The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum

Problem Chylde

2008-10-09T11:47:00.001-05:00

Newest place is here. http://problemchylde.wordpress.com

Blogger pisses me off.

2006-10-29T15:10:00.000-05:00

I've decided to use WordPress in lieu of Blogger because WordPress seems slightly less psychotic. I think Blogger's in a transitional mode, so it's being stupid as hell.

My new blog is http://antiessentialistspeaksup.wordpress.com/ and I've transferred everything over except comments because I don't know how. :(

Come on over and bookmark me! I'll leave this up for a couple of weeks before deleting it.

Interesting article/thoughts

2006-10-28T09:37:00.000-05:00

How many people remember that grueling section of The Bluest Eye describing the fate of HBCU-educated Geraldine (wife to Louis and mother to "Junior"), cultivated to serve as one of many black Stepford wives for the "talented tenth," so to speak? She only found sexual pleasure and comfort in her cat.

Most white feminists enjoy talking about confinement to housewifery and plunging into the workplace as a declaration of their intrinsic worth as a person -- but for upper- to middle-class black women, the movement traveled in the opposite direction and the "confinement" became a luxury. If the outside world saw some semblance of the American Dream and the traditional American family in black society, white people rethought its divisions for a moment -- but only a moment. And to a small extent, it made sense contextually. Black women have worked pretty steadily during the times when white women did not. The greatest luxury a black man could extend to a black woman was the prospect of putting her feet up in a home she did not have to clean, a home where he'd be her lover and breadwinner, and she could clean her own house and take care of her own family without compunction. Her joy would be her compensation, and the relationship on the whole would signal to white folk that we shared the same family values. (This conception would probably turn white feminism on its head with its different signals of empowerment.)

The above description is probably too generalized to apply across the board, but I think it's significant in its perspective on the housewife predicament.

BAP Like Me
A wayward black American princess sees an unnerving reflection of herself in Condi Rice's efficient soldiering for the Bush administration
By Adrienne Crew, Salon
November 29, 2002

Condoleezza Rice is a cypher -- for most people. Press profiles portray the tough-minded national security advisor as some sort of preternatural mystery. Writers consistently marvel at her articulateness and speculate about her unflappable demeanor. In a review of "The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired" in the New York Observer, Benjamin Anastas wrote:

"First, a confession: Sometimes I think that Clio, the muse of history, has come to earth in the human form of Condoleezza Rice. Consider her utter certainty, the eerie, distant quality of her voice, and the strange calm she projects at the margins of White House photographs. And I can think of no other explanation -- save, perhaps, the puppy's eagerness to chew on rawhide -- for the exuberance she inspires in President Bush the Younger, her artist ... Just what exactly did happen behind closed doors during the famous 'education process' that resulted in our nation's foreign policy?"

Overlooking, for now, the racist and sexist undertones in this wide-eyed gushing, I have to say that Rice is no mystery to me. She's a BAP -- a bona fide Black American Princess -- who exhibits all the telltale qualities of the category: a razor-sharp proficiency, cool manner and a good daughter's devotion to carrying out orders. Believe me, I ought to know.

I count myself a wayward black American princess. As the editors of last year's "The BAP Handbook: The Official Guide to the Black American Princess" put it, I have been programmed since birth to "strive for perfection" in everything I do, as well as possess a keen sense of entitlement.

The black American princess is a prim, well-groomed, accomplished and articulate woman. In mainstream business culture, she rarely draws any attention to her ethnic heritage. She's often the sole black woman sitting in workplace meetings, or the hard-working, dedicated accomplisher of miracles for her church or community organization. (Not all black educated professional women are BAPs. Oprah Winfrey? Not a BAP, no matter how hard she may try; she's too spontaneous and relaxed -- and she grew up poor.)

The BAP baffles most people by confounding their expectations. Unless prodded, she exhibits no clear racial consciousness and staunchly defends her individualism. She speaks standard American English, rarely switching to the black English vernacular unless forced to by an overly familiar white colleague trying to establish intimacy. She may speak several languages, has likely traveled extensively, and may excel at antiquated avocations and elitist pursuits, like opera singing, violin or lacrosse.

BAPs are the feminine avatars of the black bourgeoisie, the fairer (if not in skin tone) half of a subculture larger and more complex than that limned by the Eastern Seaboard's patrician black Brahmins portrayed in Stephen L. Carter's bestseller "The Emperor of Ocean Park."

This tribe of upper-middle-class African-Americans prides itself on its heirs' ability to assimilate and integrate. Growing up in white suburbs and attending elite schools and institutions of higher learning, black American prince and princesses are immersed in Anglo (often WASP) culture and emerge with modes of speech, behavior and grooming that brand them as "Oreos," black on the outside and white in the middle.

From an early age, BAP matriarchs teach offspring their duty to present a flawless front in public, affirming the superiority of our forebears in defiance of Jim Crow and other racist institutions. BAP mothers also pass on negro noblesse oblige to their children, especially their daughters, who often lead fundraising efforts to support African-American causes. But they're more likely to raise money via debutant cotillions and other social events than car washes and bake sales.

BAP encoding presumes that internalizing white Western culture is a way to combat the historical stigma associated with being African-American. Since Rice is exactly 10 years older than I am, I believe that our parents shared the same belief in this pre-civil rights era acculturation process. Often fiercely proud of their African-American heritage, our parents were either blind to the fact that BAP conditioning is based on the wholesale acceptance of racist and sexist stereotypes about African-Americans generally, or knowingly encouraged us to internalize these painful stereotypes as a form of inoculation against racist perceptions faced in the larger world. So BAP mothers pinched and prodded us, reminding us to stand up straight, clearly enunciate each letter when speaking and never display public emotion (unlike other, poorer African-Americans).

Observers may categorize BAPs in subsets. Like Rice, I'm the bookish black-girl brainiac type. Many of us attended all-girls schools (Rice and myself included), which only intensified our obsession with propriety. I've dubbed this variety the "black bluestocking." Members of this group are easy to spot. Most of us offset intelligence with an earnestly girlish demeanor that's not threatening. I secretly covet April Cornell clothing and own more than five pairs of Mary Janes.

Older men seem to respond most positively to black bluestockings. So I'm not surprised that a series of avuncular mentors -- including academic Josef Korbel and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft -- assisted in Rice's ascent into the foreign-policy power elite. I've experienced this odd connection with older white men myself. When I became the first and only black female associate at a San Francisco white-shoe law firm in the '90s, I established the strongest rapport with the senior partners.

As I prepared to leave the firm after realizing that I detested practicing corporate law, I had one last tête-à-tête with my mentor, who was 30 years my senior. He urged me to hang in there and try to turn things around at the firm. "I feel like I'm talking to one of my kids," he sighed. His words brought tears to my eyes because I shared that familial bond. Black bluestockings have huge dutiful-daughter complexes. We have been programmed to obey and never challenge the expectations of authority.

Rice repeatedly manifests her own dutiful-daughter training. Friends tell me that the former Stanford provost, literally acting in loco parentis, had no problem implementing the campus administration's most painful orders -- cutting budgets, laying off people of color or disavowing solidarity with female professors. Like me, she had been taught to be a good soldier, carrying out orders with efficiency and without regard to social consequences.

Rice's dutiful-daughter role flourishes in the Bush family hierarchy. It began when Rice was a loyal advisor to Papa George during his administration. It continues with Dubya in this administration, though they have more of a cozy sibling dynamic. Isn't it curious that the press never comments on any sexual tension between Rice and President Bush, despite the fact that she's his closest aide? If President Clinton had had a similar relationship with a female aide, the press would have had a field day trying to discover a sexual component to the attachment.

The fact that Rice is attractive without being sexual confirms her (pardon the pun) BAPtist upbringing. As black women, we have been taught not to flaunt our sexuality, thus subverting and preempting the stereotype of the oversexualized black woman.

Condoleezza Rice is the first bona fide black American princess to step into the public limelight since Lena Horne. She's a particularly exotic BAP because she's the first geeky BAP to be in the spotlight. Black male nerds' cultural profile has increased since the 1980s, with the appearance of cartoon characters like Oliver Wendell Jones in "Bloom County" and television characters Steve Urkel of "Family Matters" and Dwayne Wayne of "A Different World." These media images helped us to identify black-geek characteristics in real people like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. But we've never seen a female version, until now. Rice's stiff, processed helmet of a pageboy hairstyle is the black-girl geek equivalent of pundit George Will's bow tie.

And it is Rice's very BAPtitude that led to her success. Her ascension to power shows how the establishment will reward an individual who completely appropriates white behavior and privilege, regardless of race or ethnic background. But it's also her BAPtitude -- and its embodiment of an outmoded "white makes right" philosophy -- that's responsible for whatever African-American animus exists toward Rice.

Make no mistake, BAPdom has its perks. It helped get Rice to the White House. Visibility and privilege grant access to people, places and experiences most people only read about in Dominick Dunne's tales about polite society. Looking back on all the sleepovers, parties and wedding receptions that I've attended, only now do I realize that I was often the only person of color in the room at all, or the only one who was not a servant.

It hurt to disappoint my mentor when I left my high-flying law firm. I knew that ditching the firm was not the action of a dutiful daughter. But I had begun to reexamine my BAPtitude, realizing that the price of maintaining it was too high. BAPtitude can become an insidious mask -- not unlike the one in poet Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask" -- that conceals the wearer from herself as well as from others. Like some twisted take on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (say, "The Red Shoes"), that mask of perfection and poise wears you, instead of you wearing it.

I now struggle to balance my assertion of individuality with expressions of solidarity and concern with African-Americans, most of whom do not share my background and values. Like Rice, I've often refused to succumb to a race-based consciousness -- what economist Glenn Loury called the "figment of the pigment" in his review of "America in Black and White" by social scientists Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom. Yet I can't pretend I don't feel anger and humiliation when I'm confronted with racism. My BAPtitude isn't enough to shut out the racism around me.

I've learned something else, too: A cheerful BAP mask of perfection stifles spontaneous emotional display, often preventing personal connection, which only serves to heighten the wearer's sense of alienation. It's lonely when one's poise ossifies into impenetrability.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why Rice, like so many other tough-minded BAPs I know, has such a strong religious faith. The Lord is an excellent confidant when someone feels misunderstood. I pray that her Christian compunction overcomes any conservative impulse toward moralism and helps to keep the United States out of war.

Unlike Condi, I've decided to loosen the bindings of my mask and display my imperfections. I've been gratified and occasionally surprised by others' compassion when I dare to display my frustrations and even lose my temper in public. Fewer folks than I feared appear to think less of me for doing so. No one gasps or points fingers. And even if one of them were to do so, I feel as if I can now look back at them with pride and say: "This is me, all of me."

Adrienne Crew is the content licensing manager at Salon. She is working on a novel about black girl geeks.

Another Logical Fallacy I Don't Like: Red Herrings (Or Batshit Crazy Tangents)

2006-10-26T10:34:00.000-05:00

1: “That kid should stop playing in traffic. Four-year-olds — all children, for that matter — really should be supervised better.”
2: “Traffic is pretty dangerous, but why do you hate children? And what’s wrong with four-year-old children that you don’t seem to like? I don’t like when cars nearly hit me either, and I don’t even play in traffic! And I’m fifty-seven! But really…were you hit by a car before?”

Shifting Objectifications Solve Nothing -or- How to Oppress a [White] Woman

2006-10-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

While the title of this post does connect indirectly to the discussion over at nubian's blog, it also relates to an experience I had in my Contracts class today.

Two key points:

Objectification isn't cool, regardless of who uses it.
Objectification isn't cool, regardless of who is objectified.

Point 1 is exemplified in that comment thread about Jessica Valenti's new book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. (The comment thread on Feministing's pretty interesting as well.) Using another form of objectifying women to promote something good is still objectifying and commodifying women's bodies. You're using the body part of a woman to market your product. Period. It doesn't matter if you're marketing jewelry, alcohol, guns, feminism, world peace, or Jesus. If you use the body part of a person or the image of a person to sell or to market something, you're using that person as a means to accomplish your own ends. As Kant would say, "That's pretty fucked up." Doesn't matter how much you have in common with the person, either. So, how do you singlehandedly oppress a woman and make her cry? You explain to her that using the tools of the patriarchy to dismantle the patriarchy make you no better than the patriarchy. In other words: you wrong and you ain't special. Besides, shouldn't we question why subversion is powerful and what exactly makes it powerful? What powers are we using, people? And if they're identical to the powers used against us, do our intentions/motivations really matter in the end?

Point 2 happened today in Contracts class. I swear, when our professor gets laid, his personality improves. Today he exchanged cake for giving correct answers in class. (Okay, his new weirdness could link to drugs, but HE HAD CAKE!) Today's class introduced the subject of damages for breaching a contract. We went over the fundamentals of two ways to compensate damages for breach: expectancy and reliance. My notes describe the difference thusly:

Reliance damages measure the difference between post-K (where you are now) and pre-K (where you were before) situations. Expectancy damages weigh the difference between expected results (where you would have been had no breach occurred) and actual results (where you are presently).

Our first case illustrating the weight of these two theories for calculating damages dealt with plastic surgery. (I believe the name of the case is Sullivan v. O'Connor.) The judges deliberating on Sullivan's appeal toed the line between reliance and expectancy calculations. Our main take-away point for the day emphasized that expectancy calculations would result in higher costs than reliance calculations. However, our teacher chose a very...interesting way to illustrate this example.

First, he proclaimed that he wanted to avoid anything that would anger feminists. Since Sullivan involves a "professional entertainer" suing for a botched nose job, our professor switched the facts. He transformed the plaintiff into a male seeking ab construction surgery. Then he "regrettably" drew a scale on the board from 1-10, corresponding of course with any infamous beauty/sexiness ranking scale.

Mr. Sullivan's abs before surgery rated as a 5. However, his "5" abs weren't raking in the sexist chauvinist female pig ladies (and I'm quoting), so he decided to go under the knife to obtain Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise abdominals (ranked 11 on his scale o' sex). After surgery, poor Mr. Sullivan's abs failed the cut and have sank to a rating of 1. Ouch.

So on this scale, he illustrated the difference between expectancy and reliance. Using the expectancy scale, Mr. Sullivan would collect a hefty penny because the difference between an 11 rating and a 1 rating is a whole fucking lot. To illustrate the reliance rating, our professor then waded deeper into the pool of stupid: he equated Mr. Sullivan's ability to woo women with their level of intoxication at the first meeting. Yes, he went there. He argued that before the operation, Mr. Sullivan only needed three beers to distort the woman's judgment enough in his favor. However, after the botch job, Sullivan will require many more beers for women to ignore his newly created potbelly, so to speak. So his reliance calculations would determine the difference between his post-op situation (1 rating) and his pre-op situation (5 rating).

So after a day of cake sharing, objectification of males, objectification/denigration of females, and a strange streak of quality teaching, our professor calls it a day. We all pack to leave, and my friends realize that my [white] female friend is fuming at this lesson, to the point that she is physically trembling with anger, and she leaves the room immediately after the conclusion of class. I was pissed off as well, but after the last time I became angry about something that affected me deeply, I now try my hardest to focus on the lesson and to let the stupid fade to the background. (This is the same friend that I referenced as an anti-racist sympathizer in my post.)

A few of my friends (of course) did not understand what the big deal was. I mean, he did it with guys! Come on! He left women alone! What's the problem?! Specifically, what is HER problem?! I explained as plaintively and as calmly as I could that it does not matter who is the target of objectification -- objectification is wrong. It is also condescending to think that feminists speak out against patriarchy because they want to establish an equally wrong matriarchy in its stead. Of course, they all just scoffed and rolled their eyes at the whole situation. We Kwazy Lib'wals Wif Owr Kwazy Ideaz.

I referred to this instance in my title as oppression of white women because I found it strange that I did not have as visceral of a response as my friend did. If it were a racist matter, I would have been upset. If it were a racist and sexual matter, I would've cut somebody. But just sexist? Especially a sexist stereotype that's lumped more heavily on the heads of young white women and glosses over other women? Not so much. I wondered why that was.

I think I became jaded after a Philosophical Issues in Feminism undergraduate course where perspectives of women of color emerged nowhere in the curriculum or the discussion unless one of the five women of color made a tangential comment about it. The end-of-term discussion really fucking pissed me off after hearing all these white women around me talk about how ending sexist treatment "trumps" ending racist treatment. Good thing a section of me is saved; I guess the rest of me can go to shit in other ways.

I raised my hand and made the point that eliminating sexism will not be successful until we eliminate racism, homophobia, ablism, transphobia -- we have to tackle all the oppression-laced -isms and cooperate. My white female classmates then informed me that I would unfortunately have to wait until their problems were solved. One of them explicitly turned to me and said, "Yeah, but that stuff can come after we're done with sexism, you know?" As a way to placate me. I don't know how I resisted punching her in the face, especially since I was running on a half-hour's worth of rest for the second day in a row. I remember how livid I was, and I wrote very sloppily on the course evaluation that more course readings written by women of color need incorporation into the course.

So I guess as long as people felt comfortable spitting on different aspects of my identity, I tried to write off my disconnect as an ability to develop affinities and responses to individual violations of them as I please. Today, however, I realized that insulting one part insults the whole being. I can't accept that or tolerate it. The difficulty starts here.

[Consider this entry my answer to Race Changers Challenge #3.]

Get Rid of Affirmative Action to Shield Minorities from the White Man's Crazy

2006-10-23T14:40:00.000-05:00

'Cause these UTexas law students brought the crazy in buckets filled with "bling":

A group of first-year law students at the University of Texas at Austin has been chided by the dean for participating in a “Ghetto Fabulous”-themed costume party and posting pictures from it online.

They were law students, of all people. These people will have influences on the legal system of the United States in three years' time. Critical Race Studies & Legal Positivism for the win!

Nick Transier, a first-year student who attended the party in September and posted pictures on his Web site, said nobody meant to offend anyone of any race.
“We had no intention by any measure to choose a group or class of people and make fun of them,” said Transier, 26, of Houston.

Do people know what the word "intent" means any more? Especially law students who study criminal law? Maybe I should break this down a little bit. You know how there are those situations where a guy's aiming a gun at a woman, and saying, "If I can't have you, no one will," and then the gun goes off? From what that guy says, he may not have intended any harm, but his actions don't quite match up with that shoddy declaration of making her his BFF. Uhhh, Bueller?

Also note: this article says "26" and not "2+6," so our expectations of a mature apology...should be gone. What happened at this shuck-'n'-jive suaree, we wonder?

But the photos — in which partygoers carried 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and wore Afro wigs, necklaces with large medallions and name tags bearing traditionally black and Hispanic names — upset some black law students, said Sophia Lecky, president of the Thurgood Marshall Legal Society.

Hmmm...maybe they're making fun of...umm...Alcoholics-Anonymous-evaders-who-have-
not-cut-their-hair-in-a-really-long-time-and-have-participated-
in-high-school-track-at-a-Harlem-nightclub...

Yeah, that's it.

Surely these can't be regurgitated negative stereotypes of "ghetto" black and Hispanic folk! Can't be! Why on earth would the white man make his burden any heavier? Blessed be! Now, just how many minorities attend this school? Because if this happened in Pale Folk Po-dunk Academy of Legalation (PFPAL), perhaps we can understand. It's always prudent to blame "rednec ks"/"po' white trash"/"KKK"/"CIA"-- oops, that slipped; I meant "Appalachia," wild typo there -- for their lack of book-learnin' and hatin' the darkies.

About 70 of UT’s roughly 1,300 law students are black, according to preliminary enrollment figures. There are about 800 white students, 225 Hispanic students, 75 Asian students, 55 foreign students and 75 whose ethnicities were unknown.

Umm...you mean even diversity couldn't stop the fashion violence and increase the peace? Affirmative action, what have you done?! I bet the kids at this party will be the same ones castigating affirmative action when the topic arises for debate. 'Cause, you know, blacks and Latinos (the noticeable brown folk in the classrooms, excluding some of the Native Americans, often interspersed amongst the white women, Asians, and other-people-who-probably-shouldn't-be-there) just waste their scholarship money on a strong Afro pick, a case of 40's, and a bullhorn for when they cruise into Con Law shouting, "SHOW THEM MY MOTTO!"

Chimps. We are governed by chimps.

However, I am not thoroughly depressed. Robert Jensen, an educator in Texas (and elsewhere, thanks to the internets), put the smack on down and singlehandedly brought thought provoking sexy back:

When one of the first-year University of Texas law students who participated in a "ghetto fabulous" party posted pictures on the web, we saw the ugly face of white privilege and the racism in which it is rooted. But the depth of the problem of white supremacy at the university -- and in mainstream institutions more generally -- is also evident in the polite way in which the university administration chastised the students.

...It was kinda like that scene in Team America where the gang shitbombs some location on faulty intelligence. And Spottswoode turns to their supercomputer, I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E., and he says, "That was bad, I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. Very bad I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E." And I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. replies, "Sorry:"

...First, Sager suggests that some students "might be seriously offended by the party, and especially by the pictures taken at the event."

[Translation: Why the fuck did you take pictures? We could've just said the darkies were hallucinating again, but you took pictures! No tangible evidence! That's it: all you fuckers are taking criminal law over again!]
...Second, the email suggests that the partygoers didn't consider "the potential harm they were causing to UT Law" by doing something that could make some people "feel uncomfortable simply because of who they are."

[Translation: We're not supposed to make the darkies sad DIRECTLY. Tact is key. This party lacked tact and a PR speech in its pre-planning. Don't worry; we go over "covering your ass" in third year. Hey, maybe we should put that in the prospectus...]

...Finally, and most important, the dean's message warns the partygoers that they failed to consider "the extraordinary damage they could do to their own careers" in a society in which those who employ lawyers might not want to hire people who engage in such conduct. Sager warns that it is "genuinely foolhardy to engage in conduct (and even more foolhardy to proudly disseminate proof that you have done so) that could jeopardize your ability to practice law."

[Translation: DO NOT SAVE PROOF DUMBASSES GODDAMNIT WHY DID WE ADMIT YOU-- I mean, people will probably still hire you...but you'd have a lot of sucking up to do to those token darkies in the copy room. A looot...damn, y'all. Hahahaha. You fucked up...but we can fix it. Just...NO PICTURES on the INTERNET. GEEZ.]

Jensen then goes into areas that some people would describe as deep:

The motivations and views of participants may vary, but these parties have two consistent features: (1) white people mock African American and Latino people through stereotypes of the residents of low-income urban areas, while at the same time enjoying the feeling of temporarily adopting these looks and poses; and (2) the white folks typically do it without pausing to ponder what right they have as members of a dominant racial class to poach in this fashion on the lives of people of a subordinated racial class.

In other words, white people find pleasure in insulting non-white people while at the same time safely "slumming' for cheap thrills in that non-white world, all the time oblivious to the moral and political implications.

So wait...I thought white people were colorblind, gender-blind, and damned near vision impaired. Getthefuckouttahere. They actually JUDGE people about whom they essentially know NOTHING?! And negatively, no less? I thought they memorized the "content of their character" part of the King speech! "I Have a Dream," people? No? Surely this behavior is new!

(Sarcasm aside...do these people have to be future lawyers? Seriously? No, seriously?)

Here's what we should say to students: The problem with a racist "ghetto fabulous" party isn't that it offends some people or tarnishes the image of UT or may hurt careers. The problem is that it's racist, and when you engage in such behavior you are deepening the racism of a white-supremacist culture, and that's wrong. It violates the moral and political principles that we all say we endorse. It supports and strengthens an unjust social system that hurts people.

Preach, preacher! I mean...erm...kumbaya. (I love how he writes "that we all say we endorse" 'cause I can feel it in my heart and it's good. And I think for the others, it probably tastes like burning.)

These incidents, and the universities' responses, also raise a fundamental question about what we white people mean when we say we support "diversity." Does that mean we are willing to invite some limited number of non-white people into our space, but with the implicit understanding that it will remain a white-defined space? Or does it mean a commitment to changing these institutions into truly multicultural places? If we're serious about that, it has to mean not an occasional nod to other cultural practices, but an end to white-supremacist practices. It has to mean not only acknowledging other cultural practices but recognizing that the wealth of the United States and Europe is rooted in the destruction of some of those cultures over the past 500 years, and that we are living with the consequences of that destruction.

We white people can't simply point to the ugliest racism of the KKK as the problem and feel morally superior. We can't issue a polite warning to a few law students about being thoughtless and think we've done our job. The problem is that most of us white people -- myself included -- are comfortable in white spaces, and we often are reflexively hesitant to surrender control of that space. Real change -- the process of truly incorporating a deep multiculturalism into our schools, churches, and businesses -- is a long struggle. The more I make some progress in my own classes, for example, the more I see how much I have left to do and the more aware of my mistakes I become.

I emphasized parts of this section because I've heard people isolate affirmative action to skin color and racial discrimination to skin color way too many times. I've heard people advocate colorblindness in the same breath I've heard them refer to skin color as "trivial," and I'm always overreacting or hypersensitive or too scary black when I mention the fact that I am black. I've heard talks about tolerance and diversity more than I'd care to disclose. I have a revelation to share: white folk, all the other people whose skeletons you try to gaze at when you're putting us down -- you know, the people of color -- we've been tolerating your asses for years. Toleration runs thin. You tolerate bad smells in crowded rooms. You tolerate foul language at casual social gatherings. You tolerate the occasional pop quiz in a subject you like. It's really fucking condescending and veiled to apply such a practice to people. To be honest, we don't like toleration (even if you guys kinda deserve it), we don't want it, and we don't want to give it.

We want respect, and we want it while you can still see our respective skin colors, our respective cultures, and our history. We want to walk into a room and speak to you without feeling like we're representing for "our people." We don't want to choose between uplifting a collective and fighting for our own survival. We don't want to use your cultural standards to determine whether ours are good enough. We don't want to be your lowest common denominator.

We don't live so you can put on your fresh new private trendy minstrel shows or buffet-pick from our traditions, fashion, and standards of existence -- all traditions that we're proud of creating. We're human, damnit. Remember all those male-normative definitions of people and their multifaceted identities and creativity? WE HAVE THAT TOO. We want credit for it. We want credit for being human and beautiful and free. And god-fucking-damnit, we don't want to walk into a place defending ourselves where we're supposed to be still developing ourselves. Growthefuckup. We've survived this long; do you really think we've done it without effort? We just coasted through? After the rope, the whip, the firehoses, the dogs, the spit, the shame, and the degradation? The "border patrols," the internment camps, the black/yellow/brownface, the forced migrations, the massacres, and the segregation?

Cocaine really must be one hell of a drug.

Word Evolution in Action!

2006-10-21T18:22:00.000-05:00

Taken from here, an excerpt from a women's encyclopedia entry by Gloria Steinem about womanism:

In 1993, The American Heritage Dictionary included this new usage, and defined womanist as: "Having or expressing a belief in or respect for women and their talents and abilities beyond the boundaries of race and class; exhibiting a feminism that is inclusive esp. of Black American culture. -- n. One informed by womanist ideals. --wom an ism n." Considering the traditional definitions in such classic sources as the Oxford English Dictionary -- which illustrated womanish with the phrase, "a womanish and a whorist government," and cited womanist as a rare synonym for "womanizer,"--this recognition of change in the language was no small achievement.

Now, that's awesome. Whether Alice Walker intended to change the standard identification of the word "womanist" or "womanism" is questionable, but the result is mindblowing! (I'm a spazz, but I seriously think this is awesome. Speak to any linguist/semiotician about signs, signifiers, and the signified, or about paradigm shifts and contextuality. You'll see why I'm psyched about such a change over a relatively short time.)

This is what women can do. This is what black women can do. This is what people can do when they unify towards a great cause.

The quest now is to broaden people's vocabularies to recognize the power of this word and all words.

Race Changers Challenge #2 (this is easier to think about)

2006-10-17T20:38:00.000-05:00

Race Changers Challenge #2:

We have all made generalizations at one point or another. This is natural considering the number of stereotypes we have to filter on a daily basis, and given that we have all been trained to make generalizations and subscribe to stereotypes from a very young age.

Reflect by answering the following questions in writing:

Was there a time that you made a generalization and were proved wrong?
Do you find yourself subscribing to any stereotypes now?
If you do find yourself giving in to any stereotypes, why do you think you believe them to be true?
Can you point to any instances where the stereotype does not hold true?

Generalized and Wrong:
Hmm...my generalizations center around whether or not to trust white people. Sometimes I think a white person's a total bigot from the jokes they make or the way they dress. I've met people who have debunked that assumption personally, but it took me a while to understand them. I generally think all conservatives are repressed racists/sexists, but they only keep up political correctness to appear human. However, I have friends who identify as conservatives and are nothing like my assumptions. Some of them are even my best friends. Political leanings just may not be a great judge of a person's character. You can't judge the book by its cover, pretty much...

Stereotypes To Which I Subscribe:
White food servers are fake nice and they think no one can tell it.
Groups of people in general are unreliable and can't be trusted; individual thoughts inevitably cause fractures in the unity.
Biracial Asian-Caucasian couples/children have it much easier than most other biracial combinations.
White gay males are often misguided about exactly how oppression works and why it matters.
When people are online, they completely lose the ability to argue rationally. (Hell, that even applies offline.)
Cats are cute no matter what and are always cuter than dogs.
Unless they're in chili or black bean sauce, beans are nasty as hell.
Most professors do not grade with neutrality.
Most white people want to be around people that agree with them or listen to them unequivocally. However, there's often no mutuality of agreement or indication they listen in return.

Why I Think Some Stereotypes Are True:
This question is a trap! A trap I say!
Stereotypes make thinking about others easier. It's much easier to expect the worst and be proved completely wrong than to walk in vulnerable and allow things to blindside you. I think stereotypes are a defense tactic, and while they pretend to have intelligent roots, they do nothing but quell irrational fears of unacceptance and danger in unfamiliar surroundings. They're opiates that prevent engagement.

Stereotypes Do Not Hold True When:

uttered about another group by a group that has expressed open hostilities about them in the past (*ahem*)
when the claims are trivial/unmeasurable ("white men can't jump;" "black men are more aggressive")
when the sample size is ridiculously huge (see examples under "trivial/unmeasurable")
when the person advancing a stereotype has to make constant "exceptions" for people who exhibit characteristic A but don't execute behavior B
when the stereotype enters taboo status ("Hehe, this may be weird, and it's probably wrong, but: do black men REALLY have bigger...you know?!")
piggybacking on that: when the people perpetuating the stereotype can't plainly say the details of it

Yeah, this entry contains a lot of hypocritical identifications, but...well, it's honest. Shit.

Three Posts. Three Topics. Three Times the Fun.

2006-10-17T14:34:00.000-05:00

By...Sunday, I will make three posts on the following topics:

Race Changers' Second Challenge (for last week because I'm a week behind and times are rough)
The Ghetto Fabulous Party at UTexas Law School (happened this weekend/earlier this week)
The Black Community and Homophobia (referencing a post from blac(k)ademic and a post from LJ Blackfolk)

I'd do it sooner, but I have midterms soon. lol

The Authentic Argument Advancer Attack (4A)

2006-10-11T13:17:00.000-05:00

Over on another blog, a rather long comment thread has developed relating to a recent bloggers' meeting with former President Bill Clinton in Harlem.

Summary of Sorts:

A large stink erupted about the whitewashed representation of political/social bloggers in attendance, a particularly odious incident arose where a conservative female blogger ridiculed a younger feminist blogger because of her pose. (Essentially, you're not supposed to be young, female, and stand in front of Clinton in a picture; if you do, it's a given that the former President's slept with you. And for God's love, don't look HAPPY about it.)
Another blogger photoshops a picture of a burqa over the feminist blogger to make a point about the conservative blogger's attack.
Women of color -- I believe rightfully -- take offense to the commandeering of the burqa to make this point about the conservative blogger's hang-ups about a young woman...looking like a young woman.
The defenders of the photoshopping bloggers ask authentic followers of Islam if they were offended, they proclaimed the burqa an official "symbol of oppression," and they wrote the use of the burqa off as an exemplary testament to the oppressive comments and treatment of the young feminist blogger's objectification.

In other words: her knit sweater apparently wasn't enough covering; hell, they'd probably even criticize her wearing a burqa! Laughs presumedly to be had by all! It's humor, people! A joke! A joke of humorous, jokey, hi-lar-i-tay at the expense of this demanding conservative blogger!

...And the women who are forced to wear full body covering burqas in Afghanistan. Or was it the broader category of the Arab world? Or was it the even broader category of followers of Islam in general? I don't remember. One of those. Doesn't matter, right? No one chooses to wear a burqa. This official symbol of oppression is universal. Doesn't matter the reasons for it! It's a full body covering, and we want to make the point that Clinton would leer at anything!

See a problem arising here? (If you're on the other side, probably not.) And...to mitigate the problematic appropriation of burqa-hate...we learn that the photoshopped burqa does not even have a woman under it! It's a burqa on a stick! So women of color are very crazy for even getting offended, thinking a woman wearing a burqa was photoshopped in this picture! They couldn't see the stick for the burqa! Burqa burqa burqa -- canned laughter by all (who matter!) who are present.

So the women of color persist in discussing the implications of using a burqa for this catch-all joke, and how the perceptions of Westernized feminists rear its ugly heads in this display of humor. Which is when the women of color lose their sense of humor and are just trying to find ways to be upset. We're reaching. We can't speak for every woman of color; we're not the specific woman of color being held up to scorn. One particular commenter even said that if the person using the photoshopped picture needed to apologize, it would be to an actual Afghani woman who wears burquas. But until that person surfaces, the blogger can't apologize -- in fact, she's even absolved from issuing an apology. These women of color don't fit the target audience, after all.

I wrote the following reply to this assertion, whose framework I've christened as the Authentic Argument Advancer Attack (AAAA, or 4A):

I find this search for authenticity amusing, as if you cannot call a spade a spade without being a Card-Carrying Spade Identifier(TM).

The argument essentially runs like this:

1) A man reveals his penis in a park.

2) Groups of women notice that the man is showing his penis, bringing up other penis sightings in fields, near streams, on rollercoasters -- they're very certain it's a penis.

3) Other groups disagree with the women, saying it is his appendage he's displaying in the park.

4) Women point to more reasons why they think it is a penis and why it's not just any mere appendage. More parallel penis sightings in books, on television, on playgrounds, during honeymoons...more sightings.

5) Other groups tell the women that since they don't have penises, despite having seen them and having experienced them in different contexts, that their claim lacks validity, and that only a man or a person from the park can identify that particular penis, and until a man or a park representative identifies it as a penis, it remains an appendage.

Do you see how the merits of the claim aren't actually disputed -- there's just nitpicking at the people advancing its merits? The "calm down, it's just a joke" group seems to be operating from a pack mentality of well, I don't care what YOU think, but if someone I think is important tells me the same thing you're telling me, then maybe I'll listen. This line of argumentation does nothing but shut down the dialogue and generate animosity.

RC Assignment #1: Stereotypes and Racial Profiling

2006-10-09T19:13:00.000-05:00

Assignment #1

Stereotypes plague our interactions and racial profiling preys on certain members of society in the name of “safety.” Of course, these are things that we need to continue to challenge. Question the stereotypes that you, your friends, and your family hold (everyone is guilty of subscribing to some — it’s almost unavoidable given the amount of stereotypes that we are all bombarded with starting from a very young age!). Ask why we are subjecting a certain few to racial profiling. Do the perceived benefits outweigh the very real inconveniences and attacks on our civil rights? Generalizations are mainly detrimental, and in no way move us in a positive direction.

Read this article on racial profiling by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about the importance of knowing how and when to make generalizations. Have something to say about it? Leave a comment.

The New Yorker article is called "Troublemakers: What Pitbulls Can Teach Us About Profiling." Hmmm...

An interesting paragraph from the article:

“We have a policy against racial profiling,” Raymond Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner, told me. “I put it in here in March of the first year I was here. It’s the wrong thing to do, and it’s also ineffective. If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty per cent of New Yorkers are born outside the country. Look at the diversity here. Who am I supposed to profile?”

Notice how the subjects of profiling are non-white, and how the commissioner lumps ethnicities into the overall heading of race. The perceived flaw of racial profiling, if we are to read this quote correctly, is from latent xenophobic targeting in New York City -- a location known for its embracing of multiculturalism. But this statement makes it sound as if the police department would table that if it could only lock on one non-white, foreign-born bad guy catch-all archetype. Just one. And this segues into one of Gladwell's main points:

Generalizations involve matching a category of people to a behavior or trait—overweight middle-aged men to heart-attack risk, young men to bad driving. But, for that process to work, you have to be able both to define and to identify the category you are generalizing about.

I find this observation extremely poignant. I am currently engaging in a discussion online with a blind woman. She writes that for blind people, the definitions of race and white privilege exclude them from its understanding because of its pervasive visual component in its discussions. Sighted people like myself are trying to present examples of race to help find a definition that blind and visually impaired people can understand, but she dismisses them left and right because of the difficulty of defining race without the ability to correlate it with sight-perceived traits and our reflexive ability to offer examples that only return to sighted frameworks of understanding. In that discussion (which is continuing) and in our history, I'm discovering that anti-racists will constantly grapple with defining a process that does not work using a language that will not do the work for us.

Another good point: after a while, the dominant culture makes generalizations conform to what they want them to include -- a problem I probably could not articulate specifically in a racial context for a blind person but exists in any framework of oppression. I could illuminate this catch-all in sighted/blind/visually impaired terms, and I could show how some personality traits have superseded their visual counterparts to fall under the banner of a color or a race. But there's still something missing -- an elusive blank that even the dominating force cannot fill because it has no need to fill it. Like Plato's capitalized forms: Hope, Truth, Love in the realm of ideas to correspond with representations of hope, truth, love in the world of interrelated perceptions and circular conceptions. Is there a Blackness that supersedes all representations, or a Whiteness? Should we bother giving these forms an ontological component if they stretch beyond our epistemological frameworks? We may not create realities of abstraction in theory, but our actions correspond to our daily practice of concretizing subjectivity. Defining something with unstable characteristics is like attempting to glue water to wood. It can't be done, and if it is done, it surely doesn't last very long. So Gladwell suggests that people look at the instability as a catalogue of failed generalizations made about dichotomous/competing traits, and claims the catalogue inevitably shifts the basis for the generalizations.

So then the article describes shifting from generalizations to broad criteria and corresponding inferences. (This panorama view is like anti-essentialism in a nutshell to me.) This shift marks where discussions about intersectionality, power, privilege, oppression, and exclusion come to roost. Where all the -isms mix. Where hierarchy does not dare to wander (if it knows what's good for it).

Could racism and sexism (and any -ism) be eliminated if people just put in the work for destroying the overarching causes and targeting, as Gladwell put it, "a more exacting set of generalizations?"

Don't know, but this article sure gets my blood pumping to find out...

Participating in the Race Changers Project: Embarking into the Ignored

2006-10-09T19:01:00.001-05:00

I read about the Race Changers project on Jenn's blog, Reappropriate today, and this anti-racism education exercise sounds interesting and intellectually exciting. So far, two assignments have been posted, and new assignments are posted weekly. Assignments about what, you ask? Let's see what the first post has to say about the project...

Thank you for visiting us here at Race Changers! This is a blog that brings together a community of people working towards an anti-racist future, one week at a time.

The Goal
People often ask, “What can I do as an individual to make a difference?” Race Changers offers a way for any person to join the fight against racism. Each week we post a new assignment that we will all do together, and we discuss what we learned from the experience.

What it will look like
Assignments may be anything from reading a compelling article to initiating a thought-provoking conversation about a particular topic, from writing a journal entry to volunteering with a local campaign. We hope to harness the power of collective action to create the momentum we need to create lasting change.

Make sure that you receive all assignments!
To receive email updates whenever we put up a new post, click here. To subscribe to our RSS feed in your feedreader, click here. No idea what the heck we’re talking about? Not to worry, you’re not alone. Check out this excellent, easy-to-follow explanation of what RSS is all about.

Spread the word
As always, we encourage you to spread the word about our projects to get more people involved in the discussions. With Race Changers, it’s that much more important. Because the success of our work hinges on more and more people getting involved and learning, reflecting, discussing, and acting, we encourage you to bring friends, family members, co-workers and any others you know into this work! Also think about things that you think we should all do. If you have an idea for an assignment, we’d love to hear it! Email your feedback, ideas and suggestions to us at team@racechangers.com!

We are looking forward to making great changes and challenging racism along with all of you.

This project appears very ambitious and promising, so I plan to participate in the weekly assignments. Unfortunately I have to play catch-up for the first assignment, so I'll complete it now and add my observations/questions to the blog when I complete it (hopefully tonight; it'll be a great way to wake up my brain before studying for the criminal law midterm this Sunday).

What truth marched on Columbia's stage?

2006-10-08T12:05:00.000-05:00

Oh loop, how far out of you I am! Blame upcoming midterms, research assignments, and memoranda writing for the delay.

I just browsed the Feministing blog for some inspiration. If I feel something I've written in response to their stories is worth repeating, I'll copy/paste it on over there.

From a story posted on October 5, 2006: "Students Protest Anti-Immigration Speaker"

I heard a few people in my social group discussing this Friday afternoon. Apparently at Columbia University, a group of students rushed the stage to protest speaker Jim Gilchrist, founder of a grassroots anti-immigration organization called The Minuteman Project. There's a clip running on YouTube showing what exactly happened at the incident. My conservative friends castigated the students storming the stage in protest, calling the entire proceeding "rude" and "uncivilized," and labeling the students as "liberal wackjobs."

Since I'm currently on dial-up service (and I have a few choice words for Verizon tomorrow, who charged my bank account after telling me that my service would be free until they return my DSL service), I'm still waiting to watch the YouTube clip before passing judgment. I'm currently writhing in a liberal catch-22. John Stuart Mill (yes, I'm going there) has a famous quote from On Liberty about censorship, and so does John F. Kennedy.

Mill's quote:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

JFK's quote:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Now I personally think anti-immigration policies are racist and xenophobic in nature and only promote hatemongering amongst whites against people who are not recognizable to them and do not conform to their standards. That is my view of the entire situation in an incredibly condensed nutshell. I think the national security issue is merely a convenient lacy coverlet for this rotted and charring mess of denying people citizenship they've earned while living and working here. I agree with the sentiment of the protesters that the promulgation of this program is deplorable.

However, I disagree wholeheartedly with their approach of challenging the promulgation. I nearly shuddered when I realized I agreed with my friends. Rude does not describe this behavior adequately. Advocating decorum in challenging someone's opinions is not advocating timidity in opposing the opinion. However, the temerity of these students should not be condoned; nothing constructive or informative spawned from that display.

That video illustrates a deplorable display of entitlement on the part of those students. (If a group of students with brown faces mounted the stage screaming with banners, do you think those cops would have stood idly by, watching the fray? Do you think a measly cordon would have surfaced? I would not be surprised if very minimal disciplinary actions -- if any -- were taken.) And why the hell were the people sponsoring the event allowed to abuse the protesters?

Are there no legitimate challenges to what this man would have said that the students resorted to mobbing him? Is the battle against anti-immigration speech so bleak that this was the only challenge liberal Columbia students could offer? I'm depressed that I actually agree with the asshole at the end of that video. (His jabs at the Democratic party lost me, as well as his assertion that "no conservative" would behave in that manner after witnessing how the opposition actually got into a fight with the bannerholders in front of the podium. Plus, I hate ridiculous dichotomies in general.)

I suppose a discussion of the merits of peaceful protest versus boisterous protest could arise, and whether either style of protest has any merit in a country where its citizenry barely musters the energy to vote in political elections. Another discussion could surface on whose minds these students intended to change or to influence with their madcap dash onto the stage. Were they merely intending to preach to the choir of their supporters, and if so, what would be gained by such a show?

I also wonder what Gilchrist will say at his next speaking engagement to his new audience. Will he describe how the presence of "illegal aliens" has brought out the "wackjob" tendencies in lily-white privileged America while showing this video? What challenge would these students issue then? Would they shoot the projectors and storm the halls?

Black Women Deserve Respect.

2006-10-01T19:33:00.000-05:00

Black women demand respect

By MELODY McCLOUD
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Why are black women so increasingly ignored, abhorred, disrespected and rejected in this country?

Who declared "open season" on us, and why?

Increasingly over the past decade, the media have projected images of black women as battered about, cast down, kicked aside, ignored, denigrated and disrespected at the will of all who take delight and sport in doing so. It is tantamount to a public flogging in the modern-day town square — the media, the Internet, TV, movies and music videos.

The latest venue? The University of Georgia in Athens, where Chi Phi fraternity pledges flashed naked images of black women to passers-by. Why? Because they could. It's acceptable sport in the 21st century. They're just black women; who cares? One student told a reporter he thought it was funny. It's not.

The late comedian, Rodney Dangerfield, enjoyed a lifetime of fame and fortune and received many a laugh saying, "I don't get no respect." Many of today's black women may feel Dangerfield's battle cry is one they, too, can claim. But hardly any are laughing.

More and more, black male models and actors are readily cast opposite white and Hispanic women, to the blatant, total exclusion of black women. Magazine ads frequently engage colorism — favoring light-skinned blacks over brown-skinned ones. Lighter black women often get the sexy ads and poses; they're positioned to look soft and desirable while brown-skinned women are posed stern, frowning and even masculine with bald heads.

It also seems that the media are ever eager to show black women as "crazy " — think U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), model Naomi Campbell, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth of the TV show "The Apprentice" and others — but won't allow others to be heard or seen. It seems, "well, there's Oprah," so that's all the room they'll allow for "good" black women.

Sadly, too, those blacks in position to present black women in a better light, including Oprah, often fail to do so. Tyler Perry and Martin Lawrence, more so, get rich on the image of the fat, gun-toting, loud black granny.

Shonda Rhimes, the black female creator/producer of "Grey's Anatomy," has the black male character sleeping with Asian Sandra Oh (who brushes her teeth in the kitchen sink), while Chandra Wilson, the lone black actress on the show, is "the Nazi."

And MTV — whose president, Christina Norman, is a black woman — recently aired a cartoon to young Saturday morning viewers entitled "Where My Dogs At," which had black women squatting on all fours, tethered to leashes. In 2004, U.S. Army reservist Sgt. Lynndie England subjected Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the same denigration and was convicted and sentenced to prison. Where is the justice for black women?

Someone must speak out against this societal poison. White women aren't going to say anything because they readily benefit from negative images of black women. Many white men — media executives, and obviously some UGA frat brothers — are having too much fun and cash flow at the expense of black women's dignity and social value; and sadly, many black men are inexplicably silent, standing on the sidelines.

This year, I wrote Marc Cherry, creator of the hit show "Desperate Housewives." Normally, to see a black woman get a recurring role in the No. 1 prime-time network program would be a major coup, a step in the right direction for American media and black imagery. But alas, once again, the lone black woman — on a show that mostly deals with sexy, alluring women with kinky trysts and family matters — is portrayed as a psychopath who chains her son in the basement.

I suggest congressional hearings to effect a tangible change in the depiction of women in music videos. Black women who participate in such videos must stop; there are better, more respectful ways to gain acceptance. Black men need to step forward: Say and do something. Honor your women. Speak to young boys.

Black film and music producers need to be socially conscious and think what effect the images they set forth have on the community and the world. White media and ad executives must advance past colorism; they also need to cast black actresses and models of all hues in loving, desirable roles.

White parents need to stop teaching racist attitudes to their offspring. And UGA students need to find something else to do in the town square. Denigrating and disrespecting black women is not a sport. It's sad that members of the Chi Phi fraternity think it is.
Sometimes I'm caught between Zora Neale Hurston's two proclamations about black women. We're either the mules of the earth or as free as the freest white man. I love black women. I am a black woman. And we're awesome.

Hehe, fin.

Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President.

2006-10-01T11:59:00.000-05:00

Source: New York Times
Parts that bother me are bolded for emphasis.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush on Friday achieved a signal victory, shoring up with legislation his determined conduct of the campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.

Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them — albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment — beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.
Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. It does, however, grant detainees brought before military commissions limited protections initially opposed by the White House. The bill, which cleared a final procedural hurdle in the House on Friday and is likely to be signed into law next week by Mr. Bush, does not just allow the president to determine the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions; it also strips the courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to his interpretation.
And it broadens the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to include not only those who fight the United States but also those who have “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” The latter group could include those accused of providing financial or other indirect support to terrorists, human rights groups say. The designation can be made by any “competent tribunal” created by the president or secretary of defense.
In very specific ways, the bill is a rejoinder to the Hamdan ruling, in which several justices said the absence of Congressional authorization was a central flaw in the administration’s approach. The new bill solves that problem, legal experts said.
“The president should feel he has better authority and direction now,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar at the Pepperdine University School of Law. “I think he can reasonably be confident that this statute answers the Supreme Court and puts him back in a position to prevent another attack, which is the goal of interrogation.”
But lawsuits challenging the bill are inevitable, and critics say substantial parts of it may well be rejected by the Supreme Court.
Over all, the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president.
Bruce Ackerman, a critic of the administration and a professor of law and political science at Yale University, sharply criticized the bill but agreed that it strengthened the White House position. “The president walked away with a lot more than most people thought,” Mr. Ackerman said. He said the bill “further entrenches presidential power” and allows the administration to declare even an American citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention.
“And it’s not only about these prisoners,” Mr. Ackerman said. “If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened.”
Even if the Supreme Court decides it has the power to hear challenges to the bill, the Bush administration has gained a crucial advantage. In adding a Congressional imprimatur to a comprehensive set of procedures and tactics, lawmakers explicitly endorsed measures that in other eras were achieved by executive fiat. Earlier Supreme Court decisions have suggested that the president and Congress acting together in the national security arena can be an all-but-unstoppable force.
Public commentary on the bill, called the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been fast-shifting and often contradictory, partly because its 96 pages cover so much ground and because the impact of some provisions is open to debate.
“This bill is about so many things, and it’s a mixed bag,” said Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, a civil liberties group.
Ms. Massimino’s group and others criticized the bill as a whole, but she agreed with the Republican senators who negotiated for weeks with the White House that it would ban the most extreme interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military.
“The senators made clear that waterboarding is criminal,” Ms. Massimino said, referring to a technique used to simulate drowning. “That’s a human rights enforcement upside.”
The debate over the limits of torture and the rules for military commission dominated discussion of the bill until this week. Only in the last few days has broad attention turned to its redefinition of “unlawful enemy combatant” and its ban on habeas corpus petitions, which suspects have traditionally used to challenge their incarceration.
Law professors will stay busy for months debating the implications. The most outspoken critics have likened the law’s sweeping provisions to dark chapters in history, comparable to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the fragile years after the nation’s founding and the internment of Japanese-Americans in the midst of World War II.
Conservative legal experts, by contrast, said critics could no longer say the Bush administration was guilty of unilateral executive overreaching. Congressional approval can cure many ills, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in his seminal concurrence in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, the 1952 case that struck down President Harry S. Truman’s unilateral seizure of the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War.
Supporters of the law, in fact, say its critics will never be satisfied. “For years they’ve been saying that we don’t like Bush doing things unilaterally, that we don’t like Bush doing things piecemeal,” said David B. Rivkin, a Justice Department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.
If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.
Long before that judgment arrives, legal challenges are likely to bring the new law before the Supreme Court. Assuming the justices rule that they retain the power to hear the case at all, they will then decide whether Congress has resolved the flaws it found in June or must make another effort to balance the rights of accused terrorists and the desire for security.

Shuffling is not just a method of arranging playing cards.

2006-09-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

I plan to survive law school this way. I don't want to stand out. I've been doing an awful job blending in, but I don't want to stand out.

I have a very nice group of friends. We all come from different places, not necessarily ethnicity-wise, but significantly enough that it creates a small variety of perspectives.

We start talking about Allen. One of our group, an openly gay white male elected political official, begins talking about how the past incidences of Allen's racism infuriate him more than Allen's most recent "macaque" uttering. You'd think that white Americans would stop throwing the word "macaque" around now that there is reason to understand it is a pejorative -- but ignorance is bliss. Anyway, he mentions how he thinks it is significant. I mention a point that someone pointed out to me and I understand now -- proving past incidences will not make it concretely evident where his perspectives on race lie today. Three students could come up today and say he's a racist; twelve students could enter tomorrow and say he's not. It's all gossip. Hearsay.

Not as fucking evident as the man saying a pejorative himself on camera.

And I brought this fact up in no uncertain terms. How can we spend valuable time bumbling around searching for proof of Allen's racist sentiments when we have a VIDEOTAPE of him in his natural campaigning element making a racially insensitive remark to one of his rival's campaign aides? How is this videotape not real evidence? Why does a tongue-in-cheek apology atone for Allen's behavior? Why is it that white people always clamor for this elusive "proof" of racism but when someone presents bona fide proof, exceptions are gathered to sweep them all under the table?

I said all of this in rapid fire succession and with more venom than I probably have ever used in mixed company in my life. Meanwhile, I received blank stares and gaping mouths from most of my company. I then avowed to my friend that I needed to just keep my mouth shut. She uttered some disappointment because she realized that if she as a white female said what I did, the discussion would not have ended entirely.

Something "the unwashed internet tubes" don't seem to know...

2006-09-27T19:16:00.000-05:00

CONTEXT CLUES.

Or, fucking hell:

CONTEXT.

Start from the bottom and work your way up...

Allen, White Privilege, and Rambles (There'll Always Be Rambles)

2006-09-26T12:55:00.000-05:00

"And on your left, we have the categorical, ultimate, unwavering adamant denial of racial slur usage in college by Senator George Felix Allen, citing the accusations as 'ludicrously false!' Is this indeed our fantasy, or are we shaking our moneymakers to the right tune? On your right, we have the adamant classmates slugging it out with these denials, testifying that Allen did use the epithets! The rehash of the past is brewing, folks! How many cafeteria workers can they find! How many helmet cleaners can they unearth? How many people in the yearbooks can be interviewed? Let's get it on!"

This is becoming indisputably disgusting in some ways. I worked my tiniest of circles in the blogosphere, sending the article on Salon.com to MSNBC and Keith Olbermann specifically. I e-mailed Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com, hoping maybe she could include something there, and I also sent something by the way of Feministe by linking to it within one of the political discussions there. I also spread it around some progressive areas in my livejournal, hoping someone would do something to determine the truth or falsity of these statements. Maintaining impartiality regarding an issue of racists in office is making me batshit insane. I can't do it. I want to scream, to punch, to kick...it's almost as if my soul's being attacked by some unnamed, ominous assailant. Asses need kickin', folks. I know there are probably a lot of politicians with racist sentiments that are just good at keeping their goods under the fig leaves, but...my God, this was obvious. Allen walked into a tarpit with his "macaca" shit because he knows a lot of Americans wouldn't know anything about it and he could get away with it. He had a cheering crowd in front of him, and for God's sake, he welcomed the guy to America. "So what?" Within that context...and in our political climate where any day now, a House of Un-American Activities Committee could pop up on the tip of a needle...I don't trust it. I don't like it. If politics has become a popularity contest and a likeability game, then this man showed a very odious side of him that would have him sitting alone in any cafeteria I chaperone.

A few additions and interesting articles:

The ever famous/notorious article about white privilege that's paraded around everywhere as creamy whipped tip of the privileged sundae: Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." When I first read this article, some of those old jokes from Def Comedy Jam and Comic View played in my head. I don't remember them word for word, but they went through the whole "why are the green olives in the jar, but the black olives are in the can?" description of daily life. (Especially when we get to the band-aids discussion; I never thought about how boldly my injuries appear when a milky-tan bandage stands on my brown skin! Everyone can see it all, my empire of dust...I hurt myself today...) But is it a good starting point? Yes. It gets you thinking.

Another article is one aptly named "A Pistol Called History" by livejournal user daysofthegun. This particular discussion offers a challenge to the knapsack metaphor offered by McIntosh. I always got this veiled idea that reading McIntosh always implied on a deeper level that if you just gently got rid of everything in that knapsack and recognized your privilege, BAM ANTI-RACISM WORK OVER. What time is it? Gap Time!

Is that true?

Of course not. But I can always see how the Amateur Reader With No Available Intellectual Engagement Time (ARWNAIET) could reach such a conclusion. Anti-racism requires a level of critical thinking that most schools lack the time and resources to pound into our heads. A person can arrive at these thoughts instinctively with enough knowledge and training, and God bless those people who do. The work for anti-racism does surpass the superficial grazing of the intellectual pasture on the subject. I want to work on an ongoing compilation of sources to read for people who fall into here and for myself. (Probably more for myself. I'm selfish.)

We know "lefty loosey, righty tighty," but do we know the proper rules for skilled and effective debate on racism?

...*cough-here's-another-article-on-that-subject* Livejournal user coffeeandink's discussion is a lot more entertaining than the other two (no offense), but it shows the answer to that question and LOTS MORE! It's a satirical piece, aptly titled "How to Suppress Discussions of Racism." I'd buy what she's selling because it's been proven by 9 out of every 10 conversations relating to any -ism, but definitely racism in particular.

I think I've gone and done all I could for the time before class. I'll return to add more when my cognitive processes aren't trapped in the closet of legal analysis, research, and writing.

Enjoying the Stay "In My Place" Furnished by Senator George Allen

2006-09-24T21:35:00.000-05:00

And I'm not talking about the novel by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, or the song by Coldplay, either..

Quoted in full from Salon magazine:

Teammates: Allen used "N-word" in college

Three members of Sen. George Allen's college football team remember a man with racist attitudes at ease using racial slurs.

By Michael Scherer
Sept. 24, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.

"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place,'" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."

A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word "nigger" to describe blacks. "It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used," the teammate said.

A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word "nigger," though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. "My impression of him was that he was a racist," the third teammate said.
Shelton also told Salon that the future senator gave him the nickname "Wizard," because he shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. The radiologist said he decided earlier this year that he would go public with his concerns about Allen if a reporter ever called. About four months ago, when he heard that Allen was a possible candidate for president in 2008, Shelton began to write down some of the negative memories of his former teammate. He provided Salon excerpts of those notes last week.
On Sunday morning, Salon spoke with David Snepp, a spokesman for Allen's Senate office, to ask for a response to the recollections of the three former teammates. E-mail and phone messages were also left for Bill Bozin, a spokesman for the Allen campaign, and Dick Wadhams, the campaign manager. Though Snepp indicated that the campaign, and probably Wadhams, would respond, eight hours later no one in the Allen camp had replied to Salon. Chris LaCivita, a consultant to the Allen campaign, hung up when a Salon reporter reached him mid-afternoon Sunday. Additional attempts to contact the campaign were unsuccessful.

The racial attitudes of Allen, a once formidable presidential contender in 2008, have become an issue in his highly contested reelection campaign against Jim Webb, a former Marine and author. Last month, Allen was videotaped calling an Indian-American college student "macaca," an obscure word for monkey that is also used as a racial epithet in some parts of the world. Allen has since apologized to the student, saying that he made up the word, and did not know its other meanings.

Last week, Allen again created controversy by appearing offended when a reporter asked about the Jewish lineage in his mother's family, which he has since acknowledged. Allen has also faced questions about his affinity for the Confederate flag, which he wore as a pin in a high school yearbook photo and exhibited in his home in Virginia.

In public statements, Allen has said that he realized later in life that the Confederate flag was a symbol of violence for black Americans, and he has expressed some regret. "There are a lot of things that I wish I had learned earlier in life," Allen said in an appearance this month on NBC's "Meet the Press." But Allen has maintained that he never harbored any discriminatory attitudes toward blacks. "Even if your heart is pure, the things you say and do and the symbols you use matter because of how others may take them," he said in the prepared transcript for remarks to a luncheon with black educators on Sept. 13.
Over the past week, Salon has interviewed 19 former teammates and college friends of Allen from the University of Virginia. In addition to the three who said Allen used the word "nigger," two others who were contacted said they remember being bothered by Allen's displaying the Confederate flag in college, but said they do not remember him acting in an overtly racist manner. Seven others said they did not know Allen well outside the football team, but do not remember Allen demonstrating any racist feelings. A separate seven teammates and friends said they knew Allen well and did not believe he held racist views. "I don't believe he was insensitive," said Paul Ryczek, who played center in Allen's year before joining the Atlanta Falcons. "He had no prejudices, biases or anything else."

In the interviews, old teammates generally spoke of him highly, as a good friend, a bright and ambitious student, and a colorful character who embraced Southern culture, listened to country music, and attracted the nickname "Neck," as in redneck. "If a black guy dropped a pass, he would say something to him," said Gerard Mullins, who played defensive back in Allen's year. "If it was a white guy, same thing. It really didn't matter where you were from, who you were, or anything."

The three former teammates, however, painted a very different picture of Allen when he was around his white friends. Shelton said he feels a personal responsibility to tell what he knows about Allen's past, especially now that Allen has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. "I got to know Allen a little too well," Shelton said, adding that he does not believe Allen should hold elective office. "He had prejudices that were deep-seated."

Shelton said no political animosity has driven his decision to speak out. He has switched between Democratic and independent registration in recent elections, he said, and does not consider himself politically active. Four years ago, Shelton and his wife donated $1,000 to Sam Neill, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., because Shelton said they knew Neill and were upset by the allegations of corruption against Taylor, who was reelected. In February, Shelton supported Rick Davis, a current Republican candidate for sheriff, and penned a letter to the editor in the Hendersonville Times-News backing Davis' campaign. Shelton says he does not know much about Allen's political ideology and says he hasn't spoken to him in about 30 years. "There are no personal grudges," Shelton said. "There was no falling out."
helton played football with Allen in the 1972 and 1973 seasons, according to the team media guides from those years. Shelton remembers Allen's attitudes about race surfacing early in their relationship. At one point, Shelton says, Allen nicknamed him "Wizard," after United Klans imperial wizard Robert Shelton. "He asked me if I was related at all," Shelton remembers. "I knew of that name, and I said absolutely not." Several former teammates confirmed that Shelton's team nickname was "Wizard," though no one contacted by Salon could confirm firsthand knowledge of the handle's origin. "Everyone called me 'Wizard' that knows me from those days," said Shelton. "My nickname stuck."
Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. "He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox," Shelton said.

Lanahan, a former resident of Richmond, Va., died this year at the age of 53, said his aunt Martha Belle Chisholm of Richmond. In an interview on Thursday, Chisholm said that she remembered Lanahan speaking highly of Allen. "Bill was very complimentary of George Allen," she said. "He said he was just one of the boys." Chisholm also confirmed that the Lanahan family owned hunting land near Bumpass, Va., about 50 miles east of the University of Virginia campus.
Allen, a college quarterback, arrived at Virginia in 1971 as a sophomore transfer from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he had a football scholarship after graduating from nearby Palos Verdes High School. He relocated to Virginia around the same time that his father, also named George Allen, took a job as the head coach of the Washington Redskins. At the time of his arrival, race relations at the University of Virginia were delicate. Allen's graduating class was the first to offer scholarships to black athletes, and included the first four black players on the football team and the first black starting quarterback, Harrison Davis, who did not return calls from Salon.

Accusations of racial insensitivity have long dogged Allen's political career. As a member of the Virginia Legislature, Allen opposed a state holiday honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Virginia's governor, Allen issued a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month that contained no mention of slavery. In recent years, however, Allen has made a point to reach out to minority communities, sponsoring legislation to fund historically black colleges and a resolution to condemn the lynching of blacks in the South. In a New Republic article by Ryan Lizza earlier this year, Allen discussed a "civil rights pilgrimage" he had taken to Birmingham, Ala., in 2003. "I wish I had [gone] sooner," the magazine quotes Allen saying. "I was listening to the old civil-rights movement, the strategies, the foundations, the tactics."

Several of Allen's teammates remember him arriving at the University of Virginia in 1971 with long sandy blond hair and surfer stories of the Pacific Ocean. "He was a Californian," remembers Craig Critchley, a family doctor in Ohio who played linebacker in Allen's year, and did not remember the senator displaying racial views. "It was like, 'Wow, man, yeah.'"

Shelton last remembers speaking with Allen in the mid-1970s, in Charlottesville, when Allen, then in law school, played with Shelton, who was in medical school, in an inter-city football league. For Shelton, the memories of Allen's behavior during his football days raise clear questions about the senator's fitness for office. "I just think that someone who attains that level of higher office needs to have higher standards," Shelton said. "He has deep-seated core values that are hard to reverse despite what he says."

By contrast, Allen has pointed to a different lesson from his days of football playing in recent public statements. On "Meet the Press," he said his football career was an experience that taught him racial tolerance. "I grew up in a football family, as you well know, and my parents and those teams taught me a lot," Allen said on the program. "And one of the things that you learn in football is that you don't care about someone's race or ethnicity or religion."

I find Allen's comment at the end of the story most significant about this non-caring sentiment of which he speaks. His attitude certainly reflects that he doesn't care about race, ethnicity, or religion though his use of pejoratives throughout his life, his "fair and balanced" greeting to a cameraman working for his opponent, as well as the other interesting facts painting his attitudes towards other people. I've forwarded this Salon article to a few media outlets, and I'm posting this on my less-than-traveled blog so that America gets to see more of what its racist history and ingrained traditions have created. Thanks for the welcome, Mr. Allen; I think I'm fixin' to stay.

What Feminism as a Movement Can Do

2006-09-24T19:43:00.000-05:00

I wrote this in response to a question on livejournal about why I chose to be a feminist. All women are not feminists by nature, and I think to say so would be anti-feminist. It's a choice, a banner, an outcry of hope and courage to which a person aspires by exercising the will and voice they received and cultivated. I do believe any person can be a feminist even if they can't rattle off quotes from The Feminist Mystique or Ain't I a Woman, even if they choose stay-at-home motherhood or fatherhood or if they select a childfree lifestyle. Feminism is just that -- a lifestyle, a life choice -- and not solely characterized by intellectualism and protests. It's as inherent as morality and individualism are purported to be. Feminist thinking extends what it means to be human.

...I do believe in feminism. I think society is fucked up and has fucked up too many people. I don't think the goal of feminism is to be like men; our patriarchal society has pulled enough of that shit already. Women do not exist to be like men or for men. Women exist to be women -- leading full, healthy, positive and fulfilling lives. But as long as there's this urge to compete and this sense that domination is the only key to peace (which time and time again is proven untrue for everyone and by everyone), I think feminism holds the key to exploring better alternatives and creating healthier and happier people. Because women are capable of doing that and tons more.

(The same can be said for nearly any progressive movement, which is why I believe all of them should work cooperatively and share experiences -- but that's another entry.)

Love the Skin You're In?

2006-09-23T18:39:00.000-05:00

I was unsure about whether to speak about this topic because I had no idea what words to use. Earlier, when I only saw the Gwyneth Paltrow advertisement, I wrote the following into my Vox page:

The campaign did in fact have good intentions, but their intentions were executed poorly.
Attempts to defend the advertisement campaign, which also features celebrities like David Bowie and Kimora Lee Simmons, spotlight the fact that remotely, all of us are African descendants. Comparisons have been made to the advertising campaign made after 9/11, where people of different nationalities proclaimed to be American (presumably -- for all we know they could have all been American; I don't carry around my nationality detector), and advertising campaigns with assorted people claiming to be New Yorkers.
A common theme in all these awareness campaigns is the need to co-opt a certain situation as his/her/its own to feel properly sympathetic towards it and to inspire its viewers to action. Sort of a message sounding like, "you'd help yourself, wouldn't you?" or "you help if it were me, wouldn't you?" or "I've suffered; therefore we all suffer."
I am, and will always be, the first person to argue that the human condition shares a common thread. We all have more in common than we care to admit. However, I object to these advertisement campaigns. I think they're superficial and inspire people's narcissism rather than their activism.
If Gwyneth Paltrow was replaced by Average Schmoe #4847294, would I feel less prompted to act? Am I supposed to reach out to help the continent of Africa, specifically those within its countries who are suffering from AIDS, because Paltrow is topless and has donned a beaded necklace? What is she saying about Africans? What am I supposed to understand about her now being African? Where am I to find this righteous indignation for the suffering of Paltrow and her appropriated ilk?
The same questions arise when I think about 9/11 and the advertisements there. What metaphysical transformation have I undergone to share the plight of these people? 9/11 characterized a time when I felt terrible for the losses of New Yorkers affected directly by the attacks, but I did not want to be a New Yorker. I didn't even want to be American at that point. All the cards in our house of superiority fell fast, and I wanted to get the hell out of here.
I contributed to charities that supported the families hurt by 9/11, but I didn't do it because I transposed myself into the bodies of those people dying and those people whose tears wet the pavement as they look at a scarred cityscape. I contributed because it seemed like the human thing to do. I didn't need to see my ethnicity's face painted on the eyesore of 9/11. I don't need to see a continental identity painted on a white Hollywood celebrity, or anyone else for that matter. What happened to the days when atrocities and pandemics were horrific enough to create desires to help?
Whenever I see advertisements or enactments that transpose identities, it annoys me. I wonder who will tell the protesters who dress up like trees and animals that no one wants to be a tree or an animal. I wonder who will tell Oprah that contrary to popular opinion, a straight man cannot "be gay" for a period of time and know what it's actually like to experience those things from day to day. A white Hollywood starlet can't be one of the many inhabitants of Africa who suffer from AIDS, nor can she be one of the many inhabitants of North America who suffer from AIDS. If the thrust of these ad campaigns are true -- that we have forgotten Africa, that we haven't been attentive to AIDS, that there are constant sufferers and atrocities around the globe that need attention and funding -- borrowing someone's cultural, geographic, and/or ethnic identity is not the way to bring about that change. If anything, it merely calls attention to how shallow and superficial some cultures have become -- thinking that changing clothes or applying paint or claiming new locations alters who we are or how we're perceived.

Since I wrote about the Gwyneth Paltrow ad, I've had time to think about my response to it. I've also seen the Kate Moss cover above, taken from the UK's Independent. I buried myself in thought. I took my body, shut it in a rectangular box, and submerged myself into the dirt of my conscious mind. I searched into the recesses of my knowledge and tried to find a good reason for these advertisements. However, these advertisements call more attention to the ignorance of appropriation and blackface than any of the plights the many inhabitants in the countries of Africa are facing. Maybe these pictures can be tallied on the plight side of everything.

I find it ironic and fitting that the most widely exposed and widely castigated advertisements I have seen for this campaign are white women. More telling, these advertisements feature an actress and a supermodel: professions famous and notorious for putting on different fabrics, different makeup, different ideas to make a statement. I wondered if Gwyneth Paltrow's movie career was suffering, so she decided to go topless (and get beads) for weeping Africa. I wondered if Kate Moss decided to burn herself black to illustrate the shortage of cocaine in jungle-painted, ebony-stained, beaten Africa. These women wouldn't go naked or charred for any reason, dear audience members; God, no, they did it for Africa!

I still don't know where my mind should go for these advertisements. I still feel no call to action for Africa and its pain. I feel a call to action to ask people to stop making racialized advertisements, remembering woefully the Sony fiasco of a few months' ago. I cringe at the cultural overtones of the larger white populace, and its "wax on, wax off" attempts at broadening perspectives. Gwyneth can only stay topless for so long before feeling the shame of men's eyes on her breasts and covering up in spite of the photographer's insistence of African solidarity. Kate Moss can only withstand enough stares within the black makeup before it cracks and reveals the expanse of white, starved skin that clings to her fashionable frame. And I still wonder what it means to live in a culture that reflects time and again the mocking lyrics of Jay-Z's song: change clothes and go. Superficiality will solve nothing in Africa or in America. Nothing.

Relationships and Racial Awareness

2006-09-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

A member of the sex_and_race community on livejournal linked this article, and I enjoyed the poignancy and frankness of the author on such a sensitive topic for many people. Standing up for your own principles always proves tough and isolating, but it's tougher to sell your integrity for a few cuddles and kisses. If there's no engagement with your essence of self, there's no full engagement period.

(Warning: It's going to take me a bit to get used to Blogger, even though it looks easy as dirt. :-p)

Race Wasn't an Issue to Him, Which Was an Issue to Me
By KIM McLARIN

Published: September 3, 2006

HIS name was Jerry. A nice man, late 40’s, funny and smart, divorced with two grown children, a social worker who had dedicated his professional life to working with troubled kids.

He was also — let’s be honest — the first to come around. He was the first man after my own divorce to raise an eyebrow, to take an interest after my ex not only moved out but moved on. Funny and smart and dedicated to troubled kids is all admirable, but in truth I would have said yes to a drink with a four-foot gaptoothed troll had one smiled my direction. The self-confidence of a 40-year-old divorced mother of two is a shaggy thing.
So the fact that Jerry was also white I noted but decided to file away for now. Why worry about it right out of the gate? Yes, race had been an issue in my marriage — not the issue perhaps, but an issue nonetheless. What I did not know was whether race arose as a problem because I am black and my ex is white or because I am a person who grapples with race and he is not.
That my ex does not grapple with race he would not dispute; he does not care to read, think or talk about it, and he wondered why I did. My ex believed I always went looking for race, but I didn’t; race came looking for me.
And when it did, I would stand and call its name: when officials in our inner-ring suburb talked about closing our “borders” against a wave of nonresident students sneaking into our schools; when a white woman at my gym reached up, uninvited, and petted my locks like she was petting a dog; when my sick mother received one level of medical care and my ex’s sick sister received another. At such times he tried to understand my feelings, but he did not share them, and even talking about it made him uncomfortable.
It’s a dividing line as real as any in America — those who grapple with race and those who do not. But like most dividing lines, it’s impossible to tell on which side a person stands by looking at them, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. So why get ahead of myself with Jerry? Why dig for land mines when I may not make it past the way he slurps his beer?
We met for drinks. Sparkwise, I felt little, but we ended up talking and laughing easily for more than an hour. I told him I was a writer; he told me his five favorite books and how they had shaped his life. He told me he had gone to a seminary as a boy but eventually left the Catholic church; I told him I’d been raised a Pentecostal but mellowed into Methodism as an adult. We talked about our children, travels, mutual love of the blues and mutual dislike of the cold, and then he said he would like to read my books; he thought he would like them. I said he well might not.
“How do you deal with it when people you know don’t like your work?” he asked.
I quoted a playwright whose name I could not remember who admitted in an interview that he told his friends if there was a choice between being honest and being kind in talking about his work, they should choose to be kind. “Don’t value your opinion over my feelings,” the playwright said.
Jerry nodded. “Some people use honesty like a weapon.”
“Like a switchblade,” I said. “Like a bayonet. They slice up your heart with all these ugly, hurtful words and then, while you’re bleeding on the floor, they hand you a Band-Aid: ‘I was only being honest.’ ”
“Honesty is overrated,” Jerry agreed.
SO the following day, when he e-mailed his attraction, I tried to be both honest and kind. No spark, I wrote, but he was great, good company. If he was looking for “the one,” I was probably not going to be her. But if he simply sought intelligent dinner companionship some Friday evening, I’d be more than game.
Not a bayonet, I thought, but a butter knife. And still it hurt.
“Ouch,” he replied, and disappeared.
By the time he resurfaced a few months later, I had suffered through two terrible blind dates, joined an online dating service, carried on several e-mail conversations that died, actually talked on the phone with a few men, met three for drinks, backed away carefully from each, then canceled the service.
A few of these men were black, the others white, and in no case did I find anything remotely resembling chemistry. In fact, so utterly lacking in connection were these encounters that it made me appreciate anew how rare is connection. In the face of human isolation, race seemed to retreat a little.
So when Jerry called again, I decided to let the spark thing coast, because at least he and I could talk. “My wounds are licked,” Jerry said. “Have dinner with me.”
“Why not,” I said. Maybe, in time, the spark would come.
We talked and laughed for four hours, then necked like teenagers in the parking lot in the rain. The next day we e-mailed and text-messaged each other. It was all so much fun, such a heady relief after the months of loneliness.

But then, on our third date, things changed. First, he was late and I was irritable. Earlier, I’d had a frustrating discussion with several white undergraduates in my Literature of Slavery class. All semester I had struggled to teach them to think critically about race and slavery and history, to have them challenge their assumptions. They insisted, for example, that racial divisions were as old as time and that the myth of African inferiority preceded slavery, not, as I suggested, the other way around. And they argued that racial genetics were more than skin deep, whether I wanted to believe it or not. How else to account for the way black athletes dominate some professional sports?
That evening, when I shared my frustrations with Jerry, he wondered if the students didn’t have a point. “What about all those Kenyan marathon runners?” he asked. “Isn’t it possible there’s some genetic reason for that? Isn’t it possible blacks are just better athletes than whites?”
A PERFECTLY innocent question. Yet something small and painful flickered inside my chest. Logically, if one accepts a genetic physical superiority of blacks, one must also accept the possibility of intellectual superiority in whites. Did he not consider that notion? Did he reject it out of hand, or subconsciously believe it? And if I wondered these things aloud would he, like my ex, judge me bitter or oversensitive?
I mentioned an essay I’d given my students in which the anti-racism advocate Tim Wise suggests that no one brought up in America can claim to be free of racist indoctrination, that doing so only perpetuates the crime. “What Wise says is that we all must recognize and confront the legacy of the past,” I explained.
“I don’t think everyone is racist,” Jerry said. “Maybe racialized. But that’s not a bad thing.”
By now my hands were trembling, so I did not ask what he meant by that. I had the feeling that even if he tried to explain I would not understand. James Baldwin said being black in America is like walking around with a pebble in your shoe. Sometimes it scarcely registers and sometimes it shifts and becomes uncomfortable and sometimes it can even serve as a kind of Buddhist mindfulness bell, keeping you present, making you pay attention.
This is why, among other reasons, I engage with race, but not all black people do. I know several interracial couples in which both people swear race is never an issue, almost never comes up at all. I believe them, but it amazes me. And I know one thing: I can never join that pack.
My ex did not grapple with race, at first because he did not have to, being a white man in America, and later because it frightened him. This difference was a small but steady river that ran between us, and the more he tried to ignore it the more I clawed at the banks, and the more I clawed at the banks the larger the river swelled until, at last, we were engulfed. A black person who grapples with race cannot be with a white person who doesn’t. Whether a black person who grapples with race can be with a black person who doesn’t is a different and unresolved question for me, but on the first point I’m solid.
So when Jerry called and asked if I would meet him for a drink, I agreed, but this time I went only to tell him. We met a bar with billiard tables. He wanted to teach me to play but I said we wouldn’t have time.
“I can’t see you again,” I said.
He blinked with surprise. “Why?” he said, finally.
I used my bayonet: “Because you’re white, and it costs too much for me to date a white man. It cost me to be married to a white man for 13 years. I can’t do it again.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, after a minute. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Which proves my point,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous.”
“You can’t be with any white man?”
“No, I don’t think I can.”
I may as well face it. Because, after all, Jerry was a good man who worked with troubled kids and lived his life open to relationships with people of different races. And yet I couldn’t be with him, even though, unlike my ex, he did seem willing to grapple with race.
But he was nearly 50 and his grappling apparently was just beginning, whereas mine started at 5. For nearly 50 years he’d lived in America and yet it surprised him that race might even be an issue for us. There was an innocence in this, an innocence born of being white. An innocence I could neither share nor abide.
“It costs me too much,” I repeated.
We were silent for a minute. Behind us balls clicked and people laughed.
“And now,” Jerry said, “it’s costing me.”

A Proper Venue for Some Ranting

2006-09-18T10:08:00.000-05:00

I needed a refuge to call my own, so I created this blog to talk about my own issues as an anti-essentialist feminist. My delvings into the field aren't nearly extensive, and I'm only a first year law student. Nevertheless, these blogs give people a political voice -- literal words to manipulate instead of predetermined ballot buttons to press -- and I want to speak on it.

Right now, I'm in class (ooh, great student), but I intend to add some entries I've written previously in a few of my other blogs and a short analysis of black feminism I prepared for college to get the ball rolling. God knows I still have a lot of work to do, and I'm seeking to learn as well as to teach. I mostly want to learn.