portfolio meloukhia creatives.e. smith
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About s.e. smith
s.e. smith is a writer and editor based in Northern California. s.e. is passionate about using the written word to inform, educate, expand boundaries, challenge, motivate, and effect change. Interests include social justice topics like feminism, disability rights, environmental issues, prison reform, queer and transgender issues, and sexuality, along with subjects like science, history, pop culture, and anthropology.
You can access archives of some of smith’s work at Feministe, FWD/Forward: Feminists With Disabilities for a Way Forward, Bitch Magazine, this ain’t livin’, and The Guardian.
Interested in commissioning work from s.e., conducting an interview, working with s.e. on an editing project, or something else? Email meloukhia [@] gmail [.] com
FWD/Forward: Crude Violations: BP Is Dumping Toxic Waste In Low Income Communities of Colour
Published at FWD/Forward, August 2010.
From the start, the oil spill has disproportionately impacted people of colour. Many of the cleanup workers were people of colour, and BP also used primarily nonwhite prison labour in oil spill cleanup and tried to hide it. Now, with the spill cleanup winding down, waste from the spill is being dumped on nonwhite communities even as these communities struggle to recover economically from the impacts of the spill. They can look forward to leaching of oil and chemicals from their landfills in the coming decades, and reports on the ground also indicate that the waste is already poorly controlled, with oil slicks and tarballs showing up around communities being used as dumping sites.
Read more at FWD/Forward.
Bitch Magazine: Push(back) at the Intersections: Transgressive or Fauxgressive?
Published at Bitch Magazine, August 2010.
The attitude that anyone can make transgressive work about anything suggests that the actual lived experience of oppression isn’t very valuable. And it ignores, again, the problems with appropriating experiences and the long history of doing just that in the name of all kinds of things from art to political action. This isn’t to say that I don’t think people should ever make art about experiences they have not lived, but that they should do so with extreme caution, and when it is criticized by people with that lived experience, they should pay attention,especially if they are claiming to be doing something progressive or radical.
Read more at Bitch Magazine.
The Guardian: US police need proper training in mental health
Published in The Guardian, July 2010.
Every day in various American communities, people enter mental health crises and their friends and family members pick up the phone to call for help. Often, the first responders on the scene are police officers, and the resulting interaction does not go well. Poorly trained and frightened police officers may resort to excessive force, and sometimes this ends in death for a person who is guilty only of being in urgent need of psychiatric care.
Read more at The Guardian.
Feministe: Disability Terminology: A Starter Kit for Nondisabled People and the Media
Published at Feministe, June 2010.
It’s really exciting to me to see more and more nondisabled people thinking about disability, evaluating their own roles in this ableist world, and pushing back on the ableism they identify around them. I’m hoping that getting a little taste of the language used to talk about disability and the language that some people with disabilities prefer in this post will encourage you to seek out more writing on disability and language. I would like to reach a point where the media automatically turns to ‘wheelchair user’ instead of ‘confined to a wheelchair’ and where I can read a post by a nondisabled advocate talking about ableism that doesn’t use ‘the disabled’ to refer to us, when respectful language is the norm and everyone uses it naturally, without even having to think about it.
Read more at Feministe.
FWD/Forward: Deportation by Default: 15% of Immigration Detainees in the US Have Disabilities That Impair Their Understanding of Deportation Proceedings
Published at FWD/Forward, July 2010.
The report documents cases of people who did not understand what deportation meant and lacked the ability to comprehend deportation proceedings; one subject asked to be deported to New York, for example. Some interview subjects had intellectual disabilities or untreated mental illnesses that made it functionally impossible to understand what was happening, while others were in extreme emotional distress and had difficulty comprehending the proceedings, let alone communicating. At least two cases included US citizens wrongfully subjected to deportation proceedings. One North Carolina native had bipolar disorder, was unable to understand the case against him, and could not represent himself in court, so he was deported to Mexico. Another, a US citizen since childhood, would have been deported if it weren’t for the actions of an attorney with the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Centre.
Read more at FWD/Forward.