REMINDER

by Lina Schmidt, ’15

This article originally discussed only the Boston Marathon bombing. Because it is being posted now, it has been revised to include some events of the past few weeks that are also important to conversations about prejudice and privilege.

A lot of my friends, family, and fellow students at Stanford have been watching the news over the past few months. A lot has occurred: the Boston Marathon bombings, the trial of George Zimmerman and, recently, two Supreme Court decisions with grave implications for the Voting Rights Act and Native tribal sovereignty. These events all have something to do with the way US culture views race and ethnicity or, to its peril, attempts to ignore them.

Strategies in White Anti-Racism

by Elizabeth S. Q. Goodman, PhD student

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women — in the face of tremendous resistance — as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival…
–Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

Hello everyone. This is my first writing about anti-racism from a white, American perspective. I’m writing it in response to calls from people of color for white folks to educate each other about how racism continues to operate, and for committed white anti-racists to support each other in our learning and unlearning. Many calls to the general public, and one from a friend who made a semi-serious remark, “you should write a book on white anti-racism”.

The people I am addressing here are other white people (mostly Americans) who seek to resist racism, and who understand that while people who have directly experienced racism are experts on how it works, we can still learn from each other if we cast aside our egos and our fears of being seen as “not good enough allies”. I welcome critiques from anti-racist people of color who decide to read. If on the other hand you’re someone who doesn’t like to talk about race, then unless you’re willing to learn that historical racism has resounding effects and the status quo is still racist, this post is not for you. In particular if you’re a white person and you don’t like thinking about race because you are worried about feeling like a bad person, then please go instead to this comprehensive resource for all the good white people.

Stanford Solidarity With Real Talk Dartmouth

As students committed to resisting sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, and other systems of oppression at Stanford University, we are in solidarity with our peers who carried out a protest at Dartmouth College’s admit weekend.  We are outraged at the violent harassment they have been met with, including threats to their personal safety, as well as other aggressive and oppressive remarks.  They have brought important conversations to the Dartmouth student body regarding sexual violence, harassment, and racism.  The reactions the protestors are receiving demonstrate the need for their action and continued resistance.

Sexual Politics of Meat: Race, Gender and Food

by Rohisha Adke, ’15 

How does what we eat relate to gender issues that persist today? 

What does it mean for women to be turned into “meat,” as in the Carl’s Jr. advertisement?

How do both women and animals become “meat”?

How does this relate to racism and violence against women?

Why would someone write a book called Fifty Shades of Chicken?

 

Answer these questions and more this Thursday with Carol J. Adams at “Sexual Politics of Meat: Race, Gender and Food” in Toyon Lounge. Dinner and dessert will be served. Click here to RSVP. 

 

Carol J. Adams has written around twenty books on the links between the oppression of women and that of animals, domestic violence, sexual assault, and the ethics of diets.

On the SOCC Debacle

by Eme Williams-Blake, ’13

This piece focuses on a post written by Jason Lupatkin for The Stanford Review, entitled “Why You Cannot Vote for SOCC.”  (The uncensored version is here, the updated version is here, and you can read a comparison of the two versions here).

The broader outlook: The response to backlash of the opinion piece “Why You Cannot Vote for SOCC” was problematic to say the very least, beginning with the  way in which The Stanford Review chose to handle the negative publicity. An opinion piece was posted on their website. It was widely circulated and generated negative feedback and they chose to censor the article by removing it entirely from their website. To add insult to injury, The Stanford Review, for reasons unknown, chose to repost the article under the same title, but with major changes to the wording, omitting and rephrasing statements. These changes were made without any indication on the article’s page that these edits were made: a major breach in journalism ethics.

Latoya Peterson on the Power of Blog Posts

by Lina Schmidt, ’15

Last week, STATIC hosted a talk with Latoya Peterson, the owner and editor of Racialicious.com. Latoya, who is currently a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, addressed a large audience in El Centro Chicano. She discussed her experiences with writing, particularly the successes and challenges of writing about popular culture from a critical feminist and anti-racist perspective.

Writing was not immediately Latoya’s career. She emphasized that being a working writer isn’t necessarily the result of a college degree, talking instead about what motivates her to write. Often, she said, she begins with an idea that she can’t get out of her head. It is this — a reaction to something — that provides the raw material for a piece. Writing for Racialicious, a blog that focuses on the intersection of race and popular culture, there is always something to critique. However, calling out racism in mainstream culture can make a writer into a target.

The Stanford Vietnamese Student Association Responds to Stanford Professor’s Offensive Article

by the Stanford Vietnamese Student Association (SVSA)

The Tribune Media Services recently published an opinion article titled, “Despite increasing prosperity, Vietnam’s appetites remain unique,” written by Stanford’s Joel Brinkley, a Hearst Visiting Professional in the Department of Communication. In the article riddled with stereotypical assertions and cultural judgments, Professor Brinkley has denounced the country of Vietnam and its people as “gruesome” and “aggressive” with a backwards diet of endangered animals in the midst of its rising economic status. The Stanford Vietnamese Student Association (SVSA), in solidarity with numerous on-campus organizations, find this article to be a perversion of the cultural image of Vietnam and an antithesis to the mission of universal tolerance and acceptance that Stanford University — students, faculty, and staff alike — should promote.

Professor Brinkley’s article is a thinly veiled attack on the culture of Vietnam with its culinary habits in the spotlight. His offensive statements and baseless arguments, such as the assertion that the Vietnamese have consumed almost all of their wild and domesticated animals, are grossly inaccurate and sensationalistic; they are loosely based on statistics that are rooted in unmentioned context.

White Fetish

by Janani Balasubramanian, ’12

A failing of the word ‘activism’ is its designation of certain activities as political engagement and the rest of our lives as some other floaty and apolitical space.  In reality, we are always enacting and interacting with the structures of power and social positions each of us inhabit.  My friend Alok and I were at a queer conference this weekend in Atlanta to facilitate the same workshop that we’re presenting tonight: ‘Because You’re Brown Honey Gurl!: A Dialogue about Race and Desire’.  Our intention was to bring to bear a conversation on spaces where desire, sex, and romance circulate as political spaces.  The project of queer liberation isn’t limited to our policy engagements or our organizing work — it is also about considering how we desire and are desired in white supremacist realities.

We use the term ‘sexual racism’ to describe the ways that racism and racist traumas inflect our romantic and sexual relations.

Inappropriate Appropriations: An Interview With Adrienne Keene, ’07

by Annie Graham, ’14

Adrienne Keene is an ‘07 Stanford graduate who visited Muwekma-Tah-Ruk to speak on Monday night. Currently in her third year at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she used her spare time or sheer determination to start a project alongside her life as a student: she writes a blog called Native Appropriations, concerned with (mis)representations of Indigenous peoples. Her work proves the potential of blogs to formulate individual ideas and change the minds of others. She is also a very upbeat and welcoming person — I got to sit down and ask her a few questions before her presentation.

Annie Graham: Would you say you were an activist at Stanford as an undergraduate?

Adrienne Keene: When I was a student, my activism was a little bit more limited. Stanford was the first place that I was exposed to issues of social justice and activism, in the sort of the “on the ground, protest signs” form. When I was an undergrad and was the co-chair of the Stanford American Indian Organization, we had a couple of instances of frat houses using the Indian mascot for various things. So that was the first time I was kind of involved in activism pushing back against it.

One thing I really appreciated about the Stanford administration, at least when I was a student here, is that they really supported the Native students on the mascot issue. So, whenever something popped up — and it happened fairly often, The Stanford Review was also using an Indian image for a while — the administration would have our back fairly quickly… the president would issue a statement saying the mascot was discontinued in 1971 and is not to be used for any reason anymore.

AG: What happened in grad school that made you become more of an activist?

Our Challenge

by K. Blaqk, ’14

The title of this piece is “Our Challenge.” Over fall quarter I discovered the “Nu Rainbow,” which replaces the traditional ROYGBIV spectrum with one representing the variety of colors  of human beings. This move felt especially important to me, as I was starting to see the urgency in queer politics taking on an explicitly anti-racist agenda as well. Lumped into queer issues and racism are also structural class inequality, problems of imperialism and militarism. So, “Our Challenge” is first to build a coalition of marginalized and oppressed peoples and then to channel that organization into a form of resistance and way of remaking the world around us.