Archive | Activism

13th AMENDMENT: A Black Disabled Poetic Viewpoint

17 Feb
krip-hop-painting-copy1

Painting by Carina Lomeli

My Black disabled ancestors
Weren’t free by a swift of a pen
Way back then
Black Codes, Ugly Laws & Lynchings
Dancing on slave ships
Shackles on our feat shaking our hips
Also lead many to freedom
Hey let’s talk Representative James Mitchell Ashley & Abraham Lincoln
What happened to your pen back then
What was your definition of “Involuntary Servitude?
I don’t mean to be rude
Your pen back then
Separated us by law
Ok I can understand that was a flaw
In 2017 we are still living your mistake
And it is hard to take
Decades of freak shows, circus & museums
Involuntary entertainment for the public sake
Forced to work against his or her will
Only way to make a buck was to shut up
And get into a cage
As “owners” took our income was the hardest pill
13th Amendment wrote into the US Constitution
While Black disabled people were locked up in run down state institutions
Today we think that shelter workshops of the Salvation Army are the solution
If it wasn’t abuse it was sub-minmum wage
And we must not show any rage
Cause we weren’t free so could be again locked in a cage
Separated so not mentioned
No wonder Black scholars have no comprehension
When they write, teach & create art on the 13th to the New Jim Crow
We were never the invisible nation
My Black disabled ancestors gave my generation
The foundation to write books & make art and music
Inside & outside of Krip-Hop Nation
________________________________________________________________________________
Leroy F. Moore Jr. is a Black writer, poet, hip-hop\music lover, educator, community activist and feminist with a physical disability. He’s been working in the areas of identity, race & disability for the last thirteen years as a veteran columnist for Poor Magazine, creator of Krip-Hop Nation, Co-founder of the Sins Invalid and as the founding member of Black Disability Studies Working Group with the National Black Disability Coalition. Leroy’s book The Black Kripple Delivers Poetry & Lyrics was published by Poetic Matrix Press in the Winter of 2015. He currently resides in the Bay area.

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Trump’s America: Will “we” be fine? Depends on who is “we”. Depends on what “we” do.

18 Nov

dealer-of-hegemonic-masculinity-cdarcypusher-of-hegemonic-masculinity-cdarcy

Dear White Men,

This is on us. And now it’s up to us to undo it. I keep hearing us say: “we’ll be fine.” We may be shocked, devastated, disappointed, outraged but we also keep telling ourselves “we’ll” be fine. Sure, “we” will. But not all will, and not all are. If you are saying “we will be fine”, think hard about who that “we” is. Because many are not part of the “we” that will be fine. Our friends of color, our Native American friends, our Muslim friends and Latino friends, our LGBTQ friends and the women in our lives are not fine. And they are more than devastated and shocked. They are afraid of what is to come. And they will be, and already are, under attack. If you’ve ever questioned the existence of the concept of privilege, being able to say “we’ll be fine” is painful proof of its existence: Continue reading →

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Nine months of #MasculinitySoFragile

20 Jun

masc so fragile

from hashtag to product, #MasculinitySoFragile can now be worn.

 

Whether you’ve heard of it or not, the hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile is a personal case study in bringing public sociology, activism and twitter together.

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Tags: , , , , masculinitysofragile, misogyny, , , toxic masculinity, twitter

Reflections

17 Jun

by Kyle Ashby

With multiple sources reporting that Omar Mateen frequented Pulse nightclub and suffered from mental illness and internalized homophobia leading up to the shooting, I feel obligated to write a concise history of my queer life so you can understand two things: why I didn’t become Omar and why this shooting has affected me so greatly. Keep in mind so many circumstances and events contributed to me being alive and grieving today as an out queer man that the following can only be presented as a glimpse of the truth, a myopic description of self-determination. I present a monochromatic thread so that you can follow the unraveling edge to its black terminus: today, my third night of almost no sleep and emotional unease. I lay awake knowing that I hate Omar Mateen for the choices he made, for the pain he caused, for the lives he ruined, but learning that he may be part of my queer family means that compassion is redirecting my hate to the conglomerate of American culture that made both of our lives so different.
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Tags: , , Orlando, , Pulse, Pulse Shooting, Pulse victims, , ,

What should I do when I’m walking behind or passing a white woman late at night on the street?

15 Mar

Ever since I started talking to women about street harassment, I’ve tried to be more conscious of my presence as a man in settings where women are often made to feel unsafe. I have become especially conscious of this dynamic when I’m walking around or behind women late at night. A friend of mine once suggested that he crosses the street in these types of situations to avoid making the woman feel uncomfortable (he was Latino). I’ve done this a handful of times since then and will continue to do so, provided I’m not thrown too far off my original route.

But I still have some mixed feelings about this suggestion. For a while now, moments like these have exposed a rift in my mind. On one side of this rift is my militant/anti-racist/black nationalist self. This is the side of me committed to racial justice for all people of color, and especially for black men. It’s the side of me that’s been cultivated since I sat and watched Spike Lee’s Malcolm X with my family when I was 6 or 7 years old. On the other side of the rift is an intersectional feminist attempting to use their position of (male) privilege as a megaphone to help spread the voices of women who are harmed by sexism and misogyny on a daily basis. These overlapping but distinct parts of my consciousness crash into one another whenever a woman reacts fearfully to my presence.

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Benefit Concert

3 Mar

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Fundraising is a difficult but important part of many feminist projects; interestingly, male privilege means it is often easier for men to raise money for a women’s shelter or hotline than for women to do it. If we take on some of that work, where our privilege is especially helpful, it also leaves women and people of other genders with more time and energy to devote where their specific life experiences give them more expertise!

 Unrelatedly: music is amazing. Musicians are often cool people, many just want to go out and share their talents with an audience, or ! That said, the music industry is notoriously sexist – so it’s always good to push back against that a bit.

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Disabled Bodies

12 Feb

Two days ago I read an interesting post at Crip Confessions. The post was titled “But Won’t You be Ashamed? or Cripping Pasties”. A little background is needed. The author is going to the 2016 AVN Expo and Awards in Las Vegas. Essentially she is attending the “Oscars of Porn”.  What struck me as thought provoking was the following paragraph:

Much talk of clothes and the like have provoked side conversations coming up, including one that included the title query. I have been very open about my plan to wear pasties and frolic. I explained this to an acquaintance, and one of their first questions to me was “Won’t you be ashamed?” They were baffled I would have the audacity to wear pasties generally, and especially among porn stars – who include those with medically sculpted bodies toward social beauty, rather than away like my medically enhanced body.

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Why I Wrote the Book

5 Feb

This post, authored by Tal Peretz- a regular contributor to Maculinities 101, is a revised take on the authorial appendix in Some Men: , co-authored with Michael Messner and Max Greenberg

Looking back on my entry into feminism while writing this book, it was very clear to me that I grew up during a period when feminism was less of a public discussion. I don’t remember ever hearing the word “feminism” until taking my first women’s studies class, in my second year of college in 2002. On the one hand, I’m glad I managed to avoid the stereotypes that circulate about feminism and feminists; on the other, I also had very little knowledge or awareness about gender inequality or gender-based violence. I had experienced more than my share of what James Messerschmidt calls “masculinity challenges,” including some male-on-male violence that was clearly about gender policing, but because I receive male, white, cisgendered, straight, and many other forms of privilege, I was effectively shielded from having personal knowledge about structural oppression. Continue reading →

Another Engaging Men Workshop, Another Abusive Experience

28 Oct

This article by Ashley Maier, published on her website puts forward an important critique about efforts to engage men and boys for gender equality: 

I presented at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma on August 24, 2015, where I also attended many workshops. One was about engaging men, as several usually are these days. I’ve written quite a bit about efforts to engage men in preventing violence against women and girls. My writing about this is known to take the form of critique. As with my MPA capstone, it is a critique intended to improve such efforts, to improve our chances of attaining our goal – creating healthy, thriving communities where there is no place for violence against women and girls. What I’ve learned over the years (that include running a statewide engaging men project) is that there is no place for critique. I was reprimanded in my most recent place of employment for it. My coworkers were retaliated against for supporting my critiques. We can’t afford to make men mad, I was told. There, I learned quickly that women must keep their mouths shut when it comes to the behaviors of men in the “movement” to prevent violence against women and girls. It was no different at this conference session.

Please read the full article on Ashley Maier’s website.

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International Conference on Masculinities: Themes and Thoughts

13 Mar

I’m writing this on the flight back from the International Conference on Masculinities in New York, which was an inspiring and energizing experience. It’s been a while since I wrote for Masculinities101, and having a chance to really engage with other people who are deeply involved in engaging men to reduce gendered inequalities got me motivated to write more. At the same time, the conference was definitely geared towards people who are connected to major organizations or institutions, so I wanted to take the opportunity to bring some of the themes from the conference out to folks who were not able to attend or might do their work in a different way. These are, of course, just the themes that stuck out to me, and some of them interact and overlap in complex ways that I won’t detail, but I wanted to provide a space where folks who were not at the conference could think about and discuss them as well.

Accountability – The conference was opened with a panel discussion entitled “Accountability in Activism and Research,” and the theme came up in nearly every conversation I heard thereafterfire. Continue reading →

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