Sister, lover, French major, radical birth doula/labor assistant, feminist, pagan, anti-oppression, queer, polyamorous, French Canadian, Hufflepuff, in love with pizza and my cat.
I like to talk about most things, so don't be shy!
On last Tuesday MANA informed us that the third in the “I Am a Midwife” video series will be launched this Saturday. The topic of this video is health disparities. We were requested to write a blog of between 500 - 1,000 words on the mothering .com blog on the issue of health disparities, with internet links on research and resources and great photos, and to post the blog by Monday. We were not involved in the scripting or development of the video (though it features several midwives of color) nor have we viewed the video. Is this a topic MANA is not familiar with? While the video was being developed, could MANA or its staff have done its research on the topic? No, once again, last minute calls to the MOC to provide substance and validation of this project, without any input in the development or planning. Once again, an act of arrogant entitlement, with the MOC participation as an afterthought.
Meanwhile, the MANA leadership and the leadership of the other Allied Midwifery Organizations (excluding ICTC who was not invited) are in Washington attending a Childbirth Connection event on maternal and infant health. Did MANA or any of the other professed ICTC allies seek an invitation for ICTC?
In the last few weeks the issue of student and midwives of color scholarships to the 2012 Conference has again arisen. In March Darynee submitted a proposal that MANA open its doors to all students and MOCs who want to attend. In the last week the discussion of MOC raising its own funds to provide for MOC scholarships was again raised. Here we go again – is participation by students and midwives of color important to MANA, yes or no? If so, support your commitment with a sizable financial contribution that could make an impact!
Having suffered through the CPM Symposium, we Sisters have spent too many days trying to help MANA, its leadership and the leadership of the other AMOs “get it”. And they still do not.
We have committed ourselves to our local and global communities we serve first and foremost, doing the best we can with dignity and character knowing that our communities and our children are watching.
We can no longer continue to participate in MANA’s disrespect of us as a group, a race, as the Women our community respects. We cannot keep our heads held high and take this shit. Our view of ourselves will suffer and eventually the young ones will look at us with less than admiration. We are not “The Help - 2012 Version”. This treatment is not good for us, mentally, physically, emotionally and psychologically – this is the stress that’s kills us in so many ways, drains our energy and distracts our focus.
These issues and these organizations distract us from our true mission; we have become myopic, focusing on these groups and not exploring global approaches to maternal and infant health care, increasing the number of MOCs, and better serving our communities.
“It is the height of privilege to think that everyone must listen to what you say. Not so. I don’t have to listen to racists. I don’t. I don’t have to listen to homo-haters. I don’t have to listen to trans-haters. I don’t have to listen to their hateful speech, their bigoted comments, or their dumb as fuck opinions (about anything). Y’all can say whatever you want. But I don’t have to fucking listen. At all. Or ever. And I’ll be damned if anyone can compel me to do otherwise.
If you knew what real silencing was, you’d have a real different opinion about free speech. If you knew that people listen to your hateful words far more than they listen to anything I say, you’d get the hell out of my face about your right to free speech.
After being called out by many, many people about this May Day banner, all I’ve heard from fellow white activists are excuses and confusion as to why people are upset (among a very small number of apologies). If folks are confused about why the banner wasn’t acceptable, the answers are right in front of us. It doesn’t matter that the folks in the picture (who are friends of mine) are good people, or that the intention behind the banner was to highlight the intersections among queer undocumented folks. The fact is that the moment the picture was taken, it was being held by white folks, and it doesn’t actually say anything about undocumented people.
Basically what I’m saying is this: if you don’t understand the problem with the banner, just read the words of the people of color who are speaking against it. That’s all. We don’t need to take their anger and turn it into a “theoretical” debate about who can say what when and act like we know anything about their oppressions, because we don’t. We cannot compare white queerness to being undocumented. I understand that it wasn’t the intention when the banner was being made - I was there, I got it, but not everyone was and the photo is pretty dang incriminating. Intention is irrelevant when there are folks who are directly affected by these issues telling us it is NOT OKAY. So that’s it. The end. We screwed up, so we apologize and we don’t do it again and we move on.
This Is Also All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day: Daniel Chong, an innocent UC San Diego student, spent five days in a holding cell without food, water, or human contact after he was wrongfully detained during a raid of a friend’s house by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The 23-year-old wasn’t charged with a crime, but officers forgot to release him. He kicked, screamed, and cried, but no one came to his aid: “They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened. I’m not sure how they could forget me.”
Chong was forced to drink his own urine for hydration and he carved the words “Sorry Mom” into his arm with glass in a fit of psychosis. “I had to do what I had to do to survive,” he said. “I was completely insane.”
On Chong’s fifth day in the small, windowless room, officers finally heard his pleas for help. Upon his release, he was incoherent and had to be hospitalized. He was found to have eaten glass and treated for a perforated lung.
Chong is considering filing a lawsuit against the DEA, which has apologized to him and promised a review of the incident.
Please send a letter to CeCe while she is in jail. Let her know she has a huge amount of community support and that we are all here for her.
Public Safety Facility Chrishaun Reed McDonald #2011014667 401 South 4th Avenue Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55415
Inmates are not allowed to receive packages, including photographs. Packages will not be accepted and will be returned to the sender. Photographs will be removed from the envelope and returned to the inmate at the time of release. Please note that all letters sent to the jail are opened, read, and inspected by jail staff. Use good sense about what you say in your letter, and don’t write about anything that is likely to get you or anyone else in trouble with the cops.
You can also organize a letter writing party! If you live in the area, you don’t even have to worry about paying for postage-bring your letters to the drop box for at The Exchange (3405 Chicago Ave S, Mpls) and we will mail them for you.
“How many Americans do you figure have even heard, for example, that black youth arrested for drug possession for the first time are incarcerated at a rate that is forty-eight times greater than the rate for white youth, even when all other factors surrounding the crime are identical (4)? How many have heard that persons with “white sounding names,” according to a massive national study, are fifty percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than those with “black sounding” names, even when all other credentials are the same (5)? How many know that white men with a criminal record are slightly more likely to be called back for a job interview than black men without one, even when the men are equally qualified, and present themselves to potential employers in an identical fashion (6)? How many have heard that according to the Justice Department, Black and Latino males are three times more likely than white males to have their vehicles stopped and searched by police, even though white males are over four times more likely to have illegal contraband in our cars on the occasions when we are searched (7)? How many are aware that black and Latino students are about half as likely as whites to be placed in advanced or honors classes in school, and twice as likely to be placed in remedial classes? Or that even when test scores and prior performance would justify higher placement, students of color are far less likely to be placed in honors classes (8)? Or that students of color are 2-3 times more likely than whites to be suspended or expelled from school, even though rates of serious school rule infractions do not differ to any significant degree between racial groups (9)?”
on this 4/20, if you choose to partake in the ‘festivities,’ please do remember:
where the bulk of your marijuana comes from (rural low-income communities marginalized by systematic institutional and socio-cultural violence)
the labor that has gone into your recreation (members of said communities who continuously risk their futures and their lives to survive off earnings derived from primarily upper-middle class urban marijuana consumers as a stop-gap measure in the face of rampant unemployment and high poverty)
the privilege you have as a consumer rather than grower or dealer (especially considering that if you are consuming illegally the possible legal ramifications you face are much smaller than producers’ or distributors’)
add to the second bulletin: drug trafficking has resulted in insurmountable violence overseas especially. i mean, there is war going on right now in mexico.
i had stopped partaking for quite some time for the above reasons. the glorification of weed culture rekindles the nausea / existential disgust that i turn to pot to remedy.
i haven’t been smoking in the off chance i wind up being drug tested if i manage to secure a job interview somewhere, but reasons like this make me want to keep abstaining unless i know the grower. at the same time smoking is one of the only treatments that works for my anxiety and panic disorder, and helps a ton with my blackouts too in regulating my blood pressure. plus after studying it in a lab for 2.5 years i know how beneficial it can be for other sick or differently-abled persons.
ugh. why can’t anything in this country ever not exploit marginalized peoples? ugh ugh ugh
Such a good conversation. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and trying to figure out how to talk about the fact that smoking in the evenings helps me eat and not care/go to sleep without panicking (I get most anxious at night) without justifying the fact that smoking for my own health (and enjoyment, let’s not lie) puts someone else’s health and well-being at risk. Hm. At the same timeee there are people in my family who grow/personally know growers, so I should probably start turning to them rather than trying to find someone in Richmond that I don’t even know.
“At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people who use drugs need help… . I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said they would arrest them. It didn’t say that in the video. The police officer held me by the shoulder and made me watch them put handcuffs on my mom and dad and put them in the police car. I always thought police were honest and told the truth. But in court, I heard them tell the judge that I wanted my mom and dad arrested. That is a lie. I did not tell them that.”
Ugh, this did this shit in my kindergarten class. They sat us all down on the floor and then talked to us each individually and asked if we wanted to tell them anything. Luckily my stoner parents had the foresight to tell me not to say anything, but you should not have to make your five year old lie to people.
I had been haunted by a question to the past, a mystery of feminist history: How did the radical suffragists come to their vision, a vision not of Band-Aid reform but of a reconstituted world completely transformed?
For 20 years I had immersed myself in the writings of early United States women’s rights activists — Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) — yet I could not fathom how they dared to dream their revolutionary dream. Living under the ideological hegemony of nineteenth-century United States, they had no say in government, religion, economics, or social life (“the four-fold oppression” of their lives, Gage and Stanton called it.) Whatever made them think that human harmony — based on the perfect equality of all people, with women absolute sovereigns of their lives — was an achievable goal?
Surely these white women, living under conditions of virtual slavery, did not get their vision in a vacuum. Somehow they were able to see from point A, where they stood — corseted, ornamental, legally nonpersons — to point C, the “regenerated” world Gage predicted, in which all repressive institutions would be destroyed. What was point B in their lives, the earthly alternative that drove their feminist spirit — not a utopian pipe dream but a sensible, do-able paradigm?
Then I realized I had been skimming over the source of their inspiration without noticing it. My own unconscious white supremacy had kept me from recognizing what these prototypical feminists kept insisting in their writings: They caught a glimpse of the possibility of freedom because they knew women who lived liberated lives, women who had always possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination — Iroquois women.
The more evidence I uncovered of this indelible Native American influence on the vision of early United States feminists, the more certain I became that this story must be told.
