Lierre Keith: The Girls and the Grasses

by | Aug 25, 2015 | Agriculture, Listening to the Land, Male Supremacy, Male Violence, Rape Culture, Women & Radical Feminism

Captured in a test tube, blood may look like a static liquid, but it’s alive, as animate and intelligent as the rest of you. It also makes up a great deal of you: of your 50 trillion cells, one-quarter are red blood cells. Two million are born every second. On their way to maturation, red blood cells jettison their nuclei―their DNA, their capacity to divide and repair. They have no future, only a task: to carry the hemoglobin that will hold your oxygen. They don’t use the oxygen themselves–they only transport it. This they do with exquisite precision, completing a cycle of circulation through your body every twenty seconds for a hundred days. Then they die.

The core of hemoglobin is a molecule of iron. It’s the iron that grasps the oxygen at the surface of your lungs, hangs on through the rush of blood, then releases it to wanting cells. If iron goes missing, the body, as ever, has a fallback plan. It adds more water to increase blood volume; thin blood travels faster through the fine capillaries. Do more with less.

All good except there’s less and less oxygen offered to the cells. Another plan kicks in: increased cardiac output. The heart ups its stroke volume and its rate. To keep you from exploding, the brain joins in, sending signals to the muscles enfolding each blood vessel, telling them to relax. Now blood volume can increase with blood pressure stable.

But still no iron arrives. At this point, the other organs have to cooperate, giving up blood flow to protect the brain and heart. The skin makes major sacrifices, which is why anemics are known for their pallor. Symptoms perceived by the person―you―will probably increase as your tissues, and then organs, begin to starve.

If there is no relief, ultimately all the plans will fail. Even a strong heart can only strain for so long. Blood backs up into the capillaries. Under the pressure, liquid seeps out into surrounding tissues. You are now swelling and you don’t know why. Then the lungs are breached. The alveoli, the tiny sacs that await the promise of air, stiffen from the gathering flood. It doesn’t take much. The sacs fill with fluid. Your body is drowning itself. This is called pulmonary edema, and you are in big trouble.

I know this because it happened to me. Uterine fibroids wrung a murder scene from me every month; the surgery to remove them pushed me across the red cell Rubicon. I knew nothing: my body understood and responded. My eyes swelled, then my ankles, my calves. Then I couldn’t breathe. Then it hurt to breathe. I finally stopped taking advice from my dog―Take a nap! With me!–and dragged myself to the ER, where, eventually, all was revealed.

Two weeks later, the flood had subsided, absorbed back into some wetland tissue of my body, and I felt the absence of pain as a positive. Breathing was exquisite, the sweetest thing I could imagine. Every moment of effortless air was all I could ever want. I knew it would fade and I would forget. But for a few days, I was alive. And it was good.

Our bodies are both all we have and everything we could want. We are alive and we get to be alive. There is joy on the surface of the skin waiting for sunlight and soft things (both of which produce endorphins, so yes: joy). There is the constant, stalwart sound of our hearts. Babies who are carried against their mothers’ hearts learn to breathe better than those who aren’t. There is the strength of bone and the stretch of muscle and their complex coordination. We are a set of electrical impulses inside a watery environment: how? Well, the nerves that conduct the impulses are sheathed by a fatty substance called myelin―they’re insulated. This permits “agile communication between distant body parts.” Understand this: it’s all alive, it all communicates, it makes decisions, and it knows what it’s doing. You can’t possibly fathom its intricacies. To start to explore the filigree of brain, synapse, nerve, and muscle is to know that even the blink of your eyes is a miracle.

Pracht_1.tif

Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddes of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time , we knew we were alive. And it was good.

__________

And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell.

Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.

Necrophilia is the end point of sadism. The sadistic urge is about control–“the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being,” as Fromm defined it. The objective of inflicting pain and degradation is to break a human being. Pain is always degrading; victimization humiliates; eventually, everyone breaks. The power to do that is the sadist’s dream. And who could be more broken to your control than a woman who can’t walk?

Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven-year-old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with its 8,000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of FGM, the labia are cut off and the vagina sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl’s husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.

You don’t do this to a human being. You do it to an object. That much is true. But there is more. Because the world is full of actual objects—cardboard boxes and abandoned cars—and men don’t spend their time torturing those. They know we aren’t objects, that we have nerves that feel and flesh that bruises. They know we have nowhere else to go when they lay claim to our bodies. That’s where the sadist finds his pleasure: pain produces suffering, humiliation perhaps more, and if he can inflict that on her, it’s absolute proof of his control.

Behind the sadists are the institutions, the condensations of power, that hand us to him. Every time a judge rules that women have no right to bodily integrity—that upskirt photos are legal, that miscarriages are murder, that women should expect to be beaten—he wins. Every time the Fashion Masters make heels higher and clothes smaller, he smiles. Every time an entire class of women—the poorest and most desperate, at the bottom of every conceivable hierarchy—are declared legal commodities for sex, he gets a collective hard-on. Whether he personally uses any such women is beside the point. Society has ruled they are there for him, other men have ensured their compliance, and they will comply. He can kill one—the ultimate sex act for the sadist—and no one will notice. And no one does.

There is no stop to this, no natural endpoint. There is always another sentient, self-willed being to inflame his desire to control, so the addiction is forever fed. With other addictions, the addict bottoms out, his life becomes unmanageable, and the stark choice is stop or die. But the sadist isn’t hurting himself. There’s no looming bottom to hit, only an endless choice of victims, served up by the culture. Women are the feast at our own funeral, and he is happy to feed.

_____

If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: no. “No” is a boundary, spoken only by a self who claims one. Objects have neither; subjects begin at no. Feminists said no and we meant it.

The boundary of “no” extended outward, an insult to one being an injury to all: “we” is the word of political movements. Without it, women are cast adrift in a hostile, chaotic sea, holding our breath against the next Bad Thing. With the lens of feminism, the chaos snaps into sharp focus. We gave words to the Bad Things, then faced down denial and despair to see the pattern. That’s called theory. Then we demanded remedies. That’s what subjects, especially political subjects, do. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragettes, worked at the Census Office as a birth registrar. Every day, young girls came in with their newborns. Every day, she had to ask who the father was, and every day the girls wept in humiliation and rage. Reader, you know who the fathers were. That’s why Pankhurst never gave up.

To say no to the sadist is to assert those girls as political subjects, as human beings with the standing that comes from inalienable rights. Each and every life is self-willed and sovereign; each life can only be lived in a body. Not an object to be broken down for parts: a living body. Child sexual abuse is especially designed to turn the body into a cage. The bars may start as terror and pain but they will harden to self-loathing. Instilling shame is the best method to ensure compliance: we are ashamed—sexual violation is very good at that—and for the rest of our lives we will comply. Our compliance is, of course, his control. His power is his pleasure, and another generation of girls will grow up in bodies they will surely hate, to be women who comply.

_______

What has been done to our bodies has been done to our planet. The sadist exerts his control; the necrophiliac turns the living into the dead. The self-willed and the wild are their targets and their necrotic project is almost complete.

Taken one by one, the facts are appalling. In my lifetime, the earth has lost half her wildlife. Every day, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. “Ocean” is synonymous with the words abundance and plenty. Fullness is on the list, as well as infinity. And by 2048, the oceans will be empty of fish. Crustaceans are experiencing “complete reproductive failure.” In plain terms, their babies are dying. Plankton are also disappearing. Maybe plankton are too small and green for anyone to care about, but know this: two out of three animal breaths are made possible by the oxygen plankton produce. If the oceans go down, we go down with them.

How could it be otherwise? See the pattern, not just the facts. There were so many bison on the Great Plains, you could sit and watch for days as a herd thundered by. In the central valley of California, the flocks of waterbirds were so thick they blocked out the sun. One-quarter of Indiana was a wetland, lush with life and the promise of more. Now it’s a desert of corn. Where I live in the pacific northwest, ten million fish have been reduced to ten thousand. People would hear them coming for a whole day. This is not a story: there are people alive who remember it. And I have never once heard the sound that water makes when forty million years of persistence finds it way home. Am I allowed to use the word “apocalypse” yet?

The necrophiliac insists we are mechanical components, that rivers are an engineering project, and genes can be sliced up and arranged at whim. He believes we are all machines, despite the obvious: a machine can be taken apart and put back together. A living being can’t. May I add: neither can a living planet.

Understand where the war against the world began. In seven places around the globe, humans took up the activity called agriculture. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and then you plant it to human use. Instead of sharing that land with the other million creatures who need to live there, you’re only growing humans on it. It’s biotic cleansing. The human population grows to huge numbers; everyone else is driven into extinction.

Agriculture creates a way of life called civilization. Civilization means people living in cities. What that means is: they need more than the land can give. Food, water, energy have to come from someplace else. It doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide. Because no one willing gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences.

The end of every civilization is written into the beginning. Agriculture destroys the world. That’s not agriculture on a bad day. That’s what agriculture is. You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil. Civilizations last between 800 and maybe 2,000 years—they last until the soil gives out.

What could be more sadistic then control of entire continents? He turns mountains into rubble, and rivers must do as they are told. The basic unit of life is violated with genetic engineering. The basic unit of matter as well, to make bombs that kill millions. This is his passion, turning the living into the dead. It’s not just individual deaths and not even the deaths of species. The process of life itself is now under assault and it is losing badly. Vertebrate evolution has long since come to a halt—there isn’t enough habitat left. There are areas in China where there are no flowering plants. Why? Because the pollinators are all dead. That’s five hundred million years of evolution: gone.

He wants it all dead. That’s his biggest thrill and the only way he can control it. According to him it was never alive. There is no self-willed community, no truly wild land. It’s all inanimate components he can arrange to this liking, a garden he can manage. Never mind that every land so managed has been lessened into desert. The essential integrity of life has been breached, and now he claims it never existed. He can do whatever he wants. And no one stops him.

__________

Can we stop him?

I say yes, but then I have no intention of giving up. The facts as they stand are unbearable, but it’s only in facing them that pattern comes clear. Civilization is based on drawdown. It props itself up with imperialism, conquering its neighbors and stripping their land, but eventually even the colonies wear out. Fossil fuel has been an accelerant, as has capitalism, but the underlying problem is much bigger than either. Civilization requires agriculture, and agriculture is a war against the living world. Whatever good was in the culture before, ten thousand years of that war has turned it necrotic.

But what humans do they can stop doing. Granted every institution is headed in the wrong direction, there’s no material reason the destruction must continue. The reason is political: the sadist is rewarded, and rewarded well. Most leftists and environmentalists see that. What they don’t see is the central insight of radical feminism: his pleasure in domination.

The real brilliance of patriarchy is right here: it doesn’t just naturalize oppression, it sexualizes acts of oppression. It eroticizes domination and subordination and then institutionalizes them into masculinity and femininity. Men become real men by breaking boundaries—the sexual boundaries of women and children, the cultural and political boundaries of indigenous people, the biological boundaries of rivers and forests, the genetic boundaries of other species, and the physical boundaries of the atom itself. The sadist is rewarded with money and power, but he also gets a sexual thrill from dominating. And the end of the world is a mass circle jerk of autoerotic asphyxiation.

The real brilliance of feminism is that we figured that out.

What has to happen to save our planet is simple: stop the war. If we just get out of the way, life will return because life wants to live. The forests and prairies will find their way back. Every dam will fail, every cement channel, and the rivers will ease their sorrows and meet the ocean again. The fish will know what to do. In being eaten, they feed the forest, which protects the rivers, which makes a home for more salmon. This is not the death of destruction but the death of participation that makes the world whole.

Sometimes there are facts that require all the courage we have in our hearts. Here is one. Carbon has breached 400 ppm. For life to continue, that carbon needs to get back into the ground. And so we come to grasses.

Where the world is wet, trees make forests. Where it’s dry, the grasses grow. Grasslands endure extreme heat in summer and vicious cold in winter. Grasses survive by keeping 80 percent of their bodies underground, in the form of roots. Those roots are crucial to the community of life. They provide physical channels for rain to enter the soil. They can reach down fifteen feet and bring up minerals from the rocks below, minerals that every living creature needs. They can build soil at an extraordinary rate. The base material they use to make soil is carbon. Which means the grasses are our only hope to get that carbon out of the sky.

And they will do it if we let them. If we could repair 75 percent of the world’s grasslands—destroyed by the war of agriculture—in under fifteen years, the grasses would sequester all the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the industrial age. Read that again if you need to. Then take it with you wherever you go. Tell it to anyone who will listen. There is still a chance.

bison

The grasses can’t do it alone. No creature exists independent of all others. Repairing the grasslands means restoring the ruminants. In the hot, dry summer, life goes dormant on the surface of the soil. It’s the ruminants who keep the nutrient cycle moving. They carry an ecosystem inside themselves, especially the bacteria that digests cellulose. When a bison grazes, she’s not actually eating the grass. She’s feeding it to her bacteria. The bacteria eat the grass and then she eats the bacteria. Her wastes then water and fertilize the grasses. And the circle is complete.

The grasslands have been eradicated for agriculture, to grow cereal grains for people. Because I want to restore the grasses, I get accused of wanting to kill six billion people. That’s not a random number. In 1800, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, there were one billion people. Now there are seven billion. Six billion are only here because of fossil fuel. Eating a non-renewable resource was never a plan with a future. Yet pointing that out somehow makes me a mass murderer.

Start with the obvious. Nothing we do at these numbers is sustainable. Ninety-eight percent of the old-growth forests and 99 percent of the grasslands are gone, and gone with them was most of the soil they built. There’s nothing left to take. The planet has been skinned alive.

Add to that: all civilizations end in collapse. All of them. How could it be otherwise if your way of life relies on destroying the place you live? The soil is gone and the oil is running out. By avoiding the facts, we are ensuring it will end in the worst possible way.

We can do better than mass starvation, failed states, ethnic strife, misogyny, petty warlords, and the dystopian scenarios that collapse brings. It’s very simple: reproduce at less than replacement numbers. The problem will take care of itself. And now we come to the girls.

What drops the birthrate universally is raising the status of women. Very specifically, the action with the greatest impact is teaching a girl to read. When women and girls have even that tiny bit of power over their lives, they choose to have fewer children. Yes, women need birth control, but what we really need is liberty. Around the world, women have very little control over how men use our bodies. Close to half of all pregnancies are unplanned or unwanted. Pregnancy is the second leading cause of death for girls age 15-19. Not much has changed since Emmeline Pankhurst refused to give up.

We should be defending the human rights of girls because girls matter. As it turns out, the basic rights of girls are crucial to the survival of the planet.

girl with wolf

Can we stop him?

Yes, but only if we understand what we’re up against.

He wants the world dead. Anything alive must be replaced by something mechanical. He prefers gears, pistons, circuits to soft animal bodies, even his own. He hopes to upload himself into a computer some day.

He wants the world dead. He enjoys making it submit. He’s erected giant cities where once were forests. Concrete and asphalt tame the unruly.

He wants the world dead. Anything female must be punished, permanently. The younger they are, the sooner they break. So he starts early.

A war against your body is a war against your life. If he can get us to fight the war for him, we’ll never be free. But we said every woman’s body was sacred. And we meant it, too. Every creature has her own physical integrity, an inviolable whole. It’s a whole too complex to understand, even as we live inside it. I had no idea why my eyes were swelling and my lungs were aching. The complexities of keeping me alive could never be left to me.

One teaspoon of soil contains a million living creatures. One tiny scoop of life and it’s already more complex than we could ever understand. And he thinks he can manage oceans?

We’re going to have to match his contempt with our courage. We’re going to have to match his brute power with our fierce and fragile dreams. And we’re going to have to match his bottomless sadism with a determination that will not bend and will not break and will not stop.

And if we can’t do it for ourselves, we have to do it for the girls.

Whatever you love, it is under assault. Love is a verb. May that love call us to action.

Lierre Keith is the author of six books. Visit her website at www.lierrekeith.com

Editor’s note: This essay first appeared August 8, 2015 on RadFem Repost.

 

Ernesto Aguilar: What Fathers Should Tell Their Sons

by | Jul 9, 2015 | Gender, Male Violence, White Supremacy

By Ernesto Aguilar for Feminist Current

When they find out, people ask me incredulously if I regret not attending my father’s funeral.

I had no relationship with my father for all of my adult life. I lived a childhood where he hit my mother often. I could never reconcile it and fought him as a boy. As an adult, I never forgave him. He died a stranger, someone in my past I never talked about.

Violence was not my father’s only indiscretion. He grew up hard, and did his best to raise me with the totems of manhood as he saw them, for better or worse. All men, and especially men of color, learn quickly and from an early age that our existence depends on our performance of masculinity. My father tried to teach me to survive in a world that looked at we dark-skinned men with the kind of hostility my generation would never know.

Unless I told you, you’d probably never know my myriad traumas, or how many people I failed on the way to healing them. You’d never know I don’t know when Father’s Day is. Or how I never had children because I reasoned it best to break a cycle not worth repeating, to spare someone else from being damaged the way I was.

As a boy who craved his father’s approval, as young boys often do, I can’t help but wonder how different I would have ended up if my father taught me what I needed to understand about love, about principle, and about respect. Would I have hurt the people I hurt? Would I be as I am, still restless and unsettled? I will never know.

I write about this now because I want you who are fathers to not have a son like me. I don’t want you to have the moments my father had in his later years, desperately wanting a relationship with a son who stopped believing in him years before. This time you have now to share and talk with your son is far more important than you think. Use every minute wisely. Don’t take the casual things you say and do for granted. Make sure you don’t end up where we did.

I have lost count of the conversations I wish my father and I would have had, or the things I wish he helped me to see, instead of the lessons I spent years undoing.

It was not until some time away from my father that I learned to love my emotions. If I’d had a son, I would tell him to live your happiest feelings boisterously. It can feel very isolating to be that man who acts, speaks and expresses differently than other men. People question your intelligence and sexuality for it, moreso for men of color. But there is no reason to not be ostentatious, bold and open in what you feel. Holding it in proves nothing. Stuffing it down doesn’t make you better. It often makes you worse. More importantly, you have but one life. No one’s last days are spent thankful for all the times they avoided tears, played cool so someone didn’t know where they stood, or just didn’t share feelings.

I wish my father had told me it’s always easy to see the down side of things, but to take a moment to appreciate the people around us. My view today of my father is more nuanced — he had his own demons, and many resentments he never resolved. I wish it was not still a daily battle against sinking into his familiar morose and bitter place. Or to let the anger that comes with male entitlement rule my day. It’s hard sometimes to find joy in simple things. I learned gratitude matters far more than almost anything. Perspective means a great deal. It can always be worse. The best day is what you make of it.

I’d tell my son that respect for women is our responsibility to do and speak up about. Not just because we have mothers or sisters or partners, but because dignity is not about what people do for and mean to us. I’d remind him that you don’t talk like you know what others go through, because men almost reflexively always do that. And you especially do not to talk like you know what a woman goes through. Men are taught that is okay and do it often. Really though, men will never know.

I wish my father had told me freedom of choice can’t be divorced from how the world works, and from the power that men have. Everyone can get fixated on making their own choices. We’re told people make decisions and that’s okay, but we never hear about context, or how decisions come to pass. Our choices as men have consequences, often for those with far less power than us. The same gender binary that depends on choice and demands we act in particular ways also calls on us to acquiesce to things we may not agree with. As men have the greatest privilege, my father could have told me asking questions and standing up for my beliefs are virtues.

Most of all, I wish he had spoken through his actions. I don’t know one man who has a positive relationship with his father in instances where he was physically, emotionally or verbally abusive to the male’s mother. Not one. Like anyone, I’ve been upset with partners who hurt my feelings, said unkind things or seemed not to care. Maybe because of the way I was brought up, I never thought for even a second to put my hands on anyone. Physical violence against my mother defined my life. It scarred me for years. It changed the way I think of my father. I can’t say strongly enough how critical respect for partners, even when times are bad, is for a child.

My story is going to surprise even close friends, because it’s something I just don’t talk about. I’m doing it now because I recognize it must be hard for a father, with the expectations of maleness and more on him, to talk to sons about women and respect, about emotions and about vulnerability. Yet they’re the issues that come to matter most as we grow up. Teaching your son to fix a car, clean a handgun or fight a bully might feel urgent. Showing a boy to be tough in the face of adversity could seem right. From experience, I can tell you that if your son has to learn on his own how to respect the women in his life, how to express his feelings, and how to be just in a world that is often unjust to women and those with the least power, you’ll not only have failed him, but yourself.

If that’s not enough to convince you, let mine be your cautionary tale. For you who are fathers, the last memory you want is of a son who doesn’t even say your name or remember your face. If pressed, he can’t recall when you were born. Or one whose good memories, and even most of the bad, are gone. You don’t want your son to be me, with no regrets about erasing you out of his life or not attending your burial. I can only encourage you to teach them well and show them a better way. Do whatever you can to make sure the day my father and I saw never comes.

From Feminist Current: http://feministcurrent.com/12364/what-fathers-should-tell-their-sons/

“Bring Down the Culture”: An Interview with Kourtney Mitchell

“Bring Down the Culture”: An Interview with Kourtney Mitchell

by | Mar 3, 2015 | Male Violence, Movement Building & Support, White Supremacy

By Vincent Emanuele for Counterpunch

Kourtney Mitchell is a writer and activist currently living in northeast Georgia, United States. He sits on the steering committee for Deep Green Resistance and the national board of directors for Veterans for Peace. Co-author of The Enemy in Blue: The Renatta Frazier Story, he has been involved in social justice activism for eight years. Kourtney is currently AWOL from the Georgia Army National Guard.

***

Vincent Emanuele: Let’s talk a little bit about your background. I know you were born in Illinois and now live in Georgia. What was your childhood like? Was your family politically active?

Kourtney Mitchell: Yes, I was born and spent the first part of my childhood on Chicago’s west side, right in the heart of the inner city. I remember huge gang fights and gun shots carrying on while I was trying to sleep as a kid, and always worrying about getting into fights with neighborhood kids while playing outside with my family. In Chicago, I lived in a three story home where each floor was like its own apartment. I lived with not just my parents and siblings, but also cousins, aunts, uncles, their spouses and my great grandmother, who to this day continues to keep the family together as the virtual matriarch. This is why my family always has and forever will have strong family bonds. Loyalty is natural for us.

We would cross the street to get Chicago-style polish sausages and Italian beef sandwiches, and fries smothered in mild sauce. This was back in the day of corner stores—real corner stores that weren’t attached to gas stations and pharmacies. Up the street the other way was a city park with a basketball court and jungle gym. Even though there was a lot of gang violence in my neighborhood, my family was well-established in the community and for the most part we got along just fine.

In Chicago, we were bussed out of the inner city to a magnet school instead of attending the schools closer to home. Of course I realized the problems with this, but I loved that school as a kid. I can still remember some of my friends, including the sweet little girl who wanted to be my girlfriend after I roughed up a bully who hit her during recess.

As a matter of fact, my grandfather is a former Black Panther in the Chicago chapter. That’s the only thing I know of the political activity of my family. We’ve visited him several times while I was a kid. However, he’s currently in prison in Illinois for charges dating back to his time with the Panthers.

When my mom moved us to Springfield, IL to finish her undergraduate degree, it was a different world. There in the state capitol, we attended mostly white schools where we surprisingly got along just fine and made a whole lot of friends. Schools with enough computers and television screens in the classroom, and decent textbooks. It was in those schools that I was able to write a full romance novel manuscript started when I was ten years old, almost get it published, and appear on Black Entertainment Television for an interview about it. Our middle and high schools were a bit more integrated, and those were the most formative years of my life.

It was in high school that my mother joined the Springfield, IL police department and experienced a lot of racism and sexism, for which she filed a civil suit against the city and settled out-of-court. That whole fiasco was extremely traumatic for my family—we had to move out of the state, and then back to Illinois within a single year. Constant media coverage and negative publicity for my mother and family until it was all settled. Continued harassment from the police department, including an eviction where cops threw all of our belongings out onto the street on my brother and I’s birthday. But we made the most of it. My mother and I wrote and self-published a creative nonfiction book about her experiences.

Vincent Emanuele: The last time we spoke, you were AWOL from the U.S. Army. I remember wanting to escape my unit, but being reluctant because I didn’t have politicized friends or comrades in the military or outside the military. Why did you join the military? And what’s your current status?

Kourtney Mitchell: Technically my status is still AWOL, though I’m working closely with my unit leadership to get the discharge once and for all. The unit was very good to me actually, so I believe them when they say they won’t pursue legal recourse. Answering why I joined the military is tricky. I want to admit right away that I knew better, but… I never should have enlisted.

Okay, so I had returned to Georgia from living and going to school in Missouri, which I still to this day view as a mistake because I had a great community in Missouri and it was hard leaving them. I didn’t like living at home, and I was having a very hard time finding decent work. My family urged me to enlist, so originally I was going to enlist with the Marines, even signed the contract and received a ship date for boot camp. But then I backed out, and went with the National Guard instead. The 68W MOS (combat medic) had a ship date that was too far in the future for my liking, so I decided to join as infantry so I could ship-off ASAP. That was an even bigger mistake than enlisting. Basically, I did it so I could get out on my own again and develop some job skills that may lead to career opportunities. I attended OSUT infantry training at Fort Benning, where WHINSEC (formerly the School of the Americas) trains death squads to squash the resistance in South America.

Vincent Emanuele: Let’s backtrack. At what point did you become radicalized? And who were some of your initial influences?

Kourtney Mitchell: My radicalization started when I was in college. It’s a long but interesting story. I’ll try to keep it somewhat short. My first experience with any kind of radical thought was when I decided to take a writing-intensive course in college that was focused on black female writers. We read Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, etc. I didn’t take the course because I thought it was something I should learn about. Honestly, I took it because I needed the writing credit, and the class was available. It turned out to be a very good decision, and it contributed to real change in my life. It helped me establish the basics of feminism as it relates to the experiences of black women.

The instructor offered extra credit for attending a campus community discussion at the Black Culture Center on the representation and exploitation of black women in mainstream media. I shared my thoughts at the event based on what I was learning as a journalism student (later changed my major to sociology), and there was a woman there who really liked what I had to say. She was from the campus Women’s Center, and invited me to join the male ally program. I really don’t know why I agreed to do it; I guess there was something about the course I was taking that got me interested in pro-feminist men’s work, even though I wasn’t articulating it at the time.

I began attending the meetings and actions, and from there I joined the campus peer education program that was focused on anti-violence and anti-sexual assault on campus. That was my training ground—a formal, for-credit course that taught the fundamentals of sexual assault, relationship violence, patriarchy and ending male violence on campus. We were trained in how to help a friend in crisis, as well as how to give presentations to our peers.

That program changed my life forever. The course was extremely intense, at least for a starry-eyed undergrad like me. I remember many nights going home crying because I couldn’t understand how men could be so violent and create such a violent world. I struggled with what I could do as an individual, but I knew that I had no choice but to make pro-feminism my life’s work. I got so many good opportunities—giving presentations to fraternities, football teams, teenagers, college kids, so many different communities. We hosted spoken work events and open-mic nights. It was a fantastic program.

Once I switched my major to sociology, I began learning a bit about Marxist theory, which lead me to anarchism eventually, and then I began reading Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan and Layla Abdel Rahim. Anti-civilization thought revolutionized my thinking of social justice. Now it all made sense. All of the converging crises of racism, patriarchy, and human supremacism now became the overall problem I was trying to name—civilization, namely industrial civilization.

Not long after I returned to Georgia, the Deep Green Resistance book was published, and I began reading voraciously and watching all of the DGR videos online. I attended a workshop that early DGR members gave at a community spot in Atlanta, and I knew that I needed to find a way to join the group after that. I was invited to do so, and from then on my understanding of radical feminism and anti-civ thought has grown by leaps and bounds.

While in college, I got to kick it with Fred Hampton Jr (who pointed me out during his speech because he recognized me, and knew my mom and grandfather), and have dinner with Angela Davis. I saw Maya Angelou, Michael Eric Dyson, Jackson Katz and many others speak on campus. A few friends and I traveled to Jena, Louisiana for the huge Jena 6 protest, and I attended and helped organize several protests and marches on campus, including Take Back The Night marches, as well as a march and occupation of the student commons when legislators were threatening to repeal affirmative action programs. There was also well-attended community forum events for different incidents, such as when some white students thought it was funny to dump cotton balls on the lawn of the Black Culture Center.

Vincent Emanuele: In the past year, the intersection of race and policing has become one of the most galvanizing issues of our time. As a black man living in a nation built on the genocide of indigenous peoples, African slavery and white supremacy, how do you understand, process and resist within this culture?

Kourtney Mitchell: Understanding and processing what is happening in this culture is an ongoing process for me. I’m still fairly new to activism; most of my time was spent as an educator, with only a handful of real on-the-ground actions under my belt. But I guess I understand and process by being an avid reader, listening to pretty much every interview, speech and lecture I can find and/or attend in person, and constant conversations with other activists. As far as racism and white supremacy go, well that’s just a daily grind. My family has experienced both overt and covert racism. My family’s living conditions in Chicago were a direct result of racist housing practices. I mentioned the craziness with my mom at the police department in Illinois. And being followed and stopped all the time for just walking here in Georgia is so normal for me that sometimes I forget it’s not how it should be.

The processing part is the hardest, though, even harder than resisting. Processing is an internalization of what is happening, and it affects my very soul. Truthfully, I sometimes sit in my home, contemplating all of the police murders of unarmed people of color, their rape of women and all of the other craziness happening with policing and I just cry. That coupled with the destruction of the natural world, and it’s all just too much sometimes. But it’s a process—eventually I come out of despair even stronger and more determined. I am extremely privileged to be connected to several very large activist communities. I have a lot of allies, so I have it easier than someone who’s trying to navigate this culture alone.

Some people may not know this, but my family is military and police officer heavy. So I get a heavy dose of both perspectives every day, both against and for this culture. Again, I consider it a privilege, because I get to really hone my analysis on a real-world level.

Resisting this culture has become a calling for me, a purpose for living. I’ve attempted to set out on my own, drop all of my responsibilities and live a nomadic anarchist lifestyle, but that didn’t go well, and just thoroughly upset all of my loved ones. I began realizing that collective action, joining together as an oppressed group of people, is how we effectively resist the empire. So joining DGR and Veterans For Peace has become how I am able to leverage my skills, knowledge and passion for more effective actions. I also don’t mind using all of the tools at our disposal, even though many may say we’re hypocrites for using technology or finding ways to work within the system. I think Derrick Jensen is right when he said that we need it all, whatever skills people can bring in whatever capacity. We need it all to resist.

Vincent Emanuele: Right now, I know you’re a member of two organizations: Deep Green Resistance and Veterans for Peace. Can you talk about these organizations? What are you currently working on?

Kourtney Mitchell: DGR is the first activist organization I joined once I left Missouri and joined my family in Georgia. I was feeling isolated as an activist, partly because I wasn’t able to get to Atlanta consistently, which is where the majority of the activism in Georgia happens. So joining DGR was really a saving grace for me.

So DGR is a grassroots, volunteer-run social justice organization with chapters all over the world. Our analysis is that industrial civilization is currently killing the planet and oppressing living communities. Unless we bring down this culture—that is, unless we stop all extractive processes and dismantle all oppressive institutions, then the culture will keep going until it has literally killed every living being on the planet. So our strategy is Decisive Ecological Warfare, in which we advocate for the formation of a hypothetical underground militant movement that can attack industrial infrastructure and thus lead to the collapse of industrial civilization. We are not a part of, and do not ever wish to be a part of any kind of underground that may form to this effect. But we loudly and vocally speak in favor of such actions, because we believe it’s the only hope our planet has for survival. Our members engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, as well as widespread educational and activist campaigns around the world. Those killing the planet will not ever stop by asking them nicely. They will only stop when we force them to do so.

Veterans For Peace is a 501c3 non-profit activist organization composed of hundreds of chapters around the world. We are a military veterans-led organization with non-veteran associate members, and one of just a few veterans-led organizations that loudly and vocally opposes all wars and foreign interventions around the world. Our mission is to expose the true cost of war and militarism, and to advocate for reparations to both civilian communities affected by war and for veterans who carry the scars and moral injuries of war.

With DGR, I currently sit on the Steering Committee, the People of Color Caucus and I am the anti-racist editor for our News Service online. I’m involved with several projects as well, including art and music, pro-radical feminism, and I help direct security for the organization.

I currently sit on the National Board of Directors for Veterans For Peace, and I’ve joined the Nominations Committee to help recruit young veterans to the organization and encourage Post-911 veterans to take leadership positions. I also am hoping to do work with our G.I. Resistance working group to encourage young veterans to consider Conscientious Objection or other forms of resistance to military service, and to offer assistance to those who already have. Being AWOL myself, I understand the importance of having a close, loving community to assist in this struggle.

Vincent Emanuele: How has a “deep green” vision and understanding of patriarchy/male violence influenced your approach to strategies, tactics, and so on?

Kourtney Mitchell: As I mentioned earlier, the anti-civilization perspective revolutionized my understanding of social justice. It brought together all of the social problems that were important to me and put them under a big umbrella of civilization as the cause. The “deep green” perspective is really the foundation of this approach.

So it’s easiest to understand what the deep green perspective is when you contrast it with what we like to call “bright green” environmentalism. Bright green is what you get when capitalism attempts to paint what it is doing to the planet with the brush of consumer choices. So corporations and governments want us to think that it’s our fault that the planet is warming and the oceans are dying, and the top soil is blowing away in the wind. They want us to think that it’s because we aren’t buying the right products—our light bulbs, toilet paper, plastic shopping bags, our vehicle emissions, etc. They want us to believe that if we just buy and use the right products, then we can stop the destruction of the natural world, purely by consumer product choices alone.

To go along with this, so-called environmentalists have completely bought into this elaborate and well-funded lie. Even huge organizations like Greenpeace, The Sierra Club, etc, have touted the good of making better consumer choices. Capitalism has completely co-opted the environmental movement, which used to be about actually protecting the natural and is nowadays more about perpetuating industrial economies.

The bright green perspective has a fatal, fundamental flaw: it’s not the products of industrial civilization that are the problem, it’s the industrial economy itself. As a matter of fact, only as high as 20% of all energy and resource use comes from municipalities, and usually that number is much lower. The other 80-90% of all resource depletion and pollution comes from militaries, governments and corporations. The United States military is the world’s largest polluter, dumping more toxic waste into the environment than the top five corporations combined. Someone please tell me how my buying florescent light bulbs and recycled toilet paper is going to stop the military from committing this atrocity?

The deep green perspective takes this radical approach: Earth is a living, breathing being, which sustains homeostasis and provides the very foundation of life. All extractive processes, regardless of what products result, are detrimental to the health of the planet. The industrial economy is completely at odds with life on the planet, and since this is the case without a doubt, then it is the industrial economy that has to be dismantled. Green technology, such as wind turbines and hydroelectric power and solar power, all require industrial extraction, and thus cannot be considered sustainable.

The deep green analysis recognizes that for 99% of our existence on this planet as human beings, we lived in harmony with the land. We had a close physical and spiritual relationship with the web of life on earth, and our communities were set up to directly provide for real human and animal needs, not the needs of cities and empires. Our only hope for survival on this planet is to bring down the culture that’s killing it and return to our humble, close relationship to the land.

Vincent Emanuele: Since being involved, what are some of the pitfalls you’ve seen within the movement? In other words, how could groups and individuals better organize communities?

Kourtney Mitchell: The most obvious thing to me, at least for the environmental movement, is to give up the idea that so-called green technology will save us from certain destruction.

Other pitfalls include the failure of privileged activists to join in a material way the movements that oppressed people have created. There is too much sidelining by men who call themselves pro-feminist, or by whites who call themselves anti-racist. Oppressed groups need your material solidarity, not just your words. Oppressed groups need folks to join the front-lines of resistance, to put our bodies in between the oppressors and the communities they intend to oppress. In the DGR strategy, we recognize that only very few resistors will do the dirty work of materially dismantling the culture using militant means. The rest of us need to do radical actions including nonviolent civil disobedience and loud, vocal, and public advocation of radical strategy, normalizing resistance in the culture and attempting to counter the hegemonic messages of the empire.

I think there’s a lot of good organizing going on, but I just wish there was more cohesion, more collaboration across movements. This is hard when men in various movements refuse to check their male privilege, and refuse to call out male activists who are sexist or have a history of violence against women. And it’s hard when whites in various movements refuse to undergo the hard transformational process of admitting to and dismantling their own racism. That silence needs to stop right now. We don’t have time for half-assed activism. We need effective actions that can actually challenge power, dismantle capital and overthrow the power structure.

I think we should start adopting a process-oriented approach. What I like so much about the DGR strategy is that it recognizes that each action has a place in the movement, and that each action has to be evaluated on its ability to reach intended goals.

So growing community gardens alone cannot stop pipeline construction, nor can it stop Monsanto. But it can help feed activists. Such an action can sustain the movement. Actions such as hypothetically attacking oil infrastructure can actually lead to the collapse of the system, so that’s considered a decisive action. We have to analyze actions in this way, otherwise we’ll always be fighting a losing battle against an enemy who has vastly more resources and has a monopoly on violence.

Finally, I think activists overall need to understand that our goal should be to dismantle the culture entirely, not simply just to feel good about our actions. Feeling good is not the point when people of color (POC) are still being murdered in the streets; men are still killing and raping women; and indigenous communities are still being wiped off the planet. We need to get over our reliance on nonviolence as an end goal, and speak honestly about what it will actually take to win this war.

Vincent Emanuele: What is your vision for the future? Here, if you would go into some detail, that would be great, as I think people are interested in alternatives.

Kourtney Mitchell: Well, I can’t say that I personally have a vision for what the entire world needs to look like in the future. Personally, I want to possibly raise kids, grow food, tend to animals and live in a loving, supportive community away from industrial infrastructure. I want a sustainable off-the-grid lifestyle for my loved ones. But the way this culture is going, that may not ever be possible.

I can say that since civilization is a monoculture—that is, it is a culture characterized by the growth of cities, and that cities are proliferating all over the world, demolishing other forms of living such as tribes, clans, bands, etc—and that civilization behaves in a way that says only it can exist in the world, I think what could be of value is the proliferation of a diversity of cultures. A diversity of living arrangements tailored to the specific land-base that people find themselves living on. Our social structures, our communities, must be intimately tied to the specifics of the land we live on, so that we can live in such a way that actually contributes to the land, that actually benefits the land, instead of destroying it. Whatever that looks like for different communities, I welcome that future.

I think that inevitably means we must give up on all extractive processes, including agriculture. Many people do not understand just how harmful agriculture is to the land. This method of growing food has been characterized as the worst mistake humans have made in our history. Agriculture relies on annual mono-crops that actually destroy the land. What we need to rediscover is the perennial polycultures that give back to the land, and that cultivate the other lifeforms on the land. Agriculture has lead directly to our skyrocketing human population that is set to crash pretty much any decade now. Agriculture has to grow more food to feed more people, which in turn leads to more people and thus requires more food. It’s a never-ending cycle, and it’s really the most horrific consideration of our future. We need to be smart about how to address the population problem, starting with emancipating women around the world towards autonomy over their bodies and families.

Vincent Emanuele: Who are some of your personal influences? 

Kourtney Mitchell: Oh goodness, too many to name them all. Really, my activism has consisted mostly of repeating what a lot of good people have said and done before me.

Some of my most influential comrades are dear close friends of mine, such as the seasoned activists in DGR and VFP. Saba Malik, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith have had the most influential impact on my activism. My mother continues to be my biggest inspiration for overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to become successful and instill her family with a sense of pride and purpose. The work of Gail Dines has been absolutely huge for my understanding of the evils of the sexual exploitation industry. Michael McPherson of VFP is a prime role model of mine, and I greatly admire his work both within the organization as well as his longtime work with some of the nation’s biggest anti-police violence movements. Doug Zachary, who’s a member of both VFP and DGR, is an incredible pro-feminist man and war resistor. He had the biggest impact on my decision to get involved in the anti-war movement.

Vincent Emanuele: What are you currently reading?

Kourtney Mitchell: The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen, who pulls no punches in his analysis of the dominant culture, and that makes his reading pretty tough to get through. It took me over two years to read both volumes of Endgame, but I’m glad I did. Derrick is a talented writer who has the ability to grab the attention of even his most ardent detractors. If you don’t feel like resisting with all of your might after reading his work, then you really don’t have a pulse.

Also, I’m reading Radical Acceptance by Dr. Tara Brach. I’ve been into Buddhist meditation and spirituality since 2006 and it gives me a good balanced perspective on the human condition and the nature of suffering in this world. I like how Dr. Brach weaves her personal narrative into a transformative program for overcoming our self-loathing. Probably the most practical Buddhist book I’ve ever read, which is saying a lot because I’ve often felt my spirituality and my activism weren’t meshing as well as I would like.

Vincent Emanuele: Any closing remarks or suggestions? 

Kourtney Mitchell: In the words of Andrea Dworkin: Resist! Do not comply!

Vincent Emanuele is a writer, activist and radio journalist who writes a weekly column for TeleSUR English. He lives in the Rust Belt and can be reached at vince.emanuele@ivaw.org

From Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/27/a-feminist-radical-environmentalist-and-awol/

 

Let’s Get Free!: Escalate the Fight to End Male Violence

Let’s Get Free!: Escalate the Fight to End Male Violence

by | Oct 22, 2014 | Direct Action, Male Violence, Women & Radical Feminism

By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance

I do not have a creative introduction to start this article. I have only the seething rage of a spirit absolutely fed up with a culture that is at war with women, their fervent pleads for solidarity and their righteous actions of self-defense against the monster of male supremacy echoing in my mind. I have only the scenes of men torturing and raping women, filmed for the goal of profit and produced on an industrial scale like a slave trade, an auction where women’s bodies are mutilated and sold for entertainment and sexual gratification, to drive me ever forward to find ways to organize against this barbarity. I have only the cries of my loved ones as they tell of their own abuse and that of others, their wishes to somehow get their murdered or missing friends back from the endless night of death enacted by men who are supposed to be human but instead behave more like demons.

No, I am all out of creative words. All I have are the words of the reality of the world women live in, a reality that I can never fully know, a reality that I still do not truly realize no matter how angry I get about it. I have women’s words – the words they use to tell their stories, to recount their experiences – words I still find increasingly difficult to hear. But hear I must because I do not ever want to become apathetic. I want to be angry, I want to be furious. I must stay furious. And I must allow that fury to teach me how to be a human being once again, instead of a monster. I must allow that fury to inform my actions, and to constantly remind me that the world has had enough of men’s words. What the world needs – what women need, what children need – is men’s action to destroy male violence and patriarchy once and for all.

I have the shame of being a man, that sex-caste category that has socialized me to be abusive, and to be callous towards other men’s abuse of women and children. I have the shame of knowing that I benefit from large-scale violence against women, the subordination and objectification and public humiliation of half the world’s population in the name of masculinity and manhood.

But that shame is not enough. I can see that my shame has not changed men’s behavior. Shame has not prevented our fists from breaking women’s jaws, our penises from torturing women’s bodies, our words from dismissing their experiences.

No, that shame has not ended male violence, but our actions can, and they must.

Profeminist men must escalate the fight to end men’s violence. And we must escalate NOW.

Abusive and controlling men have already declared outright war against women and children. This war is not metaphorical, and it is not an exaggeration. With at least a quarter of all women surviving or fighting off rape (and it is widely known that is an underestimate), and men committing as much as 94% of all child sexual abuse, what else can we call it? These men will readily tell you that they are at war, and it is high time profeminist men take them seriously.

For too long men have left the dirty work of defense and prevention to women, opting to just talk about supporting and defending women but never actually organizing truly effective offensives against male violence. No more. No more complacency, no more lip service, no more disingenuous half-assed activism that has not resulted in real progress towards women’s liberation.

It is time now that profeminist men begin publicly calling for and supporting militant action against the institutions of male supremacy. Simply put, men must stop other men, physically and definitively. We must organize smart, strategic and highly informed offensives against the men abusing women and we must do so under the leadership of feminist women, actively seeking accountability to these women so that our actions are in accordance to liberation on their terms, not ours. We must challenge men in our families, workplaces and peer groups when they speak or behave in ways that normalize or trivialize violence. We must instead normalize respect for women and respect for life, not just supporting militancy which can so easily become glorification of male violence, but committing ourselves to completely dismantling masculine culture on the interpersonal level as well.

Many of us have traveled the world speaking, marching, picketing, and participating in myriad forms of nonviolent protest in support of the feminist and anti-violence movement. And yet, the rate of men’s violence against women is increasing. Our work has been ineffective in bringing about lasting change. The change that we do manage to see is the result of generations of brave and courageous women who bled and died and were imprisoned for fighting for their right to be treated as human beings.

No doubt, some men have done great work, and must continue to do so. But we also must come to terms with the reality of the situation. We must now be honest about what it will actually take to end the violence of this culture.

We have to do more than just recite the numbers, or watch the films, or attend the conferences. We must do more than just abstain from consuming sexist, violent media, or purchasing consumer goods sold on the marketing of women’s bodies. We must do more, a whole lot more. Some of us are going to have to stop abusive men. Some of us are going to have to put our bodies on the line – place our bodies in between these men and the women they intend to abuse. And while physical intervention in interpersonal violence is not the primary focal point of men’s work against patriarchy (and is not applicable in most cases), profeminist men should support such actions when done in a smart, strategic manner.

We have to start treating abusive men like the enemy. No more of these vapid appeals to their humanity or their inner child or whatever else pacifists are coming up with to avoid doing what it takes. Sure, abusive men were once children, many of them abuse survivors themselves. But now they are abusive men. They are not children anymore. They are adult men who make the decision to break women’s bones, blacken their eyes and blast bullets into their skulls. They are adult men who choose to be paid to abuse women on camera, and then laugh about it in porn documentaries. If you do not fume with rage, then you are not paying attention. Start paying attention.

The fact that porn shops are still standing instead of roasting in flames is an affront to women everywhere. The fact that international activist and humanitarian organizations are defending johns and pimps instead of women should cause the planet to stop spinning on its axis. Instead what we see are men locking women in basements for decades, starving and raping them and then standing in court talking about how they actually enjoyed the abuse.

Men as a sex-caste hate women. We hate women just as much as whites as a caste hate people of color, and members of settler culture hate the indigenous. Do those statements make you angry and defensive? Good, they should. You should be appalled that we live in a culture that facilitates and rewards such grotesque behavior. Use that anger to confront those who abuse, go take that energy to them, not us, not the ones who are actually fighting for justice. Go confront men, not the women they abuse.

And if you refuse to do that – if you refuse to examine your own masculinity, your own culpability in men’s oppression of women, then all I can say to you is that you had better get out of the way and let us get this done. Otherwise, you are the enemy, and we will treat you as such.

We do not have any more time to plead with men and ask them nicely to stop abusing and murdering women and children. We do not have time to continue asking our governments to stop dropping bombs and using chemicals to kill and maim people around the world. We do not have time to ask corporations run by psychopathic men to stop destroying the planet. We have been asking nicely for hundreds of years, and nothing has changed. I am done with asking. I want to see porn studios burned to the ground. I want to see “men’s rights activists” fearing for their lives and hiding in their homes, because no one with the audacity to fabricate this fake movement should ever feel safe walking the streets. I want justice, and I will do whatever it takes to achieve it.

Escalation can mean physically intervening if we find ourselves witness to male violence, and it can also mean no longer allowing your buddy to speak or behave in sexist ways. It can mean publicly shaming abusers, speaking in support of women’s right to defend themselves however they need to do so, and actively challenging ourselves and other men to dismantle masculinity inside and out. Just as in any strategic resistance movement in which the very few capable resistors are on the front line and the rest are supporting, the vast majority of profeminist work should be undoing the culture. Ultimately, justice means that we have to start doing something about a culture in which men are either abusive or hardly doing anything at all to end abuse.

Profeminist men must escalate now, or we are not worth the two pennies our words claim. Every day we fail to be effective is another day women are tortured, enslaved and killed and I will be damned if I continue to sit back and let this happen. Profeminist men must say it and mean it: over our dead bodies will this culture continue.

Let’s Get Free! is a column by Kourtney Mitchell, a writer and activist from Georgia, primarily focusing on anti-oppression and building genuine alliance with oppressed communities. Contact him at kourtney.mitchell@gmail.com.

Launch of Website for Community-led Database for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Launch of Website for Community-led Database for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

by | Aug 5, 2014 | Education, Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence

By No More Silence
As Indigenous peoples, working for justice for #MMIW is a process that starts within our own communities. The launch of this  website is one example of the resurgence of community documentation as justice.

In April of 2013, No More Silence, Families of Sisters in Spirit and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network began what has become a long term vision for a community-led database documenting the violent deaths and disappearances of Indigenous women. It is our collective hope that the lives of Indigenous Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTTQQIA) will also be recognized as gender based violence also impacts these communities and is often invisibilized.

The website is available for viewing at: www.ItStartsWithUs-MMIW.com

FSIS, community partner on this initiative indicated that they “support a grassroots led community database because Indigenous people are first and foremost the experts in gathering data and information about missing and murdered Indigenous women”. The launch of this website is an outcome from many community conversations with impacted families and individuals affected by colonial gender based violence.

1 year later and still no justice…The purpose of the database is to our honour women and provide family members with a way to document their loved ones passing. As the one year anniversary of Bella Laboucan-Mclean’s death approaches the family has provided the first of many tribute pieces on the website, available to read at: www.ItStartsWithUs-MMIW.com/bella

According to Melina Laboucan-Massimo, “Our family still does not have answers from the Toronto Police about Bella’s death which is still listed as suspicious. We appeal to anyone with information to come forward with answers. We urge the Toronto Police to investigate her death as if Bella were part of their own family and not just another police statistic. This new website and database gives families like ours the ability to not only document the lives of our loved ones but also commemorate and celebrate their lives and achievements.”

As the search for answers persists, we continue to urge the Toronto Police Service to maintain their focus on the details surrounding Bella’s death as the family and larger community follow this case closely. We are honoured to have Bella’s story be the first tribute that is shared on the website as a way of recognizing her life and spirit.

We also call attention to Sonya Cywink, murdered in London, ON who’s family and community are preparing a memorial on the 20th anniversary of her passing and are also holding out hope that one day they will uncover the mystery surrounding her murder.

Krysta Williams of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and community partner, “We know there are many other stories, families and anniversaries, this is just the beginning. We continue to build capacity within our networks to respond and support.”

For more information and background on #ItStartsWithUs please read “Supporting the Resurgence of Community-Based Responses to Violence” at: http://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/march142014.pdf

No More Silence Media Contact:
Audrey Huntley
Phone:647-981-2918 Email: audreyhuntley@gmail.com
Bella’s Family Media Contact:
Melina Laboucan-Massimo
Phone:780-504-5567 Email: miyowapan@gmail.com

Native Youth Sexual Health Network Media Contact:
Erin Konsmo, Media Arts Justice and Projects Coordinator
Email:ekonsmo@nativeyouthsexualhealth.com

From Warrior Publications: http://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/database-website-for-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women/

Mohawk protesters blockade rail line, demand inquiry into indigenous women murders

by | Mar 10, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Obstruction & Occupation

By Canadian Press

Police say three people will be charged after Mohawk protesters calling for an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women occupied CN Rail tracks in eastern Ontario.

Provincial police say demonstrators moved onto the tracks Saturday morning in Napanee, leading to CN issuing a stop order for all trains.

Police say a man struck the window of an unmarked police cruiser, breaking the glass.

Sgt. Kristine Rae says four people were arrested, and that three of them will face charges that have yet to be determined by investigators.

VIA Rail issued a travel advisory on Saturday saying the blockade affects the movement of VIA Rail trains on the Toronto – Montréal and Toronto – Ottawa routes, in both directions.

The stop order was lifted early in the afternoon, and train service is resuming.

Demonstrators had vowed on Friday to step up their protest in response to a parliamentary report into missing and murdered indigenous women that rejected numerous calls for a full public inquiry.

Spokesman Shawn Brant has said that there will be consequences for a national inquiry not being called.

The activists have been blockading a road east of Belleville since last Sunday night.

The release of the missing women report on Friday set off a firestorm of criticism from opposition critics, First Nation leaders and human rights groups.

Liberal and NDP members who sat on the all-party panel issued their own dissenting reports, accusing the federal Conservatives of sanitizing the final report on an ongoing crisis that has caught the attention of the United Nations.

Among its 16 recommendations, the report calls on the Conservative government to work with the provinces, territories and municipalities to create a public awareness and prevention campaign focusing on violence against aboriginal women and girls.

It’s estimated there are hundreds of cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada dating back to the 1960s – officially as many as 600, and likely hundreds more unreported victims.

Passengers are being told to expect delays. Service recovery measures such as late train travel credits or travel credits for bus substitutions will not be offered for affected trains. Extra charges paid for Business Class tickets will be reimbursed in the case of a bus substitution.

From Global News: http://globalnews.ca/news/1196149/4-in-custody-after-mohawk-protesters-occupy-train-tracks-near-belleville/