anarcho-queer:

America Only Gets Outraged About Gun Violence In White Neighborhoods

On 24 April in the town where I live, a wonderful town that I love, a woman was shot to death in front of her four-year-old son, Joshua. According to authorities, she was a college student.

A young woman, obviously invested in education, undoubtedly with dreams of a good life for herself and her child, struck down. It’s a sad story, a tragedy worthy of deep sorrow and serious reflection about gun violence and gun policy, especially when added to the fact that it was the fourth fatal shooting in my town in a week. Despite the obvious potential of such a story to poke at the hearts and minds of anyone who hears about it, most people won’t hear about it. It won’t get in the 24-hour news cycle. And it certainly will not spark a national debate about gun control. Why? Because the woman who was killed, Donitra Henderson, was a black woman and she died on a street corner in Oakland, a predominantly black and Latino town, in front of her black child.

Gun violence affects black and Latino people in poor, inner-city neighborhoods on a regular basis. As The Washington Post reported, black people are 10 times more likely to be killed by a gun crime, and yet our deaths by gun are much less likely to result in national conversations in which liberals and conservatives duke it out over the second amendment. We become statistics, just one more added to the number of gun deaths in the US in a particular year, and that’s all.

As I wrote in my recent blog post, “Hey, White liberals: A Word On the Boston Bombings, the Suffering of White children, and the Erosion of Empathy,” if you’re not white, your tragic death doesn’t feel quite as tragic to the American media or the collective American conscience, which are inextricably linked. It does not inspire the kind of national outrage and grief that white deaths, and especially middle-class and affluent white deaths, inspire.

There is a certain level of indifference in this country to the deaths of people of color. But there is also a double standard in the narrative around gun violence, depending on where it takes place and who is affected by it. When it happens to wealthy white folks in the suburbs, it’s a tragedy visited upon those who didn’t deserve it. When it happens to black and Latino people in a city, it’s our own fault.

Take, for example, President Obama’s speech in Chicago about gun violence where he talked about policy change, but also focused a lot on the structure of the black family, saying:

“There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families – which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.”

Compare that to speeches he made following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a predominantly white area, where a gunman murdered 26 people, including 20 children. The president never connected the violence there with the structure of anybody’s family or with the failure of any white parents. Even though the shooter, Adam Lanza, was raised by a single mother. Instead, he promised the people of Newtown that lawmakers would stand beside them and create policy to protect them. Those are two very different messages.

One reason this double standard is so easy to apply is that the question of why gun violence happens so much in inner cities is brushed over or ignored. There are many factors: the effects of racism on individuals and communities, failed education systems, high unemployment, etc. These are rarely discussed in connection to gun violence on a national level.

Without that connection, and thus with no greater social ills to help explain it, it’s seen simply as the fault of the people who live in those places, as if they have some inherent defect in their families and their communities. And because it’s our fault and not, as in the case of violence against middle-class white people, a national tragedy, it does not warrant a national conversation.

This double standard leads to the further devaluing of black and Latino lives. It also contributes to the sporadic nature of the national gun control conversation itself. Because gun control is only talked about on a national level when multiple murders happen in affluent white places, it’s talked about a few times a year at most.

If the conversation were shifted to include the tragedies of people in the inner city, if our lives were valued enough by the American media and the collective US conscience to warrant that conversation, it would be an ongoing debate. Maybe then it would at least have a chance at leading to some actual change. Which would be great. Especially for those of us who are most often affected by it.

(via righteouspussypower)

stfuconservatives:

I know someone personally who also compared a higher minimum wage to a handout. This is a good sign of our times when a living wage is considered a “handout for doing nothing.” - zenodotus5

And minimum-wage workers are the hardest workers in America. I’ve worked minimum-wage jobs, and I’ve worked part-time jobs that pay barely above minimum wage. I’ve also worked well-paid desk jobs.

Compared to waiting tables and scrabbling at startups? White-collar jobs are a vacation. You’re not docked pay if you come in late. You take lunch whenever you want. You sit in front of a computer all day. Your legs don’t feel like cement pillars by the time you get home because you’ve been standing for so long. When you’re sick, you can take a day off without worrying about whether you’ll make rent. You can afford to take a vacation and relax for a few days. You can afford to visit your family at the holidays. You can afford to replace your car when it breaks down. This is paradise.

And there are fewer and fewer jobs like this in America, and more and more minimum-wage jobs that require physical labor and dealing with customers and not having benefits or health insurance, and the least - the VERY least - that we can do as a society is make sure that people who work those jobs, or two or three of those jobs, don’t have to struggle to pay for food and housing. Minimum-wage workers aren’t “doing nothing.” They’re achieving record-breaking corporate profits for their CEOs. They’re doing EVERYTHING.

(via gaobibaituo)

Jason Richwine, who joined the Heritage Foundation in 2012 as a senior policy analyst after receiving his doctorate in public policy from Harvard University in 2009, focused his dissertation, “I.Q. and Immigration Policy,” on his view that the lower intelligence of immigrants should be considered when drafting immigration policy. (via le-kif-kif)

…Latina in a top tier PhD program would like a word with ur racist ass

(via rhizombie)

Honestly I can’t get over the fact that faculty at Harvard for real let someone write a dissertation on this subject and I’m getting kinda pissed just thinking about it. A fairly shallow, cursory foray into current research in intelligence testing, identity, and demography would tell anyone with half a brain there is A LOT irrevocably wrong with the basic premise of I.Q. as an accurate and unbiased measure of intelligence, as well as the basic premise of discussing “Hispanic” people as a monolith (considering that “Hispanic” usually encompasses all Spanish speakers, which is an extraordinarily geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse group). How Harvard fails to see that allowing a student to base a whole fucking dissertation on a tenuous and racist connection between two shaky-ass concepts makes them appear racist, backwards, and out-of-touch is beyond me.

(via the-split-lark)

Harvard is actually the worst tho, almost everyone I’ve met who went to Harvard or has taught there are racist and classist as fuck. “IVY LEAGUES” are centers of (white, cis, male) power and privilege (“center” as a condensation/perpetuation of these things) and as someone in the academy (which usually presupposes an already fucked up relationship to class/race/gender), you could seriously not bribe me with all the money and prestige in the world to teach/go there. One of my profs who taught at Princeton said that they would have someone bring sandwiches and coffee on literally SILVER PLATTERS to the faculty offices. I’ll take the shittiness (lack of funding/support/sammys on silver platters) of being in a public institution any day. I’ll also add that departments vary within institutions (which explains why someone like John Yoo ended up at Berkeley), so a degree in “public policy” from Harvard is totally synonymous with racist fuckwad in my mind.

(via rhizombie)

This is so ableist, racist, and classist that I don’t even know how it got published. There are these things called developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, and lack of access to good education and healthy food that make it so that some Hispanic (isn’t “Latin@” a better term?) people have lower IQs and academic achievement than others.

(Source: The New York Times, via aloofshahbanou)

bad-dominicana:

Life as a black person:

-inquire bout renting a space, get told they dont want that particular kind of biz there, soon after its rented to whites w same exact biz

-inquire bout buying biz, get shot down w money in hand, soon after sold to whites on credit

-inquire bout employment at 695595 white places, get shot down once they realize youre black, get sent to the one black place in town

“why dont black people have more businesses or people in this field or making money, i havent the slightest!”

gaobibaituo:

awesome-everyday:

shorterexcerpts:

thecallus:

theatlantic:

The Cheapest Generation: Why Aren’t Millennials Buying Cars or Houses?

What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits? It’s a question that applies not only to cars, but to several other traditional categories of big spending—most notably, housing. And its answer has large implications for the future shape of the economy—and for the speed of recovery.

Read more. [Image: Kagan McLeod]

It’s safe to say that a decent number of Tumblr users are a part of the Millennial generation. So, tell us: Do you own a car or house? If not, why?

IT’S BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO DISPOSABLE INCOME YOU THUNDERING IDIOTS. Fucking preference has nothing to do with it. 50% of college graduates have no job! They all have the most student loan debt ever! What are you asking this question for?!

Also: housing is a good bit more expensive now.

My parents got a 15-year mortgage on a new house in the mid-70s. The house was $32,000. Average home price in that area now? $190,000.

So, home prices went up. Food prices went up. Health care prices went WAY UP. Rent prices went up. Higher education went up so damn high that some of us forgo that all together. Energy prices went up. Car prices went up.

Prices of prices went up.

We also pay cell phone bills, internet bills, data plans, text plans, online subscriptions, cable/satellite tv, netflix, DVR subscriptions — bills that didn’t even exist 30-40 years ago. We also use computers and smartphones and microwaves and other consumer electronics that didn’t exist 20-50 years ago.

We need medications and doctors and contact lenses and tampons and maxi pads and other things that cost money just to be alive and keep us healthy.

Most of us can’t afford to:

1. Get married and have a “Traditional” big wedding
2. Buy a house
3. Buy a new car
4. PLAN to have children
5. Take two, consecutive weeks of vacation.

Jobs that paid 50k in the late 1990s now pay between 30-35. Interest rates that favor consumers have gone down.

So I say, no. We are not choosing not to buy homes. We’re not choosing to take the bus in cities where there’s no good public transit. WE ARE NOT CHOOSING TO LIVE WHAT SOCIETY DEEMS AS AN UNDESIRABLE LIFESTYLE.

Don’t even get me started on the fact that these two people in the picture are young white hipsters. Young black and brown folks have been forgoing homeownership and buying new cars for decades, this shit isn’t new, pal. You’re just acting like this shit is new because it’s hitting white folks.

anyway, my point is: We are fucking broke.

 fuck all these articles written by assholes who actually know nothing about our generation

FUCK THEM

FUCK
THEM

microaggressions:

Do people who use the phrase “first world problems” not realize that this is also a microaggression? Assuming that people in non-first world countries are too wrapped up in their ~horrible poor lives~ to have “everyday” concerns? It operates on the predication that inhabitants of non first world countries are in blanket states of “underprivileged” existence and directly compares their lives and cultures to US life and culture as if the US culture is or should be the standard. Do people seriously not see what’s wrong with that?

moniquill:

bad-dominicana:

ryuxethehuman:

theyoungsocialist:

It doesn’t matter how little space you have, there is always space for growing!

That’s really cool

my nigga, is you payin and gettin me a bigger apt, w a terrace, some land? money to plant and grow it all? gettin me a job thatll take part time hours but still pay enough to get by, so i got time to do it all? help me grow it when im not physically able? no? ok, well dont tell me how much space i got, either

bai.

Srsly, this ‘YOU CAN DO IT!’ shit needs to be -BACKED-.

I am all for the encouragement of urban gardening, but pretty pictures and platitudes aren’t enough. You need to be out there handing out dirt and seeds and containers, you need to be getting out there and building wheelchair-accessible raised community gardens and building seed libraries and showing people how to hang tomato plants off fire escapes and commandeer city land - and even THEN you don’t say ‘YOU CAN DO IT!’ you say ‘Hey, this is how to do it, if you want in.’

Telling people they can do it isn’t doing shit if you’re not actually showing them how and helping to make it possible.

The bolded is mine.

(via decolonizeyourmind)

current:

Who’s being hurt the most by Chicago’s public school closures? You guessed it: low-income and overwhelmingly black and Latino students. TYT discusses it with Professor Tricia Rose and Chicago Alderman Leslie Hairston here.

(via bmoburns)

miyasha:

cumaeansibyl:

bookwormbreakfast:

futurejournalismproject:

ReadWrite’s Dan Lyons points to a disturbing trend in tech journalism as he tries to unwrap why iPhones have such significant US marketshare while the rest of the world runs 75% Android.

Android, goes a coverage tick, is for poor people:

But Apple and its cheerleaders in the States don’t just criticize Android phones; they also criticize Android users, depicting them as low-class people who are uneducated, poor, cheap and too lacking in “taste” (a favorite Apple fanboy word) to pay for an Apple product and instead willing to settle for a low-price knockoff.

See, for example, a recent story by Sam Biddle on Gizmodo called “Android Is Popular Because It’s Cheap, Not Because It’s Good,” illustrated with a photo of a homeless man sleeping next to a shopping cart and bags full of collected cans. Nice touch!… Apparently inspired by this article, John Biggs of TechCrunch picked up the “Android is cheap” meme and ran with it too…

…[I]n America, a noisy chorus of pro-Apple bloggers keeps repeating the mantra about Android being cheap and crappy and second-rate, and people keep believing it and insisting that they must have an iPhone. American consumers have been told that those Android smartphones are hard to use, or complicated, or geeky, or unreliable, and, worst of all, on top of all that, they’re made for poor people. 

And that’s where the rhetoric starts to border on something ugly. Look at what Apple fans were saying in April 2012 when Instagram became available on Android. Cult of Mac had a nice roundup which included sneering tweets about Walmart and “poor peasants” and “riff raff” and “poor people,” but also included these:

• “It’s like when all the ghetto people started coming to the nice suburbs. Instagram was our nice lil suburb.”
• “Instagram just got a whole lotta ghetto.”

The italics are mine, and I’ve added them for a reason. Yes, it’s the dreaded G word, and it comes up again in a Dec. 13, 2011 article by Glenn Derene, who wrote that “Android’s Cheap, Low Quality Apps Make It Feel Like A Technological Ghetto.”

Related: Henry Blodget, founder of Business Insider, writes about the horrors of flying economy. Evidently, he couldn’t charge his laptop, there was no wifi and the food was bad.

i don’t own a smartphone of any kind, so I certainly can’t speak to the comparative quality of the types of devices, but this is definitely a trend in coverage and it absolutely needs to stop.

Interesting. My husband has an Android because he prefers the hardware and because I told him I wouldn’t allow an iPhone in the house. (I have serious issues with Apple’s philosophies.) The software gets twitchy on occasion but we never had any trouble making actual phone calls on it.

He points out that the US is weird because we have a lot of legacy crap hanging around and so we actually tend to have worse stuff than other countries which started later. For instance, because we had the first Internet stuff, we still have a lot of old equipment that countries who came to the Internet later don’t have to deal with. Similarly, we got out ahead of the smartphone game with blackberries (I hate their formatting), and iPhones were the next major successor. Meanwhile, folks who are just now showing up to the game have no loyalties and nothing to unlearn, so they’re picking the cheaper, less restricted product.

Apple’s real mad that people operating strictly from a pragmatic viewpoint are picking Android in overwhelming numbers — even people who could afford iPhones — so of course they have to take the high ground as the sophisticated choice, since they can’t claim to be the smart one.

this is almost every reason why I won’t ever own an apple product. ever. fuck you, apple, you sweatshop running sons of bitches

trungles:

I’m not angry or upset about anything in particular at the moment, but I thought I’d take a little time to write something out that had been bugging me about allies. It’s certainly not all-encompassing or totally comprehensive, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about in terms of being a good ally and a good neighbor, especially here on Tumblr.

Before you step in to help us out, I’d just like to clarify a couple things.

You and I, we may have taken the same seminars and maybe even read the same Audre Lorde excerpts or Ronald Takaki books, but know this: we learned very different things in very different ways 

For students of color, for gay students, for trans* students, for the children of immigrants and refugees, these classes aren’t always about learning new concepts when it pertains to us. It’s more about learning the names of things we already knew fairly intimately. Do you understand that? You learned it another way. You went in, you got this set of key words and a list of definitions. Your learning was, in all likelihood, “Here is this word. This is what this word means.”

For you, it was “Xenophobia: a strong fear or dislike of people from other countries.”

For us, it was “Xenophobia: the time that boy in my kindergarten class spat on me because I couldn’t speak English yet. Or when I saw that clerk yell at my mom in the grocery store because her English wasn’t clear enough. Or when USCIS had us confirm our American citizenship with the same set of papers seven times over the course of sixteen years because they wanted to confirm that we were, in fact, actual American citizens.”

For you, it was, “Racism: unfair treatment of people who belong to another race; violent behavior towards them.”

For us, it was, “Racism: that one time I saw that manager tell that sales girl to follow my dad around at Kohl’s. Or that one time my neighbor’s kid got shot by the police and they tried to cover it up by convincing everyone he was in a gang because he was Hmong, but we knew he wasn’t. Or that one time my dad told me I shouldn’t rollerblade to the library because I’m not white and it’s not safe for me.”

For you, it was, “Homophobia: a strong dislike or fear of homosexual people.”

For us, it was, “Homophobia: that time in the sixth grade when Ryan shoved me against a glass door and banged my face in it while yelling, ‘faggot!’ at me until the teacher stopped him. Or when my Catholic high school’s president told me that, though he loved me as a child of God, he still believed I was sinful when I suggested that we start a GSA.”

For you, it was: “Classism: prejudice or discrimination based on social class.”

For us, it was: “Classism: that one time when my best friend came over to hang out in high school and her parents didn’t want her to come over again because they didn’t like our neighborhood. Or that one time when my friends had no idea what food stamps looked like and I was too embarrassed to explain what they were.”

So while you were learning that these academically-framed phenomena were real problems, we were just getting little figurative nametags for awful things that we already knew. Your weekly vocabulary list was, to us, just a hollow shadow of our lived experiences.

So my point is this:

If you didn’t live an experience, then step aside. Because we knew this stuff before our professors told us what to call it. We learned it from the bottom up, you learned it from the top down, and that’s not even a metaphor.

When you step out of class, you get to be like, “Oh, awesome. I am learning how to be a good ally and a better human being. This will help me.” For us, it’s more like, “Ah, so that’s what they’re calling it nowadays. When exactly did they say change was going to come for us?”

So in practice, here’s what all this theory looks like: you don’t always have to speak. I mean, certainly, you should totally call someone out on their oppressive bullshit. But if you identify as male, you don’t get to tell people what is best for women as though you have that authority. If you’re white, you shouldn’t be trying to “uplift” people of color by the grace of your intellect or your words. Nobody’s looking to be ‘rescued’ or ‘pulled up from out of their unfortunate circumstances’ as you may be tempted to believe.

All anybody’s looking for in an ally is someone who knows that “empowerment” means taking a step aside in a place where you know you have privilege. And if it is, for example, a PoC-to-PoC conversation, a woman-to-woman conversation, a queer-to-queer conversation, etc. about this stuff, and that isn’t who you are, you don’t need to be chiming in.

Just take our word for it, let us talk, and let us vent. We’d like you to give us room, and if you have to be helpful, then help make room for us by giving up some of your proverbial social girth.

Because the bottom line is that our academia has made a commodity of our lived experiences as teaching moments for you. And if you think your academic knowledge is more valid than our lived experiences, then you’re definitely not part of the solution.

Much love.

indigocrayon:

baritonepats:

huongbinh:

geeawwfree:

rrrogerthattt:

ngogiujason:

kurtthewurt:

So… this is what I wasted my morning/early afternoon doing…  I have so much work to do but I just refuse to do it.

No, I didn’t make one for Merced.  Nobody goes there.  

lol @ Merced

I only haven’t been to SF and Davis. I’ve been to Merced and it’s pretty!

That’s so disrespectful to not only UC Merced, but to the whole UC system to not include UC Merced and to also make an insensitive remark about the campus.  I don’t like it when people have an elitist attitude to certain UC campuses because of it’s prestige, as oppose to academic programs and campus environment -___-

So when you say that “Nobody goes there”… Are you referring to the only UC campus that is over 50% low income and is over 50% first-generation college students? 

oooh reblogging for that important commentary

Reblogging for the commentary bc it’s a thing people should remember!! An associate professor who gave a guest lecture in one of my freshman year classes taught at Merced first before coming to Irvine. She’s really cool and she was in Wired.

The bolded is mine.

Inga Muscio, Cunt:  A Declaration of Independence (via)

Yep.

(via mehreenkasana)

(via mry-j)

One of the entries from the list ‘20 Things Everyone Thinks About the Food World (But Nobody Will Say)’.

Real. As. Fuck.

And real talk, I wish there was a Clueless Whitebread Muhfuckas filter on Yelp, because they stay talking stupid shit about places around my way.

(via crankyskirt)

Let’s also talk about how if there is a white face in front of these foods, that person can get more money because this is now a “sophisticated version made by whiteys”, but if people are doing their own shit it needs to be cheap like it is back in the country.

(via crackerhell)

oop.

(via inkplink)

Same thing about soul food being horrible and cheap and harmful to your health until some pasty trick decides to put it on the menu in their mediocre ass white table-cloth restaurant where they charge $20 for a plate of turnip greens and corn bread!!

(via jcoleknowsbest)

There is a possibility that immigrants sold food like that from their homeland cheaply, and that because it was originally cheap and has largely stayed that way, people think it should be cheap. Maybe these immigrants were just trying to make a living in a new country and realized that selling expensive food wasn’t the best way to do that. There is a possibility that not every single fucking thing that you perceive is bad is a result of horrible white people. There is also the outright bullshit comment above that would implicate soul food was ‘appropriated’ from black people, even though white people have eaten it for centuries too. Not to mention that one can very easily find cheap Italian food. Are you familiar with pizza?

(via pamplemousseonesixseven)

Here’s the thing.

Suppose you’re into French food, right? And you want something inexpensive, that’s authentically French. You could go to a cheap crepe place and get a crepe and call it a day. Cool

But suppose you want something more high end? That’s fine - there are options. Nice, white tablecloth joints with foie gras galore and highly-trained waitstaff.

Those two places, by the way, are both almost guaranteed to be owned by white people. Not necessarily French white people, but white people. And based on numbers, it’s highly likely that the head chef at the expensive place is also white.

Now suppose you want Mexican food. Want something inexpensive? Cool. Head to a neighborhood with a significant Mexican immigrant population, and it should be easy to find. And that restaurant (or food truck, in some cases) is probably run by someone from that ethnic community.

Suppose you want high-end Oaxacan cuisine, though? At a nice sit-down place with Michelin or Zagat writeups? (Because some folks are into that, and want to go to a place with an impressive wine list, or a string quartet playing while they eat, or whatever. It’s not my thing, but that’s some folks’ taste.) Chances are, that restaurant is also owned by white people. Chances are, the head chef there is also white. (Rick Bayless is a good example of a white dude who’s made his reputation on high-end Mexican food.) Maybe some of the back-of-house employees, the ones who get paid the least and do the drudge work of cooking the food served, are Mexican, but nobody sees them. They don’t get recognition, and they don’t get the paychecks that come with that recognition.

That’s the issue. This isn’t about some “ugh, everything bad is white people” grousing (and how you took it that way, I’m assuming, is based on your own biased reading) - this is about who gets recognized for doing what. Who gets credit. Who gets paid.

And if you think I’m full of shit for saying that, get at me when you can find a Mexican American chef of Bayless’ level of fame, with their own PBS cooking specials and cameos on Iron Chef America.

I’m not even going to touch that comment about pizza, because it’s disingenuous as fuck, considering that pizza is for the most part closer to street food than high-end restaurant fare.

(via crankyskirt)

(via decolonizeyourmind)

post-colonial:

in my socio class, we are talking about womb out-sourcing. there is a global commodity chain where (mostly) white upper/middle class women rent out the wombs of indian villagers because of fertility issues. its tens of thousands of dollars cheaper in india, of course.

we watched a documentary where a doctor delivering the child is on his phone, talking to the ‘legal’ parents as he cuts open this woman with a knife. he yanks a baby out and instantly everyone forgets about this woman. typically the contracts only cover till the ‘job is done’ meaning as soon as the baby is out of the womb. should this indian lady, who is paid 4k for 9 months of ‘work’, develop complications because she has been coerced into a c-section, the medical bills are on her.

anyway this white woman in the class kept insisting that no one knows the trauma of being infertile, that this process is SOO HARD on the legal parents, that we cant judge people for surrogacy.

my professor, a distinguished indian researcher who has spent years working on this issue, says yes— i sympathize with the parents, of course, but we are not against surrogacy. to treat these women as human beings, that is important too….

the lady goes on about how raising the wages for the surrogate mothers means that more ladies in america dont have access to this process… protecting the cheapness is important… 

every black and brown girl in the room rolls her eyes… this white boy is noticibly irritated, pipes up and says, BUT HISTORICALLY REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY MOSTLY BENEFITS RICH WHITE WOMEN WHILE EXPLOITING WOMEN OF COLOR, HOW CAN YOU IGNORE WHAT IS BEING DONE TO THESE WOMEN? JUST BECAUSE WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY FOR SURROGACY DOESNT MEAN YOU HAVE ACCESS TO THE BODIES OF POOR WOMEN OF COLOR!!

all the brown and black girls and many white women look at him appreciatively..

the white lady ignores that doctors and facilitating agencies make 20k+ off the process… she ignores you can provide for the birth mother while making huge profits…. would it be a big deal if a facilitating agency makes 15k instead??

the professor says, i interviewed this legal mother once. she said that she watched her child being born. as soon as the baby came out, the surrogate put the baby to her breast.

this white lady says to my professor, THIS DIRTY WOMAN. SHE JUST GAVE BIRTH. SHE WAS FILTHY AND DIDNT CLEAN HERSELF UP BEFORE PUTTING MY CHILD TO HER REPULSIVE BREAST.

so she’s good enough to be your incubator but not to feed the child she sustained for 9 months??

the professor says, there is this blog about a woman who did this out-sourcing. when her child was born she signed a contract with the surrogate for 1 m of breast milk. every 2 hours, she was hooked to a pump and basically milked at the hospital where she was recovering. the mother refused to let the surrogate breastfeed directly. she had a runner go to the hospital and bring the milk every few hours.

but no, let’s not speak of this!

how hard must infertility be for rich white people…….

(Source: le-kif-kif)

thisisnotindia:

Slumdogs: Funny how these tropes go along animalistic lines, right? Okay, maybe not so funny. Anyway, this second trope is the one modeled on the ever popular fascination with “poverty pornography,” as exemplified by Slumdog Millionaire and other films. Like the butterfly trope, the Slumdog fundamentally undercuts Asian women’s agency. Consider, for instance, the Academy Award winning documentary Born into Brothels, which follows Western photographer Zana Briski as she teaches a photography class to group of children from Kolkata’s red-light district. Although Briski’s project, at one level, was to give these children the tools to represent their own world through their own eyes, the film itself undermines this message by casting Briski as its protagonist–a white heroine who is seemingly the only adult who cares for the children of Sonagachi. The film’s portrayal of the sex worker/mothers as, at best, neglectful and, at worst, horrifically abusive, is highly problematic, as noted in an open letter from a sex worker/ grassroots organizer to an Indian newspaper:

The film is a one-sided portrayal of the life of sex workers in Sonagachi. It shows sex workers as unconcerned about the future of their children….The documentary does not shed light on the valiant efforts of the sex workers to unite in order to change their own lives as well as that of their progeny…We fear the global recognition of such a film, giving a one-sided view of the lives of sex workers in a third world country, may do a lot of harm to the global movement of sex workers for their rights and dignity.

As seen in this year’s Saving Face, a documentary about acid-attacks in Pakistan, the Slumdog trope is favors by the Oscars–which seems to love films which teach “us” about a victimized “them.” So, too, mainstream filmgoers (lest you think the Slumdog trope is only relevant to South Asians, let’s remember the Amy Tan Joy Luck Club syndrome). Just consider The Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a novel and film about women’s friendship, yes, but also about the practice of foot-binding in historic China. There is a pleasurable voyeurism in learning about “exotic” and oppressive practices, and conflating the two (exotic/Eastern = oppressive), while usually ignoring on-the-ground, local, grassroots activism against such oppression.

(via le-kif-kif)