Week #15 – Pride in Whistleblowing

Tags

Bradley Manning, LGBT, queer, San Francisco Pride, SF Pride, street art, whistleblowing, Wikileaks

Installed at Harvey Milk Plaza, Castro & Market

Last week, the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee rescinded the selection of military whistleblower Bradley Manning as an honorary grand marshal of this year’s parade.  According to the flood of articles about the decision-making process, the committee was pressured by LGBT military organizations to withdraw the invitation.  Manning was elected grand marshal by the SF Pride “Electoral College,” which is composed of past community grand marshals, and they are supposed to choose someone from “the community.”  So one part of the debate has centered on who is our “community”.

We in BAAQUP (which includes at least one former grand marshal) say that our community is people who follow their conscience and do not remain silent when they see war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed.  We see Manning as more worthy of being honored than the big banks and other corporations who pay to put their names and banners all over the parade.

Take action!  Tell the Pride Committee to stand up for justice.

Week #14: Congratulations, UC Berkeley!

Tags

@ucbdivest, biometric scanners, divestment, EDS, Hewlett Packard, Israel, Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, UC Berkeley

Street Cred and BAAQUP commend the UC Berkeley Student Senate for its vote Wednesday night to divest from companies profiting from Israeli occupation.  The student senators voted 11-9 to divest its funds from Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar and Cement Roadstone Holdings, and recommended that the UC Regents do so as well.

Caterpillar sells armored bulldozers to the Israeli military.  The bulldozers are frequently used to demolish Palestinian homes, in violation of international law.  One such bulldozer killed U.S. solidarity activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003.  A Hewlett Packard subsidiary sells biometric technology to the Israeli government to track the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.  Similar technology was supplied to the South African government by Polaroid and IBM, which were key targets of the U.S. divestment movement that helped to topple South African apartheid in the 1980s. 

Cement Roadstone Holdings owns 25% of Mashav Initiating and Development, parent company of Nesher Israel Cement Enterprises. Nesher provided cement for the construction of the separation wall, checkpoints, West Bank settlements and Israeli construction in the occupied territories.

The Berkeley vote was the fourth at a UC Campus in the last few months.  The UC Riverside senate passed a similar resolution a few weeks ago, but then overturned it under pressure from Zionists on campus.  A resolution at Santa Barbara was narrowly defeated last week.  The UC Irvine senate passed its resolution in November.

Street Cred members installed bus shelter posters in downtown Berkeley and at the Bancroft and Telegraph entrance to campus, congratulating the student senate for its courageous action for justice.

Week #13 – Homos Strike Back at Islamophobic Gay-Baiting

Tags

hate speech, human-rights, Islamophobia, jihad, lgbt community, middle-east, Pamela Geller, politics, religion, San Francisco, SF muni, transit

Professional Islamophobe Pamela Geller’s new campaign was specifically intended to provoke the LGBT community.

Well she ought to know that when we’re provoked, we get active.

Let’s be clear:  we abhor and condemn homophobia and transphobia wherever they exist.  We oppose fundamentalist governments from Arkansas to Saudi Arabia.  But queers will fight our own battles in our own ways in every country where we live and we will NOT be used to promote hatred, ignorance and violence.

The silence in the media and social networks about this latest outrage by Geller and her ilk make us very frightened.  She cannot be allowed to succeed in normalizing anti-Islamic hate speech on our streets and wearing down the opposition to her attacks.

Resistance is hard but it is not futile.  We will continue to act with joy and love against hate and we will triumph.

Week #12 – “Marriage Equality” in Twizzlers

Tags

gay marriage, gay rights, HRC, LGBT, marriage equality, marriage rights, queer, same-sex marriage

Installed at Telegraph and Grand in Oakland, for “First Friday”

We’re queer.  We’re here.  And we don’t want “marriage equality.”

It’s not that we have anything against people getting married, if that’s what they want.  But for us, as for many many of the queer (and straight) people we know, the issue is marginalizing in a million ways.

The people who are fighting so hard for marriage rights represent it as “the new civil rights movement.”  But the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s-1960s was about securing equal rights for everyone.  No, the Public Accommodations Act and the Voting Rights Act did not magically produce racial equality, but they did establish that everyone is equal under the law.  Marriage rights, on the other hand, are about extending unequal benefits under the law to more people.

Every benefit that is used as an argument for same-sex marriage could be and should be achieved by extending civil rights to every person living here.  Everyone should have guaranteed health care, not just people who happen to be married to people who happen to have employer-paid health insurance.  Every person should be able to live where they want, not just people who happen to be married to U.S. citizens.  Everyone should be able to have the visitors they want if they have to be in a hospital, and even if we were married, there are a lot more people we would want to be able to visit us than our spouses.  We’ve all been part of loving support communities for people who were critically ill, and we expect to do it again.  We didn’t need and don’t want any state interference in the creation of those supportive communities.

For many queers, the fight for same-sex marriage feels marginalizing in a host of ways

“Marriage equality” institutionalizes an ideal of social conformity that we want no part of.  We want to acknowledge and love and recognize and validate the range of relationships that most people have, whether we define them as “family” or “friends” or “armies of lovers.”  It’s a way of devaluing and marginalizing relationships, and people, who are seen as countercultural or based on unsanctioned forms of love.  But we don’t want the state or the church sanctioning our loves.  We want to expand the ways people can love, not further entrench archaic values that don’t work for most people (married couples, with and without kids, have been a minority of U.S. households since 2005).

Marriage rights are largely property rights – who gets your stuff when you die and how much tax do they have to pay on it?  We don’t want equality in a society that is built on such rampant inequality.  We want to tear it down.  Not so long ago, being queer meant transgressing in a host of wonderful and creative ways, built of necessity but transformed into a liberatory vision of a better way to live.

When we gain marriage rights, what will we have lost?

At Harvey Milk Plaza, Castro and Market

Press Release: Why we are changing Pamela Geller’s hate-filled bus ads

Tags

hate speech, Islamophobia, jihad, muni, Pamela Geller, San Francisco

Bay Area Art Queers Unleashing Power and Street Cred are a loose collective of artist activists with a long history of liberating public spaces and creating images that challenge attempts to control of our lives by corporations, government and the assumptions promoted by mass media.  Our work addresses an evolving series of campaigns aimed at disrupting the status quo by awakening people’s consciousness.  We are Advertising for the People.

We believe that all public spaces including public transit and should be welcoming and safe for all members of our community.  The hate-filled messages purchased by Pamela Geller’s AFDI defame and vilify Muslims and are harmful and offensive to residents and visitors in San Francisco, both Muslim and non-Muslim.
Since the City will not take action against these ads on City buses, we have.

Our goals are:

(1) To reconfigure texts and images that are harmful, inciting, misleading and dangerous.  Hate speech leads to hate actions. Anti-Muslim violence is prevalent in the United States and on the rise.

(2) To interrupt the normalization of anti-Islamic rhetoric and actions. Our art is designed to help people understand that Islamophobia and other hate speech should not go unchecked and that we have the power to disrupt these racist and hateful discourses.

(3) In the case of this most recent campaign, to identify the person who is intentionally fueling and inciting hatred in our communities.

There are plenty of quotes from the Bible that could be used to paint Jews and Christians as violent and dangerous.  There are plenty of individuals whose actions could be used to further that impression.  It’s hard to believe that pictures of Bernie Madoff or Timothy McVeigh, with words suggesting that all Jews are corporate criminals or all Christians are mass murderers, would be allowed to be displayed on City buses.  Geller’s anti-Islamic venom is no more acceptable than those misrepresentations would be.

BAAQUP was able to remix all ten of AFDI’s previous round of bus ads in August 2012

We support the first amendment and also look to The European Court of Human Rights which has recently broadened its definition of hate speech to include speech “that might be offensive to individuals or groups”.  We also appreciate the cultural shift in this country that recognizes language such as the “N” word and imagery that promotes negative stereotypes as something that is extremely sensitive and not to be paraded in public space for sensation’s sake.

As long as these advertising outrages continue to appear on our streets, we will continue to reconstitute them to reflect something more truthful, just, and ideally fabulous.

Week 11: Unmaking Hate Speech (Pamela Geller)

Tags

Aaron Sankin, hate speech, Huffington Post, Islamophobia, jihad, LGBT, Pamela Geller, queer, SF muni, street cred, transit

This work was featured in a Huffington Post article about the hate speech ads.

We have also learned that Geller is bring a new campaign in April specifically targeting the queer community.  We will respond in kind!

Week #10 – Pam Geller Hate Speech UNWELCOME in San Francisco

Tags

advertising, anti-Muslim, bus ads, hate speech, Islamophobia, Israel, jihad, Palestine, Pamela Geller, racism, SF muni, street art, street cred, transit

Geller’s original ad (top left) modified to read “I’m Pamela Geller and I spread Islamophobia. I don’t know why, but it’s a struggle for me not to.”

Pamela Geller is back in town, this time with a series of ads modeled on the ones created by the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) last month.  The CAIR ads in turn were responding to Geller’s previous series, which said, “Defeat Jihad, Support Israel” below a quote from Ayn Rand: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.”  CAIR launched the “my jihad” series to familiarize Americans with the true meaning of the often-misued term “jihad,” which means “struggling in the way of God”.

CAIR kicked off its national campaign in San Francisco in December.

Geller’s new series uses incendiary alleged quotes from various Muslims, along with their photos, to stir up anti-Islamic fervor.

When her previous series ran in San Francisco, we unwelcomed her by stamping out hate speech and remaking them to say “Defeat Racism.  Support Palestinian Right of Return.”

This time we are choosing to show Geller what it feels like to have your photo plastered on a bus next to something you may or may not have said. We hope she appreciates it.

Week #9 – For International Women’s Day

Tags

antiwar, feminism, International Women's Day, Oakland, street art, street cred, women in combat

Women in combat? I need that kind of liberation like I need a hole in the head.

On March 8, 1908, International Women’s Day was inaugurated in New York City, as part of a huge strike by garment workers, most of whom were young women and girls.  15,000 women, including middle-class women and sweatshop workers, marched through New York demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights – all of which they eventually won through collective action.

In 1961, Women Strike for Peace was born, as 50,000 women across the country marched for peace and against nuclear testing.

In 1970, the National Organization for Women organized the Women’s Strike for Equality, in which 20,000 or more marched through New York, demanding “free abortion on demand, free 24-hour childcare for all mothers and an end to discrimination against women in hiring, pay and promotions.

In 1978, 100,000 people marched on Washington to demand ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which declared that, “Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”  The ERA died an ignominious death in 1982, when it failed to be ratified by the required 38 states within 7 years of passage by Congress (it came three states short).  One of the main arguments used by the right wing to instill fear and kill the amendment was that if women were equal under the law, we might be sent into combat.

So now, women are officially allowed in combat, though in fact many have been there for years in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  But not only do women still not have guaranteed equality under the law, but states are fast and furiously curtailing the right to abortion and even contraception. And there sure isn’t free or even affordable childcare for most women.

The right to kill and torture isn’t liberation.  We don’t want women in combat, we want people of all genders to refuse to participate in wars of aggression.

At Snow Park

Week #8: Dreams Deferred

Tags

Berkeley, Islamophobia, Langston Hughes, Oakland, Palestine, police killings, street art

Langston Hughes gave voice to the frustration and rage of a generation of
African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance.  This is perhaps his best-known poem, and many know it as “A Dream Deferred,” but its actual title is “Harlem,” which pretty much speaks for itself.

The question it asks has never been more relevant than today in Oakland, where unemployment in the heavily African American neighborhood of West Oakland is up to 44% and in East Oakland, which is largely Latino and African American, it’s as high as 35%.   At least nine young African Americans have been killed by police in Oakland in the last five years.

A translation of some of Hughes’ poetry into Arabic was published by a Lebanese publisher in 2011.  We posted this English and Arabic version in Oakland and Berkeley to provoke contemplation of all the dreams deferred and denied by our government’s wars on Arabic speaking people, from Iraq to New York to our own streets.  Arabic speakers are increasingly criminalized and suspect, and as anti-Islamic sentiment gains legitimacy Arabs and Muslims area increasingly targeted for violence.

Week #7: How to End Poverty

Tags

#Occupy, billionaires, end poverty, Oxfam, street art

We read that the British anti-hunger organization, Oxfam, had released a report saying that the wealthiest 100 people in the world made enough money last year to eliminate extreme poverty in the world four times – that means a quarter of the money they made in one year could wipe out all the poverty in the world.  This is truly an astounding statistic, especially at this time when we’re seeing deep cuts to the fragile safety net that so many in this country and other countries depend on for survival.  We live in a time when scarcity is taken for granted, but the only real scarcity is of compassion.

We can’t wait for these billionaires to decide that they want to give enough of their wealth to charity to eliminate unnecessary suffering.  They won’t do it.  Most of this money came from other people’s labor.  The people have a right to it, and taxation is the answer.

This install in downtown Berkeley stayed up for a week until we replaced it with the next one. Now it’s hanging somewhere in Oakland.

The Oxfam press release calls for:

• a reversal of the trend towards more regressive forms of taxation;
• a global minimum corporation tax rate;
• measures to boost wages compared with returns available to capital;
• increased investment in free public services and safety nets.