Keeping information from patients is not in keeping with medical ethics. It makes the power dynamic between doctor and patient even more unequal, and breeds mistrust. Patients, after all, are routinely reminded that they should tell their doctors everything, even if something doesn’t seem relevant or obviously applicable, because you never know when something might pertain to diagnostic and treatment decisions. Those who hide things from their doctors because of fear, shame, or other complex emotions are chastised for it, and if there are problems with their treatment, it’s blamed on the patient. If only you’d told the doctors about the pain in your stomach before, they could have caught the cancer.

Patients have a right to expect the same thing from their doctors, to be given information about themselves. Patients should be able to read their own medical records, review test results, and have information explained to them in a manner that is accessible. They should be able to ask questions about treatment options and retain copies of information for future use. Retaining this information may be important in the future; what happens if a patient moves away or travels and gets sick and the original records can’t be located? If the patient has a copy of them or has been educated about their contents, this information could become critically important to a new treating physician.

That’s what makes gag orders on physicians especially chilling. It’s not just the fact that they’re repulsive on the face of it, they’re also incredibly dangerous. And in Pennsylvania, that’s exactly what doctors are dealing with right now in the form of a new law that allows them access to proprietary formulas for chemicals used in fracking, but only if they agree not to disclose the contents to their patients.  Doctors have fought long and hard for this information on the grounds that it’s critically important for patient treatment; it’s rather difficult to provide appropriate care to someone exposed to unknown toxins. If information about toxins is available, it should be provided to the treating physician so the patient can get the best possible treatment in a timely fashion.

But Pennsylvania doctors aren’t allowed to tell their patients what they were exposed to. People injured by fracking are not allowed to know what is inside their own bodies, what they may have ingested that made them sick, and may continue to make them sick in the future. If they develop cancer in 30 years as a result of fracking, they can’t tell their physicians which chemicals they were exposed to in 2012, because they won’t know. It’s a lot harder to tell if a patient is sick from fracking if a doctor can’t even access basic information about chemical exposure.

The last few years have marked a rising level of government intervention in medical practice, especially when it comes to autonomy and allowing patients to make decisions about their own bodies. The right wants to compel women to carry pregnancies to term even when those pregnancies are unwanted or endangering. Legislators apparently think patients don’t have the right to know what they were poisoned with, and they’re willing to put doctors in a very sensitive position with gag orders. Physicians have their hands tied here and the lack of clarity in the law makes it even harder to determine what’s legal for them, and what might get them sued by Halliburton or another huge firm that they can’t possibly hope to beat.

Physicians need to be able to think about their patients first, and to focus on the best care for them, working with patients on an individual basis to assess needs and situations and determine how to move forward. Anything that interferes with that is dangerous, whether it’s an order to read explicit misinformation about fetal development to someone seeking an abortion, or a law allowing you to access information about what might be killing your patient at the price of never telling anyone about it. The fact that multiple states have such fracking gag laws is troubling, and of course defenders of the laws say that the opposition to the law is clearly coming from people who don’t like fracking.

Well, yes. That’s part of it. But it’s also coming from people who are concerned about public health and safety, and who are well aware that transparency and openness are critical when it comes to protecting the health of the population overall. Tracking chemical exposure is one way to determine whether chemicals are dangerous when they’re in use in the long term, because the dangers of chemical compounds aren’t always readily apparent in development. Researchers interested in assessing the safety of fracking need access to this information just as much as individual patients and doctors do, and hiding it from them will make it that much harder to connect the dots when it comes to clusters of illnesses.

Which is, of course, the industry’s goal with pushing for such legislation. It knows that fracking is dangerous, it knows that there’s a growing public awareness about the issue, and it knows that the last thing it wants is for people to be able to add it up. Fracking is a cancer, and the industry wants doctors to be able to see the cancer, but not talk about it. To somehow provide patients with information about treatment options without telling them what, exactly, they have. To send patients away with the knowledge that the cancer might recur or pop up somewhere else, and the patient will have no idea, because the patient didn’t know it was cancer in the first place.

Bullying has been in the news a lot in the last few years, particularly anti-LGBQT bullying, which means people are more aware of it. Schools are also much more aware of it, and have been cracking down hard with policies intended to identify and stop bullying early. Unfortunately, such policies aren’t doing enough, as clearly illustrated by the fact that fatal bullying is still a problem. It’s a cause the President and First Lady have both discussed, with the goal of making our schools a safer space for their marginalised attendees.

Which makes the whole Romney situation a big fucking deal, as our Veep would put it, since it’s providing some fascinating insight into how Romney, and his handlers, view bullying. We all have episodes from our past that we’re not proud of, though some of us can probably cite worse offenses than others. The question isn’t whether someone needs to be saintly to run for public office, but how people choose to deal with their past transgressions against the people around them.

The Romney campaign first went with the ‘bullying? What bullying?’ line, before switching to ‘sorry if I offended anyone.’ Specifically, a spokesperson’s initial response to the piece was:

The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base, and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.

Incidents so vivid that individual participants independently recalled them, and quite vividly. Evidently Mittens has a faulty memory. At a much younger and tenderer age than Mitt, I wince thinking of some of the things I did to my classmates, and I’m fairly certain I’m going to continue to do so until the day I die. And that’s after having reached out to apologise, which, notably, several of the people involved in 1965 definitely did, because they felt so troubled and ashamed by these happyfuntime ‘pranks’ later in life.

‘I would think this would be seared in his memory,’ one classmate who participated, Philip Maxwell, told the New York Times. ‘Certainly for the other people that were involved, nobody has forgotten.’

Once the story got too big to ignore, Romney came out with a mealymouthed statement about perhaps his ‘pranks’ had ‘gone too far’ and for that he apologised; but not to the victims personally. It was a more general statement in a radio interview, clearly made to appease critics who were angered and concerned by the story. He’s expecting it to fade into the background, despite the fact that it’s actually more evidence of a cruel streak that should deeply concern voters.

Because, his abhorrent politics aside, having a bully in the White House would not be a good thing. The United States has a very fragile image in the international community, and it hasn’t helped itself with autocratic, aggressive, and invasive foreign policy decisions. Under the Obama administration, Secretary Clinton has worked hard to repair a lot of that image, and to rehabilitate the global view of the United States. Putting someone with Romney’s capacity for cruelty and aggression in the Oval Office could result in multiple steps back for the United States, because make no mistake, these incidents are not firmly in the past and evidence of a youthful childhood: they are evidence of how Romney will behave now.

There isn’t much about Romney to suggest that he’s changed, if he still thinks of these incidents as ‘hijinks.’

The incident many people are focusing on is one in which he forcibly cut the hair of a classmate because his gender expression evidently offended Romney’s delicate sensibilities. The description of this scene in the media is not that of a fun prank; the young man was screaming for help as a group of boys surrounded him and held him down. Their victim, John Lauber, lived with the memory of the incident for the rest of his life.

Romney also made fun of closeted gay students and teachers with disabilities, and seemed to have a particular zest for ‘pranks’ that put people in physical danger. Yes, some young men, especially those raised in an atmosphere of privilege, can be cruel, and nasty, particularly when surrounded by privileged friends in an environment that rewards aggressive displays of masculinity and discourages compassion and politeness; no matter what the honour code says. But Romney’s cruelty went deeper and darker than normal, and it’s telling that he doesn’t seem to experience any remorse about it.

While such stunts might sound like fun, Smith argues they’re anything but if you happen to be the target of them. That’s because pranks and other forms of disparaging humor — racist jokes, sexist jokes, derogatory jokes — are all about hammering home that you’re not part of the group. And since such attacks are couched within the confines of comedy, they can be harsher and more insulting than would otherwise be allowed in polite society. (source)

This should be a key part of the discussion in reactions to Romney’s ‘pranks,’ because they were designed to underscore divides, creating an us-versus-them mentality that the GOP also participates in, extremely actively. Romney’s politics show the same kind of divisive thinking, with one thing for the ingroup and something else entirely for the outgroup. His record on civil rights for a variety of minorities is poor, and it’s no wonder, looking at his history and the kind of environment he grew up in. His ‘pranks’ wrote it all on the wall long before he first took political office.

In the course of dehumanising people for fun and amusement, Romney reinforced his own sense of superiority. This was not simply roughhousing or casual fun, where everyone involved is enjoying it and dangerous power dynamics aren’t at play. This is bullying, and it is abusive, and it’s not the kind of behaviour one likes to see in someone who wants to be President of the United States. Not, anyway, without substantial evidence of regret and reform, a genuine desire to change backed up with hard evidence that the former bully is working on it. Many of his classmates grew up to become changed men, as evidenced in part by their regret over what happened in their youths.

Where is that evidence in Romney’s case?

The fact that so many responses to Romney’s abuse categorise it as pranking or fun rather than bullying says a lot about why this country has such a big bullying problem. The refusal to identify what he did as wrong, and to connect the dots on what it means politically, speaks to dangerous social attitudes. A reformed bully in public office might bring needed compassion and care to our foreign policy. One who refuses to deal with his past and dismisses it as harmless fun would be a disaster. For all the youth currently being bullied right now, the response to Romney’s past and present speaks louder than words.

I love porn! I do! I have even written about porn recently! Yet, I really resent that I need to offer this disclaimer any time I would like to address something about the genre. Because it seems that there is a dominant trend within feminism where you are either for porn or against it. And the thing is, for me, one can be “for” porn and still have serious reservations. However, this lack of nuance in most of the discussions leaves so many important and necessary arguments out because, being in favor of porn, for the most part, means you do not align with the critics of porn, you just play along, you tout the usual favorable talking points, namely

• porn can be empowering for some people
• there is a way to produce consensual non exploitative porn
• there is a market for feminist porn
• as long as the participants partook out of their own volition, we should not stick our noses into their choices, after all, people should live their lives in any way they see fit.

And I agree with all of the above. These are the reasons why I believe that porn and erotica, and the producers of said media, should be respected for their work and not treated like people who are incapable of making informed decisions about their own bodies and well being.

Then there is the camp that staunchly opposes porn and sex work on the basis that it is always exploitative and degrading. Organizations like Object in the UK, who carry on the ideological legacy of Dworkin, aggressively campaigning against it, conveniently leaving out the arguments of sex workers, porn producers, people in the industry and consumers alike. Theirs is a specific brand of “neo puritan feminism” that seeks to empower women by silencing those who are deemed “oppressed” and not capable of making decisions about their own bodies and lifestyles. This condescending, binary dichotomy of “what is good for women” vs. “what is degrading” leaves no room for counter points or personal autonomy. Either you are for “exploiting women” or you are against it.

Still, both camps share an inherently similar approach towards porn: it is hardly ever intersectional. It hardly ever addresses the many ways in which racism, classism, ableism, etc conflate to turn porn into a cultural minefield.

If you point out that there are ingrained elements of racism within certain sub genres of pornography, to wit, some stuff that is presented as “fetish”, the usual defense, even from many in the sex positive feminist camp, is that “people like what they like” and, as long as it is consensual, we should not question it. This kind of determinism due to preference remains unexamined, unchallenged, as if our personal taste would develop in a vacuum, devoid of any other sociocultural influence. As if we could separate ourselves from the environment where we exist. I suspect this uncritical “we like what we like” argument stems from a need to anticipate the attacks based on moralistic arguments. I understand that anything that deviates from the heteronormative and patriarchal ideas of “acceptable” is criticized on tenuous arguments involving “values” and supposed “deviance”. However, “we might like what we like” and still, that supposedly personal preference might not be as simple or as harmless as we might want to believe. Kyriarchy, after all, infiltrates even the most seemingly disconnected areas of our lives.

So, I have to ask the obvious question here: how “consensual” is some of this fetish porn when it involves extreme and brutal forms of racist degradation? Sure, we say, the women were paid for this, they agreed to be featured, they signed consent forms, they knew they were going to take part in porn. And yet, nothing prepares us for the horror involved in some of these fetish productions that Jamel Shabazz so well illustrates in this piece at Hycide, GHETTO GAGGERS: A Nation Can Rise No Higher Than It’s Women. From the piece:

I clicked on a video. As it begins, the women are asked, “Why are you here?” Many say they want cash because their boyfriends were “broke ass n*****s” or because they needed money to support their children. “Ghetto Gaggers” allegedly pays $2,000. Some say they want to be porn stars. Some are college students or unemployed, and some are even pregnant. They have names like Mecca, Ashanti, Precious, Ebony, and Destiny. Maybe they are expecting to star in an erotic video, or maybe they think this is gag porn, in which women who sign a release form are humiliated and hurt to satisfy fetishistic viewers. But it’s hard to believe they expect the level of degradation that comes next, or the resulting emotional trauma.

Some porn stars who reportedly knew what they were in for have quit the industry after starring in “Ghetto Gaggers”. “After we get through with them they’re going to have to see a psychiatrist for the rest of their lives,” one attacker boasts on camera. In a typical video, three or four men take turns physically and mentally destroying their victims. During 90 minutes of barbarism, the perpetrators spit in their faces, slap them, stomp them and force some to crawl on all fours with chains around their necks. In other scenes, the women have watermelons smashed on their heads and then are forced to eat the melon, along with the men’s semen. Some women have their faces shoved into a toilet, much to the pleasure of the assailants. During the grotesque finale, the men shove their penises deep inside the women’s throats until they vomit into a large dog bowl, which is emptied on them. As the humiliated women cry, a host promises fans there will be new girls every week!

I can hear the arguments already “but this is the BAD kind of porn!”, this is the “non feminist!” kind. True, however, missing the point entirely, since, as feminists, even for those who identify as sex positive, we should concern ourselves with all issues involving matters of gender and gender representation. Even more so, when they involve the systematic degradation of an entire group of women based on their ethnicity. Here’s where the argument in favor of unexamined fetish becomes flimsy and harmful: people like what they like and as long as it is consensual, what is the problem? Except that something like precisely this case illustrated above, can be simultaneously consensual (the women initially agreed to participate) and extremely harmful (obviously, if they needed therapy to overcome the experience, nobody would claim that this was just an innocuous form of indulging in fetish). Because consent, especially for women who are already viewed as targets, whose bodies are already viewed as “ready for abuse” is more complicated than signing a release form and agreeing to be filmed while a bunch of racist white guys degrade you.

From the horrific website featured in Jamel Shabazz’ piece (BIG NSFW WARNING): “Beauty Dior is another A-List ebony pornstar who we destroyed”.

Or take this other description from a video poignantly titled: Degrading a Latina slut (BIG NSFW WARNING):

Cali Couture is pretty new to the industry. She did a few things, but nothing note worthy. She walked in today and sat down and said, “God I’m so nervous.” I asked her why. She said, “This is the first time ever I am doing something like this.” I said, “Dear diary, PAY DAY!” We started out just passing her head back and forth from cock to cock. After about 5 minutes of that she began to whimper like a little puppy. Then we stuffed our cocks in her tight pussy and went to town, all the while she was bound in leather restraints, and getting smacked across her face.

“People like what they like”

Just like politicians like to call the children of women like the Latina above, “anchor babies” and send them to detention camps where the degradation will be of another nature, this time, supported by the State.

Now, imagine the same line of argument invoked in any other area of racist critique. When the editor of a fashion mag calls Rihanna a “ni**abitch”, would we, as feminists, accept this idea that “people like what they like”? When the fashion industry does something racist, would we agree that people just “like” that kind of fashion and leave the subject alone because well, “as long as the models took part in the production consensually, then who are we to critique?”.

Even in my last piece, where I critiqued the penis centric nature of porn and erotica for straight women, some commenters felt the need to inform me that “that’s what they like and I had no business criticizing it”. However, again, I repeat myself: how can this personal inclination be isolated from everything else? How can our desire be isolated from the rest of our influences? And I am sort of exhausted of this individualistic defense that because “someone likes it”, these notions cannot be challenged or analyzed as part of a bigger framework. Because that is at the very root of an intersectional approach to gender politics, we cannot separate the personal circumstances involving race, class, gender, dis/ability, etc, from the overall frameworks of consent, fetish, porn production and the consumption of said products. All of them are interconnected and, “BUT I LIKE IT!” is a poor defense focused on individuals when the focus should perhaps be better directed on how the sum of each individual adds up to create a system of representation.

“We might like what we like” and yet, that very same media might as well be based on the systematic portrayal of certain individuals as “inferior”, unworthy of love, of care, their ethnicity solely “a fetish”. The idea of consent, only in paper, unexamined because we are supposed to operate under the assumption that agreeing to a sex act for the camera only stems from personal choice. Although for WoC depicted in porn, there is obviously more than meets the eye.

Last week on Think Progress, our pal Alyssa Rosenberg articulated some of the problems with Glee, arguing that:

[Glee is] a show that claims credit for seeing clearly and portraying teenagers’ lives honestly, but that can’t acknowledge its own cruelty and manipulation of other people. It’s one thing for bringing the underexamined lives of gay teenagers, of abused women, of gay people of color into the mainstream of popular culture. But spotlighting them only to use their pain to accrue credit to yourself isn’t admirable. And it’s not entertaining.

I got into a great discussion with her, Emily, and Arturo R. García from Racialicious about the show and popular reactions to it; Arturo and I both discussed the fact that it’s been heavily criticised since the start for the depiction of people with disabilities and people of colour, but this hasn’t gotten much traction. Glee has also done fairly terribly with domestic violence and sexual assault since close to the beginning, and while it may have been lauded for its depiction of queer youth, as Alyssa points out, even those depictions are sinking into a mire.

Surprise! A popular television show is exploiting people for ratings!

I confessed to some frustration to suddenly seeing more critics engaging directly with the problems in Glee, and acting like they’re new (note: Alyssa is not one of those people, so don’t think I’m picking on her!), when people like me and Arturo have been discussing the show since the start to pretty much resounding silence. As often happens, when an issue doesn’t directly affect you or a cause you’re close to, you tend to ignore it. Hence, most people ignoring criticisms from the disability community and people of colour when it came to the show’s depictions of our lived identities.

Emily pointed out that: “It’s not perceived as bias but rather a neutral reflection of objective ‘reality’” when it involves minority groups,  even when we’re saying otherwise. As per usual, those in power get to define the rules, including, apparently, the rules of how we live and interact with society, even though they have no actual knowledge of life in the body of a disabled person, or a person of colour. Evidently, one’s opinions about what these experiences should be like supercede reality, and thus Glee fans had little interest in our critiques.

Now that Glee is hitting closer to home, more people are up in arms; though of course there are still die-hard fans who refuse to engage with any critiques at all. However, they were always in it for the entertainment and nothing else and they’re an audience that those concerned about depictions were unlikely to ever reach. We can hope, and we can aim critiques at them, but ultimately, we do so in full awareness that those critiques are unlikely to be taken seriously.

Glee’s audience has always had a lot of members of the social justice community, though, and their refusal to engage with the critiques has been really frustrating. The show is tremendously influential and provides a great vehicle for talking about depictions in pop culture and who gets to write, define, and portray them. The fact that many people were resistant to hearing any criticism at all of the show was really frustrating, and it’s almost more frustrating that some are deigning to pay attention now that it’s involving more mainstream issues; queer youth have become a popular cause in the last few years, although a lot of that causemaking is also laden with issues of its own, like a focus on only certain aspects of the young queer experience (where are the queer and trans youth of colour, for example?). Say, the aspects Ryan Murphy was doing reasonably well until very recently.

The Ryan Murphys of this world exploit people for fame and profit, and always have. Viewers feed that by consuming the content they create but in the case of Glee it was particularly revolting because of how the show positioned itself: as progressive. As educational. As an after-school special to put teens into the shoes of minorities and build empathy and solidarity. Glee was going to show people that it’s okay to be gay and not cool to hurt people, and it won awards for this, along with accolades from a number of major culture-arbiters. Viewers could feel secure watching it because it was a ‘progressive’ show.

Despite the fact that critics were screaming to be heard; the same show that won an award from GLAAD was using terms like ‘she-male.’

Which raises the question: How bad does media have to get before criticisms can be taken seriously?

How many representations does it have to foul up before social justice-oriented fans are forced to face facts and engage with critics who disagree with their depiction of a show as a strong and useful piece of media? From the early airing of the pilot, people with disabilities were articulating thoughtful and complex criticisms of the show that were ignored, sneered at, and cast aside; we were told that we were too sensitive and not reasonable, and informed that characters like Artie were ‘inspiring’ and accurate, despite being told by people with spinal cord injuries like Artie’s that this was not true. Meanwhile, people of colour expressed concerns about the handling of characters like Tina and Mercedes, and those criticisms didn’t get much air time outside of spaces specifically dedicated to racial justice and conversations about race in pop culture.

Now, discussions about the problems with the representation of queer characters are starting to flower, and some of those same viewers who turned the other cheek before are actually paying attention. And acting surprised that there are legitimate grounds for frustration with Glee, that not everyone thinks it’s a great show social justicewise (let alone productionwise, which, please do not get me started). While there’s been kind of a running meme of hatewatching Glee, a lot of people haven’t really fully understood what that meant for a lot of critics; that we watched and critiqued because we felt it was necessary, since the show was so influential, and that the constant overriding of our voices was monumentally frustrating.

Alyssa says:

It’s become a show that’s not just sloppy but exploitative and manipulative of serious societal issues and human experiences. And it’s time to walk away, even for hate-watching purposes.

And I take exception to that, because Glee hasn’t ‘become’ that way: It always has been that way, it’s just that more people are noticing and starting to pay attention.

Which raises another question: in a critique-saturated world where so much amazing discussion is a link and a click away, how long does ignorance hold up as an excuse? Some very high-profile folks and sites have been talking about the problems with Glee since the very beginning, as well as a vast number of people who don’t enjoy that kind of platform, but are still determined to make their voices heard. When can we start differentiating between true lack of knowledge and willful ignorance? Because I’m pretty sure we passed that dividing line a long time ago with this show.

After the panel I asked her if she’d consider gchattin’ with me about it and she agreed. So here we are.

GARLAND: So, this Texas Observer panel we went to on Thursday…

JESSICA: Yes.

GARLAND: What did you think? Generally? No pressure.

JESSICA: I have mixed feelings. I was glad that it took place. It’s very important that local communities are having discussions about the rollback of reproductive rights. I also thought that some of the ground covered was excellent. At the same time, I had problems with some of the rhetoric that was used, the way generations of activists were pitted against one another, and no real discussion of what to do moving forward.

GARLAND: I remember there were points during the talk that you looked as if you were internally screaming. Like when people would talk about having already won this particular battle during the 70′s.

JESSICA: Yes. I found that particular refrain of “We thought everything was fine in 1973 with Roe and look it all now” tiresome. Especially because the Hyde Amendment passed just years later and has had devastating effects on access to abortion ever since. It’s not as if it is our generation alone who has lost important political battles.

GARLAND: Also the sort of, I guess, silly questions about whether or not there would be a popular feminist uprising in support of choice like there was before Roe, when legislators have been careful to disproportionately attack the reproductive rights of marginalized populations, populations that Feminism doesn’t typically rise up in any number to be supportive of.

JESSICA: There was a problematic moment when the woman moderating the panel said something about how Feminism back in the 70s was simpler because it had a single focus. And she said it in such a way that implied that the movement was better for it, that Feminism then was more agile and able to get things accomplished. Of course, that kind of history of the movement denies the massive problems of intersectionality that historians and journalists have since drawn attention to – namely, the fact that it was a movement primarily of middle- and upper-class white women looking out for their own interests.

GARLAND: I know that you have a personal distaste for the “war on women” language that was flying around the room that evening, with one woman raising her hand to praise the language based on hearing a Republican strategist comment on how effective it was. It seemed like it underscored the false dichotomy of that earlier statement: we can either care about everyone or we can win. Which totally worked for the 2nd wave because here we are, in this gender utopia.

JESSICA: Even the woman who spoke about the importance of intersectionality spent a fair amount of time praising the term “war on women,” which is a term that actively excludes people who aren’t cis women but are just as (or more so) deeply affected by anti-choice legislation and ideas. I was glad that there was discussion about doing intersectional social justice activism (in this case, specifically in reproductive rights movement) without diluting the message. Yet, I feel that even the idea that intersectionality dilutes our message is false and plays into conservative beliefs about how the world works. When we use the language of “war on women” because it is politically expedient in talking to conservatives about these issues at the expense of denying the existence and struggle of trans* and non-binary people, what social justice activism are we actually doing? And why are we watering down the reality and lived experience of other people in order to make conservatives feel more comfortable in this conversation? I can’t get behind the “War on Women” because that is simply too narrow a term for who is actually being affected. But I’m also not sure how to talk about this at a local meeting about reproductive rights rollbacks.

GARLAND: The most important part of the evening, I felt, was Carolyn Jones’ retelling of her experience with the abortion restrictions set in place by the Texas Legislature. I actually saw my vision narrow to a pinpoint while she was speaking as she described having medically inaccurate information forced on her, having to endure the description of the fetus, and being forced to be traumatized and humiliated and then wait 24 hours with a private decision she had already made. I think we tend to compartmentalized abortion when fighting for reproductive rights, thinking about abortion restrictions and patient harassment and TRAP laws as if they were separate and forget that for the people seeking abortions this is a continuous experience with a very real and malicious gauntlet designed to make them feel powerless and give up.

JESSICA: Jones’ story is so important and she is so brave to not only write about it but to speak about it publicly. Late-term abortions are still so incredibly taboo. My friend wrote a piece for my blog over a year ago about her late-term abortion and it is easily the most widely-read post on my site specifically because people who have second-trimester abortions have no way of knowing what that experience will be since we, as a society, never talk about it. So those going through it search out other people’s stories on the internet. And while Jones’ case may be the extreme in terms of when in her pregnancy she got the abortion, her experience under the anti-choice laws is one that a large amount of people in this state will face in order to get a legal medical procedure. These laws drive up cost, make access very difficult (especially for low-income Texans), and are designed to make patients feel ashamed of their decision every step of the way. Yet when you hear someone tell their abortion story, it immediately complicates the picture, makes it harder to judge people who get abortions, and shows how these laws serve no purpose other than to emotionally punish a very specific population of people (a population that many of us could easily be a part of).

GARLAND: There was that moment when someone in the audience began to speak about intersectionality and the moderator mentioned forming alliances, which sort of puts the onus back on each individual group, and Dr. Smith talked about how alliances can only happen if both parties are on equal footing. I don’t really think the majority of the audience understood the point she was making — a think a lot of them think that the end of the process of inclusion in Feminism is for there to be a person of color on the panel, whether or not they get as much time to speak as their white counterparts, whether or not they are treated as a niche or specialty voice.

JESSICA: Dr. Smith’s presence on the panel was interesting. The other three panelists were white women as was the moderator of the panel. And there was a strange moment when after the three white women had each talked and the moderator threw out a question to the entire panel. I felt a moment of panic because I thought perhaps they were not going to give Dr. Smith time to talk as well. That turned out to not be true and my panic was premature. And while I loved what Dr. Smith said about intersectionality (I enjoyed her comments the most), it is disheartening that the burden of introducing and pushing that topic fell onto the shoulders of the single woman of color on the panel. It’s not enough that she was there. Her presence on the panel was treated as a token in many ways which made it seem like what she was saying was not a concern except for people of color and others who are not typically included the larger conversation – that intersectionality is not a major issue. I fear that people in the audience who aren’t as familiar with discussions of intersectionality would not see her contribution as central to the discussion. It was amazing and sad to watch those racial dynamics play out subtly on stage.

GARLAND: I loved what she said about the attack on reproductive rights being an attack on marginalized and oppressed bodies, especially bodies of color. I also loved the woman who stood up in the back to talk about religious communities, although when she said she represented women who were prochoice but would never have an abortion themselves a sad emoticon blinked into my soul for a few seconds. There is just something about that qualified support that a) makes me really, really happy because frankly we need all the help we can get and b) makes me equally sad that the other side has moved the moral fulcrum of the debate so far that some people can only support a private medical procedure by distancing themselves from the people who would choose to make it. And in the process, place themselves somewhat above those people, which ignores that fact that you can’t cleave the world into smart, conscientious people and reckless abortion-seekers and that what they’re actually saying is “I know I have a right to a choice, but would never exercise it, even if it were in the best interest of myself or my family.”

JESSICA: Yes. That language of “I support abortion but wouldn’t get one” is part of the conservative agenda to make abortion shameful and each time a pro-choicer participates in it, it simply reifies this anti-choice idea. While one can personally feel like that (though no one – NO ONE – knows what will happen to them in the future), saying that out loud serves two purposes: 1) to show that you do think there’s shame in abortion and 2) to position yourself higher on a moral hierarchy than people who get abortions (and, of course, that woman said that in a room where Carolyn Jones had already told her abortion story). That language does not help the pro-choice movement in any way. I will say that I appreciate how many people spoke up as pro-choice supporters and as active members in their religious communities. One of the panelists remarked that the reproductive rights movement does not do enough to include those voices in their protest and I think that’s true. I did love your intervention in the discussion of the morality of abortion, Garland. I think what you said about how necessary it is for pro-choice advocates to stop ceding the moral ground to anti-choicers and to say vocally that what we do is moral and is about saving and protecting lives is vitally important right now.

GARLAND: Like I said that evening, that was the tack that finally brought me around from milquetoast support of choice to demanding abortion on demand without apology. I think as long as a person is going around and around about “when life begins” it can seem like a distant philosophical question and as long as they’re clinging to the idea that there are babies that they are courageously saving, they are intellectually pliable. Yes, there are some people who think that if a person dies during an abortion procedure and their children are left orphans that that person was a dead slut who got what they deserved, but I don’t think that describes everyone who currently identifies as “pro-life.” I think there is a large portion of the movement that is moveable on this issue, if we could shift the conversation away from fictitious magical unicorn babies to the consequences of blocking abortion access for real people.

JESSICA: Right. One of the problems with the current pro-choice movement is that we have ceded the moral argument. Therefore, we are always working from the defensive, trying to skirt around the “kill the babies” argument because we are fearful of answering for it. It seems to me that for many former anti-choicers, when they discuss why they moved positions, it involves hearing someone’s personal tale. When someone, like Carolyn Jones, tells their abortion story, it forces the reader/listener to acknowledge that abortion is not uncomplicated or that the people who get them cannot be painted with a broad brush. It is in the telling of these personal stories when the morality of the pro-choice position speaks for itself. Dr. Hopkins talked about that moment in her class when, after showing the Frontline piece about abortion, a young male student said, “I’d never thought about abortion from the woman’s perspective before.”

GARLAND: I think one of the most important things we could do is to continually find ways to make pro-choice people proud and forthright about their beliefs, to puff them up with moral superiority and FACTS and send them out into the world with the conviction that abortion isn’t shameful, not even a little, that supporting abortion is not merely the right thing to do but opposing abortion is morally obscene, and that anyone who questions these two premises is more invested in self-righteousness than they are in human lives. I think if we could drain the residual shame from the movement and create activists who aren’t simply pro-choice but who understand that being “pro-life” is a symptom of not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about and not giving a damn as long as you can think of yourself as morally superior, we could move this fight toward a decisive victory.

JESSICA: What you just wrote is part of why I feel frustration at events like this panel we attended or at the War on Women rally this past weekend at the state capitol, which I also went to. Even as people are getting mad, and vocally so, we aren’t moving the discussion in any way that will help long-term in winning this so-called war. It’s not enough to be having a discussion; we need to be having serious conversations about what is next, where we go from here, how we become the offense in this fight instead of constantly operating from the defensive. Yes, voting matters, very much so. At same time, things are so bad right now that we are simply voting for people who won’t deny us access to birth control, not those who will truly fight for our reproductive rights.

GARLAND: I’m actually really glad we went to that meeting, because it sort of relit my pilot light on this issue. I remember that thing you said a while back about reproductive rights activism sometimes feeling like you’re shouting in a soundproof room, especially since we’re sliding backwards as a country on reproductive rights and this bullshit is being exported to other countries, and it is so, so true. It can become overwhelming very quickly, and it helps to be reminded of how completely the argument for choice crushes the other side.

JESSICA: I agree. Attending the panel and the rally make me more aware of the general discussion outside of my activist cocoon. I look forward to the next conversation about this.

While thinking about this loss of life and the ensuing continuum that leads us to today, May 1st 2012 (coincidentally or not, International Workers Day), I end up with a few snapshots, a few seemingly disconnected events that offer a landscape, a view from the margins if you will, which is, after all, the only view I am ever capable of.

I. The legacy of eugenics

I don’t write about The Netherlands as often because usually, I am caught in the immediacy of the news I end up sharing on Tumblr or Twitter with short commentary. I am, after all, immersed in this context on a day to day basis which means I do not always have the emotional distance to reflect on the big picture, which is, invariably, what interests me the most. However, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been accumulating outrage in a way that does allow me to see a bigger framework at play: one of complete disdain for the life of those that are cast away, set aside, deemed unworthy.

For a glaring example of this disdain, I do not need to look into far away lands like the ones European media like to portray as “backwards” or “brutal” or events in the distant past. Here, in my own backyard, so called Dutch experts propose eugenics as a means of “birth control”. 

Compulsory birth control should be introduced for serious drug addicts, psychiatric patients and people with mental disabilities, according to the former chairman of the Dutch Safety Board Pieter van Vollenhoven.

“Most people will say that’s going too far,” Mr Van Vollenhoven says, speaking on the current affairs TV programme Zembla, to be broadcast on Friday. “I must say I can imagine it if you don’t know the reality. There are people who can’t control themselves. If you observe this, you should perhaps resort to contraception.”

Mr Van Vollenhoven’s proposal draws support in the programme from a number of experts in the field. They include Amsterdam’s child welfare chief, the head of mental health and addiction organization Bouman GGZ, and a former juvenile court judge and Socialist Party senator.

Now, I invite you to reflect on the significance of this proposal for a moment. That the people in charge of caring for those with mental health issues and addictions are proposing sterilization as a means of “control”. That in spite of the legacy of the Holocaust and its reliance on eugenics as a means of genocide, not one, but several people in positions of authority are proposing this.

More than fifty children a year in the Netherlands die as a result of abuse by their parents, the programme reports. “The majority of these parents have a psychiatric problem, are addicted to alcohol or drugs, or are mentally impaired,” says Rob Bilo of the Netherlands Forensic Institute. “They are damaged parents.”

Another fact worth noting: Mr. Van Vollenhoven is the husband of Princess Margriet of the Netherlands, a member of the Royal House of Orange-Nassau.

II. The legacy of “Othering the alien”

I have written extensively about the EU’s internment camps and the treatment of migrants across the continent. However, a week does not go by when I am not reminded of the systematic nature of this treatment. This is a matter that goes even beyond regional borders. Europe has two executing arms to extend this beyond policy making and into action: Frontex and NATO. Sometimes, the two organizations even collide to bring death in equal measures:

A damning new report into the death of dozens of African migrants who were left drifting in the Mediterranean last year has concluded that Nato contributed to the 63 deaths, and raises the possibility of British military forces being connected with the tragedy.

The 90-page study by experts at Goldsmiths, University of London, employed cutting-edge forensic oceanography technology to determine the exact movements of the doomed migrant vessel, which was left drifting for two weeks in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, despite European and Nato officials having been aware of the boat’s plight and location.

Almost everyone on board, including two babies, eventually died of thirst and starvation.

In a video interview, one of the few survivors of the tragedy, Dan Heile Gebre a man from Sudan, tells the heart breaking story of his escape from Libya and the appalling conditions that migrants faced during the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. They escaped hoping to reach Europe to save their lives, only to be met with deaths that could have been prevented, were it not because the EU had collectively decided that migrants should be stopped from reaching the border no matter the cost.

From NATO’s website, where they list the current missions:

NATO operations are not limited only to zones of conflict. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, NATO immediately began to take measures to expand the options available to counter the threat of international terrorism. With the launching of the maritime surveillance operation Active Endeavour in October 2001, NATO added a new dimension to the global fight against terrorism.

Two babies died because NATO refused to take action. Is this the new face of terrorism that the European Union seeks to combat? Is this the way Europe protects human life as part of the legacy of World War II?

III. The legacy of racism

Back at the end of December, I closed the year with a post that listed what I considered my personal failures. I mentioned how a major national newspaper published a column by one Rutger Bregman claiming that “Only neurotic Americans think that we are racist”. In this column, Bregman entertained us with novel ideas such as the fact that there is no racism in The Netherlands and that those of us who actively work to dismantle it are nothing but delusional people who see evil where there is none. Now, the piece itself was nothing but pandering to the dominant culture in a baffling case of self congratulatory lack of critical thinking. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, further than when it came out, if it wasn’t that one of the most prestigious foundations in Europe, Felix Meritis, invited Rutger Bregman to discuss the significance of evil, liberation and freedom in the eve of Liberation Day.

To understand the importance of this invitation and the legitimization of Bregman’s views, awarded with further exposure and institutional support, I’d like to quote from Felix Meritis’ mission statement:

Felix Meritis is an independent European centre for art, culture, science as well as an (inter)national meeting place in Amsterdam. In Felix Meritis art, culture, philosophy and politics are matters of everyday life. It continues the values of the Enlightenment that led its founders (40 citizens) to erect one of the grandest buildings on the Keizersgracht with Holland’s oldest purpose-built concert hall (opened in 1788).

It provides the European public with a space for reflection and connection, a home in which to network and be surprised. We believe in (the need for) cultural diversity in Europe as an engine of progress and social cohesion. Under the motto “Connecting Cultures” we foster the European dialogue and take part in national and international cultural networks.

Through deeper understanding and dialogue with different groups in Europe and the world, we strengthen the insight into and understanding of the European cultural integration process among citizens of Amsterdam, Europe and the world.

However, lest anyone thinks that this is an isolated incident, the result of bad programming decisions, I must contextualized this invitation with another news item from this past week: Row over teenager’s poem overshadows Remembrance Day

A poem by a 15-year-old Dutch boy about his uncle who joined the SS will not be part of next week’s Remembrance Day commemorations following boycott threats from several organisations.

Auke de Leeuw had been invited to read his poem after winning poetry competition for schools organised by the May 4 and 5 organising committee. Pupils were invited to write a poem about the after-effects of the Second World War.

De Leeuw’s poem focuses on his uncle who served as one of 20,000 Dutch volunteers with the military wing of the SS. He died on the Eastern Front.

But a group representing Auschwitz survivors said they would boycott the event if the poetry reading went ahead. The Israel information centre Cidi also criticised the decision to allow De Leeuw to read his poem.[…]

The teenager at the centre of the row told the NRC he wanted to show everyone loses during a war, no matter what side they are on.

‘How can we learn from our mistakes if we are not allowed to name them,’ he said. ‘I was born in peacetime. It is hard enough for me to make the right choices, so how must it have been for people during the war?

This moral relativism, this attempt at presenting victims and victimizers on equal grounds, as the result of “bad decisions” in a shocking effort to re-write history is not an isolated episode. Rutger Bregman, who claims there is no racism in The Netherlands is invited to speak at a commemoration while organizers of the main Remembrance Day event attempt to include a poem about “bad decisions”, equating someone who willingly joined the Nazi SS with victims of war. None of this gratuitous.

IV. Today in counter legacies

On April 14th, I attended the opening of an exhibition by Dutch cultural critic Quinsy Gario at one of The Netherlands most important museums for modern art, the Stedelijk. Some of you who read this blog regularly (and what I write more specifically), know Quinsy as the activist who was arrested during the Black Face protests in The Netherlands back in December and whose video of the ensuing police brutality made international news. During the opening of his exhibition, I tweeted photos of the event which, in turn, were re-tweeted by the official account of the museum. When I got home, I was dismayed to see that some had complained that Quinsy was featured at the Stedelijk due to his relentless anti racist activism. “Disappointment” was the word they used. Because, you see, if you make it your life commitment to fight against systematic discrimination, you should not have a place in respected institutions. Instead, such place should be awarded to the Rutger Bregmans who invite the dominant culture to bury their collective heads in the sand and claim we are “delusional”.

So, this week, to reflect on the legacy of the end of World War II, I will most likely be attending the Day of Empathy, an event where Quinsy is a co-organizer and where I will most likely not be told that racism is a result of my mental health problems. And in the eve of Remembrance Day, on May 4th, when everyone holds two minutes of silence for the dead, I will remember the unnamed asylum seeker who committed suicide two weeks ago so that his children could avoid deportation. This unnamed man from Burundi, so desperate to provide his children with a future saw no other option but to end his life. And I will remember the other forty also unnamed people who try to commit suicide every year in The Netherlands and the countless others who remain in internment camps across the continent because in spite of the memories of a war that happened only 67 years ago, Europe seems to forget the most valuable lesson: one death is a death too many.

I’m in the process of preparing for surgery in June, which seems to require reams of paperwork and endless discussions with people in white coats who suck out your bodily fluids and wave devices at you. The surgery dance is a long and often graceless one that ends with being heaved onto a metal table in a cold OR while a surgical team assembles around you to watch, looming from above while the bright lights dazzle you. I’m excited about the surgery, but also afraid; and not for the reason people seem to think I should be.

Complications do occur while under anesthesia. You can have an adverse reaction to anesthetic agents or other drugs used during surgery. The surgeon could damage an internal organ or nick a vessel. The power could go out and the backup generator might not kick in. Equipment might malfunction. Weird things happen in operating rooms sometimes and in some cases they are entirely out of control of the medical team. This isn’t what I’m afraid of.

What I’m afraid of is the vulnerability created by anesthesia. 

Hypnotic, dissociative, and paralytic agents are used in anesthesia. You’re not just unconscious but disconnected. Many medications are specifically designed to limit memories of the procedure, which is intended to prevent trauma, but it does more than that. It creates a memory hole, a dark place which anything can fill, and the thing about dark places is that sometimes scary things hide inside of them. Dark draws darkness.

People are sexually assaulted, mutilated, and abused while under anesthetics, and sometimes this abuse is allowed to continue as serial rapists and other assailants move through different medical facilities while patient complaints are ignored. This is what I am afraid of. I fear the thought that I might be assaulted, that my body might become an object of humour and mockery and amusement. I fear the potential that I may never know about it, and that if I do, I may be powerless to take action, because victims of medical assault are rarely believed when they attempt to file complaints.

A blind Lakota elder was mutilated while under anesthesia and a nurse nervously alerted him, advising him to have a friend examine his surgical site and take photos. A nurse anesthetist sexually assaulted patients and videotaped it in Georgia. An anesthesiologist in California assaulted multiple patients. Graeme Reeves, ‘the Butcher of Bega,’ mutilated hundreds of women in surgery.  A dentist partially anesthetised and raped his assistant. Nonconsensual pelvic exams on anesthetised patients are routine at teaching hospitals, as Cara Kulwicki recently reminded me.

There comes a time when your mind goes into overload and shuts down, which is what mine starts to do when I think about medical assault, particularly of patients under anesthesia, but the sensory input just keeps coming. It’s not enough for people to abuse patients who are putting their lives and bodies in the hands of people who claim they will take care of them. Anesthesia fetishism is real and there are thousands of videos of anesthetised patients being assaulted and mutilated; some are available for a fee, and others can be viewed for free, distributed through the black market by doctors and other medical professionals.

Acting and enthusiastic consent for role play are one thing, but these are clearly not the case in the vast majority of these videos, if any. These are real people, overwhelmingly women, who were assaulted while under anesthesia, under the ‘care’  of medical providers, in a place they thought was safe. And they may have no idea that they were assaulted, let alone that it was videotaped and shared with the world. That the kindly surgeon or anesthetist or scrub nurse who checked in so thoughtfully after the surgery committed a profound violation.

Those same drugs that make a patient utterly vulnerable, unable to fight back, unable to remember, unable to clearly articulate experiences of assault, those same drugs are used as a weapon on patients who report assaults under anesthesia. The defense to sexual assault charges is that the assault must be ‘a hallucination.’ Scholarly papers like ‘Sexual hallucinations during anesthesia and sedation‘ underscore this. Anesthetic agents lend themselves extremely well to gaslighting as a faltering, confused, and tangled mind attempts to make sense of something, to find an explanation for lacerations or bruises or marks that shouldn’t be there.

And this is what I fear, deeply, and will fear until the moment the mask goes over my face. It’s what I will fear when I am in recovery, and it’s what I will fear for years afterwards, because I will never truly know what happened while I was unconscious and vulnerable in that operating room, or groggy in the recovery area. I think about asking a trusted doctor friend with hospital privileges if it might be possible for her to stay with me, but I don’t know if that will be allowed. And I know that asking for an escort marks me, singles me out.

After all, I have nothing to be afraid of. I’m in the hands of trusted medical professionals. They trained for this.

This is a fear that many people consider to be irrational. They rush to assure me that the vast majority of medical professionals are ethical, upstanding people who would never commit these kinds of crimes, let alone tolerate them. They tell me that medical professionals would be appalled to know that a patient might be afraid of being assaulted while under anesthesia, that patients under anesthesia are treated with extreme care and sensitivity. They tell me that I can’t let a few bad apples ruin the bunch.

But the thing is, I am the one going under anesthesia. And I am still afraid. Because bad apples and outliers and statistics equal real people and real lives. And I am a real person with a real life and thus I experience real fear.

And I am afraid. Not of poor surgical outcomes or unexpected reactions to anesthesia but of this, the dark place where the dark things hide and there’s no lightswitch.

On her Tumblr, Flavia frequently discusses feminist ethics and praxis; she talks about the transformation of theory, ideas, and dreams into concrete action. She also touches upon the critical importance of accountability among the feminist leadership, and feminists in general, and her coverage of these matters always brings me back to the critical dividing line between words and action. Not just within feminism but generally, as a society, as human beings; we owe each other not just theory but also praxis, and accountability.

Turning words into action can be immensely challenging, but it’s a key part of behaving ethically, and responsibly. A case study in exactly why praxis is just as important as theory unfolded in Sweden on 15 April at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Five ‘birthday cakes’ were commissioned to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Swedish Artists Association and world art day.

One stood out. Makode Linde’s blackface cake:

On the table, a huge cake, with a smooth shiny black surface, in the form of a caricatured African female body, sans legs. Naked, splayed on its back, it is composed of crotch, belly mound, large pendulous breasts held by truncated stick arms, a row of neck rings. Where the neck rings end, a living human head rears up through a hole in the table. The head belongs to the kneeling body of a man. It is tricked out in exaggerated blackface –large white circles around the eyes, drawn-on cartoon red mouth and pointed teeth.

Controversy erupts when the Swedish Minister of Culture picks up a knife and cuts into the cake, simulating a clitoridectomy, revealing a rich red interior. More people join in, eating and laughing while being photographed. The artist, performing the ‘head’ of the cake, screams and writhes. It’s provocative art, you know. As Shailja Patel points out, no women of colour are in the room.

T. F. Charlton writes:

This was no generic statement; it specifically invoked the ways the white West has exploited and violated bodies read as black and female. As others have done, I wonder whether any black women were involved in conceptualizing this piece, or whether Linde at all considered the potential reactions of black women to painful, degrading depictions of our bodies and humanity, displayed for and literally consumed by a mostly white audience. Linde chose to highlight a racialized misogny that he doesn’t directly experience…

There is much debate over whether Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth is racist for cutting into the cake (‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ she says). Context is brought up—she’s been attacked for not supporting ‘provocative’ art and thus was put on the spot with this artist’s ‘shocking’ installation. People talk about how the white people in the room must have felt. Awkward and uncomfortable. Yes, good, let’s talk about white feelings, shall we? The artist’s Intent is discussed; he meant to ‘raise awareness’ and ‘challenge the traditional image of racism, abuse and oppression through provocation.’

Charlton again: ‘Linde’s installation did little to spark awareness or conversation, much less action, around these issues on the part of people not already familiar — or living intimately — with them…he didn’t succeed in getting white people to reflect in any productive or substantial way on their own complicity in racism, nor did he do anything to illuminate or address black women’s experiences of racism.’

Adelsohn-Liljeroth was ‘put on the spot,’ we are informed, and we are challenged, asked what we would have done in the same situation. She claims to be anti-racist and says she wants to work together to address ‘intolerance, racism and discrimination.’ Here she was with a prime opportunity to turn her theory into praxis, and she threw it away.

She had many choices, confronted with this scene, and she chose the easy one, which was to cut into the cake. She lifted the knife and sliced into the simulated body of a screaming Black woman while white people stood around eating canapes and laughing. She chose to perform this for an audience, to become part of the artist’s performance.

People call this incident an example of groupthink, which positions Adelsohn-Liljeroth as a victim: ‘she had no choice.’

But she did. She did have a choice. She could have chosen to walk away. To not cut the cake. To say ‘this is racist and offensive.’

She chose to cut the cake.

She chose not to turn her theory into action.

Women are trained to be nice; they are socialised to not cause a fuss, to not make a scene, to be orderly and calm. Particularly for women in high-ranking government positions, there is tremendous pressure to not rock any boats. This was the social pressure Adelsohn-Liljeroth was under when she picked up that knife and was presented with this scene, a group of white people egging her on. Some people might argue that making the choice not to cut the cake could have ruined her reputation and career.

Is the reputation and career of one white woman more important than standing up against racism? Because if it is, there’s a serious flaw with the theory underlying the praxis here. She took an action and it was categorically the wrong one, and more important than that, she was the first domino to fall, which allowed the groupthink to progress. That room of ‘uncomfortable’ white people would have been made even more uncomfortable if she had put down the knife and said ‘no,’ forcing them, too, to take stances. To cut the cake or not. To make a choice: perform a racist act, or not.

Being antiracist requires you not to be nice.

‘Some things deserve scenes,’ says Marianne Kirby in our conversation about this.

This deserved a scene. Theory demands a scene; theory says that we white people, when in positions of power where we are confronted by racism, have an ethical responsibility to resist the racism, to indicate that we do not tolerate it and do not stand for it. We have, in fact, no choice here: We must not cut the cake. We must put the knife down and walk away. We must say something.

And when someone does cut the cake, it’s our responsibility to come get our folks, as they say.

This is uncomfortable stuff—I get it. No one said it would be easy.

I cannot speak for the Black women harmed by this piece: They speak for themselves.

I can speak for the white people who did nothing about this, because I, too, am white.

And I say: Next time, don’t cut the cake.

The history of US involvement in Colombia has been filled with violence and the exertion of colonial power. We have peeled back its surface and bitten down hard on a soft, creamy core. We have consumed it and we have dressed our consumption in a sweet sugary glaze to make it more palatable.

Colombia represented a property to exploit; first for a canal, later for agricultural products. While workers in the United States struck for fair working conditions in the early 20th century, the US government was involved in the notorious United Fruit protests in which soldiers opened fire on unarmed striking workers demanding better treatment. Six hour work weeks? Eight hour days? Contracts? Nothing shall stand between us and our bananas.

United Fruit became an almighty power in Colombia, using the government to protect its interests—and those of the United States—all for the sake of cheap tropical produce sold in the United States. Every grocery store in the US carries bananas, now. They are ubiquitous; typically any sort of convenience store with any kind of fruit at all has bananas. Bright yellow emblems of colonialism, suffering, and interventionism.

There are some ripening on top of my fridge right now.

The term ‘banana republic’ exists for a reason, and it is not a line of clothing. United Fruit controlled vast swaths of territory in South and Central America and maintained an iron lock on them and the labourers it exploited. Its effective monopoly extended tentacles deep through the halls of power; el pulpo knew no bounds. It controlled the land, the transportation, the government. It needed only lift a finger for troops to arrive to protect its precious resources, of which profit was the most precious of all.

You know it as Chiquita Brands International now. You know, the brand with the cutesy images of Latin American women in ruffles, objects to be exploited? They are exotic and delicious! Eat them up.

People have died for bananas.

The matanza de las bananeras was not the low point in our involvement in Colombia.

La Violencia

It was in the 1960s that we provided training and military assistance in Colombia to crush the aftermath of a civil war. Our old friend napalm came with us so we could destroy ‘peasant enclaves,’ hotbeds of revolution that they were.

Oh, such allies we are!

Business interests were threatened and that meant mounting pressure on the Colombian government to ‘accept’ our ‘assistance.’ For we could not have Colombia politically unstable. This would do no good at all. We helpfully imported counterinsurgency experts to train the military and the police in the interrogation of peasants. This was important, world-saving business, you know.

Torturing people.

Things that represent ‘insurgent infiltration’:

• Initiating letter-writing campaigns
• Protesting poor conditions
• Speaking out about the government
• Petitions
• Worker unrest
• Political art

We maintain a legacy of ‘counterinsurgency’ in Colombia. How helpful we are!

We must protect oil piplines. This is helpful. And we must fight the drug war.

Let us spray defoliants on the people of Colombia.

Planes fly overhead to deliver a rain of death.

Let us school you in our ways

We train human rights abusers at the School of the Americas. Colombian graduates are among our finest accomplishments. If you threaten to imprison the families of your subjects, they become more cooperative! Also effective: beatings. These are the skills we teach there.

The SOA is a secretive place but it is not an invisible one.

How helpful we are, with our foreign police aid.

Your women mean nothing to us

What is more surprising, that Secret Service agents avail themselves of sex workers in possible violation of the law and certain violation of agency policy, or that they think they can get away with not paying them? Rest assured that this is not the first nor the last place that the Secret Service has played sex tourist;  this was simply the time someone was caught.

What is the personal misconduct here? That they besmirched the reputation of the United States and endangered the President by dallying with sex workers? That they used US tax dollars to stay in a five star hotel and live the high life with a party so loud that it apparently disrupted other guests? That they failed to set a good example for the residents of Colombia, that ‘lesser’ and ‘inferior’ nation?

Or that they carelessly flexed their muscles as the colonisers, as the abusers, as the takers?

We know nothing about the women involved in this scandal; they are the faceless ‘prostitutes’ and we need know nothing more about them. They don’t matter; they aren’t human beings, women with lives and careers of their own. In every story they are simply the vehicle for the shame and embarrassment. How awkward for the US Secret Service, to be caught with whores. 

Disposable women. Chiquitas!

We are all in danger here

Flavia talks about the desecration and violation of nameless brown bodies, the treatment of these bodies as things, the objectification of women who are inhuman by virtue of who they are: This is what she means when she talks about this.

That we, the coloniser, should enter the colonial subject and take what we will.

Are you aware of autism?

Excellent, we’re done!

Just kidding.

Let’s start over.

April is Autism Awareness Month. Originally developed in the 1970s, it’s designed to educate the public about autism and what it means to be autistic, demystifying autism and fighting ableism directed at autistic people. Like a lot of other ‘awareness’ initiatives, it’s been plagued with problems, and a lot of those problems are compounded by Autism Speaks, which is an extremely high-profile ‘advocacy’ organisation that you shouldn’t be supporting. 

There are a lot of great reasons not to support Autism Speaks, and one of the most important to me is the fact that the organisation has no autistic people on its board. Unlike the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, which lives and breathes ‘nothing about us without us,’ Autism Speaks reinforces the idea that people with autism cannot communicate, cannot articulate ideas, cannot be their own advocates. Autism Speaks, all right: for the parents of children with autism.

This is a common problem in disability advocacy. Instead of focusing on people with disabilities and their own lived experiences, including what they have to bring to the table and their differing opinions on policy and other issues, the focus is on their parents and other loved ones and how disability impacts them. This inherently positions disability as an externality, something that happens to someone else, to people who are not quite real, to faceless and amorphous individuals rather than actual human beings. It also positions disability, typically, as something that requires endless sacrifice, work, and misery from the people around the disabled person. And, of course, it suggests that disabled adults don’t exist.

Autism Speaks and organisations like it silence people with disabilities. The organisation’s name is fantastically misleading, as is its tagline, ‘it’s time to listen.’ It is time to listen, but not to Autism Speaks.

It’s bad enough that the organisation doesn’t actually include autistic people in its endeavors, but the kind of rhetoric it propagates is also really harmful. Instead of promoting self-advocacy and independence, it effectively promotes elimination of people with autism. This is very upfront and clearly advertised, as well; Autism Speaks makes no bones about the fact that it thinks people with autism shouldn’t exist.  The organisation’s own mission statement leads: ‘We are dedicated to funding global biomedical research into the causes, prevention, treatments, and cure for autism.’

This is eliminationism, where autism is positioned as a problem that needs to be solved, and actual autistics aren’t mentioned at all. When you’re talking about ‘curing’ autism, you’re talking about getting rid of human beings. The attitude is reinforced in the kinds of ‘awareness’ campaigns the organisation is involved in, which routinely position autistic people as a burden to their parents and society in general. The overall message sent in these campaigns is that autism is a terrible, bad, no-good, horrible thing, and that people saddled with an autistic child live in misery and woe. With the claim that autism is something that needs to be eradicated, the organisation writes off existing people with autism and their own needs, and certainly does nothing to support self-advocates and people who see autism as anything other than a horrible thing.

Autistic adults are strangely absent from much of the organisations marketing and awareness campaigns. Especially those who are successful self-advocates, illustrating that being spoken for is actually both insulting and not necessary. Anything that doesn’t fit the narrative is quietly swept away, and Autism Speaks has a chokehold when it comes to lobbying, interacting with policymakers, and direct involvement in decisions that affect the autistic population in the United States. It pressures the Centers for Disease Control into substantial spending on autism, for example, which sounds great on the surface, until you realise that most of this spending is directed at research.

Because direct family services aren’t a priority for the organisation. People donating to Autism Speaks may be under the impression that they are directly helping autistic people, but this is simply not the case when the vast majority of contributions are funneled into research, fundraising, and administrative expenses. Helping autistic people is better accomplished by working with groups like ASAN, or looking for locally-based self-advocates who need funding or in-kind donations to reach the autistic community; a community that includes adults, not just children.

Autistics who have criticised the organisation have been sharply rebuked, when they’re not being ignored. Attempts to get autistics on the board of Autism Speaks have been repeatedly rebuffed, and defenders of the organisation shout autistic people down when they demand that the group live by its own tagline and take a turn listening instead of speaking. Or, indeed, move beyond narrow bands of communication where speaking and listening are the only ways to convey and receive information.

Autism Speaks is a hateful and deeply harmful organisation, and self-advocates are constantly having to work to undo the messaging of Autism Speaks. Instead of spending the month of April educating people about autism, comparing experiences, advocating for themselves, speaking out, fostering disability pride, self-advocates are forced to spend their time explaining why people shouldn’t contribute to Autism Speaks or circulate its materials.

An advocacy group with the kind of power and social clout Autism Speaks has could be doing immense things for autism, and Autism Speaks definitely is, but they are bad and terrible things rather than excellent ones. Sadly, Autism Speaks is probably going to continue to dominate the landscape while smaller organisations remain largely unknown. Groups like ASAN enjoy a fraction of the visibility because they represent everything people are afraid of: autistics speaking for themselves, rejecting eliminationism, being out and proud, demanding full social inclusion, and working for better lives for people with autism, rather than trying to get rid of autism altogether.