No Manipulation
Let Me Dismiss the Stereotype
Interesting image on Postsecret this week, where this postcard originates.
I’ll be honest, I never really understood the whole Asian exotic thing. It wasn’t until I began performing mental biopsies on stereotypes did I begin to understand that Asian women are stereotyped as sexual toys, to be dominated, played with, and understood in those contexts.
What could be understood as a trivial stereotype fuels much of the oppression of women and young girls in this world.
The power of stereotype is frightening. I understand it now, in the context of human sex slave trafficking, mail brides, prostitution, and pornography. Asian women, combined with the assumed docile and quiet chacteristic, are viewed as ultimate sexual enjoyment: do whatever you want and they’ll never say a word.
I have two words for whomever this postcard was intended: WAKE UP.
Trans/Gender Focus
Fashion "Sense"
Thanks to enough people who created enough uproar, this image was pulled from Dolce and Gabbana who did not think it would be viewed as promoting violence against women.
Notice the BYSTANDER issues here? The objectification? Fantasy rape? The CLEAR as day problems with these images? Sometimes I must remember that the fashion industry is run by humans who, oftentimes, are idiots.
What I’m Reading
To answer some questions, here is what I’ve been multi-reading:
For Inspiration
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Wounds of Passion by bell hooks
Colonize This! edited by Daisy Hernandez
For Debate Purposes
Full, Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti
Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
On Deck
Essential Neruda edited by Mark Eisner
Another Reason to Hate Bank of America
SERIOUSLY, is anyone surprised that this happens?
Bank of America sued for race discrimination
By Jonathan Stempe
Five black current and former employees of Bank of America Corp. have sued the second-largest U.S. bank, accusing it of racial discrimination by steering lucrative clients to their white counterparts.
The 29-page complaint, filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Boston, contends that the bank discriminates against African-Americans in pay, promotions, training and support services.
It said the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank regularly teams African-American workers together and assigns them to largely minority neighborhoods and low net-worth clients.
When the workers complained, according to the lawsuit, the bank said it believed that clients are more “comfortable” dealing with bankers and brokers of their own race.
A spokeswoman for the bank was not immediately available for comment.
“There is a perception at the bank that predominantly white, wealthy customers in high net-worth neighborhoods are only going to be comfortable with Caucasian financial advisers and bankers,” said Darnley Stewart, a partner at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP who represents the plaintiffs, in an interview. “It’s a complete stereotype.”
The complaint covers April 2003 to the present, and seeks class-action status. It seeks a halt to the alleged improper practices, back pay and compensatory and punitive damages.
According to the complaint, Bank of America’s investment services unit employs 4,400 “premier bankers” and 3,000 brokers in 30 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. It is unclear how many African-Americans might be covered by the lawsuit.
Other brokerages have also faced bias lawsuits accusing them, among other issues, of steering wealthy clients to particular groups of workers.
Merrill Lynch & Co. faces an 18-month-old lawsuit in Chicago by African-American brokers and trainees. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, last month agreed to pay $46 million to settle bias accusations by six former female brokers.
The Bank of America plaintiffs work or have worked for the bank in the Atlanta, St. Louis and south Florida areas, according to the complaint.
Stewart said that while the alleged discrimination differs from accusations other brokerages have faced of creating hostile work environments, she said “it’s equally pernicious.”
“The tone from the top needs to be that the bank will treat professionals equally, and that is not happening,” she said. “Too many decisions are left to people at the local level.”
Freak Out Fridays
Fridays are really just invisible partitions, a long line at your favorite rollercoaster, extra John Handcocks on forms before you receive cash. Fridays are fillers that make you wait before you get what you really want: time, freedom, and doing whatever you want.
I will spend Fridays very deliberately from now on. I will be choosing one significant issue and exploring it into the ground. Perhaps it will be trivial or something of the dead-serious variety. We shall see.
I’ll check back soon. I need time to select.
Immigration
A trend of targeted violence is erupting.
When you hear “immigration,” most people think of Mexico, or the Latino population. I can’t disagree that even I tend to focus on the plight of our Latina/o sisters and brothers when I see their peaceful protests raided by police, or racist signs about immigrants needing to “go home,” or when I witness billboards like the one I pass everyday that has a picture of a White man, arms folded staring into the camera, wearing a sheriff’s outfit that reads, “NO ALIENS ALLOWED HERE. We do not support illegal immigration.”
I am a child of immigrants. My parents came to this country from the Philippines over thirty years ago and have endured more stories of racism, shame, and forced assimilation than I can possible communicate or fathom. Their stories are real yet unbelievable. Most people wouldn’t believe that my father lost his front tooth because a stranger threw a glass bottle at his face while he crossed the street. Most people wouldn’t believe that my mother received a failing grade in her nursing clinical courses, not because of academic performance in which she was receiving good scores, but because her instructor wrote, “Language Difficulties” in the side margin and she was asked to leave the program after years of academic slaving. Never mind the lawyers who told her she’d never win a case in Ohio about racial and ethnic discrimination, “the jury would think exactly like the instructor,” they advised. And they were right. My mother is perfectly bi-lingual and speaks English more frequently than Tagalog. Whose story would you believe?
When I think of immigration I think of my father’s frequent fights he had with strangers who demanded he return to his own country. I think of my parents strength and how often even I have overlooked their stories of survival and bitterness. When I read stories like the one above, I think of my father’s angry retort to that racist demand to go back to one’s own country.
He replied, “I’ll go back to mine if you go back to yours. This isn’t your country. It was founded on stealing it from Native Americans. This is their country. So I’ll go back, if you go back, that is, if you know your history. Do you?”
Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!
Carnival of Radical Action
Announcing:
The Carnival of Radical Action
Most of us are organizers or activists in our real lives. Or at the very least, we think about it an awful lot and wish we had the skills and/or knowledge to organize. But contrary to the images of protest that make front pages and cause our hearts to swell–actual organizing is not as easy as it looks–nor is it very glamorous.
More often than not, the process it takes to actually get to the glamorous protest part is boring, tedious, filled with infighting, or done by one or two overburdened people who haven’t quite figured out how to say no.
And yet, the organizing part is so vitally important to achieving liberation (whatever that may be). It was through tons and tons of grass roots organizing and hard work that the right managed to come to power in the U.S. the way it has. The Zapatistas and the U.S. based Civil Rights movement both also have a history of achieving goals towards liberation through grassroots organizing.
So how does one go about doing this grassroots organizing?
That’s what this carnival is all about. I will be accepting any posts/submissions that have anything to do with organizing on a grassroots level. Some topic ideas that you might feel inclined to think about:
How do you do radical leftist organizing in the Midwest [or wherever you are]? How do you confront racism/sexism/disableism/homophobia/classism etc within your group? How do you work with a community instead of on a community? How do you confront accessibility issues (that is, you’re all working class mothers and there’s rarely a time to meet or the site where you meet is not wheelchair accessible etc)? What’s been the major problem/setback your group has faced? How did it over come it? What has been a successful tactic in your organizing (for example, you found that taking pictures of violent cops and posting them online is more successful in stopping the abuse than reporting them to their superiors)? If you’re a life time activist, what are some problems you see today with organizing compared to when you first started? Or, if you’ve never organized before, write about why you never have.
This carnival will be about sharing strategies more than finding a “right” answer. In the world we face today where there are so many intersecting forms of oppression, one answer will not fit every community. But something that worked for one community might work for another if they alter it and adjust it to suit their own needs.
[…]
DEADLINE: MAY 25th
and the carnival will be posted on May 27th.
I’ll be waiting!
and many thanks to fire fly for motivating me to organize this!
You can post links to your submissions in the comments or e-mail them to me at sylviasrevenge at gmail dot com.
Let’s turn this idea into an excellent carnival in honor of BFP and our dedication to human rights. 🙂
Reviews: Hello Dolly and Notes on a Scandal
Every now and again, I blow the dust off my cultural critic pen and lend my lens to shows, music, theater, food, and literature.
Broadway Musical: Hello, Dolly!
I purchased tickets to a community theater show in which a friend was performing in Hello, Dolly! As community theater is to Broadway what independant films are to Hollywood, I try to support art in these venues and believe that non-commercial creativity is the bed of great idea, inspiration, and rejuvenation.
That, however, does not excuse bad community theater, unfortunately. Hello, Dolly! is a comical musical that explores the intersection of lives through a match-making busy-body socialite wannabe in the 1800s. Think of a nauseating Paris Hilton superficiality inside the look of Queen Elizabeth.
Written with high right chords and a splittingly boring storyline, actress and actor must possess an unsual talent to sell this production. Adorned with baby cries of a lovestruck teen, corsettes, and vocal bravado, Hello, Dolly! had me buying a rare caffeinated beverage at intermission. On a thematic level, Dolly exudes Broadtriarchy, where Broadway meets patriarchy: women/actresses who are in the role of crying, pathetic, lovelorn elbow gloved damsels waiting with high scrunched foreheads for their men to wisk them away. The men/actors appropriately feed the Broadtriarchy with songs like It Takes a Woman with lyrics that warm the Conservative soul, such as:
O yes it takes a woman
A dainty woman
A sweetheart, a mistress, a wife
O yes it takes a woman
A fragile woman
To bring you the sweet things in life
And so she’ll work until infinity
Three cheers for femininity
Rah Rah Rah…Rah Rah Rah
F. E. M. – I. T. Y
This was perhaps the fifth or sixth time I have seen a production of Hello, Dolly!. Now that my 28 years of maturation has resulted in highly selective tongue of entertainment, I can assure you, this will be my last. I can swallow Broadtriarchy every once in a while in good humor, but, should I decide to be entertained in such a manner, I really should head to 42nd street in NYC instead. At least there it will be only the highest quality of patriarchy performance.
Hollywood Film: Notes on a Scandal
If a 30-sumthin male sleeps with a 15 year old girl, what do we call that? I call it statutory rape. What do we call a 30-sumthing female who sleeps with a 15 year old boy? We call her Sex Teacher and label the behavior Unacceptable.
Is it just me or is there some form of imbalance when movies show “love scenes” between adults and 15 year olds without the blatant theme of RAPE? In fact, this movie, which is based on actual events, calls the rape of the 15 year old boy an “affair.” Um, no, it’s rape. And had the “rapist” been a man, the shock of the crime would not be overshadowed by Cate Blanchett’s, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” cries.
Obviously entertaining, in a disturbing Euro-manner. Judi Dench plays a Virgina Woolf wannabe writer, insanely isolated and dry who develops a psychotic connection to the new art “Sex Teacher” at her school (Blanchett). Think Single, White Female meets Mary Kay Laterno.
For as much as I love listening to those accents, when the “love” scenes are framed with unbridled lust with no mention of crime, I tend to squirm in my seat and wish I’d chosen Love Actually for the umpteenth time.