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MLK Day

16
January

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

-MLK, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

In high school and college, I participated in many a service activity, but they left me dissatisfied. I was interested in sustainable, positive change. “Service” didn’t seem to be accomplishing much other than metaphorically (or literally) feeding some for a day while pacifying others’ guilt and powerlessness. For me, it pacified nothing. From those experiences, I formed the opinion that, in general, service is a band-aid to an infected wound. While not shunning it completely, I’ve since been seeking a more impactful way.

MLK Day is now typically billed as a day of service. The new catchphrase is, “It’s a day on, not a day off.” I love that sentiment, and believe the day should be a time for both reflection and action. But what kind of action? In remembrance of Dr. King, many emphasize charitable community service over Love, economic justice, sociopolitical action, and speaking truth to power.

That does a disservice to King’s legacy.

For a long time I felt alone and unjustified in my annoyance at our culture’s emphasis on service at the expense of authentic civic and political engagement. Not anymore, and I partly have Dr. King to thank for that. Many of us have been successfully socialized to “give back” in place of participating. The cycle consists of unaware adults presenting limited community engagement options to young people. We’ve got the emphasis on volunteerism and formal political training down pat, but the former is often unsatisfying and uninspiring while the latter appeals only to a select few. Informal politics? Public participation? Youth political voice? Real-life civic engagement? Not so much.

Many of us rationalize gross income inequality with philanthropy and service. But unless that philanthropy and service result in greater equity and social power, there’s not much justification to be found. So rather than imploring people to participate in a day of service, we would better honor King’s memory and sacrifice by working to develop social power (people power) and to fight inequity and injustice in our communities – and by doing so for more than a day.

PREACH!

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the interrupters

19
October

“You can judge, but that’s not what we do in science.”

-Gary Slutkin, M.D., CeaseFire Executive Director, Professor of Epidemiology and International Health at University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health

A few weeks ago I saw the documentary The Interrupters (trailer below) at Nashville’s independent movie theater, The Belcourt. The documentary follows three “violence interrupters” over the course of a year in Chicago, documenting their work intervening in interpersonal and gang conflicts and offering alternatives to violence in conflict resolution. The Interrupters work for a program called CeaseFire, which views violence in these Chicago communities from a public health perspective as pathology or disease, and recognizes it as learned behavior. They break down the thought process of participants in violence in the following way:

1. I have a grievance.

2. My grievance justifies violence.

Their approach is to intervene between steps 1 and 2 to facilitate a nonviolent outcome.

When I began teaching, I remember being astounded by many students’ lack of what I thought of as “coping skills” for handling grievances (which were usually some form of feeling disrespected). I tried to address this problem by establishing a “Peace Table” in my classroom where I would mediate student conflicts using posted guidelines. Students would then have to collaborate to complete a form (pictured below) detailing the conflict and how they could behave differently in the future to avoid a similar problem. In some cases, as students became more familiar with the guidelines and if the conflict were low-intensity, they could resolve their issue without my assistance. Sometimes it worked better than others. But I like to think that it helped at least one student think about conflict resolution differently going forward.

(Clearly I created this form at a staff meeting or in some other setting that encouraged mutitasking with pen and paper.)

So yeah. We can choose to be disgusted by and judgmental of violent behavior (or any behavior we disagree with), or we can choose to understand why it’s happening, figure out ways to help minimize it, and work toward a better way. Hell, we might even learn a little something for ourselves in that case. And as is always important to remember, violence in our culture does not begin and end with the modern ghetto, inner city, or low-SES individual.

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Wangari Maathai

26
September

I am forever grateful that Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan woman who founded the Green Belt Movement, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004; not only because she was so deserving but because it led me to become aware of her extraordinary life. She died yesterday at 71, but her legacy does and will live on.

“Every experience has a lesson. Every situation has a silver lining. Each person needs to raise their consciousness to a certain level so that they will not give up or succumb. If your consciousness is at such a level, you are willing to do what you believe is the right thing – popular opinion notwithstanding.”

-from her memoir, Unbowed

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Rebecca

350

22
September

Today I was minding my own business on Facebook when I accidentally found out that Bill McKibben was to speak at Vanderbilt this evening at 5pm. I was pretty sure I’d heard him on NPR and liked what he had to say, so I shot an email to my resident environmental activist expert for more info. Mr. Expert replied fairly quickly to confirm the legit-ness of Mr. McKibben, so I vowed to commit to the last-minute decision to attend his talk.

I’m glad I did. It was informative + interesting, blah blah blah, here are the two (three?) things I’ll leave you with:

FIRST: Visit the 350.org website and sign up to be a part of the global movement to solve the Climate Crisis. If you don’t or haven’t already, basically you’re super lame and I have no idea why you’re reading this. (In the words of the most excellent Modest Mouse, “if you’re not thinking at all I’m not sure why you’re alive.”) (I guess at this point I have to actually sign up myself.)

SECOND/THIRD: Pictures!

Exhibit A – Mr. McKibben + pretty much the entire Ingram Hall audience

Exhibit B – The notes/sketches I made during his talk

Oh, and I just realized that Modest Mouse has a song about the climate crisis. Um, well, it talks about carbon and stuff, so I’m just assuming. Connections are fun!

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filosofia

31
August

Last week, Feministing posted this article about women studying and working in academic philosophy, and it struck a chord in me.

I had to forward the link to a few high school friends, see, because at our high school we were lucky enough to have access to a logic course and a philosophy course taught by the same teacher. I took and enjoyed both during my senior year, and felt fortunate to have access to them at a public high school. Still, the closest I came to ever studying philosophy again was a modern crit course I took as an English Lit major in college. I remember my main takeaway from the high school introduction to philosophy being that the discipline consists primarily of purposefully dense treatises assigning lofty terms to banal, quotidian, existential, obvious thoughts. To me, the discipline smacked of asserted privilege and the intention to elevate thinking and wisdom to a plane largely and unnecessarily inaccessible to most people. Sure, this argument is a hasty generalization, intended to both be dismissive and immediately be dismissed. What of it?

The Feministing post flipped on the light switch of my brain’s dusty and forgotten room of my high school years, reminding me of a prominent memory sitting atop countless taped up boxes of life experience. This memory is of a comment my philosophy teacher made in class one day – that it was notable that all major philosophers were men. I remember that when he made that comment, I immediately began an inner search for the counter-argument. During some class downtime, I found I wasn’t alone in hearing the implication of women’s inferiority in his statement, so this group of three or four girlfriends wrote a one-page (wo)manifesto about men’s oral fixations leading them to pontificate pointlessly (and call it philosophy), and about women being historically denied the status, education, recognition, and general privilege to be published, employed, or recognized as philosophers. (That was the gist of it. Our high school didn’t provide a course on feminist, queer, or race theory, so we were pretty much starting from scratch.) We posted our paragraph on the class bulletin board for our teacher to find, which he did, and to which he claimed or feigned offense. Looking back on it, I’m struck by how a man could teach high-schoolers about the history of Western philosophy without recognizing that the reason women are comparatively absent from this history has everything to do with culture and nothing to do with women being inferior thinkers.

While I buck gender (amongst other) stereotypes in certain ways, at some point I tire of being responsible or recognized for breaking the traditional constraints of femininity while men are punished for breaking the traditional constraints of masculinity. While I appreciate those women and other philosophical minorities motivated by some categorical imperative to work their way into philosophy departments, I am not nor do I want to be one of them. But in light of recent conversations with some male friends and acquaintances, there is still a prevalent misunderstanding that the condemnation of male weakness is unrelated to the cultural perception of feminine inferiority. The fact is that if it is an insult to cast a man into that category, then that category is considered inferior and it is not only men who are victims of such culturally-ingrained behavior and ill logic. Then again, it is not only women who are victims, either. This small event forms my opinion that all students of philosophy, including that masculine-minded majority, should make it their business to love and recognize all wisdom and to correct to the extent possible their own vast ignorance about the history of human thought in which they claim or want to be so well-versed. I’m no Socrates, and there are some things I know to be true.

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“pro-life state” failure

30
May

Last Tuesday, May 24, the Louisiana House Health and Welfare Committee voted 10-2 to pass HB 587, Rep. “Johnny” LaBruzzo’s abortion ban bill, out of committee. This is completely unsurprising, though the vote could have been a little closer if a couple of absent representatives sympathetic to the opposition’s cause had shown up.

GROSS STUFF THAT HAPPENED AT THE HEARING

1. Legislators repeatedly referred to Louisiana as a “pro-life state.” But according to 2006 data, Louisiana had the 2nd lowest birthweight rate in the U.S. and the 2nd highest infant mortality rate. How is that pro-life? In 2008, at 541 murders, Louisiana had the 2nd highest murder rate in the nation. How is that pro-life? Violent crime is directly related to a state’s quality of public education and its economic conditions. Though policymakers and legislators may deny responsibility for these statistics, they actually have the power to improve this reality. As fellow fighter Dawn Collins asserted in her testimony, life in Louisiana is only valued from conception to birth. In my opinion, that is insufficient for deeming oneself “pro-life.”

2. LaBruzzo twice and obviously proudly used a football analogy that ended with, “and I’m no Drew Brees [chuckle chuckle], but I have a feeling the Saints are behind me” (paraphrased). He compared previous Louisiana anti-choice legislation to “two-yard dashes” and his bill to, well, the same metaphor guys use when they brag to their friends about bagging chicks (notice a pattern?).

3. Just before the opposition was to have the opportunity to speak, Committee Chair Kay Katz (R) personally addressed the many children in the room, emphasizing that the Louisiana legislature is strongly pro-life and has passed much pro-life legislation in the past. She basically said she did not want them thinking that the legislature had not already worked to address the problem of women’s reproductive rights.

4. When trying to smooth over some damage being caused by his special counsel in testimony, LaBruzzo made a sexist-masked-as-deferential remark about sometimes not understanding what “lady attorneys” are talking about, at which another lawmaker joked, “You’re married to one!” This exchange was followed by guffaws from a number of the representatives and anti-choice adults in the room, while we pro-choicers rolled our eyes and shook our heads at the Daily Show clip-worthy exchange.

5. Rep. Regina Barrow (D), during a question and answer session with Rep. LaBruzzo, defined herself as pro-choice with her line of questioning (concerning the unintended consequences of the “broad brush” of an abortion ban and the uncertainty of an abortion ban being the appropriate way to address rising abortion rates) yet she also repeatedly stated that she is pro-life and voted to pass the bill out of committee (after LaBruzzo threatened the representatives before him and not a one of them was educated or critical or inclined enough to call him out for it). Rep. Barrow’s confusion is a perfect example of how the anti-choice movement frames this debate. They distort what it means to be pro-choice so that more people will identify as pro-life/anti-choice.*

* The dichotomy presented to frame this debate has to be: “pro-life” and “anti-life,” “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion,” or “pro-choice” and “anti-choice.” The first dichotomy is falsely and uncritically reductionist since, as already explained, pro-life policies are only concerned with life in the womb and do not address the value of life at all stages. The second dichotomy inaccurately frames the issue because being pro-choice does not equate to being pro-abortion. The last accurately frames the issue because this is about a woman’s freedom of choice to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy or carry to term.

HOW TO TELL IF YOU ARE PRO-CHOICE OR ANTI-CHOICE

If you assert you are pro-life/anti-choice, you assert that no woman should be legally allowed access to an abortion (with whatever exceptions, if any, you feel are justifiable to legislate). No woman, no matter her age, financial/social situation, marital status, number of children, psychological/mental state, should be able to legally access an abortion.

Personally believing that abortion is murder is insufficient reasoning for defining oneself as pro-life and supporting anti-choice policies.

If you assert you are pro-choice, you assert that women should have access to safe, legal abortions.

A pro-choice stance says nothing about your personal views on abortion, it simply says you recognize the complexity of personal views and situational contexts related to abortion, and you do not wish to dictate other women’s choices whose values, beliefs and lives differ from yours.

Pro-choice individuals recognize that:

1. Abortion bans perpetuate gender and class oppression and disproportionately punish poor women.

2. Abortion bans that do not include a rape/incest exception (e.g. LA HB 645) punish victims of sexual violence.

3. People strongly disagree over whether abortion is murder and whether a fetus possesses greater value than a woman.

4. Abortion bans prioritize the life of a woman’s fetus over the life of a woman.

5. Abortion bans remove the right of a personally anti-abortion woman from “choosing life.”

One may be personally anti-abortion and politically pro-choice.

HB 645 (formerly HB 587) will soon be coming to the House floor for debate. For more info on the hearing and this bill, including some videos of the action, visit this grassroots website. To stay up-to-date on this bill throughout the legislative session, like the website’s Facebook page and/or follow them on Twitter.

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national seashore

20
April

On April 15, 2010, I sent DB the following email:

This beach campground has been closed since Ivan in 2004, and now it’s open. We must go there this spring/summer!!

Five days later, exactly one year ago, well, you know what happened. Two months later, oil hit that same beach.

I didn’t fly in an airplane until I was seventeen, because all family vacations were taken by car. Each summer, my mom, brother and I would pile into the car before daybreak, hop on I-10 W at Bluebonnet, curve onto I-12 E and head to Florida to visit our grandparents in Lake City, which lies at the intersection of I-10 and I-75 in the northeast part of the state. Pensacola was an approximate halfway point, and it was tradition for us to veer off track through Pensacola and Gulf Breeze and stop at the beach for a few hours on the way to and from Lake City.

My mom disliked the built-up stretch of Pensacola Beach heavily populated by people and high-rise hotels, so we always paid the few bucks to visit Fort Pickens National Seashore at the western end of Santa Rosa Island. No hotels, no restaurants – just a pristine stretch of gleaming white sand dunes and a black asphalt road stretching through it, with the Gulf of Mexico on the left and Pensacola Bay on the right.

There was a parking area for the daytrippers and a covered wooden structure with picnic tables, restrooms and open showers. Further down the road were the campground and the fort itself. A cousin of mine once saw pictures I had taken there, and he asked if they were taken in the Caribbean. This beach is beautiful. White sands, blue-green water, blue skies and sunshine. It’s part of the Redneck Riviera, whose moniker is (was) entirely appropriate. I grew up with this beach and its waters. I looked forward to it each year. It’s where as a baby I cried and resisted when my feet touched sand for the first time. It’s where as a college student I came with my friends to camp out and stay up all night on the beach. It’s where I could feel completely at peace.

Now tarballs and dead sea creatures litter the beach. It is cleaned, then more washes up. And no matter how clean it looks to my naked eye, I can’t help but think it will be tarnished for the rest of my life…because how do I peacefully wade into waters that still contain oil and dispersants? How do I peacefully wade into waters where people have gotten severe skin reactions for doing the same? Where people back home are dying from the mess they were being paid to clean up? How do I one day teach my baby child to walk on this soiled sand? I can’t. It’s not only about what I can see, but also what I can’t see, since this is a post-Dark Ages era and we (most of us) understand that toxic, microscopic matter can inflict harm upon living beings.

It’s one thing to decide to kill my own self by living in this region, swimming in the waters, breathing the air and eating the seafood. But what about my future children? And where is the line between being drawn kicking and screaming into this mess and being an accomplice, when you’re taught to behave pleasantly and politely around family and strangers who both share and affect your fate, but when lots of our habits and way of life are wasteful and damaging to our beloved natural surroundings? When, as consumers of oil, we allow and enable this to happen? When, as an exceptionally conservative state, in corporations we trust and environmentalists we disparage? When the car that took me to the beach ran on gasoline? (To that last one I submit this and this.)

This stretch of beach is a part of my history that I wanted forever in my future and for my children. I’m not quite sure how to deal with that.

“Solastalgia: A new strain of homesickness. The emotional pain you experience and the loss of hope you have about the future when you find out that your home – the place you live in and love – is under immediate assault and may soon no longer exist.”

10 reasons to still be pissed off about the BP disaster

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why it is about abortion

8
April

True, legislators and reporters should be clear and correct in what they say and report. But here’s why the women’s health care argument is about abortion: lots of us believe women’s health care includes family planning services that must include access to safe and legal abortion. Even considering the facts, for many people, the 3% of PP’s (technically non-federally funded) services overshadows the other 97%.

Case in point: a Facebook comment from a friend of a friend:

Hmmm…I find it interesting that they don’t mention anything about their life ending practices among the “health care” they provide, either in this letter or the original. But I suppose since they are facing loss of funding, they will say …(or not say) whatever they want.
And to clarify, I’m not anti-choice, I’m PRO-life.

War is another life-ending practice that kills innocent civilians (including fetuses!) but I don’t hear vociferous calls to eliminate federal funding for war, like has been done for abortion. Oh, and I am UNAPOLOGETICALLY pro-choice, in case anyone missed that, and cutting funding for PP would increase the number of abortions (and/or the need for more social programs) because it will increase the number of unwanted pregnancies (ya know, since that other 97% of what PP does helps to prevent unwanted pregnancies and keep women healthy so they can have beautiful, healthy babies one day) ~ so way to be savvy, pro-lifers! Also, way to shift blame for the recession and budget crisis from Republican & conservative Democratic policies to Planned Parenthood and similar social programs. Beautimus! Sometimes even tulips don’t help…maybe amateur wrestling night will…

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so (pro)choice

28
February

I walked for choice on Saturday. Because the organizers had prepared lots of extra signs for the event, almost everyone had one to wave. Mine said in big, blue block letters:

SAFE

LEGAL

RARE

(Classic.) At one point I walked next to a guy about my age, also a Vandy grad student. From San Diego, he mentioned that a similar event there would draw at least six times as many people as we had walking in Nashville. I told him, being from Baton Rouge, we would be lucky to ever have this many participants. “It’s still important,” he said, no matter how many march. I agreed. Walking through a “transitional” part of town, passersby of all races/ages/sexes honked, waved and gave thumbs up in support. In that way, it was a surprisingly affirming experience. My favorite sign of the day was one which stated simply, in multicolored pastels: UNAPOLOGETICALLY PRO-CHOICE. I decided on the spot that’s a new mantra of mine. “Unapologetically pro-choice.”

I support all of my sisters and brothers who are making the health care/preventive measures argument in response to the Pence amendment and other right-wing, GOP attacks on women’s health. I agree that is a major part of the debate our current reality dictates, and it is necessary for our voices to argue the facts. The other part of this, though, is that the GOP and anti-choice groups have skillfully framed this and every other reproductive rights debate since the Roe v. Wade decision outside of a current reality in order to shape the future. And their debate, their motivation, has everything to do with depriving women of abortion rights.

To the GOP and anti-choice groups, it is always about abortion. No matter the concessions from the Dems, it is not enough. No matter the collateral damage, it is insignificant in achieving their goal. It feels as if anti-woman, anti-choice legislation is like blowcaine they can’t get enough of, and they only hunger for more. The lack of awareness of reality fits their profile as soulless, self-centered, single-minded junkies, hustling to score that next fix by any means necessary. [My opinion as a metaphor-prone former English major. (Similes being a type of metaphor.)]

While it would make sense to focus on women’s health and reproductive choice toward the prevention of unplanned pregnancy, those aren’t the policies they end up supporting. Maybe that’s because prevention means women are getting away with something, and how dare us? How dare us have sex without anguishing through selfless, arduous consequences? No, it’s not about preventing abortion for them. If it were, they would have condemned and never entertained the notion of abstinence-only sex education, they would support access to birth control, they would support access to reproductive health care. But they have not and do not. It is sadly ironic that those who attack abortion also attack preventive measures against abortion. This is not about life. This is about dogma and talking points that stand like cardboard cutouts propped up to appear as meaningful, sanctified beliefs, but which do nothing to glorify God, nature, or humanity.

Abortion. Trumps. Everything. Else. And until abortion is illegal, they will not rest.

The GOP and anti-choice groups cite poll numbers that show how the American people feel about the pro-choice/pro-life debate, when they have constructed that reality with decades-long political and public relations campaigns against choice, and when public opinion doesn’t determine what rights are constitutional or not. (My mother has told me more times than I can remember to not speak publicly about being pro-choice because she worries for my safety. Oh, the “pro-life” irony.) The GOP and anti-choice groups talk about post-abortion syndrome, when they do nothing but condemn women for choosing abortion, dancing around a problematic version of women who have sought abortion as either victims or murderers, or both. They cite statistics on how unsafe abortion is when they have striven relentlessly to decrease access to safe abortions, so that the conditions surrounding the procedure induce trauma that is not necessarily attributable to having the abortion itself. So while they condemn the act of abortion, really they condemn women’s choices. While they proclaim value for life, specifically for the life of a woman’s fetus/baby, they devalue hers.

If it were actually about preventing abortion, we could all work together to do so. But in that case, the GOP and anti-choice groups would have to make commonsense concessions to their persistent projection of personal moral and religious beliefs onto all others. Or, at least, they would have to allow for the reality that even though they are metaphorically all torn up about it inside, it is my insides that would literally take a beating in this process, whatever my choice may be.

So here’s why I am fiercely, proudly, assertively, lovingly, humbly, and UNAPOLOGETICALLY PRO-CHOICE.

And here are some pictures from Saturday:

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mardi gras ballers

17
February

As I was working on my hat for last weekend’s Spanish Town ball, I sat at the bar sipping on some Saturday morning orange juice. I was constructing an oil derrick replica to sit atop my handmade hat, while pink cutouts of a pelican, a magnolia and the state of Louisiana sat to the side awaiting black paint to be smeared upon their as yet unblemished forms. Kanye played in the background. David was watching me work from across the bar, in the kitchen, while preparing a breakfast shake for us. He remarked that someone should be documenting this all around the city, documenting the creation of each individual expression of frustration at both the spill itself and at the unapologetic social, political and economic construction that got us there. This is who we are, this is how we express ourselves, he said. It’s true. For those of us who want a better way and spend many days and nights working the only way we know how to make it happen, sometimes (lots of times) we need these celebrations as cathartic distractions that are something in themselves. This is no documentary, but here’s my personal documentation. (It’s how I express myself.) Oh, and it was a super fun night.