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On this day, 29 March 1986, anti-fascists got wind of a secret meeting which was due to take place in the small Dutch town of Kedichem to reunify two fascist political parties: the Centrum Partij and Centrum Democraten. They initially threw a smoke bomb into the hotel where the meeting was taking place, however it accidentally set the curtains on fire and within minutes the building went up in flames, causing the fascists to have to flee into the rioting outside. The proposed merger didn’t take place. More info in this short history of Dutch anti-fascism: https://libcom.org/history/history-dutch-fascism-militant-anti-fascist-response

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We were hundreds of women, marching on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan.

We shouted slogans. ’“Aurat aiee, aurat aiee, tharki teri shaamath aiee!” (Women are here, harassers must fear!)

We raised our fists in the air, smiling, laughing.

We wore what we wanted to wear: burqas, jeans and designer shades, brightly embroidered skirts, the traditional tunic and baggy trousers called shalwar kameez.

Men gaped, shook their heads, filmed us from passing cars as we walked by, disrupting traffic.

We did not care what the men thought of us.

We were free to stand, walk, dance, with nobody to tell us to sit down, be quiet, be good.

It was the first time in my life that I saw women gathering in public, in strength, in numbers.

This was the Aurat (Urdu for “women”) March, the first of its kind in the conservative Muslim country of Pakistan. There were actually three marches — in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad – all held on March 8, International Women’s Day.

Word spread through Facebook and Twitter posts among the various networks of women involved in grassroots work — in education, health, microfinance, women’s shelters, workers’ rights.

Objectives were ambitious: a demand for the recognition of women’s rights and gender equality, and an end to the hideous scourge of gender violence, among other aims.

But the overriding intent was to raise the morale of Pakistani women. The constant drip of misogyny can turn life into a misery, where you are considered a lucky woman if you have a husband who doesn’t beat you. The Aurat March wanted to remind women that the bar doesn’t need to be set that low.

Before the march began, activists took to the stage and spoke of their struggles and triumphs. Veeru Kohli, a member of the Dalit community in the Thar Desert (low-caste Hindus known by the epithet of “untouchables”) related how she escaped a life of slave labor to become a political activist. Kainat Soomro, a victim of gang rape at 13 who is trying to take her rapists to court, described her as yet unsuccessful 11-year fight for justice. An activist from the Christian community excoriated the government for ignoring the scourge of forced conversions, where Muslim men kidnap minority women, force them to convert to Islam and marry them against their consent.

The March brought together women across class, ethnic, and religious lines. University students cheered on older feminist icons. Placards in English and Urdu read “Patriarchy is Fitna (sedition)”, “Kebab Rolls not Gender Roles”, “Woman is King” and “Stop Killing Women.” Children waved orange and yellow flags with the Aurat March logo, and 97-year-old folk singer Mai Dhai sang and banged enthusiastically on a dhol, the traditional Pakistani drum played at weddings, stirring women and men to dance together in a spirit of festivity and celebration.

For the first time, I felt as though the invisible ties that held me back, those hundreds of written and unwritten rules about Pakistani women’s behavior in public, had been cut through with a blowtorch.

A small group of trans women watched from the edges, nervous and scared, but they soon joined in, along with the procession of nuns bearing giant crosses and the Dalit women from the desert. We marched behind women in red, members of the working women’s union, bussed in from Hyderabad. We marched, hair bare or covered, to the beat of the drums and the pounding of our hearts.

We were accompanied by women on motorcycles, girls on pink bikes. Tens of men and boys joined us. We walked next to women wearing masks portraying the face of Qandeel Baloch, the social media star who was murdered by her brother two years ago because he could not stand her bold, risqué public persona. They bore a symbolic coffin containing a body shrouded in white, calling it “patriarchy’s funeral.”

It’s been three decades since members of the Women’s Action Forum were beaten on the streets for protesting the Islamization laws of dictator General Zia in the early 1980s. Pakistani women in 2018 still find themselves trampled under decades of discrimination and oppression. But the Aurat March has motivated them to demand equality and justice. The Aurat March has uncovered an undeniable truth: The revolution has arrived in Pakistan — and it is a women’s revolution.

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🗣🗣🗣🗣🗣 A word

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Guys, this is really important. Until now, Google collected your data, but did not attach your name to it. Now, they can, and will. This new thing they’re doing will allow them to collect your data across searches, your email, Youtube, Maps, Google+, and all their affiliates, and build a complete profile of YOU.

If that doesn’t bother you, maybe this will: they own and can sell all that data, including anything you create and send (artists and writers, take note).

There is a way you can opt out of this ridiculousness. It’s described in the link, but if you’re still not sure about it, please ask me and I’ll guide you through how to turn all this off.

This is my wake-up call. I’ll be locking down my devices and scaling back what I put through the big Google machine, which means you may see less of me across social media. I’m going to keep researching this, but it may mean in order to keep the rights to my creative work, I’ll have to keep it out of Google’s hands. And that may take some doing.

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Questions that need answers…

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One of the most annoying type of Black person is the kind that thinks they’ve discovered the universe’s truth because they don’t believe in any of the abrahamic religions and think their hotepery makes them superior to other Black people like if you wanna obsess over ancient Egyptian culture (which isn’t even yours to obsess over most times) and homeschool your kids so you can raise them to be contrarian asshole adults like you that’s great but leave other Black people alone

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one time a white student from the university in my home town was talking to a student that came from africa to study and said “wow growing up in africa must have been so tough for you” and he just replied “my family could buy you” and walked away

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Powerful New Video Tackles Racial Bias To Remind Kids Their ‘Black Is Beautiful’

A new video released Monday titled “The Talk” compellingly tackles the impact of racial bias through the lens of black parents in America.

This video accurately displays what it is like to be black in America. It shows the conversations all black parents have with their kids to keep them safe and to encourage them to fight the racist society. And it’s heartbreaking that parents need to remind their kids that their “Black is beautiful”.Society needs to change and time has come to talk about this.

Source

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Female BAMFs Throughout History

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You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.

So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?” 

And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”

“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.

“I don’t want to know that my mother was a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. And yet she gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? And how can I forgive her for it? How can I ever repay her for the good and the evil of it, my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of loneliness. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, as always, you men, and your special man powers, for making art. 

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You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.

So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?” 

And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”

“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.

“I don’t want to know that my mother was a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. And yet she gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? And how can I forgive her for it? How can I ever repay her for the good and the evil of it, my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of loneliness. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, as always, you men, and your special man powers, for making art. 

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My boyfriend signed up for an Economics class last semester that had a professor who was described by other students on Rate My Professors as “a little offensive but still funny” and “you will still learn if you do the work and attend his workshops.” On the first day of class, he pointed to an Asian girl next to him.

“Are you Chinese?” he asked.

She looked bewildered and said, “Yes…?”

“How do you feel about the One Child Policy?”

The entire class went silent.

She glared at him, “I’m American.”

He shrugged it off, “Yeah, but you’re Chinese. So how do you feel about being the only child in your family?”

When I peruse through class lists, one of the very first things I want to know is whether or not I will be in a safe environment with a professor who cares about their students. Rate My Professors is the most commonly used tool for students to decide whether or not a professor is right for their learning style. It’s a tool for students created by students. But when such tools actively work against students who want to give proper warning about professors, what does that tell you? Does RMP care about student safety? Or is it doing everything in its power to protect corrupt educators? Should students compile a list of corrupt professors to combat RMP’s new policy if they don’t reverse this rule?

The Chinese woman and the rest of the students had to endure a semester filled with violent racist, sexist, and classist rhetoric (he later humiliated a student for 15 minutes for having an old Ford—what he described as a “loser car”) with a professor who only taught outside of class hours instead of during class hours. There are many more stories like this one because students pay for a class they weren’t expecting.

Because students can’t say “racist and sexist”, people have opted for “problematic” with examples as well as synonyms. You can contact them here to ask them to change their policy.

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