Are women squandering our power?

Catherine Orenstein (writer, founder Op Ed Project) Twittered:

Women control 83% of consumer spending. Men control 83% of congress. Which is more powerful? If used at full potential?

I say that today corporations hold more power than the people (government). (Healthcare reform, anyone?) Thus, she who holds the purse strings has the strength. We simply have to use it.

Your thoughts? How can we use consumer spending to affect change?

White parents confronting white privilege

I just posted a compelling article on Anti-Racist Parent, written by Susan Raffo of White Noise, "a group of white parents with white children who have been meeting for two years to learn together and support each other in ending white supremacy."

So, white parents raising white children. We looked at books and blogs. We googled for magazine articles and newspaper features. We talked with our friends – white and of color – and kept coming against the same thing: there is hardly anything out there that directly talks about raising white kids to be anti-racist, to work against white privilege, to be a different flavor, an accountable and creative flavor, of white. There are resources about raising children to live in a multicultural world. There are resources about raising your children to respect difference.  There are books about nonviolent child-rearing. But really thinking about what kind of white your kid might be? It's not out there. And here's why: most of us white adults don't really understand what it is to be white ourselves. We sometimes have language about being Irish- or Italian-American, or about growing up on a farm, being Midwestern or from the mountains, but this whiteness thing? The ways in which being white affects our sense of who we are and the communities around us? We usually have no words.

My partner and I decided that if we're going to raise a white child we want to pay attention to how she becomes white and how she is white. It's the same thing as paying attention to the fact that she is a girl, that she likes to dance but isn't so into playing soccer, that she gets shy in front of lots of people she doesn't know. Each of these things is about her, and each is about the world around her. Read more...