Comment if you want in. If you're here to complain or inquire about feminist_rage or any other community I mod/participate in, e-mail me.

Also!

kiss for the sake of kissing. it's nice.

I'm not online as much as I used to be and, therefore, I just can't keep up with everything anymore. So. I went on a big defriending spree - friends, communities, and feeds - to clean things up. Mostly, it was either a "let's be real, we don't really interact" thing or an interests diverging thing.

Just so ya'll know. And, you know, every day is defriending amnesty over here. I'd be sad, maybe, but it sucks to have that person who you feel BAD about defriending. Don't let me be that girl!

So, as many of you know, my good friend magnificentmndi's son has been undergoing treatment for Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia (JMML). Everything in their world changed in February and it's about to change again. Gregory is undergoing a bone marrow transplant tomorrow morning, a procedure that could save his life.

Bone marrow donors are too few and far between. Please, if you're not registered to be a donor, sign up. It takes very little to change everything for someone else.

Register to be a bone marrow donor, free for the first 46,000 registrants between June 8 and June 22.

Sometimes, in conversations about race, I wonder what is going through people's HEADS. I mean, I'm white. I get assloads of white privilege every day and in every way. And I fuck up. TRUST me, I fuck up bad sometimes and I feel like an idiot and people call me on it and I apologize and I try to learn.

And then I see shit like Patricia Wrede's Thirteenth Child, a book that takes the premise of an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

No people. Fully erasing the genocide and slavery that America was built on, but no. No, there are ANIMALS. AND THEY'RE MAGICAL. AND DANGEROUS.

So let me get this straight. To begin with, there is a complete erasure of indigenous peoples in North America - they're simply gone. It's certainly possible (even likely) that the author did not know about or intend to fall into it, but this furthers a longstanding pattern of invisibility, silencing, othering, and ignoring of indigenous peoples in North America.

Because, largely, Americans act as if our country has no history before Christopher Columbus. We act as if the beginning point of this landmass, of "our people" starts when white people landed, when white people killed, when white people destroyed. Sure, a part of the reason we do it is because we're trained that way and part of the reason we're trained that way is because of racial and cultural shame about the widespread genocide that built this country.

So we kill entire tribes, decimate families. We take lands. We treat indigenous people like animals for most of our country's history. We lie, we cheat, we steal. We give them smallpox blankets.

And then we make them invisible. Children in many large cities may never see a person who is a tribal member or an American Indian. Most American children will never know the name or anything about a tribe that is not represented in a bad mainstream movie. They will not know about the American Indian Movement and Leonard Peltier, they will not know about Chief Cecilla Fire Thunder and the fight for reproductive freedom on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

They won't know anything about native people in our country except a deafening silence of information that is offset largely only by factually-incorrect Disney movies (I'm look at you, Pocahontas) and mainstream movies and the occasional paragraph in their history books.

An entire book of that furthers the invisibility of indigenous people, one where Europeans are the first peoples, is a premise that continues that silencing. It's made worse, of course, by allowing the "presence" of the "magical Indian" through the dangerous, magical animals - the same things that Europeans originally thought of many of the tribes they encountered.

I don't care how well it's written, this whole premise is gross. And I'm disappointed in Tor for publishing it at all.

As soon as I wrote, that I bet about half of your eyes glazed over.

But it's going to be short! I do have a DW account and I'm trying to think about how I might want to change my journaling experiences. So. A poll!

Poll #1394207 DW
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Are you thinking about/using Dreamwidth?

Why do you read my journal? (There are no wrong answers)

Why else?

If you AREN'T planning on creating a Dreamwidth account, would you use an OpenID account to access locked posts at that site if they weren't crossposted here?

If you are using Dreamwidth, are you reading on LJ or DW?

If you are using DW, what is your username there?

Okay, so my girl wrote this book, right? And you should all order it, because it came out TODAY and she's amazing, so therefore, it will be amazing.

It is simple mathematics. Order Salt and Silver (or here, at Amazon.)

Also, since I'm already ordering THAT, I'm thinking ... why not order an LSAT prep book? Because, um. Maybe I'll take the LSATs this year? I don't know!

Poll #1391616 Law Skool
Open to: Friends, detailed results viewable to: Friends

Should Krista take the LSATs?

Did you attend law school or take the LSATs?

Did youlike law school?

Have I lost my mind by considering law school?

Piece of advice?

I've read a lot of Daphne's stuff in the last few years, but this poem remains memorable to me. Maybe it's because I've never seen her live - but her voice makes this real, makes it matter more to me.

I wish I knew the title. I've looked a lot and cannot find it.

(Warnings for possible sexual assault triggers)

Daphne Gottlieb in Big Sur, California - 7/15/00 from Slam America

I just realized that (for a change), I've been pretty good at tracking my books read so far this year in my GoodReads account. I've even been trying to put little reviews in there.

Why anyone would care about my reviews, I have no idea. But I know that I read other people's, so.

So I guess I'll start crossposting them when I write them.

25. As Cool As I Am, Peter Fromm
Sad. Surprisingly sad. There was something really aching about all of this. I rarely read female main characters (I would hesitate to call Lucy a protagonist) written by men - they're generally awful. But this book was set in the town that my grandparents live in, the town 30 miles from where I spent my summers and where my parents grew up. And there are painfully few contemporary books set in Montana.

Pete's narrative voice of Lucy makes a lot of sense to me as a girl that grew up lonely and weird in a small town in Montana. I didn't have Lucy's absentee parents (her father physically gone, her mother emotionally), but I did have the Weird Kid thing. It makes me wonder what my choices would have been if I'd had parents who were less involved in my life and if I were more traditionally pretty.

A pretty damn good book. Flawed in places and I was bothered by how a sexual assault in the book was dealt with, but I have to remember that the narrator is an unreliable narrator. She isn't doing What Is Right or being an example, she's just a fucked up kid trying to figure things out.

Grade: B

There is not a lot of me that is not sarcastic or jaded.

But that part of me that's left over? Loves this.


BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

I am actually in awe of Ely Kim. There is something so joyful about this video, something so clearly celebrating what makes him happy, what makes him *him*. Like unprolific mentioned in hir link to this video, it is a celebration of identity, a moment where this man is exactly who he is and who he wants to be. And he shares it with us by throwing himself around and dancing his ass off and, seriously, I love this video.

Thank you, Ely Kim.

Okay. I am not great at admitting when I don't understand something - I'm terrible at it, actually. But I'm working on that.

And, honestly, I don't know that I totally understand the impact of the economic stimulus bill that Obama signed. I don't understand how it's going to work, how it should actually improve the economy (I'm really not an economist).

And wouldn't the combination of this stimulus bill along with the bailouts lead to massive inflation, like ... Germany, post-WWI style? Or not?

If anyone has some sort of understanding of this, I'd appreciate it, not only for me, but because I have students asking all the time and I really don't know what to say beyond what I read in the NY Times.

These are some ruinations for 14valentines for [Day 4] Reproductive Rights and Motherhood.

I've been pro-choice since I could remember, been aware of reproduction as a femnist issue since long before I really knew what a feminist was or that I might be one.

It took me longer, however, to take that beyond abortion.

See, the thing is? I can't have children, almost definitely can't give birth. So I have messy, painful, awful miscarriages.

You don't have to feel sorry for me. I've always known that I probably couldn't have kids, so the only thing that really sucked about it is that the miscarriages were painful.

So, for me, in a personal way? Abortion was a way to avoid those miscarriages, as well as the ability to control giving birth, which I never really wanted to do. So, beyond that I thought that all women should have access to safe, legal, affordable abortion with no shame, it was almost definitely a personal issue.

( But reproductive freedom has to be about more than that )
Reproductive freedom is about the rights of women of color and poor women and women in the global south to have the right to know that they will not be forced, coerced, tricked, or financially railroaded into sterilization.

At the most basic of all levels, reproductive rights are our rights to be people, with full bodily integrity, and the right to make our own decisions.

It should be simple, right?

Honestly, I never know how to do this. Because it's always going to be misinterpreted by half the world that cares, embraced by a quarter of it, ignored by three-quarters of it (yes, that is one and a half) and ignored by 99% of my flist.

But still. I have to weigh in on the bandflesh stuff going on, on the idea of breaking of friendslock, of anonymous communities, and of community members regulating the boundaries of their communities.

But the thing is? I made my break with Mean Girls two clean years ago. I decided that the activities of my friends did, in fact, reflect upon me, upon my heart, upon who I was as a person. And I can't just be silent here, as much as it would make my life easier.
( Read more... )

So don't tell me that people can't be held responsible for the activities they allow. Unfortunately, silence is complicity. And it makes me sad to see how complicit people are with just full-on cruelty.

It's not a personal condemnation. But it is, I cannot lie, it is a deep-seeded discomfort with a community that many of you have joined.

So. Do with that what you may. I don't know. But at the end of the day, my silence is complicity, too. And I can't hang with that.

There are times that people make me smile. There are times that people make me cry.

The folks giving money so that my kids can have new underwear, bras, and socks? Are making me do both.

So thanks to all of you that could give, those that spread the word, and to all of you that at least look the teenagers who ask you for your spare change in the eye when they're talking to you. Not everybody knows that they are people, but ya'll seem to.

Some days, I think the internet has done more for these kids in the last year (gaming books, mp3 players, new underwear) than most of society has ever bothered to do for them.

Oh, also? I did that thing, the Love Meme. I could use some smiles, no lie.

all you need is love ♥

I've found a couple of yours, but if you do it, could you let me know where? Rad.

So hey.

Y'all know that I attended a Jesuit university for undergrad. Me, the commie, radical, baby-killer VOLUNTARILY entered into a private Jesuit university.

People often wondered why. Did I grow up Catholic, maybe?

Nope. Not even a little bit.

I wasn't drawn to Gonzaga because of faith, but rather because of the Jesuit's commitment to a well-rounded liberal arts education and because of their commitment to social justice. I figured that the matches on those fronts would more than make up for any residual discomfort I might have with being a part of a school that was founded and run on religious principles that I didn't share.
( Read more... )

Women in our Church are telling us that God is calling them to the priesthood. Who are we, as men, to say to women, “Our call is valid, but yours is not.” Who are we to tamper with God’s call?

Sexism, like racism, is a sin. And no matter how hard or how long we may try to justify discrimination, in the end, it is always immoral ...

Silence is the voice of complicity. Therefore, I call on all Catholics, fellow priests, bishops, Pope Benedict XVI and all Church leaders at the Vatican, to speak loudly on this grave injustice of excluding women from the priesthood.

I'm still kind of amazed that anyone is even remotely surprised that Prop 8 passed in California. I'm not dismissing the hurt and harm that it puts out to people in California, hell to queer folk and allies all over the U.S.

But, c'mon. Every time. Every time something comes up to deny queer people basic rights, especially when those rights have to do with our relationships, they pass. They always pass and it doesn't matter if it's in blue California or red Montana, they always pass.

And instead of looking at a lot of problems that could be connected to that truth - that maybe queer organizing is particularly organized or maybe that we do live in a country where queer people Yes We Can't or even looking deeply into the LGBTQ "community"'s activism as overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly middle-class, and overwhelmingly politically middle-of-the-road (especially when it comes to marriage rights), people like Dan Savage are going to step down to actually blaming it on the brown people?

REALLY?

Wait, why am I surprised?

Black and African-American people are, after all, the queer community's favorite correlation in the U.S., throwing Civil Rights rhetoric all over the place, singing "We Shall Overcome" at the drop of a hat, comparing things to lynching and school integration like it's nothing.

But the minute we feel threatened? That legislation doesn't go our way, that we are again denied human rights? All black people, all people of color in general (and lets talk later about how not all POC are black, queerfolk, okay?), are conservative, their churches made them do it, they're not our allies.

Wrong.

We have no RIGHT to expect allies where we have rarely reached out, when the number of queer people deeply involved in prison reform or immigration issues is negligible. We have even less right to hope for support from those activists whose work you are dismissing, whose identities collide (because, believe it or not, THERE ARE QUEER BLACK FOLK), who we leave out in the cold all the time.

But more than everything?

PROP 8 DIDN'T PASS BECAUSE OF BLACK PEOPLE. 7 white people voted for it for every 1 black person that did.

So, shut up, Dan Savage. I never did like your sexist, fat-phobic ass. And now you've turned on this racist dime with your hatemongering? No. I'm done with you. Get off my side, I don't want you here.

In other post news: Read slit's brilliant open letter to white activists. It's much smarter than mine.

Hey, ya'll -

So I got the mp3 players last night and I'm trying to pre-load some of the with music I know the kids like. HOWEVER, I don't necessarily have all of it.

I just found my external harddrive (YES) and a taking it in with me to the shelter. So if you have ANY music that you think I could use for the kids, especially if it's already uploaded somewhere, I would appreciate it.

I'm particularly low on hip-hop that isn't kind of alternative-y hip-hop (ie; the stuff you'd see on BET or MTV) and on electronica.

I also don't have really much of anything in the soft rock/country vein. I don't know if it'll be needed, but if you have it, throw it my way.

THANK YOU!

A couple of months ago, I had this idea. I thought "hey, you know what sucks? My kids at the shelter don't have access to mp3 players, really to music in general."

So, then ... I asked the internet if they would help me get them some.

You did. As always, as always ALWAYS happens, the love and the random $5 or $20 or $100 from people all over the world means that something amazing happens.

Today, the last shipment of mp3 players came and it means that we have players, we have batteries, we have extras to give to other kids.

So thank you. Thank you from me and thank you SO much from the kids who will have a minute, ten minutes, an hour of quiet because of you.

Thank you.

I've stayed pretty quiet around the subject of the upcoming US Presidential election. It's not because I don't care - I always care. I care about school board elections, about propositions in and out of my state, about state legislators.

But the way that I care, frankly, isn't very popular. And that doesn't keep me from talking about it, but it gets old to argue over and over again about the same shit on the internet.

That said: Please, if you are of voting age and legally allowed to vote in the US, vote. Please take a minute and think about who you chose, please research your options.

I know a lot of people are talking about knowing your rights when voting and that is awesome. We all need to know what we can expect, what we deserve in that voting booth.

But what about those people who aren't allowed in there anymore?

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about voting rights and how they are abused and rescinded for felons (since that phone call, vagal_nerve.

Did you know that 46 US states and the District of Columbia deny the right to vote to all convicted adults in prison, regardless of their crime? 32 states disenfranchise felons on parole, 29 deny the right to vote to those on probation.

And, due to laws that might actually be unique in the WORLD, 14 states disallow voting even ex-offenders who have fully served their sentences and completed all requirements of their service (including paying all fees associated with their trials). They're just fucked, barred for life.

Sounds bad, right?

It gets worse.

5 million Americans are expected to be banned from voting because of a felony conviction in the 2008 elections.

According to the Human Rights Watch, more than 1.9 million of those will be black men. That 1.9 million represents more than 13% of the total population of adult black men and more than 1/3 of the total number of adults banned from voting.

According to the HRW, as of 1998, ten states disenfranchise more than one in five adult black men; in seven of these states, one in four black men is permanently disenfranchised.

Given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men will be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states with the most restrictive voting laws, 40 percent of African American men are likely to be permanently disenfranchised.

Think about that when you vote or worse, when you chose not to.

OKAY.

So I'm trying to remember the name of this fiction book that I read in ... probably middle school? So it was probably YA, though who knows?

Students in a high school (?) social sciences class are allowed to take part in what I think was called "The Color Game". Each of them was assigned/picked randomly a colored scarf - the only thing that I remember is that Blues were the elite class. Everything in the class, from access to class money (which could buy free periods, blah blah) to first pick of books, was assigned by your color class.

But then things break down in really interesting ways and the colors of their scarves affect the way they interact with each other outside of class.

I remember thinking (AT TWELVE OR WHATEVER) that it was a really interesting book and said interesting shit about oppression, especially since the teacher assigned a lot of the Blue scarves to students of color.

Right. Anyone know what the hell I'm talking about?