oppression
By your own admission you admit you don’t know exactly what happened when you said “this needs to be investigated to explore all options, whether suicide, murder or manslaughter.” Again you admit there needs to be an investigation when you said “There were many policy and procedure violations, as well as inconsistencies in the police departments stories and errors in reports.” After the video we don’t know what happened but you “blame the police and white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Huh?
StandardYes, The angry Black woman narrative, rationalizes abuse & violence against Black women.
It is a mechanism of white supremacist patriarchy that strips Black Women of their humanity.
Sandra was labeled as “combative”. The angry Black woman trope is dangerous. White supremacist patriarchy is a threat to Black bodies.
So yes, I blame white supremacy capitalist patriarchy and the State that perpetuates, reinforces and performs anti-Blackness and anti-Black misogyny for the arrest of Sandra Bland that lead to her death in the cell.
If she wasn’t arrested, she would have never died in the cell.
Period.
zellie
Fast food workers in NY just won a $15/hr wage.
I’m a paramedic. My job requires a broad set of skills: interpersonal, medical, and technical skills, as well as the crucial skill of performing under pressure. I often make decisions on my own, in seconds, under chaotic circumstances, that impact people’s health and lives. I make $15/hr.
And these burger flippers think they deserve as much as me?
Good for them.
Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? Fuck those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, fuck these burger flippers.”
And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich assholes who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.
My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the fucking CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they? No one’s making them.
The workers in NY *made* them. They fought for and won a living wage. So how incredibly petty and counterproductive is it to fuss that their pile of crumbs is bigger than ours? Put that energy elsewhere. Organize. Fight. Win.
95% OF PROSECUTORS ARE WHITE MEN!! You wonder why jails are filled with black and Latino men?
Exactly
Intersectionality
Standardis the undercurrent theme of this blog. Perhaps this is a new concept. If so, here are some things to get started:
Kimberlé Crenshaw (who coined the term in 1989) on intersectionality: “I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use.” (source)
“Intersectionality promotes an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ‘race’/ethnicity, Indigeneity,gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration
status, religion). These interactions occur within a context of connected
systems and structures of power (e.g., laws, policies, state governments
and other political and economic unions, religious institutions, media).
Through such processes, interdependent forms of privilege and oppression
shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, ableism and
patriarchy are created.PUT SIMPLY: According to an intersectionality perspective, inequities are never the result of single, distinct factors. Rather, they are the outcome of intersections of different social
locations, power relations and experiences.” (source)Read more things! There are a lot. Here are just a few:
1: Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality in NewStatesman
2: USCB Center For New Racial Studies
3. Interview with bell hooks in Common Struggle
4. Lecture by bell hooks at the New College of Florida
5. The Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be” –
James Baldwin, Freedom Fighter
The Angry Black Woman stereotype can mean getting mocked and overlooked like Nicki Minaj or beaten and killed like Sandra Bland.
People think these stereotypes are innocuous when the former happens without realizing that the same stereotypes are the underlying justifications for bigger issues like state violence.
Some thoughts…
StandardAll taylorswift did today was let her white privilege and white feminism show to the masses. Systematic oppression of black people, especially black women, is why Nicki will never be a cultural phenomenon in pop culture like Miley or Taylor because they are starting from two different levels. Nicki is starting 17 steps behind Miley (who has an industry parent), and 17 steps behind Taylor – who is America’s sweetheart just by being white and traditionally pretty – because she is a black woman.
Therefore, when Nicki does something in the industry, especially in the hip hop industry, she has to work twice as long, and twice as hard, to get half of what white artists are literally handed without trying. And even then, her allocades come with the * of “black artist”, and not just “artist”. So not only does Nicki have to survive in the entertainment as a woman, which is hard enough, she has to survive in this industry as a black woman. Black women are the literal bottom of the barrel in society due to the systematic oppression of gender and race.
So when Nicki is upset that her video, which broke records, and became a hit by media standards, doesn’t receive a nomination, as trivial as the VMAs may happen to be, she has every right as a hard working black woman to be upset that white women, doing the same thing, are getting recognition for their work.
More often than not, those women, are copying/imitating things black women have been CONDEMMED for in the past. For instance: Miley twerks and it’s a new cultural phenomenon. A black woman has been twerking since God created Earth and being told that what we are doing is degrading/too sexual/too exotic/too black/too anything but right.
Just like black women have bigger butts, lips, or finding new ways to do our hair (cornrows/weaves etc), we get stomped on for these features or techniques that get deemed ugly or ghetto, but the minute a white woman begins to do it, it’s “edgy” and new.
So what I’m not going to stand by and let happen is more white people sit around and say, “Nicki didn’t deserve an award anyway bc a, b, c….” When Nicki likely WOULDN’T be nominated at all because those in power (usually white people), find any black person in a position of power/creativity/uniqueness , as a threat to the way they see the power balance of the world, and will consciously or unconsciously condemn the black person for that, and refuse to give praise or awards or whatever when it’s due.
Additionally, Taylor telling Nicki to come on stage with her if she wins is her shrugging off this systematic racism that benefits HER, and maintaining her position of power as a white person, and instead showing pity toward an oppressed person. It’s truly embarrassing.
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