I Remember


I was there when the events discussed at the beginning of this post happened. I started the Girlcot Seal Press accountability campaign. It is a traumatic story in the sense of cavalier disregard for intellectual property and closing of the ranks by certain mainstream feminists and a large portion of NWSA attendees that year as much as how the careers of those folks were completely unhindered by their involvement in both oppression and “potential” plagiarism. Yet it is also a powerful testament to the work woc social justice and feminist bloggers engaged in then and, if you know them, now. I am so proud of my virtual sisters for the community we built together and for all the amazing work I see them doing now. I too have grown and changed but I have never gotten to carry our histories with me.

Please click the link to read

An Open Letter to Amanda Marcotte

Black Lesbian Excitement in Tejas

So … it seems two of my favorite people and/or their work will be featured in co-sponsored events by Allgo this week. For those who don’t know, Allgo is the place for queer people of color in Austin TX, a place I do not reside but Allgo often makes me wish I did. They sponsor artists in residence, film and discussion series, performances and activism, and just generally conscious-righteous stuff for the qoc.

This week they are featuring a poetic play by one of my favorite black lesbian authors, Sharon Bridgforth on Friday March 4 (TODAY PEOPLE):

8pm, The University of Texas at Austin, Winship Drama Building 2.180, 300 E. 23rd Street, Austin, TX


Tomorrow after the amazing conference Performing Lesbian Archives, Allgo will be hosting an intimate dinner and discussion with  fellow blogger and newly minted PhD Alexis Pauline Gumbs (who I love and you should love too) and colleague in revolutionary black lesbian praxis Julia Wallace.

Bring a dish to share and get a chance to see footage from their amazing intergenerational project on black lesbian lives @ Out Youth 7:30pm 909 1/2 E. 49th Street, Austin TX 78751

And hey, if you can’t be in TX for these events, then consider getting your local college, women’s center, queer center, or feminist bookstore to invite these people out to your town.

The Shadow Knows


(this man’s art is amazing, check out his blog)




(cover art Detective Short Stories 1938; @Syracus Library)




This is Who You Handed the Reigns Over to

I really should have done this yesterday, when there was still time to help mobilize the vote. That failure is on me. While I took to twitter with a bunch of other progressives to try and rally young people to go vote and to remember that even if the choice was between a Democrat who sold out universal health care and ending the war, it was better than a Republican who circulated watermelon photos or had dinner with members of the Klan and certainly better than Tea Party folks who, among their many issues, still refer to “my America” to mean racial homogeneity and support things like ending equality in education and employment, not hiring differently-abled people or relegating them to the first floor, or simply not serving people in a restaurant, store, or other business just because they are racially or sexually different than you. The problem with our electoral system is often progressives and radicals are faced with voting for the people who have disappointed them just because they aren’t the people who want to lock them up in huge cages and put them on display on Main Street (and yes, someone in Ohio ran on such a platform a few years ago). The problem is exacerbated by a smug disregard for progressive politics that starts at the top, I watched President Obama on John Stewart too, and trickles right on down to snark said to entire Press rooms. The problem is a government system that makes being in government a lucrative career rather than a civil service, where career politicians worry more about the 30 misguided folks with incoherent signs than the 80% of voters who swept them into office. The problem is a government so bent on “bipartisanship” that they let Fox News tell them who to hire and fire and the only people compromised are the American people. So yeah, the Democrats threw away momentum like we have not seen in the last 30 years and they failed to carry the mantle of change they defined and we handed them, but this is what being disillusioned and staying home or voting for something “new” really means:

More Tea Party Signs

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for original archive click link at top of blog

While neither progressives nor voting Democrats, ie not the politicians, can be blamed for the racism in this country (subconscious, covert, overt, or otherwise), we do have to ask ourselves what our decisions around voting helped sweep in to the halls of power both this election and the last one. By which I mean, when our “representatives” started to act like they were not going to uphold the mandate to provide affordable health care, end the war, support the poorest among us, etc. were we as vocal, strategic, and present as the Tea Party? Did we hold our own rallies, put them up on you tube, demand an audience with our Congresspeople, etc.? Or did we just send Stephen Colbert? And when it came time to vote yesterday, when voters across this nation ran to the polls in a racialized frenzy did we offer rides to the polls to our friends, neighbors, or even the guy on the street? Did we even vote? And I use “we” here, even though I did vote, even though I did participate in meetings with local politicians, and I did try and ensure my students knew where to register and the consequences of switching their registration if they are from out of state, because ultimately as a group we spend a lot of intellectual power critiquing the world around us and far less coming up with viable alternatives. The system is broken and the politicians on the Left are still just politicians, but if we want something different than it is time to build that and make it happen. Until then, we are all implicated in who won the elections last night and what all of us will ultimately lose because of it.

On Collaboration

Dear Pompous Professor XY








the wary and watchful Chair

Time Adds Stealing Youth’s Lives in CA

The declining U.S. economy has led many to wake up to the fact that prisons are increasingly warehouses for “unwanted people” in the U.S. Whether they are people of color, immigrants (usually also people of color), poor women, trans, subsistence level or homeless youth, mentally ill, differently-abled, etc. the prison system is ready to take them on the most minor infraction. Once there, the system is designed to keep them through a combination of degradation and punishment that includes added time. The assumption that people in prison belong in prison has served to shield most N. Americans to the realities of mothers separated from nursing babies for nothing more than crossing a border or Latino youth clocking time because they were hanging out on the wrong street corner together or trans women praying they make it to prison instead of the infirmary because of “unexplained injuries” while in custody. While more information has come out about U.S. prisons becoming the largest state funded mental health facilities in some state’s, very few discussions outside of activist circles have centered on the interconnectedness of marginalization (“unwanted people”), incarceration, and income and job generation. Prisons are becoming one of the largest employers across the nation, providing jobs in food service, medicine, administration, sanitation, as well as guards and counselors. They also stimulate local economy because all of these new workers have money to spend at the local diner, coffee shop, clothing store, etc.Yet, as some small towns have argued, this stimulus restructures the entire economy toward the prison in ways that stunt alternative economic growth and econ sustaining diversification. Put another way, if the prison closes towns that were struggling before it opened would become ghost towns. So the prison must stay open. And to keep the prison open, there have to be criminals …

For those familiar with the prison-industrial-complex, or already working on the issue, this is not new information. Yet new ads inundate the local television with calls to join the ranks of border patrol (immigrant prison guards) and law enforcement careers (non-immigrant prisons) and my own uni has seen a massive increase in enrollment in the prison related degrees. It’s big business. Big business that is shielded by the national level discourses of citizenship and criminality.

Enter California.

While scandals about youth prisons are nothing new, the California prison system has one of the longest incarceration rates for youth offenders in the nation. Most of those offenders are originally arrested on misdemeanors, though there is a large percentage involved in hard core or gateway crimes. The issue is not whether or not incarcerated youth are “perfect victims”, ie completely innocent, but how they move from every day youth, to criminalized populations upon whom the prison-industrial-complex depends to generate money and jobs at the expense of lives.

Many youth in California prisons are people of color, second or third generation immigrant youth, and/or poor. 84% of youth in California prisons were people of color in 2007; while some will take this as proof people of color are more prone to criminality than white people, more than enough studies of race and racism in the legal system have proven that this overrepresenation has more to do with racism and classism than anything else. 1/3 of the youth serving time in CA prisons are there because of “time adds”. This means they have already served their original sentence and are serving time for behavioral issues ranging from talking back to guards to being involved in a fight (the application of the law has made little distinction between those who were targeted in those fights and/or defending themselves against bullying and harassment and those who intentionally caused a fight). The system is similar to that applied to people with mental health issues in prison who are often picked up on misdemeanors or petty crime and then warehoused for years based on behaviors related to their MH issues (talking back, ignoring lights out, fighting, etc.)

According to Books not Bars:

In the United States, 90,000 youth find themselves in juvenile detention centers on any given night and 2.2 million youth are arrested each year. In California, the state youth prison systems cost $216,000 per child per year while a mere $8,000 per child are allocated to Oakland public schools.

Once again, needed resources are funneled away from programs and services that help people succeed and deliberately moved into ones that require them to fail.

5 years of organizing in California against the inhumane treatment of incarcerated youth, including court cases finding the prison system or its employees guilty of beating, raping, or harassing youth prisoners, some times with the goal of goading them into time add violations, has had some positive effect on the system. According to Truthout, the number of youth arrested in 2009 was 1500 down from 5000, 5 years earlier.  Ella Baker Center introduced a bill, AB 999, in CA that would eliminate time adds all together, replacing them with incentive programs that provide time reduction or other privileges to youth who take anger management, participate in counseling or work retraining programs, or otherwise show good behavior during their sentence.  The bill has not yet passed but you can help by sending a letter to the California Legislature letting them know that intentionally incarcerating youth for years beyond their original sentence is not only inhumane it often causes irreparable damage to their education, self-esteem, and life choices.

The fight does not end with California’s youth however. As I’ve been trying to show, the problem is the system itself. The same tactics used to criminalize, round up, and retain youth in the prison system is similar to that of any other marginalized population. The correlations become all the more apparent when we map how policies about criminalizing normal behavior, like hanging out, and adding time to sentences is used on differently targeted populations, ie how these policies are used against Latin@s and immigrants in the Southwest, youth in California, black men in Chicago, and mental health patients in the U.S. Drawing connections between the groups least wanted, or in some cases least employed, in any given region and their treatment in prison to disparate least wanted populations in other regions shows a clear map of state sanctioned discrimination, violence, and economic gain on the backs of not only criminalized populations but the cities and towns that house the prisons. The problem is often worse for queer populations criminalized for their gender or sexual “transgressions” as well as the ways their identities often intersect other targeted populations. While Californians have been working to change this, Gov Schwarznegger has vetoed the the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Prisoner Safety Act and its predecessor, leaving queer people, particular trans women, extremely vulnerable to violence and murder in the prison system. According to the documentary Cruel and Unusual, trans people are incarcerated at 3 times the rate of cis people and many of them begin their time in prison as youth picked up for loitering, homelessness, or petty crime.

When we think intersectionally it is impossible to ignore how the prison system in the U.S. upholds the idea of who has a right to be considered N. American and who is part of Palin’s “other [N.] America”, the one we lock up and throw away.

Related videos

Now What ?!?



Why am I telling you all of this?


Example One:



Example Two








Tiananmen Square/unattributed




Return to Kyrgyzstan


In June, I wrote a post about violence erupting in Kyrgyztan and its impact on women. For those who do not know, an unidentified number of Kyrgyz systematically targeted Uzbek neighbors for several days, including nearly burning down one of largest cities in the state and moving slowly out to the rural areas. Homes and shops were burned and women and children fled through the streets, being trampled, caught in the crossfire, and potentially targeted for sexual and emotional abuse. They were herded toward the border even though the Kyrgyz had intentionally blocked the ditch they would have to cross to flee to safety; in other words, the women and children were intentionally forced together in a holding area while Kyrgyz killed off the men. The first female acting-President, Roza Otunbayeva, begged for direct military action from international governments that came too late. Her ascendancy to power and proposed reforms, including the use of Kyrgyzstan by U.S. troops stationed there, is said to have sparked the ethnic cleansing attempt targeting her fellow Uzbekis and potentially fueling the inaction of the U.S. Base. Like the current scapegoating of Latin@ and Muslim immigrants in the U.S., the Uzbekis were targeted because of Political turmoil, unemployment, growing migration, criminal activity, and growing religious intolerance and at the center was the belief that an ethnic minority female president was not only unqualified to lead but also playing favorites by nature of shared identity.

A month later, women were at the center of rebuilding both the burned out communities and the sense of trust across ethno-religious lines. The city itself maintained a curfew and tensions continued in general, flaring up in small acts of violence on both sides. Like so many communities who experienced unchecked ethnic cleansing then end of major violence has left the population weary, scarred, and angry. Women in particular are surviving the scars of being raped, beaten, disappeared, taken hostage, forced to flee their homes, wounded, and killed. Many are trying to rebuild families that were separated only to find that most of their missing relatives are dead. And yet, according to Dr. Nurgul Djanaeva, the founder and president of the Forum of Women’s NGOs of Kyrgyzstan, no one had created bureaus specifically for dealing with women’s trauma, the potential for ongoing targeting of women in the aftermath, or the documenting of gender based violence against women during the conflict. One other major hindrance has been the stigma of rape and sexual assault that is making women wary of being counted or exposed while seeking treatment.

uzbek women voting amidst the ruble of their burned out home/unattributed

Women’s NGOs are at the forefront of bringing women together to heal. They are taking a lesson from other ethnic cleansing incidents in Europe, Africa, and Latin America to address specific gender based violence and support the centrality of women’s voices and experiences in rebuilding the nation. The hope is that rather than sparking ethno-religious misogyny in the future, women’s leadership will become a regularized part of Kyrgyzstan life.

While the conflict has led to opportunities for women, the trajectory of that conflict and its specific use of gender based violence largely unchecked by international peace keeping forces is becoming all too familiar. The strategic location of the U.S. military base in Kyrgyzstan and the ties to Russia were leveraged against the proposed autonomy of the people and the safety and security of women, children, and ethnic minorities. The rhetoric turning neighbor against neighbor is no longer the stuff of “never again” (WWII) but instead the common day occurrences that allow “good Americans” to burn other people’s holy books regardless of its impact on them or the U.S. troops they claim to support and have radio broadcasts using racial “puns” about rape and sexual assault of Latinas while others form vigilante groups and beat immigrants, often to death. What is the dividing line between those whose fears and misplaced envy is harnessed by radio stations and politicians into a lethal genocidal force and those who claim their references to “re-loading” are metaphorical? And why is it that despite what we know about how women are targeted both during these conflicts and in the makeshift camps built to keep them safe in the aftermath, why do we still fail to take this knowledge into account to ensure women’s bodily integrity? And why, after all the genocide we have seen in this world, are the military and economic interests of major Super Powers more important than safety and security of women’s lives? Haven’t we learned that societies where women have access to education, family planning, and representation and poor people have access to jobs, food, and shelter free of discrimination, are more stable than places where both populations, and their intersections, are exploitable? But then asking these questions might make us have to look at foreign policy through the lens of humanity rather than profit and ask when and where we are culpable and how these “exceptions” are in fact just more extreme versions of behaviors that permeate our own society.

What Happens in Iraq, Stays in Iraq: Remembering Lavena Johnson

This is a post in progress. Trigger warning for rape survivors, some descriptions are graphic.


I’ve spent most of the morning trying to write a post about the contrast in attention in Hollywood to stories about murdered male soldiers and raped and/or murdered female ones. My main argument is that white male soldiers exemplify a narrative about the nation and citizenship that makes their stories reaffirm “americanness” even as many of their stories also critique war in general and especially the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I will continue to include Iraq until every soldier and government paid mercenary has left). Stories about female soldiers however challenge notions about gender and the nation by subverting the strong white male in uniform with a normative gender crossing female face (since the definition of masculinity being sold here is one that depends on pretty girlfriends and wives who stay at home to care for the kids and cook dinner). More than that, the number of female soldiers and “consultants” who have been raped or otherwise sexually harassed in the military refuses an easy reading of military culture and subsequently “americanness” as exclusively heroic and just. The female soldiers whose deaths and abuses have been covered up further illustrate the links between sexism, violence against women, the war machine, and the state.

Gone is the tragic narrative of the “good soldier” who after doing all for “love of country” is murdered, like rising football star Tillman who gave up his career “stop terrorism”. In its wake is the story of women hazed along sexist and/or racialized sexist lines, abused and harassed for daring to do what their male counterparts are praised for doing, and some even murdered for daring to speak out or seek help. You cannot valorize a female soldier without confronting gender stereotypes that are embedded in the meaning of the nation. Nor can you talk about cover ups surrounding the abuse and/or murder of female soldiers without exposing the ways that violence against women is mapped onto military culture and war. This is not to say that all men or male soldiers are rapists, but rather that rape is a tool of war and that women’s bodies are the terrain by which men in war claim conquest and re-establish manhood. In the face of this truth, the narrative of the nation that depends on valorizing soldiers and seeing them as definitive images of the nation crumbles under the weight of oppression.

The farther away from the white male all-American soldier we get, the less likely the story will be told. In 2007, In the Valley of Elah was released to a moderate-sized audience. The movie told the story of Richard Davis, a third generation soldier who had fought in both Bosnia and Iraq who was murdered by fellow soldiers a few days after returning from war. Davis’ story garnered attention in the media because he was a legacy and covering up his death was much harder to do with so many other high ranking soldiers in his family. Yet, in order to tell his story, Hollywood execs decided he had to be white. They cast Susan Sarandon as his mother, a woman of color, and Jonathan Tucker to play Davis himself. No similar white washing of his assailants, which included men of color, was done. In order for the narrative of “good soldier” to hold, he needed to fit the myth of “americanness” that increasingly ignores the presence of Latinos as legitimate citizens.

Pat Tillman/wikipedia

Yet Davis’ story still got told, partially because of power within the military held by his family and partially the fact of his maleness. Re-written as white, he could still embody the hyper-masculine pseudo-sanctity of the State. Pat Tillman offers the same opportunity to Hollywood, all the more so because he was a football star turned patriot gunned down by friendly fire. The subsequent government cover up went all the way to the Bush White House. Hollywood is positively giddy at the thought of: a rising football star with a square jaw and a John Wayne sense of justice going off to inexplicable war only to be killed in a massive government conspiracy. It’s the kind of movie that helps win hearts and minds in the peace effort all the while nodding appreciatively at the hawks. In other words, both of these stories allow us to keep the image of N. America and heroism intact while underscoring the adage that “war is hell”.

No similar films have been made about Shoshana Johnson, Jamie Leigh Jones, or Lavena Johnson and there probably never will be. You may recall that Shoshana Johnson, a Panamanian immigrant to the U.S. and food service specialist in the military, was the first black female prisoner of war. She was caught and held for 22 days in Iraq along with 5 other soldiers from her unit. When they returned to the U.S., the media focused on Jessica Lynch, a young blonde, blue-eyed soldier who became emblematic of the war effort. In this role, Lynch re-affirmed gender norms by becoming the face of why we are fighting rather than the fighting itself. In the discourse of war, small boned, blue-eyed Lynch desperately tried to hold off the enemy only to be captured and held prisoner for days, possibly even raped during her ordeal, reinforcing the idea of the region as barbaric and a threat to valiant women and children everywhere.  Lynch never fired her weapon. Some reports even claim her lack of action during the conflict may have gotten another soldier killed. She also denies being raped, all though her biographer says her medical records are consistent with sexual assault. The media frenzy surrounding her, quickly died when the military cover up of what actually happened stripped her of her “innocence”. Shoshana Johnson was permanently disabled in the incident and had to fight the U.S. Army for benefits. She received no media attention and her fight to have her injuries recognized and paid for by the military, to receive her pay for her service, and to leave the army with an honorable discharge were all unreported. While the experience of both of these women is part of a larger racial discourse in the nation where big boned black immigrant Johnson could never stand in for the nation nor garner national sympathy in the quest for definitive americanness in war time, both women also had their stories manipulated or neglected because of their gender.

Shoshana Johnson & Jessica Lynch/unattributed

Think about the story as told by Hollywood, devoid of gender reference. Young, innocent soldiers, take a wrong turn into a fire fight and are then terrorized by the enemy as prisoners of war; when they return home, the military quickly concocts a story of heroism elevating one of the soldiers who may have been implicated in the death or capture of a fellow soldier while forcing the others to keep silent. Sounds fascinating doesn’t it? Now add in gender and race: a multi-racial unit of soldiers is captured during a firefight, including two women; they are held captive, and upon return to the U.S. the stories of the soldiers of color quickly fade into the background to highlight the plight of a single white female soldier until the truth surfaces and it turns out she was just an exploitable “pretty face” for the war machine. While I find that story interesting, does that sound like a Hollywood blockbuster to you or a Lifetime Movie? And what are some of the defining differences in those two genres?

Like Pat Tillman, Jamie Leigh Jones story went all the way to Congress. Jones was a KBR/Halliburton employee, a consulting firm in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan who has filed suit against 7 KBR mercenaries and employees who drugged and raped her while in country. Her gang rape was so brutal that at least one or more of her assailants ruptured her breast implants and tore the muscles underneath. The rape kit that confirmed 7 men had raped her both anally and vaginally throughout the night was stolen from the military infirmary. When it was later recovered, all pictures of Jones’ injuries had been destroyed. Jones herself was kept in locked up by KBR/Halliburton employees as punishment for seeking medical attention until one soldier snuck her a cellphone she used to call her dad in the States.

The investigation into Jones’ rape claims briefly exposed the legal issues surrounding the use of contracted “consultants”, mercenaries, in the U.S. war effort. They operate outside of military law and in international territory making the application of U.S. laws questionable.  At the same time, rules limiting the governing power of Iraq over soldiers and contracted mercenaries makes it almost impossible for Jones’ to hold them accountable in Iraqi courts either. In December of 2007, the DOJ decided they had were not going to press charges. From 2007 to 2009, KBR/Halliburton did everything in their considerable power to prevent Jones from filing suit or having an open court case if she was able to do so. In the meantime, Jones’ testimony before Congress forced them to change their rules about contracting with companies that require mandatory arbitration but as of January 2010 Halliburton/KBR was still fighting Jones’ right to have an open court trial against them.

Again, imagine this story devoid of gender in the hands of Hollywood. A young idealist consultant arrives in a war zone and discovers violence and corruption for which they are held prisoner and then spend the next 4 years fighting to expose in court that takes them all the way to The Hill. Again, this is the kind of story you could see at your local movie theater if starred someone like Jake Gyllenhaal or Matt Damon. (Matt Damon, by the way, appeared in one of the few made for Hollywood films about a female soldier’s mysterious death and the cover up surrounding it. Unlike the stories outlined here however, the soldiers were trying to cover up for her because she was incompetent and they “had to frag her” to save everyone else.) But when you add gender back in, centering the brutal rape of Jones, it once again makes move to Lifetime.

If we compare Lynch’s story to Jones’ the gendered aspects of “americanness” and war become all the more evident. Lynch was seen as a national hero because she supposedly bravely fought of the enemy who punished with rape and torture. Her victimization at the hands of the enemy was all the more valorized because she was song, small, blonde and blue-eyed. She exemplified the Birth of a Nation narrative that casts men of color as barbarians and rapists unable to govern and helped elevate it to international discourse justifying war. Jones’ was also blonde and blue-eyed and also fairly young. But these attributes were consistently used in a victim-blaming narrative that argued “she should have known better than to show up in a war zone pretty” and that her implants meant she wanted it … Why the difference? Because Lynch’s assault fit the war narrative of us=good vs they=bad. Jones’ story blurred those lines and implicated not only “us” but also the Bush administration who was intimately tied to Halliburton. Further, her story would have once again centered violence against women as a fact of war on all sides, undermining the image of America the Savior, and potentially privileged the Iraqi government over the U.S. one since the Iraqis made some indication that they were willing to prosecute the mercenaries for violence against women. This would hardly fit with the image of sexism that has underlined both pro-war and even some mainstream feminist interpretations of the Middle East and women.

Finally, Lavena Johnson’s death has garnered the least amount of attention in mainstream media of all of these women and yet hers is also a story of brave soldier and cover up.

As the news report shows, Johnson’s parents were told that she committed suicide in Iraq to cover up what medical reports indicate was a rape and murder. Not only did the military once again try to hide the fact that female soldiers are being raped at the hands of their own fellow soldiers, but their tale of suicide demeaned Johnson’s memory and denied the family benefits she had earned as a soldier.

Lavena Johnson was a high school honor’s student with a bright future ahead of her. She enlisted in order to pay for college. She was killed by fellow soldiers at 19 years old. Like Lynch, she was small (5 foot, 100 lbs) and pretty but as a black woman her rape and murder did not fit the national narrative of americanness and “family values” that the war was supposedly meant to uphold. Like Jones’ her rape may have been the result of hired mercenaries working for Halliburton/KBR as her body was found in one of their tents. And her death sheds new light on what may have happened to Jones had a soldier not gotten her a cellphone. According to the autopsy, Jones was beaten, shot at an angle that would be impossible for her to do on her own, and then, unsuccessfully, set on fire. While her breasts were not as severely damaged as Jones’, they showed signs of scratches and bite marks meant to abuse and torture. Someone had also poured lye into her vagina, something I can only interpret as an act of racialized violence since Johnson had pressed hair.

Sadly, Jones and Johnson have one other thing in common, the DOJ is refusing to investigate. Johnson is dead and her parents are working class African Americans with no ties to the military or to Halliburton/KBR. Unlike Jones, they do not have the kind of clout or momentum behind their cause in mainstream media to force the issue. Once again the disparities between how the nation views white women and women of color has left Johnson with only a handful of mainstream activists and mostly black activists on her side. And both women, by nature of being women have had to fight, Johnson through relatives, to even have their stories of rape validated precisely because their stories undermine the nation’s image of itself and its mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1 in 3 women who join the military will be raped or sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers or U.S. hired mercenaries. According to Time Magazine, The Pentagon estimates nearly 3,000 women were sexually assaulted in 2008, up 9% from the year before. Among women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number rose 25%. Women’s advocates in the military estimate the rate of rape and sexual assault in the military is nearly twice that of civilians living in the U.S. The same Pentagon report determined that 80-90% of sexual based crimes in the military go unreported and only 8% of those that are actually end in prosecution of rapists. Of the 94 N. American military women who died in Iraq, 36 died from injuries unrelated to combat. Many of these were ruled as suicides by the State Department, while 15 deaths remain shrouded in suspicion. Given that Lavena Johnson’s death was ruled a suicide it is hard to say how many of the other deaths attributed to suicide were in fact examples of violence against women or military sexism. At least 8 women died due to “non-combatant injuries” in the same base in Iraq and all 8 had shipped out from the same base in Texas. Moreover, these numbers do not include women who died for other reasons that may have actually been related to violence against women, like the 3 women who died of dehydration in Iraq in 2003 because they were afraid to drink liquids provided to them on the base after a certain hour. Given the incidents involving date rape drugs, their fears may not be as paranoid or as limited in scale as their case implies.  Interview data by Salon author Benedict shows that female soldiers are consistently warned not to go the bathrooms or showers by themselves and on some bases, not to go out at all at night. At least two women have come forward with claims of brutal rape at the hands of KBR/Halliburton. The contracts forcing them to remain silent and seek arbitration rather than legal options may be hiding any number of additional abuse cases. No data is available on Blackwater, though Iraqi citizens have claimed that some of their employees have raped Iraqi women and girls unchecked.

These stories are not headed to Hollywood. In some ways, this is a good thing because like the story of murdered soldier Davis, there is no way to know if Hollywood would do their stories justice or simply reinforce the same old narratives in a kinder, gentler, package. Nor do I think equal attention from Hollywood would make the fact that both women and men are dying under suspicious circumstances in Iraq all better. Instead, I am trying to argue that the war effort is based on an increasingly insular definition of N. America and americanness which reflects marginalizing traditions in our nation while deepening them. This in turn makes women’s lives less safe by allowing them to be targeted and even killed by fellow soldiers and mercenaries. The sexualized violence they experience, which often gets carried on racial lines that erases the plight of black and brown women as well as Iraqi women, is part of war culture that has historically come to visit on the mainland with returning soldiers. The failure to tell these women’s stories, particularly those of women of color, at a national level has helped allow this process to continue. Moreover, the desire to on the one hand, not vilify soldiers who are trying to do their best in an inexcusable war and on the other, to not validate the war effort by either focusing exclusively on the plight of N. American women (as I have done in this post) nor elevating the lives of soldiers above those of the 100,000s of civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, has left us worrying about moral dilemmas and ideologies while women suffer unchecked.

Ultimately, this what motivated me to write this convoluted piece today from the perspective of Hollywood where for art thou. I am concerned about the lack of attention to women’s stories and experiences in war in general. And the constant refrain of how amazing Pat Tillman was and how great the movie about him was going to be finally pushed those concerns to the surface in a new way than the posts I have done about sexism, sexual assault, and sexualized racism against both N. American women and women and girls living in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Tillman’s story is important, I think he embodies everything we tell ourselves is the definition of American, everything makes this country great, and yet it is the narrow space he occupies as a “family values”, nationalistic, white heterosexual male football star that allows us to vilify women and people of color in this country and outside of it. It is the focus on that face as definitional space of the nation that makes it possible to laugh at the rape of poor black women in this country and to excuse away the rape and murder of them in another one as “suicide”. Until we better confront the meanings of nation, heroism, and war in this nation we cannot tell the stories of female soldiers because their stories undermine those images. And if we do not tell their stories, than violence against women as a weapon of war will continue precisely because we don’t talk about it and when we do, it is only to prove the barbarism of others.

On Feminism, Liberals, Black Folks and Antione Dodson

For those who do not know, Antione Dodson is the brother of a potential rape victim. He, his sister [whose name I will not use in this post], her daughter, and his mother lived in low income housing, Lincoln Park,  in Huntsville Alabama until recently. According to Dodson a rapist was targeting Lincoln Park because no one was doing anything about it. He said several young women and girls had been raped, and had either received no assistance or not asked for help because they knew the police were not going to do anything. Dodson also says the same thing happened to his family.

In late July, a rapist broke into their small home through a window and attempted to rape his sister. Dodson managed to scare the assailant and force him out of the apartment. He then called several of his friends in the area to look for the person because, like everyone else, he did not believe the police were going to do anything about an assault in low income housing. Later Dodson called both the Housing Authority Office that runs Lincoln Park and the Police. Hours went by before the police arrived and according to Dodson and others no major search was mounted by them. Also according to Dodson and others, the Housing Authority issued a statement but has made no improvements to security or safety in Lincoln Park to help protect them from being targeted. In fact, an attempted rape following a similar m.o. (rapist came through bedroom window, advanced on girl inside) occurred the following evening.

This story of systematic rape of young black women and girls left to fend for themselves because they are poor and the failure of the police or tax-payed for housing programs to protect them has been totally eclipsed by the spectacle made of Dodson. Dodson’s interview outlining the attempted rape of his sister and the sexual violence and rape other women and girls endured was put on youtube, not to highlight the problem but rather to highlight how “ghetto” and “effiminate” Dodson was. While youtubers across the racial spectrum showed up to laugh, police failed to capture a serial rapist. A white hipster-nerd comedy troupe known as the Gregory Brothers, made up of 3 white men and 1 white woman, recut Dodson’s interview to make “the Bed Intruder Song” which was played on black and alternative radio stations and sold on itunes. The song appeared on Billboard’s hot 100 list and made a considerable amount of money for the Gregory Brothers. As far as I know, none of their proceeds were used to help track down the Lincoln Park rapist. None of the attention the song garnered sparked national outcry about rape, the unchecked rape of low income women, or national feminist rallying around changes in policing and housing options for poor women of color. Nor did many make connections between these erasures and the latent homophobia and gender policing embedded in many of the comments.

In fact, many people have counted the Dodsons as lucky. The attention allowed Dodson to become an internet star and make enough money on interviews and fought for profits from the autotune song to get his family out of low income housing. His sister will not be targeted by the Lincoln Park rapist again. But what about everybody else’s sister? And does moving out of low income housing on an unstable economic source negate the fear and trauma related to the attempted rape of Dodson’s sister that both she and her mother, who witnessed the attack, are now experiencing? To me it seems kind of like the politicians who say “in a way Katrina was a good thing” because of all the services and new construction people received. The idea is predicated on the assumption that black people’s, especially poor black people’s, lives are so worthless that if several of them are tortured, murdered, sexually assaulted, or traumatized, so that 1 or 2 of them can live better lives that is acceptable because those 1 or 2 were never meant to live better lives anyway. Only people who imagine they will never be abandoned by their government to die in a un/natural disaster or be raped or have their children raped in a government funded housing project would imagine that these things are trumped by a few months-1 year of free housing (much of which was contaminated) or a few short months of internet fame.

In the midst of this institutional racism are the actions of three groups that cannot be ignored:

  1. the viewers and listeners who openly mocked Dodson, completely ignoring the rape survivor narrative embedded in his story
  2. the white middle class hipster-nerd comedy troupe that made money off of the rape and attempted rape of poor black women and girls and the one man willing to stand up for them
  3. the mainstream feminist blogs and feminist communities who have remained largely silent on Dodson’s sister despite the core issue of rape

The multi-racial viewers and listeners spent their time laughing at Dodson and mocking him and his sister in print in the youtube comments for days. The video received some of the largest hits of the week when it first went up. The auto-tune version played black radio stations and a black marching band even did their own rendition, laughing at the “ghetto” in ways that I personally cannot excuse as “black humor as survival”. Instead, I would argue for many it represented black humor as classism, homophobia, and internalized hate though some of it was certainly mixed with the understanding of our “throwaway lives” in the United States. Amongst the 100,000s of people commenting on Dodson or the autotune song, very few talked about the heinous act of rape, the existence of a serial rapist in the area that had gone unchecked for an unspecified amount of time, or the engineered tragedy of the state’s willingness to abandon poor women and girls to predators. In other words, the chance to mock an uneducated black man was more enticing than the fact of violence against women and girls. The very thing that allowed systemic racism, classism, and sexism to do nothing about a serial rapist in state owned low income housing was manifesting in individual viewers of Dodson’s story.

Once again, liberal, middle class, white hipster-nerds also failed to act on the tenets they claim to be central to their very beings, ie social justice, in the face of the opportunity to be “clever.” Thus three white men, and one white woman, cut and remixed Dodson’s interview in order to point and laugh at the uneducated black man in crisis. His crisis at not being able to get help for his sister, his sister’s attempted rape, and the targeting of poor black women and girls were either edited out or remixed in order to highlight the “hilarity” of blackness and poverty and for some, gender transgression. Dodson and his sister’s story were pimped out by white liberals for a few bucks a pop on itunes precisely because they fit all of the stereotypes of blackness that liberals are quick to criticize in the mouths of conservatives but embrace as “clever” in their own. (It should be noted that Dodson did eventually receive 50% of the profit after advocating for himself and saying in a radio interview that his words and experience were being used to profit everyone else and it was “time he got paid”. Without this advocacy Dodson, like the Katrina victims whose words were taken without permission to by poet/adjunct Professor Raymond McDaniels for his book Saltwater Empire, would have simply been a cash cow for white male “poets” and “artists”.) Once again, like the systemic racism, classism, and sexism allowing the state to do nothing about a serial rapist, these white liberal hipster-nerds, who no doubt think racism and sexism are wrong and probably volunteer in low income neighborhoods or women’s crisis lines, let the reinforcing image of poor blakness whip them up into such a frenzy of hilarity that it never occurred to them that rape is not funny, that serial rapists targeting black women and girls because the police are doing nothing should not be the subject of comedy but rather social action, and that the real clever thing to do would have been to cut a song that actually highlighted oppression and gave the proceeds back to the impacted community.

Finally, the mainstream feminist blogosphere and national level activists also remained largely silent on the plight of women and girls in Lincoln Park. A quick search of the top feminist blogs and magazines, with blogs, showed that at most, they linked to black women bloggers talking about the situation. At the least, they said nothing or openly laughed at the Dodson video themselves, commenting solely on his patriarchal attempt to recenter himself and his boys protecting his sister rather than her story of rape. And while this critique is important, ie that male rage about rape taking center stage to women’s attacks is a function of patriarchy, I do not think that was the point of Dodson’s larger story. Nor does that critique have the same meaning in the face of complete and total lack of action on the part of the people charged with preventing rape and tracking down/stopping rapists. They did however, contribute some of the most salient critique about gender policing and homophobia when they weighed in. When the critique of masculinity and patriarchy supersede any discussion of state inaction to catch a serial rapist then it seems all the more suspect. Once again, the failure to recognize the humanity of black women and poor women, and especially poor black women, allowed mainstream feminists to miss another opportunity to call attention to violence against women and demand action to make women’s lives safe(r) in this nation by rejecting a culture of violence, oppression, and inequality based on gender. That failure not only colludes with the white male establishment that runs and fails to address rape in low income housing but also looks the other way when middle and upper class white women are beaten, raped, or otherwise abused or treated unfairly or unequally in their workplace, home, or lives.

So what is the lesson of Antione Dodson and his sister. For many people, it will always be that poor “black people are funny”, “white people are clever”, ” ‘girlie men’ are funny”, and the spectacle of blackness is really a benefit in disguise because after all the Dodsons are out of the projects.  Some will even use Antione’s comment that he was happy with the song because the proceeds he received actually helped move his family out of the projects to justify not discussing the intersecting oppressions that puts women and girls in Lincoln Park in danger. Not only does this stance ignore rape and the realities still enduring it but it shows little regard for how earlier interviews underscore Dodson’s hurt and anger about people not taking the situation seriously and making money off of him or the reaction the song itself elicited outlined in this post. (ie people laughing at a story of attempted rape, and a serial rapist that the police and housing authority have made seemingly little effort to track down and stop, is ok because Antione ultimately decided he liked the song for getting him out of low income housing). This narrative will always mask how sexism, racism, and classism allows women, especially poor women of color, to be targets of unchecked violence by both individuals and the state. It will always excuse away liberals who not only do nothing but laugh along with everyone else because “its funny” or “clever” but also helps perpetuate the myth that liberals can’t be racist or sexists or classist. Except, these moments prove that they can be and often are as racist and classist as neo-conservatives. And it will stand as a shining example about how intersecting oppressions and the ongoing failure of the feminist movement(s) to fully and radically address them makes all women’s lives less safe.

And yes, for each of the groups I have singled out here, from black radio to white mainstream feminists, there are people who did stand up against rape, did talk about the intersections of poverty, gender, and state level or state sanctioned violence. My point is not that everyone is evil but that collectively, these particular groups failed to discuss violence against women in favor of laughing at the spectacle of poor blackness that reinforces existing stereotypes and allows state level, systemic, inaction and violence. Nor does the existence of black people behaving in sexist and classist ways negate the existence of white people behaving in racist, sexist, and classist ways.

Here are some links to people discussing what we should all have been discussing these past few months, ie violence against women and the intersections that mask it: