elle, phd

Black Like Me

2012-01-30T17:38:00.002-06:00

I re-read the book a few weeks ago because I am teaching it this semester. I have issues with, but I think it can be a valuable text. Who's read it? Anyone wanna discuss it? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

FYI:

2012-01-29T20:03:00.004-06:00

"Some of Us Did Not Die
We're Still Here
I Guess It Was Our Destiny To Live
So Let's get on with it!"

-June Jordan (inspired by Auschwitz and Fallersleben survivor Elly Gross, who proclaimed in an interview, "I guess it was my destiny to live.")

In Which I Try to Share a Recipe, Sans Pictures or Close Care to What I Am Saying

2012-01-27T11:35:00.000-06:00

Warning: This is not a "healthy" recipe, and I am a fat chick. If you think that you might feel compelled to judge or wish potentially devastating illness upon me, please read no further.

Did I tell y'all about the best scalloped (maybe au gratin) potatoes ever that I just made?

I didn't?

Let me rectify that.

So, I needed a side dish and was totally unmotivated to go to the store. I took stock of what was here. Potatoes, half and half, packaged shredded cheese, onions, bell peppers, garlic and some other staple-y stuff.

I know! I'll make scalloped potatoes!

So I did. It was a day that I didn't have to go on campus, but I still had errands to run. I grabbed 5 or 6 or so Idaho potatoes( which I typically hate because they are so dirty, but they are the least expensive and I have 3 boys to feed), scrubbed them, and sliced them on the mandolin. I put them in a bowl with water, a little salt, and a little white vinegar and put them in the fridge. I also diced maybe a quarter of a yellow onion (or a half, I love onion) half of a particularly small bell pepper and two cloves of garlic. Put them in bowls with tops and refrigerated.

Errands, errands, errands.

I returned a few hours later. Began with my cheese sauce--heated 3 tablespoons of butter (not margarine!), added 2.5 tablespoons of flour (no I don't do exactly equal because I am scared of being overpowered by flour). Whisk, whisk, whisk on a low to medium low heat. Keep it moving and keep it blonde. You do NOT want a burned roux. Just... yuck, trust me. In the meantime, I heated 2 cups of half and half with 1.5 cups of 1% milk (no particular reason for this mixture, that's what I had here) and turned my oven to 375 degrees. After about five minutes, I added my warmed dairy products to my roux. You can turn up the temp a little. Stir, let it thicken, stir, etc. When it is just about right (after several minutes is all I can say) add two cups of shredded cheese (cheddar blends work here--I had one called a cheddar melt. I also like the American and cheddar blend. Had it been for a holiday, I would've done one cup of cheddar melt OR American/cheddar blend plus one cup of gruyere), and a dash, I mean a dash--no more than two, of nutmeg. I can't stand for nutmeg to be too strong in cheese sauces. Now taste for salt. Do this after you add the cheese because cheese is salty.

While your sauce was thickening, you know what your lazy self should've been doing? Arranging your potatoes in a greased baking dish then tossing them with your onion and bell pepper and garlic and maybe a a half teaspoon to a teaspoon of seasoned salt. At this point, you can pour the cheese sauce all over them and mix all well. Cover with foil. Put in your preheated oven for 50 or 60 minutes. Remove the foil and, just for the hell of it, sprinkle some of the mozzarella you had left from pizza day on top. Bake a few minutes more. Then let that mozzarella bubble and do amazing, delicious things under the broiler.

Be prepared for your children and/or other loved ones to weep upon your feet.

What's Up?

2012-01-26T13:18:00.001-06:00

Give me some news! Interesting links! Good gossip! Delicious recipes!Anything :-)

This is the beginning of the semester and I have 3 classes this time. I haven't been keeping up with the world!

Well...

2012-01-25T09:27:00.002-06:00

Not a lot to say right now. But I sat down. And I wrote. And since I am off today, I hope to come up with something else. But count this as my obligatory post-every-weekday-until-you-get-back-into-the-habit post.

21 days to develop a habit, I heard.

I'm on my way!

Just Edit the Bad Parts Out!

2012-01-24T08:45:00.000-06:00

Ran across this: Tenn. Tea Party Demands Slavery Removed From Textbooks:

Regarding education, the material they distributed said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

That would include, the documents say, that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

I vote that last sentence be included in upcoming dictionaries as a definition for "white privilege." Let's obscure "minority" experiences so the "majority" can come away looking angelic and declare that "the truth."

Please!

And this little bit about their rationale:

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds

Wow, wow, wow. Apparently, it is okay to dismiss the parts of history that make your heroes look... well... less heroic, to prioritize the image of some over the experiences of others.

As for "liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed," dude, your founding fathers' fathers were the primary reasons there was a notable shortage of liberty 'round these here parts.

They weren't all that revolutionary. They were a bunch of privileged white guys that laid out a system that supported their privilege as wealthy, white men. They did not and did not want to bring liberty to everybody.

This reminds me of one of my many issues with the idea of "colorblindness," that if we pretend not to see and refuse to talk about things, from skin color to differential treatment to patterns of inequity, that they will magically disappear. No one will have to be uncomfortable. No one will have to acknowledge the perpetuation of inequality and discrimination. And, oh, if you bring those things up, well, you're the racist.

Also, I am faintly amused by the way they use words like "truth" and "made-up."

Life in our post-racial world.

After Almost Four Decades...

2012-01-23T10:24:00.003-06:00

...why are we still having to fight for this, and so many other aspects of reproductive freedom? From a statement by NOW President Terry O'Neill:

As we celebrate the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade [which was January 22], the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized a woman's constitutional right to legal abortion, we can't forget how many times women's lives have been put at risk in the past year. Legislators in 24 states passed 92 anti-abortion provisions in 2011, shattering the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
These new restrictions included waiting-period requirements, onerous and unnecessary clinic regulations and cuts to family planning services and providers because of their connection with abortion. Thanks to a newly energized grassroots coalition, voters defeated the Mississippi Personhood Amendment, a measure that would have legally defined personhood as beginning at fertilization in the state's constitution. But that fight is far from over.

Far, far from over, unfortunately.

I'm Tryin'

2012-01-23T10:19:00.000-06:00

Well, I've already surpassed the number of posts for all of 2011. And I've re-set my blog as my browser's home page, so I have to think about it.

I am hoping that this perseverance rolls over into my academic life. I've been on a writing hiatus since early-December. I really need to work on an article that is bugging me.

Wish me luck!

FYI:

2012-01-22T11:33:00.002-06:00

"Your silence will not protect you."- Audre Lorde

This Story Is Too Bootylicious for Me

2012-01-20T09:45:00.001-06:00

The fascination/fetishization of black women's backsides... will it never end???

From the Associated Press:

A newly discovered horse fly in Australia was so “bootylicious” with its golden-haired bum, there was only one name worthy of its beauty: Beyonce.
Australian researcher Bryan Lessard, 24, says he wanted to pay respect to the insect’s beauty by naming it Scaptia (Plinthina) beyonceae. Lessard said Beyonce would be “in the nature history books forever” and that the fly now bearing her name is “pretty bootylicious” with its golden backside.

This is not an honor. He is not doing her a favor. In fact, Lessard is evidencing an ongoing, problematic fascination with black women's bottoms. Dr. Janell Hobson, in an essay in which she analyzes "the prevalent treatment of black female bodies as grotesque figures, due to the problematic fetishism of their rear ends," (88) on the history of this bullshit:*

[A] history of enslavement, colonial conquest and ethnographic exhibition-variously labeled the black female body "grotesque," "strange," unfeminine," "lascivious," and "obscene." This negative attitude toward the black female body targets one aspect of the body in particular: the buttocks (87).

Dr. Hobson delves into the longstanding fascination with/assumptions about black women's alleged hypersexuality, a hypersexuality symbolized by our deviant bodies and an "emphasis on the black female rear end, with its historic and cultural tropes of rawness, lasciviousness, and 'nastiness'," (97). And though this history extends much farther than two centuries into the past, she highlights the heartbreaking and dehumanizing display of Saartje Baartman, arguing that "perhaps no other figure epitomizes the connections between grotesquerie, sexual deviance, and posteriors than the 'Hottentot Venus'," (89), put on display primarily for the " 'strange,' singular attraction" of her rear end (88). As crunktastic notedm over at the Crunk Feminist Collective, about Lessard's naming of the fly in Beyonce's "honor," "The legacy of Saartjie Bartmann lives."

Lest you think this is purely a compliment (I say purely because I am sure, in some strange way, Lessard meant it as such), ponder Dr. Hobson's words on Sir MixALot's Baby Got Back:

This so-called "appreciation"of black women's bodies does not necessarily challenge ideas of grotesque and deviant black female sexuality. Interestingly, both the song and video uphold and celebrate the black body precisely because it differs from the standard models of beauty in white culture, (96).

Substitute "the naming of the fly" for "both the song and video."

If you're still leaning towards, "compliment," think of this: The recent "global desirability of a Black girl’s ass" is not complimentary; it grows out of a history of othering and "exotifying" black women's bodies and "excuses her allegedly less desirable dark complexion, full lips, and kinky hair," you know, the still grotesque and "ugly" parts of us.** But the appeal of black women's butts is not always enough to "excuse" our deficiencies/lack of beauty in other categories. In fact, a curvy backside becomes even more desirable when it is not attached to a black woman. As Dr. Hobson notes,

[P]erformer Jennifer Lopez offers a slightly different take on rear-end aesthetics. Her Latina body, already colored as "exotic" in a so-called changing American racial landscape, bridges the desires of black and white men, because she can serve as the "racial other" for both. More importantly Lopez's derriere does not carry the burden of Baartman's legacy.
[snip]
Dominant culture came to celebrate Lopez's behind as part of a recognition of "exotic" and "hot" Latinas, women perceived as "more sexual" than white women but "less obscene" than black women. In this way, Lopez's body avoids the specific racial stigma that clings to black women's bodies (97).

Or, as I read in my Facebook feed the other day,*** part of the adoration/fascination with Kim Kardashian is the desirability of having physical features typically associated with a black woman unencumbered by the history of racism, colonization, and devaluation.

I guess what it boils down to is the naming of this fly as symbolic of a culture of what crunktastic calls "disrespectability politics":

This is a world where disrespectability politics reign, a world where black women’s bodies and lives become the load-bearing wall, in the house that race built, a world where the tacit disrespect of Black womanhood is as American as apple pie, as global as Nike. (Just do it. Everybody else is. ) In this world, Black women have moved from “fly-girls to bitches and hoes” and back again to just, well, flies. Insects. Pests.

Please spare us honors like these, Mr. Lessard.
_______________
* Janell Hobson, "The 'Batty' Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body," Hypatia 18, no. 4, Women, Art, and Aesthetics (Autumn - Winter, 2003): 87-105.

** From this sentence by crunktastic: "In this world, the global desirability of a Black girl’s ass excuses her allegedly less desirable dark complexion, full lips, and kinky hair." I know, I know; someone might argue that full lips are all the rage, but remember they can't be too full and they are much "better" on a non-black woman--hello, world's fascination with Angelina Jolie!

***paraphrased from a note or article posted by one of my friends for which I have searched desperately and cannot find. Please let me know if you know the citation. (Update: Here it is! Hat Tip to checarina at Shakesville, where this is crossposted)

The Continued Erosion of Reproductive Rights

2012-01-19T10:50:00.000-06:00

From s. e. smith:

The attack on reproductive rights in the United States is likely to heat up in 2012, and we have an early entrant in the race to the bottom in the form of a court decision that went through on Friday, ordering the immediate enforcement of a mandatory sonogram law in Texas. More specifically:

The law, enacted in 2011, requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound on pregnant women, show and describe the image to them, and play sounds of the fetal heartbeat. Though women can decline to view images or hear the heartbeat, they must listen to a description of the exam…unless she qualifies for an exception due to rape, incest or fetal abnormality.

This is not the first state with such a law and I fear it’s going to become a growing trend in the US, right along with dismembered fetus anti-abortion ads on television. The right wing is bent on making abortions as difficult to access as possible through every possible means, and that includes coercive, invasive, and unwanted interference from their medical providers. As spelled out under the law, this is yet another hoop in the series people with unwanted or dangerous pregnancies must jump through to get access to medical care, and it’s a humiliating and shaming one.

Says Texas Governor Rick Perry:

The Fifth Circuit’s decision requires abortion providers to immediately comply with the sonogram law, appropriately allowing Texas to enforce the will of our state, which values and protects the sanctity of life.

Texas "values and protects the sanctity of life," said, I am sure, without irony.

But... this is Texas, number one in the number of executions carried out in the last 35 years and the state where the legislature hoped, just last year, to gut education, health care, and social services.

I guess, however, with regards to a state in which lawmakers "slashed family planning funding by two-thirds," we should not be surprised at the continued erosion of reproductive rights.

Doesn't make it any less scary.

Ugh!

2012-01-19T08:27:00.001-06:00

Went outside and the passenger side mirror on my car was broken. I just had both of the door mirrors replaced last February!

Grumbly elle is grumbly.

Ugh!

Your Resident Sistorian

2012-01-18T09:18:00.004-06:00

Saw this at Mai'a's and had to repost. Of course I, your resident Sistorian, find this to be just about the the coolest thing ever. Of course I do!

Following the Tumblr chain, I think I need to give credit to this post.

You Already Know

2012-01-17T11:07:00.004-06:00

The downfalls of going to a small, independently owned liquor store:

I have a weakness in which I indulge every weekend: Sour Apple Martinis. I like cosmos. I love margaritas. Malibu w/pineapple is my bar drink. And my girls are turning me into a flavored-Ciroc fan. But when it comes to what I am going to mix at home, it's all about that sour apple, for some reason!

Friday night, I walked into my friendly neighborhood store for my "weekend libation."

"I want something new this weekend," I proclaimed.

"Mm-hmm," said the clerk.

I walked all around, with this silent perusal: "Do I want rum? I don't feel like rum! Ugh, gin makes me sick! No vodka! I'm tired of weekend martinis!" Etc. Etc.

I walked to the counter and looked behind there.

"I really want something new."

"You say that every time," the clerk reminded me.

I stood, indecisive, while she asked me about my son. "13, right?" said the store's owner.

"And going on 23, tall as he is!" said the clerk.

I sighed. The clerk decided to make it easy on me. "I already know," she said. She grabbed the sour apple pucker and some vodka. "Go to the grocery store and get your juice. It's too expensive here!"

I couldn't do anything except laugh...

And pay for my stuff.

The Horror

2012-01-17T09:53:00.000-06:00

**Bear with me as I ease back into this and thus, jump in midstream on a number of issues. There are very real and very important critiques that have been made of the "Occupy" Movement, beginning with the problematic nature of the use of "Occupy" in the first place. I am not ignoring that.**

So, someone in the Occupy Memphis movement flew the U.S. flag upside down.

Feelings of horror ensue, including words from service people (with details of their service and their decorations) who were offended by the display, one of whom declared, "Over 1 million men died protecting that flag." (Emphasis mine, for, well, obvious reasons.)

I never can understand how people are more disturbed by the "mistreatment" of a flag than of people. Like, "We're not bothered by the fact that people feel compelled to protest to draw attention to the very real social and economic injustice that is characteristic of this country, but they flew the flag upside down? The Horror!"

Another of the interviewees equated this to a declaration of war. I think one of the main claims of people involved in this movement is that war has already been declared and has been viciously waged against the majority of us for sometime now.

And then the caption contains this:

The United States Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Section 176, under "respect for flag," reads: "The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property." It is a fair assumption that the protesters camped on Main Street are not facing "extreme danger to life." They are in no danger of an attack from enemy forces or even at risk of being run over by a trolley. They are just messing with the system.

First, I'd argue that many people, pressed to the wall and on the verge of economic ruin, might feel that there is an "extreme danger" and that they are being attacked. Also, are you really expecting dissenters to follow the carefully laid out rules? To be as heavily invested in your national symbols when they are telling you that your nation is not what it claims to be?

As to that last insightful sentence I quoted: Why yes, yes, they are trying to mess with "the system."

I don't think they see that as a bad thing.

My Soul Looks Back...

2012-01-16T15:00:00.003-06:00

Everything has me weepy today on the observation of MLK, Jr.'s birthday, feeling sentimental as an African American historian and a product of the rural South.

Everything. Like, in the midst of re-reading Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (I'm teaching it (again) this Spring), I have (previously) run across Cara's review of the book and, just today, this interview with the author and other scholars bearing the grim subtitle "How a Racist Criminal Justice System Rolled Back the Gains of the Civil Rights Era." This article also centers the book and the school-to-prison-pipeline that acts in some of the same systematic ways as the old system of Jim Crow. As I read them, I am disheartened, overwhelmed, teary-eyed. And I thought, "My God, so far to go!"

Everything. Like the fact that I have never watched The Great Debaters but today caught the last ten minutes of it with my boys. I was struck by the young man at the end who spoke of our duty to resist unjust laws, of the fear and shame with which African Americans lived, of a world in which you could stumble upon a lynch mob and do nothing but hide, hoping to save your own life. As I watched, I felt awe-struck, angry, teary-eyed. And I thought, "My God, how far we've come."

Far enough that I, the granddaughter of domestics and sharecroppers, will get up tomorrow and go to my job as an assistant professor at a public university after making sure my kids are safely off to school, once upon a time little more than a dream for most teenaged black boys whose lives were dictated by agricultural needs.

You know, I've never known for sure if the words to that old song are "My Soul Looks Back in Wonder" or "My Soul Looks Back and Wonders." I don't worry about it much, because either is fitting when I look back over the course of the history of people of African descent in this country. So far we've come. Every once in a while, I do take a moment, reflect, feel gratitude, feel strengthened, realize the resilience that comes from past victories and defeats. This is one of those days.

And then I remember, So far we have to go. And I get back to business.

Foodie in the Making!

2012-01-16T11:01:00.001-06:00

The kid and I were watching Paula Deen and one of her sons talking about their years running "The Bag Lady." He was inspired. First, he told me he'd take my food and sell it door-to-door or at businesses. Aware of his own charm, he said, "I'd get ridiculous prices for it, too." Then he said, "We should get a van and drive it around the city and cook."

"Like a food truck?" I asked.

"Yeah!"

"You know the health department is all over those. We have to work hard and keep it super clean!"

I figured that would change his mind, he-of-the-science-project-on-growing-random-things-bedroom. But who I am to discourage my child's entrepreneurship/ideas? Maybe he'll really do it one day!

An Observation on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

2012-01-16T09:11:00.000-06:00

"WHY IS IT THAT MLK IS CELEBRATED SO MUCH, BUT MALCOLM X IS SLOWLY SLIPPIN OUT OF OUR MINDS, HE TAUGHT US HOW 2 STAND UP, AN FIGHT THE MAN WIT THERE OWN SHIT."

I often decry the sanitizing and beatification of MLK, Jr., because it makes him all conveniently palatable and ripe for consumption. It makes him safe for white people to admire and accept and celebrate.

But I don't often mention the flipside of what that means for his image. The quote above was written by one of my cousins. I've heard the same derision repeated by students in my classes. They think of MLK, Jr. as obsequious, unreal, too willing to compromise, the polar opposite of their image of the fierce, uncompromising Malcolm X (and I should talk about the construction of him at some point). They claim to respect MLK, Jr. and his work, but they feel that he could have gone farther and that he too easily said "what white people wanted to hear."

And, after a mental eye-roll and side eye, I ask them, can't they imagine, given all they've learned over the course of an "African American History from 1865 to the Present" class, that there would've been people who thought of him as uncompromising? Who didn't want to hear his messages of social and economic justice and equity? Who thought of him as a threat? I also ask them to define militant. Is it a term that has to be rooted in the willingness to take up arms?

Typically, I can at least get them to re-consider. But the idea that I, as a "progressive" historian, am considered the ridiculously "revisionist" one?

I think, in the future, I will have my students spend a few minutes juxtaposing my cousin's quote, their own perceptions, and this article by Fred Grimm, which notes:

The icon of the national holiday, the Disneyfied hero celebrated by school kids, a replica of the original made into someone palatable to business and civic leaders across the political spectrum, hardly resembles the righteous rabble-rouser who inflicted so much discomfort on the American establishment.

[snip]

[M]odern powerbrokers, in their prosaic tributes, tend to forget the Martin Luther King Jr. whose causes would have a stinging resonance in 2012 America.
After a year when some political leaders have tried to gut public worker unions, they might find it a bit inconvenient to recall the Martin Luther King who was gunned down in Memphis in 1968 during a campaign to organize the city garbage workers.
In a time when the American middle class has noticed that the one percent was scarfing up an ever greater portion of the nation’s wealth, while its own relative buying power has been frozen since 1970, King’s demands for economic justice might seem just a bit too contemporary. (Someone might also notice that his movement’s Resurrection City, the shanty town protest against economic disparity, erected a month after his death, might as well been called Occupy Washington.)
Amid so much apprehension over the lack of judicial restraint in the use of roving wiretaps and other surveillance authorized in the Patriot Act extension signed by President Obama, our political leaders would rather forget about the Martin Luther King whose home, office and hotel rooms were bugged, for years, by the FBI. (J. Edgar Hoover explained the “unshackled” surveillance of King as a way to track, “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.”)
After a decade of war in Afghanistan, with that long, bloody, pointless diversion into Iraq, it’s doubtful that the we’ll hear our President or congressional leaders from either party quote from King’s anti-war speech in 1967, when he called the United States, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Certainly, the politicians behind the coordinated campaign in 14 states (including Florida) to enact new voting restrictions, would be vexed by the Martin Luther King who fought to bring voting rights to the disenfranchised.

And I will remind them that King himself acknowledged and accepted the fact that, in his time, he was considered "an extremist":

...though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. [...] The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? [...] Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

The one-dimensional, heroic caricature that we have made MLK, Jr., into does a disservice to the legacy of our creative extremists and the work of dissenters in shaping and re-shaping this country.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King!

2012-01-15T20:12:00.002-06:00

I used to love this commercial--well, the song in particular.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King. Your life was a gift, treasured and beloved.

A Manifatso

2012-01-14T09:36:00.003-06:00

From Liss:

It's like a manifesto, but filled with fat.

[Content Note: This post contains discussion of fat hatred and disablism.]

I've spent the past two hours (give or take) tweeting my fingers off about fat hatred and the fact that, no, Paula Deen allegedly having diabetes is not, in fact, "justice" for her particular culinary oeuvre, which centers food associated with fatness.

(Yes, it's true that rich foods make some people fat and/or unhealthy; it is also true, however, that rich foods do not make other people fat and/or unhealthy; it is further true that foods not associated with fatness make some people fat and/or unhealthy. You may detect a patten here! A pattern that suggests people are not Bunsen burners!)

Anyway! Because I'm a motherfucking progressive optimist and shit, I wanted to end on an upbeat note, so now I'm busily tweeting my manifatso. And here it is:

I want to be in the world, and I will participate, and I will take up the space that I need without apology. Also: I may occasionally eat butter. But mostly: I will be publicly, shamelessly, unshakably fat and happy. Happy-Go-Lucky, in fact! I am a fat woman, and I will matter—to me and to you.

Read the rest here.

And I just have to add: Diabetes as justice? As what fat people or people who eat certain food deserve? I wonder if @baratunde has seen diabetes in action, if he knows what it can do?

Maybe I should tell him about how my father and grandmothers and uncle lost their kidney function and had to go through the exhausting process of dialysis every other day.

Or maybe I should tell him how frustrated my father and MamMaw were by sores that wouldn't heal, that turned gangrenous, that took their limbs.

Or maybe I should tell him about my grandmother losing sight in one of her eyes and my mom's terror now that all the changes she's made mean little in the face of worrisome reports from her eye doctor.

Or maybe I can bring up my niece, who, just out of her teens, dropped from 130 lbs to 94 lbs (on a 5' 11" frame), was unable to walk more than a few steps, and was perpetually tired, her (gasp!) thin frame ravaged by diabetes?

Or maybe I should tell him, how, as I lay in bed sick with other ailments, my dad's dialysis shunt came out, bringing with it copious amounts of blood, a flow that no one could stop, that ultimately took his life... while I, she-who-thought-she-could-fix-everything, had to lie their, unable to move, and listen to him ask people to hurry to help him. Listen to my family's sounds of panic and uncertainty and urgency. Listen as people came to help me get dressed and I knew, if they were rousing my grievously sick self from bed, that he must be gone.

Is that how justice is defined now?

Hmmm...

FYI:

2012-01-14T09:15:00.001-06:00

“I love myself when I am laughing, and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” — Zora Neale Hurston

I love her.

That is all.

Link Love

2012-01-13T17:30:00.002-06:00

So many of my friends have moved on to other venues; my blogroll was primarily a list of dead links or archived writings (valuable in their own right and I want to re-link).

I'm starting fresh! Give me ideas--I'll re-post this for a few days because I assume most people have more exciting lives than I on a Friday night. Who should I be reading?

Please Help

2012-01-13T08:34:00.002-06:00

UPDATE: EVAN MILLER HAS BEEN FOUND UNHARMED

Ran across these last night (the baby's story was updated around 6 this morning, so I assume he is still missing.)

An Amber Alert has been issued for a missing 18-month-old who was in a car that was stolen at a Walmart store off South Gessner.

Houston police say Evan Montgomery Lamar Miller was in the back of the Jeep when it was stolen around 5:44pm from the parking lot of the Walmart store at 11200 S. Gessner.

[snip]

The stolen vehicle is a green, 4-door, 1996 Jeep Cherokee, Texas license plate BP2N042. The car has a "Baby on Board" sticker on the back window.

Police say Evan was last seen wearing a blue knit cap, a white T-shirt, a gray sweatshirt, hunter green sweat pants with stripes and tan hiking boots.

Evan is pictured below. On the left is a sketch of his suspected kidnapper.

More here.

And

**Missing Teen in The Newark Area** PLEASE REPOST

Attention Newark & surrounding areas... Amber Torres has been missing since yesterday. If anybody know’s of her whereabouts or has info please call Newark Police Dept

SHE WAS LAST WEARING A BLACK HOODY & BLACK JEANS/PANTS FROM HER HOUSE. SHE IS ABOUT 115LBS & 5’2 TALL. SHE DOESNT HAVE HER GLASSES. iTS REALLY NOT LIKE HER TO REBEL & RUN AWAY. SHE DOESNT HAVE HER CELL,MONEY OR A COAT TO WEAR.

The blogger says Amber's ex-boyfriend has been stalking her. He's pictured below:

Please help bring them home!

99 Years Strong

2012-01-13T07:39:00.002-06:00

Happy Founders' Day to my lovely Sorors of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc, founded at Howard University on January 13, 1913. Here is my line's probate chant (which will reveal how old I really am, alas :-):

We are the ladies
Of Delta Sigma Theta
Everybody knows
There's no one greater
Elegance
Intelligence
You know we are live
We are the NEW Deltas
Spring '95!

What I'm Reading

2012-01-12T10:02:00.002-06:00

Good morning, sunshines! Back at it again. Thinking about blogging ideas and as I stick my toes cautiously in the water, my ever-faithful cousin sends me topics. I've read a lot about the so-called "slavery" math problems and the proposed boycott of the Girl Scouts/Girl Scout cookies by a cisgender girl and her adult supporters who are appalled that the Scouts accept transgender girls.

Read and SYDH along with me.

Homework

2012-01-11T15:37:00.000-06:00

So, tonight, I have to proofread my son's book report on The Hunger Games. I have not had time to read it (I try to read along with them, but I am playing catch-up from my absolutely ridiculous laziness over the break). Description? Thesis? Trying to read about it online while skimming his copy, but I'm starting to give it the side-eye.

Is This Thing On?

2012-01-11T10:28:00.002-06:00

So, the one piece of advice that I keep getting about my writer's block is, "If you want to write... then write." That means stop my procrastinating and perseverating (what a psychologist friend just called my stalling and avoidance techniques) and write.

Even if it's fluff.

Or boring.

So, in 2012, I am trying to get in the habit of writing something, ANYTHING each day. Seriously, sitting my butt down in one spot and just going for it.

So, here we go.

Same Script, Different Cast

2011-08-17T11:34:00.003-05:00

[Trigger warning for racism; classism; sexual violence.]

A caveat: I have not seen "The Help." I do not plan to see "The Help," yet I feel pretty confident that I have "The Help" all figured out. If you don't know about this film, please see this post. I'm going to ground my thoughts about "The Help" in two other documents I will link: Valerie Boyd's review entitled, "'The Help,' a feel-good movie for white people" and "An Open Statement to the Fans of 'The Help'" from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH). A brief description from Boyd:

"The Help" — the film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett — is a feel-good movie for a cowardly [wrt to the ways we deal (or don't deal) with issues of race] nation.

Despite its title, the film is not so much about the help — the black maids who kept many white Southern homes running before the civil rights movement gave them broader opportunities — as it is about the white women who employed and sometimes terrorized them.

And there you have it, the problem at the heart of works like "The Help" that blossoms into myriad other problems—the centering of white women in a story that is supposed to be about women of color, the positioning of white women as saviors who give WoC voice. As my colleagues in the ABWH note,

Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers.

I want to meld these critiques of "The Help" with my own, which is rooted in who I am: My name is elle, and I am a granddaughter of "The Help." And while I can never begin (and would never want) to imagine myself as the voice of black domestic workers, I can at least share some of their own words with you and tell you some places you can find more of their words and thoughts.

I. The Help's representation of [black domestic workers] is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy… [p]ortrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites…—ABWH

Early on in "The Help," we hear the maids complain that they've spent decades raising little white girls who grow up to become racists, just like their mothers. But this doesn't stop Aibileen from unambiguously loving the little white girl she's paid to care for. —Boyd

When you put white women at the center of a story allegedly about black women, then the relationships between those two groups of women is filtered through the lens and desires of white women, many of whom want to believe themselves "good" to black people. That goodness will result in the unconditional love, trust and loyalty of the black people closest to them. They can remember the relationships fondly and get teary-eyed when they think of "the black woman who raised me and taught me everything." They fancy themselves as their black nanny's "other children" and privilege makes them demand the attention and affection such children would be showed.

From a post I wrote some time ago:

I hated, hated, hated that my grandmother and her sister were domestics.

Not because I was ashamed, but because of the way white people treated them and us.

Like… coming to their funerals and sitting on the front row with the immediate family because they had notions of their own importance. "Nanny raised us!" one of my aunt's "white children" exclaimed, then stood there regally as the family cooed and comforted her.

But, as the granddaughter of the help, I learned that the woman my grandmother's employers and their children saw was not my "real" grandmother. Forced to follow the rules of racial etiquette, to grin and bear it, she had a whole other persona around white people. It could be dangerous, after all, to be one's real self, so black women learned "what to say, how to say it, and sometimes, not to say anything, don't show any emotion at all, because even just your expression could cause you a lot of trouble."** They wore the mask that Paul Laurence Dunbar and so many other black authors have written about. It is at once protective and pleasant, reflective of the fact that black women knew "their white people" in ways white people could never be bothered to know them. These were not equal relationships in which love and respect were allowed to flourish.

Indeed, with regard to the white children for whom they cared, black women often felt levels of "ambiguity and complexity" with which our "cowardly nation" is uncomfortable. Yes, my grandmother had a type of love for the children for whom she cared, but I knew it was not the same love she had for us. I think August Boatwright in the film adaptation of "The Secret Life of Bees" (another film about relationships between black and white women during the Civil Rights Era that centers a white girl) voiced this ambiguity and complexity much better. When her newest white charge, Lily, asks August if she loved Lily's mother, for whom August had also cared, August is unable to give an immediate, glowing response. Instead, she explains how the situation was complicated and the fragility of a love that grows in such problematic circumstances.

Bernestine Singley, whose mother worked for a white family, was a bit more blunt when the daughter of that family claimed that Singley's mother loved her:

I'm thinking the maid might've been several steps removed from thoughts of love so busy was she slinging suds, pushing a mop, vacuuming the drapes, ironing and starching load after load of laundry. Plus, I know what Mama told us when she, my sister, and I reported on our day over dinner each night and not once did Mama's love for the [white child for whom she cared] find its way into that conversation: She cleaned up behind, but she did not love those white children.

II. The caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers.—ABWH

From films like "The Help," we can't know what life for black domestic workers is/was really like because, despite claims to the contrary, it's not black domestic workers talking! The ABWH letter gives some good sources at the end, and I routinely assign readings about situations like the "Bronx Slave Market" in which black women had to sell their labor for pennies during the Depression. The nature of domestic labor is grueling, yet somehow that is always danced over in films like this.

As is the reality of dealing with poorly-paid work. In her autobiographical account, "I Am a Domestic," Naomi Ward describes white employers' efforts to pay the least money and extract the most work as "a matter of inconsiderateness, downright selfishness." "We usually work twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week," she continues, "Our wages are pitifully small." Sometimes, there were no wages, as another former domestic worker explains: "I cleaned house and cooked. That's all I ever did around white folks, clean house and cook. They didn't pay any money. No money, period. No money, period."**

Additionally, the job came with few to no recognizable benefits. The federal government purposely left work like domestic labor out of the (pathetic) safety net of social security, a gift to southerners who wanted to keep domestic and agricultural workers under their thumbs. After a lifetime of share-cropping and nanny-ing, my grandmother, upon becoming unable to work, found that she was not eligible for any work-based benefit/pension program. Instead, she received benefits from the "old age" "welfare" program, disappearing her work and feeding the stereotype of black women as non-working and in search of a handout. (I want to make clear that I am a supporter of social services programs, believe women do valuable work that is un- or poorly-remunerated and ignored/devalued. So, my issue is not that she benefited from a "welfare" program but how participation in such programs has been used as a weapon against black women in a country that tends to value, above all else, men's paid work.)

The control of black people's income also paid a psychological wage to white southerners:

[Their white employers gave] my grandmother and aunt money, long after they'd retired, not because they didn't pay taxes for domestic help or because they objected to the fact that our government excluded domestic work from social insurance or because they appreciated the sacrifices my grandmother and her sister made. No, that money was proof that, just as their slaveholding ancestors argued, they took care of their negroes even after retirement!

The various forms of verbal and emotional abuse suffered are also glossed over to emphasize how black and white women formed unshakeable bonds. By contrast, Naomi Ward described the conflicted nature of her relationships with white women and being treated as if she were "completely lacking in human dignity and respect." In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody says of her contentious relationship with her employer, Mrs. Burke, "Mrs. Burke had made me feel like rotten garbage. Many times she had tried to instill fear within me and subdue me…" Here, I wrote a bit about the participation, by white women, in the subjugation of women of color domestic workers.

And what of abuse by white men? " 'The Help's' focus on women leaves white men blameless for any of Mississippi's ills," writes Boyd:

White male bigots have been terrorizing black people in the South for generations. But the movie relegates Jackson's white men to the background, never linking any of its affable husbands to such menacing and well-documented behavior. We never see a white male character donning a Klansman's robe, for example, or making unwanted sexual advances (or worse) toward a black maid.

This a serious exclusion according to the ABWH, "Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness."

Why the silence? Well, aside from the fact that this is supposed to be a "feel good movie," when you idolize black women as asexual mammies in a culture where rape and sexual harassment are often portrayed as compliments/acknowledgements of physical beauty (who would want to rape a fat, brown-skinned woman?!), then the constant threat of sexual abuse under which many of them labored and still labor vanishes. But black women themselves have long written about and protested this form of abuse. My own grandmother told me to be careful of white boys who would try to make me "sneak around" with them and an older southern man who was a fellow grad student told me that he and other southern men believed it was "good luck" to sleep with a black woman. Here, in the words of black women, are acknowledgements of how pervasive the problem was (is):

"I remember very well the first and last work place from which I was dismissed. I lost my place because I refused to let the madam's husband kiss me... I believe nearly all white men take, and expect to take, undue liberties with their colored female servants."*

"The color of her face alone is sufficient invitation to the southern white man… [f]ew colored girls reach the age of sixteen without receiving advances from them."*

"I learned very early about abuse from white men. It was terrible at one time and there wasn't anybody to tell."**

These stories abound in works like Stephanie Shaw's What a Woman Ought to Be and Do, Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter, Deborah Gray-White's Too Heavy a Load and other books where black women are truly at the center of the story. Black women's concern over sexual abuse is serious and readily evident, but "The Help," according to the ABWH, "makes light of black women's fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief."

III. The popularity of this most recent iteration [of the mammy] is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.—ABWH

This mention of the White House is not casual (Boyd opens her review with an Obama-era reference, as well). I'm currently working on a manuscript that examines portrayals of black women and issues of our "desirability," success, and femininity in media. To sum it up, we, apparently, are not desirable or feminine and our success is a threat to the world at large. Many black women are trying to figure out why so much is vested in this re-birthed image of us (because it's not new). One conclusion is that it is a counter to the image of Michelle Obama. By all appearances successful, self-confident, happily married and a devoted mother, she's too much for our mammy/sapphire/jezebel-loving society to take. And so, the nostalgia the ABWH mentions comes into play. It's a way to keep us "in our place."

It happens every day on a smaller scale to black women. I remember someone congratulating me in high school on achieving a 4.0 and saying that maybe my parents would take it easy on me for one-six weeks chore-wise. The white girl standing with us, who always had a snide comment on my academic success, quickly turned the conversation into one about how she hated her chores and how she so hoped the black lady who worked for them, whom she absolutely adored, would clean her room.

Even now, one of my black female colleagues and I talk about how some of our students "miss mammy" and it shows in how they approach us, both plus-sized, brown-skinned black women with faces described as "kind." I do not need to know about the black woman who was just like your grandmother, nor will I over-sympathize with this way-too-detailed life story you feel compelled to come to my office and (over)share.

IV. [T]he film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers' assassination sends Jackson's black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight.—ABWH

Embedded in this is perhaps the clearest evidence of the cowardliness of our nation. First, we cannot dwell too long on racism, in this case as exemplified in the Jim Crow Era and by its very clear effects. "Scenes like that would have been too heavy for the film's persistently sunny message," suggests Boyd. I'd go further to suggest that scenes like that are too heavy for our country's persistently sunny message of equal opportunity and dreams undeferred.

Second, when we do have discussions on the Jim Crow Era, we have to centralize white people who want to be on what most now see as the "right" side of history. They weren't just allies, they did stuff and saved us! And so, you get stories like "The Help" premised on the notion that "the black maids would trust Skeeter with their stories, and that she would have the ability, despite her privileged upbringing, to give them voice." Or like "The Long Walk Home," (another film about relationships between black and white women during the Civil Rights Era that centers… well, you get it) in which you walk away with the feeling that, yeah black people took risks during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but the person who had the most to lose, who was bravest, was the white woman employer who initially intervened only because she wanted to keep her "help."

These stories perpetuate racism because they imply that is right and rightful that white people take the lead and speak for us. (On another note, how old is this storyline? Skeeter's appropriation of black women's stories and voices, coupled with the fact that "Skeeter, who is simply taking dictation, gets the credit, the byline and the paycheck" reminded me so much of "Imitation of Life," when Bea helps herself to Delilah's pancake recipe, makes millions from it, keeps most for herself and Delilah is… grateful?!) The moral of these stories is, where would we have been without the guidance and fearlessness of white people?

I know this moral. That's why I have no plans to see "The Help."

_______________________

*From Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America.

**From Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow.

_______________________

Reason #43790 mama is going to kill all of us...

2011-08-02T13:57:00.003-05:00

She has said emphatically that no more dogs can come here. She's gone too much. The kids don't help like they say they will. The adults don't come take care of them as they should.

But...

the other day my nephew went to take the trash to the dumpster and he found three itty-bitty puppies that someone had left there. Of course he had to bring the bedraggled little things home. Their ribs were showing.

Mama wasn't here. I was all, "Oh, no. WE CANNOT HAVE DOGS. You have to take them somewhere... as soon as you feed them and give them some water. But then immediately!!!"

And I resolved to ignore the puppies. Maybe just look at them out the door. Or, pet them only once. Use a really old pan to give them water. Buy just one bag of puppy food because they wouldn't be here long. They couldn't be--my nephew and I are both going back off to college in 3 weeks.

Then, Mama made it home. She fussed and huffed and shook her head. NO NEW DOGS.

Last night, as we were driving home, she outlined her very good reasons. Three dogs are too expensive on her fixed income. They need vet visits immediately. We don't have a doghouse anymore and it is blazing-ly hot (My mama is very much "Animals belong outside!!!" We used to get in the most trouble for smuggling puppies in because we figured they were too cold or too hot or too lonely. That's the reason this post is titled as it is; as you can see from the picture, Deuce is carrying on the smuggling them in when Mama is gone tradition :-). She's on the go several days out of the month. I nodded along. It's not like I'm going to volunteer to take 3 dogs back to my apartment, so fair is only fair.

We pulled up in the yard. She looked at the puppies. She looked at me. She looked at the puppies. She looked back at me. "You know if you've started feeding those dogs, they're going to want to stay."

Me, meekly: "Yes ma'am."

She shook her head and got out. "Feed the puppies. They're little enough already. But we are not keeping those dogs!"

Yes, we're all suckers.
___________________________________
Seriously, we're in a rural area where we can't just run them to a shelter or a pound. Abandoned animals are just abandoned here. I have no idea what we're going to do. We won't just turn them out but we really can't keep them. My nephew is hoping that his other grandmother might have mercy on all of us bleeding hearts and take them in--she lives out in the country and already has some dogs.

Mundane

2011-05-20T10:05:00.001-05:00

Last night, while I was cooking dinner, my son suggested we have hot dogs at some point this weekend. I just looked at him because he knows a hot dog for me means all I'm eating is chili and a bun. I can't stand boiled wieners. He tried to compromise.

"You could grill 'em and burn them a little bit like y'all like."

Now, that has possibilities because I can tolerate a grilled hot dog a little better. But when it comes to grilling, I feel strangely torn. I'll marinate or season the stuff, throw it on the hot grill, but the grilling itself? I can't STAND smoke in my hair and clothes. Someone always starts the grill for me and watches the stuff. I have a feeling my kid is about to become an expert at the latter.

At this point, he's become emboldened by my silence. "You know, if I could have my favorite barbecue meal, it'd be hot dogs, sausage, and some of those brown beans."

And I recognize, this is my child's plea for simplicity. He's been placed in the role of guinea pig and while his palate has expanded a lot and I can get him to try most stuff one time, he longs for just a few things: rice, mac n cheese, fried catfish, hamburgers, and sloppy joes. He'd eat those everyday, but I, on the other hand, want to cook something new or different every night. Plus, rice goes with grits in my mind--why the love? They have no flavor! I understand their role as staples and fillers and recognize the importance of rice in diets around the world, but rather than add a pound of sugar and butter to my diet (as I am wont to do when I have to eat white rice), I just avoid it.

So last night, he watched me butterfly pork chops, stuff them with herbed goat cheese and sundried tomatoes, sear and then braise them in a mix of whatever I felt like throwing in the pan. I also made him try squash with peppers and onions which he thought was akin to losing cell phone privileges. As a compromise, I cooked rice... with a little cheese, broccoli, and butter :-) He mostly ate the rice... and dreamed of hot dogs, apparently.

As he planned his barbecue, I reminded him Friday was out because he has basketball practice. And Saturday is probably out because of a basketball tournament.

"All day Saturday?" he asked.

Here is where y'all should be proud--I totally resisted the urge to tell him "We might be caught up." I almost explained the Rapture to him in a teasing way then remembered how biblical stories like that terrified me when I was a kid.

Hell, I'm terrified now given some of the chain text messages I've been sent. Dear concerned family, you don't have to send any more messages questioning my readiness. No, I'm not. Though there are plenty of people who have gone on that I'd love to see just one more time, I don't know about being caught up with them mid-air.

And what does one wear to be Raptured?

On Presentism

2011-05-18T13:45:00.001-05:00

Dear U.S. History Student,

I understand protectiveness of your idols, I guess. If I felt someone impugned the figure of, say, Fannie Lou Hamer, I'd be ready to take off the earrings and smear the Vaseline. But I'm weary of your smug responses to any critique of your beloved Founders and/or your racist and sexist and classist grandfathers--the cry of presentism. How dare I or any student suggest that your beloveds were, well, fucked up? We can only come to that conclusion because we're judging them through the lenses of our day. We have to look at the "time in which they lived" (C). We are guilty, in our naivete and lack of understanding, of presentism.

I'd like to point out that your concept of presentism rests heavily in your identification with dominant groups. You may not have noticed, but one of the books I use, that you're supposed to be reading, is called Dissent in America. It's chock full of all kinds of primary sources that show that people in the past also thought your idols were full of privileged bullshit. Your adored historical figures had contemporary critics who were pointing out the same things that your classmates and I are. So, your claim of presentism dismisses all those people, all their arguments, and the history of dissent in this country.

I suppose that saying "The historical figures I admire were understandably a product of their times" is a lot more face-saving than saying "The historical figures I admire held tightly to oppressive systems out of self-interest and an unwillingness to challenge the status quo, thus ignoring the people who suggested that maybe, just maybe, there were problems with said systems." Whatever. Hey, they ignored protest from the margins, why shouldn't you?!

So, you can, if you choose, go ahead understating your idols' flaws and bristling at the critique of them. Or you can acknowledge things like the fact that, for whatever else they did, quite a few of your Founders were a bunch of sexist, elitist, racist slaveholders, some people told them that, and they didn't give a damn. Or that it wasn't just some abstract notions of states' rights and strict constitutionality that your southern forefathers were interested in upholding. Etc, etc.

Or you can continue to claim that critiques of them only occur in the present and conveniently disappear people like:

Benjamin Banneker
Abigail Adams
Maria Stewart
Frederick Douglass
John Brown
Chief Joseph
Ida Wells
Mother Jones
Joe Hill
Carlos Montezuma
Alice Paul
W.E.B DuBois
Hubert Harrison
Angelo Herndon
Fred Korematsu
Hector Garcia
Grace Lee Boggs
Bayard Rustin
Septima Clark
Clyde Warrior
Dolores Huerta
Audre Lorde
Vito Russo
Howard Zinn

Yep, I listed all those as a start. Crying presentism erases their historical critiques, their arguments that the world that was, wasn't the world that had to be.

Of course, that version of history is the one for which you probably long. It's safe. You can simultaneously, dissonant-ly claim the U.S. is exceptional and dismiss any problems with "but other people did it as well." Either we're different and special-er than everyone else or we're not; make up your mind. But maybe that dissonance is part of our heritage as well--how could the same person who theorized "All men are created equal" so completely challenge his own theory in Notes on the State of Virginia?

But my God, if your totally complacent answer is "That's just how it is," what limited possibilities must you envision for yourself and your abilities to effect change?

Sincerely,

dr. elle

Breaking News!!!!!!

2011-05-17T11:11:00.001-05:00

In a blog post at Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa has come to the totally original conclusion that black women are "Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women." For some reason, Psychology Today pulled down this ultra-objective, ultra-scientific post! You can read it here.

Personally, I'm floored. This is such new, groundbreaking stuff. No one in our society has ever suggested that black women are less attractive than other women! I mean, this is not something you see every day in media outlets.

Oh, wait...

Okay, slightly turning off my sarcasm, I'm just going to post what I wrote to my BFF on when she asked me to find the article and talk about it:

**Yawn** same ol', same ol', Mrs. O. We as black women are too masculine/have too much testosterone AND his "objective evidence" of our lack of attractiveness [as far as I can tell] is based on the opinions of some interviewers who do the longitudinal study "ADD Health." These are the opinions of people who have **totally** not been influenced by a culture that is always positing black women are less attractive and less feminine than other women, I'm sure. Now, while their opinions are "objective" the opinions of black women, who rank themselves as more attractive than other women, are subjective. 'Cause we're not bona-fide experts or authorities or whatever. **Side-eye alert**

But, oh, thank goodness that our lack of attractiveness is not due to our lack of intelligence (yeah, he cites "racial differences" in intelligence, too).

He also pondered if it might be our "much heavier" bodies (surprise!) or our African genetic mutations.

What he didn't seem to consider is that beauty is a standard constructed by and within a sociocultural context. As Kanazawa's colleague explains:

Standards of beauty, like most other beliefs, are socialized and change not only from place to place but also over time. In both the United States and England, (where Kanazawa lives and works), standards of beauty are essentially "White" standards, because whites comprise the majority of the population and have disproportional control over both media and fashion.*

[snip]

As long as this is understood and framed accordingly, there is no problem with the data Kanazawa reports. What they show is that because Black faces and bodies don't fit mainstream White standards of physical attractiveness, both respondents and interviewers show an anti-Black bias. Unfortunately, Kanazawa fails to consider either sample bias or socializing effects. Even if he believes, as he apparently does, that human behavior is entirely "evolutionary", good science requires a careful analysis of sample bias and an explicit discussion regarding the study's generalizability. Without this kind of methodological analysis, Kanazawa's entire premise -- that there is such a thing as a single objective standard of attractiveness -- is fatally (and tragically) flawed.

What's tragic is that this shit keeps getting published.
____________________________________
*These aren't the only reasons, I'd argue

I Need to Borrow a REALLY Small Violin, Please

2011-04-28T11:32:00.001-05:00

TW for homophobia and transphobia, including use of slurs and references to violence

Via a university newspaper, I first became aware a couple of days ago of a proposed Texas state budget provision "requiring state colleges and universities that use state funds to support 'a gender and sexuality center' to spend an equal amount to promote 'family and traditional values'." The amendment was proposed by Representative Wayne Christian and passed by a margin of 110-24. Christian identified the source of his consternation as centers "for students focused on gay, lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, transsexual, transgender, gender questioning, or other gender identity issues."

Inside Higher Ed has more on the story, including the observation that "Lawmakers supporting the bill have said that they favor only equal time for all kinds of sexuality" (Because cisgender heterosexual people aren't getting their fair share of time or money... or something).

But the Inside Higher Ed article and the school newspaper make it clear that other supporters are honest about their ultimate goal--getting rid of centers "that serve gay and lesbian students":

[T]he Young Conservatives of Texas, a group that worked with Christian on the legislation, did so with the hope that public colleges would respond to a law, if the bill passes, by ending support for existing centers. Tony McDonald, senior vice chairman of the group and a law student at UT Austin, said in an interview that "we could try to get these groups defunded" in a law, but that the equal funding approach was viewed as more likely to pass (perhaps with the same impact).

And from the school newspaper:

"State funding and student fees should not fund any university minority or political group whether it be black, white, gay, etc," John McClellan, Christian's Chief of Staff, said. "This amendment is just one step in the process towards getting rid of these centers."

The argument seems to be that traditional family values*, whatever the hell those are, and heterosexuality are in danger because of a conspiracy to "promote" homosexuality. Wherein promoting homosexuality is roughly equivalent to daring to exist as a gay person.

Poor Tony McDonald of the Young Conservatives of Texas is distraught that ""If I were to walk through UT law school with a shirt on that said, 'Homosexuality is immoral,' if I were to do that, there would be an uproar. People would be upset, and it would be considered out of place and not acceptable to do that. I'd probably get a talking to. But if you go through campus to promote homosexuality, that is the norm."

See how equivalent these things are? Being gay or supporting a university gender and sexuality center is the same as walking around wearing a t-shirt that actively promotes a hostile climate and condemns/others people.

Again, I ask where does this shit come from--these ideas that the most privileged people in our society are persecuted simply by the presence of truly marginalized people who are refusing to stay confined to those margins?! According to the article, students indicated that they just want "to create 'an equal playing field' for those who may disagree with the gay center."

Because the playing field at universities is so obviously leveled in a way that unfairly benefits gay students.

Dear Mr. McDonald, despite your (un)righteous indignation, as the Inside Higher Ed and the linked Texas Observer articles point out, there are things you will probably never have to worry about:

1. Grown ass lawmakers won't "crack jokes and guffaw" when discussing your sexuality or gender identity.

2. As the program co-ordinator for the center at Texas A & M notes,

I have never heard of any student who took their life because their college roommate outed them as being a heterosexual student.

[snip]

I have never had a student come up and complain that someone comes up and out of the blue calls them a 'hetero' and slapped them, but that happens to my students, who are called 'dyke' and 'fag.'

3. No one is ever going to accuse you of promoting heterosexuality just because you exist.

4. I agree with the Observer that you probably won't have these worries on the first day you're on campus:

How will he fit in? Should he tell his new roommate about his alternative hetero lifestyle? Will he be bullied, just like he was in high school, where he was mercilessly teased for being a sexual deviant? Where does a straight person turn?

No, you'll bounce through life willfully oblivious to the ways that heterosexuality is promoted, via everything from media outlets to tax benefits, imagining yourself egregiously put out and put upon.

But it's everyone else that has a "grievance-based" identity, right?
________________________________
*It would've taken another post to unpack the ongoing assumption that only people who are straight and cisgender (and to a certain extent, married/aspiring to be married) have family values and that "traditionally"/historically no one but those people have existed--I find the term "traditional" neatly and conveniently disappears the lives and experiences of a whole lot of people.

Pull Over, that Ass Is Too Black!

2011-04-27T14:10:00.001-05:00

When I first turned on the internet this morning and realized that President Obama had released the long-form version of his birth certificate, verifying that he was, indeed, born in Hawai'i, my first sarcastic thought was, "Bet some people finally regretting how we stole Hawai'i now."

Beyond my sarcasm, though, I think the president has set a horrible precedent. I mean, on a grand scale, he just got pulled over and asked to show papers proving his citizenship. I could be optimistic, I suppose, and think, "Well, maybe now he'll take a firmer stand on the treatment of immigrants and other people of color who are harassed, badgered, interrogated and violated every single day over questions of citizenship. Maybe he'll have this as a reference point." But optimism is not my strong suit.

He is supposed to be, as we so smugly and arrogantly love to say, the most powerful man in the world. This should be a lesson as to how that power is negated? mitigated? birthergated? by race and the equation of "Americanness" with "whiteness." In releasing that birth certificate, President Obama not only validated current problematic (understatement!) immigration policies, he conceded to the historical demand for people of color to "prove" their citizenship and that they deserve access to political and civil rights.

And why? He can't really believe the people who even posit shit like this will ever be satisfied or accepting of his presidency. Instead of saying, "I'm tired of this shit, it's ridiculous, so here is proof," he should've been saying, "I'm tired of this shit, it's ridiculous, and I won't engage with it."

I don't understand how you validate the extremists in the "other" party while always scornfully chiding the so-called extremists (ahem, perhaps actual progressives?) in your own.

Endangered White Men: The Saga Continues!

2011-04-19T13:28:00.001-05:00

In a Newsweek article more accurately described as a lamentation on the possible loss of privilege, Rick Maren and Tony Doukopil explore the plight of the "Beached White Male.” More specifically, they continue the ever popular myth of "the endangered white man.” From the article:

Brian Goodell, of Mission Viejo, Calif., won two gold medals in the 1976 Olympics. An all-American, God-fearing golden boy, he segued into a comfortable career in commercial real estate. Until 2008, when he was laid off. As a 17-year-old swimmer, he set two world records. As a 52-year-old job hunter, he’s drowning.

Brock Johnson, of Philadelphia, was groomed at Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Co., and was so sure of his marketability that he resigned in 2009 as CEO of a Fortune 500 company without a new job in hand. Johnson, who asked that his real name not be used, was certain his BlackBerry would be buzzing off its holster with better offers. At 48, he’s still unemployed.

Two coasts. Two men who can’t find jobs. And one defining moment for the men in the gray flannel suits who used to run this country. Or at least manage it.
Capitalism has always been cruel to its castoffs, but those blessed with a college degree and blue-chip résumé have traditionally escaped the worst of it. In recessions past, they’ve kept their jobs or found new ones as easily as they might hail a cab or board the 5:15 to White Plains. But not this time.

[snip]

The same guys who once drove BMWs, in other words, have now been downsized to BWMs: Beached White Males.

The theme throughout the article is that the effects of the “Mancession” are suddenly more alarming because people like this--Ivy-league educated, BMW driving, white men--might be suffering, too!

I don’t know rightly where to start or stop with this article because it is so very, very loaded. Maren and Doukopil really used the phrase “All American… golden boy.” They really casually reference the easy way in which white men "hail a cab," an un-innocent choice of words, an invocation of the sorts of things white men have been able to take for granted, given cab drivers' well-documented reluctance and outright refusal to stop for men of color. They really suggest that white men used to run the country, as if the presidency of Barack Obama renders invisible the makeup of Congress, the court system, the governorships, business leaders… well, you know. But most disturbingly, they really imply that the situation created by the recession is unfair, not solely because these men “deserve” security because they are educated or made good career choices (that would be problematic enough in and of itself given the unequal access to education and work opportunities, but I digress), but they “deserve” better because they are white and male.

See, the endangered white man myth does not solely rest on the zero-sum argument that white men are increasingly disadvantaged in this country by the gains of women and people of color. The myth is also fed by the fear that being white and male will no longer bring all the old advantages. Claiming that white men are suffering unfairly or disproportionately is the not-so-subtle code for, “Ahh! The old system of privilege is being dismantled and we want to hold onto it!” Many white men have come to see the benefits of the privileging of whiteness and maleness as their due, as rights to which they are entitled. When that privilege seems even remotely challenged, when the systems that have upheld and institutionalized their "exceptionalism" seem no longer to do so, the result is a "real" crisis, i.e. one felt by the people deemed most important in society.

And so, Maren and Dokoupil inform us that the term “ ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged populations’… now includes white males.” This operates at once, as an acknowledgement of class and an ahistorical disappearance of generations of poor and working class white men, commensurate, I guess, with their focus on the plight of white men with the most social privilege. They speculate on the devastating effects the recession may have on the mental health and well-being of these men who might feel less-than-men. And they equate (their problematic definition of) manhood solely with the experiences and existence of upper class white men as they wonder, “Can manhood survive the lost decade?”

The power of the endangered white man myth lies partially in its ability to obscure the plight of people who really are suffering inordinately. In this case, in an admittedly terrible economy in which white men are struggling, they still have relative privilege to everyone else, who are also struggling, but even worse. For example, the alarming statistic around which the Newsweek article is organized is this: “Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats. That’s more than 5 percent jobless.”

Y’all… when I looked quickly at BLS statistics for March 2011, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for white men 20 and over was 7.7% For black men in the same age group, it was 16.8%

But Newsweek makes it clear to whom we should direct our attention and concern. For the last few years, we have been repeatedly told that the effects of this recession are somehow made more damaging because it purportedly affects men more than women. Now, we learn, its even worse than we thought because it is affecting the men who matter most.

My Child, Son of a Sistorian

2011-04-13T10:09:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, on our way to basketball practice, my son and I were treated to the delightful sound of Rihanna... umm... "singing" S & M.

"I hate this stupid ass song," I said.

"Mama," he countered, in that tone that lets me know a dig is probably about to be made about my age or total lack of coolness, "this is a good song!"

"Boy, please."

"It is! The only part that's bad is when she says 'chains and whips excite me.'"

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, half afraid to ask why he thought that particular line was bad. I just knew he was going to reveal some knowledge about bondage or sex that I wasn't ready for him to have, much less discuss with his fragile-flower mama. But, of course I asked, "Why that line?"

"Mama! Chains and whips excite me? How she gone say that? She needs to think about her history. I bet they didn't excite her ancestors!"

On Law & Order

2011-01-17T15:58:00.001-06:00

The emphasis on and call for "law and order" has often been synonymous with the suppression of social justice struggles in our society. Martin Luther King, Jr., realized that and spoke eloquently of it. Today, as some of us commemorate his birthday, I just want to quote relevant passages from his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and the "Statement from Alabama Clergymen" that prompted the letter.

The Alabama clergymen had already written a statement called "An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense." They imagined themselves moderates, negotiating between southern segregationists and civil rights workers, each equally "extremist." See, there's a problem with proclaiming oneself a "racial moderate" or "neutral." Because the perspectives of dominant groups are normalized and regarded as the default, those perspectives are often viewed as “neutral.” In the case of social justice struggles in the United States, the so called “moderate” perspective, in reality, centers the feelings, thoughts, and ideologies of non-marginalized people. King wrote, for example, that white moderates took the same paternalistic view of African Americans as white southerners who were more overtly racist. As a result, he had been

...gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.

King also pointed out how the moderates’ claim that the Birmingham protests were "unwise and untimely" revealed their privileged status as “white” in the racial hierarchy and their inability to fully understand African Americans’ perspective:

Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait."

Unaffected by the "disease of segregation," clergymen composed a statement that insisted on the importance of obeying the law. They implied that the legal system and the institution of law were logical and just and that justice would be the result if people use them. The clergymen acknowledged no distinction, King claimed, between just and unjust laws. Segregation laws were unjust, examples of "dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.”

So, why did the Alabama clergymen, who imagined themselves moderate and even sympathetic to African Americans insist on "law and order" and define civil rights demonstrations as representative of disorder that "incite[d] hatred and violence?" Why did they suggest that African Americans pursue their cause via the courts--a suggestion not rooted in any historical or social context, as African Americans had received little redress in southern courts--instead of "in the streets?"

Obviously, the people who will or do benefit from the system in place have a vested interest in maintaining and/or prolonging the status quo through the use of "law and order." Order was more important to them than any semblance of justice, despite their claims:

[The moderate] ...constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; ...paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; ...lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

And, in the case of the "moderate" Alabama clergymen, King theorized they had a problematic definition of peace, that prioritized "a negative peace which is the absence of tension" over "a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

King called for moderates to shift their perspectives and to realize that the "calm" appearance of order often obscured the violence necessary to maintain it:

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation.

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake.

Do me a favor? Keep thinking of justice and positive peace, not "order," as the foundation upon which we should build.

Happy MLK Day!

Happy Blogiversary, elle, (abd) (phd)

2010-11-28T10:47:00.003-06:00

Five years ago today, I began this blog with these words:

A few minutes shy of November 29, 2005, I'm beginning a new blog. Let's see how this goes...

I think it has gone swimmingly :-) I don't post as much as I'd like, but the friends I've made, the thoughts I've worked out, the writing I've done, the realizations to which I have come all have made this one of the most important endeavors I've undertaken in my life.

I don't know what the next five years will hold. Will I have a year in which I actually post consistently? Will I finally call it quits as the tenure clock shifts my focus away from writing anything but THE BOOK (that's how I think of it--a terrifying, in-need-of-revision thing that stands between me and job security :-)? I really don't know.

But I am glad I did this!

Thanksgiving Thoughts

2010-11-25T10:42:00.002-06:00

I am thinking about how Thanksgiving is a story we weave for ourselves so we don't have to focus too much on the horrific reality of what happened to indigenous peoples before/after this "story."

I am thinking of all the people who mark this day as a "Day of Mourning."

As part of this culture, I am thinking of that for which I am thankful. In a few hours, my family, (largely) spared and well for another year, will pour into this house with an abundance of food and warmth and children and love.

I am thinking about the physical absence of my father and feeling that, but I am thankful for what his life of work and sacrifice and love made possible. I am sitting in a house he bought with an education and gift for words he helped make possible. I have a security-in-self, an assured-ness that I am loved and appreciated that he fostered.

So, it should come as no surprise that I have a wide variety of thoughts and feelings and observations. I am, after all, a SIStorian who is quite interested in the way U.S. history is constructed and taught in ways that encourage nationalism, often at the expense of (hi)stories that don't fit the narrative. I am also very much a product of this country and a Christian heritage that emphasize the need to be and express thankfulness.

I don't try to figure me out--neither should you :-))

Anchored

2010-11-08T10:31:00.000-06:00

Once, during a particularly un-Louisiana like winter in my youth, we had a severe ice-and-little-bit-of-snow storm. The world outside our flimsy screen doors was cold and white. The ubiquitous pine trees bent beneath the weight of icicles. The roads lay covered by inches of ice and the little stream in front of our house looked as if it had been interrupted mid-flow, frozen into a wavy sheet that we assumed must be just right for ice-skating (we were kids from the Deep South; what did we know? :-). Because my blue-collar parents didn’t have the luxury of having jobs to which they could just call in and miss, they went to work. My mom always hated the fact that if one person made it out of the bad weather to the plant, all of them would be expected to come.

My sister and I spent the day at the babysitter’s who lived down the street from us. At some point after 3 p.m., my dad, who was working days that week, came to collect us. We were so excited. Because mama did most of the day-to-day care and was so overprotective that we were always with her, Daddy was the “fun” parent. (As a mother, I think that’s horribly unfair, but it’s how we perceived it.)

He’d ridden with someone else who dropped him at our babysitter’s house. We were all going to walk home together. My sister and I initially took itty-bitty steps, scared of slipping and falling. We clung to Daddy’s arms and I honestly have no idea how he stayed upright and managed to keep us standing. Over the course of the few hundred yards to our house, we grew bolder, sliding on the ice, nodding at Daddy’s warnings, but skipping and squealing as we’d slip. Each time, Daddy would sigh, catch us, set us on our feet. It was a little scary, the knowledge that we might slip down the steep sides of the “branch” and land on the frozen stream. It was also exhilarating because we were made virtually fearless by the presence of Daddy, secure in the knowledge that he would never let us fall.

Today is my dad’s birthday and I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for our relationship than the one expressed in that story. I have done some questionable, dangerous, make-no-sense-at-all things in my life and my dad was always there to catch me, to make me feel safe, to keep me upright. Even when I ignored his warnings, he’d sigh a lot, scold for a minute, then pick me up and set me on my feet again. His presence made me feel safe in venturing out, messing up, and trying again. One of the reasons that I’ve been able to do so much, good and bad, is because I knew I had a secure foundation in my parents. “You can always come home,” they told us, and they didn’t mean it in just a literal sense. My parents were/are home, and in the last four and a half months, I’ve felt the missing part of that structure keenly.

This is the first November 8th I’ve ever faced without my dad. I’m not even home to visit his grave. And in two weeks, I’ll have my own first birthday without my Daddy. I don’t like thinking about that, either.

But I do have moments of peace. A few weeks ago, we went rock climbing. As I hemmed and hawed and climbed, I kept thinking, “Your ass knew better than this! Lord, I’m not gone make it.” I kept going, though, a little bit at a time, stopping to catch my breath or balance. And then, a good way up the rock, we suddenly felt a strong wind at our backs. It was so forceful that we could feel it pushing us. I made it to the top and just sat there for the longest, thinking, breathing, silent as the wind blew all around me. That night, when I talked to Mama about it, I told her, only half-jokingly, “I know that was Daddy helping me up that hill.”

“It probably was,” she said, “You know he’s still holding you up.”

I love you, Daddy. Happy birthday.

And thank you.

Weekend Crises

2010-10-18T10:56:00.001-05:00

I graded papers this weekend. That created the first crisis. Roughly 20% of the students in this small class plagiarized. Another 50% percent did their own work, had great ideas, but lacked the organization, details, and analysis to make their exams good.

This class has turned out to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated because quite a few of the students came in not ready to do the work required in upper division classes. Grr.

But here is the main crisis. Crisis One facilitated an emergency moscato-run. I returned home to find...

MY CORKSCREW WAS NOT WORKING.

And so I was reduced to this chisel-and-shove game involving a paring knife, a steak knife, and, as my need and desperation grew, a small hammer.

You know how sometimes you say f*ck it and just push the cork down into the bottle and swill down cork with your deliciously sweet wine? Well, yeah, no. This one wouldn't budge. I swear we worked on it for an hour.

Finally, the bottle just cracked and off popped a smooth piece of glass. My niece looked at me, ready to toss it.

"Girl, get my glass," I told her.

In Which CNN Doesn't Get "It"

2010-09-16T11:43:00.000-05:00

Liss directed me to an article on CNN entitled “Is Ethnic Beauty the New “It” Factor?” From the article

There was a time when the Caucasian girl-next-door looks of Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford and more recently Kate Moss dominated the fashion pages. Then came new fashion icons: Naomi Campbell, Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce - and then Giselle, Kim Kardashian and Shakira.

More voluptuous figures, fuller lips and darker skin, features traditionally associated with women of African, Latin and Asian cultures, are "in." Over the past decade, an appreciation for ethnic beauty has been on the rise, and these natural features are becoming popular among Caucasian women who desire to look more "exotic."

My immediate response was, “Eww.” I’ll give you some reasons why in simple, numbered form.

1) CNN, you’re a little bit late. The New York Times ran a piece way back in 2003 about “Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous” in which advertising and fashion industry insiders waxed on about the “desire for the exotic, left-of-center beauty.” And you know what T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting discovered when she analyzed the “rise” of Generation E.A. in her book, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down? This:

“Despite the hubbub about Generation E.A., editors and ad executives admit that whiteness continues to dominate the beauty and fashion industries,” (31).

2) There is something creepy and fetish-y and colonizer-y about talking about WoC’s “exotic” beauty, white women’s desire for it, and the commodification of it. “What’s not to love, embrace and emulate about ethnic beauty?” gushes one fashion director. And, yes, the NYT article actually used the word “exotic,” too. They also both, not-so-covertly, define WoC outside the realm of “Americanness.” From the CNN article:

The desire for individuality leads people to embrace the image of ethnic women over typical "cookie-cutter American beauties," said [Marie Claire beauty and health director, Ying] Chu.

And one blogger claimed that “no one wants to just look like the quintessential American girl.”

With regards to the NYT article, Sharpley-Whiting notes that the “left-of-center” designation “still situates whiteness at the center of American beauty culture and darker hues on this schematic shifting to the left,” (31).

3) There is, apparently, “beauty” and “ethnic beauty.” Love that continued disappearing of (the normalizing of) whiteness.

4) This isn’t just about our increasingly multicultural nation. “ ‘Race’ mixing is not a ‘new reality,’” writes Sharpley-Whiting, “America [has never been] as ‘white’ as it believes itself to be,” (30). This is about the beauty myth and those ever-shifting goalposts. Naomi Wolf is right—women are never going to meet the elusive standards. I did agree with the blogger I mentioned in point two that this has less to do with a melting pot and more to do with the “obsession of perfection.” “The beauty standards,” she said, “[are] a bit skewed and contradicting.”

5) To imply that the fashion industry, with its notorious color and race issues is at the forefront of this “trend” is laughable, at best.

6) Speaking of the word trend, now, come on! I mean, the “it” factor? And the claim that the mainstream popularity and visibility of Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez “made the larger, rounder bottom sexy?" This underlying notion, for which I don’t yet have the words, that implies that so-called ethnic beauty needed the affirmation, acceptance, and envy of white people to exist, is infuriating.

Jail Is Preferable

2010-08-23T12:14:00.009-05:00

File this under continued vilification of poor people:

Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

I don’t think I can fully break down the classist, sexist, and racist stereotypes/myths embodied in sentiments like these, but just to start:

1. Welfare recipients don’t work outside the home and don’t want to do so. Even before welfare “reform” back in 1996, most recipients worked or sought work. I always wonder if people like Paladino have any idea how paltry benefits are.

2. Being poor/needing assistance is some sort of moral failing that requires institutionalization and constant shame. That people seek welfare assistance is particularly “bad” to people like Paladino—the poor are supposed to suffer nobly and silently. As one commenter romanticized:

[B]ack in the thirties young men were ecstatic to get a job and to develop new skills via the Civilian Conservation Corp. But back then, the poor were tough, honorable folk with intact families… Today's poor aren't poor due to the economy, but the result of hand feeding that created and now sustains society breakdown.

Recently, problemchylde commented on this mindset:

All rags-to-riches (or rags-to-bitches, if you want to get all Boondocks about it) stories start with people who are poor but industrious. Tales of kids eating cigarette ash sandwiches to survive. Tales of people saving mustard packets so they have food that stretches through the whole year. Bonus points if your parent proudly refuses government help, or if you suffer through and survive a vitamin deficiency. You’re a rock star if you live many years out on the streets and still pull down a 4.0+ GPA. You have done poverty correctly.

However, if you take what little disposable income you have and buy sushi, you are doing wrong. Poor people do not want things like smartphones (you’re poor; who are you calling on a smartphone?), televisions (you’re poor; what do you need entertainment for?), nice cars (why wouldn’t you get a modest car to get around when you’re poor), or delicious food (do you know how much ramen you could have bought for the cost of that scone?). Poor people should not take any windfalls or nest eggs or scraped together pennies and expose themselves to luxuries. After all, isn’t that just a brutal reminder of how poor they are any other time? Why not just face the fact that poor is what you are, poor is what you shall be, and poor means that you cannot have nice things?

I’d advise you to read the whole post.

3. Motherwork is not "real" work/not valuable. The only work that is important/deserving of remuneration occurs outside the home. The article quotes Paladino as saying, “Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check.” (Emphasis mine)

4. The mothering of poor women, especially poor women of color, is insignificant/not necessary for their children. As I said at that link,

A discourse has developed in this country to support stealing our children away from us that attacks us as immoral, "illegal," or uneducated. [Remember] black children sold away from their mothers and Native children forced into "Indian schools" so they could be "properly" Christianized and Americanized. In fact, Americanizers of the late 19th/early 20th century spent inordinate amounts of time threatening to take immigrant children from their parents, telling immigrant mothers how their methods of child-rearing were substandard to those of more WASP-y Americans, probably as much time as 20th century welfare critics spent convincing themselves that poor black women did not really love or want their children--they only had them to get more out of the system--and as much time as 21st century anti-immigration proponents spend convincing themselves that Latinas don't really love or want their children--they just want anchor babies.

If most welfare recipients are single moms and you move them into dormitories, who takes care of their kids? Or do you institutionalize the children as well, under the blanket assumption that the state will do a “better” job of rearing them? As Dorothy Roberts said in Shattered Bonds, "America’s child welfare system is rooted in the philosophy of child saving—rescuing children from the ills of poverty, typically by taking them away from their parents," (p 26). Which brings me to another problematic idea…

5. Poor people need to be institutionalized/under constant government oversight because of their deficient character and abilities. We already know that the state intervenes disproportionately in poor families of color. According to Roberts, "the public child welfare system equates poverty with neglect," (p 27). And as the article noted:

the suggestion that poor families would be better off in remote institutions, rather than among friends and family in their own neighborhoods, struck some anti-poverty activists as insulting.

I think “insulting” is too mild a word.

6. Poor people are unclean, all come from disordered homes and, thus, lack social skills. I mean, he’s going to give them lessons in:

“personal hygiene… the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes.”

[snip]

“You have to teach them basic things — taking care of themselves, physical fitness. In their dysfunctional environment, they never learned these things”

Related to the belief in the disorder/dysfunction of all poor homes and communities, Paladino asserts, "These are beautiful properties with basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities. Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities." To live in... jails. And see how he emphasizes the bathroom/toilet facilities? As if this is 1910 instead of 2010 and people aren't used to them?

As an aside, that comment reminded me of Barbara Bush's assertion, after talking to Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Houston, "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." The idea that poor people don't have "real" or worthy communities or family and geographic ties is infuriating.

7. Poor people deserve to have their labor exploited. He’s using prisons to house people to extract low-cost labor. I don’t think this idea is so original.

I'm sure there is more that I could highlight in this disaster of a suggestion, but I think you get the idea.

Concentration

2010-08-13T10:34:00.001-05:00

From the Florida AP/Miami Herald:

A candidate for the Florida House of Representatives says "camps" should be built to house illegal immigrants in Florida until they can be deported.

Yeah, let that sink in. Said candidate seems woefully unaware of how similar ideas have worked in U.S. history. Or, you know, maybe she is.

As if that isn't enough:

Marg Baker, who is seeking the Republican nomination for House District 48, says officials could "collect enough illegal aliens until you have enough to ship them back."

The dehumanization in that sentence--as if referring to people as "illegal aliens" is not a clear indicator of her mindset, she actually makes the suggestion that the government "collect" them and "ship" them as if they are cargo.

Baker even threw in a little classism* for good measure:

Baker added the housing would be "regular homes like a lot of poor people live in."

Then, just to be sure the us vs. them sentiment came through (minus words like "undesirable" and "dangerous"), Baker warned:

"We need to have camps because there are a lot of these people roaming among us."

Emphasis mine.

Ignorance hers.

H/T Quaker Dave He found video (that I just saw this morning and as I am on my way out for a while, I can't transcribe right now). Scratch my idea that maybe she doesn't know about historical precedent. She actually says:

We can follow what happened back in the 40s and 50s. I was just a little girl in Miami and they built camps for the people that snuck into the country because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and shipped them back... we must stop them.

Ms. Baker... while you're reminiscing about history, please remember someone else used camps in the 40s.
__________________
*Of course, much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly anti-Latino immigrant rhetoric, is classist already.

I Write Letters

2010-08-12T12:07:00.002-05:00

(edited below the fold: h/t
ajoye and The Chemist at Shakesville)

Dear Allstate,

Despite what your advertising people may have told you, this is not a commercial:

(Transcript below the fold)

This is a twisted conglomeration of stereotypes. In 15 seconds, you perpetuate and reinforce the ideas that the “typical” teenage girl:

likes pink,

is distracted by sparkly things,

is careless,

is a dangerously poor driver,

is selfish.

Who is this girl? I'm not sure she's typical. And, as if the commercial isn’t insulting enough, you have the nerve to refer to this mysterious girl as “Mayhem?”

Who’s “in good hands” with you, Allstate? Certainly not young women or the image of them.

Exasperated and insulted,

elle

And this:

Because women out performing their daily routines are a danger to men who just can't help themselves. Here is the same sentiment present in so many rape apologists' arguments: "It's the woman's fault for wearing certain clothing/being attractive/taking up (public) space)."

Grrr.
__________________

Transcript 1:

A pink SUV makes its away across a parking lot. The camera then switches to the inside of the SUV where we see a disheveled man (Mayhem) driving and clutching a cell phone with a sparkly cover.

Mayhem: "I'm a typical teenage girl."

The phone chimes and Mayhem looks down at it. In the process, he hits the front fender of a car and knocks it off, damaging his own car, as well. He continues to drive off and tosses the cell phone into the back seat.

Screen fades to black and the words "Are You in Good Hands" and then "Allstate" appear.

Transcript 2:

Commercial opens on Mayhem jogging with requisite pink headbands and weights.

Mayhem: I’m a hot babe out jogging. I’m out making sure this (gestures towards his upper body) stays a ten when you drive by.

(Guy drives by in black car and ogles Mayhem. Mayhem smiles and winks because we all know how flattering it is to be ogled.)

Mayhem: You’re checking out my awesome headband when…

(Guy crashes into light pole)

Mayhem: Oops.

(Light pole falls on car)

Mayhem: That’s when you find out, your cut rate insurance… it ain’t paying for this.

(Guy gets out of the car to survey damage)

Mayhem: So get Allstate. Save cash and get better protected from Mayhem like me.

Allstate logo appears along with voice of Dennis Haysbert: Dollar for Dollar, nobody protects you from Mayhem than Allstate.

Well, This Might Be a New Angle

2010-08-11T11:09:00.000-05:00

Did you know black women are in a crisis? A marriage crisis? Forty-two percent of us have never been married and that spells OMG!!! DOOM!!!

Seriously, how could you not have heard about it? It's been a hot topic for the past few years now (And here's a timeline from just the last few months!). Media outlets have been all over it. Scholars at Yale even did a study and Oprah got in on the hype.

Yesterday, Liss sent me an article that captured an argument that was new to me. It poses the question: Does the black church keep black women single? "A-ha," I thought (after I picked up my jaw) "yet another way to keep this largely manufactured crisis going."

Why am I so aggravated, you might ask, if all these articles are simply stating a true fact? I'm not bothered by someone saying 42% of black women have never been married. I am bothered by how the tone and content of these articles often play into old tropes of black women as undesirable and of black communities on the verge of collapse.

They're also plain old sexist for a number of reasons. For one thing, this is always a crisis for black women. As one of my colleagues pointed out when we did a presentation on this, the percentage of black men who have never been married is quite similar (43% maybe--I need to find the number she unearthed) but we never hear about the black man's marriage crisis. The "problem" is quite often cast as black women having the nerve to get educated/be successful. This crisis also presumes that women are incomplete without men and marriage, that nothing we've accomplished matters, that contentment and happiness cannot exist for single women.

The "marriage crisis" is also used to obscure systemic/institutional causes of larger problems like poverty and lack of equal access. As I wrote in my half-hearted review of CNN's "Black In America"

After watching parts and pieces of CNN's Black in America: ~~What's Wrong With~~ The Black Woman and Family last night, I was worried.

I mean, I'm single, educated, and a mother. I felt practically doomed.

But! CNN has the solution for the problem I didn't even know I was: marriage. Yep.

See, marrying would mean that I wouldn't be a single mom anymore. And, it would magically mean no more poverty for single moms! Never mind that

1) Many single moms (like me) have arrangements that work for us and our children. I am single because I'm not married, but I'm not raising my child alone.

2) We refuse to adequately address pay equity and the devaluation of women's work which contribute to the impoverishment of women and children.

3) We've stigmatized and rendered thoroughly inadequate any system of social provision.

4) Marrying a guy who does not work or who works in low-wage labor won't solve much of anything.

5) What about single moms who don't want to marry? Is that not a valid option when you're poor?

6) What about single moms who don't want a heterosexual marriage because they're lesbian or bisexual?

I'm also irritated because no matter how much we analyze, challenge, and try to debunk the crisis, the news organizations proceed willfully unaware with these stories.

The other major source of my irritation/aggravation? So often the solution to the marriage crisis is presented as black women's need to settle/compromise. Our standards are too high, apparently. In that sense, the argument that "the" black church "keeps black women single" is not new. From Debborah Cooper (the article is based on a discussion she began):

"Black women are interpreting the scriptures too literally. They want a man to which they are 'equally yoked' -- a man that goes to church five times a week and every Sunday just like they do," Cooper said in a recent interview.

"If they meet a black man that is not in church, they are automatically eliminated as a potential suitor. This is just limiting their dating pool."

Now, I can understand Cooper's critique on some other points--she writes, for example, about how black churches are structured around "traditional gender roles which make women submissive to and inferior to men." But if a woman has made up her mind that it is important to marry a man who shares her beliefs and values, why all the demands that she compromise? Is that unreasonable? Don't women other than black women have similar desires?

My jaw dropped again when Cooper suggested that church-going black women should give up their Sunday morning habits to "leave-and go where the boys go: tailgates, bars and clubs."

Cooper says she is trying to empower black women. But what is empowering about giving up something to which you are dedicated to linger around places you might find questionable or unpleasant in effort to "get" a man?

To me, this sounds like more of the blame-the-black-woman-for-this-imaginary-crisis. What do you think?
___________________
I should really, really do another post on one magical solution that's been posited as the "crisis" has grown--interracial marriage. Of course, the issue is not interracial marriage itself, but the portrayal of it as an easy cure-all.

Signs and Such

2010-08-05T15:56:00.001-05:00

Since my father's death, I've been in this space--the spot where tangible things are so important--his truck, his clothes, the last thing he may have worn. And I have been battling guilt because I was so sick the last weeks of his life that he was consumed with worry about me. He'd just come sit in my room and look at me quietly. Sometimes he'd knock on the door and I'd be too sick to say anything, even when he'd ask if I was ok. I feel horribly about that now.

Yes, I tell myself not to reduce my 35 and a half years with my dad to those last two weeks or so. Yes, I tell myself that the memories I have and the lessons he taught me are things that are more important, more lasting than anything tangible. But right now, so early on, I still have regrets.

People have told me to perceive so many things as signs. A song on the radio, the birth of two new babies to my family so shortly after his death, fleeting scents or feelings. But I'm not that type. I always search for the "logical" explanation.

Back to my need for tangibles. When I finally made it home from my hospital stay, my sister presented me with one of the silicone bracelets he'd been wearing when he died. She had one on her wrist and she gave me one that they'd had to cut off him because his congestive heart failure often made him suffer from edema. I put it in my coin purse until I could glue it together.

Sometime shortly thereafter, I opened the coin purse somewhere and lost the bracelet. I looked for it desperately to no avail. I was heartbroken, but tried to convince myself that it was just a thing, that I didn't need it because I had so much more of him.

And still, I felt horrible. It was one of the last things he'd worn and I planned to always keep it close to me. How could I be so careless?

Last night, my oldest nephew emerged from my father's room with a ring. I recognized it immediately. It was his wedding ring, one he'd refused to take off until the edema made it impossible to wear. Once he'd taken it off, the kids had meddled and lost it. And now, little more than a month after his death, here it was.

I slid it on my finger and went to my mom. She confirmed that it was his wedding ring. She reached for it and I began to take it off. Then she shook her head.

"It fits your finger," she said.

It does, quite well. Never in my life had I been happy that I'd ignored my mom's warnings that cracking my knuckles would make me have "big ol' fingers" with an "embarrassing" ring size. As always in my life, I was happy I have a mama who knows when I need something.

And I needed this ring. I know that one day I probably won't. One day I might be able to look at it fondly in a jewelry box or return it to my mama or be content with memories, but not now.

I don't know if this is one of those elusive, ethereal signs, but I am so grateful for it.

No Place Safe

2010-08-05T14:51:00.001-05:00

(Wrote this a month ago. Forgot that I didn't publish it here. Will give you some idea of my summer before I start writing more)

Today, I am on the bright side of the sickest period, physically, of my life. And days ago, while I lay on my bed, thinking I might be slowly dying, my darling father actually did. To say that I am not well is an understatement. My family and friends banded together to bring me back to the city to better care and I am feeling the effects.

The nausea no longer turns me inside out.

I no longer have to close my eyes while my best friend or my mom or my sister bathes me.

I can actually make tears and jokes and dear God, words.

But just now in this hospital, the sickness has rebounded in away. I feel assaulted, so shaken, so fucking tired that I can only do the one thing I feel that I know how sometimes--write.

The other day, long dark hours ago, when I couldn't speak and my mother was telling one of the aditting doctors that I was a professor, and of history no less, I should've felt the warning come of him, but Lord I was so ill. He said something like, "A-ha! Is she ready?"

He came back today. I was not ready. He pulled his chair up in the middle of this room where my mother and I sit now and began with the questions. What did I teach? Surely I realized the broad scope of my fall classes? Had there been black films made in a protest tradition? Could I find copies of them?

Did I get the Amazon suggestions he left at my bedside table the other night while I was vomiting--books I should read as a historian, he assured me. My mom asked had he been a history major. "No," he said imperiously, "I just read."

Because of course she doesn't.

And then came the heart of his argument. Could I understand the position of white people like him who respected black people who had seen real racism in the 1940s and 50s but now had to deal with the anger of black people for whom racism was rare, and mostly a memory?

A memory of resentment, I think he said. No black person born after 1970 has really encountered racism--well, maybe me from Louisiana, but here? Oh no. No, we want to preserve our racial preferences without acknowledging our racism. We too often assume racism.

As an example, he'd grown weary of his black friend who often wondered if poor service was a result of her race. Anyone could be served badly in a Texas city by the end of the 20th century.

And yes, he understood the feelings of (black) nurses' aids who cared for (white) patients who were subjected to racist abuse. BUT alzheimer's... delirium... old memories... and couldn't I understand that one of the greatet fears of old white women was thata black man would come do something to them into the night?

Also, when would I teach about the Palestinian-Israeli comflict? Wasn't Israel as guilty as South Africa? Step outside my comfort zone--it was as easy to teach about others as ourselves.

Finally, he prepared to leave after telling me I didn't talk enough for him. Me with the nausea and the phlegm and the cracked lips.

He doesn't see racism (or sexism I'm sure)

but he

came into my room

turned down the TV my mama was listening to

disregarded my recently delivered dinner

ignored my signs of discomfort and final outright silence

advised me on what to teach--though he never asked my specialties

gave me homework

had a history of dismissing black women's opinions and experiences

planned to challenge me and my authority from the moment he knew my title.

Before he re-situated his chair and left,

He said, "I feel better now."

My blood pressure when they just checked it?

149/104

and all I can do

is write.

Will this be my life?

ProfessorWomanofColor?

I don't want it right now.

In Which I Share Some (Re)Sources

2010-05-03T12:34:00.002-05:00

I'm prepping for my Construction of Femininity class and one of the things I want to explore is, what happens to women who don't meet the definition of feminine? How do they negotiate femininity, masculinity, the pressure to be either/or and external and internal pressures? What social sanctions are imposed upon them?

As one source for these kinds of reflections and life experiences, I wanted to read what butch/stud/aggressive lesbians had to say about their experiences as children and adolescents. I wanted information shared by these women, not written about them. I didn't find a lot with my own (probably clueless) searches or in academic databases. So, I wrote the organizers of the Butch Voices regional conferences and pleaded for help. They responded quickly and wonderfully. I have a few books to begin with--a number of them seem to be fiction, but historians can use that (and my class is a multi-disciplinary topics course)!

I also was given a link to a website about the Kicked Out Anthology. A description:

In the U.S., 40% of homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ). Kicked Out published by Homofactus Press brings together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth and tells these forgotten stories of some of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Diverse contributors share stories of survival and abuse with poignant accounts of the sanctuary of community and the power of creating chosen families.

And I really want to share the video below, called "Tomboy" with y'all. It's geared towards kids, based on the book Are You a Boy or a Girl? by Karleen Pendleton Jimenez, but I will use it in my college classroom to prompt my students to talk about what they saw/experienced as youth and how they see the same lessons being perpetuated today.

Because it is for kids, it has some simple, generalized language and characters we'd probably question: "boy things" and "girl things," for example, and the girl who is "traditionally feminine" is a villain of sorts, a complete tool of the patriarchy. That in particular reminded me of the questions Gwen at Sociological Images asked here:

How do you reject the trappings of that socially-approved version of femininity without devaluing femininity, girls, and women themselves?

(snip)

My students who are trying to distance themselves from ideas of passive femininity often disparage “girly-girls,” those they see as unambiguously accepting pink culture. Thus, wearing a sparkly barrette or painting your nails pink becomes inherently problematic, a sign that you must be boy-obsessed, dumb, superficial, and so on.

That being said, here is the video:

Tomboy from Barb Taylor on Vimeo.

And if you have more suggestions for resources, please drop them in comments. I am looking now for non-fiction adn film. The discovery of this video led me to another book by Pendleton Jimenez, "Unleashing the Unpopular": Talking About Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity in Education. I am about to beg the history department (I'm exaggerating--no begging required) to get me an exam copy as it looks as if it could be really useful to me as a professor.

So Sexy Too Soon

2010-04-30T13:19:00.001-05:00

I don’t think I knew, outside the realm of those beauty pageants for little girls, that 8-year-olds wore mascara. Not only does this phenomenon exist, according to a NYT article, but

From 2007 to 2009, the percentage of girls ages 8 to 12 who regularly use mascara and eyeliner nearly doubled — to 18 percent from 10 percent for mascara, and to 15 percent from 9 percent for eyeliner. The percentage of them using lipstick also rose, to 15 percent from 10 percent.

We’re* prepping them earlier and earlier, with the assistance of the beauty industry, for conforming to notions of “beauty” and “femininity,” for life as the objects of the heterosexual male gaze.

From the article:

"There’s relentless marketing pressure on young girls to look older,” Ms. [Stacy] Malkan said. “Not just from magazines and TV ads, but from shows like ‘90210.’ Those kids are supposed to be in 10th and 11th grade, but they look 25.”

Indeed, the aisles of Sephora and CVS are lined with cosmetics aimed at Miley Cyrus fans. Fashion runways teem with heavily made-up girls of 14. Neutrogena offers a line of acne-clearing makeup featured on the “Neutrogena Teen” section of its Web site. Even Dylan’s Candy Bar, the upscale candy store whose Upper East Side flagship has become a tourist attraction, has a “beauty” line that includes cupcake body lotion and strawberry licorice “lip saver.” (“Lips should always be candy-luscious and sweet to kiss!” reads the Web site.)

Others have documented this ongoing sexualization of young girls. In speaking of her book, Girl Culture, Lauren Greenfield notes the “the exhibitionist nature of modern femininity.” Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne explore the role of gendered and sexualized marketing on young girls in So Sexy, So Soon. They tell a story of 7- and 8-year-old girls who feel they must be sexy so boys will like them and are upset that their parents won’t buy them sexy clothes. Levin and Kilbourne describe the messages transmitted over and over to young girls

In today’s cultural environment, products that channel children into narrowly focused content and activities threaten to consume every aspect of their lives. For young girls, this usually means focusing on buying fashion items, looking pretty, and acting sexy. From newfangled Barbies and sexy Bratz dolls to “old-fashioned” princess fairy tales, young girls… learn to value a certain aesthetic and a certain behavior—be pretty, be coy, and… be saved in the end by the handsome prince. [T]hese gender stereotypes and sexualized messages are everywhere. **

They are everywhere and apparently they are effective.

The author of the NYT article says that some young girls might be “sophisticated enough to make… their own beauty decisions.” He points to an 11-year old who denied trying to emulate anyone by wearing makeup; “I try to make myself look like me,” she said.

That immediately reminded me of a scene from Good Hair when Chris Rock tries to go into a hair supply store and sell “black” hair to the store owner who stocks primarily Indian hair. Black women, the store owner tells him, don’t want “black” hair, because they want to look more “natural.” You can see that scene beginning around the 2:09 second mark in the trailer below.

All of that leads me to wonder why looking “natural” is never equivalent to being "natural" (i.e. without artifice) for women. Instead, “natural” is constructed as the outcome of subjecting our bodies, head to toe, to various processes.

As girls began these processes at younger and younger ages, what will be the effect on their physical and mental well-being?
_______________________
*The article says that 2/3 of the girls surveyed reported getting makeup and makeup techniques from a “family member or adult family friend.”

**Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne, So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), 30; 32-33.

Fomenting the Mommy Wars

2010-04-30T12:53:00.000-05:00

Or maybe the mommy/non-mommy wars, as for some people, motherhood seems to be the only reference for women's identity.

So, Luisita Lopez Torregrosa wrote an article entitled "Childless by Choice," in which she discusses her decision not to have children or get married, how she enjoys her life, and how she's felt distance grow between her married, "child-filled" friends and herself. In other words, she's describing her life.

I didn't like the blanket statement here:

Take women with children, especially with young children. They get together -- at the park, at the grocery, at play dates – and can talk about nothing else but their beautiful, brilliant, amazing children.

When I did manage to get with my girlfriends when my kid was small, the last thing we wanted to talk about was the kids. We wanted mixed drinks and a break. I didn't like the generalization, but I don't doubt for a minute that might be her experience and again, she's describing her life.

Which should be just fine, right?

Wrong! The AOL lede/link to the story is "Woman's Column May Anger Moms."* Because all moms decide other women's lives must be read through and judged by moms' experiences and because we get blazingly angry that all women don't make the same choices.

Or something.
_______________________
*Sorry, y'all, wanted to provide a screen capture, but my en-virus laptop is not cooperating. As of right now you can go here, and click to page 5 of 9 in the little lead stories box to see the link.

Breaking News!!! OMG! WTF??? XYZ!

2010-04-30T11:36:00.000-05:00

Brace yourselves...

Joe Arpaio arrests 'very few' non-Hispanics.

Shocking, right?

Sweep Around

2010-04-29T11:55:00.001-05:00

Every Saturday morning, Mama used to throw open the doors to our little house, turn on her stereo, and start cleaning. One of the songs we listened to over and over included the line, "Sweep around your own front door, before you try to sweep around mine." I thought the song was really about cleaning for the longest time.

I share that little anecdote to say, my horror with Arizona might need to extend to areas a little closer to home (Texas). From the AP:

[Republican Rep. Debbie Riddle of Tomball, TX] says she plans to push for a law similar to Arizona's get-tough immigration measure.

(snip)

Riddle says if the federal government did its job "Arizona wouldn't have to take this action, and neither would Texas."

Apparently, she has at least one person of like mind in the state legislature:

[State Rep. Leo] Berman... plans a broad bill similar to the Arizona law, which makes being an undocumented worker a crime. He specifically wants to include the measure to allow law enforcement officials to ask people who they believe may be in the country illegally about their status.

Berman is also enamored of the Arizona bill that will require President Obama to prove that he was born in the U.S. or risk being left off the ballot in 2012:

Berman said he's planning several bills, including one that would require presidential and vice presidential candidates to prove their citizenship to the Texas Secretary of State before their names can be put on the ballot. The Arizona law requires presidential candidates to produce birth certificates.

"We'll do it," said Berman, R-Tyler, and a former Arlington mayor pro tem. "We'll do it from now on. If he can't prove citizenship ... he won't have a place on the Texas ballot."

As if he ever could "prove" citizenship to their satisfaction.

I hope this shit doesn't get off the ground here.

Support BFP’s Computer Fundraiser!

2010-04-29T10:33:00.000-05:00

Via ProblemChylde:

Brownfemipower is one of my favorite bloggers and people on the internet. She is brilliant, open, and her sense of humor is out of this world. Plus we share a deep, unabashed love for Salma Hayek’s tetas.

In order for her to stay on the internet and spread her flip flopping joy far and wee, she needs to upgrade her computer. She wants to blog and write in style, and she has selected the Apple MacBook Pro as her goal computer. As a die-hard Apple fan I am proud of her choice; but we all know Apples do not run cheap.

From now until June 23, Miss BFP is fundraising for her new machine. She has a donation/gift scenario similar to that of a PBS telethon, and the goodies are just as rewarding:

Every person who donates will receive a gift!

For those who donate between:

$5-25: You will get a personalized thank you note from yours truly!

$26-50: You will get the personalized thank you note and a newly published zine!

$51-100: You will get the personalized thank you note, and two newly published zines!

Over $100: You will get the personalized thank you note, two newly published zines, and a surprise gift (I will tell you once you order–I only have certain quantities of each, so I don’t want to list them online!).

The bad news: Because this computer breaking down has taken me by surprise, I am only in the planning stages for the zines. So it will be up to two months before those of you who order zines will get them. So that you know what stage I am at making the zines, I will be documenting the process I go through to make them here on the blog. This has the added bonus of hopefully helping other people–so many people I know have expressed interest in making zines, but have also expressed not having any damn clue how to.

Not only can you get a treat, you also get a lesson wrapped around the treat. That’s what I call a great exchange. You can’t place a price on learning… but in this case, let’s give it a shot!

Please head over to her blog and give what you can. She has a Chip In donation badge on her sidebar. Keep my friend doing the great work she’s known for!

She's a little over half way there! Yay!

Exposing the Racist Roots of Arizona's New Immigration Law

2010-04-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

If you thought there was any chance that the new immigration law in Arizona was about anything other than race, watch how Rachel Maddow thoroughly rebukes that notion.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

That people like Russell Pearce and members of the Federation for American Immigration Reform have the platforms that they do and can shape legislation is chilling. I was going to add "especially to me, as a WoC" but I am trying to get better about statements like that which imply that racism is primarily the concern of people of color and that white people should not care/worry about it/address it.

Transcript below the fold:

MADDOW: The big deal news headline out of the world of politics today was the Republican Party‘s filibuster of Wall Street reform. But there was supposed to be another big deal thing in politics today. Today was supposed to be the day that Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham announced bipartisan climate change legislation.

That announcement, as you probably noticed, did not happen today. Why didn‘t it happen? Because Lindsey Graham got very mad. He scuttled his own climate legislation because he says he‘s angry that the Obama administration might bring up the issue of immigration reform first.

Quote, “This comes out of left field. We haven‘t done anything to prepare
the body or the country for immigration.” Senator Graham‘s anger has been seconded now by the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who said yesterday, this isn‘t, quote, “the
right time to do immigration reform.”

Republicans are bending over backwards right now, doing everything they possibly can, scuttling their own legislation if they need to in order to make sure that immigration reform does not come up. Remember when George W. Bush wanted to do immigration reform in 2007? Again, it was
his own party, the Republicans, who bent over backwards and delivered their own president a huge political defeat on this issue because they were so desperate to not do immigration reform at the federal level.And the fact that it continues to not happen at the federal level is
all the justification that some states need right now to deal with immigration on their own, which is how we got this—

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. JAN BREWER ®, ARIZONA: The bill I‘m about to sign into law, Senate Bill 1070, represents another tool for our state to use as we work to solve a crisis that we did not create and the federal government has refused to fix.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: And so, the state of Arizona now has a new law requiring police officers to demand the paperwork of anyone who looks like they might be an illegal immigrant.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REPORTER: What does an illegal immigrant look like? Does it look like me?

BREWER: I do not know. I do not know what an illegal immigrant looks like. I can tell you that I think that there are people in Arizona that assume they know what an illegal immigrant looks like.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: In the meantime, papers, please. Before this bill was actually signed into law, we told you about the guy who introduced it in the first place. It‘s this guy, Republican State
Senator Russell Pearce. Mr. Pearce is famous in Arizona for having sent an email to his supporters that included a white nationalist screed, accusing the media of pushing the view, quote, “a world in which every voice proclaims the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish, quote, ‘Holocaust‘ tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood of nonwhite aliens pouring across the borders.” Mr. Pearce sent that around to all of his supporters, which he later apologized for.

Russell Pearce is also famous for having been caught on tape hugging a neo-Nazi. No, like a real neo-Nazi. Not some sort of metaphorical Godwin‘s law-invoking neo-Nazi guy, but an actual neo-Nazi guy. See, with the swastikas?

Russell Pearce is the guy who introduced this radical immigration bill in Arizona that just became law. But if you want to meet the guy who’s taking credit for writing the new law, that would be the gentleman named Kris Kobach. Kris Kobach is a birther. He‘s running for a secretary of state in Kansas right now. His campaign Web site today brags, quote, “Kobach wins
one in Arizona.”

The guy that helped Arizona‘s new immigration bill is also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute. That‘s the legal arm of an immigration group that‘s called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR was founded in 1979 by a man named John Tanton. Mr. Tanton is still listed as a member of FAIR‘s board of directors. Just for some insight into where John Tanton and FAIR were coming from seven years after he started FAIR, Mr. Tanton wrote this, quote, “To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?” That‘s FAIR, who helped write Arizona‘s anti-immigrant law.

After John Tanton got FAIR off the ground, for nine of the first years of the group‘s existence, the group reportedly received more than $1 million in funding from something called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund describes itself as a group formed, quote, “in the Darwinian-Galtonian
evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement.” For the last 70 years, the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the
racial superiority of white people. The group‘s original mandate was to promote the genes of those, quote, “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.”

John Tanton‘s organization, FAIR, which, again, claims credit for writing Arizona‘s new immigrant law, John Tanton‘s FAIR was long bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund—which actually makes sense after you read some more of Mr. Tanton‘s writings. Quote, “I‘ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-
American majority and a clear one at that.” In 1997, John Tanton told the “Detroit Free Press” that America will soon be overrun by illegal immigrants, quote, “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” Defecating is the problem, I guess.

Again, this genius is the guy whose group is behind Arizona‘s new radical immigration law. They take credit for writing it. FAIR is bragging about having, quote, “assisted Senator Russell Pearce in drafting the language” of his Senate bill.

In drafting that language, FAIR may have slipped a little something special in there for themselves. FAIR makes a living off of suing local and state governments over immigration laws. Tucked inside Article VIII of Arizona‘s new law is a provision that if groups like them win their cases, quote, a judge—sorry—a judge may order that the entity, quote, “who
brought the action recover court costs and attorney fees”—which could create a nice financial boon for the formerly eugenics movement-funded, advanced the white majority, promote the genetics of white America anti-immigrant group whose attorneys helped write the new law.
Congratulations, Arizona. This thing is going to make you really, really, really famous for a really, really, really long time.

Another Item for the "What the Hell, Arizona?" File

2010-04-28T10:48:00.000-05:00

What in the world are they up to out there?

From that link:

The Arizona House of Representatives recently approved a provision requiring President Barack Obama to prove that he is a natural-born citizen before the state agrees to place him on the ballot in 2012. He must have his birth certificate approved by the state's attorney general in order to run in the next election.

Oh, Arizona...

Is Your Boyfriend Making You Fat?

2010-04-23T13:20:00.000-05:00

Hey, girls, the people at Women's Health are concerned that having a boyfriend might be leading you toward the dreaded fattyhood. Here is the newest update on the "Women just let themselves go once they have a man" idea:

Falling in love can make you feel all soft and gooey inside. Unfortunately, it can have the same effect on your outside. Skip a workout here, order some greasy takeout there, and before you know it... you've got a full-on jelly roll hanging over your waistband. Or as Lauren Conrad, former star of "The Hills," put it: You've acquired the dreaded "boyfriend layer."

"When we get comfortable in a relationship, we establish new habits together that aren't always the best for our weight," says Amy Gorin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut.

But worry not! The Women's Health crew has identified five of the behaviors that contribute to the "boyfriend layer" and included helpful fixes.

Because I care about you all, I shall share a few:

Behavior: You eat out ... all the time
When you're single, you tend to prepare healthy foods at home. But once you're in a relationship, it's decadent dinner dates followed by caloric brunches.

(snip)

The fix: Eat in

That is so rocket-sciency! I'm so amazed by that fix, that I will refrain from commenting on the classism evident in the description of the "behavior." And I won't even bring up how you'd think people at "Women's Health" would recognize this might create more work for women, who still do the disproportionate share of domestic tasks like cooking.*

Then, there's this one:

Behavior: His snacks are your snacks
You might not buy chips for yourself, but when he leaves the bag out on the coffee table, you need supreme willpower to ignore it.

(snip)

The fix: You have two diet-friendly choices: Serve yourself a small amount of his snack and put it on a plate (dipping your hand into the bag over and over again leads to diet disaster), or... have a portion-controlled, lower-calorie alternative on hand to munch while he takes down that bag of chips or pint of ice cream.

Oh, look. Virtual product placement for the diet-industry foods that already target women and symbolize the pressures to be thin! He can enjoy his snacks; you can agonize over yours. Maybe this is what Gwen meant by the gendering of dieting? She writes

we gender who we think cares about the caloric or nutritional content of food in the first place, and we gender why we think they care about it if they do.

I'm going to go ahead and skip to the fifth behavior they identify, and on this point, I'm feeling decidely less snarky. Why?

Because the fifth behavior is being happy:

Behavior: You're Happy
Research shows that what's good for your heart may be bad for your hips. A study published last year in the journal BioPsychoSocial Medicine found that happy people were less likely to succeed at losing weight than those with a "slightly negative and cautious outlook."

The fix: Weigh in often

These people are really worried that part of being happy might be learning to love and be comfortable with yourself as you are. I know it's unfathomable that fat women can be happy, but damn. The fix is so chilling--weigh in often so you can see if those numbers go up, thus creating anxiety and unhappiness, jarring you out of your happy "complacency."

The whole tone of this article is like that. These people are positing that falling in love and being happy are things of which you should be wary in case they lead you to the horror of being fat. Just think about that for a minute. Your negative and cautious outlook might be... well, negative, but you have a better chance of being thin. Hooray!

As for women partnered with women, I can't decide if the writers are saying you're not "at risk" or you don't exist.
_______________________

*I'm not saying that you should eat out all the time, but I'll bet it's commonplace that couples' determinations to eat at home more creates more work for women.

Link to a description of a study I'm thinking about using in a fall class on the Construction of Femininity that posits "women observed eating with a male companion chose foods of significantly lower caloric value than those observed eating with another woman." Description of it here. For me, there's something about the juxtaposition of this study and the Women's Health article.

Shifting the Burden

2010-04-22T12:55:00.000-05:00

**Trigger Warning**

So apparently, Oprah Winfrey had Mo'Nique's brother, Gerald Imes, who molested Mo'Nique beginning when she was seven, on her show Monday.

Why? I am asking seriously because I really can't think of a good reason.

And he apologized.

So?

I know it's not my place to be dismissive, but I don't understand what the apology is supposed to do.

I am angry that Oprah gave Gerald Imes such a public, highly visible venue to make his apology. Though Mo'Nique has refused, understandably, to respond, he has created the impression that "the ball is in her court." It as if he has shifted a burden onto her because of the unspoken expectation that she do or say something. He hopes, he says, that they can "come back together as sister and brother," putting further pressure on her to negotiate some kind of relationship.

He gets to re-image himself as penitent and remorseful and as a victim in his own right. And in remaking himself, he tries to disrupt what Mo'nique said, ensuring that he has the final word if she keeps to her silence. According to his story, it's not that she's a liar... exactly. She's just wrong about the details.

From Liss, I learned that their parents were there. That they would join him in this very public forum made me angrier. Yes, I can understand that they don't want to abandon their son, or whatever.

But what does their appearance, as he was giving his apology, mean/say to their daughter? To me it says, "We have forgiven him." What it doesn't say, but seems to imply, is--"You should, too." That's how that sort of pressure works. I don't think I'm far off in my assertion; Mo'Nique's own parents seem to have a "Let's put this behind us" attitude:

The Imeses told Oprah they thought the matter had been addressed when they temporarily asked Gerald to leave the family home after Mo’Nique told them her older brother had “tried to lay on top of me” when she was 15.

(snip)

Imes now regrets not revisiting the sexual assault with her daughter after banished Gerald returned to the family home - but she was hurt when Mo’Nique decided to go public with the family’s secret on national TV.

She added, ..." ‘As a family such as we were, this is something I felt that should have been discussed first privately within the family. Now, if you wanna tell the world, but give us a chance (sic).'

(snip)

“I only hope, with doing this, this can cleanse her hurt.”

I don't think Mo'Nique's hurt is the primary concern here, especially since she is the one being portrayed as betraying the family bonds.

I am viewing this through the lens of someone who has been disheartened by the way many communities rally around men who abuse--that in itself is not a racially specific thing.

But the pressure on women of color not to tell, because men of color already have a difficult time having to deal with a racist/kyriarchal system is well-documented.

As if we don't exist, and as women (!), under that same system.

There may be survivors to whom the apology means something. Mo'Nique is in a situation in which, while the abusers wasn't prosecuted, her story was believed/verified. If an abuser was denying the abuse or walking around as if zie had done nothing and people were doubting or disparaging the survivor, maybe the apology would mean something. Or maybe there are people, in circumstances like hers, to whom the apology means something. I don't know.

I really want to understand why Oprah had him on.

What is that apology supposed to mean or do? Especially, if it is true that Gerald Imes is seeking to make money off the "story."

What the Hell, Arizona?

2010-04-22T11:18:00.004-05:00

Both houses of the Arizona state legislature have passed SB1070, a truly frightening piece of "immigration legislation":

Arizona's bill orders immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and requires police to question people if there's reason to suspect they're in the United States illegally. It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them.

As a historian, I don't like to hear people say "If we don't learn history, we're doomed to repeat it." We learn history all the time, and still do much of the same, hateful stuff that's always been done.

In reading the provisons of the bill, I wondered, how different was it from the Geary Act of 1892:

The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit, a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year at hard labor.

or the 1954 INS-sponsored operation that

coordinated 1075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies, to mount an aggressive crackdown, going as far as police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people in a region with many Native Americans and native Hispanics

or, in Arizona's own more recent history, the actions of Joe Arpaio?

Historical comparisons are not the only things circulating in my mind, though. The point is this law codifies racial-profiling and harrassment and criminalization of Latino/as (because, really? what is likely to be the basis for "suspect[ing] they're in the United States illegally"?). Isabel Garcia, an Arizona legal defender, offered this description:

[T]his bill represents the most dangerous precedent in this country, violating all of our due process rights... We have not seen this kind of legislation since the Jim Crow laws. And targeting our communities, it is the single ... largest attack on our communities.

Latino/a* lawmakers are entreating Republican Governor Jan Brewer not to sign the bill into law for fear that it will "authorize discrimination."

Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce shrugged off those kinds of worries:

You know, this is amazing to me. We trust officers, we put guns on them, they make life and death decisions every day

The casual assertion that everyone lives in communities in which police and their decisions are respected and trusted?

Pri-vi-lege.
____________________________________________
*I sincerely hope Latino/a lawmakers are not standing alone in protest of this travesty.

RIP, Soror

2010-04-20T11:15:00.000-05:00

"I think of my life as a unity of circles. Some are concentric, some overlap, but they all connect in some way. Sometimes the connections don't happen for years. But when they do, I marvel." -Dr. Dorothy I. Height

More here

Deuce in Boots

2010-04-19T22:33:00.001-05:00

Cutest just-turned-two-years-old in the world. Happy belated birthday, sugar!

Chip, Chip, Chip

2010-04-14T14:53:00.001-05:00

That's how I'd describe what the state legislature is doing to abortion access in Nebraska:

Nebraska lawmakers on Monday gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind measure requiring women to be screened for possible mental and physical problems before having abortions.
[snip]
The bill requires a doctor or other health professional to screen women to determine whether they were pressured into having abortions. The screenings also would assess whether women have risk factors that could lead to mental or physical problems after an abortion.

I read that article just before reading this one about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's decision to again declare April "Abortion Recovery Month":

The proclamation... “encourages and promotes healing opportunities and raises awareness of the aftermath of abortion experienced by individuals and families,” according to the document signed by the Republican governor and Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.

Despite claims to the contrary, the bill and the proclamation are not about caring for women and their mental and physical health. They are about politics.

I am convinced of that, especially in the aftermath of recent studies which found

There is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women

and

Recent studies that have been used to assert a causal connection between abortion and subsequent mental disorders are marked by methodological problems [example here] that include, but not limited to: poor sample and comparison group selection; inadequate conceptualization and control of relevant variables; poor quality and lack of clinical significance of outcome measures; inappropriateness of statistical analyses; and errors of interpretation, including misattribution of causal effects. By way of contrast, we review some recent major studies that avoid these methodological errors. The most consistent predictor of mental disorders after abortion remains preexisting disorders

My point is not that no woman ever experiences depression or guilt after having an abortion, but that evidence points to co-occuring factors, not abortion, as causal. For example, in my case, any guilt I felt was about not feeling guilty as everyone had told me women who have abortions should. About the abortion itself, I felt relief, and I thought, "Wow, does that mean something is wrong with me?"

My case exemplifies what potential laws and proclamations like this do--they foster the notion that abortion has to be traumatic and guilt-inducing, even when studies and women themselves counter that idea.

I say these actions are about politics, too, for at least two other reasons. First, the goal is to scare women into not having abortions. Having one's doctor say, "You can have this procedure, but you are at risk for serious difficulties if you do," is frightening and, as I'm sure anti-choice folk are hoping, quite the deterrent.

Second, I don't see as much concern for screening women who decide not to terminate their pregnancies. We know that women can have physical and mental health issues after spontaneous miscarriage and childbirth--why no push for intensive screening and "warning" or recovery proclamations for those cases?

The other major question circulating in my mind is, what do laws like the potential Nebraska one mean, with regards to the way we frame choice, for women who are determined by their doctors to have mental or physical health "risks?"

At This Rate...

2010-04-10T14:30:00.002-05:00

...we're never going to finish. I finally finished typing up the labels for all the people mama wanted to invite to the anniversary party.

165 labels, y'all. I was planning for 150-200. Most of these labels have couples or "and family" on them. This is going to be fun and possibly my biggest challenge to date. I know everyone won't show and a few of them are to cousins and classmates waaaaay out of town. Can't wait until the RSVPs start rolling in (hint, hint).

Anyway, we have almost 6 pages of labels. I did three pages of addresses and mama is supposed to be doing three. But every time she calls one of her classmates for hir address, an hour long conversation ensues. She's probably gotten three addresses today and she's been at it for hours.

We're never going to finish by my tomorrow deadline (so I can get the invitations out exactly two months before).

But she's having fun catching up. :-))

I Write Letters

2010-04-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

Dear Animal Rights Group That Shall Not Be Named,

I must say, you have outdone yourself. Because this shit right here:

takes my breath away. You have a bit of everything going on here. I mean, obviously this ad can appeal to a variety of people, most notably people:

Who liken poor mothers to animals.

Who are proponents of negative eugenics and forced sterilization.

Who believe poor mothers and their children are burdens on "taxpayers."

Who believe only certain women should have children, and who see the birth of children to some mothers as an "epidemic," or a "problem" or any of those other negative terms.

You know, the old sympathetic me might have been tempted to believe maybe, since you keep producing such horrible ads, you don't know the background of some of this stuff you invoke. Then I remembered some wise words from Sarah M.:

[They know] they are operating within potent historical narratives—without a history of the objectification/subjugation of women, or slavery and racism, their imagery wouldn’t be nearly as powerful.

I suspect you're reaching people whom you might not envision as your target audience, but really, we can't tell.

Sincerely,

elle

On Collective (and Selective) Memory

2010-04-07T13:50:00.001-05:00

You know, I am not at all surprised by the fact that Virginia's Governor Robert McDonnell proclaimed April Confederate History Month. My (Louisiana) parish has done it before and I'm sure it's not an anomaly in the South.

But what gets me, what always gets me, when I see people loving on the Confederacy and declaring that their flags and memorials are all about heritage, is the selective, largely one-sided memory they have. The "Old South" may have been all moonlight and magnolias in their recollections, but there were four million or so people who, I'll bet, remembered it quite differently.

Encouraging people to remember the Confederacy includes encouraging them to remember that those states left the Union largely because of their fear that Abraham Lincoln would not just stop the expansion of slavery, but abolish it all together. Remember that these people were willing to go to war to protect their right to own and exploit other people. That dims the moonlight a little bit.

The irony is, it is "heritage" to remember the Confederacy, but we are never supposed to talk about slavery. McDonnell urges people to "to recognize how our history has led to our present," but when we talk about how slavery has very real effects on our present, that is dismissed. It ended a century and a half ago, after all, and to talk about it is to search for grievances and dwell on the past or however that argument goes. The proclamation itself makes no mention of slavery, just vague allusions to "a time very different than ours today." McDonnell himself suggested that slavery was not important enough to merit mention in a proclamation about remembering the Confederacy.

That is not the only contradiction in that proclamation:

all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace

No, they didn't. They fought like hell to reinstate and then maintain their previous control over every aspect of southern life, at the cost of thousands of lives and the continued denial of the most basic civic rights.

And then, the admonition that "this defining chapter in Virginia’s history should not be forgotten," as if that has ever been a possibility. (Some) white southerners and their sympathizers have been busy since the end of the Civil War making sure we never forget their noble "Lost Cause" or how near-perfect the South was before the intrusion and unwarranted intervention of the North. Confederate flags haven't just been on people's bumper stickers or their back windows. They've flown over state capitol buildings and been woven into new flags. We are not in danger of forgetting "this defining chapter."

I think what we are in danger of forgetting--and I say this as a history teacher in Texas absolutely appalled at what the Texas Board of Education is doing to the social studies curriculum--is that not everyone has had the same experiences of every event in U.S. history and that those "defining chapters" have tended to be interpreted very differently by people forced into the margins of society. That doesn't make those interpretations any less valid or real or "American."

It is enraging and hurtful to me that people expect us to learn, to teach, to glorify history in a way that disappears us, our experiences and our contributions. The history of this nation is not composed solely of the experiences and opinions of the dominant group(s).

Neither should its collective memory be.

I Don't Think You Understand...

2010-04-07T10:35:00.001-05:00

Dear Jami Bernard,

When writing an article about the ableism on display in Burger King's "Crazy King" ads, it is not clever or hilariously pun-ny to state "Mental health advocates are not too crazy about" the advertising campaign. Neither is it somehow better to use "crazy" in the following context:

But perhaps what they should be complaining about is how crazy it is to tout such cholesterol-laden food to a public that is collectively headed for a heart attack.

It is not cool to equate peoples' outrage over the campaign with "political correctness"... twice.

And I know you might not have chosen your headline, but really? "Mental health advocates not so nuts about cheesy Burger King ad?"

Jami, maybe you should've passed this one on to someone else.

Sincerely,

elle

Hey, This Seems Familiar

2010-04-06T09:57:00.000-05:00

trigger warning

I have a new piece up at the Guardian's "Comment Is Free America" about that cartoon that depicts a scene after President Obama has raped the Statue of Liberty. I try to put that cartoon and so much of the related sentiment in historical perspective:

The juxtaposition of this cartoon and the violence/assassination threats [against Obama and his supporters] are significant, as well, in historical context. One of the primary reasons given for mob action that resulted in the death of black men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the accusation that a black man had raped a white woman. The cartoonist has accused President Obama, figuratively, of that crime – say what you want about Liberty's greenish hue; women who historically represented the US, from Columbia to other depictions of Liberty, were white. Obama, according to the cartoonist, has violated this symbol of both white womanhood and America. This serves as more justification for retaliating violently against him.

Please check out the whole thing!

A Quick History Lesson

2010-03-29T12:18:00.005-05:00

Dear Military Folk,

Read about your idea of requiring "separate bunks for gays" if gay servicepeople are allowed to serve openly.

Wanted to remind you we tried that separate-but-equal thing. It was never equal. It was unfair and stigmatizing.

People grew tired of it and effectively resisted.

The military finally gave it up.

I mean, it was even repudiated legally.

Yet, here you are, contemplating a march backwards. This is wrong for so many reasons, and not solely the ones I mentioned above.

As Vanessa pointed out in another forum, the very premise of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, acknowledges that there are already gays in the military. Why do you expect a problem to develop if they are allowed to serve openly? This idea, that gay servicepeople should be segregated, suborns homophobia, particularly, as a colleague of mine wrote, the idea that gays are indiscriminate in their desires and straight people are in danger/in need of rescue. You are insulting your own personnel with suggestions like this which imply they, as a whole, threaten other service people with sexual aggression and potentially, sexual violence.

If only you were as concerned with the actual and significant problem of sexual violence that occurs within your institution.

Though, I suppose you could flip the argument and try to say it was for the protection of gay personnel, especially given the current political climate towards any so-called "progressive" change. In that case, I'd still accuse you of upholding homophobia and some sort of macho-ethic (okay, I'd accuse you of that, anyway).

Why? Because if your solution to addressing the potential danger openly gay servicepeople would face, is to segregate them, rather than address the military culture which allows for that danger, you've totally missed the point.

Sincerely,

elle
___________________
*And I'm not relying on the opinion of one general as sole evidence that the government would consider this. The article says, "The question of whether changes to housing policies would be necessary is being addressed in a study to determine how to allow gays to serve openly."

That Itawamba County School District is Really Something

2010-03-26T10:27:00.001-05:00

Mississippi's Itawamba County School District has recently become notorious for canceling a high school prom rather than letting a lesbian couple attend.

Turns out this wasn't the first discriminatory, hostile act they committed with regards to a student this year. When a trans student enrolled earlier this year, he* was virtually kicked out after attending only one half-day:

[T]he next time [Juin] Baize came to school, according [to] Kristy Bennett, legal director of the ACLU of Mississippi, Baize was given a suspension notice and sent home. When Juin returned to school after his first suspension, he was suspended again.

“Juin’s case was a situation where a transgender student wanted to attend school dressed in feminine clothing," said Bennett, "and the school district would not even let him attend school."

This school district seems to be in the business of teaching heteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia, the "appropriateness" of gendered clothing** and the need to maintain narrowly-defined gender expressions.

And yet, they accuse Constance McMillen and Juin Baize of distracting from the educational process.

The hostile environment that the school district is fostering is disheartening. McMillen speaks of it here and the article about Baize includes this description:

Baize's appearance and the fact that he, unlike Constance McMillen, was perceived as a trouble-making outsider made living in Fulton increasingly impossible. Beverly [Bertsinger] couldn't find work because, she believes, Fulton is a small town and people disapproved of her son. Juin was harassed when he left the house, according to Beverly Baize, so she stopped letting him go out alone and then stopped letting him go out at all.

“I’m so afraid for him,” Bertsinger told me last week. “I support him. I buy him the clothing to wear as a female. I just want him to be safe.”

The result is the continued isolation [and endangerment] of LGBTQ students, expressed so poignantly here:

Whether she intended to or not, McMillen has inspired others -- not just nationally but in her home state, said Izzy Pellegrine, 19, a student at Mississippi State University.

"I thought for a long time I was the only gay person in the state of Mississippi," said Pellegrine. (emphasis mine)

The ACLU is not pursuing Baize's case, in part because he has had to move:

“Juin not being in Fulton makes it difficult for us to pursue any kind of legal action here,” says Bennett. "And personally, I feel it may be a better decision for Juin to relocate and move on with his life.”

That last line leaves me particularly upset; people always suggest that we, who exist simultaneously as southerners and members of marginalized groups, should just leave and move on.

Sometimes, we can't. Sometimes, we have no desire to do so.

In any case, we shouldn't have to.
___________________________
*The article indicates that Baize prefers male pronouns for now.
**Remember, one of the issues in the McMillen case was the fact that she wanted to wear a tuxedo.

It All Depends on What You Mean by "Safer"

2010-03-25T12:39:00.001-05:00

A security guard at Heathrow Airport was issued a harassment warning after he "ogled" a female colleague who walked through a body scanner. The body scanners:

were introduced at Heathrow and Manchester airports to check for concealed weapons and explosives following the failed Christmas Day bomb plot by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a jet over Detroit in the United States.

They're supposed to be a security/safety measure designed to reassure passengers.

But, this incident and learning what, exactly, the machines reveal, make the scanners seem decidedly unsafe. Another article described them in this way:

The full-body scanners take "naked" images, revealing everything under someone's clothes - including a clear outline of genitals.

They violate a very basic sense of privacy and they allow that violation to be repeated over and over everyday.

We learned of this case because the security guard made "lewd" comments to his co-worker after she was scanned and she reported it. What about all the guards who might "ogle" in silence? And I, at least, feel quite insecure, knowing that my body could be on display, to someone I don't know, in a manner I didn't choose. That is the price I must pay to travel? I think it's a bit steep.

Last fall, I re-read a piece by Angela Davis (or maybe I heard her say it), in which she noted how we have increasingly problematic definitions of what will "keep us safe." Her focus was our (U.S.) fascination with locking people up to make us "safer." I've also heard Alexis Pauline Gumbs speak to our reliance on defense and force to make us feel safe rather than things like education, eradication of poverty, community building, and being good global citizens. I think we increasingly face the questions of how to define safety and how much (and who) are we willing to trade in the name of being safe?"

H/T to TheBaldSoprano

Denay

2010-03-24T13:07:00.001-05:00

People always give me virtually sole credit for the parties I do. One thing I try to point out is that, for all my visions of what I want, it takes many, many people to implement and create the finished product. I am overwhelmingly grateful to my family and friends who love me enough to help me do something I dream about. Just think about that for a second--most of them could not care less about party food or decorations, but because I sign myself up, they sign on too.

One of those friends was Ms. Alondra Shenay Coleman. Shenay, with her creativity, neatness, and her recipes, saved my butt at the last minute quite often. I knew her all my life, but came to know her better in the 90s when she dated my brother. We loved "Nay"; she was so funny and talkative and ready to go-go-go. I remember going to Shreveport in her little red car, three of us crammed in the back, and shaking our heads at Shenay in the front because she couldn't make up her mind on so many things.

My brother's children loved her, too. In the years since they broke up, she has always checked on them, remembered birthdays, scolded them when needed. She came into their lives when they were relatively young. My nephew, a toddler, couldn't say her name properly. He called her "Denay." My sister and I have done the same since then.

In the last year alone, Shenay had helped me several times--for a week, we stayed up virtually all night, every night getting ready for Dee's wedding. She'd tell me, "I'm tired. I'm getting old, I can't do this with you." And she was still right there. Half the times I called her for a recipe, she'd say, "Girl, just bring the stuff, I'll do it for you."

But the one thing she asked of us, was not to take any day for granted. She'd had heart problems, including two heart attacks, and she threatened to kick my butt if I didn't get my chest pains "seen about." My chest hurt so bad the week before Dee's weeding, but I thought, "Lord, I'ma have to fall out at the reception, because I can't stop." Shenay asked me everyday had I been to the doctor and fussed when I ruefully shook my head no. Turned out my problem was horrible anxiety and GERD, but I've never forgot her cautioning or her concern.

Earlier this month, I had to get ready for Dee's anniversary party. But Dee and I had miscommunicated--I thought it was the 20th; she set it for the 13th. As I wouldn't be arriving at home until late the night of the 12th, I panicked. I e-mailed Shenay the first week in March with a plaintive, "Help!"

It took her a week to respond, which I thought was unusual, but I pushed that to the back of my mind when I finally got her response which was along the lines of "What you need?" Just that quickly and simply, she was ready to help. I told her about the rush and she said, "I've been sick, but I'll help all I can."

I felt horrible--she'd been sick and I hadn't even thought to ask after her. Conversation with friends revealed she'd actually been in hospital. Ashamed, I vowed not to bother her with yet another hectic event.

She came to the party, though, and I apologized for being inconsiderate. She smiled at me and waved that off.

On Friday, March 19, she posted a Facebook status that read, in part:

Good Morning facebook, I'm on my way to New Orleans, please pray for my safe journey.

She was going to see her dad's family.

But her journey took an unexpected turn. As I was making it home Sunday night, my sister called.

"Girl," she said, then paused for a minute. "Girl, Shenay died."

I really couldn't make sense of that for a minute. I repeated it to Coti, needing to hear the words out loud, to believe them, I guess.

When I signed into Facebook that night, I saw this amazing outpouring of disbelief and love. She was really gone.

I didn't want to cry.

And yet, the tears slipped out slowly, all night. They came again, the next morning when I read that my pre-school aged cousin had consoled her mama, another of Shenay's friends with the words, "Don't be a little sad Mommy, Heaven is a good place!"

Shenay loved so much and so hard. Kids absolutely adored her and she had a gift with them. When I told my son, he said, "Shenay that helped us with the wedding? She always talked to me!" She was typically smiling or laughing, sharing a good story, or telling a dry joke in her high-pitched-but-deadpan voice.

Today, I read the quote she'd put on her Facebook page some time ago:

I am blessed and always happy, life is too short.

Way too short, it feels like, at times like this.

We love you, Denay, and we miss you. We always will.

Constance McMillen Wins... Sort Of

2010-03-24T09:55:00.003-05:00

Late last night, via a friend's twitter post, I heard that a federal judge had decided that the Mississippi school district that canceled prom rather than allow Constance McMillen and her girlfriend to attend as a couple had violated McMillen's First Amendment rights.

The school district does not have to reinstate the prom, however. Parents have planned a private prom, instead.

The Clarion-Ledger article linked above noted that "all junior and senior students would be allowed to attend, although it was not clear whether same-sex couples would be allowed to attend together." On other sites, I read that McMillen was not invited to the private prom.

If that is the case, the school board wins, too. They relied on an old southern tactic I described in a piece I did for The Guardian's Comment Is Free:

The prom cancellation is reminiscent of tactics from at least a half-century ago: rather than integrate public pools, parks, and schools, southern municipalities often closed them. Sometimes, in lieu of closure, they turned over such accommodations to private enterprises. In defiance of school integration orders, they opened private schools and segregation academies. Such acts allowed them to continue de facto segregation long after de jure segregation was outlawed.

If you're so inclined, please go check out the whole piece!

Kindergarteners, YOU'RE DOOMED!!!!

2010-03-23T13:20:00.002-05:00

One of the things I most hate is hearing my younger cousins (always female, and I mean elementary school age) bemoan their "fatness" or their need to lose weight. I want to keep them from falling deeper into the pit of despair that is the fatphobic-and-dieting culture.

As of today, I think I have finally lost. I just learned, via the NY Times, that "Baby Fat May Not Be So Cute After All."

Scientists are worried that their efforts to "end childhood obesity" aimed at school-age populations "may be, if not too little, too late." Too stop the horrible, horrible curse-of-fat, we must begin at birth:

Things are starting to change: late last year an Institute of Medicine study committee was charged for the first time with developing obesity prevention recommendations specifically for the 0-to-5 set. The report, due in about 18 months, will look at the role of sleep and early feeding patterns, as well as physical activity.

I don't have much comment, except to note, there is always room to blame mamas:

Many doctors are concerned about women being obese and unhealthy before pregnancy because, as they point out, the womb is the baby’s first environment

[snip]

“The intrauterine environment of a woman with diabetes overnourishes the fetus,” said the study’s author, Dana Dabelea, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health. And that, she added, may “reset the offspring’s satiety set point, and make them predisposed to eat more.”

I think this could quickly take on class and color connotations as well, in a society in which the mothering of poor women, particularly poor women of color, is constantly assailed and called into question. One of the doctors quoted worked on a study that asserted "compared with their white counterparts, black and Hispanic children exhibited a range of risk factors related to child obesity."

One of the "solutions" suggested for lowering the "risk of obesity" was breastfeeding. Black women (in the U.S.), in particular, have much lower rates of breastfeeding than other women. This might be tied up in a number of factors like the fact that many black women have low-wage jobs which don't allow for purchase of expensive pumping equipment (or breaks to pump) or the historical stigma attached to forced wet-nursing. But this could fuel the sometimes-present argument in the to-breastfeed-or-not debate that mothers who don't breastfeed don't care as much about their babies' health.

Given the blame-the-fat-mother meme, we can expect the continued condemnation of poor mothers and black mothers, who are more likely to be fat than mothers in other socio-economic and racial groups. Also, poor mothers might be eligible for programs like Food Stamps and WIC (which will provide infant formula), putting them in a position in which many people feel that their food choices should be scrutinized and judged.

Obviously, this is just what we needed: another way to assess how horribly mothers fail.

And, another way to tell kids, at an even younger age, that they fail, too. It isn't as if schools or scientists or Michelle Obama are couching their programs or suggestions in any other terms. "Prevention," "risk," "epidemic," etc. Kids are not clueless--even the little ones know when they've been judged deficient. To be fat is to be bad and immoral.

How sad that they're getting that message earlier and earlier.

Random Realization

2010-03-17T11:36:00.002-05:00

Last night, I was shopping online for dinner plates and ran across this image*:

We've probably all seen similar descriptions before, but sometimes I am struck by how many times, in so many little ways, people of color are reminded that "white," in terms of race, is presumed to be the default or that white people are presumed not to "have" race in the same ways that we are.

We are "other" and the constant reinforcement of that is tiring.

__________________________________
*The image is of two bride-and-groom ornaments. The first, depicting a white couple, is labeled "Bride and Groom Ornament." The second, depicting a black couple, is labeled "African American Bride and Groom Ornament."

Socially Constructed Before Conception

2010-03-15T11:37:00.005-05:00

In the fall of 2010, I'm teaching a new (for me) class, the title of which I've whittled down to "A Brief and General Overview of the Construction of Femininity and the Ways in which It Was/Is Reflected, Perpetuated, and Mandated by Popular Culture in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries." Strangely, the class schedule still refers to it by the way too broad, overly-ambitious title, "The Construction of Femininity."

In any case, I am re-reading Emily Martin's "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male- Female Roles."

Martin addresses the bias present in scientific language and literature, particularly in discussion of reproductive processes. She noted,

That the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men.

Thus, in scientific and popular literature, menstruation is referred to as "wasteful" and in terms of "losing" and "debris," ovaries are described as "battered," "old and worn out," and the egg is "passive" while the production of sperm is described as "remarkable," "amazing," and "a feat" and sperm are described as active.

That article was published almost 20 years ago, not nearly enough time for the people at National Geographic Channel (NGC) to have heard of it, apparently. Last night, they premiered "Sizing Up Sperm," a show that presented the "epic journey" of sperm from ejaculation to fertilization. Someone sat down in a meeting somewhere, raised hir hand, and said, "Hey, y'all, let's view the female reproductive system through the eyes of sperm!" Because how can you understand anything except through its relationship to "male" systems? I mean the whole journey is called "The Great Sperm Race" as if the woman's body and reproductive system are just incidental.

The process is "scaled up to human size" (or "man-size," as one of the scientists says) so that the sperm are represented as white-clothed (I'm not touching that right now) heroes, "real people," NGC tells us, racing towards the passive prize--the egg. The program describes sperm in the heroic language that Martin detailed. Sperm are "smart," "fun to watch in a petri dish," and are propelled by a "mighty tail." The sperm-producer on the show, Glenn, was clueless about "the miracle of engineering in his pants," according to the narrator.

The woman's body is represented as terrain to be overcome and defeated. Why do I say defeated? Because the narrator describes the process of fertilization and conception as an "epic quest," and "a war," calls the sperm "250 million genetic couriers... about to invade Emily's body" and talks in terms of "securing victory." For sperm, "landing in Emily's vagina is like D-Day."

Anyway, back to women-as-landscapes. There are forests and mountains and oceans. There is a rough, rocky road (aka the floor of the vagina. Yes, seriously). The woman's reproductive system is defined in terms of its treachery or pleasantness to sperm. "Everything in the vagina," says one of the scientists, "works against the sperm's survival." The vagina has a "dark side." The cervix is a "dark, treacherous maze of uncharted tunnels." It is "hell," a "twisted, nightmarish, urban environment." On the other hand, the fallopian tubes are "sperm heaven." But, it's not all sunshine at this point! The egg's short life span presents "a final, fatal hurdle."

"Worst of all" according to the narrator, "thanks to the female immune system, sperm are covered in acid." The leukocytes are black-clothed, scary, masked zombie monsters who kill our heroes in a process of "utter decimation." It doesn't matter that they are protecting the body from possible infection or "invaders"; they are "elite assassins." Who knew an active, working immune system was so evil?

Near the end of the race, two sperm remain--one male and one female--drawn to the egg by "the red carpet" it lays out and by the "lily-of-the-valley" scent it produces. The egg just looms, waiting patiently for the sperm. As Martin wrote

It is remarkable how "femininely" the egg behaves and how "masculinely" the sperm. The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but passively "is transported," "is swept," or even "drifts" along the fallopian tube. In utter contrast, sperm are small, "streamlined," and invariably active... with a "whiplashlike motion and strong lurches" they can "burrow through the egg coat" and "penetrate" it.

Martin discusses quite a bit the characterization of the egg as "dependent," in need of rescue by the sperm. The egg, unlike the sperm, is not remarkable in its own right--the sperm makes it into something.

Not surprisingly, the male sperm "won." This allows the program writers' to stray into New Testament territory. The sperm, you see, sacrificed itself. But "it did not die in vain"; "it gave it's life to start a new one--a baby boy." Please control all hurl urges; I wouldn't want you to mess up your keyboard.

And oh, while the sperm are shown as "real people," the egg is just a big ol' ball. Apparently, it's easier to envision sperm as human.

In conclusion, I'd like to present to you one of the cutting edge experiments presented in the show. An evolutionary psychologist (ok, y'all know where this is headed, right?) theorized that women have an estrous cycle (which the narrator helpfully described as going into heat) during which the "reproductive processes control woman's actions and man's responses." To test the the theory, he chose to conduct a study in a "gentleman's club." He was amazed by the evidence that he found--women in "estrous" made nearly twice as much money as menstruating women. The reason, he theorized, was that women in estrous are more attractive to men.

More attractive was defined as having more symmetrical breasts and a thinner waist.

A Day in The Life...

2010-03-14T17:26:00.004-05:00

Ok, more than a day. This is an opportunity for me to say, "Look how tired but happy I am!" and a real diary-like entry for the future.

Friday, I left Texas, en route to Louisiana for Spring Break. My sister and her crew had come to visit for their Spring Break, so we traveled as a mini caravan.

At least, until I was pulled over by the most talkative (but friendly) cop in Texas. I thought the speed limit was 70 because it was daytime. He claimed it dropped to 60 at some point and I was going 74 (yes, speeding either way, I know, I know).

I told him I hadn't seen it drop (I really hadn't) but that I fully acknowledged I was going 74. I don't argue with cops or try to talk my way out of anything. It's a matter of pride for me, even though I cannot afford a ticket. He asked me where I was going.

"Louisiana."

"Long ride," he said. (Yeah, that's why I was going 74). He then launched into a story of how he had been stationed at Ft. Polk and how far was my hometown from there and the lack of big cities, etc. etc.

I mostly nodded and smiled then drove away happily with my warning. I would only go 72 in a 70 mph zone, I decided. That's a compromise, right?

After two stops and about nine hours, we made it home. Bed, you think?

Wrong! I had a Lemon-and-Lime anniversary party on Saturday for which I needed to decorate. I'd thought the party was the 20th which would give me time to get home to prepare. I was wrong and we were on the clock. It was a relatively casual party, but still!

Coti deserted me, my sister promised she'd come cook the next day, mrs. o was exhausted from her own too busy week. So, Janna, T'niya, Tren, Mama and I went to work in the main room while Dee (one of the honorees) cleaned the kitchen and unpacked groceries.

We made all sorts of lovely discoveries. The last renters of the place hadn't cleaned. It was filthy. We planned to use three tables for a buffet style meal and set up eight for guests. We only set up six, because so many were broken. Below you can see our efforts-in-progress.

I made it back to my parents' at 2 AM and couldn't sleep. I decided to read. Around 4 AM, I dropped that book in my damned eye and realized, it was time.

Of course, I woke up at 5, fell back to sleep, and woke up for good at 8. I was excited about the day and had so much to doooooooooooo.

Coti, in makeup mode, agreed to play chauffeur. I went to every store in town, I swear (which amounts to fewer than ten, but still) for last minute items like pans. And, I changed my mind again and decided I wanted to do a small candy buffet. I had jars; I just needed yellow and green candies. I bought every bag of lemonheads and Andes mints at Dollar General, then bought the little green and white mints from another store. My sister brought green jolly ranchers, lemon drops, and green and white candy rings from a neighboring town. Coti and Tren filled a center vase with lemons and limes, and voila!

But food. I'd decided we'd have sandwiches and salads. Plus, the hubby involved wanted wings. So, our menu (sandwich wise) was mini burgers, mini pulled pork sandwiches, these hot deli sandwiches I make on rolls with a spinach and cream cheese based spread, and chicken salad sandwiches. Salads were chef's salad, potato salad, coleslaw, a fruit salad, and pasta salad. And we were going to have barbecue wings and Italian wings.

No way could I do that, all alone in, a day, in a kitchen with one really small stove. I had so much help. Coti cut up meat and cheese for the deli sandwiches, ran to the store, and stopped at everyone's house to pick up miscellany. Tren made chicken salad, she and Mama made sandwiches, and assembled deli sandwiches. My sister made the green salad, patted out some of the hamburgers and she and Tren fixed up the punch. Tesha made half the coleslaw, seasoned the chicken, made potato salad, cut up lemons and limes. Mama cut up the honeydew (we wanted green and yellow fruits for the fruit salad with a few strawberries to make it "pop" but we didn't know how to approach that honeydew :-). Mrs. O peeled potatoes and sliced rolls. I seasoned the hamburgers and patted out most of them, made coleslaw, cut up strawberries, made a pasta salad, made limeade and lemonade, made the spread for the deli sandwiches, prepared the roasts for the pulled pork, and made barbecue sauce. I also made pitchers of way too strong margaritas, mojitos, and lemon drop martinis (I was serious about the yellow and green, y'all). That stuff was so strong, I didn't touch it. I don't like to taste alcohol in my alcoholic drinks. Initially, I planned to mix and pour as the night proceeded, but my cousins said no, we were not going to run and serve the whole night. So we set up cups and set the pitchers and ice out. I also had two punchbowls, one with a limeade based punch and the other with a lemonade based punch.

I was on my feet for nine hours, on four hours of sleep. And the night before, I'd gotten about five hours then taught and drove all day. You know where this story is going, right?

My back! My ankles! I couldn't bend over by the time the party actually started. The hot shower didn't help as I hoped it would. I kept my cute little open toe heels on for all of ten minutes before I retreated to the kitchen and my house shoes. It was lovely and we were all in good moods, but Dee and Mike like blues music and I can't get down with it.

I made it until midnight. I had to come home and have mama rub my back with Bengay. Muscle aches beat my cute black dress and shoes! I'm getting old, y'all, for real.

I was supposed to go to Family and Friends' Day at my cousins' church. Church started at 11. I rolled over at 10:52, thought about making it, realized my clock was an hour behind and flopped back over.

I finally stumbled up, my eyes full of sawdust (I didn't drink the stuff I made. I did, however, have Malibu coconut rum and pineapple juice), and my body aching. I ate a plate of collard greens so I could have something on my stomach to take three ibuprofen for my poor body. A few hours, a coke, and this long story later, I feel better.

I could go again! But I think I will just climb in bed with this book I found.

No use in overdoing it :-p

The Past Is Present

2010-03-11T11:00:00.001-06:00

ETA: My best friend, who taught at our old high school, and my sister corrected me. The school did eventually sponsor off-campus proms, however, “tradition” meant that students quickly left (usually after taking pictures) to gather for their own separate (in terms of race) functions.

Dear Mississippians,

I find it amazing the type of symbolism with which y’all manage to imbue high school rituals like prom. I mean, some of you held on to racially segregated proms well into the 21st century—although some progress has been made there.*

Now I hear others of you would rather cancel prom than allow a lesbian couple to attend. This, just a few months after your execution of a flawless southern swoon at the idea of a high school senior challenging the norms reinforced by gendered clothing.

I don’t know if it’s nostalgia for the good ol’ school days. I don’t know if you're scared that Anita Bryant's predictions have come true and proponents of the radical homosexual agenda™, have infiltrated the schools and are recruiting your children.

But, really, stop. Time will not stand still. You cannot re-create your youth or what you envision as the glorious past through your children.

Your fellow southerner,

elle
_________________________________________
*My own Louisiana high school did not have integrated proms and, only shortly before its closing, did it stop the practice of having a homecoming court with one white and one black representative from each grade.

One Guess...

2010-03-10T11:10:00.002-06:00

As to why I grumbled at this Ebony cover featuring Gaboure Sidibe:

It's the caption.

Because when I see the words "Gabourey Sidibe... What's precious about her? Read on..." what I read is "Let us tell you what's 'precious' about her, because you obviously can't see it from just looking at her."

Things of which I Am Tired

2010-03-09T10:30:00.000-06:00

Number One: Racially-charged/racist incidents on/around campuses. See:

A) UCSD reacts to racial incidents

This began with the "Compton Cookout" party for which hosts "invited students to dress and act in a way that encouraged racial stereotypes, mocking Black History Month." Text of the invitation here, but it included helpful details like:

For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey's, stuntin' up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes... They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave... They... speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face.

When overly-sensitive, politically correct, free speech stifling people [/snark] objected, a campus group called KOALA defended the party on the university's television station, and "one student used the 'N-word' to describe critics of the Cookout."

The university then held a teach-in, but students walked out, feeling that the method was ineffective for addressing or healing the problem or underlying issues like the dearth of black faculty or students.

Then, a student strung up a noose in the campus library. Students, again, demanded that campus officials effectively and actively address the incident.

Let's see what happens.

B) 2 MU students apologize for cotton ball incident The "incident" involved the students "scattering cotton balls outside the black culture center at the University of Missouri in Columbia."

C) A Towson University adjunct, Allen Zaruba, was fired for describing himself, in front of his class, as "a nigger on the corporate plantation."

Number Two: The disavowal of racist intent.

The noose-hanger says she had no racist motivation.

The two students at the University of Missouri in Columbia described their actions as "part of a series of foolish acts."

Zaruba pointed out that he serves in a prison ministry and that his stepfather was black. ("One of my best friends...") And it's not that I believe that Zaruba's intent was like the other two cases, but I resent that he fell back on that trope.

I just have more respect for people who own their shit. In what other context do the first two incidents make sense? Black people protest disrespect, lack of representation and support, and systemic racism, and a noose is hung? That's not even original. Cotton balls outside the BLACK CULTURE CENTER?!

Number Three: How quickly the comments on any post on any of these incidents turn to "This is PC gone mad/this is unfair because white people can't say/do what black people say/do!!!/Is this really a racist incident?" etc. Even in the f*cking Chronicle of Higher Education comments!

Really? Are those the primary issues? That some black people say the n-word or called someone cracker, so we must never protest incidents like these? That it's unfair that *everyone* can't bandy around the word "nigger?" Do you want to? Because if you do, I'm sure you already are.

I just want to fire off a snarky letter that begins with, "I am so sorry that our desire to work and study in less racially hostile environments inconveniences you!"

And to all my academic colleagues defending Zaruba on the basis of the "appropriateness" of his comparison:

Adjuncts are overworked and underpaid with little job security. The circumstances under which many work are appalling and I know that I'm fortunate to be on the tenure track.

But I can pretty much guarantee that being an adjunct is markedly different from being "a nigger on a plantation." For some reason, I'm pretty certain of that.

I am reminded of the exasperation my colleague, an Africanist, feels when people say they are working like a slave. Few of us can even imagine the reality (and horror) of that.

Nothing Good (Things Heard 3)

2010-03-08T10:20:00.000-06:00

What if you heard a commercial that used language like this (words in brackets indicate a paraphrase to heighten your suspense!) :

There’s nothing good about [ __________ ]. They don’t [engage in beneficial activities]. All they do is [cause a specific problem]. That’s their sole contribution to mankind.

And that’s why, they have to die.

It’s that simple. You cannot rehabilitate [ __________ ]. You have to kill him, his little friends and the [reproductive capacities of “his” community].

What you need is a quick, easy extermination plan. [One simple step] and you’re done. And here’s the really good part: everybody dies!

And while there is joy in all creatures living in harmony, it’s nothing compared to killing [ __________ ]. Now, that’s a rush.

What would you think filled in the blanks? What would you think of the language? What would it remind you of?

Don't worry; this was just the style of a fire-ant-killer commercial I heard Friday. Still, it bothered me so much that I came home and looked it up to see what the hell was creeping me out.

This commercial is supposed to be funny, but in talking about exterminating fire ants, it relies on language and imagery used throughout history to talk about the extermination of people, as well. Think what you will about my fascination with language and animals-as-stand-ins-for-humans in media, but really, how many pest extermination spots have you heard delve into the intrinsic worthlessness of pests? Annoyance and inconvenience, sure. But no-contribution-to-"mankind?" I don't run across that everyday.

I'm also hearing the commercial in a historical context as well, I suppose. I've talked previously about how media outlets reinforce connections made between people of color, particularly immigrants, and vermin/pests. Late 19th/early 20th century cartoons often portrayed Chinese Americans as living with/eating/making pets of rats and the queues of men of Chinese descent were drawn to look like rats' tails. Another example is the racist comparison of people of Mexican descent to cockroaches. And think about the ways we talk about immigration, in terms of "swarms" and "invasions."

Anyway, you can hear the commercial here.

Below is an actual transcription, with links that help provide context as to what I found so unsettling.

There’s nothing good about fire ants. They don’t pollinate your roses, they don’t make cute little sounds when they rub their legs together. All they do is build a big mound in your yard and bite the hell out of anyone who gets near it. That’s their sole contribution to mankind.

And that’s why, they have to die.

It’s that simple. You cannot rehabilitate a fire ant. You have to kill him, his little red friends and that big fat queen down there making more fire ants.

What you need is Orthene Fire Ant Killer from Ortho. You put one tablespoon of Orthene over the mound and you’re done. You don’t even water it in. The worker ants track it back into the mound. And here’s the really good part: everybody dies, even the queen!

And while there is joy in all creatures living in harmony, it’s nothing compared to killing fire ants. Now, that’s a rush.

Orthene Fire Ant Killer from Ortho. Guaranteed to kick fire ant butt.

Now, do I think the Ortho people are operating from the same place as this turn-of-the-century company?

No. I'm just saying that language matters. Ortho's advertising people might not even be able to pinpoint what made them write the ad in this style, but for me, the cultural influences seemed obvious.

Too Early in the Day...

2010-03-07T11:40:00.001-06:00

...to be reminded of how dangerous it can be to be a woman who displeases a man/men. I swear, I was reading news links sent to me, and here are three of the first five:

Doctor guilty in wife's cyanide murder:

[Yazeed] Essa laced his wife's calcium supplements to escape a loveless marriage.

Man killed ex-lover over Facebook photo with new man:

A woman was stabbed repeatedly by her ex-lover after he saw a picture of her with her new boyfriend on Facebook.

Paul Bristol, 25, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of murdering Camille Mathurasingh, 27, at her east London home in April 2009.

The IT technician, who lived in Trinidad and Tobago, flew to London within two weeks of seeing the picture and killed the accountant.

Bartender says exotic club demoted her because she was pregnant:

Due to the tough economy, [Jennifer] Paviglianiti says she needed this specific bartending job and feared she'd soon be out of work. To protect herself, she decided to secretly record her boss on tape.

On those recordings [John]Doxey can be heard saying, "Customers don't wanna come in and see a pregnant woman behind the bar!"

[snip]

In other recordings, Doxey is heard suggesting that Paviglianiti's appearance is hurting business. "Maybe they don't go there because the bartender is pregnant and doesn't look sexy."

I know this woman could possibly lose her livelihood, not her life, like the other cases, but imagine losing your job, with a new baby in this economy. And if you have never had a workplace environment that you felt was hostile, let me tell you it can be one of the most draining, self-doubt-inducing, literally depressing things in the world.

In addition to the second story, I also received two links to stories about how Facebook can work against women wrt their lives and their jobs:

Teacher killed herself after ex-boyfriend posted naked photos on Facebook:

A British teacher working in the Middle East killed herself after an ex-boyfriend posted naked pictures of her on Facebook, an inquest heard yesterday.

Emma Jones, 24, drank poisonous cleaning fluid after confiding in friends that she feared she could be jailed in the Muslim country [UAE] over the explicit images.

And lots of female colleagues have been circling this one, warning each other to be on guard:

Professor Fired for Disgruntled Posts on Facebook:

Last week Gloria Gadsden, an associate professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania who had been telling her FB followers stuff like "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman? Yes, it's been that kind of day," was put on indefinite paid leave when the school found out about it.

When I first heard of it, I thought, "Why is she even using language like that?" then wondered about the risque things I say (not violent, but my friends and I discuss "sexy" topics all the time). Of course, that FB account is under my pseudonym, but it's not like I'm all that well pseudonym-ized. What really has my colleagues and me cautious is this observation that Gadsden made in another article that reported on the case:

Gadsden... says that university officials have been discriminating against her ever since she wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education saying universities don't do enough to retain minority faculty.

Those kinds of political games are what terrify me about this profession.

Now, I hope I made your day as bright as mine :-(.

It Occurs to Me...

2010-03-07T10:17:00.001-06:00

For all my dreams of taking pastry-making classes (after I finish culinary arts school after I get tenure and on and on--my life is all about "afters"), I'm never going to be much of a baker because I hate getting flour on my hands and counters because it usually ends up on my clothes and floor.

And I HATE sifting.

But I still want a shiny red, top-of-the-line standing mixer with a dough hook attachment.

And I'm still probably going to make my nephew a cake today, even if I cuss while doing it.

Love,

elle, the kitchen gadget lover

I Don't Think "Bad" Is the Word They're Looking For...

2010-02-24T09:21:00.001-06:00

Living with someone who loves reality TV has sparked many thoughts in my active mind...

Mm-kay... re: "The Bad Girls' Club,"

Given Amber's bi/homophobia ("How can you not know what you like?" "Unless you just like licking vagina, why would you be a lesbian?" "I don't understand [bisexuality]!"

and

Kate's racism ("I don't feel like going to a club and being hit on my black men... but I'm not racist." "I'm not racist, but I just prefer to have white friends.")

and Natalie's... everything...

why are these people on TV?

My Block

2010-02-16T14:23:00.002-06:00

Just heard this song for the first time in a while.

Not exactly like my little neighborhood, but made me miss Lake Terrace and Louisiana, all the same. No place like home, no matter how much I critique it. In my heart, "I'll never leave my block; my ****** need me."

And, oh my God, I need them.

Music Lessons

2010-02-15T08:23:00.000-06:00

I'm researching 60s music for my parents' anniversary. My child, who thinks he is a music connoisseur, has been helping me. We got into a discussion of records (actual vinyl LPs) my parents owned. I asked him if he knew what I meant by records.

"Uh-huh," he said.

"Describe them."

He sighed and said, "Records, Mama! They're the CDs that DJs use!"

GRRR!!!

2010-02-14T14:37:00.001-06:00

Just saw this headline on CNN.com: Biden, Cheney spar via talk shows.

Am I the only one wondering why Cheney's smirking, lying, evil ass still has any sort of platform?

I'm So Dreading Valentine's Day

2010-02-11T08:44:00.003-06:00

I saw this slideshow, catchily entitled "Where the boys aren't" last week at NYT, discussing the major issue raised by the fact that women "have represented enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000." You might be surprised that said major issue is not "schools are hostile to boys" or "this is proof that men are underprivileged."

Nope. It's that college women can't find dates and face bitterness, desperation, and meaningless hookups. (Read the captions, f'real)

So, let's follow the NYT's premise for a minute--which seems to be something along the lines of "all college women are interested in men and see dating as a significant part of their college experiences." This sad state of affairs produces not only a sex ratio imbalance, but a power one, in which men have all the control. Note the following quotes:

The on-campus gender imbalance puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories.

"On college campuses where there are far more women than men, men have all the power to control the intensity of sexual and romantic relationships," said Kathleen A. Bogle, a sociologist at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

The accompanying pictures are primarily of social settings in which women outnumber men (7 to 1 in the last one), highlighting how serious this crisis is!!! I mean, a girl can no longer go to college and pursue what her real goal should be--finding a man???

Particularly touching to single me, however, was this lovely quote:

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine's Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.

I couldn't help thinking, "Wow! It's eerie how accurate the NYT is on the lives of single women!"

Update: Apparently there's a whole article linked to this travesty. I started writing this a few days ago and just saw Jill's post on it:

It seems to be a problem of perception more than statistics — if there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in a room, or if there are a few more women than men, we perceive the situation as thoroughly female-dominated. The same phenomenon happens with race. We’re used to seeing men (and white men in particular) as the standard; we’re used to them dominating higher education and the workforce. When we up the numbers of non-men in a situation where men have traditionally made up large majorities, the perception is that no more men exist – even though men are nearly half of the room.

Co-sign!

Also, the article talks in much more troubling terms than I did about a "power imbalance." Even my flippant self paused and wondered about this:

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

...

Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them.

...

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray.

Emphasis mine.

Just in Time for Black History Month...

2010-02-04T09:27:00.001-06:00

...we find out, according to Vanity Fair, that the up-and-coming female actors of "Young Hollywood" all have a certain thing in common:

See Prof Susurro's analysis.

Randomosity

2010-02-03T09:38:00.003-06:00

Maybe it's because I just had to re-read U.B. Phillips's "The Plantation as a Civilizing Factor" in which he encouraged a return to and reliance on the plantation system to keep black people from "sliding into barbarism"--on the plantation, they'd come into contact with the good white folk. He couched it in the terms popular during the Progressive Era in which he wrote--the plantation was like a "social settlement" in which the white planter and his family acted as guidance and examples.

Or maybe it's because Mark Krikorian's assessment that Haiti wasn't colonized long enough is still ringing in my ~~ears~~ eyes...

But, having seen Avatar and Blindside nominated for best picture Oscars...*

And, having read about the folk who were trying to smuggle children out of Haiti and set up an orphanage with said children, some of whom were not orphans...

My first thought was, "Goodness! How do white people, with that heavy burden and all, have time to do anything else?!"
____________________________________
*My co-worker/friend talked me into seeing Avatar this weekend. She's a sci-fi fan and wanted to see the images and such. I think our jaws remained on the floor 97.3% of the time until she finally said, "Really, elle, don't listen to the words, don't think about the plot. Let's just wait for the fight." I have not seen Blindside. I have, however, seen multitudes of "Captain Save-A-Negro" movies which, I would argue, qualifies me to speak :-)

M-elle-odramatic

2010-01-29T10:14:00.001-06:00

A seemingly impenetrable wall of papers and meetings stands between me and my beloved Friday evenings. I have a headache :-(

One More Note on Chris Matthews and the Myth of Colorblindness

2010-01-28T12:46:00.002-06:00

Via Maegan:

The scrubbing away of color is not what sets the US free from racism. Ending inequality based on race is.

You should read the whole thing.

I Fully Recognize that Women Are Neither Men's Nor Our Children's Property...

2010-01-28T12:25:00.001-06:00

But this still makes me laugh because recent discussions have revealed that my son is against the thought-of-mama-dating:

Though, I think Doritos might owe Ronnie Jordan a little change or credit or something:

"I ain't got no candies for you... no cookies for you..."

You Probably Should Discard Some of Your Previously Held Notions about Black People

2010-01-27T23:24:00.001-06:00

Dear Friends,

Please don't ever "forget" I'm black, even for an hour. That is not a compliment. Colorblindness =/= progressive; Colorblindness = "You a damn lie"

Love,

elle

Howard Zinn dies at 87

2010-01-27T18:56:00.002-06:00

I hope to be able to write something coherent tomorrow :-(

More

Please Know Something about That of Which You Speak

2010-01-27T12:49:00.001-06:00

Thinking of getting that inked on my forehead so people stop saying stupid sh*t--to me, at least.

Of course, that won't stop me from reading stupidity, things like, oh, say, this article by Paul Shirley. Shirley feels the need to tell us why he won't donate to Haiti relief efforts, and infuses his story with meaningful personal insights like:

I haven’t donated to the Haitian relief effort for the same reason that I don’t give money to homeless men on the street. Based on past experiences, I don’t think the guy with the sign that reads “Need You’re Help” is going to do anything constructive with the dollar I might give him. If I use history as my guide, I don’t think the people of Haiti will do much with my money either.

And historically clueless rhetoric flavored with a touch of social darwinism and a smidge of eugenics* such as:

Dear Haitians –

First of all, kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure, and birth control should be applauded.

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it’s possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World

Oh, Mr. Shirley, might I, in my boldness, point you to two brief observations? First from Kai:

It’s not just a natural disaster, it’s a disaster of the modern neo-colonial social order. Earthquakes need to happen, but this doesn’t need to happen. It’s a devastating unfolding of institutionalized racism. Not only rhetorical or interpersonal or representational aspects, but perhaps more importantly the vital economic, infrastructural, and human consequences of several centuries of the very gunships-n-slaves imperialism which generated the modern concept of race.

Then, from Summer:

Haiti was born of a slave rebellion. They didn't seek or wait for permission. No one wrote a speech declaring their freedom. They claimed it for themselves. They were their own saviors. Their own, I suppose, personal Jesus. (All those white men they killed, must have been a deal with the devil.) And so, Haiti couldn't survive or be successful. Haiti concerned Thomas Jefferson--and rightfully so. Can't have those kinds of examples floating around the Caribbean circa early 19th century. What kind of message would that send to other enslaved people on this side of the Middle Passage? Haiti fought the law and won. That couldn't have been good for business. So the powers meddled with the land until the seeds sprouted nothing but "flimsy" stalks, ushering in the refrain "Haiti is the most impoverished..." Straight dissonance to my ears. They treat it like a bastard child. Father France, Mother Africa, or something like that.

A flourishing Haiti is white supremacy's greatest fear. Haiti cannot survive. If Haiti endures, if it succeeds, then the slaves win, right? Haiti's continued endurance would prove that everything they've ever taught us is false. If we only understand Haiti as a perpetually impoverished nation, and have no comprehension of Haiti as symbol of black resistance and survival then what have we learned? We will have learned that Haiti is poor because its citizens are lazy, culturally backwards, wary of outsiders, lawless, lascivious. What we should know is that even in these dark days of desperation, Haiti has survived, despite even the most powerful acts of a most angry God and world powers that imagine themselves in His likeness.

They don't like the message, so they don't want Haiti to survive--but it will.

Haiti will survive, Paul Shirley, without your donation and in spite of your condescension and ignorance.
__________________________________
*Is that (the oh-so-new blend of social darwinism and eugenics) the flavor of the month or something???

Ready for the Restaurant...

2010-01-26T15:00:00.000-06:00

Y'all know, after I'm tenured and make my way all the way to full professor, I'm catering or becoming a restaurateur :-)

Anyway, I think I'll start sharing some of the constant experimenting I do here. And when I break down and buy another digital camera, I'll have pretty, shiny pics.

What we had last night:

BBQ pork sandwiches
Coleslaw
Corn on the cob

I highly recommend all these. I didn't use poppy seeds in the coleslaw, though. And I just boiled the corn with a little vinegar, sugar, butter, and salt. I rubbed the roast Sunday, then came home between my morning class and evening class yesterday to put it in the oven. We had a way late dinner.

And of course, all my kid ate was corn on the cob. That's why I slacked up on my cooking for a while, but forget him! ;-p

See What I'm Up Against?

2010-01-25T13:14:00.001-06:00

Okay, you probably all know the stories of the Texas Education Board's attempts to change the state's social studies curriculum to "downplay the contributions of civil rights leaders, minimiz[e] an 'emphasis on multiculturalism,' and try to 'exonerate' Joe McCarthy." (Follow the links in that article for more details). The Texas Freedom Network has accused the board--comprised of 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats--of "blatant politicization of social studies curriculum."

Well, here comes a new highlight of their efforts:

What do the authors of the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?

Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.

In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

The Texas students subjected to years of what I call "only-white-men-and-war-battles-are-important" history are the ones I get in my surveys, fresh out of high school. A good portion of them will already question my ability, authority, teaching style, etc, because I am a woman of color. Combine that hostility with the fact that I teach the survey from a social and cultural history perspective and emphasize "shifting the lens"--viewing an event or era or concept from diverse perspectives--and you get a situation that makes me dread-until-I-am-sick walking into a classroom sometimes.

And this does not just affect elle, the historian. It affects elle, the mama, as well. Last week, I wrote on facebook and twitter about experiences my son was having in social studies classes. As one of a few black kids in fifth grade, he notices the other students look at him when black people come up during class (last week it was Harriet Tubman and Cinque of the Amistad). I'd point out that that is partially a result of teaching a history in which black people randomly pop up rather than being understood as an integral part of the story of this country. Of course, that is a reflection of a much larger scale erasure and othering--my son exists not as an individual, but as representative of a group in which one can easily stand in for another.

My son, big admirer of President Barack Obama, was also upset by the fact that his teacher talked negatively about "Obama Healthcare," telling the children that it was going to cost a trillion dollars and that even their grandchildren's children would still be paying for it. I already had an encounter with her when she sent out a short, snippity note about how our school district wouldn't be showing Obama's speech to school children a few months ago (ours was the only district here that didn't--probably speaks volumes).

From my position in the Lone Star State, I have to ask, that fear that conservatives had--that Obama was trying to indoctrinate their children--is that called irony or hypocrisy?

Because I'm really worried about what they're teaching--and not teaching--my son.

Who Dat?

2010-01-24T21:42:00.002-06:00

Geaux Saints!

Now that I've talked to everyone in my immediate family and screamed the roof off, I'm ready to focus on the Super Bowl. ;-p

Turns Out, My Shrill, Humorless Feminist Voice IS Needed

2010-01-24T16:15:00.003-06:00

Just saw this on the teevee:

Flirty Girl Fitness

And look, now you, too, can learn to pole and chair dance while keeping the booty beat, from the comfort of your own home! What? You don't have the pole installed in your garage like I???

My sorta raison d'etre (feminist critique of popular culture) has just been affirmed.

This Week in "Stuff elle can't f*cking believe!"

2010-01-24T14:09:00.001-06:00

Item 1: Mark Krikorian posits that Haiti's suffering is the result of not having been colonized long enough. Haitians didn't have long enough to absorb civ-uhl-eye-zayshen from the French.

My guess is that Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn't colonized long enough. The ancestors of today's Haitians, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, experienced the dislocation of de-tribalization, which disrupted the natural ties of family and clan and ethnicity. They also suffered the brutality of sugar-plantation slavery, which was so deadly that the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born, because their predecessors hadn't lived long enough to reproduce.

But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn't stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

You notice this line: "the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born"--yep, no civilization at all.

Item 2: "South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer(R)Compares His State's Poor Children to 'Stray Animals'" and advises against feeding them, lest they reproduce:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.

And y'all thought negative eugenics was a thing of the past!

h/t Nezua

elle, phd

Black Like Me

FYI:

In Which I Try to Share a Recipe, Sans Pictures or Close Care to What I Am Saying

What's Up?

Well...

Just Edit the Bad Parts Out!

After Almost Four Decades...

I'm Tryin'

FYI:

This Story Is Too Bootylicious for Me

The Continued Erosion of Reproductive Rights

Ugh!

Your Resident Sistorian

You Already Know

The Horror

My Soul Looks Back...

Foodie in the Making!

An Observation on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

Happy Birthday, Dr. King!

A Manifatso

FYI:

Link Love

Please Help

99 Years Strong

What I'm Reading

Homework

**Is This Thing On?**

Same Script, Different Cast

Reason #43790 mama is going to kill all of us...

Mundane

On Presentism

Breaking News!!!!!!

I Need to Borrow a REALLY Small Violin, Please

Pull Over, that Ass Is Too Black!

Endangered White Men: The Saga Continues!

My Child, Son of a Sistorian

On Law & Order

Happy Blogiversary, elle, (abd) (phd)

Thanksgiving Thoughts

Anchored

Weekend Crises

In Which CNN Doesn't Get "It"

Jail Is Preferable

Concentration

I Write Letters

Well, This Might Be a New Angle

Signs and Such

No Place Safe

In Which I Share Some (Re)Sources

So Sexy Too Soon

Fomenting the Mommy Wars

Breaking News!!! OMG! WTF??? XYZ!

Sweep Around

Support BFP’s Computer Fundraiser!

Exposing the Racist Roots of Arizona's New Immigration Law

Another Item for the "What the Hell, Arizona?" File

Is Your Boyfriend Making You Fat?

Shifting the Burden

What the Hell, Arizona?

RIP, Soror

Deuce in Boots

Chip, Chip, Chip

At This Rate...

I Write Letters

On Collective (and Selective) Memory

I Don't Think You Understand...

Hey, This Seems Familiar

A Quick History Lesson

That Itawamba County School District is Really Something

It All Depends on What You Mean by "Safer"

Denay

Constance McMillen Wins... Sort Of

Kindergarteners, YOU'RE DOOMED!!!!

Random Realization

Socially Constructed Before Conception

A Day in The Life...

The Past Is Present

One Guess...

Things of which I Am Tired

Is This Thing On?