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.

It isn't about you.

Photo copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.

After the last few days, I'm starting feel as burned and broken — as dead — as those limbs.

This happened when the Sandusky story broke, and apparently, it's something we need to work through again and again and again. And then again.

Someday maybe I'll feel more up to writing about my own experiences.

For now, I've spent the last several days haunted and taunted by the images of my own past. Not even the basic sexism and discrimination, oh, no. This is a whole other depth. Reliving — refeeling — the touches and pinches and gropes and bites and things shoved into places where they're not welcome and not wanted. Memories as tactile physical sensations. 

And the blame, always the blame. It must be your fault. You had no business being out at night. Why are you wearing that skirt? Well, you must have done something to lead him on. You're a tease. You're a bitch. You're a slut. You're a whore. You asked for it.

Day in, day out. Every day, world without end, forever and ever, amen.

So you'll understand if I'm really not interested in tolerating hijacks and derailments. For me, for any of my sisters.

Because it's not about you.

This time, for fucking ONCE, it's about US.

#YesALLWomen.

Watery Trading Posts, Where the "Trade" Is in Indian Women

Photo copyright Wings, 2013. 2014;
all rights reserved.

Author's Note: This piece first appeared as the second of a two-part series at Daily Kos on September 8, 2013, as part of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION diary series there. Since this is Women's History Month, and since indigenous women remain invisible to the dominant culture except as cartoon characters and subjects for appropriation, it seemed an apt time to run them again. What follows is Part II; Part I appeared here yesterday.

In Part I, I wrote about the escalating rates of rape and other violence inflicted on Native women in and around the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — a deadly byproduct of the new colonial invasion of Indian land courtesy of the fracking companies drilling in the Bakken oil shale reserve. Last Monday, I posted a companion piece in last week's edition of "New Day: This Week In American Indian News.", noting that it would be expanded into a full-length diary today, covering the story of the colonialist trafficking in the bodies and spirits of indigenous women in the shipping lanes separating the U.S. and Canada.  

As I said last time:

This series is, among other things, about the intersectionality of race and gender in this country's culture, both historical and contemporary.

Intersectionality is simply a fact of being, of existence, for women of color. Every moment of our lives is lived at a crossroads.

Sometimes, the four roads don't lead outward, but rather, inward — toward a vortex of interrelated and competing risks, benefits, calculations, interests, slings and arrows and aggressions micro and macro and everything in between.

Today, I'm going to talk about four very specific roads:

Objectifying. Commodifying. Targeting. Trafficking.

It's spectrum and linear progression, crossroads and vortex.

It's destroying indigenous women's lives.

And today, these watery crossroads meet at a very specific vortex: a whirlpool of colonialist sexual violence in the boundary waters of the Great Lakes.

Author's Note: At the outset, readers need to be aware of the content of this piece. Much of what follows deals with stories of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence and human trafficking. If any of these issues presents a trigger for you, you may not wish to read further.

Of course, this one is also an old, old story, and even in its latest incarnation, it's been around for several years now. Unfortunately, it's been mostly women who have done the reporting of it so far, particularly Native women. Which means, of course, that it's gotten virtually no attention in the mainstream.

Much as I loathe Bill Maher's casual racism and sexism, his new multimedia project, VICE, has the capacity to change that: A white man is reporting this story now, for an "edgy" media outlet founded and run by another, much more famous white man. The CBC has also now picked up the story. So I'm grabbing this opportunity.

For what?

To bring attention to the fact that our women, our girls — our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our very selves — are being sold into the sexual slavery of human trafficking. Right here. In the U.S. and Canada. In the boundary waters separating the two countries, just as they are in the filthy, gritty oilfield towns of the Northern Plains.

Indian women are being raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, and worse — on a daily basis, and in an organized way.

And it has to stop.