a letter to a Black child

I want you to be your best self.  Whatever that means for you, I want you to be your best self.

I want your wit.

I want your curiosity.

I want your cynicism.

I want your quirkiness.

I want your queerness.

I want your street smarts and your book smarts and your gut smarts.

I want you bright, beautiful, and bold as fuck.

Because as long as you are what you are, you can reach any height.

You can be your best and reach mediocrity.  That’s okay.

You can be your best and reach notoriety.  That’s maybe not as okay; but you know what?

You’re still doing you.

If you have a question?  Please ask.

And don’t just ask one person, ask a lot of people.

Then go investigate answers for yourself.  This is how you cultivate judgment.

When you develop a how, it helps to have a why in your back pocket.

Sometimes you don’t even need a good why.  But whys give your hows peace of mind.

Don’t take that as a message that you have to justify everything you do to the world.

You don’t have to do that.

But you are your most important person.  If you don’t know why you’re doing something? Ask yourself.

Learning is your evergreen state of being.

Always learn from your circumstances, your peers, and your environment.

It can be as complex as astrophysics or as simple as “don’t get shot.”

Life is full of rich lessons to make you excel.  Learn them.

There may be moments when it feels like nothing’s happening.

This is a teachable moment.  What were you expecting to happen?  Ask yourself the question.

Then make it happen.

You are what the world is waiting for, and so much more.  Be yourself, and make the world smile.

 

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

(Just finished this book tonight and thought I’d share my review from Goodreads.  It does contain some spoilers.)

I remember

I remember when I was afraid to start statements with “I feel” because someone once told me that was a womanly construction and it betrayed a weakness in the speaker’s ability to articulate their thoughts without preface.

I remember running across the internet and yelling at people.  A lot.

I remember having more articles open on my internet browser than I had attention span to read them.

I remember reading some articles horribly wrong because I couldn’t keep pace with all my reading.  I’d then say something completely wrong.  Later, when retracting, I’d feel a visceral pain in my stomach for being careless — but no urge to slow down.

I remember composing articles by starting from the end or the middle instead of the beginning.  Link farming.  Tying complex ideas together in my head, explaining them, and sounding like a complete lunatic.  Metaphysics and sociology/anthropology/postmodernist literary theory mish-mash.

I remember blaming Derrida, Spivak, Althusser, hooks, and Plato.

I remember near-manic composition about things and later having to go back and read what exactly my positions were on particular issues because I forgot as soon as I composed my posts.

I remember lots of fantastic fictional worlds that never made contact with a page or a pixel.

I remember lots of poetry and wordplay that (sometimes fortunately, sometimes unfortunately) did.

I remember physically shaking when my family members would tell me about writing anything on the internet and how it was risking losing everything.  Just convulsing, developing new nicknames, and writing.  More aliases and emails than I can manage, for writing.

I remember having to shake my head until I felt dizzy because understanding a position is not agreeing with a position.  And yet, everywhere I looked, people took them as one in the same.  Except the ones fighting.  And I would hear all sides as voices in my head.  Screaming voices.  And I can’t abide screaming, and I’d start to shake and ache and even cry sometimes.

I remember how it didn’t occur to me to find other ways to write.  How I bought (and still buy) countless notebooks and journals that I never used.  How I wrote briefs, papers, outlines, and notes in blog dialog boxes.  How other writing formats felt completely out of my control, and somehow, through habit or denial, positive release came with composing in the blog dialog box.

I remember doing guest writings and forcing myself to conform to the venue.  Like putting on second, third, fourth skins that wouldn’t slough off afterwards.

I remember all this now.  Fighting through reluctance and fear of being wrong to write.  And stopping because I lacked a course and a purpose to my composition that I could carry with me into and through my life.  I don’t want anything to take over my voice anymore; my feeling, thinking, and creative voice.

Lisa/Sudy once wrote that accountability is key to action, and it’s important to hold yourself accountable to someone.  I am slowly understanding what she means.  And I think there’s a corollary that one shouldn’t hold herself accountable to just anyone, either.  It’s easy to float on the wind and land where it takes you; it’s harder to fly and determine your own course.

I remember because to forget is to undo everything — the mistakes, the critical hits, the lessons, and the love.

accountability process disaster

So…I’m really not liking how often the first response after I talk about my experiences is that my abuser “needs support”. How does that center the survivor? How does that break entrenched gender norms that dictate that I should be meek, forgiving, caretaking, not take up too much space and “heal” on demand? How does that disrupt the power dynamic in which this man -who turned out to be a serial abuser- used his age, gender, community connections (queer poc/radical desi circles) and phd-track credentials to to dehumanize and retraumatize me around sexual assault? This man was ten years older, made snarky comments about my aspirations and condescending comments about my style of speech and my lack of Ivy-League cred, and has had several pieces published on immigration policy issues – and they’re worried about “demonizing” this privilegefest, like it’s his humanity that was fundamentally attacked in all of this over the past several years and not mine. At the moment, he is trying to get my crew to feel sorry for him, give mushy support to him, and pay attention instead to the ways he is marginalized – his usual fallback pattern with women specifically.

I have been looking for NY-based community groups to contact and I have been adding on friends scattered around the country and abroad to cc on the email correspondences for the accountability process and to take part in the next conference call. Their role is be to serve as an extra pair of eyes and to have my back; to basically make the accountability process group is itself accountable. Yes, it’s a headache. This process is going badly, as they tend to do. They’re outsiders, so I don’t know how much clout they can have in this context. There are really not many people in NY I know; it was my isolation here to begin with that facilitated the abuse.

The crew got one of his male friends to be a “male ally” in the process. So the first time I spoke with this man to gauge where he’s at. But what happened was that this guy told me he “cares about [the abuser] deeply” and doesn’t want to “demonize” him. I found this offensive and problematic and it made me feel undervalued. This type of reaction is pretty endemic to accountability processes and to male friends of male perpetrators. So, this guy is refusing to apologize, and the rest of the crew has barely responded to this even though it’s been 3 days.

My concern is that we can’t even hold the “male ally” accountable; how
the heck are we supposed to hold the abuser accountable? I don’t think
they have the skills to mediate a conversation with someone who is
very savvy with manipulative language. I got a “I’m sorry you were
offended” pseudo-apology from the “male ally” and they seemed to think
this was enough. He followed this up by saying that he is stepping out
of the process and doesn’t think engaging with the concerns/criticisms
I raised will help. No apology for his phone comments.

I am familiar with other accountability processes, and that they tend
to go badly because of how much they can end up coddling perpetrators
for a number of reasons – because the perpetrator comes from a more
highly valued social position and is therefore fully human and more
relatable than the person who was harmed, or because being “mean” is
falsely equated with the prison system, etc.

I think there is a very gendered way that people respond to this
particular type of situation – call upon the woman to respond with
grace, compassion, forgiveness, and to”heal” on demand, not show
frustration, not take up space. Be ladylike. I find these expectations
completely outrageous. On the other hand, the perpetrator must be
handheld through the process; we must all fret about whether he’s
being “demonized”/”exiled”. Such melodramatic language when he’s
hardly showed remorse or made any real efforts, and it’s the first
concern some people have. It all just seems to solidify the
hierarchies in place.

Action for Troy Davis

Clemency denied for Troy Davis. Contact Chatham County’s District Attorney’s office NOW: Telephone: 912-652-7308, 404-656-5651. Fax: 912-652-7328, (912) 447-5396. Tell them to withdraw the death warrant against Troy Davis.

more contact numbers here: http://blog.amnestyusa.org/deathpenalty/resisting-troy-execution/

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163498/tomorrow-georgia-murders-troy-davis

“It’s with shock that I report that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday denied clemency for Troy Anthony Davis. The 42-year-old Davis is now due to be executed tomorrow, Wednesday September 21, at 7 pm. For those unfamiliar with the case, let’s be clear: Davis’s execution is little more than a legal lynching. This is a demonstrably innocent man that the state is about to execute in the premeditated manner of a murder.

The facts speak for themselves. Back in 1989, nine people testified that they saw Troy Davis kill Officer Mark MacPhail. Since that time, seven have recanted their testimony. Please allow me to repeat: of the nine people who testified that Troy killed Officer Mark MacPhail, seven have recanted their testimony. Beyond the eyewitnesses, there was no physical evidence linking Troy to Officer MacPhail’s murder. None. Three jurors have signed affidavits saying that if they had all the information about Troy, they would not have voted to convict. One juror even arrived in person to the Board of Pardons and Paroles to say to their faces that she would not have voted to convict if she’d had the facts. Another woman has even come forward to say that a different man on the scene that night, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, bragged afterward about doing the shooting. Of the two witnesses who still maintain that Troy was the triggerman, one is Sylvester “Redd” Coles.

From day one, Troy has maintained his innocence. But he was the wrong color, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong bank account and the wrong legal team, so he was thrown into the death house with little fanfare. Yet the tireless work of Troy’s family, particularly his sister Martina, brought international attention to the case. From former President Jimmy Carter, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher, to Pope Benedict XVI, to Reagan’s former FBI Director, William Sessions, to the more than one million people who signed petitions, the call has gone out to spare Troy’s life. But the Board of Pardons and Paroles didn’t care. Previously the Board issued a statement that they would only allow the execution to go through, if there was “no doubt” as to his guilt. They lied.

As Brian Kammer, one of Davis’s attorneys, said Tuesday after the decision was announced, “I am utterly shocked and disappointed at the failure of our justice system at all levels to correct a miscarriage of justice.” He’s correct. Demonstrations have been planned for today in cities around the country. I know that Washington, DC, will see people come out at 6 pm at 14th and Park Rd. NW. I know the Supreme Court could still intervene or the board could withdraw its death warrant. These are slim options, but I also know that this isn’t over until they send the poison into Troy’s veins. Troy himself has refused a “last meal,” choosing to fight until his last breath. We owe him nothing less.”

Home Ec: Do It for the Kids (Not Just the Fat Ones)

The New York Times published an op-ed by Helen Zoe Veit about bringing home economics back into the public school curriculum to combat obesity among young people. It’s one of those ideas good in theory. If kids learn to cook early, they will make responsible choices about what they put in their bodies.

Realistically, though? I think kids would be more excited about the example Veit gives about putting a hole in canned biscuits to make doughnuts. I was. (That’s essentially what Chinese doughnuts from the buffets are — deep-fried canned biscuits dipped in white sugar. You’re welcome, fellow fatties.) Why cloak such a good idea in fat shaming? Veit’s right about these courses being undervalued because of the gender associations of household cooking with women (specifically, domesticated women, whether housewives or hired help) and the whitewashing of time and marketing on food preparation innovations. People may not enjoy investing time in cooking; but it can be the difference between a $1 cheeseburger every day for a week, or a $7 bean soup lasting a few weeks. (Can of broth, bag of veggies, bag of beans, spices, and some rice if you’re fiesty. Prepare, eat, and take the leftovers to the freezer to store and reheat. You’re welcome, fellow frugal cooks.)

Can our schools do this? First of all, we need to evaluate if schools have the resources to accommodate home economics courses. Home ec requires appliances: dishwashers, ovens, microwaves, refrigerators. Home ec requires cookware and bakeware: pots, pans, dutch ovens, skillets, casserole dishes, cookie sheets, muffin pans. Utensils, plenty of tupperware or other plastic, and… what’s that other ingredient? Yes. FOOD. Some public schools barely can afford to heat and to cool the buildings properly. Outfitting them with full kitchens — multiple kitchens to accommodate overcrowded classes — will take major investment.

My high school — one of the few all-girl public high schools in the nation — had a home economics class. And yes, I took it. Sometimes we were encouraged to bring in our own ingredients for casseroles, and as a poor kid, I couldn’t always make that happen. It could be difficult watching your classmates pull out bags of fresh seafood across the room and make exquisite meals. Nevertheless, it was a great learning experience. I still wince at the time someone in our small cooperative forgot to add sugar to our first yellow cake. We had to eat everything we prepared — good tasting or bad tasting — so long as it was fully cooked.

But do I know my way around a kitchen? Yes. I can, at the very least, follow a recipe. I know how to properly measure wet and dry ingredients. Making things from scratch does not seem nearly as intimidating as it did before I took that high school course. We all learned to keep our hair tied back, we washed our hands religiously, and we were well-cautioned against cross-contamination of foods. We were schooled on what utensils were before we even entered the kitchen, and our lessons on how to spot botulism have followed me into adulthood.

I am not currently Suzy Homemaker, though. Cooking is a slow science. In our fast-paced society that has trained us for instantaneous results, cooking can be a slow crawl for kids who want something to eat when they want it. A crash course on proper food storage won’t be enough. Plus, there were moments where all of us in the classroom raised our eyebrows, such as the manners video. No one eats pizza with a knife and fork unless it is a massive, messy, well-layered, deep dish monstrosity of deliciousness. With extra sauce and pepperoni.

But I digress.

Who would be best for teaching these classes? Hospitality industry familiars, nutritionists, dietitians, and chefs, perhaps? The only way I could see these courses impacting people’s eating choices is if there’s someone installed in the kitchens who understands the importance of balancing diets and realizes deprivation and austerity do not result in healthy chow-down habits. Scaring kids with “if you don’t cook, you don’t eat” would send a lot of people into unhealthy binging and ridiculous eating schedules, and those are not conducive to healthy living at all.

Another positive side effect of home ec? You could transform it into a vocational enterprise for the school. Have kids make baked goods and sell them to the student body and local communities for a reduced price. Host district-wide competitions, or take them to existing ones. Team up with hospitality colleges to show kids who want to make a career out of it that it’s an option. Encourage the construction of a school garden for homegrown choices and pair it with biology curricula. The possibilities are endless to segue food preparation with healthy rewards for everyone. Investment is the key, as it is with every good idea for rebuilding communities and initiative in a floundering economic climate.

A potential negative is the politics of food. Cultural sensitivity around what to prepare, how, and the reasons why requires conscious teachers. There are healthy alternatives and techniques for every type of cuisine.  While the French may have named virtually every cooking technique in the book, healthy and delicious soul food, techniques for making tamales, the secrets to a delicious and spicy teriyaki sauce, the filling properties of injera bread — all of these foods can open up the world to an America growing more and more close-minded in its worldview. Teaching the value of food substitution and culinary creativity goes a long way for feeding a new generation of experimental eaters.

In short, I am not completely down on Veit’s idea. The culinary industry is an important vocation. People do not like cooking at home all the time. Even home chefs who enjoy cooking like a reprieve from the kitchen. There is an open market for people who can prepare healthy, fresh and affordable foods and serve them safely. Bolstering home economics could be a valuable opportunity to take advantage of the glamor television shows like Hell’s Kitchen, Master Chef, and channels like The Food Network and The Travel Channel have given to chefs and food preparers of all genders and races. Let’s face it: Gordon Ramsay was a former football player who is one of the most respected chefs in the world.  That’s a pretty awesome profile to an up-and-coming adult.  Plus, it’d be nice to come home from school and watch Top Chef knowing exactly what a beurre blanc and a gastrique is.  (Granted, in my cooking class, we learned little about beurre blanc and gastriques; but we made some mean batches of holiday cookies to conclude the semester.)

But is the solution to curbing obesity as simple as putting a fat kid in front of a stove? Of course not.  You could even say it enables us.

evil laughter

FYI…

If you’re following the talk about raising the debt ceiling and fixing the deficit, there’s an interesting report from December 2010 that illustrates some of the financial reforms the Obama administration is pushing.  I suspect that the plan proposed to Republicans initially came from this report, and it is a lengthy PDF.  Many of the reforms and information about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are in this report.  A lot of the “cuts” to those three programs in particular interest me because it reflects Obama’s assurance that he wanted to evaluate every program and to make efficiency cuts where needed.  Medicare tends to do a lot of wasteful spending.  Social Security could be administered better, and there’s a recommendation in the report to extend Social Security for people who exhaust their retirement pay-in after a certain age.  Medicaid may be more overloaded with management (which is worrisome because Medicaid already strains state and federal budgets).  But overall, the recommendations of the report appear very pragmatic on first read.

Whatever Congress decides to do, they must do it by the end of this week to have everything signed and authorized by the August 2 deadline.  The legislative impasse taking place now is a tremendously irresponsible display of power-mongering.  I hope many of the lawmakers holding up our nation’s financial solvency and security get their comeuppance during their re-election, especially since a lot of the Republicans holding up the deal are the ones who replaced Democrats for being “ineffective” at the last midterm election period.

Anyway, enjoy the report.  I love you all, and yes, I still plan to write here every now and then.

US/NATO Military Invasion of Libya

*I am welcoming links from non-US-based commentators, if anyone would like to add them

 
Wanted: An Anti-War Movement

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis

http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/17-Jun-2011/Wanted-an-antiwar-movement

“After campaigning as the candidate of change, the man awarded a Nobel Prize for peace has given the world nothing but more war. Yet despite Barack Obama’s continuation – nay, escalation – of the worst aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, including his very own illegal war in Libya, you’d be hard-pressed to find the large-scale protests and outrage from the liberal establishment that characterised his predecessor’s reign (and only seems to pop up when a Republican’s the one dropping the bombs).
That’s not for a lack of things to protest. Since taking office, Obama has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan and now looks set to break his pledge to begin a significant withdrawal in July. He has unilaterally committed the nation to an unapologetically illegal war in Libya and in two years has authorised more drone strikes in Pakistan than his predecessor authorised in two terms, with one in three of their victims reportedly civilians. In Yemen, he has targeted a US citizen for assassination and approved a cluster bomb strike that, according to Amnesty International, killed 35 innocent women and children.
But these war crimes, which ought to shock the consciences of the president’s liberal supporters, haven’t spurred the sort of popular protest we witnessed under Bush the Lesser. At a recent congressional hearing on the bloated war budget, a handful of CODEPINK activists were the sole dissenters. Thousands poured into the streets to cheer Osama bin Laden’s death, but no Americans were in the streets decrying the drone attack that killed dozens of Pakistani civilians weeks earlier.
While diehard grassroots peace activists continue to bravely protest US militarism, with 52 people arrested last month protesting outside a nuclear weapons factory in Kansas City – if they’d been Tea Partiers protesting Obamacare, you may have heard of them – there’s no denying that the peace movement has taken a beating.”

Libya and the Passive Repeaters: Deploying Depleted Information Warheads

http://zeroanthropology.net/2011/03/27/libya-and-the-passive-repeaters-deploying-depleted-information-warheads/

“the video below in part shows how the use of social media to make falsified versions of Libyan reality can go viral–radioactive–(re)producing an intellectually toxic swarm of passive repeaters. Critical questions are like static, they interrupt the clarity of the message: dictator vs. revolutionaries, support the people, implement a no-fly zone right now. But this is so patronizing, it denies “agency”–just like the agency of the consumer who must decide and then boldly act on which colour iPod™ to buy. Have a look at The Guardian‘s “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military’s ‘sock puppet’ software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda.” The video has many rough edges, but some of the critical questions and points about propaganda deserve some consideration. Also check “‘Post-Qaddafi Libya’: on the Globalist Road,” “Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?” “US-trained [and U.S.-based] economist, Libyan rebels’ new finance minister,” and “New Libyan rebel leader spent much of past 20 years in suburban Virginia.”

I haven’t been seeing a lot of sources that are talking about the impact of the bombing campaign on civilians in urban areas. Most of the sources I have seen have been pro-intervention and it reminds me of the propaganda for the Iraq war, except this time around the usual anti-war left in the US seems confused.

Congressman Kucinich has a petition up: http://www.kucinich.us/libya/

The pain is cyclical.

There is a reason why the kyriarchical apparatus recycles the same dualistic tropes.  Black bad, White good.  Fat bad, Thin good.  Woman bad, Man good.  Non-Citizen bad, Citizen good.

It uses these patterns because they are simple to absorb and they work.  Having a good guy and a bad guy is the equivalent of a psychological nervous system.  No pain is good.  Pain is bad.  No itch is good.  Itch is bad.  Our responses to our bodies do not necessarily have middle ground; we tailor our remedies to the severity of what’s ailing us.  But any sign of an ailment that cannot be managed, adapted, or eliminated is bad, and that’s how we navigate from day to day.

But that’s where critical analysis sets in.  With our bodies, we learn to recognize what problems can be managed ourselves and when we  need to consult trained professionals to help with larger issues.  We learn to recognize the difference between a paper cut and the loss of an appendage, despite different pain thresholds between us.

For our body politic, I can’t point to the same urgent care operation.  It’s not that simple.  If it were, we would not be battling the same tropes stemming from the same root causes — racism, gendered hatred, homophobia, ablism — on a regular basis.  The pain is cyclical, it is constant, and it is debilitating.  With each battle, we lose time and loving energy.  Every onslaught is perpetuated so that there is no time to recover and to prepare for the next fight.  The pain is cyclical.

I have learned during my distance from blogging and from writing on political issues that I have allowed my psychic pain threshold to rise astronomically.  There are concerns with self-care, concerns with self-sustenance, and concerns with self-preservation that can successfully keep me from caring about other human beings who struggle with the same things in similar or worse circumstances.  Staring at that realization is incredibly painful; yet my day-to-day living permits me to realize it coldly, clinically, as if it is a part of another person who will do all my feeling for me so long as I travel to work on time and refuse to make waves.  It’s enough to make me furious, and anger is punished when it accompanies any sort of observational truth or categorical imperative to move towards peace.  That pain is one I can’t face and I avoid it as surely as I type this out.

But the onslaughts keep coming.  What can one person do to face them without fear?  What can I do to face them with absolute certainty that the pain I witness while fighting is nothing compared to the pain inflicted on the world?  Do I dare disturb the universe?  Depends: is peace a disturbance or a balm?

My role in any struggle is to speak.  I am not good with my hands, and I do not have many redeeming qualities beyond putting words in the ether and letting them move.  If the pain is cyclical, I must write and speak to stop it.  But where is the time?  Where is the courage?   What sacrifices must I make and accept before this life becomes bearable?  Because even though I may grow numb, the pain doesn’t stop and it won’t until its root causes are eliminated.

reasons why the left shoots itself in the foot

1. the left actually believes in a cacophony of voices designed to enrich debate. so centralizing a voice for a long-term cause is often daunting.
2. short-term causes can get places across divisions but once the immediate goal is satisfied or leftists feel adequately pompous, no follow-up is conducted except by a few die-hards.  these die-hards are then criticized for being holier-than-thou.
3. see #1.
4. groups dedicated to a single left-leaning cause are criticized because they have decided sticking to their goal is important and not to be sacrificed for periodic election seasons or favor with others.  these groups then become holier-than-thou when their issues receive lip service for an election cycle and gets tabled again. and again. and again.
5. see #1.
6. left leaders must eschew money. or fame. or publicity. or exposure beyond the kind that causes them to bald prematurely, go gray, or develop ulcers.  if you want to lead on the left, you cannot do anything to indicate you enjoy leading, you like money, or you favor the establishment that can enable your ability to not die before thirty-five.
7. see #1.
8. RIGHT WINGERS!! DAMN YOU AND YOUR MONEY-MAKING MEDIA-OWNING INTRANSIGENT WAYS!!  WE WILL CRUSH YOU!! WE WILL CRUSH YOU ONCE WE FIGURE OUT HOW TO INTERPRET YOUR MYRIAD WAYS OF PROTECTING YOURSELF!! SHAME!!!
9. see #1.
10. unlikely allies are spat upon because one faction of the left remembers what the other faction of the left said about Our Malcolm X.
11. see #1.
12. leftist thought is like blood quantum. if you think just a little like a lefty, you are a leftist.  this merges everyone together into an uncomfortable armpit funk of reluctant activism and screaming about individuality.
13. #1.
14. if you do not conform to the million leftist causes immediately upon finding out you are 1/1200000000th leftist, you are a traitor, or even worse: a moderate.
15. did i say #1?  oh, i did.  forget my head next!
16. some leftists think marches are important.  they are right.
17. some leftists think marches are obsolete.  they are right.
18. there’s no context for 16 and 17!  leftists often times forget that too.  which leads to…
19. #1.