The quick and dirty breakdown of one of the most significant laws affecting our generation in 90 seconds.
h/t Upworthy
Does anyone have time to add a transcript in the comments?
Watch: Nurses offer some real talk on Obamacare
Tagged Health, health care reform, nurses, Obamacare Leave a comment
Zoe Saldana can miss me with her oversimplified views on race and gender
Photo: Coqueran/FameFlynet Pictures
We haven’t talked about this at great length yet but I’d been thinking about Zoe Saldana’s comments about race in recent interviews (BET and Allure) she’s done to promote the new Star Trek film. I don’t know. The key problem in Zoe’s comments seems to be rooted in the fact that she doesn’t seem to be surrounded by a cadre of people who speak in a language that engages in the complexity of being brown and woman in America. She’s a young actress and her publicist, undoubtedly, has coached her in the language of comfortability, something that ensures that she gets hired for more acting jobs that transcends race, right?
On race :
I find it uncomfortable to have to speak about my identity all of the time, when in reality it’s not something that drives me or wakes me up out of bed everyday. I didn’t grow up in a household where I was categorized by my mother. I was just Zoe and I could have and be anything that I ever wanted to do…and every human being is the same as you. So to all of a sudden leave your household and have people always ask you, “What are you, what are you” is the most uncomfortable question and it’s literally the most repetitive question. I can’t wait to be in a world where people are sized by their soul and how much they can contribute as individuals and not what they look like.
I literally run away from people that use words like ethnic. It’s preposterous! To me there is no such thing as people of color cause in reality people aren’t white. Paper is white. People are pink, it’s a bit ridiculous when I have to explain to a human being, that is an adult like I am, that looks intelligent but for some reason I have to question his intelligence and explain to him as if he was a two year old, my composition in order for him to say, “Oh I guess I can chill with you, I can work with you.” I will not underestimate a human being and I will not allow another human being to underestimate me. I feel like as a race, that’s a minute problem against the problems we face just as women versus men, in a world that’s more geared and designed to cater towards the male species.
That is a situation that, I spend time thinking about, and working towards ending that, I guess we could talk about that
As black people, it often feels as if it is our job to make white people comfortable around the diversity of black experience and identity, with white people barely meeting us halfway. Because white people in America would like black people to transcend race, lest they be forced to accept the responsibility of looking at their role in perpetuating assumptions about the meaning and value of brown bodies in America.
In an interview for the June issue of Allure Magazine, Zoe Saldana made this statement: “…to be an American or black or Latina, it’s arbitrary compared to our battles as women.” The strange logic in Saldana’s remarks above, however, lives in this line of establishing a hierarchy among struggles. That being a woman supercedes race and ethnic identities. If she identifies as woman first, perhaps it somehow erases the fact that she is brown, a blend of heritages that majority white Americans fail to comprehend. That brown is synonymous with something less, inferior to gender struggles. It’s as lightening rod for most feminists of color, certainly for us feminists of the African Diaspora, when such a hierarchy of oppressions is made. It’s why we of a certain generation opted for the term ‘womanist’ in lieu of ‘feminist,’ because it included the narrative of our struggles of having to navigate in this culture with multiple identities. Every day involves a very quick code/switching computation of what my body says in spaces where I’m the singularity–woman or black. I’m darker skinned too, so I don’t get the luxury in majority white spaces to turn off race until I open my mouth and the intonation of my words communicates educated, thoughtful, strength. It’s how we signal that we are not to be fucked with and that we are to be respected for the opinion we offer in professional worlds.
It’s why we are all so enamored with Olivia Pope, with her flaws (in her personal life) and perfection (in her professional life). We know her. Some of us are Olivia; it’s why we root for her. We don’t get to see her on TV very often, but we most definitely have seen her in various professional universes. The camp and high Dynasty salacious drama of Scandal aside, America needs to see a brown woman in command and solving problems in a high-pressure environment. Read More
Tagged Gender, nina simone, Race, Racism, Zoe saldana Leave a comment
Quick Hit: Why do men keep putting me in the girlfriend-zone?
I love this brilliant reversal of all the Nice Guy whining about the how terrible the friend-zone is. It really gets to the heart of why I think complaints about the friend-zone are just so obnoxious. Even more than the sense of entitlement–that men are owed sex or a relationship for being “good guys”–it’s the idea that a real friendship with a woman couldn’t possibly be valuable in and of itself. Obviously, unreciprocated feelings always suck, but that is just straight-up sexist.
You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he wants to be your friend.
But then, then comes the fateful moment where you find out that all this time, he’s only seen you as a potential girlfriend. And then if you turn him down, he may never speak to you again. This has happened to me time after time: I hit it off with a guy, and, for all that I’ve been burned in the past, I start to think that this one might actually care about me as a person. And then he asks me on a date.
I tell him how much I enjoy his company, how much I value his friendship. I tell him that I really want to be his friend and to continue hanging out with him and talking about our favorite books or exploring new restaurants or making fun of avant-garde theatre productions. But he rejects me. He doesn’t answer my calls or e-mails; if we’d been making plans to do something before this fateful incident, these plans mysteriously fail to materialize. (This is why I never did get around to seeing the Hunger Gamesmovie. Not to name any names, but thanks a lot, Tom.) Later, when I run into him at social events, our conversations are awkward and lukewarm. This is because the moment we met, he put me in the girlfriend-zone, and now he can’t see me as friend material.
Read the rest here. And, of course, note the many commenters who do not catch the satire.
Tagged friend zone, nice guys, Relationships, Sexism Leave a comment
How you can support the domestic workers movement
Domestic work is gendered and waaay undervalued. This we know. We know this because it’s been established over and over again on feminist blogs and in academia. But more importantly we know this because so many of us have seen it happen before our very eyes. We’ve watched our mothers cook and clean each day after working at her full time job, while Dad watches TV. We’ve seen this happen to our sisters, our friends, maybe it’s even happened to you. So many women aren’t properly compensated for that “second shift” they take on, and this extends to women who do domestic work professionally.
The profile of the average domestic worker tends to be a low-income, migrant woman of color. This holds true in the U.S. and throughout most of Latin America. These women often work in homes taking care of children, cleaning, or cooking. Within this private sphere, they work under harsh conditions and are vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment. The nature of domestic work can make organizing difficult, as these women are often stuck within a home and fear losing their job if they speak out. In spite of this, domestic workers movements around the world have been making huge gains in the past few years.
One of the best examples of this is the International Labor Organization Convention 189 which was adopted in 2011 to guarantee decent pay and working conditions for domestic workers. Since then, only six countries have ratified the convention (including Bolivia, Nicaragua, the Phillipines, Maritius, Italy and Uruguay), but many more have taken steps to support domestic workers, particularly in Latin America, which at 20 million has one of the world’s largest populations of domestic workers.
For example, this March, Argentina passed a law requiring that domestic workers be given maternity leave, paid holidays and a maximum 48-hour work week. The month after, Brazil implemented a constitutional amendment that recognizes domestic workers as the same as any other informal worker, guaranteeing them a 44-hour work week, overtime pay and an 8-hour work day. The Mexican government is discussing following Brazil’s example and is expected to ratify the ILO convention in June of this year. Mexico will be joining Nicaragua, Bolivia and Uruguay, where women-dominated movements made up of workers and employers have pushed their governments for regulation.
Domestic workers in the U.S. face similar problems as those in Latin America. In a report conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, researchers found that half of the domestic workers surveyed were paid less than is necessary to support a family. However, few spoke out for fear of losing their job, or having their immigration status used against them. Read More
Daily Feminist Cheat Sheet
Eighteen-year-old Kaitlyn Hunt was expelled from school and is being charged with a felony for having a lesbian relationship with a fellow student.
Another horrible rape documented on social media. (Trigger warning)
Great piece by Tamara Winfrey Harris on Beyonce and feminism.
The Virginia GOP nominee for AG previously introduced a bill that would have required women who miscarry to report it to the police within 24 hours or risk going to jail.