THIRTY (or so) SMALL REASONS
WHY NIKKI CRAFT CANNOT BE A WHITE SUPREMACIST(!!)*
by Nikki Craft

Oh I know. Jennifer McLune and "Divine Purpose" and all their friends and allies are all in a raging fit typing in all capital letters, ranting with multiple exclamation marks that there is NO way you can prove you are NOT!! a white supremacist; and it doesn't matter what you have EVER done in your whole life. It DOESN'T matter. Nothing trumps their accusation that you are one. But I would disagree.

I'm going to use this page as place where I can list these projects, letters, articles, events I have taken part in or created since the early years of my activism as far back as when I was 19 years old, and even going back to when I was in Jr. High School and becoming aware of the insidiousness of racism as I became strongly aware of, and upset by prejudice, discrimination and racism, institutionalized and not, that caused me to work directly against white supremacy my whole life: The powerful kind of white supremacy--white male supremacy. Except for one article Jennifer wrote years ago, from what I can tell these women don't even touch on that and I don't understand why. They never mention white men, only "white racist radical feminists," (the easiest targets for those who can't manage to go up against the really powerful) oh and black men ...and did I say black men? (for instance rap without touching the white very male power structure that is behind the music industry.) ... when they are doing inventory of oppressors.

I will get in lots of trouble for doing so, :) but I will venture to say here that what I have done is way more than most, perhaps even some of you reading this. How many of you can say you have risked your life to fight institutional white supremacy? I doubt Milla can (*****ADD Link.), that's for sure. I have on several occasions and I have made many personal sacrifices to challenge white supremacy, used resources and years of my life and incorporated intentional actions and anti-racist political statements throughout my life's work.

I'm going to list some of those one by one here on an ongoing basis as I have time to work on it and can remember these stories. I know some will object to the inclusion of certain items in the listing, which is fine. But it's not your list. It's mine. Now I'm not saying any one item is any big deal, some are petty against such horrible allegations as have been made against me. However, piled on top of one another these examples will tell a story and most likely reveal to any reasonable reader that yes I do have a little bit of an understanding of the issue of discrimination and race. I'm sixty years old now besides in a couple of articles I've never written publicly about much of this, except for a few on lists perhaps, so understand I am not writing this to brag or to get credit, but it is being published here for the specific reason cited previously. One activist recently claimed that by documenting these instances that I was trying to assert that I was a leader in the anti-racist movement. No I am not. I have never considered myself anyone but an activist who incorporated racism throughout all my activism. However I have never been, nor do I ever intend to be, included in the leadership of the anti-racism movement. This list is being compiled to counter these accusations and to document my own activism and for no other reason.

1. In my late teens I went on a blind "date" with another woman and two horribly racist, sexist hateful men. Ironically we went to see Deep Throat at the neighborhood drive in. After the "date" they were just driving aimlessly and we were all drinking and we ended up in front of Fair Park in Dallas. The strip was lined with bars with several blocks of hundreds of drunk people and not one white person in view. It was probably about midnight. It was in the middle of the night. I was a little drunk, but not too drunk to know what was going on. As we approached a light thru the glare of our car lights from the center of the backseat, leaning forward, I saw in front of us a black family with several children going across the street using the crosswalk. This clod revved his car and screeched forward as if he would plow thru them then slammed on his breaks. The parents scurried to protect their children and the idiot males in the car laughed and ridiculed them. I grabbed the handle of the door and jumped out. I was wearing a dress and heeled shoes with hose. I hit the street hard with the car taking off from the light. I had just jumped out of a car that had just attempted to run down a black family and I would rather risk whatever I faced on the street that night than be in the car one more minute with those racists jerks. These men who I extricated myself from were for real white supremacists.

2. Mohawks Struggle for Self-Determination: The Golf Green as Metaphor for White Dominant Culture: I wrote this article in Fall, 1990 in Bellingham Washington. The article goes against everything white supremacy stands for and is protected by. I don't believe a racist white supremacist could have even written this article because the observations documented here go so much against the grain of it. If such a person could have written it, they certainly would not have. I wrote: "Today, I and other white Americans are starting to learn some of what Native Peoples have historically endured and are still undergoing in the grip of greedy, white imperialists. And even though I have chosen to examine and practice the tenets of nonviolent resistance for two decades as a means of bringing about political change, I would no more preach pacifism to the Native American and Mohawk Indians than I would to Blacks in South Africa, or to Nicaraguans in Central America, or to the embattled Palestinian resistants on the west bank Gaza strip — or to women facing gender warfare and terrorism everywhere." --Nikki Craft, 1990.

3. Letter to Focus on the Family about Racism in their publication (1989). This was an unprinted letter and had never been read by anyone but me until just recently.

4. In the decades that I organized against pornography I took on Bob Guccioni and Larry Flynt for many years over their misogyny and racism. Racism was always one of the main priorities of our actions. I've been arrested probably approx. 20 times total doing actions against these two pornographers.

5. Since I was 19 I have been against every US invasion of another country including Iraq after 9.11. I'm aggressively anti-imperialism. During the Vietnam war I got single handedly got 6,000 signatures on the Hatfield McGovern amendment to end the Viet Nam war. While in school at U.T. Austin I attended anti-war demonstrations in South Texas at doing demonstrations with a very radical street theatre troupe that worked directly with Jane Fonda. I have actively protested and organized against every war including demonstrations in San Francisco to protest the first invasion of Iraq. Here's an extensive website I did, NO BLOOD FOR OIL: US OUT OF AFGHANISTAN, at the time of the second invasion. It took me over a month of night and day work. Fighting US invasions of other countries counters white supremacy always. Here's the Dismember Male Imperialism action we did just to pass some time one holiday when my mom visited me in Lansing Michigan. Notice the penis is white, well pink. I also wrote an article called "Rape and Violence Against Women Have Always Been Terrorism: Are We So Keen To Go to War for All Women? A CALL ON FEMINISTS TO PROTEST THE WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN". I included in this article information about racist policies against women world wide and encouraged a predominately white feminist movement to protest the invasion of Afghanistan. That works directly against white supremacy.

6. Every one of the beauty pageant protests we did from the mid 1970s until 1990 challenged "corporate defined white male beauty standards". It was a repetitive theme over ten years with racism always being on the forefront. Here's my tribute to the white beauty standard in the video below. The statement against the racism in the pageant is obvious. Besides all the the white primping/saluting "beauties" the globe which was red, white and blue, had Nestles stickers all over it to protest black children dying for Nestles profits. Notice the five white dicks on top of the globe. The interview with De Clarke shows the politics around class and race that was always in our protests, intentionally so.

Myth California 1982 to 1983

7. Oh yeah, and when I was 14 or 15 I wrote a poem. It was inspired after I was on a bus and saw a black man just behind the bus running after it took off to try to get on it. He was hitting on the back of the bus and the driver knew he was running after it. And the bus driver was going just slow enough where the man chasing the bus hoped he could catch it so he kept running. The bus driver knew what he was doing and I could see him looking in his rearview mirror. I did identify this as intentional humiliation (racist sadism tho I did not know the word) at the time and I identified with the man and was very upset, and yes I have cried over remembering that incident in the past. At the time I was very upset about it but I was only a child and could not/did not intervene. From my other example at Fair Park (*****CURRENTLY #1) it should be apparent that I have intervened since that time however and on more than that occasion. This bus incident tho I could not act at that time caused me to write the following poem.

I'm a little embarrassed by this poem, but since this is all about coming clean, right, I may as well include it. (I cannot believe I'm publishing this on the internet. ;) ) [I just got an email from a guy who said it was racist of me to even write this poem. Again I wrote it when I was 14 or 15.]

My poem was called "Mommy".

Mommy can you tell me
why I was ever born
into this world of prejudice
into this world of scorn.

Mommy can you tell me why
people look with hate filled eyes
and when we're walking down the street
eye to eye ours and theirs never meet.

Mommy can you tell me why
they yell and call us dirty names
and drag their kids in off the streets
if we're playing games.

Mommy can you tell me
why they killed daddy
why daddy will never be back.
Mommy can you tell me why
Why my skin is black.

8. Then there something else I'm a little embarrassed to mention here, but it's on topic so I will include it. I want to put my "Mommy" poem into a particular time frame as well. It was the mid 1960s and there were still "white" and "colored" drinking fountains at Fair Park at that time, and it was upsetting to me to see them. They were not in use and the water didn't even come out of the fountains, but I can remember one time when I was probably 19 or 20 and on drugs, perhaps acid, trying to find someone to complain to about them so they would remove them and how shameful it was that they had left them there all those years. There was no one I could find in that area of the fairgrounds (my walking capabilities admittedly limited) but I did look for someone in charge for quite a while and talked to everyone coming and going from the bathrooms about the injustices about that and racism in general. This is a petty thing, but chasing around Fair Park trying to demand to anyone who would listen to get the segregated drinking fountains out of there, in retrospect, should count for at least something so I make it number 7 on my list.

9. When I did the Kitty Genovese Women's Project I made sure that I included upfront in that project as strong as possible a statement against racism as I was capable of writing. Here's something that I carefully researched and wrote when I was 27 years old. It began like this:

"This project would not be complete without an open acknowledgement of the racism that pervades the American criminal justice system, particularly with respect to rape.

"Since our judicial system is based on a discriminatory application of the law, this list will contain a disproportionately large percentage of minority and low income males. In a classist racist society, the people lowest on the ladder of privilege are first to be punished--and usually overly punished--while white middle class and upper class males often have seeming immunity.

"There are many myths about rape. One of the more persistent myths is that most rapists are black men who attack white women. The injustice of this racial "myth" was called to national attention as long ago as the infamous Scottsboro trial. (and it continues ... in "Rape and Racism" Part I & Part II ~~Kitty Genovese Women's Project, International Women's Day 1977

10. Oh, then there was the time when we were in Dallas going to buy an xmas tree. I was maybe, i think, about 16, but not sure about this. I might have been younger. Just can't remember the timing of when it happened. Oh, but i do know how to tell because i think Mart had just opened up in Dallas, so whenever that was. My grandmother and I were out in the car while my father ran in to buy a tree. My grandmother was an open and hateful racist from Alabama on my father's side who used to snarl about "niggers". So I more than knew where she stood on the subject when this occasion arose. My grandma was furious because my father was buying our tree at a store where "niggras" shopped. Oh yeah and she was against KMART too because they broke the blue laws and opened on Sunday, "the day of the lord." So I was trying to let her know it was going to be ok to get the tree there and she was getting worked up and breathless. My grandmother probably said something like she couldn't stand to be around them. I said something or other in their defense. "Well," she asked me,"Would you marry one?" And I swear I said this. I said, "Well grandma I'm not going to get married, but if I was, and if I loved one (sic), then yeah I would marry one(sic)." I was by the window and she was in the middle and we were close when I said it and she was in my face with her face all puckered up and said, "But what about the children?" And I looked at her and I said, "Well, what about them? I don't know what you mean." She said "they're ugly. they'd be "half-breeds". I shut up then cause I couldn't have any idea of what that was or what was so bad about it. It would be quite a bit later before I would be able to understand what she was doing with that one. And I used that incident as a reference point to myself about the depth or racism of white people. I confronted all my "redneck" relatives about their racism all throughout my life and i can tell you I have made more than one family reunion and trip very miserable for them and everyone else there.

11. (This is text written elsewhere and just copied here for now.) Nikki twenty something with a little stray puppy, spring 1977... haha lest you think i look a little too quaint in this photo, i just got to thinking i better explain that vase in the forefront is one that I lifted out a Zales jewelry store window during a riot in downtown dallas one saturday where i was one of very few whites protesting the protection of a dallas cop after he had killed one mexican american boy then a short time later a young african american boy, both under questionable circumstances, without any punishment or very minor, can't remember which. that day three police cars were turned over in front of the police station and lit on fire by the crowd and every huge window in downtown dallas on both sides of the street all the way from the north side to the south side down Main and Elm (i think it was) by where kennedy was assassinated were broken out and i was at the front of the running crowd with that thick glass falling all around and people bleeding with massive wounds all over the streets. And tho i didn't break out these huge windows I was there to make my statement of protest against the dallas police racist policies and I was plenty close enough to vouch for the fact that there's not any more powerful statement of disgust at such corrupt police powers so as to cause muti-millions of dollars of damage to the city resources. That was the mid 1970s. Shortly after that, only weeks later, I was present at another riot where I was one of only a few white people present. (I have another more thorough written version of the riot somewhere and I will that here eventually instead of what i have as a placeholder for now.)

12. In approx 1976 the city of Dallas passed an unconstitutional law that allowed the police to harass prostitutes in this particular area in Oak Lawn, and I got so mad about it I organized a "Loiter-In" and turned out 3,000 people on the streets one night and the city was pressured into overturning the law as unconstitutional. Our statement, which I essentially wrote, read:

As Dallas area feminists we do hereby submit this statement of support and solidarity for our sisters who are prostitutes. Even though the women distributing this leaflet do not necessarily agree with the politics of prostitution.... Prostitution will flourish as long as sexism, racism and capitalism exist and no band-aid city ordinance will stop pit. Prostitution is the result of the economic and social inferiority of women... [and will exist] until more meaningful work is provided for all womankind other than selling herself sexually as a means of existence and is a more rational and humane alternative to prostitution.

I worked with several black women at that time and in fact the law could have effected them disproportionately because of the area. Organizing to help black prostitutes overturn a discriminatory and unjust law back in 1976 was working directly against white supremacy. Yep I did that.

13. My first anti-rape project was W.A.S.P. Women Armed for Self Protection. We advocated for women learning to use guns for self defense. Our first statement read, "We are W.A.S.P. We are a small group of women growing stronger every day. WE ARE OUTRAGED. (I can remember at the time it being such a big deal that we would dare capitalize the last sentence. :) Our statement of purpose included this:

We are outraged at the discriminatory application of the law, in that a disproportionately large percentage of minority and low income males are prosecuted while white, middle and upper income males often have seeming immunity. [This goes against the grain of white male supremacy about as much as one can go up against it.]

Our first advocacy case came through the local rape crisis center where I volunteered. She was a black woman who was raped by a white man who burned her across the chest with cigarettes and rammed a flare up her rectum and forced her to say "It feels good master." and left her for dead. He said he would do it "to any black bitch [he] could get his hands on". He admitted in court burning her with the cigarettes and leaving her with the flare inside her. He walked. Our statement, which I essentially wrote, read:

PC is a white male who is employed at ____ Railroad. He resides at _Address_. He was brought to trial on _date_ charges with the rape of _victims name_, a black female, and found NOT GUILTY by an all white jury of his peers. W.A.S.P. believes PC to be a menace to all women based on complaints from black women in our community and other women who were present at the trial. ... It is further our belief that racist, sexist, and social prejudices of the jury may have made objective analysis of the evidence impossible. In this case, as in most rape cases, the victim is on trial and judgment is passed on her. ... WASP recognizes that whether it is a result of economic survival or simply out of choice, some of our sisters will turn to prostitution. We demand that society recognize that by the very nature of their jobs these women are likely to be victimized. WASP demands that these women be given equal protection under our laws. __Victim's Name_ is black and has one conviction of prostitution and a record of treatment for barbiturate abuse. The officer who arrested, did so almost in her behalf. He testified he knew the "street women" in that area and he had not seen _Victim's Name_ there before or after the night of her first arrest. However, the fact that she may have been a prostitute is not the issue. The issue is that this enabled _Rapists Name_ to walk away from the court room cleared of all charges.

For a twenty something I was doing my best to keep a very broad spectrum of political issues in focus and the function and influence of racism on any situation was and has been something I have always worked hard to understand and make a priority. One good thing that came about from that action is that we passed out hundreds of leaflets and the rapist did get fired from a job he had had for many years. His employer had never heard about the arrest and was only finding out after the trial through our leaflets since neither arrest and apparently coverage of the trial did not appear in either newspaper.

So there is at least one situation where my organizing directly caused a white man--a rapist would-be murderer-some fairly serious harm and perhaps benefited a black woman some and that certainly challenges white supremacy. I also got my first death threat from that perpetrator that left her for dead. It was left on the rape crisis center answering machine the day after the trial. They said it was very scary, but I never heard it. He said to tell the "bitch on the little honda with the helmet that he was going to kill [me]". It was a bit of a concern for me because every night I had to ride home and go down a busy street that ran in front of his house and me on a little Honda 100 was quite identifiable He could have even identified from his house by the sound of the Honda, and I kept very late, wild hours at that time so I was on the streets in the middle of the night often, with no one else on the streets. Oh yeah and now that I'm talking about the helmet I want to add that walking from the trial out of the court house onto the courtyard I was so angry that he got off I threw my Bell helmet down on the ground so hard that it bounced up almost to the second story window and I cracked it. Also this reminds me to say that when the rapist was walking into the court room my boyfriend at the time, Robert, got his photograph when he walked by without him knowing it and we put the photo at the top of the leaflet along with a court room drawing that Robert did while sitting in the trial. Oh and I'm also just now noticing what the leaflet begins with: The headline reads: "RAPIST? What would have happened if _Rapists name_ had been black and _Victims's name_ had been white?" Racism could not have been placed more in the focal point of this action and I did that.

14. When I am watching FOX, MSNBC and CNN I know I am in enemy territory. My main news sources are Free Speech TV and Link TV--"Link the the World." and other alternative sources. I go out of my way, besides monitoring the cable news, to expose myself to media sources that will explicitly challenge all forms of power, but especially classism and racism.

15. Since 1990 I have actively supported and defended the rights of the Palestinians and I align with Jews Against Zionism.

16. Spent a great deal of time putting together this Mail Order Brides and the Abuse of Immigrant Women website with animations and extensive footnotes that took weeks for me to create including the animations for "Big Bad Chinese Mama".

17. (Unfinished.) add doing activism i give up so much privilege on a daily basis due to my full time activism that I don't have to account about what little i might have left to anybody.

18. Fighting against capitalism and multi-national corporations IS fighting white supremacy. I have organized against and been arrested for protesting at several nuclear power demonstrations. I have organized against McDonalds and done an anti-McDonalds website against them (use URL). In the context of organizing Michael Vick associate Boycotts of some of the most powerful corporate conglomerates--all representative of white supremacy--like Viacom, Pepsi, Nike ____add other corporations___________________ I have called out the racism of the Humane Society of the United States, the largest, wealthiest and most powerful animals rights organizations in the world.

19. (write about) what I've done on lists on the internet to challenge racism including CATWa (LINK) and anti-muslim racism after 9.11 on dignity. (Unfinished section.)

20. Decades ago I rejected Thanksgiving and for the last ten years I have wished friends and family "Happy U.S. Imperialism Day" as my only greeting. In the 1970s my mom started a new tradition in our family of going on long walks on Thanksgiving and sitting down along the way and eating fruits. Many years we have eaten at a vegan temple on Thanksgiving. In the 1970s I was reading radical Native American literature in the form of direct releases. I educated myself about what the Bureau of Indian Affairs was doing and why there would be militant actions against it and about Wounded Knee and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and I have never once sided with the BIA. Not too many white supremacists have had these priorities.

21. In the 1970s in Dallas I protested in front of Safeway stores with the Farm Workers for months and didn't eat lettuce for years.

22. I was outspoken about supporting the Oakland Black Panther Party in the early 1970s in Dallas Texas which was fairly rare and certainly not very many white supremacists were not doing it.

23. I support dominant countries reimbursing non-dominant countries for destroying the world. And I knew many years ago when they first started talking about regulating countries emissions and pollution, was this a decade ago?, that it would be unfair to hold the countries that had not destroyed the earth and air and water to the same restrictions as the ones that had. I knew it the first time I heard it. This is a serious challenge to white privilege and it is finally being seriously confronted at the Copenhagen 2009 Cop15.

24. Since the 1980s I have rejected the term "third world country" and for a large part of that time have called these countries non-dominant instead. No one had to tell me to do this. There is probably a better word/concept but I don't know it. I just knew that third world country did not work. Coming to these conclusions does not reflect a white supremacist way of thinking.

25. The fact that I can make this list with all these examples from my life illustrates that I do not think like a white supremacist. I do not arrive at my conclusions at all from that perspective. (THIS MIGHT BE A DUPLICATE)

26. UNFINISHED. Will be added soon.

27. Because many of the general letters I wrote on all kinds of topics for four decades have included discussion about racism and prejudice. Here's once example: A letter I wrote in 1988 against a racist, pro-technology ad from the American Society of Civil Engineers Public Communications

28. I attended demonstrations about and was outspoken and organized against the FBI's racist and fascist Cointelpro for many years beginning in the late 1970s until the mid 1980s.

29. Because I'm not a "RACIST WHITE SUPREMACIST!!" just because some black woman happens to say I am; who has based her/their whole case on a fabricated accusation where she lied about circumstances three years ago and has yet to apologize or be accountable for that to this day.

30. I have never ever considered working for the Central Intelligence Agency in any form or fashion. However Jennifer McLune , the woman who is accusing me of being a white supremacist, did. What's that about? In July, 2009 she was scheduled to report for a job interview at their Headquarters in Washingon D.C. This is substantiated in an email exchange where, when asked why she would do such an interview, she replied, "WHY NOT? They are hiring librarians. ... it's a government job. great benefits. it's just an interview" Did she go on the interview? She claimed the next day that she did not show up at the interview, but I don't know if she did or not. Did the CIA specifically run those ads for librarians to recruit her? I don't know that either. No one does. But any peripheral events beyond the fact that she was going on the interview is not relevant to this writing. What is relevant is that by her own definition of what a white supremacist is that applying for a job at the would have to be the most white supremacist act there could ever be in my opinion. Here's _what's wrong_ with any activist having any interaction with the CIA, even a friendly phone call. What does this mean to other activists and who can be unknowingly jeopardized? Why not have anything to do with the CIA? Because the C.I.A. has been the perpetrator of genocide against people of color from the streets of New York to Los Angeles, from Guatemala to Afghanistan and Iraq freely using invasions, bombings, overthrowing governments, occupations, suppressing movements for social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting elections, manipulating labor unions, manufacturing "news", economic and political sanctions, death squads, torture, biological warfare, depleted uranium, drug trafficking and mercenaries. They are the most powerful White Supremacist force on the planet and that's what's wrong with political activists cooperating with them at any level; or even thinking about it; or even asking why not about cooperating with them.

After reading this, and other associated materials, I hope some readers may understand better why I was so irritated to be being traipsed after by young women who use the words "racist" and "white supremacist" as name calling and so sloppily as to make these words meaningless. That's a shame. They will be the ones who are to hold me accountable where I will take them seriously with their accusations of me being a white supremacist? I don't think so.

*White supremacy (n.) a doctrine based on a belief in the inherent superiority of the white race over other races and the correlative necessity for the subordination of nonwhites to whites in relationships.

**(This is the temporary working title of this piece. I don't know what I will title it when it's done. The title has just changed from "Twenty Reasons" to "Thirty Reasons" and will probably go higher. I also don't know how many instances I will be able to recall. I will also eventually probably change the order to chronological before I officially complete the list. In other words this document is currently a work in process and should be viewed as such. Feedback welcomed.)

ADDENDUM

31. Happy US Imperialism, Genocide and Murdered Roasted Turkey Day! Collaboration with Michael J. Sliwa, Karen Sliwa (Puritan, left) and Nikki Craft.