Allied Media Conference

I arrived home Monday night and have been working like a maniac ever since. No rest for the wicked.

I accomplished many things by attending AMC. I met awesome women. You know them from the internets. They are also awesome in person. I'll write more about that later.

I managed to raise the average age 20 years or so every time I walked into a room. Which is perfectly OK. Being around young activists is a real treat. Only sour point came when I signed into the dorm and someone behind the desk asked me if I was there as a chaperone. Not a big deal, since there were, in fact, events for high school age kids at which chaperones are required. But I was with two 30 something (I think) videographers and it felt like an insult to them. What? These folks need chaperones?

The dorms were ascetic to the extreme. And empty of everything useful. First, call me old for not realizing that dorm rooms have private baths and showers these days. Also call me clueless for not realizing I'd need soap. In the U.S., of course, it is impossible to buy one bar of soap. So I was forced to walk to a CVS and purchase way more soap and shampoo than I needed.

Call me an old fogie for having nothing at all to entertain myself in the ascetic dorm room. No laptop. No MP3 player. Just a Walkman. So I listened to some awesome jazz stations as I fell asleep.

What's different about AMC from other conferences I've travelled to? People are all about caring and learning. No old axes to re-grind. No old battles to re-fight. Just new ideas and new attempts at making a difference.

Grace Lee Boggs in her closing speech talked about the anger of the sixties that motivated a lot of us. Activists today seem to be motivated by something else: caring and loving and forgiving and continuing. If I were a poet (Little Light could do this!), I could describe this sense of both acceptance for our faults and hope for our futures.

I also got to experience my first pay-as-you-go cell phone. The rest of you awesome nerds know all about this, but I have been postponing my acquaintance with modern technology. I can't tell you how much wasted time I spent trying to figure out how to use and program this tiny piece of technology.

I keep reminding myself of my mother's experience. She's a very intelligent woman. She read the instructions about loading websites. The instructions tell you to type a url address into the text box and you will be transported to the website you desire. Nowhere in the instructions does it mention you have to hit return or enter in order for the website to be accessed. So she spent far too much time typing addresses in and waiting for something to happen. Same experience, different tool for me and the cell phone. What an amazing waste of time!

Much more to talk about, of course. I am psyched and inspired.

Tomorrow, I head off to continue my tour of the rust belt cities. I'm attending the National Anti-War Conference in Cleveland this weekend. About which, more later.

Hugs to all the fabulous people I spent time with this weekend. You make the world a better place!

Going to AMC

Why is it that I have to work three hours of overtime in order to get ready a few days off? Yikes!

Anyway, I'm headed off to Detroit for the Allied Media Conference this weekend. I've never been before and I have no idea what to expect, except that I look forward to meeting some folks I've been reading on the internets. Brownfemipower, Black Amazon, Little Light, Miss Crip Chick Lex, Mamita Mala, tigera consciente will all be there. An embarrassment of riches if you ask me.

I'm going to do my best to sit, listen, learn, absorb, and try to comprehend. One thing about an old gal like me is how hard it is to sit and listen for hours on end. I know I did this when I was in school for many years. But I've lost the talent. I need to rest and let stuff settle in or it will just bounce right off my hard shell of a brain.

Going to Detroit is almost like going home. I spent much time on my Grandmother's farm growing up on 37 Mile Road north.

I hope to give a decent report when I return. Wish me luck!

Women of Color bloggers want you to know

The amazing turnout for Jena 6 and the fact that it finally hit the mainstream media after months of work by WOC bloggers, reminds us that there are more issues out there that are just as worthy of attention. And if Jena tells us anything, the way to get the real truth is to avoid the nonsense put forth by money-making enterprises like cable news, and go straight to the grassroots.

FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment) in New York City, is just such an organization. They are leading the struggle to highlight the cause of four lesbian and black women who are imprisoned after confronting a sexist homophobic thug in the West Village of New York.

Imani Henry has written a terrific summary of the events leading to their prosecution that bfp posted in June here:

Lesbians sentenced for self-defense
All-white jury convicts Black women

By Imani Henry
New York
Published Jun 21, 2007 2:58 AM

On June 14, four African-American women—Venice Brown (19), Terrain Dandridge (20), Patreese Johnson (20) and Renata Hill (24)—received sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years in prison. None of them had previous criminal records. Two of them are parents of small children.

Their crime? Defending themselves from a physical attack by a man who held them down and choked them, ripped hair from their scalps, spat on them, and threatened to sexually assault them—all because they are lesbians.

Read the entire article.

Beautiful, Also, Are The Souls of My Black Sisters has a beautiful call to action:

That these women could not go to this area of town as if they had no right to be there (per the district attorney who prosecuted their case) reeks of society’s desire to segregate and suffocate these women for what they are. Lesbians.

That these women who sought to harm no one, but, instead, were vilified and castigated because of their attacker’s hatred, while he still walks free, and they languish in prison, is unconscionable. Deemed a so-called “hate crime” against this straight male, every possible racist, anti-woman, anti-LGBT and anti-youth tactic was hurled against these women by the state of New York, and that they lived in a working-class black-majority city of Newark, N.J., and their gender expressions and body structures, was dehumanized, and demonized, in the eyes of the public, and ultimately, the jury that decided against them, is concrete proof that LGBT people have rights that no heterosexual is bound to respect.

The organization, FIERCE!, (http://www.fiercenyc.org ) is fighting a campaign to free these women who have been unjustly imprisoned for having the temerity to be themselves in a lesbian, homosexual-hating society.

Please do not forget the Newark Women.

Contact FIRECE! to lend your help for these unjustly accused women in their fight for justice.

Give them your solidarity, your support, and let them know that they are not forgotten. Let them know that respect and dignity are the rights of all people: black, white, male, female, heterosexual—and lesbian and homosexual.

Envy me!

I had a wonderful evening Monday night. Our local feminist bookstore had a reading that I learned about because I'm on their mailing list. The fabulous Jay Sennett was in town doing a reading from his book, Self-Organizing Men.

My hearing sucks, so I got there early and planted myself front and center in the comfy chairs in the basement meeting space of Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, the longest running feminist bookstore on the continent. I happened to share the wicker sofa with the amazing Ms. H, Jay's wife. Bonus points for me!

Jay read several passages and displayed his own cartoons in discussing that thing we call masculinity. I really enjoyed the balance between readings about personal experience and readings about theory.

The question and answer period was great. I really liked the things Jay had to say about how racism must be acknowledged and how letting poor people lead will serve the movement well.

In addition to meeting Jay and Ms. H, I met an Amazon worker I did not know before. Heather and I have the same taste in books and she talked me into buying two new science fiction books I'd never heard of before. That's what makes an independent bookstore better than the big boxes. Real people with real tastes who can spread the righteous word about books we need to read!

I "came out" as Ravenmn to Jay, and that led to discussions of our mutual appreciation for Bitch|Lab/Mighty Quare Dewd and BrownFemiPower, among others. BFP, Jay has instructions to pass along a hug from me to you when you next meet!

I have rarely before run into people I encountered first on line. This was an awesome and wonderful experience. If you have not read Jay's book, please consider purchasing a copy. I now have my very own autographed copy.

Envy me! I'm one happy chica today!

Serendipity on the Internet

Brownfemipower is writing a series on Radical Women of Color Theorists that began with Lee Maracle. BFP is helping us learn there are more than just two (Audre Lorde, bell hooks) radical women of color theorists in the world.

Intrigued, I googled Maracle and found an article in Trivia magazine called "The Lost Days of Columbus". Great quote:

Columbus came from a “throwaway” world. A “get rid of them” culture. We don't.

I'm unfamiliar with Trivia: Voices of Feminism magazine. So I clicked on current issue and found a wonderful poem by my favorite writer, Marge Piercy, called "Blue Mojo". This is a poem Piercy wrote for her friend, Audre Lorde.

Here's a portion:

We were Amazon raiders dusty from battle,
feisty, thumping, hope riding
our shoulders like a screeching parrot.

After you lost your first breast
you joked that now you were a true
Amazon. You were always true.

Writing by or about Lee Maracle that I found on the internet:

I am Native. I am Woman. I am.
Article from the McGill Daily

Some Words on Study As a Process of Discovery
Coming to know is connected to and a result of the process of seeing, thinking and considering phenomena, subject or text and either challenging and either believing or transforming that phenomena, subject or text, based on your particular culture of origin.

The Lost Days of Columbus
"I return Christopher to those who would adore him. I give him back to those who cling stubbornly to throwaway ways."