Re: Fwd: [BRC-ANN] Statement on New York Festival Attacks

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 12:21:13 +0100
From: DANIEL.DAVIES@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Fwd: [BRC-ANN] Statement on New York Festival Attacks

I'm gonna need some help on a new term here, and it's sort of relevant to
the stuff on consensus vs. hierarchy ....
>
>Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit & Transgender
>People of Color Communities

OK, Lesbian, Gay, & Bisexual are fairly straightforward, & Transgender is
the same as "transsexual".  But "Two-Spirit" is a completely new one on me.
I've always hated people who splutter "phhwargh! how ridiculous" without
having a fair go at finding out, but a google search (
http://www.google.com/search?q=two+spirit&meta=lr%3D%26hl%3Den ) doesn't
seem to be much help (you get a lot of stuff about motorola radios), so I'm
guessing it's not in common usage.

As far as I can make out from what I could dig up, the two spirit bunch are
basically Native Americans who are gay or bisexual, plus Native American
ceremonial transvestites, plus some people with MPD (only 1 ref for this;
may be a misuse), plus a bunch of fairly bog-standard gays & bisexuals who
have decided that even though they aren't Native Americans, they are
really, and that they want to dress up their sexuality in a lot of
semi-invented New Age stuff.  My cynical turn of mind tends me toward the
assumption that this last group outnumbers the previous three.

I guess the question is, how did the Two Spirit people get their name into
the headline, as opposed to drag queens, eunuchs, celibates, or whatever
all manner of what have you that I'm too square to know about?  I doubt in
can be because of sheer weight of numbers, and the stuff that google turned
up for me didn't seem to point to the existence of a massive conceptual
difference between them and the rest of the community that used to be just
lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender/sexual.  I'm guessing that they got
their name into the headline because, at some meeting or other, somebody
present cared about it enough to make an issue, and nobody else was
prepared to die in a ditch to stop them.  Which seems fair enough.  And
then, other groups saw people putting "Two Spirits" into the name, and it
caught on, much in the way that venture capital firms have started calling
themselves "Value Partners" these days.

It does make you want to drag out the old copy of "Politics and the English
Language" (also known as "How to Shop your Mates Without Missing a Comma"),
however, when you read paragraphs like this:

> On
>the other hand, we are also witnessing a dangerous public
>discourse that is using racism and ageism to scapegoat men
>of color and young people as the roots of the problem.
>As part of justice movements, we are right to demand
>accountability and justice in each of these cases.
>At the same time, it is critical that we combat
>the backwards elements of this public discourse.

Which as far as I can tell, means "But we know the media's game; they're
making a big deal of this because it gives them the chance to print big
pictures of black men assaulting white women".  Committees and consensus
(or "consensii", if you're following kelley's pluralisation of "virus") may
be good for many things; for writing, they're a disaster.

We also get a fundamental disconnect between the following statement and
the reality it describes:

>
>We also reject current trends of public discourse that have
>sought to single out youth and hip hop culture as somehow
>inherently violent. Commentators and public figures who
>attempt to scapegoat and criminalize youth and hip hop
>culture as the root causes of violence against women ignore
>the daily and historic role that young people and hip hop
>culture have played in struggles for justice, including the
>ongoing struggle for women's rights and feminist justice.

If you like hip-hop and don't object to the violent and sexist rhetoric
because you admire the direct, truthful and unvarnished style of language
it uses, then fair enough.  But in that case, why not *use* some of that
language already when making your own points, instead of praising it in
this mealy-mouthed pussyfooting prose.  It's like defending Byron through
the medium of a civil service memo, or ...well, writing about Marx in most
Marxist periodicals.  This group is right to headline the role of hip hop
culture in the struggle for justice, and right in its implied message that
hip hop has been far more important than groups like this one, for the
simple reason that people can in general, be bothered to find out what the
rappers are saying.

It's followed by a paragraph that is as fine an example of groupthink as
anything I ever saw in my central banking days:

>
>Finally, as a Center committed to justice and liberation for
>all of our peoples, we call on our communities to struggle
>with the contradictions inherent in some of the recent
>calls for increased policing, police presence, and enhanced
>criminal penalties as a solution.

This looks like a call to action, but it's actually a call to *inaction*.
We're being called on to "struggle with contradictions", a damnably
pointless activity if ever there was one.  The problem here is that the
group wants severe penalties for offences, but doesn't want them to be
inflicted on people.  Or more likely, that this sentence represents a
consensus between people who want to chop the knackers off the Central Park
mob and people who don't want anyone to be arrested for anything ever.

I'm now in full rant mode, being exactly the kind of prick I professed to
despise above, but I think I have a point.

dd









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