I will begin by saying: if I start trying to sound like I am some learned academic or wise sage, this is not the goal of blog, and please tell me to shut the fuck up. I have the perspective of only one person, and thus have no right or ability to unpack all the trauma, oppression, and cultural theft that is present throughout much of collective martial arts history and practice. That being said, if our future is to be a decolonized, liberated, and/or abolitionist future, we must start facilitating a change, and this is part of a limited attempt so far.
I have been involved in martial arts training and culture for over ten years collectively, and loved it for over thirty years. Being an avid practitioner of a variety of martial arts (MA) disciplines in amerikkka for some years, I have my own personal experience in witnessing/facilitating the cultural appropriation, the hierarchical relations amongst participants, and the complete erasure of communal identities and practices within MA communities. Obviously, I am not the only who has seen this, and there is a wide assortment of literature and media that is currently being published addressing such issues. These contextual frames will be the main foundations from which I will be writing future blogs from, and I will make sure to cite sources at the end of all my writings when necessary. However, none of this can compete with the understanding that comes from the variety of lived experiences of the community members directly affected by such imperial/colonialist actions.
Because of this truth, this blog will be focused on sharing the platform with all community members that wish to speak up about community self-defense, decolonizing martial arts, liberation martial arts as a practice, or social justice issues. It is our collective hopes at LSDC that, through practices like these (community building through physical practice, open dialogue about collective protection, understanding and addressing historical/current oppression) we can push the development of the community we want to live in.
I will also be occasionally posting about subjects including: an attempt to create a working definition for liberation martial arts, the erasure of regional martial arts as an attempt at the primitivization of indigenous communities, and an analysis of the boundary between performative/high art and practical/physical arts and its relationship to racial and class boundaries.
If there are problems with the things that are said here, let’s communicate; this platform is open as long as it is within community standards (antiracist, antiterf, antiswerf, antifascist, antiabelist, proqueer). Let’s be stronger together.