PETA Dresses Up As KKK
Does this outfit remind you of anything? PETA will stop at nothing to push its agenda no matter who it marginalizes, no matter who it hurts.
“Crowds gawked at a table set up outside Madison Square Garden on Monday afternoon, where People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was protesting the start of the Westminster Kennel Club show. PETA contends that the American Kennel Club promotes pure-breeding of dogs that is harmful to their health.
“Welcome AKC Members,” read a banner hanging from the table — with AKC crossed out and KKK written above it. Two PETA protesters dressed as Ku Klux Klan members, while other volunteers handed out brochures that read: “The KKK and the AKC: BFF?”
“Obviously it’s an uncomfortable comparison,” PETA spokesman Michael McGraw said.
But the AKC is trying to create a “master race,” he added. “It’s a very apt comparison.”
The amount of insensitivity it takes to dress up like the KKK and attempt to draw a link between the breeding of animals to the terror that blacks have lived with for generations can only be described as the audacity of whiteness. It mattered not to these ignorant over privileged fools, that seeing people dressed like this in a public place could be terribly triggering to POC.
This is not going to be the kind of post were I try to make a larger connection to social injustices faced by people of colour. The mock KKK uniform that they are wearing stands for itself. Human Beings are also animals and continually performing wilder and wilder stunts in which the most vulnerable members of society are targeted could hardly be called ethical.
The KKK is a terrorist organization. It has murdered, stalked, raped, abused and committed so many violations against humanity that I could not possibly list them. This is what PETA wants to be associated with. In some ways they are not far off the mark because they are an organization that is built on nothing other than hatred. Their actions reveal a hatred of POC, women, and transgendered people.
PETA has been called out time and time again on their behaviour but they are so blinded by their various privileges that they cannot or will not see the damage that their actions cause.
I can barely think rationally because I am so fucking incensed. Seriously FUCK YOU PETA. Never will I contribute a single dollar to your cause. I believe in preventing cruelty against animals but not at the cost of dehumanizing the weakest members of society.
Each one of these little campaigns that PETA runs does more harm to their cause than good. When people think of animal rights they think of PETA and immediately get turned off. Who wants to associate themselves with a movement that continually creates the vulnerable as “other.” What this campaign tells me, is that to PETA I am less than a dog.
I simply have no words. Time and time again we are told that we have moved into a post racial society. We are supposedly equal and if only blacks could let go of the past and forgive all, things would be better. How the fuck can I even consider forgetting what was done to my ancestors, when day after day I have to be reminded that at any moment whiteness can decide that I am not worthy of any respect?
Cross Posted From Womanist Musings
The Invisible Mother
In feminist circles there is often commentary regarding our shared experiences as women. What is ignored is that though certain situations are similar based solely in gender, quite often we experience them differently when there is a race or class intersection. As mothers our capacity to love our children is boundless, but this is not nearly the universalizing experience as presented by most forms of media, or mainstream feminism. All mothers are not created equal. For the middle/upper class white woman, with her mini van and Prada purses there are plenty of visible representations of positive motherhood. If however you are a woman of color, the erasure in the discourse of motherhood is totalizing.
Women of color are not constructed as mothers; they are presented as irresponsible breeders who did not have the decency not to burden society with their offspring. Their right to reproduce is continually challenged because a capitalist economy does not encourage production without an obvious profit. The reality of the situation is, if a child grows in a poor household despite the pull yourself up by the boots rhetoric, they are most likely to grow into poor adults trapped by a system that has refused to give them equal opportunity from birth.
The mother/breeder binary is readily obvious in most parenting magazines. The stories are often written by white women of the privileged class, while the lived experiences of women of color are absent from the pages. Despite the courage and strength of will that is necessary to raise a child, when you exist as a marginalized body your stories are not deemed compelling, or marketable. Women of color are meant to serve as “mothers helpers,” not exist as actual mothers.
As the elite rush off to mommy and me gatherings in between scheduling for their high intensity careers, what is ignored is that the option to pursue such a range of possibility only exists because of the ability to exploit another woman. Poor so-called third world women who are often separated from their families function as an invisible support staff, permitting women of the privileged class to announce that yes Virginia, we can have it all.
These elite women are often presented by feminism as having benefiting from the legacy of women’s organizing struggles. The question then becomes, was it the goal to emancipate all women, or endow women of a certain class and race with the ability to exploit in the same fashion as white males? While Betty Friedan was writing about the gilded cage, women of color where already employed within the homes as domestic servants to white women that claimed to be imprisoned. For some it was the drudgery of domestic labour to feed their families, and for others it was a prison of the intellect.
Women of colour have experienced motherhood in unique ways. For the elite pregnancy often meant a time of reduced labour, but for the slave physical labour continued on in the fields. The faith and confidence with which a white mother bonded with her child was not accorded to the black female slave, at any moment her precious child could be sold away from her forever.
Even at the end of slavery, social workers continued the trend of destroying familial links for people of color. Native children were often stolen from their parents in what was considered benign friendship. The wombs that bore them were considered unfit to raise them. Their intuitive ways were not considered acceptable in a society that now encouraged scientific home management. What was this but the brutal repression of a culture in the name of uplifting a race?
Black families underwent the same sort of relocation plans. After a day of cooking and cleaning in white homes, when black women returned to their own family settings they were often too exhausted to provide the same form of care that they had given the white children under their charge. Often angry from the ill treatment and the daily debasement at the hands of her white employers, her children in whose name she daily laboured bore the brunt of her frustrations in the form of physical and mental abuse. Instead of seeking to diminish the responsibilities of these women, or search for a common bond based in their shared humanity, social workers removed black children from their mothers and placed them in the foster care system. In The biography of Malcolm X he relates the pain of being separated from his siblings and his mother after the murder of his father. Dick Gregory has also spoken openly of the harassment of his mother by social workers under the guise of child safety.
A poor working/under class mother of color faces the stigmatizations of gender, class and race; therefore their prescriptions on the idealized family unit could never be applicable. Deciding that one is an unfit mother for being unable to provide a home with heat, or a cupboard that is always stocked with the finest possible nutritional elements is not a reflection of motherhood, rather it is a physical testimony to the imbalanced racist, patriarchal, capitalist state, that seeks to profit from the exploitation and marginalization of poor women of color. That these social workers who invaded the spaces of women of color could not acknowledge the ways in which the very system that provided their employment created the living conditions at which they were so aghast, is a sign of unacknowledged white privilege. Whiteness will not see its own culpability in maintaining the hierarchy that has served to support the politics of so –called benign aid.
The white woman as expert on motherhood continued to be a model that was maintained. When we examine the sterilization of Indigenous women and Black women, the reason offered was to save us from our own biology. Unlike the pure sexuality that has been constructed for white women, women of color could not be trusted to choose when reproduction was appropriate and desirable. It was often theorized that we were overcome by our supposedly natural hyper sexuality. In many cases the women were denied informed consent and were sterilized against their will. Since reproduction is tied to womanhood in many Indigenous tribes, not only was the ability to become a mother removed but so was their female identity. To this very day many Indigenous women go without vital medical treatment for fear that their bodies will be violated once again by the medical establishment.
The purposeful sterilization of women along race and class lines amounts to a form of genocide. Programs like this were endorsed by women like Margaret Sanger. While the ability to choose is of paramount importance in the life of a woman as it endows her with agency in terms of reproduction and autonomy over her own body, such standards were not universally applied. The children of women of color were deemed a plague upon society for conditions that were not of their own making. Instead of examining the social markers like race, class and gender that lead to the issues that poor children of color face, sterilization was employed as the great equalizer. This was clearly an erroneous policy, as wealth and race advantage does not endow the body with anymore maternal instinct than destitution and race.
The demonization of poor mothers continues to this day. That the system is inherently imbalanced is not considered in the effort to justify the supposed failings of mothers of color as naturally occurring. When representative LaBruzzo offered one thousand dollars to women as a reward for submitting to sterilization this represented yet another attempt on the part of the elite white bourgeoisie to attack the poor and bodies of color. Eugenics has always been aimed at the most vulnerable members of society. When one considers his connection with David Duke the intention to secure white supremacy behind this proposal can hardly be denied. While his suggestion was attacked by the media, his ability to even offer it as a solution to the problems that are faced by poor women of color, is predicated on the historical disavowal of the legitimacy of our motherhood.
Our child rearing efforts are only noteworthy when they are performed in the maintenance of white supremacy. When mammy nurtures the white children under her care, though infantilized, she is considered a necessary cog for the maintenance of functional reproduction. In the ultimate form of betrayal she will one day witness the white children she was forced to nurture, instead of the fruit of her womb due to economic and racial disenfranchisement, apply their unearned racial privilege to her. In the end despite her efforts mammy is despised by all.
From the moment black women set foot in America in chains the entire experience of our motherhood and femininity has been complicated by the desire of whites to assert a hierarchy in which we are firmly located at the bottom. From mammy to jezebel to sapphire our roles continue to be constructed in complete absence of any recognition of our shared humanity. Sojourner Truth once famously asked ain’t I a woman, and today her daughters are still waiting on a response.
Cross Posted From Womanist Musings
Confronting Hyper Sexuality In The Black Community
As the mother of a young child who is approaching his tween years, thoughtful consideration of our social dialogue as it relates to sex and sexuality has been of great personal concern. Along with assuring that my child receives accurate information to make the correct decisions for him, ensuring that he understands that even the options that are available to him are strictly a result of his race and gender are an essential part of an evolving conversation on sex and sexuality.
When educating black children about sex, it is not enough to speak about the mechanics of the act. Though it is an absolute necessity to stress safe sex in a time where AIDS has reached a truly epidemic stature within our communities, the why we choose to engage in sex can and should be an equally important conversation.
Children come to an understanding of our world by interacting and confronting the agents of socialization. They will receive clear and direct instructions on performing gender, race and sexuality. These intersections are internalized and accepted as normative, despite the fact that they are often damaging on multiple levels.
Black children in particular must deal with the social idea that their bodies are hyper sexual. This can be seen in the overtly sexualized images of black women in rap videos, or the black male as rapist construction. In both of the aforementioned examples, sexuality is perverted in that it is presented as overly aggressive, and existing outside of normalized engagement.
The virgin/whore dichotomy is continually reified through the lens of race wherein white women exist with the construction of purity and the black female is reduced to the ever wanton Jezebel. This construction has its foundation in slavery. It was meant to justify the repeated rape of black women by their white male slave owners.
Though we have long since moved beyond slavery as a condition of living in the broader culture, its shadow continues to interject itself into our discourse about sex and sexuality. Young black girls quickly internalize the idea that their bodies exist for consumption based in the falsehood that they are continually desirous of sex. This construction removes the agency from the decision to have sex and implies that sex must occur because that is the foundation of the black female identity. It further reifies a hierarchy of beings wherein the black female is routinely located at the bottom. Bell Hooks theorizes that the black woman has no institutional other, and when we examine the discourse of sex and gender what immediately becomes clear is that the politics of colonization and oppression continually manifest in ways in which foster a negative sexual identity in black females.
Reducing black women to simply sexual beings without agency or autonomy over their physical beings translates into high rates of teen pregnancy and a low cultural self esteem. If your identity is based on sexual performance rather than achievement in education, it perpetuates the idea that success can only be achieved by conforming to the role of eternal Jezebel. This creates an unhealthy sexuality in that sex is no longer something one engages in to share pleasure or manifest a loving relationship, but to assert a form of self worth.
While a healthy sexuality is important to achieve a well rounded sense of self, the overvaluation of it is detrimental. Reducing women to what they do with their vaginas rather than with their brains serves patriarchal interests. For black women who have a history of slavery the perpetuation of the Jezebel complex amounts to the continued colonization of black female bodies.
This form of sexuality is also heterosexist nature in that it constructs women as existing solely for the purposes of male sexual pleasure, while ignoring the existence of same sex loving women. Lesbian love is delegitimized because it does not actively serve patriarchy; and therefore its erasure is not only a slight on black women, but on all women that identify as lesbian. Queer culture is very much a part of the black community, but when sexuality is controlled by outside forces instead of individually, certain identities become invisible if it is deemed that their existence does not help to maintain the race/class/gender hierarchy.
The model held for the black male is quite similar to the black female. It once again finds it origins in slavery; wherein the black male was constructed as the sexually aggressive savage to promote distrust between black men and white women. In this way white men are assured their place at the top of the race and gender hierarchy, while constructing themselves as the saviour of white women and the socially evolved masters of black men.
The hyper masculine sexuality that is presented as a model to black men can be seen in rap videos, and throughout mainstream media. The black male sexuality that is offered is one that is desirous of continues conquest; wherein the pleasure of the act itself is over looked. Black men are perceived not to engage in sex because it is an act of intimacy between two beings; rather it is construed as an act that reifies their masculinity. In a world where in the black male is continually reduced to an exotic “other” combating such images can be difficult. If masculinity is derived through sexual conquest, then this reinforces a problematized identity.
Just as same sex loving is detached from black female sexuality, a queer identity is similarly not associated with black male sexuality. Black masculinity is forever measuring itself against that of the white male. Due to the historic imbalance caused by racism any form of sexuality that is deemed “socially deviant” is actively denied. This has given rise to living a life on the “down low”. Though black males are certainly not the only ones to lead closeted lives, the tendency to deny sexual orientation is higher because of the association of black masculinity and sexual conquest. This is not healthy and is ultimately damaging to the individual on many levels.
We have a tendency to speak about sex as though it is divorced from other social elements, yet it is one of the most complex forms of human interactions. When we ignore the complexities of race, class and gender in our discussions it has a tendency to minimize the ways in which different groups of people not only understand but experience sexuality. What must be paramount when we seek to educate our youth is that they be made to recognize that though they are the products of social construction, as individuals they exist with ability to transcend norms and create a sexuality that is not only more positive, but a reflection of their right to possess a sexuality in which the onus is on individual agency.
When we begin to discuss sexuality with black children, it is important to make connections to the ways in which racism has affected our understanding of what it is to be black, while at the same time exist as a sexual being. Reclaiming sexuality from the race infused dialog would foster a more positive understanding of what it is to be sexual thus encouraging youth to see this as a decision that is not synonymous with claiming their gender identity, but in sharing an experience of intimacy with another.
Token Negress Alert
Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Renee and my blog is Womanist Musings. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to blog here and share some of the ideas that I have with a new audience. I am not known to mince words, so if you find my style abrupt oh well, I will not be policed. WOC have had our voices silenced for far too long for me too worry about anyone’s delicate sensibilities.
I would like to discuss something that I have come to refer to as the token Negro, or in the case of feminism the token Negress. All social movements have one thing in common; they must present a diverse progressive image publicly even if the hierarchy of the organization does not actually reflect a fair distribution of power. Ironically it is the least oppressed group – whiteness, that has become the face of oppression. Whether it is gay rights, fat acceptance, disability rights or feminism, you can guarantee the closer you get to a leadership position the whiter the faces become.
Maintenance of the power structure requires a token Negress, unless you can call on a black person, or a POC to play the role of the “diversity being” the obviousness of the exclusion is difficult to hide. What we see over and over again is the same pet blacks who have learned to speak the language of submission repeatedly being created as experts and given the authority to speak on behalf of POC by white people. Think that about for a moment…permission to speak on behalf of POC by white people.
This puts WOC in an untenable position. On one hand working towards social justice does provide its own reward; however continually being devalued is a constant reminder of exactly how racist society is. We have become accustomed to having our ideas shot down only to have them rephrased by a white person and immediately praised. We must walk a delicate balance between maintaining the little power we have and hiding from view the truth of our emotions and thoughts. Even speaking bluntly is often enough to illicit the charge that we are angry. Whiteness only wants us to be present for long enough to make the coffee and smile pretty for the camera. Say cheese everyone.
Even as we are being used to promote an atmosphere of diversity, we are well aware, but the only other option available to WOC is to fade into oblivion. We work diligently muting our rage in the hopes that one day the world will recognize that we are women, and that we are human too. Feminism has much invested in maintaining the status quo. Though some white women step forward for their daily bit of self flagellation, and depreciating commentary, in truth few are willing to listen with an open heart. We hear the “I am a white woman but” commentary daily. There is always a proviso, some need to insert the word but, as though there is any form of legitimization for the current imbalance in power. Somehow they can understand what it means to be silenced by relating it to their experiences of privilege. Somehow they can imagine what it is like being asked to speak on behalf of your people and then told that what you have to say is not good enough.
We are expected to be happy playing the role of token Negress because on some level we are supposedly being heard. The ethnic representative role is just as binding as being created as invisible because on one hand something needs to be said to represent black woman,but what we are allowed to express in these spaces does not close to the reality of our experiences. It allows no room for truthfulness and no room to challenge the status quo. The token negress ends up performing her race and gender in the hopes that at some point truth will be allowed to reign supreme. This is a role that at some point most black women will be asked to play. It preserves whiteness as good and powerful while relegating us to a mouth piece for hire.
Sex-Positivity
I'm passionate about sex-positivity and believe every sexual being should have the freedom to explore their sexuality safely and without condemnation. I even lost my ad network after my refusal to censor myself after reviewing feminist porn.So if you're in the market for sex toys, porn, books, etc. take a look at the retailers below, all of which are feminist-friendly.
Out Campaign
The OUT Campaign allows individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.
