Towards a Black Male Feminism

There are any number of arguments why the practice of active feminism is an obligation of men. I have opined in the past that a woman, just as she has a choice whether or not to ever consider abortion or have one, also has a choice of whether or not to be a feminist. Her liberation or how she defines her liberation needs to be defined as she wills it and it may shift, change, and morph based on locale, history, religion, race, color, and belief. The debate on the necessity of an articulated feminism for women is a debate for women to hold and define.  But let me be clear that feminism is not monolithic and white feminism and the racism its practice has sometimes entailed as practiced historically has caused some powerful harm, which is why the Combahee River Collective's statement on Black Feminism and Barbara Smith's essay Towards a Black Feminist Criticism are so critical.

But the debate on feminism and what that means from a female point of view is not for a man to decide. But the power of feminism is that contrary to how it is often presented it is not the same as sexism. Sexism is the practice of power plus privilege and its use to oppress women while holding up the institutions of male power and privilege. Feminism is the mindful deconstruction of that system for both men and women. In short, feminism is the key to the liberation of men as it is, in my opinion, the basis for the liberation of women. How feminism is practiced, though, and what it means for men and women and their path to liberation is, necessarily different.  And what it means for black men in particular is very simply about survival.

To begin, 72% of all black households in the United States are led by single mothers. The reasons for this are plentiful including rates of teen pregnancy, school to prison pipeline, drug laws, poverty, and any other number of factors that are geared towards removing a particular type of black man, which happens to be the majority of us, from our homes and into the new articulations of modern slave labor or, as has happened during the recession, the removal of us and our labor from the economy completely to make room for the recovery of the white community.  The unemployment rate of black men with college degrees is almost twice that of white men with college degrees, and while the overall unemployment rate for the black community is around 13%, 8.3% of black men over 25 with a college degree are unemployed. Though critical to understanding the ways in which power pushes black men out of the "legitimate" means earning system and into survival economies that make black men vulnerable to power and easily eliminated at the ease or pleasure of the state, particularly in a time of increased private prisons and the shifting of so much small manufacturing labor to prisons where fair wage laws and other Constitutional and legal guarantees do not apply, these are all symptoms that lead to towards a black male feminism and its necessity.

Feminism at its root means that both men and women get to express their full humanity without oppression, without prescribed ways of being that are rigidly policed and socially/politically/often physically punished when deviated from the norm, and allow both men and women the full range and expression of their vitality and spirit without taking away from the other. Indeed, feminism is, at its root, the negation of gender roles and the full expression of human experience as in a liberation framework---ie...you get to be all of you, and I get to be all of me, and together we are committed to building each other to our full potential.

For black men this becomes about survival. Black men are taught from the gate to be tough, hard, in control, "macho", independent, players, victims, and that our potential is circumscribed by history, circumstance, and ability--not to be punks, to be virile, the mandigo syndrome...and these ideals images and thoughts are reinforced through our own communities, often, media--too often--, and what we consume from mainstream dominant ideology. We resemble what we are presented by others as ourselves. We become charicatures because so many of those that would be our own role models are dead, absent, or in prison. We are socialized internally and externally, and unless somoene or something intervenes to break the cycle of history, legacy, and socialization we often become what we were never born to be. We become angry, and turn that anger inwards and towards our own community. And as a wise woman once told me, there is a place for angry black men: jail.

The truth or untruth of these socializations are related to our relativity to power, history, presentation, and ability to conform or not (willingly or not, consciously or not) to a paradigm that requires us to set our skin aside and adopt a way of being that imitates the master consciousness. This too is an ultimate expression of sexism and must be rejected through conscious practice. Further, I would argue it is sexism and a lack of feminist ideals and thoughts that are at the root of the pandemic of the single parent home, which, in and of itself, keeps the community widely struggling with poverty and in cycles of poverty.

To be clear, I grew up with a single white mother that, like most mothers, worked hard to give us a better opportunity than she had, but the fact remains that a loving two parent house hold would have afforded better opportunity, education, and emotional support. The key word being loving.

So what is the solution? The solution is for men in general, and black men in particular to adopt feminist ideals. To reject prescribed notions of masculinity and dominance, to reject heterosexism and homophobia, to see women and gender non conforming individuals are partners in liberation, to ask for help and support, to love our partners and to see each other as family instead of objects to be desired and dominated, to understand that materialism and consumerism as status are socializations again that have been offered up on a dish that we have swallowed whole by white folks that could care less about the strength of our community and only want the power our dollars give them. It means to love women and to use whatever power and privilege we have to open up the space so that they can be full and powerful partners with us, since it was a woman and most likely a single woman that raised us. It means investing in the power and strength of black women that have sacrificed to give us life and have loved us both in our own realities and broadly as a male community when we didn't deserve it.

There are structural reasons why black men often fail to survive or end up in cycles of poverty but while power owes us a Hell of a lot, the mentality that one is owed will do nothing but keep us in the same cycles of destruction, despair, and subjugation. By starting at the point of undoing our own sexism and claiming identities and practice as feminist, we heal the rift that has existed between black men and women and begin with a unity that power will not be able to undo. It is for all of our survival that black men must move towards an articulated black feminism, accountable to black women, and responsible for ourselves.

Ungowa Queer Black (and Brown) Power!

So, this last weekend, thanks in large part to the generosity of a lovely friend of mine, I was able to attend, for the first, time the Fire Island Black Out Party (FIBO). For all y'all that don't know, Fire Island is off the coast of Long Island and is a miles and miles long sand bar in the bay (or it might be the sound...lord if I know and I am too lazy to Google it). The island has been famous for nearly fifty years for being THE Mecca for the queer community. P-Town is Miss Congeniality but The Pines and Cherry Grove take first and second on that particular list. The Pines is generally where the boys hang out and has magnificent mansions and you can smell the ducats in the air. The Grove est une pue demurre in comparison but is still stunning with more than one dyke with dollars prancing about in this or that.

On one weekend each year, which up until this year coincided with Black Pride in NYC, FIBO takes place in Cherry Grove and quite literally thousands and thousands of largely black and Latin@ folks from all across the country descend on this little piece of sand in the water for three days of sun, sand, dancing and shenanigans.

The things I saw on the beach liked to make be howl. (for example...technically it was a nude beach but the one person that exercised the full nude option was this not-so-lovely white man that would then walk up to groups of black men and get an erection...I was like....if you can't control it...PUT IT AWAY!). Then there was the black twink that had a bathing suit with a mesh bubble in the crotch for his dick and balls while covering the rest of him...that was even worse than Le Nude Whitey.

But other than the now and again moments of utter insanity, the weekend was one of laughter with new and old friends, so much joy, and so much pride in the beauty, diversity, power, and love of the Black and Latin@ community, especially with all of us all together celebrating our sexuality, our cultural expressions, and our love for our fellow queer folks.

And like in many queer settings the men and women (and trans folks) were together. I can't remember, and so I won't attribute exactly the paraphrase but one of the black women elder lesbians said (might of been Barbara Smith, might have been Mandy Carter, but I can't remember at the moment), "we as women of color can't afford to leave men of color behind."

This weekend, to be with an entire group of stunning and powerful women of color (shout out to Jaael, Sondra, Selena, Arti, Sam, and Nadia  (with a guest appearance by our token white girl Di), and to find so many other groups of friends, queer/trans men and women together, gave me some hope for our community---particularly as people of color doing the work and struggling together---that feminism is going to will out and the recognition of our survival is contingent on the dismantling of the barriers that sexism has created between our family. Women of color would have been justified in leaving their men behind and going on and being the bright candles that they are...but they chose to reach out and drag us along...sometimes by smacking us upside the head the entire way.

FIBO for me was not about the partying as much as it was about being in community, meeting the black neurosurgeon from Columbia Presbyterian, the chief legal advisor to the Detroit City Council--also a black man--the investment banker women, the British Indian actor (what what Arti), the school teacher, the dancer, a banker that finances public housing projects, and so on and so forth. We gonna be alright.

But not to dismiss the party; what better way to build community than butt shaking throw downs that bring folk together to share in the bright diversity of our music, language, and joy?

Thanks for the love and good times my FIBO crew and here's to next year!

Poetry at the Heart of Revolution: Working at the Intersection of Feminism, Queerness and Social Change

WELCOME TO THE 500th BLOG POST AT MY FEET ONLY WALK FORWARD! THANK YOU FOR READING!

This week, I have had the amazing opportunity to spend the bulk of my time at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. I was invited to visit the school by Dr. Shante Smalls, and for the last three days I have had the privilege of sitting and thinking and building with some truly great students and some amazing professors. Last night, I gave my first formal public lecture at a college. Though I have done a number of classroom lectures over the last seven or eight years, this was my first all eyes on me (actually us...I shared the evening and the week with the stunningly amazing, beautiful and transformational Sophia Wallace...I am SO in love with her and her work and her--did I mention she is amazing) scholarly conversation on why I do the work I do and how I do it.

I have decided to publish my remarks here. Each section of the discussion was paired with a poem from my collection, It Ain't Truth If It Doesn't Hurt, which you can purchase by here.

Davidson College Remarks
Queer Communities/Queer Critiques

Given at the College on October 25, 2011 at the invitation of Dr. Shante Smalls and in dialogue with visual artist Sophia Wallace

Owning the Space We're In

Poetry: Stump Speech

I want to thank Davidson College, Professor Shante Smalls, Dean Ross, Sophia Wallace, the English Department support staff, and the students of Davidson for having me here to share some time and thoughts with you. And I am particularly pleased to be back in North Carolina. I will forgive all ya'll for deciding to go to Davidson when you could have gone to Warren Wilson, my alma mater, just up the road in Swansong.

To have the opportunity and space to sit in dialogue across disciplines, within academia, while connecting the practice and function of artistic form to grassroots revolutionary change is a privilege that most people do not have nor get to have. It is a privilege that most practicing artists of whatever genre or medium are never privileged to have, and so I want to acknowledge, sitting in this space, the presence of folks doing the work of radical social change, public critic and power building using art are many, varied, and often doing their work outside of they academy, and sometimes, in opposition to it—not from any particular hatred of academia but often because of the particular role that academia plays in propping up certain forms of oppression and the role academia has often played in determining which art forms are valid, valuable and respected. Page poetry versus spoken word, oil on canvas versus spray paint on a train trestle, museum art versus mail art, pop art (aka the art of the people) versus high art. As a spoken word artist, I have felt distinctly that disconnect, and so this conversation today, with two practicing artists that have connections to the academy but work outside of it, is important not only for the content of our work but also for creating intentional relationships within a system that has, traditionally, undervalued our work or tokenized it, relegating it to classes and studies that are themsleves marginalized within the academy (raise your hand if you are only able to encounter significant subject matter of value to communities of color within the context of “ethnic” studies department or have submitted an idea for a paper or project and been told that it doesn't have enough “theory” in it.)

Theory is oftentimes academic speak for bullshit. Don't get it twisted, the ghetto is alive and well behind the ivory walls. But I digress. I am supposed to be here talking about poetry and politics, queerness and feminism, gender fucking and fucking in general, the personal as political as political as personal.

So let's talk about that for a minute. I don't mind getting real personal with all y'all.

I came to my life as a writer very personally. Poetry was how I survived the self-awareness process that is the phenomena of coming out of the closet. All through high school I wrote terrible poetry about tear drops falling and lighting and broken hearts and the moon. In fact, a good friend of mine still has all the poems I wrote to her, and I have told her that she had better be buried with those poems as I never want to see them again. Poetry and other forms of writing that I practice, very simply, is how I see, feel, and process the world. Whether I am talking about love, a break up, a one night stand, going to war, racism, addiction, or living with HIV, my poetry is very personal yet to walk in this world as a queer man, a positive man, a descendant of slaves, a survivor of abuse, a child of the Ojibwe Nation, light skinned, college educated, from a family full of immigrants, is to understand that everything I do at all times is influenced by and takes part, actively or passively in fundamental political systems and systems of privilege and oppression.

Poetry: Big Sam

Poetry As An Act of Feminist Resistance

Beyond the fact that I know and love and have organized and worked with Dr. Smalls for over a decade, there is another reason that I am sitting here instead of a queer woman of color doing the same work. I now have the privilege of having published a book, and being a male with other male friends that have benefitted from male privilege, I was able to circumvent the normal publishing process, take my work straight to the publisher and here I sit. I didn't think about any of that at the time but just because I didn't think about it doesn't make it any less real or any less connected to real political systems that are foundational to who gets to make, create, and publish art. And so I'd like to honor and bring into this space that I am grateful to be here but I am here not entirely because of my own work but because of work that is done before I even wake up in the morning by a system that maintains a reserve of privilege for the male body in which I move.

I also want to talk to you a little bit about why I identify as a feminist and do my work through a feminist lens. Listen closely because I am about to lay something on you. I firmly believe that women have a choice of whether or not they wish to move in the world as feminists. While I would thoroughly want to shake my little sisters until they looked like bobble heads if they came home talking about submitting to their husbands and birthing babies and the like, I would resist the urge and instead make a bee line for her intended to let him know that if he ever asked her to submit, I would submit my foot to the back of his head.

Men, you have no choice. You are required to be feminist if you ever want this world to even begin to consider dismantling systemic oppression. Like racism and classism, sexism is the third leg of the stool that is the fundamental and foundational underpinning of the capitalist system and like those two other legs of oppression, sexism is combined and recombined to create other forms of oppression such as heterosexism, transmisogyny, feminist racism (I wish that were an oxymoron), etc. Just as white power and privilege is propped up through the vehicle of racism, male power and privilege is propped up through sexism and committing oneself as a man to feminist principles, action, and living means to be not only staunchly anti-sexist but proactively pro-woman and to use the power, privilege, and opportunity you have been given by virtue of being born with a penis, or the ability to pass (for the trans men that may be in the audience), to smash oppression as it impacts women, batter down the glass ceilings and, wait for it, step away from advancement and opportunity at times when it would be more effective, meaningful, and powerful for the work to be done by a woman.

Now I am not talking about turning down a job to feed your family, but I am talking about making sure that you are actively opening up space in your student groups, in your classrooms, in your daily life and actively asking the question of yourself AND other men, “What can I personally do and SYSTEMICALLY support to ensure that the voices of women are centered in the world and in the spaces to which I have been given access.”

Without women, and specifically radical feminist women of color—queer and straight—I would not be a poet today. In 2003, I attended a International Women's Day spoken word performance at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, MN. It was called Women Holding Up Half the Sky. Poets Juliana Hu Pegues, Sha Cage, and Coya Hope White Hat Artichoker gave spoken word performances. That evening changed my life. That night I wrote my first spoken word poem. Unfortunately, due to a combination of electronic misfortune and a brain malfunction that poem is lost forever. What remains is a commitment to using poetry as a way to challenge misogyny and heterosexism and male privilege.

Poetry: Stolen

Racism/Classism/Poetry Oh My!

I'd like to share another poem with you now. And though my friends often refer to me as an I.R.A—I require attention, I am going to prove them slightly wrong by reading to you an excerpt from another poet. I am not going to tell you who this poet is, in fact, I am going to ask you to tell me who this person is once I have read to you this excerpt, please note that in order to keep from handing you the answer any more than the piece already does, I will be omitting a couple of lines from the work:

...if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.

This is an excerpt from Martin Luther King's speech, “I've Been to the Mountaintop,” which he gave the night before his assassination in Memphis, TN. This speech was given in support of the sanitation workers strike in Memphis. It is pure spoken word. It was also part of a larger rallying cry to make sure that by marching for racial justice we did not forget or were not divided from a movement for economic justice.

Dr. King understood that one of the ways that capitalism was maintained and that slavery had been maintained and Jim Crow had been maintained was a systemic division of poor black and poor whites from one another. He understood and colonialists understood that poor whites and poor blacks had more in common simply by being poor than they had in a difference created by skin color. It was thus that race based oppression was systematically created in this country as a way to do two things at the same time: maintain a system of control by intrinsically linking working class whites to slaves while also keeping them from seeing each other as allies and create a permanent basis of low wage and free labor.

Though folks like Bayard Rustin and Ralph Abernathy and others had, a generation before, tried to bridge the race/class divide by organizing within the union and labor movements of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s (through intentional work in both the north and south especially in places like the Highlander Center), Dr. King understood, and built upon the work of and worked in partnership with Abernathy and Rustin, that in order to bridge the race/class divide you first had to break down ENOUGH of the racist inculcation of working class whites and blacks for them to be able to stand side by side and see the humanity each other. Once those cracks were hammered into the side of racism, you could blow the basis of the entire system wide open when black folks, using the power and momentum built up by the Civil Rights movement, inserted themselves into the working class white/black struggle around economics as evidenced by the sanitation workers strike in Memphis.

Dr. King wasn't murdered because he had played a role in breaking down certain racial barriers/norms/mores that were already falling apart on their own due to the natural pressures of competition within a capitalist system, he was murdered because using the poetry of his words, he was attacking the fundament of capitalism itself, and it was working.

J. Edgar Hoover wasn't having any of that.

Poetry: These Streets

Poetry at the Heart of Revolution(aries)

There was a time in the American experience when poetry and politics went absolutely hand in hand. We listen still to Martin Luther King' Jr's speeches specifically because they are spoken word. And this is not some coincidence, it is not a rare phenomena in the black experience, in fact, this oral poetic history is a thousands of years old West African tradition tied to the griots. Politics and loss, weddings and death, regime changes and life changes were told as poetry from town to town by griots—poets of the people that created art out of the every day life and its circumstances. The griots work was not distinct from the needs, wants, and desires of the community. The griot reflected back and outward to a broader audience the goings on of the moment while also tying those same happenings to the history of the community. The griot and the poet were one and the same and art was inimically tied to the people and reached its peak at a time when, for example, the university at Timbuktu was the most respected place of learning in the Western world, where Europeans were considered too limited in their education to instruct students, and any notion of divorcing poetry from the people would have earned you side eye from just about everyone.

We are seeing a distinct resurgence of the art politic in grassroots communities and most definitely it is an integral part in much of the anti-racist, anti-police brutality, anti-corporate organizing happening in communities across the country. Spoken word is one of the rare art forms that the corporate state hasn't found a way to co-opt and market (beyond a short run of Def Poetry Jam) and as such it remains a distinct vox populi in a way that hip-hop has struggled to maintain and that mainstream rap ceased to be 20 years ago. In this commercial, corporate oligarchy with tendencies towards democracy when it suits the purposes of power, folks would have you believe that art has always been something for consumption by the idle as opposed to a tool for social change. Too many texts would have you study Diego Rivera divorced from his Marxist-Leninist ideology, Frida Kahlo from her first wave of feminism roots, Emily Dickinson's poetry is desexualized and denies the revolutionary content of her work on claiming women's sexuality and would have you study her as an asexual spinster pining for a missed love.

Every generation and every movement for social change has had artists as intellectuals as revolutionaries at its heart and is the reason why reactionary governments target artists first. A people without artists as prophets are doomed to wander in the desert until they can reclaim the artistic expression that gives articulation and purpose to their outrage. And we aren't just talking about Stalinist pogroms against the intelligentsia in some far off place, we are talking about cuts to the National Endowment of the Arts by GOP administrations (Robert Mapplethorpe almost gave several US Senators an apoplectic fit), and the subsuming of the creation of art inside of the nonprofit industrial complex where artists are often times required to tie their art to specified predetermined outcomes that naturally limit the scope and content of their work. They exchange their true voice for the right to eat or, more specifically, from the fear of going hungry. And this, frankly, is the curse of social movements no matter how they are devised and why Occupy Wall Street and its love children are scaring the beejus out of folks. OWS is a movement outside of the reigns of the nonprofit industrial complex, untied to the carefully crafted systems of control devised during the advent of the Great Society programs and large enough that it can easily push back against the relatively weak administrative attempts (permit denials and “park clean ups”) to mitigate its impact.

I am fairly certain that it was one of Karl Rove's ancestors that created the myth of the starving artist. Just as revolutionary movements in the 60s organized to provide support and sustenance for their members--Black Panther food kitchens and the like--so too do artists have a long history of self organizing to sustain each other. This was and has been and continues to be so that they could create without relying on the very systems that piss them off to the point of doing art in the first place. And, of course, those self-same revolutionary movements (anti-war, black panther, brown power, women's movement, queer movement) had artists at their core and spawned and continue to inspire artistic expression generations later. That is truly revolutionary. Revolution is the essence of creation and is a requirement of the creative process, anything else is mass production...the art is there but it is so distant from the original as to be a glossy two dimensional distraction removed from the grit of its original intention.

To sustain ourselves as artists/organizers/change-makers requires that we actively disbelieve the notion that there is a limited supply of nourishment in the world. We know, for a fact, that the food produced in the U.S. ALONE is enough to feed the entire planet, and for those of us that grew up in poverty, we understand, to paraphrase that fantastic writer and friend Aurora Levins Morales, that sustenance can be created from empty calories. And I am, of course, not speaking solely of food when I speak of nourishment. I am speaking about love, affection, joy, peace, accountability, safety, creativity, attention, celebration, and liberation. So we have to make a choice to reject the “slice of the pie” that is served to us and learn to not only believe that we deserve a bigger, fatter, juicer slice but also, in fact, we need a pie baked the right way with the right intentions so that there is enough for every single person that has hunger. No one is going to feed us but us. It's beyond time that we start building a kitchen, with a house around it, that can feed, house, and hold us all.

Poetry: Resuscitation by Any Means Necessary

Critique of the Call for a "SlutWalk" from transnational woman/women of color

As an ally to women, but, more specifically, as prioritizing women of color, I absolutely agree with this critique and support the women making it.

AF3IRM Responds to SlutWalk: The Women’s Movement Is Not Monochromatic.

AF3IRM Responds to SlutWalk:

The Women’s Movement Is Not Monochromatic.


From the moment the first call for a SlutWalk in the US went out, the AF3IRM membership – transnational women who are im/migrants or whose families are im/migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa – has been analyzing and discussing this burgeoning movement to address the issue of sexual violence and continuing victimization of rape victims by police, the justice system and other agents of authority.



It is a testament to the compelling nature of SlutWalk’s call against women’s victimization that we hung fire for months, hammering out our position and analyzing why, while we applaud the effort of those who organize SlutWalk, we remain uneasy about responding to such a call.



We realize that we are the ones who compose the majority of sex trafficking victims in this country, who comprise the majority of those sold in the mail-order-bride system, who are the commodities offered in brothel houses ringing US military bases in and out of this country, who are the goods offered for sexual violation in prostitution. We who are and historically have been the “sluts” from whom traffickers, pimps, and other “authorities” of the global corporate sex trade realize $20 billion in earnings annually cannot, with a clear conscience, accept the term in reference to ourselves and our struggle against sexual violence and for women’s liberation.



We therefore feel it is our responsibility to address the organizers and participants of SlutWalk and remind them that Women’s Struggle Cannot and Should not Be Monochromatic.



Our Concerns



We call upon the SlutWalk steering committee to reassess language use and re-examine how it is, in a sense, offensive to our history, how it is neglectful of historical and cultural sensitivity and competency. Indolent ideology only further pushes transnational women, women of color, away from the current mainstream feminist narrative. It prevents us from establishing a broad front that can create a powerfully dynamic and long-lasting women’s movement. The ebb-and-surge of the women’s movement in the US is clear enough an indictment of such neglect of the historic particularities of the condition of transnational women and women of color.



Our collective transnational histories are comprised of 500 years of colonization. As women and descendants of women from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, we cannot truly “reclaim” the word “Slut”. It was never ours to begin with. This label is one forced upon us by colonizers, who transformed our women into commodities and for the entertainment of US soldiers occupying our countries for corporate America. There are many variations of the label “slut”: in Central America it was “little brown fucking machines (LBFMs)", in places in Asia like the Philippines, it was “little brown fucking machines powered by rice (LBFMPBRs)". These events continue to this day, and it would be a grievous dishonor to our cousins who continue to struggle against imperialism, globalization and occupation in our families’ countries of origin to accept a label coming from a white police officer in the city of Toronto, Canada.



There are two pervasive pejorative words used for women globally, and “slut,” puta (in Spanish, Tagalog), sharmoota (Arabic), Jendeh (Farsi), Ahbeh (Lebanese) - is one. This label has become integrated in our languages and cultures, and has followed us across oceans into our own communities here in the United States. It has followed the poisonous spread of feudalism and capitalism into the economies and ultimately cultures of the global South, building its own systems of power and exploitation of women’s bodies. It has followed us into migration and still plagues us in our communities here in the United States. Women are treated and dismissed as “sluts”, “putas”, etc., as a product of both the structurally racist and sexist US society, as well as transplanted cultures from our families’ countries of origin.



We invite you, organizers of SlutWalk, to study how many times im/migrant women of color have been coerced into sex by immigration personnel, by border patrols, by jailors. Surely that will suffice to underscore why even the idea of joining a SlutWalk is like a massive boulder on our chests, squeezing out our breath, killing us, in effect.



We invite you, SlutWalk organizers, to peruse the catalog of women offered to men by mail-order bride agencies. Surely that would suffice to underscore why joining a SlutWalk would be equal to accepting an identity conferred on our being by this sexist, exploitative society of violence.



We invite you, SlutWalk organizers, to walk the brothel houses and see how our women are treated truly as “sluts” – i.e., mindless flesh with orifices from which profit can be made. Surely that would suffice to underscore why every fiber in our mind and being scream in protest at the word.



AF3IRM rejects this label; AFIIRM refuses this identity; AF3IRM views it as an abomination. It has been used to exacerbate class-exploitation, race and gender discrimination. AF3IRM prefers to work to eradicate it from the common vocabulary, along with other five-letter, four-letter, words derogatory of the humanity of womankind. More, AF3IRM works to eradicate the material social conditions which have made these words possible and acceptable.



We are not sluts. We are women, whose struggles are very much layered, trying to end the pervasive view of women as objects and commodities for profit and entertainment.

AF3IRM hopes this will serve as a basis for a dialogue with the Slut Walk organizers, because to achieve the egalitarian society we all aspire for, we need, will need, and have always needed a movement of women of all colors.

Thank you and we await your response.



In order to reach AF3IRM, please feel free to contact its officers from various regions.

National – Jollene Levid, AF3IRM National Chairperson, chair@af3irm.org

New York/New Jersey – Leilani Montes, Coordinator, nynj@af3irm.org

Boston – Emelyn De La Pena, Coordinator, boston@af3irm.org

San Francisco/Bay Area– Katrina Socco, Lauren Funiestas, Co-Coordinators sfbayarea@af3irm.org

Los Angeles – Angela Bartolome, Coordinator, losangeles@af3irm.org

Irvine – Mona Lisa Navarro, Coordinator, Irvine@af3irm.org

Riverside – Gayle Palma, Coordinator, riverside@af3irm.org

San Diego – Olive Panes, Coordinator, sandiego@af3irm.org

Dr. Brandon Lacy Campos?

So, for those of you that are my Facebook pals, you know that for the last three days I have been up to my neck in my first graduate school application. It is due tomorrow, lord help me now. Since I shared that I would be applying to a PhD program in addition to MFA programs, a number of you have asked me why. Specifically you've asked why a PhD versus an MFA.

The best way that I know how to answer that question is through the publication of my personal statement to the Feminist Studies PhD program to which I am applying.


William Brandon Lacy Campos
Personal Statement

Until a few short weeks ago, the PhD program in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota was not included in the pile of graduate school applications that has been haunting my desk since the beginning of the fall. Rather myopically, I had directed my attention to MFA programs in Creating Writing, specifically fiction. Though, I have a deep passion for scholarship, and I proudly describe myself as a NOC (Nerd of Color), I was finding it difficult to find a program that was flexible enough to allow me to explore both of my passions that are pushing me towards graduate school: honing my craft as a writer and exploring the ways in which gender, sexuality, sex, race, and the politics that intersect, interweave, and dissect these issues play out in an artistic and pedagogical manner in science fiction and fantasy literature and movies.

Having worked closely with three graduate students in the feminist studies department, specifically Jess Giusti and Charlotte Karem Albrecht—with whom I co-authored a chapter, in the recently published anthology from the University of Minnesota Press, Queer Twin Cities—and Dr. Kandace Creel Falcón, I had a fairly clear picture of the flexibility of the scholarship within the department. But it wasn’t until a recent conversation with Dr. Jigna Desai, a brilliant thinker that I have known for 13 years and with whom I would hope to work as a graduate student, that I was convinced that a PhD in Feminist Studies would help me achieve my personal and professional goals.

In order to understand those goals, it is first necessary to understand the multiplicity of identities and experiences that have contributed to creating the person that I am. As a staunch anti-post modernist, please allow me, in detail, to delineate the identities that I claim (forgive me-- the identity theory of Foucault and Wilchins makes my skin crawl—Lisa Duggan is my hero). I am an African American, Afro-Boricua, Anishinaabe Euro femme genderqueer male-bodied HIV-positive working class recovering addict queer feminist man born that was born in Duluth, MN and grew up in a geographical reality that stretched from Duluth to Pampanga, Phillipines. My Father is from southern West Virginia where he grew up in the same town in which our family lived as slaves, and my Mother’s family is a working class clan from just outside of Duluth, MN.

These particular narratives: coming out as queer, coming out as positive, embracing being a person of color, critically examining my relationship to masculinity, choosing my gender expression, working as an artivist/organizer, choosing to be a community scholar and people’s policy wonk, finding richness in my extreme Northern and beautifully Southern heritage, choosing to draw strength from my slave ancestors and my reservation-ized indigenous people, being raised by a single mother, having a beautifully complicated family structure, and acknowledging my penchant for academia have all participated in my decision to pursue a PhD in Feminist Studies as a specific means to push forward my personal mission, which is to create positive social change through research, analysis, and idea exchange through writing, particularly creative writing, and as an instructor.

In order to create a strong foundation for sustainable progressive social change, it is necessary to critically understand the role that current systems play in propping up regressive ideas and paradigms, stagnant notions of identity, and harmful concepts of being that are then codified into our moral precepts and propped up through the media, pop culture, public policy, laws, and jurisprudence. Once understood, and I believe we have made progress with that understanding, new ideas, institutions, thought patterns, arts, pop culture, media, educational systems, and other modalities of socialization and idea exchange must be created to replace the self and society concept delivery systems that currently exist.

This must include a fundamental integration of the arts and artists as tools and agents for social change. While the “artivist” most certainly exists, and in my role as a spoken word poet I count myself among them, there still remains a lack of scholar/artists that are or have the training to integrate critical pedagogies into their work as tools for changing the ways in which justice concepts, particularly of race, gender, and sexuality, are consumed and integrated into community.

Imagining ourselves newly is difficult if one removes the option of only recreating ourselves in an equality framework—I have no interest in being equal to straight, white, able-bodied, misogynist wealthy men with the same privileges they have. I am interested in a liberation framework that requires a full expression of my best self while at the same time committing myself and my work to the full and best expression of everyone else without regard to national borders or the dictates of privilege.

That is why, personally, I love the creative genres of science fiction and fantasy in literature, television, and movies. In worlds where literally anything can be imagined or created, one should not be limited to concepts of gender, race, and sexuality within the frameworks that exist in our quotidian reality.

Unfortunately, while speculative fiction has created brave worlds where non-humans can thrive and be object lessons in diversity, the mass consumed franchises of speculative fiction literature and movies reify and reinforce rigid concepts and stereotypes of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation. There are notable exceptions in the genre, but, for the most part, the role of speculative fiction in socialization (the Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Star Wars, the Wheel of Time series, ad infinitum) continues to be largely unexamined or critiqued. And in those rare instances when they are critiqued (for example, there was a plethora of conversation about alien racialization in the latest three Star Wars movies), there is still very few artists/scholars that are offering bold alternatives. Indeed, some of the best and brightest offerings in speculative fiction that challenge our notions of, for example, gender were Ursula LeGuin’s 1969 classic The Left Hand of Darkness and Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis trilogy, the first book of which Dawn was published in 1997. While there have been notable books between those two that have challenged our concepts of race, gender, and sexuality (specifically Mercedes Lackey’s Last-Herald Mage trilogy which was published beginning in 1989 with Magic’s Pawn featured a gay protagonist) the library of speculative fiction that challenges or lifts up different notions of gender, race, and sexuality are few, far between, and far from the most recognized titles in the genre. Thirty years between notable speculative fiction works that implode gender is much too long to wait.

And, forgive my skepticism, but while The Left Hand of Darkness was a work of literary genius that openly discussed issues of fluid sexuality and basic concepts of transgender identity in the same year that Stonewall took place (and I am sure that I do not need to mention that 40 years post-Stonewall trans and gender identity continue to be disconnected discourses from the LGB community let alone the community at large), I doubt it will be made into a Hollywood summer blockbuster anytime soon. While Harry Potter, as much as it is loved, still adheres to rigid concepts of male dominance, damsels in distress, distraught and overwrought mothers that turn to men for help, and the wise old crone that offers random sage advice to the young, white, male heroes that ultimately, time and time again, save the day (sometimes with a little help from Hermione) and continue to reinforce rigid gender roles and conventional mores around good and evil and the relationships between “men” and “women.”

My professional goals are to not only write amazing speculative fiction that is consciously, though not overbearingly, written to challenge notions of race, gender, and sexuality but to also create and teach coursework at the university level. My work as a professor, and the work I hope to explore through my coursework and dissertation, is to outline methodologies that use the arts, particularly the literary arts, to actively and consciously train writers and artists to address not only inequalities but liberated concepts of being and to provide the theory and the praxis tools in order for artists/academics/organizers to be able to do so.

On November 29, 2010 at NYU, I performed as part of program called Living Out Loud, which featured three artist/activist queer men of color living with HIV. During a panel discussion after the performance an audience member asked us a specific question about academia. The question was how did we deal with getting the ideas demonstrated through our poetry into classrooms with faculty and administrators that were resistant. My answer was two-fold: use community organizing principles to build relationships with instructors that are natural allies and get your work in front of students that way and become an instructor yourself. Pursuing a PhD in Feminist Studies is my commitment to walking the talk. I believe that sustainable social change starts with education and the classroom, and as a veteran community organizer and artivist, I believe the best way that I can continue to be effective in my work as a change agent is to research, write, and teach.

This begs then the question of why Feminist Studies? To be blunt I wholeheartedly believe that sexism is the root cause of not only gender and gender identity based discrimination but also homophobia and heterosexism. Further, it is sexism and its accompanying requirement of the oppression of women to maintain the privilege of men that is the ultimate roadblock for radical social justice. Even racism, which at its root is about maintaining economic hegemony for the elite, has at its core a fundamental roadblock built around sexism. Sexism has been so ingrained in many communities of color that it is a natural check on progress towards racial justice. It keeps men of color from working effectively with women of color and white women allies, and the feedback loop between racism and sexism often keeps white women and women of color from building with one another. As such, I believe that in order to effectively work towards liberation that my work must be centered in an overtly feminist approach, identified as feminist at its root, and the analysis and theory that it is built upon most come from a feminist ideologies.

Specifically, I am interested in the Feminist Studies PhD program at the University of Minnesota because of its multidisciplinary approach to scholarship, its cross university breadth and scope, the amazing faculty that I have had a chance to know over the years (particularly Dr. Desai, Dr. Torres, and Dr. Zita), and, perhaps most importantly, the students in the program with whom I have worked, and for whom I have the utmost political and personal respect: Dr. Kandace Creel, Jess Guisti, and Charlotte Karem Albrecht. And, considering my own extensive background in political movements and my work around community of color political ideologies, I am deeply excited at the possibility of working with Dr. Isoke. Finally, In my conversations with Dr. Desai as well as students in and previously of the program, I have been assured that my own commitment to a multidisciplinary approach to scholarship as well as my rock solid to making direct connections between academia and the broader justice community would be welcomed and nurtured within the department.

While I do not meet the program requirement of having at least a minor in a feminist studies concentration, I have consciously exposed myself to feminist thought and ideologies. My study abroad in Puerto Rico from 1999-2000 was specifically designed to study the feminist movement and impacts of colonization in Puerto Rico, including the course La mujer contemporanea en la sociedad puertorriqueña (The Contemporary Woman in Puerto Rican Society). I have been deeply influenced by feminist writers and thinkers such as Lisa Duggan (The Twilight of Equality changed the way I think about organizing), Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith (and the Combahee River Collective), Lisa Albrecht, Karín Aguilar San Juan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Octavia Butler, Jacqueline Carey and Aurora Levins Morales. Lisa Albrecht and Aurora Levins Morales are friends and mentors, and I have also had the privilege of knowing, working with, and being mentored by Barbara Smith.

In the end, I am a feminist. I am also a man and as such work daily to keep in check my own privilege. Most of the time I am successful. Sometimes I am most definitely not. But I firmly believe that if only women identified individuals center their scholarship in a feminist framework, then our work to dismantle system sexist oppression, and therefore all forms of oppression, will continue to be slow, uneven, and ultimately less than liberating. It is for this reason as well as those that I have stated previously that I am interested in pursuing a PhD in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Ain't I A Woman?

Well, actually, no I am not a woman. I was not so blessed as to have been given the gift of life. Though, after seeing friends and family go through the birthing process, I would be lying if I said I am jealous of the actual birthing process. Giving life is a miracle...shooting a football out of a hole the size of a lemon makes me think waterboarding would be a more enjoyable alternative.

Today, the U.S. Congress unveiled the first statue of a black woman in the nationa's capitol. And, fittingly, it was Sojourner Truth. On the dais today were Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader John Boehner with First Lady Michelle Obama making the dedication and Cicily Tyson acting out the speech Ain't I a Woman.

Unfortunately, fucking C-SPAN left the program just before the First Lady spoke. Idiots. But, they did show Miss Cicily give the performance of a lifetime. I was on this crazy machine at the gym that combines an eliptical machine, stair climber, nordictrack, and mideval torture device, and I had the broadest grin on my face listening to Cicily. She brought the speech to life. She made Sojourner live again, and each time she said, Ain't I a woman, I tucked my penis back and said, YES I AM!

Somehow I made it to 31 _ years of age without every having heard or read the full text of that speech. It, along with Martin Luther King's “I've Been to the Mountain Top,” is now my favorite speech of all time. The entire speech is roughly four or five paragraphs long (I am going to include it at the end of this blog). But in five paragraphs Sojourner Truth laid out the best, most succinct, and clear articulation of actualized feminism that I have ever seen. I understand the value of academia and theory. I often lapse into academy speech. But this brief oration reminded me that some people earn (or should earn) their doctorates in exactly 354 words.

Sojourner Truth was a powerful woman. She was a radical. She was a mother of abolitionist, civil rights, and feminist movements. The honor she received today was overdue and well deserved. Thank you Sojourner. You were one hell of a woman.

(P.S. And what a hell of a present to Miss Truth that Arlen Specter announced he is going Blue Dog on us and giving the Democrats a filibuster proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Word).

Text of “Ain't I a Woman” delivered in Akron, OH at the Women's Convention in 1851.

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. (emphasis added)

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.