Final scene from Russian Ark (2002).
Saturday, January 31, 2015
*someone does something nice for someone*
white people: thanks man
brown people: Habibty, thank you so much. May you find happiness and love. May you live a long happy life and may your kids treat you well. May you graduate with the highest of honors and find a wonderful spouse. InshAllah ya qalbi, you never step on any legos and may your eyebrows always be on fleek.
Friday, January 30, 2015
One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?
Noam Chomsky, “Media Control” (via siegfriedandfreud)
Three or four million Asians killed by the US — and three Southeast Asian countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) shattered for several generations — is nothing to US Americans, not even worth a footnote. In World War II, 20 million Chinese were killed, many in concentration camps every bit as brutal as those in Germany, subject to human experimentation for developing chemical and biological weapons, yet I guarantee you that most US Americans have no idea this happened in a war in which the US and China were ostensibly fighting as allies and indeed the Chinese land war was every bit as critical to securing Japan’s surrender as the US naval campaign. Any German who believes that only 300,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust is rightly condemned as a history-denying racist, and for me the same logic applies to US Americans.
(via zuky)
Thursday, January 29, 2015
and like wrt eugenics if you;re arguing that some disabled people shouldn’t actually be killed/sterilised/segregated because they could be useful to society and we just haven;t realised!!! then you’ve already completely fucking failed to recognise the problem
people’s lives should not be determined by how much they can contribute materially to society, we do not have to prove our worth in order not to get segregated, sterilised or killed
When Asian American students seek therapy…their mental health issues–overwhelmingly perceived as intergenerational familial conflicts–are often diagnosed as being exclusively symptomatic of cultural (not political) conflicts. That is, by configuring Asian cultural difference as the source of all intergenerational disease, Asian culture comes to serve as an alibi or a scapegoat for a panoply of mental health issues. These issues may, in fact, trace their etiology not to questions of Asian cultural difference, but rather to forms of institutionalized racism and economic exploitation. The segregation of Asian American health issues into the domain of cultural difference thus covers over the need to investigate structural questions of social inequity as they circulate both inside and outside the therapeutic space of the clinic.
David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” Loss: The Politics of Mourning, pg.355-6 (x)
No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.
Martin Luther King Jr. (via quoteswagga)
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
The Prison Industry: A new form of slavery in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a 90 cents - $4 a day. [X]
According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S.
Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of “hired-out” miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.
During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. “Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex,”
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street.
MAJOR CORPORATIONS BENEFITTING FROM PRISON INDUSTRY COMPLEX. [X]
- McDonalds
McDonald’s uses inmates to produce frozen foods. Inmates process beef for patties. They may also process bread, milk and chicken products.
- Wendy’s.
Wendy’s has also been identified as relying on prison labor to reduce it’s cost of operations. Inmates also process beef for patties.
- Wal-Mart
The company uses inmates for manufacturing purposes. The company “hires” inmates to clean products of UPC bar codes so that products can be resold.
- Starbucks
The company uses inmates to cut costs as well. Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions hired Washington state prisoners to package holiday coffees.
- Victoria’s Secret
The company uses inmates to cut production costs. In South Carolina, female inmates were used to sew products. Also, inmates reportedly have been used to replace “made in” tags with “Made in USA” tags.
Wow
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.
Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three (via fables-of-the-reconstruction)
[gallery]
The 70th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation isn’t the time to mark just another historical event, but to remember humanity at its worst.
you can find anything at the halal store
you can find meat, clothes, juice , candies that you thought they stopped sellin, cheap hair products, your future bae, gold, furniture, blankets,answers to lifes hardest questions, slippers, shoes that no one actually wears, your long lost cousins, as well as many many other things
A fifty year old balding man that calls you “sister”
i think culture is important even if it’s from a country that is racialized as “white” in the united states (southern italians, eastern europeans, etc). assimilating into the hegemony of western whiteness is terrifying when you think of the effects it has. i’m not saying that it doesn’t make these groups any less white in the context of the united states, but i think it fosters a mentality more open to forming solidarity with people who aren’t white and resisting cultural hegemony is crucial for any significant political change.
[audio https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/bruixeria/109301869106/tumblr_mowhowhpcd1qgd39o?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]
As I make my way c’mon c’mon
Through these battered nights that seem too long
Now we grieve ‘cause now it’s gone
Things were good when we were young
Monday, January 26, 2015
I just don’t know how long you can hang suspended in the space between two places, bastard child of both and wanted by neither, before that space itself becomes your home. Until the diaspora is not a dream of a return but the only reality you can imagine.
I don’t even know which I want: a place I believe is home, or for home to be nowhere at all.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Okay, it’s working. My PayPal link is on my blog. Please donate only if you feel comfortable in doing so. Thank you for guiding me in making this.
Please consider this!! Mehreen has opened so manys eyes supported educated loved. Heard and taught when questions were asked from good souls!!! Mehreen i await my paycheck for u!! Give what u can, if u can, my friends. If u have love for me, too, since all aspects of my life have been touched bc of her
Do you suspect the same for WMAF couples? That the male is a fetishizer and the female is putting white guys on some kind of pedestal?
so to be honest, i have a lot of complex thoughts about the reactions to the last answer, which i did not write. discussing attraction and interpersonal relationships is difficult because they do not necessarily map onto political ideologies. i do personally get annoyed when i’ve had people actually ask me how i could’ve dated white men in the past considering my pro-asian, anti-racist leanings. being on the receiving end, i realize it’s a nuisance to have to defend myself.
AT THE SAME TIME, i think the way people responded to the last post does ignore a lot of social realities. despite my own experiences being in interracial relationships, i do get kneejerk reactions (particularly with WMAF and WMAM relationships), because i am concerned about the very real ways that asian women and gay asian men are sexually objectified by white men, or (in the case of AMWF couples) the ways that (straight) asian men are socialized to uphold white femininity as ideal over asian femininity. maybe yi could have rephrased it in a way to highlight this, but being concerned about whether and in what ways these social constructions subconsciously affect people’s attraction to asians is a valid reaction, and does not suggest that “every interracial couple is like that.” you can acknowledge that these are actual problems that need to be addressed without assuming that we’re talking about your parents, whom we’ve never met, or that we’re talking about your relationship, or whatever.
-e
no no no no no nope no no no holy shit no!
are you mixed race? no? then you really don’t get a say in whether or not you treat mixed race couples with ‘suspicion’ or not. trust me, mixed race people and mixed race couples already get fucktons of shit from monoracials of all races - too white to be asian, too asian to be white (or whatever combination you are) - and it’s really fucking exclusionary. we already get this shit from racists everywhere - to have a social justice blog start spouting this exact same bullshit is shocking, and really fucking disappointing. we already spend our entire lives being told that we’re destroying various races because we aren’t “pure” enough, and constantly treated with suspicion by both sides of our family for being the wrong race.
i do not care how concerned you are about fetishisation right now - that’s fantastic, but absolutely does not give you the right to discriminate against mixed race relationships or mixed race people! when your kneejerk reaction to any mixed race couple is immediate concern and suspicion, you cannot pretend you don’t think “every interracial couple is like that” when you are treating every interracial couple like that. the only social reality being ignored here is the unholy amounts of shit mixed race couples and people get from society, and you are actively contributing to that with your kneejerk negative reaction to them. i’m sorry it was just a “nuisance” to you - this is my entire life!
you can absolutely acknowlege problems, yes absolutely - but only if they arise. otherwise, you are being racist towards mixed race people and couples and you need to acknowledge that.
check your monoracial privilege.
you are reaching so hard in this post im worried you might have sprained something vital.
1. monoracial privilege is not a thing anymore than monosexual privilege is. let’s just get that basic framework established first.
2. it is not discriminating against mixed raced children (you pulled that idea out of thin air lmao the op didn’t even MENTION them) to be concerned ab the balance of power and privilege in a white/poc interracial relationship. if you’re really concerned ab problems mixed kids face like idk, the racism and abuse our white parents throw at us is a bigger problem than those evil monoracials being worried our white dad is a fetishist.
3. again I know half of tumblr SJ is SOCY 101 kids who can’t understand social dynamics unless they’re steamrolled to fit into a privilege/privileged format for easy consumption and the other half just want any chance to collect SJ points and level up but. Monoracial. Privilege. Is. Not. A. Thing. Especially in America or Europe aka “non poc counties” lmao.
i can’t find a way to send you a message so I’m just reblogging this to inform you I’m not a mixed Asian kid, I’m just mixed w/ white and was annoyed about the comments OP had about being mixed w/ white in general.
Do you suspect the same for WMAF couples? That the male is a fetishizer and the female is putting white guys on some kind of pedestal?
i disagree. both are certainly a thing. bisexuals and pansexuals face prejudice that is unique to them being non-monosexual, and this of perpetuated by both straight monosexuals and lgbt monosexuals. similarly, mixed race people may face racism that is unique to the fact that they are mixed race, and separate to the racism they may face for being poc.
2. it is not discriminating against mixed raced children (you pulled that idea out of thin air lmao the op didn’t even MENTION them) to be concerned ab the balance of power and privilege in a white/poc interracial relationship. if you’re really concerned ab problems mixed kids face like idk, the racism and abuse our white parents throw at us is a bigger problem than those evil monoracials being worried our white dad is a fetishist.
mixed race people - not just children - are most certainly relevant to the conversation, because in case you didn’t notice, we are the product of mixed race relationships. shit that is flung at mixed race couples is very much real to our every day lives, and any relationship we are ever going to get into will always be a mixed race relationship.
obviously if there is racism and abuse within a mixed race family, that is a massive problem and i certainly don’t seek to diminish that. but there will always be a ‘bigger problem’ out there somewhere, and the pissing contest won’t really get you very far. and this being present in some families does not mean that racism directed towards mixed race families for being mixed race is not a problem either.
3. again I know half of tumblr SJ is SOCY 101 kids who can’t understand social dynamics unless they’re steamrolled to fit into a privilege/privileged format for easy consumption and the other half just want any chance to collect SJ points and level up but. Monoracial. Privilege. Is. Not. A. Thing. Especially in America or Europe aka “non poc counties” lmao.
i grew up in china, applying your western-centric ideas to the entire world doesn’t interest me.
ETA: I’m not Asian, I’m mixed Morrocan/Rroma/white, but since OP seems like they’re jumping in to pontificate about ALL MIXED PEOPLE EVER and an ask about Asian interracial relationships was just their launching board and their opinions annoyed me I responded.
ok we gotta go back to the dictionary.
i disagree. both are certainly a thing. bisexuals and pansexuals face prejudice that is unique to them being non-monosexual, and this of perpetuated by both straight monosexuals and lgbt monosexuals. similarly, mixed race people may face racism that is unique to the fact that they are mixed race, and separate to the racism they may face for being poc.
sfsdfjls
polysexual people might face unique obstacles that “monosexual” gay or lesbian people do not, but this doesn’t mean that gay men or lesbian women are in anyway privileged over them, or in a position to wield institutional power. only straight people can do that to lgbt people. the same applies for race, especially when we are talking about mixed w/ white people and the dynamic that entails.
mixed race people - not just children - are most certainly relevant to the conversation, because in case you didn’t notice, we are the product of mixed race relationships. shit that is flung at mixed race couples is very much real to our every day lives, and any relationship we are ever going to get into will always be a mixed race relationship.
obviously if there is racism and abuse within a mixed race family, that is a massive problem and i certainly don’t seek to diminish that. but there will always be a ‘bigger problem’ out there somewhere, and the pissing contest won’t really get you very far. and this being present in some families does not mean that racism directed towards mixed race families for being mixed race is not a problem either.
thanks for pointing out to me that i’m the product of a mixed relationship :) i hadn’t noticed :)
it is actually possible to to be wary about interracial relationships where one partner holds power/privilege and the other doesn’t without being prejudiced against mixed race people, even though you aren’t capable of doing so yourself. me, a real live mixed person in the flesh, can do so! we are talking about white/non-white couples here—this isn’t “shit being flung at mixed race couples” it’s non-white people grappling with racism and how it affects their attraction and how others are attracted to them. these are very valid concerns. i have them myself re: white people. i have the same concerns about being in a relationship with a man and not a woman because men hold that same kind of power over me that white people do and it shapes the way they view me and i view them.
so to be honest, i have a lot of complex thoughts about the reactions to the last answer, which i did not write. discussing attraction and interpersonal relationships is difficult because they do not necessarily map onto political ideologies. i do personally get annoyed when i’ve had people actually ask me how i could’ve dated white men in the past considering my pro-asian, anti-racist leanings. being on the receiving end, i realize it’s a nuisance to have to defend myself.
AT THE SAME TIME, i think the way people responded to the last post does ignore a lot of social realities. despite my own experiences being in interracial relationships, i do get kneejerk reactions (particularly with WMAF and WMAM relationships), because i am concerned about the very real ways that asian women and gay asian men are sexually objectified by white men, or (in the case of AMWF couples) the ways that (straight) asian men are socialized to uphold white femininity as ideal over asian femininity. maybe yi could have rephrased it in a way to highlight this, but being concerned about whether and in what ways these social constructions subconsciously affect people’s attraction to asians is a valid reaction, and does not suggest that “every interracial couple is like that.” you can acknowledge that these are actual problems that need to be addressed without assuming that we’re talking about your parents, whom we’ve never met, or that we’re talking about your relationship, or whatever.
-e
i grew up in china, applying your western-centric ideas to the entire world doesn’t interest me.
you jumped onto a post that was talking about white men being attracted to asian women and asian gay men. it is impossible to have this conversation without including western-centric ideas. where do you think white people came from? this isn’t #weareallafrica. if you’re mixed with white it means your existence is a result of white colonialism and conquest and so western/white dynamics are going to be involved in the discussion. it’s not “western-centric” to include part of our heritage in a discussion that’s specifically ab being mixed?? how do you even breathe in that contextual vacuum, bruh.
Do you suspect the same for WMAF couples? That the male is a fetishizer and the female is putting white guys on some kind of pedestal?
so to be honest, i have a lot of complex thoughts about the reactions to the last answer, which i did not write. discussing attraction and interpersonal relationships is difficult because they do not necessarily map onto political ideologies. i do personally get annoyed when i’ve had people actually ask me how i could’ve dated white men in the past considering my pro-asian, anti-racist leanings. being on the receiving end, i realize it’s a nuisance to have to defend myself.
AT THE SAME TIME, i think the way people responded to the last post does ignore a lot of social realities. despite my own experiences being in interracial relationships, i do get kneejerk reactions (particularly with WMAF and WMAM relationships), because i am concerned about the very real ways that asian women and gay asian men are sexually objectified by white men, or (in the case of AMWF couples) the ways that (straight) asian men are socialized to uphold white femininity as ideal over asian femininity. maybe yi could have rephrased it in a way to highlight this, but being concerned about whether and in what ways these social constructions subconsciously affect people’s attraction to asians is a valid reaction, and does not suggest that “every interracial couple is like that.” you can acknowledge that these are actual problems that need to be addressed without assuming that we’re talking about your parents, whom we’ve never met, or that we’re talking about your relationship, or whatever.
-e
no no no no no nope no no no holy shit no!
are you mixed race? no? then you really don’t get a say in whether or not you treat mixed race couples with ‘suspicion’ or not. trust me, mixed race people and mixed race couples already get fucktons of shit from monoracials of all races - too white to be asian, too asian to be white (or whatever combination you are) - and it’s really fucking exclusionary. we already get this shit from racists everywhere - to have a social justice blog start spouting this exact same bullshit is shocking, and really fucking disappointing. we already spend our entire lives being told that we’re destroying various races because we aren’t “pure” enough, and constantly treated with suspicion by both sides of our family for being the wrong race.
i do not care how concerned you are about fetishisation right now - that’s fantastic, but absolutely does not give you the right to discriminate against mixed race relationships or mixed race people! when your kneejerk reaction to any mixed race couple is immediate concern and suspicion, you cannot pretend you don’t think “every interracial couple is like that” when you are treating every interracial couple like that. the only social reality being ignored here is the unholy amounts of shit mixed race couples and people get from society, and you are actively contributing to that with your kneejerk negative reaction to them. i’m sorry it was just a “nuisance” to you - this is my entire life!
you can absolutely acknowlege problems, yes absolutely - but only if they arise. otherwise, you are being racist towards mixed race people and couples and you need to acknowledge that.
check your monoracial privilege.
you are reaching so hard in this post im worried you might have sprained something vital.
1. monoracial privilege is not a thing anymore than monosexual privilege is. let’s just get that basic framework established first.
2. it is not discriminating against mixed raced children (you pulled that idea out of thin air lmao the op didn’t even MENTION them) to be concerned ab the balance of power and privilege in a white/poc interracial relationship. if you’re really concerned ab problems mixed kids face like idk, the racism and abuse our white parents throw at us is a bigger problem than those evil monoracials being worried our white dad is a fetishist.
3. again I know half of tumblr SJ is SOCY 101 kids who can’t understand social dynamics unless they’re steamrolled to fit into a privilege/privileged format for easy consumption and the other half just want any chance to collect SJ points and level up but. Monoracial. Privilege. Is. Not. A. Thing. Especially in America or Europe aka “non poc counties” lmao.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
how many of us have disordered eating because buying food is too expensive? because prepared food it too expensive? because we don’t have the energy to feed ourselves? because we forget we need to eat? because sensory problems makes most food too hard? because food requires too much focus so we just forget about it?
boys
cons: literally everything
pro: they usually know the answers to questions in sports category on trivia crack
I almost forgot that blatant misandry and generalising an entire gender was funny! Thanks for the borderline daily reminder.
k anyway do you know for what franchise the basketball player Otis Birdsong played for in the 1980-1981 season
little bpd things
other mental illness resources: how to cope and get better because you’re worth it
bpd resources: how other people should deal with you because you’re a burden
Friday, January 23, 2015
I’ve been living like this longer than I ever lived without being a fucked up snarl of hatred and more hatred and rage and guilt and shame. Great job, me. Cheers, gg on getting this far. Here’s to twelve years of nothing but straight fuck ups.
PSA: don’t fuck kids or they end up like me and you don’t want anything to be like me, ever. I’m going to go smash a bottle of vodka over my head and then lick the shards clean.
I don’t ask for a lot, I just want to go one day without intrusive thoughts dominating every single moment and flashbacks triggering at the drop of a pin. Also I want everyone to love and worship me unconditionally while I throw a stack of plates into a wall and set myself on fire but like, I’ll settle for just the former?
what is the point of being so strong when this strength protects nothing. there is nothing inside this body. there is nothing here. i’m a shell stumbling through the remnants of a life that ended more than a decade ago, pretending to be a beloved sister a beloved daughter but that girl is dead and i just want to rest with her.
i can’t sleep i am tired but i can’t sleep because i have been having unceasing nightmares since we started imaginal exposure and like my head isn’t safe i know that the world isn’t safe i know that there is nothing nothing nothing and no one safe but i want to feel safe just for a little while is that so hard i wan tto stop fighting if only for a moment.
mostly i just wish prasad was here so i could sob into his shoulder lmao i’m tired of being the strong stoic one with no feelings.
prasad’s skype is broken so i have no one to talk to and ptsd pe therapy has been utterly destroying every ounce of progress i have made to claw my life back from the abyss over the past twelve years im honestly thinking clawing off my own skin and jumping in front of a car is a better alternative than showing up to my appointment tuesday.
turns out you’re wrong, sherlock holmes. i don’t do any kind of farming or professionally take care of dogs or anything you said. i threw on all this shit to see which and how many wild assumptions you’d make about me from one random glance, like an asshole. and you did. you made so many assumptions about my life just by taking one look, you asshole. here’s an assumption for you: sherlock holmes is a huge jackass
Within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.
Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60’s (via daughterofdiaspora)
What's wrong with the word classist not hating just wonderin
because the problem is capitalism and the point is to abolish the class system, not to make sure the bourgeoisie stop calling working class people Bad Names lol
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Hello. I’ve attempted to share a PayPal link for donations (much to update you all on [also, how do you guys do the HTML embedding - this breaks a lot). If you can, please let me know if it is visible and functional on my blog. In unrelated news, I have been working on creating several lists of free and accessible reading material for interested readers. Hope to post it today. Stay warm.
please help mehreen!!!
Hello, I saw you comment on a post about how missionaries in developing countries are ruining the cultures/societies of their people, and it really intrigued me. You see, I am about to go on a trip to Nairobi this coming June with the organization Me To We. Me To We is not religious and I'm not a religious person. But, while there I will help build a school and learn about Maasai culture. Do you feel that service trips without the intention of converting/teaching people are still alienating?
I am radically against service trips where people go to “build schools” (or other facilities) in a developing countries, and I find them to be incredibly disempowering and paternalistic at their core. It all boils down to stroking the (usually white) egos of the volunteers to make them feel like “good people” and does NO longterm good for the community.
I just wish people thought more critically about international development and saw through the smoke screen of “aid” that many of these “development” organizations put up as part of the white savior industrial complex. Like it just seems so obvious to me that an organization that goes through all of the logistical and human effort needed to bring “volunteers” to build schools in ~*aFriCa*~ has values that are fundamentally not aligned with those of their communities. They do not have the best interest of locals at heart, at all.
If they cared about the community, they would be building out local capabilities and talents rather than trying to make a quick buck from western volunteers. They wouldn’t be bringing in untrained (usually) white people from the West without any language skills or understanding of local cultural intricacies to a community that is most at need. Rather than siphoning resources toward making white people “feel good” about themselves and aligning their values with white supremacy and white savior-dom, instead they would be working to give that exact same business to local carpenters and construction workers. Or, worst case, they would bring in people using those same dollars to train community members so that they develop these critical skillsets for themselves and their community at large. Why not actually work in solidarity with a community and build together to improve and develop local capabilities in the longterm? Why must we instead center the white gaze and destructive paternalism, which is disempowering and harmful and only has one longterm impact: making the Western volunteers “feel good” about themselves for “saving the Africans”
It makes me sick.
I also think it’s just so indicative of the deepset narcissism that lies in white supremacy and Western global hegemony that somehow we think that we can “build a school” better than people who are actually from that community. You know the ones who intimately know their needs and those of their communities, far better than the volunteers swooping in for 2 weeks to “save” them. How sick is it that we presume that “expanding our global horizons” can come at any cost, including undermining the fabric of a community, breeding dependency, and pulling resources away from actually building out the longterm capabilities of the people in these communities? I discussed these topics at length with someone who worked in international NGOs for 7 years in Africa and who left incredibly jaded because she saw how the values of so many of these organization was focused on “more NGO, now” rather than doing the more important work of creating communities where the presence of NGOs fades progressively with time as these communities are empowered.
The structure of the white savior industrial complex is one of disempowerment, damage and harm. Participating in it furthers this destruction and hurts these communities in the long run.
The vast majority of these international aid and development NGOs do not have our best interests at heart, and are simply there to make white people (and other Westerners) feel better for the “good deed” they did once in ~the third world~
It’s horrible.
Absolutely. Think about how much money it takes to send a “volunteer” to a volunteer location. A couple thousand dollars, right?
They could *hire* dozens of local EXPERTS for the cost of ONE volunteer’s plane ticket. And then they could *actually* put money back into the place’s economy.From a former volunteer: “Our mission while at the orphanage was to build a library. Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual. Us mixing cement and laying bricks for 6+ hours, them undoing our work after the sun set, re-laying the bricks, and then acting as if nothing had happened so that the cycle could continue.
Basically, we failed at the sole purpose of our being there. It would have been more cost effective, stimulative of the local economy, and efficient for the orphanage to take our money and hire locals to do the work, but there we were trying to build straight walls without a level.”
(http://pippabiddle.com/2014/02/18/the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys/)
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
If everyone was actually demisexual as some of its critics claim the world would be completely different.
Hypersexualized advertisements, sex work, one night stands, one of the deadly sins, and porn would all be so much less prevalent and institutionalized in our society.
If you honestly think that demisexual is what everyone is like you probably don’t understand what demisexual is.
pretty sure most of those examples have a lot more to do with the prevalence of misogyny, not sex
On Medical Schools and Empathy
When do medical students lose their empathy?
The moment I truly realized how much the system had affected me was taking the history of a young woman in her twenties (my age), who had presented with a nebulous constellation of symptoms and ultimately was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that had a survival rate of less than 20%. She had three children, a husband, and until that moment, in the emergency department, had no idea that her life was about to change completely. I completed the history, felt a momentary stab of pity, and immediately searched for my consultant to tick the box and mark my form so I could get through the daily checklist of requirements I needed to fulfill to successfully complete the rotation. I did not stop to think about this patient and the news she was receiving and how that would affect her and the people who loved her until I was driving home. As I sat at the traffic lights and reflected upon her terrible diagnosis and equally distressing prognosis, the question that swam into my mind was this: “What kind of person have I become? And what kind of doctor will I then end up being?”
The third year of medical school turns students from altruistic to bitter
Many of the qualities that students entered medical school with—altruism, empathy, generosity of spirit, love of learning, high ethical standards—are eroded by the end of medical training. Newly minted doctors can begin their careers jaded, self-doubting, even embittered (not to mention six figures in debt).
The erosion of empathy, for example, may have long-reaching consequences. Patients of doctors who score lower on tests that measure empathy appear to have worse clinical outcomes. Diabetic patients, for instance, have worse control of their blood sugar and cholesterol. Cancer patients seem to experience more depression. Medication compliance diminishes. Even the common cold can last longer.
Teaching empathy in medical school
hen students first start medical school, they are often very empathetic. They are idealistic and desire to become healers, caring for rich and poor alike. Sometimes, however, the ability to connect emotionally with patients decreases during medical school, residency, and on into a doctor’s career. One study has shown that empathy significantly declines in the third year of medical school, when extensive exposure to clinical settings typically first occurs.
Articles
Evidence of declining empathy in third year osteopathic medical students
The devil is in the third year: a longitudinal study of erosion of empathy in medical school.
Humanism at heart: preserving empathy in third-year medical students.
Michael Brown’s killer will not face federal civil rights charges
The Department of Justice has decided it will not pursue federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who shot and killed unarmed black teen Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014.
Prosecutors had been investigating the circumstances surrounding the fatal encounter for months, continuing their work well after a St. Louis County grand jury decided in late November that it would not return an indictment against Wilson, who resigned from the force days later.
This unfortunately comes as no surprise
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The defence of misogynist art is not dissimilar to the defence of misogynist everything else. Misogyny both creates and thrives on women’s intellectual insecurities, implying that dissent merely signifies one’s inability to access a greater, higher truth. Don’t criticise misogyny in porn or people will say you’re sexually repressed; don’t criticise it in comedy or they’ll say you’re humourless; don’t criticise it in art or they’ll say you’re stupid. In fact, why not save time and never criticise it anywhere? Be a cool girl, not some 1970s earth mother who believes all kinds of hippy shit about women’s bodies, inner lives and creativity being worth something. Welsh describes the outrage directed at American Psycho as “disingenuous”. It’s not clear what he means – perhaps he doesn’t know, either – but it’s made quite clear that a good girl ought to shut up and do what the nice man says.
What I look forward to most about my upcoming move is escaping my current work environment. I work at a high end restaurant and I am the only non-white server. There is only one other non-white employee and she works the bar, so we don’t interact much. We’re both liteskint and conventionally attractive and I have no doubt that’s why we were hired.
This environment is killing me slowly. It’s like choking down poison. Always being fawned over as a “gypsy”, the objectification, the tokenism, the islamophobia. I mean, coworkers are never your friends but it is hard to work in a place where I know most of my coworkers probably don’t register me as a person, even. Navigating their social field of microaggression and casual racism is tiring as hell. I’m excited to move and change and to try and find a less white job.
intimate trust by me
i wanted to draw something casual and intimate and cute at once for these two, something happening like… on a lazy sunday? yeah, i’ve always found a woman shaving a man quite erotic —don’t ask XD— so TADA! here some SasuSaku fluff!! (i added the colors quickly so i am sorry for the bad coloring *oops*)
Free PDF Books on race, gender, sexuality, class, and culture
Found from various places online:
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Angela Y. Davis - Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Y. Davis - Race, Women, and Class
The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (link updated 1/14)
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (link updated 1/14)
The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America- Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki (link updated 1/14)
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism - bell hooks (link updated 1/14)
Feminism is for Everybody - bell hooks (link updated 1/14)
Faces at the Bottom of the Well - Derrick Bell
I am Your Sister - Audre Lorde (link updated 1/14)
Black Feminist Thought-Patricia Hill Collins (updated 1/14)
Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Medical Apartheid - Harriet Washington
Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory - edited by Michael Warner
Colonialism/Postcolonialism - Ania Loomba (updated 1/14)
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
This Bridge Called by Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by CherrÃe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
What is Cultural Studies? - John Storey (updated 1/14)
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture - John Storey (updated 1/14)
The Disability Studies Reader (updated 1/14)
Michel Foucault - Interviews and Other Writings
Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3
Michel Foucault - The Archeology of Knowledge
This blog also has a lot more.
(Sorry they aren’t organized very well.)
I had been looking for the file for a few days now and became restless not seeing it anywhere but I finally found it. Here is an accessible PDF of the selected essays by Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre’s in State, Space, World. [x]
Hey Noor, what is your opinion on western humanitarian intervention in other countries?
*rubs hands*
Okay you should really really really read Mamdani’s ENTIRE piece, “The New Humanitarian Order" because I guarantee you will be snapping in agreement the entire time, and he says it so much better than I can but here is an excerpt that just about sums up humanitarian intervention for me. It’s long, but the context is necessary:
When World War II broke out, the international order could be divided into two unequal parts: one privileged, the other subjugated; one a system of sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere, the other a colonial system in most of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Postwar decolonization recognized former colonies as states, thereby expanding state sovereignty as a global principle of relations between states. The end of the cold war has led to another basic shift, heralding an international humanitarian order that promises to hold state sovereignty accountable to an international human rights standard. Many believe that we are in the throes of a systemic transition in international relations.
The standard of responsibility is no longer international law; it has shifted, fatefully, from law to rights. As the Bush Administration made patently clear at the time of the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian intervention does not need to abide by the law. Indeed, its defining characteristic is that it is beyond the law. It is this feature that makes humanitarian intervention the twin of the “war on terror.”
This new humanitarian order, officially adopted at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, claims responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations. That responsibility is said to belong to “the international community,” to be exercised in practice by the UN, and in particular by the Security Council, whose permanent members are the great powers. This new order is sanctioned in a language that departs markedly from the older language of law and citizenship. It describes as “human” the populations to be protected and as “humanitarian” the crisis they suffer from, the intervention that promises to rescue them and the agencies that seek to carry out intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even antipolitical. Looked at closely and critically, what we are witnessing is not a global but a partial transition. The transition from the old system of sovereignty to a new humanitarian order is confined to those states defined as “failed” or “rogue” states. The result is once again a bifurcated system, whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East.
The Westphalian coin of state sovereignty is still the effective currency in the international system. It is worth looking at both sides of this coin: sovereignty and citizenship. If “sovereignty” remains the password to enter the passageway of international relations, “citizenship” still confers membership in the sovereign national political (state) community. Sovereignty and citizenship are not opposites; they go together. The state, after all, embodies the key political right of citizens: the right of collective self-determination.
The international humanitarian order, in contrast, does not acknowledge citizenship. Instead, it turns citizens into wards. The language of humanitarian intervention has cut its ties with the language of citizen rights. To the extent the global humanitarian order claims to stand for rights, these are residual rights of the human and not the full range of rights of the citizen. If the rights of the citizen are pointedly political, the rights of the human pertain to sheer survival; they are summed up in one word: protection. The new language refers to its subjects not as bearers of rights—and thus active agents in their emancipation—but as passive beneficiaries of an external “responsibility to protect.” Rather than rights-bearing citizens, beneficiaries of the humanitarian order are akin to recipients of charity. Humanitarianism does not claim to reinforce agency, only to sustain bare life. If anything, its tendency is to promote dependence. Humanitarianism heralds a system of trusteeship.
It takes no great intellectual effort to recognize that the responsibility to protect has always been the sovereign’s obligation. It is not that a new principle has been introduced; rather, its terms have been radically altered. To grasp this shift, we need to ask: who has the responsibility to protect whom, under what conditions and toward what end?
The era of the international humanitarian order is not entirely new. It draws on the history of modern Western colonialism. At the outset of colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading Western powers—Britain, France, Russia—claimed to protect “vulnerable groups.” When it came to countries controlled by rival powers, such as the Ottoman Empire, Western powers claimed to protect populations they considered vulnerable, mainly religious minorities like specific Christian denominations and Jews. In lands not yet colonized by any power, like South Asia and large parts of Africa, they highlighted local atrocities—such as female infanticide and suttee in India, and slavery in Africa—and pledged to protect victims from their rulers.
Mamdani later discusses the difference between “genocide” and “counterinsurgency”. Spoiler alert, there is no difference:
What, then, is the distinguishing feature of genocide? It is clearly not extreme violence against civilians, for that is very much a feature of both counterinsurgency and interstate war in these times. Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different “on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion” is that violence termed genocide. It is this aspect of the legal definition that has allowed “genocide” to be instrumentalized by big powers so as to target those newly independent states that they find unruly and want to discipline. More and more, universal condemnation is reserved for only one form of mass violence—genocide—as the ultimate crime, so much so that counterinsurgency and war appear to be normal developments. It is genocide that is violence run amok, amoral, evil. The former is normal violence, but the latter is bad violence. Thus the tendency to call for “humanitarian intervention” only where mass slaughter is named “genocide.”
For a perspective on how Western imperial humanitarian intervention is extremely gendered, here’s a little excerpt of “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving" by Lila Abu Lughod:
Most pressing for me was why the Muslim woman in
general, and the Afghan woman in particular, were so crucial to this cultural mode of explanation, which ignored
the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated,
in sometimes surprising alignments. Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this “War against Terrorism” in a way they were not in other conflicts? Laura Bush’s radio address on November 17 reveals the political work such mobilization accomplishes. On the one hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should have been maintained, There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one word—a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-and-the-terrorists. Then there was the blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish. On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the “civilized people throughout the world” whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, “impose their world on the rest of us.”Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the “War on Terrorism” of which it was allegedly a part.As Laura Bush said, “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (U.S. Government 2002).
These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men. The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East, In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called "colonial feminism" was hard at work. This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no support to women’s education and was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed women’s suffrage back home.
Sociologist Marnia Lazreg (1994) has offered some vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to its cause in Algeria. She writes:
Perhaps the most spectacular example of the colonial appropriation of women’s voices, and the silencing of those among them who had begun to take women revolutionaries.. . as role models by not donning the veil, was the event of May 16, 1958 [just four years before Algeria finally gained its independence from France after a long bloody struggle and 130 years of French control—L,A.]. On that day a demonstration was organized by rebellious French generals in Algiers to show their determination to keep Algeria French. To give the government of France evidence that Algerians were in agreement with them, the generals had a few thousand native men bused in from nearby villages, along with a few women who were solemnly unveiled by French women. Rounding up Algerians and bringing them to demonstrations of loyalty to France was not in itself an unusual act during the colonial era. But to unveil women at a well-choreographed ceremony added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized the one constant feature of the Algerian occupation by France: its obsession with women. [Lazreg 1994:135]
Lazreg (1994) also gives memorable examples of the way in which the French had earlier sought to transform Arab women and girls. She describes skits at awards ceremonies at the Muslim Girls’ School in Algiers in 1851 and 1852. In the fust skit, written by “a French lady from Algiers,’ two Algerian Arab girls Reminisced about their trip to France with woids including the following:
Oh! Protective France: Oh! Hospitable France!. ..
Noble land, where I felt free
Under Christian skies to pray to our God:.. ,
God bless you for the happiness you bring us!
And you, adoptive mother, who taught us
That we have a share of this world,
We will cherish you forever! [Lazreg 1994:68-69]These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of
this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian
skies. This is not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists
would “like to impose on the Rest of us,’ Just as I argued above that we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives, so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria,
and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them,
claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.So as you can see from only two relatively short pieces on the subject, humanitarian intervention has long been an instrument in Western imperial intervention. The distinction between crimes like “genocide” and “counterinsurgency” entirely depends on who is doing the killing. (Mamdani and Abu Lughod both regard the War on Terror and humanitarian intervention to be different sides of the same coin.) In Mamdani’s piece, he also elaborates on the ways in which Western colonialism often constructed categories of division, instigated conflict in its colonies, and now we see the West posturing itself as the intervening savior. Lastly, the very real struggles of Muslim women also have been and still are co-opted by a Western imperialist, islamophobic agenda under the guise of “saving”.
In conclusion, it’s bullshit.
Capitalism has co-opted homosexuality and is wielding it as a tool, crafting imagery and definitions of “homosexuality” in order to push products, or rather, push subjectivities, shaping and sexualizing the way consumers view themselves and the world.
Nicholas Martin Arrivo, Selling Sexuality: A Critical Genealogy of Homosexuality and Capital (via s3p0y)
How much wealth can one flaunt before the miserably poor before they decide to do something about it? My daily room rent at the club was more than the monthly salaries of most of the staff. I ate dinners with friends that cost more than the monthly salary of government school teachers. I bought a shirt for my wife that could have paid the tuition for a child to attend school for a year. It was about 65 dollars and hand-embroidered. How much can one indulge oneself before one senses some dissonance? Before one feels some shame? And I am not saying this is a unique Pakistani problem: I have felt something similar stepping out of the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York after a round of drinks with friends and hopping over a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box to get into my taxi. That too is obscene. That too has made me feel sick.
Unequal distribution of wealth and income have been much in the news in the West in recent years and discussions of these subjects in the more serious intellectual journals have reached a fever pitch recently since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s tour de force, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which adduces new evidence and arguments to show, among other things, that concentrations of capital and income in the top 1% of the richest persons in America have now once again reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. And there is much discussion there on how to combat and curb these fundamentally inegalitarian trends. But in Pakistan, where things seem much, much more extreme, there is little or no talk of how to redistribute wealth. The dreams of social justice of the 1960s and 70s have not just died, they have long been buried and forgotten.
The Discombobulating Hedonism and Exclusivity of a Karachi Club
we disappear
eagles tigers
nothing in the gold
nothing in the emeralds
nothing in the feathers
nothing in the word//
it is so hard
to live like this!
no happiness on the earth
for me//
we live on earth
lent
here we are
men
over there ones without bodies
in your house
here home between
a little while only
//on the edge of war near the bonfire
we taste knowledge//
because I cry
because I am desperate
I am left alone
there is no compassion on earth
how can I live among men
even at your side
god
I am bitter//
where are we going Oh where are we going
are we dead are we still alive
is this where time ends is there time somewhere else
people are only here on earth
with pungent flowers and with songs
and out of the world
surely
they make truths!//
only with our flowers can we find pleasure
only with our songs does our sadness dissolve
Stephen Berg, Nothing in the Word: Versions of Aztec Poetry (via heteroglossia)
I’ve always had a problem with the comparison of Palestine to South Africa. Not that what’s happening in Israel isn’t apartheid, but it is an apartheid that doesn’t look anything like South Africa’s apartheid, and that needs to be acknowledged.
Here’s my reason for disliking the comparison: Israel’s occupation of Palestine is much, much worse than White South Africa’s colonization of Black South Africans was.
South Africa operated according to a colonialist logic. Israel operates according to a genocidal logic.
White South Africa had an investment in the perpetuation of the Bantustans, the cordoned off slums in which Black South Africans were relegated to. Black labor sustained the Apartheid state — it was a source of steady, cheap labour that served as the lynchpin for the South African economy. That meant that Whites at least had an incentive to keep Black South Africans alive. Subjugated, imprisoned — but alive.
Israel has no similar investment in Palestinian lives.
Since 1993, since the fall of the Soviet Union, millions of Russian Jews have emigrated to Israel, providing the cheap labor the Israeli economy required to function — rendering the Palestinians, who had previously constituted Israel’s working class, utterly irrelevant to the state of Israel. Palestinians, for more than 20 years, have been a surplus population; nothing more than a nuisance to Israel and its economy.
The grand project to wall in the Palestinians started around the same time as Palestinian labor lost its position in the Israeli economy. (The Israelis, of course, claim that the wall project started in response to terrorism. This is nonsense. Palestinian terrorism is the strawman trotted out each time Israel needs a villain to throw darts at. Their true motivation is political and economic.) Palestinian life turned from a hard but tolerable existence in slum-like conditions, to living in an open air prison. Things have only gotten harder, with each successive embargo, with each encroachment of Israeli settlers and their accompanying military apparatus on Occupied land.
Israel is squeezing Palestine to death. What happened a few months ago in Palestine, Operation Protective Edge, as the Israelis are calling it, will happen again, and again, and again. Liberals are mistaken when they mourn the wars of the region, hoping beyond hope for diplomacy, praying for peace, pleading with “each side” to lay down its arms and embrace each other. What they fail to recognize is that a state founded on settler-colonialist logic is inherently primed to replace indigenous cultures and peoples with transplanted ones. There is no “normal” to return to, there is no baseline of peace that we can bounce back to when “tensions” die down. How things are is how they are meant to be.
This is the Israeli strategy: Force Palestinians to leave their homeland, and kill the ones who choose to stay.
Never forget that.
"and that needs to be acknowledged"
Who the fuck are you? What is it with this website and its uncanny ability to attract the most pompous navel gazers who actually think a point that has been rehashed to death is fresh and profound when they turn it into a flaccid text post? Do you honestly believe you’re the first person to realize that.. *gasp* two oppressions that operate(d) on a different axis, socioeconomic history and biopolitical metrics, didn’t actually have the same trajectory? Are you joking? You can’t seriously be that invested in your pseudo intellectualism. Are you also that student who flails your arm violently when a professor asks a rhetorical question that everyone else in the lecture hall knew didn’t need an answer?
You don’t seem to understand (or perhaps you just don’t care) that both Palestinians and South Africans have commented on the parallels between their own experiences under settler colonialism and that in itself is denying autonomy and analytic agency to colonized subjects, which ironically is one of the most consistent tactics in the trajectory of colonialism.
One of the primary reasons (which seems to be lost on you, so I’ll iterate) that Palestinians and solidarity activists relay the parallels with South Africa is because its one of the main instances in which the colonized achieved their immediate liberation through economic pressure and boycott. When you insist that the two cannot be paralleled, what you’re telling activists for Palestine is that they don’t have hope with BDS because things are so much worse (which is still an illegitimate and very much contestable point). Does that sound like an honest and thorough political objective?
Aside from the clear apathy you feel towards settler colonialism in South Africa, your points about Palestine are also historically inaccurate. The idea that Palestinian labor isn’t exploited or a significant part of the current working class structure is only a conceivable idea if you’re solely focusing on Gaza and not the West Bank or what is now Israel. (x) (x) Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem account for a large percentage of textile and factory workers. So much of the internal Sodastream controversy stems from putting working class Palestinians in morally precarious situations by giving them either the option to eat and work in an exploitative setting or refuse to engage with a company that profits from settlements, but have even more limited work options. (x) Just to add on, primary exploitation of low level “Jewish labor” (for a lack of better terminology) did not start after the fall of the Soviet with Russian Jews. That quota has been filled since the 50’s by Mizrahi/MENA Jews. Excerpt below.
The Mizrahim who arrived in Israel landed in corrugated iron transit camps where Israeli officials attempted to strip them of their “Arabness” by getting rid of their “unpronounceable” Arab names and replacing them with good “Jewish” names.Most ended up in agricultural work, 10-12 hours a day in conditions of disease and squalor. Their high death rate was explained by one Zionist official as a “common and natural thing”.
[..]
Today Mizrahim constitute around 50% of the Israeli population. Palestinian Arabs make up another 20%, so the total non-European population is about 70%. This rises to 90% with the inclusion of Palestinians from the occupied territories, making clear the colonial nature of Israel.
Mizrahim and Palestinian Arabs make up the vast majority of the Israeli working class, concentrated in lower paid sectors and largely ignored by the official trade union movement, the Histadrut. (x)
You’re basically asserting that one, working class Palestinians accounted for much of labor exploitation in Israel prior to the 80’s (which is wrong) and that they don’t account for much of low level labor currently (which is also wrong).
Here’s an excerpt from a report done on Israel and labor exploitation. “However, the hundreds of thousands of Russian and other Eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent still did not provide enough labor [..] employers began to look elsewhere, particularly from Thailand. [..] Between 1994-2000, following the start of the Oslo peace process, there were periods of relative calm in the region. There was also a considerable need for labor in Israel. [..] employers began to increasingly began to employ migrant workers, in addition to the Palestinians they employed (x).
Let’s not forget those thousands of non-Jewish migrant workers, mainly from South East Asia who are mistreated and subject to cruel treatment in Israel today and should be factored in when discussing labor exploitation. (x)
To be quite frank, your reasons for disliking the Palestine/South Africa comparison are not only irrelevant, baseless and completely besides the point, they’re pretty fucking gross too. Your ultimate qualm boils down to “Black Africans weren’t being blown off the face of the Earth and AT LEAST we have that”. Dress it up in whatever academic jargon you wish, but your entire post stems from the fundamentally flawed perspective is we should be grateful that colonialism turn into an all out genocide, the specific way that Palestinians are experiencing genocide.Except colonialism by its very aims and goals is genocide. Don’t mistake yourself. Black South Africans did endure genocide. Colonialism turns a full functioning community into an ugly configuration of hierarchy, oppression and making pariahs and ghosts of people and societies on their own land. Their cultural practices were barred and socially unacceptable. Many South Africans were forced to integrate with their colonizers to allow their children access into institutions and occupations that they themselves had no chance at.
By your own logic, we can also deduce that Palestinians are comparatively fortunate compared to Indigneous communities in North America because AT LEAST the vast majority of them weren’t instantly killed and AT LEAST they were turned into a forced diaspora of refugees all over the Levant, South America and beyond. So we can end that comparison too, yes? Completely ignore the solidarity, political strategizing forged between these two communities because of them. And while we’re at it, let’s nip the Jim Crow/Apartheid Wall comparisons because AT least Palestinians know their historical roots lie in Palestine, whereas Black Americans don’t. AT LEAST they weren’t trafficked for 400 hundred years. hell, Zionism hasn’t even been a concept with material impacts for 400 years. AT LEAST they weren’t shipped for six months to a full year at a time in the most heinous and unsanitary conditions possible.
How much longer do I compare what Palestinians haven’t been through before it actually disappears the very real urgency of what Palestinians do go through and how it plays into their struggle/resistance everyday? How much longer until I don’t see posts like this that treat oppression and suffering of people into a quantifiable olympic, instead of insisting upon treating the conditioning of millions into a contest of theory? This is such poor and counterproductive praxis on numerous grounds and I’m hard pressed to believe that anyone who genuinely champions for justice would make such crass and vile comparisons like this.
^^^
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