feminist blogs in english

Another recent post over at Change.org:

Why Pop Culture Matters to Race Bloggers

Prince of Persia, Twilight, The Last Airbender, Karate Kid, Red Dawn — this summer’s blockbusters seem to have gotten the blogosphere humming more than usual, with many writers examining Hollywood’s relationship with race.In my experience, sardonic or critical posts focusing on the latest pop culture icons fare far better among readers than dry, data-heavy sociological analyses (which take about 23 times as long to prepare). Pop culture diatribes tend to be easy to write, widely read and more likely to go viral. For bloggers who live and die by pageviews and ad-clicks, this is our bread and butter.

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This is good news, but lawyers for Gov. Brewer are expected to appeal and this may go the United States Supreme Court:

A federal judge on Friday, weighing in a clash between the federal government and a state over immigration policy, blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law from going into effect.

In a ruling on a law that has rocked politics coast to coast and thrown a spotlight on a border state’s fierce debate over immigration, Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District Court here said that some aspects of the law can go into effect as scheduled on Thursday.

But Judge Bolton took aim at the parts of the law that have generated the most controversy, issuing a preliminary injunction against sections that called for police officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws and that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times.

Judge Bolton put those sections on hold while she continued to hear the larger issues in the challenges to the law.

“Preserving the status quo through a preliminary injunction is less harmful than allowing state laws that are likely pre-empted by federal law to be enforced,” she said.

“There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens,” she wrote. “By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”

I've been wondering what to say about this whole mess--the mess that is U.S. media, the mess that is electoral politics and political appointments, the mess that is white het male supremacy in the U.R.A. I've spent many hundreds of hours speaking in depth with many women, African American women, about this country and what it so effortlessly and intentionally does to anyone Black and female, that I've not really known what I should say about this, as I knew many women bloggers of color would be addressing this matter in all its political complexity. So, with that as a preface, I'll speak a bit about what I understand to have played out before our eyes this past week, informed as it is by those hundreds of hours of conversation, with me mostly listening.

I first came to awareness of this "story" seeing "the clip" of Shirley Sherrod delivering a deviously extracted sliver of her speech at an NAACP banquet, about how (in my words) she came to understand that not only was this country white supremacist, but that it's classism meant that poor whites has more in common with poor Blacks than with rich whites, despite what rich whites would have us all believe. Watch as poor and non-poor whites blame Mexican immigrants and poor Black and Brown people for their social ills, and you'll know that rich white men's media works well to bind the oppressed to the oppressor in ways that make sturdy solidarity and trustworthy alliance among the oppressed very difficult indeed.

Now, being a radical and all, and being fed up to here [cuts hand across the air a foot above my head] with liberalism in all forms, I was hoping, against all hope, that the media might be making the point that white supremacist racism takes its toll on people in many ways, and one of those ways is it causes one to doubt that white people are human. I grew up, a white child in a white area, hearing that the White Man is the Devil. I didn't understand until later how true that is.

When I say the White Man, this is not making a determination about the value or depth of the souls of every pale male in North America. No. It is not "bigoted" or "prejudicial" as the white conservatives and white liberals might politically correctly decry. To speak of the White Man is to speak of a governing idea, embodied in practice, that whiteness and manhood are supreme and ought reign this land forever. To speak of the White Man as the Devil is only to note the cruelty and callousness, the sadism and the condescension that comes with occupying this political location with so little owned awareness of what that means for those who do not. I mean on one level, Andrew Breitbart knows full well what being a white het male supremacist means. He's no Glenn Sacks, but between and among them there is this noxious denial of privilege and power; no matter how much media Sacks controls, he'll cast the white het man as the noble underdog in any social justice battle.

Socially and collectively we are not encouraged to speak of this, really, honestly--especially if we are of color in the U.S., and particularly if we are women of color. This means that only portions of truth about white male supremacy may be known, because as long as men and whites refuse to hear what women of color have to say, the rest of us will be ignorant as hell.

"The Devil", coming from this white Jew who doesn't believe in such things as "heaven" or "hell" other than what appears before us on Earth, is a term that stands for something; it isn't literal. The Devil isn't a wicked being, cast out of a white-male sky-god's left hand, forever cursing those who were born left-handed to be sinister (sinestra in Italian means "left"). The Devil is a way of referring to something evil that is going on. What "evil" is, may be known to us in many ways. I don't believe it is a force without social structural roots. I don't think there is evil in the wind, for example, other than the evil of a very industrialised world that is killing the planet and changing weather patterns, making rain storms, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes more frequent and more intense.

The wind that current concerns me is that emanating from the proverbial buttocks of white het male supremacists who choreographed a mass media assault against a very real human being named Shirley Sherrod. They did this willfully, with malice aforethought. White het men like Andrew Breitbart, the execs at Fux News, and Tom Vilsack did this. Others participated. The men at the NAACP. The U.S. president's spokespeople. Andrew got that sudden blast of foul wind blowing but it needed currents to carry it as far as it went.

The foul wind blowing across the land these days is an old breeze--it flows out of Tea Partier Andrew Breitbart, but he pre-exists him also. It is back for another go at swaying and shaping the current crop of saplings in our collective imagination, distorting reality in such a way as to make us believe the most absurd things. Things like this: Black women have revolutionary power in the U.S.

As has been noted here before, one stream of gaseous, noxious fumes emanating from WHM supremacists is the idea that the Black woman exists for everyone else uses and abuses, and ought never be in service to herself. Every African American woman I know has been systemically and chronically mistreated by Black men and other men of color, by white women, and by white men. Somewhat paradoxically, Black women are too often regarded as white men by Black men--as the ones with more power, as Black men by white women--as "the dangerous dark other", and as mammies and hos by white het men. These groups, who each in their own ways oppress Black women, confuse race as gender and gender as race in precisely the wrong ways, and as a consequence they project all the powers of their own position onto Black women.

Black men and white women can disagree about who has more institutional power in the U.S. (That rich white men have the most is beyond dispute.) The Democratic battle in early to mid 2008 between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was experienced by me, a white male, as a socially debated sure-fire test of what you believed the lesser of two evils was: having white privilege but being a woman or having male privilege but being Black. (That there was, in fact, a Black woman running for the same office seemed utterly on many, especially the media.)

The mathematics of such calculations tends to forget that oppression isn't only additively accrued, it's exponentially experienced. So, as I understand it anyway, being a Black woman in the U.R.A. means that one doesn't "just" deal with white supremacy and male supremacy every day. It means that one also deals with the sexism that is infused in white supremacy, and the racism that is embedded in male supremacy. To be a Black woman in the U.S. is not to endure what Black men and white women endure, only. It is also its own marginalised political position, its own stigmatised structural location, with an institutionalised national identity infused and  influenced variously by the political meaning of many other things, such as class, age, and level of heteronormativity as defined and enforced by WHM supremacy.

One's own life, of course, is another matter. One's life is, at least partly, one's own, shaped by region, one's parents, upbringing, the media and events of the era, and the alchemical, spiritual combination of one's own personal characteristics, temperament, talents, and individual ways of being. As Toni Morrison said, to a white Southern man named Charlie Rose on his talk show (and I'm paraphrasing), To know I'm Black is to know nothing at all about me. To be a Black woman in white supremacy, if I've been listening closely, is to have layer upon layer of white male supremacist sordid story-telling loaded up in trucks and dumped on you daily, with little to no relief.

As some bloggers have noted*, what gets dumped is dug up from polluted ground that's been lying around all smelly and foul, for centuries now. It's not the blood of savagely massacred American Indians--through to this very hour, that fouls the ground, nor the blood of raped and lashed slaves--who exist also in this day and time. It's the blood and bodies of evil white men who controlled everything from the start of "this great nation" who in life and in death have made it their mission, an emission, as it were, to pollute the Earth with the Western capitalist societies that currently, and for some time now, ride roughshod across it, with spurs on its heels, always pounding, digging into the body of the Earth, trying to get more and more from it.

The BP oil spill disaster and what happened to Shirley Sherrod are manufactured from the same massive cloud of destruction, and its name is the White Man, a simultaneously mythic and manipulative political figure as straight as an arrow, piercing the souls of anyone who stands in his way, or who attempts to speak the truth about who he is that he projects onto everyone else: a dangerously powerful and contemptuously bigoted form of being that achieves and maintains power only through the systematic subordination and destruction of the people who he believes are not as good as him.

*See these and other posts at The Crunk Feminist Collective, That Girl Has Issues, and Race-Talk for much more detailed and careful analysis of this whole matter.

My latest post over at Change.org, which addresses Fox News’ recent quest in search of black racism:

Fox News Would Really Like to See Evidence of Black Racism

Since the NAACP passed a resolution denouncing racist elements within the Tea Party (the details of which NAACP chairman Ben Jealous explained on Change.org last week), Fox News has been spinning its wheels trying to expose what it sees as racism among the black community.For example, as Prerna Lal recently reported,  Fox has lately been up in arms over the New Black Panther Party, a group that allegedly engaged in voter intimidation in 2008. In her post, Prerna cited video footage of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, in which he pointedly declares: “The evidence clearly shows the [members of the New Black Panther Party] breaking the law. Why were they given a pass [from the White House]?”

Forget about the fact that Obama isn’t the one that chose not to file a criminal case against the New Black Panther Party (that decision rested with Bush). O’Reilly’s choice of the phrase “get a pass” is a deliberate effort to suggest that certain minorities (specifically African-Americans) are getting preferential treatment in the Obama administration. He’s suggesting that whites are the real victim of racism here — a theme we also saw in the Shirley Sherrod case.

Across Fox’s coverage, we see the same message. It’s no coincidence that within days of the NAACP’s announcement, Fox devoted several segments to the New Black Panther Party — highlighting their supposed efforts to disenfranchise white voters. FoxNews.com also ran an opinion piece by Congressman Lamar Smith that explicitly accused the Department of Justice of racism in its failure to file a lawsuit against the group. In it, Smith writes, “Had the defendants been members of the Ku Klux Klan, I doubt the Justice Department would have dropped the charges. This appears to be a case of reverse discrimination.”

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A recent post I wrote for Change.org, examining why the Shirley Sherrod controversy was intended to resonate amongst White viewers:

Shirley Sherrod: A Lesson in White Victimhood

Back in March, the speech Shirley Sherrod gave before the NAACP seemed innocuous enough. In it, the Obama appointee urged her audience to heed the words of Toni Morrison, declaring, “we have to get to the point where race exists, but it doesn’t matter.” Sherrod — the current state director of rural development — also movingly recounted how her attitudes toward race have shifted since growing up in the South, at a time when lynchings were still commonplace.

Yesterday, though, Fox News managed to twist Sherrod’s words. The network aired a video that was edited to suggest Sherrod currently discriminates against white farmers. (View the edited video here.). As edited, the video suggests Sherrod has previously tried to avoid having to actually help a white farmer keep his land — and that she made this decision based on the color of his skin.

Actually, what Sherrod discussed was how her views on race changed after witnessing how a white farmer whose land was being foreclosed suffered the same apathy and mistreatment at the hands of wealthy whites that she’d seen black farmers experience. Ultimately, she encouraged her audience to view the world not just in terms of black and white, but in terms of “haves” and “have nots.” (Full speech here — the relevant anecdote is around minute 17.)

But so much for “fair and balanced.” Instead, Fox News chose to insinuate that Sherrod actively discriminates against whites in her current job with the administration. Fox News also went a step further to argue that the NAACP was backing Sherrod’s supposed discrimination against whites.

Sherrod holds a fairly obscure position within the Obama administration, and it’s plain that the edited video that surfaced was just that — edited, and heavily so. So why the sudden controversy?

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An (older) new post I wrote over at Change.org last week:

Why Ryan Murdough is Racist and Why You Probably Are, Too

The wonderful thing about democracy is that even the most radical political extremists can participate in our political process. But of course, this is also democracy’s curse — particularly if these radical extremists are noxious white supremacists that try to spout racist, intolerant hatred from the largest soapbox they can manage.New Hampshire’s Ryan Murdough is one such case. A fringe Congressional candidate running as a Republican — a man unknown to the state’s political powers-that-be — Murdough flew under the radar until earlier this month, when he wrote a letter to the Concord Monitor. In it, Mudough outed himself as the state chairperson of the New Hampshire branch of the American Third Position Party.

Sound innocuous? Actually, the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks hate groups in America) labels this group ”a fledgling political party…with the aim of uniting disaffected racists.”

Murdough is a textbook white supremacist who sees multiculturalism as a threat — not just to his cultural identity, but to his very safety. In his letter to the editor, Murdough wrote, “Statistics show that areas with high non-white populations have higher rates of violent crime.” In a one-on-one interview with the Concord Monitor, Murdough expands on this viewpoint by suggesting that non-whites are genetically predispositioned to committing crime. “I’d rather live in a place that would be safer for my kids, and most of those places happen to be white. New Hampshire is an example.”

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[This post was revised later on 24 July 2010, with a partial list of WOC blogs added, and text added by me in bold and in brackets.]

When I think about the problem of men falsely accused of rape, one story leaps to mind: the story written about, magnificently and movingly, by white Southern writer Harper Lee, in her classic book, which was published 50 years ago this year--less than a couple of weeks ago--titled To Kill A Mockingbird.

There's a Southern white woman allegedly named Connie Chastain, and she's no Harper Lee in the social justice or writing departments--for those who haven't seen the movie or read the novel recently, Ms. Lee, a white Southern woman, described the climate and culture of violence of white men in the South, and who is victimised by them: namely, everyone else.

Connie, however, seems to think there's a significant social problem with white men (and women) being falsely accused of rape. This significant social problem apparently merits the formation of an online resource, primarily for men and the mothers of falsely accused boys, called "The False Rape Society". Her blog focuses its supportive lens on white men falsely accused of raping white women, and the token woman of color.

Has she noticed there's a different problem in the South--as well as the North, the East, and the West? That of white men raping white women, and white men raping women of all colors, and Black men raping Black women? And men tending to rape the women of their own ethnic and cultural group, except for the wealthier white het guys... who roam the Earth raping wherever they go? I know she knows about the intersection of race and gender problems in the South: she's read To Kill A Mockingbird and does list it as one of her favorite books.

She's just done a post about yours truly; she identifies what someone has decided are the "Top Ten Feminist Blogs", which she admits to not visiting. Note: more or less, they are ALL basically white-dominated feminist blogs. She doesn't seek out the opinions of women of color who have feminist or womanist blogs on the problem of rape. What's up with that? This shows a lack of regard for the experiences of rape faced by women of color (and also by white women) who have an analysis of men's violence against women. Connie was just checking the list that she came across. But, isn't she capable of going beyond the list to, say, the blogs of women of color? The answer is "yes", she is capable of going beyond the list, but "no", she isn't going to arrive at any WOC blogs. She does, however, arrive at my blog. Why, because I'm not a woman? Typical antifeminist practice--ignoring women's voices, especially ignoring the voices of WOC and going right to one of the very few males who has a feminist view on men's violence against women and related atrocities.

Why ignore the blogs of feminist women of color, you might ask? Because, it appears, the only woman of color she cares to highlight, to focus her attention on, with a photo and all, is a Black woman who she identifies as "The Duke Liar"--the woman who WAS abused--verbally, physically, and sexually--by a gang of white frat guys. (The abuse was in the ridiculing of her, the taunting of her, the remarks that they wanted a white woman, not her; the ways they degraded her humanity by treating her as a thing to be used, paid for, and cast out like a rag. The abuse was in their disgusting remarks, and their physical touching, as if she was "theirs". Even without rape, there was plenty of sexual abuse by that white gang of men that night. And if you believe they've been non-misogynist saints before and since, I've got some oily sea water to sell ya in the Gulf of Mexico.)

This white woman, Connie--and I do wonder if she is a woman, honestly--shows her racism against Black women in several ways. Later on in her post, below, she mentions a white feminist blogger who doesn't much like me because I once called her out on being racist to women of color to whom I am an activist ally. (The whites--of whatever gender--generally don't like being called out on racism, with a few notable exceptions.)

She also doesn't seem to notice that I identify as an intergender male, not as a man. (It is a tad confusing, as "male" and "man" are often used interchangeably, even here at A.R.P.; and I personally and politically support men and males being identified in ways that women wish and need to do for women's safety and resistance efforts). The only group of people Connie Chastain seems to go to actively support are privileged white men who might, or might not, be rapists. (How, honestly, can she know?)

Connie wrote a novel called Southern Man, about someone who is falsely accused of sexual harassment--do you think he's Black man falsely accused of harassing a white woman? Nope. He's a class-privileged white guy.

Here's a blurb about her book:
A family man is targeted with a false sexual harassment complaint by an amoral young woman and her uber-feminist mentor. 

In case Connie's antifeminism wasn't apparent, that blurb sure clears up where she stands. Could the 'family man' be amoral?? Naaah.


She mentions below, in citing "the problem" that she discovered that the two percent false rape charge rate wasn't accurate according to her own work and findings. What percent is false, "Connie"? You fail to note that. Why? (As found generally, that false report rate is generally stable at 2% to 8% percent, which means the non-false report rate is always at 92% to 98%. Think about that. And how many of those 92% to 98% of correctly accused men--the men who are rapists--see a courtroom, or prison terms? Not a whole helluva lot. And what percent of raped women get defended? Not a whole helluva lot. None of the raped women I know have someone like Connie doing up a blog about The True Rape Society. Apparently injustice only counts as such when it happens to white guys.

Coming up shortly, from The False Rape Society, is her explanation for its need. Then comes her latest post, on me and my blog, not on blogs by women of color, including but not limited to:
An Arab Woman Blues, Anishinaabekwe, AROOO (A Room Of Our Own),  Aunt Jemima's Revenge, Celie's Revenge, Code Red, Diary of An Anxious Black Woman, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, Guerilla Mama Medicine, Journal de la Reyna, Mariposa Tales, masterwordsmith-unplugged, Racialicious, Standupsistah, The Angry Black Woman, The Crunk Feminist Collective, The Feminist Texican, That Girl Has Issues., The Kitchen Table, What About Our Daughters, and last but not least, Womanist Musings. 

There are so many blogs by WOC that I seriously wonder how far out of her way Connie has to go to purposefully avoid reading any of them. Given the list you'll see below, I now feel like this blog post is at least a BIT more balanced.

She also ignores one of my all-time favorite white feminist blogs, by a woman who VERY responsibly focuses on the reality of rape (and the truth about "false rape claims"); that blog is called Abyss2Hope. I'll bet Connie won't go near THAT blog EVER--it's got way too much information about men's rape cultures. It would shake the very foundation of Connie's blog, and political focus.

There's a lot of "reality" Connie seems to intentionally avoid. Because we know those class-privileged white het men need all our support and attention and all. Lorde knows they don't get enough from one another!

Well, they're not getting all of it. And that's not a sign of hate, Connie. It's only a sign that I pick different battles. You want to be sure that around 5% of falsely accused men are not faced with prison terms. And I want to see rape by the approximately 95% of men who do have raped when accused, stop doing it, and to get all men to stop other men from committing rape. My focus is also on Indigenous people's rights, and rights of the Earth. Does that mean I also hate everyone who isn't Indigenous, and every form of life that isn't "the Earth"? Do you get, yet, the illogic of drawing a conclusion that someone fighting to end an atrocity hates the perps? Might I actually--are you sitting down?--love women and justice for women? Can WHM supremacists and the women who defend their callous and selfish actions even imagine such a thing!! (Wait: you mean someone can LOVE women, focus on women, or focus on how and when and where men are oppressive, and not HATE men???? I know: what a concept!)

Anyway, reader, below Connie's post are some comments posted to that F.R.S. blog, and included there is one from some dolt (I think that's the right term--I'm using "dolt" in the most positive sense) named Michael Waters, who goes out of his way to find some old comment by "v" that was posted here once upon a time. Because apparently he couldn't quote me, the host, who writes most of what is on this blog (well, that isn't cross-posted). This is how the MRA-trolls' bullshit goes: Michael quotes a commenter as a representative of my voice, rather than, oh, say, quoting me directly. And then MRA-trolls can pick up that post, and use it over and over again to make their same silly points. This is typcical of how MRAs and their defenders misrepresent feminist or profeminist points of view, for their own biased and bigoted agendas which are pro-patriarchal and racist--at least. (See *here* for much more on that strategy.)

I do offer a comment to her and to Michael, at the end, which was posted to that blog she moderates.

Now, what follows next is her own introductory material from The False Rape Society blog, and after than is the latest post to that blog, which mentions me, which is really silly--who the hell am I? Doesn't she have some serial, gang, marital, or date rapists to spend time criticising? She concludes I'm basically insane. So, Connie: why bother writing about me then? (Shrugs shoulders and shakes head.) I don't offer commentary on the introductory material, but I do put commentary, in bold and in brackets, among her comments in the blog post about my blog and moi.

Why this blog [The False Rape Society]

Well, Andrew Breitbart, smearing Shirley Sherrod in order to refute the NAACP’s resolution against “racist elements” in the Tea Party turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Yes, you cost her her job, but she’s making black people look good. It’s too bad you’re not like, a journalist, or something, and did some digging to find the full video before you declared it to be an example of reverse racism. Ms. Sherrod is actually a really worthwhile person, unlike yourself, and now the world knows it. So kudos to you for bringing our attention to a woman who was and is working to bring black people and white people together in solidarity during a time when so many are feverishly working towards the opposite.

Anyway.

I try to avoid watching Fox News. I hear about it on the real news and I see its headlines on my iGoogle page, but I can’t bring myself to waste the electricity changing the channel on my TV to “FNC”. Apparently Glenn Beck has been heralding the coming race war. I’ve always understood “the coming race war” to mean the time that racist white militias finally band together and kill off all the browns. I also thought it was a joke, and kind of funny. Beck, however, wants us to believe otherwise. He’s saying that the “New Black Panthers” are going to start a government-backed race war to kill off Big Whitey. Of course this is silly. Fox News has been complaining about the tiny group of New Black Panthers for like a decade. I don’t know who they think Obama is, but if anything is true about him, it’s that he’s not demonstrably a militant black man. I’m more militant than he is, and I’m a bougie tragic mulatto living in the suburbs. I don’t see any medallions, dreadlocks or black fists adorning the Oval Office. But we’re supposed to believe that in between getting blamed for the oil spill and fomenting socialism, he’s been training this small elite squad of brothers to take out the white menace with the U.S. Army at their disposal? I’m really just speechless.

There was a time when I wasn’t always hearing about reverse racism, race wars, etc. in the mainstream media. It kind of seemed like most reasonable people had come to the conclusion that racism was bad, we needed to work against it, and that if you were a violent, loud mouthed racist you should just stay in your cabin and keep it to yourself. We didn’t worry about them because they stayed in the woods, for the most part, and everyone thought they were “crazy” anyway. I was focused on rooting out insidious racism, the kind that you can’t easily identify, the kind that exists in progressive communities, the institutional kind that deeply affects every person of color and which still exists today but has been obscured by all this blatant racism and the fact that we now have a black man in the White House. I could be romanticizing pre-2008, but it just seems like we wouldn’t be seeing articles like “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” during the Bush years. They knew to keep their racism under wraps back then. I’m almost laughing to myself remembering when the GOP was respectful of black people because they felt like if they tried hard enough, they could lure a few over the fence. Case in point: Michael Steele, head of the RNC. He became head of the RNC during the 2008 campaign as, I think, a way to say “hey black people, we’ve got ourselves a Negro too!”, and also as a way to criticize Obama without seeming racist. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way they planned, and the black guy still won. So what’s the point of respecting black people or other nonwhite people now? They’re all just going to vote for the Colored, right? Because all people of color are a monolith, especially those predictable darkies.

I think the “racist elements” of the Tea Party/GOP are playing their end game. Calling him any name they can think of, blaming him for everything from AIDS to increased activity on the sun, doing anything they can think of to bring him down before the end game plays out. What happens then is yet to be seen. Will it be the repudiation of the Tea Party by the majority of U.S. citizens in this coming midterm election? Will it be the end (again) of acceptable blatant, virulent racism? Will something ominous happen to Obama? I couldn’t tell you. But you can’t be a right wing ideologue with unstable, easily manipulated followers and go on and on about a “coming race war” without something happening at the end. I know what some of Beck’s followers would really like it to be, and that’s scary.

I live in California, Los Angeles to be exact. I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day:

“Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald When You Really Need Him?”

It's time. Or past time. Perhaps it is centuries past time. Or perhaps someone ought to have had a good talking to with Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, giving those Jewish men a heads up about how people who would come to call themselves "Christians" would almost completely misunderstand and misuse Jesus-the-person to promote their own patriarchal agendas and project their own needs for a Father-God who is also a Son.

A month or sometimes a week cannot go by without someone approaching me--a Jew who is neither atheist nor theist--with the idea that "You need Jesus". What they mean is "You need to believe in this cultish religion I've decided is The Truth because I've taken in the delusions and distortions human beings have spoken and written about Jesus and I MUST believe they are true--my faith in my cult depends on it." That's what they usually mean. Some are more good-hearted. Some approach me with a kind of condescending compassion that makes me want to vomit. Some with an arrogance that makes me want to spit in their faces.

Regardless of their reasons and anti-Jesus-while-"Christian" ambitions, they won't get away with it here at A.R.P. Jesus will be spoken about respectfully here as the Jewish person he was, not the Christian God he wasn't.

Let's begin with a few basic truthful facts, as opposed to the kind many Christians preach, promote, and proselytise.

Jews in the time and region of Jesus (while he walked the Earth) didn't tell history the way contemporary Western Christians often do--as a set of facts that are understood to have actually occurred in ways that are not open to interpretation and contradiction, discussion and disagreement.  

Christian Fundamentalism is a deeply and dangerously anti-Jesus phenomenon.


What most Christians don't want you to know about Jesus: a top ten list.

1. Jesus was not ever a Christian, nor did he ever advocate that anyone be a Christian.

2. Jesus was not THE son of G-d. He was, as all of us are and each of us is, a child of G-d if we're going with the metaphor of G-d as parent.

3. Jesus used metaphors to make his beliefs and experiences more comprehensible to his audience. Making G-d a "Father" was not something Jesus believed a "truth". He used the language as a device to convey deeper meaning to his listeners. Jesus was a Jew, and while Jews frequently defaulted to various patriarchal metaphors, any rabbi who has studied and experienced G-d, knows that G-d does not have a gender, a sex, or a patriarchal personality.

4. Jesus was not pro-capitalist, and anyone who honors and respects capitalism as a social good that should be made sacred or should be worshiped is behaving in a way that is anti-Jesus.

5. Jesus was not a white supremacist or a racist. Jesus was also not ever white. (Whiteness didn't exist when he lived, for one thing. And Jesus was Semitic, or what would now be called a person of color.) Anyone who believes Jesus was white and behaves as though whiteness is better than any other politically constructed and enforced racial identity is not behaving in accordance with the teachings of Jesus.

6. Jesus was not homophobic and was not an anti-gay or anti-lesbian bigot. He didn't speak on the subject but he did stand with the oppressed, the marginalised, and the socially ostracised and disempowered, the castigated and degraded, and not with the corrupt power-brokers of society. If you are homophobic, heterosexist, and anti-lesbian or anti-gay, you are behaving in a way that is anti-Jesus.

7. Jesus was not anti-woman . He was pro-woman; he held Mary Magdalene as his closest disciple, an equal to him, not beneath him. He never said she was a prostitute. A comma in the New Testament has been ignored, as Jesus, according to that biblical story listed people he encountered including Mary Magdalene and a prostitute. He stood with women enslaved in systems of prostitution, not in patriarchal, misogynistic judgment of them. If you are anti-woman, including against women who are trapped in systems of prostitution, you are behaving against the teachings of Jesus.

8. Jesus was not born from the womb of a woman who was "a virgin" if by "virgin" we mean a woman who had never had sexual intercourse. She may not have had sexual intercourse willingly: she may well have been raped. Joseph, quite possibly, was not his biological father but was a man who took care of Jesus' mother, Mary, after she was raped. Regardless, Jesus had a biological father, not a heavenly one. A sperm and an egg combined and Jesus was born, like every other human being on Earth. The notion of Mary the Mother being a "virgin" is a misread and mistranslation of a term that more accurately means "maiden" or very young woman.

9. Jesus was opposed to the worship of Man, of Mankind, of Men and of Patriarchal societies, particularly and outspokenly against the one he lived in that was governed and ruled by the Roman Empire, which, as all ought to know by now, was lethally anti-Jesus. The Roman Empire was coercive and corrupting of some of his people, the Jews. If your values and practices are pro-man-worshiping, believe in the man as the only appropriate head of household, or head of state, or if you are in any other ways pro-patriarchal, you are anti-Jesus.

10. Jesus was not resurrected in any way that is different than any other human being. In other words, he was not uniquely resurrected. The Resurrection spoken about in the New Testament is metaphorical, and a device to communicate something about our spiritual nature, not only Jesus'. He was not a kind of human being metaphysically different than others but he has been made into one who is metaphorically different. He was a human being, like me and like you, who noted that we are not just animals as "animals" were understood in that anti-Indigenist framework and culture: all beings are and all being is divine. All of Life is Divine. He welcomed people to know and experience this. If you believe Jesus was qualitatively different in his humanness; if you believe he was a fundamentally more metaphysical being than anyone else; if you believe he was "more spirit" than any Indigenous, Wiccan, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindi, Jewish, agnostic, atheistic, or pagan person, you don't know Jesus.

Now spread THAT word.

Peace to us all, collectively, when we realise we are not entirely separate beings who need warfare, social hierarchies, rape, racism, and civilisation. When we join with revolutionary feminist women and revolutionary Indigenous warriors in the effort to radically transform all patriarchal and genocidal societies, we may begin to collectively know peace on Earth--if Earth survives what industrial and corporate patriarchal civilisation has done to it.

We may know peace, love, and joy in the mean time as well, in a way that is sometimes termed "individually" by those who may limit our being to the distortions of a kind of living-experience not promoted by Jesus. We may know peace, love, and joy by reminding our apparently individual selves who we really are: waves on the sea of non-separate Being that are simultaneously and paradoxically Many and One.

We may know peace, love, and joy when we accept and experience, against much Christian mis-teaching, that G-d, which is not male and is not a man; which doesn't live only in (as) the sky--which lives equally as Earth; which doesn't look down upon us as a patronising father might; which is not in us, or outside us, or above us, or beyond us.

G-d is not a being who is fixed in some sort of sacred portion of outer space. G-d is Being and Becoming. In this sense, G-d is not theistic and theists are wrong about G-d. G-d is non-theistic, not atheistic as that term is commonly used by that arrogant bunch who call themselves atheists.

G-d is us--all of us, and is all that is not us' G-d always has been and always will be becoming this in ways that our limited human minds register as paradoxical and perplexing.

G-d is not Giant Ego that cares one bit whether G-d is referred to as Jesus or "Christ" or Buddha or Krishna or Abraham, or "Allah" or "God" or "Great Spirit", or Goddess, or G-d or any other name that humans can speak or write. For G-d is authentically unspeakable and ultimately unknowable by humans who believe they are not part of all Being as a wave is part of the sea.

To promote one name for G-d, including the term G-d, or Christ, is to not understand AT ALL what Jesus was preaching about and experiencing. It is, rather, to be egotistical and arrogant, lost in one's own private being and ego while often pretending one is doing what Jesus spoke about as seeing and knowing G-d. Delusions about G-d, or about Jesus, or about other human beings, or other Life, will not serve us in our collective quest to find peace, love, and joy on and with Earth and its Biosphere, which is, metaphorically and not-so-metaphorically speaking, our parent.

There is no heavenly Father. There is "us" living in a nightmare of our own making, in part by not understanding what Jesus and Buddha and Indigenous Spiritual Guides were, are, and said.

Wake up from the nightmare. Now.

Know yourself as Being. Sit humbly in the knowledge that G-d is not absolutely or objectively knowable to you, and that you have no moral business going door to door or nation to nation to proclaim that you, and your people uniquely know what G-d is and wants better than any other people who know G-d or Buddha-nature, Goddess or Great Spirit.

The following news release may be seen at its Amnesty International website, *here*.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL APPLAUDS PASSAGE OF LANDMARK LEGISLATION ADDRESSING SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST NATIVE WOMEN

Tribal Law and Order Act is an 'Historic Effort to Tackle Major Challenges That Allow Crimes Against Native Peoples to Flourish,' Says Amnesty International

July 21, 2010

Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today applauded House passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that tackles the complex jurisdictional maze that allows violent crime against American Indians to continue unabated. The Tribal Law and Order Act, a long overdue effort to address public safety issues in Indian Country, would enhance the criminal justice system by improving coordination and communication between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.

"This historic, bi-partisan legislation addresses long-overlooked human rights abuses in Indian Country. It is an important effort to tackle major challenges that allow crimes against Native American and Alaska Native peoples to flourish," said Larry Cox, executive director for AIUSA. "If properly implemented, it will open the door for the U.S. government to address the erosion of tribal authority. In time it will decrease the high levels of rape and finally provide Native women with effective recourse if they are sexually assaulted. In short, this legislation stands to curtail the impunity that allows rapists to prey on Native women like vultures."

The Tribal Law and Order Act is bi-partisan legislation that was introduced by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD). The Act passed the Senate on June 23, 2010, as part of H.R. 725, The Indian Arts and Crafts Amendment Act of 2010. Today, the House passed H.R. 725 with the Tribal Law and Order Act attached. The legislation addresses disturbing rates of sexual violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women, a subject that Amnesty International drew national attention to in its 2007 report, Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA.

Maze of Injustice exposed the disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual violence that Native American and Alaska Native women suffer in this country -- 2.5 times higher than for non-native women in the United States. The complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions often allows perpetrators, 86 percent of them non-Native men, to rape with impunity. To navigate this maze, authorities need to establish whether the crime took place on tribal lands and whether the perpetrator was Native or non-Native to determine which law enforcement agency has jurisdiction, during which critical time is lost. This leads to inadequate investigations or a failure to respond.

"It is encouraging to see Congress begin to address some of the complicated jurisdictional issues that arise in Indian country," said Sarah Deer, Assistant Professor at William Mitchell College of Law and a consultant for AIUSA’s Maze of Injustice report. "The erosion of tribal authority means that Native perpetrators tried in tribal court can receive only one year per offense, while non-Native perpetrators cannot be prosecuted at all. The legislation provides beginning steps to empower tribal governments to take more direct action in cases of violent crime. When victims know that their perpetrators will be held accountable for their behavior, they will be more likely to report crimes. Empowering tribal law enforcement personnel to protect their communities is the key."

In addition to the jurisdictional morass, the lack of trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs) at Indian Health Service (IHS) facilities to provide forensic exams and gather essential evidence is a factor that leads to a failure to prosecute. The AI report raised concerns about the lack of prosecutions and the need for accurate information about prosecution rates.

"Currently there are no standardized sexual assault protocols within the Indian Health Service, meaning that victims of sexually violent crimes may not be given rape kits that obtain critical evidence to prosecute perpetrators," said Charon Asetoyer, chair of AIUSA's Native Advisory Council. "The Tribal Law and Order Act will remedy this and underscore the importance of the need for medical staff that collect forensic evidence to testify in a court of law. It is a critical step toward ensuring that Native women’s human rights are recognized."

The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009 is in direct response to concerns raised by tribal leaders, tribal organizations, Native American and Alaska Native women and the AI report. Specifically the Act will:

clarify the responsibilities and increase coordination among federal, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies with respect to crimes committed in tribal communities;

begin to restore tribal governments with authority, resources, and information to address crimes on tribal land;
combat violence against Indian and Alaska Native women;

increase and standardize the collection and distribution of criminal data in tribal communities, including the data that establishes whether crimes are being prosecuted.

Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.8 million supporters, activists and volunteers who campaign for universal human rights from more than 150 countries. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.


For more information, please visit www.amnestyusa.org/maze.