H-Town

Houston, Texas at its finest

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Mic Check!

Ale, a dear friend and former classmate of mine, and I decided to get together to have awesome conversations about our goals, accomplishments, and deconstruct the oppressions and nonsense all around us. Please join us in our mock podcast rehearsal, a pilot of sort, if you will, in which Ale and I share things we're proud we did recently, discuss the film The Intern, and make goals for ourselves. powered by podcast garden
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Systemic Violence

The Rice Hillel held an event recently where they brought in several IDF soldiers to talk about their diverse experiences and backgrounds. In response, the Rice Left walked out in the middle of their event. I wasn't sure how I felt about the event itself when I first read about it in my college's announcements email. I thought it was weird to have soldiers talk to us all the way in the U.S., and it seemed fishy as a political and politicized event, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what is so wrong with it. After reading the Rice Thresher article about the event and walkout, I reflected on the issue of systemic violence and realized what the problem is: individual IDF soldiers' experiences and stories cannot account for state-sanctioned systemic violence. Recall all the Black lives we lost and continue to lose due to state brutality in the U.S., for example in cases where police officers are the killers. Would it suffice for communities to meet and greet several polic
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Collective Solidarity vs. Individual Comfort

A few weeks ago in my seminar, we read a piece by Andrea Smith called "The Problem with 'Privilege" . Directed at activists and people who are engaged in grassroots work, Smith calls for more focus on collective action to actually dismantle oppressions as opposed to individual "confessing" of privileges in so-called safe spaces. What Smith meant by this is that activists claim and try to create their spaces as safe spaces so that people feel comfortable being there, but no space is ever really free of oppressions. Instead, Smith argues that it serves all of us better if we acknowledge that every space already has people who can oppress and work to dismantle those systems. Moreover, in these safe spaces there are people who confess their privileges and then people who either have zero or few privileges to confess. Privileged people, once again, get to take up space by talking about acknowledging their privileges. Furthermore, this act individualizes oppression by
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