Happy holidays

That last post is hard to scroll through but I hope some of you read it.

I decided to make a shorter post for easier access. This time just to wish you all a happy and safe holiday season. Congratulations to the women on this board who are pregnant.

Happy holidays to all of you and your families.

Chris Z performs spoken word with The World Is A Beautiful Place at the Webster Theatre in Hartford. This piece, entitled "Tyler's Big Day Out" is a response to the very negative and hate-speech laden online reactions to a workshop Chris ran in April, one specifically aimed at the use of the word "nigga" by a bunch of white people.

From his Tumblr: 

This is me.in April, i tried to hold a workshop in response to a white dude saying the words “get money nigga” at the end of one of his band’s songs. it didn’t go well. i was being “too pc” for people’s liking. they thought i was on a guilt tripping spree, trying to make them all feel racist.  these people were defending the band’s right to say “nigga” so, i gotta say, they were being racist. i got called retarded, a retarded nigger, a faggot, a nigger faggot, etc etc. fuck that.you seem to think that because you don’t/ wear a white hood & burn crosses/ that you aren’t racist./that your “black friends” and vaguely left-leaning political views pre-ordain you to a lifetime supply of good dude credits. in 2012 when a Black youth is 7 times more likely than a white youth to be punished for a comparable offense in school, we are colorblind right?[i]when college educated Black people make less than their high school educated white counterparts, they are just unlucky right[ii]? or maybe not trying hard enough.when white authority places no value on Black life (see police brutality convictions[iii], stop and frisk procedures, etc) it’s all wrong place wrong time right?in 2012 racism exists in a bubble. tiny pockets in the South, in Arizona, but not here. not you.if anything us here in the North East have become too PC right? because one night i decided to try and call racism by its name. because your friends think that word is archaic. it’s funny. no harm done.i did my research.  a study in 2011 (archaic) conducted by Penn State found that Black people often exhibit what they called Racial Battle Fatigue, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder/ the Poverty Clinic found that micro-transgressions against People of Color had not only psychological but also physical effects.Robert Carter, relooked at ‘Carson’s Conceptual Model for Trauma’ as it related to Race and the million tiny slights whites commit without thought.and there’s the Perilla Study (2002), Glenn Miller’s The Trauma of Insidious Racism, so on and so forthbut  yet, when i tried to research the long-standing psychological damage of middle class white people being told to watch their fucking tongues… i was shocked to find none.but i guess what i forgot is: you are the expert right? cause people always call you…. oh wait. there isn’t a slur for you that denotes the 100’s of years of oppression,that indicates all the actions others commit that attempt to tell you that you aren’t even human, that triggers all the times your mother and grandparents ET ALL fought for the most basic rights and were continuously told they didn’t deserve those rights.that word doesn’t exist, does it?what i am getting at is, shut your fucking mouth you whiny goddamn overgrown babies and open your ears.because maybe you don’t wear a hood but defending the repeated saying of racist words under a guise not even as base as freedom of speech but that they aren’t harmful?well that’s fucking racism.

Someone tell Mindless Self Indulgence and My Chemical Romance.

More about hipster racism

I thought this was pretty great, and relevant to this blog.

RIP Adam Yauch

I Want To Say a Little Something That's Long Overdue The Disrespect To Women Has Got To Be Through To All The Mothers And Sisters A And The Wives And Friends I Want To Offer My Love And Respect To The End

If only there were more musicians who felt this way instead of degrading women. RIP MCA. OK, there is something else I want to add to this. This article. Like the woman here I am a long time Beastie Boys fan, since the early days. This article talks a lot about the feminism of the Beastie Boys, how they apologized for using slurs in their old songs, and the misogyny still in music today. I think it is well worth the read.

Once you’ve realized that you’re living in a world that believes women are “less than” in every imaginable way, one of the things that can be most frustrating is that very few men get it. You want the people in your life, the men you care about, to understand the awful toll it can take on you. Operating in a world that sees you as less than fully human can be soul crushing—but it’s also incredibly lonely. When you speak up about any sense of unfairness or injustice, you’re told that you’re overreacting, you’re too angry, too silly—shut up already. It takes a tremendous amount of fortitude to be able to live in this world as a woman, let alone a woman who wants things to change. And that’s what was so remarkable and emotional about the Beastie Boys’ feminist turnaround. Maybe your father says sexism doesn’t exist and your boyfriend disrespects you. Maybe you have to deal with assholes on the subway who rub up against you every day and laugh when you yell at them. But listening to this band that you love so much say that your pain is real, that the world is fucked up and that they are not going to participate in actions that hurt you anymore because they care about you—it was the overwhelming feeling of being made visible. They were sending a clear message to their female fans: This isn’t okay, we have your back, we’re sorry. It was the apology we never got from the high school teacher who stared at our breasts, the acknowledgement of injustice that politicians and American culture dance around—and it was coming from people whom we cared about and respected, people with cultural power. Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to “do the laundry” and “clean up my room” could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.

Hipster racism

"If you have a problem with the word n*gger, please get on your telephones and call Method Man at his agency, at (redacted,) and when his agent and/or secretary therein picks up, I want you all to say 'I came to bring the pain...'"

Jimmy Urine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHQ8f1WuRs

The typical racist, "Well black people say it so that means it's okay if I do" argument.

Except no.

When a non-black person says the N-word, one of the top excuses given is that since black people use the slur, others should be able to as well. 

Why Black People Can Use the N-Word: A Perspective

That African Americans (and some Latinos) are able to use the N-word freely while others are not is, I take it, an obvious fact.  In one particular form, the N-word carries connotations of camaraderie.  The expression is used, as rapper Q-Tip has pontificated, “as a term of endearment.”  However, it is also widely known that this use is typically not available to non-black language users.  



White People Can Use the N-Word
White People Can Use the N-Word

 the real reason I don’t get the urge to slap a black person every time I hear them say the “N-word” is that the image of them holding a whip and screaming at me to pick cotton doesn’t pop into my head when they say it.  I don’t get the image of them telling me and “my kind” to go to the back of the bus.  If you’re white and you’re really wondering why so many blacks are against you saying the word, blame your ancestors.  They fucked it up for you.
And again, I’m now saying that you CAN say the word.  Just realize that saying it could come with consequences.  I have a group of female friends that call each other “Bitches.”  I’m smart enough to know though that if I walked up to one of them and said “Hey bitch”, I might get a knee to my nuts.  Same thing with white people who are hoping for the ability to use the N-word.  You can use it.  Use it as much as you want.  Go to downtown Baltimore wearing a “Nigga Please” shirt.  But after you get beaten to a pulp, I don’t want to hear you crying about a damn thing.



Jimmy Urine also uses the argument that he's "racist against white people." You cannot be racist against white people. Racism is about institutionalized oppression. he will just never get it. After all this time, what I still can't believe is how ignorant and yes, racist this band is.

And that's just the one song, mind. This says nothing about "F*ggot" and "Bitches" and "Five Year Old Panty Shot."

He (and his racist friends) can excuse this all they want. They are still all a group of ignorant, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic assholes.

Men who "learn" not to degrade women

I found this quote from an anon commenter on the last post and I thought it was relevant.

What do you guys think of Jay-Z's recent announcement?

Jay-Z has vowed to never use derogatory terms for women in his music again following the birth of his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter.

The rapper, who welcomed his first child with wife Beyoncé last weekend, has stated in a poem to celebrate the birth of baby Blue Ivy that he will drop the use of 'b*tch' - revealing that his degradation of women in his songs "has passed."



"Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich/ I didn't think hard about using the word b*tch/ I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it/ Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it. I never realized while on the fast track that I’d give riddance to the word bitch, to leave her innocence in tact."

The hip-hop icon continued:

"No man will degrade her, or call her name. I'm so focused on your future, the degradation has passed. I wish you wealth, health and insight. Forever young you may pass. Blue Ivy Carter, my angel."

I personally think of this as a start, but only that. He still has a lot of work to do. We see this with men a lot. They have a daughter and all of a sudden they don't like to see women degraded. There are two problems I see with this immediately.

One: Didn't his wife count as a woman who shouldn't be degraded? Or wasn't she "innocent" enough? He seemed to think it was all right for "non-innocent" women to be degraded.

And OK fine, it is good that he can see it from a different perspective now that he has a daughter and maybe he will extend this feeling to all women. I hope so. I hope he can continue to learn.

But the second problem is that it is still about HIM. It took him personally experiencing the feeling of "this is too close to me now and I don't want it to happen" in order for him to change.

Or as another anonymous commenter said on this blog,

I don't understand, Why does something dramatic have to happen in someone's life before they decide "Oh, yeah I gotta stop being this way because I don't want some one to mess with mine in the future."

Men should respect women not because the disrespect upsets men, but because it oppresses women. At least that is what I believe in cases like that.

However I still want to say that it is a good start and in my own opinion, if he continues to learn more about oppression and misogyny, then maybe he will come to realize this. I have hope.

We didn't hear a word like this from Gerard Way, Lindsey Way, or Frank Iero when they had daughters. Not one of them came forward and said "I never thought about how women were treated until I had a daughter, now I think I'll stop degrading them." So also in my opinion, Jay-Z is way ahead of them. MSI and MCR are still in the dark ages.

Also, I wish all of you a happy and healthy new year and the best of luck in 2012.