September 2011
“Arguing that fat characters should not be seen on television is making the statement that fat people do not have a right to be seen — or even to exist — in media or in life. It suggests that fat people should hide themselves away in shame and not burden the public with having to look at them; by extension, it suggests that fat people are less valuable individuals than thin people. This idea harms everyone: it makes fat people feel terrible about themselves, and it makes thin people terrified of becoming one of those disgusting fatties. Everyone’s humanity is lost in the equation.”
—Lesley Kinzel, Yes, Fat People Exist: A Vote in Favor of More Diverse Bodies on TV
“Societies are becoming markets first and communities second. We become consumers above all, and only then are we given the permission to be human.”
—Paul Kingsnorth
Troy Davis and the Politics of Death →
truthdig.com
Death brings cheers these days in America. In the most recent Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, hypothetically, if a man who chose to carry no medical insurance, then was stricken with a grave illness, should be left to die, cheers of “Yeah!” filled the hall. When, in the prior debate, Gov. Rick Perry was asked about his enthusiastic use of the death penalty in Texas, the crowd erupted into sustained applause and cheers. The reaction from the audience prompted debate moderator Brian Williams of NBC News to follow up with the question, “What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?”
That “dynamic” is why challenging the death sentence to be carried out against Troy Davis by the state of Georgia on Sept. 21 is so important. Davis has been on Georgia’s death row for close to 20 years after being convicted of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah. Since his conviction, seven of the nine nonpolice witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining the testimony. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder.
Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Davis should receive an evidentiary hearing, to make his case for innocence. Several witnesses have identified one of the remaining witnesses who has not recanted, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, as the shooter. U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. refused, on a technicality, to allow the testimony of witnesses who claimed that, after Davis had been convicted, Coles admitted to shooting MacPhail. In his August court order, Moore summarized, “Mr. Davis is not innocent.”
One of the jurors, Brenda Forrest, disagrees. She told CNN in 2009, recalling the trial of Davis, “All of the witnesses—they were able to ID him as the person who actually did it.” Since the seven witnesses recanted, she says: “If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty.”
Troy Davis has three major strikes against him. First, he is an African-American man. Second, he was charged with killing a white police officer. And third, he is in Georgia.
More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South. She published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” in 1892 and followed up with “The Red Record” in 1895, detailing hundreds of lynchings. She wrote: “In Brooks County, Ga., Dec. 23, while this Christian country was preparing for Christmas celebration, seven Negroes were lynched in twenty-four hours because they refused, or were unable to tell the whereabouts of a colored man named Pike, who killed a white man … Georgia heads the list of lynching states.”
The planned execution of Davis will not be at the hands of an unruly mob, but in the sterile, fluorescently lit confines of Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Butts County, near the town of Jackson.
The state doesn’t intend to hang Troy Davis from a tree with a rope or a chain, to hang, as Billie Holiday sang, like a strange fruit: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” The state of Georgia, unless its Board of Pardons and Paroles intervenes, will administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Georgia is using this new execution drug because the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized its supply of sodium thiopental last March, accusing the state of illegally importing the poison.
“This is our justice system at its very worst,” said Ben Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Amnesty International has called on the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Davis’ sentence. “The Board stayed Davis’ execution in 2007, stating that capital punishment was not an option when doubts about guilt remained,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Since then two more execution dates have come and gone, and there is still little clarity, much less proof, that Davis committed any crime. Amnesty International respectfully asks the Board to commute Davis’ sentence to life and prevent Georgia from making a catastrophic mistake.”
But it’s not just the human rights groups the parole board should listen to. Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel Peace Prize laureates President Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, also have called for clemency. Or the board can listen to mobs who cheer for death.
“
It is not the flesh I want
but what glows behind it.
For you are not the face
softened with evening. Not
the eyes I’ve searched,
in vain, for my own.
Because you are never what binds you—
not muscle or organ, not even
the voice: that rupture of air
I dare to deem melodic.
Who can trust the body
when making love?
How it never fails
to fail so accurately. The way
it promises to wither
despite joy.
As I lie on top, my tongue
resting on your chest—
the steady metronome
blooming beneath it, I can’t help the urge
to pry you open, plunge through
the artifice of beauty.
And if I were to tear apart
the heart, lower my face
into that warmth, would I see you
among that glistening ruin?
Would there be
a small sphere of light
to swallow?
“How do you rebrand the image of a country that is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than any other country in the world? You do so by silencing the truth tellers, by denying the truth and calling those who tell it liars and criminals - and that is what we see happening right now. Prosecution attempts to depoliticise Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech and this trial ring hollow.”
— The Irvine 11: Islamophobia is alive and well (via swintons)
“The lie of virginity - the idea that such a thing even exists - is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality.”
—Jessica Valenti, “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women”
“Affordability, of course, is another significant barrier to access. It is often cheaper to buy packaged foods than the raw ingredients to make similar foods; it is cheaper for me to pick up a box of Kraft than it is to buy macaroni, milk, and cheese. Fresh vegetables and fruits, in particular, are extremely expensive, and yet foodies sneer at poor folks who eat packaged foods and fast food, as though they are just lazy and useless. Not trying to make ends meet and eating what they can afford, even if they are not thrilled to be eating it. Shaming people makes it a personal problem; ‘you don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables,’ instead of a social problem, ‘we need to make fruits and vegetables more affordable.’”
—Shocking News, Not All Ingredients Are Available To Everyone!
Somewhere around the development of our 1,800th operational strategic nuclear warhead I stopped feeling threatened by Iran.
Re: Black Women's Blueprint letter to Slutwalk organizers
I’m a proud Slutwalk NYC organizer. But because of my own troubled history with it, I have no interest in reclaiming the word “slut.” That’s not at all why I’m doing this.
“
Here’s what you need to realise about anti-racism: It’s not about you. It’s not about your feelings as a white person. What you just said is that you’ll entertain the idea of listening to POC talk about ways they’ve been fucked over by whiteness, white privilege, and white people as long as they don’t hurt your feelings.
To put it another way: you’re saying that not having your feelings hurt is more important to you than actually trying to understand PoC’s experiences of enduring racism—which is, itself, perpetuating racism. No, maybe you didn’t partake in whatever act of racism we’re talking about in this very moment, but if you’re white, then you are benefiting from the systemic racism that allowed it to happen, whether you like it or not.
Yes, listening to the ways that your privilege fucks over other people is uncomfortable. Yes, it can be embarrassing & lead to feelings of guilt, but it is not up to People of Color to censor ourselves to spare your delicate fee-fees. If you truly want to be considered anti-racist, you need to deal with those feelings with other white people & not add to the burden of PoC’s experiences of racism by saying that you won’t take us seriously unless we’re ‘nice’ about the emotional & psychological violence that we endure simply by being PoC in a racist society.
So literally, all I want you to do is understand that being anti-oppression (of any kind) is about understanding how the oppressed group is affected & then countering those systems, activities, mindsets, etc. It’s not about you being comfortable, because if you’re doing it right, it’s not going to be comfortable.
” —VELOCICRAFTOR (via sapphrikah)