January 2017
LISTEN UP If you are reading this, you have received a copy of the What About Us zine, a work of labour combining the hearts and minds of folx who are allowing themselves to be vulnerable, and allowing the world the opportunity to see a slice of their mind. This compilation, What About Us, is very important, for we have forged a space for Ourselves. We are marginalized voices, who often lack a platform. Here, we have created a space for creativity, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and unwavering opinions. By Us for you, to see our perspectives on the inaugeration of Donald Trump, activism, feminism, and the current United States political climate as a whole. What you will be reading is raw, unfiltered, uncompromised deposits of radical minds. You will be uncomfortable, but discomfort is necessary to galvanize change. On behalf of the contributors to this zine, who have put their time and energy into What About Us, we hope that this inspires a starting point for discourse, education, and true intersectionality. Please, remember Us.
Cover art: Malkia
Table Of Contents
LISTEN UP 2 “Allyship” Check List: 6 Love Trumps Nothing 9 PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH/DEMOCRAZY 10 Executive Dysfunction 11 Safety Pins 12 Twenty-Sixteen and the Death of the Black Superwoman Together 14 I do not fear that Deaf people have become complacent. A Woman’s Work Is Never Done 18 Sambo Belle 19 White womanhood can fck off 22 Glossary 26
Photo by Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
13 17
Art by Celeste Isabel Franco
By: Malkia
Photos by Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
Photos by Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
Love Trumps Nothing Carly Joseph When I was little I was taught to love the sinner And told stories about a White Jesus passing dinner,. I was taught to turn the other cheek By weaponized white washed Christianity to make me meek, Baptized by men Who were more worried about me keeping my legs closed Than by the predators that forcibly opened them, Called a pedophile by some atheists That rather blame religion on our societal problems Then take responsibility for their own bigotry. We live in a world Where I can’t dare to be me Now I see people with signs that say, “Love Trumps Hate” , When the people that love us were complicit in his Presidency. Bear with me, You can love someone and not be self aware of your bigotry Privileged folks have been silent systematically Too busy taking pictures of themselves with their safety pins While Black Trans women are being falsely arrested and thrown into the pen, I drive around my hometown And see signs that say, “Love Orlando” By the same people, who won’t speak up for Latinx Trans Woman That just want to go to the bathroom, So many people exploit our pain To make them look good Constantly looking for trends to showcase Their white savoir hood It’s about time for people to own up to their bigotry Instead of hiding behind this made up colorblind disease, People is being abused daily But somehow these people who that tell us to spread love in the face of our enemies Is nowhere to be seen When one of our necks is in a noose Wrapped around a tree
PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH/DEMOCRAZY By: Titiso Kour-Ara
How do you want a nation Implement your idea Of democrazy When you keep fueling Dictators with weapons Makes no sense at all Tell me the truth‌ I want the truth... Children know what their Childhood memory is like Helping rich countries Just to show their love Build a happy family But what about ours? Yet they want our lives Big smiles, they romanticise Do they know how it feels to have nothing? Nothing at all! But big smiles as our daily food Practice what you preach I can’t hear my heart beats From all these noises Better be, better be, better be gone
Photo by Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
By: Danny Weekend
Executive Dysfunction
Sunrise is the sluggish gunpowder trail that burns across your floor. Its creep starts at 7:20 AM. Today, a tender darkness shields your eyes with Their fingers. Sleep. The phonemic /z/ /k/ of your blinds being drawn. Weak At 8:00 AM the light touches your head, winds parasitically around your eyes, Which flutter listlessly, phlegmatic butterflies. Each time you try to rise it eats at your bones. Your femur (r) slips out and clatters to the floor. The marrow bleeds like red wine over your carpet, three days of worn, tossed outfits. You let the parasite in. The phonemic /z/ /k/ of your blinds–thrown open! In the kitchen you pour coffee–liquid neurotypicality. Painful jitters, you decide, are preferable to looking like you are. Your coworker likes Buzzfeed and Starbucks. Her boyfriend filled in the remaining space with himself. Emotional manspreading, you think. Your boss likes Darth Vader and Dunkin’ Donuts. The manager, lacrosse and WaWa. They collect cups, place them like toy soldiers in front of the window. You swim in fluorescent bleariness, the gunpowder strip of sunlight sears the eggshell ceiling. At 8:00 PM the pillow touches your head, winds gently around your shoulders. Your femur (l) slips out and clatters to the floor. You let it. You become soft. You become tenderness. Tomorrow, hard industrial light will pass through your new body, impotent. Weekend Sunrise is the sluggish gunpowder trail that burns across Their floor. Its creep starts at 7:27 AM. Today, a tender form shields Their eyes with its fingers. Grow. The phonemic /z/ /k/ of Their blinds being drawn.
^cool beans
By: Malkia
Twenty-Sixteen and the Death of the Black Superwoman By: Tara “To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the pretexts of intimidation is to award no one power — it is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact… Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over.” —Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”, 1981 Twenty-sixteen was the fruition of black female anger, chiefly the variety of anger Audre Lorde paints with in her bold and tactical presentation, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981). Anger, Lorde describes is a brand of disease few black women are impermeable to; it’s a peculiar percolation of normalized inferiority swaddled in affirmative racial and gender blindness. Undoubtedly, one might argue twenty-sixteen was the year of racial disparity and dialogue, yet a more nuanced look might view the rise of seemingly unapologetic acts of misogynoir as catalyst for the augmentation of the black female voice. In essence, twenty-sixteen was the year of black female agency, the reclamation of her anger. Anger moves. It forms and flows, crafting and exciting. And twenty-sixteen serves as its qualitative evidence. Whether Lemonade, A Seat at the Table, Insecure, Queen Sugar, The Mother by Yvette Edwards, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi, Fences or Hidden Figures, twenty-sixteen was the year black women reclaimed their anger for their manifestation, and epitomized the Solange-inspired vernacular FUBU (For Us, By Us). And yet, black female anger has been societally packaged for commodification and marketed for select seasons, while it’s sale normalized for voracious markets. Here lies the plight of the black woman: despite minefields of mischaracterization on the grounds of unmitigated anger, anger is required, is demanded from her to both excel in fighting the world and assimilating to its standards. Hence, the troupe of the black superwoman: the black woman who can do it all. Despite the harmful mental health side effects of this heroism fallacy, the myth of the black superwoman is doubly oppressive in its exclusion of humanity. When perpetuating that norm are we diminishing their human providence to be weak, to be fallible, or perhaps this perpetuation dismembers their birthright to a socially accepted lesser majesty? Moreover, this idolatry of an impermeable woman leaves room for harsher, unimaginable liberties. The question remains: how can we celebrate the valor of black women without holding them to the standard of impenetrability, the almost cousin to inhumanity? Perhaps, twenty-sixteen could serve as a rough template, exemplifying the byproduct of emotional ownership and reclamation, and dully the appearance of imperfection. We must allow black women to be seen through the lens of humanity, to own their emotion and likewise be imperfect in expressing it.
Together The people can never trust the state to give back to them the rights the state has taken away. It is the work of these oppressed peoples to claim those rights again, a fight which will require violence and arms, because it was with violence and arms that these rights were taken away. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fight of indigenous peoples against imperialism. No matter how “progressive” the state seems, it must first extinguish (annihilate) any and all traces of civilizations dissimilar to theirs. My homeland, West Papua, home for thousands of years to hundreds of peaceful, Melanesian tribes, has been absolutely decimated by violent Indonesian colonization. Every single cry for independence has been silenced. When we raise our traditional bows and arrows, Indonesia salutes us with machine guns. Hands held out in peace are sliced off. Children are murdered, their fathers are tortured, and their mothers are raped. And the celebrated perpetrators are given medals for this great work, which they clutch in still-bloody hands. This is not the work of a corrupt government. It is the work of government who knows that those who are not Papuan, those who buy the myth of “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” or “Many, Yet One,” will stand by in tacit acceptance of the murders of thousands of Papuans each year in the name of the Nation of Indonesia. The West Papuan fight for independence serves as just one example of the state-sanctioned violence. We see everywhere other examples; some are less explicit, and may present themselves in legislation which places the lives of actors of state-sanctioned above those whom they will kill, such as America’s Blue Lives law. But we must not accept even these pieces of legislation. The state will not help us. These wars cannot be won in courts, they will not be won for us by the state. Join in our fight, but not just nominally. Join completely, with your bodies and your souls and every part of you that knows that this injustice cannot continue. March with us, rally with us, protect our children. Recognize that our struggle is your struggle in the true meaning of “solidarity.” And I swear to you that I will do the same. Kanita Miyedadi Mote West Papuan Exile
Photo by Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez
Art by Celeste Isabel Franco
I do not fear that Deaf people have become complacent. We have long since been revolutionaries We kept sign alive under the oppression resulting from the Milan conference We barricaded ourselves with buses for a Deaf university president I have marched beside you; demanding Deaf teachers for Deaf children demanding that oralism is not automatic demanding equal access to jobs demanding respect as humans Where I do worry, is in our history of denial: denying the racist nature of signs denying the sexist nature of signs denying the transphobic nature of assuming genders Presuming that such things come from our frank nature, and in fact makes us better. Our history of denying our disabled siblings. Many Deaf say that we are not disabled -- I am not here to argue against that. I am here because in doing so, we create problems for disabled and disabled Deaf individuals. In our vehement denial of disability, we reinforce the idea that disability is to be a shame --that it means to be broken. How often do I see words of annoyance for these same ideas, levied against us? In our rhetoric, we dismiss the idea of a disabled community. I am Deaf and disabled. My disabled community has brought me food, cleaned my home, and walked with me when I could not do such things on my own. It is this community that I have given back to when I can, scented candles and comfort animals. I am Deaf and disabled, and I’m disabled because I’m Deaf. I am tired of fighting my own community for recognition. I am tired of defending it when hearing people say we lag behind in about ten years of “social development.” I am tired that often, it feels like they’re right. P.S. If we want to truly claim that we are in no way disabled, we must create a self sufficient community of only signers, one much like what Martha’s Vineyard once was. P.P.S. Hearing people: Learn sign, teach it to your children, both hearing and Deaf. By: Wyatt Taylor
A Woman’s Work is Never Done by Lady Majoria
The mammy character has always been a desexed selfless caregiver to white children with no troublesome desires of her own. By making a pin-up girl out of mammy I attempt to trouble the nostalgia that white America has for its racist past and explore the suppressed internal life of black women forced into domestic roles. Model, styling, directing: Lady Majoria Photography: Haftom Khasai
Sambo Belle By Lady Majoria
I created this fashion-inspired photoshoot based on The Little Black Sambo, a children’s book where a kindly white woman buys and civilizes a naughty slave girl. Sambo Belle romps around when her mistress is out. The aesthetic is a marriage of black stereotypes, like watermelon and dirty bare feet, with signifiers of southern gentle society. This resembles a feel of a minstrel show where black people acting “high class” was considered comedic. But, Sambo Belle and her suitor meet the camera’s gaze with poise and dignity, daring the audience to find them ridiculous. Models: Haftom Khasai and Lady Majoria Directing and Styling: Lady Majoria Photography: Bill Figueroa
“Of course I have
By: Coby Haynes
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White womanhood can fck off Ivanna Berrios Sometimes i wonder if white people have a capacity for empathy. Sometimes I wonder if white people can ever, in any way, see beyond themselves, unless they try very very very very very very very very very very very very very very hard. People of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ folx have been feeling fear for literal centuries. We are tired. We have been trying to tell you that something is wrong with the systems that oppress us. Yet when you speak of Trump, you never acknowledge that he is a product of a system which you have never bothered to criticize until it affected you. He is a product of America. He is not an anomaly and you cannot distance him from yourself, because his overtly racist supporters derive trust in their exaggerated dogmas from the insidious institutional racism that everyone lives in. How could any logical human being make those outrageous claims? Because they are merely radicalized versions of the reality which you never questioned until you thought it might threaten you. I love hearing people describe Trump supporters as outdated. As living in the past. Because this acknowledges that Trump supporters are a result of America’s history. They didn’t crop out of nowhere; they’ve been holding on to their bigotry for centuries and the mere fact that it hasn’t been viciously grappled from them goes to show how complacent the American public has been until cis white people were endangered. History doesn’t just disappear after the fact. To believe so is just pure naiveté. History stays in the hearts of the angry. Trump supporters were fed Jim Crow, the lie that they were better than Black people, to satiate their economic dissatisfaction, and have been hungering ever since. Trump threw them a bone and they pounced. But their hunger was always there, allowed to remain, and never remedied. It’s also an awfully erroneous generalization, to view the Trump supporter as this prototypical relic. Not only is it an easy way for white liberals to feel good about themselves (“well I’m not them, nor would I ever be near them”), it allows the college educated, elite racism to slip through the cracks. This is the racism that never bothered all you cis white men and women, because it always protected your folk. The educated high brow racists never upset you, because they were your friends at the country club and they’d never overtly endanger your white womanhood. Trump is the overt expression of the people you have been clinking wine glasses with your whole life. And brown people have been been been been been knowing that. I don’t need a white woman to tell me she’s scared. Her men killed Emmett Till in her name. In the genteel antebellum era they referred to white womanhood as the “crowning flower of the South” (Marrow Of Tradition). Men look down on you. They by all means oppress you. Some (many) hate you, even if you are white. This is patriarchy and this is undeniable. But what you will never admit is that white men hate and oppress people of color more than they ever will white women. You are one of them. They delegate you to a lesser status, which by all means you should fight against. But we aren’t even one of them. We don’t represent them.
What white women need to understand is that when I say I don’t care about their tears right now, I’m not saying they don’t have a right to feel pain. And when I say I distrust white people, I’m not saying every white person is evil. The fact that I must explain is that this goes to show what awful allies you must be, to demand that I center your white feelings and lay my nuanced, personal feelings bare so that you can make sure I’m not directly attacking you (which I pretty much am, oops). When I say those things, I mean that me and my family and my friends and our ancestors and our people have been suffering for so long, and you never did a thing. You recoil at this oppression because it’s new to you, and you dare to say it’s unprecedented, and shocking. You are like babies, new to the whole “invalidation of personhood” thing, and interpreting the pain as acute and piercing. Well it is, and nobody deserves that. But no brown person deserves a white woman to tearfully touch them on the arm and say, “We’re in this together. I understand.” Because you do not. And I do not trust you, because you were never there for me before. Let bygones be bygones? For the sake of literal fucking survival? Sure. I welcome white allies and their bodies which will never be mishandled with the same brutality as brown ones. I welcome their privilege as a shield. I welcome the power they wield, that they have always wielded and will continue to wield. But I don’t want any white person, and especially any white person in the name of feminism and uniting womanhood, to act like we are in the same situation I don’t trust y’all. The fact that y’all insist I do, makes me distrust y’all more. In fact, I hate y’all. It must seem so backwards that I keep attacking white women. Well it’s because cis white men so obviously cannot relate to me, and the ones who act as allies tend not to try. The differences are so marked that they stay in their lane in terms of “togetherness,” but of course waste no time establishing superiority. I single out white women because they think they are untouchable, out of reach of my criticism because I too am “Woman.” There is no single unifying womanhood. I don’t believe in it. It’s a cisnormative farce. You and I experience radically different things. You and I face radically different scenarios. What is the white liberal woman’s answer to this? Intersectionality. I used to love the concept of intersectionality. But i’ve found in the light of this election that it is thrown around as a buzzword that acts as a fucking asterisk, the fucking small print, the disclaimer that says “but brown women too!” White feminists, if y’all were really for intersectionality you would’ve been at the Black Lives Matter Marches, at the refugee events, at the immigration panels. Y’all would’ve seen the human rights infringements being done to brown women and done something, anything. But you didn’t lift a fucking finger. You expect me to put my womanhood before my race so that I’m not “divisive.” But you always put your whiteness before your womanhood. If you say otherwise, you’d be hypocrites, because you were never out here for brown women. Now, you want it to act as a Great Unifier so that we’ll accept you into our activism. The only reason I offer my diplomacy is strategy. I feel no sisterhood with you. You are not my sisters. You are also my oppressors, and never forget it. You just also happened to get fucked over by a force even larger than yourselves, and now collective power is what we need.
Art by Celeste Isabel Franco
TERMS Intersectionality: A form of critical analysis that recognizes that oppression under capitalism operates in gridsalong lines of race, class, gender expression, sexuality, etc. Identity is multifaceted. White Supremacy: A system of racial hierarchy in which whiteness and white people are prized and advantaged. White is viewed as “normal” or baseline; white thought and people are viewed as the standards and given deferential treatment over PoC (‘people of color’). While certain whites may still be disadvantaged along other matrices, such as class, the ruling elites will almost exclusively be white (and male). As a system, white supremacy even affords lower-class whites power over PoC. Microaggressions: A statement, action, or incident of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minorities. Often hostile and/or derogatory, under a guise of sarcasm. Impact vs. Intent: Related to microaggressions, this is usually involved in discourse in the circumstances or, “it was just a joke.” Impact rules out intent. Ally theater: Epitomized in safety pins and feel-good Facebook statuses, usually a highly visible, performative gesture when a member of an ally group expresses kindness to a member of a marginalized group. Performative allyship is designated as superficial actions of solidarity that are not intended to actually help marginalized people, but rather to make the individual performing appear virtuous to either themselves or a white audience. Socialism: Socialism is a form of social, economic, and political organization whereby political and economic power are merged and the means of production are owned and operated by the working class. This is the abolishment of private property–not to be confused with personal property, e.g. no one wants your toothbrush. Means of Production: The machinery, intellectual property, land, and other resources by which the goods necessary for the sustainment of life and society are produced. Under capitalism, this is controlled by the capitalist class and access is restricted due to the amount of money (capital) required to access it. Capitalism: is a system of social organization where the means of production are owned by the capitalist class. Historically, capitalism began during what was known as the “enclosure movement,” where landed elites enclosed the land surrounding villages (known as commons) off from common use, instead using it for profitable ventures such as raising sheep for textiles. Under Capitalism, non-capitalists must sell their labor in order to obtain the necessities of life back from the capital class. Unlike other modes of production, under capitalism economic and political power and intentionally separated (‘bourgeois democracy’) in order to prevent the lower classes from seizing the capitalists’ property.
Tone Policing: Invalidating marginalized peoples’ arguments. Discrediting a person on account of tone instead of what exactly they are saying. Ignoring marginalized peoples’ experiences. Cisheteronormativity: Etablishes heterosexuality as an unremovable norm, erasing other sexual orientations and gender identities. Decolonization: Colonization is the violent systemic control over another people, erasing their original identities and enforcing a set of constraints belittling their personhood. To decolonize is to go back to one’s roots and attempt to free one’s self from the damaging influence of the oppressor. Gentrification: The act of displacing lower class peoples under a fake title of “growth” and “development”. It makes living conditions unaffordable and inpractical for original communities, forcing them to relocate. Anti-racism: Going to beyond allyship, or simply being “not racist”, anti-racism is taking an active roll in dismantling the system of oppression facing people of color today. Acknowledging one’s own oppressive thoughts and tackling them, as well as being reliable to marginalized communities. Capitalist Feminism: Materialist feminism, focusing on merchandise and profit as opposed to the actual exploitation of women. Commidification of fake activism. Ties in with ally theater. Eurocentrism: Prioritization the western world, silencing anything and everything that does not involve European descent. Prizes whiteness, white history, and glorifies western civilization.