Category Archives: Feminism

Arizona school district adds abstinence-only, anti-choice sticker to science textbook

Last year, the conservative Gilbert School District decided that to fully compile with the law they should probably censor the parts of the high school honors biology textbook that mention contraception and abortion. Because we all know that mentioning the fact of the existence of something amounts to promoting it. They seem to have dropped their original plan to literally just rip out those pages, and instead are handing out these stickers and requiring students to put them on the inside cover of their book as a little reminder of the state’s values.

via Arizona school district adds abstinence-only, anti-choice sticker to science textbook.

Yesterday 40,000 people donated over $1,000,000 in fewer than…

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Yesterday 40,000 people donated over $1,000,000 in fewer than 12 hours to help Fatima end bonded labor. The fundraiser currently sits at almost $1,400,000. There were no perks offered. No ‘reward levels.’ This was motivated by nothing more than genuine compassion and a desire to empower a woman who’s devoted her life to freeing people trapped in modern slavery. Thank you so much. Fatima has prepared a statement that I will post shortly.

I want to conclude this series with a story that will show you the character of the person you’ve just empowered. This is one of thousands of anecdotes that reveal a person who is more committed to humanity than to her own safety or comfort:

Recently a family trapped in bonded labor got in touch with Fatima. They told her that they could not escape their owners, and that the girls in the family were being sexually abused by the owners. Fatima immediately jumped in her car and drove to the kiln in the middle of the night. She told the family to run. The owners woke up and began to fire guns. The family reached the car, but the youngest girl—only four years old— had fallen down and been captured.

For three months the child was missing. Fatima went to court and begged for intervention, but the police kept insisting that they’d searched the kiln, and no child could be found. “I couldn’t sleep,” explains Fatima. “Every night I laid in bed and could think about nothing but this young girl in the hands of her brutalizers. I stayed awake all night thinking about how I could rescue her.”

Fatima recruited several other laborers to help her. Dressed in rags, they went to the kiln and pretended to be workers. They spent several days searching. They couldn’t find the girl anywhere. But from the owner’s house, they heard constant crying. They went back to the court and demanded that the house be investigated. The girl was found. But for weeks, she would not eat, talk, or cry. Fatima eventually learned that every time the girl would cry for food, the owner would beat her.

(Lahore, Pakistan)
(7 of 7)

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I’m going to leave the fundraiser up for the remainder of the day.
Anyone else who wishes to donate, can do so here:

via Yesterday 40,000 people donated over $1,000,000 in fewer than….

Why Are White Liberals Getting So “Berned Up” By Black Women Activists? | Dame Magazine

Garza and the other Black women activists are unbossed and unbought, following in the footsteps of Shirley Chisholm, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer. They have made it clear that there can be no business as usual while Black people are dying in the streets.

BLM is also working in the tradition of ACT-UP and Code Pink, both mostly White organizations that have embraced the tactics of disrupting public gatherings and officials. The hostility directed at BLM, given the celebration of these White-led movements by White progressives, begs the question: Is it the tactics that people are uncomfortable with, or the sex and skin color of the people putting their bodies on the line?

“When these groups disrupted, they were heroes and courageous. Now we have a group of Black women who are disrupting forums on behalf of Black life and we’re seen as people who don’t have a strategy,” said Los Angeles–based BLM co-founder Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac. “That has everything to do with stereotypes of being Black and female in this country.”

“White supremacy is very real. If two Black women can go up there and hold space and get that kind of response from those folks in Seattle who claim to be so progressive then we have a problem. The vitriol from the left is a litmus test for what we imagine what would happened if we did this in a Republican setting,” said Moore.

The optics of two Black women publicly confronting powerful White men is certainly unprecedented. Willaford and Johnson pushed aside a history where Black women have been denied access to the political stage, a place where White male politicians routinely demonized and chastise them as bad mothers and welfare queens driving up the national debt, who regularly denounce their cultural influence as disputable and immoral. Willaford and Johnson snatched the mic, owned the stage, and made clear who was in charge, followed up with a hashtag: #BowDownBernie.

While eschewing White fragility in favor of Black survival, BLM activists are also challenging Black people’s hang-ups around queer leadership, women’s roles, and respectability politics.

“There’s a lot to be learned from Black women’s resistance,” said Garza. “Black women participate consistently in elections and toward the side of justice. Black women are consistently carrying the crisis of democracy and of the country’s economy on our backs. They have consistently taken risks that have opened up opportunities for everyone in the workplace, home, and in social justice.”

“From what I can see, it is a wholly new paradigm of Black women’s leadership,” said Daryl Scott, a history professor at Howard University. “Historically Black women have been expected to do be the support for the leadership of Black men, doing everything from serving food to carrying out the details of organization. BLM, however, places women in leadership roles and tosses aside gendered expectations of how roles are supposed to be fulfilled.”

Scott said he is not certain if we are witnessing a new brand of womanist politics or a new brand of Black feminist politics, but we are definitely witnessing a new paradigm. Historically, Black women were organizing, and working at a grassroots level, often behind the higher-profile Black male leaders. Now, they doing the work and are the face, and voice, of the movement.

The politics of respectability, which required male clergy leaders, have been pushed aside; the walls of a media that sought after those leaders and credentials have been kicked over by this group of Black women who aren’t calling press conferences or asking for a microphone, but snatching it without care or concern of the optics. For this generation, there are no worries about “airing dirty laundry” or reinforcing stereotypes. These women are literally fighting for their lives and they could care less if that makes White people uncomfortable.

via Why Are White Liberals Getting So “Berned Up” By Black Women Activists? | Dame Magazine.

In Mexico, Hunted Down for Speaking Out

At a recent demonstration of journalists and human rights defenders, the sense of dread was palpable. As communicators in Mexico, we’re angry and intensely frustrated at how so many of our ranks have been killed, disappeared, displaced, or censored with no repercussions.

For many, including me, this crime especially hit home. For a long time, whenever I was asked if I was afraid to speak out critically in Mexico, I answered that fortunately Mexico City was relatively safe. Drug cartels and their allies in government only kept close tabs on reporters in more disputed areas.

The quintuple homicide in a quiet corner of the city shattered that myth — and with it what was left of our complacency. Several days before his murder, Espinosa told friends that a man had approached him to ask if he was the photographer who fled Veracruz. When he said yes, the man replied, “You should know that we’re here.”

Once considered a haven, Mexico City has become a hunting ground in a country where, too often, journalists end up reporting on the brutal assassinations of their colleagues — and wondering who will be next.

via In Mexico, Hunted Down for Speaking Out.

“I left an abusive relationship and I have nowhere to go. I…

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“I left an abusive relationship and I have nowhere to go. I have Hepatitis C, so no one is willing to take me in. I don’t know how long I will live. I tried to give her up for adoption so that she’d have a good home. The wife of a minister told me about a place where I could drop her off. But when I got there, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” (½)

(Lahore, Pakistan)

via “I left an abusive relationship and I have nowhere to go. I….

The Donald Is a Lot More Dangerous Than You Think | Dame Magazine

Like his White Populist predecessors, Trump is capitalizing on widespread anti-immigrant sentiment. And this kind of rhetoric is just a more socially acceptable form of anti-Black racism. Trump with his anti-p.c. stances and anti-Mexican rhetoric can rally his White troops against everything from #BlackLivesMatter to demands for the expulsion of ethnic studies out of our classrooms, for more prisons and police. He is the personification of White supremacy and patriarchy, cloaked in a mirage of the American Dream and its related ideology of American exceptionalism.

He is recycling a trusted playbook of demonizing immigrants of color, playing on the fears and anger from the White working- and middle-class people who have long supported the GOP since the introduction of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which capitalized on White bigotry throughout the South while mobilizing White fears of Black crime by advancing an aggressive law and order platform.

His anti-immigrant and racist message is an old historical narrative. It worked from the Know-Nothing Party that mobilized around anti-Irish and anti-Black sentiments. It worked for countless Republican politicians who used fear of the “Yellow Peril” which led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the 1942 Bracero Agreement, a labor and wartime strategy that was used to maintain political power. And of course, racial fear has been fundamental to the maintenance of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and the amped-up militarization of the police who are disproportionately killing people of color and being acquitted for it.

via The Donald Is a Lot More Dangerous Than You Think | Dame Magazine.

Humans of New York

“On her sixth birthday, two of her friends came over and brought her presents. One of the presents was big, and the other was small. The friend who’d brought the big present was laughing at the smaller present. It was so hard for me to not intervene. I was so used to telling my daughter how to act and what to say. But I decided that this time I’d sit back and see how she responded. “I like both my presents the same,” she said. And I remember feeling so proud, because I knew that what I’d been teaching her was working.”

via Humans of New York.

CENSORED NEWS: Resisting the Censors, Gatekeepers and Powermongers

It is more annoying than anything. First, Project Censored gives me an award in 2008. Then, they use my work without paying for it in a book. Then they use my work at other times without asking. Now, they threaten to file a lawsuit against me eight years after the award because they think they own the words ‘censored news.’

The whole thing is a scam. What a joke: Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation at Sonoma State University, Calif.

One has to wonder if Peter Phillips came up with this lawsuit threat all by himself.

This latest threat to Censored News comes one day after Censored News published this article, Cynthia McKinney’s Dissertation: Hugo Chavez, White Supremacy, COINTELPRO and Wikileaks.

The threat comes shortly after the takedown order from Google Blogger, when Google ripped the article off Censored News about the Anonymous member killed by Canadian police, James McIntyre, jaymack9, as he was defending Treaty 8 from Site C dam in British Columbia.

via CENSORED NEWS: Resisting the Censors, Gatekeepers and Powermongers.