Angry White Kid

Support community radio and authentic journalism

Mid-afternoon on May 1, Labor Day, students took over the radio station at the Autonomous University Benito Juarez of Oaxaca, in Oaxaca, Mexico. They explained that they intended to cover two days' events which included a march by the Popular Assembly and Teacher movement.

By seven o'clock that night, the government supporters were already hard at work jamming the university signal. By 10:00 the students were no longer audible.

The government fears that the public might hear honest news, news of real events that affect their lives.

The only available remedy is community radio. Right now, young Oaxaquenos are working to put on the air as many community radio facilities as the communities can afford. The technical support project for them is completely Oaxaqueno in staff and muscle. It's controlled and managed at the base, in a system of democratic participation. But the funding comes in part from people like you.

This is the moment to show Oaxaca communities that they are not alone in wanting the truth as it relates to them, in their towns and villages.

Your donation, of any amount, will help to maintain the vital training and technical support provided by SeComo (SERVICIOS DE COMUNICACION DE OAXACA).

The best way to send money from the USA is to mail a check made out to Jean Rodriguez,  "for the community radio project in Oaxaca". Send it to:

Jean Rodriguez
917 N. Van Ness
Fresno, CA 93728 
Her telephone number is 559.445.0425
Her email address is wabob@earthlink.net

From within the European orbit, money can be wired to:
Frankfurter Volksbank
BLZ: 501 900 00
Kontonummer:  6001801196         (Account number) 
Kontoinhaber:  Kurt Herrmann        (Beneficiary)
BIC (Swift code):  FFVBDEFF               
IBAN:  DE55 5019 0000 6001 8011 96

Notify davies_me@yahoo.com and you will receive confirmation that your donation was received.

Social revolution is not tax deductible.

Thank you from Oaxaca,

Nancy Davies, for authentic journalism

Warriors, warming and awesome kids

Though I was just giving a friend some flack about engaging the spectacle when he tried to convince me how great Obama is, I gotta say, the Golden State Warriors are unreal. Making Oakland proud.

Here's a gem from Arkansas my uncle sent me.  Honestly, I was unaware of this liberal conspiracy.

And these kindergarten kids have just conducted the best May Day/anti-Minutemen protest ever.

I'm off to Wyoming for the weekend, so any comments might not go up until Sunday night.

May Day 2007

The origins of modern May Day. Haymarket, 1886.

Probably don't need to tell readers of this blog that May Day is coming up.

In the U.S., the National Immigrant Solidarity Network is calling for decentralized, multi-tactic actions based around these ten demands:

1) No to anti-immigrant legislation and the criminalization of the immigrant communities.
2) No to the militarization of the border.
3) No to immigrant detention and deportation.
4) No to the guest worker program.
5) No to employer sanction and "no match" letters.
6) Yes to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
7) Yes to speedy family reunification.
8) Yes to civil rights and humane immigration law.
9) Yes to labor rights and living wages for all workers.
10) Yes to education and LGBT immigrant legislation.

There are marches, strikes and protests planned.  Here's an incomplete national list of events.  In the Bay Area there are actions in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and more.  Indybay is the place to check.

Doha Debate on the right of return

For those interested in Palestine and the right of return of Palestinians refugees, I highly recommend watching this debate and Q&A that aired this past weekend on BBC World.  It featured Bassem Eid and Yossi Beilin arguing against the right of return and Ali Abunimah and Ilan Pappe arguing for it. 

In my opinion, and in the opinion of the house, Abunimah and Pappe do a fantastic job while Eid  basically voices his surrender to the occupiers and Beilin can't fathom why Palestinians won't accept apartheid. An interesting post-debate exchange between Eid and Abunimah can be read here.

One of my favorite quotes:

Tim Sebastian, moderator:You don't think there should be compromise? 

Ali Abunimah: Of course there should be compromise.  The compromise is that I have no objection, in fact I'm very glad, that Yossi Beilin and his family and his ancestors live in the country. They're there.  The compromise is that they live there, with us, together in peace.  The thing I can't understand is why he finds it so horrifying that my mother should live in the country with him.

That illustrates an important point.  People are always saying that "both sides need to compromise" and "make difficult concessions for peace" and so on, but the failure of that line of thinking is that it ignores the concessions Palestinians have had forced upon them for the past sixty years.  78% of their country was stolen and they were expelled. The rest of it is slowly being colonized.  They've lived under military occupation for 40 years.  Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as third class citizens.  Basic human rights of every imaginable kind are consistently denied to them.  And the list goes on.

Removing settlements, taking down the wall, ceding control of East Jerusalem, implementing the right of return - these are not concessions for Israel to make and for Palestinians to counter with concessions of their own.  They are obligations under international and humanitarian law.  Just as ending apartheid in South Africa was not a concession but an obligation.  You don't get points for dismantling structures that you knew were illegitimate, contrary to international law, and shouldn't have been constructed in the first place.

Two articles on the Virginia Tech tragedy

I wanted to share these two pieces on the shootings at Virginia Tech.  Both mainly address the media response from different angles. As, obviously, the media in the end largely will control how people think about, act on and remember this tragedy, such considerations are very important.  The first piece is below, the second is after the link.

And while I haven't been consuming much media as of late, largely to avoid the spin, sensationalism and haranguing, I find this Washington Post page very grounding in thinking about what this is really about.

UPDATE: I should've clarified the sources.  I received both of these in emails, but it looks like  Nopper's piece was originally published on Azine.  As far as I know, O'Donoghue's piece has not been published online.

What May Come: Asian Americans and the Virginia Tech Shootings

Tamara K. Nopper
April 17, 2007

Like many, I was glued to the television news yesterday, keeping updated about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech University.  I was trying to deal with my own disgust and sadness, especially since my professional life as a graduate student and college instructor is tied to universities.  And then the other shoe dropped.  I found out from a friend that the news channel she was watching had reported the shooter as Asian.  It has now been reported, after much confusion, that the shooter is Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant and Virginia Tech student. 

As an Asian American woman, I am keenly aware that Asians are about to become a popular media topic if not the victims of physical backlash.  Rarely have we gotten as much attention in the past ten years, except, perhaps, during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.  Since then Asians are seldom seen in the media except when one of us wins a golfing match, Woody Allen has sex, or Angelina Jolie adopts a kid. 

I am not looking forward to the onslaught of media attention.  If history truly does have clues about what will come, there may be several different ways we as Asian Americans will be talked about.

One, we will watch white media pundits and perhaps even sociologists explain what they understand as an “Asian” way of being.  They will talk about how Asian males presumably have fragile “egos” and therefore are culturally prone to engage in kamikaze style violence.  These statements will be embedded with racist tropes about Japanese military fighters during WWII or the Viet Cong—the crazy, calculating, and hidden Asian man who will fight to the death over presumably nothing. 

In the process, the white media might actually ask Asian Americans our perspectives for a change.  We will probably be expected to apologize in some way for the behavior of another Asian—something whites never have to collectively do when one of theirs engages in (mass) violence, which is often.  And then some of us might succumb to the Orientalist logic of the media by eagerly promoting Asian Americans as real Americans and therefore unlike Asians overseas who presumably engage in culturally reprehensible behavior.  In other words, if we get to talk at all, Asian Americans will be expected to interpret, explain, and distance themselves from other Asians just to get airtime. 

Or perhaps the media will take the color-blind approach instead of a strictly eugenic one.  The media might try to whitewash the situation and treat Cho as just another alienated middle-class suburban kid.  In some ways this is already happening—hence the constant referrals to the proximity of the shootings to the 8th anniversary of the Columbine killings.  The media will repeat over and over words from a letter that Cho left behind speaking of “rich kids,” and “deceitful charlatans.”  They will ask what’s going on in middle-class communities that encourage this type of violence.  In the process they may never talk about the dirty little secret about middle-class assimilation: for non-whites, it does not always prevent racial alienation, rage, or depression.  This may be surprising given that we are bombarded with constant images suggesting that racial harmony will exist once we are all middle-class.  But for many of us who have achieved middle-class life, even if we may not openly admit it, alienation does not stop if you are not white. 

But the white media, being as tricky as it is, may probably talk about Cho in ways that reflect a combination of both traditional eugenic and colorblind approaches.  They will emphasize Cho’s ethnicity and economic background by wondering what would set off a hard-working, quiet, South Korean immigrant from a middle-class dry-cleaner-owning family.  They will wonder why Cho would commit such acts of violence, which we expect from Middle Easterners and Muslims and those crazy Asians from overseas, but not from hard-working South Korean immigrants.  They will promote Cho as “the model minority” who suddenly, for no reason, went crazy.  Whereas eugenic approaches depicting Asians as crazy kamikazes or Viet Cong mercenaries emphasize Asian violence, the eugenic aspect of the model minority myth suggests that there is something about Asian Americans that makes them less prone to expressions of anger, rage, violence, or criminality.  Indeed, we are not even seen as having legitimate reasons to have anger, let alone rage, hence the need to figure out what made this “quiet” student “snap.” 

Given that the model minority myth is a white racist invention that elevates Asians over minority groups, Cho will be dissected as an anomaly among South Koreans who “are not prone” to violence—unlike Blacks who are racistly viewed as inherently violent or South Asians, Middle Easterners and Muslims who are viewed as potential terrorists.  He will be talked about as acting “out of character” from the other “good South Koreans” who come here and quietly and dutifully work towards the American dream.  Operating behind the scenes of course is a diplomatic relationship between the US and South Korea forged through bombs and military zones during the Korean War and expressed through the new free trade agreement negotiations between the countries.  Indeed, even as South Korean diplomats express concern about racial backlash against Asians, they are quick to disown Cho in order to maintain the image of the respectable South Korean. 

Whatever happens, Cho will become whoever the white media wants him to be and for whatever political platform it and legislators want to push.  In the process, Asian Americans will, like other non-whites, be picked apart, dissected, and theorized by whites.  As such, this is no different than any other day for Asian Americans.  Only this time an Asian face will be on every television screen, internet search engine, and newspaper. 

Tamara K. Nopper is an educator, writer, and activist living in Philadelphia.  She can be reached at tnopper@yahoo.com.

Woodfin struggle continues

The actions of Woodfin Suite Hotels in the East Bay city of Emeryville epitomize the term "evil corporation." Since September of last year they have been trying to fire immigrant workers who are simply demanding that Woodfin comply with Emeryville's recently-passed living wage law.

Every other hotel in town had no problem complying, yet the Woodfin apparently feels it is entitled to continue exploiting workers - paying them poverty wages and then trying to fire them when they demand what they are due.

In truly vindictive fashion, just ten days before Christmas the Woodfin made good on its threat and fired twenty one workers. A court temporarily blocked the firings and ruled the workers should be permitted to stay on the job until April 20, which is fast approaching.  Woodfin is even suing the city over Measure C, the living wage law.  Seems they're doing everything possible to avoid respecting workers' rights and meeting the requirements of the measure.

An easy thing to do is send an email to the Woodfin CEO telling him to meet the workers' demands and that you'll boycott the Woodfin. Keep an eye on WoodfinWatch.org for further developments. And of course, spread the word.

A protest on April 10 at Emeryville's City Hall, followed by a march to the Woodfin. It's hard to see, but there are about 10 various monks and priests on the stage.  Even god (in its hypothetical christian incarnations) is pissed off at the Woodfin.

Smug Woodfin workers watching the April 10 rally. Apparently they have yet to learn the boss will be more than happy to kick their asses to the curb, too.

A Christmas protest following the original firings.

They didn't like us dropping by.

Grinch is pissed, too.

Defend Rev. Pinkney

I wrote about Reverend Pinkney and Benton Harbor back in 2005 and last month he was convicted of election fraud and faces twenty years in prison.  Here's a brief backgrounder on the situation, for more in-depth info, visit the BANCO blog.

Benton Harbor Michigan is 94% Black with an average income of $8,000. Across the river is St. Joseph, world headquarters of the Whirlpool Corporation, nearly all white, $41,000 average income. In 2003, the police killing of a young Black man erupted in so-called riots in Benton Harbor. Rev. Pinkney was already publicly identified as a leader of the overwhelmingly Black disadvantaged community. Rev. Pinkney works with his wife Dorothy and others in the Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizations (BANCO). Together they organized the regular monitoring of courthouse proceedings, pickets of the local newspaper, and openly named those involved in corrupt and racist practices.

When the CEO of Whirlpool announced a “development plan” for 465 riverfront acres in Benton Harbor, BANCO and Rev. Pinkney were outspoken in their opposition to this land grab that would do nothing for those of us who have nothing. They successfully recalled a City Commissioner for being in the pocket of Whirlpool, but the recall was overturned and the Commissioner reinstated. Meanwhile the power elite attempted to criminalize Rev. Pinkney, accusing him of election fraud, and charging him with paying $5 for votes and being in possession of absentee ballots.

The first trial, whose jury included two Black people, ended in a hung jury. A new trial was ordered.

During the second trial, as in the first, the Black residents of Benton Harbor came out in support of Rev. Pinkney both inside and around the courthouse. Despite lack of evidence or credible witnesses for the prosecution, on March 21, 2007 the all-white jury found Rev. Pinkney guilty of election fraud, and he now faces 20 years in prison. He is currently under house arrest as his appeal goes forward. Sentencing has been set for May 14.

Between now and then, all fair-minded individuals, particularly those who have had the privilege to meet Reverend Pinkney or follow his work, should write letters of support.

THEY SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO: The Honorable Alfred M. Butzbaugh, Berrien County Circuit Court, 811 Port Street, St. Joseph, Michigan, 49085-1187, regarding the case of People v. Reverend Edward Pinkney.

BUT THEY SHOULD BE SENT TO: Hugh M. Davis, Constitutional Litigation Associates, P.C., 450 West Fort Street, Suite 200, Detroit, Michigan, 48226. Phone: 313-961-2255; Fax: 313-961-5999; email: conlitpc@sbcglobal.net.

Pro-Israel censors strike again

It's always struck me as odd how some of those who love to falsely proclaim Israel to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" also seem to be rabidly engaged in stifling free speech - ya know, one of those "tenets of democracy" things - in the U.S. when it comes to Palestine.  But they've done it again, this time in Miami, where:

My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the controversial play about a young American activist who died after she was run over by an Israeli-operated bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has been pulled from the lineup at Plantation's Mosaic Theatre after protests from some of the theater's subscribers and outside individuals.

Mosaic, a professional company that presents its shows in a black-box theater space at the private American Heritage School, had planned to offer the one-woman Rachel Corrie in repertory with Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire, a solo show about Iraqi women.

But Mosaic's board of directors agreed to drop the play after phone calls, e-mails and comments on a special Rachel Corrie blog -- which has now been removed from the company's website -- made it clear that an impassioned, vocal minority strongly objected to the play.

Everywhere this play goes in the U.S. the pro-Israel crowd tries to shut it down. Even my cynical self still gets baffled at how threatened these people are of a dead 23 year old and her words. The irony of course is that those working to shut down these productions likely have never seen the play nor read Corrie's words.  They simply reactively clamor with sickening zeal to squash or discredit anyone who may claim that Palestinians are human beings and as such are deserving of, and indeed have, rights.

But as Robert Jamieson writes in the Seattle P-I, where the play has met with broad acclaim,

News flash: The best art, whether it deals with war or love in the time of AIDS or dark family secrets, touches political, social and moral nerves. If done well, a production can compel audiences to think.

That's lost on folks so blinded by their cause they would rather see the stage dark than a ray of light shine on one of the most contentious issues of the day.

PS - I'm leaving technology land for a few days, so any comments may not be published until Sunday.

Josh Wolf is free!

Yea Josh!  Glad that you're out.  From the SF Chronicle:

Josh Wolf, the blogger whose record 7 1/2 months in federal prison stirred debate about who qualifies as a journalist and what legal protections they should receive, was freed today after releasing video footage sought by prosecutors about an anarchist protest.

Wolf, 24, held in contempt by a federal judge last August for defying a grand jury subpoena, walked out of the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin at mid-afternoon after his lawyers and federal prosecutors reached a compromise, with the help of a federal magistrate.

Wolf posted the uncut video on his Web site, gave prosecutors a copy and denied under oath that he knew anything about violent incidents at the July 2005 protest. In return, his lawyers said, prosecutors agreed not to summon him before the grand jury or ask him to identify any of the protesters shown on his video.

I really respect and applaud Josh's steadfastness in standing up for the rights of journalists and not cooperating with the Grand Jury.  Those must have been a long seven and a half months.  There should be a Josh and Gabe freedom party.

Anarchists against the veil?

Last week, a statement from the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (MACG) was blasted out into the internet ether entitled "No to racism and the veil." It was noted this article was published in the first edition of "The Anvil," MACG's newsletter.

I know little about the MACG aside from the brief announcement of their formation and their stated aims and principles.  I found their article very troubling, and in the interest of constructive dialogue, offer my response to it here.

In "No to racism and the veil," the MACG argues that the "veil" is a symbol of the oppression of women in Islam and therefore should not be worn.  Paradoxically, however, they state that women should wear whatever they like - but the MACG really doesn't think women should wear the veil.

To begin with, there are a few blatant problems with the piece.  First off, it condemns "anti-Islamic racism."  "Anti-Islamic racism" is an impossibility because Islam is not a race but a religion with adherents from a wide range of races and ethnicities.  Secondly, the premise that a handful of (I'm assuming) white, male anarchists feel entitled to give direction to at least 500 million women is extremely troubling.  Compound this by the fact that the authors apparently presume the experiences of all women under Islam to be the same, and this piece jumps off into the deep end of Orientalism and what Chandra Talpade Mohanty labels "methodological universalism."

In "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse" - an essay every Westerner who is going to attempt to save global Southerners from themselves needs to read - Mohanty writes:

The argument goes like this: the greater the number of women who wear the veil, the more universal is the sexual segregation and control of women....For instance, Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India and Egypt all wear some sort of a veil.  Hence, this indicates that the sexual control of women is a universal fact in those countries in which the women are veiled....

[T]he problem is not in asserting that the practice of wearing a veil is widespread....it is the analytic leap from the practice of veiling to an assertion of its general significance in controlling women that must be questioned.  While there may be a physical similarity in the veils worn by women in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the specific meaning attached to this practice varies according to the cultural and ideological context....

[T]he application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so it ultimately robs them of their historical and political agency.... [emphasis in original]

The crux of the problem lies in that initial assumption of women as a homogeneous group or category ('the oppressed'), a familiar assumption in Western radical and liberal feminisms.

By arguing that all Muslim women should wholesale disavow the veil, the MACG is doing just as Mohanty describes above, creating a homogeneous category of "Muslim women" where none exists and robbing women of their agency.

Thirdly, the authors write that the veil "is a physical limitation on a woman's freedom and ability to act in society."  While a niqab or burqa may limit physical mobility in a sense, how a headscarf does so, I'm not quite clear.  As well, the authors reference an article in The Guardian written by a British woman who wore the niqab for one day as proof that the veil is physically oppressive.  Instead, they may have wished to talk to a Muslim woman (or several) who wears niqab every day before making such statements and conclusively evaluating the limitations (or not) of the veil.

Fourthly, and this is where things get really ugly, the authors write:

Here, we find women in the situation where they are burdened with the responsibility to limit their personal freedom because of the poor behaviour of men. In societies where the veil is customary, the assumption is that women are sex objects and a man in the presence of an unveiled woman to whom he is not related cannot reasonably be expected to control himself and keep within the bounds of morality.

The image of Muslim men as rapacious sex fiends who are inherently physically incapable of restraining themselves from sexual attacking a woman who is not veiled qualifies as nothing short of "anti-Islamic racism," the very thing this statement was supposed to be against.  The stereotype of the male Other as sexually predatory and insatiable has long been a weapon in the white supremacist arsenal and it is gravely disturbing to see such rhetoric employed here by anarchists.

Fifthly, the authors lament that "many Muslim women in Western countries have adopted the veil as a symbol of defiance and cultural identity. Despite its physical oppressiveness, they experience it as a liberatory symbol."  The authors promise that "[b]y defeating racism, we will remove the illusory 'liberation' of the veil and make its real physical oppressiveness more obvious."

Not only do the authors find wearing the veil as an expression of solidarity and defiance in the face of rampant Islamophobia troubling, but they (white, male anarchists) have generously taken it upon themselves to do their utmost to demonstrate to these deluded Muslim women just how oppressed and misguided they are in their veil-wearing.

By painting a homogeneous picture of women in Islam and essentializing Muslim men, women and Islam in general, this piece veers beyond mere inaccuracies into Islamophobia and Orientalism.  It also, as Mohanty writes, "perpetrate[s] and sustain[s] the hegemony of the idea of the superiority of the West."  All of these are things anarchists should be fighting - not propagating.

Though undoubtedly the comrades in Melbourne meant well in taking a stand against Islamophobia and the oppression of women, their analysis itself appears to be based on knowledge produced by the West about Islam and women instead of knowledge produced by Muslims and women about Muslims and women.  And in doing so, instead of sticking a wrench in the works of such problematic beliefs, it just ends up feeding and recycling them, even if it does come with a radical bent.