An apology came later with and the infamous, “I’m not a racist,” disclaimer.
RIGHT.
Technology + Highschool + Racism + the likes Imus/Isaiah Washington behavior = Irresponsible and irrevocable damage to young Asian-Americans
For links to the lame apology and more, go to and give a h/t to The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum
With a psychology background, it is a privileged ability to “reframe” a situation. Reframing is simply the dismantling of one context and rebuilding another. Reframing is often used in counseling. You reframe a sentence and say it back to a client to put it in a different, hopefully more positive or uplifting tone.
For example, a client may say, “All I want and need is to be with my son who is starting first grade. He’s getting bullied and comes home everyday, silent and moody. And there’s nothing, nothing I can do about it. I just want to be with him, but my jobs make it impossible for me.”
Reframing is cleaning up the verbiage, getting to the heart of the message, and offering it back for clarity. So, reframing would be, “I can understand that it’s very frustrating to want to be there and support your son while the demands of your jobs complicate that for you.”
I often reframe. It helps keep me grounded and keeps my mind sharp. On days like Independance Day, it can be helpful to reframe such major concepts.
Normally, when I think of America’s birthday, I think of a patriarchal and oppressive government, dominated by white men and the stealing of this land from Native Americans. That is the history of this country and I cannot ignore it.
I think of the conversation I had with an Indian man I met in NYC six years ago outside a Thai restaurant. He charged at his pad thai with a force comparable to his politics of the wastefulness of fireworks, “All I can think of is the million of dollars that go into planning such a display when that money could easily go toward a project that truly celebrates freedom, of independence. Like, I don’t know, actually helping the poor instead of celebrating the freedom of a few people to exploit a capitalistic society that forces poverty on millions.”
What to do on the 4th of July. What to do. What decisions to make.
How DO you celebrate our “independence?” And at what costs come at such independence? My independence has been lifted upon the blood shed of millions, the oppressed. My 4th of July comes at a price that I know most people on this planet cannot afford. Do I have a Corona with a lime to mark this day? Do I grill up some burgers and call it a holiday?
How do I reframe this ‘holiday?’
CAN I reframe this ‘holiday?’
The only way I can reframe it, honestly, is to go forth like it’s any other day in America, a country. A day where I realize my freedom to blog about the 4th of July has come at the expense of other human lives and the American flag will continue to wave itself under artificial winds, boasting a supernation’s chest. Do we, North Americans, realize we are one more firework’s boom away from implosion? That our policies are cracked, our pride is circus, and our politicians are filthy magicians?
Our independence is introuble and IN-dependence of inhuman practices of modern day slavery and a war that was flawed in its infancy.
I spin my wheels on this one. How do I make sense of this when I can hear the firecrackers going off next door with periodical whoops of drunken celebration?
My wheels continue to spin. I don’t feel anger, only shame.
To my ancestors, to my foremothers and forefathers, to all who came before me on trails of tyranny and blood, to all who fought and lost, and whose glory of freedom was never realized, to all who have paid a dear price – far larger than my burdened heart – the only reframing I have for this 4th of July is an apology.
I’m sorry that we, as a country, are still learning social and global responsibility. I’m sorry that I am not capable of more on a daily basis and this screen is the only tool in which I express my rage for this country’s reign of terror. I have never paid for nor have never lived outside my citizenship. I’m sorry that the resonating explosion in the hearts of North Americans tonight will not be a jolt to action, but a mundane appreciation for pretty fires in the sky that we claim as ours. There will be no thundering realization that the world is not right and that we, North Americans, are responsible for much of that. And yet still, we will light canons to glorify our constitution, our practices of self-centeredness, and misguided patriotism. All we know are stars and stripes, in English, and we believe that is more than enough.
I offer my own reframing of this holiday as a wrecked gift, a hasty and embarrassed attempt to reform what is most grotesque: a night of loud celebration when so many exist in the wailing darkness that we have cast in our ignorance and complacency.
A Womyn’s Ecdysis is one year old.
That one year has changed my life. Oh, how trite that sounds!
Let me provide evidence.
Before
Wavering in writer’s confidence
Alone
Visions without beams
Strong, but without conviction
Intimidated
Docile
After
Certain I have something to contribute to this world and I indeed will contribute
Met and keep in touch with fabulous WOC bloggers around the globe
Visions with supportive beams
Strong, able, convinced I am purposeful and of use
Learning without assuming I’m the most naive and unrealized person in the room
The internet can be a place of cyber crap, highlighting the most unforgiveable and nastiest tidbits of the human race. On any given minute, you can find oppression in pictures, words, power dynamics, and exploitation.
Or it can be a place of establishing community, exchange of ideas, organization and mobility. The lost turn to it’s last hope and my experience has generated a long list of other women writers who did not find their haven in the offline world, in their real names. They were turned away, dismissed, ignored, and overseen. For whatever reason, they turned to express it and I am now one of them.
Sudy is a womyn I have dreamed of for a long time. She is me, sometimes the best part of me who has waited her whole life to carve a small place to have her say with the world. This one year of revelation has not only shown the world who I am, I have shown myself who I want to become.
Happy Birthday, A Womyn’s Ecdysis.
Traveling around so much is draining all my energy, forgive the lack of insight and sporadic postings that is to come this week.
48 hours after the AMC conference in Detroit, I loaded up a University car and took off for St. Charles, Illinois for the NWSA conference. Saturday, I flew to Norfolk, VA to meet family for a Virginia Beach vacation and then I will be flying to Boston for two job interviews then I will fly home.
There is so much that I need to write about, reflect further on the AMC and NWSA conferences, but time is getting away from me and the more time passes, the more I fear I won’t be able to hold onto my reactions.
So, I am recording as much as I can: my thoughts on WOC feminism, where I believe it is headed, meeting and talking deeply with both Jessica Valenti and Daisy Hernandez at the NWSA conference and the pearls that have surfaced from those interactions. Ah, there’s so much. I will do my best to get things posted as soon as possible, but just know there will be some heavy journaling posts coming up in the next few weeks with moving, transition, and, once again, saying good-bye to another chapter of my life as I move onto a new location, job, and environment.
Bittersweet days ahead.
Here are some shots of the crowd and panel for the Bridge tribute. The marvelous of the evening could not be caputured, accurately.
Tribute panel to “This Bridge Called My Back”
Daisy Hernandez
AnaLouise Keating
Maria del Carmen Ochoa
veronica precious bohanan, left
camil willliams, right
Tonight held the session I had been waiting for with curiosity. A Tribute Panel, Bridge Inscriptions: Radical Women of Color Envision – Pasts, Presents, Futures.
Basically, it was a worship session for This Bridge Called My Back.
The panelists were all invited to speak on how this book affected their lives. And while I walked in with no expectations, I left with a similar sensation in my bones as when I left Detroit: spirited, energized, and in community.
There’s just something about when women of color get together. I swear, it’s something in the air.
The panel was comprised of Aquamoon, a two women artistic team, camill williams and veronica precious bohanan; Daisy Hernandez from colorlines magazines (also co-editor of Colonize This!); AnaLouise Keating from Texas Woman’s University; and Maria del Carmen Ochoa from San Jose State University.
What can I say? It was had the most diverse crowd, moving words, and spirited audience. (Don’t you love when the panel is speaking about the different oppressed populations and a moved audience member yells, “And don’t forget the mother of Jesus!” Ahh, the laughter)
As they paid tribute, I jotted a few of their gems:
Moderator began with this statement, “Our poetry, prose, and theory…for women of color, it is all the same.”
Gems from Daisy Hernandez
I found the stories that you never read in school, you meet women on the page.
I once thought that feminism was making poetry out of shame.
Cherrie Moraga said, ‘In my dreams, I am met at the river,’ and it is because of you I am always at the river.
The ‘bridge’ may not be the most suitable metaphor anymore. We don’t cross the bridge to meet all these different people because they all already met on iChat.
We’re not a bridge, but a crossroads, a place where two roads meet and multiply. A place of ritual, sacrifice, choice, conflict. Racism looks different here, we hold imposing powers.
Gems from AnaLouise Keating
Feminism is not a white thing. We. Are. Feminists.
Spiritual Activism is not religion, it is a holistic approach to plitics and transformation. It is the belief that there is more to existence than the embodied world and the spirit infuses it. We are all connected and are accountable for the people down the street, across the border, across the seas.
It is not based on sameness, not about walking in a straight line.
Feminism must stretch to an unseen place.
Gems from Maria del Carmen Ochoa
We must revisit Bridge because of its ability to subvert. From this book we learned how to learn from both critical and creative works.
It is a writing from the lungs. The heart is what usually recieves the metaphorical attention, but the lungs is what takes in air. And we must not forget what the other word is for inhale: inspiration.
Writing=Breathing=Living
We are the changer and the changed.
From Toni Morrison, ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else.’
There are no selective gems from AquaMoon. I can only describe it as one of the most transparent illustrations of talent and brilliance I have ever seen in person. They embrace hip-hop, “will never leave it,” and use it to analyze, poeticize, and create a space for discourse. They rap, sing, make melody out of works. They are human song. They are shine. My only regret in watching the room stand for them is the rest of the world just missed the sky turn gold. In the presence of true artists, individuals who polish their craft, nothing brings me closer to Spirit, than true artists and their work.
The umbilical cord connecting Cisneros to this session was the outcry against a failing healthcare system. Gloria Anzaldua died from diabetes, a dangerous and complicated, but treatable disease. What Cisneros said the previous night about taking care of writers while they are ALIVE is bitter. Had Anzaldua lived, we know she would have been there that night. And it was mentioned again on the panel.
We invoked Anzaldua and all the pioneering women of color who laid down their bodies as the Bridge, no les olvides!
The 2007 NWSA keynote speaker was Sandra Cisneros, a Chicana writer who bases her writing in her life, personal relationships, and Latin@ culture. Her poetry seductive, her prose inquisitive into family secrecy, Cisneros spoke for nearly three and a half hours.
In the span of over three hours, she spanned topics of women of color writing, the writing process, and then shared some of her temporarily unpublished work. Her unmistakable reverence for Gloria Anzaldua was hard to miss, often commenting, “Had we taken better care of her, had a better health care system, Gloria would be here instead of me. She was better with words, theory, and vision. She should be here, not me.”
Here are some of her beautiful fireworks that lasted for hours:
We need to take care of writers who suffer from depression and self-destruction.
Some audience members, non-writers I assume, laugh at this, thinking she is joking. She replies:
No, I’m serious. Writers, women of color writers aren’t seen as real writers…[we have] all the times we doubted ourselves.
But Gloria, she believed in women of color.
Racism seeps into our psyche and we ourselves begin to believe it.
Depression is about walking to the sea and not drawing attention to yourself. I had to go through the darkness and hang on, hang on. Sometimes you just have to hang on by a thread.
Sometimes you need to leave home to reinvent yourself, especially if home is intolerant of your kind.
There are some questions a daughter can never ask her father.
I thought my novel would force my family to finally sit down and talk, normally. Where only one person talks and the other listens. I’m a bit of an idealist.
I am against Mexiphobia which hides under the guise of homeland security.
I saw a man wearing a tshirt that read, ‘If you deport me, who will build the wall?’
I’m a writer, I think for a living. I live my life facing backward.
My brother asked me, ‘how do you remember those things?’ I said, ‘How do you forget?’
There is no “in sum” for Cisneros. Her voice, girl like in delivery, was light but flexible. Sometimes she spoke imitating her characters, pushing them alive. Cisneros loved word, opening depression, and sex. Unashamed, she bares. This was the last note I had scribbled in my notes about listening to this gifted storyteller:
She spoke. If you close your eyes or lose your gaze into the floor, her voice could have been the one in your own head or tuning in to her ponderings aloud, lifted. Like a cloud, her thoughts thickening around me.
I only took notes for the first 10 minutes of this session. I have much to write about these particular hours, which I will post in a separate piece.
Creating Conversations to Dismantle Racism and White Privilege in Our Women’s Centers and the
NWSA Women’s Centers Committee
Utilizing vignettes from The Way Home, taping of conversations about counsels of women; indigenous groups: AA, Euro, multi, asian, arab, latino, jewish
Importance of getting to our personal edges
Engaging looks different if you are a white woman or a woman of color
Hold the space that the experience is different
Even though it is time limited; it is imperative to continue the conversation, emphasizing the word “continuing”
How do we balance talking with “doing” with being an anti-racist women’s center community?
Ground rules/Ways that we want to be with one another
Do not get lost in critiquing the video or someone else’s experience
Just because you understand racism and sexism in one part, doesn’t mean you understand it in all parts
Own your privilege; how does it serve alliances
Resisting the desire to interrupt and bringing it back to yourself
Building on the stories on one other person’s stories
Acknowledge what has been said before you
These are my notes, at times hard to follow, from my first session. My style for this session was to record the comments of both the panelists and participants and letting my mind (read in bold) go where it felt called. So my thoughts unspoken are in bold and the rest are the discussion points.
Session One: Feminist Leadership in Student Affairs:
A Critical Look at Scholarship and Practice
Definition of Feminism
Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender
It’s about not bemoaning that we’re not where we want to be, but action toward building toward where we want to be.
Common language:
What is your definition of feminism?
Radical inclusion that works toward the empowerment of all individuals and the dismantling of all personal and systematic oppression.
How does it play out in your leadership style in the Women’s Center on your campus?
I challenge, speak out, seek mentoring and being a mentor in every situation that I am involved.
Others Sharing:
Egalitarian, so student focused.
Examining power and privilege in individual schools (what percentage of the student body is women)
I feel an acute sense of individualism, high intellectual streamlined thinking where people want to self-talk talk talk, than collaborate and share. Community is about supporting and laughing, not just working together.
Piercing eyes, not the most welcoming of leaders.
Why is there power and privilege and assigned worth in every thing?
“We’re as smart as the faculty,” say staff.
“We’re as smart as the psychologists,” say social workers.
“They think the women dress like whores.” – audience participant, on introducing a dress code and someone’s thought on how it would apply on women
I have serious issues with the word whore. What is a ‘whore?’ A women who has a lot of sex? A woman who will sleep with anyone? A woman who charges or takes money in exchange for sexual activity? What is a whore? Regardless, there is an incredibly unjust label, a pejorative label, to assign any individual. Never mind there is no equivalent for the male gender, but there’s something about the word WHORE, as if it’s something we strive to NOT be, be afraid of. If it is a woman who is hypersexually active, there is usually a much detailed backstory that necessitates privacy and/or understanding that women, especially, are so slow to give one another.
From a perspecive of clinical pedagogy, experiential learning:
“If you don’t name it, you’re not doing it.” – law studenton practices that are feminist, but not labeled as such; if you don’t use it as a critique of the hierarchal approach, it’s not enough for me
Are we more obsessed with things being labeled feminist than just the reality that things are in practice without being labeled as such?
“I was first aware of my whiteness than before my gender.” – far more committed to issues of social justice; talking about how few student affairs administrators identify as feminists; identifying in an academe that is NOT feminist and pointing out contradictions
A researcher compares experience of academic feminists and the experience of immigrants in the 1920s and 30s….
That last comment is a bit of a stretch. Sounds a bit too Friedanian for me. Like when the Betster compared stay at home middle white class women to the torture of the refugees in Nazi camps.
I first thought of myself as a black person, then as a women. WOC are always asked to choose. I began struggling with what it meant to be woman, looking at womanism. Moving to a women’s center, I felt a personal mission to talk about race, social and economic class in the context of feminist work, which I found was often left out.
Good stuff. Nothing new. I think the
lack of new thoughts has more to do with the academe than the speaker. Academe might be the slowest place to catch up with the trends. It’s more about the venue of distributing one’s knowledge than it is a place for change.
Feminist leadership: not many resources. Good number on women and leadership; gender and leadership, but not feminist leadership; organizational development and transformational leadership – they’re feminist principles! But now it’s called *** and *** and now it’s ok for men to claim it. Feminism caused a split between woc feminism and mainstream feminism; conversations are different, especially with men; split between communities; relegated to issues; it’s opened my perspective but has constrained my work –doctoral candidate for educational leadership
Finally.
Dated a man who was gay and came out after a long time – I’m going to support him or be angry. Obviously, she took the caretaker road.
Hello. Most women usually take the “caretaker” road. I think the majority of women in this situation would take the supportive role in the sense of “Staying friends, being there for him.” I can only speak for myself, but in my history of being in a relationship where the other person at the time is not certain of who s/he is, and what their identity is, it ALWAYS turns unjust for the other. Always. It’s so imbalanced that it’s impossible for mutually healthy relationship to flourish. I think there are ways to end relationships out of self-respect. I take, “I love you, but go figure your shit out and quit screwing me over,” road. I don’t think “support” always necessitates standing by one’s side presence and enduring emotional daggers to the soul.
I came to social justice in this relationship experience, first time to think about these issues. Began another “turning point” after working in a dv/sa position. Women with multiple identities are often forced to choose communities. In all white women communities, I didn’t find a mentor or anyone who broke down race, class, gender. We need to hold our partners accountable as partners because once you talk about women in student affairs we immediately talk about balancing family; also getting men involved in the movement; bring men into the conversation in constructive ways that do not take away from the work that women have been doing for ht past several decades; hold them to higher standards; do not exclude women who choose not to have children and respect that they have the need for balance as well.
Yes.
I was here from the beginning. It was easy to come to before.
I was the first to join the hockey team. There are still more firsts to be had. There is still more work to be done. – audience
Talking about the .76 to a man’s dollar. “I’m not satisfied with that.”
Why do we always hold this as one of the mainstays? Like, always.
Practical ways; being intentional about the library; south end press utilization; it is NOT feminist practice to give so much money to other “big” speakers and privilege that over smaller, grassortts activism, like using the money to really expand the resources (what movies, documentaries do we need? What else can we support?)
Activism should be focused on broadening the definition of feminism
Hiring practices – search committees – should work on shifting the language “I’m looking for an activist,” not a student affairs professional. Look at the students who are working in your office.
I realize it is a privilege to talk about gender all day. At NASPA, we had a session on feminist leadership, we had a room this size and it was full and women CRIED.
Sweet.
I’ve had grievances filed against me for hiring practice, but you have to have the courage to do it and hopefully you lay the ground for someone else to do the same. These are various forms of activism, but you have to find other people who do it. You find yourself talking to yourself a lot.
What does your activism look like?
Be transparent with students
There was an immediate gag rule
I can’t talk about this or do it, but you can. What can I do to help you? We can’t support you because some things are too institutionalized. It sucks and I hate it, but I can personally support you. – says Duke Women’s Center employee
Be sure there is sustainability in your feminist activism.
How do you get people jazzed about sexual assault preventative education?
I think getting men jazzed about it is more important.
We work well together because we all identify as feminists. We all have women-centerd principles. Feminism is a wonderful foundation for social justice work – you can call it what you want – just adopt it and use it.
Get feminism into the headlines and titles into topics, dissertations, conferences, national boards, literature
Of course Women Writing for a Change in Cincinnati came up – feminist leadership academy – Mary Pierce Brosmer
It’s more important to be more collective.
Word. Why’d that come at the end?
Not that I am one to complain, but in Detroit, I was in a singular bedroom dorm, suite style, with NO comforts of home. Hey, I enjoyed it and I loved the accessibility it gave me to Blackamazon next door and Fabi a few floors away, among other awesome WOC. But, here in St. Charles, I’ve got a few luxuries, to say the least.
