Radical CUNTS
We are officially affiliated with the IRC (Intercultural Resource Center), which is run under the umbrella of the OMA (Office of Multicultural Affairs).
Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Inclusion in Feminist Thought 3 (1988).
(via hairyprincess)
Family planning initiatives in the Deep South in the 1950s encouraged women of color (predominantly African American women) to use contraceptives and sterilizations to reduce the growth of our populations, while obstacles were simultaneously placed in the paths of white women seeking access to these same services. A Louisiana judge„ Leander Perez, was quoted as saying, “The best way to hate a nigger is to hate him before he is born.” This astonishingly frank outburst represented the sentiments of many racists during this period, although the more temperate ones disavowed gutter epithets.
For example, conservative politicians like Strom Thurmond supported family planning in the 1960s when it was used as a racialized form of population control, aimed at limiting Black voter strength in African American communities. When it was presented as a race-directed strategy to reduce their Black populations, North Carolina and South Carolina became the first states to include family planning in their state budgets in the 1950s. One center in Louisiana reported that in its first year of operation, 96% of its clients were Black. The proportion of white clients never rose about 15%. Generally speaking, family planning associated with women of color was most frequently supported; but support quickly evaporated when it was associated with white women.
Increased federal spending on contraception coincided with the urban unrest and rise in a militant Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. In 1969, President Nixon asked Congress to establish a five-year plan for providing family planning services to “all those who want them but cannot afford them.” However, the rational behind the proposed policy was to prevent population increases among Blacks—-this would make governance of the world in general, and inner cities in particular, difficult. Reflecting on concerns strikingly similar to those driving US population policies overseas, Nixon pointed to statistics that showed a “bulge” in the number of Black Americans between the ages of five and nine. This group of youngsters who would soon enter their teens—“an age group with problems that create social turbulence”—was 25% larger than ten years before. This scarcely disguised race- and class-based appeal for population control persuaded many Republicans to support family planning.
Loretta Ross, White Supremacy and Reproductive Justice, in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology
A lot of progressives like to go around talking about the radicalization of the right around abortion issues. While it’s true that anti-choice extremism has become more mainstreamed, the repeated efforts to prove this fact specifically by pointing to how Republicans like Nixon and Bush Sr. promoted birth control use without noting WHY and TO WHAT EXTENT they were pro-contraception is extraordinarily racist and a violent erasure of the sterilization and population control policies used against women of color, as well as poor women and women with disabilities. It’s also yet another sign of what is so very fucked about so much of the pro-choice movement. (via thecurvature)
(via hairyprincess)
(via twitterpatedlyyours)
I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on.
So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards … it’s just being poor– but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.
Comment/response left on the Racialious post “Sustainable Food & Priviledge: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class)”
»BOOM! (via tobia)
Remember folks, as always! When women of color (who comprise the majority of farmers in this world) grow food, they’re just going about their poor-poor business as usual. When white privileged people do it? They’re SAVING THE PLANET, SOWING REVOLUTION AND SMASHING PARADIGMS OMFG.
(via brandx)
(via ideaswithoutcauses)
Twenty students at the University of Virginia are starving, but not only because they haven’t eaten in 10 days.
They’re starved for justice from an administration they say has failed to provide a living wage for its employees, and so they began a hunger strike on February 18. Their demands: Pay UVA workers more–at least $13 per hour–and ensure safe working conditions. According to UVA’s Living Wage Campaign, the lowest paid service workers at the institution are primarily women of color, making as little as $7.25 an hour. At the same time, the campaign says, six out of the top ten highest paid state workers in Virginia hold administrative positions at the school.
After 14 years of mobilizing through sit-ins, meetings, rallies and teach-ins, the group has now resorted to their most extreme act of protest in an effort to end what they describe as “a perpetuation of economic violence against the UVA workforce.”
In an exclusive interview with the Ms. Blog, striker Hallie Clark, a queer feminist of color, describes her place in the movement and why all feminists should be concerned about the living wage.
- I am poor, I exist, and I’m right here. Hi! Many people who meet and get to know me without knowing my background are rather surprised to find this out. It matters to me on a very personal level when people do things like make nasty comments or assumptions about poor people, or assume that…
A great breakdown of poor as a social and personal identity, and how we can better address social injustice not by pitying the less privileged, but by letting them speak and respecting their ideas.
I’m very tired of hearing that women only make 77 cents on the male’s dollar. It’s not a correct statistic. It should read: White women only make 77 cents on the white man’s dollar.
That’s the real statistic.
Not all women are white. WOMEN don’t make 77 cents on the dollar, WHITE WOMEN do.
It’s important to remember.
Because every time we repeat that 77 number with no mention of race, we are erasing all women who are not white.
Black women make 69 cents on the white man’s dollar.
Hispanic women make 59 cents on the white man’s dollar.Those women matter. Those women are women.
Women who should be included in feminism, who should be included in our movement.
So don’t erase them.
(via iamayoungfeminist)
Yolo Akili brings us a reflective essay about unemployment and barber shop culture in black communities.
