What I'm Reading...

Kortney Ryan Ziegler (nubian) on women of color as bloggers

Our words challenge the inherently racist idea that we are incapable of engaging in intellectual discourse. As we tread on the ideological terrain that tries to position us as inferior bloggers (and intellectuals), we strengthen our resistance by merely naming oppressions that other bloggers don’t. We provoke a conscious need to remedy the ills of racism in the hopes of transforming society. We resist the standards of what should and should not be said in the virtual world, standards which to some degree reflect the oppressive conditions of our larger society.

BfP on institutional violence against girls

15 year old girl arrested, punched in the face and pepper sprayed for breaking curfew
13 year old girl arrested for writing “Okay” on Desk
10 year old girl arrested for taking scissors to school

Girl arrested for spilling cake:

And so many more incidents. Too many more incidents.

Professor Black Woman on how recent incidents of violence against PoC are not "isolated incidents" but part of a pattern. She also notes how PoC and their allies who document and protest the pattern are likened to "antebellum white Southerns who took isolated incidents out of context in order to stir up a violent fervor targeted at a named enemy."

What is telling about this accusation is not only how easy it is to do a basic search and discover the number of incidents we are talking about but also the ways that once again standing up for the basic civil and human rights of people of color is being seen as inciting hatred and violence.

Ann on the invisibility of black women in the U.S. She's illuminating the truth in the phrase "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men," the subtitle of Hull, Scott, and Smith's But Some of Us Are Brave.

[B]lack women have never been accorded humanity, personhood, nor womanhood, in America.

We have always been everyone’s toilet to be used for the most grossest and abominable manifestations of female hatred.

This is a topic that I, as a blogger and a historian, have been so hesitant to write about in the way that Ann does--contrasting attention given to the struggles of black men for justice, equality, citizenship, personhood, to the abysmal lack of attention given to black women's struggles. The divide is at times very real to me, but from other angles, it can seem to be a false separation.

Donna Darko has questions for white bloggers:

If four white lesbians aged 19-24 were sentenced to 3 1/2-11 years in prison for defending themselves from a man who held them down, choked them, ripped hair from their scalps, spat on them, and threatened to sexually assault them, all because they were lesbians, wouldn't it be a top story on the progressive blogs for its ludicrousness?

And that's just her first question!