ok, i’ve had vicious profanity laced rants, more academic (although no less profanity laced) rants and letters to young black girls written. I erased them all.

And decided that this is all I’m going to say about John RACIST DICK SCUM Mayer:

When a dude says that his dick is white supremacist dick (insinuating that he does not find black women attractive enough to fuck) and makes all sorts of gendered racialized fucked up statements about black women and white women ON A MAJOR MEDIA SITE–You don’t blow that shit off with “ZOMG he’s such a troll, ignore him.”

Especially after you just spent a month emailing me, texting me, facebooking me and writing posts about the sin that is Tim Tebow “using public airwaves” to spew his anti-women hate.

And especially ESPECIALLY not after you stop and consider that there’s a whole slew of young girls that are Mayer’s LISTENERS, SUPPORTERS and BUYERS that you will surely lecture and wring your hands over the next time they don’t react to violence or abuse the way you want them to.

Isn’t weird how when a black man is a sexist cock head spewing filth about black women, we all go: ZOMG black women, why are you putting up with this shit, why do you put race over gender???

But when it’s a white man that is a sexist cock head spewing filth about black women, we all go: ZOMG why are we giving troll man a stage? Just ignore him?

Filth is filth. Cock heads are cock heads. And the integrity and honor of all the black girls that bought John Mayer’s records deserve outrage, protests, email campaigns, marching in the streets and John Mayer’s teeny tiny filthy little boy white supremacist dinky (because you have to be a man to have a dick or a cock) on a goddamn plate.

i was walking through the supermarket the other day, really slowly, just taking the time to think through my various experiences with the supermarket.

like:
* the first time W* and I went grocery shopping after we had spent almost five months living on about 100$ every two weeks (we didn’t have kids then.) we were working to pay off some really huge bills once and for all, and once we did, we went straight to the supermarket and bought food.

I remember walking up and down those aisles–permitting myself to notice for the very first time–*exactly* how much food was in that supermarket. I’d never really noticed before because we had been on such a strict budge, we literally ran in, got exactly what we got the last time, and left.

I told W*–I understand what somebody from the Soviet Union must feel like when they went to the market outside of the US.

Awe.

* the first time I realized that the majority of all that food–those rows and rows of more and more food–were actually not good for you. were actually *crap*. feeling betrayed. tricked. like i had *trusted* the store. The store told me that they were working *for me*. to bring me the best deals. to help me feed my family the right way. the store lied.

* years later, when i was taking a women’s studies class that talked about how women often don’t question what their doctors have to say, no matter how abusive the doctor may be–because doctors are in a position of authority over the women– I understood that reasoning perfectly.

stores are in a position of authority over you. not in the same way a doctor is. but still. they promise you things, they make you feel guilty for doing certain things, they claim to only have your best interests in mind, they deny and restrict access to things, they *enforce capitalism* at the most base level.

it makes sense to me that “average” people like who I used to be, who my family is, who most of my community are (i.e. working class w/only high school degrees if that), don’t have the tools to really question/challenges store, and in fact, deal with a lot of anxiety around “the supermarket”–i.e. what foods to buy, what supermarket to go to, etc.

In a weird way, supermarkets are the primary source of mothering for so many of us (think of how many of us were bottle fed and where that formula came from).

* how many times was the supermarket the only place where I, a mother with no access to a car, living in an unsafe neighborhood (where outside walking, especially for women, was unsafe) made a public appearance? The only space that I left the private sphere for? Where I interacted with other humans for a little while?

And yet–even as I walked up and down those aisles with my baby girl, I knew I was being monitored. And so I didn’t raise my voice to my girl, no matter what tricks she pulled. ANd I taught my kids about stealing very early on.

and I still remember the look of confusion when I tried to explain money and what it means to a three year old. and then another three year old.

when there is so much of this stuff just laying around–why can’t it be used?

This was an incredible (democracy now!) show to listen to–I took notes through the whole thing and have ordered the books from the library.

In it, Gabor Mate (an author, therapist, addiction expert) discusses links between ADD, addiction, abuse and violence and “stressed” parenting (and so you know, “stressed’ and “bad” are not synonymous).

a clip:

AMY GOODMAN: How do you think kids with ADD, with attention deficit disorder, should be treated?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if we recognize that it’s not a disease and it’s not genetic, but it’s a problem of brain development, and knowing the good news, fortunately—and this is also true for addicts—that the brain, the human brain, can develop new circuits even later on in life—and that’s called neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to be molded by new experience later in life—then the question becomes not of how to regulate and control symptoms, but how do you promote development. And that has to do with providing kids with the kind of environment and nurturing that they need so that those circuits can develop later on.

That’s also, by the way, what the addict needs. So instead of a punitive approach, we need to have a much more compassionate, caring approach that would allow these people to develop, because the development is stuck at a very early age

A word used in this passage reminded me of the post by WCD: Nueroplasticity. SOOOOooo many interesting spasms of color exploded in my brain when I heard it.

during a time in your life when you really needed something (for whatever reason), what would you have said if you could’ve? What *did* you say?

me: as i’ve become more and more vulnerable these past few months–the one thing that keeps popping up: I want to be held.

Not in a sexual way. Not in a “relationship” way (i.e. husband holding wife, mother holding child, etc). In a being interacting with a being way.

I want to feel another person’s energy interacting with my own–in a way that is not verbal, in a way that demands nothing, in a way that does not have imposed identity values written on it (a mother is a mother, and thus she holds a child *like this*.)

Just human energy (heat, life, perspiration, breath etc) intertwining with human energy.

On my terms.

what about you?

mai’a aka guerrilla mama

i have a couple of other posts churning in my mind that i want to write for flip flopping joy.  but a quick note in the meantime…

those of you who know me, know that i am a birth worker.  with a relatively rational philosophy around reproductive health.  basically, i trust women.

so a couple of months ago, there was a post on a relatively popular ‘natural birth’ blog, unnecesarean.  called: stuff white people like: talking about birth.

now, it is rare in the natural birth world to see anything more than a token mention of race, class, ethnicity or other marginalized identities.

normally, i dont bother with the: where are all the people of color at in our movement? kind of questions, because well, i have a life.

but i had been thinking and researching about birth outcomes in relation to race in the us america.  and so i was interested in seeing where the conversation was going to go.

it went.

i added a few (very long) comments trying my darndest to move the convo passed–i guess woc just dont care about birth the way that we white women do (because woc are used to being abused and dehumanized)–to looking at the multitude of ways that woc are speaking up and continue to be dismissed by the natural birth movement.

of course that didnt happen.  (ha! when does it?)

anyways.  on with life.

a few days ago i was tip toeing through the birth blogs when i say that unnecesarean had taken on two new bloggers.  so now it is a group blog.  which is great, except all of them (to my knowledge) are white women.

sigh.

this isnt sour grapes on my part.  i stopped blogging before unnecesarean announced it was a group blog.  but considering the amount of women, birth advocates, doulas of color, etc. who are writing about birth, i just want to shake my head when i see one of the more popular natural birth blogs just increase its whiteness triple fold.

why bother asking: where are all the women of color at? getting a series of specific answers (with links).  and then when you finally do get the opportunity to support ppl of color in birth activism, to give them access to a larger audience,  you choose not to?

i hope im wrong.  i hope that at least one of these new writers is a poc.  i hope that i get to read from all of the new writers about rights to informed consent and refusing medical interventions that explores the multiple histories and experiences that exist across racial and socio economic communities.  i hope that i read more on the blog from folks who are most at risk for birth trauma, unnecessary interventions, maternal and child mortality, etc.

i hope.

one thing i know for sure: I am less and less invested in ‘organizing’ and ‘activism.’

and more and more invested in “artists” and the work of artists.

Cowards.
Hiding behind a critique.

~Gloria Anzaldua~
She had diabetes. And I remember being mad, so mad, when died. Diabetes is preventable, first of all, and second of all, it’s manageable. Everybody in my family who is my parents generation or older has it. And some struggle to contain it, but they all do.

It’s preventable and it’s manageable.

I know I wasn’t the only one. I read a magazine put out by organizers in Texas about Gloria’s death, and at least two of the essays/poems were about how angry they were at Gloria. She didn’t have to die. She could’ve gotten this under control.

In my own mind, my sugar addiction was not the same thing as Gloria’s (a little less important, a little less necessary to confront, a little less urgent) because I didn’t have diabetes. (not yet, my mind always whispered.)

Coward.
Hiding behind a critique.

As I’ve worked through this addiction, I’ve kept asking myself over and over again. Why do we expect individual responses to what are ultimately the vestiges of (slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, nationalism, heteroviolence, etc)?

What is addiction, but a reaction to racism, to sexism, to heteroviolence, etc?

I mean–addiction may mean something else in the world of white folks–but in my world, addiction is a way to handle life. A way to handle a man that you love but won’t stop beating the shit out of you. A way to handle dealing with three children who have died before you because of lack of health insurance. A way to handle being the sole caretaker of a sick and mentally unbalanced mother (because your brothers have got better shit to do and have never been good at that “feeling” stuff).

Why do we expect–why did *I* expect–Gloria, one of our stars, my star, to deal with the effects of racism and sexism and nationalism and heteroviolence–all by herself?

Why was I so angry that she “didn’t take better care of herself?”

Is it possible to take better care of yourself when living under such extraordinary violence? Is it possible to survive alone under the burden of structural violence?

~The personal is political~

I don’t remember why (and I’m living under the cloud of depression right now, so please don’t ask me to remember or find links–just know that this isn’t my idea), but a while back, there was a flurry of posts about “the personal is political” and why that concept was such a failure. Or taken to a really horrible extreme. Or simply useless as a political strategy.

The feminist blogosphere does this every once in a while–like there is a cycle set up. Every six months to a year, sometimes sooner, the blogosphere runs through a rotation of concepts that are simply not relevant or outright unuseful as organizing tools any more.

First: the blogosphere simplifies what are usually deeply complex concepts into the least common denominator (intersectionality is pay attention to ALL the isms!). Then it talks about how this incredibly simplified concept wasn’t relevant this one time…then it dismisses the entire theory out of hand.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve done this. The example I can think most plainly of is the sex wars (radical feminist theory versus sex positive theory). Especially when I first started blogging, I didn’t see a lot of women of color in either camp, so I wrote off the whole lot of it as unimportant and unnecessary to women of color. That we would find our own spaces.

So I’ve done it too. I don’t want to point fingers at individuals–because individuals are not the problem (and well, I”m just too tired.). This is something that is wrong with the blogosphere as a whole. With the output of theory as a whole by the blogosphere. With the critique. With critique in and of itself.

~~~

It became especially noticable to me after the latest run of “we as a movement no longer need ‘the personal is political’ as a mantra!” posts.

Because I am dealing with a “personal” right now that is so personal, I’ve only shared it with my partner and a few other people. It is so personal, it rams into my guts every time I think about it.

But as I’ve sat with this personal–longer and longer–partially because I’m a coward who is emotionally incapable of moving out of a deeply reflective space right now, and partially because there is simply no response to be had–I know, I feel, I am absolutely CERTAIN, there is no other way to deal with this personal thing than by politicizing it.

~Politicizing the personal~

I can’t write about this personal thing. So I use Gloria and her memory–I use my experiences and a communities experiences with her death to flesh out what I am talking about.

But first. Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The personal is political as an organizing strategy was NEVER meant to be what it has become today. In a world where “choices” and boot straps dominate our ideology, I’m not surprised that the “personal is political” has become about lipstick wars and “what choices will best support the movement” show downs.

But that’s not what the concept ever meant or what it was intended to interrogate (personal choices). In fact, as an ideology, it explicitly refused to interrogate women’s choices–as it argued the choices women make are all choices of survival. Some may be privileged choices that are made by women who are further away from the burn of survival than other women are–but they are still choices of survival.

Instead, The personal is political interrogated *spheres*.

The public versus the private.

The “that’s a private matter.” response.
The “I don’t want to get involved, that’s personal.” response.

What made something personal? And why was it that things like rape, abuse, abortion, house work, etc where are strictly private–and all strictly considered “a woman’s world”?

An example:
Why is it that when Mike’s sister is fighting with her husband in The Godfather–to the point that she gets her ass kicked, *repeatedly*, both brothers are told quietly (by the mother) “to leave it.” That it was “personal” between the sister and her husband.

Even though if her husband did those things to a *man* in the Family–he’d been killed after the first strike (as was the cop who kicked Mike’s ass and the gang that shot Mike’s father was).

“It’s a private matter” was used to justify violence and abuse and allow it to continue. Women who rebelled against the “private” violence were subjected to the wrath of the community (see Gloria’s comments on The Loudmouth in La Frontera/The Borderlands).

Would we (as radical political communities of color) ever tell a man that the police violence he experienced was “personal” or “private” and nothing we need to get involved in?

~~~~

The personal is political has been manipulated by feminists that are privileged and/or reformists. And again, it’s something that I bought into for a long time on different levels.

I wouldn’t have felt that anger at Gloria for dying from diabetes if I didn’t. She could’ve managed it. She could’ve prevented it from happening.

If she wanted to.

But now–I reject that line of reasoning. I look at the reasons I got addicted to sugar, and I see nothing but a deeply political response to deeply political happenings.

I was, for all intents and purposes, a single mother, caretaking two young children, one of them chronically sick for months and months. I had no family. No friends. No community. To help. I had this child that never slept and woke up vomiting if he did. Which meant that he couldn’t sleep laying down for fear of choking or being unable to move his face out of the vomit.

I was going to school full time, living on welfare, living with a partner that I saw for about thirty minutes before he drove the hour and a half to a 16 hour work day. I also had untreated depression, ADD, and hypothyroidism. And that kid that just never slept. Who cried even in his sleep because he was so sick.

Do you know what lack of sleep does to a person?

The only response I had to lack of community, lack of support, lack of respect, lack of public response to this very private problem–was ice cream.

That’s how I stayed awake through long nights. That’s how I looked forward (and thus was in a good mood) to no sleep. That’s how I fed myself. And dealt with being the most alone and private woman in the world.

And of course, it escalated from there. Ice cream became candy became pastries became fast food became….

Could I have quit, if I wanted to? Sure, I guess. But then I would’ve pulled an Andrea Yates and killed my children. Or left the family for California. Or said fuck this education shit, and gone back to working at McDonalds.

What I was responding to was sexism. Racism. Classism. I was dealing with structural violence as it plays out in a private sphere. A private sphere where there are no responses available to most of us outside of individual self abuse.

~Cowards~

I reject the idea that feminism has outgrown The Personal Is Policial–and instead posit that feminism has grown cowardly. That cowards run feminism and that cowards are encouraging a whole slew of people who desperately need feminism to be cowardly.

Hiding behind a critique.

I remember a critique of Gloria after she died. The author was angry. I was too, so I sat and read that thing through nodding my head. Yes, yes yes, there was the little thing called colonialism. That took our healthy food and gave us starch and sugar instead. That continues to devastate the native and mexican communities (which are so often intertwined)–what other communities will you find diabetes decimating so many of us? Or alcoholism? Or smoking?

But Gloria, unlike that girl on the rez or buried in south Texas ignorance, knew about this history, and still got drunk on sugar that was killing her every night.

How could she?

As if a critique helps us to get sleep when we are all alone with too many bills and no job.

So many of us Chicanas are up late at night, comforting ourselves with sugar that know kills us–that has killed better souls than our own.

We as a society *expect* Chicanas to create that private sphere to deal with our lives. Sure, let’s talk about blueberry picking or rape in the fields. But…that baby that won’t stop crying? That mother that won’t talk to you since you came out? That desperate unfufilled need to stimulate your mind?? Off to the computer with a bowl of ice cream for you.

But if our lives are political–if our skin and our blood and our hair and our tongues are political–why isn’t how we *deal* with our lives political as well?

We’ll organize and put our entire being into a public movement (abortion rights, reproductive justice, media justice, a Tebow commercial, ending rape, etc)–but will we stop everything and organize for the girl on our committee privately addicted to sugar? Or the other girl who rarely comes to meetings because she’s hiding the cut marks on her arm? Or the other girl who does everything for everybody completely perfectly and who never talks about her personal life, ever?

Cowardly.

Will we ever stop everything and organize around our mother, who hordes anything she can get her hands on, even the silverware at the local restaurant, for reasons we don’t understand, but have suspected for a while?

Will we stop being embarrassed of her, hiding her in a private sphere so that nobody knows our shame?

Did we so quickly forget that embarrassment has long been used as a tool to keep the private and public spheres separate and hidden?

Will we be brave and stop trying to convince ourselves that once the door closes, everything is fine? And we don’t have to concern ourselves with the lives behind the door until the next time we can schedule a visit in?

Will we be brave and investigate our own private sphere that we have created to deal with the ‘mundane’ problems sexism, violence, classism, etc have created for us?

Will we be brave and admit that our “organizing community” has become a way to continue the stratification of “public and private”?

Flicking through the NYT today, I heard about embodied cognition as a field of scientific study. There’s a lot about it on the web, but the NYT explanation for beginners seems pretty good:

… when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore.

That’s fascinating. It tells me a lot about my body, body memory, and the words we use for movement. We understand language, ideas, the world in part through our physical bodies and the movement of our bodies. We yield and open to each other, to concepts, to conversation. It’s not just a question of body language being independent of mind, something that happens when you aren’t looking. It is that movement of the body is an integral part of feeling, speaking and apprehending language and, further, the world itself.

The body’s movement is language. Movement is understanding. Understanding arises in and from movement. The presence and possibility of such bodies is awe-some. Understanding, speaking, being in the world is literally a sustained sequence of movement: a dance. When dancers talk about pedestrian movement, we often mean movement that originates in every day life, that doesn’t necessarily belong to a particulary movement vocabulary. Embodied cognition makes that even more true.

But what about disability? What if your body doesn’t or cannot do what researchers would “expect.” Does that mean that you don’t understand in the same way or cannot process or develop moral cognition? Not being a specialist in the field, I don’t have access to most of the research, but the little available on the web was provocative. Michael Anderson lays out the issues:

… first of all, that no researcher in, or theorist of, embodied cognition has ever suggested that physical handicaps imply cognitive deficits. Nor, if there were differences in the conceptual contents or structures of differently abled individuals, would one expect them to be detectable at the level of the linguistic mastery displayed in conversational interaction (the usual evidence offered by those who object to EC along these lines).** Language and linguistically available concepts are highly abstract phenomena; one would therefore expect the criteria for participation in a linguistic community to be likewise somewhat abstract. Thus, the concept of ‘walking’, in so far as it is logically and semantically related to various concepts of movement, and given that examples of walking exist in, and can be easily seen in the environment, ought to be easily acquirable by an individual who cannot, and who perhaps never could, walk. The concept can be placed in a logical and semantic network which is on the whole grounded, even given that there is no specific experience of walking which directly grounds the concept. Everyone is able to understand things which they have not directly experienced, through imagination, analogy, demonstration, and testimony; the physically disabled are in this regard no different.

** (is to a footnote: “assessments of children with spinal muscular atrophy bear this out”)

I support his conclusion, but not, of course, his language. Walking, it turns out, is less about the planting of one foot in front of the other than the experience and idea of moving through space at a certain time. Granted what you see might be slightly different if you are sitting in a wheelchair from what you would see at, say, a height of 6″ 2′. But then, it would also be different if you were 5″ 4′. And no one would argue that people of “only” average height are unable to develop effective cognitive strategies.

So, yes. It comes down to the act of moving your body. Interesting to find that there is a scientific way of expressing what I thought was only an artist’s take on movement (link here is to an earlier post in bfp’s rethinking walking series). We who move through the world experience the world differently, travel differently, but engage in the same moral and intellectual process of cognition as we go.

I also rather liked the disability rights perspective here as articulated by Jackie Leach Scully (I so liked much of what I could get from the google books clip that I have ordered the book. It seems to put together other thinkers that I am familiar with in oh-so productive ways. hooray!). The excerpts are full of paragraphs like this:

Suppose it really is the case that preflective moral cognition is mediated through sensorimotor pathways mediated by the body interacting with the environment, and that this happens differently when anomalous interactions are involved. It would still be true that adaptions of the environment are a distinctly formative of moral cognition as morphologies, movements or perceptions themselves. It certainly cannot lead to the essentialist conclusion that there is a “disability brain” or “disability mind” that is unlike, or should be treated as unlike, the brains of “normal people.”

I am going to go out on a limb for a second. From studying the history of race and bad evolutionary racial “science” in the early twentieth century, I am wary to make any kind of argument about the connection between brain and disability. Remember the awful stuff about cranium size and race as a justification for why African-Americans could never attain full citizenship. Actually, even now if you do a google search on cranium size and race, you get a series of pretty nasty links, including one to a David Duke site. No link love from me, here.

But I also feel awkward about saying that all brains are the same. These days, we happily accept the idea that all minds don’t work the same way, and we value (except perhaps in grade school) the things different minds do. If we believe that disability is a social construct, made up in part of the negative judgments we impose out of fear and goodness knows what else, what would happen if we admit that brains — like minds and bodies — work differently, that such difference is a social benefit of the highest order, and that we aren’t so filled with fear that we have to denigrate people because their brains are different and work differently? Would difference matter in an objective sense?

What could difference could create? What would we have to set aside in order to see disability brains and minds as powerful creative forces, equal to those of non-disabled people? What if we explicitly worked on movement and cognition, if we could take classes in refining movement with regard to cognition and vice versa? Encouraged people to move and think?  What if dancers were critical to a new society?

Wheelie spins and leaves to go to studio.  I have work to do!

x-posted at my blog here.

via the always amazing Bianca, we get this awesome new tumblr!

Contribute if you can!!!

As the formal US focus on Black History Month (February 1-28/9) is upon us we seek to celebrate all of the peoples who have influence and history via the African Diasporas. Expanding the inclusively of Black History Month is a goal for several of us, self-identified LatiNeg@s, Afro-Latinos and Afro-Caribeños. As people who recognize and claim the African heritage and history, we have often been excluded from US History, whether it be Black history or Latino history (Septermber 15-October 15). Join us in honoring and recognizing LatiNegr@s this year during Black and Latino History Month. We are Black, Latino and from the Caribbean. We REPRESENT!

Please share any images, videos, quotes, websites, links etc. you’d like to include on this page. Go to http://lati-negros.tumblr.com/submit to submit what you’d like to contribute.

The painting is by Jorge Arche, a Cuban painter from Santiago de Cuba who painted “Banistas” in 1972.

The Palestine Think Tank [Haitham Sabbah, Yousef Abudayyeh, Mohamed Khodr, Mary Rizzo,] have published this excellent list of common errors made by activists / movements and how to rectify them. The errors and solution are applicable to movements and activists worldwide.

Activism and activists for Palestine have been getting some media attention recently. This is absolutely great news. It is an opportunity that we need to take advantage of, especially since Palestinians themselves are denied space in almost all mainstream mass media. Reflecting on this fact, we at PTT have decided to express some of our observations, thoughts and suggestions in order to enhance the work of all activists, ourselves included. This is a summary of some of the things that we believe are some common activist errors and our proposals for avoiding that errors lead to damage. In the coming weeks we will elaborate on each of these points in essays. We hope that our observations and proposals can be of use for ourselves and for those who commit their time and energy to the Palestinian cause. Read the full list here