Unbelievable. Or perhaps I should say, disgusting.
What saddens me is how unsurprised I'm becoming at reading things like this. When I was younger, I used to wonder why people didn't take every opportunity they could to learn about other cultures and ethnic practices; now that I'm older, I can recognize that as the privilege that it is.
And don't even get me started on the way that some white people seem to think that it''s 'only natural' for people of colour to all know about each other's social traditions and customs.
Message in a bottle
Bisphenol A in plastic bottles may be more harmful than anything in our tap water.
Dateline: Sunday, May 18, 2008
by David Suzuki, with Faisal Moola
The water that comes out of most city taps in Canada is pretty clean. Yet many people prefer to spend money on bottled water, believing that it is somehow safer. Now were learning that the stuff in plastic water bottles may be more harmful than anything in our tap water.
Bisphenol A is just one chemical that's been in the news — and in many plastic bottles — recently. This compound mimics estrogens (human female hormones) and has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers and childhood developmental problems. It is found in clear, hard polycarbonate plastic commonly used in household and commercial water coolers and some reusable bottles, and it's just one potentially harmful substance associated with plastic containers.
( Read more... )
Seriously now.
This absolutely disgusts me. I can't even fathom a grown person conceiving of such a cruel exercise, much less a grown person who's supposed to be a caretaker of these children.
In tangentially related news, I spent much of my lunch hour yesterday reading a book called The Highly Sensitive Child, mostly because I was quite sceptical about how it pathologized being shy, observant, or "particular". The book did nothing much to change my mind, since it:
- made broad assumptions that everybody reading it grew up in North American culture
- romanticized Asian cultures as being "more sensitive" and "more communal" without mentioning the underlying factors of, oh, communism and xenophobia, to name a couple
- blithely made no real differentiation among baseline experiences/traumas, so highly sensitive children (HDCs) were all kind of lumped together regardless of whether their background was "I was physically abused by my uncle" or "I once stepped on a frog and then had nightmares".
So the FDA has moved forward in their initial announcement that cloned animals are safe to eat in meat or milk form. But don't worry! Due to their costliness, clones will not replace meat/milk animals and will only be used for breeding purposes. So that steak you eat on Monday may be the exact same as the steak you eat on Thursday, on a molecular level. At the very least it'll belong in the same family of cattle.
Or, you could read about how attempts at cloning often lead to hideous birth defects in calves and are torture for the cows and about how unstable the genetic templates become with each copy, and use the Center for Environmental Health's letter as a template to send your own note to the FDA telling them to halt approvals on cloned meat/breeders.
ETA: more articles
Center for Food Safety
commondreams.org
Live Science
In semi-related news, this month's issue of Bon Appetit (ostensibly the "Green Issue") has articles extolling the virtues of a $444 tote made from a fair-trade coffee bag and lauding Mario Batali for encouraging livestock farmers to raise the severely at-risk Red Wattle Pig. No mention is made of the fact that the only reason he wants the piggies to stay alive and not die out forever is SO RICH PEOPLE CAN EAT THEM.
How can a professional publication get the idea of eco-responsibility so WRONG?!? I feel sort of like Lisa must have when she first saw the Burns Omni-Net.
If you (like me) have been somewhat divided on the whole Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" thing, this might be the tipping point for you: In addition to Dove's parent company of Unilever being responsible for those fucking offensive Axe Deodorant ads, it also markets Fair & Lovely overseas. Fair & Lovely, for those of you lucky enough to never have been told that you should invest in it, is a skin-whitening cream that is really big in the Indian community.
I was always a little wobbly on giving up my Dove products (enough that I wrote Dove a letter, and got a predictably condescending response), because I thought that maybe if the Campaign helped some girls and women, that might be a note in its favour. But then those Axe ads came out (with accompanying bleating copy from news sources sniping about how being "PC" isn't sexy), and I got uncomfortable.
And now, finding out that they market Fair & Lovely? It's just too much. I mean, check out that webpage, with the same fakey care for women and the enormous welcoming graphic of a woman's face in shadow gradually becoming lighter and lighter until it's stark white. And all the "inspirational" taglines -- "She changed cricket/politics/theatre ... what are *you* going to change?" MY FUCKING SKIN COLOUR I GUESS.
ETA: Have some links --
. Side-by-side comparisons of Campaign/Fair & Lovely ads
. The paradox of marketing both "real beauty" and "pheromone-crazed sluts"
. This discussion segueways into a broader debate about the fashion industry, but notes that Unilever also makes Slim-Fast. Booyah!
. The internal instability of Dove's Campaign
. Addresses specific parts of the Campaign
Did you know that there's a rape tourism industry in the US? I sure as hell didn't. This makes me angry and upset in equal measure. Read
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
alestar's post up there for info, then donate to Pretty Bird Woman House if you can. Even if you can't afford to donate at this time, I strongly believe that making the effort to inform yourself about these issues is a step towards helping to prevent this kind of atrocity.
Link from
lily_liedtome: More information from the Daily Kos.
See this fetching young lady? Apparently, she is the newest Disney Princess, to be appearing in the upcoming film "The Frog Princess". Which will be set -- ready for it? -- in New Orleans.
Gee, this wouldn't have anything to do with Disney aiding and abetting the Bush administration in pretending that everything's hunky-dory down in post-Katrina Bourbon Street, would it? I mean, it's not like Disney has a history of protecting the Bushes' interests or anything. And it certainly isn't that the Disney Corporation gives right-wing zealots a stage to divert attention back to THE TERRORISTS so everybody forgets the domestic ineptitude that helped exacerbate the Katrina disaster.
Disney chief Robert Iger claims personal reasons for holding the company's annual shareholder meeting there. Maybe I'm just cynical about these things and the eventual movie will prove me wrong, but somehow I doubt that a company that makes its living fascistically creating the illusion of Utopia where none exists will in any way address the realities of New Orleans. Somehow I think they'll use the movie to essentially say, "see, Princess FEMA thinks that everything in New Orleans is magical and good, and she's coloured, so it *must* be true!!"
Sigh. A black princess, though, in the year 2007 or thereabouts. Go Disney.
One of the biggest arguments against feminist peacebuilding is, in a sense, strangely non-discriminatory: that a world ruled by women would not be any more peaceful than a world ruled by men, because women are not inherently less warlike.
While I agree that men and women shouldn't be essentialized into "masculine/feminine traits", this objection is pretty ridiculous on most other levels and I'm surprised that people treat it like a salient point. First of all, our world has evolved through systems of patriarchy, so naturally turning power over to women wouldn't erase centuries of patriarchal history and thinking. In order to compare the two empirically, you'd have to reverse time and start all over with a matriarchal system to see what differences pop up.
Second, feminist peacebuilding is not about a world ruled by women. It's about a world built on feminist anti-racist ideas; it's about understanding that women, as the primary victims of war and the people left behind to pick up the pieces, have a valuable contribution to make when it comes to circumventing conflict in the first place.
Our media likes to concentrate on the image of the victimized Third World woman, subjected to barbarous tortures, ignorant, submissive. I think it's important to know that there are many, *many* women out there doing grassroots work to improve not only their own lives but the lives of women around the world. So instead of linking you to statistics about death and rape and impoverishment, here are some links to women's organizations that are working for peace:
. MADRE: working with women at a community level for human rights and security</a>
. Coalition of Women for Peace: Jewish and Palestinian women mobilizing for an end to conflict</a>
. Code Pink: rejecting Bush's pro-war politics and anti-woman domestic policies</a>
. The Green Belt Movement: bringing rights education, civil development, and greenery to Africa</a>
I dunno how many of you watch The View (not that I would recommend it, as I loathe that show like poison), but I was horrified to discover through a link on an lj comm that Rosie O'Donnell made a godawful racist 'impression' of Chinese and I haven't seen news coverage on that AT ALL. I don't really know which part of that to be more disgusted with.
Casual, 'well-intended', meant-to-be-a-joke racism like this is what makes prejudice against Asians so hard to define/fight, because it's not as dramatic as police brutality or gay bashing. It's passed off as harmless or funny most of the time (Chinese drivers, anyone? Or how 'bout Indian call-centres?) because these aren't 'big' isses, they're not 'serious' enough to count as racism. Well. If you have enough people:
1) ask if you're going to have an arranged marriage
2) tell you how good your English is (despite it being your only language)
3) say "i bet your mom makes good curry" five minutes after meeting you (which she does, but that's beside the point) -- and my personal favourite,
4) try to explain to you what an archangel is (despite the fact that you WENT TO A CATHOLIC SCHOOL CALLED ST. GABRIEL'S)
-- then you eventually start to understand what racism means when you're part of the 'model minority'. I mean, dammit, I'm not saying that prejudice against us is *greater* than it is against people who are black, gay, Jewish or Latin; I'm just saying it's different. Michael Richards and Mel Gibson were publicly shamed, and rightly so -- why isn't that happening with Rosie? So far it's mostly a bunch of pissed-off Asians flooding her blog and being told they don't understand her sense of humour and what she did wasn't mockery of the Chinese language but awesome funny comedy and a Chinese 'accent'. Hey, I get that Chinese sounds funny sometimes; my friend Margaret did an impression once of the Mandarin-speaking kids who lived next to her that still makes me laugh to remember it. But Margaret is ethnically Chinese and can speak & understand Cantonese, so it's very, very different. From what I've read of her blog posts, Rosie doesn't understand that difference at *all*. Or care to.
Ugh. I feel sickened.
So, it's International Blog Against Racism Week. And I say, 'cool'. Although I know to some people, stuff like this is ... well, it's like Black History Month. It's another excuse for people of colour to see racism and oppression in everything and blame white people <i>en toto</i> for their problems when really they could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps because there's affirmative action and reverse racism and stuff like that, right? And, like, WHY did the Academy give the Oscar to yet another movie about racism when they could've given it to the movie about homophobia?!? SO UNFAIR.
And now that I've totally devolved into silly sarcasm, let me confess something: there have been times when I wished I was white. Because then, I could have an option for eye/hair colour that wasn't brown/brown. Then, I could have one of those really nifty family backgrounds, like Scottish or German instead of some convoluted East Indian whatever. Then, when I have to fill in innocuous fun questions like 'what actress would play you in a movie?' or 'what comic book character looks most like you?' I'd have trouble choosing from a vast array, not trouble *finding one*.
I'm not saying this to make white people feel guilty. Hell, I don't want that -- but at the same time, *I* don't want to feel guilty about pointing out that I don't see myself in popular media. Considering that I am a)ethnically East Indian and b)of Caribbean descent you'd think that would double my chances of finding characters who are like me in tv/movies/comics. And while I've discussed before that East Indian people (outside of Bollywood, which I feel no connection to) are usually just store clerks, taxi drivers, or random nerds/weirdos, I haven't talked about Caribbean people.
Generally, if you're West Indian on the screen/in print, you are:
1) a voodoo practicioner of some sort
2) a spliff-smoking Rastafarian
3) a headscarf-wearing mammy or a trampy 'island girl' **
Throw in a fakey half-Jamaican, half-Buster Poindexter 'accent' and voila. I can think of exactly two characters who don't fit this stereotype: Sebastian the Crab (The Little Mermaid) and Hermes Conrad (Futurama) -- and Hermes just barely squeaks in.
That's my people, y'all.
So this can make being in fandom a little weird, because, let's face it -- fandom is primarily white. And I have to admit that part of what I like about the largely online nature of it is that unlike in real life, I don't have to be a POC 24/7. (I mean, of *course* I do, but it's not the first thing people see. You know what I'm getting at.) But I find that I <i>assume</i> that everybody I'm talking to online is white, unless I've met them or they've explicitly said they're not, and that bothers me. Because doing that is tantamount to making *myself* invisible, and if there's anything I'm tired of, it's not having a presence. I nearly cried when I went to see Superman Returns because there were Indian people all over in the background and Kal Penn was in it in a non-ethnicized role, and I was so grateful to Bryan Singer for normalizing my skin colour that it was almost *pathetic*.
Margaret Cho kind of sums it up in this article when she says, "I am so sick of not existing, that I would settle for following any white person around with an umbrella just so I could say I was there." She's talking about Asians of Chinese/Korean/Japanese descent, but I guess I can include myself there because we're all lumped together under "Asian", after all.
None of my posts about racialized issues ever end on a definitive note of closure, and this one probably ain't gonna be any different. But that's how these things go, I suppose.
... now, to get cracking on answering backlogged comments. Sorry, y'all -- I've been bad about it lately!
**<small>i have, of course, expressed interest in voodoo, spliffs, and headscarves my own damn self, but that's hardly the totality of my personality or interests!</small>
The United Nations has warned that by 2025, about 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity. That means no access to safe drinking water, much less water for irrigation, livestock, and sanitation purposes. It also means that multinational corporations are chomping at the bit to install water systems that the local people will be charged to use [see: Cochabamba vs. Bechtel]; this is a World Bank solution, and we all know how great the World Bank is at looking out for the welfare of the people at the bottom. They want to privitize water service/sanitation despite the fact that the poorest people can barely afford food without having to also pay for a <b>basic human right</b> such as water access.
And yet, in North America, one in six people avoids tap water entirely and drinks only bottled water. Half of all Americans drink bottled water on a regular basis. It's a $400 billion dollar industry despite the fact that bottled water can be less safe to drink than tap water and in most cases, is drawn from the municipal water supply to begin with. Hey, I worked at a Pepsi bottling plant when I was temping, so I know whereof I speak; nobody I worked with drank Aquafina, because <i>there was no point</i>. It's filtered tap water.
Ounce for ounce, bottled water costs more than gasoline. But we're convinced that it's worth that money, because marketing tells us that bottled water is somehow safer, purer, better for us ... even though the Environmental Protection Agency is more thorough about water purity than the Food and Drug Administration is. But if big corporations can convince us that it's okay to pay exorbitant amounts for a basic human necessity, then it will be easier for them to privitize water completely.
Personally, where I live has pretty good-tasting tap water, so I'm cool with drinking it. I totally understand turning to bottled water if your local public water isn't a great drinking experience. And I understand if all the articles and stuff I linked to are overwhelming/boring, because I feel the same way half the time.
But please, <b>please</b> consider drinking filtered water instead; it's cheaper, it's just about the same quality as a bottle of Dasani or Aquafina, and even if that's only a drop in the bucket when it comes to water security for all living things, it's *your* drop. Even if there are health/tainted water concerns where you are, try going for the local grocery-store-brand bottled water rather than a branded name-label kind; that's cheaper too and doesn't prop up the multinationals.
So <lj user="arallara"> made <a href="http://arallara.livejournal.com/112929.h
When I was a girl and I'd write stories, if the characters weren't animals they were white people. I was considered smarter than my classmates in Trinidad because I speak Canadian/American-sounding English with no accent (and the only time that changed was when a British girl came to my school, because being British trumps being Canadian). I've vigorously avoided getting my nose pierced, or wearing gold jewelry, or packing home-food to take places because that is just Too Indian and god knows I don't want people to think I'm FOB (that's "Fresh Off the Boat" for you people who don't live near ports).
I don't understand Hindi and I don't watch Bollywood movies and it's hard to decipher whether this is just *me*, just a natural evolution of having grown up Canadianized even in the Caribbean, or if it's because I don't want to seem like some country bookie from the islands -- or worse yet, "Indian-from-India". And my dad tells me about when he was young, going to the movies with his parents and walking ahead of them because he was so ashamed they spoke Hindi, and how he was embarassed to take Indian food to technical school because everybody else there brought *sandwiches*, and it's awful to think that I'm just doing the same thing when I always thought I was so <i>enlightened</i>.
And even then, there's fandom, which brings up a whole other set of issues because -- why don't I write more fic about people of colour? Why aren't they interesting to me? And conversely, why should I feel like I *need* to write about black or Latino or Japanese people out of some misguided sense of solidarity, when all we have in common is a little sheen of melanin? But that one's real life too, because I have white friends who seem to think that it's some act of great largesse for them to learn something about other cultures, while my own knowledge of different cultures is somehow more 'natural' or something.
I've always told myself that I've been pretty lucky in that I've never had any real racism directed towards me. That is, of course, discounting the time one guy in high school railed against Punjabi kids before saying, "oh, but you're not like them," even though I'm not Punjabi; discounting the times people can't match my brown face to my perfectly mundane 'Canadian' name and repeatedly ask me to re-spell "Sammy" (I've resorted to saying, "well, it's pronounced 'Sammy' but spelled 'Sukhjinder'"); discounting when a teacher once told me I looked like <i>Indira Gandhi</i> -- whom, of course, I look NOTHING like. I never wanted to admit to those. I'm an almond extraordinaire, dontchaknow?
My father and sister are very dark; my mom and I are lighter. People ask Lori if she's Somalian and ask me if I'm Mexican (once within the same conversation, which was...amusing). "No, we're Canadian," we say, and then the old standby comes back: "--yeah, but where are you from <i>originally</i>?"
It's a good question. We were watching <i>Bend it Like Beckham</i> the other day, and it was the end scene with the big Sikh wedding, dancing and colours and bhangra, and Lori wistfully said, "It looks so fun...but I wouldn't want to be there. At least with white people who go to these things, it's sort of expected that they wouldn't know what to do and how to dance and stuff. But I'm *Indian* and it's just as foreign to me as it is to them, and that just seems wrong."
And it does, but anyhow. I'm hardly likely to resolve this in a day or a week or a month or a year, and maybe I should re-think my initial skepticism about colonization of the mind, maybe just a little.
When I decided to go back to school and take Peace & Conflict studies, I thought it would mostly be Political Science stuff -- nuclear arms, peace treaties, guerilla warfare and the capitalist economy. I might have more-or-less agreed with the girl in my Women's Studies class last semester who said, "I'm not even sure why this class exists. I mean, everybody loves us, right?" I might have agreed with the woman in *this* semester's class who said, "'Feminism' has such bad connotations; I don't blame guys for feeling like they're not included. Maybe it should be called something else." I had no real feeling of being particularly oppressed as a women, especially because I (speak English and) live in Canada and women have it pretty good here, in the larger scheme of things. No acid in the face, no genital mutilations, no forced marriages. I was complacent.
And this isn't to say that I learned all these horrible things about how women are discriminated against and it robbed me of that feeling, because I don't think that resignation is helpful at all. It's more to say that I never knew all of the ways that society has been shaped to exclude women from structures of power, and that I never saw all of the *changes* that women have made and ARE making in society apart from the Big Three -- voting, job equity, birth control. I certainly never saw anything in the media about women like myself of Indian extraction, other than stories about suttee, honour killing, or bride-burning.
It's only because I'm priviliged enough to be able to afford an education that I learned about <a href="http://www.vshiva.net/" target="xx">Vandana Shiva's</a> work with biodiversity and female stewardship, and about the <a href="http://www.maquilasolidarity.org/" target="xx">maquiladoras</a> who are routinely exploited and abused to keep us in Nikes and cheap clothes, and the <a href="http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/followu
But. <i>But</i>. I am a great believer in the idea that once people learn something, everything that they're exposed to after that is viewed through a new lens. Maybe just because *I* feel that way, I don't know. I can't and wouldn't presume to speak for everyone. However, I know that I have learned so much from all of the people in my life (and yes, that includes you, friendslist) who have different views and interests and passions and causes -- despite the fact that lj is ostensibly my real-life free, fandom arena. And so even if I come off as naive or painfully earnest (which is entirely too possible), I'd rather that than staying quiet about what women face in this world. Especially when Americans have to fight for <a href="http://www.plannedparenthood.org/pp2/por
What's most important, I think, is to know that for all of the dreadful pressure that women face, we still make a difference. We still <a href="http://www.womenwagingpeace.net/content/w
Anyhow. I'm a bad preacher because I get overwhelmed with outrage and emotion I know that my life and knowledge have been enriched a hundred times over by the wonderful, smart, opinionated and kind women whose lives and joys and craziness I've been able to share. Danke, thank you, merci.
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