Read this black lesbian’s article about the racism, misogyny, and homophobia she experienced when she was part of Alcoholics Anonymous. Warning for a couple of mentions of racist and homophobic slurs/language and sexual harassment.
Four years after a young Montreal woman was sent home from work for having braids in her hair, the Quebec Human Rights Commission has ruled she was a victim of racial and gender discrimination.
The owner of Madisons New York Bar and Grill in downtown Montreal has been ordered to pay the 23-year-old $14,500 in damages.
“She took me aside personally and told me she didn’t want that kind of hairstyle in her establishment,” Lettia McNickle said, while fighting back tears.
McNickle recalls the distress she felt the day she was sent home by her boss in November 2014 and hopes the commission’s ruling will serve as a lesson to other employers.
“Now they [Madisons] know and other restaurants and companies know that they can’t get away with this,” she said.
McNickle’s mother, who worked as a hairdresser for two decades, claims it’s a victory for all black women.
“I just want to encourage other black women out there to be proud of who you are, from your afro hair to your curly hair, whether you want to straighten it out, it doesn’t define you,” Huelette McNickle said.
Black women are forced to assimilate to eurocentric hairstyles because our hair is punished for its natural state.
“It’s just hair”
“Why don’t you just wear your natural hair?”
Good. Now if we could get the US to agree, but it’s not discrimination because they can “just straighten it.” Sigh.
This reminds me of that Jurassic Park quote, about being so preoccupied with whether or not you could do something they didn’t stop to think if they should.
So what if they can straighten hair or shave a beard? So what if that tattoo or piercing was their choice? And don’t get me started on unnatural hair colors. Is it really any of your business?
Or to put it another way. If you are forcing a black woman to relax her hair to keep her job, the typical cost of that is $50 to $70. Every other month. With every single time risking physical injury.
Even if you ignore the risk, you are effectively paying that woman $25-35 a month less than her white coworker in the same job with the same pay.
“Can’t we just have the racism without the misogyny? Is that too much to ask?” (Who would have thought that a system based on fear of the other and enforcing “traditional gender roles” would fear the other and enforce traditional gender roles?)
an institutional problem that highlights why class reductionism is so dangerous is the infant mortality rates that black women in the united states experience. anyone who calls themselves a “feminist” or a “leftist” is hopefully aware that black women experience the highest rates of infant mortality out of all racial groups in the united states, and the disparities between black women and white women in this context are too astounding to ignore.
i’m watching episode two of a documentary series called “unnatural causes” – the title of ep 2 is “when the bough breaks”, for my women’s health class. it focuses on work done by two neonatologists (doctors who specialize in taking care of infants who are born prematurely, underweight, or both) and who explore the causes of black women’s high infant mortality rates.
one of the doctors initially thought that the reason this occurs is because of the socioeconomic disparities between black people and white people – so when they engaged in empirical analysis of this problem, they wanted to see what the gap would look like if they corrected for socioeconomic status. what they actually found is that the gap didn’t disappear – in fact, it /widened/ as educational attainment level and socieconomic status improved (which means college-educated black women and higher-income black women still have incredibly high infant mortality rates).
next time one of you dimwits says that class is the only real division or the most important division in society, know that your willful stupidity has a body count.
This is something that I am constantly thinking about and it really angers me when white leftists act as if class analysis is the end all be all. Of course that is important but just as you’ve said when looking at mortality rates of black mothers numbers say otherwise. I know that Serena William had a very complicated/dangerous birth with her daughter and obviously she has all the money in the world and access to the best doctors. More money will never mean less racism and trauma in many cases it means more.
I’ve read about and listened to podcasts analyzing studies about the black mother mortality rates and it really is connected to mental health and trauma. The fact of the matter is that especially compared to white women black women have a whole lot to worry about and that worrying is heavily tied to misogynoir. The same misogynoir that prevents doctors from having empathy for their black patients. I find that when you look at racism below the surface level of shouting racist epithets it goes over most people’s heads even leftists.
The neo-nazi who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters and murdered Heather Heyer was found guilty of first-degree murder and a bunch of other charges and will die in prison, Happy Hanukka.
“Degenerate” and “shouldn’t be allowed to breed more defective mutts to corrupt decent Anglo-Saxons” are not the same thing as “illegal”, however. Even in that time and place.
Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).
Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.
You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.
I have studied this in multiple women’s studies classes taught by white professors and they never once mentioned this. Yikes.
I figured the dialect writing had been played up and overdone in a very period condescending racist way. But, I had no idea before that it was a complete rewrite in totally fabricated “dialect”–considering the lady was not from the South at all and spoke Dutch as her first language.
Whatever political message Gage was trying to put across with that rewrite, it really doesn’t reflect Sojourner Truth’s intentions. I wish I were more surprised that it does so commonly get presented as a faithful transcript of the speech, but that really is appalling.
In October 2017, Vermont-based Migrant Justice scored a major victory in the organization’s campaign to extend labor protections to undocumented farmworkers in the state. After years of public action and lobbying, they reached an agreement with Ben & Jerry’s that established basic labor standards at the farms supplying dairy products to the company. Those standards included one day off a week, a minimum wage of $10 per hour, and accommodations that included electricity and running water — a milestone for farmworkers’ rights in Vermont. For many Migrant Justice organizers, who were themselves undocumented and had worked long hours in those dairy farms, the victory was personal.
But while Migrant Justice’s organizers were celebrating their victory, according to a lawsuit filed this week by a coalition that includes the ACLU of Vermont, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was carrying out a targeted operation to arrest and deport them. Using tactics that law enforcement agencies typically employ to disrupt organized crime, the lawsuit alleges that ICE agents planted at least one informant in Migrant Justice, attempted to hack into the email accounts of the group’s members, and compiled detailed dossiers on their movements and social circles.* And ICE had an eager partner in those efforts — the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles.
In 2013, Migrant Justice played a critical role in the passage of Vermont’s Driver Privilege Card law, which allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain legal driving permits. But a public-records request filed by the ACLU revealed that DMV officials systematically passed the private information of applicants for those permits directly to ICE, even in cases where ICE agents hadn’t asked for it. Email correspondence obtained in the request show DMV workers using racist language to describe those applicants, referring to “South of the Border” names and in one case lamenting that the state was being “over run by immigrants.”
ICE agents used the information they obtained from the Vermont DMV to track down Migrant Justice organizers who’d played critical roles in the group’s labor rights campaigning. According to the lawsuit, since early 2016 at least 20 Migrant Justice members were arrested by ICE, including the four plaintiffs in the suit. ICE agents referenced the group’s activism during some of those arrests, warning that other Migrant Justice organizers would be “next.” In other cases, agents indicated knowledge of the location and time of private meetings for Migrant Justice members that they could only have gained through intensive surveillance.
“The individuals in the complaint were targeted for political repression in retaliation for their constitutionally protected activity,” said Lia Ernst, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Vermont.
The lawsuit describes ICE agents tracking the movements of Migrant Justice organizers through a combination of surveillance operations, social media data mining, and DMV records. Leaders of the group were targeted since at least 2014, despite the Department of Homeland Security policy that supposedly prioritized enforcement against immigrants with serious criminal records. Two of the plaintiffs in the case, Enrique Balcazar Sanchez and Zully Palacios Rodriguez, were labeled “high-profile targets” by ICE, despite having no criminal record of any kind. Both were highly visible activists in Migrant Justice’s campaign to organize farmworkers.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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