RAINBOW RACISM's topics - tribe.net

Gay Fascists/ Gay Republicans

nilochem — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:17:31 GMT

I was reading an article in Details about the death of prominent leader of the extreme right in Austria. After his death it became public that, not only did he have a male lover, but that he surrounded himself with a coterie of young gay men. Now given the history of the Austrian Right Wing Parties, one would think that any gay person with even a hint of historical knowledge would veer as far away from the far right as possible. That is not the case. What is it that deludes people into acting against their own long-term interest?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Tattle tale

fucko — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:08:37 GMT

I just don't know what to do about this cause I've never encountered a genuine homophobic rasist before, but this guy takes the bait.

http://people.tribe.net/9b1247a7-c221-41cb-82e4-6c1a13871371

I think people should know,
But maybe I'm over reacting.

advice?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

I'm a Racist?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:21:01 GMT

In Continuing on my Southern Oddessy, I've wound up in Keller Texas. It's not to far outside of Fort Worth... my stay here will be brief before i FINALLY return to the bay area. Within the length of time betweenleaving bay area... working in New orleans and living in the Louisiana semi-rural land....and even spending some time in Memphis Tennessee, I've accumulated some sort of warpped anxiety of white people.

Instances:

Mothers day in Louisiana i spent with my fairweathered grandmother, we traveled to nearby Hammond, I believe home of ms.Jamie lynn Spears. It was my grandmother and step-grand dad and their married couple friends, all over the age of 60. They spent 2 hours looking for a place to eat....and my grannys friend, Elmer suggested a place in the countryside named Charlies. When we approached the place it looked like a large Trailer home instead of a eatery. And it was jam packed with "really white " people. good ol' boy looking people.... and I started to sweat. My grandmothers friend asked me if i was afraid and spoke yes...and asked if they'd been here before. they said once..and don't be surprised if we don't see any brown faces. I was flustered and beyond upset... I thought...

"These are older Black people who were born in the south and lives through the 40's,50' and 60's.. my step grandfather being 76 years of age... why aren't they terrified? Don't they have better sense then to bring ME here! ah i hate them!"

The place was indeed packed. No black people at all. But the wait would have been 2 hours. So we left.

Instance 2:
Going to the gym in the apartment complex and being uncomfortable when I'm left in a room with a white woman on the treadmill or an old lady trying to aerobics. I will leave.

Or today a father let his little girl run wild and i was taking the garbage out and she spoke to me and I ignored her.

So it's safe to say my kneejerk reaction is to over react and i'm actually generalizing white southern people as racist...and possible of misconstruing my actions.... calling the police on me if i'm out at night taking out the garbage or utilizing the gym. complete fear and loathing. I feel better when i'm at Mc Donalds and theres black patrons or i'm around black people... when... indeed it was the OPPOSITE in California. I find this fascinating and scary. I'm actually assuming all white people are racist while just trying to avoid the POSSIBILITY of any attack. White people do this to black...Blacks can do this Arabs.... it's rooted sometimes with the best of intentions. For me it's a combo of the "WalMart" arrest and going into the south with preconceptions...and the mass media in my head. The stories... the history.

So i thought i'd come here to spark some convo on the root of this problem and how it manifested itself with me... a (i'd like to think) concious person of color...reasonable for the most part, who desires change and fluidity between races.

So here's my current experience... Please do what you guys do best... deconstruct and investigate and report.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

A New Gay Dating Site……with a twist

I-Thought-You-Knew — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:37:39 GMT

YES....you will see this post in my various tribes, so if you've seen it in another tribe you're a member of.........Don't Bitch. OKAY! And I say this in jest:-)

This gay dating site is unique in regards, to its approach, for its membership. Here’s the premise of the site, written and originated by the creator of the site:

“Welcome to Dissident Dating”

“Maybe you don't test for HIV or maybe you did and just don't trust the results. Maybe you've learned that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and that tests are inaccurate. Then you can meet like-minded people here, make friends, date, and...well, its up to you! On this site no one posts "status" because negative and positive are proven to be meaningless or at best misleading. Why not live and love!”

My Observation:

With all the fear and pandemonium about dating (these days) a person labeled ‘so-called’ hiv-antibody positive, this site doesn’t ask that you reveal your ‘status’ because the members are dissidents, and have accepted, not to accept, the fear based paradigm of hiv ‘antibodies’ being the cause of aids.

Definition of ‘Antibody’: any of numerous Y-shaped protein molecules produced by B cells as a primary immune defense, each molecule and its clones having a unique binding site that can combine with the complementary site of a foreign antigen, as on a virus or bacterium, thereby disabling the antigen and signaling other immune defenses.

So if you’ve been labeled hiv-antibody positive, or negative, or just don’t know, no one on the dating site will judge you about that. Just be prepared for a vast amount of mind-blowing (and boggling) knowledge from some of the members, you may come to know, on the site.

What I find interesting about the site, is it’s ability, to reach out to people, who, are taking a different stance and approach on dating, loving, meeting someone new, and being with someone who shares their views about the ‘Otherside’ of the hiv paradigm and model. And hey…you just might learn something new, and a thang-or-two, from a member, or so.

This is not a debate, or bitching, or mud-slinging site; that usually happens after you’re in a relationship. It’s a gay DATING site, with a majority of members who are interested in meeting and getting to know others, who question(s) the model we call hiv. Revealing your status (I would assume) – to another member – it entirely up to you and he, if you care to include it in your dialogue, but not required.

The site is new, so it will be a matter of time, when the membership continues to grow.
It is ‘not’ to assume that every member joining -- this site -- are considered as hiv antibody pos, because a lot of people aren’t, because they know enough and don’t believe hiv=aids, to be afraid of being with someone label as pos:
http://www.dissidentdating.com/index.php

Be open-minded. You may met someone who can change you life for the better. One just never knows, where cupid may strike.
Terry

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Tim Wise coming to Oakland!!

Khadijah — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:34:01 GMT

Speak Out presents
An Evening with Tim Wise

"Tim Wise is one of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous critics of white privilege in the nation."

‹ Michael Eric Dyson, best-selling author and University of Pennsylvania professor

Speak Out presents anti-racism activist and author Tim Wise in a rare Bay Area appearance - one night only!
WHEN: Friday, April 4, 2008, 7:30 pm

WHERE: First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685-14th St. Oakland CA
COST: $12-$20 sliding scale, $8 for youth ages 18 and under
Available online at
or call the Brown Paper Tickets 24/7 ticket hotline: 1-800-838-3006

MORE INFO: Contact Speak Out at 510-601-0182, info@speakoutnow.org

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

STORMY LEATHER Celebrates Black History Month and Women’s History Month

Mistress M — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:26:21 GMT

January '08:
STORMY LEATHER FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Event 2/1-3/28/08

Venue Contact: Kirsten Griffith, Promotions & Marketing Manager
415.626.1672 or email: kirsten@stormyleather.com

STORMY LEATHER Celebrates Black History Month and Women’s History Month by presenting BAY AREA WOMEN OF COLOR PHOTO PROJECT – Fine Art to Elegant Photography’s Beauty’s Lenses photography exhibition which runs February 1 – March 28, 2008. Plus Special Opening Reception Performance Event (No Host Bar) on Friday, February 8, 2008.

SAN FRANCISCO – January 2008 STORMY LEATHER in San Francisco is proud to host a special Black History Month and Women’s History Month with a fine art photography exhibition presented by the Bay Area Women of Color Photo Project’s Beauty’s Lenses from February 1 – March 28, 2008. Photographers featured in this tantalizing adult oriented, artistic group show include: Andrew Morgan, Larry Utley, Refa One and Darling Propaganda.

The opening event for the exhibition will take place on Friday, February 8, 2008 with a unique multimedia fetish event featuring high art, performance, and audiovisual imagery designed by Andrew Morgan and presented by our Photographers. Performance Artists for the reception event include: Madame Butterfly - Shibari & Twilight Vixen Review - Burlesque. Anyone over 21 is welcomed, and guests are encouraged to dress in their finest fetish wear. Event Sponsor: STORMY LEATHER: Gold Sponsor: Ms. Heart, Silver Sponsor: Christine-Submissive and Bronze Sponsor: Laurie Girl-Ms. Alameda County Leather 2007.

About STORMY LEATHER:
"Stormy Leather is a leading manufacturer and retailer of distinctive, high-quality leather clothing and toys. With customer enjoyment paramount, we continually strive for excellence in function, innovative design and customer service." http://www.stormyleather.com

About the Bay Area Women of Color Photo Project:
The Bay Area Women of Color BDSM Photo Project is a volunteer community lifestyle Photo and Educational project started by Ms. Heart of San Francisco and photographer Andrew Morgan, Founding Photo Project Manager. The mission of the "Bay Area Women of Color Photo Project" is to expand the aesthetic and cultural perception promoting artistically tasteful artistic photographic images of Women of Color in the fine arts and elegant lifestyles. The project only supports behaviors and activities engaged in by adults with mutual informed consent in safe and sane situations. For more information about the project, visit www.bayareawoc.com and email heart-sf@sbcglobal.net.

Short:
FOR CALENDAR EDITORS: EVENT LISTING-ART GALLERY/PHOTOGRAPHY LISTING-RETAIL EVENT
Theme Tie in with: Black History Month and Women’s History Month

STORMY LEATHER Presents Beauty's Lenses
A Bay Area Women of Color Photo Project's Photographic Exhibition
February 1st - March 28th, 2008
~Experience the tantalizing photographs of the Featured Photographers~
Andrew Morgan, Larry Utley, Refa One, and Darling Propaganda

Reception Date: Friday, February 8th - 7:30-9:30 pm (No-Host Bar)
The reception's audiovisual show is designed by Andrew Morgan and presented by our Photographers.

-Special Performance Artists-
Madame Butterfly - Shibari & Twilight Vixen Review - Burlesque
-All Communities Welcome – Dress to Impress-

WHEN: February 1st - March 28th, 2008
WHERE: Where: Stormy Leather (lower gallery level)
1158 Howard Street (near 8th St. ) San Francisco , CA 94103
Store and Gallery Hours: 12:00 noon - 7:00 p.m. Daily
Toll free: 800.486.9650 Phone: 415.626.1672 Fax: 415.626.0308

For more information on the Bay Area Women of Color Project:
www.bayareawoc.com and or email heart-sf@sbcglobal.net

PHOTOGRAPHS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST!!!

Press Inquiries/Photos/Interviews: Heart, Bay Area Women of Color Photo Project
heart-sf@sbcglobal.net

-----------------------------------------------------------------

**Heart
http://www.msheart-sf.com
**Bay Area Women of Color Photo Project
http://www.bayareawoc.com

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Walking while black

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:11:03 GMT

I Just had the scariest, most confsing, fucked up hour of my life. Maybe in the top 5 at least.

While still in Covington Louisiana, I headed out today to do last minute Christmas shopping for someone i forget to buy for. My cousin Teresa dropped me off at Wal-Mart, where i was picking up wired cash. The process was simple. The line to customer Service wasn't very long. My cousin was supposed to circle around and I'd hop back in the Car and we'd go to shopping for a some kind of massage device for my aunt, that my mom wanted me to buy for her.

My anxiety tightened like a steel noose. I've been experiencing the holiday blues and I've been Anxious to get back to California. Plotting and Planning. Apartment hunting and balancing what cash i have in the bank so i come up alright. My mind is whirlpool.... fastly spinning... in motion. I don't wanna be out here on this day, in a wal mart parking lot for that matter.

I leave the Store looking for Teresa and her big deep red suv. To me All Suv's look a like. I never pay attention makes... Cars period confuse me. That's why I tried my damnest to avoid driving one. All i know is that i'm looking for a red SUV...in a huge parking lot. It's cold, and I'm not dressed to wheather. I spend the next 25 minutes furiously going up and down the parking lot hoping to spot her or increase the chances she'll see me. I rushed out of the house so fast that i left my phone. In my fury, i regret that decision. Or lack of... Things were about to get worse.

I wait... more... until i decide that i should just walk home. I feel humilated because i must look strange to people. I notice people looking at me strange.I figure that Its me... my social anxiety. My fear of people... people are wierd and shit. Come on. I think it's a shared feeling. Especially southern people. Louisiana people. In the past mouth my contempt for them has slowly boiled into a rue. A deep dark ruby red hue. I started wearing baseball caps to shield myself form the cold and maybe aid with contact with these people.

It's awful to feel that way. I'm slightly guilted.

I have no clue that the boiling rue of contempt towards a town and a state is about to rise above the lid and spew all over my face. I'm about to get burned.

After spending ALL this time searching for my ride, I exit the parking lot. On my way to exit the parking lot a car cuts in front of me. I speed up doing a fast jog to the closest curb. A guy suddenly appears in front of me with a taser aimed in front my face. I quickly think.... Oh Thats a taser...thats what it look like.

Two guys in Back appear. I hear yelling. My brain goes fuzzy but it's not too fuzzy that i don't catch onto whats happening. They're talking to me...and i should do as they say and get on ground. I'm ordered to put my hands behind my back. I'm frisked...asked if i have any weapons or drugs on me. I lay there for a few minutes. Long enough to access the police had me under suspicion of some "Criminal Miscief" .

I'm lifted up off the ground and pushed on the squad car. Back towards the sky.

I'm getting more upset thinking about this shit.Anyways.....

I stood while the rest of my body lay on the hood of the police car for what seemed an eternity. I was calm for most of... pushing anger and confusion, anxiety as deep as i could...and just remained Tranquil.

"Boy, we CAUGHT you. We been trailing you for 20 minutes watching you go up and down the aisle looking into cars and pulling on handles."

WHAT!

THE

FUCK!!

I told him what i was doing. Why i came there. What i was doing in the parking lot...looking for my cousins car...or her. Why i was looking confused. I was looking for A Red SUV with a fat black girl wearing pink in it.PROLLY eating a hamburger,

"You liar. Look here. You can save your stories. We got people...witnessnes watching you in this parking lot... looking at cars."

Huh!!?

"Were you going to steal some wheels. Is that what you were gonna do."

I can comput. A terrible terrible feeling rushing through me. And this comes at the tail end of an excurciatingly tense and emotional week. I'm too exhausted for this shit. I made my plan to get the fuckout of his town. This man who has me leaning on his car wants to throw me in jail. I calmly tell him that if he checks the survailence cameras, it will show that I was simply walking... albiet confused and stressed out looking.. for my cousin. I Tell him i have never been held by the police. EVER. Arrested? NEVER. Not even a talking to. Nothing.

The Handcuff are tightened. When he got behind me...i didn't think he would let me go for some reason after 10 to 15 minutes outside of the car on my stomach on the hood... so... i wasnt surprised when he tightened them and then put me inb the car.

He told me he could put me in for Criminal Mischief. I don't know what that is... but I took a residue of comfort, all i could muster as my stomach ache, and Began to feel dispair. The Car was tiny. A tomb. I began to get clausterphobic.

I overheard racist shit. Fag shit. In the background between the cops and two employees. The manager of wal mart came out.

"Oh yeah. I know Jack. Didn't we just FIRE you!!!"

Oh my god. I QUIT. So the picture was being painted for me. The no good ex employee who only worked there like 3 weeks (i needed the pay check so i whored out...yeah) and left. I was in the parking lot looking to steal a car or pick some shit out of someones car. Even I felt guilty and shameful.

They eventual let me go. They had nothing to hold me on.

He told me if he would have a clear profile of me... he would have hauled me in...and I would have been in jail for Christmas.

He took my information and told me that if anyone in Wal-Mart complains of something missing from their car.... He's "coming for me."

So there's this looming fear that someone could knock on the door at any moment...and it will be police with their tasers and a full on SQUAT force to "take me down" at like 3 a.m. because some old lady misplaced some shit. I'm "wanted"

wanted for getting lost in parking lot.

Nothing else.

I thought this shit was a myth. One can't ignore the racial implications. Theyw ere quite blatant. But shit like that never happened to me before...i've been lost in parking lot looking for a car before.

And however would they get the idea that i was trying doors is beyond me. They probably looked at the tape...I'm sure and knew they had no shit to hold me on.
I was told to stay away from the premises of Wal-Mart. He sent me on my way...as if i were a no good shit head. I was too relieved and foggy brained to be pissed off. I walked home.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 9 replies

Listen to my links

LEA — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:32:36 GMT

http://asx.ljcentral.net/mp3/eir/tls/2008/tls080209_en_hi.mp3

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Benefit for local non-profit working for lgbtq rights in schools

Ben — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:16:34 GMT

Hey all,
I dont want to sound like spam, but I'm looking for folks to come out a week from sunday to the white horse in oakland. I'm putting on a fundraiser with a BBQ 4-6 then raffle and show at 8. Stop by anytime. The beer bust has been extended to 9 for us and if you get a burger with the beer bust, you'll save a few dollars. Also, jello shots and other baked goods and of course, the ipod we'll be raffling off among other things. PM me if you have any questions.

Ally Action:
www.allyaction.com
"Making schools safe for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender-identity/expression."

THE WHITE HORSE INN
6551 Telegraph Ave Oakland, CA 94609

Thanks!!!
Ben

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

so i just watched crash for the first time...

Ben — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 04:37:18 GMT

...and i'm not quite sure what i think yet. It seemed a little problematic, with certain stereotypes being conformed to a little too much. It's hard for me to say what should have been done, as it could have been a shitty movie, the writer/producer/whatever wanted it to be that way, or perhaps both. I found the format a little confusing and almost too predictable as everything was connected oh so perfectly well.

I think my biggest issue was the scene where the movie guy's wife suddenly runs to the arms of her molester? I liked her initial reaction--it was a little more appropriate--but then running to him was just absurd. I also found the one who was in the car when the movie guy's navigator got pulled over to be a little off as well. He was like a corrupt or blind robin hood or something but maybe that was the intention?

I'm wondering what others' thoughts on the movie were, although I do realize it's not exactly something new. I just noticed it in the movie store tonight when they didn't have the other ones i was looking for, so I figured it was time to watch it.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Black Lesbian Feature & Oakland Film Co.

DeeJay — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:06:11 GMT

Griot Soul Films, an Oakland-based non-profit film company dedicated to producing complex film images of Black and Black Connected communities, and providing community members tools and training to do the same. We're currently working to produce the 1st Black Same Gender Loving Woman's Romantic Dramedy "She Wasn't Last Night."

It's community funded and we've gotten a lot of positive press both nationally and internationally. We need more local involvement and the Winter Holidays are a great time to connect!

Please check out our website at www.griotsoulfilms.org and our trailer at www.afterellen.com/blwe/12-14-07

....and consider making a holiday donation of any size. Join our social network for the film at shewasntlastnight.ning.com

Thanks for taking the time!!!!

DJ

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

For San Fran Peeps

riotgrrl — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:40:12 GMT

-this came from a friend of mine:

Dear friends,

I hope you will be able to attend a hearing called by the SF Board of Supervisors to discuss the newly-implemented "gang injunctions" (we call them "neighborhood injunctions") in neighborhoods like the Mission and the Fillmore.

Please join us on MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 10 AM, SF CITY HALL, 2ND FLOOR.

Youth, families, advocates and others will be testifying to the fact that these gang injunctions don't reduce violence, violate the civil rights of communities of color, further criminalize young people, and undermine the work of community-based organizations.

For more information, please feel free to contact me at renee@lrcl.org, or (415) 553-3404.

Thank you,
Renee Saucedo
La Raza Centro Legal

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Mandingo Porn??

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 07:12:47 GMT

I was surfing youtube and landed on a pg-13 rated clip of a xxx film called BLACKBALLED 5: Starfucker. Of course i watched it...and honestly i didn't get the title until i saw the black guy corner the white soap soap star. Of course, a gang bang ensues. (not in the clip)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ypYmGZw0RcU

the trailer is here:

http://www.channel1releasing.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=4589&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=159

It was hot. Although it's completely racist.... i still found it hot and I will be provocative enough to challenge other gay men to tell me if they found the idea of an attractive white (in this case prolly latin or italian) boy getting pummeled by a bunch of black men somewhat, if not entirely erotic. I have to question why i find it hot.... and why there's a huge market for black gang bangs in the first place. Do a google search... or search nakedsword.com for BLACK/GANG and BANG...bam!!!!.... you'll get tons. Same scenario...sweet light skined human gets his ass rammed like Mac into a Miyata.

Pornograpghy has these themes even in straight porn... but Gang bangs carry a certain flavor of Hot and just plain wrongness.

thoughts?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 8 replies

WTF ?!

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:51:06 GMT

Ok....I just need to vent for a minute.

Yesterday at work I found out that a client at my shop has a husband
who doesn't like her coming to my place of employment. Why?
Because of " that black gay guy." ( yes they're both white. )
She comes anyway...and is very nice to me. But her husband
will pull up out front and honk for her when he comes to pick her up.
He won't come inside. I suspect in fear that my faggoty negroid
germs might infect him? WHATEVER !! Funny...since she confessed
to finding him searching for gay sex on the internet. He told her that
he was luring them with sex so that he could meet them
and tell them about the Lord Jesus Christ. Now....
where have we heard THAT before? I wonder if he had a bag of coke?
But didn't use it of course. ;- P

Awhile ago...a very sweet elderly client of mine stopped coming to me. She eventually told my coworker it was because
her son ( gay & white ) was racist against blacks. She felt really bad but claimed that her son haranged
her every time she came to see me. Since she lived with him, her only solution was to concede to his demand and
see another person at my job.They live around the corner from my shop. So I guess he would
do a drive by every now and then to make sure she wasn't getting work done by the "black fag."

S.F. claims to be so diverse ( lip service imho ) but I find it has just as many issues as anywhere else in the US.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me here in SF. But it still hurts every time.
I have to say...these things are making me think twice about continuing to live here.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 13 replies

Lawd I gets tired, so tired.....

Khadijah — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:07:20 GMT

OK... for the cube decorating contest this dumb 'ho' thought it would be funny to decorate as the Jonestown massacre. complete with cauldron of coolaid, and if you didnt drink it she would shoot you with a watergun. I told her it was a bad idea. then I showed ppl in her cube why, because they didnt know the story. looking at those pics made me email her, just to let her know.. You dont even have to read the following.. I just have to get it out of my system..

Thanx

K

Me:
You know. Just looking at those pics were a bit upsetting. And I just don’t think it’s a good idea. To me it’s akin to making fun of the Jewish Holocaust. How comfy would you be doing that? Yeah... it’s not sitting well with me. And Im really surprised that it was ok with Anne.

Please rethink it.

Her:

I’m sorry you were upset by photos (I’m assuming you’re referring to pictures online of Jonestown?) but I have a real problem with comparing Jonestown to the Holocaust- the events are completely unrelated. One event was led a charismatic cult leader who convinced 900+/- people of different races to kill themselves in the name of their faith, the other event is systematic genocide of 6 +/-million people, the majority of whom were Jewish but a group which was also comprised Roma, physically disabled people, homosexuals, mentally disabled people, prisoners of war, and political dissidents( to name a few.) Jim Jones was seeking to create a communist paradise on Earth for his religious followers, while Hitler was attempting to engineer a master race. Both events are terrible but for very different reasons and I think that equating one with the other does a major disservice to human history; it belittles both experiences by reducing them to simply “terrible” and not taking into account the very real differences between them and their places in history. I have a problem in general with equating any large scale loss of human life to the Holocaust because it’s not a fair comparison.
That said, considering how close Jonestown is to recent Bay Area history and the possibility that someone here could have been directly effected by the tragedy, we have chosen to redesign our cube’s Halloween idea.

B

Me:
B.

I would have to question your issue with comparing Jonestown to the Jewish holocaust. The point being made is that they are BOTH sensitive issues that should not be up for Halloween mockery. I mentioned the Jewish Holocaust specifically, so you would understand the gravity of the situation you were about to create. It’s interesting that you conveniently miss the point.

“I have a problem in general with equating any large scale loss of human life to the Holocaust because it’s not a fair comparison.” This statement speaks directly to your ignorance of the history of the people that killed themselves in the name of faith. And perhaps explains the humor you find in it. The motivations were different, but the results were the same, despite the different scale. As you recognize with the bit about getting shot (with a watergun) for not drinking, you also know that many people killed did not drink willingly, or die for faith. You conveniently say they were of different races, a little research will show you that they were overwhelmingly mostly Black and poor. Whose history in this country began with the loss of OVER 6 million in the Middle Passage alone, not to mention continued atrocities like lynching, and destroying of whole cities, etc.
To assume the Jewish Holocaust is the worst “large scale loss of human life”, totally negates all kinds of tragedies that have happened and are happening in world histories, and shows a stark lack of knowledge of genocides that have happened all over the world through history. Native Americans, Rwanda , Darfur , etc. This lack is what actually does a disservice to human history.

Now, that said, I would hope that beyond the possibility of offending someone, there would be a little reverence and empathy for those that suffered trying to find hope from the constant injustices and injuries that befell them. The issues they were running from to live in a “communist paradise” still exist, by the way.

To paraphrase Elie Wiesel, to compare atrocities is to belittle them all. If you re read my original email, you’ll see that the only comparison I was making was to illustrate the horror that you found amusing. The rest was yours.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 5 replies

Um...WTF? Too.....

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 23:51:46 GMT

I'm reading Marcus' Post in this very tribe..and I accidently click something (it was a google ad next to his post ) that took me here:

http://www.caucasianrightsfoundation.com/?gclid=CNqZzsWHjY8CFQspFQodq2xueg

CLICK it. Whadduhell?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 6 replies

Racist Ice Cream Trucks

Eee — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:06:32 GMT

http://popnomination.blogspot.com/2007/10/racist-ice-cream-trucks.html

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Should racism and gay rights piggyback on each other?

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:54:44 GMT

Miami Herald

Mayor's gay remarks split black community

Posted on Sun, Sep. 23, 2007
BY PETER BAILEY
pbailey@herald. com

Inside Fort Lauderdale City Hall, a contingent of gay white men squared
off against black ministers this month, arguing over civil rights.

Outraged over the ministers' decision to announce their support of Mayor
Jim Naugle's crusade against homosexuals on Sept. 4, about 20 gay
activists wearing red shirts and AIDS pins condemned the clergymen the
next day for not being sympathetic to their cause -- one they say
mirrors the African-American struggle.

The ministers did not agree.

''You didn't have to drink from separate fountains. Our struggle is not
the same ... you can't equate race and sexuality,'' O'Neal Dozier,
pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center, told one activist. ``Slavery
was not a choice.''

''Yours is a message of hate, minister ... you don't speak on behalf of
freedom,'' answered Michael Rajner of the Campaign to End AIDS, a
nonprofit group.

Now the debate over gay rights threatens to drive a wedge between
members of South Florida's black community. Despite the support that
many black ministers showed for Naugle, the local NAACP took a public
stand against the mayor, calling his crusade a ``hate campaign.''

''I'm not here to condone or condemn gay sex,'' Marsha Ellison, head of
the Broward NAACP, told The Miami Herald. ``This is a hate campaign
against gays launched by the mayor.''

She said the branch's position -- adopted after a unanimous vote of its
22-member executive committee as well as branch members -- echoes the
national NAACP's position. ''Anytime any group is discriminated against
it becomes a civil rights issue,'' she said.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond made national headlines with his recent
endorsement of gay marriage -- a step several prominent black ministers
publicly criticized.

While Bond has noted that ''no parallel between movements for rights is
exact,'' his position differs with ministers and others who suggest that
sexual orientation is a matter of choice. He wrote last year: ``Like
race, our sexuality isn't a preference -- it is inborn, and the
Constitution protects us all against discrimination based on immutable
differences. ''

Naugle drew scorn from gay activists nationwide after endorsing an
advisory board proposal to spend $250,000 on an automated public
restroom on Fort Lauderdale beach. The mayor said it would cut down on
men having sex in public facilities.

Initially, the city said only two people had been arrested for sexual
activity in a public restroom since 2005. But Naugle recently said that
number is at least eight, including a recent arrest at Holiday Park.

Coming to Naugle's support this month was a coalition of ministers who
argue that the NAACP's stand is out of step.

''The NAACP is getting away from their mission ... the organization
never got involved with sex sins,'' said Mathis Guice, director of the
men's ministry at Koinonia Worship Center and former vice president of
the Broward NAACP. ``Homosexuals have masterfully redefined words to
suit their cause ... theirs is not a civil rights issue.''

It's the first time the branch has taken a public stand on behalf of gay
rights, said Guice, a member of the branch for more than 20 years and
its former vice president. Guice, Dozier and other ministers gathered at
a rally with Naugle at City Hall on Sept. 4 to stir what they call a
''spiritual revival'' in hopes to ``transform Fort Lauderdale and
Broward County into the Bible Belt of South Florida.''

Some black ministers in Miami-Dade were also disappointed in the NAACP.

''I was very taken back by their position,'' says Rev. Richard P. Dunn,
the head of PULSE, People United to Lead the Struggle for Equality. ``I
get offended when they compare gay rights to civil rights.''

The Rev. Victor Curry, who heads the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP, did
not respond to repeated requests for comment.

For his part, Naugle says the gay rights issue is playing a divisive
role in the black community. He told The Miami Herald that Ellison's
``position damages the NAACP and its credibility to the community it
serves.''

``On this issue I've gotten the strongest support from the black
community ... from people in Northwest Fort Lauderdale.' '

Ellison argues that Naugle, like some white conservative politicians, is
appeasing to the black clergy's staunch opposition to gay rights to
garner favor among a constituency that hasn't been a power base for
conservatives.

''They jump on the gay issue and win everytime,'' said Ellison. ``There
are ministers that won't even touch the topic because of the stigma
attached.''

Ellison and others argue the clergy is ignoring Naugle's questionable
track record with blacks.

The mayor drew harsh criticism last April from the city's predominantly
black Northwest section when he rallied against an economic
revitalization plan along Sistrunk Boulevard spearheaded by Commissioner
Carlton Moore. Naugle sparked further anger after siding with the police
after the November 2006 shooting death of Troy Eddines, 21, -- the
fourth police slaying that year.

''It's baffling that those ministers have chosen to stand with Naugle,''
said Ellison. ``He's attacking gays now ... it'll be blacks next.''

''He's continued to be downright derogatory about various groups of
people different from himself, whether they be black, poor or gay,''
said Rev. Rosalind Osgood, of Mount Olive Baptist Church. ``My faith
doesn't allow me to support the practice of homosexuality, but no one
should be degraded ... Jesus loves everybody regardless of their sins or
other problems.''

Naugle, for his part, maintains he has a ''great track record'' with the
city's black community.

Nevertheless, Osgood says the black clergy's dual roles as leaders of
the civil rights movement and biblical scholars puts them in an awkward
position with the gay community.

''It puts us as black clergy between a rock and a hard place,'' she
said. ``Our faith says we should be inclusive of all people, but it does
give us rules on how to live our lives.''

__._,_.___

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 11 replies

Jena Six

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:26:39 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_Six

I'm in Louisiana at the moment and it's a huge case down here. There were marches last week and many businesses had black employees wearing black in protest of the decisions handed down by the court.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Little Rock and Race, 50 Years Later

I-Thought-You-Knew — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:45:10 GMT

I came across this 'Newsweek' article and considering what's going on in Jena, I wonder how far we've come and came or will we ever escape or resolve racism. After looking at the face of the two women, it's clear to me that that horrific experience still hunts them to this day, while making history. But the Law of Attractions says, we create and attract these kinds of hardships to our selfs by our thinking. That's when I have to give a second thought about such beliefs.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20789361/site/newsweek/

"Little Rock, 50 Years Later

By Ellis Cose
Newsweek

Sept. 24, 2007 issue - The image is among the most iconic in civil-rights history: a dignified black girl in a prim, white-and-black dress marches through a hostile mob intent on keeping her from school. Fifty years after it first flashed around the world, that image retains its power—evoking sorrow, even anger, that one so young would face such cruelty. Now a 65-year-old woman, Elizabeth Eckford still bears scars from that long, lonely walk as one of the Little Rock Nine: teenagers charged with integrating that city's finest high school in 1957. "I'm the only one who says I wouldn't do it again," said Eckford in an interview at the Little Rock courthouse where she works as a probation officer.

This month, Little Rock will commemorate the date, 50 years ago, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to escort black children to Central High. In that moment, Little Rock became a synonym for hate. After claiming that desegregation would lead to violence, Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to keep black children from attending the school. Meanwhile, the black students designated to integrate Central High made plans to enter as a group. Eckford's family had no phone, so she never got the message. She came alone, only to be sent away by Faubus's soldiers and left to the angry mob.

No black child got in on the appointed day. Three weeks later, armed with a judge's order prohibiting Faubus from interfering, the students were spirited in through a side door (the mob was so unruly, however, police decided the Nine could not stay). In the weeks that followed, they endured unrelenting abuse. They never believed the task would be easy, but they had no idea how hellish it would become. Minnijean Brown Trickey was expelled for a fight she didn't start. "If we knew what it was going to be, we would have been too scared to go," says Trickey, who returned to Little Rock after many years away to care for an aged parent. Decades later, Eckford realized she suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder. For years, she could not work. In her current job since 1999, she has found a measure of peace: it has taken "a long time getting there, a long time to talk about the past without crying."

Mostly, the Nine have flourished. Many got advanced degrees. All moved away—for a while, at least—and Little Rock tried to move on. Mayor Mark Stodola says it's time to put the past aside. He says Little Rock never deserved its racist reputation and that "the people who want to continue to look to the past are an impediment to where we want to go for the future." Ralph Brodie, a Central High football player and student-body president at the time of the crisis, says the reputations of many were unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few. Most people at Central were receptive to the black enrollees, he says, yet the world focused on "problem students—25 maybe, a minuscule percentage." The rest "did everything they could to make that schoolyear work," says Brodie, a lawyer and member of Central's 50th Anniversary Commission.

The black students do not remember things that way. "The tone was set by a couple of hundred students engaged in this reign of terror," says Ernest Green, one of the Nine and an executive with Lehman Brothers. "The silence was deafening. We would have appreciated some of them speaking out when all of this harassment was going on." Eckford also dismisses Brodie's point. Those who were silent, she says, are just unwilling to "think of themselves as bad people."

Today, like much of the rest of America, Little Rock grapples with a continuing achievement gap in its schools, economic distress in disproportionately minority neighborhoods and mistrust among competing communities and public officials. Earlier this year Central High student Brandon Love drew a straight line from the past to the present. In an article in the Arkansas Times and elsewhere, he observed that his Advanced Placement classes were overwhelmingly white: "As an African American and the student body president, I have encountered A Tale of Two Centrals ... As the only African American in most of my classes, I experience firsthand what some dismiss as 'subtle' racism," he wrote. Nancy Rousseau, the transplanted New Yorker who is principal at Central, acknowledges that more whites than blacks take AP classes—but she blames differences in preparation and achievement, not discrimination. "That's an issue that we're dealing with, an issue that, unfortunately, is universal," she says. "There are places that are overcoming it, and I want us to be one of them."

The Supreme Court agrees that focusing on past racial wrongs will not yield solutions for the future—as made clear in June by its ruling against voluntary school-desegregation plans. But there is still a point in remembering how we got here, and remembering how determined some people were to keep Americans apart—if only because it reminds us of why it remains so hard for us to come together."

Terry

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies

San Francisco Gay Community Grapples With Race, Rape

DommeFemme — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 03:42:18 GMT

http://www.nysun.com/article/58981?page_no=1

"Gay-rights organizations estimate that about 58,000 gay men and women live in San Francisco, a city of 700,000 residents. The numbers include 4,500 black gay men and women"

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 6 replies

a few weeks ago in the white horse.....

Ben — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:23:31 GMT

.....i met this guy who reminded me first hand that there is indeed racism on a individual level, not just the institutional level racism i see everywhere else in my life.....

he is a flight attendant and was talking about a flight he was on which had "lots of black people" but instead of calling them something obvious, he says they referred to "those people" as canadians.....yes...canadians...that way, he says, they can go on to talk shit, be racist and it is okay. I've been beating myself up for the last few weeks for not saying anything to him, i was just so stunned. as i'm getting more involved with stuff at school as far as the institutional racism at places like berkeley (in addition to causing trouble for my racist coworkers at alta bates of course), i'm learning waaaaaaaay more than i could have ever imagined, coming out of suburbia just three years ago.

i knew it existed in places like louisiana and the castro, but i was quite surprised in oakland...grr

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 4 replies

This is a response to the question "Why do most women on CL do not date Black Women???"

DommeFemme — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:45:55 GMT

I was really wounded...more like sobbing at her answers.

The reason I do not typically date African American womyn is:

1. use of language or the lack there of (I am a stickler for the proper use of grammar and punctuation when speaking and writing.)

2. the brashness of their tone and body language.

3. their dress is too flamboyant for me. I prefer womyn in a more conservative, less revealing attire.

4. I am very cerebral and very much enjoy speaking at length on many varied topics from world history to animal rights to emotions to science, etc. and find that in African American culture these topics are not explored.

5. I was raised in an environment of fine dining, theater and opera, and find that these activities are not enjoyable to many in our culture, not just AA womyn,

6. I am spiritual and find that the AA community is very Bible based and religious and that does not compute in my world.

7. the AA community is very homophobic and I am very out and proud and have been since I was born.

8. I love diversity and find that the AA community 'stick' with their own kind and that is something I am totally against. My friends are from all walks of life and I prefer it this way.

Before I get branded a racist, I will add that I am of mixed race and ethnicity (African American, French, German, and American Indian.)

I will also state that I know that many of the above mentioned reasons are more culture than race.

I have dated AA womyn in my recent pass and that is because she and I came from the same culture and background. I would not rule out dating an AA womyn or any womyn of race nor ethnicity, if we have things to talk about. As I stated, I prefer communication and welcome it from anyone.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 10 replies

Reveiw: What Black Men Think.

DommeFemme — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:51:39 GMT

http://www.racialicious.com/2007/09/12/movie-review-what-black-men-think/

Movie Review: What Black Men Think
by Racialicious special correspondent Latoya Peterson

If you take nothing else from this review, remember this:

That often-touted statistic that there are more black men in jail than in college? That’s a myth.

In the documentary What Black Men Think, director Janks Morton takes a sledgehammer to the falsehoods and misconceptions that are used to describe and categorize black men. Using expert opinions and cold hard facts, Morton tackles popular perceptions and assumptions that plague black men to this day. (Racialicious has mentioned the film before, here and here.)

Assumptions include:

- There are more black men in jail than there are in college
- The crack epidemic and the resulting violence in the black community
- Black Men on the DL and the AIDS crisis
- “I can’t find a black man because they all want white women.”
- Black Men don’t pay child support.

The trailer for the film addresses some of these statistics directly.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies

"A warning to gay (BLACK) boys!" Funny and NOT SAFE 4 WORK

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:42:31 GMT

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8_uiBeW4Uig

I just got wind of her. Apparently she's on cable access in Atlanta. Alexyss Tylor.

What cha think?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 11 replies

Why people of color feel attacked...

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 00:28:46 GMT

I feel the need to begin this thread. We feel attacked because we HAVE been attacked. This is not simply something that occurs on a day to day basis but goes back for generations. It is in the DNA now. Myself and my family have been attacked for being Mexican. Nothing more...nothing less. Many black and brown people have been pulled out of cars, off of busses and off the street and beaten and killed for simply being a different color. This at the hands of white people. When I was 8 yrs old I was with my Abuelita and familia and we were refused seating at a restaurant because we were Mexican. I remember being terrified and embarrassed at the incident and it has clearly had an impression on me because now at 40 I recall it clearly.

Maybe some people on this tribe might try to just listen and understand, if you can. If a person of color is claiming to feel attacked, then for them it is real, not a mental or emotional problem. Ask them what they need to feel heard, ask them what you can do to help them not feel afraid. Making statements like, well I have their entire post history and I can prove it will only make more POC feel afraid to say anything on these forums. Notice the screaching lack of input here from folks of color?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 10 replies

Please help: I'm a white person having trouble talking about race to other whites

-robin — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:57:27 GMT

Now I know that for many people here BDSM is not a part of the LBGT communities, but judging by how the BDSMers took on Pride as their festival too, there is lots of overlap and that overlap is happening more and more.

I keep getting very frustrated when trying to talk to other white people about race, most especially in the BDSM community in San Francisco.

Most recently on the "new to BDSM (uncensored)" tribe here on tribe.

There was a Black woman who has recently unsubscribed who has been expressing that she is happy to be more active in BDSM after a long time of researching and watching. She has mentioned feeling worries about feeling welcome and comfortable in spaces due to being a WOC. She also mentioned that she gets defensive when lectured to (which has happened to her almost every time she wrote something). She was called a racist and a segregationist by a white man in one thread and was told that race was an irrelevant subject for a bdsm newbies tribe (which is something I hear white moderators say whenever a POC brings up discomfort related to racial stuff). She was also given historical examples of the persecution of Jews to somehow deflect from what she herself was expressing. This is stuff I see all the time.

I want to have magic words to say to white people that will somehow open their eyes and most especially their ears to hearing what POC have to say of their experiences in communities. Partly because when other white people shit down a POC who's actually taking the time to express themself I don't get to hear from that person and learn what they might teach. It frustrates me to see the defensiveness that causes a kind of ganging up on any POC who speaks out in any way about racial discomfort. Or for that matter on most white allies who try to speak of racism.

Is there anything anyone can say that will help me come up with the right things to interject into these conversations? I feel as if I am beating my head against a wall and it makes me feel disgusted. I say that I know other POC besides the one complaining who have expressed the same sentiment, but then I just get shouted down (or typed down?).

Any insights are welcome. Thanks alot.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 45 replies

Racism in the LGBT community - Wikipedia Encyclopedia Entry.

Mistress M — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:47:59 GMT

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_LGBT_community"

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Sexual Racism / Gay Asian Male (GAM) pages

Mistress M — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:55:03 GMT

http://www.timbomb.net/andyq/gam.htm

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

SF Gay Rape Reports Remind Us that Race Matters

Mistress M — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:53:13 GMT

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977066241

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

RACISM AND LGBTTIQ WEBSITES

Mistress M — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:50:45 GMT

http://web.uvic.ca/~kreed/331/index.html

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Oh my people I have found you!!!

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:52:21 GMT

I have been trying to get people to recognize that there is racism in the community at large and in the BDSM community.
I love the brother that started this tribe.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Jack Must Stay!

ffiercefaggot — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:06:45 GMT

Jack came to the UK in February 2006 fleeing persecution for homosexual activity in Nigeria. He applied for asylum, but was immediately put in immigration detention, even though he was under 18 years old. At the time Jack was unable to prove his age or the facts of his story and his asylum claim was refused.

After 11 months in detention, Jack was granted bail on the strength of a report from a medical expert from the Helen Bamber Foundation, which provided evidence that Jack has scars and other injuries consistent with his experience of torture. After being granted temporary admission from detention in January, Jack’s solicitor was in the process of submitting a Fresh Claim for Asylum when Jack was re-arrested on Wednesday 19th April. His deportation was stopped last minute and he now awaits the outcome of the Fresh Claim. He has again been released from detention on temporary admission because of his experiences of torture in Nigeria.

According to the law, religion and culture in Nigeria, homosexuality is strongly criminalised. Homosexuality is outlawed in the Nigerian penal code and Muslim law. However, in northern states under Muslim law the punishment can be death; in the civil penal code homosexuality can carry up to a 14-year prison sentence. A new law forbids same-sex marriage and prohibits gay people from assembling and petitioning the government. It also allows prosecution of newspapers that publish information about same-sex relationships and religious groups that allow same-sex unions. Those who violate this law can be sentenced to five years in prison.

Jack had a relationship with a boy, (both 16 years old), who was the son of a local chief. On learning of this relationship, the family of his lover threatened to have him killed. They also went to the police, who issued a warrant for Jack’s arrest for homosexual activity and widely publicised this in Jack’s home area. The police came to Jack’s house looking for him. Jack went into hiding, but was discovered by a group of men who recognised him. He was abducted and severely beaten and tortured for several hours. The men left Jack for dead, but having survived this ordeal, he sought to escape Nigeria with the help of other gay friends.

Jack’s solicitor has obtained an authenticated copy of Jack’s arrest warrant from the Nigerian authorities. Together with the expert medical report and other supporting materials this forms substantial new evidence that has not yet been considered by the Home Office.

Since his first temporary release in January, Jack has been active in fighting for and supporting migrants and asylum seekers in the UK, and continues to do so. Help support Jack to ensure that he is granted asylum and is not sent back to a country where he has been criminalised for being gay and faces arrest, prison, torture and maybe even death.
To Help please visit
http:// www.jackcampaign.pbwiki.com
Click here to sign Online petition - Jack must stay!

please help spread the word, the link for the petition is: http://www.gopetition.com/online/13060.html

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

tokenism...

riotgrrl — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 02:24:36 GMT

I was talking with another college campus activist friend about our experiences with working in the LGBT and Women's centers. In talking we both realized that we were disgusted with the degree of tokenism being employed under the mantra of diversity and anti-racism. It's a complicated situation, but basically, our synopsis was that (white) people in charge were adament about hiring people of color so that there would be an appearance of inclusion without any real investment or understanding on their part. It's the kind of attitude that says, "we'll just hire someone to do that job for us". And the problem was that the people in charge were interested in diversity only insofar as it didn't rock the boat. The moment anything ugly was exposed it was swept under the rug asap.

I'm still adamant that no one should be hired based solely on the color of their skin, but I'm not trying to say that it's reverse racism here. It's still racism, just dressed up in new clothes. It's to fit appearances and doesn't have substance. It's all lip service. But I'm having trouble explaining how these people are being exploited to grease the wheels of the machine without allowing them to have a real voice in the system.

Does anyone else have experiences like this?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 8 replies

new hiv poz dating tribe please join

RAFAGA — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:06:45 GMT

post picures asks pals to join

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Latinos not immune from the racist game

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:00:19 GMT

BLACK PRIDE
LATIN AMERICA NEEDS ITS OWN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT SAYS THE WORLD-FAMOUS RAPPER
By TEGO CALDERON

Tego says skin color's still a major issue for Latinos.

February 15, 2007 -- Just this morning, I was listening to radio host Luisito Vigeroux talking about a movie project that I am working on which co-stars Mayra Santos Febres and he was saying, "Her? She's starring in it?" Questioning her Black beauty.

I remember, too, when Celia Cruz died, a newscaster, thinking she was being smart, said Celia Cruz wasn't black, she was Cuban. She was pretty even though she's black.

As if there is something wrong with being black, like the two things can't exist simultaneously and be a majestic thing. There is ignorance and stupidity in Puerto Rico and Latin America when it comes to blackness.

In Puerto Rico, Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" was only shown in one theater and unlike all the other movies shown here, there were no subtitles. It's as if they don't want the masses to learn.

But it's not just here - in Puerto Rico - where I experience racism. When I lived in Miami, I was often treated like a second class Boricua. I felt like I was in the middle - Latino kids did not embrace me and African American kids were confused because here I was a black boy who spoke Spanish.

But after a while, I felt more embraced by black Americans - as a brother who happens to speak Spanish - than other Latino kids did.

Because I am well known, sometimes I forget the racist ways of the world. But then I travel to places where no one knows Tego Calderón I am reminded.

For instance, when I travel first class, the stewardess will say, "Sir, this is first class," and ask to see ticket. I take my time, put my bags in the overhead, sit, and gingerly give them my ticket, smiling at them. I try not to get stressed anymore, let them stress themselves.

And the thing is that many white Puerto Ricans and Latinos don't get it. They are immune to the subtle ways in which we are demeaned, disrespected. They have white privilege. And I've heard it said that we are on the defensive about race.

Those things happen and it's not because of color, Tego, but because of how you look, how you walk, what you wear, what credit card you have. Then, they spend a couple of days with me, sort of walk in my shoes, and say "Damn negro, you are right."

When I check into hotels and use my American Express they call the credit card company in front of me saying the machine is broken. This happens a lot in U.S. cities but it's not because there is more racism there, it's because they don't know me. When I'm in Latin America, I am known, so it's different. That is not to say that there is less racism.

The reality for blacks in Latin America is severe, in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Honduras ... Puerto Rican (and Latin American) blacks are confused because we grow up side by side with non-blacks and we are lulled into believing that things are the same. But we are treated differently.

My parents always celebrated our history. My dad always pointed things out to me. He even left the PIP (Pro-Independence Party) because he always said that los negros and our struggle was never acknowledged.

Maelo (Ismael Rivera) and Tite Curet did their part in educating and calling out the issues. Today, I do my part but I attack the subject of racism directly.

It makes me so happy to see Don Omar call himself el negro and La Sister celebrate her blackness. Now it's in fashion to be black and to be from Loiza. And that is awesome, it makes me so happy. Even if they don't give me credit for starting the pride movement, I know what I did to get it out there.

Young black Latinos have to learn their story. We also need to start our own media, and forums and universities. We are treated like second class citizens. They tell blacks in Latin America that we are better off than U.S. blacks or Africans and that we have it better here, but it's a false sense of being. Because here, it's worse.

We are definitely treated like second class citizens and we are not part of the government or institutions. Take for instance, Jamaica - whites control a Black country.

They have raised us to be ashamed of our blackness. It's in the language too. Take the word denigrate - denigrar - which is to be less than a negro.

In Puerto Rico you get used it and don't see it everyday. It takes a visitor to point out that all the dark skin sisters and brothers are in the service industry.

It's hard in Puerto Rico. There was this Spaniard woman in the elevator of the building where I lived who asked me if I lived there. And poor thing - not only is there one black brother living in the penthouse, but also in the other, lives Tito Trinidad. It gets interesting when we both have our tribes over.

Black Latinos are not respected in Latin America and we will have to get it by defending our rights, much like African Americans struggled in the U.S.

It's hard to find information about our people and history but just like kids research the newest Nintendo game or CD they have to take interest in their story. Be hungry for it.

We need to educate people close to us. I do it one person at a time when language is used and I am offended by it. Sometimes you educate with tenderness, as in the case of my wife, who is not black.

She's learned a lot and is offended when she sees injustices. She gets it. Our children are mixed, but they understand that they are black and what that means. My wife has taught her parents, and siblings, and they, in turn, educate the nephews and nieces. That is how everyone learns.

This is not about rejecting whiteness rather; it's about learning to love our blackness - to love ourselves. We have to say basta ya, it's enough, and find a way to love our blackness. They have confused us - and taught us to hate each other - to self-hate and create divisions on shades and features.

Remember that during slavery, they took the light blacks to work the home, and left the dark ones to work the fields. There is a lot residue of self-hatred.

And each of us has to put a grain in the sand to make it into a movement where we get respect, where we can celebrate our blackness without shame.

It will be difficult but not impossible.

As told to Sandra Guzman

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Know any gay activists of color in SF?

stkyrice — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:10:15 GMT

Hi everyone:

I'm on the board of directors for SF Gay Men's Community Initiative, an organization committed to establishing connections and community among gay men in SF, and we're inviting nominations from different people, especially those involved in activism among gay men of color in SF to nominate organizations/individuals who've been committed to this purpose, to honor them at a community party/fundraiser we're having on June 10.

Below is a letter from Buzz Bense and me detailing this in more detail. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions and/or nominations.

I realize that it's extremely short notice, but hopefully those of you out there can give us some suggestions to honor gay male activists of color here in the city.

Efren

_____________________________________

Dear SFGMCI member,
In June, SFGMCI will be hosting our first ever fundraiser and community recognition party. This event will be at Mecca on Market Street on June 10 from 6 - 8 PM. Details about the actual event will be sent soon.

We are calling the event "Community Heroes: Honoring Volunteer Leadership." SFGMCI will be acknowledging the valuable and selfless work that has been done by individuals and volunteer organizations on behalf of our community. We all know the difference that volunteer energy can make in our social lives, our community institutions and in the beauty of our city.

Do you know of someone who has quietly worked to build or maintain an organization? Do you know a volunteer that you admire for their ongoing commitment to make San Francisco a better place? Do you know a volunteer group who quietly stepped up and took on a community problem, and drew people together to help? This is the kind of person and organization we want to acknowledge and say "Thank you."

We are interested in your ideas of who should be recognized. We want to gather a diverse group of nominees from our GMCI supporters. If you have person in mind, please send their name and a little description of their work and contribution to guyssitting on the award committee at info@sfgmci.org. We need your input by the end of this Thursday May 10th. Sorry for the short notice; we are running a bit behind.

We also hope you will join us on June 10th for a fun evening with fellow GMCI'ers cheering on those people who exemplify community leadership.

Thanks for your help
Buzz Bense
Efren Bose
Event co-chairs
_______________________________________
San Francisco Gay Men's Community Initiative
415.820.9606
(mailing address)
2215-R Market Street #253
San Francisco, CA 94114
visit SFGMCI at our website
www.isparksf.com

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Something is VERY wrong with the VA Tech story!

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 02:27:03 GMT

* This is a repost from the blog of Reverend Damien Lucas Leadbeater

10:53 a.m. -- Students receive e-mail about Norris Hall shooting

-----Original Message-----
Subject: Second Shooting Reported;
Police have one gunman in custody

In addition to an earlier shooting today in West Ambler Johnston, there has been a multiple shooting with multiple victims in Norris Hall.

Police and EMS are on the scene.

Police have one shooter in custody and as part of routine police procedure, they continue to search for a second shooter.

All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until further notice.

All entrances to campus are closed.

**********************************

If they have him in custody, how could he kill himself?

If he is dead, how do they have him in custody, they wouldn't say that if he was dead.

What the hell? I'm lost...

When I first turned on the news while eating lunch yesterday, I saw the police with their knee in the back of an asian man on the ground.

Is this the SAME Asian man that they are trying to say killed himself, Cho Seung-Hui...? They say Cho was found dead in one of the classrooms. So who is the "look-a-like twin" that the police have on the ground live on CNN during the broadcast at lunchtime yesterday?

Another thing, Cho's fingerprints were supposedly found on both guns. I may be going out on a limb here, but any officer or investigator will tell you that it is very hard and often impossible to get a good print off of a gun. They're oily, prints smear with movement of the weapon, the grips usually have ridges or some contour that isn't very flat, etc...

Something is very, very, very wrong with the reporting associated with this incident. If anyone else can figure it out, do let me know...

The ReV

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies

Stand with our undocumented brothers and sisters-Mayday 2007

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:26:09 GMT

www.mayday2007.org/

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

The Genealogy of African (Black) people

I-Thought-You-Knew — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:42:58 GMT

Was browsing around, and came across these remarkable ‘youtube’ videos by Dr. York who gives a detail and in-depth look into the origins of the African (Black, Brown, Yellow) hue-man/woman, and how the African race (people) got off the path of losing touch with their true self, in exchange, for worshiping ‘other’ teachings that are not in alignment with ‘right-knowledge’. Certainly something for the Spirit-Mind-Body. These videos gives an account of how (and who) the Adam and Eve are (the new black man/woman), and how they came into being, and who their parents really are, also, an account of the real name of Egypt and the real ancient black people of the land. It’s very mind opening into ‘right knowledge’ instead of believing in unfound religion, and race, as we’ve been told to believe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y620P8PvJG4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3JWW75rDxk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIGajPNz98

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VkdHooDF7U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpqV9dGV3K8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSqWCSeg6a4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jn7rCaBPW8

I found these videos on this site: http://nuworldorder.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=36&topic=1908.0

After watching these videos and finding out how certain children where being raised (in the seventies) to bring in the next generation to raise the consciousness of people, it made me ponder on just how the same thing is being done today, to manipulate and mutilate the DNA and reproductive organs of black man and women, by making up ‘accepted’ lies and estimates the world over.

Terry

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Imus Is An Ass

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 14:21:54 GMT

Is it me or does there seem to be a lot of celebs and polititians
showin their true colors these days?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070407/ap_en_ce/imus_apology

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 11 replies

The Long Shadow of Race

Kes — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:32:47 GMT

Interesting post from Portside.

The Long Shadow of Race
by Michael D. Yates

Monthly Review March 2007

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0307yates.htm

[This is an excerpt from Associate Editor Michael D.
Yates' new book, Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An
Economist's Travelogue, available from Monthly Review
Press. Readers should ask their local bookshop for the
book or order it directly by phoning 1-800-670-9499 or
1-212-691-2555.]

I have always lived in the long shadow of race.
Johnstown, Pittsburgh, Portland, Miami Beach, in every
city racist remarks and racist actions were
commonplace. You didn't have to look for them; they
were hard to escape. And on our road trips, no matter
where we went or for how few days, it was not at all
unusual for a white person to offer a racist comment.
It is almost as if there is an understanding among
whites that they are all fellow conspirators in the
race war.

In Johnstown, daily racism--in bars, at the college
where I taught, even in union halls--was a fact of life.
A colleague complained in the faculty dining room that
he didn't know why his daughter had to pay for work
done at the university's dental school clinic when all
those "niggers" got it for free. In the college gym,
students told me they cheered for the Boston Celtics
because they were the "white team." A man in a bowling
alley threatened to assault me because I said that
Michael Jordan was a great basketball player. In a
union class, I got a complaint on the student
evaluation forms: too many blacks in the class. There
was one.

Black people call the Steel City "Pittsburgh South." In
our first home there, in an apartment building complex,
the college kids got drunk on weekends and hurled
racial epithets at passersby from their balconies. When
we moved to another part of town, an old neighborhood
woman warned us to keep our curtains closed. She said
that black people looked in windows trying to spot
something to steal.

I have already commented on the racism of Portland. In
Miami Beach, during our six-week stay in 2002, while we
were talking to the Cuban-American manager of a realty
office, she began to berate the city's Haitian
immigrants as dirty criminals. She automatically
assumed that I would have no sympathy for these
wretched souls who, desperately poor to start with,
have been denied asylum, put in detention centers,
forced to take the worst jobs, and subjected to vicious
racial discrimination.

I got a haircut in a small shop in a mall along Santa
Fe's Cerillos Road. I struck up a conversation with the
white woman cutting my hair. She was a single mother
with a teenage son, and beginning to plan for his
college education. Out of the blue she said she was
angry that the local schools were biased in favor of
Hispanics and Indians. They got all the breaks. This
astounded me. We had been reading about--and seen--the
dismal conditions faced by the city's people of color.
They were poor; they lived in substandard housing; they
did the worst jobs; their neighborhoods were ravaged by
drugs and alcohol. Many went hungry. The whole history
of New Mexico and its capital city was awash in racism
and violence against nonwhites. Yet here was a woman
who had no hesitance to tell a stranger that the
oppressors were really the victims.

In Flagstaff, Arizona, we went to a party organized by
a progressive organization called the Friends of
Flagstaff. Over its potluck dinner, we met a woman from
Boston. She decried the lack of diversity in Flagstaff,
saying without irony that she wished it was more like
Boston, with its many ethnic restaurants. What was
remarkable was her seeming unawareness that Flagstaff
is a diverse city, with large Hispanic and Indian
populations--Indians comprise nearly 20 percent of all
residents. They must be invisible to her.

Again in Flagstaff, we were enjoying the exhibits in
the Museum of Northern Arizona. We ended our visit with
a stop at the museum's bookstore. We were admiring the
Indian-made works of art for sale when an Indian artist
came in and showed the manager some of his jewelry and
asked if the museum was interested in buying his
pieces. Apparently the craftsmanship was good, but the
Indian had been drinking and was known to the manager.
The manager and his assistant treated this man as if he
were a pathetic drunk unworthy of their time. He kept
lowering his price, giving up whatever pride he had to
these white people with money. A few minutes later, he
was dismissed. After he left, the two museum staffers
mocked him. The assistant, not realizing her ignorance,
said that perhaps it was time for the Indian to join
AAA. We left the museum with heavy hearts. It was as if
the history of white oppression of Indians had been
reenacted in microcosm before our eyes.

In Estes Park, people smugly said about a group of
shabby riverside shacks not far from our cabin, "Oh,
that's where the Mexicans live." The local peace group
didn't bother to solicit support from local Mexicans
because "They probably wouldn't be interested. They
have to work too hard and wouldn't have time." We were
talking to a jewelry store owner who, after remarking
on how much safer (often a code word for "whiter")
Estes Park was than his former home in Memphis,
Tennessee, said that the Estes Park crime report was
pretty small and those arrested always had names you
couldn't pronounce. (Those damned Mexicans again.) In
the laundromat we met a woman from the Bayview section
of Brooklyn, and she said that she had moved here
because you couldn't recognize her Brooklyn
neighborhood anymore. She told us, without I think
realizing how racist she sounded, that there were so
many Arabs there now that locals call it "Bay Root."
"Get it?," she said, "Bay Root."

There are numerous inconvenient facts that racists are
unwilling to confront. The following data compare
mainly blacks and whites. This is because these are the
most readily available and the ones I know best.
Comparisons between whites and other minorities such as
Hispanics or Indians would show the same trends.

More than one million black men and women are in our
jails and prisons, about the same number as whites,
though the black share of the population is less than
one-sixth that of whites. It is more likely that a
black person of college age is in prison than in
college. There are no economic indicators showing a
black (or Hispanic or American Indian) advantage. Black
median income, whether for families or individuals, is
less than for whites, as is wealth. Black wages are
lower. Black poverty rates are higher, by wide margins.
Black unemployment rates are typically double white
rates. All of these indicators show differences between
blacks and whites even after variables that might
influence them are held constant. For example, on
average, black workers with the same education, the
same experience, working in the same industry, and
living in the same region of the country as whites
still earn less money.

These racial inequalities can be simply explained. A
common argument made by whites is that, since more than
150 years have passed since the end of slavery, there
has been more than enough time for blacks to catch up
with whites economically. However, recent economic
research shows the flaw in such arguments. Economists
have shown that economic advantages carry over from
generation to generation and disadvantages do the same.
As economist Austan Goolsbee put it, "The recent
evidence shows quite clearly that in today's economy
starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid
for a long time to come" (New York Times, May 25,
2006). Across generations, we find:

Although Americans still think of their land as a place
of exceptional opportunity--in contrast to class-bound
Europe--the evidence suggests otherwise. And scholars
have, over the past decade, come to see America as a
less mobile society than they once believed. As
recently as the later 1980s, economists argued that not
much advantage passed from parent to child, perhaps as
little as 20 percent. By that measure, a rich man's
grandchild would have barely any edge over a poor man's
grandchild....But over the last 10 years, better data
and more number crunching have led economists and
sociologists to a new consensus: The escalators of
mobility move much more slowly. A substantial body of
research finds that at least 45 percent of parents'
advantage in income is passed along to their children,
and perhaps as much as 60 percent. With the higher
estimate, it's not only how much money your parents
have that matters--even your great-great-grandfather's
wealth might give you a noticeable edge today. (Wall
Street Journal, May 13, 2005)

Imagine my own great-great-grandfather and suppose he
had been a black slave in Mississippi. He would have
been denied education, had his family destroyed, been
worked nearly to death, suffered severe privation
during the Civil War, and been considered less than
human. Then in 1865 he would have been "freed," to fend
for himself and whatever family he had. No job, no
land, no schools, no nothing. For twelve short years,
he might have had some protection provided by the
federal government against the murderous rage of white
Southerners. But in 1877 even that ended, and afterward
he would have been confronted with the full force of
Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. What chance would his
children have had? How likely would they have been to
catch up with their white overlords? Isn't zero the
most likely probability? His grandchildren might have
migrated north, but again with no wealth and not much
schooling. His great-grandchildren would have lived
through the Great Depression. How much property would
they have been likely to accumulate? Finally, through
the heroic struggle of my ancestors and my own
generation, I would have seen the victories of the
civil rights movement, the desegregation of the
schools, the end of lynchings, and the opening up of a
few decent jobs. I might have been an auto worker in
Detroit for a dozen years, but then in the 1970s
everything would have come crashing down again.

Too many whites, and a few blacks, cannot confront such
facts and analysis. They'd rather comfort themselves
with the notion that what lies behind these data is
social pathology. When a local black minister wrote
that black people in New Orleans were themselves
responsible for the misery inflicted by Hurricane
Katrina, Denver's talk show hosts had a field day. They
said that he was heroic for having the courage to say
such a thing, and they hoped for the day when a white
politician like President Bush could say the same.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

what's your type?

BenjaminPatterson — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:32:05 GMT

So, I know the topic of preference vs. racism has come up here before, but I had a recent personal experience that I wanted to share & get some opinions on.

I had a birthday party at my place a week ago & was talking with some friends about my miserable dating life & suggesting that they might be able to help by introducing me to some new people or going out with me different places, etc. The question came up: "What's your type?", which sometimes can make me nervous about the reaction I might get telling people that I'm more attracted to guys of color & generally not attracted to white guys.

This time, someone decided to yell out from his corner of the room (full of about 15-20 people) that I was a self-loathing racist. It was pretty shocking & I wasn't sure who said it at first and couldn't think of anything to say. So, luckily I was able to ignore it for the moment & keep the conversation going. (As it turns out, it was a POC who I would call a casual friend and someone I generally like and respect for various reasons -- up to now anyway)

Anyway, the comment still stings when I think about it a week later. I find myself wishing I had responded right then with something like ...

"Has everyone met [his name]? [Name] is going to be hosting a panel discussion later tonite at the LGBT Center on the topic of 'Who's more racist? white guys who prefer guys of color? or white guys who prefer other white guys?'. In fact, I think he has to go start setting up for that right now... " Then to him: "Glad you could make it"

But, I didn't get to say anything like that. So, I have to write it now.

Anyway, the point of my post is to ask your opinion on the following:

1) How many white people here who have a preference for people of color find themselves feeling a little anxious saying that to some people (white or not) because you're worried about how they're react?

2) How would you respond to being labeled a self-loathing racist for having a preference for people of color?

3) How do you feel about the point of his statement? Are white guys who prefer POC racist? Are white guys who prefer other white guys racist?

** Note: I know a lot of people would like to say that we all should be race blind. I personally think that's too idealist -- if not completely impossible -- and I don't believe anyone who says they're race blind is being completely honest. Gay guys are especially visually oriented in their mating practices and it's impossible to size up another guy's physical appearance without noticing their race.

4) How many POC have experienced something they would call racist from a white person who prefers POC, compared to white person who prefers other whites, or compared to a white person who said they were race blind?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 10 replies

Community Mourns Murder of Latina Transgender Woman

stormaldo — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:21:17 GMT

Tina D’Elia, Hate Violence Survivor Program Director (415) 777-5500 ext. 304
Alexandra Byerly, EL-LA Program Coordinator (415) 864-7278

Community Mourns Murder of Latina Transgender Woman

Requests Attendance at Vigil to Demand Change

San Francisco, California (March 22, 2007) – A Nicaraguan transgender woman, Ruby Rodriguez, 24 years old, was murdered on Friday, March 16, 2007. Her body was found on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Indiana Streets in the Mission District of San Francisco. The murder is currently under investigation by the San Francisco Police Department. Community United Against Violence (CUAV), EL-LA, San Francisco LGBT Community Center, TRANS Project, allies, and community members will hold a community vigil in her honor on Friday, March 23, 2007 at 6:00PM, on the corner of 24th Street and Mission Street in the Mission District.

Organizers request that the community bring a white candle to the vigil. There will also be an additional altar set up on Cesar Chavez and Indiana Street, and community members are encouraged to bring flowers, photographs, cards and good wishes to this site. Let us not forget Ruby. She was an exceptional woman who was intent on improving her life. Ruby participated in various support groups and language classes, and idolized Chicana singer Selena.

This murder comes at the heels of at least two other violent deaths of transgender women of color in the San Francisco Bay Area over the past six months. Transgender people, particularly low-income transgender women of color, are disproportionately poor, homeless, criminalized and imprisoned as a result of systemic discrimination in our daily attempts to access safe housing, healthcare, employment, and education.

Unfortunately, Ruby’s murder is not an exception, but an everyday fear for many transgender people who are targeted and brutalized by institutions and society at large. Our communities mourn Ruby’s death and ask for a renewed commitment to real safety for transgender communities. It is vital that the Mayor’s Office, the San Francisco Police Department, and the District Attorney’s Office work to end the cycles of criminalization, poverty, and violence in transgender communities and communities of color.

Please direct any questions about the vigil to Tina D’Elia or Alexandra Byerly. If anyone has any information regarding Ruby’s murder, please contact Inspector Karen Lynch at (415) 553-1388 or Inspector Tom Cleary at (415) 553-9569 of the SFPD Homicide Unit.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Crossing the Gay Color Lines

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 15:35:25 GMT

Crossing the Gay Color Lines
by James Hillis, March 12, 2007

Isaiah Washington, an African American actor, uses the word "faggot" during an altercation on the set of ABC's Grey's Anatomy. Tim Hardaway, a black former NBA star, hears that another former NBA player is gay and responds: "I hate gay people. … I am homophobic. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

White gay men see these incidents as examples of a homophobic African American culture. Straight African Americans see a cynical media exploiting caricatures of the angry, ignorant black man. Neither appraisal reveals the more complex truths about why GLBT people and African Americans still eye each other suspiciously across the cultural divide.

Are the parallels that gays make between GLBT struggles and the civil-rights movement instructive or offensive? What is the deeper meaning behind the perceived homophobia in the African American community? And what about inclusiveness in the gay community? Do gays of all ethnicities live up to the ideal of the "rainbow" people?

AfterElton recently spoke to five gay African American men - artists who are fiercely active within their communities - to explore how white gay people and African Americans can better understand each other, and ultimately come together to promote the equality of all people. That journey may begin with uncovering some hard truths.

Controversies Spark Conversation

Out filmmaker Lee Daniels is the producer and director of last year's Shadowboxer, which starred recent Oscar-winner Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. He also produced Monster's Ball, which featured Halle Berry's Oscar-winning performance. During the Isaiah Washington controversy, some in the gay press compared the word "faggot" with the N-word, and as a gay African American, Daniels sees this as a fair analogy. "I think it's an absolute comparison," he said. Washington "should have been fired on the spot."

Daniels believes many gay men have been oppressed by the word "faggot," including himself. "To me, 'faggot' is an atrocity," Daniels said. "The word sends shivers down my back." While he acknowledged there are differences between the two struggles, Daniels believes that the comparisons gay people make between themselves and African Americans make sense. "Hitler f---ing burned the gay men with the Jews," he said. "I mean, certainly gay men were strung up and hung."

But Rod McCullom, a television producer (ABC News, NBC News), journalist and cultural commentator via his blog, Rod 2.0, sees those comparisons as simplistic at best. "The N-word — we're coming out of several hundred years of racist oppression, slavery, genocide," McCullom said. "I think that that word is extremely loaded in a different way."

Noah's Arc series creator Patrik-Ian Polk believes the correlations that gay people often draw to civil rights ends up alienating the black community. The civil-rights struggle "is still a very painful scar for the black community," Polk said. "So when the gay community continues to reference that, it just brings up all these painful issues and memories. And it doesn't necessarily help to encourage the black community to have these conversations."

He added that oversimplified comparisons display a lack of understanding that's off-putting: "They aren't acknowledging the tremendous pain of the civil-rights struggle, and they aren't acknowledging the differences."

Tori Fixx, a music producer, hip-hop artist (Pick up the Mic) and DJ, points to one of the most glaring of those differences — one that doesn't have to do with history. "Gay men can conceal their identity to get ahead," Fixx said. "But black men … you wear that every day you leave the front door. It's there on display whether you want it to be there or not."

Former BET producer Kevin E. Taylor, who is now an author and pastor at the Unity Fellowship Church, a large congregation of gay blacks, agrees with Fixx. "As a black gay man it's unnerving for me to hear white gay men so quickly run to civil rights," said Taylor, "when you can tell somebody's black from a mile away, so that any insidious racism, any bias that you have, you're allowed to pick it up and put it on before the person ever opens their mouth."

Polk, Fixx, McCullom and Daniels all feel that the challenges they face as African Americans in our culture are greater than those they face as gay men. "For me, it boils down to an issue of privilege," Polk explained. "White gay people are just as privileged as white straight people."

Daniels seems to understand this may not be a popular opinion among some white gay people. "It's not cool to call the race card," he said, "because it's politically incorrect to say that that's an issue anymore."

Taylor is the lone dissenter here, and pointed out that gay people don't have families who understand their struggles in the same way that black people do; in fact many gays lose their families in the process of coming out. "Being black comes with a built-in support system," Taylor said. "Gay doesn't."

Taylor found the media coverage of the Washington affair
two-dimensional; the media barely mentioned Washington's groundbreaking role as a gay character in Spike Lee's 1996 film Get on the Bus. Set during the Million Man March, the film took enormous heat from black religious leaders for its inclusion of a gay couple ( Washington played one of the partners). It was a courageous role for any actor at the time, and doubly so for an African American one.

When the film was released, Taylor interviewed Washington for BET and found him to be eloquent and sensitive on the issue of sexuality, describing how he fought with producers to ensure the character wasn't a dismissible stereotype. "He was really sweet and forthcoming, and knowing that this would be an inroad for black gay men," Taylor said.

He believes that more effectively including this part of Washington's body of work could have led to a more productive discussion after the Grey's Anatomy fiasco. Then "it becomes a dialogue," Taylor pointed out. "It becomes: How could you have been so sensitive a decade ago, and then this rolls out of your mouth in the new millennium?"

But what about Tim Hardaway? The judgment here is unanimous. Polk offered, "He deserves whatever he gets." Fixx said, "He was an embarrassment to himself and the whole NBA franchise."

Taylor said the response was swift — as it should be. "What I appreciated about the NBA is they said hatred is not acceptable as it relates to our code of honor," he said. And Taylor feels "hatred" is the way to frame this discussion, especially if you're trying to reach out to African Americans.

"That's why I don't like the word homophobia," Taylor explained. "We've got to use the word 'hatred.' Because you can't tell a grown man that he's scared of a grown man. … But when black folk in Christianity hear the word 'hatred,' they are put in check. Homophobia is just another excusable construct."

The White Gay Image

Media images such as those mentioned here tend to frame this debate for the larger culture, and it is the very images the gay community creates that Taylor thinks may explain some of the black community's resistance to the entire concept of gay rights.

"We [as gays] want to put our best image out there, and our 'best' images can be very in-your-face to poor black people," Taylor explained. "They can be very arrogant as it relates to two white gay men on a beach outside their luxurious home." In other words, "It always comes back to the unspoken anger of other communities that are pissed at the white gay male community for white, male privilege."

Taylor said that going through many gay magazines becomes a tour of exclusively white men enjoying “cruises and beach houses and resorts, saying we've got money, we've got money, which causes this insidious invocation of white, male privilege,” explains Taylor. “And now you've got two of them. Now you've got Skip and Kyle!”

He added, "At the end of the day, tight-ass Will Truman [Will & Grace] is just another rich white man."

Polk also sees the exclusiveness of white images as an issue. "With Noah's Arc, for example … during the first season of that show, we got no covers of any of the national gay magazines," he said. "Meanwhile you had Dante's Cove [a program airing on here! with a predominantly white cast] on the cover of almost all of them. And we have hot guys on Noah's Arc! … We've got the eye candy if that's what it's about."

But instead, said Polk, the magazines are full of the same “blandly attractive, white model-looking guys in bathing suits. … I call them the Aberzombies,” Polk observes archly, alluding to the vacant models of the Abercrombie and Fitch ads.

Ultimately, Polk was told point blank by an editor of Genre, a gay men's magazine, that the publishers didn't want African Americans on the cover because they believe covers featuring African Americans won't sell. (Last July, The Advocate did put Noah's Arc on the cover in conjunction with its Season 2 premiere.)

The lack of diverse gay images is linked, Taylor believes, to why gays may be losing the marriage debate within the black community. "We, the rainbow people, should have made sure that this conversation [about marriage] started with a rainbow coalition," Taylor said. “So that the black people would look down and go ‘he looks like my son.' So that Latinos would go ‘wait, wait, wait, carino, what are you doing here?'”

Instead, the predominant image for quite some time was that of "the wonderfully suited white gay men," Taylor pointed out. "When the white man stood at the table and said, 'Oh let me have my basic rights,'” explained Taylor, “black people felt like, 'Mr. Privilege, you already have most of 'em — shut up!'"

Questioning Homophobia in the Black Community

One often unspoken assumption — on the part of white gay people and possibly among black gay people as well — is that many African Americans don't support gay rights because of widespread homophobia within the black community. But like many issues that cross race lines, the reality is much more complex.

"I certainly would take issue with gay people who suggest the black community is more homophobic," McCullom said. "Jerry Falwell isn't black. George Bush isn't black. Most people in the Republican party — they aren't black."

Daniels acknowledged, however, that coming out as a gay black man may be harder than coming out as a gay white man. "I think it takes a real man — at least if you're African American — to come head to head with your family, with your society, with your church, with your friends, because it's so taboo, so deep." And yet Daniels feels that it may be the openness of coming-out that actually makes the black community uncomfortable, not the sexual identity itself.

"I think a lot of black men are fine with homosexuality," said Daniels. "This is the big misconception." In recent years, the phenomenon of black men who sleep with other men "on the down low," but do not identify as gay or bisexual, has been covered on Oprah and in the New York Times.

Daniels continued: "The DL (downlow) is so powerful and so widespread that I can't even begin to articulate it. It is cool and accepted that men are sleeping with men. I think that no one would have a statistic for that. It's so rampant, it's wild."

Taylor believes that the notion of black homophobia is something new. "The current strain of homophobia or fear of gay people in the black community is probably a latter 20th century construct," he said. "You hear people talking all the time about the gay and lesbian involvement in the black church. And I want you to understand — that was never a cloaked presence."

Taylor explained that religious homophobia in the black church was fomented in the '80s by AIDS, the loss of black men to prison or death during the crack epidemic, and financial seduction by politically motivated, conservative white evangelicals.

In the '80s, the so-called Moral Majority "realized that the way to start getting black people at the table was to bring the pastor to the table," said Taylor. "And they started this from these faith-based initiatives, which was essentially 'here's more money,' and [if you want to keep this money] these are the things that need to come out of your mouth. White evangelicals put fear in the pulpit. … We were never ostracized from our community [before then]."

Racism Within the White Gay Community

One thing that all five men agree on is that a major issue that is rarely addressed is not homophobia in communities of color, but racism within the white gay community.

"You're talking about African Americans being prejudiced," Daniels said. "I mean gay men are prejudiced against gay men [of color]."

Fixx said: "You have the homophobia within the black community, which is just the same as the racism that's still within the gay community. I think that's the comparison that no one is really addressing."

Ultimately, Polk believes, the comparisons that gays make between their struggle and the civil-rights movement ring hollow. "The truth of the matter is white gay people don't really care about racist and racial issues," Polk said. "They really don't. There's just as much racism within the gay community as anywhere else. You would think gay people would be less racist, but they're just as much."

Part of the issue, McCullom suggests, is the gay community's inability to even recognize racism when it exists. He gives the example of Shirley Q. Liquor, a white drag queen, who performs as a black female character in full makeup with a heavy — and questionable — accent. Black activists have been protesting the routine for years, arguing that it is an offensive caricature reminiscent of blackface minstrel shows.

"And the white guys don't think there's a problem with it," McCullom said. "They just think it's hilarious."

McCullom also sees Shirley Q. Liquor as a missed opportunity. "It just would have been great if so many more gay activists would have just latched onto it and came out publicly against it. That way they're sending a message that they're condemning racism. And that way they're endearing themselves to black audiences." (GLAAD did finally come out against Shirley Q., but only recently.)

Racism within the white gay community extends beyond not recognizing racism, however, into social arenas. Daniels related a recurring theme with his gay, African American friends: That white gay men were perfectly happy to have sex with them in the dark, but didn't want to be seen with them in public. He also explained: "I have gone to clubs, and not once, not twice, not 10 times, not 20 times, but many times throughout West Hollywood — where it's simply not [OK to be black] — you would get the once-around."

Polk too, has had similar experiences at clubs. "If I go to a predominantly white gay club, the men just aren't really interested," he said. "I call it the invisible man syndrome." People try to explain their lack of interest by claiming it's "just a preference," but Polk pointed out, "it's not really a preference to exclude an entire group of people based on the color of their skin."

Fixx believes that gay men — who often seem predisposed to judge the image rather than the human being behind the image — may be uniquely positioned to fall prey to racism. But he sees another factor as well. "Because of us [gays] being the last group of people that it's OK to belittle and bash by the rest of society," Fixx said, "I think everyone within our community is scrounging to find a way to make themselves feel better. So it's like, 'OK, who can we now put down?'"

Beginning a Dialogue

The idea of prejudice begetting prejudice and marginalized peoples cannibalizing segments of their own communities for a sense of superiority is, unfortunately, something that has haunted minority communities for countless generations. So is it possible for gay people and people of color to move beyond that cycle? How can we begin to come together?

"I think the way it begins is right what you're doing here," Taylor said. "To be willing to ask questions that haven't been asked over a sense of discomfort. You cannot have a breakthrough without a breakdown. And we have not been willing, many of us, to have a breakdown in the truth of the conversation. The truth: Why don't you like me?"

Taylor believes we'll have more success if we think more inclusively and more broadly; if we change the framework from gay rights or black rights to "basic human rights" for all people. "So that," Taylor said, "we turn this conversation on its head: to equality. Period."

Daniels believes it will take "pioneers and people who are mavericks" to see outside those boxes. "Martin Luther King made a statement," Daniels said. "He was a brave man, and was politically incorrect. I think that people really don't get his wife even — her stand on same-sex marriage and homosexuality. And all of that stems from him and his belief that we are all one. And no one has the right to be prejudiced against anyone."

Fixx sees the answer as something simple: compassion. "If we can pay attention just a little bit to each other's struggles or stories, I think that will start to bring about change," he offered. "Once we allow ourselves to care about others just enough … maybe we can find a way to get out of this together."

See Tori Fixx in the upcoming Homorevolution tour, and visit him at his website www.t-fixx.xbuild. com. Lee Daniels upcoming film is Tennessee
starring Mariah Carey. Visit Kevin Taylor a www.kevinetaylor. com. Rod McCullom blogs every day at Rod 2.0.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Gay Latino Immigrant Documentary Seeks Spanish/English Translator

Brad — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 19:56:12 GMT

A student-led, community-based documentary film looking at ways that Gay Latino Immigrants cope with oppression and are creating a more resilient community is seeking volunteers who can help with transcribing and translating dialogue from project interviews.

"SOMOS: Los Experiencias de los gay inmigrantes" is a documentary film project focused on celebrating the experiences of gay Latino immigrants, and highlighting the way members of the community are overcoming oppressive forces like racism and homophobia, while building a stronger community.

The time commitment can vary according to the volunteers’ time availability, from just a few hours to a larger commitment to oversee the translation effort. The project is part of a graduate-level inter-disciplinary course (Documentary Filmmaking for Social Justice) offered by the San Francisco State University Masters in Public Health Program and the Cinema Department.

The transcription/translation project will provide critical help in the film’s editing process. Individuals volunteer will:

• receive acknowledgment in the film credits
• gain experience in professional translation/transcription work
• play a significant role in helping the filmmakers reflect the concerns of the community
• learn more about the broader filmmaking process
• be helping reduce isolation and other negative effects of oppression experienced by gay Latino immigrants

You do not have to gay, or Latino, or an immigrant to help out with project. Obviously, though, you do need to have strong Spanish to English translation skills. To find out more about the project visit my webpage, www.twentyfive7.org. Click on the “SOMOS” link to read more about the project.

Thank you for any assistance you can lend to this important community-based project!

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Why I Hate Blacks Article Causes Stir

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:41:05 GMT

http://www.lompocrecord.com/articles/2007/02/28/ap-state-ca/d8nik14g0.txt

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 9 replies

Tim Hardaway and George Takei

kerrickadrian — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:09:30 GMT

What is going on here, folks? It makes me angry that Hardaway said those things, but he's had people come down on him like they never would have come down on a white man. And George Takei's "chocolatey" comments on the PSA (that you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA20dKc3kK8 )? That just made me cringe. There's a lot of complexity to this situation that I haven't seen explored.

Things I've been thinking:

It's not okay to use racism against homophobia. Tit-for-tat is bad politics, bad ethics, and doesn't work anyway because the two things aren't interchangeable.

If a person who isn't Black is sarcastically coming on to a Black man who has stated that he's not interested in your advances and calling his skin "chocolatey", is there any way that's not racist?

Hardaway was baited into saying that stuff by the reporter. He's gotten way more flak for it than white homophobes ever do. It's been the season for the media triumphantly making Black people apologize humbly for saying homophobic things, and for power structures to retaliate against them for it. Is this helpful?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 5 replies

Immigrant rights

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:38:04 GMT

I find it very intersting that in the past 2-3 weeks with all the protesting going on nationwide, that no one has started a topic to discuss how you feel about it. My family and I have been involved and are working for equal rights for everyone. I have had some very interesting and frankly surprising discussions with some friends about how the black community has been dealing with this. I will save that topic for later but I want to know how everyone is thinking about this.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 37 replies

national black hiv/aids awareness day

Ben — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 03:35:20 GMT

Hey all

does anyone know if there's anything going on in the bay area for this? i got an email about it this morning and would like to get involved, but didn't have luck trying to find someone at the bsu even though it was club day. i'll be going to the queer club's meeting tomorrow, but wanted to ask around to see if there's anything going on in the wider community.

if anyone out there is in outreach and could use any help, i'd love to. here's the link to the website that talks all about it and has some very frightening stats that make me that much more inclined to do more outreach.

http://www.blackaidsday.org/

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Black gays say broader gay community ignores their issues

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:45:55 GMT

Date: Sunday, January 28, 2007
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb. com

When actor Isaiah Washington announced last week that he was going into
counseling to deal with the anger and frustration that reportedly led
him to call "Grey's Anatomy" co-star T.R. Knight a gay slur, many people
began to see deja vu all over again.

After all, it was only two months ago when comedian Michael Richards
launched into a racially charged tirade at a Los Angeles comedy club,
calling several black audience members whom he believed had heckled him
"niggers." Richards later apologized publicly, appearing on CBS'
Letterman and the Rev. Jesse Jackson's radio show, and said he was going
into counseling to deal with his deeply rooted anger management issues.

Within the black community, there was reaction to Richards' behavior and
lively discussions about the use of the n-word and whether it is ever
appropriate, even among black people, and whether putting the word out
there as part of regular discourse among black people opens the door for
other groups to use the term as well.

In the gay community, a similar -- but perhaps more intense -- debate
has emerged. In addition to the debate about Washington's behavior,
there have been protests in several cities against the nightclub act of
Charles Knipp, a gay white man who performs a minstrel show in which he
dresses as a big black welfare mom named Shirley Q. Liquor, with
routines that feature a range of black stereotypes.

Some black gay activists contend that the broader gay community does not
concern itself with racial issues that offend a smaller segment of the
population and focuses only on those issues that offend across the
board. This behavior, activists said, has created a split in the gay
community along racial lines.

"The derogatory words that (Washington) used crosses all racial lines,"
said Ramone Johnson, who writes the "About Gay Life" column for
About.com. "Faggot is a universally offensive word. It doesn't matter if
you're male or female, light-skinned or dark-skinned, and the context he
used it in was offensive in front of a national audience."

Following a protest led by a coalition of civil rights and gay
organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of
Greater Los Angeles, the South Bay Chapter of Rainbow PUSH Coalition and
the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, a performance by Knipp scheduled at the
Factory during Black History month was canceled.

Knipp, whose controversial act has created a stir in many places since
2002, has yet to prompt a national buzz or nationwide condemnation.

"It isn't that he isn't offensive, because he is," Johnson told
BlackAmericaWeb. com, "and it's not that he has been given a free pass by
some. The issue is it's a debate over what is offensive.

"There are a lot of people who don't even know who Charles Knipp is. His
primary audience is in gay Caucasian bars, and these people don't see it
as offensive."

There are those who would argue, Johnson said, that Knipp is no more
offensive than the routine of Carlos Mencia, a Latino comedian who pokes
fun principally at Mexican-Americans on his Comedy Central Show, "Mind
of Mencia," or Dave Chappelle's old routines on the network's "Chappelle
Show."

"They don't see the history of a minstrel show and why it's offensive to
black people, the denigration to our race, culture and history and what
made that history. They may ask why is it okay for the Wayans brothers
to be in whiteface (in the movie "White Chicks") and not be offensive,
but not for Charles Knipp to be in blackface," Johnson said.

"I'll never be removed from the injustices to my ancestors because there
are constant reminders. I talk to my grandparents, and they've told me
what they went through," Johnson said. "For (many white people), that
happened generations ago. They have no clue. I'm not making an excuse
for them; they just don't have a clue."

"Racism and the forms it takes is often discussed in a manner that is
often accusatory and tends to be guilt-ridden, " Tokes Osubu, executive
director of Gay Men of African Descent, told BlackAmericaWeb. com.
"Consequently, non-black people can often get defensive because they
feel that we, as black LGBT (lesbians, gays, bisexuals and
transgendered) , paint them all with the tainted brush of racism, rather
than finding potential allies among them or use the dialogue or
instances of perceived racism as opportunities to raise awareness and
gain new allies.

"So whilst it can appear as a double standard, the fact that racism
affects us, not them, dilutes that argument. The Charles Knipp issue
exposes the ugly underbelly of racial politics in America," Osubu said.
"It feeds on stereotypes about black people. The fact that he continues
his portrayal of black people the way he does, in the name of comedy,
without the voice of the broader gay community denouncing it says a lot
more about the state of America than gay America."

The difference between the Washington and Knipp cases, Osubu added, also
raiseS the twin issues of politics and money.

"What the Washington and Knipp cases also demonstrate, " Osubu said, "is
the power politics that plays itself out in our country. The response to
Washington was swift, and it elicited an apology not because here was a
black man who had offended gay men, but truly a black man who had
offended a very powerful economic and political bloc. The same cannot be
said of the Knipp case because, as a community, black LGBT have not
exerted nor galvanized their inherent power."

Osubu said he has written to Washington and the producers of "Grey's
Anatomy."

"In that letter, I told Mr. Washington how disappointed I was with his
outburst and his use of the demeaning slur against his fellow cast
member," he said. "I went further by applauding his public statement
admitting to having used the slur. But I did invite him to demonstrate
the sincerity of his apology by meeting with leaders of the black gay
community at a meeting that GMAD is prepared to convene in NYC. Mr.
Washington was told in the letter that he had to go beyond meaningless
and should sit down with us in a fruitful dialogue as a start to
addressing homophobia."

"There's hypocrisy," counters Jasmyne Cannick, a lesbian activist and
writer. "What goes on in gay La-La Land is much different than black
L.A. A lot of white gay folk think (Knipp) is not offensive. You've
never looked through the lives of someone else. You want to blast Isaiah
Washington, but you don't want to clean up your own backyard."

Cannick said the black gay community will have to carry the message that
Knipp's act is unacceptable and cannot wait for the broader community or
white gay leadership to take up the cause.

"Knowledge is a powerful thing," Cannick told BlackAmericaWeb. com. "If
people on the ground don't know (Knipp) is coming to their city, it is
incumbent on us in L.A. to let our brothers and sisters know what's
going on."

While not all white people in the gay community are indifferent to
issues of race, Cannick said, there is a divide along racial lines.

"There is a chasm between the black LGBT and broader LGBT communities, "
Osubu said. "In essence, there are two rights movements moving at
different paces. For the wider LGBT community, gay marriage and other
such issues are the priorities, while for black LGBT people, we are
still dealing with stigma and discrimination, visibility or lack of it
and how these issues define our relationship with our families and
community institutions. "

"This goes beyond growing pains. It is more about identifying with each
other's issues and goes to the heart of the question of how true it is
that there is a gay community or several communities, " Osubu said.

Educating the general public about race and gay issues will be the only
way to sensitize Americans to the issues, said Johnson, who added he had
conducted a poll on his Web site about Washington and whether he should
be given the benefit of the doubt.

"It was pretty even across the board," Johnson said, showing that even
within the black gay community there are differing definitions of what
is offensive language.

"I don't think finger-pointing needs to be done," Johnson said. "What is
happening should be happening to general America."

He said organizations such as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation have a broad mission and respond to pressure from its
membership, just as it hopes organizations and individuals it targets
respond to external pressure.

"All those who are offended by (Knipp) need to rally up and organize to
end his bookings," Johnson said. "Education needs to happen, and
sometimes the education doesn't need to be a pie in the face."

Rashad Robinson, senior director of media for GLAAD, said the
organization has consistently worked behind the scenes with civil rights
organizations to address issues of race, as well as issues of importance
to the broader gay community.

"Our works is based on media defamation. We work to focus it in that
realm," Robinson told BlackAmericaWeb. com. "When it affects LGB people,
whether it offends people of color or not, we focus on the issues."

He said that GLAAD members have taken on Charles Knipp and lobbied to
have his shows canceled in several communities.

Robinson said his organization has worked with black media, including
Ebony and Essence magazines, "placing and working on stories" that
address issues of importance to both the black and gay communities. "But
when you come out of editorial board meetings," he said, "you don't send
out a press release about it because it may make these organizations
reluctant to work with you in the future.

"There's a role that the media has to play" in representing the
diversity of the gay community, Robinson said. "The images we tend to
see of gays is that they are white and wealthy, not the full diversity.
The same gender-loving community runs across the spectrum."

And the issue cuts both ways, Robinson said.

"While folks may be critical of the gay community for not being more
racially sensitive, there is criticism of the broader civil rights
community for not being more sensitive to issues that affect LGB people
who are black. Beyond the criticism, there is really an opportunity for
dialogue here."

__._,_.___

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

An Evening with Anti-Racism Activist and Author Tim Wise

Yosenio — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 06:36:50 GMT

Please help spread the word!

Speak Out and the Center for Political Education present
An Evening with Anti-Racism Activist and Author
Tim Wise

WHEN: Thursday, February 1, 2007 * 7:30 pm

WHERE: First Congregational Church of Oakland
2501 Harrison Street, Oakland CA

COST: $10 general admission, $5 for youth 18 and under
Advance tickets available through Brown Paper Tickets
by calling 1-800-838-3006 or on the web:
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/9397

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact Speak Out at 510-601-0182
or via email: info@speakoutnow.org

MORE ABOUT TIM WISE:

"Tim Wise is one of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous
critics of
white privilege in the nation." - Michael Eric Dyson, best-selling
author
and University of Pennsylvania professor

Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists
in
the U.S. He has spoken to over 300,000 people in 48 states, and on over
350
college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at
Yale
and Columbia.

From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race
Relations
Institute, and in the early '90s was Associate Director of the Louisiana

Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups
organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political candidate,
David
Duke.

Wise is the author of two books - White Like Me: Reflections on Race
from a
Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press) and Affirmative Action: Racial
Preference
in Black and White (Routledge). He has contributed essays to a dozen
books
and anthologies including White Privilege: Essential Readings on the
Other
Side of Racism and Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on

Reparations. Wise is also featured in the book White Men Challenging
Racism:
Thirty-Five Personal Stories (Duke University Press) and Shakti Butler's

newest documentary film "Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness
Visible."
--

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

the more things change, the more they stay the same

Khadijah — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 20:17:19 GMT

tinyurl.com/pqg3p

Let me know what you think?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Are black women undesirable because they have been masculinized? Masculinization of Black Women

Alexei — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 19:59:57 GMT

Are black women undesirable because they have been masculinized?

CVK
There’s an interesting debate brewing at Salon.com, triggered by an article Debra Dickerson wrote, titled I Want You to Want Me.

Dickerson starts off by noting that in “The Wedding Crashers,” Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn “seduced their way through every culture and every ethnicity but mine"–that is, they don’t sleep with any black women. She then goes on to link this to the fact that–in her opinion–black women are unloved in this country. Much of it has to do with the countless media representations of black women as “harridans,” “harpies” or “bitches.” But Dickerson argues that on a deeper level, it is caused by the masculinization of black women:

It’s a misery to black woman why our strength, the strength that kept our people from extinction and which holds the community together yet, makes us seem manly somehow, as if no white woman has ever roughened her pink hands or survived rape for her family’s sake. Or been a bitch. Why is it so hard to fathom that we can raise our children alone (if need be, rarely by preference), work two jobs and still look good in a miniskirt. Still want to look good in a miniskirt. Sisters are simply not seen as either ladylike or, to put it bluntly, fuckable. Rapeable, certainly, as the history of slavery and Jim Crow prove, just not fuckable.

This “gendering” of race is something that Jen and I talk about in our workshop on the myths and realities of interracial relationships. There’s a tendency in this country for both black men and women to be associated with masculinity, and Asian men and women to be associated with femininity. This gendering is especially obvious when you look at some of the slang used in the gay community. An excellent article by Jason Chang notes:

The use of the term “lesbian” to identify gay Asian men who are attracted to each other is a stunning indication of how many gay Asian men perceive that only white men are “real” men and that Asian men who date each other are therefore “lesbians"–two “women” together. Mainstream society’s stereotyping of Asian men as feminine is raised to a grotesque level in the gay community.

Dickerson’s article definitely struck a nerve. You can read all the letters to the editor Salon.com received, some agree with Dickerson, others disagree. Here are some highlights:

Why is she so preoccupied with white men desiring black women? Does she think that will change the basic conditions that black people face in this society? I mean, white men have proven throughout history that they will fuck just about anything, including farm animals. Has that changed their attitude about people of color in general?

and another perspective…

I don’t understand how your reactions to what you’ve observed about the treatment of black women (and their “unfuckable” appeal to whites) square with the reality of the interracial sexual history of this country. Black women, as you noted, have obviously been raped and fucked by white men before, more often for pure lust or power than for love or emotional attachment. The underlying justification when white males rape black women has long been that black women are sexual addicts and really hot bed partners… And now, you’re upset because black women are not being shown as willing partners to interracial sex without emotional involvement? That is your measure of social progress in this country?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 4:58 pm and is filed under General, Identity Groups, Issues, Media Representations, African-American, Interracial Relationships, Online, Caucasian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 19 replies

i hate craigslist

Ben — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 02:26:37 GMT

so in a drunken fit of rage i posted a little rant about how racist all the ads are (m4m of course) and just came to find out it was flagged down....quite bewildering i must say

i dont go on there super often, except after i read essays about the racism in the community of course, but when i do peruse the postings, most of them are white guys looking for white guys, something i never understood.

has anyone else ever read "why i hate abercrombie and fitch: essays on race and sexuality"? (as this is what sparked my posting)

ben

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 21 replies

Kkkramer!!! : "This is what happens when you interupt a white man"

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:58:35 GMT

hahaha... I HAD to bring this up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feexXs0st9o

If you havent heard of Michael Richards disgusting rant in which he yells out nigger like 20 times and makes some pretty fucked up and evil racial remarks to a few black hecklers.

It blew up over the past week. He went on Letterman and apologized. Didnt work and NOW Youtube is bursting with more clips of him being a flat out racist...
like this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVt6eoKB9sw&eurl=

and Richards even got his publicist to cover up that he's NOT a jew...and is a Mason!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lewis/michael-richards-is-not-j_b_34772.html

Discuss.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 4 replies

the flava of love

nilochem — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:26:42 GMT

Has any one seen the show? I saw an ad for it, and from the top-hat and tails to the way Flava-Flav lolled his eyes about I could have sworn it was minstrelsy.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

What's Up in Oaxaca

johnpowers — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:39:00 GMT

I don't really know who Simon is but he's interviewed on a community-access TV show out of NYC available at this link http://letemtalk.blogspot.com/2006/11/simon-on-situation-in-oaxaca-brad-will.html

One doesn't have to agree entirely with Simon's analysis to recognize that his deep understanding of what's happening in Oaxaca. The show is about 30 minutes. I think it's great and some of you here may be interested too.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

POC AS A COSTUME

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:13:58 GMT

So....last night was Halloween. I saw some cool costumes..
and some that made me wanna thump some heads.
These ill costumed folks promted a conversation with a friend that I thought I'd share here.

Why do some white people ( mostly men ) think it's cool
to dress up as POC for Halloween?! To me this is just
an example of a modern day minstrel show.
They act out in ways they wouldn't normally...thinking
that's how the POC they're aping act. Every year I see
some dumbass thinking this "disguise" is funny and cool.
A few years ago I saw some dude dressed like " a Mexican."
He had a sombrero, a poncho and a big moustache. I noticed
he spotted a REAL Mexican and was trying to get him to do a
"Mexican hat dance" with him! WTF???!!!!!

A several years ago I had dreads down to my ass. One year they came out
with those dumbass " rasta hats" with fake dreads connected to it. ANYWAY....
on my way home ( it was Halloween ) I saw this ass clown wearing one of these
hats. He was aping for his adoring friends by talkin loud about smokin out and
"fuckin bitchez." He was standing at a stop light on the corner. I came up right
next to him. He saw me ( So did his friends )...and he immediately stopped aping.
I just looked at him...not glaring...just looking at him...straight in his eye!
Sheepishly he turned away and nervously tried to change the conversation
with his friends. I continued to look at him after the light changed as we walked
across the street. His eyes would dart back to me then his friends anticipating
I was gonna say something and go off on him. I just continued to look at him
until he and his friends turned the corner. They were silent the whole way until
we parted. Then his silly girlfriend says, "Damn what the hell was his problem?! Doesn't he know it's Halloween?!"

This year it was Afro wigs. *rolls eyes*
Folks just got quiet when they saw me and rushed to get by me.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 14 replies

Africans using the n-word

Alexandra — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:52:14 GMT

Thanks to Special K for posting this in
Underground hip-hop and Multiculturalism.
And for doing the thousands of miles of biking to get to Malawi,
and posting this to your blog:

http://playahata.com/hatablog/index.php?p=725

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Shopping Anxiety....The reverse.

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:46:36 GMT

Those of you who are long time RR tribe visiters might remember a thread i began 5 or 6 months ago titled "shopping Anxiety"...which focused on my (and many others) experiences with strange prehaps racists employees at retail shops and the feeling as if you are being profiled by race as to whether you recieve "customer service"or instantly seen as a potential threat while shopping.

I HATE shopping for these reasons: Sales person is less courteous with me than with the person not of color. I get followed....and I am not acknoledged in the store when i walk in, i'm only greeted when i get to the register.

I started working OF ALL PLACES.....Payless. I have a second job at a boutique in Castro where the cheepest thing is 89 dollars and the most expensive is 1700..... and the cheepest Jeans are $149. I cant even afford the stuff i sell. Payless is located in a somewhat "busy"part of town...busy as in Drug trafficing. My first week at Payless i started to notice who I would give more time to. Disheveled People: I still would smile... i just wouldn't "put my all"into it. It was almost instinctual. White people with money.... I found myself smiling conversating and giving my best...as well as with any black or latino person who looked "put together". If you view the thread discussion we had earlier this year i think the answer (at least for me) became evident as i observed my own behaviour towards my customers. As much as I have a credo to give the best service possible to ALL.... There's a divide that is more about appearance (the appearance of having money and being sane) rather than flat out racial profiling. For instance I had a black woman, not well dressed...looked tenderloin homeless-like...walkman on.... she looked a bit coked out and I didn't greet her. Not sure why...but i didnt greet her when she came through the door. She could have been like the rest of the skid row-like people who come in and spend hours until we have to tell them to get out. I left her alone.... i rethought my decision. After an hour she came back with 7 boxes and bought a purse and socks and three hats.

total i think came to 187. What tripped me further out was that my coworker told me.."something to the tune of "Well she's just probably burning off money she doesn't have."I didn't think it was within my right to justify not treating her like ëvery other"customer by discounting her purchase with a hypothetical reasoning.'

This and tons of other self observations lead me to recognize that even POC can prejudge. And besides that...in "training camp"... especially for a company like Payless which sells low priced shoes and is synonymous with the family with a budget.. they have guidelines for custumer "reading"...very disturbing...that aren't so much racist as it is classist.

Just thoughts while revisiting this subject.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 5 replies

Central Park Zoo outing in NYC

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:27:39 GMT

Get together with other nature lovin' women
Sponsor: Particular Friendships: For L & B Women
www.nyclinkup.com; find Particular Friendships: For L & B Women ; sign in or sign up; see you there!

The Central Park Zoo
64th Street and 5th Avenue In Manhattan
New York, NY
(212) 439-6500
Sunday, November 19, 2006 - 11:00 AM
Duration: Abount 3 hours

Cost: $8-9
(Cost refers to approximately what you would spend at the event yourself, unless the host indicates otherwise.)

Comments from host:
We will be meeting on the northwest corner of 64th street and 5th Avenue.

I figure we can go to the zoo, have a few laughs and all interested parties can agree on getting food somewhere.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

gay shame

Ben — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:40:23 GMT

just read an article by matt bernstein and was wondering if anyone out there is involved with them?

http://lipmagazine.org/articles/featmattilda_gaymarriage.htm

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 13 replies

Queers over 40 tribe

Ms. Fill in the Blank — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 06:22:22 GMT

Hey all , just wanted to put this out there.
I have a queers over 40 tribe. for me Its for men, women, trans etc.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 8 replies

Sex Discrimination...

riotgrrl — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:01:25 GMT

I just received an assignment for class:

Assignment 02: HR Issue (10 points) Due Week 06. Length 4-5 pages
One of your employees decided to file a (choose one: sex or racial/ethnic) discrimination against you as his/her supervisor claiming that you have discriminated against her in salary, promotion and work assignments because of his/her gender, sexual preference, or color, national origin; or religion). State the case, and explain how you would handle the situation, what rules and regulations may have been violated and what course of action should you and the claimant take.

And it is really bothering me. I'm not sure why. Part of me is really bothered that a professor wouldn't divide the class in two and have half the class be the employee and the other half be the supervisor. The other part is really bothered because all the students are going to feel like they didn't do anything wrong, and this will teach the preconception of frivolous discrimination charges far more than the reality. I am also annoyed that he wasn't so good at making it gender neutral (he refered to her salary, but his/her gender...).

Am I being a wingnut again? Why is this bugging me?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Let Us Now Praise Nelly Men!

varianpierce — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 04:17:40 GMT

I started a new tribe to counter some of the negative bullshit directed at gay men who don't fit into society's limited notions of how a man "should" be. Many gay men have taken on these judgments, as well, and try to emulate some silly hypermasculine ideal, while pointing fingers at other men who don't conform.

Personally, I find gay accents, graceful mannerisms, and softness in men to be a powerful turn-on. So it's time that gay-acting, gay appearing men got some strokes for being so beautiful and sexy and GAY!
http://tribes.tribe.net/2170cabb-c2a1-47b6-8fb3-01ca24684db0?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5B2170cabb-c2a1-47b6-8fb3-01ca24684db0%5D

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Noah’s Arc: ...on the MTV Logo channel August 9

vulcan — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:41:26 GMT

I got an e-mail press release today about the second season premier of "America’s First Black Gay Television Series". I want to do an interview with the folks involved and I'm interested/in need of inoput; impressions, feed back, suggestions, questions...ect.

Here is the Press release I got.

Los Angeles, CA—IMMEDIATE RELEASE—Noah’s Arc: America’s First Black Gay Television Series will premiere its second season on the MTV Logo channel August 9 (10 PM ET/PT).

One of the most talked about comedy series of the year, Noah’s Arc debuted in October of 2005 to an enthusiastic audience. Noah’s Arc stars Darryl Stephens as Noah, Rodney Chester as Alex, Christian Vincent as Ricky and Doug Spearman as Chance. The series is created by and executive produced by Patrik-Ian Polk and his Tall Skinny Black Boy Productions, and is based on the lives, loves, trials, and tribulations of four Black gay men in Los Angeles.

Guest appearances this season include Victoria Rowell (“The Young and the Restlsess”) in her first role as a lesbian. Other guest appearances include Rockmond Dunbar (“Prison Break” and “Soul Food”) as himself, Keith Hamilton Cobb (“The Young and the Restless” and “Andromeda”), B2K’s Raz B, and Jennia Fredrique (“Passions” and “Half and Half”).

The Complete First Season DVD will be available in retail stores August 8, 2006, one day before the premiere of the second season of Noah’s Arc.

Logo is the nation’s leading 24/7 channel and source of entertainment for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) audience.

More information about the Noah’s Arc: The Second Season premiere is available now at LOGOonline.com.

Episode One Synopsis

August 9 (10 PM ET/PT)

Episode 201: “Housequake"

Airdate: Wednesday, August 9 @ 10 PM ET/PT

Logline: The second season begins with a bang as Noah and the gang experience more than just a physical shake-up! A traveler returns with some interesting ‘baggage.’

Written By: Patrik-Ian Polk

Directed By: Sheldon Larry

Stars: Darryl Stephens (Noah), Rodney Chester (Alex), Christian Vincent (Ricky), Doug Spearman (Chance), Jensen Atwood (Wade), Gregory Kieth (Trey), Jonathan Julian (Eddie), Benjamin Patterson (Guy), Merwin Mondesir (Dre), Sahara Davis (Kenya)

Guest Stars: James Mathis III (Malik), Mike Hanus (Miguel), Laura Di Cicco (Marta), Jose Vargas (Senor Rodriguez)

ABOUT TALL SKINNY BLACK BOY PRODUCTIONS

Tall Skinny Black Boy Productions, Inc. is the full-service feature film and television production company owned and operated by writer-director-producer Patrik-Ian Polk

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Does this make you laugh?

Thu, 18 May 2006 22:42:27 GMT

http://www.davidfary.com/DON%20IMUS%20THE%20BLACK%20BEATLES.MP3

Or should i title this thread laughing @stereotypes.

I've always wanted to bring up how often do we laugh at racially charged comedy ...no matter how 'PC' or 'conscious' we are about issues of stereotypes..racism...sexism..

There are limits to what i will laugh at... take Dave Chappelle...who had major conflicts with his routine and began to question whether or not he was purpetuating myth... and just selling out. I love the guy...he's smart...cerebral ...subtle and amplified racism in america for laughs while bring up serious issues. Like the Wac Donalds sketch...if anyone is familiar? Classsssic.

Carlos Mencia, though... he's Comedy Centrals replacement for Dave. He talks of wetbacks and Niggers...more in your face, less about mirrors and more about confrontation.

Comedy Central over all IS the last channel on your TV where racism is actually funny and acceptable. Comedy Central has tapped into the market and trend that is growing where racism has become funny, in a way since the 70's, always has. It seems comedy is the last place where PC-ism is rejected.

what are you attitudes towards comedians and race?
Can Minority comedians get away with more?
Or are you uncomfortable even in this medium, when subjects or race,gender,class and sexuality are brought up?

open topic.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 18 replies

do you guys know matt cole?

Michael — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 06:16:14 GMT

Does anyone else like porn. I know i love it. heh heh My friend Matt Cole a pretty new porn star has just launched his porn site

www.mattcolexxx.com, its HOT.. heheh he

i snuck in and looked at it a few ago. heh heh,

Michael

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 4 replies

Hold on to your fucking seats!....

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:31:59 GMT

A Tribe friend sent me this link.....

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/m4m/144403168.html

ahem. I'll dispell my thoughts in a little while....i have to sit on this.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 40 replies

Indiginous Permaculture Project: Cultural Event in Berkeley, CA Wed. June 28

Alexandra — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:42:37 GMT

This is my friend Guillermo's event and I would like to invite you all:

Indigenous Permaculture Event
Slides, Music, Education, Poetry, Dance...
June 28, 2006
7-9pm

Come enjoy this evening's events which will include Mayan native dance, music, poetry and a slide show presentation of the Indigenous Permaculture Project's work in the Bay Area, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and in El Salvador.

The Indigenous Permaculture Project is traveling this summer to El Salvador to support the Traditional School Program in Sonsonate state which is working on building water purification systems, constructing a community building, and giving workshops on health and traditional farming.

Poverty and exploitation of resources has led to rapid deforestation and erosion in this area. The Indigenous Permaculture Project links people in the Bay Area with the communities of El Salvador to restore the natural environment in this region.

If you can't make the event but would like to make a donation, please contact us at the Ecology Center. All proceeds will help fund the work.

Event Location:
Ecology Center
2530 San Pablo Ave (near Dwight Way)
Berkeley
For more information call: (510) 548-2220 Ext. 233
or email: erc@ecologycenter.org
Recommended donation: $5-$50 sliding scale
No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

The Ecology Center is a membership organization providing environmental information and direct services to promote sustainable living and a healthy, socially just world.

www.indigenous-permaculture.org/Ec...htm

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

25 Years of HIV in San Francisco: Chronicle Series

Alexandra — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 21:59:42 GMT

The Chronicle's Science Editor, Sabin Russell, has put together a series commemorating the first 25 years of the HIV epidemic.
The series started yesterday, Sunday the 4th of June, and continues this week.
It will include snapshots of SF history, SF people living with HIV today, and open up a global perspective on the epidemic. There are specific articles addressing the overwhelming impact of HIV on African Americans in the Bay Area, and on Ugandans, that I was consulted on. The following link is to one of the first articles, but sfgate.com will let you search by date or topic.
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

I wish I was hearing some noise about this.

kerrickadrian — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 08:48:25 GMT

http://www.elizabethmuststay.co.uk/elizabethsstory.htm

"Elizabeth, a Ugandan lesbian who is a rape and torture survivor, is being held at Yarl's Wood Detention Centre and is danger of being removed to Uganda early next week. She is unlikely to survive if returned.

Elizabeth's solicitor is preparing to submit a fresh asylum application with substantial new evidence including a medical psychiatric report currently scheduled for completion on the 8th of June. However, she has been told Elizabeth is likely to be deported within the next week. It will be a grave injustice if Elizabeth is deported before all evidence has been considered.

Elizabeth is a Ugandan lesbian who has been living in Manchester. She fled to the UK in 2004, having lived her life as a lesbian secretly for many years. One night after being out with friends at an underground gay club she was visited at her home by several men she now believes to have been associated with the Ugandan authorities. She was bundled into a car and taken to a so-called 'Safe House' - unofficial Ugandan prisons where torture is regularly practiced. Elizabeth was held for 5 months, during which time she was repeatedly raped, whipped and beaten. She eventually managed to escape, and fled to the UK where she claimed asylum.

Elizabeth's asylum claim, and her appeal, have both been rejected. Whilst the adjudicators recognise that homosexuals are persecuted in Uganda, they do not believe that the term 'homosexual' and evidence relating to the treatment of homosexuals, applies to lesbians. They have also questioned her identity as a lesbian, because she had a child as a young woman, although this is common among British lesbians too. They show further misunderstandings about the nature of both underground gay communities, and of state sanctioned abduction, detention and torture.

Elizabeth is in desperate and genuine fear of what awaits her if/when the Home Office forcibly deport her to Uganda. Not only has she been through the most terrible experiences, her long term partner has not be heard from or of since 2004; Elizabeth fears that she too has been abducted and detained. Unsurprisingly the abuse Elizabeth suffered in Uganda, and her fear and sadness at the apparent loss of her partner, has left Elizabeth depressed and extremely worried for her future."

The updated information is that she is due to be deported Friday, that's tomorrow. Activist groups are asking that people nonviolently protest at the airport.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Questions.

Sat, 06 May 2006 09:14:10 GMT

Depending on who you are....are there any questions that people will ask you.... regarding race, Trangender-ness, age or whatnot..... that are prone to make your eyes role, make you want to discontinue conversation...will piss you off to whatever degree... or maybe siren your ability to understand and correct?

Reccently someone asked me if i was "half white and half black" which personally peeved me. Yet... i'm empathetic and i understand that stupid question and even potentially demeaning ones can come from a pure place. This guy expressed interest in me and said i was hot... questioning my racial make up ...especially in the begining of introduction didn't sit well with me. I'm though guilty of at times asking the wrong questions...with say ...a Female to male (but I objected personally to asking question in the first three weeks of knowing him... to which he asked me why i didnt ask him questions and I told him that i'd rather wait for him to bring up certain things to the table.... after three weeks i started to want to know more about his journey from female to male who primarily dates gay men... that never came to the surface naturally).

But I would say in the first few minutes whether online or offline... in a rowdy club or at a quiet coffee shop.. there's shit you just don't ask if you have pure motives in 'getting' with someone who is different than you... unless you really are an idiot. Those are personal views.

and when a guy will ask me if i'm all black...which has happened many times....with them telling me after i answer that stupid quetsion.... " Oh well you just dont have normal black features."

Wtf?

Does that mean... "big nose"... "huge lips and eyes."

however i'm conscious... or try to be of plain shelteredness....and honest curiosity without the intent of being a jerk or being actually stupid. Thus i must disregard the words and the sentences and look in deep for intent. I think Intent matters alot...especialy if you are any kind of minority dating a brand of majority. Case in point:

I dated a transgender man (FTM) and he made a joke about his 'clit' being 4 inches....and I thought it was true...my dumbass told him after we had sex...weeks later on the phone... "You know... I wouldnt have been so freaked before sex if i wouldn't have said what you said."

He then said...what did I say?

I got scared... because i knew he had a way to refer to his body.

and I said... "You said your clit after T was 4 inches."

Oh shit... there was a fire storm afterwards. 45 minutes of anger and correction.. he swore he never refered to his own body as 'clit'... but i wouldn't have said that if he wouldn't have said that. I got checked 5 times over....and it left a dent in relationship ...no matter how much i cried... i didn't mean to say that in it's context and refer to your body with the "c" word.

I felt attacked ....

and had to defend myself...yet... i thought back to the men who have said shit like...

"Oh you must use a lot of lotion because blacks have dryer skin than whites." and maybe they meant well but i jumped down their throats for making such a definitive statement however...in reality.. i dont think the intent was to harm....so i do believe in discerning intent when dealing with people.

what are your thoughts on this....period?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

King Kong! (yeah im seriously starting a thread here about this)

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 12:27:28 GMT

*Huge fucking grin*

When this film came out last year I had a conversation with a friend of mine of Arab decent, I had seen the Original and documentary on TV afterwards, and Told him about the racial subtext that was just bubbling OVER, at least in my eyes, in the older version of the film.

Which led me to Saturday night in which, i subjected myself to all three hours of the Peter Jackson version released last year on DVD and all ic ould do while sitting on my couch was SEE nothing but racial implications, and nothing about colonialism and it's impact (as my arab friend stated in his argument with me)..... I saw nothing... i mean NOTHINg but what follows.....

In simple form: The historical fear and protectiveness the white man has always had over the white woman. hahaha. I mean I saw this in the first version of the film. Which lead to believe this was just me....a black man....projecting something i've always felt.... That white women were cherished as pure.... and here you have a perfect BLONDE, thin white woman being taken up by this HUGE ape, found on an Island of 'savage' 'dark' people... who worship this huge APE....who dominates everything...and he's chasing after this white woman...again...i say blonde.....blue eyes...... and i dont wanna sound like malcom fucking X...but ya get the picture.

This version though...for those who have seen it...LOVE Peter Jackson....great filmmaker! Brave and smart .... he emphasised the emotional level which maybe he unwittingl;y brought out more racial subtext...

Through out the whole film though....you had this overwelmingly strong sense of wrong and right and what was right to save this woman being taken by the savage beast. i Really wanna know if im the only one who saw this. ANY version.... of this 'KING KONG'? is it me.

and most importantly the ideas of the 'white womanness'. i thought i'd toss that up here...

a side note:

To any who saw the peter Jackson film....

did you see any Homo-subtext in the relationship with the 'young white boy' and his 'black daddy'...hahaha! I totally saw that.

someone let me know i am not alone??

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Protest against "Battle Cry" Rally this Friday, SF City Hall 2:30

Alexandra — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:56:42 GMT

reposted from Cal. Progressives. Thanks, Janet!

EMERGENCY PROTEST
AGAINST RIGHT WING CHRISTIAN AGENDA

FRIDAY, MARCH 24
2:30 PM - 4:0O PM
SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL

Once again, out of town right wing extremist Chrisitans are coming to San Francisco. They are having a youth “battlecry” Friday and Saturday at SBC/AT&T Park, but as their “warm up” they are staging a rally on the steps of OUR City Hall.

Who are they? Check out www.battlecry.com: They believe in ongoing wars against Muslim countries, recruiting our youth as “Christian soldiers.” They want to enact laws that are antiwoman, antichoice, antisex, and anti-gay.

STAND WITH US TO TELL THEM
TO GO AWAY—
WE DON’T WANT THEIR THEOCRACY!

San Francisco Code Pink
riotcrone@yahoo.com

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Lambda Youth Project Gay Prom 2006 in Hayward, CA

Alexandra — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 22:39:48 GMT

I am going to volunteer for this prom. It is an annual event by and for youth held in Hayward, and inviting youth up to age 20 all over the Bay. There are many parts we adults can play in making this a safe and fun environment for LGBTQQ youth in the Bay Area, from being chaperone the night of the event (June 10, 2006), to raising money for poor kids to attend, to updating their webpages with current info.

I have volunteer applications with me or you can visit

www.gayprom.org/gp2006/index.html for info

or request a volunteer packet at: info@gayprom.org

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

being charged by white people for native spiritual practices

-robin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:25:01 GMT

am i the only person who cringes when some white person offers a "spiritual journey" where anyone can participate if they have the $100 to practice what is an appropriation of a practice used by Indigenous people?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 4 replies

Crash

zehxeh — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 22:08:50 GMT

I wanted an opinion from this group. As some of you may know, Crash won best picture this year at the oscars. I thought this was great because a) I think it's a great movie, and b) It is all about racism and actually verbalizes a lot of things that I only see written. I thought it was pretty innovative in how it used the film format as a literary device, a way of communicating these ideas to the masses in a way that was easy to understand. The dialogue, for this reason, is not as natural, but I thought it served an important purpose and did it's job well. I enjoyed the movie through and through.

So at work this monday I mentioned to some of my co-workers, that I thought it was great that Crash had won, and 2 women in particular had the opposite opinion. They thought the movie was "obvious and heavy-handed," slapping the viewers across the face with racial issues that, in their opinions, are old-hat. I basically decided that they just didn't want to think about these issues and so decided that they'd been there, done that (although I'm fairly certain they've never even heard mention of half the conversations that take place on this tribe).

So anyway, I was so disturbed by their diametrically opposed view of this movie, that i made me want to know what people in this group thought of it. These two women are white and from non-diverse areas of the country, and so I can't really trust them as any sort of authority on how a movie like Crash is handling racial issues. But I can't really consider myself any expert either. So yeah, just wanted to see what others thought about the movie.

thanks;-)

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 13 replies

NY Times Article

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:10:15 GMT

January 15, 2006
The Pressure to Cover

By KENJI YOSHINO
When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. "You'll have a better chance at tenure," he said, "if you're a homosexual professional than if you're a professional homosexual." Out of the closet for six years at the time, I knew what he meant. To be a "homosexual professional" was to be a professor of constitutional law who "happened" to be gay. To be a "professional homosexual" was to be a gay professor who made gay rights his work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay, my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don't flaunt.

I didn't experience the advice as antigay. The law school is a vigorously tolerant place, embedded in a university famous for its gay student population. (As the undergraduate jingle goes: "One in four, maybe more/One in three, maybe me/One in two, maybe you.") I took my colleague's words as generic counsel to leave my personal life at home. I could see that research related to one's identity - referred to in the academy as "mesearch" - could raise legitimate questions about scholarly objectivity.

I also saw others playing down their outsider identities to blend into the mainstream. Female colleagues confided that they would avoid references to their children at work, lest they be seen as mothers first and scholars second. Conservative students asked for advice about how open they could be about their politics without suffering repercussions at some imagined future confirmation hearing. A religious student said he feared coming out as a believer, as he thought his intellect would be placed on a 25 percent discount. Many of us, it seemed, had to work our identities as well as our jobs.

It wasn't long before I found myself resisting the demand to conform. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture. At a time when the law was transforming gay rights, it seemed ludicrous not to suit up and get in the game.

"Mesearch" being what it is, I soon turned my scholarly attention to the pressure to conform. What puzzled me was that I felt that pressure so long after my emergence from the closet. When I stopped passing, I exulted that I could stop thinking about my sexuality. This proved naïve. Long after I came out, I still experienced the need to assimilate to straight norms. But I didn't have a word for this demand to tone down my known gayness.

Then I found my word, in the sociologist Erving Goffman's book "Stigma." Written in 1963, the book describes how various groups - including the disabled, the elderly and the obese - manage their "spoiled" identities. After discussing passing, Goffman observes that "persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large." He calls this behavior covering. He distinguishes passing from covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a characteristic, while covering pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how F.D.R. stationed himself behind a desk before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, playing down his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities.

As is often the case when you learn a new idea, I began to perceive covering everywhere. Leafing through a magazine, I read that Helen Keller replaced her natural eyes (one of which protruded) with brilliant blue glass ones. On the radio, I heard that Margaret Thatcher went to a voice coach to lower the pitch of her voice. Friends began to send me e-mail. Did I know that Martin Sheen was Ramon Estevez on his birth certificate, that Ben Kingsley was Krishna Bhanji, that Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch Demsky and that Jon Stewart was Jonathan Leibowitz?

In those days, spotting instances of covering felt like a parlor game. It's hard to get worked up about how celebrities and politicians have to manage their public images. Jon Stewart joked that he changed his name because Leibowitz was "too Hollywood," and that seemed to get it exactly right. My own experience with covering was also not particularly difficult - once I had the courage to write from my passions, I was immediately embraced.

It was only when I looked for instances of covering in the law that I saw how lucky I had been. Civil rights case law is peopled with plaintiffs who were severely punished for daring to be openly different. Workers were fired for lapsing into Spanish in English-only workplaces, women were fired for behaving in stereotypically "feminine" ways and gay parents lost custody of their children for engaging in displays of same-sex affection. These cases revealed that far from being a parlor game, covering was the civil rights issue of our time.

The New Discrimination

In recent decades, discrimination in America has undergone a generational shift. Discrimination was once aimed at entire groups, resulting in the exclusion of all racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities and people with disabilities. A battery of civil rights laws - like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 - sought to combat these forms of discrimination. The triumph of American civil rights is that such categorical exclusions by the state or employers are now relatively rare.

Now a subtler form of discrimination has risen to take its place. This discrimination does not aim at groups as a whole. Rather, it aims at the subset of the group that refuses to cover, that is, to assimilate to dominant norms. And for the most part, existing civil rights laws do not protect individuals against such covering demands. The question of our time is whether we should understand this new discrimination to be a harm and, if so, whether the remedy is legal or social in nature.

Consider the following cases:

• Renee Rogers, an African-American employee at American Airlines, wore cornrows to work. American had a grooming policy that prevented employees from wearing an all-braided hairstyle. When American sought to enforce this policy against Rogers, she filed suit, alleging race discrimination. In 1981, a federal district court rejected her argument. It first observed that cornrows were not distinctively associated with African-Americans, noting that Rogers had only adopted the hairstyle after it "had been popularized by a white actress in the film '10.' " As if recognizing the unpersuasiveness of what we might call the Bo Derek defense, the court further alleged that because hairstyle, unlike skin color, was a mutable characteristic, discrimination on the basis of grooming was not discrimination on the basis of race. Renee Rogers lost her case.

• Lydia Mikus and Ismael Gonzalez were called for jury service in a case involving a defendant who was Latino. When the prosecutor asked them whether they could speak Spanish, they answered in the affirmative. The prosecutor struck them, and the defense attorney then brought suit on their behalf, claiming national-origin discrimination. The prosecutor responded that he had not removed the potential jurors for their ethnicity but for their ability to speak Spanish. His stated concern was that they would not defer to the court translator in listening to Spanish-language testimony. In 1991, the Supreme Court credited this argument. Lydia Mikus and Ismael Gonzalez lost their case.

• Diana Piantanida had a child and took a maternity leave from her job at the Wyman Center, a charitable organization in Missouri. During her leave, she was demoted, supposedly for previously having handed in work late. The man who was then the Wyman Center's executive director, however, justified her demotion by saying the new position would be easier "for a new mom to handle." As it turned out, the new position had less responsibility and half the pay of the original one. But when Piantanida turned this position down, her successor was paid Piantanida's old salary. Piantanida brought suit, claiming she had been discharged as a "new mom." In 1997, a federal appellate court refused to analyze her claim as a sex-discrimination case, which would have led to comparing the treatment she received to the treatment of "new dads." Instead, it found that Piantanida's (admittedly vague) pleadings raised claims only under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which it correctly interpreted to protect women only while they are pregnant. Diana Piantanida lost her case.

Robin Shahar was a lesbian attorney who received a job offer from the Georgia Department of Law, where she had worked as a law student. The summer before she started her new job, Shahar had a religious same-sex commitment ceremony with her partner. She asked a supervisor for a late starting date because she was getting married and wanted to go on a celebratory trip to Greece. Believing Shahar was marrying a man, the supervisor offered his congratulations. Senior officials in the office soon learned, however, that Shahar's partner was a woman. This news caused a stir, reports of which reached Michael Bowers, the attorney general of Georgia who had successfully defended his state's prohibition of sodomy before the United States Supreme Court. After deliberating with his lawyers, Bowers rescinded her job offer. The staff member who informed her read from a script, concluding, "Thanks again for coming in, and have a nice day." Shahar brought suit, claiming discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In court, Bowers testified that he knew Shahar was gay when he hired her, and would never have terminated her for that reason. In 1997, a federal appellate court accepted that defense, maintaining that Bowers had terminated Shahar on the basis of her conduct, not her status. Robin Shahar lost her case.

• Simcha Goldman, an Air Force officer who was also an ordained rabbi, wore a yarmulke at all times. Wearing a yarmulke is part of the Orthodox tradition of covering one's head out of deference to an omnipresent god. Goldman's religious observance ran afoul of an Air Force regulation that prohibited wearing headgear while indoors. When he refused his commanding officer's order to remove his yarmulke, Goldman was threatened with a court martial. He brought a First Amendment claim, alleging discrimination on the basis of religion. In 1986, the Supreme Court rejected his claim. It stated that the Air Force had drawn a reasonable line between "religious apparel that is visible and that which is not." Simcha Goldman lost his case.

These five cases represent only a fraction of those in which courts have refused to protect plaintiffs from covering demands. In such cases, the courts routinely distinguish between immutable and mutable traits, between being a member of a legally protected group and behavior associated with that group. Under this rule, African-Americans cannot be fired for their skin color, but they could be fired for wearing cornrows. Potential jurors cannot be struck for their ethnicity but can be struck for speaking (or even for admitting proficiency in) a foreign language. Women cannot be discharged for having two X chromosomes but can be penalized (in some jurisdictions) for becoming mothers. Although the weaker protections for sexual orientation mean gays can sometimes be fired for their status alone, they will be much more vulnerable if they are perceived to "flaunt" their sexuality. Jews cannot be separated from the military for being Jewish but can be discharged for wearing yarmulkes.

This distinction between being and doing reflects a bias toward assimilation. Courts will protect traits like skin color or chromosomes because such traits cannot be changed. In contrast, the courts will not protect mutable traits, because individuals can alter them to fade into the mainstream, thereby escaping discrimination. If individuals choose not to engage in that form of self-help, they must suffer the consequences.

The judicial bias toward assimilation will seem correct and just to many Americans. Assimilation, after all, is a precondition of civilization - wearing clothes, having manners and obeying the law are all acts of assimilation. Moreover, the tie between assimilation and American civilization may be particularly strong. At least since Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's 1782 "Letters from an American Farmer," this country has promoted assimilation as the way Americans of different backgrounds would be "melted into a new race of men." By the time Israel Zangwill's play "The Melting Pot" made its debut in 1908, the term had acquired the burnish of an American ideal. Theodore Roosevelt, who believed hyphenations like "Polish-American" were a "moral treason," is reputed to have yelled, "That's a great play!" from his box when it was performed in Washington. (He was wrong - it's no accident the title has had a longer run than the play.) And notwithstanding challenges beginning in the 1960's to move "beyond the melting pot" and to "celebrate diversity," assimilation has never lost its grip on the American imagination.

If anything, recent years have seen a revival of the melting-pot ideal. We are currently experiencing a pluralism explosion in the United States. Patterns of immigration since the late 1960's have made the United States the most religiously various country in the history of the world. Even when the demographics of a group - like the number of individuals with disabilities - are presumably constant, the number of individuals claiming membership in that group may grow exponentially. In 1970, there were 9 disability-related associations listed in the Encyclopedia of Associations; in 1980, there were 16; in 1990, there were 211; and in 2000, there were 799. The boom in identity politics has led many thoughtful commentators to worry that we are losing our common culture as Americans. Fearful that we are breaking apart into balkanized fiefs, even liberal lions like Arthur Schlesinger have called for a recommitment to the ethic of assimilation.

Beyond keeping pace with the culture, the judiciary has institutional reasons for encouraging assimilation. In the yarmulke case, the government argued that ruling in favor of the rabbi's yarmulke would immediately invite suits concerning the Sikh's turban, the yogi's saffron robes and the Rastafarian's dreadlocks. Because the courts must articulate principled grounds for their decisions, they are particularly ill equipped to protect some groups but not others in an increasingly diverse society. Seeking to avoid judgments about the relative worth of groups, the judiciary has decided instead to rely on the relatively uncontroversial principle of protecting immutable traits.

Viewed in this light, the judiciary's failure to protect individuals against covering demands seems eminently reasonable. Unfortunately, it also represents an abdication of its responsibility to protect civil rights.

The Case Against Assimilation

The flaw in the judiciary's analysis is that it casts assimilation as an unadulterated good. Assimilation is implicitly characterized as the way in which groups can evade discrimination by fading into the mainstream - after all, the logic goes, if a bigot cannot discriminate between two individuals, he cannot discriminate against one of them. But sometimes assimilation is not an escape from discrimination, but precisely its effect. When a Jew is forced to convert to Protestantism, for instance, we do not celebrate that as an evasion of anti-Semitism. We should not blind ourselves to the dark underbelly of the American melting pot.

Take the cornrows case. Initially, this case appears to be an easy one for the employer, as hairstyle seems like such a trivial thing. But if hair is so trivial, we might ask why American Airlines made it a condition of Renee Rogers's employment. What's frustrating about the employment discrimination jurisprudence is that courts often don't force employers to answer the critical question of why they are requiring employees to cover. If we look to other sources, the answers can be troubling.

John T. Molloy's perennially popular self-help manual "New Dress for Success" also tells racial minorities to cover. Molloy advises African-Americans to avoid "Afro hairstyles" and to wear "conservative pinstripe suits, preferably with vests, accompanied by all the establishment symbols, including the Ivy League tie." He urges Latinos to "avoid pencil-line mustaches," "any hair tonic that tends to give a greasy or shiny look to the hair," "any articles of clothing that have Hispanic associations" and "anything that is very sharp or precise."

Molloy is equally frank about why covering is required. The "model of success," he says, is "white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant." Those who do not possess these traits "will elicit a negative response to some degree, regardless of whether that response is conscious or subconscious." Indeed, Molloy says racial minorities must go "somewhat overboard" to compensate for immutable differences from the white mainstream. After conducting research on African-American corporate grooming, Molloy reports that "blacks had not only to dress more conservatively but also more expensively than their white counterparts if they wanted to have an equal impact."

Molloy's basic point is supported by social-science research. The economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan recently conducted a study in which they sent out résumés that were essentially identical except for the names at the top. They discovered that résumés with white-sounding names like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker drew 50 percent more callbacks than those with African-American-sounding names like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. So it seems that even when Americans have collectively set our faces against racism, we still react negatively to cultural traits - like hairstyles, clothes or names - that we associate with historically disfavored races.

We can see a similar dynamic in the termination of Robin Shahar. Michael Bowers, the state attorney general, disavowed engaging in first-generation discrimination when he said he had no problem with gay employees. This raises the question of why he fired Shahar for having a religious same-sex commitment ceremony. Unlike American Airlines, Bowers provided some answers. He argued that retaining Shahar would compromise the department's ability to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses and to enforce sodomy statutes.

Neither argument survives scrutiny. At no point did Shahar seek to marry her partner legally, nor did she agitate for the legalization of same-sex marriage. The Georgia citizenry could not fairly have assumed that Shahar's religious ceremony would entitle the couple to a civil license. Bowers's claim that Shahar's wedding would compromise her ability to enforce sodomy statutes is also off the mark. Georgia's sodomy statute (which has since been struck down) punished cross-sex as well as same-sex sodomy, meaning that any heterosexual in the department who had ever had oral sex was as compromised as Shahar.

Stripped of these rationales, Bowers's termination of Shahar looks more sinister. When she told a supervisor she was getting married, he congratulated her. When he discovered she was marrying a woman, it wasn't long before she no longer had a job. Shahar's religious ceremony was not in itself indiscreet; cross-sex couples engage in such ceremonies all the time. If Shahar was flaunting anything, it was her belief in her own equality: her belief that she, and not the state, should determine what personal bonds are worthy of celebration.

The demand to cover is anything but trivial. It is the symbolic heartland of inequality - what reassures one group of its superiority to another. When dominant groups ask subordinated groups to cover, they are asking them to be small in the world, to forgo prerogatives that the dominant group has and therefore to forgo equality. If courts make critical goods like employment dependent on covering, they are legitimizing second-class citizenship for the subordinated group. In doing so, they are failing to vindicate the promise of civil rights.

So the covering demand presents a conundrum. The courts are right to be leery of intervening in too brusque a manner here, as they cannot risk playing favorites among groups. Yet they also cannot ignore the fact that the covering demand is where many forms of inequality continue to have life. We need a paradigm that gives both these concerns their due, adapting the aspirations of the civil rights movement to an increasingly pluralistic society.

The New Civil Rights

The new civil rights begins with the observation that everyone covers. When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the "angry straight white man" reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn't racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control - wearing cornrows, acting "feminine" or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally protected groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree. Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional civil rights groups - racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities and people with disabilities. This assumes those in the so-called mainstream - those straight white men - do not also cover. They are understood only as obstacles, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are themselves struggling for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to civil rights advocates with hostility. They experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have been refused - an expression of their full humanity.

Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register. That ascent makes use of the recognition that the mainstream is a myth. With respect to any particular identity, the word "mainstream" makes sense, as in the statement that straights are more mainstream than gays. Used generically, however, the word loses meaning. Because human beings hold many identities, the mainstream is a shifting coalition, and none of us are entirely within it. It is not normal to be completely normal.

This does not mean discrimination against racial minorities is the same as discrimination against poets. American civil rights law has correctly directed its concern toward certain groups and not others. But the aspiration of civil rights - the aspiration that we be free to develop our human capacities without the impediment of witless conformity - is an aspiration that extends beyond traditional civil rights groups.

To fulfill that aspiration, we must think differently both within the law and outside it. With respect to legal remedies, we must shift away from claims that demand equality for particular groups toward claims that demand liberty for us all. This is not an exhortation that we strip protections from currently recognized groups. Rather, it is a prediction that future courts will be unable to sustain a group-based vision of civil rights when faced with the broad and irreversible trend toward demographic pluralism. In an increasingly diverse society, the courts must look to what draws us together as citizens rather than to what drives us apart.

As if in recognition of that fact, the Supreme Court has moved in recent years away from extending protections on the basis of group membership and toward doing so on the basis of liberties we all possess. In 2003, the court struck down a Texas statute that prohibited same-sex sodomy. It did not, however, frame the case as one concerning the equality rights of gays. Instead, it cast the case as one concerning the interest we all - straight, gay or otherwise - have in controlling our intimate lives. Similarly, in 2004, the court held that a state could be required by a Congressional statute to make its courthouses wheelchair accessible. Again, the court ruled in favor of the minority group without framing its analysis in group-based equality rhetoric. Rather, it held that all people - disabled or otherwise - have a "right of access to the courts," which had been denied in that instance.

In these cases, the court implicitly acknowledged the national exhaustion with group-based identity politics and quieted the anxiety about pluralism that is driving us back toward the assimilative ideal. By emphasizing the interest all individuals have in our own liberty, the court focused on what unites us rather than on what divides us. While preserving the distinction between being and doing, the court decided to protect doing in its own right.

If the Supreme Court protects individuals against covering demands in the future, I believe it will do so by invoking the universal rights of people. I predict that if the court ever recognizes the right to speak a native language, it will protect that right as a liberty to which we are all entitled, rather than as a remedial concession granted to a particular national-origin group. If the court recognizes rights to grooming, like the right to wear cornrows, I believe it will do so under something akin to the German Constitution's right to personality rather than as a right attached to racial minorities. And I hope that if the court protects the right of gays to marry, it will do so by framing it as the right we all have to marry the person we love, rather than defending "gay marriage" as if it were a separate institution.

A liberty-based approach to civil rights, of course, brings its own complications, beginning with the question of where my liberty ends and yours begins. But the ability of liberty analysis to illuminate our common humanity should not be underestimated. This virtue persuaded both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to argue for the transition from civil rights to human rights at the ends of their lives. It is time for American law to follow suit.

While I have great hopes for this new legal paradigm, I also believe law will play a relatively small part in the new civil rights. A doctor friend told me that in his first year of medical school, his dean described how doctors were powerless to cure the vast majority of human ills. People would get better, or they would not, but it would not be doctors who would cure them. Part of becoming a doctor, the dean said, was to surrender a layperson's awe for medical authority. I wished then that someone would give an analogous lecture to law students and to Americans at large. My education in law has been in no small part an education in its limitations.

As an initial matter, many covering demands are made by actors the law does not - and in my view should not - hold accountable, like friends, family, neighbors, the "culture" or individuals themselves. When I think of the covering demands I have experienced, I can trace many of them only to my own censorious consciousness. And while I am often tempted to sue myself, I recognize this is not my healthiest impulse.

Law is also an incomplete solution to coerced assimilation because it has yet to recognize the myriad groups that are subjected to covering demands even though these groups cannot be defined by traditional classifications like race, sex, orientation, religion and disability. Whenever I speak about covering, I receive new instances of identities that can be covered. The law may someday move to protect some of these identities. But it will never protect them all.

For these and other reasons, I am troubled that Americans seem increasingly inclined to turn toward the law to do the work of civil rights precisely when they should be turning away from it. The primary solution lies in all of us as citizens, not in the tiny subset of us who are lawyers. People confronted with demands to cover should feel emboldened to seek a reason for that demand, even if the law does not reach the actors making the demand or recognize the group burdened by it. These reason-forcing conversations should happen outside courtrooms - in public squares and prayer circles, in workplaces and on playgrounds. They should occur informally and intimately, in the everyday places where tolerance is made and unmade.

What will constitute a good-enough reason to justify assimilation will obviously be controversial. We have come to some consensus that certain reasons are illegitimate - like racism, sexism or religious intolerance. Beyond that, we should expect conversations rather than foreordained results - what reasons count, and for what purposes, will be for us all to decide by facing one another as citizens. My personal inclination is always to privilege the claims of the individual against countervailing interests like "neatness" or "workplace harmony." But we should have that conversation.

Such conversations are the best - and perhaps the only - way to give both assimilation and authenticity their due. They will help us alleviate conservative alarmists' fears of a balkanized America and radical multiculturalists' fears of a monocultural America. The aspiration of civil rights has always been to permit people to pursue their human flourishing without limitations based on bias. Focusing on law prevents us from seeing the revolutionary breadth of that aspiration. It is only when we leave the law that civil rights suddenly stops being about particular agents of oppression and particular victimized groups and starts to become a project of human flourishing in which we all have a stake.

I don't teach classes on gay rights any more. I suspect many of my students now experience me as a homosexual professional rather than as a professional homosexual, if they think of me in such terms at all. But I don't experience myself as covering. I've just moved on to other interests, in the way scholars do. So the same behavior - not teaching gay rights - has changed in meaning over time.

This just brings home to me that the only right I have wanted with any consistency is the freedom to be who I am. I'll be the first to admit that I owe much of that freedom to group-based equality movements, like the gay rights movement. But it is now time for us as a nation to shift the emphasis away from equality and toward liberty in our debates about identity politics. Only through such freedom can we live our lives as works in progress, which is to say, as the complex, changeful and contradictory creatures that we are.

Kenji Yoshino is a professor at Yale Law School. This article is adapted from his book,"Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights," which will be published by Random House later this month.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Paris Is Burning.

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 01:13:55 GMT

So....after years of hearing about this film...since i was 12! I finally saw this documentary by way of Logo. It was amazing and actually filled in some voids i had with "gay history". I would watch In Living Colors "men On Film" sketches and not "get" the "learn it and Learn it well"..."Chantey. Chantey" refrences.... Or had no idea what "reading" was...... hahaha.... or where Madonna stole the Vogue ...Mystery solved!

But at it's core it had alot to say about White privilage and it's influence on poor gay minorities. It opened up alot of doors in that sense..... and some scenes were wonderfully textured.

I thought i'd ask what others thought of this film.

I saw a LOGO news report on Sundance and that those profiled in the film were not happy with their representation by the director and felt used.

There was one very heartbreaking scene where one guy talked about his wish for fame and his want to take the "vogue" across the globe.

hrmmm. A weathier more prominent white woman did that for you, babe. and when i think of the vogue I do not think poor ethnic queer new yorkers ...I think wealthy dancers.... i think Madonna. What a cunt.

She did the same shit with the Krump?? Im now informed.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 8 replies

The Meritocracy Myth

riotgrrl — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 21:59:56 GMT

I found this on portside this morning, its a little long, but I was wondering what you peeps thought about it:

The Meritocracy Myth
A Dollars and Sense interview with Lani Guinier

Dollars and Sense
Issue # 263, January/February 2006
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2006/0106guinier.html

Lani Guinier became a household name in 1993 when Bill Clinton appointed her to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and then, under pressure from conservatives, withdrew her nomination without a confirmation hearing. Guinier is currently the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard University where, in 1998, she became the first black woman to be tenured at the law school.

Guinier has authored and co-authored numerous books including, most recently, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, transforming Democracy (2002, with Gerald Torres); and Who's Qualified?: A New Democracy Forum on Creating Equal Opportunity in School and Jobs (2001).

Guinier's latest book, Meritocracy Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and College Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich, will bepublished in 2007. This past summer, she offered a glimpse of her upcoming book in this interview with D&S
intern Rebecca Parrish.

Rebecca Parrish: What is meritocracy? What is the difference between the conventional understanding and the way you are using the term in Meritocracy, Inc.?

Lani Guinier: The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward
mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more
democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised.

RP: How did you become interested in studying meritocracy in the first place?

LG: I became interested in the 1990s as a result of looking at the performance of women in law school. A student and I became interested in the disparity between the grades that men and women at an Ivy League law school were receiving. Working with Michelle Fein and Jean Belan, we found that male and female students were coming in with basically the same credentials. The minor difference was that the women tended to have entered with slightly higher undergraduate grades and the men with higher LSATs.

The assumption at that time was that incoming credentials predicted how you would perform. Relying on things like the LSAT allowed law school officials to say they were determining admission based on merit. So several colleagues told me to look at the LSAT scores
because they were confident that I might find something to explain the significant differences in performance. But we found that, surprisingly, the LSAT was actually a very poor predictor of performance for both men and women, that this "objective" marker which determined who could even gain access was actually not accomplishing its ostensible mandate.

I then became interested in studying meritocracy because of the attacks poor and working class whites were waging against Affirmative Action. People were arguing that they were rejected from positions because less qualified people of color were taking their spots. I began to question what determines who is qualified. Then, the more research I did, the more I discovered that these so-called markers of merit did not actually correlate with future performance in college but rather correlated more with an applicant's parents' and even
grandparents' wealth. Schools were substituting markers of wealth for merit.

RP: As a theorist of democracy, how do you approach issues of educational equity and achievement differently from other scholars? Are current educational institutions democratic?

LG: My approach builds on and borrows from work of many other scholars. It perhaps expands on it or shifts emphasis. For example, many people defend Affirmative Action on grounds that there are multiple measures of merit and that bringing diverse students to the school would benefit the learning environment. The problem with this argument is that it pits diversity as a counterpoint to merit. And, the argument is not strong enough to counter the belief in "merit" as an egalitarian and democratic way to allocate scarce resources. I am arguing that there are fundamental flaws in the over-reliance on these supposedly objective indicators of merit. This approach positions
poor people and people of color as the problem rather than problematizing the ways we measure merit in the first place.

RP: Can you talk about the Harvard and Michigan studies?

LG: Harvard University did a study based on thirty Harvard graduates over a thirty-year period. They wanted to know which students were most likely to exemplify the things that Harvard values most: doing well financially, having a satisfying career and contributing to society (especially in the form of donating to Harvard). The two variables that most predicted which students would achieve these criteria
were low SAT scores and a blue-collar background.

That study was followed by one at the University of Michigan Law School that found that those most likely to do well financially, maintain a satisfying career, and contribute to society, were black and Latino students who were admitted pursuant to Affirmative Action. Conversely, those with the highest LSAT scores were the least likely to mentor younger attorneys, do pro-bono work, sit on community boards, etc.

So, the use of these so called "measures of merit" like standardized tests is backfiring on our institutions of higher learning and blocking the road to a more democratic society.

RP: You refer to college education as a gift from poor to rich.

LG: Anthony Carnevaly made that statement when he was the vice president of the Educational Testing Service. He did a study of 146 of the most selective colleges and universities and found that 74% of students came from the top 25% of the socio-economic spectrum. Only 3% came from the lowest quartile and 10% (which is 3% plus 7%) came from the bottom half. So that means that 50% of people in the country are providing substantial state and federal taxes to both public and private institutions even though they are among those least well off and are being excluded from the opportunity.

RP: In Meritocracy Inc., you'll be exploring the relationship between class and race in structuring US society. What insights can you offer into their relationship? How can we think about class and race in our efforts to democratize higher education?

LG: The argument I'm making is that in many ways race is being used as a stand in for class. I am not saying that race and class are coterminous but that people look at race and see race because it is highly visible but they don't see class.

RP: Can you give some examples?

LG: In Arkansas in 1957 whites rioted as Central High School in Little Rock was desegregated by nine carefully-chosen middle-class black students. The rage and hate on people's faces was broadcast on national television and President Eisenhower had to send in the
National Guard to ensure that blacks could get an education. What most people don't know is that at same time as the leaders of city of Little Rock planned the desegregation of Central High, they built and opened a new high school located in area where the sons and
daughters of the doctors and lawyers lived.

Blacks were coming in at the same time that upper class whites were exiting and this was part of what provoked the intense backlash; there was the sense among the working class whites who remained that their chances for upward mobility were lost because they could no longer fraternize with the middle and upper class. Previously, there were only two high schools in Little Rock, one white and one black. So Central High was segregated by race and integrated by class. Now Central was integrated by race and segregated by class.

Beth Roy did interviews with white graduates of Central High thirty years later [for her book Bitters in the Honey] and determined that many of them still blame blacks for the failure of themselves and their children to gain a secure toehold in a middle class lifestyle.
They think that the American Dream owed them individual opportunity through its promise that if you work hard and play by the rules you will succeed. The problem with the American Dream is that it offers no explanation for failure other than that you deserve your lot in life and that if you fail there must be something wrong with you. Many people are perfectly willing to believe that success is individual but don't want to think about failure as individual and no one wants to believe that they deserve to fail. So they find a scapegoat and blacks were an easy scapegoat in this case. Even thirty years later, the white graduates of Central High claimed that blacks stole the American
Dream.

While the integration of Central was hyper-visible, the building of Hall High was kept under wraps--most people still don't know about it. Wealthier whites were able to get away with building Hall High because blacks were used as a scapegoat.

RP: You and Gerald Torres wrote about the Texas Ten Percent Plan in The Miner's Canary. How does that relate to this?

LG: Sheryl Hopwood was a white working-class woman who applied to the University of Texas Law School and was denied admission. In 1996, she sued the university for racial discrimination, arguing that less qualified blacks and Latinos had taken her spot. Thirty-nine
years after Central, she sued in the district court and then in the Fifth Circuit and won, but the problem with the court's analysis was that they did not look behind the school's claim that all slots, except for those bestowed through Affirmative Action, were distributed
based on merit.

It actually turns out that the school's own formula for determining merit disadvantaged Sheryl Hopwood. She went to a community college and the University of Texas Law weighted her LSAT scores with those of other applicants from her school and graduating year. Because her community college drew from a working class population, Hopwood's own LSAT score was negatively weighted. So Hopwood's chance of attending the University of Texas was diminished because of class status not because of her race.

After the ruling in Hopwood's favor, a group of legislators and concerned citizens determined that the University of Texas would not return to its segregationist roots. They started investigating the population of the University of Texas graduate school and found that 75% students admitted according to "merit" were coming from only 10% of high schools in the state. These schools tended to be suburban, white, and middle or upper class. Their logic was that if the University of Texas is supposed to be a flagship school and a place from which the state's leaders would be drawn, then 10% of students from each high school in the state should be automatically eligible for access. So the Texas Ten Percent Plan was passed by the legislature and Governor Bush signed it into law.

It all started with concern about racial diversity but it was discovered that class was also at the core. The law ultimately passed because a conservative republican legislator voted for the law when he learned that not one of his constituents, who were white and poor or
working class, had been admitted in the previous cycle. So, "meritocratic" standards were keeping out poor and working class whites, especially the rural poor. Many people worried that if SAT scores were eliminated as marker, then grades would go down. However, those who've come in based on the Ten Percent plan have had higher freshman year grades.

RP: You've said before that race is being used as a decoy.

LG: Race was being used as a decoy for class, leading Working-class and poor whites to challenge Affirmative Action, and to challenge the integration of Central High School. In fact, meritocratic standards, which favor the wealthy, have kept them out. Too often, poor
and working class whites are willing to throw their lot in with upper class and middle class whites because class is obscured while race is quite visible. People think that if anyone can succeed, if these other whites can succeed, then they can too because merit claims to
be about the individual operating without regard to background conditions.

RP: So what are the background conditions of students of color attending elite universities?

LG: Many students admitted through Affirmative Action are not that different from those admitted through conventional standards of merit because schools are so committed to the annual issue of US News and World Report that ranks educational institutions according to the their students' standardized test scores.

In Ivy League schools, a large percentage of Latinos and blacks are foreign-born and don't identify with communities of color who are born in the United States. I'm not arguing that international students should not have access to US institutions. It is significant, however, that while in the '70s and '80s, blacks and Latinos entering through Affirmative Action were coming in from poor U.S. communities and were passionate about returning to those communities and lifting as they climbed. Currently, schools are more concerned about admitting people who have high SAT scores who will boost their status than recruiting leaders. Education is changing from an opportunity for students to explore and grow to institutions that are consumed with rankings. Education is becoming about providing
credentials to obtain high-paying jobs rather than training people for a thriving democracy.

Rebecca Parrish was a Dollars & Sense intern in the summer of 2005.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Speech patterns

LorenzoRodriguezyRios — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:59:20 GMT

Okay, here is another example of very subtle racism. Speech. I have been told many times over the years that I am very well spoken. Well, thanks, I did go to college and have had quite a professional career. It is something that I have discussed with my POC friends. We laugh at it because the expectation is that we all speak in our individual accents, that come from the barrio. I will tell you that when I am with friends and family that do in fact live in the barrio (where I came from as well) I do incorporate the accent and key words in order not to feel too separate from them too. Kind of becomes a catch-22.

Yo, sup my bruhs? You feelin me?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 7 replies

What do you make of THIS!

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 10:52:07 GMT

Something odd happened on Sunday on the very edge of my visit to meet and hang with a triber in Los Angeles. After 2 days of wonderful food, conversation and entertainment, it was time for us to part ways, and he offered to drive me home. We stopped off not far from his home, in a diverse but i'd say mostly Hispanic community/ Part of the city, to get some Mexican food from a small Mom&Pop resteraunt. It was located right next to a head shop and the building itself stood on a corner, in a particular spot which actually made me feel unsafe. My friend, a "white-queer-male " got interested in the head shop while I ordered my food. Yes. I was nerve wracked...but tried very hard to conceal it. There were a few Young hispanic "thugs" (whether ginuine or not. heh.) behind me. I just could not wait to get my food and go. But I tried so hard to put up a front i think around this point in time. My white friend still in the head shop talking to his family on his cell phone, and looking out at me waiting in line. He comes to join me, next to the pick up window of the resteruant. He is talking, not exactly loudly, but well audible on cell phone when a sort of intimidating Hispanic guy... mid 20's maybe younger, comes between the space between me and my friend, and just stands, Baggy jeans, stern face, very very serious look on his face, looking at my white friend who is at this point oblivious to what i was seeing...... a stare. A questionable Stare.

That stare lasted for what seemed whatever. I got and odd vibe....and suddenly his weird silence broke. He turned around towards ME and said this......

"Is he with you?"

(Now I must interject; I have a shaved head, I stand 5'9...wiegh 175 pounds. I'm wearing a jean jacket over a hoodie with built in "cut-off gloves"...oh and derrr. I'm black.)

I respond "yeah."

When I said yeah I almost instinctly said this in my butchest, most serious-cool Man-man's lowest decible voice. Well the best i could muster up while silently uneasy. I said yeah and nodded.

The hispanic guy then said ... "ok.cool" and did this motion with his hands....both hands like..... a "forget about it" like hand arm motion. He then walked away. And went to talk to the rest of his "crew"... No he did not "appear" to be hitting on my friend. In trying to find an answer to this quite odd questionable experience... I come up with a "no." this was not a hit. There WAS something menacing I felt about him. But in some ways i think.... "maybe i was projecting that?"

it was just ODD.

I was startled. And so was my friend who i had to fully clue in on what just occured behind him while he was on the phone.

I STILL do not know what happened.

But it was funny how he approached me. It almost seemed like my blackness was actually somewhat of a cred. Did i just save my white friend from getting his ass kicked? Or robbed?
hide

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 8 replies

Win the new CD from queer spoken word group, Athens Boys Choir!

mandrakesociety — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:29:41 GMT

This is JW Richard, of Mandrake Society Radio, letting you know about a cool contest to win some hot spoken word!

If you haven't heard the work of Athens Boys Choir, then you need to listen to their interview here: http://mandrakesocietyradio.com/?p=52

After you listen, call the Mandrake Society Radio comment line at 206-600-5066 and leave a message as to where the artist is originally from (the answer is in the show). Be my third or my fifth caller, and you win the latest disc, Rose Cuts the Cake. So, you get two opportunities to win this hot disc. If you love queer, raw, political spoken word, you'll dig this CD!

Go! Listen to the show.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

cleanliness

nilochem — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:03:11 GMT

inspired by the the "how do you bathe" thread. What are your stereotypes around cleanliness? Which groups do you associate cleanliness, or dirtiness with?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies

Museums

kerrickadrian — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 05:23:52 GMT

I'm a graduate student in museum studies, and I'm doing a project on African American GLBT people and museums, trying to make museums and other cultural heritage institutions more responsive to this community. I'd love to talk to some folks informally about your experiences with museums or your perceptions of them, what you think they can do for you, ways museums have exploited your communities in the past that we never want to see again, whatever comes to mind.

This is a student project. I talked with the Executive Director of a major GLBT history center, and he said he was very interested in my results and recommendations, so there's a better than average chance that what I do will actually have an impact that could benefit your community. I will work to make sure this project does give back to your community in some way.

If you'd be willing to talk to me about museums, please email me at kereth at gmail dot com or message me on tribe.

Thanks so much for your time just reading this post.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies

Shopping Anxiety

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 10:01:09 GMT

I need feedback.

I HATE to shop. It's almost dreaded when I need some new threads, and I must go shopping. It's almost as if the store intimidates me. From when i was pre-teen my mother always told me to never go into a store with a bag. She held a fear that I would be put in a place where i would be accused of stealing. I can understand her fear, yet she still fully does not understand what neurosis this created....One i still carry as right about now the emperor would like some new clothes..

Maybe she did not take into account that me fearing that I would be accused of stealing, would obviously make me look guilty where ever i go. I'm very conscious of how, as quentin once put it in another thread.."HOW MY ENVIROMENT READS ME." in other words, I find myself at time wearing the guilty for being black sign in my disposition...and i think i am not alone, in that i do notice other minorities who do much to assert they are not the "Scary hooded Thug".... "The shoplifter"..... I notice that I carry fear of being the stereotype (yes. I have a therapist)....but on a more general level it's funny how i AM buying into stereotypes of myself...so much so I might even be seen as that stereotype by someone wondering, why the hell is that boy making sure his hands are always seen....Why does he make sure he pays in Cash... Or his best VISA.... Or he automatically checks his bag before entering any store. So odd. Lots of factors in this problem indeed.

On another note though, white people seem to find me friendly and comforting...strangers feel safe around me alot... I get the feeling they think i am honest...and I am...but the need to asert that is somewhat troublesome, ya think? I'm the guy who you will ask to watch your drink or a coat at the club, I am the guy who you will ask to escort you off a bus into a "dangerous" black nieghborhood. I am the guy who you'll instantly ask to take your picture with your expenisive digital camera and you'll know who will give it back to you.

and

thats important to me. *shakes head* and that sorta bothers me. But i can't quite contact exactly why.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 16 replies

Racism is not a disability.

nilochem — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:20:26 GMT

Personally, I get offended when people compare being fat or being disabled to being black.
One, for the most part, is a choice. While people may have a bias, there isn't a history of violence against fat people, and few people end up poor because they were born fat.
The other while, unfortunate, most of the problem is not due to systemic impression. Even if society didn't exist, it would still be difficult to be disabled. Imagine trying wheel oneself through jungle, accross the savannah, or through the dessert. Imagine trying to hunt or gather food while bind and deaf?

Yes being fat sucks, and having a disability is difficult, but they are not oppression. To use that word to describe them dilutes its meaning to the point lacking any potentcy whatsoever.

Thoughts?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Don't Mock Me as violent--or I'll kill you!

nilochem — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:35:07 GMT

Cartoons make them burn down embassies, but a man burning his young daughters so that they will be unable to "dishonor" him barely causes a stir.

Even in the U.S. Arab Muslims take offense at the cartoon as blasphemous, but don't seem to be offend that all the Arab owned liqour stores that sell something clearly forbidden by the Q'uaran.

Many Arabs object to Israel taking land from the Arabs, but at the same time seem to forget how many Jews had to leave their homes and lands behind due to the violence of Arab countries frenzy of nationalism.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Manderlay

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 09:38:35 GMT

Hooray! Lars Von Triers Manderlay is about to finally drop stateside!!

I can not wait to run to see this. I think his just might be a great film for discussion here.

http://www.manderlaythefilm.com/

I loved Dogville. This one, the second in his American trilogy will focus on a 1930's Plantation where slavery still exist. Grace, Now played by Bryce Dallas Howard,(previously Nicole Kidman) goes to free these slaves.

I'm already fascinated and Von Trier happens to be my favorite modern day director. He's amazing.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 1 reply

Politics

nilochem — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:32:48 GMT

"if you are a conservative you're an asshole. A liberal? Then you're an idiot."

As a creative person, I am distrustful of extreme right wingers, and extreme lefties. In my opinion both are rigidly dogmatic and proselytizing. Both the communists and the fascists have killed artists for not thinking "the right way". Both are reactionary.

What are non-dogmatic, non-preachy ways to create non-prejudiced environments and communities?

Remember, there is not right answer but try to provide localized answers as opposed to universal pronouncements.

hehehe...

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 8 replies

Frustrations with existing organizations?

-robin — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 22:49:18 GMT

i'm trying to move this into the concrete.

what are your current frustrations with existing LGBTQ orgs when it comes to issues of race, diversity, or multicultural awareness?

please include, if you can, ways you think they would be better off.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 21 replies

"Overdefensiveness"

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:41:50 GMT

I've sort of been asked to post this topic:

How do you define "overdefensiveness" here in RR?

I can start by saying that I take all defensiveness, when it's directed at me or a 'community' I think I belong to, as an opportunity to read closely, to respond and, I guess, to try and clarify in the interests of both or all involved. So, unless there are tons of rehashes of the same subject because of some basic lack of comprehension, I would say there is no "overdefensiveness" for me. I think it all comes from a desire to be heard and understood and I need to try to honour that.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

What orgs are doing it right and why?

-robin — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:17:30 GMT

Are there organizations out there that are really working well within the LGBTQ community?

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 0 replies

Triggers

nilochem — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:52:22 GMT

Every one in this country even when they are actively struggling against it are racist. We are programmed that way, because our culture is. The same applies to classism. How have you internalized racist and classist thinking? What things trigger your racist impulses? This is NOT about what you know you should think, say, or do NOR is it about how you combat this type of thinking. This is SIMPLY NAMING the fucked up attitudes you have and what triggers them.

hehehe...

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 20 replies

Programming

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:53:42 GMT

I've seen this term used in a couple of threads here and I wondered about your reactions to it as the most accurate term to describe how prejudices are transmitted or spread.

Myself, the term seems too inorganic to describe the process of learning prejudices. To me, it implies a definite plan of coded instructions, and I don't think that this is how it works. When parents and teachers transmit prejudice to children, for example, it's an organic, psychological state of mind that's transmitted, not some logical, coherent recipe of how to be bigoted. OK, maybe it's so in extreme cases where someone teaches children regular lessons using, say, "The Protocol of the Elders of Zion", but I don't think this is the main way that prejudice is transmitted. So I think that "programming" is not the best word to describe this process. I'd stick with "learning". Don't you think using the term "learning" also is more encouraging for anti-prejudice activists, in that what is learned can be unlearned more easily that what has been programmed? I don't think we humans are programmed like computers.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies

Lessons for white dudes...

kerrickadrian — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 07:24:15 GMT

...racism and homophobia are not interchangeable.

I've been asked to explain why it's not a good idea to conflate racism and homophobia, or use racism as an analogy for why homophobia is unacceptable, on a message board which is primarily white people who are queer-positive and sort of antiracist (although not always clueful— there are many more clueful people on there than me, though.) I think I get this, but I want some feedback before I go talking out of my ass like I usually do. These are the main points I want to make:

1) Race is imprinted on your skin (as a rule), while sexual orientation is something many people can hide. Meaning, while some people of color can pass for white some of the time, it's usually not something you can hide if you feel like it— either you pass for white or you're a target for discrimination and prejudice, for your entire life. And while some gay people could not pass for straight under any circumstances, many can and do for long periods of time, without losing their queer cred.

2) If you are gay, you probably don't have the additional disadvantage of having come from a family where your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents are all also gay and have experienced homophobia, thereby not having the opportunity to pass many resources on to you.

3) There is no history of institutionalized gay slavery.

4) The current stereotype about gay men is along the lines of "Gay men are good at co-ordinating draperies." The current stereotypes about Black men are along the lines of "Black men are good at committing crimes." I won't make any hard statements about which is more damaging, but they're definitely damaging in different ways.

5) Using racism as an analogy for homophobia sometimes leads to statements like "You can't call me a f-----; if you called a Black man a n----- no one would tolerate it." This rests on the belief that racism is dead, when actually it's perpetuated all the time. There are plenty of spaces where racist language is tolerated— even many queer spaces.

6) Some white queers colonize the civil rights movement by saying things like "X is the gay Rosa Parks (or Malcolm X)." This betrays a lack of understanding of the history of the civil rights struggle. These people want all the benefits of being associated with the civil rights effort without the burdens or the work.

7) Some white queers also make assertions like "Asian culture is inherently homophobic" and thus perpetuate racial prejudice in queer communities.

8) White queers who want to do coalition building with people of color on the basis of the understanding that racial prejudice and homophobia are both bad things— that's great. But in order to do that we need to have a really clear understanding of the current state of racism and the struggle for racial equality, and this isn't served by confusing the issue with misguided metaphors.

I'd appreciate it if anyone with the patience could point out to me what I've messed up and what I forgot, or recommend links and books which will help me get this clearer in my head. Also, if it's entirely inappropriate for me to be talking like this in a primarily white space, I'd appreciate you telling me that too. I apologize for still being in a stage where I sometimes need things spelled out for me.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 30 replies

Queer Sex Talk Tribe

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 13:32:19 GMT

Everything you wanted to know about gay and lesbian sex but were afraid to ask.

Got a health question like.... Is anal Douching Safe? What's my risk if I'm am a top and I'm bare backing a Positive man? I've got hemorrhoids, should I continue to let my partner eats me out? Boyfriend or girlfriend trying to get you to something freaky you've not heard of?

No judgement. No editing. Just Straight talk. This is a Tribe for people to asks their peers questions they might be to timid to ask those immediately around them. However odd. However embarrassing. However perverted. Just ask. It's better if you do.

We can only hope we all can help.

We've got your back!

http://tribes.tribe.net/queersexqanda

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 3 replies

Question about how and whether to invite

-robin — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 08:19:38 GMT

I do alot of promoting things in the kink community and the queer scene. Alot online. I always wonder about joining a group for people who are interested in something if it is exclusively a POC group like the tribe BDSM & POC. At the same time I feel like I'm not inviting those people to the thing and maybe they wanted to go. Because I'm white I want to feel like I respect POC space by leaving people alone to discuss their things.

I feel conflicted and then get anxious and just avoid it. I would like some insight.

posted in RAINBOW RACISM - 2 replies