Victoria Law's Blog, page 7

Race, class & gender in prison system (Marc Steiner show)

I appeared on the Marc Steiner show yesterday as part of a radio segment examining race, class and gender in the prison system in the wake of the recent scandal at the Baltimore City Detention Center.

The show description:

We continue our conversation about the federal indictments naming 25 people including corrections officers at Baltimore City Detention Center and members of the Black Guerilla Family with racketeering, drug and money laundering charges. We’ll speak about the news, and dig a little deeper, asking how issues of race, gender, class, prison culture, and mass incarceration play into this story. Our guests include Maryland State Delegate Jill Carter; Maryland State Senator Lisa Gladden; Vikki Law, activist and author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women; Hassan Giordano, columnist for the Baltimore Independent Examiner and publisher of DMVDaily.com, Jacqueline Robarge, Director and Founder of Power Inside, and Sue Esty, Director of Legislative and Political Affairs AFSCME Council 3.

You can listen to it here:
http://www.steinershow.org/podcasts/r...

What if Blood Type Mattered More than Race?

New post on my Girls of Color in Dystopia series on the Bitch Magazine website. This time I look at whether race & gender matter in post-Quarantine New Orleans in Sherri L. Smith's Orleans:

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/new-boo...

"Going Extinct is Genocide": Lakota Elders Tour to Raise Awareness About Struggle

On Tuesday, April 9, Lakota elders, activists and nonindigenous supporters marched through the streets of Manhattan to the United Nations, where they attempted to present a petition to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Entitled the Official Lakota Oyate Complaint of Genocide Based on the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the petition listed the numerous injustices faced by the Lakota people. (Oyate is a Sioux word for "people" or "nation.")

At the UN, security officers informed them that they would not be able to enter the building and present the complaint to the Secretary General. Instead, the security officers offered to take it to Ban's office, but refused to give the Lakota documentation verifying that their complaint had been received.

Outside the UN, Charmaine White Face, a Lakota grandmother and great-grandmother, addressed the 60 people who had marched with her. "We come here as a nation. If they won't let us take our message to them, how disrespectful is that to a nation?"

The action is part of the 13-city Truth Tour by Lakota elders and activists to draw attention to the situation of the Lakota, mobilize solidarity networks to benefit Lakota elders, and renew the Lakotas' traditional matriarchal leadership on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation and across the Lakota nation. Between April 1 and 16, they traveled to Minneapolis, Chicago and other points east and west.

The full story is here: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/158...

Moving away from Asian-American dystopic fiction...new post up on Girls of Color in Dystopia series

Greetings from North Carolina where I gave a talk about gender, incarceration and resistance at UNC Chapel Hill this evening. We had a lively discussion on realities inside women's prisons, reasons why people engage in anti-prison work, ways to balance offering programs inside prisons with an abolitionist framework, and the framing of race when we talk about prison issues.

Got back to my hostess's house and found that my post on Catherine Knutsson's Shadows Cast By Stars is now up on the Bitchmedia website!

Now it's nearing midnight and I have to go brush my teeth, finish the last chapter of Karen Sandler's Awakening (I'm too tired to search through the bazillion links to Awakening that come up to find the proper one) and get to bed.

Good night all!

2 new posts on Girls of Color in Dystopia up

I've got two new posts up on Bitch Magazine's blog this week.

The first is on Isamu Fukui's Truancy. Given that Fukui wrote the book when he was still a 15-year-old student at NYC's Stuyvesant High School, how does he address race and gender in his dystopia?

The second is Julie Kagawa's The Immortal Rules, which also happens to be the only YA book I've found with an Asian vampire girl. You can check out my post about that here.

More next week!

Lakota Grandmothers' Truth Tour

I recently finished Catherine Knutsson's Shadows Cast By Stars, a YA novel set in a dystopic future where a Plague ravages the world and the cure lies in the antibodies of aboriginal people's blood. The government hunts down aboriginal people for their blood, forcing many into hiding or to join the Band, an aboriginal community on the Island.

Knutsson lays out several issues that are realities confronting indigenous and aboriginal people in the U.S. and Canada today. If you've found yourself angered or outraged about some of these issues (or even just curious), I encourage you to check out the Lakota Grandmothers' Truth Tour:

http://www.lakotagrandmothers.org/tru...

Wagunpi Woashake Ikickupi (Lakota Elders Take Back Their Strength) is a grassroots movement to end the genocide of the Lakota people and support the full renewal of matriarchal leadership by Lakota Grandmothers on Pine Ridge and across the Lakota Nation. It also works to educate non-Natives about the situation of the Lakota, mobilize long-term solidarity networks to benefit Lakota Elders, and build solidarity with other indigenous resistance movements worldwide.

This April, a delegation of traditional grassroots Lakota elders and activists are traveling from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the United Nations (U.N.) offices in New York, and U.S. Government offices in Washington D.C., to present irrefutable evidence of the ongoing genocide of the Lakota Oyate (Lakota people). They are visiting 13 cities and speaking out to end the genocide of their people and reclaim their traditional matriarchal leadership. They will also show their incendiary documentary “Red Cry.”

If you are in any of the cities they plan to visit, spread the word about their tour!

If not, there's a LOT of info on their site about the tour and the issues they raise. Spend some time reading and watching.

Reading Race in Marie Lu's Dystopian YA Hit "Legend"

I've got a new(ish) post up on Bitchmedia. This one looks at race & gender in Marie Lu's Legend and Prodigy.

You can read it here.

What if Cinderella Wasn't Straight and White?

My latest blogpost on race and gender in YA dystopia is now up at http://bitchmagazine.org/post/what-if...

This time I look at Cinder and Ash. Check it out!

New Blogpost on Girls of Color in Dystopia Up Now!

We're still in Hong Kong, eating lots of good food, bicycling around fishing villages (nothing like biking by the sea although I do wish the groups of high school students would stop blocking the pathways), and taking lots of pictures. (I'm using old fashioned film & paper, so you'll have to wait at least til April to see what we've been seeing)

In the meantime, my next blogpost, looking at the world that Lauren Oliver created in DeliriumDelirium and Pandemonium, is up at Bitch magazine's blog: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/young-a...

Do Girls of Color Survive Dystopia?

I'll be spending April guest blogging on BITCH magazine's website about race & gender in YA dystopic literature.

My first post went up yesterday. You can read it at:
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/do-girl...

I'm currently in Hong Kong where it is muggy and warm (sometimes bordering on sweltering if you are, say, walking around the wetlands preserve on the border of China and Hong Kong in the middle of the afternoon). After freezing freezing freezing this past week in NYC, I am super-happy about the weather (but am now kicking myself for not bringing more summer clothes).

Looking forward to not only the usual haunts of our Hong Kong visit, but also the chance to explore the YA English language section of Hong Kong's fabulous Wan Chai branch in Causeway Bay. And, of course, noodle around the gigantic English language bookstore in the nearby shopping mall (although I do wish they didn't shrink wrap most of the interesting-looking books).

Off to bed because tomorrow is the Hung Shing festival in Sai Kung and we have to catch a 9 am boat off to the temple.