Correspondence from Chicago Revolution Club:
“Women Are Not Bitches, Ho’s, or Punching Bags… Women Are Full Human Beings”
August 12, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The small inner city park looked pretty empty for such a nice Sunday afternoon. But the Revolution Club had promised to come there and do a scaled down version of the program at our anti-4th of July picnic. So, five of us from the Revolution Club took banners, a table and a sound system and set up in the park. We set out free samplers of Break ALL the Chains! BA on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution, loaner copies of BAsics, the BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! DVD, Revolution newspapers, invitations to the Break ALL the Chains cultural celebrations and a Proclamation we had issued.
This park is a neighborhood hangout, including for a lot of youth. Members of the Revolution Club have visited the park this summer. Last year, during the BA Everywhere Van Tour, some youth in the park had watched parts of REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
We looked strong as we all lined up with our “BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!” t-shirts on. One of us held a large banner with the "Three Strikes" quote from BA on slavery, Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow. A young woman in the Club, who had gone with Stop Patriarchy and BA Everywhere to the Warped Tour, brought her sign from that event that said:
“Women Are not Bitches, Hos, or punching bags” “Women Are Full Human Beings” revcom.us
One person from the club, well known in the park, mc’d and kicked off by explaining the revolution with these basic points:
The World Is a Horror
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
We Need Revolution and the Revolution Needs You
The MC explained that some people in the park are familiar with the revolution and know we are opposed to police brutality, the murder of Trayvon Martin and mass incarceration, but the revolution is more than that. He said that there was a strategy for revolution and that this summer, as part of carrying out that strategy, we were seeking to make serious advances. There are many ways to be part of the movement for revolution and as the revcom.us/Revolution editorial on "Summer 2014: Making Advances...Toward Revolution" made the point, there is "An Ensemble of Initiatives Not a Jumble of Initiatives." He explained that it was like an ensemble (a musical grouping that is made up of several instruments which play separately but together make a fuller richer sound then each instrument can separately). He said that the leading edge of this ensemble was the BA Everywhere campaign.
Two club members read the Proclamation that has been posted throughout the neighborhood and on a nearby newly created Revolution Wall. The MC explained that part of our ensemble is the battle against mass incarceration. The bolded sections of the Call for the October Month of Mass Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation was read by a young member of the Revolution Club holding up the Three Strikes banner. The MC read BAsics 3:22 and spoke briefly about the struggle to End Pornography and Patriarchy. He introduced the young woman holding up the sign that said “Women Are not Bitches, Ho's, or Punching Bags… Women Are Full Human Beings… revcom.us." She read a letter from a young woman going on the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014 in Texas. Then a part of a challenge around the 1000 years/$1000 project for BA Everywhere was read along with some excerpts from a prisoner about this.
At first glance, it looked like people were just hanging out and ignoring us. No one came up around us. But the loud sound system caught people’s attention, and we realized that people by cars, on benches and perched on bikes were actually listening intently.
As we ended the rally a few people came up to the table, and what ensued was a wild debate over the sound system , and in other parts of the park, around the slogans “Women Are not Bitches, Ho's, or Punching Bags,” “Women Are Full Human Beings.”
A man from the park stepped up to the mic and, talking down to the revolutionary women and to all the women, proclaimed, “I was born a pimp and I am still a pimp and I will always be a pimp.” Another man stepped up to the mic and said that any woman who dresses like a ho deserves to get treated like a ho. Revolution Club members became furious at this shit. The young woman took this on, arguing that women are queens, we come from kings and queens. She was arguing on the basis of people (in particular Black people) not degrading themselves and a narrative on history that trains people to have self-esteem based on a view of descending from African royalty.
Another revolutionary spoke to how we are not for a world with kings and queens—we are for getting rid of masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, and emancipating and liberating all of humanity.
Then a guy stepped up to the mic with a giant squirt gun saying—I will clean the women off. One of the revolutionaries was enraged and said, “I got next” and got on the loudspeaker and took on all this male chauvinist degradation. She exposed that 1 of 3 women worldwide, from the age of very young to very old, will be raped or brutalized in their lifetime, and it had nothing to do with the way they dress, including women who are covered from head to toe.
A guy in a God t-shirt came up and got into a heated exchanged with a Revolution Club member who called out how the Bible was used by those on the slave ships to justify slavery. Someone else from the club took on the Bible’s view of women. Another club member read BAsics 5:18 over the loudspeaker.
What seemed to start to changing things, including really reaching some of the women in the park, was when a male club member read the following from the sampler edition of Break ALL the Chains: Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution: “Rebelling Against 'Guy Culture,' Fighting to End All Oppression. Look at what gets promoted in the music industry—what gets supported and promoted, in hip-hop, for example: mysogyny–crude, demeaning and degrading of women; openly promoting the idea of getting yours on the back, or through the blood, of other people, get rich or die trying, I gotta get mine no matter what I gotta do; and often all wrapped up with religious obscurantism and crosses and references to nonsense in a poisonous package. And what do we hear, what’s the excuse, when people are confronted with this: Oh, I’m just...I’m just keeping it real; I’m just telling it the way it really is down here.
"Keeping it real, my ass. You are helping to keep it going the way it is.”
Although none of them got on the microphone, some of the women in the park got mad at how the men who stepped to the mic were not taking seriously what the revolutionaries were talking about. There were women who challenged the people who called women bitches and ho's, saying how would you feel if someone talked about your mother or sister or daughter that way. As this scene wound down a number of women gave us their contact information and got the sampler. A few of the guys, including at least one who had put out ugly shit on the mic, got the sampler too. One young man took a stack of BAsics 3:22 palm cards to distribute and challenged a friend, saying, “You need this!”
Before we left the park we talked on the loudspeaker about the Neighborhood Patrols to Stop Police Brutality. We read the Points of Discipline for the patrols and passed them out to the crowd.
On the way home Revolution Club members grappled with how to sum this up. We all felt that it was good that all this got stirred up even though a lot of ugly stuff came out. One person characterized it as bringing up sludge from the bottom of a river that just sits there all the time and doesn’t get challenged. One of our objectives for our Summer in the City initiative in this community is to bring forward a different and contending morality. We felt that this rally was a small step in that direction. We agreed that it is vitally important that these fundamental questions of what kind of society and what kind of revolution are we talking about and fighting for gets posed and debated out among the masses. As it says in the Summer 2014 editorial:
We cannot build a revolutionary movement off to the side of what is going on in society–that just won’t cut it. Revolutions are built by going in to the heart of the most intense contradictions in society, leading people to stand up and politically battle back against that...putting that resistance in the context of a way and a strategy to change the whole world through revolution...and leading people to change themselves as they change the world.
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