Let me focus on this for a second.
Are you black?
Because when I was a teenager, HIV was a huge deal in my community. We were taught proper HIV prevention. We talked about HIV prevention in church. I was a part of multiple black focused organizations that talked about safe sex.
To say that HIV isn't talked about, especially among women, within the black community sounds pretty errornous. It makes it sound like you're not black.
It reminds me of racists and dumb black people like Kendrick Lamar who ask things like "How do Black Lives Matter when you people keep killing yourselves?" when most violence is intraracial. Furthermore, Black Americans have been decrying gang violence as far back as the fucking 80's, from shows like Family Matters, to rap records, and workshops on gang prevention. So to see someone, who lives so fucking far on the outside, talk about how it's not an issue and how we "don't talk about" really reminds me of what you're doing right now.
Essentially, you have no idea how our, or the Native American community functions and you're positing your own authority as the right one. You have no idea if Native American organizations aren't making sexual abuse an issue, because you're likely not Native American, aren't a part of Native American organizations, don't spend time with Native American's, and if you do, probably don't know them on a deep enough level for them to talk to you about it.
Everything you're telling me smells of white supremacy.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I apologize. In that post, and all my earlier posts, I was not discussing any kind of community outreach or internal social work to help assuage these issues. When I used the word "activist", I meant people like me: concerned citizens who have the privileged of experiencing issues of social inequity through the safety of a textbook or computer screen. I was not referring to people who actually deal with these issues daily. However, ignoring the people within these communities who arguably do the most important activism is a massive oversight, and for this I am sorry.
What I was referring to were the actions of the activist left, especially in academia or on college campuses. Your post has made me realize, though, that focusing only on external observation is both short-sighted and ignorant.
I was not meaning to tell African American or other marginalized communities how to behave, but instead to critique the academic left, which is largely non-black but makes similar observations to the ones you responded to. In trying to criticize the priorities of other outside activists, I made the same mistake of ignoring the communities which are actually affected. I had not even considered that more vital issues were already being addressed by people within those communities. For this, I'm sorry. I'll do what I can to avoid speaking over marginalized peoples in the future.
Holy shit, thanks Cindi for pointing this out.
What the fuck, dude? You honestly don't think there aren't tons and tons of black people working on this? And have been, for decades?
"We" in that post referred to people like myself -- bloggers, protesters, politicians, or other activists who seek to raise awareness about social inequity potentially from the outside. I was not referring to peoples directly affected by these issues. However, this attitude obviously comes from a place of ignorance and privilege. But only people like me, who have the luxury of not being as likely to be affected by mass rape or higher HIV rates, I missed the forest for the trees. I wasn't intending to discount the work of black community activists, and realize now that my post was very poorly expressed.
Are you still talking about Valhelm? He didn't say "black people" care more he said "activists" care more: "activists tend to care a lot less about this than about white women who wear box braids". And that in a sentence where he was talking about "we"; I don't know if Valhelm is black but if not, he probably wasn't talking about "activists" as being "black people" there. And that was his last post in this thread, several hours ago. I'm pretty sure you've put more words into representing Valhelm's position than Valhelm has at this point, so I'm not sure how close we are to understanding at this point.
When I said "activst", I was referring to mostly white groups who discuss and promote these issues. I should have been more clear in my language, but I also recognize that
only discussing external activism is ignorant and racist.
Obviously people within black communities have been discussing HIV for decades.
But I'm admittedly very out of touch with these communities. Because I've very rarely seen issues like HIV discussed on Tumblr or on NeoGaf, I made a generalizing assumption about activists that ignored the very important labor of internal activists who are actually affected by these issues.
