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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