Women of color cannot and should not wait to keep a social movement alive that is in defense of ourselves and our daughters. History and contemporary reality has consistently shown all of us that hardly anyone will speak on behalf of us, in defense of us, and/or for us but ourselves. It is based on this, that I made NO! The Rape Documentary.

In the Spirit of so many Diasporic African, Latin, Asian, Indigienous, Arab, Pacific Islander women, my Sistren at Document the Silence have organized their second national campaign to raise awareness around the various forms of violence against women of Color.

On Wednesday, April 30, 2008, which is the last day of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, women of color and their allies will wear red to:

1. commemorate Sexual Assault Awareness Month
2. represent the various forms of violence against that women of color experience on a daily basis
3. show how allforms of violence are interconnected.

After April 30, 2008, please email your pictures and videos connected to any Be Bold. Be Brave. Wear Red. activites to beboldbered@gmail.com so that the sistren at Document the Silence can flood the web with RED.

From April 15, 2008 through April 17, 2008, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Monica Dillon will be featured guest lecturers, workshop facilitators, and performers at University of Wisconsin – Madison as a part of their Sexual Assault Awareness Month programming. In addition to screening NO! The Rape Documentary and meeting with studens and faculty, they will perform “For Women and Men of Rage & Reason, a cinematic, poetic and musical journey from victim to survivor and activist in the international movements to end violence against women.

An extra highlight to this experience is that Tiona M., the fierce producer, director, photographer, and editor of the ground breaking documentary black./womyn.:conversations… will document Monica and Aishah’s performances and presentations. Tiona will also screen the black./womyn.:conversations trailer, which features the voices of over 50 lesbians of African descent, including Monica and Aishah, and talk about the process of making this important film.

Aishah and Monica are so very excited to be performing and presenting with other again. Each time they present and share together with students and faculty they learn more and more about each other as cultural workers, eradicating violence against women, and of course, what’s on the mind of students right now.

For detailed information about the two major events that are open to the public on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 and Thursday, April 17, 2008, please visit http://www.today.wisc.edu/events/view/3933 and http://www.today.wisc.edu/events/view/3183

Temple University

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

9am to 5pm

Kiva Auditorium and Tuttleman Learning Center, Room 101

For information about participants, schedule, and work by participants and material relevant to symposium themes, go to our website:

http://www.temple.edu/philosophy/standup/

Purpose of Symposium:

The Millions More Movement, Cosby’s ‘call-outs,’ and other recent trends renew an old approach to black political thought and practice. The racial uplift tradition tries to improve the conditions of black life by insisting on moral refinement and race-based organization. Uplift ideology and practice have a long and storied past, but critics of the tradition worry over its limitations. Some express concern that it is anti-democratic, intolerant, elitist, sexist, and heterosexist. Others think it focuses too much on personal morality and cultural pathology and not enough on social justice and political economy.

The participants in the ‘Stand Up!’ symposium will think through the risks and rewards of this new racial uplift politics. This interdisciplinary exercise in public philosophy will explore the implications of a social phenomenon with broad ethical significance. The new politics of racial uplift emerges from a widely shared conviction that something is deeply wrong in American society. Our public philosophy conference will take this judgment seriously, and subject this politics to searching and critical scrutiny.

Confirmed Participants:

Angela D. Dillard, Afroamerican and African Studies and Residential College, LSA, at the University of Michigan

Kenyon Farrow, essayist, organizer, media and communications specialist, and board co-chair for Queers for Economic Justice

Kevin Gaines, Afroamerican and African Studies and History at the University of Michigan

Kathryn T. Gines, African American and Diaspora Studies and Philosophy at Vanderbilt University

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and the Jamestown Project

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Women’s Studies at Spelman College

Joy James, Humanities and Political Science at Williams College and Senior Research Fellow in the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas-Austin

Adolph Reed, Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania

Jared Sexton, African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine

Aishah Shahidah Simmons, AfroLez® Productions and award-winning African-American feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, international lecturer, writer, activist, and producer, writer, and director of the internationally acclaimed documentary NO!

Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University Law School and the Jamestown Project

Paul C. Taylor, Philosophy at Temple University and the Jamestown Project

Sponsors:

Temple University Department of Philosophy, the Office of the Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, the Center for Humanities at Temple, the Ira Lawrence Family Fund, and the Jamestown Project

The symposium is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Tamara K. Nopper, assistant organizer, at tnopper (at) temple.edu

On Thrusday, April 10, 2008 at 7pm, The Women’s Resource Center at the University of Houston will host a screening and discussion of the award-winning, feature length documentary NO!, which is about rape, other forms of violence against women, and healing. Producer, writer, and director Aishah Shahidah Simmons will introduce the documentary and facilitate a question and answer session immediately following the screening.

Free Admission and Parking in Lots 20A and 20C.

Directions: From I-45 take Spur 5 and take a right at the first light, which is University Drive. Free parking is on the right in Parking Lots 20A and 20C. You must then walk across Calhoun Street and straight down University Drive, which dead ends into the Cullen Performance Hall. If you wish to park closer, paid parking is available at either the Welcome Center at the corner of University and Calhoun or in the underground parking under the Hilton hotel. For futher directions, click here.

Click here for a campus map.

This event is generously underwritten by the Tenneco Lecture Series.

For more information, please visit http://www.uh.edu/wrc/Nodocumentary.html. Alternatively, you may call the University of Houston’s Women’s Resource Center at 713.743.5888; or the Sanfoka Pan Afrikan Student Organization at 832.894.5015.

tiona m.’s ground-breaking, revolutionary, feature-length documentary black./womyn.: conversations…, which features the voices of over 50 lesbians of African descent throughout North America including featuring powerful voices such as Def Poet Staceyann Chin, poet/activist/scholar Cheryl Clarke, and filmmakers Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Michelle Parkerson will have it’s New Orleans premiere at the Fifth Annual New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival. Scored by New Orleans-based musician Monica Dillon, the screening and discussion with tiona m., Monica Dillon, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons will be held on Sunday, April 13, 2008, 4pm, Zeitgeist – 1618 Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard.

This lively and interactive panel will feature a diverse chorus of voices engaged in local, national, and global movements for human rights for marginalized and disenfranchised people in New Orleans, throughout the United States and across the globe.

Moderator: Aletha Strong, American Friends Service Committee
Panelists:
Monique Harden, Advocates for Environmental Human Rights
Suha Dabousseh, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Filmmaker
Ursula Price, Safe Streets, Strong Communities.

The panel, which is FREE, will be held on Sunday, April 13, 12pm, at Zeitgeist — 1618 Oretha Castle Boulevard.

For more information about the panel, please visit http://www.nolahumanrights.org/content/view/114/190/

After a long hiatus of screenings, book signings, and lectures, the Raday Salon kicks off its 2008 season with a screening of NO! The Rape Documentary to commemorate Women’s History Month. This is not the first time that Raday Salon has hosted screenings and discussions of NO! The Rape Documentary both as a rough cut and now as a completed documentary to standing room only audiences. However given the horrific and unfortuante global manifestation of sexual violence, combined with requests from people who have not had the opportunity to view the documentary, Linda Carranza and Michael Simmons, the Salon’s co-founders, are hosting an encore screening.

“...We have developed many new ties with folks who are new to Budapest or just new to our Salon, who have expressed an interest in seeing the film. We would be happy to see both old and new Salon friends at this showing, especially as the discussion is always different and brings up new observations every time we show the film…” will be an encore screening and discussion of NO! The Rape Documentary.” — Linda Carranza & Michael Simmons

Aishah Shahidah Simmons will not be present at the screening. However, Michael Simmons, who has definitely screened NO!, more than Aishah, throughout Europe and the Middle East, will both host the screening and facilitate the dialogue following the screening.

For more information about the screening and equally as important for upcoming events at Raday Salon, please visit their site (http://raday.blogs.com).

“Our Salon is dedicated to the proposition that all people are fascinating individuals, and everybody has a story to tell.” — Linda Carranza & Michael Simmons, Co-Founders, Raday Salon

If you ever find yourself in Budapest, Hungary, definitely get in touch with both Linda and Michael. They definitely walk their talk.

On February 7, 2008, there was an almost standing room only screening NO! The Rape Documentary at the Brecht Forum. Immediately following the screening there was a very lively panel discussion with Ejeris Dixon, the Program Coordinator of the Safe OUTside the System Collective, Ebony Noelle Golden, poet and organizer, who is a founding member of UBUNTU and other groups in the Durham area after the Duke lacrosse case, and Michael Simmons, who is an international human rights activist and a featured interviewee in NO!. Unfortunately, due to illness, Salamishah Tillet, who was scheduled to moderate the discussion, wasn’t able to participate in the conversation.

One of the people who attended is a member of an organization called “SAFER (Students Active for Ending Rape)“, an advocacy group in the US which works to improve universities’ response to sexual assaults in the campus environment. After attending the event, she wrote two reaction pieces on the SAFER organization’s blog, which you can read by clicking the following two links.
NO! A Documentary about Rape
NO! Part 2

In June 1995, my sister-survivor-comrade Janelle White, who was a graduate student at the time, brought me to University of Michigan for my very first paid NO! speaking engagement. At that time, I hardly had any footage. What I had was a vision and a commitment, as a survivor of incest and rape, to use the moving image to address a global atrocity, through the herstories, testimonies, scholarship, activism, poetry, music, and dance of predominantly African-American women.

Little did I know that my vision and commitment would be tested over and over and over again on multiple seen and unseen levels. Nor did I know that it would take a full 11-years before my vision would wo/manifest.

The funds received from that first paid engagement enabled me to film Essex Hemphill perform his very powerful and (unfortunately) timeless poem “To Some Supposed Brothers,”which is featured in his book ground breaking book of poetry and prose Ceremonies. Five months later, Brother Essex made his physical transition into the metaphysical world due to complications resulting from AIDS. Brother Essex transitioned eleven years before NO! was officially released. And yet through the power of film/video, Essex lives on, not only in NO! but through cinematic masterpieces produced and directed by (the late) Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, and Shari Frilot.

Almost 13-years later, I came full circle when I returned to the University of Michigan in January 2008 to screen my completed, award-winning, internationally acclaimed documentary NO!. My return to the University of Michigan began in June 2007 with my meeting Erika McCollum and Puneet Sohdi two fierce feminist activists in the anti-sexual violence movement, who are undergraduate students at the University of Michigan, at the very radical and not to be missed Allied Media Conference. When I met them, they were in organizing and strategizing mode about bringing me and NO! to the University of Michigan. Through Erika and Puneet, I met Alexis M. Watts who, on behalf of Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center, worked tirelessly in collaboration with many of her anti-sexual violence activists/comrades to bring me to University of Michigan.

The travesty about coming full circle with NO! is that it is as relevant and critically needed as a completed feature length documentary in 2008, as it was when it was when it was barely a work-in-progress in 2005. The flip side of this sobering reality is that there are more and more survivors, activists, and/or advocates of all ages, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations who working tirelessly to end all forms of sexual violence.