See you in the street!

I've still been writing, and it seems a lot of people haven't switched over to the new site yet.

These are exciting times, and the battle is heating up.

Hope to see you over at the new site...and on the streets!

What You're Missing at the New Site...

Are you still linked to this page? You're missing out, because I've actually been writing. Here are some of the most recent updates:

Where Did the Civil Liberties Go?

10 years have passed since September 11, and groping people's genitals still doesn't make the world safer for democracy.

Drunken Political Rants, Episode 2: Wikileaks

Not only is Wikileaks one of the most important political topics of the day, it's also fun to say when you're drunk!

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired (http://stillhavetoprotest.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/sick-and-tired-of-being-sick-and-tired/)

Or, why we can't take the "War on/of Terror" sitting down anymore.

Stop the Execution of Troy Davis

(http://stillhavetoprotest.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/stop-the-execution-of-troy-davis/)

The only thing Troy Davis is guilty of is being a Black man accused of killing a white cop in the state of Georgia. Why you need to act now!

Let's Make Like Tar Heels: Fighting the Anti-LGBT Amendment in NC

(http://stillhavetoprotest.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/letsmakeliketarheels/)

I'll be voting a big fat NO on Amendment 1, but I won't cast a vote for the lame-ass Democrats.

I've Moved!

Hey everyone, due to ongoing technical difficulties, I've decided to move to Wordpress.

The new blog address is:

http://stillhavetoprotest.wordpress.com

100th Post: The More Satirical Side

Friends had been encouraging me to start a web series after I developed some serious My Drunk Kitchen addiction. One idea was "Healthy Eating for Endurance Athletes" since my healthy (haha) eating consists of biking to the bodega, getting a 50 cent ice cream sandwich and then watching your cat eat it.

Instead, I went with "Drunken Political Rants." The first episode was posted this morning, titled "NATO and Qadafi." This seems like the right direction, since I'm already a part-time alcoholic, and this at least gives me an excuse to drink. I'm "working."

I had a lot of fun writing this while drunk. If it had fit in the series title, I would have called it "Which Vodka Would Lenin Drink?"

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

Five Realities of Patriarchy He Wants You To Ignore

I came across an older article this week on FOX's Men's Health site called "Five Feminist Demands She Wants You To Ignore." It concluded that "no matter how independent women get, there will always be that part of them that wants to be treated like an old-fashioned lady."

That's news to me, who, as an independent woman, really has no desire to be forced into a corset, "protected" by coverture policies, stripped of my legal and political rights, denied access to birth control and other reproductive services, and...you probably get the idea.

However, according to AskMen.com (because surely we couldn't ask women what they want, since women apparently have no innate desires), I, as a part of what seems to be a frighteningly homogeneous group of about 3 billion people, just want a man who can make some decisions for me. As a woman, I am a liar if I claim I do not want to be objectified, and I can also not tell the difference between being told that I am attractive and being designated to the role of masturbatory sex object. And, whatever fuss I might put up now, I will eventually "crave the ultimate commitment." (That being marriage, apparently? I thought it was pinky swears--guess not.)

The articles stunningly vomit-worthy conclusion is "Women are a complete contradiction in terms and that’s one thing they’re likely never to evolve out of — like men and leaving the toilet seat up. We all have our crosses to bear."

This is how to "decode" this patriarchy speak (decoding is something the article suggests must be done to women, since we seem to lack the ability to communicate with humans):

"I do not understand why my girlfriend didn't like this article I wrote. I just can't understand women. Also, she's like 30, so she'll be wanting babies soon. Tick, tick and all. Aren't you glad men have evolved past the whole pregnant, barefoot thing? Me too. This Armani suit is great! Don't get me wrong, men have flaws too. Women are substandard human beings, sometimes my left incisor doesn't sparkle quite enough--apples and apples. Both my girlfriend and I have crosses to bear, but her ass looks hotter when she stands up straight, so I'll carry them both!"

This is all just more clear evidence that patriarchy and sexism are still up and swinging. But if they had their way, we would never even know they were still here. So here's my response Women's Health column...Five Realities of Patriarchy He Wants You To Ignore."

1. Voting women in isn't all it's cracked up to be. See exhibit 1: Hillary Clinton. Just as legal equality doesn't necessarily translate into real equality, representation in patriarchal systems does little to end women's oppression. Even with three women on the Supreme Court (though to be fair, they are not democratically elected), women were denied recognition as a class in suit against Walmart. Elected women officials create, enforce, and defend policies that are destructive to women around the world. Even with equal political representation, the situations faced by women worldwide would not change significantly.
2. Good luck with getting that abortion. Despite the right-wing portrayal of reproductive health services as being equivalent to a bunch of promiscuous women getting abortions en mass and then forcing all other women to get them, free abortion on demand--which is a basic right and requirement for the liberation of women--seems further away today than it has in a long time. Increasingly, we women seem to have less rights than the fetus lawmakers would have us carry to term regardless of how it was conceived, regardless of our personal situation, choice, or desires. They not only make direct attacks on the right to an abortion, but they use sneaky backdoor methods to curtail our rights. North Carolina legislators this week said that a new waiting period would "help women make a truly informed choice," completely ignoring the reality that women are perfectly capable of making our own choices in any time frame we see fit.
   
3. Rape is just a four letter word. It might seem strange that society, which is so eager to take away our responsibility for making our own life choices would then expect us to take the responsibility for rapes committed against us. In addition, the rise of raunch culture tries to tell us that some rape is "not really rape" and maybe even "enjoyable." The thought process here is that if you have a body, men have the right to enjoy it. This is the kind of bullshit that gets sold to us as "sexy" and "desirable." Also, 11 year old girls who are gang raped can "ask for it," according to this rape culture. Welcome to the 21st century. Does this start to sound like The Handmaid's Tale to anyone else?
4. You don't need men to protect you, but they're going to do it anyway. And by protect, I of course mean "deny you access." Women are still "protected" by men in sports, the workplace, and just about anywhere else you can think of going. Men claim to recognize that women are strong, intelligent, and capable, but then conveniently ignore it unless they think it's a good line that might get them laid. In every aspect of life, where the competence of men is assumed, it falls to women to prove their competence. And when they deny you a job, or the right to play with the men, rest assured (and hungry, if you didn't get a paycheck for another week in row) that they were doing it with your "best interests" at heart. Except, of course, that what they call our best interests are really their best interests and are of no benefit to us at all.
5. Think for yourself...and enjoy the psych ward. Women who disagree with male perspectives have always been labeled as crazy. These days, the psychiatric profession has reserved whole diagnoses for "difficult" women, like borderline personality disorder, a diagnosis almost exclusively applied to women have "erratic" and "manipulative" behavior and relationship patterns. Slightly lower on the scale of severity, but in the same mode of thought, is the tactic many sexists use of dismissing anything you say that they disagree with as being "emotion-driven" or "irrational." Men, apparently, control rationality, making anything that goes against it irrational. Oh, and anything else will be blamed on your period. Good times.
   

JAMA's Big Joke

Ever since I first heard about the new recommendation from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that "super obese" children should be removed from their families out of concern for their immediate health, the story has seemingly been everywhere, and while the mainstream sources raise the story as a "question" or "debate" there has been startlingly little challenging of the article's suggestion. Everyone seems unwilling to repudiate the notion which--as I'll discuss--is not only ridiculous, but also manages to target the poor for punishment, further protect and expand corporate interest, and weave racism into its ugly tapestry before the journal is even cool off the press. Even Dr. Atronette Yancey, professor in the Department of Health Services at the UCLA School of Public Health, noted that childhood obesity stems from several factors over which parents have little control, but her conclusion was not to say the program would be a bad idea, but rather that it should be a "last resort."

Even small criticisms that have been laid at the proposal still argue that while it might be undesirable to remove children from their families, it is certainly being done in the best interest of the child. This argument rather disturbingly--and almost verbatim--echoes arguments that were used across the world to "justify" removing children of color from their families--even their country-- and placing them in the "care" of white families, a practice that continues to this day. (Think about the Haitian "orphans" who were stolen from their families. Consider the process of transnational adoption, where the--usually non-white and always non-Western--children, who are not always "orphans" as we tend to think of it, are adopted by Western--and usually white-- parents. The argument that the Westerners are "saving" the children is severely undercut by the fact that the reason the child's parents are no longer able to care for the child is usually connected to histories of war and imperialism, at the root of which we invariably find the West.)

The logic of the proposed removals is that allowing a child to become "super obese" (whatever that means--I haven't been able to find guidelines) constitutes neglect. If one was to carry that logic through to the rest of society, what would that mean? Are "super obese" adults legally incompetent because of their ability to attain or maintain a healthy weight? Does not providing "super obese" prisoners with proper "treatment" constitute torture? Would elderly or dependent people who are "super obese" be considered victims of neglect as well? That none of these questions are being raised belie the fact that this policy is not even at its root driven by a desire for good health.

That train of thought leads to another question. Why are the GOP--who have been railing against every conceivable basic service as the downfall of America--not up in arms over this proposal? They--who are seemingly so concerned with the personal liberty of citizens--have left the crickets to chirp about this proposal. By now, one would surely expect to hear some crazed Tea Partier argue that this program would singlehandedly kill every remaining American job, raise taxes, destroy Wall Street, and pose an imminent threat to national security. But none of the usual right wing hysteria associated with social health and welfare programs is forthcoming, and we should ask ourselves why.

Why? Because this program will not increase public health and will not threaten the corporations. In addition, it targets poor people and people of color. If you're a crazed right-winger, what's not to love?

And to be clear, taking obese children away from their parents is nothing new. Long before it was put forward in JAMA, Alexander Draper, a Black South Carolina teen who weighed 555lb at the time, was taken away from his mother Jerri Gray. When Gray found out she was going to lose custody of her son and be charged with medical neglect, she fled with her son to Maryland, where she was arrested and her son taken into protective custody to receive treatment.

The sheriff claimed that help had been offered to the family previously, but had not been accepted. It should be clear though, that this aid did not include access to healthy food. Gray explained that the programs had been inaccessible or ineffective, that she had sought help for her son and not received it.

She cited two major obstacles to providing her son with a healthy diet--low wages and long, odd hours. Gray didn't have the money to purchase healthier food options, and her work hours meant that she didn't have time to cook for her son. Her financial and employment situations dictated that most of his meals were high-calorie, high-fat fast food that had otherwise low nutritional content (minerals, vitamins, fiber, etc.). This was not "bad decision making" on her part, though the media certainly portrayed it that way. Gray knew that fast food was not the healthiest option for her son. Instead, it was the inevitable outcome of a reality with restricted food choices--a reality the wealthy never have to face.

The story of Alexander Draper and Jerri Gray is typical. By that I mean that every single case I was able to find of an obese child being removed from his/her family involved a Black family and usually a single mother who cited long hours and low wages as the chief obstacle to providing a healthy diet to her family.

Certainly, there are white and affluent children who are obese. Class is one cause of obesity, but a very large one, and obesity in affluent children is more likely to stem from an eating disorder rather than inability to access healthy foods and exercise facilities. Under capitalism, health is something we buy, not something to which we are entitled as a fundamental human right. This means that regardless of whether wealthy children are obese, they will not be targeted if this program is implemented based on the JAMA recommendations. Their families could afford expensive medical care that would preclude being taken into "protective custody."

No, the poor will be the target of any policy instituted based on these recommendations. And despite the fact that parents have few--if any--healthy options available on a low income budget, parents are the ones being blamed for "poor choices." A better focus would be the poor ethical choices of marketing and corporate agriculture. While these choices fit in marvelously with the morals of capitalism, they grate viciously against common human decency.

Essentially, corporate agriculture has manufactured chemicals out of food and non-food items that will sustain working class life (in the most basic sense) with no concern for the long term health effects--whether it be obesity or cancer. Then, the marketing industry has convinced us that this "stuff" is actually "food." Think Soylent Green, only with less cannibalism.

And consider this: it is cheaper to buy soda, with high fructose corn syrup as one of its main ingredients, than it is to buy bottled water (and the poorer you are, the less likely your tap water is safe to drink). In addition, since so many working class people are overworked, overstressed, and in a constant state of fatigue, many use the sodas with sugars and caffeine to help them "get through the day"--i.e., keep their jobs.

While the wealthy among us might be able to stroll through Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Earthfare, and have their choice of good fruits and vegetables, and whole grain, pesticide-free foods, that's not an option available to most of us. After, the $4 you might spend on a tomato in such a store will buy a week's worth of boxed macaroni and cheese or ramen noodles. The "choice" of what food to buy is about as meaningful as the right to quit your job if you don't like your boss. In other words, not a choice at all.

However, the rhetorical construction of this choice serves the ruling class extraordinarily well. It fits the ideological construction of working class people as stupid and unfit to make important choices, a construction that is necessary to the maintenance of capitalism as a system. After all, they argue, if they can't even make healthy eating decisions, how can they possibly run society? The construction of choice also helps maintain the illusion that the super-rich are somehow biologically superior to us, even though they are almost all related to Neanderthals. They maintain--whether explicitly or implicitly--that they are the Darwinian champions of society--neglecting of course their personal pools, tennis courts, trainers, and all-natural, organic stocked pantry. (Working class people are far less likely to have a safe place to exercise, access to a pool which can provide minimal concussion exercise, etc.) When necessary, the rich can afford medications and weight-loss surgery.

But even in the working class, all people aren't targeted equally. Black families seem to be the favored target for discrimination for many of the classic racist reasons. (Name one, they all fit.) Whether it's the "good-ol'-white-folks" trying to "help" Black families by breaking them up, or whether it's claiming that the (white) doctors "know better", this program will surely go down in the long history of racism in this country if it is implemented. Every online news story discussing these proposed guidelines featured Black children in the photos, not too subtly suggesting that they would be the primary targets of such a program because their parents don't care and won't pull their acts together to save the children. I have not seen the issue of racism raised once by any commentator anywhere even though it is already embedded into this tactic of removal (not to mention the connection one might make to the way families were split up during slavery). Disgusting.

Health (and not something so narrow as body shape/size) is a huge issue in working class communities, but parents are not the problem, and removing kids from their families isn't the solution. Ultimately, what's needed is a completely new society, organized around human need rather than profit--socialism. But as we continue to struggle for that new society, here are some steps along the way:

1. Access to healthy food is a human right. This is perhaps the most basic principle ignored by capitalism (and out of necessity). There is enough food to feed everyone in the world 2800 calories a day--enough to make all of us obese. Yet tens of thousands die every day from starvation. At the other end are those who are forced to eat food with high calorie content but low nutritional value. Neither qualifies as access to healthy food. Food is required to survive. Healthy food is required to live a meaningfully active life. It is a basic necessity of human kind. This makes it a fundamental right. Denying people good food based on their inability to pay is immoral (to put it nicely).
2. Access to preventative health care is a human right. If it's good enough for the rich, it's good enough for the rest of us.
3. Blame corporations, not parents. Corporations that manufacture "foods" like high fructose corn syrup, jack up prices of food staples, control growing and enforce unsustainable practices (Monsanto, International Corn, I'm talking about you) are to blame for the food and nutrition crisis. If you want to get to the root of the problem, they're the ones to go after, since they control what is produced and how it is distributed.

We already have the resources to feed everyone, for everyone to live healthy productive lives. The work that remains is re-appropriating those resources and using them for human need, not profit. Standing against policies that would enforce the JAMA guidelines is a step in the right direction. Demanding that researchers place the blame where it's due is a step in the right direction. I call them steps because they will be achieved by movements, not politicians who are in bed with companies like International Corn and Monsanto, with associations like the American Medical Association. We have to fight, and we should not allow one more child to be removed from their family. Instead, we must fight for healthy food for all, free health care for all, and a place to be able to exercise safely for all.

Words Who Never Said?

If you haven't heard it yet (doubtful)--you should definitely listen to Lupe Fiasco's new track, "Words I Never Said." (Watch the YouTube video here.) Any popular song that begins with "I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit," can't be that bad after all. Lupe does a great job of connecting the war on terror to domestic racism too.

But there's one thing about this song (that also pervades is accompanying video) that disturbs me more and more every time I listen to the song. You see, while Lupe is speaking truth to power, he doesn't actually sing the part "It's so loud inside my head with words that I should have said. As I drown in my regrets, I can't take back the words I never said."

There are two ways to read this discrepancy, and neither of them are appealing.

Option 1: it doesn't mean anything. I'm going to give him more credit than this. He's a smart, politically minded guy, and he can be held accountable for the political messages he sends.

Option 2: Skylar Gray is singing as a separate part of his consciousness or a separate person entirely. She doesn't feel she can fight back. She wallows in her own powerlessness. She is weak and needs to be rescued, guided to light even.

I think you probably see where this is going. It's sexist. Don't believe me? Seriously, the paragraph above didn't convince you? Okay. Replay the song in your head, except this time, imagine Lupe singing Skylar's part. Yeah, sounds weird doesn't it. Now try and imagine Skylar Gray rapping "Limbaugh is a racist. Glenn Beck is a racist. The Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit," or "I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence. Fear is such a weak emotion. That's why I despise it."

Part of the sexist result of this song's impact is in our head. Not because it's made up--it's very real--but because sexism is so deeply internalized. In fact, sexism is still considered completely legitimate in day-to-day life. After all, "women's work" is still considered an actual thing by the majority of the population. Women still earn about 77 cents to the white man's dollar (even less for women of color). It is considered acceptable to argue that a woman deserves fewer rights than a non-viable lump of tissue in her uterus. So it's hardly surprising that Lupe, who, like the rest of us, grew up in an incredibly sexist society, has internalized sexist ideas that have manifested in this song. On our end, it's difficult for the average person to swap the roles--having the male be vulnerable and the woman the enlightener. This even decades after the emergence of artists like Sista Souljah, Lauryn Hill, Joan Baez, and Hazel Dickens.

Having said that, "Words I Never Said" is hardly the misogynist crap put out by some of the musicians in every genre. Just think about the raunch culture glamourized by modern rock, pop stars who are hypersexualized while young teenagers, etc. But it's still important to talk about it. After all, we don't consider the transition from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the top Harvard law student at the time, being denied a job with a Supreme Court Justice because he "wasn't ready to hire a woman" to three women sitting on the Supreme Court to signify the end of sexism. It was just last month that women were denied class status as the court ruled in favor of Walmart. Corporations, like fetuses, seem increasingly to have more rights than women.

But why did Lupe even write the song that way? Was this all just the product of subconscious internalized sexism? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I have no way of knowing. And while I think Lupe Fiasco and all other artists need to be held accountable for the messages they send, there are a couple of things we need to keep strongly in mind.

First, sexism in music is a symptom of our sexist society, not the cause of it. Even if we tried our best, we could not eliminate sexism in our culture without abolishing sexism itself. Our efforts would become moralistic, individualistic, and ultimately rather futile if they do not attack the root cause--namely capitalism, which has the music industry and the rest of us firmly in its grip.

Second, the "hold accountable" arguments, taken outside of a broader movement, are often used to perpetrate racism. Many times, discussions of misogyny in music focus only on music created by Black artists and completely ignore the likes Justin Bieber, who thinks attacks on women's rights are funny, Gene Simmons who--just yuck, and whoever does Miley Cyrus's wardrobe.

So why then, did I choose to write about Lupe Fiasco, a Black artist? Because I think he is committed to changing the world for the better (unlike, say, Justin Bieber, with whom I try not to waste my time) and I think if we called him on it, he might at least consider what we're saying, and maybe, just maybe, add sexism to the list of things he makes such wonderful music against.