Processed Lives

Virgen de Guadalupe - Marion Martinez’s Circuit Board Art

So the most listened to (internationally) French artist happens to be a Black woman, her artist name is Aya Nakamura. She is the only woman in France in the top 20 of the most listened to artists. She was born in Mali (Bamako) came in France as a young child with her family and she now has the French citizenship.

She might be the one singing (a song from Edith Piaf) during the Olympics opening ceremony in France.

Again she is the most famous French artists right now internationally.

White people are putting signs saying “No way for Aya, this is Paris not the market of Bamako”. That’s how racist France is.

But wanna know the icing on the cake? The reaction of some politicians on the left. Sandrine Rousseau defending Aya by saying that it would give the image of a “tolerant and open” France. This is all about “image” they don’t want to stop being racists pieces of shit they want to be able to do it while still looking good and anti racists.

You say “this is Paris not Bamako” meanwhile when Black and Arabs undocumented workers went on strike the construction site of the Olympics had to fucking slow down and stop in some sites because there was enough undocumented workers on those construction sites that their absence meant not being able to continue.

You say “this is Paris not Bamako” meanwhile the only reason your health system hasn’t completely collapsed is because 1 doctor out of 4 is born abroad. Some of your hospitals would close without foreign doctors (Algerians represent almost 25% of the foreign doctors in France.

So you know what? This is Bamako. This is Algiers. This is Dakar. Without us you wouldn’t be a rich country. If you didn’t want us here you shouldn’t have colonized our people and shouldn’t keep looting our countries while financing corrupted governments, organizing assassinations of rulers who want to decolonize Africa and organizing uprising against them.

(P.S: Le premier qui vient défendre Sandrine Rousseau je le bloque ici on soutient la gauche révolutionnaire et porteuse de valises pas la gauche avec des relents de paternalisme colonial qui bégaie dès qu’il faut prendre position correctement contre le racisme)

@raxiesrot

Fady Joudah, on his new poetry collection "[ ... ]", in an interview with Aria Aber for The Yale Review [ID'd]

Assotto Saint, born Yves Francois Lubin in Les Cayes, Haiti in 1957. Assotto was an author, editor, dancer and musician in the band Xotika with his partner Jan Holmes. Assotto was named after a ceremonial drum used in Haitian voodoo rituals -- tambou assoto. He took the name “Saint” after the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Assotto edited The Road before us : 100 gay Black poets and encouraged Black gay men living with HIV to come out and disclose. Writing and publishing work became a means of living life and making sure the legacy of their artistic gay Black artistic community would not be forgotten. You can find his work and other gay Black anthologies like, In the Life, on Internet Archive.org. Sign up for an account and you can check the books out for an hour or 14 days.

A cartoon from 1914 that could have been written today

this is so funny

"but uh when we advocated for indigenous sovereignty we thought you guys were just going to make a big park or something"

"fuck you. ultradense housing that bypasses your stupid zoning rules"

One of the most common criticisms of "housing first" initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first "does not improve mental health."  Now, let's set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant -- the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to "improve mental health" -- what definition of "mental health" could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of "mental health," how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street?  What possible definition of "mental health" would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?

Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of "mental health," one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.

For relatively privileged people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.

For oppressed people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.

Like most privilege disparities, this isn't binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, "mental health support" will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes.  All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children's "mental health" has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.

One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the "self-care" recommended to privileged people, and the "meaningful days" imposed on oppressed people.

Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They're told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.

By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with "severe" or "serious" or "low-functioning" mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded "mental health initiatives" require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days "meaningful" and thus improve their "mental health." And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.

The form of "mental health" applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.

Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It's obsessed with classifying experiences as "trauma" or "toxic." It's one of the worst culprits in feeding the "long adolescence" phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and "correcting" people about their own feelings and desires.

But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented "mental health care" forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like "We all deal with mental health" or assume that the mild, relatively benign "mental health care" they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?

Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how "Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic"... and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses. So perhaps "everyone struggles with mental health," but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.

As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged "mental health care" and reassuring them that we're not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it's great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It's not even close to the same "mental health."

The other side of this is the insistence by many people who work with unhoused folk that they are “too mentally ill” to even want housing, that, when given the option, they will choose to remain on the street.

When interrogated a little further, you find out that they aren’t being offered housing as the rest of us understand it. It’s not an apartment (or room) for which they have the key, a bed, bathroom and kitchen(ette) that is only theirs, security for their belongings and the freedom to come and go when and as they please. There are always rules, and hoops to jump through and limitations on their ability to live freely, and the sword of Damocles intentionally hung over their heads: break the rules and we will gladly put you back on the street.

Of course that is going to be rejected by people whose entire lives demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to live within other people’s (or society’s) restrictions and imposed expectations!

“They don’t get better” is ideologically not even a millimeter apart from “they don’t want to get better” as an expression of a completely parochial and controlling perspective on how unhoused people must demonstrate their eager willingness and ability to live like healthy, abled, capitalism driven workers in order to have basic human necessities.

Just give people housing, dammit.

Right, they aren't "refusing housing" because they aren't being offered housing. They're being "offered" incarceration with extra steps.

Ph. Bertil Nilson

"prisoner's day" by palestinian painter sliman mansour, 1980

Dusk Till Dawn, Josh E Wylie, 2023

— James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

Roberta Flack by Anthony Barboza