I’ve been reading Caroline New’s 2001 Sociology article about oppression (pdf link).¹ New argues against the idea that “oppression” requires a clear-cut division between “oppressor class” and “oppressed class.”

I do not believe we need to identify a clear-cut agent/beneficiary to speak of oppression. Sometimes there is one, sometimes not. I propose the following structural definition, which subsumes zero-sum conceptions when they are applicable, and allows us to recognise the very different, yet related, oppressions of women and of men.

A group X is oppressed if, in certain respects, its members are systematically mistreated in comparison to non-Xs in a given social context, and if this mistreatment is justified or excused in terms of some alleged or real characteristic of the group.

The key phrase, “systematically mistreated,” implies that as a result of institutionalised social practices, Xs’ human needs are not met, they are made to suffer, or their flourishing is not permitted, relative to other groups and to available knowledge and resources.While human needs are culturally mediated, some basic conditions for human well-being can be specified independent of social context. We recognise these as needs because undesirable consequences arise from a failure to meet them, though the severity of the price paid may range from death to discomfort.Unmet needs may result in forms of development that preclude ‘flourishing’, the term used by ecological feminist Cuomo (1998) in her feminist ethics. For Cuomo, knowledge of a thing’s nature can give rise to knowledge of what it is for it to flourish.

‘In comparison to non-members‘ means that Xs are disadvantaged in relation to non-Xs on some particular dimension or in a specific context – non-Xs may themselves be oppressed in other respects, which may sometimes result in similar (or more severe) disadvantages than those suffered by all or some Xs. ‘Justified … etc.’ refers to the tendency to legitimise oppression by treating the oppressed group as different, less than human or actually malign, and therefore not morally requiring the treatment appropriate to one’s own group.

‘Oppression’ is a value-laden term which implies that, ceteris paribus, an oppressive state of affairs should be brought to an end; this definition is clear enough to allow such states of affairs to be investigated and identified. It recognises that oppression is rooted in power relations,without reducing it to formal relations of power. Treating agents’ accounts as evidence rather than essence, it can encompass complicity and denial on the part of the oppressed. It can embrace, as relevant sorts of harm, the ‘hidden injuries’ of class, ‘race’ and so on which fall through the net of purely formal definitions. ‘Systematic mistreatment’ covers not only material inequalities but also the deprivation of ‘recognition’ and other forms of inclusion necessary for groups and communities to flourish (Young 1990). By not making identification of the agents and beneficiaries central to that of oppression, the proposed definition allows us to recognise the oppression of fat people, disabled people, children and other groups where the agents are not always the same and the question of benefits is unclear.

[…]

The proposed definition in no way denies that men are frequently – most frequently – the agents of the oppression of women. In a minimal sense this is inevitably true, since oppression is relational. If Xs are oppressed because on some dimension they are systematically disadvantaged in comparison to Ys, Ys can be seen as oppressing Xs as long as they merely accept the status quo or act in ways which
tend to maintain their relative advantage. In gender terms, such a stance would be part of what Connell calls ‘complicit masculinities,’ which accept gender privileges but keep themselves distanced from direct displays of power (1995:114). Men undoubtedly oppress women in more direct ways than this. The maintenance of the power differentials between the genders requires regular belittlement of women, continual discrimination against them, and a stream of misinformation about their capacities and liabilities. From various motives, men carry out the bulk of this work. They also oppress women by killing, beating, raping, harassing and sexually exploiting them, and by appropriating their unpaid work.Gendered power relations make such behaviour normal, in the sense of expected and intelligible, even though most of it is deplored and some of it is punishable. My contention is that men’s agency in this regard is the result of their positioning within oppressive structures. It is not caused by, and does not express, the intrinsic nature of male humans, nor was the gender order erected by men in their own pre-existing interests. Gendered interests, including those of oppressors, are constructed within gender orders, and cannot pre-exist them. Men’s agency is part of the explanation of women’s oppression only in the context of a sex-gender system which also involves the oppression of men.

I’m curious to know what “Alas” readers think of New’s definition of oppression, and of its consequential inclusion of “men” as a class that can be oppressed. My (possibly self-serving) tendency is to agree with New.

New’s analysis recognizes complicity in gender oppression, without having to argue that bullied boys, men rounded up for imprisonment or murder in war zones, and men killed at workplaces are not being oppressed by men, even though in all these cases their being male is essential for their selection for mistreatment.

Once criticism I anticipate is that the “oppression” of men cannot be oppression because their “oppressors” are male. This seems to me a dubious response, because it only makes sense if oppression is defined based on who the oppressor is, rather than on what the oppressive acts and barriers consist of. Imagine if a group of masked commandos took over the government and began rounding up and imprisoning cartoonists; would we say that whether or not this could be called “oppression of cartoonists” is contingent on unmasking the commandos, since if the commandos are themselves cartoonists no act by them can be oppressive of cartoonists?

* * * PLEASE NOTE * * *
Comments on this post are open only to feminist, pro-feminist, and feminist-friendly writers.

Curtsy: Feminist Critics.

1. Caroline New (2001), “Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men,” Sociology Vol.35, No.3, pp.729–748. (back)

Vagina Suspension 

First, the three students who were suspended for saying vagina will not have to serve their suspensions.  The school superintendent decided to rescind their punishments: 

Lichtenfeld last week froze the suspensions pending a review, and then informed the students late Monday night that he decided to rescind the punishments.

The response from those at the school board meeting last night was evenly split. Some continued to argue that the school administration never should have asked the girls to refrain from saying the word in the first place, while others argued that the decision to rescind the punishments undermines the principal’s authority.

You can read the entire story in the Westchester Journal News.

Wrongful Conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic 

The other update is related to the wrongful conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic.  The man whose DNA was actually found at the scene has been identified.  He subsequently pled guilty to second degree murder in the death of Angela Correa.

Steven Cunningham told The Journal News in October that he would not force a trial if charged in the death of Angela Correa. Yesterday, he kept his word, pleading guilty to second-degree murder after a judge promised him 20 years to life in prison.

Correa’s mother, Angela Vasquez, watched silently in Westchester County Court in White Plains as Cunningham admitted fracturing the girl’s skull and strangling her during a rape. Afterward, she declined to comment, saying it was still too painful to talk about her daughter’s death and the recent twists in the case.

“He made it clear to me from the outset that he wanted to plead guilty,” said Cunningham’s lawyer, Barry Warhit. “He knows he will spend the rest of his life in prison, but he wanted to plead guilty.”

I suppose it is a good outcome considering how bad this situation was.  Not only did they convict the wrong person, but the man who actually murdered Angela Correa went on to murder his girl friend’s sister (Patricia Morrison) a few years later.  He went to jail for the second murder, but had he been caught the first time perhaps both Deskovic and Morrison would have been spared.

As for Deskovic he seems to be adjusting fairly well given the circumstances.

He is now a student at Mercy College, working to complete a bachelor’s degree in psychology, which he began in prison. He has spoken about his ordeal at several forums around the state and is working with New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty to highlight the dangers of wrongful convictions.

Deskovic is pursuing a lawsuit against Westchester County and Peekskill for his ordeal. He has expressed anger at Cunningham’s role in that - particularly after the killer claimed he never knew someone went to prison for his crime. But yesterday, when told Cunningham had pleaded guilty, Deskovic said his only thoughts were about Correa’s mother, sister and stepfather.

Hopefully, the Deskovic, Correa, and Morrison families will all be able to go forward in spite of this terrible series of events.  I think this makes it clear how one mistake in our criminal justice system can have a domino effect; hopefully groups like the Innocence Project will lead to fewer cases such as this.

Please go check it out.

I’m a bit late in posting this; today is the final day of Majikthise’s pledge week. Lindsey is taking requests for blog post subjects from donors. She’s raising money for a new camera and other journalistic expenses. I really admire what Lindsey’s doing in becoming, in effect, a professional blogger.

The Carnival will be held at Racialicious.  Go here for submission information.

Nexy reports that’s she’s been having problems leaving comments on “Alas” and other wordpress blogs. She’s not the only one; I’ve had similar reports from Jake Squid and Defenestrated.

It’s normal for comments to sometimes be put into moderation; when that happens, you should see a notice saying that the comment is in moderation. But what’s happening to some posters is that their comment just fails to appear, without any notice at all. When this happens, the most likely culprit is the Akismet spam-blocker, which is now automatically built into Wordpress blogs.

If this has been happening to you a lot, you might want to go to the Akismet contact form to let them know you’re not spam.

If you think Akismet has mistaken a comment you left on “Alas’ for spam, please email to let me know immediately and I’ll try to rescue it. But it’s important to contact me quickly — I get over 400 spams a day, so I can only find yours while it’s near the top of the pile. “Akismet” is supposed to be learning software, so if I keep rescuing your comments and telling it that you’re not a spammer, eventually it should get the idea and stop mistaking your comments for spam.

If nothing else works, you can also email me a comment and I’ll post it for you.

* * *

Meanwhile, blogspot has been keeping me and (I suspect) many other people from posting comments — the word verification image isn’t loading (Nexy has a screenshot), and neither is the disabled access alternative verification. If you have a blogspot blog, you should consider turning word verification off.

(Of course, by the same token, I could turn Akismet off. For me, 400+ spam comments a day is enough so that I need a spamcatcher that’s genuinely effective at catching almost all the spam, and Akismet really is better than any other spamcatcher I’ve tried. But it’s my impression that I get more spam than many bloggers do.)

From Reuters, under the headline “Catholic politicians must oppose gay marriage: Pope”:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Church’s opposition to gay marriage is “non-negotiable” and Catholic politicians have a moral duty to oppose it, as well as laws on abortion and euthanasia, Pope Benedict said in a document issued on Tuesday.

In a 140-page booklet on the workings of a synod that took place at the Vatican in 2005 on the theme of the Eucharist, the 79-year-old German Pope also re-affirmed the Catholic rule of celibacy for priests.

In the “Apostolic Exhortation” Benedict says all believers had to defend what he calls fundamental values but that the duty was “especially incumbent” for those in positions of power.

He said these included “respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built on marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.”

“These values are not negotiable,” he said.

There are hundreds of similar articles in the mainstream media today, mostly focusing on the Pope’s “not negotiable” opposition to same-sex marriage. ¹ I’ve also seen some mentioning his opposition to abortion, and one mentioning his opposition to divorce. But defending human life until “natural death” is pretty clearly an anti-death-penalty statement, and this too is (according to the Pope) “not negotiable.” Yet I’ve been searching in vain for a single news story pointing out that the Pope called opposition to the death penalty “not negotiable.”

This confirms to a general rule the mainstream media follows: Events that highlight a split between Catholic teaching and liberal policies are news, and are reported on prominently. In contrast, events that highlight a split between Catholic teaching and conservative policies are not reported on at all.

Then again, maybe the media silence is more truthful than the Pope’s statement. Despite what the Pope said, opposition to the death penalty is negotiable. Has there been a single case of a Bishop refusing communion to a politician — or to local activists — to object to their public support of the death penalty? Will the Church leadership criticize pro-death-penalty Catholic politicians with one-tenth the passion that they’ll devote to fighting same-sex marriage? Of course not. For the Pope — and for most right-wing Catholics — supporting discrimination against queers is much more important than opposing the death penalty.

There’s also a very notable omission from the Pope’s 140-page discussion; he doesn’t call on politicians to oppose torture, nor does he call for the Eurochrist Eucharist to be withheld from politicians who support torture, even though he must know that many prominent politicians have been pressing for laws to accommodate and support torture. In fact, Benedict didn’t mention torture at all. It’s not surprising that the Pope is such a moral coward when it comes to standing up to the right wing, but it is disappointing.²

So maybe the media has it right after all.

1. Why are so many reporters using the phrase “non negotiable,” when the official text of the statement says “not negotiable”? It’s a mystery. Anyhow, here’s the relevant paragraph, quoted from the Vatican’s website:

   Here it is important to consider what the Synod Fathers described as eucharistic consistency, a quality which our lives are objectively called to embody. Worship pleasing to God can never be a purely private matter, without consequences for our relationships with others: it demands a public witness to our faith. Evidently, this is true for all the baptized, yet it is especially incumbent upon those who, by virtue of their social or political position, must make decisions regarding fundamental values, such as respect for human life, its defence from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms (230). These values are not negotiable. Consequently, Catholic politicians and legislators, conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound, on the basis of a properly formed conscience, to introduce and support laws inspired by values grounded in human nature (231). There is an objective connection here with the Eucharist (cf. 1 Cor 11:27-29). Bishops are bound to reaffirm constantly these values as part of their responsibility to the flock entrusted to them (232).

   (back)

2. Contrast Benedict’s silence on torture this week to the words of the Second Vatican Council:

   Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed. They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practise them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonour to the Creator.

   (back)

I was disappointed and upset to see that this case resulted in an acquittal. It’s hard to be surprised, the woman was drunk, and it’s hardly news that there are people who believe a drunk woman automatically consents to sex. But what really upset me, was the effects this is going to have on her life:

The complainant, who is also a student at the polytechnic, told the Nelson Mail that she planned to pull out of her studies at NMIT and transfer to another polytechnic, because she felt she could not return to the campus if Mr Singh was there.

NMIT chief executive Tony Gray said the polytechnic would continue to manage the situation if both students decided to stay there, as it had done previously by making arrangements to limit their contact on campus.

Without a guilty verdict this woman has nothing. Her polytech can’t even guarantee that she won’t have to see the man who raped her. To do this is to choose the abuser over the abused, because it is those who have least power who will feel compelled to move on.

The justice system don’t care what survivors of sexual violence want, or what they need to get on with their life. There is no way for a woman to say: “I want to live a life free of the man who raped me” without first proving that he raped you beyond reasonable doubt.

We all know that most rape cases will not result in convictions. We must be able to offer those who have been raped something more than the responsibility to avoid their rapist.

This post is open for feminist and feminist friend commenters only.

This is cross-posted at Cool Beans, however, due to the time issues and my desire to get word of this out to as many people as possible, I’m also posting it here, rather than just hoping others will link to it

At ReZoom.com, they are collecting votes for “A Better World” Awards. You can vote once a day (every day) until March 31, 2007. More than 20 charities will win $5,000, with the grand prize winner winning $100,000. You can check to see if your favorite charity is already nominated and vote for them. If it’s not, you can nominate them by filling out the on-line submission form and writing an essay that states why that charity is making the world “A Better World.”

At this point, I will take the time to try and persuade you to vote for the charity of my choice. Why should you vote for this one over all of the other deserving charities? Well, besides the fact that it could actually help me out, personally (ahem), The American Domestic Violence Crisis Line is the only crisis line of its type in the world. It is the only service available to US women, men, and children, living in foreign countries who are trying to escape domestic violence and child abuse. US crisis lines, including the National Domestic Violence Crisis Line, can only help those currently living in the US. And DV agencies in other countries (if they exist at all) can only help in very limited ways (if at all), and probably have no way of helping these women (and men) relocate back to the US (and the financial assistance is only one aspect — the legal issues are even more complex). The US Embassies may be of some help, but that will partially depend on the particular workers that are currently working in that location and how much they know or care about domestic violence.

From the essay posted on ReZoom:

The American Domestic Violence Crisis Line, (ADVCL), 866-USWOMEN, operates the only international toll free domestic violence hotline serving abused American women and children living in foreign countries. The line is currently toll free from 175 countries. Our target population is the estimated 6 - 7 million American civilians and military living in foreign countries. Officially 4.2 million civilians are registered with American Embassies along with ½ million military personnel and their families. To give a perspective of the size of the civilian population we serve, if the number of Americans registered with embassies were placed in one state, it would be the 25th most populous state in the nation. Although no statistics exist for abuse in this population, applying abuse statistics in the USA to our target population, an estimated 57,000 women and 45,000 children are abused annually.

ADVCL began crisis line operations in April 2001 just two years after Paula Lucas, Founder and Executive Director, finally escaped a foreign country with her three children to flee 12 years of domestic violence and child abuse. Frustrated at the absence of services for her and her children while overseas, and shocked at the legal obstacles she encountered upon her return home to be able to keep her American children in their own country, Paula was determined that other American women & children would not need to suffer the same fate. Paula first founded the non-profit organization as an online resource for abused Americans living in foreign countries in September 1999. At that time, she and her children were still homeless themselves, living in a domestic violence shelter.

Since 2001, the organization’s crisis line advocates have served an estimated 1,000 families on the crisis line providing crisis intervention, domestic violence advocacy, case management, safety planning, information & referral. Also since 2001 the organization has provided danger to safety trans-national relocation to 26 families back to the USA, paid 13 legal retainers to enable battered mothers to file for custody of their children in the USA, provided professional counseling to 19 abuse survivors and placed 3 families into a one-year transitional housing program.

In 2006 alone, crisis advocates received 1158 crisis calls and emails, providing services to 248 families in 47 countries. Collectively volunteer advocates volunteered 3,849 hours on the crisis line in 2006. The crisis line currently operates continuously from 9am Monday PST through Friday 11pm PST.

And here’s something else to consider, something that separates the needs of this charity from just about every other charity on this list. This valuable and much needed service takes significant amounts of funding (the phone bills alone can cost thousands of dollars every month). At this point in time, due to the inability to provide a concrete “population” (many of the numbers are estimates — and the exact percentages of DV may vary from county to country), we are unable to gain access to government grants and funds. All of our funding comes from private grants and donations.

If you already have a local charity that you believe is truly deserving of this award, by all means, vote for them. But, please consider voting instead for the ADVCL. Or, perhaps you could switch back and forth each day (again, you can vote once a day, everyday, until March 31).

The next article is hard to translate, because so much of it is based on specifically New Zealand references, but the idea of comparing urban, liberal, middle-class people with conservative, rural, working class people isn’t limited to New Zealand.

Chris Trotter’s column on Friday made connections between 1980s police rape cases and the tour.¹. I’m not willing to concede that police rape belongs to a by-gone era, but I do think there’s probably a point there. These men’s obsession with using their batons to abuse women, clearly comes out of the same culture that created the red squad.²

The first part of Chris Trotter’s article, which covers the incident in some detail, is very interesting. But I disagree with most of the conclusions that he draws from it:

The thing about the 1981 Springbok Tour that made such vicious confrontations inevitable was that people who would normally never come within half a mile of each other were suddenly arriving at the same place. The New Zealand of The Listener and film festivals and feminist consciousness-raising was on a collision course with the New Zealand of the TV Guide and “adult” videos and steaming male bodies in the rugby club changing- room.

On the surface it might have been a case of “liberals” and “progressives” meeting “reactionaries” and “racists”. But, beneath the political veneer, a deeper, more visceral, dynamic of cultural attraction and disgust was at work. In some part of their respective psyches, “Pro-” and “Anti-” responded to the Springbok Tour like a carnival freak show at the edge of town with each group defining the other as the geek.

This simplistic analysis is a reasonably common explanation for what happened in 1981. There’s enough truth in it to sound plausible, but it ignores more than it explains. It was the connections that he drew between this and the police rape cases that I strongly disagreed with:

In its essence, the public outrage surrounding the acquittal of Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum represents the moral collision of two mutually incomprehensible sub-cultures. Like Banquo at the feast, the ghost of 1981 pro-Tour provincial New Zealand has returned to trouble the consciences of the morally, politically and socially victorious veterans of the anti-Tour protests.

It’s as if we’ve all been trapped in an episode of Life on Mars with a New Zealand twist. Here, we don’t have to travel back in time to discover a world governed by sexism, racism and homophobia – we have only to take a trip across town.

When I read that Brad Shipton’s brother had described Louise Nicholas as “that maggot-lying bitch”, all I could think of was the scene with the placard 26 years ago, and wonder how many Kiwi blokes still think of courageous, outspoken and assertive women as dogs to be kicked, punched, raped, intimidated and cross-examined into a proper appreciation of male power.

The first problem with this argument is that he’s wrong. I’ve talked to lots of people about the police rape cases over the last year, middle-class, working-class, urban, provincial, progressive, conservative, and the vast majority have believed those women. I think this issue has united people across usual boundaries, not polarised them.

There is a more fundamental way that Chris Trotter is wrong. He is arguing that objectifying, abusing and degrading women is intrinsic to working-class provincial masculinity, and alien to middle-class urban masculinity. I’ve addressed this argument before, in a slightly different form.

This idea is one that I’ve only ever put forward by middle-class men, and you can see why - because it is in their interests. Either they can use it to argue that women shouldn’t fight sexism, because to do so would alientate the working class (who are inevitably entirely male). Or they can use it to distance themselves from men who abuse women and so not examine their own behaviour, or that of their mates.

In reality Chris Trotter wouldn’t even need to cross town to find men who “think of courageous, outspoken and assertive women as dogs to be kicked, punched, raped, intimidated and cross-examined into a proper appreciation of male power.” I’m sure he knows some (as Span says “Of course I spotted one particular man who really shouldn’t have been on the march, given its focus, but then activist circles aren’t necessarily less sexist than general society, and sadly I suspect he wasn’t the only hypocrite pounding the tarmac for International Women’s Day.”). Most abusive liberal men are probably smooth enough not to call a rape survivor a ‘lying maggot bitch’, but they’ll discredit her just the same.

I’ve never heard a woman express this idea, whatever her class background. You don’t have to have much experience with middle-class men to know that some of them are abusive misogynist assholes. You also don’t have to have much experience with working-class men to know how much some of them respect and support women.

1. I’m not sure I can explain what the tour means, although I’ve written about it on my blog - possibly comparing it to the anti-vietnam war movement is the best term of reference, if the anti-vietnam war movement happened in 1981 over a period of 6 weeks (back)
2. New Zealand police brigade used during the tour (back)

This is Sydney’s bunny outfit. It’s not really a bunny costume, just an outfit with bunny-themed pictures on it, but Sydney likes to pretend she’s a bunny when she wears it. Note her slight attempt to give herself buck teeth in the above photo.

More bunny pics below the fold….

Read the rest of this entry »

The New Zealand Herald, the NZ newspaper with the biggest circulation, nominated Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty the blog of the week for capturing the public mood (and quoted from this post - I was pretty happy), which gives you an idea of how widely felt the anger is.

I’m going to repost a couple of the posts I’ve written here, edited slightly to make sense All you need to know is the basic details of the case. Clint Rickards (one of New Zealand’s top police officers), Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum were police officers together in Rotorua (provincial New Zealand) in the 1980s. They used police power to rape and abuse women. Over the last two years they have stood trial for sexual offences three times. In the first trial Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton were convicted of rape. The next two juries were not told about these convictions, and each case came back with verdicts of not guilty. The women told very similar stories of being raped and abused by these men, and I believe all of them.

This post is a response to something Russel Norman, co-leader of the NZ Green party, wrote. Their focus is on the environment, and they’re usually the most left-wing party in parliament in terms of social issues. I voted for them reluctantly, but it’s very unlikely that I’ll do that again.

**************

Today Russel Norman wrote about the police rape trials on frogblog.

I don’t see that being involved in consenting group sex is any reason for him not to go back to work. And people use sex aids so using a police baton in a consenting situation doesn’t seem grounds for refusing him his job back.

What the fuck is anyone who has ever heard of the existance of feminist analysis doing suggesting that these incidents involved consenting sex?

I understand that most people have more to lose than I do, and would face consequences if they said “Clint Rickards is a rapist piece of scum” at every opportunity. But just because the jury believed that the case hadn’t been proved beyond reasonable doubt, that doesn’t make the sex consenting. Two women have come forward and said that they were raped by these threemen. Anyone who states categorically that Clint Rickards had consenting group sex is saying that they don’t believe those women.

Usually that’s what you’d expect, but all the female Green party representatives are feminists and one has talked bravely and publicly of her experience of being raped. I would have expected him to pay attention to these women, and their experiences, and not choose the words of rapists over the words of rape survivors.

Russel Norman did acknowledge that there might have been a power imbalance in an addendum, but says:

My original comment above about group sex was in response to my perception that a lot of the reaction to the case was of a conservative moralistic nature about group sex rather than about an abuse of power

I’ve paid obsessive attention to all the media, and any reading which saw a lot of the reaction to the case to be conservative and moralistic is ridiculously inaccurate. I can’t imagine what sort of priorities you have if your response to everything that’s happened is to worry that people are condemning group sex.

Those paragraphs are offensive, the rest of the article just focuses on side-issues. Russel Norman believes that the two issues that come out of this case are:
1. Should the jury have been told that Schollum and Shipton were previously convicted of rape?
2. Should Rickards be allowed to be Auckland police chief?

Here are some of the questions that I think come out of this trial:
How many women’s testimony equals one man’s in the NZ legal system?
Is Brad Shipton the most vile man in New Zealand? (I’m really hoping the answer to this one is yes)
Why was Clint Rickards promoted within the police rapidly, even after a report stated he abused his power?
Why did no-one do something to stop these men?
I’ve talked to half a dozen women who have been raped by police over the last year, how many more are out there?
What alternatives ways are there that we can get justice for rape survivors where they don’t have to go through abusive cross-examination?
Are there actually any ‘reasonable doubts’ here aren’t they all just ‘misogynist doubts’ or is that considered the same thing?
Why is the past of the woman involved fair game in rape trials?
How many times do I have to yell “it’s not a ’sex trial’ at Sean Plunkett before he hears me?
Why are the police allowed to investigate their own?

Why did these women have to go through this?

How can we make this stop?

Generally his post made it clear that he didn’t think this issue was particularly important. He’d read some of the media it wasn’t something he was focusing on (given he didn’t know a lot of rather basic facts about the cases), but he thought he’d chime in.

To me, and to so many other women and men throughout New Zealand, this case is important. It’s important because we put ourselves in those women’s shoes, because we think about the pain and horror that those women went through, because we can imagine how it’s affected the rest of their lives, and the lives of the people around them. The way Russel Norman wrote trivialises all that.

I’m not saying that everyone must obsess about this case the way I have. I’m not bedgrudging people sleeping fine, and having time and energy for other things. Even I want to think and write about other things (the Air NZ redundancies are first on the list). But I do believe that anyone who considers themselves politically progressive should give this topic weight and reverence, and realise that they’re writing on women’s lives and women’s pain.

MadTV parodies Music of the Heart, the story of a teacher (Meryl Streep) who bucks the system to bring love of music to the underprivileged colored kids she teachers. Or maybe they’re parodying Dangerous Minds, the story of an ex-marine teacher (Michelle Pfeiffer) who inspires her inner-city students with a great opening credits song. Oh, wait, I think that was Freedom Writers, the story of a history teacher (Hilary Swank) who inspires underprivileged inner-city students by making them read the diary of Anne Frank. (”See, underprivileged inner city students? Things could be worse!”)

All of these movies were based on true stories, and I don’t doubt that the women these movies were inspired by are terrific teachers and all that. But I somehow doubt their real lives were as simplistic and, well, soppy as these films are. Why does our culture have this hunger to see at-risk youth rescued by the pure hearts of gorgeous white women? And isn’t there something smary about, well, about an image like the one below this paragraph?

It’s like a generation of filmmakers saw Up The Down Staircase when they were kids and are now determined to remake it… and remake it… and remake it.

Anyhow, the MadTV parody (YouTube link) totally cracked me up. Via Assault On Black Folks’ Sanity.

I’m having a nice night. I’m a borderline teetoaller so it doesn’t take much alcohol to make me happy (in fact being drunk is such an exciting rare event that I have to talk about my drunken state constantly to whoever is around). About 11.30 my friend is heading home, so I walk with him. We stop and admire the shop that has left alone the “Clint Rickards: Rapist Scum” graffiti and the fake recruitment poster.

We go to the dairy that is open until midnight and buy some snacks. I buysome chocolate and water; he buys some strawberry and cream lollies and a red licorice twisty thing. I make him sit down and talk with me for a bit, because I don’t want to walk up the hill just yet. We sion the corner and yell at the police cars that go by (”Clint Rickards is a Rapist”, “Stop Police Rapists” and a rather ridiculous “Police Rapists Suck”).

Then I say goodbye and head up the hill. I’m thinking to myself about the blog posts I am going to write when I get home (mostly about why the existance of the police are the problem, not a few bad apples). From about a third of the way up the hill there is park on both sides of the road and that’s when I became particularly aware of my surroundings. I notice the man walking behind me; I notice the cars going past.

I am about half way up when a car stops about 40 metres in front of me. No-one gets out. There’s nothing there. The car just stops.

What I usually do in these situations (because fear is regular enough that you have a plan) is unlock my cell phone. But I don’t have a cellphone so I just hold my keys (interlaced between my fingers) and a half empty water bottle (weighing all of half a kilo).

I just keep on walking; I don’t look at them. I try to keep breathing and wait to see what happens. I just get past them when they start moving again. They follow me slowly for a few steps, and then drive off.

I’m relieved; all these two men and their car wanted to do was scare me. I’m OK now.

I walk home and start composing a new blog post, about what just happened. Because all I can do is write about it. All I can do is register the power that fear has over me.

This post is open to feminist and feminist friendly comments only.

Update That should read feminist commenters only, not just comments - this is what happens when a teetoller writes after drinking.

And, you can be suspended from school for it.  Here is the story from the New York Times.

The three girls had been warned by teachers not to utter the word. But they chose to say it anyway — vagina — in unison at a high school forum, and were swiftly punished by their school.

Now the case of the three, all juniors at John Jay High School in this affluent hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, has become a cause célèbre among those who say that the school has gone too far, touching off a larger debate about censorship and about what constitutes vulgar language.

Is vagina, or the “v-word,” as some around here have referred to it, such a bad word?

“We want to make it clear that we didn’t do this to be defiant of the school administration,” said Megan Reback, one of the three girls, who all received one-day suspensions for using the word during a reading of “The Vagina Monologues” at the forum last Friday. “We did it because we believe in the word vagina, and because we believe it’s not a bad word. It shouldn’t be a word that is ever censored, and the way in which we used it was respectable.”

We actually had a discussion about this in my sexuality class in the first couple weeks of the semester.  The students seemed to agree that many (other) people thought vagina is a dirty word, but none of them expressed opposition to the word themselves. However, most of them agreed that vagina was considered a “dirtier word” than penis.  It was a good opportunity to talk about sexism and feminism. Now I’ve got to email them this article. 

[This was originally posted in June 2002, and at some point disappeared from the archives, so I’m reposting. –Amp]

A friend of mine told me she didn’t like Peanuts better than Garfield. At first I assumed I had heard her wrong; then I assumed she was joking.

Why is Peanuts a better strip than Garfield? It’s hard not to feel ridiculous addressing this question (”why is ocean wetter than desert?”), but I’ll try.

1) Originality. Most of the best aspects of Peanuts were new when the strip started. In contrast, the main elements of Garfield are not only unoriginal – they’re usually taken from Peanuts. The basic idea of a smart pet dominating a loser owner, for instance, and the formal device of having pets “speak” in thought balloons, were both Peanuts originals that became the basis for Garfield.

2) Peanuts is a humane strip, whereas Garfield is cruel.

Not that Peanuts lacked for cruelty. The world shown in Peanuts is usually cruel — or, at least, it usually was before 1972, before the strip lost much of its vigor. But Peanuts never asks its readers to be cruel. Schulz may torture Charlie Brown, but he still wants us to sympathize with Charlie Brown’s predicament, nor are we meant to be thrilled by Charlie Brown’s failure. Compare this to the delight Garfield readers are meant to get from Jon’s humiliating rejection when Jon flirts with the pretty vet.

The reader is meant to feel superior to Jon — who is, after Garfield himself, the most important character in the strip. In contrast, readers are not invited to look down upon any major Peanuts characters; we’re supposed to feel their losses, not feel above them.

3) Emotional life. Because Schulz sympathizes with his characters, he was able to take their inner lives seriously. The result is that Peanuts at its two-decade-long peak had a much deeper, richer emotional life than Garfield — or almost any other daily strip.

Consider Linus: so insecure that he can’t go a minute without his security blanket, yet facing down bullies at school without hesitation (using his blanket as a whip). His home life is a perpetual losing war against an older sister who never gives him a moment’s peace, and he has an abiding but constantly frustrated faith in the Great Pumpkin. And at the same time, he’s a sincere Christian, whose faith is seldom talked about but usually evident in his serenity.

No character in Garfield is as multilayered or interesting as Linus. What, after all, is Garfield’s emotional life? He enjoys eating Lasagna; he dislikes Mondays (for no discernable reason, since he doesn’t have to go to work); he squashes spiders. Think of Linus’ ongoing struggle, against the scorn of all his unbelieving friends, to maintain faith in The Great Pumpkin. Can you imagine Opie having a crisis of faith?

Linus is only one of four equally well-developed main characters in Peanuts (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy are the other three), plus several supporting characters have inner lives almost as complex (especially Peppermint Patty and Sally). I’m not saying, of course, that Peanuts should be read like an Anne Tyler novel; it’s a gag strip. We should read it for the gags and laugh. But having characters with inner lives not only makes the strip cozier to read, it makes the gags funnier, because the best humor is based in character.

Although the team of cartoonists who create Garfield honestly try to entertain, the strip is structured around disdain for the dreams of the main characters. Sure, you can wring endless gags out of that formula; but you can’t wring an interesting emotional life out of it, or any real connection between their readers and the characters.

4) Sexism. Peanuts is, I would argue, one of the least sexist dailies ever; despite being created before the modern feminist movement began, Schulz created some of the strongest, most memorable female characters in the dailies — Sally, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, and especially Lucy. Both Peppermint Patty and Lucy constantly refuse to fit into 1950s ideals of what girls should be — in Lucy’s case, by being too powerful a character to squeeze into the meek ideal even as she wanted to fulfill it, in Patty’s case by being serenely oblivious.

Garfield, created after feminism should have made us all know better, nonetheless manages to be almost perfectly sexist: there are no important female characters, and the few females that exist are drawn as ridiculous caricatures of femininity (I once attended a lecture by Alison Bechdel in which she made a good case that the female characters in Garfield are actually bad drag queens), and are in the strip only so the guys can have girlfriends to chase after.

5) Grace. I’ve never found a vocabulary sufficient to discuss grace in comics drawing. It’s the way the lines all fit together purposely, pulsing with life, no line out-of-place and no line too studied. It’s all I love, visually, in comics: grace makes Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes look great, while lack of grace is why Cathy looks like shit. Every line drawn in Peanuts is perfectly placed, without ever being lifelessly mechanical. That combination of rendering skill and artistic soul is found in all the best comics — from Love & Rockets to Dykes to Watch Out For to Krazy Kat — and it is rarely done as well as Schulz did it.

“Lifelessly mechanical,” on the other hand, is an apt description of Garfield’s art. Mainly, I’d guess, this is because Garfield’s creator Jim Davis stopped drawing the strip personally many years ago. It’s now drawn by cartoonists who are obliged to slavishly reproduce Jim Davis’ style; and artists trying to look like someone else can’t allow the least spark of spontaneity or individuality in their drawings. But even in the first few years, Garfield’s visuals always had more skill than life. You can always see the draw-a-circle-than-draw-two-small-globes-embedded-in-it formula that goes into drawing the characters; all of their movements look staged rather than natural.

6) Peanuts is just plain funnier than Garfield. You remember the one where Lucy buried Linus’ blanket, and Linus desperately digs up the whole neighborhood looking for it? How about the one where an giant icicle appears above Snoopy’s doghouse, and Snoopy’s too terrified to leave?  The one where Lucy runs back and forth at her “advice five cents” stand, being both customer and advisor?  It’s hard to think of a dog in goggles standing upright on a bullet-ridden doghouse roof yelling “Curse you, Red Baron!” without getting a giggle.

I could go on forever, but I’m beginning to feel bad for picking on Garfield. Even for a strip as mediocre as Garfield, comparing it to Peanuts is unfair; only a handful of daily strips have ever been in Peanut’s class.

But still. Man. I know there’s no accounting for taste, and it’s all subjective, and to each her own and all that…

But still…

How could anyone not see that Peanuts is better than Garfield?

The mind boggles.

BumbleBee Sweet Potato presents The 32nd Carnival of Feminism!

NEW TO THE BLOGROLL SECTION: I don’t use my blogroll for blogreading anymore; I’ve been using bloglines for over a year. As a result, some of my favorite blogs never make it to my blogroll. So some of these blogs really are new to me; others I’ve admired for ages. (If I link to you regularly but you’re not on my blogroll, please drop me a line.) Anyhow…

New to the Blogroll: Anti-Essentialist Conundrum

New to the Blogroll: Super Babymama

New to the Blogroll: My Private Casbah

New to the Blogroll: Cassandra Says

New to the Blogroll: Muttering In A Corner

New to the Blogroll: Ilyka Damen

New to the Blogroll: Moderately Insane

New to the Blogroll: Renegade Evolution

Vue Point Blog: Upcoming Documentary To Spread The Word About Po’pay

Several years ago, the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in New Mexico teamed up with filmmakers Derek Stokes and Catherine Angeles of Skalalitude Productions to change all that. Their upcoming feature-length documentary, Po’pay, A True American Hero, will pay tribute to the man, and perhaps even more importantly, the legacy of his victorious revolt against the Spanish in the lives of modern-day Natives seeking to maintain their languages and traditions.

“What is so inspiring about the story it is really the only time during the colonial onslaught that an Indigenous people were able to stand up and defeat that force and save their culture in the process,” explains Stokes. “It is such a wonderfully, positive story people aren’t familiar with, although they really should be. It’s because of this revolt that the culture in the Southwest is still so strong comparatively to other Native American tribes.”

The F Word: One Man’s Conversion To Feminism Story
Curtsy: I’m Not A Feminist But…

*** ONGOING INTER-BLOG DEBATE ABOUT RACE, BEING A WHITE “RACE TRAITOR,” AND FEMINISM ***
Or, as Nine Pearls aptly calls it, “The White Lady Pity Party.” There are good link round-ups at Fetch Me My Axe and Renegade Evolution, so I won’t attempt to replicate their work. But I will point out three posts that were (for me) stand-outs: Brownfemipower’s typically super-sharp and well-written analysis; the “Clue Phone” post at Cassandra Says; and this milk-shot-out-my-nose visual post at My Private Casbah.

Cool Beans: Responding To Jessica Valenti’s Discussion Of Age Conflicts In Feminism

Amazing grotesque sculptures by Kris Kuski.
To the right is a tiny, tiny detail from one of Kris Kuski’s amazing grotesque sculptures. The intricacy his work is just jaw-dropping, and there’s a quirky sense of humor lurking, too. Curtsy: Neatorama.

Thinking Girl: Regarding Feminism and False Consciousness

Fetch Me My Axe: Feminism and “the hunger for purity or innocence.”

Feministe: The Regressive Political Implications Of Fat-Bashing Conservatives

Flash Animation featuring a gigantic mouse cursor and a lot of middle-aged men in their underwear
This totally cracked me up. Curtsy: Neatorama.

Balkinization: The Feminist Justification of Roe vs The Libertarian Justification of Roe

The very expression “reproductive rights” hides an important ambiguity. Reproductive rights could refer either to women’s ability to control their reproductive lives or to the ability to choose when and how to have offspring. In the former case, reproductive rights would help secure equality with men and avoid the subordination that comes from forced motherhood. In the latter case, reproductive rights might include the right to have a child engineered to lack a particular disease or disability, or more fancifully, the right to have a child with blonde hair and blue eyes, or even a clone of one’s self. The latter account of reproductive rights may increase the personal liberties of parents without promoting the relative equality of women.

Ares Poetica: American Domestic Violence Victim Brings Her Case To International Human Rights Commission

Cassandra Says: If You Talk About Sex Work, You Have To Talk About Class
Curtsy: Being Amber Rhea

Shrub.com: Check My What? On Privilege And What We Can Do About It.
I’ve linked to this before, but Andrea’s been updating and renaming and stuff, so I thought I’d link again.

I Blame The Patriarchy: Liberal Men Using Ann Coulter As An Excuse For Transphobia
The hypocripsy of liberals who think it’s horrible that Coulter made a gay-bashing joke about John Edwards, but who nonetheless tell trans-bashing jokes about Coulter, is awe-inspiring.

The Carpetbagger Report: So Which Labels Does He Wear Proudly?

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) got the crowd cheering early in the day. “I have been called — my kids are all aware of this — dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun,” he announced. “And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly.”

Beat The Press: Bush quietly proposes phasing out Medicare; Press doesn’t say “boo”

Moderately Insane: Raising Feminist Daughters, WordPlay Edition
The discussion in the comments is really interesting, too.

Feminist Allies: Do Women Pressure Men To Be Masculine?

Safe2Pee: A Directory Of Gender Neutral Public Bathrooms
What a great idea. Curtsy to Brownfemipower and to A.J. Luxton, who makes an interesting comparison to historic hobo signage.

Primatology.org: Male Chimpanzee Violence Towards Female Chimpanzees Doesn’t Tell Us About Humans

Ilyka Damen: On Being A House Bitch

…It keeps me up at night that I have no financial power in my marriage. My husband always claims that it’s OUR money. But, seriously, it isn’t. If he gets hit by a bus tomorrow, or leaves me for someone else, I have nothing to fall back on. I would lose everything if it got ugly. I wouldn’t even be able to pay my first husband the lousy $43 in child support I’m obligated to pay each month.

Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty: NZ Green Party Leader Blows Off Police Rape Case

Sepia Mutiny: All Over The World, Nations Are Building Giant Walls. Literally.

Muttering In A Corner: More Nonsense About Atheists Not Being Able To Have Morality
It’s disappointing to see this coming from Paul Campos, a writer I usually like.

Muttering In A Corner: Smart Women Like Men Who Like Smart Women, And So Forth

Box Turtle Bulletin: First US Soldier Wounded In Iraq Now Battles “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

The Government Accountability Office found in 2004 that of the 9,488 service members who had been discharged since 1993, approximately 757 “held critical occupations”, including 322 with “skills in an important language such as Arabic, Farsi or Korean.”

The Gimp Parade: Medicaid Wants Me To Submit A Monthly Waiver Certifying My Need To Not Drown
(And see Bint’s follow up post, too.)

Not Just Your Garden…: OMG Ceiling Cat Is Watching Me Masturbate
You have to admit, it’s an intriguing title for a blog post.

Ilyka Damon: Great post about shaming, poverty, and racism.

I recall being maybe 8 years old and standing in line at the grocery store with my mother. A woman in front of us was paying for her groceries with a combination of personal check and food stamps. My mother hissed to me, “LOOK at that. She’s wearing a leather jacket and has PICTURES on her CHECKS! Maybe she could find some ways to save some money!” [Curtsy: Fetch Me My Axe]

Newspaper Rock: Dueling Stereotypes About Indians And Casinos

The Gimp Parade: Disabled Pornography

StealthBadger.net: Fisking Rush Limbaugh’s Attack On Feminism, Plus An Intro To Feminism
Curtsy: Being Amber Rhea

Masculinity And Its Discontents: Recognizing One’s Own Homophobia

Ilyka Damen: Conversation With My Husband About Men Feeling Defensive Reading Feminist Blogs
I really enjoyed the format. Maybe I’ll try writing a post in dialog sometime.

Neatorama: Giant Zipper In Polar Ice Sheet

Fatal Accidents And Violence While At Work¹

In the United States, in 2005, men were 54% of the workforce but 93% of workers who died at work due to fatal accidents or violence (pdf link). (The raw numbers are 5300 men, 402 women).² For women at work, the most common cause of death was highway accidents, followed by homicide. For men at work, the most common cause of death was also highway accidents, followed by “contact with objects and equipment” and then by falls. Looking at risk ratios, the most likely workers to die of accident or violence at work are agricultural, fishing and lumber workers; in terms of raw numbers, however, construction workers are killed the most often.

There are a little over 200 workplace suicides each year, about 94% of which are men. (Interestingly, although in all other areas of workplace death non-whites — and especially non-white immigrants — are disproportionately likely to be the victims, a disproportionately high number of workplace suicides are committed by white workers.) The most likely occupations for workplace suicide are police, farmer, and soldier.

Death Due To Workplace-Related Disease

Workplace deaths due to accidents and violence tend to get a lot of attention, because they are dramatic and relatively simple to measure. But, in terms of total numbers, they’re a minor problem. Deaths due to workplace-related disease and toxic exposure are a far larger problem, killing over 100,000 Americans a year, according to the International Labor Organization’s estimates (pdf link).

I couldn’t find clear figures comparing female and male deaths due to work-related disease and exposure in the United States. But according to the ILO, in established market economies as a whole, 240,700 men and 46,298 women died in 2002 due to work-related disease; put another way, 84% of workers who die due to work-related disease are male. (These figures are estimates; workplace mortality due to disease is not possible to measure with pinpoint accuracy).

Occupational Segregation

What causes the discrepancy in workplace deaths? The main cause is “occupational segregation” - the tendency for some jobs to be mostly held by men, and others to be mostly held by women. The most hazardous jobs — whether due to exposure to dangerous substances, or to risk of falling or being in a highway accident — are disproportionately held by men. (Contrary to popular belief, people in risky jobs are not usually paid extra to compensate them for danger).

Occupation segregation, in turn, is caused in part by workplace discrimination, both in the form of employers preferring a particular sex, and in the form of on-the-job harassment and discrimination making blue-collar women, or a pink collar men, know that they’re unwelcome.

Occupational segregation is also caused by self-segregation, as many male workers feel uncomfortable applying for female-dominated jobs, and vice versa. There is, in my opinion, a vicious cycle functioning; the lack of pink-collar male, and blue-collar female, role models and mentors makes it less likely that future workers will cross the occupational gender line.

Conclusion

While we should fight occupational segregation, getting rid of occupational segregation won’t solve the tragedy of work-related deaths; more women and less men dying is less sexist, but still not a net improvement in terms of saving lives. What’s needed is more pro-active government intervention to make workplaces safer³ , along with a reform of tort laws to make it easier for workers and their survivors to successfully sue employers.

The problem with a dry term like “occupational segregation” is that, while it’s accurate, it also obscures how disproportionate male deaths in the workplace are caused by sexism. Nearly all of the causes of occupational segregation, in one way or another, are themselves caused in part by sexism. Workplace deaths are a clear example of how sexism harms men in the United States.

1. In this blog post, I’m concentrating on workplace deaths. But it’s also the case that men are more likely than women to be injured at work. (back)
2. This number does not include illegal jobs. My impression is that prostitution — a female-dominated job — and drug dealing — a male-dominated job — are both relatively high-mortality jobs. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that including illegal job mortality might reduce the male/female mortality discrepancy a bit, but it certainly wouldn’t eliminate it. (back)
3. There’s no reason that this has to consist solely of micro-management and regulations. For instance, the government could offer tax breaks for companies that can rigorously prove that they’ve reduced workplace accidents and fatalities by a substantial amount. (back)

I’m feeling lazy today, so only one baby blogging pic this week… Maddox in the sink. Maddox is happy to be in the sink, of course. She’s happy anywhere. Unless she’s decided that being unhappy might get her mom to put her on the boob, in which case she’s unhappy anywhere. One of Maddox’s few complete sentences is “I want boobie.”

Oh, and speaking of milestones, it’s been a week since Sydney pooped anywhere but in the potty. (Sorry, no photo to go with that).

One lovely thing about having babies is that you can dress them in the most outlandish outfits and they’ll like them. Next week: Sydney in her bunny dress.

The White Indians of the Cherokee Nation have voted to revoke the tribal citizenship of Black descendants of the Freedmen (Black Indians in my view). So the descendants of the Freedmen can no longer be members of the tribe. The vote was overwhelming.

With all 32 precincts reporting, 76.6 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of “by blood” tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission’s rolls from more than 100 years ago.

I have written about the background of this case before, and even people who are known descendants of tribal leaders are being kicked out. The evidence that the Freedmen are of Cherokee descent is strong, and the leader of the Cherokees, realizes that the Freedmen are indeed of Cherokee ancestry.

When the Dawes Rolls were created, those with any African blood were put on the Freedmen roll, even if they were half Cherokee. Those with mixed-white and Cherokee ancestry, even if they were seven-eighths white and one-eighth Cherokee, were put on the Cherokee by blood roll. More than 75 percent of those enrolled in the Cherokee Nation have less than one-quarter Cherokee blood, the vast majority of them of European ancestry.

Marilyn Vann said she could not believe that one election could determine whether she was allowed to claim Cherokee blood.

“There are Freedmen who can prove they have a full-blooded Cherokee grandfather who won’t be members,” said Ms. Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. “And there are blond people who are 1/1000th Cherokee who are members.”

Mike Miller, the Cherokee Nation spokesman, agreed.

“We are aware that there are those who can prove Indian blood who are not Cherokee citizens, because they are not on the Dawes ‘by blood’ Rolls,” Mr. Miller said. “But I don’t know of a single tribe that determines citizenship through a bunch of sources.”

In the spirit of keeping it real, I can’t understand for the life of me why anyone who is of Native American/First Nations descent would use a document like the Dawes Rolls which was drafted using the United States definitions of race to determine ancestry. I hope that they would understand how the US governments treaties and documents have never been used in a way that uplifts Native peoples, which is why relying on those documents should be obviously wrong. People who have been so decimated by racism should really know better than to engage in this racist behavior.

But u