Damn right, she’s angry

The inestimable Ijeoma Oluo has a few thoughts about the “angry black woman” trope:

I used to work very hard to avoid that descriptor. I used to busily reassure people that no, I am not angry. I used to force smiles and swallow pain and reassure everyone that I was fine.

But I am not fine. I am angry.

And I have a lot to be angry about. I am angry that I have to see so many black men and women murdered by police without any justice. I am angry that my 15-year-old son is already terrified of cops. I am angry that black households have, on average, 12 times less net worth than white households.

I am angry at the unchecked rise of racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism in America.

I am angry that this country elected an ignorant and unqualified bigot into our highest office.

I am angry that my 9-year-old son feels utterly failed by the adult society that was supposed to protect him from racist hate.

I am angry that the color of my skin is one of the biggest indicators of not only the quality of my life, but also of my life expectancy. I am angry that my son’s transgender classmates are being told by our federal government that they cannot use the restroom in safety. I am angry that this administration is gleefully deporting brain cancer patients and domestic violence victims. I am angry that my fears look so similar to the fears that black people had in the 1950s.

I know why I am angry, and I know who I am angry at.

I am angry at school systems that refuse to treat implicit bias and the criminalization of black and brown youth as the emergency that it is. I am angry at politicians who knowingly activate and exploit voter bigotry with phrases like “black-on-black crime” and I am angry at the voters who fall for it, despite all of the scholarship out there that shows such dogwhistling to be a racist trap.

I am angry at media that constantly portrays my people as violent and unpredictable. I am angry at business and community leaders who will stoke xenophobia to distract from their exploitation of the poor. I am angry at those who value their comfort so much that they’d rather call me a liar than face the truth of how this country treats so many of us.

It would be appalling to not be angry at these things. To ask me not to be would be to ask me to divorce myself from reality.

Read more of Oluo’s powerful declaration here.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Alcoholics Anonymous, minorities, and abuse

AA has a pretty spotty reputation outside of conservative Christian circles, and typically for a good reason. Here’s a perspective from a trans women of colour on their principles and how they ignore or exacerbate minority stress, a dangerous prospect considering substance abuse is often a coping mechanism for said stress.

At the first AA meeting I attended at the hospital, I was pulled aside by one of the speakers, who told me I should get off my hormones and pray for God to “remove my problem.” It was clear he wasn’t talking about my drinking or my using, but my gender “problem.”

And so it was that my rocky relationship with 12-step programs began. I enjoyed, and would still enjoy, the AA and NA meetings I felt comfortable attending. But as I was typically the only trans person in the room — and in some cases, one of the only people of color — I also often experienced harassment and humiliation.

Members at subsequent meetings told me to pray my gender dysphoria away, or declared that the dysphoria remaining was a sign that I failed to move through the steps thoroughly. Complicating this was the fact that that my drug abuse did start off as a way to cope with gender dysphoria (and my being trans in a Latinx household) — but because of the judgemental environment, I never felt comfortable expressing that.

Other times, members would attempt to use meetings as their conversion therapy camp. In one instance, a group of religious men gave me their phone numbers because they felt that I needed men to set me on a religious path and make me masculine again. They seemed to believe that trans women who used and abused drugs and alcohol became trans as a “symptom” of addiction or alcoholism.

Other times, I faced sexual harassment or physical intimidation (usually if I rejected advances). One incident resulted in me having to change my phone number because I was getting threats and insults daily for refusing a man.

Read more about it here.
-Shiv

Can I get a cookie for not being a fucking murderer, too?

Remember that time people were celebrating a video of a cop handing a black woman an ice cream cone instead of a ticket or a bullet?

Did anybody notice how fucking absurdly low our standard of behaviour is for cops? (Royal “Our” here–I largely mean white people who are not habitually profiled by the police).

A few months ago when I was walking to the store with my teenage son, a cop followed us on a busy highway, at a walking pace, all the way to the store. He stared at us coldly the entire time. When we entered the store parking lot he followed us in there too. Driving slowly behind us, all the way to the entrance of the store. He stayed there until we went in.

My son was shaking with fear the entire time. “Don’t say anything,” I said quietly, “Don’t make any sudden moves, don’t look at him. Just walk. We’ll be okay soon.”

“I shouldn’t have to be this afraid, Mom,” my son said, his voice wavering.

“I know, baby,” I said.

We entered the store feeling grateful to be alive and aware that if the police officer had decided otherwise, we would not have been.

Today, when I saw this video which has gone viral these past few days as a “feel-good” cop story, I finally made the connection. The video is of a black woman being pulled over by police. There is terror on her face as the officer walks up to her car. His gun is at her eye level. But the officer doesn’t reach for the gun — instead, he reaches for two ice cream cones to hand over to her and her passenger. Her terror gives way to the almost tearful relief that she is not going to come to harm at the hands of these officers. At least not today.

I haven’t killed anyone today. Does that mean I should get heaps of praise?

Is that really our standard now?

Hey, I’ve gone an entire day without shooting someone, somebody give me a pat on the fucking head and a gold fucking star.

Jesus fuck.

-Shiv

 

State sanctioned abuse of women

The Guardian has been publishing reports of people who have been victimized by undercover police officers, groomed as unwitting informants via romantic engagements. For the women targeted in these ventures, their feelings are often genuine–and they must endure a shocking betrayal that is not only legal, but sanctioned by the state.

Like Jessica, I too was deceived. I understand the shock, disbelief and disorientation that come from this appalling discovery, that someone so close and so trusted could actually be a spy sent to infiltrate and disrupt legitimate protest and political movements.

I was tricked into a long-term relationship with the SDS (Special Demonstration Squad – the Met’s undercover unit) officer who I knew as “Carlo Neri”. We met in London in September 2002 at an anti-war demonstration. Neri was a steward at the march and on that day he was with friends I knew socially and through work – who just happened to be trade union activists and anti-racism campaigners.

Neri and I were inseparable. Within six weeks he’d moved in with me. We lived together for two years and in that time we got engaged and talked about having children. My family and friends loved and trusted him too, and he became very much central to all our lives.

Neri left me after appearing to have a breakdown, during which he disclosed trauma and domestic and sexual abuse within his family. This trauma was re-emerging and deeply troubling him. Leading up to his final disappearance from my life, he went missing several times and threatened suicide. This had a massive impact on my life and my wellbeing.

It was in the summer of 2015 that I discovered that Neri had in fact been leading two lives: one with me, as a locksmith and leftwing activist, and the other with his wife as a highly trained police officer, operating in the so-called elite SDS, a secretive unit within the Metropolitan police.

Like Jessica, for over a decade I had no inkling that the man that I had lived with was in fact a state spy. It was activists and researchers who had suspicions about Neri’s sudden disappearance who put all the fragments of this strange jigsaw together. They provided me with unquestionable proof that Neri was an undercover police officer, his profession documented on his marriage certificate and his children’s birth certificates. To be invited to join this elite unit, it was a prerequisite to be married and to have a stable home to go back to when the long undercover deployment – or “deep swimming”, as they referred to it, ended.

The impact of the discovery has been profound. It has re-opened old and painful wounds, which never quite healed. This real-but-not-true person has come back into my life – uninvited. When this happens, when your life narrative becomes a fiction, time itself becomes fragmented. There’s a ripple effect. It impacts your family, your relationships, your career, your health. There are still many missing pieces, questions unanswered and a huge sense of loss.

I urge you all to do a bit of digging to see how drastic your local governments can get when it comes to surveilling domestic activists.

Read more about the UK’s actions here.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: WeCopwatch

The Establishment has an interview with the creators of WeCopwatch, a group that trails police officers and records their activities during arrests so as to corroborate allegations of police brutality. (emphasis mine)

The WeCopwatch members spotlighted in the documentary — Kevin Moore, David Whitt, and Ramsey Orta — have stepped behind the lens to record police brutality in New York, Baltimore, and St. Louis.

In addition to revealing the importance of exposing abuse, the documentary shines a light on the aftermath of such activism. Orta’s video of Eric Garner’s last words-turned-mantra, “I can’t breathe,” as he died in a headlock on a sidewalk in Staten Island went viral, prompting him to take several interviews. Copwatch reveals this made him a target for the police, who surveilled him until he was brought up on charges. Orta was eventually arrested and found with a gun, and later charged with second-degree criminal possession. Ramsey, too, was arrested, on gun charges and for domestic violence; he maintains his innocence on the latter, and says he’s been harassed by the police since filming Garner’s death.

Copwatch points out that this might be the “cost” that members of the grassroots organization face as they challenge a broken system set up to fail them at every turn.

The film, which just had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, has plans for more festival appearances in the U.S. and Europe in the coming weeks, and is currently pursuing digital and theatrical distribution. I spoke with director Camilla Hall about police brutality against African Americans, knowing your rights, and the process of making her crucial film.

Read more here.
-Shiv

The significance of “Papers, Please” in xenophobic America

Just following orders? Ethicists don’t generally buy that. Nonetheless it’s a testament to video games as a medium that you can be confronted with that reality through Papers, Please.

Papers, Please is an honest examination of the practical limits of resistance for anyone working in immigration and a demonstration of how oppressive states use bureaucracy to obscure their abuses. The increasingly complex rules for who you admit to Arstotzka don’t just exist to arbitrarily increase the game’s difficulty.

It’s a bureaucracy suffocating you under an avalanche of regulations, guidelines, and checklists so you don’t have time to think about the “why” of what you’re doing. The legalistic framework surrounding every aspect of your life and job serves to separate you from your own morality, replacing it with a series of rules and regulations. You may have been assigned a job without consent, you may have to screen refugees and immigrants according to nonsense criteria, and your family can be forcibly relocated at any time… but it’s all legal. And if you have a moral problem with any of those laws, confronting them makes you a criminal.

A state that requires self-immolation in the act of genuine resistance is a state designed to enforce compliance. Part of Papers, Please‘s power is that it doesn’t offer you a heroic path out of your dilemma. There are no good options: you’re either enforcing these rules and therefore you become part of the problem, or you are doing what you can to subvert those rules, and in doing so, you put your life and the life of your family at risk. All for seemingly meaningless results, since you have so little agency as an inspector that any commonplace acts of defiance seem futile.

The bureaucratic grind of your border inspector’s life is compounded by how devastatingly poor you are. If you aren’t fast on the first day of the job (where the rules about who to admit are their most simplistic), you’re liable to be dangerously low on money very quickly. Papers, Please has 20 separate endings, and only one of them involves your inspector managing to more or less successfully complete their mission. The majority of playthroughs will find you in an impossible position.

The severe poverty of Arstotzka and Papers, Please‘s intentionally oversized portrayal of despotic overreach can strike many Western players as a profoundly alien experience, but many of the structural hurdles your border agent faces are written into the marrow of Western democracies as well.

Even before Donald Trump, American immigration policy was a labyrinthine horror show of red tape. ICE as a tool for targeting the most vulnerable immigrants en masse predates Trump as well. We’re only seeing it utilized now as a larger scale vehicle of state terror. The key difference between your inspector in Papers, Please and the federal agent staffing an airport checkpoint is that your inspector never signed-up for any of this. You were forced to become a cog in this machine.

Read more about it here.

-Shiv

A familiar story

I have asked at multiple points in my time here on FTB whether those taking various anti-trans positions have bothered to read the material they claim to be criticizing. The answer, at this point, is most often “no,” but sadly ignorant cisgender editors of otherwise respectable media outlets continue to publish these dog awful jokes.

So how do they get away with it? Zinnia Jones explores that. Her answer–“through denialism.”

This exercise, of searching outward from a given state of the world in order to map the many tendrils of its implications, can be a very efficient way of detecting errors, distortions, or outright nonsense. If you have an idea, does that idea imply anything about reality, or concretely connect to the world in any way? At which points does it come in contact with reality? Does it make testable predictions? Can it be disproven, and what would disprove it? What elements of the world changing would affect the validity of this idea?

The facts of the world generally don’t support transphobic arguments, and transphobes don’t really have the option of making robust arguments based on an honest assessment of the current state of our knowledge. They know this – they make use of this same technique of pondering counterfactuals. The difference is that they work backwards to fabricate an entirely new counter-reality, tailored to support their positions and vast enough that it can substitute for reality itself in a person’s mind. It’s called denialism: an entire ideological support system made to preserve a desired belief by rejecting the overwhelming evidence that would threaten this belief.

Denialism is wrongness with an infrastructure – ignorance with an armored shell, a whole fake world weaponized against the real world. Denialism can be observed in the various forms of “scientific” creationism, where facts of evolutionary biology and earth science contradicting certain readings of the Bible are targeted for incompetent rebuttal by non-experts working for various conservative Christian “institutes” of “creation research”, which is not a real field. It can be seen in climate change denialism, where the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming is discarded in favor of fringe nitpicking, oversimplified misunderstandings of the science, and so very many conspiracy theories.

Some forms of transphobia have grown so well-organized that they, too, now constitute an instance of denialism. Diethelm and McKee (2009) describe five core themes of the phenomenon of denialism:

Jones outlines the following themes of denialism, and just to help support her point, I’ll link to some of the works I’ve examined to corroborate them.

  1. Allegations of conspiracy are used as grounds to dismiss a well-established and consistent body of science.
  2. Fake experts are presented to lend apparent authority to denialist claims.
  3. Denialists will be extremely selective when it comes to the evidence and facts that they accept as valid.
  4. Standards for scientific findings are shifted in order to be practically impossible to meet.
  5. Shoddy arguments, fallacies, and deliberate misrepresentations are deployed to mislead the public.

As Jones concludes, if the factual arguments for transphobia existed, transphobes would just use them. Instead a heavy reliance on lies fiction gets them where they want to be.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: The limits of free speech and who gets thrown under the bus

FTB (or, PZ for the most part) periodically wanders into free speech debates that I find intensely frustrating, given that I am a member of several commonly targeted demographics for hate speech. It doesn’t help that avowed ‘pitters are stirring the pot, but even setting aside abusive troglodytes there is the matter of otherwise-liberal people defending the right of someone to incite violence against people like me under the auspice of “free speech.” Part of the problem is that these free speech defenders fail to actually consider speech to be a set of actions, and that Milo has used his speech to publicly call for the sexualized violence against at least one transgender student. Instead of recognizing this, they always fall back to generalizations.

Julia Serano takes it away from there: (emphasis added)

Rather, there is speech that we (as individuals, or as a society) are willing to tolerate, and speech that we deem to be beyond the pale. Every single one of us has a hard limit — a point at which we will exclaim, “I simply cannot tolerate that!” For certain Breitbart employees, the American Conservative Union, Simon & Schuster, and journalist Kurt Eichenwald (whose tweet initially inspired this post), that hard limit is apparently advocating (or seeming to advocate) adult-teen relationships.

I have no problems with any of these groups refusing to tolerate Yiannopoulos’s [pederasty] comment. And I have no qualms with their decisions to “no platform” him over this issue. But I do want to point out that, by drawing the line there, the American Conservative Union, Simon & Schuster, Kurt Eichenwald, and others, are implicitly saying that EVERYTHING ELSE that Yiannopoulos has done up until this point — his long history of blatant racism, misogyny, and transphobia, and his penchant for doxxing, harassing, and intimidating marginalized individuals online and during his talks — all of that is a-okay. Absolutely tolerable. Within the boundaries of normal discourse, in their eyes.

Read more of her here.

-Shiv

 

Signal boosting: The Transgender Threat to Free Speech is a Lie

KC Clements lays out one of the attempted rebrandings of anti-trans political strategy, one that has even hoodwinked many liberals–the notion that “””trans activists””” (all the scare quotes) are enemies of free speech.

It’s bullshit too, even if more people fall for it.

Citizen GO is a conservative Christian mirror of sites like Change.org. The organization, which seeks to politically activate primarily young folks and college students on the right, appears to have co-opted their tactics from progressive social justice movements. For example, Citizen GO emphasizes its adherence to “rationality” and “biology” as opposed to “ideological dogmas,” defining itself as a small grassroots collective, and developing its base through social media, petitions, and hashtags. In short, despite being rooted in the promotion of a privileged positionality — namely cisgender heterosexuality — Citizen GO likes to fancy itself the underdog, the oppressed.

This support of free speech is how Citizen GO justifies its intolerant views. Actions of protesters who came out against the bus and were, for the most part, acting well within their First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and protest, are described by Citizen GO as violent, intolerant bullies. Painting themselves as the victim, Citizen GO writes, “All we ask for is respect for our views and the opportunity to voice them in accordance with the First Amendment.”

The campaign plays on the public’s tendency to fear the other, and it has done so by overstating the power and the scope of said other. Citizen GO understands the insistence on rights for trans people as “gender ideology dogma,” a tactic which fails to consider the cultural context in which the White House is actively stripping away our protections (including, yesterday, making a move to do away with a trans-inclusive health-care rule). When trans people are seen not as victims of violence and discrimination, but as violent radical ideologues and bullies who pose a threat to the right to free speech, people who harbor transphobic beliefs feel even more empowered to cling to them.

Read more here.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: About that Heineken ad

My opinion on The Heineken Ad couldn’t really fill out a full article on my own–my biggest complaint is how self-styled progressives were happy to accept the premise that merely being trans or black constituted an ideological position or opinion.

Which, to be frank, is bullshit. Heineken put the abusers and the abused in the same room and told them to build a table, and fucking liberals are coming out of the woodwork to pat the bigots on the back for acting like a human being while the cameras were running.

What the fuck do they think is happening when there aren’t any cameras around?

This is the danger of the feel-good “let’s just talk to each other” approach. It’s just a more cuddly version of that horrible bothsidesism that equates being called a racist with actual racism as reasons for hurt and anger. Both sides are not the same. The transphobe who agrees to have a beer with the trans woman is sacrificing nothing. She, on the other hand, is giving up a certain amount of dignity by breaking bread with someone who thinks she shouldn’t have the right to exist. She’s risking her mental and physical safety, volunteering for the hard emotional labor of arguing for her right to be a person. And with ads like this, that labor is being demanded of her with no consideration of how much it may cost. Worse, it’s heavily implied that if she were to walk away, it would make her just as intolerant as the bigot who views her with disgust.

Not all viewpoints are equal. Not all olive branches are earned. And it is not in the service of justice to demand emotional labor of marginalized people while praising bigots for doing the bare minimum to act like humans on a single occasion.

I know if I tried to have a beer with my critics some of them would just as soon crack me over the head with the bottle.

This commercial is the worst type of propaganda. It tricks you into thinking social problems can be resolved if only people tolerate their oppression just a LITTLE while longer. It pushes the idea that bigotry, sexism, and transphobia are just differences of opinion that are up for debate, and deserving of civil discourse and equal consideration. And it makes folks think that four minute commercials are a viable way to address societal ills that corporations have no interest in fixing.

If we could stop equating “being a minority” with “ideology,” that’d be great.

-Shiv