Read the call to action from the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and WoC PhD‘s useful post on the latest planned demolitions of public housing in New Orleans. Be there December 10 if you can, donate if you can, but also call your legislators. The call list includes many not from Louisiana. This means that people nationwide can really help.
In other Louisiana news, note that Mychal Bell (of the Jena Six) has plead guilty to a lesser charge. Justin Barker is suing the school board for not adequately supervising students or maintaining discipline. There is this statement by him on what appears to be a white supremacist site. Here is what Color of Change says about the allegations, repeated by Barker, that donations to Bell’s legal defense fund were used to buy luxury vehicles.
Be all of this as it may, and whether or not it was a good idea for Bell to plead guilty (I tend to think not, but it is a complicated issue), it is still amazing – to me, at least – that so many feel that hanging nooses is unproblematic. Everyone is distracted by the fact that Bell is apparently a thug, but if you read Barker, so is he. The point being lost is the nooses.
Then again it appears that for many, slavery itself is unproblematic. Via the Changeseeker.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The problem is the current political climate in the US, which pushes all forms of discourse to the right. It is that climate that has to change, before people can acknowledge that there are various forms of injustice which need to be overcome. With the demise of Howard in Australia, it is not impossible that the US may start to feel a few unsettling ripples, destabilising the death hold of right wing ideas.
Yes – there is that climate, and in that climate there is this culture of complaining. If one points out an actual injustice that is “embracing victim status,” but whining members of the middle classes are victims of actual injustice. Et cetera.
What if we all declined to be victims, starting today?
Except that some people really are. In those cases the common exhortation “not to be a victim” really means, “Do not name your situation accurately. Do not make a clear assessment of it. Do not design a realistic course of action. Instead, blame yourself if you have sustained damages. You should not work to cure these because you should not have sustained them in the first place. Now, put a smile on your face and limp on!”
What if we all declined to be victims, starting today?
I agree with Hattie. One should take up arms and blow the shit out of the oppressors.
However, I also agree with Z: A small bump in the road for a bourgeois type is something they will cry for days over. But somebody who has nothing but bumps in the road is supposed to put a smile on the dial and turn the frown upside down. In other words, it’s really not a big deal, is it.
“One should take up arms and blow the shit out of the oppressors.”
Yes, *that* is the way not to be a victim.
“In other words, it’s really not a big deal, is it.”
Yes. Like these rapes of women in that family that did not know slavery was illegal, in that story the Changeseeker linked to (posted at Nubian Waves).
Yes, *that* is the way not to be a victim.
It IS what Hattie meant, isn’t it — or is she just murmuring into the wind?
These days, I feel more like being a Nietzschean, in the sense of applying the stringent standards of morality and self discipline that I apply to myself to others, too. This is the mood I’m feeling these days.
I think it is what she meant but I did not understand it until you explained it.
Nietzchean: I think I shall look into it. It sounds refreshing. I am definitely taking more authority. Interestingly, our culture is now very authoritarian and people have no self-discipline.
Interestingly, our culture is now very authoritarian and people have no self-discipline.
Right. They police each other, probably, too — but only for saying or thinking something different.
Exactement.