Blacklisting

This post comes from Feminist Current: On Saturday, December 5th, Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter hosted their annual Montreal Massacre Memorial event at the Vancouver Public Library. The event coincides with the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (December 6th), the anniversary of the murders of 14 women at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989, also known as the Montréal Massacre. This episode features audio from a panel called: Creating Alternative Platforms for Feminist Analysis, featuring myself [Meghan Murphy], [Deep Green Resistance author and co-founder] Lierre Keith, and Vancouver Rape Relief collective member, Hilla Kerner (whose speach is not included in this podcast episode). We discuss not only the ways in which we’ve managed to continue to find and create platforms for feminist discourse and to speak out against male violence against women, but also the kind of no-platforming and silencing of feminists that has become common practice in recent years. ...

Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance co-founder, recently wrote one of the most powerful articles that we have read in a long, long time. Her piece, titled The Girls and the Grasses, is like poetry. We invite you to read it here: Link: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015/08/25/lierre-keith-the-girls-and-the-grasses/ – Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International writes about the colonial and racist origins of the “conservation” movement. His organization helps push an alternate perspective. ...

The Modern COINTELPRO and How To Fight It Despite the seeming popularity of environmental and social justice work in the modern world, we’re not winning. We’re losing. In fact, we’re losing really badly. Why is that? One reason is because few popular strategies pose real threats to power. That’s not an accident: the rules of social change have been clearly defined by those in power. Either you play by the rules — rules which don’t allow you to win — or you break free of the rules, and face the consequences. ...

The following is a response to an open letter written by Bonnie Mann to Lierre Keith. Hello Professor Mann, You wrote an open letter recently to my friend and fellow activist Lierre Keith. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but as your letter discusses issues which are very important to me, and as I feel that you’ve gravely misconstrued those issues, it feels incumbent upon me to respond. You may choose to write me off as “uncritical,” since I share the views that you have dismissed as such in your letter, but I hope that you will instead choose to listen and reflect on my reasons for finding your letter uncritical at best, and in all truth, irresponsibly misleading at worst. At the risk of casting too wide a net, there are two things I’d like to address: the things you say in your letter, and the things you don’t say in your letter. ...