Speech and its Consequences

Boy, Howdy!  I have a lot to blog about!  I should have taken some time yesterday; but my day was insane, and then it was over.  I will have to write yet more tonight, I think.

My friend Luz had a blog called "She Flies with Her Own Wings".  This one should be called something like, "She blogs with a tuna sandwich in one hand". 

Yesterday was the dreaded annual fundraising luncheon.  As I predicted, Laura Guerrero brought the house down. 

 Here she is, being nervous and doing last-minute pronunciation mark-ups instead of eating.  The student speaker is almost always too nervous to eat.  Sometimes, depending on the speaker, I am also too nervous to eat.  Not this time. I know this lady.  

And, who wouldn't be nervous?  There was quite a crowd.  If you were giving your first-ever speech?  And if it were in a language that you were just learning? 

And of course, she totally nailed it.  Great microphone control as well.  We had done a sound-check before the guests arrived, but seven-foot-something Mark Eaton spoke right before she did, so she had to grab the thing and pull it back down.

OK, Laura, you can relax now. Even if you don't bother with the chicken salad, you really ought to try this chocolate cake...  Here she is relaxing afterward with Team Guerrero-Cortez.  Then the reporters attacked, so Laura is the darling of the Spanish-speaking media today. 

And the speech with negative consequences?

*****

ANGRY LETTER TO Eurocentricity
FUCK YOU! Yes F U C K YOU for making me feel this way. For reminding me every single day how you colonized my people, this land, the ethnic-biological make up of my skin and the skin of others who claim superiority. FUCK YOU! Fuck your institutions of higher learning that are fucking with my HEAD, my intellect, and the vivid experience of my lived reality. FUCK YOU for posing myself doubt, politics, bureaucracy in the ivory tower. THIS IS WHY I choose to continue to connect top MY community, to my BARRIO, the GHETTONESS YOU CREATED and has resulted in my anguish and resistance against YOU. FUCK You white supremacy and white privilege. FUCK YOU male patriarchy and machismo. You are MONSANTO, NAFTA, FREE TRADE, WHITENESS, RACISM, RAPIST of CULTURE, patriarch embodied in western literature, western foods colonizing and patenting biodiversity and humanness. EUGENICS, westerns Eurocentric through and SCIENCE. FUCK YOU, and please note, I have chosen to fight you, until the day I die, because I’ve had it. And even if you have kidnapped me and you are holding me captive in graduate school (YOUR INSTITUTION) I will fight you, even if all I can spit at you with my sharp tongue and fire blood is FUCK YOU!
 no oppologies here, just ANGER

***

This is a Facebook rant by one of the graduate students in the College of Education at the U.  The reverse racism there is so bad that my white coworker who is enrolled in the program actually feels physically unsafe.  She got tired of feeling like she needed to apologize for being Czech.  She tried to point out that there are many kinds of oppression; and that her family experienced WW II, Communism and then the Velvet Revolution. Let's just say that didn't go down well.  Discussing political oppression would actually require knowledge of history.  Screaming about racism is so much more gratifying, and any ignoramus can do it. 

If I could say anything to the writer of this rant, it would be;

1.  I agree with you about some if it.  But screaming, "Fuck you!" at it doesn't make it go away. I wish I could just scream, "Fuck you!" at a BUNCH of stuff and make it go away.  If only. 

2.  No one is holding you hostage in graduate school.  Last time I checked, all you have to do to get sprung from that prison cell is to stop paying tuition.

3.  My co-worker is so disgusted that she has decided to leave the university.  She has been offered a full ride at University of Arizona, Flagstaff.  One of the best linguistics programs in the country. She will have a fantastic time down there, since her primary interest is language revitalization.  We were poring over her Navajo textbook late last night.  And so I will lose her at the end of June.  First, Anne, now Martina.

Question is, dear ranter, did this strike a death-blow to Monsanto?