JANE FONDA AND PATRISSE KHAN CULLORS ON THE SOBERING REALITIES OF RACISM GENDER AND JAIL

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Patrisse: I wanted to ask what was your impetus in joining movements? What drove you to that? I know that you talked about your own family's history, but what about you?

Jane: Well, it was the Vietnam War. I was living in France, and the French had already been there. So, they had their war in Vietnam, and they knew we couldn't win, and it was an interesting thing for me, as an American, to listen to [the French] talk. I just felt, I can't just stay here and listen to this, I have to go back and be part of it. And, as you probably know, once you begin to study one issue, everything else—race, imperialism, capitalism—everything starts to come into question: economic issues, the fact that we don't have that economic democracy. But it was when I read your book, "When They Call You A Terrorist"—when Trump was elected—that I realized that white supremacy is closer to the surface than I had ever realized, and I thought, "Man, I better understand this more." You think you know, you think you understand, but if you're white, you don't really. And so I very deliberately have been studying, and I read your book, and it really moved me, and I called you up.

Patrisse: I thought it was a joke. June [my assistant] was like, “Jane Fonda wants to talk to you.” And I was like, “What?”

...Jane: You know, I've traveled a lot around the world, and the third world, and one of the things that I've learned is, it's easier to understand—for example, misogyny, women being treated like cattle—when you're in a country where it's totally blatant. That's when you think, "Okay, oh I get it." One of the gifts that POTUS has given us, is things are so blatant and bad, that things that were underground before, at least for white people, have come to the surface now. It's like oh my God, I now understand that we can't really be a full democratic country, a healthy country, as long as we have the legacy of slavery and race. We can't, and I'm not sure that it would've hit me before November 2016. Isn't it awful to say, I'm grateful for the lesson.

Patrisse: Of course.

Jane: But we all have to do it together.

Patrisse: For the last decade, many activists across Los Angeles county have been trying to stop a $3.5 billion jail plan. A plan that would be a woman's jail and a mental health jail. We tried everything: we lobbied our elected officials, we held protests, we did everything and we realized, "Oh they're not budging on this, so we need to take it to the people." We did a poll ahead of time, sort of to see what people want to see, so I started Reform L.A. County Jails, the pact, and we've been gathering signatures since March, we just completed our signature gathering. We have gathered over 230,000 signatures, we've registered over 10,000 people to vote in a short amount of time, and this is gonna be on the March 2020 ballot box.

I told Jane, you know, "We're gonna do this initiative." And she goes, "I want to help. I've been studying around jail issues and prison issues." Jane has done more than help, I mean Jane's been an ambassador of Reform L.A. Jails initiative. She's gone out door knocking, she's gone out gathering signatures, she's held dinners in her home around it. I mean, she's literally been a huge collaborator with me on this project. I think we've been able, for the first time in history, in Los Angeles County history, to popularize a jail fight and a conversation around ending mass incarceration...

 ~Harpers Bazaar

Read More: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a23105747/jane-fonda-patrisse-cullors-women-who-dare-2018-racism-civil-rights/?

STRONG BLACK WOMAN, INFANTILIZED WHITE WOMEN, AND AZIZ ANSARI

I know I have this still have remnants of the strong black woman in the back of my head. I'm fighting her all the time. So, I know I am biased toward thinking women need to suck it up and keep stepping no matter what. But I still think I legitimately see that white women have the opposite expectation of themselves. 

From where a lot of black women sit, a large percentage of white women appear to be raised to believe that somebody is always going to take care of them, like a child. In the meantime, most of the black women I know were raised to never, ever believe that -- hence the Strong Black Woman trope which is just as false. 

Though the strong-black-woman creates a false narrative to follow as well, black women who worked side by side with black men in the field during slavery have always knew they'd have to pull their own weight as an adult, inside or outside of a marriage,

White women do talk about embracing their strength all the time, as if they do realize there's childishness to overcome. But white feminists in particular, don't ever seem to talk about how behaving like an infant benefits white women to a certain extent. 

Unlike black and brown women, some percentage of white women are married to the biggest oppressor in the land, white men. And a bunch of white women enjoy that secondary-power acquired through marriage just fine --temporary though it may be.

--which is why nobody but white feminists are confused as to why 53% of white women voted for the PussyGrabber-In-Chief. .

But the differing ways in which white women and black women are socialized is probably one of the reasons I'm having a hard time understanding how that little, fugly dawg Ansari Aziz wound up being central to any discussion about #MeToo and consent. 

MY  STORY

Most women have had an experience with a sexual aggressor. I am not an exception.

My job sent me to the east coast for a class. I met this guy that lived three or four states away in Texas.. I found him very attractive. We didn't really speak that much, but it wasn't long before I knew he found me attractive to 

Eventually, on his birthday, he invites the entire class to go out and have a drink with him. The two of us? We wind up flirting all night. He gets drunk. About half of the class is staying at the same hotel. I'm the one he asks to help him to his room as I simultaneously volunteer.    

I was going through a dry spell with men. But a couple of hours worth of flirting and my sexual-attention-deficit had been met. So we get half way to his room, and I ask him if he's okay. He says he is. We go our separate ways to our rooms. 

I'm feeling sexually attractive and desirable. I'm good. I'm going to bed

But then he calls me. He says a bunch of people are continuing the party, having a few drinks. He's easy on the eyes and I'm getting a charge out of being around him, so I decide to go. But it takes me a while. In the hotel, I'm using three towels a day: floor covering, body, hair. I need more for the next day. So it takes me a little while to get to the after-party.  

I get there and he's the only one in the room. I'm confused for a split second. I'm late, so maybe everybody left already or he's lied to me. And I'm thinking it's the latter. 

I'm attracted to him so I go in anyway. We talk for a while. Then he moves closer. After some benign chatting, he's aggressively kissing me. And when I say "aggressively kissing me," he has sort of squatted, straddled me on the couch. I'm trapped. I was shocked-scared for a second or two 

...but excited too.

In that moment, while I'm kissing him back, I'm trying to decide if I want to go forward or not. Ultimately, I decide that I do. I'd been lonely for a while. And, living in a small, mostly white town, I knew that I could be lonely for a good while longer. 

I decide I don't want to miss it. 

The next day I didn't like how we're interacting and I felt bad. But I never once thought he assaulted me. And I've been sexually assaulted before. This wasn't that. 

There are times, such as when a woman is unconscious or drugged when she isn't ABLE to say "no" when lack of audible consent is definitely the basis for a sexual assault or rape charge. But I don't think every time a man pressures a woman for sex and there's no audible "no" means there's been a sexual assault.

In the real life scenario described above, my decision making process was invisible to the man who had trapped me on the couch. Things could have gotten really ugly if I had pushed him away and said "no." But we'll never know because that never happened.

Frankly, thinking of the unpleasantness that might ensue if I said "no" was a tiny factor.  But if I had decided that I did not want to have sex and the "no" remained in my head, if something sound he would NOT have had the obligation to read my mind.

I can't help but think that my attitude about "consent" is born inside my being raised to believe that I have to take responsibility for myself as an adult. I cannot even conceive of uttering a sentences like these when I'm accusing a man of forcing me to have oral sex.

AZIZ'S DATE SAID,

"...They walked the two blocks back to his apartment building, an exclusive address on TriBeCa’s Franklin Street, where Taylor Swift has a place too. When they walked back in, she complimented his marble countertops. According to Grace, Ansari turned the compliment into an invitation. 

“He said something along the lines of, ‘How about you hop up and take a seat?’” Within moments, he was kissing her. “In a second, his hand was on my breast.” Then he was undressing her, then he undressed himself. She remembers feeling uncomfortable at how quickly things escalated.

When Ansari told her he was going to grab a condom within minutes of their first kiss, Grace voiced her hesitation explicitly. “I said something like, ‘Whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill.’”

She says he then resumed kissing her, briefly performed oral sex on her, and asked her to do the same thing to him. She did, but not for long. “It was really quick. Everything was pretty much touched and done within ten minutes of hooking up, except for actual sex.”

....Ansari also physically pulled her hand towards his penis multiple times throughout the night, from the time he first kissed her on the countertop onward. “He probably moved my hand to his dick five to seven times,” she said. “He really kept doing it after I moved it away.”

https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355

First of all, "Whoa....let's chill" means "wait" or "go slower." These words do not mean "no."

Second of all, context matters. For example:

• If a strange man walks up and grabs your hand and just walks beside you, that's assault in my mind. It's a mild assault. But it's frightening and threatening and should legitimately make the victim wonder what violent thing might happen next.
• If a blind date walks up and grabs your hand and walks beside you, that might be a little weird in the first few minutes of meeting someone -- implying an intimacy that isn't there yet.  This probably isn't even a mild assault
• If a man you're dating walks up and grabs your hand and walks beside you, hopefully, that's a good thing.

   By the same token...

• If a strange man walks up, takes your hand, and put it on his penis that ought to be called a sexual assault
• If a blind date walks up, takes your hand, and puts it on his penis right after he introduces himself and says "hello" that probably ought to be a sexual assault too. But  even if women become in charge of 50% of the world like they should be, I doubt that's going to get crime status.
• if a man you've gone on a date with once, then agreed to go to his home or room, then takes your hand and puts it on his penis, he's a dawg and an aggressive, nasty date -- but probably not  guilty of sexual assault.  And if you stay after having said "slow down" but not "no" and he does it again, I know it's not going to fall into the sexual assault zone.

The woman who seems to be halfway accusing Ansari of sexual assault in this scenario doesn't have to be a white woman, but she sounds like she's been raised like one. I simply haven't met a woman who wasn't white who believed this level of infantile behavior means a man assaulted her in some way.

ANSARI'S DATE ALSO SAID

Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was. “Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling. I know that my hand stopped moving at some points,” she said. “I stopped moving my lips and turned cold."

Whether Ansari didn’t notice Grace’s reticence or knowingly ignored it is impossible for her to say. “I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn’t interested. I don’t think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored.”

https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355 

"Reticience." 

He's being accused of not noticing her reticence?

Really?

In the 1970s and 1980s feminists were taking rape statistics of 1 in 4 women getting raped or sexually assaulted very seriously. Affluent white feminists (class counts) were talking their girls to self-defense classes.

But then they failed to teach their daughters how to say "no" and leave when they are

1) not afraid for their life
2) not afraid for their livelihood.
Really?

This scenario is ugly and sexually aggressive. But Aziz Ansari looks like he weighs 100 pounds soaking wet. And not one word of this story that suggests that Aziz was physically forceful.

Men and women communicate in non-verbal ways before, during, and before they have sex again. But when things grown folk don't like start happening to them, grown folk use words like, "Get out of my way. I don't like this. I'm leaving,"

By this woman's own account, nothing like this happened. And she didn't once hint she was afraid of him. And all of her non-verbals seemed to communicate what she said aloud, "slow down." So, I'm trying to figure out how she figures she didn't tacitly agree to give him oral sex etc. and stay there more of the same treatment.

Furthermore, the way the predominantly white press and some --not all- white feminists have been handling this story and the Larry Nassar story, it seems most people see white women and white children as equivalent in personal responsibility.
Or is the real problem that Ansari didn't treat his date like a princess while not failing to be white himself?
Even if I remove from my mind the possible racist element in this complaint(?) and believe every word of this woman's story-- and I do believe her--there's still too much of her own decision making missing from the story to really know the whole story.

And we need a whole story that's more like Lupita Nyong'os, Salma Hayek's and mine, in order to figure out if Ansari is more than just disgusting and sexually aggressive. The decisions Ansari's date made during every moment of that encounter matter and are part of what happened...contrary to popular belief(?)

"BELIEVE WOMEN" DOESN'T WORK FOR ADULTS IN ADULT SITUATIONS

Some women who have been definitely been assaulted want to give testimony about having been assaulted without telling us any of details or without making the details of what they've said make sense. Some women want to say "He attacked me" and "believe me" and let that be the end of it.

But real life doesn't work that way for adults, not even when you've been raped.

The problem with the #Believe Women section of the #MeToo Movement is that most of what we're identifying/mis-identifying as sexual harassment was never really about lack of belief. Men just said it was. A lot of workplace sexual harassment, sexual blackmail, and sexual assault was based in oh-who-cares more than lack of belief.

Ben Affleck squeezed a woman's breast knowing he was on camera. His brother, Casey, was accused of encouraging men to expose themselves while working on his movie---and likely blew this off as "it was just a joke." According to Ellen Page, Brett Ratner talked about hearing a woman's vulva flapping as she walked by on some sound stage or other.    

More importantly, a bunch of people ALREADY knew what kind of pig Harvey Weinstein was -- and they knew long before the scandal broke

A comedian made a public joke about Weinstein's forcing actresses to pretend they liked his sexual attention until they won an Oscar or Golden Globe and got some power. And none of the stars that heard about the joke said "boo" ...because they all knew.

The rapes and near-rapes at work were happening in the dark. But a lot of the sexual harassment was out in the open. Therefore, #BelieveWomen is not the issue. Believe sexual harassment and sexual assault is a big damn deal is the issue.

White women, having taken over and making #MeToo's next step #BelieveWomen (rather than the more accurate #TimesUp) have inadvertantly made women's goals dovetail with the goals of male run corporations and congress.

Under the guise of *believing women* more than a few high profile men have been fired and/or told to resign quickly so that government bodies and corporations could save face and/or avoid damaging their brand.

For example, I STILL don't know the details of what Senator John Conyers did. I don't know the details of what Charlie Rose did either. What I DO know about these two men being fired sounded like sexual harassment but not necessarily career ending sexual harassment. 

However, I strongly suspect male run congress and male executives at PBS know a lot more than they ever told the public. 

But what looks like a rush to judgement ultimately undermines #MeToo

There needs to be detailed PROOF of wrong doing
THEN creation of laws
so that some of these men can have more
than a lost job on their record.
Keeping in mind that blackmail always involves
a kind of coerced-cooperation, we need to change laws
so that some of these men can go to prison
where they belong for what I call "sexual blackmail."

The #MeToo movement has re-revealed that men blackmail women for things other than money. Men blackmail women for sex. It's time that the laws catch up with the realities of powerful men working with, more often than not, less powerful women. Men, anybody, who blackmails another person for sex needs to go to jail for a blackmail charge.

And some of the people, men and women, who help blackmailers cover their tracks need to be at risk for going to jail as accessories. 

to be continued

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

A LOVE LETTER TO WHITE PEOPLE

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Joseph Osmundson wrote,

White people, I love you. I really do. Not because I am a white person myself. This is not a story of self-love, although those can be important. This proclamation is not an attempt to subvert power structures that disavow love of white bodies. No, love of white bodies and selves, that is the norm, so hidden in plain sight that it is rarely given a racial identity at all.

We are so afraid of talking about race. We almost always believe racism is a thing that other people do. Talking about race and our own racism is ugly, and it implicates us in terrible things. But love without honesty is infatuation. If we want to love ourselves and each other we have to admit to the worst amongst us and claim the worst within us. I want to do this work.

White America, America full stop, I am trying to love you in a different way, an honest way, a way that provokes a dialog, a way that requires progressive change. I love you, and we need to do better. James Baldwin said, “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” White people, it’s time we grow up.

Who am I and what am I doing here?  

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X embarrassingly late in life, at 28....X, it turns out, was also reading me.

“I sure don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings,” he wrote,“but in fact I’ll even go so far as to say that I never really trust the kind of white people who are always so anxious to hang around Negroes, or to hang around Negro communities.”

I looked around me. In the heart of hipster Williamsburg, the pool was filled with people of color. I turned back to Malcolm. 

“I tell sincere white people, ‘Work in conjunction with us – each of us working among our own kind.’ Let sincere white individuals find all other white people they can who feel as they do – and let them form their own all-white groups, to work trying to convert other white people who are thinking and acting so racist.  Let sincere white people go and teach non-violence to white people!” (emphasis added)

While I believe that white people do have a role to play in the fight for racial justice, simply unpacking our invisible backpacks of privilege is necessary but not sufficient...

Read More
http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/09/love-letter-to-white-people/

BONE MARROW OF THE BECKY DEFLECTION: THE WHITE FEMINISTS THAT SCREWED HILLARY

This first part has been discussed to death.

But one more time for those living under a rock lately --

excerpt from

Dear Fellow White Women: We F**ked This Up

"The exit polls from the Nov. 8 election show that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump, compared to only 43 percent for Hillary Clinton. It appears many white women are not moved by Trump’s sexism, and instead would rather applaud the candidate for his lack of political correctness...

For many it wasn’t enough when he came for Muslims, Latinos and Black people. The real “pearl clutch” was the “grab ‘em by the pussy” moment, one that threatened all women but specifically white women. All of a sudden, everyone was appalled, and the endorsements started dropping like flies ― as if, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, he hadn’t already shown us who he was. 

And the worst part is: By the end, he had come for [us,] too."

~HuffPost 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dear-white-women-we-messed-this-up-election-2016_us_582341c9e4b0aac62488970e

* * * * * * *

Let's be clear. It wasn't just plain run-of-the-mill white women that screwed us all over (in addition to the very white Bernie Bros) It was intersectionism resisting white feminists and their unacknowledged racism who were out front that screwed us over.
While white women who were clearly targeted by Mean Tangerine and should have known better, I'm going to label most of these white women as ignorant, self-hating, know-nothings.

And as one black woman commented, there needs to be an internalized-misogyny class at every college in the nation, just for white women.

But I say that the biggest hypocrites crying right now are the white feminists. Because Mean Tangerine and his original gangsters could have been stopped if white feminists had been truly dedicated to intersectionality and therefore anti-racism. If white feminists were anywhere near dedicated to anti-racism they could had turned to other white women a YEAR AGO and said, "What is wrong with you racist bitches?"

If white feminists had the ability to do anything other than scream about reproductive rights of white women, maybe they could have, for example, talked to Christian white women about

1) their supposed Christianity and racism,
2) their supposed Christianity and sexism, and even
3) their supposed Christianity and hatred for gays even if they don't "believe in homosexuality" -- still not supposed to vote to crush people not like you.

Would white feminists been 100% or even 50% successful? No probably not. But quiet as it is kept? A bunch of white women Christians would never HELP someone get an abortion but a bunch of them wouldn't see it outlawed either --because they've had them or have had friends that simply could not care for a child.

Besides, somehow black feminists, a bunch of them Christian, have figured out "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" Black people, in general, have had to learn to live together regardless of what we believe. Black people,for example, have had "don't ask/don't tell" decades before Clinton implemented that in the military for LGBTQ folk. There's intolerance, sure. There's ignorance. But there isn't a concerted effort to mow people that are different within black culture into the ground.

Still using white Christian women (dedicated to whiteness more than Christianity) as an example, another thing white feminists could have talked to white Christian women about how "pro-life" ought to mean anti-death penalty. That's less of an issue now. But the point is this: Before you talk to someone else's beliefs you have to be able to respect positions and opinions other than your own
And white feminists can't do that. White feminists can't even commit to being anti-racist which is in-your-face visible every day.

If white feminists had tried to talk to white women from other "walks of life" about ALL the various forms of oppression (anti-black, anti-immigrant, homophobic, islamophobic, anti-trans) coming out of Trump's mouth maybe they had have more talking points OVER THE LAST YEAR, a hell of a lot more than abortion and "grab em by the p*ssy" Hillary Clinton might have gotten 60% of the white female vote like I thought she was gonna get.

But in order to do this white feminists have to acknowledge their OWN white racism problem.

Even within this article, as it tries to acknowledge the lack of progress in white feminists' intersectionality there is a extreme lack of awareness.

After all the supposed progress we’ve made, painstakingly trying to change a white feminist movement into an intersectional one (and for that we have only the hard work of women of color to thank), white women didn’t show up to fight back against a man whose rhetoric and policies directly attack women of color, immigrant women, Muslim women, LGBTQ women and more.

The writer acknowledges there's been just about zero work by white feminists to join other feminists. But this only acknowledges neglect. And it's bigger than that. Much. White feminists are just as actively committed to being willfully ignorant and racist as other white women A few days ago white feminists called on all women to wear white while voting in order to acknowledge one of the earliest white feminists like those in England and those in the U.S. like Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard some of whom were racist and others of whom moved deep into anti-blackness territory. In the late 19th century an early 20th century, at the expense of black women, these suffragists (early feminists) were always trying to court southern white women into their women's movement instead of working on anti-lynching. Early white feminists from the north courted southern white women who would have slavery reinstated if they could while some of them bragged about being from families that were abolitionists during the Civil War. When women of color call white feminists on this hypocrisy, revisionist history, e-racing of racism crap in the here and now, they tend to say the same things that Mean Tangerine does about his own sexism and racism,

"Well that was a long time ago"

with a side helping of

"That's just the way it was back then."

The minimization of white racism by white society is always happening simultaneously with a minimization of white racism in each individual white soul. And this same minimization of white racism within made it impossible for white feminists to call other white women out on their racism A YEAR AGO.

With ethnoracism alone white feminists would have had three to four times as much evidence that Mean Tangerine is a lowlife when talking to other white women about how they should vote. If only white feminists took other oppressions seriously too.

Racism and sexism walk hand in hand within white society. They are locked together too often to try and separate them. If white feminists had made a true attempt to understand white racism, its motivations, and how racism is denied within the self and inside white others, Hillary might be president right now.

But ENOUGH with the Becky deflections already.

People of color already knew white women always side with white men when it counts. We've always known who Becky is. People of color KNEW we had to jump white men and white women as united white supremacy front. I thought we'd only get 33% of white people to stand against white supremacy and its associated patriarchy. But color me surprised, the white vote was 3 or 4% higher than my estimate (I expected white men to go for Trump in a stronger way.)

So what the hell happened to the POC Coalition that was supposed to be the vast majority of voters blocking Mean Tangerine?
And why is it always the women of color that are always leading the anti-racism defense, politically speaking?

More later.