covenesque:

I def remember the riots and one thing anti black Koreans always fail to remember is that cops didn’t want to help Koreans during the riots either and left their asses to protect rich white people across town.

And lol, I def remember stories of apologies and cleanup efforts by ppl in the community, but people like op have severe selective memory

Yes! Fostering enmity and suspicion between Korean Americans and African Americans (or any POC) only serves white supremacy.

This is why I have no patience with Asians who drink the white establishment Kool-Aid. It’s not only morally wrong to be racist, but it’s so stupid and self-defeating. It may make you feel useful to be used as a stick to beat up other people of color, but you know what people do with sticks once they’re done using them? They throw them away. Aping the master doesn’t mean you’ll be the master someday. You’re only reinforcing the bonds that are keeping you in your place in the racial hierarchy.

It’s funny how a (biased) memory of the LA riots remains alive in Asian American consciousness, but not the history of POC solidarity movements that began in the 1960s with African American organization and aid. We should be inspired by the latter memory, not dwelling on the former. But it serves the white establishment better to sensationalize stories about inter-ethnic conflict than to talk about inter-ethnic coalition efforts.

upsettingrapeculture:

Yesterday, young facebook users hi-jacked the social media outlets of Victoria’s Secret to promote something very different from panties and push-up bras. Within ten hours, over 50,000 people visited PinkLovesConsent.com, where they saw Victoria’s Secret’s image “promoting consent to fight rape.”

The satirical website was launched at noon on Monday, December 3. According to the site, “PINK loves CONSENT is our newest collection of flirty, sexy and powerful statements that remind people to practice CONSENT. CONSENT is a verbal agreement about how and when people are comfortable having sex.”

Through Victoria’s Secret’s social media, the concept of consent was cropping up in some unexpected places. The Victoria’s Secret facebook pages were flooded with “I heart consent” posts, excited campus reps were retweeting pinklovesconsent.com, and the “pink hearts” at pinknation.com were declaring their love for “open sex talk.” One employee tweeted, “I am so happy to currently have a job for a company that stands for something so beautiful!! @LoveConsent #victoriassecret #loveconsent”  Highschool students were tweeting “I’m loving the new @LoveConsent! Victoria’s secret goes feminist!” At the outset, 100 young facebook users were in one the prank. It just went viral from there.  

How did customers respond to the prank? Victoria’s Secret fighting rape? Some people were skeptical, some people were confused, and most people LOVED it.  

The pr@pinklovesconsent.com inbox was flooded with fan mail from over-joyed customers.

“Hey, I just wanted to say that I am really incredibly happy about PINK’s consent line. It’s really encouraging to see mainstream clothing that promotes women’s safety and choice while still being fashionable and letting her feel good about her body. I wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret customer before, but I sure as hell am now

“Dear Anyone who made this happen at VS,
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! As a college student, and as someone who is constantly trying to create awareness of consent and body image awareness, I love this. As someone who is a survivor of assault, I love this. I love this times a million. I am floored, and a proud customer. I will flaunt these the minute I am able to buy them.”

Why should Victoria’s Secret (or anyone) promote consent? To end rape. By the time American women graduate from college 1 in 4 will have been raped. Every 21 hours, a rape occurs on an American college campus. Women are twice as likely to be raped in their lifetime than to develop breast cancer.  

Turns out feminist duo FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture is behind the campaign. Just last month, on the eve of the last presidential election, the same team projected “Rape Is Rape,” along with stories of survivors, onto the US Capitol Building. FORCE says, “We envision a world where sex is empowering and pleasurable rather than coercive and violent.”

Will Victoria’s Secret take a nod from the customer fan mail and change their styles? Fighting rape would be a major shift for the brand. Though they are a woman-focused company, VS has never taken a stand on any women’s issue. In fact, their current designs seem to lean more toward rape culture than consent. Their PINK brand, marketed at high school and college-aged women, sports thongs with the slogan “SURE THING” printed right over the crotch. Young women across the country are wearing underwear with “SURE THING” literally printed over their vaginas. We can think of one circumstance where a vagina is treated like a “SURE THING”: rape.

So if Victoria’s Secret clearly would NEVER promote consent why use their brand for a consent campaign? The organizers say, “We could write a pamphlet about consent.  In fact, we have written and distributed pamphlets about consent.  But how many people are reading pamphlets about sexual practices and how many people are reading facebook post about Victoria’s Secret? Consent needs to become a mainstream idea. Condoms became a mainstream idea in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Just like pausing to put on a condom prevents the spread of STDs, pausing to check in with you partner prevents unwanted sexual experiences.

Social media is becoming a tool for social change. We have seen the role of social media in revolution in the Arab Spring, but change Victoria’s Secret? “Probably not,” says the organizers.  “We’re not about taking Victoria’s Secret down.  We are about changing the conversation. The sexiness that is being sold to women by Victoria’s Secret is not actually about sex. It is not how to have sex, relationships or orgasms. It in an IMAGE of what it is to be sexy. So while we are sold cleavage, white teeth, clear skin and perfect hair no one is asking us how our bodies feel and what we desire. Victoria’s Secret owns the image of female sexuality, instead of women owning their own sexuality.”

As the project went viral, some saw right through the shenanigans. Many who knew it was a prank openly wished that it was real.  After a first incredulous look and some detective work, Jezebel blogger Katie J.M. Baker said, “If only Victoria’s Secret focused on empowering women rather than objectifying them!” Bloggers wrote about how the Pink Loves Consent project makes women look powerful and strong. Jezebel users commented on the “fiercely real” body types represented on the site. “Too bad they don’t use some models like her for their regular advertising. The girl’s gorgeous and it’s awesome to see a different body style once in awhile.” A frustrated Facebook user commented, “Damn, I wish these were real. I just got paid.”   And a savvy Victoria’s Secret customer tweeted, “So I guess the #loveconsent campaign isn’t actually affiliated with Victoria’s Secret but they SHOULD BE I WOULD BUY SO MUCH UNDERWEAR.”

Why do so many women love something they know is not real? FORCE made something that people want, but that a company like Victoria’s Secret can never give them. Imagine how different our lives would be if we put as much time and thought into sharing ideas like consent as we do into selling underwear.

As one high school student eloquently blogged:

“i’m still freaking out over this pink loves consent thing. And people say nothing’s gonna change, that talking and educating doesn’t help. Watch how many people will second-guess their actions when a widely popular company is pushing the issue. This is so fucking cool.”
—a seventeen year-old high school student posted on tumblr

We are so sorry to tell young women that Victoria’s Secret is not using its voice to create the change you need to grow up safe and free from sexual violence. Victoria’s Secret is not using its brand to promote consent. They are not promoting consent to their 4.5 million “PINK nation” members, to the 500,000 facebook fans or the estimated 10 million viewers who will be watching tonight’s fashion show. But what a different world would it be if they did?  What if consent and communication showed up in the bedroom as much as push-up bras and seamless thongs?  Things WILL change and talking and education DOES help.  We can create a culture where the sexual empowerment of women is more common than their sexual assault. But it’s going to take some work to keep on fighting against the messaging from giants like Victoria’s Secret.

While we can’t expect a message that is empowering for women to come from a brand like Victoria’s Secret, we can make it come from their hashtag. This campaign has only begun.

Tonight you can celebrate the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show by joining more than one thousand social media activists who will be posting, pinning and tweeting about consent. Join the CONSENT REVOLUTION! Tweet at #VictoriasSecret why you #loveconsent. Facebook @VictoriasSecret about why @loveconsent is revolutionary. Combat the sickening reality of rape culture by making the culture of consent go viral!

I didn’t like the idea of VS or anyone else trying to make money off of rape culture. At all. But I mind this idea less now that it’s clear it was a stunt to raise awareness. And the women behind it have a point—people (including journalists) are going to pay a lot more attention when a big company like Victoria’s Secret does something like this than when feminists do it.

realfakescientist:

The reality of minorities when spoken about honestly is considered slander by the majority. “Unity” and “compromise” usually means the the dilution of the minority’s ground and the compromise is never that because it is one-sided, just enough to where the majority feels comfortable.

strugglingtobeheard:

Trayvon Martin’s parents launch fund to fight stand-your-ground laws

sinidentidades:

The parents of Trayvon Martin have launched a website and a political action committee aimed at fighting the proliferation of stand-your-ground laws.

Change For Trayvon will collect funds to be “distributed to candidates, elected officials and efforts which support the mission of … revising stand-your-ground laws across the nation to ensure there is judicial or prosecutorial oversight”.

A video on the website shows Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, and mother, Sybrina Fulton, sitting side by side, urging viewers to join their campaign. “We need your help to change the laws which keep parents like ourselves from finding peace,” Tracy Martin says.

The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, prompted weeks of protest and racially charged debate. Police cited Florida’s stand-your-ground law, which allows the use of deadly force if threatened, in their decision not to arrest the gunman.

Zimmerman, who claims he shot the unarmed 17-year-old in self-defence, was eventually charged with second-degree murder and is out on bail awaiting trial.

wyveraryborealis:

Unless you literally are them, you are not Savita Halappanavar. You are not Gaza. You are not Trayvon Martin. You are not, for that matter, Huskies or Hokies. It’s a weird thing to say, it’s extremely appropriative, and it does nothing but make it about you. It doesn’t feel like solidarity when people start doing that to your life, it feels like someone’s stolen your grief.

You’re wearing someone else’s tragedy like a costume. Don’t do it.

The “we are [x]” sentiment is something I identify with leftism—unions striking in support of labor in other industries and especially marginalized brown peoples linking their oppressions under white supremacy and imperialism. So Mexicans who live near in dangerous areas along the U.S. border might explicitly liken their situation to what’s happening to Palestinians. There are South Africans who talk about what’s happening in Gaza in terms of apartheid.

And those are just the more recent examples. The original Black Panther Party expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese people because black radicals saw the common sources (capitalism, white supremacy, etc.) of struggles for justice and equality around the world. Eldredge Cleaver wrote, “if the nations of Asia, Latin America and Africa are strong and free, the black man in America will be safe and secure and free to live in dignity and self-respect.”

This was an era when brown leftist activists worked hard to create coalitions among nonwhites by pointing out how the same basic structures and systems oppressed brown people all around the world. Coining and using specific phrases and labels to emphasize unity and solidarity was one way of accomplishing that. So terms like “women of color” emerged as a a political identity around which nonwhite women could rally, which could be used to increase their voice, resources, etc. And if you look at galleries of old leftist posters, it’s common to see slogans like, “Victory! Vietnam-Palestine” and “Laos: Their Struggle is Our Struggle” that explicitly link one resistance movement with another. The “we are [x]” phrase is something used by oppressed peoples to emphasize the commonality of their struggles against shared foes like western imperialism or white racism. 

So in my view, that history makes it doubly problematic when a privileged person does the whole, “we are all Trayvon” or “we are all Savita” thing. It not only appropriates the tragedy and lived experience of that individual brown person, but it waters down the meaningfulness and power of the “we are [x]” assertion into a generic expression of sympathy. Even when you’re advocating for a progressive cause, that doesn’t mean you can forget about your privilege.

I’m not telling people not to join the boycott against Olive Garden, Papa John’s, Red Lobster, and Longhorn Steakhouse. I just want everyone to realize that this problem is much larger than these two particular companies and runs much deeper than conservative opposition to Obamacare.

If you’re outraged by what Darden and Papa John’s are doing, then I hope you’re also mad at every other corporate chain because they’re ALL doing the same thing and have been doing it for years. Whenever costs go up for any reason, profit is maintained by wringing more labor out of low-level employees. Being mad at Obamacare is just the latest excuse for owners to treat labor like shit. This kind of behavior is baked into contemporary American capitalism. Fixing this is going to take a lot more than a boycott of a few restaurants.

Anyway, if you do want to boycott Papa John’s, Olive Garden, etc., you should also write to the companies to inform them of what you’re doing. While you’re at it, write to your representative to express your feelings about the matter and to ask them what they’re going to do about corporate chains constantly screwing low-level employees. Ask them to work to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. Ask them to work to support the president’s efforts to raise taxes on the wealthy. Ask them to protect the social safety net and to work for the interests of the poor and working class.

Oh, and vote against Republicans whenever possible. They are consistently opposed to pro-labor legislation.