Dispatch #32 October 4th 2017
Day 332 Post-Ascendency of White Supremacy & Misogyny PAWSM
Day 257 Post-Installation of White-Supremacist-Misogynist-Pussy-Grabbing-Self-Aggrandizing-Demagogic-Bully-Illegitimate-PeeeOTUS & his White-Nationalist-Fascistic-Christian-Supremacist-Quislings
OK!!! Shout-Out to WNBA Athletes (that would be Female Athletes) who courageously acted in solidarity to protest racism and police killings of black people and to support Black Lives Matter before Kaepernick took a knee. Failing to recognize these courageous female athletes of all races who led silent protests in sports underscores the toxic impact of misogyny, especially in sports. Here is the Herstory:
Before this weekend’s mass NFL protests against police brutality, racism, and President Donald Trump’s attempt to squash those protests, there was Colin Kaepernick’s famous kneeling protest in August 2016.
And before Kaepernick, there were the WNBA protests in the summer of 2016.
They began in Minnesota. On July 9, four members of the Minnesota Lynx — a dynasty on par with the Warriors — held a pre-game press conference to talk about police violence in the wake of the killing of Philando Castile by a Minneapolis-area officer and Alton Sterling by two Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officers. The four members of the Lynx — Maya Moore, Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen, and Rebekkah Brunson — wore black shirts with the phrase “Change Starts With Us: Justice & Accountability. www.sbnation.com/2017/9/24/16357206/national-anthem-protest-wnba-history-donald-trump; https://hellogiggles.com/news/badass-wnba-athletes-wont-stop-fighting-believe/; http://wgno.com/2016/07/22/male-stars-begin-supporting-wnba-players-protests/; https://theshadowleague.com/story/wnba-players-protest-anthem-before-game-1-of-finals .
Here is more Summer 2017 Herstory in response to White-Supremacist-Misogynist-Pussy-Grabbing-Self-Aggrandizing-Demagogic-Bully-Illegitimate-PeeeOTUS:
The WNBA and its players are showing their support for the victims of racially charged violence in Charlottesville. The Los Angeles Sparks and the Washington Mystics locked arms at center court before the start of their nationally televised game Wednesday night. The Minnesota Lynx and Seattle Storm did the same thing before their contest later in the evening.
“It is not a surprise that racism and bigotry exist in this country, but it is not something we stand for in any way. We feel great shock, sickness, and sadness with the degree of acceptance and normalization of this hatred, culminating in ways in the events in Charlottesville this past weekend,” players from the Washington Mystics and Los Angeles Sparks said in a statement.
“We feel pain and disbelief following the blatant hate displayed and the President’s response to it. There is no way to innocently protest alongside a hate-based group and to take pause on condemning the acts that took place is inexcusable.” https://blackamericaweb.com/2017/08/17/wnba-players-take-the-lead-in-athlete-support-for-charlottesville/
Tina Charles Courageously Protesting (team shirt inside out) After Being Fined and While Receiving WNBA Player of the Month Award: https://www.instagram.com/p/BIIkmuPgBCU/
tina31charles Today, I decided to not be silent in the wake of the @wnba fines against @nyliberty, @indianafever & @phoenixmercury due to our support in the #BlackLivesMatter movement . Seventy percent of the @wnba players are African-American women and as a league collectively impacted. My teammates and I will continue to use our platform and raise awareness for the #BlackLivesMatter movement until the @wnba gives its support as it does for Breast Cancer Awareness, Pride and other subject matters. July 21 2017
Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you!!! You fabulous Women Athlete-Leaders. Equally important is that white and black WNBA athletes stood together protesting racism and bigotry. All too often, white women in America, crippled by the reinforcing oppressions of White Supremacy and Misogyny, are unable to walk the path to justice and equity.
Kaitlyn Greenidge begins her poignant and powerful piece, ‘Sisterhood’ Felt Meaningless. So My Sisters and I Got in the Car, with this question:
What does the rallying cry of sisterhood and the concept of feminism mean when last year, the majority of white, female voters chose whiteness as a political identity over womanhood? What does feminism mean to each of us, as black women, when we had just lived through an election season of hearing candidates and commentators use that old, unexamined phrase, “women and black people,” skipping over our existence as both? How do we understand women’s history as triumphant when we are still smarting from the very public smackdown of a woman attempting to reach the highest seat of power? www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/feminist-history-road-trip.html
Greenidge wonders how she can find a way to live with the choice of white women voters.
Black womanhood was always centered in our home, so I didn’t look at white women with envy because they were white. And I was rarely instinctively suspicious of them. Like most black and brown people in this country, despite what white people may believe, I was not actively looking for the ways whites slighted me because I was black. Especially when you live and work in predominantly white spaces, you have to hold on to the social fiction that white people are responding to you as an individual. If you do not hold on to that lie, or at least use it judiciously, you risk going mad with grief and anger. But since the election, that has changed.
Greenidge and her two sisters hoped to find reason for optimism via a New England road trip designed to find women who could remind us that another, more tolerant, hopeful way of being is possible. It was possible 150 years ago, during a time when people supposedly didn’t know any better — and we hoped that perspective would help us in this present time, when people supposedly do. My sisters selected the following women to lead us on our tour: Prudence Crandall, Sarah Harris, Belinda Sutton and Ellen Garrison.
They experienced the herstories of three black women and one white woman who resisted white supremacy and fought for the human rights of black people in the mid-19th century. At their last stop, Greenidge reflects: ….my sisters and I sat on the green, while all around us, people paraded, dressed in the costumes of colonists who believed in freedom with conditions — not necessarily for women, not necessarily for black people and certainly not for black women. I think about the foresight and sheer leaps of intelligence it took for Crandall, for Harris, for Sutton and Garrison, to imagine a world that most around them could not imagine. It is a world I have to keep telling myself we are almost in sight of, if we keep thinking and planning and plotting as they did. www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/feminist-history-road-trip.html
We must never stop demanding that Misogyny be understood as a Structural Oppression as powerful and insidious as White Supremacy.
Indeed these two oppressions nourish and enable each other.
Engorging their capacities for debilitating hate/bigotry through mutual ingurgitation.
Starving and eviscerating the human potential for compassion, courage and the sheer leaps of intelligence needed to imagine a world that so many cannot imagine.
Black Women in America have always led this fight, despite their doubled vulnerability under the reinforcing structural oppressions of White Supremacy and Misogyny.
BlackWomensBlueprint emerged in reaction to the failure of 2008 Democratic candidates to address the particular problems “Black women are facing within their communities and in greater society (gender-violence, poverty, the over-criminalization of black women and girls among others). What was manifesting itself was the cultural tendency to erase Black women by conceptualizing white women as speaking on behalf of the rights of the sex and Black men as speaking on behalf of the race.” www.blackwomensblueprint.org
Black Women’s Blueprint envisions a world where women and girls of African descent are fully empowered and where gender, race and other disparities are erased.
We work to place Black women and girls’ lives as well as their particular struggles squarely within the context of the larger racial justice concerns of Black communities and are committed to building movements where gender matters in broader social justice organizing so that all members of our communities gain social, political and economic equity. www.blackwomensblueprint.org/mission
In June 2017, BlackWomensBlueprint discussed the state of human rights for black women in America with the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights.
Just this past weekend, the September 30th March for Black Women, sponsored by BlackWomensBlueprint, demanded justice for all genders and called out the all-too-familiar strategy that elevates racial injustice while excluding gender injustice.
On September 30, 2017, Black women in all their diversity will march at the center of the March for Racial Justice in our very own MARCH FOR BLACK WOMEN in Washington, D.C. to denounce the propagation of state-violence and the widespread incarceration of Black women and girls, rape and all sexualized violence, the murders and brutalization of transwomen and the disappearances of our girls from our streets, our schools and our homes. www.mamablack.org/about-the-march-for-black-women
On September 30, 2017, Black cis and trans identified women will remove the gags from our mouths, protest in collective action and lift the foot of imperialist white supremacist patriarchy off our necks. We call on every Black woman from every U.S. city, every walk of life, every demographic to rise together within our differences and face our common oppressors—the systems, and too often the very communities claiming civil and human rights for some, while invisibilizing, rejecting and relegating the rest of us to political backseats.
Recent actions by our federal government and leaders to dismantle our civil and human rights by plotting to eliminate access to health care, and in particular reproductive health; the increase of prisons while threatening to eliminate resources to communities of color that empower all of us to prevent violence against cis and trans identified women; and the undermining of economic justice demonstrates not only a disregard for the lives of all Black women in America, but perpetuates what James Baldwin prophetically proclaimed—that “the American Dream is at the expense of [Black people]”. The physical, financial and social enrichment of the nation-state at the expense of Black bodies and at the expense of Black lives is too old a strategy, and Black women will not allow for it. It is us, and in particular trans Black women and our girls, and our elders and those of us on a low income, who bear the brunt of a multitude of racialized and sexualized abuses which are not challenged with outrage, do not make the screens of our social media pages nor our televisions.
In this moment of ealization once again that “we are all we’ve got,” we call on all Black Lives Matter, Movement for Black Lives, and Black communities at large to march especially for the lives and rights of Black transwomen, for the gender non-conforming and for our Black girls in all the 50 states, plus the so-called territories and all the African diaspora. By their very being, it is through Black transwomen and Black girls that the revolutionary potential of our entire Black community resides. Theirs are the Black lives who underscore the poignancy of this moment, and a future where all Black women and Black communities are liberated from persistent, imposed and internalized axes of gender-oppression, domination and discrimination.
Please join us, our comrades and partners in the March for Black Women, in mass mobilization for our security and safety, our human rights and our freedoms, calling on the federal government and our own Black communities to take the following actions:
Issue an apology to all Black women for centuries of abuses, including sexual violence and reproductive violations against Black bodies, especially the brutalization of transwomen.
Beyond the 2016 Gender Bias Policing Guidance, ensure immediate and sustainable measures by the U.S. Government to eliminate incarcerations, incidences of rape and “sexual misconduct”, police murder and violence against all Black women, and especially transwomen.
End the threat against the human right to healthcare and increase access, including all reproductive health care, bar none.
Ensure economic justice for Black low income women at the communal and federal level, many of whom are at increased risk for violence due to lack of economic power.
Cease and desist all threats of deportation of immigrant women across the country, especially those whose deportation may cost them their lives or safety.
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