Don't Let 'em Waste Your Time

vondell-swain:

my gay best friend wouldn’t go to the mall with me today. is it broken? what the hell? im gonna return it and get another one that works right.

(via gobonkersnow)

oclimacus:

The NYTimes recently ran an article about the high rate of rape on Native American reservations. This statistic has been reported for years, and it’s recently caught the spotlight because of a proposed amendment to the Violence Against Women Act that would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-Indian crime suspects. The amendment was passed by the Senate but rejected by the House Republicans. 

Now, the NYTimes offers an “objective” passive-voice explanation for the high rate of rapes: “Reasons for the high rate of sexual assaults among American Indians are poorly understood, but explanations include a breakdown in the family structure, a lack of discussion about sexual violence and alcohol abuse.” Of course, the NYTimes cautions against pointing the finger by saying that reasons are “poorly understood.” It then goes on to lay the blame squarely within Native American society—their dysfunctional families, their lack of discussion about sexual violence, their alcoholism. It also sends the misleading message that most rapes are committed by Native American men, that this rape epidemic is mostly native-on-native violence. In reality, 57-58% of the rapes in Oklahoma and Alaska were committed by non-Indians. Figures for other reservations are probably similar. 

The idea that the high rate of rapes is somehow intrinsic to Native American society is colonialist and oppressive. It’s the idea that, “apparently Native Americans on reservations love raping their women.” It ignores the structural causes of societal dysfunction and focuses on the symptoms. The NYTimes could have pointed to the poverty on reservations, the underfunding of law enforcement, the long history of genocide (which ended perhaps only in the late 1970s, when Indian women stopped being forcibly sterilized), the use of rape as a tool of terror by White Americans, and the preaching of female inferiority by White missionaries. When the NYTimes ignores these factors and focuses on the current brutalized state of Native American culture, when it lists Indian family dysfunction and Indian alcohol abuse as facts, then the solution is inevitably for White America to assume a paternalistic role. In other words, the description of facts compels a certain outcome. And by telling the story this way, the NYTimes is urging us toward restricting self-governance for Native Americans. 

Stories told by the oppressor provide both the pretext for violence and the post hoc justification for it.

In the following paragraph, the NYTimes gives a nod to the perspective of Indian women: “Rape, according to Indian women, has been distressingly common for generations, and they say tribal officials and the federal and state authorities have done little to help halt it, leading to its being significantly underreported.” This competing explanation is not accorded the status of passive-voice objectivity. It is merely the opinion of Indian women. They are the victims and the survivors and the ones who live in fear of rape, but their account is not objective truth. No, that belongs to the New York Times.