Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

This is a very interesting piece:

Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

By Betsy Hartmann

The greening of hate - blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color - is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth.

Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.

This is part of what is at play whenever people in the rich countries bemoan the high birth rates of many poor countries. Once again, those with the least power (poor women of colour from the global south, in particular) make a convenient scapegoat for all manner of problems that we do not want to take responsibility for. There's also a certain paternalistic bourgeois white supremacy when we see Them as the problem and Us as the solution to all the world's problems. We just have to figure out what to do about Them before They wreck our Nature.

For example, the rush to blame China and India for the high cost of gas, food prices, and global warming. See, China is closing in on the USA as the biggest fossil fuel consumer and greenhouse gas producer. Still, the average Chinese person has around 19% of the impact of the average American. Not to mention the emissions in China have little to do with people's individual lifestyles and much to do with industrial manufacturing... mostly of crap to be consumed by Americans, Canadians and members of other wealthy nations. Not that China is a saint, but I find it interesting how we love to blame them.

The article documents the involvement of some environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Conservation International (CI) with some pretty right wing campaigns. For example:

With USAID assistance, CI and the World Wildlife Fund are promoting a conservation campaign in the region focused on identifying illegal settlements -- often Zapatista communities -- which are then forcibly removed by the Mexican army. These efforts are complemented by the government's aggressive female sterilization campaign in the region. CI's close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for.

She puts this in perspective:

Coercive conservation measures, of course, are nothing new. From colonial times onwards, wildlife conservation efforts have often involved the violent exclusion of local people from their land by game rangers drawn from the ranks of the police, military and prison guards. To legitimize this exclusion, government officials, conservation agencies and aid donors have frequently invoked narratives of expanding human populations destroying pristine landscapes, obscuring the role of resource extraction by state and corporate interests.

This is so true. For example, I was recently studying how in South Africa (but not only there!) the creation of national parks caused significant dispossession of indigenous peoples' land. The racialist ideas around pollution were often driving conservation movements.

Hartmann continues by outlining several myths that help to drive this coercive conservation: man versus nature, the wilderness ethic, the degradation narrative, and scarcity. For example, the myth of the romantic and nostalgic wilderness ethic:

The ways in which wilderness is constructed have a number of problematic outcomes. The ahistorical myth of wilderness as "virgin" land obscures the systematic forced migration and genocide of its original Native American inhabitants.

By locating nature in the far-off wild, it allows people to evade responsibility for environmental protection closer to their homes. And it is geographically parochial, blinding many Americans to the complex ways in which people relate to the land in other countries and cultures. Critiquing the wilderness ethic does not mean one is opposed to national parks and nature protection - rather, it calls for equitable and democratic processes to ensure local communities are not pushed off their lands and robbed of their livelihoods.

Also popular is the degradation narrative in which

...population pressure-induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate elsewhere as "environmental refugees," either to ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is once again set in motion or to cities where they become a primary source of political instability.
[...]
It blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries; and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. It is a way of homogenizing all rural people in the Global South into one big destructive force, reinforcing simplistic Us vs. Them, West vs. the Rest dichotomies.

You should probably just go read the whole thing. H/T Lisa, commenting on Feministe

The Story of Stuff

I realize this is a few months old, but for those of you who haven't seen it yet, The Story of Stuff is worth watching. It is a free 20 minute online video that connects the various aspects of all the stuff we consume, in a cute and simple way. Questions of environment, politics, social justice, health, and equity are raised. Although somewhat simplistic it is tightly presented, and I have to say I learned some new things. Plus there's more information on the site to follow up with. Check it out at www.storyofstuff.com

Robert Jensen on Oppression

How do we explain the fact that most people's stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in concepts of justice, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people, yet we allow violence, exploitation, and oppression to flourish? Only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths, engaging in cruel and oppressive behavior openly and with relish. Feminism helped me understand the complex process, which tends to work like this:

--The systems and structures in which we live are hierarchical.
--Hierarchical systems and structures deliver to those in the dominant class certain privileges, pleasures, and material benefits.
--People are typically hesitant to give up such privileges, pleasures, and benefits.
--But, those benefits clearly come at the expense of those in the subordinated class.
--Given the widespread acceptance of basic notions of equality and human rights, the existence of hierarchy has to be justified in some way other than crass self-interest.
--One of the most persuasive arguments for systems of domination and subordination is that they are "natural."

So, oppressive systems work hard to make it appear that the hierarchy -- and the disparity in power and resources that flow from hierarchy -- is natural and, therefore, beyond modification. If men are naturally smarter and stronger than women, then patriarchy is inevitable and justifiable. If white people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than people of color, then white supremacy is inevitable and justifiable. If rich people are naturally smarter and harder working than poor people, then economic injustice is inevitable and justifiable. And, if human beings have special status in the universe, justified either on theological or biological grounds, then humans' right to extract from the rest of Creation whatever they like is inevitable and justifiable.

For unjust hierarchies, and the illegitimate authority that is exercised in them, maintaining their own naturalness is essential. Not surprisingly, people in the dominant class exercising the power gravitate easily to such a view. And because of their power to control key story-telling institutions (especially education and mass communication), those in the dominant class can fashion a story about the world that leads some portion of the people in the subordinate class to internalize the ideology.

For me, feminism gave me a way to see through not only male dominance, but all the systems of illegitimate authority. I saw the fundamental strategy they held in common, and saw that if we could more into a space in which we were true to our stated ideals, we would reject those systems as anti-human. All these systems cause suffering beyond the telling. All of them must be resisted. The connections between them must be understood.

I thought this was a brilliantly succinct summary of how systems of oppression, dominance, and hegemony maintain themselves. He is also very good at connecting different forms of oppression, showing how they are all interrelated... racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and this ecological nightmare. Read the rest of "King of the Hill"

Also, on white privilege, read Jensen's comment on this blog post

Blogging Against Environmental Apartheid

Today is some kind of blogging for the environment blog action day. So in that spirit, here are some excerpts from a speech by Van Jones (I've seen him - he is an amazing speaker): "Spiritually Fulfilling, Ecologically Sustainable AND Socially Just?"

I want to suggest that there's a communication problem and there are two things that are happening. Number one: it's just very, very hard for white people to hear the pain of the subjugated people in this country.
[...]
So we live together in these bubbles that touch, and we call that diversity, but we don't know each other. And when that bubble breaks for just a second and we're face to face with each other, it's very, very hard to hear that reality.

But white supremacy, to use the provocative term, will reinterpret that experience for you; and make it not be about your inability to hear, but be about other people's inability to speak. This is one of the most remarkable things: if you can get this, all doors open. There is the assumption - this is deep, this is deep - there is the assumption that when there’s a breakdown in communication between people of color and white people, that there is an deficiency but that the deficiency is not in white listening, that the deficiency is in black speech. "Why are they so angry?" People start critiquing, and then you find somebody who keeps themselves together just for a little bit and it's, "Oh that one's very eloquent, that one’'s very articulate." Right? Always the assumption is that the deficiency lies with the people of color. "Why don't they care about the environment? What wrong with them, don't they see the big picture? ... What's wrong with them? Maybe they are just too poor or busy, because certainly there is nothing wrong with our speech!"
[...]
If it was just that you could show up and be heroic and save the polar bears that would be a boring ass movie. That's not the movie! You show up to be the hero and you discover just like Luke Skywalker, "Wait a minute, the dark side is in me! Wait a minute; my father is the originator of many of the problems that I am now trying to solve. Wait a minute, I can't just fight now the war monger without, the polluter without, the incarcerator without, the clear cutter without - I've got to fight the war monger within. I've got to fight the polluter within."
[...]
People are always talking about their comfort zones, you ever heard that expression: "this is outside of my comfort zone"? Grow your goddamn comfort zone then, okay? 'Cause we are running out of time.
[...]
I've sat with all these people who we think are in charge, and they don't know what to do. Take that in: they don't know what to do! You think you're scared? You think you're terrified? They have the Pentagon's intelligence, they have every major corporation's input; Shell Oil that has done this survey and study around the peak oil problem. You think we've got to get on the Internet and say, "Peak oil!" because the system doesn't know about it? They know, and they don't know what to do. And they are terrified that if they do anything they'll lose their positions. So they keep juggling chickens and chainsaws and hope it works out just like most of us everyday at work.
[...]
There's a pathway back to community that we have to walk. I have to give up something, I have to give up my right to be mad at white folks, 'cause that's not going to make a difference for my child. But white people have to give up something too, which is their right to stay ignorant about all of this. You have a perfect right to be ignorant about all of this and you'll be great people, honestly. You could lead big environmental organizations, you could lead spirituality retreats, you could do all kinds of stuff and you will get cookies and congratulations and people will cry at your funeral. You have a perfect right to not care about any of this. There just won't be any human family left.

Via Gristmill. More on Van Jones and eco-apartheid. You can also watch him speak, short:

or longer.

The Challenge of Progressive Solidarity: Hamas, Palestine, plus a Fishy Analogy

From MADRE:

The question is: how do we support the people of Palestine without endorsing the Hamas leadership? Let's be clear: Hamas' long-term social vision is repressive. Hamas is a movement driven by militarism and nationalism. It aims to institutionalize reactionary ideas about gender and sexuality, and it uses religion as a smokescreen to pursue its agenda.

And there is another, equally important question: how do we put forward this critique of Hamas without reinforcing the Bush Administration's anti-Arab, anti-Islamic rhetoric? We do that by taking a stand for a sane and humane US policy in the Middle East. When we demand an end to both Israeli occupation and US attempts to control the resources and governments of the region, we refuse to be conscripted into Bush's "war on terror."

Some people worry that criticizing Hamas means casting doubt on the legitimacy of its leadership. It doesn't. MADRE recognizes that Hamas won a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council through a fair election and that Hamas must be part of any future negotiations. And MADRE acknowledges that Hamas has enabled many Palestinians to survive the ravages of Israeli occupation by providing healthcare, education, and other critical social services to families in need. We don't contest the legitimacy of Hamas' rule, but that doesn't mean that we are required to support them—any more than we are bound to support the new administration of Nicolas Sarkozy in France or any other elected government.

This article is relevant for more than this specific situation. It speaks to a very important question: how do we make a difference in this world while being neither insular nor reflexive nor by reinforcing the colonial order of things?

We have to walk a fine line. On the one hand, we need to acknowlege and respect the specificity of experiences in other cultures that differ from our own - this to avoid imposing our Western values upon others. And yet we need to not give up on the values that make us progressive. I believe a big part of that is rather than trying to dictate the terms of our support, we need to listen to the voices of the disenfranchised, whenever possible taking our cue from them. The organizations who are fighting for justice, equity, and human rights within their own countries don't need us to tell them what to do. Indeed, we can often learn from them. And those organizations we disagree with, do not need our unconditional support.

We do not have to make a choice between Fatah and Hamas. We can understand and support the right of the Palestinians to elect Hamas, while disagreeing vehemently with the platform and tactics of Hamas. Sort of like how we do not have to offer one of Obama or Hillary our unconditional support.

Our greatest responsibility to the people of the two-thirds world is probably at home - meaning, preventing our own governments and corporations from following policies that are often the root cause of so much violence, misery, and suffering. To paraphrase/mangle something I read the other day, that saying about not just giving someone fish, but teaching that person how to fish, needs to be updated. You best belive a people located in a coastal region knows how to fish. They don't need our charity, nor our patronizing fishing lessons. They need us to stop polluting the water. Or to stop arresting and killing them when they fish.

Guilt, Privilege and the Pain of Living in a World of Domination

Someone close to me is in pain because he feels marginalized for who he is: a white male.

He's basically a "gender-blind", "colour-blind" regular Nice Guy^TM who believes in equality for all. He sees people as human first and wants the same from others. The common definitions of sexist and/or racist (seen as individual attitudes or prejudices) do not apply to him.

But there's a deeper, structural understanding of racism & sexism as a system of power that goes far beyond any individual beliefs or discrimination. In other words, we are all racist and sexist because we participate (i.e. live) in a racist, patriarchal system of dominance. That doesn't mean we're all Ann Coulter. It also doesn't remove our responsibility to try to do something about the system.

As a feminist, anti-racist activist, this interests me, of course. This is a situation in which all the theories I read are pretty irrelevant - here there is pain; there is real anger and hurt.

This young man hurts because he is labeled privileged, simply because he's a white male, something he did not choose and cannot change. But as a youth who grew up poor, in a household with violence, in an unhelpful school system with bullies, believe me, he had no silver spoon. He looks at his life and asks a very fair question: how can this be what privilege looks like?

If it wasn't someone I care about I could perhaps blithely respond: yes there is privilege, if you don't see it it's because you don't have to (your denial proves your privilege and dominance, which is maintained precisely because of its invisibility to those who possess it), there's nothing more to discuss. Of course, that is me talking to the figurative, metaphorical, representation which is "White Man", not to every real individual white man. This is is the real world, and individuals have real feelings and experiences that cannot be adequately captured in such simple statements. As progressives I believe we don't want to alienate those who are trying to make the world a better place, especially by hurting them. That simply drives them into the arms of the right-wingers: Might as well get a shotgun and a gas guzzler and become a real racist sexist prick, since that is what I'm assumed to be anyways.

When we are able and have the energy to do so, I think there is a point to helping those with privilege learn how to accept and understand it, so they can become our allies, even as we continue to learn about our own privilege, and how we ourselves perpetuate oppressions.

The truth is, privilege and oppression are extremely complex. White people and men of different backgrounds have different levels of access to social resources, power and status. Economic class, language, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, even the neighbourhood a person lives in makes a difference. Aside from the intersection of many forms of oppression exist other contradictory examples. Here's one for ya: Patriarchy harms men. Patriarchy privileges men. I believe those two statements are not mutually exclusive.

From Pain and Progress (on the awesome XY site):

Because sexism hurts all men as well as women the ending of sexism is entirely in the interests of all men and all women. The "privileges" of patriarchy are paltry compared to the enormous cost we pay to maintain them. We give up so much of our humanness to become sexist patriarchs and no man who could clearly see what he has lost and is still losing by maintaining patriarchy would hesitate to give it all up. For example the power accorded to us by patriarchy is as nothing compared to the joy of real human connections to other people, men, women and children, based on equality and true relationship. We can't exercise this power and have truly equal relationships with women.

Interestingly, marginalization is at issue here too. Now we know that it is the white male perspective that is the "invisible" perspective: the universal position of imagined objectivity. Those on the margins have historically been silenced. Recognizing viewpoints that come from different experiences is an important part of our work. This does not necessarily mean that an individual white male is given a forum or platform (which are of course not identical to the dominant mainstream white supremacist viewpoint), meaning our theories do not resonate within him. They don't jive with his experience, so he may turn away from feminism and anti-racist activism completely.

I think growing our movements and building coalitions means trying to understand the pain we all experience as both oppressors and oppressed.

From Trauma and Oppression, Chapter 4 of Power-Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change, from which I've quoted before:

One of the distinctive features of our social/economic/political system is the way in which it parcels out privilege and power-over. While there are enormous concentrations of wealth, status and power at the top, there are also infinite gradations of economic, social and political standing throughout the rest of the society. The result is that while virtually everyone is oppressed in some significant way, almost everyone also has access to some type of privilege and to one or more oppressor roles. This is an aspect of what Aurora Levins Morales calls the "interpenetration of institutional systems of power."
[...]
Most white people and most heterosexuals and most able-bodied people and most people who hold wealth beyond their needs simply think of themselves as normal, and think of their privileges as something that they have earned or that they deserve or that give them some modicum of social value and self-respect. People from oppressed constituencies who aspire to privilege and dominance surely do not think in terms of aspiring to become oppressors, but in terms of achieving statuses and positions from which they have been categorically excluded.

At the other end of the spectrum, when people identify as victims of oppression, it can all too easily block their willingness or ability to recognize the ways in which they also hold privilege and dominant roles.
[...]
As victims we are understandably preoccupied with our own experience of being acted upon in utter disregard for our worth as human beings. Our suffering unavoidably fills up our entire psychological landscape and – to the extent that we are politically conscious of oppression – our political landscape. The overwhelming impact of trauma can make it difficult or impossible to believe that the suffering of other oppressed groups could be as serious or as profound as our own.

I know this has been a long and rambling post. I'd be interested to hear other thoughts on this.

Fighting Amongst Ourselves for the Scraps

One of my favourite Canadian blogs has a very interesting conversation going on in the comments of this post, as explained here. To sum up, there's a Nice White Guy who feels Indiginous peoples have unfair advantages, and Scott has some very compassionate and well-argued points. I urge everyone to go and read.

I've been hearing and reading versions of this conversation everywhere lately. The well-meaning, hard-working white guy has a tougher and tougher time making it these days. He looks back, feeling nostalgic for a time that seems simpler; the time before the women's movement, before civil rights, before various other liberation struggles. There's a tendency among many regular working class people to blame those who are below them in the heirarchy but catching up, rather than those at the top who are keeping everyone down. Thus you have increasing fear, and a huge backlash against so many of the progressive reforms hard fought and won. Vicious anti-feminism, anti-immigration, and that sort of soft reactionary racism that is common these days (such as the belief in reverse discrimination).

See, on the left, we usually see the rise of neoliberalism as one of the main causes of the increasing difficulties for the white middle class. We blame those at the very top, and their cheerleaders and supporters in the market fundamentalist government, corporate media, and think tanks. Most (though not all) of these people are white, wealthy, Christian, hetero men. That doesn't mean we blame white people, the wealthy, Christians, heteros, or men.

The nostalgic past in which life was simple and good for a hardworking everyman was experienced by a minority of white Westerners. The 50s look very different to a black woman in the US, or an aboriginal person in Canada, an Algerian in Algeria, or a Palestinian in a refugee camp.

The last few decades have seen amazing struggles, many successes, and many setbacks. I certainly don't want to bedgrudge any group the rights they fought so hard for. I want them to have more. I want us to have more. That's what social justice is about. If I may use a dog-and-meat-metaphor: we should not be fighting amongst ourselves for the scraps, but going after those who are eating the prime rib. (Well, more precisely those structures that dole out prime rib to some and scraps to the rest.)

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the mothers of the earth!

Probably one of the most powerful statements I've ever read.

Letter from the Landless Mothers

We speak to the sons and daughters of the land from all nations. To those who were not invited to the banquet. To those who have been waiting in the queue of history for centuries. We will not be spectators at a film waiting for the light to go out. It's time to believe in the possibility of defeating sorrow.

We are rising up with the mothers who are losing their sons and daughters in wars, in urban massacres, from the barrel of a rifle, in concentration camps, in acts of femicide and genocide, in domestic violence, in political persecutions, in armed sieges. We are rising up with the mothers who are losing their children because they don’t have milk, bread, land, or access to the knowledge accumulated by humanity. We are rising up with the mothers who are wandering with their sons and daughters, seeking a better world, We are rising up to call for social justice and dignity.

We raise our hands, our hoes, our scythes, and our consciences to call on all working women of the world to unite against those who exploit the land, life, the strength of our work and of our body.

We are directing ourselves to those who are said to be lords of the world. We don't want and we aren't asking for your permission to cut fences and to sow flowers and dreams. We will not hesitate to speak to you. We are struggling for land, for water, in defense of seeds and of biodiversity for the right to decide about our lives and our food, for the right to work, for our future and for solidarity among peoples.

"Development and modernity" advance over the world and open wounds. In your name, laws are passed that put humanity at risk. Against the green desert and despair we break the silence and we denounce the dust that is thrown over dreams and the prison of flowers. Your modernity is darkness and hunger and for this reason, is not in our interest. Don't you dare move ahead one step with your project of death!

The criminal manipulation of biogenetics, monoculture, agro-fuels, and agribusiness is an attempt to kill food sovereignty and the possibility of a ecologically correct and socially just world. We will not allow humanity to be destroyed. You should know that we will not accept that you kill our children through violence or for lack of food.

On this Mother's Day we reaffirm our determination to transform the countryside into a space for hope, happiness, and above all, for struggle. In our project, everyone has the right to a dignified life, a decent standard of living, and the sweet smell of flowers. We want to transform the world so that it may be more just and more egalitarian, and that all who live in it may be respected.

We will continue sowing revolutionary unrest on behalf of agrarian reform, social justice, and sovereignty of food and peoples. This is our mission and thus it must be for all peasant mothers persecuted by the violence of agribusiness and water-business.

What's left for the mothers of the world is to organize and struggle. We will struggle tirelessly against the neoliberal system that transforms food, water, land, people’s knowledge, and the bodies of women into commodities.

It's time to demand justice and punishment for those responsible for exploitation, violence, genocide, and massacres.

It's time to open up new passages, new men and new women.

It's time to set our sights on the new horizon.

We are standing up, spending night and day sculpting the fertility and the rebellion that are being born in the womb of mother earth.

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the mothers of the earth!

May 2007

MST – Agrarian Reform: for Social Justice and Peoples’ Sovereignty

The MST makes me so happy. Background here, here, and here,

Economic Growth Creates Poverty In The World

There is a "mystery" we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?
[...]
It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don't adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few. (From Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti)

Even though most Americans believe the poor are to blame for their own problems, the truth is inequality is the inevitable result of capitalism. "Wealth" is moved from those who have little money or power to those who already have a lot of both. Increasing the pace of economic growth does little to combat poverty, because it is a problem of distribution, not production. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most fertile places in the world, yet it also boasts the highest rates of poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

In The End of Economic Growth, Adam Parsons points out:

If one billion dollars in overseas aid truly lifted 434,000 people out of extreme poverty... then the world would be an altogether different place.
[...]
The 'trickle-down theorists', in no short number, argue with the same few hackneyed metaphors to illustrate their obsession with economic growth, like the rising tide that lifts all boats, or that, rather than share the cake more evenly, it is better to bake an even larger one... What this complacent premise fails to account for is the billions of people earning less than two dollars a day who are fortunate to own a corrugated shelter, let alone a 'cake' or a 'boat' to rise in. Poverty eradication is a nice enough idea, the lesson seems to be, so long as it remains consistent with the assumption of the rich getting richer.

As of May 2005, the three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 47 poorest countries. Wow, Bill Gates' personal net worth is higher than the GDP of more than half of the world's countries. (Crossed out because the comparison isn't valid - see comments)

To plead for a redistribution of wealth, even for a one percent redistribution of the incomes of the richest 20 percent to the poorest 20 percent, is tantamount to asking for a magic wand so long as the existing macroeconomic polices drive international politics... Another rudimentary metaphor to add to the trickle-down theorists limited repertoire, in this sense, might be the description of a cancerous tumour.

In other, related news, the UNDP says the brain drain costs the African continent over $4 billion annually. Canada's immigration policies do nothing to help, by the way. Our immigration policy favours the wealthy and professionals, such as doctors and lawyers - although once they get here, they are often unable to practice.

Waste Makes Want, by Skeletonwoman, Homelessnation.org

homeless & disabled in toronto,
originally uploaded by lomo_iberico.

Exerpts from Waste Makes Want, by Skeletonwoman, Homelessnation.org (a community for & by the homeless in Canada):

You call barbarism an economy and inhumane living conditions are alluded to as the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Do you expect the destitute to dine on your abstractions or choke down more peanut butter& jam sandwiches and leftover donuts, while another generation of humanity lives and dies in the streets alongside their elders?
....
Were you absent when sharing went on in kindergarden? Were you the little monsters who grabbed stuff out of other kids hands and liked to make they cry? Now it's time to grow up !
...
How much longer do you intend to pretend that mothers are "unemployed" when parenting is the most important work there is? It's ludicrous pretend that mothers are not working and to require them to be trained to sit in front of computers in cubicles all day, while strangers raise their kids according to schedule to become the robots of the future? Who wiped your ass when you were a baby?
...
We have no use for the planned obsolence you pollute the planet with or the military might of your vile drug war fought under the guise of helping the woman of Afganistan whose lives are worse than ever.
...
Are you proud of your accomplishments? Are you teaching your children how to rob the poor and keep it for themselves? Are you instructing them to peck away at the middle class social structure as well? How are parents supposed to explain the scourge of corporate capitalism to little kids who ask what happened to their schools? Are your own children looking forward to following in your footsteps? Or are they contemplating the possibility of joining the ranks of the poor, in an effort to achieve the social and economic justice everyone is entitled to? We will see what we will see as we continue to live off the scraps of corporate capitalism.

(Emphasis Mine) Read the Whole Thing

On Privilege and What We Can do About It

Came across this excellent post today: "Check my What? On Privilege and What We Can do About It. Some tips on going from pro-equality in spirit to pro-equality in deed".

A really good explanation of what privilege means, with some concrete suggestions of how to deal with it. Tells us to accept the fact that privilege exists, learn to listen so we can understand what our privilege means, and then gives tips on how to communicate (including some tips on respectful language, and dealing with minority spaces). One of the most important specifics is, I think, is the advice to recognize "it's not about you". Basically anyone who has any sort of privilege oughtta read it: men, white people, heteros, rich people, etc.

It seems to be an opportune time to post about this, considering the conversations that have been raging in this corner of the blogosphere lately. More to come.

Read the whole thing.

Also recommended for a good primer on some of the effects of privilege vs. discrimination: The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide, previously blogged about here.

UPDATE: Check out Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use it for Social Change. You can even download a whole copy here.

The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide

For every dollar in assets possessed by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime. This event asks why the distribution of wealth in our nation is so uneven; whether public policy, even when well intentioned, reinforces existing inequalities; and whether or not race and ethnicity continue to play a pivotal role in defining the haves and have-nots in our society.

With:
Meizhu Lui, executive director, UFE
Betsy Leondar-Wright, communications director, UFE
Michelle Cromwell, professor, social systems, Pine Manor

Listen Here - Free streaming audio or mp3 download, approx 1h 25m.

Why We Must Struggle Against All Forms of Oppression

A comment posted by brownfemipower on her own blog entry: Denying people food is a Male Thing.

ONe of the incidences that I had the pleasure (not) of participating in with a white feminist involved her showing me pics of an Afghani woman who had twin children, one boy and one girl, and she feed the boy breast milk and the girl watered down formula. She didn't think that she had enough milk to feed two kids, so she gave the girl formula–and of course, she’s freaking poverty stricken and can't come up with enough water to make the formula–and of course, when you're starving, what do you do, but portion out and restrict the food you do have? So anyway, the girl wound up dying.

The white feminist I was talking to was positive that this horrific thing happened because Afghani culture values men. Well, it's true that in a patriarchal culture, men are valued. But when you are a single afghani mother who can't forage for food on your own and you’re starving to death isn't there also a very real legitimate reason that you value male life? Do we really think that a well off Afghani woman in Canada that has plenty of food is going to starve her daughter to death and lavish breast milk on a son?

Desperation *creates* and/or *reinforces* gender imbalances–many times, those gender imbalances didn’t exist prior to the introduction of "desperation". Look in Iraq, for example–women are now confined to their houses in ways that they weren’t under saddamn. Is a little girl that requires food but can do nothing to help *get* the food really going to be valued?

and then, really, in the case of this woman, it really pissed me off that this white woman was decrying the sexism, but NOT the fact that a mother has to water down formula to make it last longer or deny her child all together because she simply doesn't have water. Those conditions of extreme horrific poverty were created BY US and the USSR. Do we have no responsibility at ALL in that child's death?

I think this anecdote illustrates nicely the connection between patriarchy and economic injustice. All forms of domination and oppression are connected, and ALL have to be struggled against. That is why Condoleeza Rice represents nothing for our struggles: as a black woman she has been invited into the "other side" of the racist, patriarchal, classist divide. That does not eliminate the divide. Frustrating: white wealthy women (who can choose to be stay-at-home moms because of their priviledged social position) and support right-wing parties and say feminism is dead. Grrrr...

Climate Change and Increasing Terrorism

Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.
....
"Those who are short of food, those who are short of water, those who can't move to countries where it looks as if everything is marvelous are going to be people who are going to adopt desperate measures to try and make their point."
...
John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain's Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries," al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden wrote in a 2002 "letter to the American people."

Read the whole article. Via Grist. Original article at Financial Times.

The consequences of climate change are visited first and worst upon those who have the least to lose, in the Middle East and Africa. Reminds us why all of our movements must work in solidarity.

We need to start healing our environment in the name of peace, women's rights, social justice, and economic justice.

John Mohawk, Iroquois Leader and Scholar, Dead at 61

Rest in Peace, John Mohawk.

I was fortunate enough to see John Mohawk at the Bioneers conference, at a "Kitchen Table Conversation" entitled Race, Class and Power, where he spoke alongside Paul Hawken, Aqeela Sherrills, and Akaya Windwood. This was a powerful workshop, which was so packed full there were people crammed in, sitting on the floor (You can buy a copy of the CD or MP3 from this session. It's worth a listen). I always have soft spots for historians, since history is one of my passions, but I have to tell you John Mohawk gave off such an aura of wisdom and gentleness. He also had very important things to say.

The 20th century saw the rise of Stalinism, of Hitlerism, of Fascisms of all kind all over, I mean not just Europe but in many places has led to holocausts, exterminations, extinctions.

In each and every case it was started by a people who felt like the Germans did, that they were somehow left out, somehow not given their due. People who took a conscious effort to reform their culture, and in so doing gave themselves permission to commit murder. That has been accelerating in this century and I think it will continue to accelerate into the next century.

That is going to be a result of the side effects of the combination of the globalisation of economy and all the social changes that have diminished the value of human labour and diminished the value of people's relationships and their symbiotic relationships with land.

Read or listen to the rest of this interview with him regarding the future.

Yesterday's Democracy Now also featured an excerpt from a talk he gave at a teach-in last month.

the American civilization has a rationalization for a lot of bad things, things like the removal policy and things like the Indian war thing, and things like the forced assimilation policy.

All of those flow from an ideology of white supremacy, which was the dominant ideology of race theory in the United States in the 19th century. I point this out, because it seems to me that the moment we're looking at is a proposal that peoples of the world, distinct peoples of the world have a right to a continued existence as distinct peoples. And I point to you that the white supremacy argument offers no such rights. It doesn't offer any rights to a distinct existence -- a continued existence of other species, of birds, animals, plants and whatever, fishes. It is a theory that says that one group has the absolute unhindered right to do what they need to do to get what they want.

Listen, read, or watch the whole thing

Microcredit and Women Empowerment

Are the microcredit programs that everyone is abuzz about overrated? Apparently this is a hotly debated issue.

My first inclination is to dismiss microcredit because it doesn't change the structural causes of poverty. Microcredit brings poor people into the existing global system of exploitation, and might even mask that very real exploitation, putting even more onus on the poor to get themselves out of the hole others have dug them into. It doesn't speak to social justice at all.

BUT, as I was reminded by The Rebel Sell, something that actually works shouldn't necessarily be dismissed so quickly, for solely ideological reasons. It is important to also look at the real and measurable results. Our fight for justice can, and does, occur in parallel to all sorts of development activities; indeed, as people rise out of the most devastating of poverty, they may have more resources and power with which to fight.

So microcredit needs to be examined on a functional basis: does it work? Does it help alleviate poverty? Does it empower women financially and/or within the family?

The answer is not so clear.

Increasing the burden of debt is one potential problem. As long as microcredit is managed by NGOs like Save the Children, this is a fairly small risk, as there are a whole host of additional helpful programs that accompany the actual money lending transaction. Unfortunately with high interest rates, especially when the private sector gets involved for profit, there can be grave consequences.

If not necessarily effective at improving poverty levels, what about the situation of women? Improving women's equality is vital to so many other progressive goals, that this alone might validate microcredit. If it could improve women's economic position, reduce the birth rate, and improve health, then there might be something to it.

Proponents of these micro-loans list the ways they help women, but results are mixed. According this journal article, "the effects of interventions such as microcredit loan programs—which empower women economically and socially—on domestic violence are ambiguous. Participation in such programs can, on the one hand, reduce a woman's risk of domestic violence by making her life more visible and by increasing her perceived value in the family; on the other hand, if the woman's economic empowerment results in her acting more assertively, her husband may respond with violence."

There does seem to be some preliminary evidence that involvement in one of these microcredit programmes does improve contraceptive use by women, which is a fairly significant marker of progress. There are a lot more articles here.

I can't claim to make a definitive conclusion. Although I would prefer to see the end of the disastrous SAPs and an expansion of important social programs, if microcredit energizes a discouraged development sector and elicits more money for the groups on the ground, then for that reason alone, it is worth pursuing.

More on Poverty and Women's Issues

"Environmentalists need to get on the Social Justice Bus"

This weekend I've been fortunate enough to have been able to go to the Bioneers conference in San Rafael, California. I thought I was going to an environmental conference, and had mixed feelings about this, because in some sense I feel that environmentalism is a movement of privilege.

Any regular readers of my blog probably have an idea that one of the themes that comes up a lot is the need for broad coalitions between diverse kinds of movements. I believe the suffering caused by the destruction of the enviroment is unfairly visited upon the most marginalized in society (a diverse group indeed). The marginalized groups are also often excluded from large-scale environmental movements, in particular consumer-based movements like organics, or "shopping for sustainability" as I like to (derogatorily) call it.

I have been pleasantly surprised, thrilled, even, to find out that at this conference, these underlying values of social and economic justice are actually a shared assumption, one which if mentioned would provoke a great chorus of: "duh!".

To paraphrase Paul Hawken's very inspiring talk: Instead of environmentalists inviting other movements to get on their bus, environmentalists have to get on the social justice bus.

I will have much more to write about as I continue to digest all I have learned and experienced this weekend.

More Reflection on the Environment and Solidarity

Connecting Movements = Solidarity

You might be asking what women's reproductive rights have to do with environmentalism. Well, the answer to that is: pretty much everything. The root causes of our environmental ills are the wants, needs, and desires of unimaginably huge numbers of people. Family planning is also one of the keys in helping to relieve poverty, which in turn helps to further reduce fertility rates as people climb the economic ladder. Poverty reduction and family planning go hand in hand, one begetting the other in a closed loop.
From Gristmill

Naturally, populations start to decline as a society becomes more egalitarian, industrialized, urbanized, wealthier.

Why? Give women more choices and they won't have as many babies - they may work outside the home, delay marriage, and use contraception. Children are expensive and less of an asset in industrial, urban societies as opposed to agricultural societies. Wealthier populations tend to also be healthier, which means less infant mortality (which generally correlates with having fewer babies). More info here and here.

Environmentalists can't afford to ignore structural poverty, racism, social injustice, women's rights... because these things are really several sides of the same coin. The debate should never be framed as economics vs. environment. The most vulnerable in our world have the least to lose - they will be (in fact, they are already) affected by ecological changes that we see in abstract terms.

More on women's rights, class issues, environment, solidarity

Five Things Feminism Has Done for Me

As I mentioned yesterday, the Status of Women Canada was one of the programs that got slashed by our lovely government. Also yesterday I was participating in a conversation at the end of this piece on feminism. Seems people have something against feminists. I don't quite get it, except maybe these people have absorbed the stereotype of male-bashing ball-busting "feminazis", which incidentally I think doesn't really exist (maybe on the fringe somewhere, but I've certainly never met anyone like this. The feminists I know actually like men, they just don't like mysogyny).

The Progressive Bloggers have a project going called "5 Things Feminism Has Done for Me". So here's my list:

Feminism has:

1. Improved my access to better paying jobs. Women have always worked, but now we get paid better than we used to. We are not yet at wage parity with men, but we have come a long way. Now I can at least support myself without relying on a man. I even have my very own bank account.
   
2. Given me legal rights to my own body, including abortion rights and recourse in case of domestic violence. Domestic violence is still a big problem, but at least legally a man has no right to the "rule of thumb" anymore.
   
3. Allowed me to own property (not that I do, but I could if I had the money and the desire), sign my own contracts, vote, join the army, drive, run for public office... in other words, allowed me to be considered a human being on par with the male human beings.
   
4. Enabled me to get an edu-ma-cation. I believe the men in my life are also happy that I'm educated, informed and politically aware. It gives us more to talk about at the dinner table.
   
5. Finally, along with other social justice movements, feminism has participated in making the world a more tolerant and just place for everyone. By challenging existing oppressive structures, we open society up to further change.
   

Feminism has done an incredible job so far, but we still have a long way to go. Around the world the struggles we have faced in the past continue to be fought, and our rights here are under assault, as the funding cut to SWC shows.

Solidarity is our only hope. A very small minority (mostly white upper class Christian men - please note this does not mean I hate white people, rich people, Christians or men) have it all, and the rest have to make do with the scraps. I say: don't fight each other for the scraps, fight the structures that keep us ALL down.

Oh, and tag, you're it.

More on women's issues.
related posts

Martin Luther King Day

Seems like a good time to consider what this progressive would say if he were here today. He envisioned a world free of violence, oppression, and crippling poverty, with a commitment to economic and social justice for all of humankind.

Listen to the "Beyond Vietnam" speech of 1967 (download or stream, mp3 or Real Player), in which he declared the US, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." This speech is quite stirring, and still holds so much meaning now. At the time it was called "demagogic slander" (Time Magazine):

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood-it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

This speech is particularly relevant in light of the current state of the world. The imperialist war in Iraq has many parallels to that in Vietnam, there are sharp divides between rich and poor (often along racial and ethnic lines), hate mongerers have too much control... Almost begs the question: What would Martin Luther King have done about Iraq? or should I say Vietraq?

Topics: Iraq, Racism, Politics