Call for Kelley, Call for Justice

“you always was committed, a poor, single mother on welfare, tell me how you did it.  There’s no way I can pay you back, but the plan is to show you that I understand, you are appreciated.”

I’ve posted for a couple days on Facebook about the Williams-Bolar case, occurring right here in my own Northeast Ohio, but I wanted to dig a little deeper, and encourage everyone reading this to both sign the Change.org petition to Governor Kasich and call both his office and also that of your State Senator and Representative.

For some background, Kelley Williams-Bolar was accused of falsifying records to obtain school services for her children in the Copley-Fairlawn school system, in the suburbs of Akron.  A senior at the University of Akron, where she was a few credits away from a teaching degree, Ms. Williams-Bolar will now be unable to give back to society (more than she already has) as a teacher, because of the felony charge.  She also, incidentally, has been totally antagonized in her quest to improve her ability to provide for her two young daughters.  Her daughters are presumably at least a part of why she wanted to improve her employment prospects in the first place, to say nothing of trying to do what white families have been doing for decades- sending their children to the good schools in the suburbs, where they can have a shot at avoiding grinding poverty (and too often, black people), or at the very least growing up in a safe and healthy environment.  More below the flip,

We’re Number 1!

Kind of continuing the riff off of today’s rally, I’d like to point out that Brazil just elected its first woman President, Dilma Rousseff, from Lula’s PT, Partido Trabalhador (Worker’s Party).  I haven’t read all the details (her wikipedia page is pretty extensive), but she looks to be an interesting character.  The daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant (we like to think of America as a pretty exceptional melting pot, but Brazil is probably just as much so), a former socialist and literally an imprisoned freedom fighter against the military dictatorship that prevailed back in the day, she worked also as the Minister of Mines and Energy and Chief of Staff under Lula.

At the rally today, we heard a lot about China overtaking us in education, energy sovereignty, a number of other benchmarks of progress.  I know that using other countries as a standard by which we gauge our own scientific and military prowess, human decency, and other metrics is a time-honored nationalistic tradition, but I’ve always felt weird about the twin characterizations of ourselves as benevolent stewards of Democracy who also happen to be (or need to be) better than everyone else by a weird fluke.  But that’s getting a bit off-topic.

The point really is that we are not the only advanced country that breaks these kinds of barriers, historic and deeply powerful though Barack Obama’s election certainly was.  We have a leg up in a number of metrics, but we really need to just not kid ourselves about how we’re doing (and about the progress of others) if we want to hope to make things better.  Thankfully, we have partners out there who are pushing the envelope in decency, women’s equality, energy, scientific progress, the whole thang.  The bar for excellence is being set regularly higher, and we find ourselves at a point where low-achievement and dysfunction are the new normal.

[As a brief side-note, I would say that overcoming self-delusion would also do some significant American political parties some significant good.  Which am I talking about?  Who can say?  I don't know, take your pick]

Look, I love my country.  I love it more than I ever would have contemplated as a young anarchist, so sure that this country effin’ sucked and was a hater towards everyone else in the world.  I love it for all its eccentricity, pride, hypocrisy, occasional brilliance, vision, and yes, even being the site of what I would acknowledge as some of the premier horrors of human history.  But exceptionalism cannot hide the fact that there are things we love about ourselves that are either not true, or are even truer of other people whom we deride and refuse to acknowledge.  That’s a thing I don’t love about my country.  Exceptionalism also can’t hide, however though it tries, that other countries are beginning to embody those qualities we cherish in ourselves.  That can be taken as a compliment, a suggestive nudge in the right direction.  Take it how you will, really.

So thank you, Brazil.  The bar has again been sent, may the recalibration of our sense of selves begin, and let’s work to set the bar even higher.

Peace,
Joel

I Hate The New York State Senate

So much it’s not even funny.

Particularly strong loathing is reserved for the eight Doucheocrats who voted against marriage equality.  You bigoted assholes.

Thanks however must be given to Inwood’s State Senator, Eric Schneiderman, who didn’t betray my New Yorker non-heterosexual friends and family who wish they had the same rights I enjoy as a straight-identified male.  I strongly encourage my Inwood/Washington Heights brothers and sisters to give him a call and thank him for voting like a non-asshole.

I hate the New York State Senate.  Many condolences to the aforementioned New Yorker non-heterosexual friends and family, and also those out-of-staters who expected us to do better.  I’m just ashamed of my home state right now.

Peace,

Joel

Progress and Justice

First, read Natasha Chart’s beautiful, tragic piece at OpenLeft on what abortion rights mean in terms of our valuation of women’s lives and labor, something that has become increasingly important to me as I continue to work at Hard Hatted Women.  As a white, straight, upper-middle class, private college educated, New York City-raised male-bodied person, it makes sense that I should first defer and let a woman speak to this before going on my schpiel.  In that vein, also check out Feministing, which gets away from my esoteric analysis and brings us back to the probably more real, ‘what the fuck???’ of it all.

Health care passed the House.  This is definitely progress.  But it is also decidedly not justice.

By progress, I refer to a Zinn’s definition from A People’s History of the United States:

“The easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but neccessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)- that is still with us…

If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress, is it not essential to hold to the principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves?  We can all decide to give up something of ours, but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the children of others, or even our own children, for a progress which is not nearly as clear or present as sickness or health, life or death?”

Health care passed the House.  Thirty-six million Americans will now have health care, health care that theoretically (forgive me for thinking insurance companies might just find a way of getting out of these) will be available regardless of pre-existing condition and identity (though whether it will be affordable, given the ‘negotiated rates’ rule, is another matter altogether, one that makes my head hurt).  There are certainly many people for whom the pre-existing conditions issue is almost enough, and I don’t blame them- too many lives and families have been devastated by insurance industry neglect and profiteering.  I have trouble condemning advances for people that have been so victimized.

So that is good, but it is hard for me to call it an unambiguous good, due in part to the enormously destructive Stupak amendment included at the 11th hour to bring in a number of Democrats, which ensures that the public option, and any plan that receives federal subsidies, cannot cover abortion.  This is to say nothing of the difficulties faced by immigrants, already in the uber-underclass.  Ramifications below the flip:

Washington Post FAIL!

I know, I know, I’m really setting myself up for disappointment by expecting anything more than moronic from the periodical that brought us thousands of words of climate science obfuscation from a baseball aficionado who doesn’t really bother to check his facts, but this is just really fucking stupid.

Now, as a White Man (Robin Givhan being a Black Woman), there are some race-critical criticisms I am not prepared to make. That would be over-stepping my bounds, and I admit that wholeheartedly.

But:

clothes are part of our broader aesthetic obligation to each other. That commitment pushes homeowners to mow their lawns and not be a blight to the neighborhood. It makes them think twice before painting their houses in psychedelic stripes. The desire to be aesthetically respectful means guests give consideration to what they wear to a friend’s wedding or mourners take care in how they dress for a loved one’s funeral.

I’m sorry, but who the fuck is the imperial-objective arbiter in this court of fashion? Who got appointed as the taste police? That shit is straight up elitest garbage.

And another thing: to equate dress on vacation with dress at a wedding or funeral is completely fucking ridiculous. I will absolutely accept that at a wedding or funeral there are people to whom respect is owed, there are traditional codes that ought to be adhered to. If a person grants you the privilege of inviting you to a celebration of their life (wedding) or an honoring and farewell (funeral) than yes, maybe that’s a circumstance in which conformity to their wishes is valuable.

But the woman is on god damned vacation. In fact, that is probably the last place she ought to give a shit what some pundit at the Washington Post has to say. The only obligations my public officials and symbols have to me is that they fix the oppressive and destructive systems of this country and challenge the bullshit that allows those processes to survive. They are damn sure not obligated to wear anything on vacation for my sake.

Fuck the Washington Post.

Geographies Of Displacement: Losang Rabgey Of Machik, A Tibetan Development Organization

What’s good yall? I went to an absolutely amazing talk yesterday for the Geographies of Displacement Symposium with Losang Rabgey, the director of a Tibetan development NGO and model school. I sometimes have the tendency to get down, frustrated, and cynical about prospects for social, economic and environmental change and find myself in need of a pick-me-up or hopeful story, and Machik fit the bill completely. Even more though, it had some valuable and provocative lessons to take home as I continue to think about my best, most appropriate role as an activist.

There was so much going on in her talk (and she is an extremely gifted speaker) that I can’t hope to bring out everything from the story she told, so I’ll try and hit the basics. She started off by laying the groundwork and background information, describing the Chinese occupation, conditions on the ground, internal displacement (cultural alienation, a turn to self-destructive behavior and poverty, and a growing urban migration pattern), and the state of the diaspora. As she described it, while the earlier generation was made up of exiles who had been raised in Tibet, the new generation has become a full-fledged diaspora with a globalized, pluralized, pan-Tibetan identity, for the most part uninterested in return but still very invested in the homeland’s welfare. Much of this new generation, if not in the diaspora, was brought up in a Chinese assimilationist context, in which Tibetans were encouraged to join the mainstream culture and abandon the Tibetan ‘traditional’ culture. But according to Rabgey this had the opposite effect, fostering cultural resistance and an enhanced Tibetan identity. Many advocates for Tibetan development and autonomy come out of this Chinese-educated group, and they’ve started online communities to connect and discuss freedom, leadership, and autonomy, and have started advocating for Tibetan schools for Tibetans living in core China (like Beijing.)

Sexual Assault Awareness Month TONIGHT: Supporting Survivors Of Sexual Assault

In other ‘things-you-should-go-to’ news, check out the Sexual Assault Awareness Month calendar. There is an event today, 4:30 in Wilder 101, that sounds particularly essential: on supporting survivors of sexual assault. I don’t think I really need to repeat the oft-heard but too seldom really listened to statistics on the number of women who will encounter sexual assault of some kind in their lifetimes. Suffice it to say, this is an extremely valuable if difficult event, and I strongly encourage attending if you have the time.

Peace yall, take care of yourselves.

-Joel

Diversity Strategy Teleseminar Report, Part 2: Five Strategies For Success

Happy Easter/ Passover yall! While there have been a lot of exciting developments here at Citizen Obie that I’ll describe later, it’s important to keep doing the basics and keeping consistent too. So here’s the second part of my two-part description of the teleseminar I attended, “The 5 Secrets You Must Know to Implement a Successful Diversity Strategy and Win the Respect of Your Organization,” led by Carmen Van Kerckhove of New Demographic and Racialicious. In the first part I focused on Ms. Van Kerckhove’s three self-sabotaging strategies that hinder diversity activists and professionals. Here I bring in the five strategies she suggests to maximizing our effectiveness. If you’d like to listen to the contents of the teleseminar yourself, check it out here.

The first strategy, loathsome as it may be for some of us activists, is to learn how to think like a CEO (or executive director or other kind of leader). Now what does this mean exactly? It doesn’t mean going out and buying a top hat, cigar set and blackberry and learning to evilly twirl your mustache while coming up with new ways to destroy the working class and environment (though I love the image.) What it does mean is honestly putting yourself in the shoes of the senior person in power at your organization and figure out what they’re trying to accomplish. There are tried and true (?) methods that have allowed CEOs to advance their goals, which typically consist of advancing market share, building corporate reputation, selling product, and improving profitability. These methods, while sometimes repellant to justice activists, have worked very consistently to advance these goals, and are embedded in corporate psychology such that it is very difficult to get CEOs to trust that other methods will work as well. It is up to us to suggest and demonstrate better methods that allow them to meet their goals while seriously addressing diversity. There are numerous psychological roadblocks that keep CEOs from taking us seriously, and the more we can learn to dismantle these roadblocks by speaking CEO language and making CEOs comfortable with systemic change, the more effective we will be at getting the support of those with the most power to implement structures of change within organizations. As an example, she suggested that we think explicitly about what are the greatest objectives of those in power whose methods we wish to change? What kind of legacy does a CEO or leader hope to leave? What are the measures of performance for an organization? And how can substantive diversity work to their advantage?

The second strategy is to consider the wide array of options available to organizations to handle diversity. The standard method employed is the infamous ‘diversity training,’ usually a one-shot event that under the best circumstances gets people excited, emotionally open, and ready to work but with no consistent outlet for that energy; and under the worst circumstances makes people feel uncomfortable, fails to address the urgency of the issue, and may even alienate the very people we’re trying to engage in the organizational community. With a real ‘diversity strategy,’ and a long-term sustainable series of events and demonstrated effort on the part of management we can adjust methods as we figure out what works, maintain momentum and excitement, and encourage participation and feedback to make it useful to our organization’s specific circumstances. As an example Ms. Van Kerckhove described the limited usefulness of the ‘celebrating diversity’ events, which typically feature an abundance of food and an array of cultural trivia (“did you know that the first person to perform open-heart surgery was an African American?!”) that don’t necessarily address the issues most important to employees and members of color. It’s hard to get too invested in a sushi-making workshop when your main concerns are being the only Asian American on staff, being the butt of racial jokes, and receiving less opportunities for career advancement than your white colleagues. At their worst, these token events allow organizational leaders to feel as though they are making change when they’re really diverting themselves from the steps that need to be taken.

Diversity Strategy Teleseminar Report, Part 1: Three Self-Sabotaging Behaviors

What’s good yall? I’ve been working on the backlog of posts I mean to put up, so this is from a few days ago when I ‘attended’ a teleseminar called “The 5 Secrets You Must Know to Implement a Successful Diversity Strategy and Win the Respect of Your Organization.” The teleseminar was led by Carmen Van Kerckhove, a co-founder and president of New Demographic, a diversity education firm, and a contributing writer and founder of Racialicious, one of my favorite blogs on racial issues (especially as they interact with pop culture, business, and current events.) If you’d like to listen to the contents of the teleseminar yourself, check it out here. Even though I am not working in a business setting and haven’t even started my professional life yet, I thought the teleseminar was well worth the time (one hour or so), and very useful in helping me think strategically as an activist. The lessons from the talk are definitely applicable across a wide array of issues and groups, and could work for gender issues, environmental issues, or any other kind of advocacy. It was similar in many ways to a book I read recently, Auden Schendler’s Getting Green Done, which similarly dealt with how to work as a sustainability activist within business (and which I highly recommend for activists of all stripes).

The teleseminar was organized around identifying three self-sabotaging behaviors that hinder those of us who consider ourselves racial justice activists or diveristy professionals (someone who works in any capacity with diversity in an organizational environment), as well as five strategies to utilize to more effectively achieve our goals. First though she started off with some background. Having been in the diversity professional field for a whle, she pointed out that while ‘engaging with diversity’ was hot in the 90s, it’s not as high a priority now. Even then, much of it was token engagement that didn’t really begin the sustainable conversations necessary to create real change, something I think activists from many struggles can identify with. Diversity doesn’t sell, and is not yet a major priority for most CEO’s during a recession.

But we had better make it a priority, make it be taken seriously, because Ms. Van Kerckhove pointed out that this recession is the worst possible time to shy away from racial justice issues. Citing a Pew report, she pointed out that the recession is affecting blacks and latinos disproportionately, with blacks and latinos two times as likely to be laid off within the last ten or twelve months as their white coworkers. This recession has the potential to wreak even greater havoc on communities that are already overburdened, making this recession a make-or-break moment for diversity activists and marginalized communities (again, as it seems to be for environmental, health, education, and poverty activists).

In order to describe the magnitude of the challenge ahead of us, she shared a very personal memory from her childhood, the summer of 1989 in Shanghai. The country was in a state of extremely heightened tension and fear over the student movement’s more vocal protests (think Tinanmen Square) and the likelihood of a government crackdown. Her father worked for a telecom company, her mother was originally from Hong Kong, and amidst the general anxiety her father’s company ordered an emergency evacuation of employees to Hong Kong. Her father was cheerful, whistling as he packed his bags. Her mother asked him angrily why he was happy and whistling, to which he replied that they were getting a free vacation in Hong Kong. Her mother then replied that her people on the streets were struggling and literally dying, and how could he possibly be cheerful at a time like this? The lesson Van Kerckhove drew from this was that racism robs us of the ability to empathize with each other, and further that intimate multi-ethnic relationships are insufficient to the job of ridding us of that insensitivity. Mr. Van Kerckhove had a Chinese wife and half-Chinese daughter, but he didn’t see ‘generic Chinese’ as real people. This is the challenge, and the urgent work of diversity activists and professionals, to address this insensitivity, reopen empathy for those for whom it has closed, and most importantly better the quality of life of peoples of color.

Sexual Assault Awareness Month Highlight: Domestic Violence And Women Of Color, A National Conversation

I have been meaning to get some posts out (or even better, manage to get some posts from someone at the Center for Leadership in Health Promotion or another group) for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Here is the first, a reference to a troubling article over at Model Minority on domestic violence and black women.

It first addresses some of the disturbing statistics on rates of domestic violence, according to The Domestic Violence Institute and a Tufts University survey. I’ll just mention the ones brought up in the Model Minority article, but I hope you can take the time to look at the other information:

“Black women comprise 8% of the U.S. population but in 2005 accounted for 22% of the intimate partner homicide victims and 42% of all female victims of intimate partner homicide. African Americans account for a disproportionate number of intimate partner homicides. In 2005, African Americans accounted for almost 1/3 of the intimate partner homicides in this country.” (Domestic Violence Institute)

and

“Approximately 40% of Black women report coercive contact of a sexual nature by age 18. The number one killer of African-American women ages 15 to 34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner. In a study of African-American sexual assault survivors, only 17% reported the assault to police.” (Tufts survey)

And this all in addition to the statistics I don’t have on hand for gender and racial pay disparity, AIDS epidemic, and other community afflictions we (those with the privilege not to think about it every day) tend to consign in our minds to the third world.

But the real message of the article was a question, phrased in response to some of 50 Cent’s comments that were picked up by the celebrity news cycle, in which he described the effect the pictures of a brutally beaten Rihanna had on him. The question of the article was basically, what is it going to take to make the mainstream of this nation take domestic violence in communities of color seriously? The author brought in the Obama girls, Sasha and Malia, wondering what would happen if one of them was older, and a clear survivor of domestic partner abuse. How would we react then? Would it be sufficient to wake us up?

I’ve thought about the symbolism of the Obama family before, specifically with regards to the garden in their (White House) lawn, and my only input is that I hope Michelle Obama and Barack can both use their extremely positive images to respectfully raise awareness at this issue, in a way that I’m not sure a white male like me (and every preceding president) ever could. I don’t mean they ought to condemn anyone for their lack of responsibility, go in guns-a-blazing (not that I imagine them doing that anyway) to assign blame and deal with this as is our visceral reaction, with anger and vengeance. I hope that they can open a conversation that tragically, has not yet gone far beyond the activist agenda on the national stage, and it needs to be more widely addressed. I also hope that they can address, from their vantage point as black role models, both the broader issue of domestic violence and the specific issue of unacceptable levels of domestic violence towards women of color. I’ve got to pause right now and explicitly address my privilege as a white male, and acknowledge that I can not hope to truly understand the pain, anger, and desire for justice on the part of survivors adequately. I also can not hope to do justice to the complicated conversations that go on in people of color communities. I can empathize surely, but I speak from a comparatively distant voice, as one who has recognized violence towards people I know, but never been directly assaulted. That being said, my guess is that ending domestic violence will involve a huge array of strategies, including rehabilitation (not necessarily institutionally) of survivors and aggressors, education, and most importantly, honest conversation. It will also likely involve an honest assessment of the unfortunate realities on the ground on what the numbers suggest are disturbing trends.

Michelle Obama is an incredibly powerful symbol, as is Barack Obama, and I know they are both sensitive to the need to address this issue. I think their joint facilitation of this national conversation could take this out of the realm of a ‘women’s issue,’ and hopefully engage the very people that continue, in my estimation, to perpetuate this problem: scared, angry, hopeless, confused, problematic men of all races. I also hope they can take a holistic and sensitive approach toward addressing the root causes of domestic violence in communities of color specifically. I can’t state enough that I don’t mean to excuse domestic violence behavior, but I hope we can look at the problems with men and impoverished communities that bring this conflict to bear.

As with the previous post, I recognize this is a hugely sensitive issue, and I hope readers who disagree with me feel free to address my points however they feel necessary.

Peace, and take care of yourselves.

-Joel