rivera, Director of Community Mobilization Programs, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

“You are getting la operación? You’re going to be sterilized for the rest of your life?� I said to my friend Rosalía recently. “Yes, I will,� she replied. With those three simple words, my friend threw into question all the hours I’ve spent learning and training others on reproductive justice. What else could I have said to a single undocumented mother of two, working a low wage job? Rosalía, like many other immigrant women, came to this country to escape from extreme post-civil war violence, risking her life and the lives of her children by crossing the Rio Grande on an inner tube. After realizing how lucky she was to be living in one of the four US states that offer prenatal care to undocumented, uninsured women, she felt comforted when the medical staff at her local clinic sympathized with her daily struggles and encouraged her to get sterilized as a long term birth control option.

Is this just a new type of coercion meant to strip immigrant women of their reproductive freedom? While some white women still find it hard to convince their doctors to sterilize them, there is a long history of sterilization abuse against women of color. The sterilization of more than a third of women of child-bearing age in Puerto Rico in the 1940s along with the lawsuit against USC-Los Angeles County Medical Center in the 1970s for the coercive sterilization of low-income and primarily Spanish-speaking patients are both a testament to how women of color have experienced sterilization differently. Although significant progress has been made, including federal guidelines to regulate sterilization procedures, I wonder how much oversight still exists and to what extent our movement is aware of the continuing abuses and undercover coercive medical practices.

As I prepare to speak to my friend about the history of sterilization, abuses against women of color and the long-lasting effects of her decision, I examine my own motivations. Am I infringing upon my friend’s right to self-determination with my privileged Latina discourse? I think I am not. I am not only a Latina; I am a proud reproductive justice advocate for whom silence is not an option.

Two incredibly awful stories recently about young Latina transwomen and their run-ins with the U.S. criminal "justice" system:

Via Jessica Hoffmann:

Victoria Arellano/Arrelano (the spelling of her name varies from story to story), a trans woman with AIDS who died in a California immigration facility for men in July after being denied medication and otherwise improperly treated, was one of three immigrants to die in federal custody in a month, according to the Washington Post.

And from Amnesty International (via AngryBrownButch):

My name is Mariah Lopez. I am a young, transgender person of color. I also am an activist who does street-based outreach in the West Village, where I also socialize.

Let me tell you how the police often respond to this.

With verbal abuse.

Sexual harassment.

Unwarranted arrests.

Withholding food, water and medication in detention.

Humiliating and inappropriate strip searches.

Physical assaults.

This is what I have endured at the hands of police and corrections officers - and not just once. What occurs is a systemic abuse of power, one that is seemingly inflicted on whim. For my friends and me, it seems that something as inconsequential as an officer's mood can dictate whether we spend time in jail.

Read her whole statement. It's gut-wrenching.

I don't mean to diminish the injustices suffered by these two women by lumping their stories together. Rather, I think it's important to recognize that what's going on here is systemic. For each story like Mariah Lopez's or Victoria Arellano's that bubbles up through the alternative media or queer/feminist blogosphere, there are countless more that don't even make the radar. Jessica Hoffmann (who has been tirelessly pushing for more coverage of Arellano's story) summed it up nicely: "Immigrants' rights struggles and trans struggles and health-care struggles and feminist struggles and HIV/AIDS struggles--and all other struggles for justice--are interconnected. If we believe in justice, these struggles are ours." (Which is also why I apologize for not posting on either of these stories sooner.)

AI has an online action alert calling for an NYPD investigation into the abuses suffered by Mariah Lopez while in custody. I'll post updates on Victoria Arellano's case as I get them.

Without wading into the "should feminists wear makeup" debate, I wanted to point to this great post over at Racialicious, "Sorry! We don’t have that in your color. . .", prompted by Wendi's discovery that her favorite makeup line doesn't have tinted moisturizer darker than "beige."

In actuality, as per usual, women of darker skin tones were simply being ignored, and when the industry remembered us for a moment, our needs were considered to belong to a niche market, calling for a separation of default skincare and makeup products from the ones for “women of color.� I understand the need to highlight a new set of products for a certain population, but at the same time, why aren’t colors that are made for the beyond-beige ladies just a part of the regular lines? Why must we so frequently be singled out, somewhat as a reminder of our phenotypic foreignness in a market that still considers light skin not only the default, but the beauty norm.

I don't wear much makeup at all, have only worn foundation twice, and didn't know tinted moisturizer existed until recently, so I haven't encountered this problem. Has anyone else? I wonder what they think women of color should do about our nipples?

(picture via WAPO)

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman in 1944, refused to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus headed to Baltimore. She was arrested and jailed for her bold move, but her contributions resonated. Kirkaldy died last week.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman whose refusal in 1944 to give up her seat to a white passenger is seen as a precursor to the US civil rights movement, has died at the age of 90, reports said Monday.

Kirkaldy's determination, more than a decade before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus to allow a white person to sit down, led to her arrest and incarceration and eventually to the Supreme Court, which said the law used against her was unconstitutional.

Kirkaldy, nee Morgan, was taking a Greyhound bus from her mother's home in the state of Virginia to Baltimore in neighboring Maryland.

A few miles after she boarded, several white passengers got on, and Morgan and another black passenger were ordered by the driver to move to the back of the bus.

When they refused, the driver stopped the bus and called law enforcement officials, who showed up with an arrest warrant.

What amazes me about this story is that 1944 was not that long ago. My father was born in 1942, and my best friend's father who fought in the Korean war, had to sit on the back of the bus. And while the SCOTUS relies on the belief that racism is over and all that was done to people of color in this country has in some way been rectified, those of us that can see get to sit with the bitter reality that it wasn't that long ago, and not much has really changed.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy was truly a hero.

via Rawstory and NYTimes.

Deidra has been running her blog, Black and Missing but Not Forgotten since July 2007. She states:

"This blog is dedicated to all the missing black women in America. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr once said "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." If the media doesn't step up—who will? Let these ladies know that we did not forget about them."

Deidra made time between her two jobs and blog to answer my questions. Here's Deidra...

Native and indigenous women are victims of domestic violence at higher rates than the average American woman. Why is that? A history of displacement, colonization and violence I am sure have something to do with it, along with lack of resources, legislation or education to help women out of bad situations. You know, just a few minor bumps in the road.

I guess Congress noticed after an Amnesty report found that Native and Alaskan women are 2.5 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault in their lifetimes.

The House of Representatives Wednesday approved a bipartisan measure that would provide one million dollars for the creation of a tribal sex offender and protection order registry to identify serial perpetrators of such assaults, most of whom are non-Indian.

The same measure, which was approved by a 412-18 vote, provides an additional million dollars to conduct a baseline study on sexual violence committed against indigenous women in the U.S. to better identify the extent of abuse and how best to address it. Both appropriations have already been approved by the Senate.

The study also found that 86% of assault against indigenous women is by non-indigenous men, who are rarely caught or charged with the crime.

"American Indian and Alaska Native women are living in a virtual war zone, where rape, abuse and murder are commonplace and sexual predators prey with impunity," Sarah Deer, an attorney at the California-based Tribal Law and Policy Institute, told IPS in April.

"In many tribal communities, rape and molestation are so common that young women fully expect that they will be victims of sexual violence at some point," she noted, adding that the weakening of tribal justice systems by the federal government has made it far more difficult for victims of sexual violence to gain redress.

Indeed, federal and tribal statistics may understate the degree of violence suffered by Native American women, according to the report, which noted that fear of retaliation and the lack of confidence that the authorities will take allegations of assault seriously tend to reduce reporting of sexual assault throughout the United States, as well as in Native American communities.

One support worker in Oklahoma, for example, told AI that only three of her 77 active cases of sexual and domestic violence had been reported to the police.

Half the problem is trying to figure out where to try the case. This combined with lack of resources in tribal courts, makes for a pretty dismal situation.

via TruthOut.

Thanks to Jenny for the heads up.

The 15th Erase Racism Carnival is up over at Racewire and it is GOOD! Please go check it out and show some love for all the excellent, insightful and necessary writing that makes this carnival what it is.

Originally posted at Racewire.

These pictures are too much for me.

Talk about the wedding industrial complex has been all over the place and I like it. But the conversation of race and culture has been left out of the larger discussion. How does capitalism intersect with wedding rituals in cultures other than mainstream white culture? Looking through the wedding section of Nirali has me perplexed (and cracking up) thinking about South Asian weddings in the US and how they typify this notion of the "wedding industrial complex". I have been to many and at this point I have just stopped going. I am 29 and don't plan on getting married. In fact I vehemently oppose getting married, and really can't afford to fly all over the country for a ritual I have deep problems with.

The weddings that I have seen and many of the weddings characterized in Nirali, don't really seem like weddings that are about love and romance. They seem more like business mergers and marketing ploys. Some weddings even get straight to the point and ask that you don't bring boxed gifts, just a check. Nothing says love like having all your friends give you a few thousand dollars. And clearly love can only *really* happen if you spend 70K and have 500 of your closest friends present.

Weddings in India are huge as well, but in the US they are huge, elaborate, cheesy and cost a small fortune. It has become the norm in the middle class South Asian community to have a huge wedding and spend a ton of money whether you have it or not. It is a new way to become American in an Indian way. For example, "something old, something new, " is not a South Asian tradition! That is the placement of US romantic fetish marketing within South Asian chic. Romantic heterosexuality, having money and raising a normal family have become encoded in the "becoming" process for second generation South Asian Indians. And since being American seems to be all about capitalist consumption they may almost succeed, except for that post 9/11 'you look like a terrorist snag.' (Which may be the fear that exaggerates it in the first place, but let me not get ahead of myself.).

It is so lame. Neela at Hyphen delves deeper.

Thoughts?

As we have discussed before, the erased history of the hardships faced by comfort women during WWII, has recently come into the focus of the international media. Some of these women recently spoke out about the atrocities done to them at Shanghai Normal University. Recent attacks on these women include a full page ad in the Washington Post demanding that comfort women were licensed prostitutes that were better paid than the Japanese military. For some reason, I am thinking this is not true.

For the survivors of the system of sexual slavery at Japanese military bases, the latest denials have added a deep insult to a horrific injury.

"I was very angry when I heard such news," Ms. Lin said. "The Japanese government is still denying it. But it really happened. It happened to me in Hainan. And I'm still suffering from the violence they did to me."

An estimated 200,000 women - mostly Chinese and Korean - were forced into sexual servitude under Japanese wartime occupation. Of the Chinese victims, only 47 are still alive and willing to speak out. Every year, more of the survivors are dying.

There is a lot of debate over whether Shinzo Abe has apologized enough, including a US House Resolution. But the reality of what these women lived through doesn't change. And as they get older, they lose more of the people that are telling these stories. Will they be remembered?

via Globe and Mail.

(Warning: Content gets a little graphic after the jump)

Broadsheet has the unfortunate news that an amendment may be tacked on to the immigration bill that would make women's immigration status known to federal authorities if they report domestic violence to local police.

Currently the Violence Against Women Act protects women by preventing local law enforcement from disclosing immigration status to the feds. But this amendment would essentially junk that portion of VAWA in the name of facilitating "information sharing between federal and local law enforcement officials related to an individual's immigration status," as the amendment's authors, Republican Senators Norm Coleman and Pete Domenici, put it. Broadsheet reports,

"This is an extraordinary attempt to punish the undocumented immigrants in our country," said Olga Vives, NOW's executive vice president, in a phone call with Broadsheet just now. "Their lives are at stake here, in particular those women who are dependent on the immigration status of their partners. For victims of domestic abuse, this is a double whammy."

Immigrant women are more likely to face additional language and cultural barriers to reporting domestic violence and accessing services. They are more likely to be isolated and abused economically, and many of their abusers use deportation as a threat. So without the special protections in VAWA, it's a safe assumption that these women would be even less likely to report domestic violence

NOW has a detailed letter on why this amendment is bad news, and also an action item so you can ask your Senator to say NO.

I am a little late to this, but since the media seems to be spending more time covering Paris Hilton's experience with the criminal justice system over anything else (only to be replaced by the murder of a pregnant woman--a seeming trend--which is a whole different post on how the media has to stop trying cases on TV) it seems that a conversation has failed us about the actual problems in the criminal justice system. And specifically in California, home to proposals that seek to expand prisons as opposed to schools, but also home to several prison abolitionist campaigns.

My colleague, Jeremy Bearer-Friend from Justice Now and Movement Strategy Center, pointed me to a piece he wrote about the fact that the actual problems with the criminal justice system and the populations targeted by it are being ignored for the fate of a famous woman (whether the coverage be unnecessarily cruel or not).

He writes,

“it’s imperative to bring in an abolitionist angle.�

The real scandal here is that women of color are the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the US, yet this story is never told or reported on. The current media frenzy over Paris demonstrates only the apartheid state we currently live under, with a media that is absolutely uninterested in reporting on the mass incarceration of people of color.

“De-incarceration has been a central goal of prison reform and prison abolition work in California. That Paris has the opportunity to remain within her community and recover from her substance abuse amongst her family is an opportunity that all addicts should be able to enjoy. The reaction to this story is not to lock up everyone for longer and prevent addicts from accessing treatment. The solution is to shut down a broken system and replace it with public health money that can treat addiction and substance abuse in an effective and healing way.�

So, people only want to hear about celebrity gossip? I just want to add to this the media LOVES to highlight the incarceration of people of color, just not from an abolitionist perspective. Often MSM is more focused on recreating some mythical monster beast that must be put behind bars to keep our good white children safe.

Am I wrong?

One of the less talked about side effects of the unjust and continued US led military campaign in Iraq is the subsequent displacement of people, mostly women and children, that are forced to flee from persecution and become refugees in neighboring countries. According to a study produced by the United Nations, the current number of refugees world-wide has risen for the first time in 5 years.

The total number of refugees rose by more than 14% last year to nearly 10 million, the UN refugee agency says. The number of internally displaced people also reached a record high of almost 13 million, the report says. Besides Iraq, conflicts in Lebanon, East Timor, Sudan and Sri Lanka were blamed for the rise in refugee numbers.

Furthermore, this doesn't include the 4.3million Palestinians currently displaced as well.

The report said the conflict in Iraq was largely responsible for the rise. Some 1.5m Iraqis are now estimated to be living as refugees in other countries, mostly neighbouring Syria and Jordan.

Considering that the next largest group of refugees are from Afghanistan, I think it is pretty safe to say that US military campaigns, not only kill people, but also displace them. But the bigger question for me is, what are the consequences of this displacement? What happens to people when they are forced to leave the place they know as home, go homeless, run in fear and look for protection from neighboring states, where the economy can rarely sustain them?

While our "leaders" sit pretty with greedy fists full of food.

via BBC.

I know I shouldn't give this any light, but I just had to because sometimes things--so perfectly-- capture some of the darkest corners of Western patriarchy. A friend just sent me a link she found with the search terms "Vietnamese women." It is attached to a bigger site called No Marriage, a site for why men should not get married. Let's just say the reasons offered are not because marriage is an inequitable, homophobic and sexist tradition.

It is because American women are aggressive (raceless?) bitches and Vietnamese women are quiet, subservient and, you know, stay in their place.

An American woman has several fundamental problems that will never go away and that will get much worse a few years after she is married:

1. Her inherent anti-male bias and pre-occupation with fairness that was drilled into her at high school, college, and through the media. Her constant confrontations and trying to prove herself and to make a point.
2. Her self-centeredness, her ridiculously high expectations, her sense of entitlement, her high-maintenance, superficial, and stuck up attitude, her snootiness and her sense of superiority. This "princess" syndrome means that she will always think that she is better than you, and that she deserves and she is entitled to whatever she wants from you.
3. Her general mental instability and psychological disorders.
4. Her using sex as a weapon and reward to get things.

Vietnamese women generally don't have any of these problems. Marrying an American woman simply does not make sense. The ONLY reason men stay with American women is because they did not have enough exposure to Vietnamese women. Any man who spent a few months in Asia will not even look at American women again.

I will not state the obvious and give anymore credence to the specific arguments. What is amazing is that this sounds ridiculous to us, but in some circles this is an acceptable narrative (in fact in a lot of circles). A type of racism that just falls between the cracks and outside of dominant racial discourse, aka, the seemingly harmless "desires" of the Asiophile (white boy with the Asian fetish usually found saying things like, "if you want to get laid, Thailand is the place to go!").

I would like to thank this idiot for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my biggest peeves.

via Gulf News.

A law passed unanimously by the Kuwaiti parliament on Monday means that women in the country are no longer allowed to work at night.

The law means that any job (with the exception of those working in the medical profession) between 8.00pm and 7.00am will be closed to the women of Kuwait.

The government also banned women from working in jobs that "contravene with public morals and in all-men service places at any time."

To address the last part of the article; no it is not acceptable to ban women from working at night. According to one article the purpose of the ban was to stop women from participating in "immoral" activities. Restricting women's physical mobility may seem like a quick fix, but it puts the blame on women while the much deeper problem of violent patriarchy and a sexist economy remains or even intensifies.

Samhita's post about gentrification and "ghetto fabulousness" has, not shockingly, turned into quite a conversation about race and privilege. I think it's an important conversation to have, so let's do it. The whole thing is really getting to me for four reasons.

First, my back hurts.

Second, just last week a bunch of us were sitting at a ceremony celebrating the future of reproductive rights and justice - a diverse group of young women I am proud to be counted among. And now this. Good thing all of those women were young and tough. There's a lot that needs doing.

Third, instead of sitting here I'm supposed to be in Chicago rocking out at Sistersong.

And fourth, because as the headline says, you don't have to mean to be racist to say racist things. And I understand that most of the readers here don't want to be called racist. Fine. Then don't say racist things. I'm not sugar coating this one, folks. The following comments on Samhita's thread are either racist, or positively drowning in privilege. Regardless of how you meant it. Read them, and please take a moment to think about why I say this. Just like I assume we'd like well-meaning sexist people to think about why we respond the way we do to things they say.

I stopped writing this post and came back to it later. Now I'm not angry, I'm curious. I'd really like to hear from some of the folks whose comments I include. Thoughtfully, not just angry because you think I'm an asshole and calling you racist. I'm so rarely earnest, but I really mean it.

This post by Wendy Muse on Racialicious just about sums up (really well) what I have been feeling about the hipsters all up in "our hoodz stealin all our fashionz." I also feel old as I wore door knockers the first time around (NY in the 80's) eeek.

Muse is discussing all her personal negotiations and some of the political stakes involved with "ghetto chic." She says,

For one, it’s a matter of nomenclature. The term “ghetto� is evocative of “negative� images (poverty, housing projects, crime, drug use, lack of education), and remains racialized by the media. Ghettoes and poverty are typically associated with blacks and Latinos, even though as a result of the racial demographics of the United States, there are technically more poor whites. According to a U.S. Census Bureau Press Release from 2003, though “non-Hispanic whites had a lower poverty rate than other racial groups, [they] accounted for 44 percent of the people in poverty,� which makes me wonder why whites are virtually ignored in discussions of class and blacks and Latinos are always assumed to make up the majority of the poor population in this country. . . but that’s another article.

A few months ago I was sitting in a coffee shop in my neighborhood, a coffee shop I can no longer go to as I may fight somebody, and this white "hipster" boy sat down across from me wearing a red bandana tied on the front of his head, Tupac style. That's right, he was "GANGSTA." I am not laughing. I shot him the nastiest look and freaked him out so he didn't want to share the table with me, but I was raging inside.

I worked in the schools in and around San Francisco's Mission District for about 5 years and am very familiar with the problems that are tearing our schools apart and our communities. Our kids didn't wear red. And I thought about how this kid, moved into the Mission and was just walking around wearing a flag, like he is on some shit. I thought that god forbid if he got shot (which is highly unlikely, I don't want to further sensationalize gang violence the way the media does) how the media would cover it. They wouldn't say anything about his ignorance of any of the local politics or any of the racist ways that these people just move on in and visually violate these communities. To move into a community, uninformed, taking from it, not giving back and flaunting your expensive Ipod and "ghetto chic" accessories, is a form of violence.

I may be sounding like a hater, and maybe I am just too old to get it, but I AM FED UP WITH THESE KIDS. I hate Vice Magazine and I hate this attitude that pretty much says, "I am so passed racist, I can act like this." Wake up asshole, look around you, you are part of the problem.

This is much less articulate than Wendy's post, lol. I wrote about this a few years ago, when I had heard about the "Kill Whitey," parties in Brooklyn. I had hoped that the trend was dying out, but I was oh so wrong. I am so moving back to Oakland (although I hear they are invading there as well).

Along with Ann's post of the Salon article about Michelle Obama, a post by Malena at Racewire also has some really good analysis.

She says:

Everybody's been talking about Michelle Obama these days.

Since she announced her decision to leave her high-ranked job at the University of Chicago hospitals to join Barack Obama on the campaign, she's had more time to make speeches and do interviews.

In the process, top journalists continue asking her to explain what it means for her husband Barack Obama to be a Black man running for presidency.

And every time, Mrs. Obama slam dunks the answer and offers stronger race analysis than Mr. Barack. Overall, she uses less political correctness to interrogate the issues. And I love her for it. She ought to be campaigning for her own presidency.

Take this February video for example. When asked if she's concerned about Obama being assassinated because of his race and position, Mrs. Obama said: "as a Black man, he could get shot at a gas station.

Read more at Racewire. Thanks to Andre for the heads up.

Thoughts?

Every once in a while you come across a story and for whatever reason it makes you just start crying at your computer.

A Pakistani court has arrested a couple after "figuring out" that the husband, was actually transgender, thusly making him not a "real" man and them a same-sex couple, which is against the law.

The judge said the pair had lied over the husband's gender, and a sex change operation the husband had had to become a man had not been done properly.

The couple told the court that they had got married so that the wife could avoid an arranged marriage.

The article says he married his cousin to protect her from an arranged marriage. I hate when they put something like that in, without elaborating.

If they are convicted of an "unnatural offense" aka, homosexuality, it is life sentence in prison.

via BBC.

Today in Salon, Debra Dickerson has a great piece about Michelle Obama, the politics of being First Lady, and what it means that she's the first woman of color to potentially fill that role. Some highlights below the jump...

I write this entry with a broken heart. The cumulative effect of hatred spewed via the internet inevitably bogs you down. In light of the conversations surrounding Jessica's book, I just wanted to touch on some of the issues that have come up. I am going to admit first and foremost, I haven't read all of them and I am not going to cite any people, just some themes that are coming up and the feelings they are bringing up for me.

Specifically, why is Jessica the face of Feministing? I have been writing for Feministing for 2 years. I am a woman of color and have consistently written about intersectionality in rigorous and radical ways. It seems to me, the only people that have noticed are my enemies, who have grilled me alive when they can. Some blogs calling out Feministing for a lack of intersectional analysis makes me feel like my voice has been erased and silenced. As have the voices of the women of color that write for Feministing and are written about at Feministing. This critique on the "whiteness" of Feministing is doing that which it seeks to ameliorate--erase the voices and contributions of women of color.

That said, I am not a token. I am not here to talk about all WOC voices. My being here doesn't inherently fix or solve the white-centered nature of the political blogosphere (please believe). And my brown-ness doesn't make me the spokesperson for all things brown, and similarly Jessica or the other white ladies, spokespeople for whites only. To discount the contributions of all the women that write for Feministing, while upholding Jessica as the embodiment of all that is wrong with Feministing and feminism, erases our contributions and ignores the fact that we are all working TOGETHER. What does it mean when Jessica is singled out for blame for posts or threads that we ALL take responsibility for?

All of the women that write for Feministing, from DAY ONE, have incorporated an intersectional analysis (please go back to archives and read). All of the writers at Feministing believe that a race, class and sexuality lens is necessary to inform our feminist action and writing. It's an integral part of our work, evidenced not only by what we write and how we write it, but also by who we bring in to work with us and the connections and collaborations we seek on the ground. To argue otherwise not only feels dismissive to us, it feels intensely hurtful and wrong.

The thing with blogs is that you pick who is most heard. We just do our thing and other people link to our work. What does it mean if Jessica is not the only reason Feministing is popular? That perhaps, Vanessa, Ann, Celina, Jen and myself, have had a hand in the popularization and circulation of some of our most controversial posts. It means that Feministing isn't just one perspective. It means that we have all said things that matter in a variety of arenas and in a variety of ways.

We are one blog, one group blog, we are NOT the holy grail of feminism. All the writers here draw from a variety of authors, feminists, writers and experiences. There is no central conversation, everything is a tangent to something else that someone else wrote and our reflections to it. My voice as a women of color is integrated to the greatest extent that ANY voice can be integrated into a blog. Everything is a tangent, an intervention, an analysis, a (dare I say) BLOG POST.

It seems that some of the frustration is with the way our comments threads go, sometimes unmoderated and frequently offensive. It is important to note that we do not reflect the opinions of people in comments. That is the point of comments, that they are a diverse array of opinions. This is something we have been talking about and dealing with for a long time at Feministing and have yet to come to a solid understanding of what to do. We do not want to silence diverse opinions, but it is hard to find a balance between a dialectical dialog versus things we happen to disagree with (that make us and many of our supportive readers, upset). If one thing can be said about the ladies here at Feminsting, we very passionately believe in the things we write about. So it makes moderating comments very, very challenging.

We have hit a space where it feels like, we are damned if we do, damned if we don't. For some people, Jessica has come to embody (similar to Amanda, Jill and myself in the neocon blogosphere) all that is wrong with feminism and Feministing, when she is just ONE PERSON, who also worked her ass off and was in the right place at the right time, and yes, wrote a book. She is one voice and one perspective. As my friend just mentioned to me, "she's become iconic. She's no longer a real person. Despite the intimacy of blogging, who she really is is no longer relevant to the discussion." She has become a convenient target.

Critique of white feminism is necessary to keep movement alive. It is true that certain voices get to the top, but there are a variety of factors for that--and white-ness is one of them. But what if we stop to think about what some of the other ones might be? Why is it that I might get a book deal? What are all the rest of us are doing over here? THEN WHAT? DO WE WIN THEN?

No, we don't. Clearly this is difficult terrain to navigate as it is fueled with not just our politics but our intimate and dearly held feelings. There is no winner, just the vain hope of getting somewhere with what we are doing. If we fail to look at greater systemic issues (like why white women are positioned where they are verses women of color, or WHO decides the marketing of images, products and books) as opposed to hating on someone, who you don't know, then we all lose.

All of that said, I also want to say, "JESSICA I LOVE YOU and I APPRECIATE ALL OF THE WORK YOU HAVE DONE."

Yolanda King, the eldest child of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who melded her father’s message of racial equality and nonviolence with her own calling as an actor and a motivational speaker, died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 51.

Yolanda King was an activist, actor, writer and tremendous activist for racial diversity.

Read more at the NYT.

Rebecca Sawyer is a queer hapa feminist/activist living in the Washington, DC area. She is one of two co-chairs for the DC chapter of NAPAWF.

When I received the email to guestblog for NAPAWF on feministing, I immediately volunteered to write on issues impacting queer Asian Pacific Americans (APAs). As a queer hapa feminist and one of several frequent commentators on all things queer for NAPAWF-DC, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to educate others on queer APA issues. Then, as I mulled over it a bit more, I realized, damn, that's a lot to cover.

And if you think about it, it really is. If you, like the fierce women of NAPAWF, understand that reproductive justice is a queer issue, just as ending employment discrimination is an APA issue, and that passing hate crimes legislation is a feminist issue, just as immigration is a queer issue, etc., etc., etc., you realize that I could present an encyclopedic volume on precisely all those issues facing queer APAs. Instead, I'd like to talk a little bit about the importance of defining our work and our communities.

I received an email just the other day announcing the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is releasing a new study on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer APAs. The press releases says the study, Living in the Margins (released on May 10), found "75 percent of respondents reported experiencing discrimination and/or harassment based on their sexual orientation and 85 percent reported experiencing discrimination and/or harassment based on their race or ethnicity." [Check out the full report online at the Task Force's website.]

This does not and should not come as a surprise to anyone. Especially when one considers the recent racist and homophobic remarks of the likes of Rosie O'Donnell and Isaiah Washington.

From that email, this stood out: the study's author, Alain Dang, states "these findings and others add to the growing body of evidence that support the need not only for community introspection but also for legislative intervention."

I agree. As a community working towards social change, we need to think about what's working and what's not.

For one thing, we're still not making that concrete individual impact. On top of all that activisty jargon of ensuring intersectionality in our work to create social change, we need to learn how to speak plainly about what this means for your ordinary, run-of-the-mill person. We need to share our stories with other people. We need to share our experiences as domestic workers (as the women from Casa de Maryland did with members of NAPAWF-DC recently), as queer APAs (as the women of Asian Pacific Islander Queer Sisters did with advocates at Asian Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project), and as immigrants (like Larry Chang, a gay Chinese-Jamaican man and a political refugee, did with members of the DC community).

For me, it means sharing my story as a proud, out, hapa feminist. It means telling my story of where I come from, where I am, and where I'm going.

What's your story and who are you telling it to?

Daisy Hernandez is the Managing Editor of ColorLines, a bimonthly progressive magazine based in Oakland, CA that takes the issue of race in America to the forefront of national debate. It is published by the Applied Research Center based in New York City.

Daisy is the co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Today’s Feminism. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Ms., Newsday, National Catholic Reporter, The Progressive Media Project, Bitch, Curve, Criticas, and In These Times.

Here’s Daisy….

(Warning: This video is very explicit and may be upsetting)
Obviously, we haven't.

Excuse me while I got delete all Akon from my playlist.

A new report from Amnesty International USA shows that Native American women are more than twice as likely to be raped as other U.S. women. The report also noted that at least 86 percent of the reported rapes of Native American women are by non-Native American men.

From The Associated Press:

The human rights group said Tuesday that at least one in three Indian women will be raped or sexually assaulted, compared with fewer than one in five U.S. women overall.

Confusion about whether state, federal or tribal police should respond means victims might not see a police officer or a nurse for hours or days, if at all. Even if a rape victim is taken to an Indian Health Service clinic, almost half lack staff trained to provide emergency services to victims of sexual violence, researchers said.

"What this amounts to is a travesty of justice for the tens of thousands of indigenous survivors of rape," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. He contended the U.S. government's treatment of Indian rape victims is a violation of human rights.

Cox said they would be pressing Congress to fully fund VAWA for $683 million; tribes would get about 10 percent of different grant programs under the act.

Amnesty International USA has more info, including ways to take action and a slideshow.

My favorite album used to be Biggie Smalls Ready to Die. I loved this album so much that I wrote my entire undergraduate women's studies thesis about sexism and hip-hop and tried to find ways to justify my love for an album that is practically an ode to misogyny. Along with other feminists of color and hip-hop lovers we looked for new ways to talk between our feminism and our love for hip-hop. It is really hard work.

Now, about fifteen years later, mainstream hip-hop seems to have reached it's height of misogyny. I can't even watch music videos without cringing and thinking how little they get paid. I am all for sexual expression and empowerment, but it is a fine line between the clear exploitation of women's bodies and overt sexuality as a site of women's empowerment. As Pam takes on Nelly's video "Tipdrill" my feeling is that right now we are on a exploitation tip.

I never liked to criticize hip-hop culture for anything. I didn't want the wing-nuts to appropriate our feminist words to conflate with racist ideas and suppress black voices. I don't support that. But still we need our own language and our own strategies to counter the misogyny in mainstream hip-hop. So I was delighted to get this email about an interview with Byron Hurt director of the fantastic Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. He is right on the money with some ways we can deal with, understand and work against the misogyny, violence and homophobia in hip-hop. I say just read it, but some stuff I loved included:

Now the conversation is about hip-hop, misogyny, and sexism, which are indefensible—and I don't defend them on any level—but I think the conversation should continue to be not only on Don Imus and his comments and the impact that it's had, but also on sexism and racism in American culture, not just hip-hop, because both of those things, including patriarchy, predate hip-hop.

He also says that if we stop buying the albums and buying into the messages, maybe it will change. Who knows, it could work. But I just want to know, is it ever OK to dance to hip-hop that has a bad message (cuz maybe I do that sometimes)?

Currently in Brazil women can only get abortions if there are complications to the pregnancy or if they were raped. Cultural relativism to the side, I am not OK with this. Brazil's abortion laws are dictated by a very stringent following of the Catholic church.

The new Minister of Health, Jose Gomes Temporao, feels that the debate should be moved from a religious and moral one, to one of public health.

Mr Temporao says that around 200,000 women are treated for complications following abortions every year, the vast majority of them believed to have taken place in illegal clinics involving a high degree of risk for the women.

An opinion poll released at the weekend suggests 65% of Brazilians are against changing the existing law.

Mr Temporao says that result is not surprising as he believes the question has always been debated in a superficial way.

He told the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo he wants Brazil to treat the discussion as a matter of public health.

Backlash from the church is expected, but at least he is talking.

via BBC.

This is interesting. Even when Latina women have the same access to health resources they still seem to have a higher risk of breast cancer.

University of Denver researcher A. Tyler Watlington, M.D., M.S.P.H., and colleagues looked at data on 139 Hispanic women and 2,118 non-Hispanic white women enrolled in a Kaiser Permanente health plan for at least three years.

Earlier research has suggested that Hispanic women get more aggressive breast cancer. But most experts thought that in the United States, Hispanic women's lesser access to health care explained this disparity. Women who do not get appropriate breast cancer screening tend to have later-stage disease by the time they find out they have cancer.

But Watlington and colleagues found that the differences between Hispanic women and other women persist even when they get exactly the same health care.

The conclusion seems to be that different ethnicities have some biologically determined reasoning for this. I am naturally apprehensive of these conclusions. Regardless of access to health care, studies have shown that women of color are less likely to go to the doctor if they have a problem, or go in later stages of health ailments. Also what about diet, nature of work, social environment?

I am always wary of science that tries to biologically determine racial/ethnic differences.

via WebMD.

Martha Diaz is the president of The Hip-Hop Association, and producer of the H2O International Film Festival and Hip-Hop Education Summit, amongst many other projects. An educator, organizer and filmmaker, her impact in hip hop can be traced to her early days as a young and aspiring production assistant for the late Ted Demme, the groundbreaking producer and director behind "Yo! MTV Raps. "

The H2O International Film Festival is taking place May 31-June 15, 2007 in New York City and its theme is "The World Is Yours?" It “highlights the Hip-Hop community of the early/mid 90’s; a time when youth in the community began demanding money, power, and respect.�

I caught up with Martha over email. Here's Martha...

The politics of feminism are so complicated. As we continue to define and re-define what feminism "looks like" for a new generation of women, communication and alliance building is more important than ever. The assault against feminism continues from the outside and we are forced to be defined by opposing forces. As we all know, feminism isn't just one thing, it is many things, depending on where it is happening and who you ask.

So where do women of color go? How are they included? I have recently been asked to be on a lot of panels and of course as I am wanting to expand my career and meet as many cool people as possible, I have taken the opportunities. But almost all of them have been because I am a feminist blogger of color. Of course I do think that it is important to include voices of color, and I love conferences and being on panels with amazing people, I have some really intense thoughts that I am trying to figure out.

First of all, if the inclusion of people of color is SO necessary to change content, what does that mean? That people of color bring certain thoughts and white feminists bring other (racist) ones? I also recognize that people of color DO bring alternative experiences, but everyone brings different experiences. You just can't generalize, right?

Also, if I am ONLY included because I am a voice of color, why is that? Is it to make people feel less bad for the overwhelming over-representation of white voices in publishing, panels, conferences and blogs etc.? Isn't that a type of objectification as well?

This is a really challenging post to write. I do think that my contributions to writing as a woman of color are important. I believe that we have to continue to fight for the inclusion of voices of color and I appreciate the recognition on behalf of progressive folks to insist on the actual physical representation of women of color.

But I have also been feeling like women of color are over objectified in progressive spaces, because it is our race (as it is embodied) that makes us so important to be there. A type of hyper-objectification, but it still re-centers white-ness. We are still by and for white people.

I don't think this is anyone's fault necessarily, I think it is the structure of identity politics and of feminism. The politics of exclusion that haunted previous definitions of feminism, continue to harm us, continue to reproduce themselves and it is up to us to be very very observant.

I am still noticing overall that voices of color are left at the margins and called upon when we need *diversity.* I can almost never escape my performed role as a woman of color. Does that make my opinion on issues that affect all women's lives (or about music, food and other things) less valid? Am I forever tied to the embodiment of my race?

The reality is I have a lot of really good relationships with white feminists (and people) where we talk about race and it is much more than just the inclusion of my voice, but an integration of all my talents to the content and production of the work (like feministing!). And there are some women of color that I don't work so