“ Being “anti-PC” is not sticking it to the Man, it’s sticking it to all the people whom the Man routinely stomps on.
Why do they fight us? Because they think we are dangerous beasts? Why are we dangerous beasts? Because we shake and often break the white’s comfortable stereotypic images they have of us: the Black domestic, the lumbering nanny with twelve babies sucking her tits, the slant-eyed Chinese with her expert hand — “They know how to treat a man in bed,” the flat-faced Chicana or Indian, passively lying on her back, being fucked by the Man a la La Chingada.
The Third World woman revolts: We revoke, we erase your white male imprint. When you come knocking on our doors with your rubber stamps to brand our faces with DUMB, HYSTERICAL, PASSIVE PUTA, PERVERT, when you come with your branding irons to burn MY PROPERTY on our buttocks, we will vomit the guilt, self-denial and race-hatred you have force-fed into us right back into your mouth.
We are done being cushions for your projected fears. We are tired of being your sacrificial lambs and scapegoats.
— Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers (via sinidentidades)
This is “the idea that anything wrapped with enough irony can be transformed into something else” and that it’s okay, even admirable and edgy, to make comments that appear ignorant or prejudicial. The point is to upset convention and push the envelope.
Submitted by THE POSITIVE SPACES INITIATIVE, Toronto, Ontario (www.positivespaces.ca)
Photos of NOURI, PAULETTE, NICO & JOHAN
“Now I am very happy. We have a lot of friends there, and we are going, talking to them. And when I am absent, they are missing us.” -Nouri on the friendships she and her sister made at school, immigrated to Ottawa from South Asia
“It was about coming into my own and coming out to myself, in the open. I found that refreshing…You just go through it and you think about all the things you’ve been through and you’re like, wow, this is another step forward, wow, this is another step forward.” -Paulette reflecting on her life, immigrated to Canada from East Africa
“We’re shy, we’re nervous a lot, and to be gay. We’re new in school and if the teachers know and our classmates know…” (Nico) “They judge us, they will make fun of us.” (Johan) “And maybe they’ll leave us, so we don’t have any friends.” (Nico). -Nico & Johan on their fears about being accepted at school, immigrated to Barrie from Asia
Read more of their stories here.
About the Project:
The Untold Stories Project was a research component conducted in the first phase of The Positive Spaces Initiative. Our aim was to document the ‘untold stories’ and experiences of LGBTQ immigrants, refugees, service providers and allies.
About the Program:
The Positive Spaces Initiative (PSI) was developed by Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) to share resources and increase organizational capacity across the sector to more effectively serve LGBTQ newcomers. OCASI recognizes the strengths of its member agencies and strives to support all agencies to create Positive Spaces. The initiative is grounded in the understanding that LGBTQ newcomers are often a part of multiple communities and seek welcoming service regardless of age, race, cultural community, faith or religion, disability, gender, status, etc. The strength of Positive Spaces is in creating an environment which strives to understand the overlapping and intersecting nature of our communities.
“Because I am Brown, I am oppressed.” When I speak this, I know it is not enough. The knowledge of racism is not enough. Because if I am still bound by my own self-hatred, I am the oppressor onto myself.
I ask myself, “How does a Brown sister, a Black sister, free herself?” Knowing I am oppressed, I must also know that I participate in this oppression. I must realize that I and all my darker sisters take the instruments of oppression and use them on ourselves. Our tools come in many forms.
We take from the oppressor the instrument of hatred and sharpen it on our bodies and souls. The internalization of “spic” and “nigger” begins at birth. Only consciousness must follow—or death.
— Aleticia Tijerina, “Notes on Oppression and Violence,” in Making Faces, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color [Ed. Gloria Anzaldua], (1990), p. 170 (via agradschoolbreakup)
The Bridge Poem
by Donna Kate Rushin
I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody
Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me Right?
I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the Ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends’ parents…
Then
I’ve got the explain myself
To everybody
I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.
Forget it
I’m sick of it
I’m sick of filling in your gaps
Sick of being your insurance against
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people
Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip
I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness
I’m sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long
I’m sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf you your better selves
I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self
Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die
The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses
I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful
This is encapsulates how I feel right now.
Arizona Ethnic-Studies Ban’s Unintended Result: Underground Libraries
I feel like this would be more important if kids in schools actually read books. I may not have been in the education business very long but I can tell you this much: kids may own books but only a small percentage actually read them. And assigned reading? From school? Skimmed AT BEST. Most information is gleened from class discussion. Books are dead.Some 30 students, teachers, and activists emerged from the bus carrying boxes of books. As they stepped onto the pavement Saturday and into the bright Tucson sun, they chanted in unison, “What do we want? Books! When do we want them? Now! Who are we? Librostraficantes!”
The Spanish term, which means “book smugglers,” is the brainchild of Houston Community College professor and author Tony Diaz, who with a few dozen supporters set out March 12 for Arizona to protest a 2010 state law that prohibits certain types of ethnic studies in public schools. In January officials shut down the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American-studies curriculum. The Librotraficante Caravan traveled through Texas and New Mexico, stopping in cities along the way to hold literary readings, collect donated books, and establish “underground libraries” filled with titles from Tucson’s banned courses. Several authors whose works were discontinued participated—Rudolfo Anaya, widely considered the godfather of Latino literature in the Southwest, even invited the caravan into his Albuquerque home for posole, traditional pork stew.
Years ago, I met Anaya, and came away from that encounter delighted by what a gentle, wonderful man he’d been. It’s nice to see my adolescent impression of him wasn’t wrong.
Underground libraries? Like man, the U.S. needs to do better. There’s no way this should be happening in 2012. This makes my heart hurt. It makes me angry. Upset. How offensive is it that knowledges, histories, documentation of narratives and lives have to be treated like this? How assaultive is it that communities are forced to do this? Everyday I’m trying to figure out new strategies to not letting racism affect me - simply the air of it - and every day I’m reminded of how powerful the structure is in not making that task easy for me at all. I’ve read some of these books and some are on my bookshelves. This is like white threat onto Communities of Color, when unfitting, assaultive ideologies become the law - it’s a problem… I dont even know what to say
Really? Have you considered the fact that assigned readings in schools act as a tool of a State that erases one’s cultural relevance, history, identity, etc. in order to encourage this idea of sameness, whiteness as normative for everyone, etc. I can’t even take this response seriously. If underground libraries are being built with the contribution of students, wouldn’t you assume that they ARE READING and WANT TO READ. Would they really ban these works if students weren’t reading them, internalizing them, and realizing the truth in them and how much it conflicts with the way traditional curriculum frames history and masks power dynamics through omission and distortion. Given that your icon reads “privileged, white, man” - I think you should realize just how much your perspective in this way doesn’t matter. You have no idea what it’s like to be forced to ingest readings that don’t represent you, that consistently problematize you, and just how psychologically, emotionally, and physically violent that is. Disengagement is understandable when everything that you’re taught that is important doesn’t include *you*.
yeah - students aren’t disengaged because they hate reading. Students become disengaged when their cultural/social realities are forced in the margins while their teachers impose this “apprecuiate the ‘classics’ or we’ll mark you as ignorant forever.” Students want to read things relevant to their lives, not an arbitrary list of “classic american novels” that serve as the litmus test of intelligence.
I remember having to read “All Quiet On The Western Front” in HS. Seriously? The one assigned summer reading book I remember reading in its entirety was Richard Wright’s Black Boy.
Banning these books is only going to further push these students out of school…
“SCAF painting over street art in Tahrir is an attempt to whitewash the history of the revolution.”
by Murtaza Hussain
“On an early Monday morning a work crew commissioned by the Egyptian government began covering the revolutionary murals in Tahrir with white paint, in what seemed to many to be a calculated and deliberate effort to erase the living history of the 2011 revolution. They succeeded in covering over the paintings on the front wall of the American University of Cairo compound facing Qasr Al-Ainy Street, as well as the corner directly facing the square which had previously displayed the iconic image of Hosni Mubarak as half-politician half-general, painted by the legendary Egyptian street artist Omar Fahmy.
As they continued their work and began to paint over the long stretch of artwork on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a group of passing students, shocked by what they were witnessing, prevented them from continuing…”
The other day, at my current-but-temporary (-although-maybe-not) job, I had to help these two employees move from the fourth floor to the fifth floor. This meant I had to load up all their crap onto a dolly and then move it all upstairs. So, like a trooper, my supervisor and I (two 5’2-3” women) loaded their crap and file cabinets onto the dolly and moved everything upstairs. Once we got there, the two (5’5”-6’ men) guys sat around while they observed us struggle with their crap. The most they offered was some consolation: “It’s heavy, huh.” I’m all about equality, but man those guys sucked.
And so I wonder to myself, why am I still at my High School job? I know this job is only temporary (maybe) and the $11/hour is not that bad for my financial needs, but if I remember correctly, I was promised greatness once I graduated from Duke University, the #10 best university in the country. And in this thought, so many other concerns and worries and insecurities and … things come up.
It’s not that there are no opportunities for me. The other day, I also got some advice about putting in a resume with that same company for some post-undergrad positions. I can do it, and I may have the advantage of having worked pretty hard (in my humble opinion) there for the past seven years. But I wonder if it is the right decision. After years of completing internships and focusing on immigration and social rights issues as an undergrad, I feel the options that would make me happy are limited. On top of that, my familial obligations are not making my life any easier. Currently, I am the only one employed in my family, and the rent is going to be due in seven days.
I have friends heading to New Mexico, and friends coming home to LA with two-year contracts and I know people heading to New York to make money and some people heading off abroad after dreams and people going into the Peace Corps. And when I compare myself to them, I feel stuck and hopeless and wonder if this is it for me and now I will be a machine for the rest of my days. I know I should be looking at things positively, but when all the responsibility of a whole family is laid on my arms the day I found out I passed Econ and I would definitely be graduating a couple days later, well, that just makes me wish I hadn’t passed Econ.
As for the opportunities, I’m stuck trying to find out where to go. Do I sell out? How can I continue to do the work I love if after week three I feel burned out? Why is everyone expecting me to solve my family’s problems including neighbors and friends? Why do I feel I have to solve my family’s problems including neighbors and friends? Why can’t I be a productive citizen who cares about and works on social issues while shinning all my “role-model-greatness” on three struggling siblings their friends and all their grandma’s while also paying the rent, insurance, electricity, three cell-phone bills, feeding and transporting the family, keeping in touch with friends and “changing the world” like some people claim I can? Jesus the most I’ve managed so far is to pay for my mom’s haircut and make a deal on a car whose “Service Engine Soon” light just came on. If I packed my bags tomorrow and left for Mexico or Arizona to live my life as I sometimes daydream I do, would I be making a mistake?
One of the reasons why I went from an art major to a journalism major.
— Egyptian Proverb (via arabswagger)
— Cultural Citizenship and the Challenges of Globalization. Ed. By Ommundsen, Leach, and Vanderberg.
White people think they run shit because they got money to buy a thesaurus. You say “gargantuan”; I say “big as shit!”
God forbid if I excel. A 4.0 means I’m four shades lighter because apparently intelligence is a white trait.
I will never equate stupidity with my melanin nor will I ever sacrifice my skin for the white man’s standards so never ask that I speak for anyone but me, represent anything but what I stand for, and fight for anything but what I believe in and if anybody EVER expects me to be anything but myself, they’ve got me fucked up.
This is for all my browns who were ever told by a white person that they were “eloquent” and by their fellow poc that they were “speaking white”. Y’all know what I’m talking about, I don’t even have to explain shit.
