Hi, I’m a native woman.

apihtawikosisan:

What’s that?  No honey, the fact that the okimâwastotin (that headdress worn by clueless hipster girls all the time) is generally reserved for males in Plains cultures is not sexist or patriarchal. You can stop trying to ‘save us from sexism’ thanks.

In fact, we were centuries ahead of you in the gender equality department.  There are of course a great diversity of socio-political traditions in our various nations, but one thing comes through loud and clear…our women held positions of power.  Not merely over hearth and home, but politically as well.  In some nations, women run the roost, and this without denigrating or subjugating men (in case you were worried).

Centuries of racist and sexist interference by European powers has taken its toll.  We do indeed face sexism in our communities, to an extent unthinkable before Contact. It is sadly the case that the oppressed often internalise their oppressor, and the oppressor for us has always been racist, and sexist. 

To combat this, we look to our traditions, which are egalitarian.  Where men and women are respected and venerated.  We do not fumble towards equality as sameness, as so many settler feminists insist we should (in our context only, as they often recognise this is a ridiculous approach otherwise).  We revive equity.  We acknowledge different gender roles, and recognise that the female is not subservient in our cultures. 

When we discuss ‘women’s power’ and ‘women’s roles’, you hear echoes of your history.  But your history is not ours.  Our history speaks proudly of the strength of our women and our men.  Gender roles were not created in our societies to elevate men and turn women into chattel.

You settler women have much to overcome.  Your history is fraught with inequality and abuses.  I am sorry that you come from such twisted traditions.

Do not attempt to transplant your historical circumstances into our Nations.  You have no idea what the headdress means in our cultures.  To claim that the restrictions on who can wear it are ‘sexist’ merely highlights this ignorance…your inability to see outside your own cultural norms, outside your own sad, sexist cultural history. 

Colonisers always believe they have the right to define reality, particularly for those they have colonised.  What kind of feminist are you, when you take part in these inequalities of power, and proclaim for us the meaning of our own symbols and traditions? 

In case you’re not sure, it makes you a racist feminist. 

oohhcomely:

““I am always amazed when I hear white folks speak about their fear of black people, of being the victims of black violence. They may never have spoken to a black person, and certainly never been hurt by a black person, but they are convinced that their response to blackness must first and foremost be fear and dread. They too live in denial. They claim to fear that black people will hurt them even though there is no evidence which suggests that black people routinely hurt white people in this or any other culture. Despite the fact that many reported crimes are committed by black offenders, this does not happen so frequently as to suggest that all white people must fear any black person. Now, black people are routinely assaulted and harassed by white people in white supremacist culture. This violence is condoned by the state. It is necessary for the maintenance of racial difference. Indeed, if black people have not learned our place as second-class citizens through educational institutions, we learn it by the daily assaults perpetuated by white offenders on our bodies and beings that we feel but rarely publically protest or name. Though we do not live in the same fierce conditions of racial apartheid that only recently ceased being our collective social reality, most black folks believe that if they do not conform to white-determined standards of acceptable behavior they will not survive. We live in a society where we hear about white folks killing black people to express their rage. We can identify specific incidents throughout our history in this country whether it be Emmett Till, Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, etc. We can identify rare incidents where individual black folks have randomly responded to their fear of white assault by killing. White rage is acceptable, can be both expressed and condoned, but black rage has no place and everyone knows it.””

—

bell hooks

and now that im thinking about it

strugglingtobeheard:

bad-dominicana:

so-treu:

withrevolutionarycries:

so-treu:

withrevolutionarycries:

so-treu:

looking back at that post that whatsherantiblackface wrote, Claudia Jones was NOT the first black woman to do “intersectional feminism”. by far.

not even really sure what that means, but if you mean took an intersectional approach to black women’s positionality in an imperialist supremacist world, yeah she was NOT the first by a long damn shot.

and you kind have to be ignorant of a lot of the history of black women, their organizing, and their work to make that claim with a straight face.

c-f STAY rong doe.

I mean it depends on who you ask how that lineage is traced but you can look to for example Frances M. Beal writes in her 1969 essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” but you could also look back to Anna Julia Cooper’s essay “The Woman Versus The Indian” which was published in her book A Voice from the South in………1892. That’s me drawing on non-fiction source that explicitly engage in discussions of how power and identity operate in the lives of Black women. Black american women have been writing about their position within concepts of the nation, capitalism race, and gender since they have been able to be published. That’s also me only drawing from Black women writers to create that genealogy. Basically what I’m saying is that I could shit on that whole damn argument. Which so could anyone who actually is trained into Black/Afro-America/African-American/Africana Studies w/ any kind of historical frame.

Don’t really get me started on this bullshit about Black folks and not really getting internationalism or it being relevant to Black feminisms cannon. I mean if we were just to look at the Haitian Revoution in 1804 and the establishment of the first ‘free Black republic’ for an instance of Black folks in a non-US context radically altering the discourse on which the conditions of nationhood, citizenship, and race were understood (and how white supremacy then responds to quickly forstall and disempower that move) and in turn radically influenced geopolitics in the western hemisphere for the next 50 to 100 years.

Buuuuuuuuuuuut you’d have to know or care or have read something about the histories of Black folks moving in a global political context to fuck with any of that.’ And this pseudo-intellectual douche who thinks her dipping into post-colonial theory and while  clearly really only giving time to subaltern collective and it’s criitics even though it is only one intellectual trajectory in the discourse but you know keep fronting like you know what you talking bout.

the bolded. you’re reading my mind. b/c yes, it’s definitely about framing (which is what history is, really, a framing or an interpretation), and depending on that you can pull up the figure you’re talking about, black women’s published work and writing. but i also think if you’re talking about black women’s intersectional approach to their lives and women’s lives in general, you’re gonna miss a huge chunk of the picture, consider how black folks have been historically denied access to literacy and the academy. but even then…..um, Sojourner Truth? Harriet Tubman? and i’m even thinking about people like Queen Nanny and Cécile Fatiman, who used theocratic authority and religious practices from Africa, in conjunction of other slaves from throughout the diaspora to connect with each other and create means of resistance. i mean, Fatiman, an African and Corscian woman, worked with Dutty Boukman, a slave from Jamaica, to carry out a religious ceremony that combined aspects of catholicism, dahomean, and kongo belief systems to wage a military offensive against a colonial slaveocracy and the english, spanish, and french armies, in order to establish a new country - which, ou know was itself as response to international forces, with the french revolution and the founding of the u.s. and all. i’m not sure you can get more internationalist in your approach.

then of course there’s people like Nzinga Mbande, who was a master of international diplomacy long before the u.s. was even a thing……….

and if you broaden it to artists you have folks like Josephine Baker, Katherine Dunham, even Eartha Kitt……

of course figures like Amy Jaques Garvey and Shirley Graham Du Bois … .

then there’s the fundamental role of black women in freedom struggles in south africa and in the nyabingi movement, in the mau mau, in rastafarianism……..

and again, it’s all about framing, but any way you cut it the idea that Clauda Jones, as awesome as she was, was the first to do “intersectional”/international feminism is hogwash. pure and unadulterated.

and the fact hat she gets overlooked MIGHT i suspect have less to do with the fact that she did “intersectional” feminism and more with the fact that she’s a black woman, maybe? and black women are systemically erased from history? maybe?

it would be gratuitous for me to bold the whole thing so i won’t. 

ok, so i just re-read the “tl;dr” portion of c-f’s post and realized that she’s implying that Claudia Jones is forgotten/rarely talked about because she was deported. not b/c she does “intersectional” feminism, or at least not just that.

which, if you want to make the claim ok, but then we’ll also need to talk about why Marcus Garvey’s deportation hasn’t hampered his place in the historical record. same for W.E.B. Du Bois’s exile. or a number of other black thinkers throughout the world who have faced deportation or exile as a result of their work, and consider the degree to which their deportation/exile impacted how and if they’re remembered.

and even then, it doesn’t account for the silence around black “feminists” (cause many of them were either doing their thing before there was ever such a term or might not i.d. as that) who didn’t face deportation - Mary Church Terrell, Shirley Du Bois etc.

and i’m not saying that deportation couldn’t have played a role in the erasure of Jones’s legacy, but you have to be willing to overlook a shit ton of systematic antiblack misogyny in order to make the claim/implication that it was deportation exclusively that enforced this erasure.

which isn’t really overlooking antiblackness as much as it is facilitating it.

a black dominican woman was doing intersectional feminism as early as the 30’s. evangelina rodriguez perozo. she may not have called it such, but she worked from the bottom up, w all the darkest poorest, most *fallen* women…and dedicated her life to it.  she was a writer who clamored for the rights of poor black women…a poet, a scholar. a doctor. intersectional womens rights activist thru and thru

antiblack misogyny got her erased from history as the first female dominican doctor, the first to champion for womens reproductive care in the DR and opened the first dedicated clinic, dedicating her own time and money to giving free healthcare and milk to the poorest of women and mothers…and as one of trujillos martyrs.

we hear about the precious white mirabal sisters. but evangelina did more alone in just a year of service to the people than they did their whole comfy, rich white lives as a trio.

hence the reasons i side eyed the fuck outta every single person who reblogged that shit. and wow, y’all are just sooo damn smart. all needed information and stuff to really learn from. #teamnoshame is truly hated for the beauty and brains it exudes. facts on facts on facts

Music History for Racists

bankuei:

Let’s use Wikipedia, which, while not the MOST rigorous of things, is an excellent starting point:

Rock and Roll:

Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll or rock ‘n’ roll) is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s,^[1][2] primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz,^[3] and gospel music

The Banjo

The banjo is a four, five or six stringed instrument with a piece of plastic or animal skin stretched over a circular frame. Simpler forms of the instrument were fashioned by Africans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments of similar design.^[1]

The banjo is usually associated with country, folk, Irish traditional music and bluegrass music. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in African American traditional music, before becoming popular in the minstrel shows of the 19th century. In fact, slaves influenced early development of the music that became country and bluegrass, through the introduction of the banjo and through the innovation of musical techniques for both the banjo and fiddle.^[2][3][4] The banjo, with the fiddle, is a mainstay of American old-time music.

Bonus homework for the smarties- look up Silk Road, and Islam’s influence on Europe and grind those brain cells together and see what happens.

It’s magical.

Labor Union Racism

freedominwickedness:

One of the most important pieces of erased — not “lost” or “missing, but erased — history is that American labor unions strongly embraced racism in general and anti-Asian racism in particular.

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, the American labor movement carried out a full-fledged campaign of domestic terrorism against Asian-Americans, organizing and carrying out a systematic campaign of violent riots with the objective of forcing Asian immigrants to leave the United States. The large Asian population of modern-day Portland is in fact a direct consequence of this campaign; many Asians fled to Portland because the large shipping companies there shielded them from union violence in order to protect trade relations with China and Japan.

On 14 May 1905, a group of sixty-seven San Francisco labor unions — chief among them the Sailor’s Union and the Building Trades Council — came together to found the Asiatic Exclusion League, an inter-union organization specifically dedicated to promoting anti-Asian racism through both social propaganda and political lobbying. Within three years, the Exclusion League had not only grown to nearly two hundred American labor unions, but also gone international by spawning a Canadian sister organization under the same name.

The League’s big moment came in the wake of the great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. With the combined influence of essentially every major union in town, the League was able to dictate systematic segregation as an integral part of the rebuilding of San Francisco. In particular, the League succeeded in forcing the San Francisco Board of Education to bar all Asian-American children from the city’s public schools, segregating them into a single “Oriental Public School”.

That school still exists to this day; it is the Gordon J. Lau Elementary School.

This in fact caused a major international incident between the United States and Japan, as the segregation of Japanese schoolchildren was a direct violation of a 1894 treaty. Only the direct intervention of President Roosevelt — the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1911 — prevented outright war. The Exclusion League was undeterred by this and continued to be a major force in American politics until the 1950s, at which point it slowly faded from history as American racism shifted from primarily targeting blacks and Asians to primarily targeting blacks and Latinos.

Did you know?

fyeahblackhistory:

Marcus Garvey and Halie Selassie did not see eye to eye.

Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie were not enemies; nor were they friends. Garvey was initially a very strong supporter of Selassie as hostilities between Italian and Ethiopian troops began at Wal Wal in December 1934, and events began to unfolded leading into the Italo-Ethiopian War.

Garvey moved from Jamaica to London as Mussolini was increasing his belligerence against Selassie’s rule. The UNIA leader often spoke supportively about Selassie and decried the Italian invasion of Ethiopia from Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park in London, defending the black nation’s sovereignty rights and denouncing Mussolini’s aggression. He used the pages of his _Black Man_ magazine to discuss the Italo-Ethiopian situation. But after Italian troops invaded Ethiopia in October of 1935 and Selassie was forced into exile in May, Garvey became increasingly critical of the Ethiopian leader.

When Selassie arrived in London, on his way to attempt further negotiations for help (which would not be forthcoming) from the League of Nations, he spurned Garvey along with other black activists then living in Britain. Garvey felt this rejection keenly, and at the same time he was attracted to the power dynamics at work in the rising fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. While African Americans in the United States, including Garveyites led by UNIA New York officer A. L. King in Harlem, rallied to the Ethiopian cause, Garvey began to blast Haile Selassie for his weakness in his _Black Man_ editorials, criticize him for his lack of identification with blacks and for turning to white officials (who would fail him) for help, and, at the same time, praised Mussolini for his forcefulness and his manhood.

Marcus Garvey was heckled off the platform in Hyde Park by African students who were so enraged by his criticism of Haile Selassie. Despite the actual differences the two men experienced, they have been lauded together and twinned spiritually in much of black popular culture and faith, and exist in important relationship to one another in Rastafarian belief, in the messages of reggae music, and in many other ways.