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Rob Long, at the Wall Street Journal, is concerned that the world may no longer be able to protect itself from terrorist transvestites.
His hilarious fear stems from a UN report notable for its nuance and sensitivity towards people who find themselves marginalized due to their gender expression.
Martin Scheinin, UN Special Rapporteur, wrote a report for the UN General Assembly titled “Protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism”.
In it, he makes ‘controversial’ statements like:
Gender is not synonymous with women but rather encompasses the social constructions that underlie how women’s and men’s roles, functions and responsibilities, including in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are defined and understood. This report will therefore identify the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures both on women and men, as well as the rights of persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. As a social construct, gender is also informed by, and intersects with, various other means by which roles, functions and responsibilities are perceived and practiced, such as race, ethnicity, culture, religion and class. Consequently, gender is not static; it is changeable over time and across contexts. Understanding gender as a social and shifting construct rather than as a biological and fixed category is important because it helps to identify the complex and inter-related gender-based human rights violations caused by counterterrorism measures; to understand the underlying causes of these violations; and to design strategies for countering terrorism that are truly non-discriminatory and inclusive of all actors.
Last night, I rode my bike home from an event a couple miles from my house.
It was nearly 2 am and I had some concerns about drunk drivers. I turned down a driveway passage that leads between some public housing complexes near my house to avoid the cars racing up and down the major roads.
As I was riding through the central courtyard, I noticed a group of rather large men, dressed all in black, standing together at one end.
As I passed them, they took note of my presence and started shouting at me. They yelled out “HEY!” several times and demanded that I stop and talk with them.
It took me zero seconds to decide that would be a piss poor idea and to peddle all the faster. Usually ignoring such attention from men and leaving the area quickly is enough.
Not this time. I realized one of the men was literally chasing me. I was overwhelmed with fear. I didn’t even want to imagine what a cluster of five men hanging out in a dark corner at 2 am and shouting at women would want with me. My whole body went cold and I peddled as fast as I could, aiming for the bright lights of the nearest busy street.
I heard one of the men shout “Police!” and thought maybe a police officer was coming to the rescue.
Oh how wrong I was.
Because these men were the police.
That realization did not make me feel any better. I quickly assessed my options and decided to stop before any guns were drawn. Though I experience white skin privilege, the police in my neighborhood are so accustomed to abusing the marginalized communities here that I believed white privilege wouldn’t overcome their “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality.
The five police officers approached and surrounded me. Up close I could see that their dark clothing was black or navy uniforms with policey-decorations on them. They were all white, which I thought was odd for this majority-POC neighborhood. They demanded to know what I was doing in “the projects”. I responded that I was riding my bike home, and that the complexes were between my starting point and destination. They told me that this is a “high crime area” and that I “shouldn’t be around here”. I informed them that that was unreasonable because I live “around here”. That sounding deeply implausible, the leader demanded my ID and accused me of fleeing the police. He and three officers went a few paces away and huddled, speaking in low tones, for the next 15 minutes. One officer was left to monitor me.
I was thoroughly frightened and confused. I had only planned on a quick 10-minute bikeride from hanging out with friends to my home. Being shouted at, chased, and surrounded by a group of five big-bodied men… it hadn’t really occurred to me as a possibility. I expressed my confusion at this turn of the events and questioned my detention. They told me to wait.
Eventually, the leader of the group stalked up to me and in a raised, aggressive voice informed me that I was charged with disorderly conduct and riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. He informed me that I had known all along they were police, that I had shouted insults at them, and that I had deliberately tried to flee them.
This was, of course, news to me. I explained that when I pass noisy groups of men who shout at me in dark passages in the wee hours, it is simply a matter of survival that I get out of the situation, and that any woman in my place would do the same. He repeated that I had known they were police and had intentionally committed this crime.
He handed me the tickets and I got out of there fast. I have never felt so unsafe in my own neighborhood. I have never been harassed in this manner in my neighborhood before. I feel thankful that I came out of the situation with my life. That may be my white privilege. Around here, as around the country, police have a reputation for murdering black people. They murdered one man earlier this summer for the crime of being on his porch and telling a disguised under-cover cop to stop loitering on his property. He was killed in his own front doorway.
Some other reflections:
1. All this shouting and chasing and harassing was in the courtyard of a large housing complex full of families. I am talking hundreds of people. How safe can they feel when police officers are loitering outside of their homes screaming at the top of their lungs at every passer-by? Especially when this community, being low income and of color and partly immigrant, is already subject to excessive amounts of police harassment?
2. My own white privilege was revealed to me as I came to realize that this is what my neighbors experience every day, and that I usually escape it. It’s possible that the same darkness that prevented me from seeing the police uniforms prevented them from seeing my skin tone. They may have planned on harassing a public housing resident of color, and I just blundered into the situation by assuming that I can go wherever I want without police harassment. The fact that I never realized how police interactions interlace the daily lives of my neighbors is a wake up call for me.
3. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THOSE OFFICERS? How dare they harass a woman who is traveling alone at night in an isolated location away from any busy roads (where there would be witnesses and the potential to call for help)? Are they out of their minds? How can they be so blind to their male privilege and the legitimacy privilege of possessing state power? Could they really not see why the situation they chose to create was a terrifying nightmare-scenario for their victim? How in the world is public safety achieved by men shouting at and chasing women in the night? I have never felt so unsafe in my neighborhood as I do now. My neighbors haven’t ever done anything to make me feel unsafe, and so until now I had no fears. The behavior of these men was so egregious that I believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find similar instances perpetrated by the supposedly dangerous inhabitants of the public housing buildings.
4. Essentially, my crime here is that I was biking while female. I acted as any rational women would react in this situation. For my natural behaviors of simply trying to survive on the street, I actually have to be a defendant in court.
5. I want to state clearly that this is an intersection of institutional and state classism and racism, and that I will not be accepting comments to the effect of “Oh you’re so naive to live near public housing and/or to think good on your neighbors.” Those comments would be classist and racist and that’s not what this post is here to talk about. Why would I be the “naive white girl” to live near these apartments, but the residents are “hardened black criminals” simply for residing inside the same apartments I live next to? The location of your home does not define you as a criminal or not, nor does your skin color nor your poverty. I guess I should say “should not” instead of “does not”. We all know that people of color, public housing residents, immigrants, and poor people are criminalized simply for existing as such.
Puke.
Share your stories of police harassment if you like. NO RACISM & NO POOR-BASHING.
Looks like St. Bernard Parish isn’t alone in the blatantly racist housing practices department.
Westchester Adds Housing to Desegregation Pact
Huh, Westchester is one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. Interesting.
Hmmm, I love the crisp smell of racism in the morning.
Best comment at the NYT: “Why should a community have to import poverty, of whatever color? If people, with or without color, have the money to buy a home there, fine, but to say that a group of affluent people should be “punished” for being Affluent While White by having poor and probably culturally incompatible people dumped on them is absurd.”
Oh, the burdens one must bear, when one must live in proximity to the poor! Oh, it is so terrible to be forced to look at the distasteful dwellings and personages of the dusky-complexioned! Quelle peine!
“[M]ost Australians view the price of petrol as a greater concern than the welfare of foreign children.”
A summary of the Australian attitude towards learning they fuel the child sex industry in Thailand.
What, NO TIME!? Yes, it is true. It all went down at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Prosecutors said [Christopher] Duncan, head of the Lambda Iota fraternity during the 2006-2007 school year, allowed drugs, drug paraphernalia and money to be stored in a safe in his fraternity house bedroom, helped broker drug deals and drove to Connecticut to buy cocaine later sold by Duncan and co-defendant Bent Cardan.
…U.S. District Judge William Sessions III said a prison term wasn’t appropriate…
The judge called him “stupid”, “naive and a bit player”.
WHAT!?
From the University of Vermont student newspaper
Duncan told police that he “estimated the total he sold for Cardan between February and April 2007 was 8 to 10 ounces,” according to the affidavit. That is equal to approximately $16,000.00 at the price he was selling at.
Bit player indeed. How much time do you think he would do if he were poor and black or Latino?
The blog World Class Stupid frames it nicely:
One day our court system will realize that rich white college students are just as smart as poor black high-school dropouts.
Do you think Duncan’s status as a fraternity president, as the son of an attorney, as a suburban white kid, had any effect on the incredible leniency shown to him after months of using his frat house as the center of a coke ring?
There are no pics of Duncan online, but here is a photo of Lambda Iota.
For those of you not familiar with the terms “cisgender” or “cissexual”, here is a reference.
Check out this post at Questioning Transphobia. The post addresses a piece written by a cisgendered gay man who claims the term cisgender (i.e. non-trans) is offensive. A popular blog that I usually enjoy, Pam’s House Blend, has decided to bow to these claims and ban the words cisgender and cissexual, as well as any comment that supports their use.
Cis is not an offensive prefix, nor an insult.
There is a subset of white, well-off gay men who want the LGBT movement to reflect their needs and desires, their rage at being one privilege short of absolute privilege, and who despise the fact that the LGBT movement wants them to make space for the different needs of trans folks, bisexuals, gay men of color, poor gay men, lesbians, and other queers. They don’t want to be saddled by the greater struggles these other groups face. They want to leap that one hurdle that separates them from joining the most privileged group in the world, and the rest of us hold them back. So a small group of white gay men are pushing back against inclusiveness, against the idea of having our own house in order, and against trans respect and equality.
I know most of you gay white men out there are not like this. Those who are, are not part of my community.
…And I’m back!
After some months away, I have decided to fire up the ol’ blog again and see how it goes. If safety becomes an issue, I will just stop again.
So I thought a good way to start this new chapter would be an explanation of my name. I chose it for a hodge podge of reasons. I identify strongly with my immigrant roots. My family has been bumping around the United States for a couple generations now, but we have retained a connection with our country of origin and I have retained a sense of my history in this country as a descendant of immigrants. I don’t want to forget that there were peoples here before the white man, people who are still here. It is partially out of deference to them that I identify as Czech-American.
My name also has to do with my white privilege. My Czech descendants were light-skinned, and so am I. (Not all Czechs appear “white”.) Czechs have not always been considered white. A certain German dictator had a special name for us: Minderwertige Rasse (“less-worthy race”), insinuating that we were not the white race, we were something else, something less-than.
That is mostly behind Czechs now. In America, we get white-skin privilege, regardless of that history. And I want to own the fact that I receive that privilege, however unwillingly, and the responsibility that bestows upon me. So I make my identity very clear through my screen name. There will be no mistake when I am in anyone’s space- I cannot ignore my white privilege and try to fly under the radar in spaces created by people of color. I will have to confront it all the time, and check myself with each comment.
I chose to identify as Czech-American and not white for a reason. I do not deny the white privilege that I benefit from. But I do not want to “own” my whiteness. I do not want to perpetuate white supremacy and proudly “own” whiteness. Identifying as white is problematic because whiteness only came to exist as a status self-assigned in order to denote superiority over others unwillingly assigned as something else. I cannot further that history by actively “being” white.
I do not want to identify as Caucasian either. That term also has a troubling history. A German anthropologist coined the term for these reasons:
“Caucasian variety – I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.”
Again with the glorifying of whiteness. And so again, I cannot reaffirm this term as a valid description for a group of people, since superiority is inherent in the word.
European-American is acceptable, because it follows the patterns already in use for peoples of color: Asian-American, African-American, Mexican-American, etc. However, I do not feel it is completely correct in my case. As a person of Central/Eastern European descent, my ancestors never were considered part of the ‘higher’ cultures of Western European countries. We’ve always been a bit of a hinterland, and for centuries a conquered and occupied people, to the peoples of Western Europe. I strongly feel a division from Europeans from the West. Czech-American is the descriptor I feel most comfortable with.
And from that, I became The Czech, Esq, MD, MSW, PhD, LMP, EMT, Defender of Justice, Earl of Essex, Lutheran Youth Minister, Head Sous Chef, 4-Time Olympic Gold Medalist, IBEW Local 67 Committee Chair, DnD LARP DungeonMaster, War Czar, Assistant Director of CleenGeorgia Waste Management, Televangelist, Free Range Pygmy Hen Breeder, Down-Low Danny’s Stripper Night Crowd Favorite, US Ambassador to Malawi, CEO Intel Corp, Runway Model, New Guinea Igneous Rock Formations Expert, Chairperson of the PTA, Founder: Doctor McProfessional’s EZ Parasitic Twin Removal System Corp, Cub Scout Leader, Oprah Book Club Author, Crochet Instructor, Badminton World Champion 5 Times Running, Producer: KMart Employee Safety Videos, 80s One-Hit Wonder, Associate Joist Factory Inspector, Winner: East Fairfield Paul Bunyan Pancake Eat-Off, Knight of Columbus, Karate Black Belt, Oscar-Winning Actress, 99 Cent Plus Employee of the Month July 1998.
What’s the difference between these murder headlines:
Transgender Woman Murders Husband
And these ones:
Woman Arrested in Murder of Area Woman
All of these murders took place in the UK or the US. In the second group of headlines, all of the perps or accused perps are white, cisgendered US/UK citizens.
So why do editors decide not to mention the race, religion or trans status of white murders in headlines? Why do they deliberately include that information only for people with some sort of minority status (immigrant, black or brown, trans, Muslim, etc.)? Does it make the story more “sensational”? If so, why? If not, than for what other possible reason would they include that information?
The effect of emphasizing what makes minority murderers different, not like us, while declining to emphasize the identities of white, Christian, straight, non-immigrant murderers, (who are more like “us” i.e. the majority), is to make it appear to the general media-consuming public that these minorities are more likely to commit crime, and/or that their minority status has something to do with the murder.
What would happen if every time a white person murdered, their race, religion, citizenship status, and trans-status were included in the headlines? Let’s try it out.
Straight White Man Murders Wife
Christian Citizen Murders Woman
Cisgendered White Woman Murders Husband
White Christian Man Murdered Wife
Straight Citizen Murdered Young Actor
Cisgendered Christian Woman Arrested in Murder of Area Woman
Interesting effect, isn’t it?
Retired barber Joe Godlewski says that when television chefs recommended kosher salt in recipes, he wondered, “What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?”
By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available from seasonings manufacturer Ingredients Corporation of America. It’s sea salt that’s been blessed by an Episcopal priest.
May I suggest that perhaps this is a prime example of a (North American) Christian tendency to mimic the role of “oppressed minority” when Christianity is actually the largest religion in the world?
I am just going to say it. Christians are not oppressed for being Christian in the Western world. Nor are they a minority in such countries as the US. Someone once told me that their conservative friends were worried that oppression against Christians was going to increase with Obama as president. I wondered: How, exactly? OBAMA IS A CHRISTIAN! 76-84% of America’s population is Christian. Who is doing this “oppression”? Or maybe the proper question is: what definition of “oppression” are Christians using?
Here’s a video discussing how some Christians have appropriated the terms of real oppression to paint people who disagree with their viewpoints as Oppressors.
If you feel self-punishing enough to visit the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission’s website, you will find a treasure trove of attempts at painting Christians as an oppressed minority. In order to do this, the CADC is not above painting Christians who don’t buy this paradigm as “not really Christian.”
Cerrie Burnell hosts a children’s show on BBC television called CBeebies. She has been the subject of a recent spate of parent complaints. Not because of her performance. Because of her disability. She was born without the lower section of her right arm.
The Independent reports:
One man said that he would stop his daughter from watching the BBC children’s channel because Burnell would give his child nightmares.
…[S]ome of the vitriolic comments on the “Grown Up” section of the channel’s website were so nasty that they had to be removed.
“Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?” wrote one adult on the CBeebies website. Other adults claimed that their children were asking difficult questions as a result. “I didn’t want to let my children watch the filler bits on The Bedtime Hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter’s mind and possibly caused sleep problems,” said one message. The BBC received nine other complaints by phone.
Outrage! Outrage! Outrage!
Fortunately, many more people have contacted BBC to express their support. Now I don’t have to bang my head against a wall to fall asleep tonight. Read the rest of this entry »
When did it become part of our culture to try and screw our neighbors and to openly despise the poor?
I cannot remember a time in my life during which contempt for the less fortunate was as celebrated as it is now. It’s practically a badge of dignified self-respect to publicly castigate anyone having a rough time. At least on the MSM.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe on the 20th, the talking heads discussed the stimulus package. Of particular contention were the funds intended to prevent foreclosures. As I have heard several times recently, everyone on the show seemed to fret that the money would go to unworthy recipients who are poor due to some personal fault, or greedy people who should never have dreamed of owning a home in the first place. They played a clip of Rick Santelli’s antics, whose recent rant struck a chord with poor-shamers. His “raise your hand if you want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage” got a chorus of boos from the floor of the stock exchange. The guys around him were livid at the thought.
Mary Kate Cary wrote an approving opinion piece in US News as a reaction. Basically, her point is that those lucky enough not to be touched by the recession- those who have kept their jobs and houses- are upset that the tax revenue from their good fortune will be used to help those less fortunate. They are angry that part of their tax dollars will help the poor and/or those facing loss of their home moreso now that we are facing an economic crisis as a nation.
For me, that draws a huge HUH?
What the hell is wrong with people? This “I’ve got mine- screw you” attitude is a national shame.
The Republican party seems to relish shaming the poor during the recession. The mass vote against the stimulus. The various governors talking like they don’t need and won’t take the money. It seems like they are happy to leave people in poverty in order to prove an ideological point.
The gloating, the schadenfreude, the utter lack of compassion… I think this is a really ugly way to react to those Americans suffering most during a national crisis, and it is not reserved to any party.
Why are we unwilling to help a neighbor? Why do we assume we deserve our home and our amenities, but call those facing foreclosure “greedy”? What better use for our tax dollars than to help those hit worst by a national crisis? Why has the thought of helping out the less fortunate become so viscerally repugnant to so many Americans?
When worst comes to worst, would Americans rather leave their compatriots out in the cold as punishment for their poverty because helping them out is too similar to the scary scary S-word: Socialism?
I haven’t seen a single TV discussion of the stimulus that included commentary from a person facing unemployment, foreclosure, or poverty. While they are being mocked in newspapers and on television screens around the country, they have not even been invited to speak on their own behalf. Their many voices apparently do not deserve the amplification accorded to the small circle of comfortable, employed and adequately housed pundits and politicians who bash them. Hardly a fair fight.
I guess I’m hoping that all of these writers, pundits and politicians simply do not speak for the majority of Americans. It’s just hard to believe that because somebody is reading their columns, listening to their radio shows and watching them on television.
The AP published a story today titled Muslim TV Exec Accused of Beheading Wife in NY.
Muzzammil (“Mo”) and Aasiya Hassan had started a television station together called Bridges TV that they intended as a vehicle to develop understanding between non-Muslim Americans and the greater Muslim world.
It now appears that Mo beheaded Aasiya after she filed for divorce. It seems that they had a rocky and at times violent relationship.
I will leave aside the unfortunate choice to include the word “Muslim” in the title as the modifier for the suspected murderer, as it seems to serve no purpose other than draw a broad connection between domestic violence and Islam.
This crime is shocking. The viciousness of beheading one’s partner…. unspeakable.
So when NOW put out a statement about the matter (do they put out a statement about every intimate-partner murder?), why did they focus on the evils of Islam instead of the evils of domestic violence, which transcend religion?
Here’s part of what they said:
NOW New York State is horrified that Erie County DA, Frank A. SeditaII, has referred to this ghastly crime as “the worst form of domestic violence possible.” The ridiculous juxtaposition of “domestic” and “beheading” in the same journalistic breath points up the inherent weakness of the whole “domestic violence” lexicon.
…This was, apparently, a terroristic version of ‘honor killing’, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men. Are we now so respectful of the Muslim’s religion that we soft-peddle atrocities committed in it’s name?
WTF NOW? In other parts of the press release, they cry out against media silencing of crimes against Muslim women, as evidenced by this case. Which is now a top AP story. Additionally, it seems as though the American press and mainstream American feminist orgs have spent plenty of time letting us all know how anti-woman Islam is, and have been vigilant to point out any abuse. Which has played well into conservative’s “Culture War” storyline.
But the outrage that this is reported as domestic violence? I don’t get it. Isn’t that what so-called “honor killing” is, relatives killing relatives? That sounds domestic.
Allow me to examine the second paragraph piece by piece.
“This was, apparently, a terroristic version…”
Nice way to bring “terrorism” into the discussion as the victim and murderer are both Muslim. Coincidence, I’m sure.
“…of ‘honor killing’…”
What exactly is their definition of “honor killing”? Any intimate-partner/relative murder between Muslims? Otherwise, how is this different from a wife-murder by a non-Muslim man?
“…a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men.”
Unlike “our” non-Muslim partner-murders and other forms of non-Muslim domestic violence, which are totally not based on cultural notions about women’s subordination to men.
“Are we now so respectful of the Muslim’s religion that we soft-peddle atrocities committed in it’s name?”
Ummmmm….. NOW, are you so disrespectful of Islam that you want crimes committed by Muslims given different names than those committed by “normal” people? I also like the jump to the conclusion that this murder was carried out in the name of Islam. Evidence? The husband was Muslim! QED.
Buried within a lengthy article last week in the NYT about the menace to society presented by a group of middle-aged, single women raising children without fathers, are some interesting tidbits about poverty and single mothers.
Since the mid-1990s, in England, Susan Golombok of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge has been conducting a longitudinal study of middle-class single mothers. She is comparing the children of 38 two-parent heterosexual couples with those of 25 lesbian couples and 38 single mothers. Most of the mothers have a university degree and a professional or managerial job.
When the children turned 12, Golombok measured their emotional and behavioral development, school adjustment, peer relationships and self-esteem and found no differences among the groups. That held true in the latest round of interviews with the kids, who are now 18.
That’s not what I’ve been hearing from social conservatives, demographic winter types, or the religious right! Perhaps no one has told them of this research. Read the rest of this entry »
RH Reality Check posted an eye-opening article recently on international adoption, The Lie We Love. Harsh, right?
The article discusses how a combo deal of lots of Western ca$h from potential adoptive parents plus huge demand plus corrupt officials can equal a really scary adoption scene where baby-selling and baby-stealing can and do occur. Not every time. But enough times to warrant a really serious look at international adoptions and lots of caution.
That alone is a great subject for more discussion, but what intrigued me were the comments from readers after the article. A good deal of people who had been involved in international adoptions posted their thoughts. For many of the commentors, these thoughts were along the lines of: “Poor third-world women (of color) can’t be fit mothers, therefore we (white) Westerners have the right to take their children away.” My interpretation, obviously. Read the comments yourself to see what I’m talking about. One woman goes so far to say that a third-world woman who already has several children may choose to have yet another to “sell” to Westerners, and that it is acceptable for Westerners to “purchase” this child because then they are helping the whole family!
Naturally, these are troubling attitudes for me to read, coming from actual adoptive parents. I believe that a fundamental human right is the right to bear and raise one’s children. Does the desire to adopt internationally, if strong enough, trump the birth mother’s right to keep her children? Does a family’s poverty make them unfit parents? Does a lifestyle significantly different than white Western lifestyles make a third-world family unfit to raise their own children? I say no.
True concern for these mothers, families and children would look different to me. It would look like working in solidarity with poor mothers (and fathers when present) to change their conditions so that they can raise their own children instead of abandon them or adopt them out, or sell them or prostitute them. It would mean acknowledging the troubling intersections of privilege and oppression that lead so many of these international adoption situations to be fraught with ethical murkiness. It would mean not classifying a middle-class white American (or Western) childhood as categorically superior to the childhood available in poor “third-world” families of color.
I believe that women in China, Guatemala and other countries that have or have had significant international adoption programs deserve choice. They deserve the same choices as Western women: to have or not have children. To space their births. To keep the children they do choose to birth. To raise the children they give birth to. To have governments that support their choices in real ways.
These are all basic human rights. Can we please recenter the international adoption debate around the human rights of the families that the adoptees come from? Because if we could be certain that the human rights of the birth parents were being respected, a lot of the ethical problems we’re seeing would evaporate. We could be certain that a woman got pregnant accidentally, chose to give birth, and then freely chose adoption. Unless the pregnancy was unplanned, and birth and adoption were freely chosen (and not compelled by poverty and a lack of access to birth control and abortion), can we be sure that everyone’s human rights were respected and the adoption is not surrounded by ethical problems.
BTW, I am not opposed to all international adoption. I do not hate on adoptive parents, or internationally adopted children. As a matter of fact, my own family contains several adopted members, including internationally-adopted members. I am just asking some tough questions so that we can find ways to eliminate problems with our current system of international adoption, and some of the problematic ways of thinking that surround it.
Comments? (Remember, comments containing personal insults will not be published.)
If the reference in my title is too nerdy for you, find out what I mean here.
A related post I wrote on Trans-Racial Adoption.
UPDATE 2/15/09: Welcome those of you coming over from Tell It WOC Speak. Please feel free to leave your thoughts!
Nationally syndicated radio host Bill Cunningham on October 23rd, 2008: “The reason people are poor in America is not because they lack money, it’s because poor people in America lack values, character, and the ability to work hard.”
Nationally syndicated radio host Bill Cunningham on October 27th, 2008: “Among the so-called noble poor in America … [b]irth control is not used so illegitimate children can be brought into the world, so the mom can get more checks in the mail from the government. And then once the child is born, that is the key to financial riches in the poor communities — white and black — in America.”
Nationally syndicated radio host Bill Cunningham on December 4th, 2008: “[W]e’re about the only country in the world with fat poor people . . . the poor community, so to speak … have cell phones, they have pagers, they have telephones, they have cars, they have HDTV, and they have those things because they spend no money on food, because it’s all given to them for nothing . . . Why would a grocery store open in the poor community when everyone gets fed free and they eat too much?”
Nationally syndicated radio host Bill Cunningham on January 4th: “[P]oor people were not and are not poor because they lack money. They’re poor because they lack values, ethics, and morals . . . All that the mid-’60s and ’70s did to the black community was to pay black fathers money on condition that they not be involved in the lives of their children and that black mothers were told that if you married, it would have a painful consequence. If, on the other hand, you acted irresponsibly by producing children out of wedlock, you would have a positive consequence, because government would fund bad behavior.”
Why, gee Bill, ya got quite a chip on your shoulder against low-income people. How is it that you know so much about a category of people that you know absolutely nothing about?
Via Media Matters.
“Conservatism” in America’s politics means “Let’s keep the n*ggers in their place.” And “liberalism” means “Let’s keep the knee-grows in their place — but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s fool them more, with more promises… the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the “liberal” fox or the “conservative” wolf…
…in a wolf’s den, I’d always know exactly where I stood…
-Malcolm X
Fuck all ya’ll who stand ready to sell out someone’s human rights for the political expediency of your liberal goals. Fuck your carefully crafted non-bigot credentials that mean you are not to be criticized for bigoted actions. Your “but I’m a liberal” shield of immunity.
Your pragmatism means that we should sit quietly until you let us know when it is okay to be us again, now that more important parts of the agenda are out of the way.
Anyone else getting tired of liberals for whom the term means politely keeping the structures of oppression in place? (But one day real soon, we promise, you’ll get your turn to be equal. Trust us and wait quietly. Don’t cause a SCENE!)
Blast from the Past! (Well, 2007) I can’t believe I left this guide out of my “101 101″ post. Sometimes I read it when I need to get calmed the fuck down. Here it is, in it’s entirety. Written by Chris Clarke.
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In the recent discussion about Kathy Sierra and Markos’ febrile and clueless response to her, I see there are some kind, helpful men who are taking pains to make sure emotion doesn’t run rampant in the discussion, that unfair accusations of misogyny or characterizations of harassment statistics get spread in an understandable emotional response to a few very upsetting instances of harassment by piglike men who fall far outside the norm. Surely, these men reason, we mustn’t let these nasty experiences color our judgment of the actual events involved. Surely it helps no one to make wild and baseless charges without looking, in uber-dispassionate detachment, at the actual statistics and methodology and margin of error of the studies that show women get harassed more than men. Come, let us reason together calmly, they say. References to Salem and the McMartin pre-school and such come unbidden to their lips.
I’m a big fan of dispassionate, rational, fact-based discussion of the issues myself, and it is in that spirit that I offer, to my brethren who’ve taken it upon themselves to be a shining light of dispassion on this topic, these fraternal words of guidance:
Shut the fuck up.
Here are a few of the actual facts that prompt the above sage counsel:
- You are not saying anything the women you’re talking to haven’t heard a thousand times before. You are not saying anything the women you’re talking to haven’t told themselves a thousand times before. If you would actually stop your reflexive know-it-all yammering and pay attention to what women actually SAY about the offenses they suffer on the sexual harassment – rape continuum, you will note that almost to a woman they second-guess their own gut feelings about the putative offender far beyond the point where almost any man would.
- You are wrong. If you doubt that the nature of abuse and harassment women suffer, online or off, differs from that men experience, then you don’t know what you’re talking about. Oddly, the Internets offer a way for you to verify this fact for yourself. About a dozen years ago, at the urging of a feminist online acquaintance, I logged on to AOL using an obviously female but non-provocative handle. (“AliciaMN.”) Within five minutes of logging on I had sexually abusive IMs popping up from men I didn’t know. Didn’t matter which room I was in: general chat, politics, classical music. I kept up the experiment for I think four days, a couple hours a day, sometimes chatting with people about non-sexual topics, sometimes just lurking. Two of the men who IMed AliciaMN with blatantly and obnoxiously sexual messages – “Hey, I’m up in Alaska! How ’bout you thaw my dick out with your throat?” being an example I recall – responded to my NON-response by telling “Alicia” she deserved to get raped.
This is neither new nor surprising information to any woman here. I mention it because 1) maybe if a man says it it’ll be taken seriously and 2) it implies a suggestion that disbelievers find a venue equivalent to AOL in its heyday and repeat my experiment, in the spirit of dispassionate empiricism.
- If no woman in your life has ever talked to you about how she lives her life with an undercurrent of fear of men, consider the possibility that it may be because she sees you as one of those men she cannot really trust.
- Finally, let’s assume just for the sake of argument that you’re right. You aren’t. But just as a gedankenexperiment, let’s pretend you are, and that the women who are talking about the massive deadweight silence from men about the harassment they experience, and who are getting all upset and speaking in terms of “war zones” and “hate crimes” and such are just being emotional, hysterical even, and – like the people who forward that bogus email about the guy with the ropes and duct tape in hs trunk in the mall parking lot – just need to be set straight with a calm, measured dose of logic and fact-checking.
In most situations, that’s a fine impulse. There really is no reason to get upset about LSD in blue star tattoos, and Bill Gates really isn’t paying people who forward a chain email.
But this situation is qualitatively different. When the topic at hand is men not taking an issue seriously, suggesting that the issue might not really be all that serious is not being dispassionate. It is, in fact, taking a side. And the people on the side you’re taking, incidentally, include the gropers, the rapists, the sexual-favor-demanding bosses.
In short, if you’re interested in quibbling with the data or suggesting alternate interpretations of what Kos really meant when he called Kathy Sierra a lying “crying blogger,” and your goal is not to be a flaming asshole, shut the fuck up.
And when you shut the fuck up, two magical things happen:
1) You’re no longer actively contributing to the very problem you’re discussing;
2) It’s easier to listen to what the women are actually saying.
This can be found at My Left Wing.
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