19 3 / 2013
Texas Senator Dan Patrick, R-Houston: Stop Senate Bill 1128
Senate Bill 1128 is a bill by which college courses in Mexican American history and African American history would not count towards a college degree in Texas public universities. We must stop this bill because college courses that teach about Mexican American history and African American history teach undergraduate students from a critical standpoint; students understand the meaningful contributions from individuals of color that help make this state and our country a great one. Further, students are given a multicultural educational perspective that not only underscores inclusiveness, dismantles stereotypes, and provides an opportunity for students of all racial backgrounds to collaborate towards social justice.
Followers, please take time to sign this important petition. Ethnic studies are indispensable to the liberation and empowerment of all PoC.
ASSHOLE!
28 2 / 2013
"we’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience."
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (via cielito-lindo)
For fucking real.
Like I feel like there’s this weird competition among some latinas I know in trying to see who is more learned, progressive, outspoken, has sharper analysis…has accepted themselves more. Where’s our collective? Why aren’t we growing food together or writing theory and books about dream interpretation?
Instead we’re all trying to survive and make it on our own, and we make it seem like we owe our progress to ourselves but we don’t live in a vacuum…
(via frascodebesitos)
(via maria-grazia)
21 2 / 2013
23 11 / 2012
![mohandasgandhi:
Recently, I was doing a workshop on racism. We wanted to divide the group into a caucus of people of color and a caucus of white people so that each group could have more in-depth discussion. Immediately, some of the white people said, “But I’m not white.”
I was somewhat taken aback because although these people looked white, they were clearly distressed about being labeled white. A white Christian woman stood up and said, “I’m not really white because I’m not part of the white male power structure that perpetuates racism.” Next a white gay man stood up and said, “You have to be straight to have the privileges of being white.” A white, straight, working-class man from a poor family then said, “I’ve got it just as hard as any person of color.” Finally, a straight, white, middle-class man said, “I’m not white, I’m Italian.”
My African-American co-worker turned to me and asked, “Where are all the white people who were here just a minute ago?” Of course I replied, “Don’t ask me. I’m not white, I’m Jewish!”
Most of the time we don’t notice or question our whiteness. However, when the subject is racism many of us don’t want to be white because it opens us to charges of being racist and brings up feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, and hopelessness. There are others who proudly claim whiteness under any circumstances and simply deny or ignore the violence that white people have done to people of color.
[…]
In any case, some of us are quick to disavow our whiteness or to claim some other identity that will give us legitimate victim status. We certainly don’t want to be seen as somehow responsible for or complicit in racism.
I want to begin here - with this denial of our whiteness - because racism keeps people of color in the limelight and makes whiteness invisible. To change this we must take whiteness itself and hold it up to the light and see that it is a color too. Whiteness is a concept, an ideology, whim holds tremendous power over our lives, and, in turn, over the lives of people of color. Our challenge in this discussion will be to keep whiteness center stage. Every time our attention begins to wander off toward people of color or other issues, we will have to notice and refocus. We must notice when we try to slip into another identity and escape being white. We each have many other factors that influence our lives, such as our ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, personality, mental and physical abilities. Even when we’re talking about these elements of our lives we must keep whiteness on stage with us because it influences each of the other factors.
[…]
We are understandably uncomfortable with the label “white.” We feel boxed in and want to escape, just as people of color want to escape from the confines of their racial categories. Being white is an arbitrary category that overrides our individual personalities, devalues us, deprives of the richness of our other identities, stereotypes us, and yet has no scientific basis. However, in our society being white is just as real and governs our day-to-day lives just as much as being a person of color does for African Americans, Latino/as, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Arab Americans, and others. To acknowledge this reality is not to create it or to perpetuate it. In fact, it is the first step to uprooting racism.
Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, (2002) [PDF]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9l0pvGdvL1qzhl7go1_500.png)
Recently, I was doing a workshop on racism. We wanted to divide the group into a caucus of people of color and a caucus of white people so that each group could have more in-depth discussion. Immediately, some of the white people said, “But I’m not white.”
I was somewhat taken aback because although these people looked white, they were clearly distressed about being labeled white. A white Christian woman stood up and said, “I’m not really white because I’m not part of the white male power structure that perpetuates racism.” Next a white gay man stood up and said, “You have to be straight to have the privileges of being white.” A white, straight, working-class man from a poor family then said, “I’ve got it just as hard as any person of color.” Finally, a straight, white, middle-class man said, “I’m not white, I’m Italian.”
My African-American co-worker turned to me and asked, “Where are all the white people who were here just a minute ago?” Of course I replied, “Don’t ask me. I’m not white, I’m Jewish!”
Most of the time we don’t notice or question our whiteness. However, when the subject is racism many of us don’t want to be white because it opens us to charges of being racist and brings up feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, and hopelessness. There are others who proudly claim whiteness under any circumstances and simply deny or ignore the violence that white people have done to people of color.
[…]
In any case, some of us are quick to disavow our whiteness or to claim some other identity that will give us legitimate victim status. We certainly don’t want to be seen as somehow responsible for or complicit in racism.
I want to begin here - with this denial of our whiteness - because racism keeps people of color in the limelight and makes whiteness invisible. To change this we must take whiteness itself and hold it up to the light and see that it is a color too. Whiteness is a concept, an ideology, whim holds tremendous power over our lives, and, in turn, over the lives of people of color. Our challenge in this discussion will be to keep whiteness center stage. Every time our attention begins to wander off toward people of color or other issues, we will have to notice and refocus. We must notice when we try to slip into another identity and escape being white. We each have many other factors that influence our lives, such as our ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, personality, mental and physical abilities. Even when we’re talking about these elements of our lives we must keep whiteness on stage with us because it influences each of the other factors.
[…]
We are understandably uncomfortable with the label “white.” We feel boxed in and want to escape, just as people of color want to escape from the confines of their racial categories. Being white is an arbitrary category that overrides our individual personalities, devalues us, deprives of the richness of our other identities, stereotypes us, and yet has no scientific basis. However, in our society being white is just as real and governs our day-to-day lives just as much as being a person of color does for African Americans, Latino/as, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Arab Americans, and others. To acknowledge this reality is not to create it or to perpetuate it. In fact, it is the first step to uprooting racism.
Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, (2002) [PDF]
(via le-kif-kif)
01 11 / 2012
"
A democratic state can rightfully impose guilt because guilt is focused on bad acts, and this specific focus on behavioral violation can encourage empathy and motivate the guilty to altruistic action. Something different happens when the state seeks to shame its citizens by imposing a lasting stigma on their very identity: it is proclaiming that the person herself or himself is defective. Rather than motivating restitution, shame debilitates and encourages avoidance.
For example, it is reasonable to imprison individuals who break the law, but when former inmates are stripped of the right to vote for the rest of their lives, the state has moved from punishing guilt to imposing shame. Lifetime disfranchisement marks the citizen as defective and unfit for participation in a democracy. The shamed ex-felon is not invited to rejoin the community but instead is forced to the margins.
Though we seldom think of it this way, racism is the act of shaming others based on their identity. Blackness in America is marked by shame. Perhaps more than any other emotion, shame depends on the social context. On an individual level, we feel ashamed because of how we believe people see us or how they would see us if they knew about our hidden transgressions. Shame makes us view our very selves as malignant. But societies also define entire groups as malignant. Historically the United States has done that with African Americans. This collective racial shaming has a disproportionate impact on black women, and black women’s attempts to escape or manage shame are part of what motivates their politics.
"
(via le-kif-kif)
13 10 / 2012
"As an immigrant and an honors student (before I got kicked out of that track senior year) and as a kid who grew up deep in the neighborhood, I had both narratives on me to an oppressive degree. And felt a lot of pressure to choose one side or another: to either embrace home like mad or reject it like mad. Of course within each choice was embedded a whole set of expectations. If you stay at home, don’t talk too much about books, don’t try to get motherfuckers to engage in “intellectual’ discussions,” don’t talk about an ethnic studies course you took or the study abroad you did in Japan. Same thing: if you go away to say college, don’t dwell too much on race and certainly not on how racialized poverty and class are in this country. Don’t mention white supremacy. Keep your ghetto shit to yourself. Of course I’m being a little stark to make a point, but it sure as hell felt stark growing up in it. Over time I became very aware that people had a lot invested in you choosing sides. You had to choose one or the other but not both, not neither. Complexity was out of the question. Multiple loyalties were another way of saying betrayal. I eventually realized that these bipolar choices were not only ridiculous, they would also require me to jettison the essence of who I am. My multiplicity, my complexity, my simultaneity. A lot of us in my cohort came to the same conclusion. It didn’t hurt that we had a lot of contact with people who had wholeheartedly embraced one side of the binary, and in the long run didn’t seem like it had served them too well."
13 9 / 2012
School is really important: Reading, writing, arithmetic. But what they tend to do is teach you reading, writing, arithmetic…then teach you reading, writing, arithmetic again. Then again, then again, just making it harder and harder just to keep you busy. And that’s where I think they messed up. There should be a class on drugs. There should be a class on sex education. No, REAL sex education class, not just pictures and illogical terms…There should be a class on scams, there should be a class on religious cults, there should be a class on police brutality, there should be a class on apartheid, there should be a class on racism in America, there should be a class on why people are hungry, but there not, their class is on…gym….Their class is like Algebra. we have yet to go a store and said, “Can I have X Y + 2 and give me my Y change back, thank you.” You know?…Like foreign languages. I think that they are important, but I don’t think it should be required. Actually, they should be teaching you English, and then teach you how to understand double talk, politician’s double talk. Not teaching you how to understand French and Spanish and GERMAN. When am I going to Germany? I can’t afford to pay my rent in America! How am I going to Germany?
—Tupac, Age 17 On the Topic of Education, 1988.
(via givemeavoice)
07 9 / 2012
: I really believe in what Angela Davis says— that what matters less is...
I really believe in what Angela Davis says— that what matters less is the person’s set of identities and more their willingness to engage the work of social justice.
“An African-American woman might find it much easier to work together with a Chicana than with another black woman whose politics…
29 8 / 2012
James Baldwin GOES IN!
“I Am Not a Race and Neither Are You…I’m not joking when I talk about White History Week. One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. That’s why you think I’m a problem. I am not the problem; your history is. And as long as you pretend you don’t know your history, you’re gonna be the prisoner of it. And there’s no question of your liberating me, ‘cause you can’t liberate yourselves. We are in this together. And finally, when white people talk about progress in relation to black people, all they are saying, and all they can possibly mean by the word ‘progress’, is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. I don’t want to become white; I want to grow up! And so should you.” - James Baldwin, 1986
*snaps*
reminds me of the clip when he talks about how it was imperative for the White man to create the identity of the “nigger”
27 8 / 2012
Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942
In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens from U.S. citizens, a process troubled by the deeply interconnected nature of border communities. Mckiernan-González uncovers forgotten or ignored cases in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other groups were subject to—and sometimes agents of—quarantines, inspections, detentions, and forced-treatment regimens. These cases illustrate the ways that medical encounters shaped border identities before and after the Mexican Revolution. Mckiernan-González also maintains that the threat of disease provided a venue to destabilize identity at the border, enacted processes of racialization, and re-legitimized the power of U.S. policymakers. He demonstrates how this complex history continues to shape and frame contemporary perceptions of the Latino body today.(Note, I helped edit this book :DIt was extremely eye-awakening to read, the way people of color have been systematically used as fodder for medical advancements and health experiments. How common this shit was and how NO ONE remembers. )
