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VERY STRONG TRIGGER WARNING

The story of Romona Moore’s murder is horrific, not only because of the terrifying brutality involved, but because of the terrifying apathy that allowed it to occur. Moore is dead because she and those who tried to help her were ignored. It’s a really shitty consolation, but the very least we can do, to pay attention now. If you think your mental health can handle it, I urge you to please read the full story.

You know, I’m one of those feminists who thinks that racism is indeed a feminist issue, just like poverty, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and much more are feminist issues, simply because these are factors that oppress women on a daily basis and prevent them from living lives freely, safely and to their full potential. I’m sad that so many seem to disagree — but even if you do disagree on the basis outlined above, I don’t know how anyone could read Romona Moore’s story and not see how racism is a feminist issue, when racism is allowing and assisting the unspeakably violent rape, torture and murder of black women. As for the lawsuit, I hope like hell that her mother wins it.

The failure of authorities to care about the unexplained disappearance of a black woman is not an isolated incident. Not by a long shot. And neither is average people failing to do the right thing when given the chance.

All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

There are many reasons that people do nothing, and sometimes they are justified. It may be believed (often very rightly) that doing the “right thing” will result in more violence or more severe consequences than turning a blind eye. Sometimes one’s own life is on the line. But I don’t see that this was the case here, either for the police officers that refused to even open an investigation, or for the man — probably numerous men — who saw Moore after she had been tortured raped and was probably about half-dead, and did nothing. Not even an anonymous phone call . . . that is, not before it was too late.

I read stories like these, and I find myself wondering where the hell the good people who do something are. And sometimes I wonder how “good” we can really call the people to do nothing. SAFER has an excellent post about bystander training and learning to be the person who does something. Despite our hunches and hopes for ourselves, I don’t think that any of us truly know if we are that person until put in the position. But at the very least, I want to believe that we can learn from the fatal mistakes of others.

Story via What About Our Daughters?

cross-posted from Feministe

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I’ve been waiting to weigh in on the latest of the Amanda Marcotte controversies: the images in the book. I’m not going to rehash it all here; if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click the link because Holly explains it all.

I haven’t read the book or even seen it in person. So, I was unaware of the images. As for my opinion, I agree with everything that Holly and everyone else who was outraged had to say. I noted my shock and disgust in the comments. And I didn’t anticipate writing anything about it unless there were developments.

There have been. Both Amanda and Seal Press have issued apologies.

And though I’m happy that they realize they’ve done something wrong, the apologies themselves do bring up a hell of a lot of questions.

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It’s an ironic one, too.

I will admit that I have not been following the Seal Press debacle extremely closely. I paid attention for the first week, and not a whole lot of new stuff seemed to happen after that. And though they’re definitely related, the BFP/Amanda “thing” came up and it kind of dropped off of my radar.

I thought that Seal Press was wrong from the beginning. The super-duper condensed version of what happened? Black Amazon wrote a comment on her blog that said “Fuck Seal Press.” Then a representative from Seal Press showed up and proceeded to begin a blog war by acting like a stupid, unprofessional, privileged asshole (sorry, calling them like I see them). Again, this was a pretty clear cut situation.

There was a question up in the air: why did BA say “Fuck Seal Press”? It was a remark addressed in a sort of private way to a friend, and for good reason, BA refused to say.

Last week, it turns out that the story emerged, and I missed it. Adele Nieves, a published woman of color writer and editor, came forward:

An informal meeting with an editor from Seal Press at the WAM conference regarding the proposal for my anthology left me feeling frustrated and deflated. I was not seeking or particularly interested in having them publish the anthology, but merely hoping for advice on my book proposal. The editor, while impressed with the format of the proposal, advised me that anthologies don’t sell, and I should get someone like Gloria Steinem or Katha Pollitt to contribute, even though, as she said, I wouldn’t be able to get access to them. I was struck by the fact that she did not suggest I contact Daisy Hernandez, bell hooks, Andrea Smith, or Alice Walker. I might not have access to them either, of course, but given the intent of the anthology is to highlight the voices of people of diverse backgrounds, especially those we’ve not heard from in other works, I found her comments discouraging.

Afterwards, I had a private conversation about the meeting with a small group of friends, including Black Amazon, in hopes they could help me work through this. They did.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about my feelings on the Amanda Marcotte controversy. In it, I briefly mentioned an article I had written for a feminist anthology that was shopping around for publishers. Today, about half an hour before happening to stumble across Adele’s explanation in a roundabout way via Ilyka, I got a message from the woman behind that anthology (saying that the project was now on hiatus for reasons that don’t seem to be very important here — for me this is sad, but not devastating).

Why is this relevant?

Because the woman behind the anthology is Adele. We’re talking about the same damn book.

And do you remember the title of the article I wrote? The Importance of Allies: A Call to White, Straight, Middle-Class Feminists.

You know, this thread got me close but not quite there. Now I’m going to go cry about how much my fellow white feminists can suck.

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Last week, I noted that BFP’s blog had been shut down. And I said that with regard to the situation that caused her to close it, I did not know what to say. Later on in the day, Holly put up a post on the topic. And after reading it, and reading the thread, I did know what to say.

And I didn’t say it.

A few months ago, I wrote an article for an anthology that is currently shopping around for publishers. It’s called The Importance of Allies: A Call to White, Straight, Middle-Class Feminists. It’s about just what it sounds like: the fact that the mainstream feminist movement has been overwhelmingly white, straight, middle-class, and though I do think that we’ve made progress, and though I do think that more of an effort is being made, we haven’t come nearly as far as we think we have. I think that a lot of the article is outdated now, and that’s a shame — not for me and the damn article, but because I gave us more credit than we deserved.

My eyes have been opened.

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Yesterday was the day to blog about the Congo rape epidemic. As Sunday is my day off from blogging, I missed it — but as I always say when I come in late to these things (a specialty of mine), it’s better late than never, and it’s not too late for you to participate either.

I was unfortunately not able to watch the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, since I don’t have HBO, and I hope that it will be soon available through another outlets for those of us who don’t have access. But I’m happy that it has been made and that it has inspired bloggers to engage on this difficult topic.

It’s human nature to want to ask “who is responsible?” And the obvious answer is “the rapists.” This is absolutely true; of course they are responsible. But this type of epidemic does not materialize from nothingness. When rape is allowed to exist this rampantly and for so long, when weapons and funding do not appear out of thin air, when the world’s richest and most powerful nations turn away or ask simply and disinterestedly “what can we do?”, we must hold others accountable. And as Anxious Black Woman notes, among them are the Corporate Rapists, those who benefit financially from the conflict through their pillaging of the land’s natural resources. She prints a partial list of those corporations that absolutely must be disseminated as far and wide as we can manage:

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Former employees have filed a lawsuit against a club where they used to work as dancers for hire, claiming that they were never paid wages for their work. The women are mostly immigrants, many of them Spanish-speaking only, and they were paid a mere $2 per dance direct from the customers while the club raked in profits from the door fee and drinks. They were forced to pay fees to the club in order to work there and were all around treated like shit. (All emphasis mine.)

In interviews in Spanish, several former dancers said the owners often made them pay a $60 or $70 fine when they missed a day of work. Several complained of having to pay an $11 fee each day just to enter the club and an additional $10 if they arrived a half-hour late.

They said that sometimes, after dancing from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., they had to attend meetings that lasted until 6 a.m. in which the owners held forth, calling some dancers “puta” (whore) as well as ugly and fat. The dancers’ most serious complaint was that the club never paid them a cent for their 45-hour workweeks.

“I never received anything in wages,” said Patricia Gonzalez, a long-haired, leggy immigrant from the Dominican Republic who quit dancing at the Flamingo last June. “In my three years there I must have paid thousands of dollars in fines. And I paid the daily fee of $11 to enter. What kind of job do you have to pay just to go to work?”

The lawsuit raises an intriguing question of law: whether the for-hire dancers were employees, who should have been paid wages for every hour they worked, or independent contractors who, as the Flamingo’s owners assert, were merely renting space on the dance floor.

The owners say they had no obligation to pay wages, asserting that the dancers were entrepreneurs who made a living by keeping the $2 they earned for each dance.

“They’re paying to rent the space so they can make a living,” said Peter Rubin, a lawyer for the club. “They can keep all the money they make dancing. They don’t have to split anything with the house.” The club makes its money by charging the men $5 to enter and $7 a drink.

[. . .]

If the dancers win their lawsuit, it could have ripple effects at the city’s many for-hire dance clubs, latter-day versions of Depression-era joints where men paid 10 cents for a dance. Many of today’s dancers, like their customers, are illegal immigrants who earn their money off the books. Amy Carroll, a lawyer for Make the Road, said it was ridiculous for the Flamingo to suggest that the dancers were independent contractors.

“It seems that Flamingo is doing the worst of both worlds,” she said. “They’re not paying the workers anything, and they’re controlling every aspect of the dancers’ work life. They tell them what days to work, what time to show up, what outfits to wear, what makeup to use. They even make the dancers sign in and out to go to the restroom. That level of control makes them employees, not independent contractors.”

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NY Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof muses on the differences between misogyny and sexism. And I’d be really grateful if someone could honestly tell me that this is some kind of bizarre parody and he can’t be fucking serious. Instead, we do get to play the ironic game of determining which category Kristof falls into! Emphasis mine, and try to control your blood pressure:

Then in the reporting for this column, I spoke to evolutionary psychologists who emphasized the distinct origins of racism and misogyny/sexism. Racism seems based in a hard-wired tendency of ancient humans to divide into groups to improve odds of survival, and it was an evolutionary advantage to be able to identify strongly with your own tribe and to fear or kill members of other tribes. That may be why even very small children — even infants — draw racial distinctions or other in-group/out-group distinctions.

In contrast, the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably less on hatred and more on desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes. Acquiring and enforcing a harem, so as to improve the odds of one’s own genes being passed on, might involve ruthlessness, enslavement and brutal beatings, but there was no evolutionary incentive for gender hatred as there was for hatred of different tribes. And of course much of the anti-women behavior around the world, from genital cutting to bride burnings to sex trafficking, is typically overseen by women themselves, and it’s easier to see their behavior as opportunism or deeply-embedded sexism than as hatred of fellow women. So that’s why I wonder if sexism, in the sense of discriminatory attitudes toward males and females, isn’t a better way of thinking about the issue than misogyny, in the sense of hatred toward women.

Other anthropologists I spoke to also noted that the most discriminatory restrictions against women tend to come not from those who profess to hate women, but from those who profess to honor and protect them. Think of Afghan society, for example. After interviewing many men who beat and lock up women and threaten to kill them if they take a false step, I’d say that their attitudes for females are a mix of bizarre honor and contempt, but not usually hatred.

My head hurts.

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You want to know what was definitely not a reason for my posting about the Sharpton/NAACP debacle? So that conservative assholes could use it as fodder to apologize for the white rapists, call the victims of that crime drunk sluts with “humper’s remorse,” use Sharpton as some kind of bizarre comparison to Obama’s Reverend Wright, call both men “racist” (instead of the accurate description for Sharpton, “sexist”), and proclaim that we should “burn down” Dunbar Village. I didn’t post it so that assholes could jump merrily up and down, clapping their hands and unable to believe their luck, because even the feminists agree with their racist and misogynist remarks.

I mean, I always assumed that the whole thing might be inevitable. But it was the very opposite of the reason for my post. And it still is.

Yours is the kind of support that we do not want and do not need. I absolutely do not agree with you, and we’re sure as hell not on the same side. And I wanted to make that very, very clear.

Good? Good.

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A few stories I’ve recently blogged about have some updates:

Yesterday, I wrote about a woman who was forced to undergo a painful process of removing her nipple piercings before she could board a plan, apparently for the amusement of the male security officers. The TSA has responded to the situation:

The TSA said Friday in a statement on its Web site that the officers properly followed procedures, but that the procedures must change. In the future passengers can either allow a visual inspection of their piercings, or remove them, the agency said.

The statement stopped short of apologizing to Hamlin.

”TSA acknowledges that our procedures caused difficulty for the passenger involved and regrets the situation in which she found herself,” the agency said in a statement. ”We appreciate her raising awareness on this issue and we are changing the procedures to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Hamlin’s attorney said she accepted the TSA statement as an apology, and commended the agency for taking quick action. The policy change is ”an achievement for the protection of passengers’ civil rights while meeting the security goals of the TSA,” Gloria Allred said.

Uh huh. Well call me difficult to please (you wouldn’t be the first), but I do find it a little odd how the TSA website already said prior to this statement that “If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search.” A pat-down search was never offered to Hamlin, and was in fact refused to her when she made the offer herself to show her nipple piercings to the female guard in private — the same guard who had to look at her piercings anyway as Hamlin went through the excruciating process of removing them. So I think that TSA will have to try again. Changing a policy is totally different from beginning to enforce one that is already in place. It was previously indicated that Hamlin was considering suing if she did not receive an apology. I think that it will be a shame if a lawsuit doesn’t go through, and after all of the trouble, TSA gets off the hook with a slight wag of the finger.

I’ve also recently blogged about how Al Sharpton and the NAACP are supporting leniency for the Dunbar Village rapists. Now, Sharpton’s organization (NAN) and the NAACP are furiously denying, changing their stories and pointing fingers at each other. Sharpton has tried to rewrite history and is blaming the “misinformation” on the women of color bloggers who have raised awareness and interest about this issue, without noting that the information came from numerous objective and mainstream news sources. In other words, he’s not only ignoring the fact that women of color deserve rights equal to those of men of color, but is now also blaming his own disgusting mess on women of color rather than taking responsibility for his actions. Nice. Also, while reviewing the denials and backpedaling, check out this flier. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of who produced it, but according the the Dunbar Village blog, it was passed around at the NAN and NAACP join press conference on March 11. And even if they didn’t produce the fliers themselves, the fact remains that putting together an event with this type of bullshit propaganda being openly distributed isn’t exactly the best way to prove that you’re not supporting the rapists (and neither is standing on a stage with the rapists’ families).

Keep those letters coming, folks.

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This is important.

Do you remember the Dunbar Village rape case? I’m not sure how you could forget; this is the case where a woman was gang raped by 10 men in her own home for over three hours, forced to have sex with her own 12-year-old son and survived an attempt to light both of them on fire. In an update that is a couple of weeks old but I’m just hearing from now via Document the Silence, Al Sharpton and the NAACP are taking to the streets to defend the four arrested rapists. This is despite conclusive DNA evidence and apparent photographic evidence that the rapists took on their cell phones during the attack.

Please, please, please read the call to action from Rev. Dr. Renita J. Weems, which is pasted in full after the jump. Please take time to undertake the requested actions and to pass this story along.

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UPDATE: The Washington Post happens to have an interesting article today on this very subject. It’s actually more intelligent than you might expect, though be forewarned that some of the quotes are really obnoxious and precisely what I rail against here.

—

I can’t say that Geraldine Ferraro should have quit while she was ahead, because I’m rather unconvinced that at any point she was ahead. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt for her to stop making things worse on herself (and despite the fact that she is no longer a part of the campaign, Hillary Clinton, too). In addition to complaining that the simple acknowledgment of her remarks about Obama being racist is in fact racist against white people, she is now apparently very offended that her name came up in Obama’s speech about race.

The former New York congresswoman and Democratic vice presidential nominee got the race debate going a few weeks ago with her comments in a California newspaper that Obama had gotten to where he was — on the verge of knocking off Ferraro’s favored candidate, Hillary Clinton — because he is a black man.

Today, she surfaced again in the same paper, the Daily Breeze in Torrance, to say that she objected vehemently to Obama’s linkage in his speech between her comments and the inflammatory excerpts of sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor.

“To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable,” Ferraro told the paper. “He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred.”

Overall, Ferraro said, she thought the speech was “excellent,” but she lamented that Obama did not go further in condemning Wright. She surmised that Obama was limited in that regard because he did not want to offend black voters, which she called the base of Obama’s support.

“I think they got as far as they could go politically,” she said. “They’re looking at their base. Their base is African Americans. They’re looking at that and they’re trying to walk a very thin line. They don’t want to offend the African Americans, and this is the way he did it.”

Yeah, here’s the thing: he was defending you, asshole.

Do I think it’s a mistake that Ferraro’s name came up? Of course not, it was a deliberate move to point out that if anyone in this campaign can be accused of racism, it’s not the Obama campaign. However, the fact remains that he defended her and in fact criticized the “dismissal” of her comments by referring to them as “racist.”

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Clearly, it should go without saying that