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Kill Me or Leave Me Alone: Street Harassment as a Public Health Issue

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This one is for Afrolicious and the notion of Appophenia.

Last Saturday on the way home on the metro platform I was tired.

I had been dancing. Bier was consumed. I spent the afternoon reading, and the evening posted up with my friend All Spirit and then the night dancing.

All Spirit bounced early, and he was my ride so I darted home on the metro. Looking back I should have asked another homie for a ride home.

I am walking on the metro platform and these two young Black men, are eyeing, me, saying something and if you know me you know I always trust my intuition. Full stop.

My intuition told me that I wasn’t safe and that I needed to act.

So rather than go back and for with these cats because it is late,  and I still needed to get home, and the platform was relatively empty,  I say to him “Aye blood, I’m from East Oakland California, either kill me or leave me alone.”

Even as I type it, I still can’t believe that it came out my mouth.

One of the dudes was like she from Oakland. She from Oakland and kinda let me be.

The other one took it personal as a threat. He left me alone, but there were was definitely a threat of violence in his body language and his words.

Whatever my fate was that night, I was ready.

I am so sick and tired of being treated like shit because of what is between my legs.

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I mean, I understand full and well that things could have escalated. However over the last 3 months I have had these public interactions with Black men challenging, with the explicit threat of violence, my right to be in public.

So I called my brother to help me get some context. He told me that you never know what you are going to need to do to stay alive in a situation. Sometimes it is being silent, sometimes it is setting someone straight from the gate. After he said this, and related a similar experience that he had around standing up for himself when someone threatened him, I felt better. Still uneasy but better.

This street harassment+gendered violence experience also has me thinking about Charlie Sheen.

One of the reasons why I take all of these Charlie Sheen tweets so serious is because he beat his ex wife, and because he is imploding right in front of us.

The whole time I have been trying to think about how to write this post I have been watching the discourse around Charlie Sheen.

Men, Black men and White men can joke and shit about how Charlie and what not is funny, but as a Black woman, trying to get from point A to point B, who demands to be treated like a human being, violence or the threat of violence is a real part of my day to day existence.

Nothing Charlie says is funny because that man speaking to me that way on the train platform was not funny.

It really is out of pocket that I have to damn near be ready to die just to assert my humanity after dancing to Prince all night long.

Pow.

Street harassment as a public health issue?

Can you believe I said it?

Is it time for me to leave the city?

How Oakland Brought Me #Aquemini

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On Saturday, I met #Aquemini.

I was posted up, waiting for someone, doing me. He then spoke, and asked if I was a professor. I had just come from writing the midterm and reading so I had a bag of books next to my chair. I responded no, I am a teacher. I asked him if he taught, he said, yes, once. He was a substitute teacher in East Oakland and he was just getting ready to talk shit about the Town and I said, “Baby, I’m from there.”

He responded, “Oh, really.” Yeah, Oakland.

I gave him another look, my undivided attention and said, “When is your birthday.” He stated, “June 11th.” I was like shit.

You are #Aquemini. It sounds really creepy as I write it, but I have been really deliberate about having a Gemini or Aquarius in my life.

I have been so specific about #Aqeumini that A dub walked over and said hello, and I introduced her to him and said girl, he is #aquemini, and she raised her eyebrows like word. Word.

I ask people their birthday’s before their names. Why? I am being purposeful.

So we conversate. Marinate. All that.

He apparently saw me before. And spoke last summer. I asked if I was nice. Sometimes I shut it down. He said yeah, “You were nice, but it was clear that I were reading your book and didn’t want to be bothered.” That DO be the case sometimes and I am entitled to that. Time and place for everything, no?

He is currently and anti war lobbyist, adorable and White honey. Like Kevin Costner eye crinkles and everything. As I contemplate the politics of puttering around on that interracial in DC. Man listen.

Black girls pay a social cost when they date someone other then Black men. Because I walk like I have a right to be in the city, the threat of violence is always there. Our current sex/gender system says that women are not entitled to be in public, let alone claim the right to occupy city space publicly. Domination is maintained through violence and the threat of violence.

Ah, but the synchronicity of the night.
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So, first there is the Oakland connection. Then some how he brings up Ta-Nehisi’s blog. And I say #ummp.

He says, the man has awesome prose. And I respond saying, well he does, however I had a really public conversation with Ta-Nehisi last fall when he asked whether or not For Colored Girls was a classic at a White publication in front of a largely White audience, even though he hadn’t read the book since he was a teenager. #Ummp.

I went on to say that Ta-Nehisi didn’t respond well to being challenged intellectually around his gender politics, and I am referring to his willingness to read a Black feminist text to broaden his analysis, and that I found this unwillingness to be problematic.

He was like, what “That was you” and kinda put his hand over his mouth like “Oh Shit.”  I answered yes. Now see, this is surreal because I am not use to my work preceding me.

Further it speaks to importance of remembering that your words go places that YOU don’t go.

Lastly he has done work in South Africa around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. You and I both know I Love me some TRC’s. So. Um. Yeah.

I can’t call it.

Oh. And I don’t think we exchanged info. #Extra. So Yeah. #Aquemini. Holler @cha girl. You know where to find me @2:26 sec.

#BoomandPow

#VulnerableyFearless

Can you believe that East Oakland ‘ish?

Peace to the Gemini’s.

What Women Have to Do With It: A Response to Chrystia Freeland’s Rise of the New Global Elite.

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Chrystia Freeland at The Atlantic has written an interesting article “Rise of the New Global Elite” analyzing the new transnational elite.

Her main points are that in the US we are “plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble” that the members who comprise this elite group are are becoming a “transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.”

She argues that the reason why wealth accumulation in 2011 is different from other periods in history is that “The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade.” While this is true another material factor influencing global accumulation of capital has been the low to nearly no wages of women factory workers gobaly in China, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Bangledesh, Haiti, Jamaica and the Phillpines.

My understanding of women and labor comes from Rhacel Parrenas’ book Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work and Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders. Parrenas states that global capitalism functions through and maintains and overarching world-system that organizes nations into unequal relations and creates a larger structural linkage between sending and receiving countries in migration. To put it another way, countries look the way that they do because they are apart of a system designed to get the most profit at all times. If we look at various countries at the same time, then we get a clearer picture of why Haiti looks the way it does versus why Venezuela looks the way it does. Why Egypt looks the way it does versus the United States and so on.

What do women have to do with it?

If we take women workers out of the equation then global profits seem like they magically appear from Pluto. Or they seem to be a consequence of technology or they are a function of Wall Street.

The reality is there 40% of the global population lives off of $2 per day, many of these people are women and children workers. In Feminism Without Borders Mohanty quotes Zilla Eisenstein who states that “women do two thirds of the worlds work and earn less than one-tenth of the income.” This is some serious wage inequity which could buy a lot of child care, food, pay some mortgages and send some people to grade school through college.

In short in many ways the global accumulation of capital and profits pivots on the labor of women, largely comprised of women of color.

Again, the work of women is central to the rise of the new global elite. Someone has to assemble our phones, gadgets, tv and clothing. And I say this not to run some sort of guilt trip, as that wouldn’t be useful to neither you or me. I say it make the women who do this work visible. Often times the work of women is neither unrecognized, unacknowledged and it is often underpaid.

Back to the article.
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I learned two significant things from this article. The first was that transnational conferences are in many ways the new status symbol for the transglobal elite.The second is that the status symbols aren’t just jets and international vacations but “a philanthropic foundation—and, more than that, one actively managed in ways that show its sponsor has big ideas for reshaping the world.”

If you shape ideas, you can shape society, how people think.

This makes sense. A year ago I said in a post about Beyonce that culture is hegemony’s goon. This is also the reason why I contended seriously with Jeff Chang’s idea of culture before politics in this post I wrote last month along with Rob Bland.

This article is also significant because we never get to hear about the day to day lives of the people who run the corporations and institutions that shape our lives. In this article we hear their voices. Freeland demonstrates this when she writes,

“The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

This is really good narrative.

At last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he were starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the U.S.,” he explained. “The pull to be close to the customers—most of them in Asia—is enormous.” Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

What is interesting to me about this is that Michael Splinter has basically said that the collapse and elimination of the middle class (to be crude, single family home owners), with an investment in the future of their neighborhood, is basically a part of the process. And if the middle class in the US shrinks but the middle class in India or China grows, then so be it. When I mentioned this to Rob, he said, well he can say that, he isn’t a politician. And I thought, well don’t corporations and employees influence politicians through donations? So then….

In sum, I hope that, in reading this I was able to shed some light the role that women play globally in the rise of the new transnational elite.

Where you aware of the connection between low wage women workers and global profits?

What did you think of the article?

As a man or woman have you learned that you were underpaid, what did you do about it? Did you have evidence?

The Politics of Making a “Black Film” in Obama’s America

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Image of director Kasi Lemmons courtesy of Professor Sussoro’s Blog

Last fall I tweeted that a barometer of Black women’s freedom would be their ability to control, tell, and distribute their own stories.

Having seen Push, and now For Colored Girls, two movies based on texts written by Black women about Black women, but directed by Black men, I am incredibly mindful of who gets to tell which story and why. Story telling is powerful because it is through stories that we come to see who we are in the world. Our stories define us. Stories tell us what is possible.

Consequently I was really excited when I learned that Pariah, directed by Dee Rees had been acquired by Focus Features last week.

A story, by a Black woman, about a Black girl. #Awesome.

In thinking about Pariah I was reminded of a Professor Michelle Wallace’s commentary on Spike Lee nearly fifteen years ago and what it means to make “Black Films.” In the article “Doin’ the Right Thing” she writes,

” …implicit in this formulation of Blacks having their own films was the nagging question as to whether such representations would somehow make black
peoples lives better overall. Regardless whether representation weather a film has value as any value as art, it can , if it chooses closely mirror or reflect the problems
and inequities of society. People make the mistake of thinking that a film can therefor correct inequities. This because we as a culture, are still trying to figure out what representation fully means in still new and exponentially expanding forms: what such forms can and can’t do, what we should and should not ask from them.”

She also say’s something in the article that has stuck with me which speaks to the idea that,

“we can now see that the notion of blacks making their “own” films presupposed the existence of a monolithic black community, unified enough to
posses a common ideology, ethics, morality, and culture, sufficient to override such competing and divisive interests as class, gender, sexuality, age and
education.”

This morning @tkoed Sent me a link from Ta-Nehisi’s blog where Neil Drumming, a screen writer and journalist, talks about about whether he would make “Black films.”

The article talks about how films by several NYU alums made it to Sundance this year. Full disclosure, as a little bear I worked for several years at NYU’s film school as an office manager. NYU’s Black film making culture is a part of me. It is in seeing grad and undergrad student filmmakers grind to make their dreams work that, that in some ways I developed the courage to openly pursue being an artist. Filmmakers taught me the power of story and how to analyze a film.

My homie Jase has just came back from Sundance after working on a doc on Harry Belafonte, Sing Your Song, #wingsup.

My homie’s Marquette Jones and Qwesi Davis both have films in the San Diego Black Film Festival this month.
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I also found this article to be interesting, in that it speaks to how hyper segregated both Hollywood AND the art world is. Furthermore, it is related to a conversation that I was having last week with a Black woman journalist friend about how segregated Washington’s journalism corps are, and what this means for the careers of Black people in general and women of color in particular. It appears that one can operate in the White circle or the Black circle, but not both. Where does this leave people who are neither White nor Black? o.O

Work mirrors life?

Was it this rigid in New York? I don’t recall.

What is material to me is that Neil never disclosed his race. I read the article again, looking then I asked @tkoed if Neil was White. @Tkoed says that this is because regular readers know who he is, and that may be true. But I am not a regular reader, so I finished the article wondering is this a White, mixed race or Black person analyzing what it means to have negro characters in their movies.

Perhaps given how marginalized Black films are, to choose to make Black movies is a choice to have your work live on the margins. This can be tough to reconcile for some.

The homie Dame also sent me a link to an article titled “Can Revolutionary Films Hinder Social Action.” Read it here. This article looks at how the top 1% can use the medium of film
to transmit messages to the masses that then absolve the masses from taking action. For example, if you know that “The Matrix” exists, are you obligated to do something about it?

Oh and Rob has a piece up at The Liberator about the Black Creative Class. He makes some interesting points about who makes up this class and although his timeline throws me a bit, I like
the idea of inter-generational Black struggle that’s not linear and impacted by art. In some ways I think our posts are in conversation with each other.

Excited about Pariah?

Why did we assume that having more Black Films would change the lives of Black people?

Can we have a conversation about the forces that create a “Black Film” genre in the first place?

Race and racism are draining.

The Gender Dimensions of the Giffords Shooting

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Earlier this week I was wondering aloud on Twitter whether anyone was going to address the gendered dimensions of the point blank shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords allegedly by Jared L. Loughner.

I realized that no one would, so it was my job.

By a gendered framework I mean aknowledging, naming and analyzing the fact that Congresswoman Giffords is a woman and that Loughner is a man and putting the shooting within a larger historical and a current framework of violence against women.

To put the shooting within a larger framework is to acknowledge that this is a violent culture against women, and once this is acknowledged, something will have to be done about it. That being said, it may be in the interests of those who organize society to act as if this is not a gendered act of violence. They have their interests, and I have mine.

In a culture that is violent against women, a significant amount of violence sexual or otherwise is committed against women, simply because they are born women.

For example:

  1. In 2005, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner.1 That’s an average of three women every day. Of all the women murdered in the U.S., about one-third were killed by an intimate partner.2

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  2. The poorer the household, the higher the rate of domestic violence — with women in the lowest income category experiencing more than six times the rate of nonfatal intimate partner violence as compared to women in the highest income category.11
  3. 60.4% of female victims were first raped before age 18.
  4. Among high school students, 9.3% of black students, 7.8% of Hispanic students, and 6.9% of white students reported that they were forced to have sexual intercourse at some time in their lives.3

Looking at the statistics helps us to get a sense of how this shooting can be seen as  not only arguably connected to harmful Tea Party rhetoric but also  to a narrative of violence against women.

Looking at the shooting through a gendered framework is helpful because it can help us to see how public acts of violence, such as lynching, rape and murder have been used historically in the United States to deter marginalized bodies from participating publicly and fully in Democracy.

Baldwin says to act is to commit, and to commit is to be in danger.

I don’t hold my breath, I also don’t hold my pen.

Have you noticed in mainstream media that there has been very little analysis of how this shooting was a gendered act?

What would happen if that were broached or even acknowledged?