I live in New Zealand, and like so many other countries it gives me a strange view of the USA. I’m familiar with so many things that are alien to my life. As a child I read of twinkies and home room. As a political blogger I read of primaries and supreme court appointments. But there’s much I don’t really understand. Sometimes that ignorance is a hinderence. There are things I’d genuinely like to know¹ But sometimes this difference means I see things that people more immersed may miss.

On Womanist Musings Renee began a post: “The original sin of the United States is undoubtedly slavery.”² It’s not true, the original sin, the origin sin, of the United States is colonisation. I’m not making an argument of primacy, or importance. Just of chronology. Statements such as this render colonialism, and native Americans, invisible. It invokes the idea of the colonial idea of Terra Nullis, where there were no people before colonisation, and no sin before slavery.

I read a lot of American feminist blogs, and I’m always surprised by the silence around colonialism (and I know Renee is Canadian, which makes this even stranger to me). On an intellectual level I understand the factors that tend to mean that American progressives spend less time thinking and talking about colonialism than New Zealand progressives do. But I don’t grok it - I can’t imagine it - I’ve no idea how it changes your political worldview. ³

So I thought I’d ask left-wing commenters from America and Canada, what role colonialism plays in their political analysis and understanding of their country and it’s history and racism.

Edited to Add: Just in case there was any doubt, I fully agree with Renee’s point about reparations for slavery in the post that I linked to. The line I quoted is the only line that I take issue with.

1. like why aren’t the left doing a nut about the law and order-ness of the latest supreme court judge. It seems to me that the right threw a tantram about that female judge who didn’t get nominated and they got someone they liked more. Whereas the left says “Yay she’s a centrist.” Amp has tried to explain this to me, but I don’t understand (back)
2. Personally I’m not sure about the use of ‘original sin’ as a metaphor, not just for theological reasons (I don’t know enough about the theology of original sin), but that I think the personification of nations naturalises them in a way that is unhelpful. (back)
3. I say this not to say I’m a great example on Maori sovereignty, but just that it’s a thread that I can’t imagine politics without. (back)

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

Who wants to check out the raps of a pissed-off, punk-rocking, straight-edge, vegan eating, 31337 typing, Pilipino activist blogger and scholar?

I do!

And so you do you God damn-it! The power of the simulacra of Xst compels you!

Where else can you get the postmodernist ramblings of a blogger (studying for his masters in sociology) on Donna Haraway’s cyborgisms and Marx’s alienation of labor and its use for interpreting the mega-blockbuser dark comedy Robocop (it was pretty hilarious, in a dark movie sense, the way officer Murphy got trashed by all that lead).

Just checking out his sidebar is an exercise in Internet cheekiness. His del.icio.us sidebar is titled mas.a.rap (”delicious” in Tagalog) and his monthly achieves reads “B0Mb SCh3matiCs.”

So if your down for an exercise in postmodernist intellectualism and boots on the ground Sartean Marxian activism then head on over to the 50 Megaton Paper Tiger.

This fantastic documentary (which I can’t speak of highly enough!) is now offered, in full, on YouTube. If your are in a rush just watch the first 2 minutes and 14 seconds to get a feel for it.

Through a chronological history of the South African liberation struggle, this documentary cites examples of the way that music was used in the fight for freedom.

I understand finding something to get excited about in the idea of Barack Obama being president (I don’t share it, but I can see where it comes from). I cannot understand anyone with any progressive tendancies not being appalled by his speech. The first commentary I read on the speech which made sense was Louis Proyect’s:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

[Yes, they wrote books about that. They are called Horatio Alger stories and they are bullshit. Bill Gates got where he is by being born into one of Seattle's richest families and by exploiting technology that had hitherto been common property.]

The Daily Show also did pretty well

I don’t have time (or interest) to pick apart the whole speech, but there was one section that really stuck out to me¹:

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life.

I’m going to ignore the reference to Vietnam because that’s a whole nother rant, which I’m going to assume that the reader can supply themselves. I will quickly draw attention to the fact that this narrative of US history ignores anyone who was living there before European colonisation.

But my point is something quite different. People did toil in sweatshops, endure the lash of the whip and plow the hard earth. But they didn’t do these things because they wanted to create the world that exists now, they did it because the alternative was starvation or death.

Millions of people worked in sweatshops, were held as slave and farmed in difficult conditions. They did so with varying degrees of control and consent. To say they did these things to bring about the world that currently exists is obscene. Millions of people have millions of different dreams, struggles and views of the purposes of their lives. Maybe some people were aiming to create the world that currently exists. But I know that some slaves, workers and farmers had a different idea of the worlds that they wanted to create. I know, because I’ve read about them, that some dreamed of worlds much like the world I fight for.

To claim generations of people were struggled and were exploited because so they could help create the world that we live in now is both ignorant and arrogant

1. although can I just say his view of the unselfish worker who gives up his hours so his friend will keep his job made was despicable boss pandering. How about both those workers go on strike to keep everyone’s job and reclaim some profits from the bosses. I’m not saying I expect anything else from the president of the united states. I’m just saying that I don’t see how anyone could have seen Barack Obama’s inauguration address as doing anything but choosing sides with the rich and powerful (back)

You may have seen the status updates on facebook. Although it depends on who your friends are I guess. At the moment they look like this:

In 17 days 919 Palestinians killed by Israel including 284 children & 100 women, 4260 injured.

The purpose of this post is not to draw attention to those numbers, although that’s a worthy goal. Instead I want to unpack what else the update is saying. Which may seem self-indulgent when those tallies are going up as I type, but I will get to a point, I think.

Why are women counted separately?

Maybe that’s a disengenuous question, because I think I already know the answer. It’s not just because women are the marked category, the other, although that’s true too. Listing women separately in the death tally serves a rhetorical purpose, mentioning women is a preemptive argument of innocence.

Because (rhetorically) women are not Hamas, because women do not resist. Because women, and children, are a unit of innocence and inactivity.

Those 100 women (more by the time I publish this) each had a story - each had lots of stories. To reduce those women’s lives to a proof of innocence is to deny their agency.
There are many different ways women live and die in Gaza.

I understand why the makers of the ‘Stop Israeli War Crimes’ facebook application decided to structure their information around reinforcing the idea of innocence. - It’s almost as if arguing that some Gazans are innocent (as opposed to deserving collective punishment for having elected Hamas) has become a radical position.

But I think it’s foolish to base the defence of Gaza on the idea of innocence. Once, when writing about abusive relationships I said:

If anyone who fights back is in a ‘mutually abusive relationship, then the only way you are entitled to support is if you don’t fight back. But if you react to the abuse, physically defend yourself, act jealous or fucked up by what’s happened to you, then you don’t deserve support, and people around can wash their hands and walk away from what they term a mutually abusive relationship.

As a feminist, as a human being, it is my duty and my desire, to support the powerless against the powerful, and to not wash my hands of women who fight back.

To focus on the innocence of those killed is to take the position that it is less bad if those killed are not innocent in some way. Which is to imply that the only people from Gaza deserving of our solidarity and support are those who do not fight back.

That is not my position. I do not ask or expect people to stand still and silent in the face of starvation, murder, and mass imprisonment in order to get my support(I am aware that at this point I am supposed to disclaim that I don’t support Hamas, I will not do so).

Maybe I am asking a facebook status to do too much. But I think those of us whose political analysis is more complicated than ‘women and children first’, and who do not need to see innocence to offer solidarity, should make our politics clear. Because to do otherwise is to reinforce the idea that those who fight back against oppression need and deserve our solidarity less than those who sit still.

Note for Comments This post is only open to comments from people who do not support the current actions of the Israeli state.

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to say this for a few days now, but I’ve finally decided to just point you toward Amp’s How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism. Replace “racism” with “anti-Semitism” and “white person” with “non-Jew” as you read it. Cheers! (I’m refraining from linking to individual conversations because I don’t want to make this about individual people.)

Now, sadly, in most instances I’ve seen, the only people calling out problematic statements are the anti-Palestine hawks who drop into leftist discussions just to make trouble. Nevertheless, amidst their snarling, I’m seeing legitimate points. It’s fair to ask why, if anti-Semitism on the left is a real problem, more Jewish liberals and radicals aren’t speaking up. Explanation #1 is that anti-Semitism is not a real problem, and that every accusation is a cynical ploy to squelch debate. Explanation #2, which I think is more likely, is that many Jewish liberals are reading problematic statements, getting that knot in their stomachs, and then - fearing the usual chorus of “every time anyone tries to criticize Israel they’re accused of anti-Semitism OH WHY can’t we have a debate without being accused of anti-Semitism?!” - either shutting up or rationalizing it away.

Because yes, there are people out there equating any criticism of Israel’s policies with a desire to see Jews killed. As other writers have pointed out, it’s the same cowardly tactic as the Bush administration’s assertions that liberals hate America. But the “ah HA!” response above has become thoroughly knee-jerk. Please, just listen for one second. To paraphrase Jay Smooth, it’s what you said, not what you are.

**

Meanwhile, I’ve also been trying to figure out what to say about the ground invasion.

I was talking to my husband’s family a few days ago, and his father said that he didn’t think he’d see peace between Israel and Palestine within his lifetime. He’s about thirty years older than I am, but I realized then that I don’t think I’ll see peace within my lifetime, either.

Because this invasion isn’t about the rocket attacks, just like the settlement expansion isn’t about… well, whatever people think that’s about. This invasion isn’t about Hamas; it isn’t about defense; it isn’t about the welfare of Israel’s citizens. (Where, for example, is Gilad Shalit? Dead, I’m guessing. Heckuva job, Ehud.) In 1846, the murder of a US soldier served as justification for the Mexican-American war, which led to the annexation of what’s now the southwestern United States. In 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor served as justification for an escalation of antagonistic acts against Japan that the US had already been engaging in for some time. In 2001, the attack on the World Trade Center served as (an especially shaky) justification for invading Iraq. And now, in 2008, the rocket attacks will have served as justification to install a compliant government in Gaza and possibly reoccupy it. (Matthew Yglesias compares Israel’s ideal version of Gaza to an Indian reservation - semi-autonomous, but economically handicapped and politically powerless.) Should the Japanese have killed US civilians? No. Should Mexican guerrillas have killed Colonel Cross? No (if that’s what really happened). Should Al-Qaeda have attacked the twin towers? Do I even need to answer that? And should Hamas be killing civilians? Of course not. But anyone who claims this invasion is nothing but an act of defense must think the Israeli government is profoundly stupid.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

Click here to help out and find out more information on the plight of Filipino American World War II veterans.

Julie the Girl Detective has a thoughtful post right below this one about the American Thanksgiving mythos, the enduring myth that Sarah Josepha Hale¹ created in the pages of Godey’s Ladies Book.

You should read the whole thing, but this is the question I wanted to respond to:

I’m all for a harvest festival that allows me the time to see friends and family living 400 miles away, but why do we have to perpetuate such a pernicious falsehood? What justification is there for this?

I’d like to posit an answer: It’s because we’re guilty as sin, and we know it.

By “we,” of course, I’m referring to white Americans, the folks who came up with the myth that the Wôpanâak and the Pilgrims were fast friends, working together to build a nation. It flatters us to think that we were welcomed by the indigenous peoples of this land, makes us feel like it was okay that we took it from them, piece by bloody piece, inch by bloody inch, body by bloody body. After all, they invited us in — they were asking for it.

The genocide of native peoples is hardly a unique event in human history — there have been many genocides in our past, and there will be more in our future — but it’s our genocide. This isn’t the slaughter of the Armenians or the Holocaust. This is death we caused, through disease and war and deprivation. This is land we ethnically cleansed, from sea to shining sea. This land is not yours nor mine; it was theirs. I write this on Lakota land.

The first recorded Thanksgiving in American history was in Connecticut Colony in 1637, celebrating the end of the Pequot War, and the genocide of the Pequot tribe. Those few Pequot who survived that war were either sold into slavery or fled into diaspora. But we don’t celebrate that because we’re not proud of that history. Like slavery, it is an indelible stain on our nation’s soul, one that nothing can ever erase.

This is why we cling to the myth — because we don’t want to believe our great-great-great-grandparents were murderers of a kind with the Nazis or the Hutus. We want to believe that our forbearers were good people, people who were kind to those with different skin and different languages than theirs. We want to believe that our ancestors were generous people, people who shared their bounty with others. We want to believe that our nation really was founded to be the shining city on a hill that Mather said it was.

But our nation was not founded by demigods. It was founded by people just as prone to prejudice and hate as we are today — only without the intervening four hundred years of wisdom we have gained just to get to the point where most of us believe genocide is evil — with the occasional exception.

We do ourselves no favors by clinging to the myth; believing our forebearers were good people who just happened to take over a mysteriously empty North America allows us to continue to hate immigrants, allows us to ignore the death toll in Iraq, allows us to continue believing that People Like Us are somehow superior to Other People. Better to accept that our ancestors, like all peoples’ ancestors, were flawed, and capable of the same kinds of evil that we ourselves would be capable of if not for one hundred years of concerted efforts by goo-goo liberals to drive home the point that genocide is evil. Accepting that would allow us to recognize the hatred in ourselves, and to work to eliminate it. But that’s hard, and uncomfortable. Much easier to simply hold to the fiction that there was a time, long ago, when Native Americans and American colonists sat down and broke bread together over a hearty meal, thankful for the bounty and for each other’s company. It’s a nice story, and unlike the genocide that followed the Puritan colonization, it never happened. And that makes all the difference.

1. Along with Thanksgiving, she is also the creator of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” (back)

I know this is ridiculously late, but I was visiting relatives in the Bay Area this weekend, and didn’t have much time to blog. Plus, traffic was so bad that each trip took over 9 hours. (Usually it’s around 7. A slog, sure, but doable.) For some reason, my husband and I thought we’d be the only ones zany enough to start the journey after work on Wednesday, but no, actually, everyone south of the damn Grapevine had that shitty idea. Who knew? It took us four hours just to get out of L.A. County. After midnight, when we finally decided to get a motel room south of Buttonwillow, we had to wait in line at the most crowded Motel 6 I’ve ever seen.

Anyway.

Plain(s)feminist and Nezua both wrote about the true origins of Thanksgiving, which I’d never heard before. (I’d always known that the Pilgrims-and-Indians-sitting-at-picnic-table version was more myth than fact, but I hadn’t known the extent of it.)

According to John Two-Hawks,

‘Thanksgiving’ did not begin as a great loving relationship between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett people. In fact, in October of 1621 when the pilgrim survivors of their first winter in Turtle Island sat down to share the first unofficial ‘Thanksgiving’ meal, the Indians who were there were not even invited! There was no turkey, squash, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. A few days before this alleged feast took place, a company of ‘pilgrims’ led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian chief, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out! Officially, the holiday we know as ‘Thanksgiving’ actually came into existence in the year 1637. Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed this first official day of Thanksgiving and feasting to celebrate the return of the colony’s men who had arrived safely from what is now Mystic, Connecticut. They had gone there to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot men, women and children, and Mr. Winthrop decided to dedicate an official day of thanksgiving complete with a feast to ‘give thanks’ for their great ‘victory’.

However, this is one of a few versions of the story (and none of them involve the damn picnic table). According to the LA Times (via Rye Drinker),

Although there were sporadic local Thanksgiving days in Colonial and early America, it was not until the middle of the Civil War — 1863 — that President Lincoln issued a proclamation making the last Thursday in November a national holiday of Thanksgiving. Lincoln’s statement suggested that thanks were being given as much for “the advancing armies and navies of the Union” as for a bountiful harvest, and the president urged special prayers for “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.”

I’m all for a harvest festival that allows me the time to see friends and family living 400 miles away, but why do we have to perpetuate such a pernicious falsehood? What justification is there for this?

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

When I first started teaching I taught a class called “Prejudice and Discrimination,” in order to get my students to examine race, class, gender, and sexuality issues (later I added disability) I gave them an assignment where they had to watch a TV program, and analyze it from a sociological perspective. Basically, I wanted them to apply a theory from sociology to the program they chose. It was 2000, and one student did his analysis on the Olympics. He decided to use what I’ll call a functionalist multicultural perspective. In sociology, functionalism is a conservative theoretical view that argues that society is made up of interrelated and interdependent parts, which work together to create stability harmony, and order. Functionalists generally want to minimize change, and they tend to see everything having a functional purpose. The competing theory is conflict theory. Conflict theorists see a society that is driven over competition for scarce resources–in particular they see conflict stemming from the competition between society’s haves and have nots. Since conflict theory is inspired by some insights of Marxism, conflict theorists believe that social change is necessary.

In my student’s view, the Olympics were great because they brought all the people of the world together. Furthermore, everybody was competing on an equal playing field. He also felt that the spirit of the Olympic movement wiped out race, class, gender, and sexuality issues. In other words, the Olympics made all of these things moot, and nobody cared about any of these things when watching the Olympics.

Sarcastically, I asked myself–is this student watching the same Olympics as I am. I suppose when we take a functionalist view, the Olympics is a sample of stability and harmony, but I don’t see how we can watch the Olympics without noticing the haves and have nots of the world. While one can see some functionalist elements at the Olympics; you have to be deliberately obtuse to miss how Olympic competition is just as much about the social inequalities between groups.

Let’s start with gender. If you watched careful, there were a few occasions when I saw events for men labeled in a neutral way–i.e. the basketball finals– but events for women were labeled as women’s events–i.e. the women’s basketball finals. Isn’t it interesting that even though women participate in most sports at the Olympics, the men’s events are still central in most of those sports. I’ve also noticed that some countries have significantly fewer successful women athletes, and that is often related to the limited number of opportunities for women to compete in those countries. Think about those Kenyan and Ethiopian runners–it has only been recent that women in those countries have been recruited and trained to run like their male counterparts. I also couldn’t stand looking at yahoo during the Olympics where butt shots of women’s beach volleyball players were consistently in the top 10. Don’t get me wrong these women were talented, but it was obvious that their skimpy uniforms were part of the reason the networks had them in primetime.

What about Patriotism and ethnocentrism? As a very public sociologist noted in the thread last week, the US media listed the medal count as opposed to the gold medal count. China ran away with the gold medal count, but I guess it makes us look better to note that we won more over all medals. You could also see the bias in coverage. For the most part if the US wasn’t doing good in an event, then the coverage of that event was either non-existent or relegated to a sound bite. I’ve always felt that the Olympics is largely about Patriotism; it’s a way for countries to feel good about themselves and their people, a way to show strength (quite literally). In the 1936 Olympics, Hitler wanted to prove how great the “Aryan” race was, but he was upstaged by the great African American athlete Jesse Owens.  This was the classic example of the political clashes that often occur at the Olympics.  Don’t get me wrong, there are events that symbolize coming together in spite of our differences–this year the Georgian and Russian competitors in the Women’s air pistol certainly would be an example.  But overall, the examples of countries trying to upstage each other or athletes coming to be representatives for the social and political causes of their nations are probably more numerous.  The Olympics are a competition after all.

The other issue that I’m reminded of is global inequality and its connection to immigration.  I was struck by how the US and China dominated the competition, but one thing I noticed in particular is how many top athletes representing the US were born in other countries and, in many cases, competed for those countries in the past.  I noticed a former Chinese ping pong player, a former Kenyan distance runner, and a Trinidadian sprinter.  Under the 1965 immigration Act, these immigrants are given the fast track to citizenship because of their special skills.¹  The US obviously benefits, as do many other Western countries.  These athletes are able to leave poor countries and head to wealthier ones.  When we are talking about science and occupations, this is called the brain drain.  Perhaps in sports it should be called the “muscle hustle.” ; )  Wealthy countries siphon off the top athletes from poor countries; moreover, many of the athletes from poor countries train, compete, and live in wealthy nations.  I don’t know how many people noticed how many of the West Indian (such as Trinidadian, Jamaican, Bahamian) sprinters attend college and train in the US.  I’d be curious to know how many of these athletes are able to stay in the US because of their skills.

Now I haven’t even touched on racism in this already long post, so I’ll keep it brief.  Sport is often used as a way to reinforce racial stereotypes.  Rather than connecting the racial make-up of an Olympic sports team to social opportunities, many try to assert biological distinctions between races, ignoring those who defy racial stereotypes and ignoring economic and social factors that result in racial differences.  (Feel free to share your own examples for this one.)

What do you think? How does conflict theory play out at the Olympics?  What ways do you think the Olympics represents a functionalist world view?

1. This is also applied to scientists, artists, and people in some high demand occupational fields. (back)

T’was hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us.
But harder still to bear the shame
of foreign chains around us.
And so I said the mountain glen
I’ll meet at morning early.
And I’ll join the bold united men
While soft winds shook the barley.

-Irish folk song

James Larkin (click on pic)

James Connolly (click on pic)

If you want to listen to some related Irish and Scottish songs (see below for titles) click here (around 8 minutes, it’ll be worth it).

Gur Tu Mo Ni’N Donn Bhòidheach (Old Songs of Scottish Women at Work), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem), A Fhleasgaich Ùir Leanainn Thu (Old Songs of Scottish Women at Work), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Dolores Keane)

The word ‘Haka’ caught my eye. It’s not one that I’m used to reading on American blogs. It was a headline on Reclusive Leftist Hilary vs the Haka. I clicked on the link, although I assumed she didn’t meant what I would mean if I used the word. Haka, to me and where I live, is the word for traditional Maori dances.

But it turns out that Violet Socks did mean that, sort of, and it was based on a blogger called River Daughter who has been using the word that way for a couple of months. River Dancer explained the metaphor she was making like this:

It’s all advertising and Maori war dancing. It sure looks ugly but it’s not as bad as we think.

River Daughter has continued to use haka as a metaphor for sound and fury from the campaigns that lack substance. In fact she expands what she means by the metaphor here:

What we have here is a Haka. A Haka is a Maori wardance, usually performed by men (figures) to scare and intimidate the enemy. The dancers do a lot of chest pounding and screaming and making truly scary faces complete with bulging eyes and sticking out their tongues. But just like the online world, they aren’t going to hurt you. It’s just to make you feel like they are the most dangerous people on the planet. So what if they scream at you, jostle you or make nasty faces?

To read such an ignorant characterisation of the haka makes me really angry. I have seen haka performed to congratulate and acknowledge achievement. I have been on protests where haka are performed. The racist subtext here isn’t very subtle ‘angry brown men are scary’, but deeper than that is the colonialist attitude towards Maori culture. River Daughter has no idea of Tikanga, she probably doesn’t even know what the word means.

From her posts, I’m guessing the only context River Daughter’s seen the haka is a sporting one. New Zealand’s Rugby team perform a haka before each test. While I think her description of the role of haka in a rugby test, is racist and ignorant, what she wrote was even worse, because there are many more haka than Ka Mate¹ and many more occasions where they are performed than rugby tests. I have seen haka performed as congratulations, as protests, as challenges, as rituals. River Daughter knows very little about the haka, but she is writing as if what she knows is all there is to know.

My point is that the Haka is not River Daughter’s, Violet Socks’s, yours or mine to turn into a metaphor of any sort. It’s worse because this particularly metaphor was ignorant, inaccurate and disrespectful. But I would never use the haka as a metaphor, even an accurate one. That’s one way appropriation works, the idea that you’re entitled to use other people’s culture, even though you know nothing about it.

A note for the comments: There are many threads to discuss the US Presidential elections, this is not one of them.

Edited to add: Sorry I had an incomplete draft and I posted that one rather than this. This is the complete version of my post

1. the name of the haka most often performed before rugby tests (back)

1. I want to express my (very late) solidarity with Blackamazon, Adele and all the other women of colour who were ignored and dismissed by Seal Press. I want to express my support for the girlcott of Seal press. While there’s not a lot I can do personally, since I would neither buy books from Seal Press (can’t afford them) or write for Seal press anyway. But the whole point of solidarity is answering the question ‘which side are you on?’ I think women of colour activists are more important than a feminist publishing house. I know that my liberation is impossible while women of colour are enslaved, and that means that I have to make it clear that I stand with them against racism from feminist institutions.

2. I want to express my (equally late) solidarity with brownfemipower who will be missed. It is disgusting the way her names and intentions have been dragged and lied about across the blogsphere by people attempting to defend Amanda. Brownfemipower is amazing.

[There used to be bits of my opinion on appropriation in here, but I moved them to this thread. If you want good discussion on appropriation go there, or Holly , Daisy and Sylvia/M.

3. Finally, and less belatedly on my part, Amanda’s book itself. These images are racist.¹ They come from Amanda Marcotte’s book “It’s a jungle out there” that was published by Seal Press. I don’t just want to say ‘these pictures are racist and racism is bad’, but to talk about the harm that these sorts of images cause, because the racist ideas that they maintain are very specific. They are presenting indigenous people as a dangerous other. They are presented as things that must be conquered so that white people can live freely on their land. The idea represented in these images are one of the many ways colonialism is maintained and justified.

I live in a country where land has been stolen from indigenous people in the last five years. Amanda Marcotte lives, and Seal Press operates, in a country where the history of stealing land from indigenous people stretches back five centuries. We all live in a world where the distribution of wealth was established, and justified, by colonialism. The white woman, and man, in those pictures were stealing land and resources - everything Africa had that they could use (a century earlier, of course, they would have also been stealing people).

I’ve been writing this post for a week. Writing other posts about these issues for several weeks and not finishing them. I’m posting it now, rather than trying to make it better, because silent solidarity isn’t much good to anyone.

There have been a number of racist dynamics developing in various comment threads. Amanda, and her defenders, only talking to white people and ignoring people of colour. Re-centring the issue on Amanda by focusing on a very small section of comments and demanding that they be addressed first. These behaviours will not be welcome in this comment thread.

I am not interested in the pontifications of outsiders on this. So specifically Robert, RonF and Sailorman are not welcome, nor are anyone of their ilk.

1. note for Hugo Schwyzer the problem is not that they could be interpreted as racist. It is that they are racist (back)

Great article in Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larson, whose daughter was adopted from Guatemala.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s been a lot of pushback against the “saving children from the benighted countries they were born in” narrative, led by those who were adopted.

The article covers much too much ground for me to sum up, so I’ll just quote the article’s comments on open adoption.

“One of the ways that wrongdoers hide their child-laundering schemes is by the closed-adoption system,” says David Smolin, a law professor who’s written extensively on corruption in transnational adoption. He and his wife adopted two sisters from India only to find out that they had been stolen from their birth family. Last March, a Utah adoption agency was indicted in an alleged fraud scheme involving 81 Samoan children whose parents were told that they were sending their children away to take advantage of opportunities in the United States—that there would be letters, photos, and visits, and that the children would return when they turned 18.

Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as “rescuing” children. “There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption,” he says. “But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment.”

As it stands, families who have forged relationships with birth parents often find it impossible to turn their backs on their economic needs. Some send a monthly stipend; others pay for the education of their child’s siblings, help finance businesses, or buy computers or cell phones to make it easier to stay in touch. And while all this is legal once the adoption is finalized, it’s a lot messier than writing a check for Save the Children. “We need to be careful what kind of impression that makes with other people in the village or area,” says Linh Song, the president of Ethica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparent adoptions worldwide. “Will they receive aid if their child is sent abroad?”

If you’re interested in reading further about Transnational Adoptions, there are a bunch of excellent blogs that write about this issue. Harlow’s Monkey is a great place to start, both because the blog is excellent and for the blogroll.

I don’t imagine most readers of Alas follow Australian politics particularly closely - neither do I. The main political issues I’ve followed have been union issues, racism against immigrants and indigenous issues, particularly the invasion of the Northern Territories. The common theme in all this is that Australian Prime Minister is an evil racist troglodyte.¹

Australia had elections yesterday and after eleven years in power the Howard government was finally defeated. I’m not really celebrating that - not being a huge fan of the Australian Labour party. But I do take some small joy, because it looks like John Howard lost his seat, and won’t even get back into parliament. Assholes losing their jobs is the highlight of any election.

1. The other theme is that the opposition Labour party also sucks beyond the telling of it (back)

On October 15 the police raided over 60 houses throughout New Zealand. They arrested 16 people on jointly possessing a number of firearms, and one person on drugs charges. From the very first day the police were talking about charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

The raids were brutal, a 12 year old girl had a gun pointed at her head, and when her grandmother tried to comfort her the police yelled at the grandmother to shut up and moved closer to both of them (you can view the 12 year old’s comments here). In Ruatoki, a they put a roadblock on the line where the land had been confiscated so many years ago, and anyone who went in and out had to have their photo taken by their car. When one house was raided, the children were locked in a shed for hours by the police while the search was being carried.

Four people were arrested in Wellington; three of those were friends of mine - people I loved. They didn’t get bail; they went into the prison industrial complex.¹ Suddenly prisons stopped being an abstract concept to me, and became a reality that I attempted to navigate while trying to visit the prisoners and get them books and money.

But we didn’t, couldn’t, just do prisoner support, we also needed to stand in solidarity of people who had been attacked, particularly Tūhoe, the iwi ² that had been targeted in these raids. The four weeks that followed was prisons and driving and meetings and court and protests and meetings and supporting each other and meetings and prisons and court and driving and hugs and tears and and anger and love.

At 4pm, Thursday 8 November almost four weeks after people had been arrested, the Solicitor General announced that no-one would be charged under the terrorism suppression act (these were the first charges ever attempted by the police under the Terrorism Suppression Act). The following day all my friends got bail, and all 16 defendents are now free

I don’t think I could describe the sustained joy that started at 4.01 and continued for a week. They were released eleven days ago and I’m smiling right now, because they’re out and I can see them whenever I want.

It’s joy and a respite, but we’ve got so much work to do. All 16 are still facing charges under the Arms Act. The Terrorism Suppression Act - which allowed extensive bugging, has just been strengthened. While our friends are out of prisons, those vile instituations still stand, with far too many trapped inside. ³ I still live in a colonised country, where demands for Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake⁴ are ignored.

I couldn’t write much. I was in too much of a whirlwind to know what to say. I’m looking forward to writing more regularly, but what’s happened over the last 6 weeks has affected me, and will affect what I write.

I’ve been promising to write more about feminism in prisons for a while now. While my analysis hasn’t changed much, your understanding changes as issues stop being abstract and distanced and become part of your reality, and the reality of those you love. So I imagine those posts will take a slightly different form than they might have two months ago, but will probably be stronger because of it. Most importantly, in the next few days (or weeks) I hope to write an introductory post that’ll cover some of the very basic history of colonialism in NZ, and Maori resistance, that I can use a reference point if I want to write more on Alas. I’ve generally avoided cross-posting what little I do write on Alas, but I think writing about colonialism where I live has resonances beyond, so that I should do the background work to make what I write intelligible.

I can answer questions if people have any, it can be hard to write about what’s going on here for another audience, but I think it’s worth doing.

Updated I realised I didn’t do any sort of explanation of the charges under the Arms Act. 16 of those arrested were charged under the Arms Act. These charges related to events that the police claim happened in the Urewera Mountains. Almost all the charges are joint charges - so 16 people are charged with co-possessing a rifle, or whatever.⁵ Most defendents are facing several charges under the arms act - the weapons they were alleged to possess were not found on their property during the raids. Just two people have additional charges - in relation to four guns the police claim to have found during the raids.

1. Being remanded in custody is much rarer NZ than America, and there is no such thing as money bail, so you never have to put up a bond (back)
2. tribe (back)
3. Please hold the inevitable ‘what about the rapists and murderers’ comments until I write a proper post about this and have time to reply (back)
4. I’m not going to try and translate - but I think land and freedom best conveys the meaning (back)
5. I’m the worst person in the world to try and explain this, because my knowledge of guns is so supremely limited that (back)