#ThrowbackThursday to 2013: James Hood Dies: Defied Wallace; Integrated U of Alabama

Photo credit: The Birmingham News/Tamika Moore

Author's Note:  This is a repost of one of my pieces, then breaking news, which originally appeared elsewhere on January 18, 2013. I'm reproducing it here as part of my archive of works for Black History Month.

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A hero left us yesterday.

James Hood, one of two African American students determined to attend the whites-only University of Alabama, has died at age 70. James Hood, one of two African American students determined to attend the whites-only University of Alabama, has died at age 70.

Attribution unknown

In 1963, Mr. Hood and Vivian Malone defied Alabama's racist governor George Wallace, and a racist power structure and populace, to avail themselves of the right to a public college education.

Y'All Need to See This — UPDATED

Keep RTing this video. This needs national attention. pic.twitter.com/ctf233HBwI
— FriendlyBlackHottie (@HollyGoNightly1) April 29, 2015

And then you need to do something about it.

UPDATE: The young man in the video who was summarily disappeared by Baltimore police has been identified. his name is #JosephKent, and he is reportedly a student at Morgan State University. No information has been made available as to his whereabouts or his condition. Please post his name as a hashtag on social media to keep the pressure on for information (and to keep him safe, one hopes).

No, I don't have much in the way of concrete suggestions for big action. But there is no "two sides" bullshit about this; the side that deserves your support is that of the Black residents of the city of Baltimore. What appears on that video is more suited to an openly fascist regime than what we expect (not get, but expect) in this country.

There is one thing you can do, though. The beginning of it's here, in this Storify. We have to take control of the words. I will have much, much, MUCH more to say on this in the days to come, but this is where we start, because it's what I could do right now.

Because the violence is on one side here, and it's not the Black folks in Baltimore inflicting it.






Except where otherwise noted, all content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Video and Tweet as credited above. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Early Thoughts on "Fuck Your Breath"

Image captioning credit unknown.

[Note: This post is an expansion of a series of Tweets I posted this morning and subsequently compiled on Storify. Since most of this site's small readership isn't especially active on Twitter, I'm extending it here.]

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So I awakened this morning to news of yet another lynching of a Black man by cops (and by "cops," as we have learned). It's not enough that I'm dealing with death on a very personal level right now; for people of color in this country, and especially for Black folks, it's impossible to escape it. I've seen the stat floating around to the effect that cops in this country are now executing Black men once every 28 hours; a few days ago, I saw a reference to that time span being reduced (!) to every 21 hours. More, there has apparently been exactly one — one! — day thus far in 2015 that not included a Black person dead at the hands of police. I haven't found the sources for any of these (right now, who has time to look?), but it's indicative of the situation that I find it not in the least difficult to believe.


Below is an expansion of what was my initial reaction to that moment when the hood slips, and everyone sees and hears that the honest response to "I can't breathe" is "Fuck your breath."

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"Fuck your breath."

Said by a white cop to a dying Black man who the cops were killing right then.

The shooter? A 73-year-old white insurance executive-become-"reserve deputy."

[Also, as we've since come to learn, a huge donor of money and flashy paramilitary "toys" to the police department, the former campaign manager of the sheriff during his last run for office, and one of some 130 such "reserve deputies."]

What the fuck does Tulsa need with a "reserve deputy," anyway?

On the Persistent Erasure of Women of Color (and Other Sisters and Brothers)

William Blake:  "Europe Supported By Africa and America."
Oh, the irony. The story of our lives.
I will have many occasions to use this image in the future,
and much to say about what it represents.

It's been a rough start to the year for members of marginalized populations, particularly for people of color and members of the LGBTQI community, and especially for women of color, however they identify. The past few weeks, though, have ratcheted the racist noise level way up past the threshold of pain, a result of a confluence of several incidents and events.

I'm going to address several of them in turn (which means that this will be a long post), and I'm going to do so in plain English, with some language variants. We'll get to those in a minute, but what this means, from the outset, is that a lot of the folks who read this post are not going to like what I have to say — and I'm not gonna hold your hand through it all. No punches pulled, no blows softened, although none, frankly, will be inflicted, either, as you'll see provided you can squelch your defensiveness long enough to approach these words honestly and to contemplate the factual nature of what's presented here. It's not going to be a personal attack on you for being white, regardless of what some self-styled celebrities in online spaces like to pretend is the case. It's going to be an explication and explanation of what the reality is, within the dominant culture of what we know as the U.S. (which is, necessarily, "white" culture, and mostly cis/het, as well) for marginalized populations. And as a woman with cis/het privilege, I'm going to do so largely via the lens that life has afforded to me personally, which is one of race. This is not to exclude (or, to use a term you'll see a lot of here that seems to have twisted the white liberal world's knickers so thoroughly, erase) members of LGBTQI communities and populations. But it is not my place to appropriate their narratives and to presume to speak for them, and so I am not going to arrogate to myself any [nonexistent] right to do so. I am, over the days and weeks to come, going to point you to online spaces in which LGBTQI women of color tell their own stories and share their own lives and identities, so that readers will be able to learn from those whose stories they in fact are to tell.

Now, about some of those language variants: Educationally, I caught the first real wave of any size of what is now known loosely as "critical theory" — critical race theory and critical gender theory, or studies, specifically. At that time, of course, they were both largely termed "deconstructionism," and their best-known proponents were an array of largely white (and in some instances, already dead) European males. Oh, there were women, and especially women and men of color, who'd been saying these things loud, long, and in great breadth and depth, but it wasn't given the imprimatur of ivory-tower [ahem] respectability until white men made their names on it.

The concepts involved really caught traction in the 1990s, and since then, it's developed into a full-fledged field of study, one with, of course, its own specialized jargon. Think of them as clinical terms (medicine) or terms of art (law) — highly specific to the field, yes, but also simply everyday language within that field. There's nothing magical about them, nor anything particularly difficult. Besides, "liberalism" is supposed to welcome the notion that life is a process of learning, one that's supposed to challenge, right?

Right?

Oh.

I've been thoroughly disabused of that notion over the last few weeks. I knew it already, of course; we all did. But recent weeks have given us the spectacle of respectable mainstream [white] liberalism proudly flaunting all of its conservative biases and bigotries on full and flamboyant display, not merely staking out its turf as masters of the political zeitgeist but challenging anyone not in their camp to fall meekly in line or step off as unworthy. 

In light of this, and in light of all the willful misinformation and deliberate shoveling of ignorance and worse that's filling online spaces, including those spaces occupied by those not white (and especially not white, cis, and het), I'm going to deconstruct (yes, there's that word again) this hot mess.

As I do, be prepared for some things: While I know a lot of the jargon (and there's more, more current, that I've missed in recent years), and I will use it, this is not going to be an academic treatise. The lives of people of color are a constant process, and actualized identity, of code-switching, and I will do plenty of it here. So you'll be taken between dissertation-speak and ordinary speech (what outsiders regard as slang) with no warning and no explanation, and you'll manage those bumps in the verbal road just fine, trust me. After all, we're forced to live our lives this way, every minute of every day; white folks can handle reading it on a screen for a few minutes.

Also, to lay the groundwork for anyone coming at this without knowing who I am: I am mixed-race. Red, white, and Black. It's what my "L'il Bro," with the same ancestry in differing proportions, calls "hitting the 'New World' trifecta." And unlike some of my relations, I drew the longest of long straws when it comes to the privileges, benefits, and downright luxuries that accompany perceived whiteness in this society. I have fair skin and green eyes (well, they've changed color over the years, and as I've aged, they've turned amber with dark blue outer edges, but what people "see" is "green," just as with my skin, most "see" "white"). I can "pass" in virtually any environment — although to be brutally frank, my entire life has been one of presenting people with plain old confusion. They look at me and initially assume they're seeing "white," but at the same time, something's off; they recognize something on a visceral level that their eyes don't process. And, of course, it changes their behavior accordingly (oh, yes, indeed, it does). And let me stipulate for all the records that I don't hate white people, and I'm not self-loathing. What I am is unusually clear-eyed about who I am and where I come from, something that tends to be true of people of color where it tends to be manifestly untrue of white folks. Something else that tends to be true of us? We understand who y'all are and where you come from, too. We understand it better than you do. We have to; it's a little thing called survival.

So when I talk about white privilege (and, no, I will not put that in quotation marks for you, because it is a thing, simply an objective fact of life in this society), I'm talking about it as someone who also has a lifetime of lived experience of it — in addition to a lifetime of lived experience of the racial discrimination that perforce accompanies who I actually am. This is by way of warning: Don't even try the tired old argument that there's no such thing as white privilege in the U.S., because in addition to its, you know, actual, factual existence apart from the comfortable shibboleths of equality this society loves to repeat to lull itself back to sleep, I've lived it. And I've had it wielded against me as a weapon. Daily.

Now, on to the current series of unfortunate events (a/k/a racism and other bigotries, a/k/a just another day in the dominant culture that is called the U.S.).

Thunderbird Ascendant

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

It's been a maddening week. Difficult, frustrating, infuriating . . . and none of those captures it.

Part of it, of course, is the disruption caused by the artificial time change. This happens every year, and I dread it, but the older I get, and the worse my illness gets, the longer it takes me to adapt. Part of it is the fact that more than one of our days this week was thoroughly disrupted by unanticipated concerns, the kind of disruption that knocks your whole schedule off balance. Part of it is that it is spring, calendar notwithstanding, and the rapid temperature fluctuations and the high winds are killing me. Part of it is the damage to my hand, making not only typing but everything an excruciating chore while I'm waiting for it to heal.

Part of it is the same problem we face every year at this time, only more so: With the Pueblo closed for weeks yet, sales are few and far between; fewer and farther with virtually no winter tourism all season. Part of it is the constant problems with connectivity, problems exacerbated by structural inadequacies and by the weather itself. Part of it is the nonstop hackery. I'm really tired of feeling under siege, and all the more so when the only reason for it is having stood up to bigoted bullies on behalf of others (yeah, and look where that got me).

And part of it is the constant struggle against the eternal dynamics that a woman like faces: the purposed and purposeful invisibility inflicted and enforced by others, the intentional and unintentional erasure of my very self, my very being.

The last few weeks have been difficult for a lot of women of color on that particular front.

I get accused, fairly regularly, of being "angry." Accompanying that is the clear implication that because I'm not doing my part to make those identified (whether they know it or not) with the dominant culture comfortable, I'm a problem; I'm not "respectable" enough; I'm hurting "the cause," whatever that is; I'm inconvenient at best and more often an obstacle to be removed. An obstacle to comfort is what's really meant, by the way. Oh, and then there's that drivel I've been seeing lately in some places about what constitutes "strength," and who is to be derided as "weak."

Yeah, I'm angry. Come live in my moccasins for a week, and you'll likely have torn your hair out and run screaming down the middle of the highway. Long before the week is up. Take on my entire history on top of that, coupled with what I must battle on a daily basis, and then get back to me about definitions of "weak" and "strong."

Or not. I've ceased to feign any interest in what is, truly, just drivel.

My name has two meanings. The one with which I am particularly identified is that of Crane, but there's a secondary bird, too. And Thunderbird is now ascendant.

I have a lot of work in various stages of completion in the pipeline; mostly, it's waiting for my finger to heal sufficiently to permit real typing. I'll be posting the first in the days to come, followed by a number of others. 

A lot of you won't like it. I am blunt; I am profane; I swear for catharsis. It's a safety valve that permits me to get done all that I need to do in my daily life, in the face of obstacles most people can't even conceive, without unloading on people who don't deserve it — or even on those who do. It's meaningless other than that, but I can't begin to count the number of pompous lectures I've received from folks only too happy to tell me that my use of the word "fuck" is SO much worse than racism, and that I am of course hurting the anti-racism cause by using it (of course, these same people are generally the ones inflicting the racism in the first place, so you already know how much deference their opinion gets).  

But what I have to say, in the weeks to come, is in part to make a statement about the facts of how things are in this dominant culture when you are outside it. Part of it is educational, but that will work only for those willing to put aside their defensiveness and their reflexive protests and their insistence that they know best and actually stop, read, listen, sit with it a while, try to internalize it as much as is possible, try to learn from it, and then to adjust their worldviews and actions accordingly. That will be vanishingly few, I realize. It doesn't matter. What I have to say needs to be said, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes people.

And part of it is simply this: I refuse to allow anyone to render me invisible. Ever again. I will not be erased. I exist, no matter how much that discomfits some people, and I will own my identity and my history and my narrative and my self. In public.

No, that's not a thunderbird at the top, but she's as close as I could come, photographically. Her own ancestor played with the thunderbirds, and paid the price. She visits me almost daily now, and she clearly has something to say.

So do I, and Thunderbird is now ascendant.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner. 

Yeah, No. More Catwalk Colonialism. I Am #NotYourSquaw.

#DSquaw.

I shit you not. That's what these idiot white boys are calling their new fall collection, sent down the latest Fashion Week Colonial Catwalk.

As though the theft of imagery and culture, the appropriation of names and identities and narratives, the flat-out redface faux-powwow shuck-and-jive weren't enough, these morons had to take it all to new gutteral [as opposed to guttural] depths. Dean and Dan Caten, the hipster designers who hipsterishly refer to themselves as DSquared2, thought it would own so hip [and edgy, too!] to steal from Native cultures and then call it . . . wait for it . . . #DSquaw! Isn't that just too, too precious?!

Yeah, no.

And even the Styleite article slamming this racist idiocy gets it wrong. That word, people, does not, in the white man's vernacular, in his lexicon of racism and misogyny, translate to "vagina." Oh, no, no.  It translates to something much more vulgar, much more insulting. It translates to a four-letter vulgarity beginning with "c," used to describe women's genitalia . . . but not just any women, oh, no. It refers specifically, in the most odiously racialized sense possible, strictly and solely to Native women, reducing us whole and entire to that single body part. That vulgar, unclean, subhuman body part, when it exists on us Native women. That body part that members of the U.S. Cavalry cut off the bodies of our ancestors and turned into sacrilegious "medicine bags" and other personal ornaments, scalping of another sort, trophies of rape, of massacre, of genocide. 

And, as happened two weeks ago with fellow white racist ripoff design house KTZ, there is allegedly another direct theft from a Native designer. Then, it was Apsàalooke/NorthernCheyenne designer b.YELLOWTAIL who saw her own design, from her great-grandmother's beadwork, an old traditional family design that she used with the proper permissions, stolen, warped, and twisted into a nasty little piece of cheap knock-off appropriation. This time, it's a beaded bag by Sandra Okuma, copied largely wholesale, with a few cosmetic alterations, and slung around the neck of a white model who presumably is supposed to be the designated #dsquaw stand-in.

Enough, already.

Our cultures are not your property. Neither are our histories, our identities, our imagery, our traditions, our labor, or our very selves. And the nastiest of sexualized racial slurs is certainly not yours to fling at us while stealing from us (or even while not).

Every person in the fashion industry who contributes to these instances of cultural theft (and more tangible forms of theft, too), who praises it, who countenances it without publicly calling it out, who supports it in any way, shape or form: You're the heirs apparent of a long tradition of racism, misogyny, cultural theft and erasure.

And there's another word for that toxic combination, you know.




All text copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Don't Miss Nothin'.

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Hawk doesn't.

Neither do we.

There's a lot to write about, and I have several posts in the works, in various stages of completion. The most immediate stems from that putrid nonsense from the Oscar stage/backstage, but it's grown by leaps and bounds over the last two days.

The latest involves an attempt by a white woman who engaged in spectacularly rude and privileged behavior against both a Black woman and a Black man, in public, to mount a campaign apparently designed to lose said Black man his job. Oh, yes, there will be much more to say about this, and about the many tendrils and tentacles emerging from this whole nasty nexus of "liberal" racism. But time is short, and I make no promises that it will be finished tonight, or even tomorrow.

In the meantime, it's enough to point out that, like Hawk herself up there, we don't miss nothin'. Yes, we see what's being done to ourselves, to our friends and family members and colleagues. We also have long memories.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner. 

No Red Carpet Here.

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Only a red willow screen, and celebrities garbed mostly in gray and brown.

Today, Red-Tailed Hawk had a cameo, while Northern Harrier garnered a quick walk-on fly-on. Of course, every day, the "lead" is an ensemble: Raven, Magpie, nationalized immigrant Eurasian Collared Dove. Today's featured roles, though, were played by Cassin's Finch and House Finch, House Sparrow and White-Crowned Sparrow, and, of course, Dark-Eyed Junco, who got the playbill shot above.

They'll all be back tomorrow for an encore, possibly with a few new extras. 

And the really great thing about this performance? Never any mocking of young children of color or the mothers of people lost to suicide; no segregation or exclusion, no dismissal or erasure, based on color and identity.

Hollywood could learn a thing or two. Or ten. Or a thousand.




All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Of Clicks and Pixels and Hearts.

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

There are days when I am entirely disheartened.

This is one.

I've been doing this a lot of years now. Writing, I mean. Writing about our issues. Writing, in some cases, about matters of actual life and death.

I don't expect that anything I write, however important the issue, will somehow magically trump the Kardashianing of American life, especially on social media.

What I did think I could expect is that those who proclaim themselves my — our — allies could spare a second or two, and a click or two, to spread the word. 

Apparently not.

Catwalk Colonialism

Image copyright B. Yellowtail; all rights reserved.

Sometimes "appropriation" goes way beyond what that term implies. It's a word that sort of sounds like someone just borrowed something for a little while because s/he genuinely needed it.

Really, it's just a synonym for theft, but even then, not all thefts are equal. Some are more outrageous, and more openly racist, than others.

When a white British fashion house appropriates the work of a Native designer — work that features a lineal ancestral pattern with deep cultural and spiritual significance to the designer herself, no less — and when said white-run design house then submits it as part of a redface catwalk minstrel show for New York's Fashion Week . . . well, even theft doesn't begin to cover it.

It's catwalk colonialism.

And when the international fashion media are complicit not only in the cover-up but in using their collective megaphone to amplify the racism of the company involved . . . it's time to do something about it.

Taking Our Thunder Back

Attribution unknown.

Here's the thing: When you've been caught being a racist, about the worst possible thing you can then do is to appropriate the images of children (children!) of color as a form of apple-polishing for your butthurt ego.

And that's just what Rosie O'Donnell did in her Twitter war with women of color two days ago. She Tweeted the above photo at Native activist Lauren Chief Elk, along with separate statements to the effect that Ms. Chief Elk was "only 1 person" (and therefore, her opinion didn't matter), and that she (Rosie) has "done more for WOC [women of color]" than Ms. Chief Elk ever has or will. Coming from someone who thinks it's appropriate to make fun of Asians using stereotypical fake "Chinese" words and accents, to a fierce and dedicated Native woman activist who fully grasps the obligations of intersectionality, it would be laughable if it weren't so vicious.

Well, Ms. Chief Elk has the last laugh tonight. Late yesterday, The View apparently gave a pre-weekend news dump to The Hollywood Reporter, announcing that the show and O'Donnell were parting ways. The official excuse is the old "spend time with her family" routine, buttressed by an acknowledgment that O'Donnell and her wife separated three months ago and are apparently divorcing. But if anyone thinks that's the sole reason, I have some swamp land south of Tucson and a bit of the Sahara in Miami to sell you at a really great price.

Still, though, O'Donnell herself is really a sideshow in this whole mess. A toxic sideshow, to be sure, but tangential to the underlying trigger for the whole ugly spectacle. That belongs to Eve Ensler and her ghastly, racist, narcissistic, proprietary appropriation of women of color and our causes and very identities to further her own ego. [It sure as hell ain't about the money, of which she has far more than enough.]

It was bad enough that she hijacked February 14th, a day on which First Nations women have banded together for a quarter of a century now to bring attention to the tragedy and the crime of our missing and murdered indigenous women. Worse, she decided to hijack an actual Native woman's very image, manipulate it, plaster a phrase containing the word "Vanishing" across it (as though we're some sort of exotic and rapidly-going-extinct animal), and use it to promote her hijack of the date without so much as a by-your-leave, forget about anything like royalties.

But that wasn't enough. When called on it by Lauren Chief Elk and others, she immediately became the "victim," tears flowing and whines commencing. Meanwhile, her paid minions went to work erasing Native women's voices from the organization's Facebook page. Funny, that: She wants to exploit us as "vanishing," yet erase us entirely from existence when our existences are inconvenient? But of course. That's the norm in the dominant culture.

But that's by no means all. her treatment of other women of color has likewise been nothing short of reprehensible, and in a similarly exploitative vein. For me, the nadir came with her article about her Congo experiences. I've written about it once, with the shameful title she used; I won't repeat it here. Like many (most?) Native women, I've been through a lot in my life, and borne witness to more; there's not a lot that I can't look in the face without flinching. But that "article" made me feel genuinely soiled. It still does.

Over the next week, we're unfortunately going to be treated to many more reams' worth of deathless, breathless prose about the virtues, the very sacredness, of V-Day and #OneBillionRising. It's hooey, of course, but it's celebrity hooey, and so most people won't know the difference.

But if you're on Facebook, there's a new counterbalance out there. It's called TWO Billion Rising Against V-Day, and it's a place where activists and allies can record their own testimonials and show solidarity with the #MMIW movement and other women of color, from whom Ensler's group has attempted to steal voice and presence.

Not for nothing is the secondary translation of my name "Thunderbird Woman." Right now, she's ascending, and she is pissed. So come; join me and other women of color and our allies.

Because we're taking our thunder back.



#NoMore #MMIW




All text is copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Dreams and Nightmares

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

I'm trying hard to hang onto the feeling I had night before last.

It's not really working.

My sleep has been badly disrupted lately, not at all unusual in the middle of an autoimmune crash. I'm used to it, frankly. But what that means is that the rare occasions, however brief, that I manage to hit REM are especially important, so I'm mostly grateful when I can remember a dream.

They're not always good, but "not good" does not equal "nightmare." These days, the nightmares seem to be reserved mostly for waking hours anyway.

Last night was almost a complete loss not hat front. The night before wasn't a whole lot better, but I did manage at least one short episode of REM. The dream has stuck with me.

In it, I'm kneeling on an old hardwood floor. I'm surrounded by people, every face white as far as I can tell; no one I recognize, although in the dream's internal logic, I probably had some vague idea of who they were generally, if not personally. 

We're all in an old single-story building whose latest renovations date maybe to the '70s. One big room with a lowish ceiling, old wooden plank floor, wooden support posts and beams, a scaled window on the far side and a slight dais in the center. Facing it, I'm off to the right side at the front edge of the crowd, all of whom are seated or kneeling while a pompous white guy declaims from his seat on the dais. I'm already ready to leave, and then some. It appears to be the kind of meeting room you'd find a a retreat in a national or state park or forest reserve, and I get the impression this is some retro-hippie "get in touch with the wilderness" kind of thing. No wonder I want out.

Declaiming dude announces casually that they're going to be letting one of "them" come out, without specifying what "them" actually means. And then there's no warning; suddenly, someone has opened a door around the back wall where all that's visible is the glow of harsh overhead lighting, and out comes a cat, bounding directly toward the crowd.

And by cat, I mean of the large and wild variety.

Only it's not bounding toward the crowd; it's bounding, in a half-pouncing, half-loping stride, toward me.

It's so utterly negligent and careless on the part of our hosts, and so imposing, that everyone in the room gasps. Except me; I don't even have time to be afraid. The cat comes straight up to my left side where I'm kneeling, joints aching, and puts its muzzle up to my left ear and the side of my head. I can feel its breath on hair, its whiskers brush my skin. It sniffs me for a short moment.

It licks me repeatedly on the ear, then turns and saunters out of the room.

I have no idea what to make of it.

Of course, yesterday was visited by a couple of different nightmares, both involving loss of very different kinds. One wears a human face, and breaks my heart. 

The other is the kind of theft that fills me with righteous fury: exploitation, appropriation, all for racist purposes and with racist effect, and stealing directly from Wings and me, from other Natives, and symbolically from every single Indian who has ever lived (to say nothing of other cultures, but the most egregious were those taken from ours).

I have not been as angry as I was last night in . . . I actually don't remember when. The kind of anger that I almost never experience, the kind that is unhealthy, for me. And it's not the act of the theft itself, in the abstract, that fans the flames; it's what it means, what it represents, and with what sick, twisted poison it forcibly associates us without our consent.

I've had a migraine for days, and today was no exception. Add to that the lack of sleep last night, the effects of yesterday's sorrow and anger, and it has made today something to be gotten through, not lived.

I don't like people who steal, use, exploit. I don't tolerate misuse and abuse of others. And I'm seeing frankly far too much of that in recent weeks. In venues where no one would expect it, at the expense of some in no position to recognize what is being taken from them, much less to fight back.

Yes, this is the stuff of my nightmares. But my eyes are wide open. I see.

I also don't forget.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

  

"Who's 'we,' white man?"

Image credit:  Mother Jones Magazine

So Matthew McConaughey, alleged hearthrob and celebrity flake extraordinaire, doesn't want the Washington R[acists] NFL team to have to change its name.

It’s not going to hurt me. It’s just….I love the emblem. I dig it. It gives me a little fire and some oomph. But now that it’s in the court of public opinion, it’s going to change. I wish it wouldn’t, but it will.

"Fire," huh?  And "oomph?"  What, exactly, is that, Matt?  Hey, I can call you Matt, right?  Even though I've never once seen you use it yourself, it's all good, right, because lots of guys named Matthew have let people call them that since, oh, at least the last 2,000 or so years, probably, and besides, I'm doing it to honor you.  Really.

Gah.

It gets better. And by "better," I mean ridiculous, natch:

Man, it’s twofold. What interests me is how quickly it got pushed into the social consciousness. We were all fine with it since the 1930s, and all of a sudden we go, “No, gotta change it”? It seems like when the first levee breaks, everybody gets on board. I know a lot of Native Americans don’t have a problem with it, but they’re not going to say, “No, we really want the name.” That’s not how they’re going to use their pulpit. It’s like my feeling about gun control: “I get it. You have the right to have guns. But look, let’s forget that right. Let’s forget the pleasure you get safely on your range, because it’s in the wrong hands in other places [emphasis added].

"WE were all fine with it?" Who's "WE," white man? 

Yeah, no. You're reading from a seriously wrong script, dude.

A Slur for Sacred Ground

Yosemite National ParkPhoto credit:  National Park Service

It's summer, which means it's hiking and campaign season. It's also national parks season.

Did you know that one of the nation's most beloved is named with a slur? It is, of course, manifestly stolen ground. That goes almost without saying. But few know how it came to be: to be stolen; to be claimed as community property in the name of the U.S. Government to be given a "new" name, with a complete absence of irony, that was nothing more than old epithet given new voice. 

My friend rb137 has been to this place, up close and personal. She knows it well. And she knows its history equally well. She's written about it here, and I'd like you to go and take a look.

There'll be a lot in her piece that you didn't know. There's a lot I didn't know. But I know now, and as I read her piece, I felt yet another little crack erupt across my heart, a new abrasion form in my soul. Because while she confines her words to what is well-established, she summons the spirit of what lies beneath. 

I know what lies beneath; our peoples have lived it — and died for it — for half a millennium now.

So go. Read. And then carry the story with you, when you visit, when you talk with others about this bit of national "hallowed ground." Because it's "hallowed" in ways that almost no one remembers, and that no one should ever be allowed to forget.

Sugar Shock

A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby
by Kara Walker
Image credit Time Out New York

It's an old phrase common in my diabetes-riddled family, generally misused to refer to an insulin reaction [real "sugar shock" is when your blood sugar skyrockets to dangerous levels, but it's become colloquially misapplied to refer to hypoglycemic shock, when your blood sugar drops precipitously].

This morning, it's a kick in the gut.

Go read my Spirit Sister's post, here, about the brilliant Kara Walker's new installation at the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn.

My emotions this morning are whirling, roiling ball of memory and happiness and nausea and disgust all lodged in my gut, like that of a six-year-old's Halloween hangover on November first. But this won't pass with a few hours' time.

We have a love/hate relationship with sugar in this household anyway. Indians and diabetics — what could possibly go wrong? As it happens, we have no refined sugar in the house, and never do; we use raw sugar, maple sugar when we can get it, occasionally brown sugar, or more often, agave syrup. Much healthier. 

We now keep molasses on hand for the horses as needed, but I confess to occasionally licking it off my fingers. Molasses, for me, is one of those substances braided into my memory: One of the things we could afford in childhood, even at times when refined sugar was out of reach; something used occasionally on those rare celebratory days when my mother made pancakes; the ingredient that made my sister's molasses cookies, which she so dearly loved, so savory-sweet; the association with the horses of our childhood. The taste, the smell, the texture: like maple sugar and maple syrup, for me, molasses, at the most limbic level, is a mix of warm, safe, happy sensations.

And then came adulthood, and college, and learning about the canefields. More colonialism and capitalism, likewise braided tightly together, this time into a lash with which to torture and torment human beings who were seen not merely as not fully human, but as mere things, tools to be used in an agricultural assembly line.

Even then, I didn't get anything approaching the real story, but I got enough of it to know that sugar in any form wasn't quite as sweet anymore.

Interesting, innit? For so long, the apex of sugar, the type most sought-after, was refined sugar. White sugar. Just as, for the dominant culture (and for our own peoples far too much of the time, being immersed as they were, dipped and coated like candy, in the racism that has been wholly a part of that culture since before the country was "founded"), whiteness was the apex, the goal, the brass ring to be reached, the self-actualization of the entire society.

And now, we've come to learn just how toxic, how much of a killer, refined white sugar is to the human body. All human bodies.

So much like the sickeningly-sweet false promises of assimilation.

Some weeks ago, on a trip to the local organic grocery, I picked up another bottle of molasses for the horses. Keep in mind that this is the "liberal" grocery in this "liberal" town. I was in a hurry, didn't feel like digging my reading glasses out of my bag, and could read the price-points on the shelf just fine. One brand was substantially less expensive than the other two, and so I grabbed it and continued shopping.

Sometime later, Wings said to me, "Why did you buy molasses that has "Plantation" as a brand name?"

Whaaaa . . . ?

I went to check. Sure enough, there at the top of the label, in stylized block letters:  "PLANTATION." As though this is somehow a good thing.

On the next trip to the grocery store, we got a different brand. Wasteful as it seems, we threw out the old bottle. There wasn't much left anyway, and it's the sort of thing you can't un-know, nor un-see every time you look at it.

And Wings is complaining to the store's management.

More on #NotYourRedskin

Yesterday's story turned into a day-long discussion among my peeps on Facebook. In at least one case, one of my friends seized the opportunity to push her own Facebook friends to reevaluate their positions, and as she recounted to me the turns their discussion took, it pushed me to expand on my own thinking and help her add some rhetorical weapons to her arsenal.

One thing I need to make clear at the outset, though: For us (for any marginalized population dealing with the fact and fallout of that marginalization), this is not generally something that we need to "clarify" in our minds, to "rethink" or "reevaluate." We don't need to consider the "arguments" that opponents continually insist that we do, as though their arguments are the magic bullet that will logically invalidate everything with think. You know why?

We've heard them all already.

Yes, ALL. I have yet to encounter an argument that opposes my own anti-racism (or anti-[other]ism) positions that I have not already heard many times over, in every conceivable iteration; that I have not already considered many times over, at length, and in so doing affording them much more legitimacy than they usually deserve; that I have not already used on myself many times over in playing devil's advocate specifically to sharpen and refine my own thinking. 

Also, we live with this. Every single minute of every single hour of every single day. So, you know, we come at these issues from not merely a sanitized academic perspective, devoid of real-world experience, but also down-and-dirty in-the-trenches immersion in the dynamics and their practical effects.

So I've had plenty of opportunity over the decades to reach my conclusions, thanks.

But it's one of those dynamics that I want to discuss here — one that dredged itself up from the depths of my memory during yesterday's discussions. It did not involve anti-Indian racism, but anti-Black racism. But that is, I think, even better for purposes of illustrating this particular point: Perhaps non-Indians who read it will gain a deeper understanding of why, no matter what anyone says, that slur does not honor us.

It's just a little vignette, no more than five minutes out of one day in my life many years ago. It involved two friends, a Black man and a white woman. (Tangentially, it also involved two other women, myself and another friend, both of us with similar racial backgrounds in different proportions; I identify first as Indian, she identifies first as Black. Our immediate role in this little scene was simply that of "witness," but it stuck with both of us.) 

The white woman was one of those who liked to bestow nicknames. She considered her purpose in doing so to be lighthearted and funny, but it really wasn't. As we would eventually come to learn, it was part and parcel of who she was: someone immersed in the bullying tactics and behaviors so prized by the dominant culture, herself victimized by those same tactics expressed in different ways, but so thoroughly immersed in that aspect of the cultural zeitgeist that she felt not merely justified in extending that behavior to others but wanted to be enabled and encouraged in it.

One of her favorites involved use of the term "Boy." It was an equal-opportunity nickname, on the surface; our circle included people of every race, multiple spiritual traditions, and members of the LGBTQI community. For example, one of the [white] guys who was known for liking to drink — a lot — was given the nickname "Party Boy." 

On this day, she informed one of the Black men in our circle that his name was [Whatever] Boy; I can't remember the actual name, other than the use of the word "Boy" in it. The other part, as will become obvious, was irrelevant. His reaction was immediate and unmistakable: offended, yes, but for anyone with an ounce of awareness, the hurt in his eyes was also obvious. Nonetheless, he simply said politely, "No. Please don't call me that, under any circumstances." 

So what was the proper response here?  Oh, that's an easy one, because there is only one. In such a situation, you apologize and concede. Even a toddler understands that there is no reason to hurt someone just because you can.

So did she? Of course not.

No, she kept insisting on the right to call him "[X] Boy," whether he liked it or not, "because [she] wasn't being racist." She insisted that her intent was all that mattered, and since she called all the guys some version of "Boy," irrespective of their race, it was perfectly okay for her to call him that, too.

After being told by more than one person present that it is by definition racist for a white person to call a Black man "boy," she continued to insist that she would still call him that. She even began to mount her High Horse of White Victimhood, the tired old excuse of "How dare you call me a racist; I don't have a racist bone in my body!"

And thus ended the friendship. 

In her mind, she made it about a rhetorical tug-of-war over "rights": her "right" to inflict a name (unasked and unwanted, mind you) on a person who not only did not want it, but was profoundly hurt by it — and to continue to inflict it, simply because she wanted to.

In his mind (and in actuality) she was insisting on the "right" to conjure up in his psyche a collection of images, feelings, and memories, both personal and ancestral: Every single time a white person had called into question, disrespected, belittled and scorned his identity as a Black person, his masculinity as a Black man, his very humanity as an individual. He's African American; does his family tree include men and women held as slaves? It's entirely likely. He lived in the allegedly post-Jim Crow South; does his family history include lynchings? Also entirely possible. Certainly, his history — his own personal history, that of his blood family, that of his ancestors — comprises all of the savagery and violence and humiliation the dominant culture inflicted, with no small amount of glee, on Black people generally and Black men specifically. And as a Black man, he lives daily with the microaggressions that our culture reserves specifically for him.

So every time he hears the word "Boy," I have no doubt that somewhere deep inside, he flinches. His adrenaline levels spike, along with his blood pressure. He sees, feels, the ghosts of the whip and the chain and the rope, and their diluted contemporary equivalent, the unwarranted stop, the frisk, the handcuffs, the bars. 

And that's very much like what WE see, hear, and feel every time someone uses the word "reds***" (and for us women, "s****"). We see the ghosts of our ancestors, massacred, raped, tortured, forcibly marched, interned in camps, lynched, scalped, skinned. We see their body parts being traded for bounties and used for leggings by the same U.S. Cavalry who slaughtered them. We see their genitals being torn off and appropriated as sacrilegious "medicine bags." We see the blankets. We see the genocidal mania that did its best to exterminate our peoples. Closer to home in time, we see the threats of lynching of our own immediate ancestors. We see the daily grinding humiliations: "Red n*****" as an appellation. Forced to step off the sidewalk to defer to a white person. "No Indians or dogs allowed" signs. A little boy, forced to sit in his first-grade classroom, urine streaming down his legs while white classmates jeered, because a racist teacher would not let him get up and use the bathroom.

It's the savageries, large and small. They are real. And they are embodied in our memories, they take modern form, in the word "reds***."

Please stop defending the indefensible.

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

Not all tricksters are simply coyotes. Some are just bad people.

Yes, this is going to be oblique. No, I'm not going to elaborate further. All the clues are there, and have been for days now, and I've already done everyone's due diligence for them and brought it up on FB. You want specifics, you'll have to do a little due diligence of your own (which, I might add, everyone already should have done before countenancing theft of intellectual property — in one case, from an actual Indian — vicious personal attacks and ugly bigotry).

Being an ally to people of color does not mean excusing truly indefensible behavior. In fact, there comes a point when doing so crosses the line into paternalism, to the point of infantilizing the person in question.

It's even more reprehensible when it's done to support a person who in all likelihood is not a person of color at all.  Especially when five minutes' worth of simple, basic research would have turned up exactly what I'm talking about. When a person cites a pretty-thoroughly-debunked fraud, and then further buttresses his own bad behavior by announcing that he grew up with that fraud in one location despite the debunking pretty convincingly showing that said fraud grew up elsewhere (hint: nowhere near the rez in question, and with not only no ties to it but no blood), and when the person allegedly posting from said rez elsewhere says that he's living in another state entirely, well, I'm not convinced that any of you should be defending this crap. And I wrote about this two days ago, and yet I learn that people are still defending this. Enough already.

Why am I always the one who has to point this shit out?

Yes, this puts me in a seriously bad mood.

#NotyourSHEEP, Christina.

This is racism.

It is cultural appropriation — in other words, theft.

It is redface — in other words, a minstrel show.

It does not honor, esteem, dignify, or respect us in any way.

And once you've been told, by the very people whose ancestors, cultures, histories, and very lives you dishonor, that it doesn't — more, that it insults us and steals from us —and you continue to do it, then it becomes no longer the racism of ignorance, but the much more toxic racism of deliberate intent.

Christina Fallin, this is your mirror. Like what you see? Because for all your superficial long-haired clear-skinned beauty, from where I sit, your reflection is looking pretty damn ugly.

A warbonnet? Really? Perhaps you should read what about what a warbonnet actually signifies. Even if you were Indian, you'd have no right to wear one. But because you're not, your wearing of it becomes sacrilege.

A "war dance?" Really? Again, perhaps you need to read some actual history. Including, say, the actual history of the state you call home, the state that loves to tout itself as "Indian Country." The "Indian Wars" were nothing for you to trivialize so offensively. They were nothing less than a structured, systematic campaign of genocide. 

Regalia and a shawl? Really? More redface. More minstrelsy. More mockery.

"SHEEP?" Really? The only thing remotely resembling "sheep" that I see in this entire scenario are the racists who mindlessly mouth the anti-Native slurs that you spoon-feed them, and who flip off and otherwise insult actual Indians at your urging. Of course, I can't really call them sheep, because I've never known an actual sheep to be so lacking in integrity.

Your mother thinks this is "an old story." Oh, yes, indeed it is, but not in the way she means. This particular chapter of it, of course, is only a day and a half old as of this writing. But the book itself is indeed an old, old story, one going back more than half a millennium, and one we've managed to survive despite the likes of you and her and all of your fellow travelers. And since your mother has more than adequately demonstrated her anti-Indian bias before, I'm not at all surprised, either at her own attitude or at the fact that she raised to putative adulthood a child with an attitude like yours.

No matter. It's not as though we'll be silent. We know, and we will not hesitate to remind you:

We are #notyourmascot. We are #notyourminstrel. We are #notyourTontoorTigerLilyorPocahontas. We are #notyourredskin.

And we are not going to let you take what is ours and desecrate it.

Contact Governor Mary Fallin:

Oklahoma State Capitol
2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Room 212
Oklahoma City, OK 73105
Local: (405) 521-2342
Fax: (405) 521-3353 

Tulsa Office of Governor Mary Fallin and Native American Affairs Liaison440 S. Houston Ave., Suite 606
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74127
Phone (405)522-8861
Fax (918) 581-2835

Boycott "Pink Pony" (Christina Fallin's band) and let them know why.

Boycott enabler Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips and let them know why.

Boycott Blackwatch Studios and let them know why. Warning: Studio Web site autoplays. And, no, I don't care that they allowed protestors to be present; they had no business booking a racist minstrel show, and certainly not for an Indian venue.

Boycott the Norman Music Festival and let them know why.

Contact and boycott Chickasaw-owned and -operated Riverwind Casino until it makes this right.




Copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.