by elfeminista » Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:22 am
I had not heard of Lierre Keith until today, when I recieved an invitation to register for a workshop at Wheelock College. Yes, yes and yes.
Requiered reading and required acting for males.
Lierre Keith interview:
So for liberals, defining people as members of a group is the harm. Whereas for radicals, identifying your interests with others who are dispossessed, developing loyalty to your people, is the first, crucial step in building a liberation movement. Liberals essentially think that oppression is a mistake, a misunderstanding, and changing people's minds is the way to change the world. That's where you get this tremendous emphasis on education as a political strategy. So for instance, instead of identifying the institutions that destroy communities of color and strategizing how to dismantle them, we're supposed to go to Unlearning Racism workshops and confess to being racists. Please don't misunderstand, this is not an excuse to avoid examining whatever privilege we have. And if we've behaved dishonorably, we need to make amends. My point is that however important personal accountability is, it's not political action.
Another example. One time at an activist conference I brought up some basic statistics on rape and male violence. And immediately another woman stood up and said--in that tone that's in the border area between earnest and self-righteous--"We need to educate."
I replied, "I don't want to educate men, I want to stop them." This was, of course, met with horrified silence--what exactly was I suggesting? But there is no therapy, no rehab program, that works to change perpetrators. By now, everything has been tried. Nothing works. They don't ever learn to see women as human beings. They don't ever stop feeling entitled to women's bodies. So not only was her suggestion liberal, it was useless.
And I think that's true of people--men and women--in industrial cultures as well. They feel entitled to consume the labor and, essentially, the lives of the poor, and the body of our planet. And no amount of education makes a dent in that entitlement. Hell, the Democrats had a platform in the last election that said Americans had the right--the right--to drive whatever kind of car they wanted, including SUVs. That's not a right. That's sociopathic behavior. It's destroying the planet. It's insane.
I think that to make the leap to radicalism takes three insights. The first is that there is a thing called power, social power, political power. The second is that some people have it and some people don't. The third is that there is a causal relationship between those groups: some people have it because some people don't. Once you've got that down, you can pretty much apply it to any situation.
I'm not saying we can't work together. There may be coalition projects that both progressives and radicals can engage in, but the philosophical underpinnings are going to make for permanent tensions in terms of both analysis and strategy.
Okay, so let's assume everyone reading Aric's website is a bona fide radical of whatever stripe. You asked about identifying the sources of harm. I'd say start with the most obvious, the most egregious harms. A fist in the face is pretty obvious. So is a hungry belly night after night.
Now trace it back: who's attached to that fist? Now, name an agent. If you're talking about male violence, that's hard. Not intellectually hard--it's easy to see who's attached to that fist. But emotionally, psychologically. One reason it's hard is because there are consequences to naming men and male power. You will be ridiculed, silenced, maybe physically threatened. You might be raped. You might be killed. When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, women who refused to wear burkhas, refused to stay entombed inside their houses, were lined up by the hundreds and shot. In Algeria, the Islamic fundamentalists have murdered 80,000 women who have resisted their demands, and the fundamentalists don't even control the government. I've heard from someone who's traveled extensively in Iraq that the same thing is happening to women there: men are picking women off one by one, any woman who looks like she's educated or has a job or is independent is a target for rape and murder.
Another reason it's hard is because there's a tremendous psychological identification with the oppressor. There's an absolutely brilliant book called Loving To Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives by Dee Graham. She's come up with the concept of Societal Stockholm Syndrome. Her basic thesis is that just as captives bond to their captors in hostage situations, women--and any group that's oppressed--will bond to men or the group that has social power. Everybody should read this book. It's incredibly important.
Once you've named the owner of the fist, because you're a radical you look for patterns. Who else is getting a fist in the face? And you find out: in the USA, every 18 seconds a man beats a woman. Keep tracing it back. Do the police stop him? Do the courts, the laws? Does god? Or do they in fact support his right to hit you? Who says he has a right to hit you? It's in the bible, you're supposed to submit because it's all Eve's fault. Why don't you count as a human being? You see that you're surrounded by images of women as objects, chopped into body parts, on display, for sale. In fact, women are being brutalized in millions of pictures and it's called sex. The clothes you're supposed to wear put you on display, make it impossible for you to run or even walk. They turn you into an object, a victim, and that's called "sexy." Why are you wearing these clothes? Why do you want this attention when every 18 seconds it ends with a fist in the face?
What you find is a whole web of institutions and cultural practices that support male violence: religion, laws, the police, the mass media and pornography, heterosexuality, the very definition of masculinity. He didn't put that fist in your face because of who you are as an individual. He did because he belongs to a class of people called men, and you belong to a class of people called women, and that describes a set of power relations.
"I was analyzing a phenomenon I am seeing on the internet-- a proliferation of blogs in which the blogger identifies as a radical feminist, but does not seem to embrace the distinctives of radical feminism as we understand the term in the United States.And you know, I think it's okay if they do that, but I also think it's important to say what I said because otherwise (1) herstoric radical feminism gets erased; (2) people new to feminism never hear what herstoric radical feminism really was or is."~ Heart