Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 16
August 26, 2019
Apologism… #WritingWhileBlack
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Beware of people who sit in places of privilege and constantly ask people who are disempowered for accountability, White cishet and het-passing people who are in authority and insist that marginalized people need to admit to what THEY did wrong because we “all need to be accountable”
THEY ARE APOLOGISTS.
An apologist is busy looking for ways to tell you that you have no right to protest. No right to complain. That you can’t complain. And that you have to be worried about how you asking for basic equity, human rights, or representation hurts their feelings.
Sometimes there is no representation – as in, where they literally have only white cis people in power in their organization as their entire board or most of it is white, and their management is almost all white and cis and the people who are not white and cis have roles with no actual authority
And these people are touchy as hell every time you mention it. And you have to be careful about their paper thin ego. And you have to now be asked to APOLOGIZE for rocking the boat.
APOLOGISTS think that someone else’s feelings being hurt when you mention that they hire like 95% Cis White People and/or their Management and Boards are 95% Cis White People is MORE IMPORTANT or EQUALLY IMPORTANT to the actual lack of diversity. Now we aren’t talking about the GLASS CEILING or LACK OF DIVERSITY we are talking about someone’s hurt fragile white feelings and how the marginalized people didn’t politely ask for change without offending anyone for another 80 or 38 or 31 or 27 years until they get around to any real change.
So the vested interests stay in place, we get one Black president (Token) and everyone else a White Cis Het-or-Hetpassing Male and this goes on forever and ever in the White House and everywhere else while we tell the rebels to be silent and not rock any boats because it’s rude.
August 20, 2019
It’s Back! African American Multimedia Conference
After 3 years writing arts and entertainment pieces for the Examiner.com as an Arts and Culture reporter for the Oakland Art Scene, I am now writing serious investigative reporting for the award-winning Black Newspaper the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper. The Examiner.com was an online extension of the Hearst newspaper owned that allowed people to report nationally from cities that didn’t have their own print edition of the Examiner. I learned how to write for an online news blog there. But the pieces I wrote were non-controversial, arts-centered, and uplifting works that centered on how creative the Bay Area is.
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I went anywhere where there were Oakland artists, including to all of the local fairs and festivals and conventions. I had to adhere to their journalistic standards and link all kinds of reference materials. To this day, I am affected by the experience.
Now I work at Search Magazine – a local neighborhood style paper like the Sunseter – writing those kinds of uplifting feel good pieces – and writing much more seriously political works for the SF BayView. Both papers are black owned, but have a multicultural editorial staff. It amazes me how much I am a part of the black writing world, from the black owned Mocha Memoirs Press, LLC that published Black Magic Women and where I do proofreading work for their horror division, to the Black Women in Horror project. I am touched and honored.
That is why it is very important to me to restart the African American Multimedia Conference in San Francisco and give back to the community once more.
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Iconoclast Productions is a grassroots San Francisco Bay Area based community media arts non profit organization, producers of the African American Multimedia Conference and the Iconoclast Black Independent Film Festival. We were established March 19, 1993. Our programs included computer literacy workshops, plays, and our public access television program Stagefright, which was on Access stations in San Francisco, Vallejo, Oakland, Berkeley, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Dayton Ohio, and New York NY from 1993 to the present, although it is only on in Vallejo as of this writing. It ran in Vallejo and Berkeley up until 2017. It was a variety show that included community issues and local artist and entertainers. It focused on the African American community and the disabled community, including the homeless, as artists. Because our band Stagefright was a crossover multiethnic black-centered Goth band, we worked with a lot of disabled goth artists, many of whom were queer.
August 14, 2019
Black and Queer are not Trends
Rapper Lil 4Tay and author Sumiko Saulson. Black and queer.
Black and queer
Are not just trends
Fashion or make-up
You share with your friends
You feel persecuted as a goth?
Are you for real?
The identities of the marginalized
Are not for you to steal
When they said put away
Childish things
I didn’t know they meant
Childhood friends
When achieving dreams
For your community
Means your childhood ends
When you love and you care
But there is nothing there
That can replace the fact
That you have been back and forth
And here and there with them
To find in the end
You gotta stay black
Gotta stay black,
In the face of injustice
You gotta fight back
They tell you to use
Your inside voice
And feel under attack
They don’t understand
Your motivation
And you gotta know why
When they see racism
And social injustice
They just turn a blind eye
Black and queer
Are not just trends
You appropriate for a season
Until your need for them ends
They are on you for life
With out any choice
Your skin-deep
Your soul-deep
Your kin-deep
Your voice
August 6, 2019
Debut in SF BayView Newspaper Writing While Black
I will also have a series on the writing convention scene called Writing While Black (about the Hugo Scandals and more) coming out in the SF BayView.
https://sfbayview.com/2019/08/mass-murder-white-supremacy-and-anti-miscegenation/
August 4, 2019
Following in Mom’s footsteps
I made a decision not to try to be someone I can never be, and just to follow in my mom’s footsteps and do all of that homey-ass Chitlin Circuit level stuff my mom and her community organizer friends like Doris Rowe, Sharen Hewitt and Bobbie Webb did. My mom and a bunch of the elders are gone now, and I was always trying to make everything “professional” and address all of that criticism about all the weird homey stuff the black community did but now I am 51 and I realize I do all of this shit that they did.
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Why do people who are involved in Grass Roots Community Organization do all of this sometimes disorganized shit we did and I still do? It is because we are poor. We are poor as fuck and doing community conferences like the African American Multimedia Conference and the San Francisco Black Independent Film Festival or Iconoclast Black Film Festival on a shoestring budget, with some food we got donated from a pantry somewhere.
When your events are neighborhood block parties with volunteers cooking up pantry food, that’s who you are.
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I am past being ashamed of who I am. I am past apologizing for getting foodstamps at Eastmont Center. I am beyond pretending to be from some elevated, higher and more bougie class than I am. I am through being ashamed of our BBQs and our block parties and our free furniture off of Craigslist that we took home and repainted or glued together. I am going to be proud of who we are.
I love and I miss my mom so much.
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All I can do now is to honor all of the things we have built together, our little empire.
On her last birthday – the last one before she died – mom turned 70 and she stood up at Vik’s Wheelhouse in Vallejo and sang Deacon Blues by Steely Dan.
“They got a name for the winners in the world. I want a name when I lose.”
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Well, I would rather make sure my mom is remembered than to try to win whatever contest you guys are putting on, with so much put-on and pretense. I know a lot of you who are openly classist – mocking the homeless, the disabled, the poor, those you step over in your constant climb to the top. But we love each other and our lives and our families are real.
July 31, 2019
Writing While Black coming in August
Starting in August 2019, my column Writing While Black will start to appear in the San Francisco BayView. The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, founded in 1976, is a communications network for the Black community worldwide
Bestselling author Sumiko Saulson writes award-winning multicultural sci-fi, fantasy, horror and Afrosurrealism. Her monthly column Writing While Black follows the struggles of black writers in the literary arts and other segments of arts and entertainment. From #HugosSoWhite to #OscarsSoWhite, black novelists, short story scribes and screen writers are constantly up against an industry that excludes them and pays white people to tell black stories. How do black writers navigate a Convention and Conference Circuit that is so vital to up and coming writers but often has glass ceilings and exclusionary practices?
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Writing While Black – I have a racist MRA stalker
I am living my best life as a black writer, it seems… having attracted my very own MRA trashfire, 4Chan forum troll, racist, sexist, and transphobic wannabe edgelord shitty stalker. Fortunately, he’s such a huge fucking wingnut the other trolls don’t take him seriously and his campaigns peter out quickly.
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It has come to my attention that racist, sexist I am now learning transphobic MRA trashfire wannabe edgelord Chuck Stegall and his friends have been hassling black and/or trans women who post supporting comments on my posts. I apologize to anyone who has been harassed with crank calls, crank emails, and Russian trolls and other gross and disgusting behavior by racist Chuck. Chuck may have sockpuppet accounts so I am not sure how effective preemptively blocking him will be. Please feel free to spread the word.
Chuck, a racist cishet white male of the gothic persuasion, has been cracking up ever since the girl of his dreams decided not to be with him, but instead, to marry a black man. Chuck hates race mixing, black people, and a lot of other things and is a sexist pig. Some people don’t block him because they like to troll him. He is pathetic.
If you are reposting, commenting on or otherwise supporting my campaigns please do me a solid and preemptively block Chuck Stegall so as to discourage his harrasment of black women and transwomen on my timeline. Aforementioned harassment includes harassing email messages, harassing phone calls, and super distorted MRA “see? women are just as men” bullshit sexual harassment charges erupting from the MRA sewage tank he dwells in.
He and his friends are tenter bullies and will also post vague shitty double entendre posts that are supposed to be clever to bait you in the comments sections on your posts. These are irritating and a form of gaslighting.
I apologize to anyone who has been hassled by campaigns from this nasty person and his friends due to commenting on my posts.
July 25, 2019
Mourning: 6 Months In
[image error]It’s been a little over six months since my mother died. I am finally slowing down a bit to process my grief. During the six final months of her life, I spent a lot of time at her bedside – the whole family did – and battling with doctors. The night she died I was vending. I got the call an hour before I started vending, while I was bringing in my vending set-up. And there’s this beautiful picture of me just smiling that night, with this wig like my mom’s hair and this hat my mom gave me and this gold dashiki on. It was taken two hours after my mother died.
July 15, 2019
Sometimes it looks like racism because it is
In the modern society, people are quick to say that it is not racism. I have been bullied by two young white women and their clique for about four years now. Their forms of bullying are numerous, and they often recruit other people from their popular group of young, mostly thin, predominately white 25 to 33 year old “mean girls.”
This is a screencap of one of the ringleader’s comments from SFGoth Group on my politely worded petition:
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Death Guild is an organization that was started by personal friends of mine back in 1993. Although a lot of them are attached to the logo, and are angry, they are actually personal friends of mine. This is not a crusade against Death Guild, it is a crusade against racism in the club. This girl and her friend are directly responsible for a number of racial microaggressions, tenter bullying, smear campaigns, shunning, ostracization techniques, completely false or blatantly exaggerated rumors, and other bullying techniques directed at me, an up and coming black writer who regularly vends at the aforementioned goth club.
This girl and her friend created a hostile environment, tripping me when I was loading equipment out of the club, intentionally hitting me, and speaking in extremely fallacious and loaded terms about me. Their longstanding bullying and character assassination attempts are all directed at me, a 51 year old African American goth who was one of only two black folks on the first night the club was in operation to the best of my knowledge, and is the only one of those still attending.
The woman this quote comes from was involved in a bullying campaign back in late 2015 that culminated with my attempting suicide. The nature of this bullying attempt is particularly heinous. Here are the details:
My former fiance Gregory Hug, who has since passed away (May 26, 2017) was standing outside of the club, Death Guild, telling everyone he was HIV positive, and that I was his exgirlfriend.
This woman and her friend were hostile towards me due to my association with the other woman’s exboyfriend.
In order to “troll” her exboyfriend, they created an elaborate lie to convince him and his new girlfriend that I had exposed him and his new girlfriend to HIV
When he was single, he dated a lot of women, and I was one. As far as I know, the only black one out of seven or so girls. I had spent the night with the guy and made out with him in morning before he got in his car and when to work.
The guy was/is an alcoholic. He passed out in the car and threw up earlier in the night. They created an elaborate timeline in order to “teach him a lesson” about drinking and hooking up. As I didn’t know he was still sleeping with his exgirlfriend at the time. They were going to “teach him a lesson” by “trolling him” about how he probably had HIV from me.
I was attacked by groups of people who were bumping into me and hitting me and talking loudly about my HIV status as a result. This is a very serious allegation and a very serious matter. I did not have sex with him at all, but in order to sell the idea that he might have contracted HIV, they fabricated tales of sex in the period of time where he had been unconscious. What actually happened during those hours was that I spent 2 hours drunk-driving him home because I wasn’t very sober. This was over 4 years ago, by the way.
I attempted suicide over these false allegations, over the loss of the relationship with the young man in question, over the bullying, the lies, my ex-boyfriend’s HIV status, and my mother’s cancer, as she had been getting chemotherapy twice a week. She died in January.
I am HIV negative and had not had sexual contact with my HIV+ ex in about 5 months on the night in question.
After a while, the young man in question straightened people out and told them that we didn’t have sex. In fact, we were petting and didn’t have any kind of contact that would have had ANY percentage chance of passing along HIV at all. Every time the rumor clears up, they restart it, and they fabricate more and more details that are false, they take other things and blow them out of proportion.
They also used the fact that they have ruined my relationship with him to keep it up, as I have to wait for word of it to get to him so he can clear my name YET AGAIN every time. I heard they have threatened him. Starting a false rumor that he has HIV is definitely bullying him. Trying to break him up with his new (Latina) girlfriend of the time by insinuating he has HIV is bullying him. He’s Asian. These girls have bullied and vilified and slandered both of us at various times, although the one in the message above isn’t always on the same side as the people bullying him.
For instance: Once I was going to a dungeon (that is. S&M) and had a back of floggers and whips with me. The other young lady and a friend started running around the club telling people I was armed and dangerous and had weapons, which related to the kink toys.
Just to clarify, I am not boycotting the club. I am not going there because these girls have created a hostile environment. Since I work or vend their, they have created a hostile workplace environment. I would not be going public if I wasn’t constantly being gaslit by these popular girls, their friends and associates, and more of my friends than I would have liked. It is very painful for me.
The logo is a lynching scene. These girls are forming up something like a mob to bully me, a black woman. It is like something straight out of Jim Crow. I almost killed myself over their bullying. Something needs to be done. I don’t know what will be done, if anything, because insular communities hate it when you “snitch” or tell outsiders. But I feel like a domestic violence victim who is being told its all her fault.
July 11, 2019
Goths are not an oppressed minority…
The language on the Death Guild website explains that their choice, to use a lynching scene as their logo, was one to show solidarity and identification with marginalized people who are murdered for their lifestyle:
“Our logo, a hanged man blindfolded and swinging from the limb of an oak tree, is representative of many things. It is a rallying point for those escaping oppression for there(sic) choices of lifestyle. It is a depiction of the fate of an ignorant society. It is the darkness that so many fear as they are terrified of dying. It is a symbol of strength, the oak, a guardian of sanctuary. My roommate Cathy painted the original picture of an actual oak tree, its location is known only to her and myself.”
The choice of words suggests that they are referring to vigilante lynch mobs which rounded up and murdered people for miscegenation (race-mixing), homosexuality and the like. The problem is, goths are not an oppressed minority group like those who have been historically executed by vigilante groups for homosexuality, being transgender, being in an interracial couple, or just plain being black.
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After leaving the club on Monday upset because I have been bullied by thin, white, cis newcomers in a club where I – a 51 year old African American pansexual enby woman who has been a part of the goth scene since 1981 and a part of that club since it opened in 1993 – reflected upon what a woman named Barbara Ditz told me about how she protested the logo from the start, and how it sent a message out to people of African American heritage like myself who are in the club which is hard to miss:
“We feel oppressed and don’t have any problem appropriating Jim Crow era images that are hurtful to black people in order to express how oppressed we feel as goths and how that is just like black folks being lynched”
No. Just no.
So I post this petition and the response is just… wow, some of the comments. So culturally tone deaf, apologistic, defensive, and down right bigoted. I will try to get some screencapped and erase the names and put them in here later. Shameful.
Here is my petition. Please sign it.
https://www.change.org/p/death-guild-ask-death-guild-to-retire-the-lynching-scene-logo
