activism

Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

mandy — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 09:00:00 +0000

By Meghan Huppuch, Mandy Van Deven, Joanne N. Smith

Difficulties concentrating in school, shame, depression, guilt, fear, low self-esteem, poor body image, and powerlessness are just some of the repercussions that victims of sexual harassment at school experience, according to research conducted by Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). This Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization works to “improve gender and race relations and socioeconomic conditions for [the] most vulnerable youth and communities of color.” Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Megan Huppuch of GGE have collaboratively written Hey, Shorty!, which tells GGE’s story, while providing a model for teens to teach their peers what constitutes sexual harassment and how to prevent it. The book also gives activists, educators, parents and students a hands-on guide to combat sexual harassment and violence in their schools and neighborhoods.

In September 2001, just a few months after GGE had started meeting to play basketball, an 8-year-old girl was raped on her way to school in the area. In response to the victim blaming that GGE founder Joanne Smith heard, she decided to discuss gender stereotypes and discrimination with the girls in the league. This evolved into Gender Respect Workshops, developed and facilitated by Mandy Van Deven with male and female students in the classroom. She discovered that sexual harassment was a major issue in the lives of the students, particularly girls and LGBTQ youth. Soon after, the Sisters in Strength program was born, and today it has become a paid year-long internship for teen girls of color to advocate for the enforcement of sexual harassment policies in New York City public schools through workshops and direct action.

Sisters in Strength’s first task was to raise awareness about the problem in the community, which led to their making Hey... Shorty!, a short film that later won Best Youth Documentary at the Roxbury Film Festival. They screened their film at the Street Harassment Summit, where they shared what they had learned with other members of the community.

A second Sisters in Strength project involved hands-on participatory action research. The teen interns collected information through surveys, focus groups, and slam books, or notebooks with written prompts that students can respond to anonymously. After compiling their data, they concluded that sexual harassment was rampant and normalized. Their research results were presented at GGE's Gender Equality Festival to other community organizations. Under Meghan Huppuch’s leadership, GGE went on to form the Coalition for Gender Equity in Schools with more than twenty other area organizations.

The work of GGE may well have given us the solution to bullying that we have so desperately sought. When we are sexually harassed, we believe we are alone and somehow deserve this treatment. In other words, we internalize our pain and suffer in silence. But from GGE’s research and community action, we see that this pervasive problem lies not within the person being harassed, but with the external forces that perpetuate and enable sexual harassment to exist in our schools and on our streets.

GGE is an empowering initiative for teens, our future leaders, and Hey, Shorty! is an essential resource for parents, teachers and community leaders who want to take action against bullying and sexual harassment in their communities. Chock full of capacity-building activities and ideas, Hey, Shorty! is indispensable for anyone who wants to create an environment where everyone thrives.

Written by: Heather Leighton, April 30th 2011

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives

gwen — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Stephen John Hartnett

University of Illinois Press

As a feminist concerned with social justice, in the past year or so I’ve become convinced that dismantling the prison-industrial complex should be a top priority amongst feminists.

This anthology, Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex, edited by Stephen John Hartnett, argues as much, stressing that this very goal “should be at the head of a new human rights agenda for the twenty-first century.” In making this argument, the anthology is comprised of two sections of essays: “Diagnosing the Crisis” and “Practical Solutions, Visionary Alternatives.” The anthology further incorporates artwork and poetry by those who know the dehumanization and injustice of the system firsthand – those incarcerated – in an attempt to “remind readers that the prison-industrial complex does not house monsters but humans.”

The first section addresses how the United States of America has become a “punishing democracy.” That is, a democracy that spends more on prisons than on public education and spends more on punishment than on rehabilitation. In “Diagnosing the Crisis,” the authors note how we became a country with countless prisons and a swelling prison population. Several authors cite the “war on drugs” as a historical policy shift, one which paved the way for zero-tolerance policies which heavily affect – and actually target – communities comprised of poor and working class people of color.

Other essays in this section address how the defunding of public education and social programs works to benefit the prison-industrial complex. I especially appreciated Rose Braz’s and Myesha Williams’ essay “Diagnosing the Schools-to-Prisons Pipeline: Maximum Security, Minimum Learning,” which clarifies how the term high school “dropout” is misleading. They suggest replacing it with “pushout” – a term that more accurately conveys how the current public education system (due to issues of defunding and racism) betrays students of color from at-risk communities and practically ensures their entry into the criminal justice system.

The second half of Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex offers hope and ideas for change through activism and the arts. Essays underscore the need for educational opportunities in prisons, as university professors take it upon themselves to offer college-level courses, GED preparation courses, and college entry exam courses to inmates. Several essays also demonstrate the empowering effects of offering creative workshops and classes to inmates.

These essays detail the hard work, tribulations, and results of providing playwriting workshops in prisons as well as enlisting inmates to stage Shakespearean plays. Such activism provides opportunities for inmates to reclaim their humanity and their voices, as well as provides communities a glimpse into the prison-industrial complex and the people caught up in the system.

The inmates’ artwork and poetry are powerful additions to this anthology. As with any academic text related to social justice, there is the possibility of elevating so-called experts’ thoughts and voices on an issue while simultaneously silencing or absenting the voices of the very people affected the most. Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex seeks to create a balance between the two, in which voices of those both inside and outside the system work in tandem to convey a greater realization of what is happening in our schools, in our communities, and in our prisons.

Ultimately, the conversation surrounding dismantling the prison-industrial complex needs to be happening outside the walls of academia. This is an issue that relates to racism, classism, immigration reform, youth, budget spending, the militarization of our police forces, racist and inaccurate media coverage, the privatization of prisons, physical as well as sexual violence within our prisons, and the disenfranchisement of entire communities across the country – just to name a few. Feminists should be taking an active role in this fight. Abolishing the prison-industrial complex should be routinely discussed and debated on feminist blogs and in feminist publications alongside our efforts to end sexual violence and our fight for reproductive rights.

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex provides a framework for this discussion as well as steps to dismantle the system. We should all heed the authors’ warnings and advice and work together to reimagine a new democracy.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, April 27th 2011

The Latte Rebellion

brittany — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Sarah Jamila Stevenson

Flux

Asha Jamison’s classmates are quick to categorize her. She is called both a “towelhead” and “barely Asian.” Asha and her best friend Carey have a harder time describing their own ethnicities. Asha is part Indian, part Mexican, and part Irish, while Carey is half Chinese and half Caucasian. When they begin describing themselves as lattes—a mix of coffee and milk—they start brainstorming ways to distribute their idea to other multiethnic teens and coffee lovers. The Latte Rebellion is born, first only through t-shirt sales that Asha and Carey hope to use for a post-graduation trip but spiraling quickly into a viral social movement.

Things get out of hand, though, when other chapters of the movement take the message too far. Asha promotes peaceful rallies, but others resort to hate speech and violence. The Latte Rebellion becomes targeted as a terrorist group, and Asha is forced to go before the school board for a disciplinary hearing as a result of her involvement. Now more than ever, Asha must find her voice and speak out for what The Latte Rebellion is truly about: empowerment, belonging, and identity.

Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s The Latte Rebellion sports a gorgeously textured cover, and it was the side-by-side glossy and matte finishes that lured me into the book initially. I can’t help but be tempted by a delicious-looking cup of coffee. While I couldn’t always identify with Asha’s struggle, I admired the book’s promotion of mixed-ethnicity understanding and acceptance. I was rooting for Asha, though after reading a book about advocacy—albeit a fictional one—I would have liked to have gotten more riled up. Throughout much of the novel, it was hard to accept that these teens cared about much more than their t-shirt sales, vacation plans, and cute guys. They are teenagers, after all.

The Latte Rebellion is founded on a solid premise, but its message is one that can be grasped quickly from the first few chapters. Much of the remainder dragged on and on. Unfortunately, I found this book to be short on substance, too much milk and not enough coffee. (If you are not a fan of the latte metaphor, this book is most certainly not for you, as they are used in abundance.) Perhaps teens who can relate better to Asha’s quest will find more meaning behind The Latte Rebellion’s manifesto and pursue their own journey toward social change. As for me, I’ll stick with the coffee and the cool t-shirt.

Written by: Melanie Goodman, April 9th 2011

The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 8.3 (Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert)

brittany — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Edited by Mandy Van Deven, Julie Kubala

Barnard Center for Research on Women

In hindsight, I probably should have waited to read all of the articles in this issue of Barnard Center for Research on Women’s The Scholar and Feminist Online journal, “Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert,” before emailing out sections that resonated with me and the work I’m interested in doing. Instead, I enthusiastically exploded the email inboxes of family, co-workers, friends, and even professors with links, starting with the thorough but concise introduction by guest editors Julie Kubala and (Elevate Difference founding editor) Mandy Van Deven, followed by lists of extensive blog and print resources, key thought-provoking and productive articles, strategic quotes, inspiring photography, and other creative projects.

On a visual level, I was first attracted to the gorgeous photographs, intriguing title (what does the musical term polyphony have to do with feminism?), and black/red/white aesthetic that is simultaneously academic, professional, creative, and approachable. There are also a variety of writing styles (poetry, conversational prose, mixed media, and theory) and a diversity of contributors (artists, healers, authors, activists, survivors, educators, students, and performers).

Regarding the theoretical content, what resonated with my own passions and work was the exploration of how the once radical idea of intersectionality has become institutionalized and conceptualized as “a remedy for exclusivity and hegemony.” Jennifer Nash (“On Difficultly: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor”) argues (echoing the thoughts of other contributors) that, “While naming difference certainly allows feminists to bear witness to power's operations, it does little to analyze the mechanisms by which these systems of exclusion are replicated and re-created.” Instead, she calls for intersectionality to be understood as “a metaphor, as one illustration of how structures of domination might cooperate to maintain their power.” A lot of what the journal addresses is about is “how to encourage dissent within communities” in order to continue challenging the forms of resistance; who is speaking, visible and accessing the circulation of radical ideas; and focusing on the possibilities and “what next?”

As the editors explain, “Polyphony, with its focus on non-hierarchical multiplicity, [is] a way to address” these issues, and I would recommend this online journal to anyone interested in joining, or at least reading about, the continual conversations about theory, activism, and the plurality of feminisms.

Written by: Abigail Chance, April 5th 2011

Revolutionary Women: A Book of Stencils

barbara — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Queen of the Neighbourhood

PM Press

I'm all for learning more—and for disseminating information to a wide audience—about women who have played significant roles in history. All too often, women who have contributed to movements for change have been given all too little (or no) attention or credit.

I agree that we need to have a more complete picture of the female revolutionaries who risked and sometimes gave their lives for a cause. Many of the women in this book are conspicuously missing from history textbooks, as are their images: for this reason Queen of the Neighbourhood added stencils to each of the thirty women profiled in this short book. As one of the editors notes, we have seen so many images of Che Guevara that it has almost “become kitsch from overuse,” but where are the women?

That said, the celebration of some of the women profiled in this book gave me pause—namely, because I am a pacifist who believes that violence begets violence. While I love the DIY element of Revolutionary Women, I would have a serious problem if my little sister copied some of the stencils that the editors offer to “commemorate these women and their actions.” Why should we commemorate someone who hijacked a plane (Leila Khaled), for instance? It's insulting to include her alongside a modern-day heroine such as Malalai Joya, Afghanistan's youngest member of parliament, who has risked her life for daring to demand rights for women in her nation.

That said, I was thrilled to see some lesser-known activists honored here, notably Silvia Rivera, an American transgender activist who died in 2002 and even led meetings from her hospital bed; Olive Morris, a Black women's movement activist from the U.K. who died of cancer at age twenty-seven; and Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist who assists movements all over the globe.

Despite my disagreement that violent actions should be commemorated, I'd include this as a must-read for informational and historical purposes.

Written by: M.L. Madison, March 18th 2011

Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work

annette — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Margery Freeman, Lila Cabbil, Kimberley Richards, Jeff Hitchcock, Bonnie Berman Cushing

Inc., Dostie, Crandall, & Douglass Books

“Actively listen... You cannot help if you do not hear... Actively listen...” These words swirl across the cover of Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work. The book is a collection of eleven articles by white anti-racist activists reflecting on their experiences with accountability. Almost all of the contributors trace their activist roots back to Undoing Racism™ trainings from the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), and in fact the book opens with a foreword by Ronald Chisom, co-founder and executive director of PISAB. Contributors also have ties to other prominent white anti-racist organizations, including the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop (CWS) and the White Privilege Conference.

What is accountability? In the book's introduction, the editors write, “Accountability in the traditional sense implies an underlying power that can administer sanctions, but if there are no sanctions, if one is in the power position, why be accountable, and who can hold you to it? So accountability as we view it in regard to white anti-racist organizing is about a willingness to share power.”

Some of the book's contributors focus on philosophies or systems of accountability. For example, Shelly Tochluk and Cameron Levin, of AWARE-LA (Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles) and RJA (Racial Justice Alliance) describe the model for accountability they have developed, entitled Transformative Alliance Building. They emphasize “two-sided accountability” (between white people and people of color) in contrast to “one-sided” models that emphasize white accountability to people of color without discussing the necessity for reciprocity. One-sided accountability, they claim, leaves white activists mired in white guilt, which causes them to believe that they are incapable of taking full responsibility for tasks they should shoulder (such as organizing other white people against racism). This in turn prolongs the burden of over-dependence on activists of color.

Other articles focus on “applied accountability.” Larry Yates writes about his long tenure with the National Low-Income Housing Coalition/Low Income Housing Information Service (LIHIS). Thanks initially to the conditions of receiving grant money from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a majority of LIHIS Board members were people directly impacted by the issue at hand: current or former residents of public or assisted housing. “These funder requirements,” writes Yates, “gave the LIHIS Board a clear framework of accountability.” He describes how this, along with other aspects of the organization's institutionalized commitment to tenant self-determination, helped LIHIS develop a national grassroots base that was able to act effectively on both local and national levels to change HUD (Department of Housing and Urban development) policy.

I appreciate this collection especially for its focus on telling “Stories from Our Work.” This is not a book about pedagogy or identity development, about “how to get more white people to take on an anti-racist outlook.” This is a book about action, about implementing an anti-racist outlook in a sustained way in specific contexts. Additionally, it is not a book about individual white heroes or heroines. It is a book about movement-building, about creating and sustaining networks of people that can support each other in doing long-term coordinated work. These are stories that I want and need to hear as a young white anti-racist activist.

Additionally, it makes sense for a book about white anti-racist activism to focus on the concept of accountability. As each contributor describes in his/her own way, white privilege grants disproportionate access to systems, institutions, and resources. The task of white anti-racist activism is not to deny the truth of that access in order to seek individual absolution. Rather, the task must be to leverage that access strategically (or to put it more bluntly, to work within the system in one way or another) to bring about radical change. The key challenge, as this book hashes out in eleven different contexts, is to do that work without losing the focus on ending racism—in other words, to be accountable to people of color, and to each other as well.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, March 14th 2011

Transnational Social Work Practice

annette — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Rich Furman, Nalini Junko Negi

Columbia University Press

Transnational Social Work Practice is definitely not a book intended for a popular audience. That it is a textbook was clear to me before I even laid eyes on the book, when I noted that the list price on Amazon.com—for this slim 241-page volume—was $50. The articles, too, are written with the assumption that readers are familiar with a number of complex social work and development concepts, such as sustainability, cultural competence, and professional accreditation, among others. Nevertheless, I read the anthology as a lay person, and I found it an engaging, accessible read that opened my mind to new questions about global development and social change.

The book is divided loosely into two sections. It begins with an introduction to the concept of transnationality—the state of individuals and communities who are living life with a sustained investment in two or more nations (as contrasted with an “older” immigration pattern of gradually transferring one's presence and investment out of one country and into another).

Following this introduction is a collection of four articles (entitled “The Context of Transmigration”) that further illuminate issues that affect transnational populations, including environmental change and degradation, economic networks that cross national borders (including networks of remittance), and globalization. The second section of the book (“Services to Transmigrants”) focuses on the application of social work practice to transnational populations. The nine articles in this section explore the role of social workers in responding to processes including cross-border human trafficking, refugee resettlement, and violence against migrant workers. One article, “Using Internet Technology for Transnational Social Work Practice and Education,” reflects upon the growing availability of translation software, useful both for bridging client/provider language gaps and for facilitating resource-sharing among an increasingly international professional community. Another article, “Incorporating Transnational Social Work into the Curriculum,” considers the need to prepare social work students for an increasingly international and transnational field—for example, by developing a service-learning class designed to be held at the Texas-Mexico border, as the article's authors did.

As a lay reader, one of my favorite aspects of the book was the discussion of the macro, mezzo, and micro levels at which social work practice can function. Cynthia A. Hunter, Susannah Lepley, and Samuel Nickels lay out this distinction most clearly in the last article in the book, “New Practice Frontiers: Current and Future Social Work with Transmigrants.” Micro practice refers to the one-on-one work between provider and client, which can be focused on individual coping and meaning-making, or on case management (connecting clients with welfare services for which they are eligible). Macro practice refers to advocacy and policy-making—changing institutions and systems at national and international levels.

What Hunter, Lepley, and Nickels consider mezzo-level social work (and authors Brij Mohan and Julia E. Clark describe as macro-level social work in their article “Macro Social Work Practice with Transmigrants”) can be described as a sort of “back door” to political organizing, in which providers are able to connect clients with information about their situation, and with other clients in similar situations, in a way that empowers them to organize themselves to change their circumstances. I appreciated the authors' acknowledgment of the complexity of the power relations surrounding this practice, especially if the providers in question are outsiders who have, on one hand, little local understanding, and, on the other, access to resources that their clients do not have. I also appreciated the push to consider how outsider social workers can transfer that access to clients in strategic ways.

In the end, this is the major question that the book raised for me: Can international social work be solidarity work? If the global North must be engaged in the “development” of the global South, might it be possible for “providers” to take advantage of that “welfare infrastructure” to transfer information and resources to “clients” from developing countries in a way that empowers them to demand that development take place on their own terms?

Written by: Ri J. Turner, March 13th 2011

Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

mandy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Jason Hribal

AK Press

You may already know (and I hope you do) that zoos and circuses aren't good places for animals. But how do we know? Jason Hribal's Fear of an Animal Planet argues that we only need listen to what the animals themselves are telling us. He fills the pages with story after story of animals who "misbehave": who escape, who refuse to perform and reproduce, who attack (and often kill) human handlers. After twenty years of circus life, Tyke the elephant kills one of her captors and runs wild through the streets of Honolulu. Kumang the orangutan grounds a hot wire surrounding her enclosure and climbs out using the porcelain insulators as hand-holds. None of the orca Corky's calves survive past forty-six days, apparently victims of maternal neglect. And so on.

Key themes emerge. One: captive animals are exploited, in the full-on Marxist sense of the word. Whether performing circus stunts, entertaining zoo visitors, or breeding the next generation of performers, they create value for their human owners, value the benefit of which the animals themselves never own. Sea World is a multimillion dollar business. But it isn't using those profits to feast its whales on tuna, expand the chlorine-saturated pools, or—most assuredly—release marine animals back to the ocean.

Two: other animals can resist exploitation and slavery very much like human workers, through refusals to work, sabotage, escapes, and physical attacks. If we dare to see past species difference, and accept that animals' actions have intent, we recognize these tactics.

Three: through their resistance, animals are agents in their own history. When Tyke, for instance, was fatally was shot by police after her escape, footage of her death spurred human witnesses into activism. Two established the Hohenwald Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, where elephants roam unchained and unsupervised. Protests, lawsuits, and investigations into the animal contracting company that leased Tyke followed, and most significantly, some of Tyke's fellow performers were released into the care of sanctuaries like Hohenwald. None of this could have happened without Tyke's actions.

Hribal is a student of the historian Peter Linebaugh (co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra), whose approach he shares. Instead of accepting official narratives, he inverts social hierarchies and tells history from the perspective of the oppressed and dispossessed. Here, we're seeing circuses, zoos, and aquariums from the animals' side. Alas, the accounts—taken, according to the prologue, from newspapers, government and legal documents, online databases, institutional archives and a handful of earlier histories—are not individually sourced by foot- or endnotes, which strikes me as sloppy scholarship, surprising considering the author's background. It's also a criticism I'm sure Hribal's opponents will raise.

The author also makes a brief mention of alcohol use among circus trainers. In the next breath, he describes the industry as morally bankrupt. He seems to mean that circus management is utterly irresponsible in letting intoxicated handlers have contact with animals, but the phrasing is easily misunderstood to blame alcoholics ("drunkards," he says) for their addiction. I hope later editions can amend these flaws.

I want these later editions because I want nothing to detract from the challenge Fear of an Animal Planet offers its human readers. Like the best scholarship, it invites us to reject standard narratives. Instead of chalking up their behavior to mechanistic instinct, to adolescence, gender, playfulness, or high spirits, Hribal asks us to take animals' actions seriously: to see deliberate and eminently understandable resistance to conditions that the animals themselves find unacceptable, and to recognize them as fellow sufferers in a profit-driven economy.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, March 10th 2011

The Young Lords: A Reader

andrea — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Darrel Enck-Wanzer

New York University Press

Before reading The Young Lords: A Reader, I had never heard of the Young Lords Party. The original Young Lords were a loosely organized group that emerged from a street gang fighting the gentrification of Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Chicago. The New York chapter quickly dissociated themselves from their Chicago cousins, renaming themselves the “Young Lords Party” rather than the “Young Lords Organization.” The Young Lords Party, or YLP, are perhaps most famous for their takeover of a Methodist Church in East Harlem (“The People’s Church”) or their Garbage Offensive in the summer of 1969. Sanitation was nowhere near routine in the Barrio (East Harlem), so YLP officers pushed the garbage into the streets, forcing the city to clean it up if they wanted traffic to continue as normal. These types of actions, along with free tuberculosis and lead poisoning screenings, adult education classes, worker organizing, and a celebration of the many cultures of Puerto Ricans in New York were the backbone of the YLP.

As editor Darrel Enck-Wanzer states at the beginning of The Young Lords: A Reader: “This book offers a comprehensive collection of primary texts so that... you, the reader, can decide for yourself what the Young Lords might mean to us today.” True to his word, Enck-Wanzer presents many Young Lords’ original texts organized for the first time in one compilation. Although he clearly sympathizes with the original mission of the Young Lords Party, he presents the texts warts and all, including typos and dated language that a modern reader may not quite grasp.

Almost entirely youth-led, the Young Lords Party organized their friends, grandmothers, and neighbors to fight for rights that no one else was fighting for. Young organizers would do well to study this text, specifically Latino youth who may not identify with commonly lauded civil rights leaders. In one section on education, students describe the first-ever meeting of the Puerto Rican student union at Columbia University: “Workshops were held dealing with... the role of women in the revolution; high school students, college students, Latin American and Latin unity; the military... political prisoners; Third World unity; education, and the media...” This article was published in 1970 but easily could have described a conference held this year. If we are still battling the same demons, we would do well to learn from the mistakes of those who came before us.

We should also give credit where credit is due. The YLP, more so than many similar groups, made an effort to recognize the intersectionality of different oppressions, an idea that is much more acceptable now than it was decades ago. They placed a special emphasis on the inclusion of women and the destruction of misogyny within their movement. This should be the norm by now, even though sadly it’s not. This anthology is a learning tool because most texts are presented honestly, with leaders candidly discussing their struggles, goals, progress, and failures. I cringe when older activists speak of the lack of passion nowadays, because I don’t think it’s any less prevalent today than it was in the sixties. The Young Lords: A Reader helps demonstrate part of that passion/frustration/ dedication, and helps guide young activists today with the same drive towards long-term change.

Written by: Colleen Hodgetts, March 4th 2011

Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas

tina — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Jessica Taft

New York University Press

Of the many things I accomplished in high school, “leading a political uprising” was suspiciously absent. Yet around the world, teenage girls are organizing their own social revolutions, a trend largely undocumented and unanalyzed before Jessica Taft’s Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas.

Taft’s interviews with teenage women engaged in progressive social justice work in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay area, and Vancouver reveals scores of young women active in sophisticated community organizing and creative political protests. These are girls shutting down their school systems to combat harassment; hosting workshops on challenging white supremacy; and railing against toxic waste facilities poisoning their communities.

Rebel Girls isn’t a critique of the culture of girlhood—a blossoming field dedicated to analyzing the psychosocial experiences of teenage women as they develop. Instead, Taft investigates young women engaged in social activism (either through community organizations or through their own initiatives) – a group whose power and accomplishments have been relatively ignored by the broader social justice movement. Taft not only recognizes this, but seeks to rectify it by placing the voices of the girls front and center in her research, creating a book that is simultaneously captivating and insightful.

It would be easy to stereotype the girls’ work based on their identities as teenagers or as young women. Taft astutely resists the temptation. For example, an interview with two Buenos Aires women building a community center examines how gender influences the women’s political work, but does not stray into potentially counterproductive stereotypes about girls. Observations that many of the girls featured strove to make politics “fun” does not smack of derision; rather, Taft places the girls’ “pleasurable politics” in the context of social justice movements throughout history.

The fact that teenagers are largely excluded from the standard markers of political engagement—being able to vote and run for office—colors their engagement as well as their political philosophies. The girls Taft interviews have largely circumvented these political avenues in favor of more direct and in many instances, more transformative social work. While Taft notes that ignoring the macro-level influences at the root of injustice may hinder lasting social change, her reluctance to investigate this further is one of very few weak points in Rebel Girls.

Through her meticulous interviews interwoven with historical background, Taft presents a work that is both a rigorous academic analysis and a thoughtful portrait of the intimate details of these women’s work.

Written by: Gwen Emmons, February 24th 2011

A Guide to Picking Locks, Number Two

brittany — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By CrimethInc.

CrimethInc.

Full disclosure here: I have never, ever picked a lock. I suppose it would be kind of neat to know how to bust into a door with a wafer tumbler lock, but I just never have really experienced the need. An excellent parlor trick, perhaps? A desire to emulate Houdini in a daring escape from the chains of certain death?

For those savvy entrepreneurs who wish to start their own locksmithing business (or channel their inner Houdini), there are many texts available on the subject including Visual Guide to Lock Picking by Mark McCloud and The Complete Guide To Lock Picking by Eddie The Wire. (As a side note, Eddie The Wire is also the author of the Y2K classic, How To Bury Your Goods: The Complete Manual of Long Term Underground Storage. I wish I were kidding.)

So what would the purpose be to own a lock picker’s guide, a tiny, neon pink, pocket-sized book from the publisher CrimethInc? The short answer is, I don’t know. It is pocket-sized, which is convenient for those times where you just really have to get a lock picked and don’t have your hardback version of Modern High-security Locks: How To Open Them by Steven Hampton. My guess is, however, that most folks interested in this book probably are not going to be helping old ladies into their Oldsmobiles. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t really see a locksmith-in-training using this text as an educational device.

Something about the book just didn’t seem right, so I typed in a sentence from the book’s text, and surprise! A Guide to Picking Locks, Number Two is really just a hacked-up, poorly photocopied version of the Eddie the Wire book, The Complete Guide To Lock Picking (available free online). The CrimethInc book has no author information, so I’m not sure if Eddie the Wire was involved in this version or not. Contacting CrimethInc was a hopeless endeavour. Will we ever know the truth? Chances are, probably not.

You can buy the CrimethInc book for four bucks online, but I’m not sure exactly why you would when it is available for free. Use your anarchist instincts, lock pickers! Liberate those doomed mink with a free version of this lock-picking text, and avoid paying the man! Cinch up the strings on your hoodie, and make sure your bandanna is secured tightly around your nose and mouth while you access the book free on your iPad. Also, bring your Slim Jim Universal Lock Out Tool Set and make sure you have Febreeze—because as much as I feel for the plight of the mink, the potent aroma of their musk will be nearly impossible to wash out of your mom’s Subaru Forester.

Written by: Emily S. Dunster, February 12th 2011

An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country

brittany — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Susan Rosenberg

Citadel/Kensington

Twenty-seven years ago, activists Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were caught transporting explosives to a New Jersey storage facility. Although the pair had no immediate plans to use the incendiary materials, they—and their comrades in the May 19 Communist Party—were stockpiling them for a revolution they believed was imminent.

Rosenberg’s searing memoir, An American Radical—a chronicle of sixteen years spent in four U.S. prisons—doesn’t spend much time analyzing the reasoning behind this idea. Instead, it focuses on the government’s treatment of incarcerated political opponents. Rosenberg describes heinous abuses, from 24/7 surveillance, to sleep deprivation, overcrowding, medical neglect, and outright nastiness by prison employees. Rehabilitation? Rosenberg scoffs. The High Security Units in which political prisoners are kept, she writes, “seek to reduce prisoners to a state of submission essential for their ideological conversion. That failing, the next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient self-directing antagonists. That failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.”

Nowhere is this clearer than in a chapter entitled “My Father.” In it, Rosenberg offers a painful reflection on her attempt to visit her terminally ill dad. “A prisoner may request a two-hour deathbed visit or attendance at the funeral,” she writes. “A prisoner may not request both. If granted permission for the visit, the prisoner must pay the salary of the accompanying security detail.” The machinations that followed Rosenberg’s request are mind-boggling. Despite appeals from a host of people—including her lawyers, a family rabbi, and Congressman Jerrold Nadler—the warden denied Rosenberg’s petition, stating that the nature of her conviction made her too much of a flight risk. Appeal after appeal followed—all of them unsuccessful. Then something—to this day Rosenberg doesn’t know what—shifted and out of nowhere she got word that the visit was approved.

First, however, there were documents for Rosenberg to sign, swearing not to escape. She was later prepared for the journey: “The lieutenant cuffed me, but did not wrap me in chains... They put me in a car and drove me to a small airport where we boarded an eight-seat Learjet… We were met by a small army. There were more than fifty agents of every variety and rank: state police, Westchester County police, Danbury Bureau of Prison personnel, FBI agents, and U.S. marshals—all these people assembled to take me to the Danbury, Connecticut hospital.” After a short supervised visit, Rosenberg returned to her cell in Marianna Prison, grateful to have said goodbye to her beloved father but acutely aware of the class privilege that made the encounter possible.

Rosenberg rails at the racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism that define prison life and An American Radical is brimming with fury at the inequities she and other female prisoners were forced to endure. Whether focusing on AIDS or the disproportionate punishments meted out to political prisoners—Rosenberg, for example, was given fifty-eight years for weapons possession, an offense that typically carries a five-year sentence--her struggle to retain her humanity is both laudable and inspiring.

President Clinton granted Rosenberg executive clemency on his last day in office, January 20, 2001. While the book ends here—and says nothing about her activities during the subsequent ten years—Rosenberg turns a floodlight on the many political prisoners still languishing in U.S. jails. “The government does not recognize the existence of political prisoners in our country,” she writes. An American Radical shatters the denial that has allowed this to occur.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, February 11th 2011

Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas

priyanka — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Microcosm Publishing

I was initially unimpressed by Firebrands, but that was because I approached it wrong. I tried to sit down in my living room and read it cover-to-cover, and that's not what this book is for. It's a pocket-sized compendium of amazing people—people "left out of the schoolbooks because they were too brown, too female, too poor, too queer, too uneducated, too disabled, or because they daydreamed too much." Each firebrand gets a page-long description, a lovely illustration, and a number of suggestions for further reading.

Firebrands reads somewhat like a reference book, and it could function that way—one could keep it on the shelf in case one heard the name of a lesser-known abolitionist, revolutionary, or what-have-you; then one could simply look that person up. As a blogger, though, I see it as much like a themed blog. It's best opened at random pages, read in fits and starts. It might have been interesting to include some kind of decentralized theme-organization within the book—something along the lines of a blog's tags. A few blog-inspired books have done things like that in recent years, such as the sex-positive anthology Yes Means Yes, which attaches a number of tags at the end of each essay, then lists all tags and their associated entries at the beginning of the book. (Firebrands does have a very nice index, however, so it's possible to navigate the book by themes in that way.)

Once I started reading the book at random and in small chunks, I started liking it a lot. The authors have done a great job of digging up pithy quotations and interesting anecdotes. A few entries lack vividness (it's hard to be enthralled by vague sentences like "She did a lot of community organizing"), but for the most part, these firebrands really sound inspiring. One of my favorite quotations came from the description of Latino baseball player Roberto Clemente: "Clemente's motto was, 'If you have the chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth.'" And I was charmed by an anecdote about the singer Nina Simone: "During a recital when she was twelve years old, Nina's parents were asked to relinquish their front row seats to a white family, and Simone refused to perform until her parents were returned to their original seats."

I was also impressed by the book's genuine inclusiveness—it covered a wide array of warriors, artists, leaders, and it did so while pushing beyond the typical "inclusive" boundaries. For example, as a sex-positive activist I was thrilled to note that the painter Frida Kahlo was acknowledged to be both bisexual and polyamorous.

The illustrations add a lot to Firebrands. I particularly love the images by Roger Peet. It goes with the last biography in the book, Zumbi dos Palmares, a Portuguese slave in Brazil who led an insurrection in the 1600s. Firebrands was produced by an artists' cooperative called Justseeds, and it's clear that the whole group pitched in for this book and thought carefully about each element. So you could benefit a bunch of artists by giving this charming collection as a gift! What’s not to love?

Written by: Clarisse Thorn, January 28th 2011

My Sisters Made of Light

mandy — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Jacqueline St. Joan

Press 53

When I attended the book signing for Jacqueline St. Joan’s novel My Sisters Made of Light, I knew nothing about the book aside from its inspiration: a chance encounter between St. Joan, an American domestic violence activist, and Aisha, a Pakistani activist. St. Joan was moved by a shared sense of purpose to write Aisha’s story—the story of a teacher who has orchestrated secret efforts to rescue women condemned to death for so-called honor crimes in Pakistan for the past twenty-five years.

Due to the sensitivity of the issue, St. Joan ultimately chose to fictionalize Aisha’s story. She takes readers on an intimate journey into the lives of four emboldened sisters—the “mother” of the family, Uji, and her sisters Reshma, Faisah, and Meena—as they confront the beauties and betrayals of their culture. The resulting novel is a moving portrayal of the violence women in Pakistan experience, the widespread impact, and the courageous individuals who are fighting to eradicate these life-threatening human rights violations.

Traversing the diversity of Pakistan’s distinct cultures and classes, My Sisters Made of Light successfully weaves past and present, foreign and familiar, and personal and political to create a compelling account of the devastating suffering and extraordinary heroism that exists in ordinary lives. In addition to vividly illustrating the risks and successes of human rights activism in Pakistan, My Sisters Made of Light depicts the heart-wrenching complexities that rest at the core of familial allegiances and alienation.

Together with Uji, readers encounter woman after woman, injustice after injustice: Bilqis, burned to death by her uncle; Taslima, shot and killed by an assassin hired by her family; Chanda, a girl child whose nose was sliced off by her father. What seems like a never-ending compilation of injustices reads just as it should: overwhelming and deeply unnerving. Each incident is one woman’s story and one part of a larger narrative—that of the insidious and ubiquitous legacies of violence that extend far beyond boundaries of culture and country.

At the book signing, St. Joan emphasized that, although written for the women of Pakistan, My Sisters Made of Light is ultimately intended for a Western audience. Careful not to reinforce all-too-common stereotypes of victimized Muslim women, the book’s strength is the universal: what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a sister. The tears I shed at several points while reading the book speak to its success.

To this day, Aisha is struggling to ensure women’s human rights are respected in Pakistan. Her most recent undertaking is a safe shelter for women and children escaping abuse. Aisha has the land for a shelter and the contractors are even lined up to build it; she just needs the cash to pay for it. St. Joan is dedicating half of the proceeds from the sale of My Sisters Made of Light to help Aisha. Although the book ends, the struggle for women’s human rights does not.

Written by: Alicia Simoni, January 26th 2011

Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists

mandy — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Vanessa Martir, Nancy Lublin, Julia Steers

Workman Publishing Company

Got kids? Do they have time and energy? Do they care about something? Anything? Then get them Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists. Buy it, give it to them, sit back, and feel good about having made a difference in the world. Or at least planting the seed.

Do Something! is a very smart book. Lublin begins by helping kids identify what it is they actually care about by having them take a series of quizzes in the first chapter. As long as your kids can read and count, they can make their way through the book entirely on their own. My eight year old daughter and her ten year old sister actually fought over the book, finally settling their dispute by assigning different colors of ink to determine whose answers were where.

Once your child has identified the area or areas they are most likely to be active in, they are given ways to figure out exactly how big the issues are in their own community, what specific kinds of issues there are, and how best to tackle them. Knowing her audience well, Lublin does this by asking the reader to draw brain maps and take surveys and play games throughout the book. She supplements with ideas of her own and examples of other kids who have worked on some of these very same problems. The book reads more like a journal than anything else, and kids will have fun completing the tasks as they come up with their own strategies to implement.

The chapters walk the reader through identifying their hot-button issues, researching the details, crafting a plan, implementing it, and assessing their results. The book can be used over and over again as a way to organize fundraisers or raise awareness of particular problems ranging from bullying to animal rights to disaster response. Lublin empowers kids to make a difference without being prescriptive. The genius of Do Something! is that it validates each child’s personal feelings about what is important and breaks down the steps of acting on those feelings to make activism of any kind perfectly accessible.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, January 14th 2011