Direct Action through a Racial Lens

When examining what is and what isn't effective in provoking social change, the topic of direct action always takes center stage. Highly public and dubiously legal (or outright illegal) protests and political actions garner the most media attention and often generate the most public support. However, it is necessary to consider direct action campaigns through a racial lens, especially when we consider who is permitted to participate in such groups.  Groups that are not explicitly focused on racial inequality, such as ACT-UP and more recently Occupy Wall Street and Cascadia Forest Defenders, have been unsurprisingly dominated by white men. 

When the most privileged members of the group occupy most of the leadership positions and are heard most frequently (as is and was the case in all of the previous examples) the overall direction of the group tends to reflect their specific needs. Entering the group as a member outside of that privileged elite can be both personally and politically daunting. Ann Cvetkovich addresses this in her piece "AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP's Lesbians". She quotes the activist Tracy Morgan as saying, "but I think the women in ACT UP, who were there from the start, must have trusted men politically in a way that I didn't." The sidelining and erasure of women and people of color in ACT UP did not only occur within the movement, but also followed the movement, manifesting themselves in its perceived legacy 20 years later. The contributions of lesbians and POC to ACT UP remain routinely ignored both in positive representations and in critiques of the movement.

Direct action as a political tactic relies on a certain leniency on the part of authority motivated by racial bias; it favors white activists who are less likely to face severe penalties due to lawbreaking or political disobedience. It also often relies on its participants being seen as nonviolent, which creates problems in a society where social nonconformity by nonwhite actors is seen as inherently violent. In comparison to a group of white actors, a group of black or arab men storming a government building carries an highly racially charged set of cultural connotations, regardless of their political or social aim.

The fact that direct action is currently seen as the ultimate or most desirable form of social protest by social justice activists reflects this racial bias. Those forms of political protest most accessible to white activists become valorized, even when similar forms of protest by nonwhite activists (such as the early activities of the Black Panthers) are seen as overly radical or even militant. The 

Furthermore, the group cohesion required to organize a direct action campaign also allows for prejudices to propagate unchecked for fear of "splintering the movement". Additionally, self-identified radicals often assume that they have examined their own positionalities in regards to gender and race when in fact that is rarely the case. On In Front And Center, user shergawia writes, "social justice people, by virtue of being people intensely involved in the struggle for equal rights and universal human dignity, assume themselves immune to the prejudices common to The Masses. ... For people so immersed in the fight to eradicate inequality, it’s so easy to forget that we are *equally* capable of instituting it ourselves."

Week 10: ACT-UP

In response to this weeks newspaper articles covering the AIDS epidemic in the United States from 1980-2000 I watched the documentary “United in Anger” which covered the history of AIDS activist movement ACT-UP.  In the article “AIDS Activist Group Harasses and Provokes To Make Its Point” it only begins to sum up the ACT-UP movement. The article describes the group of activist as using militant tactics such as dressing as clean-cut, white males to gain access to government buildings so they can handcuff themselves to the building and begin to make a scene through shouting or playing dead.  This is only example of how ACT-UP members physically and loudly shoved their movement in people’s face.

ACT-UP used the slogan “silence=death” to urge those who have ignored the AIDS crisis (those in power aka the government) to speak out. In the movie, one woman compared the AIDS epidemic to the Vietnam war where the people in power didn’t care about the lives of people without power.  In this ‘war’ they faced battles of corporate greed, social indifference, and government neglect.   Individuals stressed how there was no information available while thousands of people were dying daily.  This was because the epidemic was happening to a specific population(s) where it was viewed as “giving them what they deserved”.  In other words, in result of their immorality this disease was their punishment from God.

Since those in power were doing nothing about the epidemic, the only way to get the movement going was to use forceful in-your-face tactics. The movement ACT UP gained numbers instantly. The outlook of many individuals that were HIV positive was that if they were going to die soon, they might as well try and help save the lives of others by spreading the awareness. Hence, people all over the country would gather all the money they could to travel to join the ACT UP movement.  The film provides live footage of thousands of people outside of government buildings and FDA buildings making a riot.  Another tactic the ACT UP movement used was the use of media: film, newspapers, sound, and pictures. Since these were all new technologies it was a way for the movement to get their words out to the public. The documentary was filled with live footage that provided images words could never describe. Whether it was the large number of people protesting or people being brutally beaten from the police or those who were in the severe stages of AIDS. Here was a movement filled with seriously ill people that were not going to be ignored.

One of the main focuses of the ACT UP movement was to gain access to drugs being tested. As stated in the article “AIDS Coalition Targets FDA for Demonstration”: people would be able to choose for themselves, working with their doctors, whether they want to risk taking a drug because of the possible benefits.  At this point in history it took up to 10 years for a drug to be approved for on the market. Those who were HIV positive knew thousands were going to die before drugs were released.

Therefore, with militant tactics the movement gained numbers from individuals all over the world to help raise awareness about the epidemic of AIDS that no one else was doing anything about.  Without this push for drugs to be released, (hundred) thousands of more lives could have been taken from AIDS. And maybe the government would have never done anything about it because it was affecting those who were deviant in a white-heterosexual society. 

Week 7: Constraining Discourse through the Politics of Respectability

When an oppressed class comes under attack from a dominant class for deviating from its norms, one common response is to not only internalize that attack but to respond to it by shifting criticism to subclasses oppressed along other axes. Mumford provides several examples of this, noting how some leaders in the black community responded to the Moynihan report by urging community self-regulation against black expressions of homosexuality and against other perceived deviations from the standard of white patriarchy. This is exacerbated when the only members of the oppressed community who are allowed to be visible in the mainstream are those that conform to a completely unrealistic and dehumanizing idea of "respectability" dictated by the oppressive class. This however presents opportunities for subversion, where those visible members use their visibility to redirect discourse and challenge the dominant norms within the constraints placed upon their behavior and speech.

This bears similarities to recent dialogues around respectability within and without the trans community, where the lived experiences and behavior of trans women and people of color are minimized and constrained in the name of respectability.

The recent high-profile media appearances of Laverne Cox, Carmen Carrera, and Janet Mock exemplify the ways in which TWoC are made to respond to attacks . Both Carrera and Cox responded eloquently to incredibly invasive and inappropriate questions in a recent interview with Katie Couric. The overwhelming praise both received for these responses masks the fact that they couldn't have responded in any other way and have been taken seriously by Couric and her audience. A justifiably aggressive or angry response to such questions would have been perceived as playing into the stereotypes of emotional instability and "crudeness" that are constantly used to police the behavior of trans women and women of color. 

Janet Mock faced a similar dilemma in a recent interview with Piers Morgan. After Mock responded critically to Morgan's sensationalization of her body, Morgan threw what can only be called a tantrum on twitter, calling Mock "cisphobic" among other things. That a white cis man would express feeling personally attacked and threatened by a black trans woman who (politely) questioned his overstepping her boundaries and her identity speaks to the incredible degree to which he is insulated from social critique and to the impossibly rigid standards of behavior and expression TWoC are held to if they are to be considered "respectable".

This becomes deadly when one considers that trans women of color, the most demonized members within the trans community, are also the most at-risk for sexual violence, murder, and HIV. While the white (and predominantly male) components of the trans community seek to leverage events like the TDOR for political capital while maintaining an politically-respectable image of trans people, it excludes those people who are the actual victims supposedly being commemorated.

After reading Gregg's post last week about "Orange is the New Black," I watched an episode of Melissa Harris-Perry's talk show on MSNBC, about OITNB. Transgender actress Laverne Cox spoke about the case of Cece McDonald.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/cece-mcdonald-transgender-hate-crime-murder

This case brings up many of the same issues that Cheryl Hicks examines in "'Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl': Black Women's Sexuality and 'Harmful Intimacy' in Early-Twentieth-Century New York." Hicks writes about how working-class Black women's romantic and social lives were under surveillance (p. 149). They were often picked up by police -- sometimes just for walking in the streets while Black. They were commonly charged with vagrancy, disorderly conduct and prostitution (p. 420), and once arrested, racist and heterosexist prison officials hoped to reform them and strengthen their moral character. 

I see echoes of this history in Cece McDonald's case. According to the Huffington Post, 

   "CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman ... was controversially sentenced to 41 months in prison for second degree manslaughter after allegedly defending herself against a racist and transphobic attack." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/laverne-cox-cece-mcdonald_n_4588838.html)

Recently, on Jan 13, McDonald was released from a men’s prison in St. Cloud, MN, after serving time for surviving a violent, racist, transphobic attack. 

Her story is moving. Here, her support group describes what happened:

   "Around 12:30 am on June 5, 2011, CeCe was walking to the grocery store with some friends, all of them young, African American, and LGBTIQ or allied. As they passed a local bar, the Schooner Tavern, a group of older, white people who were standing outside the bar’s side door began hurling racist and transphobic slurs at them, without provocation.  They called CeCe and her friends ‘faggots,’ ‘niggers,’ and ‘chicks with dicks,’ and suggested that CeCe was ‘dressed as a woman’ in order to ‘rape’ Dean Schmitz, one of the attackers. When CeCe approached the group and told them that her crew would not tolerate hate speech, one of the women said, “I’ll take you bitches on,” and then smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. She punctured CeCe’s cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland. A fight ensued, during which one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

"CeCe was the only person arrested that night.  She was briefly taken to the hospital where she received 11 stitches in her cheek. While she was still suffering both physically and mentally from this traumatic incident, she was left alone in a room for three hours and then interrogated, and then placed in solitary confinement at the Hennepin County men’s jail." (http://supportcece.wordpress.com)

Gender Roles at a young age

             

            Children at a young age already develop a notion of what is normal and expected in society. The family and the home enforce gender roles many would argue. George Chauncey argues that in the 1950’s, the mothers were being blamed for their child’s deviance, (Chauncey, 172).  The creation of the “sex criminal” enforced norms with in society that made mothers take a closer look at their children and surveillance their actions. Due to the media there was a great amount of fear of the “Sex Criminal”. Chauncey argues that because most states were feeding in to the notion/image of the “sex criminal”, everything that was not part of the norm or a threat to the norm was considered a “sex criminal”.  The video above is an example of how children are taught at a young age to conform to the normality of society. At that young age these children know what is gender specific and the worst part is these children are already brain washed to believe that women are the caregivers and stay home and men work. On page 177 Chauncey discusses at a young age children were being looked at to see if they were going to be abnormal and in need of help. He gives the example that if boys did not play sports and girls did that they were questioned and treated as if they were psychotic, (Chauncey, 177).  This here reinforces the ideology that all children are taught at a young age that certain activities are for boys and certain activities are for girls. Back then they were viewed as abnormal and punished but in modern day it is more excepted, however many times children are teased.  I believe that we need to start breaking the notions about gender at a very young age. It is hard as we live in a society, which is fueled by patriotism. Families need to stop reinforcing gender norms in the households, as it might be to late to change the children’s views when they start school.

Week 5: Mediating Media

One persistent theme across this week’s readings is the role of media in the proliferation of definitions of the “Other”, and the impact of media on what becomes the dominant normative ideology concerning these dangerous "Others", be they black, gay, bad mothers, outspoken women, aka anyone who defies the norm.   As George Chauncey, Jr.(1993) posits:

     The postwar consensus thus maintained that to be sexually "normal" was to behave in a way the dominant      culture considered not only socially acceptable and moral, but also statistically average and "mature;"...          Failure to adhere to the sexual conventions, moral standards, and (supposed) majority practices of one's        culture made one a deviate.

Given that Michael Sam recently made a ripple in the news world with the prospect of his becoming the first openly gay NFL player, should he be drafted, let’s consider the continued role media plays in redefining societal perceptions of stigmatized peoples. As expected, several media outlets, especially those of the conservative variety, have quickly revived the refrain of homosexuality as a threat to “true” athletes (what if they have to shower with a gay player?!?), along with the familiar “think of the children” alarms, both tactics nauseatingly familiar from our readings.

In his February 10, 2014 broadcast of the Daily Show, John Stewart skillfully deconstructed the controversy surrounding Michael Sam’s announcement in a brief, yet hard-hitting, 4:24 min segment. Here is the full link for your enjoyment, Daily Show Michael Sam Segment, but for now let us narrow in on the concluding comparison which speaks directly to this week’s readings. Conveniently, the internet has already created a panel for us, starting with a news correspondent's report that Sports Illustrated has already spoken with a number of teams who are looking to avoid the "controversy" of picking an openly gay athlete:

How is it that partner preference is just too much? The sarcasm dripping from every line John Stewart delivers shreds the conflation of homosexuality (and by extension all non-heterosexual orientations) with the widespread category of deviant, a traditional line of thinking left over from the postwar sex crime frenzy days in our recent past. By running through a list of agreeably serious offenses with severe consequences for people other than the athlete involved, Stewart highlights the absurdity of conflating being gay as something worthy of a moral uproar from any NFL team.

On a related note, check out this video as well: Texas News Anchor. I was blown away. We fear that which we do not know.

Week 4: Who were the Nazis persecuting, REALLY?

As we recall during the prohibition era, we continually saw the implicit oppression of those that identified or displayed behavior that was outside the heteronormative way.  We now have observed that policy was enacted after efforts of the prohibition era failed to deter such activity from the gay community to keep them apart from the mainstream culture to deliberately express their sexuality.  Given the article we just read, "The Exclusion of Homosexuality From the Public Sphere in the 1930's", something similar was occurring abroad to what other people may have overlooked widely until decades later.  Many dismiss the events of World War II and Nazi Germany as the xenophobic elimination of one specific minority group to create the ideal "Arian Race".  The Jews were solely sought as the certain population to cleanse Germany from, however, there were more groups involved that were being persecuted for operating outside the German Norm.  It was evident that homosexual men and women were being oppressed by Nazi Germany, imprisoning them in concentration camps.  They wore an inverted pink triangle to signify that they were heterosexual.  Over 100,000 homosexuals (more specifically from Poland) became victims of these death camps.

What was ironic from the way events played out was that homosexual culture flourished during the 1920's in literature, cinema, and the media; unfortunately, due to rising inflation and economic dilemmas encouraged the Nazi regime which began to use scapegoats for the country's problem.  The question remains, who were the Nazi's persecuting, really? Many hear the narrative of the Jewish faith becoming eliminated, but the world forgot about our brothers and sisters of the gay community.  In this aspect, we observe another instance on how the government has succeeded to silence different sexual expressions throughout history.  Once again, with the Sochi games coming up the same has occurred, but the growing resistance from the gay community and its allies will be a tantamount milestone to the continued existence of a new freedom of speech.

http://en.auschwitz.org/h/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=3

Week 4: Black Women's Sexuality and 'Harmful Intimacy' 100 years later

Reflecting on “’Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl’”: Black Women’s Sexuality and ‘Harmful Intimacy’ in Early-Twentieth-Century New York,” by Cheryl D. Hicks, led me to think of Jenji Kohen’s celebrated television series on Netflix, “Orange is the New Black” (OITNB). Hicks explores questions of race, gender and sexuality in the 1910s and 1920s through the lens of 100 case files of inmates at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills. Exactly 100 years later, OITNB explores questions of race, gender and sexuality in the 2010s through the lens of the inmates of a women’s prison in upstate New York, based on the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, by Piper Kerman.

In some ways, not much has changed. Hicks documents the ways in which the “racial construction of sexuality” led authorities at Bedford to naturalize and essentialize black female sexuality as deviant. Hicks also describes the deep anxiety authorities felt over the “harmful intimacy” of white women attracted to or in intimate contact with black women.

In OITNB, the same themes and anxieties identified by Hicks still hold sway, at least as life in a women’s prison is portrayed by Piper Kerman, as adapted by Jenji Kohen. In the series, Piper, a bisexual white woman sentenced to a minimum security prison for her involvement in an international drug smuggling ring, has a sexual relationship while in prison with her ex-female lover, infuriating Healy, a prison officer and social worker who manages Piper’s case file. Piper’s “harmful intimacy” with another woman is only one of many examples of same-sex intimacy in the prison portrayed in OITNB, but because Piper is white and from an upper-middle-class background, Healy, like the prison officials in Hicks’ study, assumes Piper can be reformed and redeemed. Therefore, although he ignores or seems to take same-sex encounters among the other inmates in stride as somehow natural or “going with the territory,” evidence of Piper’s sexual “deviance” triggers in Healy an avalanche of anger and disgust.

Other characters include Mendez, one of the prison guards in OITNB. Mendez, like the prison officials described by Hicks, essentializes black and Latina inmates as inherently sexual, but he takes his demeaning, racist and sexist assumptions substantially further, dehumanizing the inmates of color and sexually assaulting them with impunity.

Some critics have blasted what they describe as OITNB’s racist portrayal of many of the inmates and the basic premise of a story largely about women of color in which the avenue in to their lives is via the character of an upper-middle-class white woman. But others have defended and celebrated the show for the ways in which they suggest Kohen, like Hicks, reveals the deeper humanity of the inmates by reflecting on their back stories, their motivations and the aspects of their lives that they generally hide within the prison walls. In this viewpoint, the racist language and stereotypes in the show are regularly questioned, critiqued and destabilized. And although Piper is the star of the show, her white privilege and her initial attempts to claim heterosexual privilege (waiting for her outside prison is her male fiancé, which Piper initially plays up, deflecting any suggestion that she is interested in intimate encounters with other women) are opened up to constant critique, undermining her own claims to the sympathy of the viewers. To the show's supporters, the characters of the other prisoners in OITBN are complex and generally sympathetic, standing in stark contrast to the attempts of some of the prison staff to dehumanize, simplify or essentialize them. For supporters, OITNB thus offers a powerful critique of the assumptions many Americans make about women – particularly women of color - in the prison system. Included among the characters OITBN presents in a strikingly sympathetic light is the trans woman Sophia, played by the transgender actress and advocate, Laverne Cox.

Kohen has suggested that she intended the show to be an exploration of the lives of a diverse cast of female inmates, but that she went with the real-life Piper Kerman’s true story as an accessible route in for mainstream white American television viewers. In an interview on NPR, Kohen said:

“In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it’s a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it’s relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It’s useful.”

Week 4: Black's n Blues... and Beyonce

While reading Cheryl Hicks' "Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl" she lightly touched the topic of black women expressing sexuality through music, specifically the blues.  During the early-twentieth- century the blues music scene was a way for black artists to express their sexual desire through lyrics and performances. While Hicks only provided a few sentences on this topic, I believe within the scope of black women's sexuality and its expression during the early twentieth-century, the importance of blues should not be understated.

During the 1920s and 1930s the blues deviated from society in terms of providing promiscuous and sexual imagery within the lyrics. For example in Bessie Smith's lyrics she clearly expresses sexual desires in the song "I'm Wild About That Thing" :

Give it to me papa, I'm wild about that thing 

Do it easy, honey, don't get rough, 

From you, papa, I can't get enough 

I'm wild about that thing, I'm wild about that thing. 

Everybody knows it, I'm wild about that thing. 

While sexual desires were clearly stated in many songs, this did not exclude desires of homosexuality.  Willie Dixon's song "Back Door Man" clearly shows this through the title of the song in combination of repetition of "I-I-I am the, the backdoor man" and later:

When everybody is-a trying' to sleep 

I'm-a somewhere makin' my midnight creep

And ev'ry mo'nin when the rooster crows 

He's tellin' me that it's the time to go

The early twentieth century was a time where all women faced more critical surveillance specifically in the topic of sexuality and social life.  However "many young working-class black women, regardless of their regional, religious, or familial background, grappled with the relentless surveillance by police officers, reformers, concerned relatives, and community members" (Hicks, 420).  Due to the increase in sexuality amongst social and public places, the African American society was labeled as  highly sexual and promiscuous. While these labels don't actually represent the African American culture the magnified glass the police held on African American women contributed to the stereotype they they are extremely promiscuous.

This stereotype continues in today's modern society. The clearest example is pop-music artist (and legend) Beyonce. Beyonce provides the public with promiscuous and sexual lyrics in combination with her hypnotizing performances on stage. 

For example, her lyrics Blow are exactly what your dirty mind thinks ...

Keep me coming, keep me going 

Keep me humming, keep me moaning

Don't stop screaming, freaking, blowing 

Can you eat my skittles 

It's the sweetest in the middle 

Pink that's the flavor 

Solve the riddle 

While some may argue that today's music lyrics are worse than what they have been before, I disagree completely. These lyrics are not any more provocative than Bessie and Willie lyrics. They are all talking about sexual experiences and desires. I personally believe that every person, no matter sex, gender, race, class should be able to speak freely about their sexuality. We are just a bunch of "filthy animals" anyway... 

Even though Beyonce publicly identifies as a feminist, she is constantly judged and picked apart for her lyrics, outfits, and performances for how they demonstrate black women's sexuality. Meanwhile, there are white female artist who do the exact same thing. For example, Madonna is a pop icon legend who visibly expressed sexuality amongst her lyrics, performances, and clothes... not to mention she publicly made out with Britney Spears on stage and it didn't jeopardize her title.  

While Madonna is praised for her expression of sexuality, Beyonce is critiqued and questioned of her views as a feminist. The difference of perception amongst the public eye, only continues the stereotype and idea that black women are considered as more of a sexual deviant than white females. 

Even though (Disney's Hannah Montana) Miley is doing this.....

For you're clear enjoyment here is Beyonce's video for "Drunk in love" ... 

Drunk In Love

-PK

Week 3: Selective Association: Reaping the Benefits

When analyzing the texts from this week and personal experiences, I could not help but think of privilege in terms of race/ethnicity and class and the ability the middle and upper class white folks had to leave their “designated spaces.” Not to perpetuate the idea of segregation and having separate appropriate spaces for specific identities, but a type of “safe space” is often needed for folks who are marginalized and not generally comfortable and accepted in most other areas.

Heap presented this idea within the LGBTQ and People of Color communities in both chapters five and six. However, the problematic aspect of this privilege, whites being able to enter traditionally non-white and/or non-heterosexual spaces, is that they do so solely for their benefit and at their whim. For example, Heap mentioned that white, middle/upper middle class folks went into Harlem and African-American nightclubs and venues to partake in what they thought to be perverse and sexually deviant behavior. For them, slumming was a nightlife activity that did not seem to interfere with their day lives or others perception of them during the day. Yet, at night they could be as sexual or even sexually active with men and women of color without it being a large issue. Therefore, they utilized spaces that were for people of color, “blacks and tans” as Heap states throughout. Initially white folks did not enter the spaces without some sort of judgment and usually racially loaded perceptions. For example, in chapter five someone comments that going into the cabarets, “you go sort of primitive up there,” (Heap, 196). In my opinion, this comment reflects implicit negative stereotypes about African American folks simply by the language used. “Primitive” implies less civilized, not modern, lesser, etc. However, despite having these ideas about those who participated in the nightlife scene, white folks wanted to be involved solely for their entertainment. White folks were selectively associating themselves with people of color and viewed them as spectacles to watch for pleasure or involve with for their own personal pleasure.

These observations lead me to think of issues of selective association for benefit reaping in my own communities, whether CU Boulder as an institution or in the larger boulder area. I came across and article a while back that made me draw connections between folks claiming a certain race or ethnic group for benefits and the questions of “who can claim a race, what amount qualifies a person to be a certain race, etc.”

Elise Hu wrote an article for National Public Radio (NPR) entitled Minority Rules: Who Gets to Claim Status as a Person of Color? The article itself is focused on “Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren…[and her] claim of Native American ancestry.” According to Warren, she is 1/32 Cherokee and actively claims that identity. Despite her self-identification as a Native American woman, many people question the boundaries and rules to claiming marginalized identities for seemingly personal benefits. I connected this with the idea of students who apply for scholarships, grants, and other forms of financial aid and claim “Hispanic” race identity yet would in almost any other situation identify as white. I find this very problematic because, like I mentioned above, white folks who do this are doing so solely for their own benefit and continue to marginalize those who have and always do actively claim said identify. It is similar to the theme of selective association in terms of slumming and Harlem. People of color and LGBTQ/non-heterosexual or gender conforming folks who are proud to identify in specific ways in respective space then have someone come into that space and utilize it only when they benefit yet receive none of the stigma of the marginalized identity. This can be incredibly frustrating because they are also the people who help perpetuate your marginalization.

Whether it be partaking in almost exclusively “black and tan” nightlife entertainment, claiming racial/ethnic identity for financial gain or political benefits, middle and upper middle class white people cannot freely enter spaces for gain that they would otherwise never associate with. It is problematic because it capitalizes on certain aspects of a marginalized identity without having to deal with the negative and constantly hurtful effects of being in a marginalized group. As a white person, already holding institutional and systemic power, then adding in the layer of class privilege, it is in very poor taste to so negatively and consciously use the power that other people do not have to benefit yourself and consequently further oppress others. http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/05/16/152822762/minority-rules-who-gets-to-claim-status-as-a-person-of-color

Week Three: Oh Miley Cyrus...modern day slumming made visible

Cultural Artifact:  Miley Cyrus Music Video for "We Can't Stop"

Miley Cyrus received a lot of press for her now oft-termed "transgressive" performance at the 2013 Video Music Awards. In the set, she danced suggestively, showed off her twerking “skills”, mimed burying her face in a voluptuous black woman’s rear end, ground her rear end into Robin Thicke’s crotch, and simulated sex with a foam finger. Quite the spectacle. The public and private responses varied from feminists calling for an end to "slut-shaming" they argued is employed by the conservatives determined to police the sexuality of young women, to activists of color asking folks to question Miley's appropriation of black culture in her recent shift as public performer (I would say artist...but that seems to be a stretch). It is the latter that I currently find of interest for this blog post, as it relates to Chad Heap’s discussion on the seemingly antiquated excursion of slumming. Rather than assume slumming no longer exists, perhaps an argument needs to be made that one must no longer travel anywhere in order to use the Other to justify the construction of your oppositional identity.

In his description of the appeal of the Negro Vogue craze phase of urban slumming, Heap states, “For these [white] men and women, a slumming excursion to Harlem or Bronzeville was ‘like taking a trip from their white world into another mysterious dark world,’ a trip that offered numerous occasions to take advantage of the supposed freedoms of black nightlife while simultaneously reinforcing a sense of white superiority,” going on to assert, and this is of special interest in relation to Miley Cyrus’ seeming wanton appropriation of urban black cultural markers, “slumming created a space where middle-class whites could normalize their own increasingly public sexual behavior by contrasting it with the spectacle of cross-racial and black sexuality presented in local black and tans.” (Heap 2009:191)

Rather than join in the chorus of responding to Miley’s VMA performance, I chose to watch, for the first time, the video of the song “We Don’t Stop” which was performed at the awards show. I was, to be honest, horrified. The video begins with Miley symbolically cutting off an ankle monitor (linking her to the perceived delinquency of blacks? I am not sure of most of the choices made in the filming of this video…), shifting quickly into an image of her placing a highly stylized gold “grill” into her mouth and “mean mugging” for the camera. Really? Oh honey, just stop. From there it just goes downhill as Miley and her seemingly diverse group of friends (although predominantly white), party in a variety of settings. Multiple times Miley engages in various forms of appropriating black culture, most notably twerking in a circle of all black women while giving sung shout: “To my home girls here with the big butt/Shaking it like we at a strip club”. 

In addition to these images of a white female body acting in seemingly “black” ways, we also see Miley writhing, dressed in all white, on an all white bed, in a varying assortment of sexually explicit poses. Legs open, crotch exposed, back arched, aggressive/assertive sexuality shamelessly on display. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing…but reconsider the quote from Heap and how slumming enables elite whites to express their blossoming sexuality as normative in contrast to the primitive, threatening and perverted sexuality of black citizens and suddenly the bad taste in my mouth makes sense. “We Can’t Stop” is a celebration of black cultural appropriation and may even be read as a contemporary version of slumming which no longer requires actually going to a specified geographic location. This makes her final chorus oddly fitting: “And we can't stop/And we won't stop/We run things, things don't run we/Don't take nothing from nobody.”

Well then Miss Miley, I’ll take this to mean you’re not interested in having a conversation about your revival of slumming ideologies.... sigh. 

Week 3- After the sweep where do you throw the dirt????

SWEAPING THE SLUMS, in today’s society is not so hidden. One might drive through a slum neighborhood and one month later drive through again and all the affordable living buildings would leveled. White people going to the slums for entertainment in the early 1900’s desired to consume the black/tan life. However, when both white men and women started promoting scare tactics into their communities, the desire for the nightlife of the slums shifted into fear of the nightlife. The slums are/were areas where people who live in poverty can afford to live, and the people in that community depend/ed on the capital brought in by the white middle/upperclass consumers. It’s similar to supply and demand, if the demand is high society keeps producing, if it is low they stop production and move in a new product. What is happening to slums, is contractors are coming in buying the land for 400,000 because the buildings are not worth anything and then they are building 20 urban lofts and selling each one for 500,000. Only people with economic capital can afford to live in the newly “highland” area. However if this was the only area affordable to live in for most people,…where do those people end up?

  I grew up in central Denver, down the street from Sports Authority Stadium, a block away from Colfax. The description of a slum that was presented in the reading, when I read it the picture of my old neighborhood appeared in my head. I grew up knowing what drugs, prostitution and strip clubs were, before I knew how to read. My grandparents live on the corner of 16th and king and across the street from affordable living apartments. This area used to be where many people would come to purchase drugs and look for people to pick up. However over the years the violence rose to an extreme level and over time less consumers would be seen. In the year 2015 the old slum looking apartments are going to be newly built million dollar lofts. Those people that lived in those apartments were bought out and pushed into the industrial area of Colorado. How many times can society push communities out before there is nowhere else to go? Freakonomics