Bringing Radical Feminism Back to the Big Apple

  

After famed authors and feminist activists Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt left Redstockings and The Feminists, (also known as Feminists—A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles, who were big advocators for cellibacy, which is probably why they were very small) in 1969, another famed author, Vivian Gornick wrote an article for the Village Voice entitled "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs," announcing the emergence of a new New York feminist group. She writes, “But there’s one great thing about these chicks: if five feminists fall out with six groups, within half an hour they’ll all find each other (probably somewhere on Bleecker Street), within 48 hours a new splinter faction will have announced its existence, and within two weeks the manifesto is being mailed out. It’s the mark of a true movement. Two extremely intelligent and winning feminists who are about to “emerge” as part of a new group are Shulamith Firestone, an ex-Redstocking, and Anne Koedt, an ex-Feminist, and both members of the original radical group, New York Radical Women. They feel that none of the groups now going has the capacity to build a broad mass movement among the women of this country and they intend to start one that will. Both are dedicated to social revolution and agree with many of the ideas of many of the other radical groups. Each one, in her own words, comes equipped with “impeccable revolutionary credentials.” They come out of the Chicago SDS and the New York civil rights movement. Interestingly enough, like many of the radical women in this movement, they were converted to feminism because in their participation in the New Left they met with intolerable female discrimination. (“Yeah, baby, comes the revolution.… Meanwhile, you make the coffee and later I’ll tell you where to hand out the leaflets.” And when they raised the issue of women’s rights with their radical young men, they were greeted with furious denunciations of introducing divisive issues! (Excuse me, but haven’t we been here before?)” She also included a contact address and phone number. As a result, the piece raised much public interest. The group was later revealed to be New York Radical Feminists. NYRF prided itself on the way it was organized. There was no authority; it was divided into small factions named after notable feminists of the past; Koedt and Firestone led the Stanton-Anthony Brigade. The group’s main philosophy was, and this still holds true for us today, that men deliberately keep force, power, authority and property over women to build up their egos, and that women are raised to be subservient and in turn internalize their subordination by diminishing their own egos. NYRF activities included holding a monthly consciousness raising meeting, publishing a regular newsletter, and maintaining a speaker's bureau. They also organized a number of public conferences and speakouts through the early to mid-1970s on topics such as rape, sexual abuse, prostitution, marriage, lesbianism, motherhood, illegitimacy, class, and work. Notable social worker, Florence Rush introduced The Freudian Coverup in her presentation "The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View," about childhood sexual abuse and incest, at the April 1971 NYRF Rape Conference. Rush's paper at the time was the first challenge to Freudian theories of children as the seducers of adults rather than the victims of adults' sexual/power exploitation. Firestone participated in many actions throughout her life such as picketing a Miss America Contest, organizing a funeral for womanhood known as "The Burial of Traditional Womanhood", protesting sexual harassment at Madison Square Garden, organizing abortion speak outs, and disrupting abortion legislation meetings.

I personally would love to see events like this happening again today. Where are OUR Shulamith Firestones and Anne Koedts? It starts with ourselves. I realize we’re met with force and harsh punishment, but we must risk all to gain all. A radical feminist meeting here in my city and your city is long overdue. The whole trans agenda is meant to dismantle feminism and it seems to be working. Porn industry, human trafficking, female genitalia mutilation, transing of children, transwomen and transmen dying, but also women and children being assaulted by transwomen and men in general, everything we talk about ever can be made into chants and picket signs to be publicly displayed. Let's not forget Desmond is Amazing. We can openly call out Michael Alig for grooming him and all those poor souls back in the 90s who never even had a chance before the time of cellphones. James St. James admitted Alig did it in his book Party Monster originally entitled Disco Bloodbath (maybe it’s been edited out since, but I remember reading the pages and I know what I saw with my own eyes) about his precious scene and how they turned teen boys into drag queens who inevitably ended up homeless and drug addicted and raped. A protest that digs a little bit deeper is what NYC needs. The only protests I see are anti-Trump and that’s all it’s about. They don’t address the human trafficking issue, they don’t address the sex industry, they flaunt it. We could bring everything we constantly write articles about that just go on getting deleted to Central Park. We could bring all the subreddits that just got banned and have disappeared forever to Fifth Avenue. Let’s bring J.K. Rowling to town, and just get all the things we still talk about....out in the streets. These streets where these radical women set foot on. There are so many issues we can meet up with. Let’s take social media to the streets. when Occupy Wall Street happened, nobody gave a shit about what side anyone was on. People just gathered and talked politics. Central Park, Union Square, The Battery, Bryant Park, St. Nicolas Park, Marcus Garvey Park, etc Trump Towers, we can be anywhere. New Yorkers, like everyone else, have the right to peacefully protest on public sidewalks, parks, plaza and streets. I’m sick of catering to men and handmaiden’s feelings. We just want male free space! We will have our boundaries and our spaces. There is a US constitutional article guaranteeing the right of free association!

About a year ago, I tried to track down more information about NYRF as well as other groups including Radicalesbians (originally called Lavender Menace and are responsible for writing “The Woman-Identified Woman”) and Lesbian Feminist Liberation (originally part of Gay Activists Alliance, but split off from men to be with women, i.e. feminists, responsible for picketing outside the American Museum of Natural History with a big purple dinosaur), but I could only get a bit from one of the original NYRF members. I wish to leave her anonymous. Here’s what she told me in an email, “Pardon my delay getting back to you. I’m beginning to reach out to other NYRF’s. Some are thinking about it. Since no one in NYRF had any defined roles, no one is really “authorized” to tell the history and everyone has a different take. My memories are ambivalent towards NYRF, but still protective because there seems to be a concerted effort to re-write its history. Eleanor Cooper, who was one of the founders of LFL, has died. She was my good friend. I could ask around for the other founders, but I can’t remember their names. You know, it only really lasted three or four years. After it was no longer separatist, it sort of stopped meeting or doing anything. I know nothing about Radicalesbians. New York Radical Women were not feminists, whom they thought were empty-headed, bourgeois idiots. They were on the left. New York Radical Feminists tended to be antagonistic towards leftists and if any showed up and spoke at a meeting, they were often challenged or ignored. No leftist woman ever came back to suffer another series of insults. I was sympathetic to the left, but kept my mouth closed because I didn’t want to be excluded. NYRF definitely raised the issue of rape and incest, it did not arise from any left group. On the other hand, some of the fight for legal abortion was done by women of the left and their contribution is often not acknowledged.“

Today, within our radical feminist circles, we see similar behavior. We as women have to try to be more supportive of one another, but there seems to be animosity toward the left today as well. I see some of the same patterns. Today this is due to the neo-liberal gender identity madness that unabashedly and consistently silences women of other opinions. Have you noticed articles about transwomen when it's them as victims, it'll say transwoman, but when it's them as criminals and aggressors it'll say WOMAN? Just another reason to protest here in New York, and every major city and just all corners of the world. Despite all our flaws, we must press on and carry the torch from sisters of the past, because even in our current year, the NYRF guide to consciousness raising is still used and is considered a favorite and classic. Like NYRF, Backbone is a small group without anyone at the head. Everyone assumes responsibility and pitches in. Our zine gets better with every edition! 

Some women and I want to organize a rally, a gathering of some kind, or potentially a protest in New York City. Contact me if you’d like to be a part of it. 

Instagram: theviolentfembot

This is in the works planned to be placed in Central Park, which would be a great spot for many of us to meet. How about Union Square? We don’t need a permit. Just need women to show up. New York Radical Feminists records, 1969-2011: https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/newyorkradfem/

How I Owned Up to My Lesbian Identity

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex." Valerie Solanas

I'm going to start writing more about my life, and how I've came to know and love myself as a lesbian. I think it would be good for other people to read about, especially younger people trying to find themselves like I was and still strive for. I am not someone who studied how to be a good writer, so if it's a little out of order, I apologize in advance. Let me just start by saying, I've always been drawn to the wilder side of life and  the one to question authority and my situation since the time I was small. I used to think that because of these things (wanting to be where the wild things are) it made me manly, and that I must have been born wrong, which seems to be what all the popular kids are thinking and saying these days. The truth is women can be wild and that's who and what I am. I'm a woman. A wild woman. A thrill seeker! Or at least I was wild. I felt feral growing up. With society's female socialization, I grew to become more silent, passive and reserved. I'm a lesbian, and if that is the most wild or radical thing about me, fine.
It took a long time for me to be able to firmly state all of those things, but what helped me get there was through feminism. Radical feminism. That's not to be confused with mainstream or liberal feminism. Yes, there are many layers to feminism and I knew nothing about it at all until now. I want to say about 2 years ago. I did not learn it from family, friends, school, church, or any societal institution. I got to know it by myself. Nobody taught it to me, but with my own research. It was thanks to the women I read articles on and watched videos of who have not been yet silenced by the state and media or deleted off the internet. I didn't learn it from silence. I learned it from unafraid and loud women.

I was born in 1989 into a world where being a "wannabe" was frowned upon (here's looking at you, wannabe women and wannabe men i.e. transfolks), but I  would always wonder why I was never happy being born a woman. I hated it so much that I began saying to myself, "you're a boy," and declaring myself "he" in my head. I found myself sometimes correcting people only in my thoughts though. I mostly wore my brother's hand-me-downs, and could sometimes pass for a boy with long hair. I loved running around outside in the summer topless and free. Kids picked on my brother and I and said we were both born in the wrong bodies. My brother would be the one to ask me if we could play Barbies. I mainly held onto Ken, G.I. Joe or a stuffed animal. This was the early 90s. Now, a person's preferred pronoun is currently protected by the law in places like Canada and the UK, and it'll be the law of the world soon. Growing up, I really disliked, what I believed to be FACT at that time, despite all the activism and feminism that had already happened prior to my knowledge and existence that I was completely ignorant of then, was that I wouldn't grow up to be the hero or the winner of my own story or my life's movie. My own life. I wouldn't be the main character of the book written about me. For me, to be the heroine in my story was a fairy tale in itself. I'd always be looked at as the princess, prize or trophy, the baby machine to the nice, brave, pure-hearted, musclular, handsome bearded man.

I envied the male sex right at the start when I could see they were able to take a piss standing up, without exposing their entire bare ass and could even walk around dick in hand just relieving themselves. I remember when I first witnessed this, and when I tried to stand up and pee, I probably got urine all over myself and went home feeling puzzled. I was to be limited to hiding myself as best as possible and squatting from that day on. How inferior I felt even as a toddler. I liked that I was able to beat up boys as a child, but I remember my mother telling me something like, "he's going to be bigger and stronger than you one day and you're going to get hurt." I remember being so pissed about that. I didn't believe her. Then my 12 year old cousin socked me in the nose one day and sent me straight into water. We had been playing on our beach club's raft roughhousing. I was always a fan of play fighting. Well, I couldn't see the problems with males then, like war, murder, violence in general, rape, crime etc...I was taught that it was PEOPLE who were responsible. People as a whole. I was told by both men and women, that men and women are equal and it's both men and women who kidnap, lie, steal, kill, etc. We're never taught statistics until it's already too late, and we're all in our boxes where they want us. I mean I'm no scholar. I am definitely not even great at math. Statistics show that one female criminal probably adds up to a dozen male. I mean that's just me estimating, but that doesn't sound equal to me. True: both women and men kill, rape and murder, right? But who does more of it? On a global scale? Who is responsible for most of it? It's not us girls. I think most women grow up being jealous of men and their power. I certainly felt that. There's a feeling and hunger for competence right from the jump, and you want to be strong, and do well, but then your family pacifies it. I can remember my brother bitching to my father when he was told to do his homework, or chores, or something and why I sometimes could slide, and my father said to him loud and clear that I would just be able to get a man some day, and to me, at the time I wasn't offended, I was just happy to be able to slack off then. I would find some sort of privlege in that, ignorantly, and when the glow of receiving this knowledge wore off, I continued resenting my own sex so much, because I could feel the world around me trying to keep me from doing certain things, yet expecting me to do others that I didn't want to, such as being pretty, and if you ever asked why, the reason being most of the time usually ended up being, "because you're a girl and this is what is expected." The way mothers treat their daughters and the overall treatment of women toward each other is horrific sometimes, and it's all because we are mirroring the way men treat women. It would take years to find the truth. About 3 decades or so. So, for all that time I struggled with these secret feelings and thoughts. I tortured myself.

I grew up in Catholic school where you felt it necessary to hike up your skirt to be accepted by other students, and I fought with my parents a lot about grades and what I was doing (recreational drugs & alcohol) or not doing (extracurricular activities) and one time I left the house saying the most ignorant thing when my mother commented on my appearance. She replied with something that still sticks and haunts me today, because I thought she was right and sometimes I still think she's right. When she saw me, she asked me, "why do you look this way?" I couldn't even tell you. Maybe I had a bunch of bracelets on. Maybe my makeup was done all wrong and looked bad, and the skirt was rolled up. I just replied with, "I want to look like a slut." I might have said it sarcastically. Regardless of why I said that isn't important. I said it, and she replied, "You need to study more, 'cause you're not even good enough to walk the streets." It's pretty hard not to develop some self-hate when your own mother makes you feel incompetent at being a hooker. Or maybe I'm just playing victim and whining too much. I don't think I gave that much thought at the time. On the other hand, I think it might have actually hit me and it just sank in then I pushed it down with more teenage future ruining fuckery that day.

Years before social media, you remember? Being on the internet all alone? Haha. Yeah, I would be reading about people throughout history who went ahead and got sex changes, lived privately or in total secret, and came across some time maybe before or during high school, Boys Don't Cry on TV. That blew me away, because that was the first time I saw a woman trying to say she was not gay, but going for women. I understood what she was trying to establish. That she was really he, and at the time, I admired it, but the thought in the back of my head was always present: that no matter how much you change your appearance, you're still going to be what you were born. The self-hate intensified. If I could never change the outside to match the inside, then the only true way I knew I could be happy was that the inside must flourish. I had to take charge of my true self. I had to learn to love myself the way I got here. That's what's supposed to come out. We have to bring ourselves out to the world, not bring the world inside ourselves. Yet, humans selfishly want to take it all in to feed the self. So, I knew that, but didn't know how yet.

Years later, I eventually went onto following transmen like Aidyan Dowling and Buck Angel on Instagram, thinking, "I bet I would be so handsome on T." Eventually, it really didn't take me long to unfollow them though, because even before getting radical, I was getting creeped out at them trying to normalize waking up and injecting testosterone with a syringe as if it's a normal morning ritual like drinking coffee or shaving a beard. So, yeah. Thoughts like, "wow those scars under his nips, you can hardly see! How sexy and masculine those abs are. I could look like that." Then I'd be hating myself for thinking like that, because for the most part I always took pride in not taking much pride in my appearance at all. I never liked to go the conformist route. I experienced moments of vanity, but never felt right about it. It really is a performance to put on femininity. My energy is not very feminine at all. It's hard to say, really. For whatever reason, I always gravitated to things that were meant for boys and men.

Cosmetic surgery (that's what sex changes are, folks. Cosmetic. Not therapeutic.) could never have been an option for me. It costs a lot of money, for one, but I was never into superficiality. Transitioning, to me, right from the start, before ever knowing about radical feminism, was as shallow and basic as a woman who gets her tits enlarged or gets a nose job. It is the exact same thing to a different degree. Men tend to be less superficial, but when they are, they're called metrosexual or gay. How many levels of mutilation and body modificiation does a hetero man have to go through to not feel so fucking unwanted and hideous in this world? He just gets a toupee? Well not now! In this day and age, not only women, but men are spending thousands of dollars, worth a whole world of surgery to successfully validate their inner thoughts about their appearance and FEELINGS. Amanda Lepore is the most expensive living body walking the earth. Is that something we should be congratulating? This is something we should be viewing as unhealthy. I don't really like that much attention as a woman. Male attention is dangerous and there's no escape. When you transition to male (you don't really transition), you still get it (from gay men). As a lesbian, you still get it. There is no escape! Now I get dressed with a transwoman at the gym. Why do we have to sacrifice our own comfort and safety, us the many, just so some man can feel validated in his identity as a woman? Why are we sacrificing the many for the few? How does no one else think it's selfish of a man to invade female only spaces to make us all validate his identity with OUR OWN? Men are taking our spaces everywhere.

When I finally got sick of wasting time in heterosexual bars (your default, standard bar) where I was preyed upon by men I was not interested in, yet told myself I might be if I just "tried," or that I should just be happy and GRATEFUL I was getting any sort of attention at all, because I did not value myself or respect myself enough to say no, I began to explore what was around in my town, Manhattan. It didn't really take long, with social media to boot, to find people. I had found women who I thought were similar to me, but they were not calling themselves women anymore, but loving pussy was all everybody talked about. They were "bois." "Queer" folks. Henrietta Hudson, Cubbyhole and a "queer-core" music scene is how I got to come further out of the closet, but it  seemed to run short on the kinds of gays and lesbians mainstream media made funny or made fun of on TV. It was like blurry vision, and playing pretend. I had to enter these spaces and use my imagination. I thought to myself, "where was the place for me to go like The Planet on The L Word with a huge ensemble of lesbian friends to accompany me?"

Then I was dating someone of that nature, and it was a pretty rocky relationship, and what probably caused most of the problems was the kind of toxic self-hating thinking that's going on in this community. We bonded over our shared self-hate for being born female. Factor in drugs and alcolhol, and you've got a lot of unresolved childhood traumas and gender feels leaking out all over the place. Her friends were all into polyamory, and group sex parties, preferred pronouns, queer theory, etc. Nothing was gay, and nothing was lesbian. Just queer or trans. After that ended, I was so tired of words like "queer" and wanted to distance myself from that. I wanted to be with someone who could comfortably embrace herself as she is, and be proud or unafraid to be called she by others. I wanted a girlfriend who I could call my girlfriend. Someone I could call a lesbian and who calls herself one. I wanted to find others like me and was only scratching the surface. I couldn't find them. I was looking for lesbians. I was looking for women. I needed to figure out why they were gone. I went on Tinder and OkCupid and there was everything, but women. Okay, if there were women, they were definitely conflicted, bi, or straight. Anytime I saw women who I thought I could vibe with, they went by nothing. They went by "they" and the only women claiming to be women were not women. There was a shortage of lesbians. The only lesbians I saw were hetero males making a joke about loving women so much that it means he's a lesbian. Het men and transwomen "lesbians." So, I researced and yeah, there they were. Women, but they were no longer calling themselves that. Now they were calling themselves queer, genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary, two-spirits, trans, etc... A simple he or she is no longer specific enough in explaining how "queer" a person is.

An Instagram friend of mine who let me use this photo for this post. I told her I was writing about how I found radical feminism on my original search for more lesbians who seem to be lost in a sea of queerdom.

It must come from a culture that is raised on homophobia and misogny. I was guilty of this behavior myself. We all were. I can remember personally cringing at the word lesbian in high school, and almost everyone I knew was only going by bi if they were gay at all. Nobody said queer yet to my knowledge. We all cringed at the word lesbian. When my highschool crush and I got together, we were too immature for sex. At least I knew I was. There was a moment when we did discuss it, and I think she was a little afraid or grossed out at the idea of going down on me. I knew she wasn't a virgin. Not with men. Of course. I was. She was a senior and I was a sophomore. We would only make out, but our feelings for each other emotionally were really strong, but I didn't come out until many years later, so eventually, we parted ways. I always felt bad I was too afraid to be on that level with her. We never had sex. I think she was in a way uncomfortable about it, or she wanted me to be a top, and I wasn't able to yet.

I came to the conclusion later on that I was a self-hating woman angry that I was attracted to other self-hating women. Why were we all so self-hating? What were we thinking trying to opt out of our oppression? We didn't think we were oppressed yet. A lot of my friends currently still don't believe women are oppressed and they laugh at some of the newfound things I say. I suppose we thought if we dropped the pronouns and got a haircut that the period cramps and blood would go away. That men would suddenly start respecting us? That other women would finally? Our mothers? Fathers? I would cringe at the word, lesbian, because homosexuality was severely frowned upon for most of every gay persons' life so that leftover stigma is what we're all still coping with. I hated my own vagina and got grossed out at the thought of going down on another one. Until I did it. I had all the insults and thoughts I've heard from people and the media in my mind whenever I heard "lesbian." I could smell rotting fish (dirty pussy) when I heard lesbian years ago. The word queer is a slur, but it became an all new identity for bisexuals who didn't want to feel so basic anymore. Trans people come out of that in not wanting to feel queer or gay. It comes from their desire to be hetero and "in the right body." It stems from self-hate man-made by society and patriarchy with another sick fad on the rise, transracialism and wow now you can even identify as transpecies. South Park made a great episode addressing all 3 back in 2005 called Mrs. Garrison's Fancy Vagina. It would be considered hate speech now. I find all of this to be truly troubling. Does no one see the problem in doing that? Self-identifying as something they're really not? Are we seriously all living in adult kindergarten where now we must play pretend and feed crazy peoples' delusions BY LAW? Not only did I realize my true identity through these politics, but it also brought me into the world of social justice which was something I used to laugh at or mock. I believe Social Justice Warriors do go out of control with it, but being raised so red pilled doesn't allow me to take it too far. I don't want anyone's rights to be taken. I don't hate trans people. If I ever hated a trans person, it was because of the violent statements I've read on social media. I thought I was trans. I can empathize and sympathize with dysphoric individuals. Google detransitioned people, and hear what they have to say. That's what sent me on this journey. I wish trans people could find true peace beyond superficialty and without victimhood.

The Trouble With Untamed Wildlife

I'm on 125th Street, in Harlem, the Mecca of Black America. Home of some of the greatest and most famous black people to rise to actual human status in America. People like Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Diddy, Samuel Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr., etc, and so on...

As I stand on the corner of 125th and Malcolm X Blvd, I watch one of those double decker tour buses ride by, the ones that take tourists all over Manhattan and jam up traffic for those of us who actually live here and have to get somewhere important.

I'm used to the faces I see riding the bus, tourists from whichever area of Europe(name a spot, it's immaterial), or wherever large groups of tourists like these travel here from. They look at what's basically my normal life with a quizzical like fascinated expression and it makes me wonder what their thoughts are at that moment. I would wonder if most of these folks have ever had any real life experience being among black people, let alone being the minority in the area. I wonder if they're looking at me and the other black people through a lens of perception created by generations of media driven stereotype and bias.....And sadly, I wonder if they're looking at us as more of an exotic species of people, not quite the same as them....something to be driven around through, like some kind of exhibit, like those safari things at Disneyland, where you can drive your car around a bunch of wild animals

I wonder if they hear the voice of one of those narrators from those National Geographic in their head, giving them the blow by blow of the nomenclature of the urban black person in their habitat, providing behavioral signs to look out for and what they would indicate is happening.
https://youtu.be/4OV3zxOSQh0

Yes, I am being mostly sarcastic, but not as mostly as what would be assumed, because I truly wonder if black people are truly still viewed as an exotic 'other' species of homo-sapien. How far have we truly come from being looked at as actual exhibits in carnivals, like Sara Baartman, or the Aboriginals?

I truly believe that the programming placed in so many people's minds regarding black people have given them this view of us as not being the same, and the recent rashes of viral videos showing white people calling the police on black citizens for the most asinine reasons, which can simply be summed up as existing somewhere while black, have given me reason to seriously ponder this. From the two gentlemen in Starbucks, to the black women golfers, to the young college student who had the audacity to fall asleep by her own dorm, to the young teenage boy, who got lost on his way to school and almost got his head blown off for asking for directions, to the two kids shopping for prom suits, to the folks having a cookout at a public park, to folks leaving an airbnb that they just finished renting out....but I digress(because I'll run out of writing space with examples).

There have been a litany of incidents, which seem to give the impression that black people are seen as not being allowed to exist within certain places, outside of certain spaces, and thus being regarded as some form of threat.....kind of like when one of those exotic animals at the Disney safari somehow makes it's way to the food court area, docile as it may be...As outlandish as the perception is, it gets even crazier when the logic then becomes that calling the police-a now universally understood recipe for death, as it applies to black people-is the next thing that absolutely should be done....Because????....I sure as shit don't know, I don't understand any of this insanity, and I do apply the word insanity purposely. How do you see another human being and apply this line of logic towards them? Why are you even threatened by them? Why the hell are you even paying attention to them, at all, when they sure as hell aren't paying attention to you?.....Or is that the point, right there? That folks are having the audacity to be where they are, just all up in their space, like they have the right? Who the hell are these....'people'?! doing normal things here?! This cannot be tolerated, this situation must be put back in order!

....But what 'order' is that?.....

Why there will be no revolution

As I sit here, shaking my head upon seeing yet another, in a countless supply of memes geared toward furthering an  established view of what the new wave 'culture' of black 'relationships' is all about these days, my already cynical view of the world shifted inward, to Black American culture.

You see, normally, my cynicism is directed and focused on how systemic white supremacy adversely affects the behavior of current Black America, from it's inception in the 1600's, to the minutes that it's taking me to write this blog. I make it a point to deconstruct what's termed within black culture as 'acting ratchet(previously referred to as being ghetto)' from a psychological view, and link it to it's original nexus, which is the physical/mental/spiritual/emotional/psychological inheritance of the effects of white supremacy of the transatlantic slave trade passed down from generation to generation all the way to current Black America. I do this, not to give an excuse for ratchet behavior, but to understand it....to understand why so many within Black Culture 'act ratchet', and to give myself some kind of hope of being able to see when it will cease to exist.

Let me break down the general meaning of acting ratchet. It's basically having a mentality that gravitates towards self-destructive behaviors. It's about knowing better and yet not being better. It's about not only seeking out dysfunction, but thriving and bathing within it's waters, being unsatisfied with what we understand as doing things that are actually productive and good for us.

Here's the PSA part of this blog. This is not the topic to conjure up 'whataboutisms' to deflect away from what I'm specifically talking about. This is not the time to bring up the fact that there are forms of 'acting ratchet' in all cultures, I'm fully aware of that, but I'm not focused on any other culture's version. What I'm about to write does not apply to every black person in America(because it damn sure doesn't apply to me and those in my circle), so spare me the blanket statement whine job. And although I fully acknowledge that this has everything to do with the epigenetic residue of white supremacy embedded into our subconscious psyche's, this is not the time to bring that up as the crutch upon which you can place the blame and fully exonerate the behavior.

This is the time to start talking about understanding what we're doing, taking accountability for our behavior going forward....and sadly, how this being so interwoven within our culture, will be the reason why our culture will never rise up and ascend in America.

There will be no revolution to televise, because there will never be a revolution. The reason why there will never be a revolution, is that we're perfectly fine with being ratchet. We like being ratchet, we somehow have come to a point where we would actually patent being ratchet and correlate it to being black, if we could. The same way so many black folks want to attach the word nigga strictly to black people is the perfect example of the desire to be ratchet. We love dysfunction, because we have been programmed to love it. An example of it is the way we've been programmed to wistfully reminisce on the hellacious beatings we got as kids as affectionate memories to look back on and laugh at. That's turning negative trauma into normalcy, perversely making it into coming of age moments, while never getting the treatment that we needed to psychologically be able to heal and grow.

I understand the psychology of it, I understand that we have never gotten our therapy, and therefore, don't recognize why we engage in these self-destructive cycles. A lot of us don't even see it, what they see is this is how things have always been, this is 'being black', so subconsciously, they gravitate to doing these things, because it's been implanted in their minds as the things that they self-identify with. It hurts my soul to watch this manifestation in my people. It bothers my spirit to see memes like the one above, to see that this is what represents todays blackness. One of the things I've learned is that we have adopted many of the old coping mechanisms that our forefathers created and used to maintain their sanity and humanity from slavery to the 1960's. They used music, dance, song, and comedy to help laugh away the pain. They created an oasis which gave them their humanity and something to which they can identify with as being unique to only them. Those were the origins of Black American Culture. It was berthed in the fires of slavery and created just so that people could find the will to live. It implanted within them a steel reserve, a resiliency that nobody else on this planet can match. I am in awe of them, of their spirit to first survive and later to ascend......and I am also embarrassed for what that has devolved to currently, because sadly, somewhere along the way, we forgot to upgrade our programming. Those very things they did to survive, also allows us to always focus on the negative things and make light of them, instead of discarding them once we grew above them. Subconsciously, we never grew above it, and therefore, we dwell in it, we make it normalcy and we identify with it.

We have truly lost our way. We have, as Roland Deschain said in 'The Dark Tower' novels, "Forgotten the face of our father". It's mainly because the side effects of the survival mechanisms that were instilled in our ancestors were never corrected. Those side effects mutated over time and manifests today as being ratchet. Things like corporal punishment, the emasculation of the man of the family and the loss of respect for them, because they were raised not to have self respect, the inability to properly care for their women, because of said emasculation and from nobody getting the therapy to heal... to be properly deprogrammed and then rehabilitated to pursue a healthy, productively functional relationship.

All we have ever known here is dysfunction. Where I'm from, we call it 'project mentality', from the culture of living in public housing. Due to racist housing practices in the various Metropolises, practices that purposely herded black people into close quartered housing projects in low real estate tax areas, which allowed the government to not properly fund the areas for various things from optimal educational resources, the opportunity to create neighborhood businesses and the living wage jobs that would come with said businesses, to basic standard of living maintenance(all of which still exist today). Put those things together and place it on a slow simmer, and you have the perfect recipe for psychological dysfunction. This is merely one example of our normalcy.

Again, I completely understand the why, and it's for that very reason why my cynicism has taken over my optimism for the future of Black American Culture. I do understand that, in pockets, we will get better. Enough of us have broken free of our programming and are making fabulous strides, breaking barriers, seeing and avoiding the systemic traps that still exist, and no longer living with the surviving mentality, but with the thriving mentality. Those are the ones among us who will make it and continue on. Those of us on this side give me so much pride, I can't properly put it into words....

But there is too much bad programming and continued acceptance of dysfunction as normalcy to create a revolution. How can we have a revolution, when we can't even have a defined, healthy relationship? You can't even have a girlfriend/boyfriend who is actually just YOUR girlfriend/boyfriend, so how can you expect to come together, and unite, as a people? You can't even unite as a couple! Over the last decade, I have witnessed our moral foundation erode, and reformatted on an ever shifting base that has no structure, and therefore cannot support anything built upon it. The lines have been blurred, people have been completely dumbed down, there are no defined roles, no structure, no discipline, no rules......and without those things, we are only left with the one thing that we have been programmed to gravitate to, and claim as ours...


Dysfunction.

Seasons Fleetings

Are your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and your cousins going to be visiting this holiday season? Are you dreading it? Do you feel nauseous? Oh, word. Samesies! Yeah I've been there in fact I'm still there. I just want to address a few things about that. Here are some topics you can mention when ol' Aunt Clara grimaces at your answer to her, "what's going on with your life" questions. Tell her what's going on with the country! She might think you're really smart and be enlightened or she might just further her frowning. At that point just pour her another glass of wine. She can join the rest of us depressive masses drinking our years away after discussing our fleeting freedoms.

Enough of your "back in my day" rantings. You know damn well  previous generations were gifted with a more straightforward path to economic success.  Now you have to jump through bureaucratic flaming hoops to get a degree, and if you happen to Indiana Jones your way out of Starbucks and through the narrow crevice that leads to Good Job Landia, there is no guarantee it'll last when you watch your job get outsourced or become obsolete in a few years.  Not to mention drastic inflation, and increasing expenses, insurance and taxes. The only jobs that offer healthcare tend to be government jobs, which are so tedious to land when at first they lie and promise all you need is your worthless high school diploma, they then explore your identity and drug test you and if you can't qualify for the fire department or police force, you'll be stuck doing menial low paying jobs unless you seriously hit the books and become a business owner or entrepreneur which they've also made nearly impossible to qualify for and if you do then you'll be shook down in tax money, insurance and jacked up rent money.

Throw in fast paced ever-changing technology, automated services, robots and kiosks, licensing, permissions, registrations, worthless college degrees you stay in debt for thousands of dollars and years for, the constant presence of terrorism, endless pressure and stress to do better but can't because it all takes time and money you don't have added to the pressure and stress to procreate and bring more mouths to feed into the world. I know! Let's all join the military and carry out dirty deeds ordered by the mysterious agenda of the military industrial complex. Its all a crap shoot.

Thanks for overseeing a Keynesian system of economics and the degeneration of moral and cultural standards so that the next generation are debt slaves with poor job prospects and surrounded by foolish communists and subservient institutions. Thanks for a rotting education system. Thanks for telling everybody else to take responsibility for their actions and then not follow your own advice. "Do as I say and not as I do," right?

Maybe we are the most whiny wet blankets of our time, but even you know, as home owners, that having property in the U.S. is an illusion since you have to pay massah guv'mint an annual fee to keep your house or it'll send jack-booted thugs with badges and guns to imprison or execute you. 

Brought to you by a lazy piece of shit millennial constantly being asked about my life and occupation. Merry Christmas!