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A morning rally at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has turned into what organizers are calling an “open and soft occupation” of the university’s Social Sciences Tower.
“Students and community supporters,” a post on the group’s blog declared, “are outraged over soaring tuition, budget cuts, skyrocketing administrative salaries, mounting student debt, attacks on cultural diversity groups on campus, and blatant disregard for workers’ rights across the nation. In light of recent student and worker uprisings around the world, students in the Twin Cities are no longer willing to bear the burdens of the economic crisis while the rich only get richer. Inspired by the actions of students at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Madison, and other campuses around the state, U of M students are standing up against injustices in their own state and their own university.”
The U of M occupiers are allowing other members of the campus community unconstrained access to the Social Sciences Tower, and “planning specific events for the space in order to benefit the entire community.” The building is scheduled to close at 11 pm local time, however, and it is not clear whether university administrators will try to remove them at that time.
As I noted in an earlier post, some activists have declared this Thursday to be a day of walkouts, occupations, and strikes nationwide. It seems that Thursday came early to Minneapolis-St. Paul this week.
Tuesday Morning Update | This tweet just came in from the @umnsolidarity account: “Hey everybody, the doors of the Social Sciences Building are open and Day 2 of the occupation has begun. Come on down!”
Looks like they made it through the night.
Second Update | The occupiers have released a list of demands.
Video footage shot in Fortnum & Mason’s Saturday while the store was being occupied by UK Uncut protesters appears to show police asking activists to remain inside the store, and assuring them that they will be allowed to disperse peacefully once outside. The protesters were later arrested en masse as they left the premises.
Of 201 arrests made in connection with Saturday’s demonstrations, at least 138 came at the Fortnum & Mason’s occupation, despite the fact that police and store officials agree that property damage at the action was minimal and violent disruption to the store’s operations non-existent. Police made few arrests at the far more aggressive “black bloc” actions that day, in some cases being videotaped standing by as masked protesters vandalized shops and offices.
March has already seen two days of national student action this month. On the 2nd, students at dozens of college campuses from coast to coast staged co-ordinated budget protests. On the 11th, high schoolers in more than twenty states walked out of classes in support of their teachers and in solidarity with demonstrators in Wisconsin.
On Thursday, the last day of March, there may be another — the folks at Defend Public Education, one of the big boosters of the March 2 day of action, are calling for a day of walkouts and strikes on March 31.
I’ll have more on those plans as the week progresses. In the meantime, however, some students and other activists in New York are planning to get a jump on Thursday’s actions by staging a Wisconsin-style state capitol occupation in Albany beginning on Wednesday the 30th.
Stay tuned…
Yesterday this site reached a milestone of sorts, registering its 500,000th pageview. It took almost three years to get there, though most of that traffic came in the last few months. (If present trends continue, we’ll rack up our millionth hit sometime in late summer or early fall of this year.)
Those numbers are still small compared to the big kids of the blogosphere, but you all have allowed Student Activism to break some significant stories and draw important attention to others. You’ve also helped to popularize a new model for blogging in the field of student organizing — this beat is a lot less lonely than it was in the spring of 2008.
I’m going to be rolling out some new features for the site this week, so keep checking in. And thanks for all your support!
The Good Men Project is something I’ve been vaguely meaning to learn more about recently. Some prominent feminist men (and women) have been writing for them, and they’ve gotten some good buzz from other folks I respect. So I followed them on Twitter a few days ago, and recently clicked through to a piece on their site for the first time.
Um, wow.
It’s a map of the countries of the world, color-coded by penis size, under the headline “Who Has the Biggest Penises in the World?”
A few things about this map.
First, it’s bullshit. I’ve done a spot check on about a dozen of the (vaguely identified) national data sources, and literally none of them have panned out. Some are completely fictitious, others are real people or organizations with no connection to this kind of work, still others combine the names of actual studies with made-up data. (None of this should be surprising, by the way, as the original compiler of the stats makes his living selling penis enlargement equipment and home laser hair restoration devices.)
Second, it’s racist bullshit. The map’s “data” portrays Africans and Latins as big, Asians as small, and white folks are somewhere in between. This isn’t necessarily racist in and of itself — some stereotypes are true, after all, and this may be one of them — but remember that the numbers in this map are made up. The folks who compiled it aren’t testing racial stereotypes against scientific research, they’re propagating them via fiction that masquerades as fact. And the implicit racism in the map is made explicit in the article it cites as the source for its data, which claims that “in Africa, where the temperature reaches high levels, people adapt to the conditions and their limbs are more slender, elongated, their outward growths have a greater area, and this applies to their lips, nose, ears, fingers, palms, soles, and also for men [sic] penis.”
That’s right. Black guys — according to the Good Men Project’s source — have big lips and big schlongs because they come from the steamy tropics. (Never mind that the site’s spurious data portrays the men of India, one of the world’s hottest countries, as having among the world’s smallest penises. Consistency has never been the “scientific” racist’s strong suit.)
Now, I know the Good Men Project doesn’t claim to be progressive, or feminist, or anti-racist. But as I noted above, they’ve signed up some biggish names in the feminist blogosphere to write for them recently, and they’re clearly making a play to be seen as a serious voice in contemporary discussions of gender politics.
This ain’t the way to go about it.
Update | Hugo Schwyzer, a male feminist columnist for the Good Men Project, responds on Twitter: “Sigh. It wasn’t the greatest choice to run the penis map. Hard to believe anyone takes it seriously tho.”
A couple of things in response. First, some folks clearly are taking it seriously, as a look at the comments thread at GMP shows. When researching this post, I found plenty of examples all over the net of people earnestly debating the stats’ validity.
Second, and more to the point, as a joke … it’s a racist joke. Again, just look at the comments at GMP: “I cannot help but notice that the guys with the smallest dicks own most of the world and it’s weapons/resources (at least for the moment). The guys with the biggest peckers are still waiting to find out about toilet paper and indoor plumbing.”
Second Update | The Good Men Project has linked to this post, noting my criticism of the data while maintaining that they haven’t seen proof of the map’s fictitiousness, so here are a few examples: [examples snipped].
Third Update | Now the GMP is admitting the map is fake, and linking to the sites I pointed out in my original piece as evidence, but they’ve pulled the link to this post.
They’re happy to give traffic to a penis-enlargement scammer, in other words, but they won’t give credit to an anti-racist feminist critic who pointed out their error. Cute.
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