Hello all! 

My apologies for my extensive absences as of late–those of you who follow me on twitter and the like know that I had a family emergency and am just now starting to get back on my feet. I’ll be answering all of your PMs ASAP–I love all of you. I appreciate all of you endlessly. 

Before I get into my piece, I want to apologize for my inability to complete two different shows yesterday. The first was technical, but the second was due to me letting my emotions get the better of me in my inability to address social discrepancies in the beginning of a show.

With that, I want to establish some suggestions going forward. 

1. It’s not fair to other CB users to inject potentially harmful/triggering language in shows (white supremacy, patriarchy, etc). While it is undeniably necessary to name them and vocalize our concerns, CB is not the space to do so. At least not in ways that don’t seem welcoming of new narratives, for example, explicitly saying, “you are wrong about x” instead of asking questions like “why do you think x?” Please respect the limitations of the space, because any space fraught with sexual tensions could easily be manipulated into anger. Going forward, those with questions or a desire to ask deeper questions about specific social issues will be guided to this social media platform.

2. On CB, we can acknowledge things like perpetual binaries, disempowerment, love, togetherness, kindness, and affection. We can also vocalize if we do not have the capacity or means to engage on this platform specifically, and request other avenues of communication. We can also say what makes us uncomfortable, but targeted language will not be tolerated under any circumstances. I don’t find “cancel culture” conducive, so I will be reaching out to individuals who amplify this targeted language. I understand that reactionary anger is also something conditioned, so I harbor no hard feelings against anyone, but there has to be an avenue for corrective dialogue. 

In that same light, regarding this “collective dialogue:” It is just as okay and necessary for someone to vocalize how language hurts them as it is okay and necessary for someone to speak the hurtful language. We build resilience in relation this dialectic exposure, increasing our adaptability to difference and change. We find our humbleness and will in our ability to accept when we have hurt someone and change ourselves instead of calling them “weak” or “easily offended.” 

If we don’t let people vocalize what upsets them, we will lack the information we need for a better world.

If we resist others reaction to our own thoughts, our behaviors, our actions–then we deny our very self. The only mode of “you” that exists is the “you” you project onto others, because this is the “you” in action–so the only genuine feedback you get from yourself is what others tell of you. Listen to them.

3. Now… on the comments last night, specifically:

White supremacy and Patriarchy.

To begin explaining what we mean by these governing social forces, we first have to develop how power dynamics emerge from some aggregated or centralized collective action. When we say something is “structural” or “systemic,” we mean that over time, with distinguished demographic processes, a certain group of people have aligned a certain social, political, and economic force which manages the daily functions of public life. For example, for monetary-based economies (in the modern context, this would be neoliberal (the belief that a free market structure is the best way to measure, value, and execute individual potential) globalization (the increased interconnectedness of global processes)), private businesses large in part control the global flow of goods and services.  

**I cannot explain all of this in one post, because there is SO much information. This will be the first of many.** 

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On #WhiteSupremacy: 

In the context of white supremacy, we have to consider looking at history with humanity. These were groups of people, just like you and I, making daily decisions, just like you and I, that informed their way of life and their future, just like you and I. You and I, in the present, did not necessarily chose this economy, this time period, this nationality, etc. Groups of people before us did–they made our languages, built the businesses that control the means of production, taught our relatives, instilled different, ideas, and these past decisions informed our way of life now.

Now here we are, the product of a series of past decisions made that produced the world you and I are operating in now. The significance of history in understanding modernity cannot be overstated–looking at how power dynamics have concretely evolved and changed over time influences our daily life and the world we project. 

Early Eurocentric imperialism was the first production of global order. A group of white men ravaged the shores of Africa and the Americas which necessarily integrated indigenous communities to those respective locations into a radically different way of life than they had been producing for themselves. 

Due to this centralized power complex, Eurocentric (now, white) people governed the global flow of resources, services, and ideas. They had more power in the global game, so they got to decide it’s function, and it was drastically different than the culture/way of life being created by African and American-indigenous communities. 

This is an early form of oppression: to be revoked of one’s agency and integrated into a structure that does not coincide with one’s desired lifestyle. 

Europeans tried to integrated North American indigenous communities into the colonial narrative, meanwhile enslaving Blacks as an economic system. In early colonial US America, classism was actually a more distinct marker for social status than race. However, Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” is the earliest documented account of white superiority we have from a powerful, colonial figure. 

And henceforth, the idea of race as one to advance certain political and economic goals, would structuralize. 

We often emphasize the history of slavery in the Americas and beyond when we begin discussing the Black experience in America specifically–however, I actually think this discontinues a more pressing narrative occurring during that time–new white Americans were actively benefiting from slavery. They accumulated wealth, managed all leadership positions, and directed the culture and order of life at the global scale. 

So while one was oppressed, another was alleviated. These benefits of power did not just go away after the emancipation of slaves. In fact, they took on a new form we call the prison industrial complex. 

After the emancipation of slaves, the Southern economy was especially left in shambles. In the 13th amendment, which granted “freedom” to “all Americans,” there is a loophole where unless you are deemed a criminal, you are free. As the Southern economy was given no transition or support policy to alleviate the economic stress of losing free labor, they exploited this loophole immediately. This is how vagrancy and loitering crimes came to be, and Blacks were arrested in droves in an attempt to ameliorate this free labor conditional to US economics. 

Functionally a working system, nothing was done to alleviate this injustice to the Black community, and this free labor in prisons is still integral to modern US economics.

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On #Patriarchy: 

I recently heard someone make some remarks about how much power a woman holds in the world “unless she is ugly.”

And why should that be the indicator of power for a women? Why should anyone be so reduced to their physical attractiveness that this is the guiding principal of their worth? 

The fact that a statement like that is so deeply declarative and “matter of factual” that it can’t even be seen how it is wrong is a testament to patriarchal power (and dualist ontology more broadly)–that this just “is” how it “is,” leaving no room for question, investigation, or moral scope. 

Acknowledging the structural disempowerment of woman is not to devalue the experience of men in the global context. Men are socially, emotionally, and physically constrained and repressed. Men are socially guided to disconnect from their emotions in an effort to portray what has been socialized as a “masculine” identity. Men are pressured to uphold an entire economy. Men are given much less social support than women.

However, the distribution of power is inadequately distributed towards men especially in the political and economic context. I don’t like statistics because I find this reductive form of knowledge can sometimes too easily generalize or simplify broader social issues, but compare the number of women in leadership to men. Similar to how white supremacy has materialized, the reality of a patriarchal global structure materialized just as a series of past decisions informing the present, where men had unequal access to power and social ideation over women. 

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It’s important to consider what happens in the day to day, interpersonal experience of race and gender relations throughout time. While all of these systemic forces are working, there are people just like you and I with our own implicit bias (unconscious, seemingly “natural” thought that informs the way we consider anything) informed by the world around us. While all of these macrosystems are operating, people are sharing information, thoughts, and ideas with one another on the ground level. If we truly embodied places of curiosity rather than judgement, adjusted our reactionary defense, and opened ourselves up, perhaps we would learn the world anew and grow ourselves too. 

I’m not saying white people are evil. I

’m not saying men are evil. 

But, we cannot continue to deny the influence or existence of systemic oppression and go on projecting our ideas of systemic intervention, unwilling to recognize that the desire to shift and change systemic forms is an indicator of systemic oppression.

If you have any questions, please message me. I’ll be posting follow ups on both of these things later, but this is what I had time for.