Author: Danaka Katovich

This originally appeared on Proof That I’m Alive.

A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise cancelling headphones.

It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happen stance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.

Continue reading “You Will Hear the Names of the Dead: The DNC in Chicago”

The following is from a speech given by CODEPINK co-director, Danaka Katovich, gave at Palestinian Feminist Collective’s International Working Women’s Day Vigil for Palestine on Friday March 8th.

I was three years old when CODEPINK was founded, by women I still interact with on a daily basis. So I’ve been able to hear what sort of discursive battles they had to face in the United States with other “feminist” groups in the lead up to the US invasions and occupations of the early 2000’s. Media or politicians would show pictures of women in Kabul or Baghdad wearing hijabs and insist that it was actually the US military that would bring them empowerment.

That notion is obviously, to us at least, rooted in racism, condescension, and quite frankly – misogyny. And I want to talk about the condescension part and how I feel it’s my responsibility as a feminist in the west, a part of a feminist organization in the west to throw condescension out the window, and what sort of political clarity it provides in incredibly important moments like right now.

Continue reading “We Need Feminism Free of Condescension”