@ yehaleung

Hey y’all, if you didn’t know, there’s actually a leftist organization called Redneck Revolt, which focuses on promoting anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-authoritarianism in the white working class (as well as liberation for LGBT and disabled people). They also have a few gun clubs that focus on community defense training. I highly recommend checking them out - they’re pretty cool. 

TRIGGER WARNING: POTENTIAL SUICIDE; DEFINITE BULLSHIT

I gotta get offline, seriously. Logged onto Twitter to find the latest trending hashtag in the Black misery sweepstakes: #PiedmontParkHanging. A young Black man was found hung in the popular Atlanta park today. This is of course the same park where the local KKK convened just days ago. Even though no autopsy has occurred, police are already claiming that it was a suicide. However, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has referred the case to the FBI. Something is rotten in Atlanta today, and it seems like another police cover-up could be at play. Prayers to the family of this potentially stolen life. #farfromover

Oh god…

in case anyone still had doubts what Leave was really about

Watch: C-SPAN uses Periscope feed to show House of Representatives sit-in

If you turned on the TV to watch the Democratic sit-in on the House floor protesting Congress’s inaction on guns, you were out of luck for several hours on Wednesday. The Republican House leadership, which controls the cameras, cut the feed to C-SPAN, which would normally broadcast from the floor.

Then C-SPAN found a way. The cameras stayed off, but Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) started a Periscope live video stream that was picked up by C-SPAN and given center stage. Here’s how to tune in. 

Once slavery was abolished in 1865, manufacturers scrambled to find other sources of cheap labor—and because the 13th amendment banned slavery (except as punishment for crimes), they didn’t have to look too far. Prisons and big businesses have now been exploiting this loophole in the 13th amendment for over a century.

“Insourcing,” as prison labor is often called, is an even cheaper alternative to outsourcing. Instead of sending labor over to China or Bangladesh, manufacturers have chosen to forcibly employ the 2.4 million incarcerated people in the United States. Chances are high that if a product you’re holding says it is “American Made,” it was made in an American prison.

On average, prisoners work 8 hours a day, but they have no union representation and make between .23 and $1.15 per hour, over 6 times less than federal minimum wage. These low wages combined with increasing communication and commissary costs mean that inmates are often released from correctional facilities with more debt than they had on their arrival. Meanwhile, big businesses receive tax credits for employing these inmates in excess of millions of dollars a year.

While almost every business in America uses some form of prison labor to produce their goods, here are just a few of the companies who are helping prisoners pay off their debt to society, so to speak.

From dentures to shower curtains to pill bottles, almost everything you can imagine is being made in American prisons. Also implicit in the past and present use of prison labor are Microsoft, Nike, Nintendo, Honda, Pfizer, Saks Fifth Avenue, JCPenney, Macy’s, Starbucks, and more. For an even more detailed list of businesses that use prison labor, visit buycott.com, but the real guilty party here is the United States government. UNICOR, the corporation created and owned by the federal government to oversee penal labor, sets the condition and wage standards for working inmates.

One of the highest-paying prison jobs in the country? Sewing American flags for the state police.

the American Revolution happened when the burgeoning American colonial bourgeois found British mercantilism to be incompatible with their own economic interests (which included the continuation of the slave trade and further westward expansion). not because a bunch of ~cool and quirky dudes~ decided to stick it to the man in the name of liberty or what the fuck ever. that’s called a) the Great Man of History Fallacy and b) historically revisionist, American exceptionalist, settler propaganda.

29th May is the United Nations International Day for Peacekeepers. @WritersofColour’s twitter will be dedicated to retelling the stories of their victims and demanding definitive action detailed in the petition below.

All day.

Join in using the hashtag #PredatoryPeacekeepers Make a noise and make sure the United Nations know we will not stand for any more abuses, any more impunity.

Ban Ki-Moon must act and ACT NOW.

‘You would never tolerate these injustices if the majority of the children raped were little blonde girls with blue eyes. That such vile abuses of power continue to happen, often perpetrated by powerful western men who consider themselves guardians of civilisation, testifies to the ways in which even “peacekeeping” can display the same dehumanising disregard which drove colonial endeavour. ’

We demand accountability. And we demand it now!

Join us in demanding:

- That the recommendations from the report of Dec 2015 be put into practice

- That the French government withdraw all its troops from the CAR and investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of the horrific abuses of children

- That action to ensure victims receive proper care and support in rebuilding their future and prevent further abuse of African children and women.

We will be announcing other actions we can all take in the days leading up to May 29th including at a secret (for now) location in Central London. Please sign and share the #PredatoryPeacekeepers petition with your friends and family.

https://community.avaaz.org/petitions/we-will-not-stand-by-when-un-soldiers-abuse-rape-and-murder?source=twitter-share-button

UN poster in a South Sudan Refugee Camp.

ARTICLE RESOURCES - 7-year-old among cases of alleged sexual abuse of children by European troops in Central African Republic 

- The UN must smash the culture of impunity that lets peacekeepers get away with child abuse | via @telegraphnews - The UN’s Good vs. Bad Narrative Clears the Way for Sexual Violence and Impunity - When African children’s lives matter, perhaps ours will too - Horrific’ #CAR crimes: petition calls for removal of #PredatoryPeacekeepers  - BBC World News - Sexual Violence and Abuse by UN and French Troops in CAR - Little help for survivors of Central African Republic abuses 

- Is the U.N. fit to investigate internal sex crime cases? @CNNI - Peacekeepers were sent to CAR to defend the most vulnerable. However, dozens are accused of sexual abuse 

A comprehensive guide to the debunked “bathroom predator” myth.

oh my god.... rest in power....

If you really think that North Korea is a beacon of evil, ripe for regime change and you’re outraged at the news that they’re sentencing an American student to 15 years of hard labor for attempted theft of a political banner  then you better think long and hard about what to do about the United States because last I checked Allen Bullock still faces life in prison for breaking a cop car window during the Baltimore uprising.  

Just a quick note on current UK political events:

They know they’re killing us. They have the numbers, they know we’re dying because of their cuts to disability spending.

They can say whatever they want, but they can’t claim they didn’t know.

They are killing us. They’re looking at the numbers of us dying because of their cuts, and they are introducing further cuts and further gatekeeping to prevent new applications from going through.

Don’t let anyone make you forget. They know they’re spilling our blood, and their response is to drive the knife in deeper.

“The UK has become the first country in the world to be placed under investigation by the United Nations for violating the human rights of people with disabilities amid fears that thousands may have died as a consequence of controversial welfare reforms and austerity-driven cuts to benefits and care budgets. - x

Last week, Queen Elizabeth II said she thought that gay marriage was absolutely “wonderful.” Meanwhile, Phyll Opoku-Gyimah — an LGBT activist in the U.K. best known for founding U.K. Black Pride — was one of 1,200 artists, activists, and other notables listed in the Queens New Year’s Honors List.

Opoku-Gyimah, who also served as a Rainbow List judge and Stonewall Trustee, was happy to be noticed. But it’s complicated.

As she told the U.K.’s Diva magazine:

However, inclusion on the list comes with an MBE, which makes her known as a Member of the British Empire. And she has a problem with that:

#lol but like#what if we did the reverse#i’m just picturing a bunch of scientists#no longer experts in mitochondria#now they’re mitochondria fan girls#i love it (via @brainsandbooshay)

“This is professor Aldridge, he is a fan girl in vacuum energy and cosmic superstrings, and highly acclaimed physics trash in the quantum phys fandom”

Something that should probably be discussed more: compulsory Christianity, specifically from the Western lens.

^^^^^^^^^^ I have SOOOOOOO much to say about this, but mostly about compulsory when it comes to someone’s parents; Teaching your very young children that hell exists and is a never ending place of torture and pain and everything not good imaginable, where there is no end or exit, is child abuse especially when you tell them they are already on track to end up there when they die unless they do everything that you tell them to. Gaslighting, controlling, absolutely abusive, and no one thinks a second thought about 3-5 y.o. children who have to consider eternal torture when making any action. Let alone being told that sinful thoughts are not /actually/ their thoughts, that the worst being in existence has a foothold on them and is brainwashing them, and they better stop thinking the bad sinful thoughts and think what you are supposed to think, what is righteous and holy.

this gaslighting really fucked me up

im sorry, im just curious, is this actually taught in christian households?

this was literally my childhood. also having to sit 2-3 hours every sunday in a dark cold church listening to chants and stories about how sinful we all are and how much we hope that god will forgive us and not send us to hell. when praying (every night) we had to say some prayers that we learned by heart, and guess what the main theme was? how huge sinners we are and how we need to do everything we can not to burn in hell.

oh my god im so sorry man i had no idea, all my christian friends just said church was boring or full of old ppl dancin

Not all forms of Christianity are as harsh on certain elements as others. Where as my mother never did this exact thing to me, my grandmother did and she took me to church every Sunday, where in the Sunday School I would learn cute stories about how God was vindictive and murderous, weird creepy songs of devotion to Jesus, and that I was going to hell for homosexuality. Not fun.

This this this this this! I’m nearly 33 and still have huuuge mental scars from being raised this way.

Being taught from birth that everything about you that doesn’t fit into the framework of absolute obedience and shame is utterly evil, and that you and everyone you’ve ever known are going to suffer eternally by default unless you live rigidly by those structures, is an incredibly terrifying and destructive thing. 

It’s even worse when the representatives and advocates of that Ultimate Authority are themselves negative and abusive authority figures. And worse yet when they see something about you that is Abnormal and not only target you for abuse themselves, but point you out to other children for abuse because you are Insufficiently Normal And Obedient.

I knew as a kid that it was fucked up, and got the hell out of the church as soon as I was confirmed (I grew up Polish Catholic) and had fulfilled the religious expectations of my family. And my negative relationships with masculinity and authority directly tie into my negative relationship with religious conditioning and normalization, because all of those factors were elements of the bullying and emotional abuse I experienced as a kid.

Because what is God other than the Ultimate Authority Figure, and what can your relationship with Him be if your experience with authority primarily consists of abuse or neglect? And when both condemn you for being Different in some way, Hell becomes much more than just a hypothetical place.

Wow you all went to terrible churches! My church was more of the God is loving, merciful, kind, and forgiving sort of thing. Even at an early age we were taught of the approachability of God; that many sins are natural and understandable and pretty much every sin is forgivable so long as you are sincere. And while yes there was emphasis placed on children respecting their parents, there was even greater emphasis placed on parents being respectable and approachable.

Here’s another snarl in the Gordian Knot, though: Churches that teach “God is Love” and “God is Vengeful” are not mutually exclusive, and many if not most Christian churches teach both messages. And that double-messaging is harmful in its own way.

Growing up Catholic, I got lots of the “God is all-benevolent, God is Love” messaging at the same time as I got “God punishes disobedience and divergence”. So not only was I dealing with the concept of eternal suffering for failing to live up to a particular normalcy, but… I’m going to be tortured not in spite of God’s love, but BECAUSE of God’s love? 

And when you live your childhood as somebody who’s Different in any way, and deal with the bullying and abuse that come with the Vengeful God narrative, the “God is Love” message adds an extra layer of shame and fear to your world. Because if God truly IS the embodiment of Love, what He’s doing must be right, correct? And therefore you deserve to suffer for your differences and imaginary transgressions, and the bullies and abusive authorities who deal out that suffering must be doing so under his aegis. And trying to reconcile the idea of an empathetic, compassionate God being the same entity as the destructive, petty Authority that tells you that everything about you is wrong is baffling and ultimately impossible to process.

Make no mistake: The “God is Love” narrative is a tool to justify the behavioral control and obeisance to authority that “God is Vengeance” demands in the first place, and ensnarls those who are Different - the queer, the disobedient, the neurodivergent, any difference that the social majority wants to subjugate - in further shackles of shame and self-hatred. It removes accountability from the Church and puts it entirely on the individual who, in some way or another, can’t live up to God’s Love.

It falls into the same category as the abusive parent or teacher saying “This is for your own good”, and “I’m just doing this because I love you.” It’s an attempt at self-justification and removing accountability from the abuser. And when you get both of these things as a child, it’s horribly traumatic and destructive.

“God is Love” is nothing but Cosmic Gaslighting.

oh my god everyone read this

thank you for writing all this up holy shit

this absolutely my experience

holy shit I never realized

“God is love/God is vengeance” literally teaches you to equate love and pain/fear.

that’s a huge priming tool for abuse. like equating those two things is probably the biggest common factor among cases of abuse I’ve seen

and it’s baked right into the fucking religion

@deeconstrvct read this ^

Hillary Clinton has officially announced she’s running in 2016!

Oh boy. I highly recommend everyone does their research on Hillary Clinton. Don’t give her your vote just because she is a woman. Consider what she has done and what she will do for the United States. She shouldn’t be voted president just because we finally want a woman in the white house. Make sure you are aware of what she stands for and what she has been willing to do in the past. We have placed her on a pedestal as pro-feminism, pro-lgbt, pro-progress, but people need to understand that this is how politics work. As millennials, we are changing and becoming more open minded. We are the target group that need to be encouraged to vote for her. Now I am not saying to not vote for her, and instead vote for a republican who will destroy any progress made. But be wary of who you are choosing to vote for. 

Some information you all might be interested in: 

hillary clinton won a plea bargain while defending a child rapist who she knew to be guilty. part of her defense was that the 12 year old girl “sought older men” and was “emotionally unstable”. she was recorded laughing & making jokes about it, and when the tapes surfaced to the media years later, she said she was just doing what she had to do to the best of her ability.

“Making Profit and War

All issues of wealth, power, and violence are also women’s and LGBT rights issues. For instance, neoliberal economic policies of austerity and privatization disproportionately hurt women and LGBT individuals, who are often the lowest paid and the first workers to be fired, the most likely to bear the burdens of family maintenance, and the most affected by the involuntary migration, domestic violence, homelessness, and mental illness that are intensified by poverty.

Clinton’s record on such issues is hardly encouraging. Her decades of service on corporate boards and in major policy roles as first lady, senator, and secretary of state give a clear indication of where she stands.

One of Clinton’s first high-profile public positions was at Walmart, where she served on the board from 1986 to 1992. She “remained silent” in board meetings as her company “waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers,” as an ABC review of video recordings later noted.

Clinton recounts in her 2003 book Living History that Walmart CEO Sam Walton “taught me a great deal about corporate integrity and success.” Though she later began trying to shed her public identification with the company in order to attract labor support for her Senate and presidential candidacies, Walmart executives have continued to look favorably on her, with Alice Walton donating the maximum amount to the “Ready for Hillary” Super PAC in 2013. Walton’s $25,000 donation was considerably higher than the averageannual salary for Walmart’s hourly employees, two-thirds of whom are women.

After leaving Walmart, Clinton became perhaps the most active first lady in history. While it would be unfair to hold her responsible for all of her husband’s policies, she did play a significant role in shaping and justifying many of them. In Living History she boasts of her role in gutting US welfare: “By the time Bill and I left the White House, welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent” — and not because poverty had dropped.

Women and children, the main recipients of welfare, have been the primary victims. Jeffrey St Clair at Counterpunch notes that prior to welfare reform, “more than 70 percent of poor families with children received some kind of cash assistance. By 2010, less than 30 percent got any kind of cash aid and the amount of the benefit had declined by more than 50 percent from pre-reform levels.”

Clinton also lobbied Congress to pass her husband’s deeply racist crime bill, which, Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, “escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible,” expanding mass incarceration and the death penalty.

Arguably the two most defining features of Clinton’s tenures as senator (2001–2009) and secretary of state (2009–2013) were her promotion of US corporate profit-making and her aggressive assertion of the US government’s right to intervene in foreign countries.

Reflecting on this performance as Clinton left her secretary post in January 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek commented that “Clinton turned the State Department into a machine for promoting U.S. business.” She sought “to install herself as the government’s highest-ranking business lobbyist,” directly negotiating lucrative overseas contracts for US corporations like Boeing, Lockheed, and General Electric. Not surprisingly, “Clinton’s corporate cheerleading has won praise from business groups.”

Clinton herself has been very honest about this aim, albeit not when speaking in front of progressives. Her 2011 Foreign Policy essay on “America’s Pacific Century” speaks at length about the objective of “opening new markets for American businesses,” containing no fewer than ten uses of the phrases “open markets,” “open trade,” and permutations thereof.

A major focus of this effort is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involves twelve Pacific countries and is being secretly negotiated by the Obama administration with the assistance of over six hundred corporate advisers.

Like Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, the deal is intended to further empower multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment in all countries involved. Lower wages and increased rates of displacement, detention, and physical violence for female and LGBT populations are among the likely consequences, given the results of existing “free trade” agreements.

Clinton’s Foreign Policy article also elaborates on the role of US military power in advancing these economic goals. The past “growth” of eastern Asia has depended on “the security and stability that has long been guaranteed by the U.S. military,” and “a more broadly distributed military presence across the region will provide vital advantages” in the future.

Clinton thus reaffirms the bipartisan consensus regarding the US’s right to use military force abroad in pursuit of economic interest — echoing, for instance, her husband’s secretary of defense, William Cohen, who in 1999 reserved the right to “the unilateral use of military power” in the name of “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”

In the Middle East and Central Asia, Clinton has likewise defended the US’s right to violate international law and human rights. As senator she not only voted in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq — a monstrous crime that has killed hundreds of thousands of peoplewhile sowing terror and sectarianism across the region — she was an outspoken advocate of the invasion and a fierce critic of resistance within the United Nations (UN).

Since then she has only partially disavowed that position (out ofpolitical expediency) while speaking in paternalistic and racist termsabout Iraqis. Senator Clinton was also an especially staunch supporter — even by the standards of the US Congress — of Israel’s illegal military actions and settlement activity in the occupied territories.

As Barack Obama’s secretary of state, she presided over the expansion of illegal drone attacks that by conservative estimates have killed many hundreds of civilians, while reaffirming US alliances with vicious dictatorships. As she recounts in her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, “In addition to our work with the Israelis, the Obama Administration also increased America’s own sea and air presence in the Persian Gulf and deepened our ties to the Gulf monarchies.”

Clinton herself is widely recognized to have been one of the administration’s most forceful advocates of attacking or expandingmilitary operations in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria and of strengthening US ties to dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, and elsewhere. Maybe the women and girls of these countries, including those whose lives have been destroyed by US bombs, can take comfort in knowing that a “feminist” helped craft US policy.

Secretary Clinton and her team worked to ensure that any challenges to US–Israeli domination of the Middle East were met with brute force and various forms of collective punishment. On Iran, she often echoes the bipartisan line that “all options must remain on the table” — a flagrant violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition of “the threat or use of force” in international relations — and brags in Hard Choices that her team “successfully campaigned around the world to impose crippling sanctions” on the country.

She ensured that Palestine’s UN statehood bid “went nowhere in the Security Council.” Though out of office by the time Israel launched its savage 2014 assault on Gaza, she ardently defended it in interviews. This context helps explain her recent praise for Henry Kissinger, renowned for bombing civilians and supporting governments that killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of suspected dissidents. She writes in the Washington Post that she “relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.”

Militarization and Its Benefits

In another domain of traditional US ownership, Latin America, Clinton also seems to have followed Kissinger’s example. As confirmed in her 2014 book, she effectively supported the 2009 military overthrow of left-of-center Honduran President Manuel Zelaya — a “caricature of a Central American strongman” — by pushing for a “compromise” solution that endorsed his illegal ouster.

She has advocated the application of the Colombia model — highly militarized “anti-drug” initiatives coupled with neoliberal economic policies — to other countries in the region, and is full of praise for the devastating militarization of Mexico over the past decade. That militarization has resulted in eighty thousand or more deaths since 2006, including the forty-three Mexican student activistsdisappeared (and presumably massacred) in September 2014.

In the Caribbean, the US model of choice is Haiti, where Clinton and her husband have relentlessly promoted the sweatshop model of production since the 1990s. WikiLeaks documents show that in 2009 her State Department collaborated with subcontractors for Hanes, Levi’s, and Fruit of the Loom to oppose a minimum-wage increase for Haitian workers. After the January 2010 earthquake she helped spearhead the highly militarized US response.

Militarization has plentiful benefits, as Clinton understands. It can facilitate corporate investment, such as the “gold rush” that the US ambassador described following the Haiti earthquake. It can keep in check nonviolent dissidents, such as hungry Haitian workers or leftist students in Mexico. And it can help combat the influence of countries like Venezuela that have challenged neoliberalism and US geopolitical control.

These goals have long motivated US hostility toward Cuba, and thus Clinton’s recent call for ending the US embargo against Cuba was pragmatic, not principled: “It wasn’t achieving its goals” of overthrowing the government, as she says in her recent book. The goal there, as in Venezuela, is to compel the country to “restore private property and return to a free market economy,” as shedemanded of Venezuela in 2010.

A reasonable synopsis of Clinton’s record around the world comes from neoconservative policy adviser Robert Kagan, who, like Clinton, played an important role in advocating the 2003 Iraq invasion. “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Kagan told the New York Times last June. Asked what to expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency, Kagan predicted that “if she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon.” But, he added, “clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Narrowly Defined Rights

What about Clinton’s record on that narrower set of issues more commonly associated with women’s and LGBT rights — control over one’s reproductive system and freedom from discrimination and sexual violence?

Perhaps the best that can be said is that Clinton does not espouse the medieval view of female bodily autonomy shared by most Republicans, and does not actively encourage homophobia and transphobia. She has consistently said that abortion should remain legal (but “rare”) and that birth control should be widely available, and when in office generally acted in accord with those statements. She has recently voiced support for gay marriage rights. These positions are worth something, even if they are mainly a reflection of pressure from below.

But nor does her record on these rights merit glowing praise. In addition to partly capitulating to the far-right anti-choice agenda in Congress, with disproportionate harm to low-income parents, Clinton and other Democrats have also actively undermined these rights. Some observers have argued that Clinton’s repetition of the Democratic slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal, andrare”reinforces the stigmatization of those who choose that option.

Her narrow definition of reproductive rights — as abortion and contraception only — does not allow much in the way of material support for parents or young children. She insists that abortion must remain “rare,” but has also helped deprive poor expecting parents of the financial support they would need to raise a child (for instance, through the 1996 welfare reform and the fiscal austerity for social programs that has become the bipartisan consensus in Washington).

She has supported the further militarization of the Mexico border and the arrest of undocumented immigrants, undermining the reproductive rights of women who give birth in chains in detention centers before being deported back to lives of poverty and violence.

Regarding non-discrimination, Clinton’s record is also worse than her reputation suggests. Her old company Walmart, widely accused ofdiscriminating against women employees, was recently praised by the Clinton Foundation for its “efforts to empower girls and women.”

Clinton has given little serious indication that she opposes discrimination against LGBT individuals in the workplace (which is still legal in the majority of US states). Her very recent reversal of her opposition to gay marriage came only after support for the idea has become politically beneficial and perhaps necessary for Democrats. At best, Clinton in these respects has been a cautious responder to progressive political winds rather than a trailblazing leader.

Clinton’s foreign policy record is even more at odds with her reputation as a champion of women’s and LGBT rights. Her policy of support for the 2009 coup in Honduras has been disastrous for both groups. Violent hate crimes against LGBT Hondurans have skyrocketed. In mid-2014, leading LGBT activist Nelson Arambú reported 176 murders against LGBT individuals since 2009, an average of about 35 per year, compared to just over 1 per year from 1994–2009.

Arambú located this violence within the broader human rights nightmare of post-coup Honduras, noting the contributions of US-funded militarization and the post-coup governments’ pattern of “shutting down government institutions charged with promoting and protecting the human rights of vulnerable sectors of the population — such as women, children, indigenous communities, and Afro-Hondurans.” Clinton has been worse than silent on the situation, actively supporting and praising the post-coup governments.

In a review of her work as secretary of state, Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes concludes that while “Hillary Clinton has been more outspoken than any previous Secretary of State regarding the rights of women and sexual minorities,” this position is “more rhetoric than reality.”

As one example he points to the US-backed monarchy in Morocco, which has long occupied Western Sahara with US support. Two weeks after Secretary Clinton publicly praised the dictatorship for having “protected and expanded” women’s rights, a teenage girl named Amina Filali committed suicide by taking rat poison. Filali had been raped at age fifteen and then “forced to marry her rapist, who subsequently battered and abused her.”

Although Clinton’s liberal supporters are likely to lament such details as exceptions within an impressive overall record (“She’s still much better than a Republican!”), it is quite possible that her actions haveharmed feminist movements worldwide. As Zunes argues:

Given Clinton’s backing of neo-liberal economic policies and war-making by the United States and its allies, her advocacy of women’s rights overseas … may have actually set back indigenous feminist movements in the same way that the Bush administration’s “democracy-promotion” agenda was a serious setback to popular struggles for freedom and democracy… .

Hillary Clinton’s call for greater respect for women’s rights in Muslim countries never had much credibility while US-manufactured ordinance is blowing up women in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Base Building

This summary of Clinton’s “enormous contributions” (as Feminists for Clinton puts it) is just a partial sampling. On almost all other major issues, from climate change to immigration to education to financial regulation, President Hillary Clinton would likely be no better than President Obama, if not worse.

As in the case of Obama, it is of course necessary for Clinton to “call it something else,” in Robert Kagan’s words. The stark disjunction between rhetoric and policies reflects a well understood logic. Mainstream US political candidates, particularly Democrats, must find ways to attract popular support while simultaneously reassuring corporate and financial elites.

The latter, for their part, usually understand the need for a good dose of “populism” during a campaign, and accept it as long as it stays within certain bounds and is not reflected in policy itself. One former aide to Bill Clinton, speaking to The Hill last July, compared this rhetorical strategy to threading a needle, saying that “good politicians — and I think Hillary is a good politician — are good at threading needles, and I think there’s probably a way to do it.”

Hillary Clinton faces the challenge of convincing voters that she is a champion of “people historically excluded,” as she claims in her 2014 memoir. Last year, The Hill reported that “Clinton is now test-driving various campaign themes,” including the familiar progressive promises to “increase upward mobility” and “decrease inequality.” Her memoirs, for those who dare to suffer through them, include invocations of dead leftists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman (“one of my heroines”), and Martin Luther King Jr (referenced nine times in Clinton’s 2003 book).

This public relations work requires that her past record be hidden from view, lest it create a credibility problem. Here Clinton has enjoyed the assistance of many liberal feminists. One former Obama staffer, speaking to The Hill, notes Clinton’s successful efforts “to co-opt the base groups in the past eight years.”

Rhetoric is not totally meaningless. The extent to which politicians like Clinton have been compelled to portray themselves — however cynically — as champions of the rights of workers, women, LGBT people, and other “historically excluded” groups is an indication that popular pressures for those rights have achieved substantial force.

In the case of LGBT rights this rhetorical shift is very recent, and reflects a growth in the movement’s power that is to be celebrated. But taking politicians’ rhetoric at face value is one of the gravest errors that a progressive can make.

The Feminists Not Invited

Liberal feminists’ support of Clinton is not just due to credulousness, though. It also reflects a narrowness of analysis, vision, and values. In the US feminism is often understood as the right of women — and wealthy white women most of all — to share in the spoils of capitalism and US imperial power. By not confronting the exclusion of non-whites, foreigners, working-class people, and other groups from this vision, liberal feminists are missing a crucial opportunity to create a more inclusive, more powerful movement.

Alternative currents within the feminist movement, both in the US and globally, have long rejected this impoverished understanding of feminism. For them, feminism means confronting patriarchy but also capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression that interlock with and reinforce patriarchy.

It means fighting to replace a system in which the rights of people and other living things are systematically subordinated to the quest for profits. It means fighting so that all people — everywhere on the gender, sexual and body spectrum — can enjoy basic rights like food, health care, housing, a safe and clean environment, and control over their bodies, labor, and identities.

This more holistic feminist vision is apparent all around the world, including among the women of places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, whose oppression is constantly evoked by Western leaders to justify war and occupation.

The courageous Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her feminist advocacy, has also criticized US drone attacks for killing civilians and aiding the Taliban. Yousafzai’s opposition to the Taliban won her adoring Western media coverage and an invitation to the Obama White House, but her criticism of drones has gone virtually unmentioned in the corporate media. Also unmentioned are her comments about socialism, which she says “is the only answer” to “free us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation.”

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has equally opposed the Taliban, US-backed fundamentalist forces, and the US occupation. While liberal groups like Feminist Majority have depicted the US war as a noble crusade to protect Afghan women, RAWA says that the United States “has empowered and equipped the most traitorous, anti-democratic, misogynist and corrupt fundamentalist gangs in Afghanistan,” merely “replacing one fundamentalist regime with another.”

The logic is simple: US elites prefer the “bloody and suffocating rule of Afghanistan” by fundamentalist warlords “to an independent, pro-democracy, and pro-women’s rights government” that might jeopardize “its interests in the region.” Women’s liberation, RAWA emphasizes, “can be achieved only by the people of Afghanistan and by democracy-loving forces through a hard, decisive and long struggle.” Needless to say, Clinton and Obama have not invited the RAWA women to Washington.

A group of Iranian and Iranian-American feminists, the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, takes a similar position in relation to their own country. In 2011 they bitterly condemned the Ahmadinejad government’s systematic violations of women’s rights (and those of other groups), but just as forcefully condemned “all forms of US intervention,” including the “crippling sanctions” that Clinton is so proud of her role in implementing.

The group said that sanctions “further immiserate the very people they claim to be helping,” and noted that few if any genuine grassroots voices in Iran had “called for or supported the US/UN/EU sanctions.”

In Latin America, too, many working-class feminists argue that the fight for gender and sexual liberation is inseparable from the struggles for self-determination and a just economic system. Speaking toNACLA Report on the Americas, Venezuelan organizer Yanahir Reyes recently lauded “all of the social policy” that has “focused on liberating women” under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, those evil autocrats so despised by Clinton.

This tradition of more holistic feminisms is not absent from the United States. In the nineteenth century, black women like Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth linked the struggles for abolition and suffrage and denounced the lynching campaigns that murdered black men and women in the name of “saving” white women. In contrast, leaders of the white suffrage movement like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to include people of color in the struggle for citizenship rights.

Unfortunately this history continues to be distorted. In 2008 Gloria Steinem, the standard-bearer of liberal feminism, said that shesupported Clinton’s campaign over Obama’s in part because “black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.”

The assumption that all women are equally oppressed by patriarchy (and that all men are equal oppressors) was fiercely challenged by US women of color, working-class women, and lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists of color analyzed their gender and sexual oppression within the larger history of US slavery, capitalism, and empire.

In New York, the women of the Young Lords Party pushed their organization to denounce forced sterilizations of women of color, to demand safe and accessible abortion and contraception, and to call for community-controlled clinics. They redefined reproductive rights as the right to abortion and contraception and the right to have children without living in poverty.

In recent years, the radical LGBT movement has condemned the state, from prisons to the military, as the biggest perpetrator of violence against gender and sexual non-conforming peoples, particularly trans women of color and undocumented queers.

These queer radicals reject the logic that casts the United States and Israel as tolerant while characterizing occupied territories, from US to Palestinian ghettoes, as inherently homophobic and in need ofmilitary and other outside intervention. They condemn US wars and the Obama administration’s persecution of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning (who helped expose, among other US crimes, military orders to ignore the sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees and the trafficking of Afghan children).

A more robust vision of feminism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t defend women like Hillary Clinton against sexist attacks: we should, just as we defend Barack Obama against racist ones. But it does mean that we must listen to the voices of the most marginalized women and gender and sexual minorities — many of whom are extremely critical of Clintonite feminism — and act in solidarity with movements that seek equity in all realms of life and for all people.

These are the feminists not invited to the Hillary Clinton party, except perhaps to serve and clean up.” (x)

Holy shit

Only afrotextured (3c-4c type hair) dreads naturally because of its corkscrew shape.

All other types of hair matt, which is a whole different process where the cuticle of the hair has to be damaged and raised, revealing the living inner sticky core of the hair in order for the hair strands to stick to one another.

Obviously, these 2 things are not the same.

That’s why all it takes for black people to have dreads is a little twisting and some kind of moisturizing product, and a life time commitment to constant maintenance & hygiene.

And why white people do silly shit like back combing, the ‘twist n rip’ method, elmers glue, not washing their hair, and other forms of damage, lack of hygiene and neglect to achieve an imitation of the real thing they consider a ‘low effort’ hairstyle.

The fact that you think dreadlocks are formed through through neglect & messiness just shows how insidious and strong the racist stereotypes about dreadlocks are.

I have locs down to my ass and seriously spend a statistically quantifiable portion of my life explaining the above to white people.

Seriously, the neglect method? I can’t even really explain how foul that is. At this point, if someone cannot inherently see that nastiness the conversation is short and I just walk away.

There should be a White History Month in America. That way we can teach all about the things White Americans have done in history, like:

1 Cherokee Trail of Tears 2 Japanese American internment 3 Philippine-American War 4 Jim Crow 5 The genocide of Native Americans 6 Transatlantic slave trade 7 The Middle Passage 8 The history of White American racism 9 Black Codes 10 Slave patrols 11 Ku Klux Klan 12 The War on Drugs 13 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 14 How white racism grew out of slavery and genocide 15 How whites still benefit from slavery and genocide 16 White anti-racism 17 The Southern strategy 18 The rape of enslaved women 19 Madison Grant 20 The Indian Wars 21 Human zoos 22 The colonization of aboriginals in australia 23 White flight 24 Redlining 25 Proposition 14 26 Homestead Act 27 Tulsa Riots 28 Rosewood massacre 29 Tuskegee Experiment 30 Lynching 31 Hollywood stereotypes 32 Indian Appropriations Acts 33 Immigration Act of 1924 34 Sundown towns 35 Chinese Exclusion Act 36 Emmett Till 37 Vincent Chin 38 Islamophobia 39 Indian boarding schools 40 King Philip’s War 41 Bacon’s Rebellion 42 American slavery compared to Arab, Roman and Latin American slavery 43 History of the gun 44 History of the police 45 History of prisons 46 History of white suburbia 47 Lincoln’s racism and anti-racism 48 George Wallace Governor of Alabama 49 Cointelpro 50 Real estate steering 51 School tracking 52 Mass incarceration of black men 53 Boston school busing riots

By the way  I got this list from facebook so I’m not an expert but I encourage everyone to look some of this stuff up, and so much more, if I missed something, go ahead and add!

Oh yeah,

54 chopping off indigenous women´s breasts off of leisure during the genocide

55 slamming indigenous children against huge rocks during the genocide

56 spaniards dividing into groups the indigenous women each white settler was gonna own and rape during the american genocide

57 In the catholic missions nailing native americans on crosses to represent the 12 disciples

58 and this: (I recommend the book The American Holocaust)

I don´t think yall understand how wicked these people are

59.  The Unangan evacuation and internment during World War II

60. Dropping an Atomic Bomb on Japan even though the military knew that Japan was beaten and was near surrender.

61. The government assassination of Martin Luther King Jr

62. White america’s support of Apartheid

63. Nazism

64. Skinheads

65. Various lies attempting to paint Ancient Egyptians as white Europeans 

66. “Modifying” authentic Egyptian artworks that demonstrate Black characteristics so they instead made it seem that Egyptians were white

67. Raping of Native American women and girls

68. The murder of Taíno Natives on the island of Ayiti (which we now call Haiti)

69. White racism ingrained in GI Bill, New Deal, Social Security Act and more

70. Second class badge (The History of Racism within Police Departments)

71. The ordering by the PBA to have cops terrorize NYC’s black and Puerto Rican communities

72. The destruction of Black Wall Street

73. The destruction of at least 10 other thriving Black communities

74. The History of Serial Killers (aka white males on murderous rampages)

75. White corporate sweatshop (Nike, Adidas)

76. Human trafficking

77. High rate of child molestation and rape among white communities

78. Forced sterilization of Blacks and Native women

79. Racist indoctrination of Black women through the media (ex: convincing Black women that unless they straightened their hair, they would not be considered beautiful, hired for jobs, make a living and etc)

80. “Last Hired, First Fired” racist hiring practices

81. Creation of various racial slurs

82. Poisoning of the environment through illegal disposal of toxins

What to do if you suddenly find yourself homeless

FOOD

SHELTER

HYGIENE

OTHER

Reblog to literally save a life