"Let's start by pointing out that intersectionality isn't such a scary word, and gasp, plenty of people who haven't been university-educated are capable of looking it up and understanding it. Here's a good definition. It's not that hard to understand. It's essentially a useful way of saying that things like sexuality, race, class, religion, and ability overlap. For example, a White woman's experience of sexism may be vastly different from a Black woman's. Has your brain died from exhaustion yet? It's so condescending to suggest that non-academics just aren't smart enough to get this."

--le projet d’amour: On Feminism: Intersectionality

(via Tudo Bom(b)) 

Photo

Source

Breaking away from my US focus for a moment

Check out this cool trailer for a documentary film about the first post-apartheid generation in South Africa and their activism to make Nelson Mandela's dreams and the governments' promises realities:

#realtalk

What is the most honest way to address privilege short of cursing out colleagues and friends? How do we examine the overlapping oppression among our peer activists who, apparently, are unaware (or unabashed) of the other forms of white privilege they possess?

--Livication over at The Intersection of Madness and Reality

Gorgeous socially concsious Black men. Yes.

#angryblackgirl

This is the hashtag that best describes my life and attitudes with regards to what is going on in America right now and for the forseeable future. 

A fellow Black Princetonian (DD) asked me last Monday night how I was feeling. I responded, "I feel..like I wanna blow something up. Like I wanna fight somebody." He put down his soda and gave me a fist bump, saying "Yesssss. If someone punches you in the face, you don't go and run to the administration saying, 'Excuse me, can you do something about this?' You punch them right back." 

Another hashtag that I have used recently and will likely continue to use in the near future is #Ishouldabeenablackpanther. My hashtags are not unrelated. It has taken me so long to write this post because earlier in the week, I was tense and shouting and shaking with anger. Anything I wrote would have boiled down to FUCK ALL OF THE PEOPLE, EVERYONE, I CAN'T EVEN FUCK WITH THE WORLD RIGHT NOW, and that's not what I want to say. 

This conversation with DD happened minutes after leaving a Black Student Union meeting at which we discussed (1) the racist comments left on a Daily Princetonian article my friend MJ, a Black sophomore, wrote about the application process for Creative Writing courses (a commenter called her a "whiny black girl" and from there all hell broke loose), (2) the small-scale protest we as the Black Princetonian community launched against the Sanford PD's failure to prosecute George Zimmerman:

What looks like a Black Power fist is actually me fixing my glasses, but I kind of wish it were an intentional Black Power fist, because that would be pretty baller. I'ma call it a subconscious act of resistance.

and (3), the unfair arrest of fellow Black Princetonian Mandela Sheaffer, '13, who while home on Spring Break was thrown into county jail for "obstruction of justice" when visiting a White friend at home in Ohio over Spring Break. I'm not going to post about the details, because it's an open case, but nothing in the vibe that I get from him as a person suggests that anything in the police report is factual. We all collectively smell something fishy, even if you don't want to toss around terms like "racial profiling" all willy-nilly. 


In the time since that meeting, my friend MH discovered this lovely message scrawled across the map in an elevator in our student center:

Let's let this serve as the fourth piece of evidence in the claims I will make in this post.


I'm sick and tired of fronting like progress is being made and everything is gonna be okay. It's fucking pouring outside, and I'm not expecting to see a rainbow after the storm.

I feel like no matter which way I turn, I see my people under attack in this country. In this particular post, I'm talking about my people as (young) Black people, but similar things could be said about women as my people, or people who don't identify as straight as my people, or the [lower sections of the] 99% as my people. 

Granted, I was 11, but I don't think I actually feared as much for the state of my life as I know it after the September 11th attacks as I do now. I'm actually afraid that I'm coming of age in a country where my views, opinions, and rights simply don't matter to anyone in charge AND it's uncouth to even suggest that that might be the case. I'm so over this post-everything era. I want to be able to talk about racism and sexism and classism and homophobia and cissism, etc. in public spaces. I want to be able to say that I. don't. feel. safe. and not be looked at like I'm paranoid or insane. 

Hold on. Let me not just put that into the atmosphere with no context. One of the things that has stuck out the most to me with everything that's going on with #TrayvonMartin and the conversations I've had with friends about the case is the degree to which racism operates in sexist and classist ways. I have never had an unfairly negative encounter with a police officer, though I was raised to try to handle things without their interference. I can walk around campus at 4 am and never feel like one of the campus safety officers is going to stop me and ask to see my ID, which I know has happened to various Black male students on this campus. Trayvon's hoodie had nothing to do with his death, but it honestly felt weird to wear my hood up on my hoodie, and it took me quite some time to figure out what to do with my hair on Monday to even make wearing the hood up feasible--if the "hoodie" (which Trayvon wasn't actually wearing when Zimmerman began following him, let us remember) is part of what makes young Black men suspicious, then I'll never be that. I have been told that my ... self can be intimidating, which hurts, but that's a rarity in my experience, rather than a frequent occurrence in the lives of Black men I have spoken to about this. Similarly, I can count on one hand finger the number of times I've been made to feel like I don't belong in an integrated academic space, like I have to prove that myself and my ideas are worthy of my professor, preceptor, and/or classmates' time, and while that is undoubtedly related to the fact that I'm a Sociology major with a certificate in African-American studies and a bunch of Gender and Sexuality Studies classes under my belt, and while I hate trying to map systems of oppression onto any sort of hierarchical scale, I just don't feel as directly persecuted as young Black men are in today's society. 

And I know that it's not only cases of young Black men meeting unjust ends that get ignored by the mass media. I know about Rekia Boyd, and that cases like hers aren't rarities. And so maybe this is where class (or the fact that generally speaking, I've never hung out with large numbers of Black people publicly outside of this campus) comes in, but I've just never ever been made to feel like my life is in danger in a racialized situation. The closest I've ever come to this is probably this little gas station my family stopped at in this little town with giant crosses on the sides of the buildings when we were on our way to Ithaca, NY when I was college visiting. I was oblivious to anything going on at the time, but my mother and grandmother told me that three muscular White men were staring at our car the entire time we were there, and that the cashier refused to take my mother's money out of her hand, but rather made her put it down on the counter and pick her own change up off the counter.


Regardless of all of that, I feel like we've regressed into a system where talking about "Black" issues means talking about the issues pertaining to Black men, and talking about "women's" issues means talking about the issues of liberal White women of at least some financial and/or educational means. (Did we ever actually grow out of this system? I'm finding it hard these days to reconcile my conceptualization of the world as shaped through the literature I'm exposed to in my classes and the blogs/news sources I read and the actual reality of the situation to people who aren't sociologists and/or race/gender scholars.) The only "big" stories about Black women I can remember existing in the past few years are all OMG BLACK WOMEN AREN'T GETTING MARRIED WTF IS WRONG WITH THEM WHAT SHOULD THEY DO?! and we're going to table that discussion for the purposes of this post. 


Trayvon Martin's death hurts me. It is my issue. It is the issue of decent human beings everywhere. And I don't use hormonal birth control, but it and abortion are my issues, not even as a woman, but as a sexual being. I don't see stories in the media about people like me, but at the same time, I see these stories and can't help but see myself or my brother or someone in my heart. Humanity is in my heart. 


I'm getting off subject. The point I want to make here is that I'm hurt and upset by...basically everything that's going on in our country right now. I'm hurt by action, by inaction, and by responses to both. I'm outraged, and I'm even further outraged that people are outraged about my outrage, and I don't give a fuck if that makes me sound like an #angryblackgirl, because that's what I am right now.

But I want to harness that anger. I can write a blog post and wear a hoodie and help to write an open letter, but none of these things feel like active resistance. I'm sick of low-level resistance. It's not working for me anymore. 

One of the things that came up at the BSU meeting last week was that more Princetonians would have participated in Martin Monday if they'd known about it. So I'm toying with the idea of creating a like, Social Justice at Princeton Facebook page. It would be one place for every person or group with a cause to find other people who care, even if that issue isn't particular to their defined community. The first step to resistance must be the creation of an army, yes?   

I'm going to listen to this every time the world seems too fucked up for me to do anything about...

"What counts as activism? Why didn’t the kind of emotional self-care me and my girls were doing—talking to each other about all the fucked-up shit we were going through as brown girls—count? Why didn’t my best friend driving her elderly East African mother to the doctor and renegotiating her way through the layers of the racist, sexist, condescending bullshit medical system count as activism? Did staying alive count as activism? Did re-learning Tamil, one of my Sri Lankan family’s languages, count? Did cooking good Sri Lankan food and learning how to cook those recipes I didn’t have female family members around to teach me count? As a South Asian femme immigrant who was having a shitty week, did shopping at the MAC counter and finding the perfect shade of fuchsia lip gloss for my milk-tea skin count?"

--Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 

“A Time to Hole Up And a Time to Kick Ass” 

in We Don’t Need Another Wave (via Racialicious)

I don't know who this is, but his message is real:

Reblogged from Racialicious

I support LGBTQQI rights and marriage equality to the core of the core of my being.

Call me controversial (please, it would make me happy), but I honestly don't understand how I, as a Black person, could think otherwise. Well, okay, I don't understand how anyone as a human could feel otherwise, but that's beside the point. 

Monday was Martin Luther King Day, and I didn't post anything mainly because it was the day before all final papers were do and I was writing my heart out about Awkward Black Girl, but also because my feelings on him and his day haven't really changed since last year's post.

So, even if it's a few days late, what I want to say is this: our people and our allies in other communities dedicated (and dedicate, present-tense) their lives to ensuring that we would not be classified as "second class citizens," as lesser than anyone else on the basis of something as artificial as race, and that we wouldn't be subjected to the oxymoronic (is that a word?) standard of "separate, but equal." We know that separate is inherently unequal. It's the basis for life as we know it today. 

So how can we have the audacity to have demanded such rights and recognitions for ourselves and to work towards or even wish for the exact same rights and recognitions to be denied to others on the basis of their sexual orientation? Anyone who cries that race is a social construction must also recognize that normative conceptualizations of sexuality are just as socially constructed. 

So if you want to live the words of King and other civil rights leaders this week, next month, and in your daily life, watch this video. Cry like I did. And do. the. right. thing. Support marriage equality. Support non-discriminatory citizenship. Support love and family and justice.



 

Wiki is gone. It sucks. I know.

But before you whine and complain about how stupid/inconvenient/unfortunate it is, I really need you to understand that we're facing the end of the internet as we know it if the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are passed. The internet was designed around free exchange and the idea that users should be able to determine the content they want to see and access it freely and openly. I was born in 1990, y'all. The only thing I really remember about a time before the internet was the fact that I had this cool Encarta Encyclopedia CD-ROM, which suggests that I didn't have THE ENTIRETY OF EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS AVAILABLE TO ME WITH THE CLICK OF A FEW BUTTONS. I once wasn't able to instantly access music by people in various other countries, or read the innermost thoughts and advice of people around the world. I am a Millennial girl. I am a child of the internet. I spend more hours interacting with it than with anything else in my life on a daily basis. 

And I refuse to let it be overtaken by corporations. I refuse to sit idly by while my source for free information and access to programming and media I might otherwise never see disappears. I refuse to accept the idea that the internet could, for all intents and purposes, be owned by corporations who could sit around in board rooms deciding what they think I should and should not be able to see. Why do you think I don't own a television? Content determined by anyone other than users is SO 15 years ago.

This guy from the Washington Post explains it better than I can. SOPA (and it's Senate equivalent, PIPA):

gives content creators the power to force ISPs, search engines or payment services to shut down access to a Web site that the owner believes violated its copyright. On its face, the bill is designed to stop access to foreign Web sites that are profiting off of stolen content. (U.S.-based business can simply be dragged into court.) In reality, it’s much more insidious than that.
Say a French company just started a social networking site in which users can upload videos of themselves singing. Now let’s say some kids upload a video of themselves singing their favorite Britney Spears song, not even playing back the original recording but simply singing along innocently to a song they like.
In the eyes of Spears’s record label or any number of parties associated with her continued cash flow, that might very well look like an instance of piracy — and indeed, major labels have had content pulled off YouTube for similar “violations.” All the label has to do is send a letter to someone such as your ISP and request that the service stop routing traffic to the offending site, and, boom, no more French-sharing site for U.S. Internet users. And what’s really scary is that U.S. Internet service providers have immunity when it comes to what they can pull from their networks, so that French site might not even have a clear path to resolving the issue.
Now take that concept and begin to apply it across all the places you could potentially find “infringing” material. Sites about art, sites about movies, sites that let users generate content of all types — some of that content containing pieces of other work that should be considered fair use by any modern standard. Suddenly, a lot of destinations on the Internet will begin to look like island vacation spots — that is, they’re really hard to get to. And the impact won’t just be cultural or legal; the technical workings of the Internet itself will be dramatically affected.

I have a doubled interest in stopping these crazy laws as not only an internet user, but as a content-creator. This blog has become more important to me than I could have ever possibly imagined, but under SOPA, corporations could decide that some of the things I do on this blog, like posting images I don't own (even when I cite my source) or uploading unofficial YouTube videos, are felonies worth up to 5 years in prison. Not to mention that YouTube would cease to exist...or at least, to exist as anything other than VEVO. Google and other search engines would be forced to remove sites that are deemed to host unauthorized content from their search results. Blogging as both an industry and a pastime could be wiped off the face of the internet. Voices would be silenced. The internet serves as the ONLY platform for honest and open discussion of many issues. Modern-day activism could come to a grinding halt.

And so, more than just writing this blog post, I'm taking an active stand. I changed my Facebook and Twitter profile pictures to an image meant to represent government-sponsored internet censorship (and so did a quarter of my Facebook friends who have recently changed their profile pictures!). I'm sharing articles like a mothafucka. AND, most importantly, I sent the following letter to my local Congressional representative: 

Net Neutrality is the cornerstone of innovation, free speech and democracy on the Internet.

More than 2 million Americans have expressed support for Net Neutrality at Congress and the FCC. They want control over the Internet to remain in the hands of the people who use it every day.

Please stand with the public by protecting Net Neutrality once and for all.

As a 20-something in today's society, I've grown up on the internet. I trust it as a source of free information and use it for many hours a day to meet many of my needs. I also publish lots of my own content, and my father runs an online business, and it would be truly unjust for either of our sites to be affected by the end of Net Neutrality. People of my generation and every generation depend on the internet; don't let it be fundamentally and irrevocably changed. Don't let the American values of free speech and free commerce be trampled on. Please support Net Neutrality. I recognize that very serious infringements are regularly being made possible by the internet, but there must be other, less potentially damaging, ways to protect corporations against such infringements and punish wrongdoers. Please vote against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act, which could very well do more to censor legitimate free speech than to control the illegitimate spread of intellectual property. Please protect American consumers and maintain the free, open, user-determined nature of the internet by supporting The Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion and Consumer Protection Act of 2011.

I'm begging you.

Maya Reid
Princeton University, Class of 2012

I contacted my representative via this site: http://www.savetheinternet.com/

And I'm asking you to spare 30 seconds of your time to do the same. They have a petition you can sign, or a pre-written letter (the first three paragraphs of the letter above) that you can just attach your name to and send.  

Your actions will help save life as we know it. I'm not going to lie, it's ANNOYING. AS. FUCK. to have Wikipedia, Reddit, xkcd, Wordpress, Mozilla, Colorlines, and other major websites down today. But imagine if they were gone forever.

(And before anyone criticizes me for not doing my own blackout...I wanted to. I just didn't know how.)    

I feel like I'm missing out on what might be my only chance to join a mass protest.

When I started really learning about the Civil Rights Movement in the context of African-American Studies classes here at Princeton, learning about all the discontent and political fracturing that my high school history classes and textbooks had glossed over, if bothering to mention them at all, I wanted to be a rebel. I gained enough insight into the atmosphere of the time to finally decisively cast my lot with my father, who marched with Malcolm X, instead of my grandmother, who was one of King's disciples. I would never deny that I most likely owe the very circumstances of my life to Dr. King, but regardless, I want to FIGHT.

When Princeton experienced the one big racialized incident of my time here during the Winter of my Sophomore year, I was all over the t-shirt/sign-making and wanted to draw lots of attention to the small group of us counter-protesting. I remembered hearing about the Black Student Union taking over Nassau Hall to protest the Vietnam War and wanting a tiny piece of history like that to call my own. But alas, my classmates were meek and apathetic, and our under-participated-in protest will be remembered only in the archives of the Daily Princetonian (and even those articles will be remembered more for their racist comments than for the actual content). 

No one wanted to fight. And so I started to buy into the idea that all the good causes are done, even though everything I know about the world begs to differ. Maybe out-and-out activism in the form of anything other than an academic work just wasn't for me.  Maybe "the movement" as a social construct had died out.

And then representatives from the 99% of the country that is currently being shit on by the tops of the corporations on Wall Street finally realized Marx's dreams of class consciousness and began to come together to rise against the system that is keeping us down. It started with a few angry students, and is now in its 3rd week in NYC and has spread to major metropolitan areas all across the country. Support is pouring in from all over the world. More than 700 peaceful protesters have been arrested in NYC alone. There are ingenious signs, catchy slogans, supplies, celebrities, meditation circles and chanters and marchers. 


The Movement is back, and every time I read a blog post or see an article about #OccupyWallStreet, a very large part of me aches to be there. Maybe this is our fight. I know my presence could never make or break things, that one more person doesn't actually change the game at all...but maybe it would change me. Durkheim calls it "collective effervescence," the feeling of exhilaration one gets from being in a crowd. I think I need to be reminded that people care about things. Normal ordinary people, not just those of us in the Ivory Tower. I think I need that jolt of recognition that things MATTER. I want to feel that I'm part of this larger thing that existed before me and will exist after me and has to exist, must exist...I need to feel a part of something I want to perpetuate. And I know I already have things like that, but none of them feel important the way this feels important. 

I don't hope to ever see a crisis bigger than 1% of the country owning more wealth than the other 99%, or more than half of Black and Latino men in prime employment age (18-35) unemployed, or teachers being laid off by the hundreds, or college students dropping out because tuition got too high, or people who graduate being unable to get jobs, or housing falling to absolute shit, or people interpreting abuse by the government as abuse of the government. This is our crisis. This is our movement. And I can't really justify the expense of going, but these images and words move me beyond expression.

Photo by vincemie

 

Original here.

Original here.

 

Sometimes the government recognizes when they're being problematic

and actually changes things. Sometimes it takes a ridiculously long time, and you've all but given up hope, but the persistent activists among us keep raising a quiet form of hell until something actually gets done. That's what I was always taught to believe, anyway. I love when I can actually see evidence of this happening IRL:

FBI to Revise Hopelessly Narrow Definition of Rape

Brother West at #OccupyWallSt

I had class with this man on my very first day at Princeton. I went to class half an hour early on Mondays and Wednesdays so that I could sit in the front row and be near to him. I'm fairly positive I've gone to every speaking engagement he's been at in my time here, and though I've only taken that one class with him, his influence on my intellectual mindset has been incredible. No other professor has ever matched his ability to make me literally stumble out of lecture, trying to reorient myself as a physical being within the new way I view the world because of what he just said. I don't always agree with his viewpoints, but that is one of the most powerful orators I've ever met. (Dr. Michael Eric Dyson rivals him.) My journey from being an American who happened to be black to being a Black American was critically influenced by this man, who calls me Sister Reid whenever we see each other, and I'm not sure I'll ever have the opportunity to truly thank him for that.

Anyway, enough of my gushing. I will leave you with an image, because it says more than I'll ever be able to: