4 results for month: 02/2016
The Modern Social Justice Movements: Pro-Intersectional. Except to One Minority
By Raffi Marhaba
I’ve always had a great sense of justice, since I was a little. My mom thought I’d grow up to be a lawyer or a diplomat. But I became an activist and an artist instead. I was born and raised in Brazil and came to the USA through a political asylum petition based on sexual orientation. I say this because I want to clarify that not only do I understand (to the best of my abilities) the points in this article, but that I myself share with you some of these violent systems of oppression.
I came across a book called When We Fight, We Win, which talks about how the new wave of social justice movements are taking a more serious ...
It’s Not Just Chocolate, It’s Their Flesh
By Tori Lion
Nielsen estimates that Americans buy 58 million pounds of chocolate in the week preceding Valentine's Day. Decontextualized from the industrial farms where children of colour and nonhuman animals are forced to work without compensation, these products are imbued with the aura of "love." Purchasing them is one of the rituals of compulsory heterosexuality, which represents another way in which our desires are manipulated to reproduce the status quo. In routine "dairy" production, mother cows are impregnated without their consent and denied the joy and pleasure of bonding with their babies, who are taken away hours after birth to be ...
We Love Chocolate
What are the first two things that come to mind when we say "Valentine's Day"? Love and chocolate. Two of the best things in the world combined into one day? Count us all in! But let's ask ourselves what chocolate truly is. How is it made? Where does it come from? Who made it? The more questions we answer, the more we realize that the story of chocolate isn't one of love; it's one of pain and suffering. And this Valentine's Day, we're all going to tell the stories of chocolate and its victims. 70% of the world's cocoa is grown in Western Africa and is controlled by a few major global corporations like Hershey's, Nestle and Mars. Farmers struggle to ...
20 ways the violence of the oppressed isn’t the same as the violence of the oppressors
By Ana Hurwitz
Whenever we seek to change the world the first thing we are asked is, "Do you believe in violence?" We are asked this because the violence of the oppressed is seen as morally equivalent to the violence of the oppressors. But the two are not the same. Here's why....
Oppressed peoples have a fundamental right to self defense. This self defense is characterized as "violence" because revolution is only seen as legitimate when it's on the terms of the oppressors. By their rules. Because they set the rules.
Nonviolence is a means of controlling the most rebellious of the oppressed. Nonviolence as an ideology is most often ...