Horses are good company -- The Witcher

Movies and shows about activists that I have seen and recommend:

United in Anger - ACT UP documentary, free on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrAzU79PBVM

How to Survive a Plague - documentary about ACT UP. Apple TV, Amazon Prime.

BPM (beats per minute), French fictional film about ACT UP Paris. I got this from the library IIRC. One of my favorite films of all time.

Rūrangi - Hulu. 2 short seasons.
This doesn't exactly focus on activism but the characters are involved with activism in one way or another. Indigenous, New Zealand, queer and trans.

Pride. Fictional film, based on Lesbians and Gays support the miners (LGSM) in England in the early 80s. Unions yay! Coalition building! On Amazon Prime.

The times of Harvey Milk - doc. Made in 1984. I liked this more than the biopic because it gets into his politics and why he was a successful organizer. HBO Max or the library.

Crip Camp - Netflix documentary about ADAPT, disability activist group that led to the ADA. ETA: it's about organizers working prior to ADAPT, free on youtube, see comments to this post.

Drunk History, episode about ADAPT. I think it is episode 5.05
Free on Comedy Central: https://www.cc.com/video/2p86bg/drunk-history-judy-heumann-fights-for-people-with-disabilities
Article about this ep: https://themighty.com/topic/disability/drunk-history-highlights-section-504-sit-ins-for-disability-rights/

Ones that I don't really remember but I think I liked:

Brother Outsider, PBS documentary about Bayard Rustin, a gay civil rights organizer. There is an upcoming biopic about him called "Rustin".
Before Stonewall and After Stonewall, 2 documentaries.

ETA, Norma Rae,
about union organizing. Hulu and Amazon Prime. 

ETA, Salt of the Earth, available legally on YouTube / public domain.

If you are interested in the general strike on January 20th (anti-inauguration day), here are some things I thought of that would be useful:

Make flyers to advertise it to non-internet people. Print, distribute, and hang flyers.
Make a press release and send the release to friendly newspapers and periodicals.
Buy ad space and/or write articles and blog posts.
Contact your local unions to see if they are interested.

I'm going to write about seeing Mia Mingus! She is so awesome, has so many great ideas, such great open energy. By culture and personality, I am somewhat conflict averse, and yet also drawn to things that involve cognitive dissonance, which is a problem. Mia has this way of being hungry for the conflict, of digging into with enthusiasm. Like, YES, let's TALK about that uncomfortable thing! And it is just honestly such a relief.

I went to a small group session where we talked about a couple of her essays from her website:
1. Changing the Framework: Disability Justice
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/

2. Access Intimacy: The Missing Link
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/

3. Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/moving-toward-the-ugly-a-politic-beyond-desirability/

The third one really blew my mind. LOVED it. Here is another way of resisting respectability politics: embrace magnificence instead of prettiness. Be memorable, own the way you look and are.

We talked a bit about being uncomfortable with "body positivity", and the intersection of disability and fat politics. This is an exciting area to me and I'd like to see more people talking about it. These are both highly stigmatized categories and activists from the two groups seem to want to avoid each other due to this stigma, even though the intersection between the two groups is pretty readily apparent. Think of fat activists emphasizing "health at any size" and talking about how they are healthy and active at their weight--centering health, which is not exactly friendly to those of us who are not in good health. Meds can cause weight gain or loss; weight (high or low) itself can be associated with certain illnesses; etc. Anyways, Dave Hingsburger writes about this a bit (mostly the stigma of being a fat wheelchair user). And I always, always rec The Fat Nutritionist, especially this post: You have no obligation to be healthy.

Mia Mingus talked about how when we are so committed to the social model of disability (or any kind of social model), we can run up against the wall of our bodies. And so we need to talk about embodiment. I think part of loving and caring for our bodies is acknowledging that being embodied can totally suck sometimes. It is ok to feel negative.

During her key note, Mia Mingus talked about transformative justice and her work using it to address child sexual abuse (often adult survivors of same). She works with Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. One of the themes of her talk was building alternatives to our state institutions, because how can we depend on the state to address violence when the state uses violence and oppression against us?

This event was part of the Gender and Women's Studies 40th anniversary event on campus. I went to some of the events the next day, but they were... much more academic and kind of not my thing.

Saving my tweets on this as I think it through.

The "Man of his time" argument assumes that everyone in that time period felt the same way. Erases nuance and difference.

It also erases experiences of dissents and marginalized people. Those people existed even if history has forgotten them. (For example: I learned from Rachel Maddow tonight that Vince Lombardi was pro-gay and had a gay brother. He was a famous football coach that lived from 1913-1970).

Me and my friends don't hold the prevailing views of mainstream society. I don't think of us as "products of our time."

This argument also assumes that society progresses forward thru time, that people in the past were worse. Which is not true. (History does not go forward in a upward line. It's more like a sine wave maybe.)

We are all influenced by our time and society, but we can all think critically and listen to our consciences re right and wrong.

Saying that someone was "a product of their time" is usually just apologism for their bad behaviors.

If something is wrong today, it was wrong 100 years ago. (Ethical behaviors, possibly, have some standards across societies and times, even if morals are relative. Have to think on this more.)

Just because people in power endorsed it, doesn't make it OK for everyone else in society to do so.

Wisdom from jesse_the_k (paraphrased, from last week):

"Sometimes people think that violence is the only way to get attention from the powerful. But the problem is, it brings the wrong kind of attention. Violence makes the powerful feel like victims and they can use it to justify their further actions." (ie their own further violence).

We also talked about how access is like a living organism, that you have to keep tending it so that it doesn't wither away and die. You can't do access for a group or event once and be done-- you have to keep doing it, keep tending that living organism.

These days I find activists to be the most inspiring people. For instance I found this obituary for civil rights activist Lee Lorch super fascinating. He was a math professor and involved in de-segregating housing. He was a white person who taught at a couple of historically black colleges; he kept getting fired or denied tenure at his jobs due to his activism. He seemed to have no regrets.

I said something tonight which seemed to surprise my friends, and now I feel the need to talk about it a little, so I'm laying it out here: I don't believe in the "obesity epidemic." I mean that I really don't believe it exists.

My essential reading for this is a 2005/2006 scientific article:

The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic? Paul Campos, et al. International Journal of Epidemiology.

Selections follow, but I suggest reading it all. It is scientfic, but readable, and a fantastic article that states the claims the claims the medical/scientific communities have been making, and swiftly knocks them down. For example:

Claim #2: ‘Mortality rates increase with increasing degrees of overweight, as measured by BMI.’—WHO, 2003 (p. 61)2

This claim, central to arguments that higher than average body mass amount to a major public health problem, is at best weakly supported by the epidemiological literature. Except at true statistical extremes, high body mass is a very weak predictor of mortality, and may even be protective in older populations.


Claim #4: Significant long-term weight loss is a practical goal, and will improve health.

At present, this claim is almost completely unsupported by the epidemiological literature. It is a remarkable fact that the central premise of the current war on fat—that turning obese and overweight people into so-called ‘normal weight’ individuals will improve their health—remains an untested hypothesis. One main reason the hypothesis remains untested is because there is no method available to produce the result that would have to be produced—significant long-term weight loss, in statistically significant cohorts—in order to test the claim.

...

The authors also speculate on social and political factors contributing to this moral panic:

In particular, organizations like the International Obesity Task Force (which has authored many of the WHO reports on obesity) and the American Obesity Association (which has actively campaigned to have obesity officially designated as a ‘disease’) have been largely funded by pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies.

Moral panics are typical during times of rapid social change and involve an exaggeration or fabrication of risks, the use of disaster analogies, and the projection of societal anxieties onto a stigmatized group.47,48

Public opinion studies also show that negative attitudes towards the obese are highly correlated with negative attitudes towards minorities and the poor, such as the belief that all these groups are lazy and lack self-control and will power. This suggests that anxieties about racial integration and immigration may be an underlying cause of some of the concern over obesity.49–51

Previous work indicates that moral panics often displace broader anxieties about changing gender roles.49,53 While this hypothesis deserves further research, a recent advertisement that ran in a major American newspaper suggests that this may be at play in the obesity panic. This advertisement blames ‘30 years of feminist careerism’ for an epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes: ‘With most mothers working, too few adults and children eat balanced, nutritious, portion-controlled home-cooked meals.

However, other works suggest that some portion of the population's weight gain can be attributed to smoking cessation,56 which runs counter to the assumption that the country's weight gain is evidence of both moral laxity and a harbinger of declining overall health. [bolding mine]

This talk was part of UW's Distinguished Lecture Series, and was given by Dr. Michelle Alexander, speaking about: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement."

Here are my notes.

An introduction was given by a professor of law? politics? who was a white man. He said that at the start of the U.S. there were only 5 laws; now there are something like 2,000, and all of us break laws. This overcriminilization leads to overincarceration. Discretion must be used to enforce the law, but this opens the door to bias. Federal laws are vague, and plea bargaining is rampant. There is a decline in the use of juries.

From 1990 to 2001, there was a doubling in the number of people in prison. The number of prisons rose by 41%. There are 2.1 million people in prison. Although blacks use drugs at about the same rate as whites, they are 9 times more likely to go to prison for drug crimes. Equal protection is not in play, which is a political issue. Other issues inc lude the fact that prosecutors often live outside of inner cities, and intraracial crime is not addressed, leaving black people unprotected.

---
Michelle Alexander spoke about the Invisible Undercaste in America. We see the Obamas on TV but that image does not match up with the "other America". Dr. MLK Jr. said there is no greater sin than sleeping through a revolution. We've slept through a counter-revolution: one that fought back against the civil rights movement. Poor folks of color are shuffled from under funded schools into high-tech prisons.

In this era of "color blindness", we aren't allowed to see or name race, so the word "criminal" or "felon" replaces race and becomes a legal form of descrimination. Being a felon makes one a pariah. She talked about her own awakening here and her own prejudice against a particular person with regard to this label, while she was attempting to bring a lawsuit against the Oakland police for "Driving while Black/Brown" stops. Felons often can't get food stamps, public housing, or jobs. The cops get to everyone in the neighborhood. The path to racial justice includes those that we see as guilty. Felon laws keep people from voting in the same way that poll taxes used to. Felons are permanently unemployable. Black families are decimated.

Incarceration quintupled over a 30 year period while crime fluctuated. This was because of the war on drugs. Our stereotype of a drug dealer is of a black person which is not true. Violence is a part of daily life in some communities: why? Because of Joblessness. Work disappeared, Factories closed in black neighborhoods in Chicago. There was no bailout for this, when there could have been. The war on drugs is a backlash to the civil rights movement! Felons can't get food stamps! This was a bipartisan effort --- being tough on crime-- Joblessness is a major predictor of violence. Incarceration does not solve crime. Law enforcement makes major money off the war on drugs. They are allowed to seize assets from people only suspected of drug crimes. Clinton escalated the drug war especially for marijuana.

The Supreme Court has supported all of this, gutting 4th amendment rights (search and seizure), much as they supported Jim Crow laws. She talked about "stop and frisk" actions.

When people get out of prison, they have many obstacles, including having to pay back child support, legal fees, and sometimes having to pay for their incarceration, all while being unemployable and having little to no access to services. This system is designed to send people back to prison. The prison industry employs white people, and private prisons are listed on the NYSE.

We need a Major Social Movement for all poor people of all colors. It needs to be a Human Rights Movement. There should be no discrimination against people released from prison. There should be an underground railroad for these people to help them get back home and get food, shelter, and work. She mentioned the local group "Voices Beyond Bars". We also need to work for the abolition of this system. We need to end the war on drugs. One trillion dollars has been spent on this useless war! We need to shift to a public health model of addiction. We need to shift away from a punitive model of justice and towards a model of restorative justice and rehabilitation. We need to challenge the belief that some people are unworthy: we need to recognize the dignity and humanity of all people!

"Illegal Immigrants" is the same game and we must reject that discourse. We must be a multi-racial and multi-ethnic movement.

Q and A: the questions were mostly inaudible but I took notes on the answers.

MA: the 13th Amendment (which bans slavery) has an exception for prison labor. This is wrong and must be fixed. Work is good, but must be by choice and be paid. Corporations profit in many ways from prisons, and it's a virtual slave system. Book rec: Prison Profiteers.

Audience member: The 11x15 campaign seeks to reduce the prison population in WI to 11,000 by 2015. Mosesmadison.org

Audience member: A woman talked about her son who is in prison. His name is Lawrence Tucker and he is a father. She talked about how dehumanizing prison is. This situation is very hard on her family.

MA: She is a prison abolitionist. Solitary confinement is used here in the states for years on end, and it is torture.

Question from a law student about getting into the field.

MA: Takes courage to get into the system and speak the truth and have compassion. Book rec: Let's Get Free.

Q: inaudible
MA: We need to transition from protest politics to movement building where the message is a critique of the system and energy is sustained over time. We would never have heard about Trayvon Martin if he'd been killed by a police officer, for instance.

Q: Suggestions for multi-ethnic movement building?
MA: Who is already doing the work in your area? Support each other's work.

Q: inaudible
MA: "Tinkering with the machine" isn't the way to go. Aim a larger goal. Have a comprehensive vision and broad picture for your activism. Her example was not to focus on just one narrow issue but when someone asks you about violent offenders, include them too and talk about restorative justice. Don't avoid the question! (As an activist I really appreciated this tip.)

Q: Incomprehensible convoluted question/story/statement which I think might have been about student activity fees?
MA: Very graciously brushed him off.

This is emotionally difficult to read but so important!

Disability Voice Lost in Medical Discrimination from Disability Rights Washington.

It talks a lot about the Ashley Treatment, and also cases where life saving treatments were withheld from PWD due to discrimination. The Report centers the experiences of PWD and the social justice model of disability. It is very good reading, very clear and well stated activism.

Or, spirit of the staircase!

I participated today in a free screening for oral and throat cancers. It took 5 minutes and I was feeling uncharacteristically talkative to the people running it. For example I told the woman taking the forms: "You should have check boxes for male, female, and other." (I doubt she took me seriously.)

So after I finished having the screening (the doc looks in your mouth with a flashlight), I was talking a man who was passing out the flyers. He was a friendly middle-aged guy that was sort of easy to talk to. He told me the risk factors for these cancers are tobacco use, alcohol use, and HPV (human pappilloma viruses).

"Well," I said, "Hopefully that will go down because now there is a vaccine." (Gardasil.)

"Or, teens could just have regular sex!" he joked, and laughed. He was referring to the fact that oral sex, ie blow jobs, are a risk factor for HPV causing cancers of the mouth and throat.

"Well, that's not going to happen, they just need to get vaccinated!" I said at the time.

What I wished I had done is either gotten scarily calm, or scarily angry, and scared him into NEVER SAYING THAT AGAIN. It was totally inappropriate for a number of reasons.

1. "Regular sex" is a figment of the imagination that exists in a subset of straight people's minds, and is centered around penis-in-vagina hetero sex. It erases queer sex, oral sex, manual sex, kinky sex, etc etc etc.

2. His so-called "regular sex" still transmits HPV-- to women, who can then get cervical cancer.

3. There was more than a strong whiff of victim-blaming to what he said-- if people get cancer from HPV, it's their fault.

People are such assholes! This guy told me he used to be a study coordinator!

ETA I just occurred to me that this man could have been attempting to flirt with me by making a risque joke about blowjobs. Such a lesbian am I-- I was totally oblivious.

For my own references: 101 Disability Links... to be updated

with particular interest in intersectionality re queerness and disability

FWD: Do Disabled People Have Sex?

Questioning Transphobia disability tag

Dave Hingsburger: The Letter (coming out parallels)


links in comments VERY WELCOME.