And, when Native Americans, Latin@s, and other People of Color speak out about Columbus Day, they’re not attacking Italians, or our culture, they’re pointing out that this country has decided that it’s appropriate to celebrate and honor a genocidal slaver. They’re not saying “let’s not celebrate Italian culture” or “let’s not celebrate the experiences of Italian-Americans”, but saying “let’s not celebrate genocide, slavery, and exploitation.”

And, with the experiences of Italian-Americans, especially with the majority of us tracing our ancestry to the Mezzogiorno, you’d think we’d have a little more understanding, instead of engaging in this simultaneous pretending that our position is oh so precarious along with a heaping dose of “well, we got ours”.

Things we need to do:

-Listen to the voices of people directly harmed by this celebration of genocide: the video at Reconsider Columbus Day, for last year, is a good baby step in that direction. But this needs to be an ongoing conversation.

-Have conversations with our families and within our communities about having a celebration of Italianità that is not connected to Columbus Day; moreover, to have a celebration that helps to develop one not tied to racism or any other form of oppression.

-Beginning and continuing dialogue between Italian-American communities and communities of color.

-Dialogue with non-Italian whites about how Columbus Day is a celebration of the continuing alternating erasure and glorification of genocide in this hemisphere, and how Columbus Day is a symbol of that, and that making Columbus Day exclusively about the Italian-American community seeks to hide the real benefits all settler privileged people receive from colonization and genocide. Too often the non-Italian white criticism of Columbus Day becomes about reiterating anti-Italian stereotypes of being violent and ignorant as a way of erasing non-Italian whites’ complicity in white supremacy.

you can keep the pentagon
keep the propaganda
keep each and every tv
that’s been trying to convince me
to participate
in some prep school punk’s plan to perpetuate retribution

Particularly appropriate for today, and such a great song.

Topics to be covered include: how capitalism and class differ from forms of oppression; a quick overview of the sociological models of class; class analysis based on relationship to the means of production; the interaction of capitalism with systemic oppression; the role of the state in securing both capitalism and systemic oppression; the tendency to call for an end of “class elitism” rather than an end to capitalism; flaws in the idea of classism and how it is deployed; and the (generally) strawperson attack of “class reductionism”.

This series of posts will unapologetically come from an anarchist communist perspective. In other words, my central ideas are: that we can only end systemic oppression by abolishing capitalism and the state; that we can only succeed in struggle against capitalism and the state by confronting all systemic oppression; that only self-emancipatory, revolutionary struggle by the working class itself can dismantle these systems and create a stateless, communist world without hierarchy or systemic oppression. Furthermore, that this struggle can only occur through the self-organization of the working class, that self-organized, working class movements of oppressed groups should be supported in their struggles, and that there should be formal anarchist organizations who participate in the struggles around them, and do not seek to control those struggles, but provide a leadership of ideas. Hopefully this series of posts will support those assertions.

A couple of useful readings that will be helpful as background material:

Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality by Deric Shannon and J. Rogue. This is a wonderful piece that details the many ways that anarchism can learn from intersectionality theory and what anti-oppression activism can learn from anarchism.

Revolutionary Anarchism: class struggle and the fight against all forms of oppression by Wayne Price. The first part details the whys of class struggle anarchism, and the second talks about the relationship between the working class and forms of oppression. While some of the anti-oppression language is a little dated, it is still a very worthwhile read.

To begin to talk about the first topic of discussion, which will form a repeated theme throughout this series of posts, one of the major failures of anti-oppression activism in talking about class is to presume that it functions like systemic oppression, which often (but not always) leads to opposing class elitism rather than capitalism itself. One crucial difference is that ending a systemic oppression does not predicate on the group of people who are oppressed by it ceasing to exist; however, undoing the exploitation of the many by the few, which is the core purpose of capitalism, requires that the group of both the exploiters and the exploited ceasing to exist as a group. In other words, once capitalism is gone, the labeling of those groups will not change, it will cease to have meaning. As an example for how this differs from anti-oppression work, let us use as an example homophobia.

Homophobia (or more properly, heterosexism), is the oppression of people who have relationships, or an interest in pursuing such relationships, that do not match socially mandated heterosexuality. It clearly intersects with other forms of oppression, and is reinforced by the power of the state and a variety of social institutions. If we were to end homophobia, we would clearly not do so by eliminating homosexual relationships and desires; rather, all relationships, regardless of the gender of the people involved, would be equally respected in all spheres of life. While we might imagine that with the demise of homophobia, that people’s partner choices might change, and that people may feel less need to adopt an identity in resistance to heterosexism, it should be obvious that some people would still engage primarily or exclusively in relationships that we would label heterosexual, others in relationships we would label homosexual, and others would engage in a wide variety of relationships. This is unlike what we would experience with the demise of capitalism, and the creation of a society without property or the exploitation of labor, where there would no longer be a group of people engaged in exploiting the labor of another group.

Another difference is that the classes exist as a consequence of capitalism, and continually recreate it; oppressions are based on socially constructing a group out of real or perceived traits, and then systemically reducing that group to less than “human” in society. While we can look at some oppressed groups where membership is not constant throughout life, class is a social relation that is recreated every day; I am working class because I am exchanging my labor for wages, and someone is making a profit off that labor (thus taking some of the products of my labor), and if, tomorrow, I were to be handed ownership of a corporation, I would no longer be working class. While we do talk about how the unemployed, children, the retired, people with disabilities are still working class, members of the working class are such based on virtue of their relationship to the means of production, not real or perceived traits they have.

I didn’t get back until January, my apartment had six feet of water, I “dealt” (if drinking and crying and fucking up friendships can be called “dealing”) with my emotional trauma in New Orleans until July, when I dropped out of school. Since then, I’ve lived all over the place, and just now, finally, starting to piece together a life again that looks further ahead than next week. The difficulties of finding enough work to live and to go back to school in this economy are another topic.

Most of the day today, I hoped for someone on my Facebook feed to say something. Other than one person, it was only my fellow New Orleanians who said anything. To be clear, when I say “New Orleanian”, I include, along with people who live there now, anyone who lived there and evac’d for Katrina, and either couldn’t go back, or when they got back, had to leave again due to a variety of reasons – emotional trauma and disrupted networks of support, economic reasons (cost of living was drastically higher immediately post-Katrina. It never went completely down in the year I was back). It feels like we have our own diaspora – New Orleans’ population is still a little less than 3/4s what it was pre-Katrina, and, as much as growing up in New Orleans was its own thing that those of us who came from elsewhere didn’t share, there’s a common bond that I feel like all of us who lived through Katrina share, whether we had lived there for six years (as I had, at the time of Katrina), or for sixty (or more).

I expected there to be a ton of articles about New Orleans today on my Facebook feed. And I didn’t see one. The Times-Picayune’s website says stories are all over the web today, and provides a brief list of links, but those are literally all I’ve seen. Even in the wake of the BP disaster in the Gulf, it feels like New Orleans and the cumulative weight of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA’s actions, the BP disaster, are all quickly forgotten.

Of course, the Corps of Engineers isn’t building the levees strong enough and the Lower Ninth gets tourists, not aid…but I’m not someone to ask what New Orleans is like now. I haven’t been back since the summer of ’06, when I moved away, realizing that taking care of myself meant I couldn’t help rebuild. I can tell you about what it was like, the stoplights still not working, the abandoned areas, the boarded up doors and windows still marked by the military, the unmarked military vehicles patrolling up to nearly a year after Katrina. I can tell you that I never doubted that as long as there was anything there, that people would keep trying to rebuild.

I can tell you what it’s like to not be there, to be in a place that you think is wonderful (and that is a place like nowhere else in the world in its own right — the Bay is not a place that could exist anywhere else), but will never feel like home in the same way as a city I first set eyes on at 17, that I moved to before I even turned 18, and that I spent seven years in, loving, changing, growing, going from a naive kid to someone who is too old, too cynical for their age. I am not sure if and when I will ever go back –I want to, desperately, but, with the vagaries of life, the difficulty of building the one I want to lead anywhere…realistically, it may not happen.

One of the most important things I learned in New Orleans is that we laugh so that we don’t cry. And most days, with most things, that is what I do. But, August 29th each year, I don’t laugh, I cry, and I let myself mourn, and that always turns into hope, into wanting to see for myself how things are now, knowing they are better than the last I saw with my own eyes. I wish I could write about what New Orleans is now. But, I can only write about what surviving Katrina is like, what a New Orleans I haven’t seen in four years means to me. And that, I think, is what I need to write.

I, standing up against some really fucked up shit, became a huge target, and ended up having to leave in the middle of the night for my own safety. This blog was initially set up to deal with false accusations made against me. Now, it’s where I’ve put my analysis of the dynamics of the space and what needs to occur in the future. I’d imagine many of the readers of this blog would find that interesting.

But, I am done with Camp Trans. After my experiences this year, it will never be a space I want to return to; when I attend Fest, I certainly won’t want to visit, even if Camp still happens, and either during, immediately before, or immediately after Fest. That is incredibly hard to say, even privately, never mind as a public statement, with how much time, energy, money, and love I’ve invested in that space.

I’m still trying to find the positive growth from this year — my resilience in the face of massive trauma? The fact that I held it together as an herbalist until I left, comforted people who were also emotionally traumatized? Forced to take a hard look at my community and stood up and spoke truth to douchebags who made it clear they would use violence on their own community if they wanted to?

I’m about processed out at this point, even if I do have a lot of my own personal stuff to process. That will have to wait until I have some level of emotional capacity again.

For those who don’t know, I’ve invested a lot in camp, over the years, having attended every year from 2006 on, and having helped organize camp from 2007 on. Many things at camp are depending on me – I’m one of the main organizers, I handle scheduling, I’m facilitating multiple workshops (radical class analysis, two camp trans herstory workshops (one for camp attendees, one for festies)), I’m a performer, I’m coordinating outreach at fest with several workers there, I’m a medic at camp, etc. I’ve probably devoted 150+ hours this year to making camp happen, mostly in the last few months. In other words, yes, camp is a fun and important space for me, but it’s no restful vacation – I work my ass off to help make it happen and I work my ass off when I’m there. Luckily I don’t have to hand off as many of those responsibilities as possible – but getting enough work when I get back to cover my September rent after my travel expenses is a shaky proposition.

Anything beyond my travel expenses that I get from either paypal donations, zine sales, or passing the hat at camp during my performance will be donated to camp.

I’m selling a zine of my poetry I’ve just put together (dirt and glitter #1 y’all) for $3 up, sliding scale at camp. Donate five or more to me via paypal, I’ll send you a zine (to cover the costs of shipping it pretty much anywhere on this continent). If you donate in the next couple of days, it’ll get sent before camp (obviously, you need to get me an address – make sure your comment has some way to contact you), sometime next week it’ll likely be after camp. If you donate while I’m at camp, I’ll likely get it at camp, and send you a zine afterwards.

I wish I could give a special gift to high roller donators so I could make this like a PBS fund drive, but the zine’s pretty much the max.

I totally opted out of pride stuff today – after the trans march on friday, and a pre-dyke march bbq, the dyke march, and wandering about the Castro, yesterday, I was way too tired and my feet were way too sore to go for another day. It was an interesting weekend of being misgendered – at the trans march, I was wearing a fabulous over-the-top dress, and got she’d all the time, and I managed to get he’d at the dyke march (of all places!) looking like a very fey Oliver Twist. I feel like if i’m always going to get gendered wrong, I might as well balance it out a bit. My general experience was yes, pride is incredibly co-opted and corporate, but, at least I went to the better events and really, this is my first pride in the bay, which made me feel like a baby queer again (despite how long I’ve been out), just with how many people there are. I think growing up in a town a good ways outside of Boston, being the only out queer in my high school class, I internalized this idea that there’s not all that many of us, and even having walked the Michfest line, gone to Camp Trans for years, lived in New Orleans, Northampton, and Portland, I’ve never quite managed to quite shake that. So that’s the positive aspect of pride, for me, anyway.

Anyway, so, for the queerly fabulous out there, how do you manage limited resources, outside queer norms gender expression, and/or not having easy to find clothes for body types, and still look fabulous? Any favorite sources of inspiration? Fun stories of being femme, fabulous, and still getting “not a womon” across?

Hi, I’m gayge, and I’ll be helping to schedule and coordinate
workshops and caucuses for Camp Trans again this year. Every year, we
have workshops and caucuses on a variety of topics connected to trans
issues or of interest to trans people. Workshops are a great way to
share your expertise and knowledge with other attendees, and also are
a whole lot of fun. We welcome workshop proposals from people of every
identity and on a diversity of topics. In the past, we’ve had
workshops on such topics as being in solidarity to other oppressed
groups, identity, hormones and surgery, relationships, flirting,
organizing, and a wide range of other topics. Workshops and caucuses
are generally an hour and a half, and you can structure it as a formal
workshop, a group activity, a guided discussion, an informal caucus,
or some other format.

We particularly encourage workshops on topics such as working in
solidarity with other oppressed groups, experiences of how other
oppressions intersect with trans*ness, or that tie the struggle for
trans liberation in with other struggles.

Some caucuses that are already planned for camp trans this year are a
people of color caucus and several trans caucuses, including a
genderqueer caucus.

To propose a workshop, email me at solitonexcitation@gmail.com. Let
me know that you have a proposal for a workshop or caucus in the
subject of the email, and please include your proposal as an
attachment. Your proposal should include your name and pronoun
preference (and those of any copresenters), your contact info (email
and phone), the name of your workshop or caucus, a 200 word
description of your workshop/caucus including its goal and how it will
be structured, whether it will be open to the entire camp population
or limited to a specific population (generally, workshops are open and
caucuses are limited to a specific group or a fishbowl, however, both
closed workshops and open caucuses are great!), and a 100 word or less
bio of each presenter. Also, if you feel that your workshop or caucus
would benefit from having an advocate present, or want or need any
other accommodations, please let me know. If at all possible, please
send these proposals by July 23rd, so we can have plenty of time to
structure a schedule and publicize the workshops we’ll be offering at
Camp!

Not sure if you can make Camp? Worried that you’ll get there and
suddenly have a brilliant idea for a discussion group or a group
activity? Don’t worry! We’re also going to make sure to once again
include plenty of room for workshops and caucuses planned right at
Camp Trans. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s workshop
proposals and helping to make workshops and caucuses rewarding,
educational, and fun experiences for everyone interested in presenting
and attending.