for duanna johnson

sister, i am angry
furious at your death
upset with my own foolishness in celebrating him
while you die in the streets

with beatings, with violence left on your beautiful brown skin
with the names, the silence, the mainstream media lies
they refuse to let us ever forget that
guns penetrating our backs, we are always standing at the cliff of our own mortality

sister, i am in mourning
lighting a candle, i read this poem into the glimmering light
my poem is a prayer for you,
for the others i will never have the opportunity of knowing, and for the friends who mourn your death today
we will not forget. we will speak your name.

you said no!, you would not let police brutality and violence against transgender women of color fade into an invisible cloud of silence
you said no…
and now you are gone.

you are gone
but we will not forget.
the anger, the connection, the injustice just cuts too deep.
instead we will carry your name on our tongue
your bravery in our own ribcage
your memory in our work
we will wear red everyday
remembering you
and countless of others

we will not forget, sister.

thoughts on the politics of independence

“the community is not great for anyone until it is great for everyone.”        –WIDU motto

BA and BFP always get me going…

Background: a professor for a women’s studies class wrote about how he assigned Full-Frontal Feminism (FFF), a book that was accompanied with much criticism, to his class and that it was a hit with the students. To sum it up it was basically “HA! you radical women of color (WOC) bloggers, I know woc who LOVED IT so there!!!” BrownFemiPower (BFP) framed the follow-up discussion in her post to not to be around FFF but how women of color are tokenized and ignored in women’s studies departments. This professor attempted to discredit every point BFP made and when Black Amazon (BA) followed up, she was made to be a spokesperson for all women of color. Gotta love it.

One of my favorite words is the term “crip on a stick.” A dear friend and activist was at a planning group for some community festival and when they did not have any Native American people present, a committee member actually suggested creating life-size images of people in ceremonial outfits, putting them on sticks, and dancing around in a circle with the stick images during the event. Ridiculous, huh? Now we use the term Crip on a Stick to describe people in the Disability Rights Movement who are brought in to meetings to be that one token crip, young person, person of color. etc.

And this is where the conversation quickly swerves to a whole different thing…

another word on privilege

I ran across this article on privilege today, written by Peggy McIntosh, an anti-racist feminist. (Maybe I’m late to the table and you folks have already seen it?) Anyways, here were some of my favorite points that describe aspects of privilege:

• If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
• I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives.
• I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented.
• When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
• I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
• I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
• I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
• I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
• I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co­workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
• I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

While the list she created was specifically on white male privilege, what I found most interesting is how they could have easily been describing abled-bodied (nondisabled) privilege, heterosexual/cissexual privilege, and class privilege. She pointed out while society sometimes does talk about how racism and sexism disadvantages women and people of color, it doesn’t talk about how it gives others advantages (her words: “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.”)

Although sometimes I think people who identify with an oppressed group of people think they have an automatic free pass from recognizing privilege (i.e. disabled men who are racist, feminists who are ableist, etc….) and it’s wrong to casually say all forms of privilege are the same, it still amazes/bothers/frusterates/surprises me how, as individuals or communities, it is still difficult to recognize that the struggle is one that is shared. 

But I guess that’s part of the oppression we face in the first place…