scATX: Speaker's Corner in the ATX

From an article in the NY Times (surprise, surprise):

A new study suggests several reasons for the nation’s rising Caesarean section rate, including the increased use of drugs to induce labor, the tendency to give up on labor too soon and deliver babies surgically instead of waiting for nature to take its course, and the failure to allow women with previous Caesareans to try to give birth vaginally. [...]

The concern arises because Caesareans pose a risk of surgical complications and research has found that they are more likely than normal births to cause problems that can put the mother back in the hospital and the infant in intensive care. Risks to the mother also increase with each subsequent Caesarean, because it raises the odds that the uterus will rupture in the next pregnancy, which can seriously harm both the mother and the baby.

Here’s where it gets bad:

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From Jon Wertheim’s Tennis Mailbag over on CNNSI:

Here’s hoping that Clijsters loses early–I’m not a huge fan of the cheesy strategy of bringing the infant to the court to score PR points. That was pretty pathetic last year.
–Juanita Sanchez, New York

This came up twice this week. Quick rebuttal. A) If there’s one player who does not embrace a “PR strategy,” it’s Clijsters. B) What’s she supposed to do? Send her daughter to Six Flags with the nanny the day of the U.S. Open final? I suspect a major motivation for Clijsters’ return was the opportunity to have her daughter watch her success. C) If anyone is to blame, it’s the media — one member in particular — who beat the “mommy trope” with unrelenting frequency.

Wow.  Juanita wants Clijsters to lose because she brought her child to her US Open final that she won, the first mother to win a grand slam tennis tournament since 1980?  WTF?  That’s all I have on that one.  Kudos to Wertheim, though.

This comes from someone who carried her son across her triathlon finish line when he was 9 months old.  Because I wanted that moment with my son.  And I wanted the picture so that he can see that his mother is strong, that his mother is fit, that his mother cares about exercise, that his mother is a bad ass, that he can know that bodies can go through so much and recover.

So, hell yeah, if my kid was 18 months old and I was once again at the peak of my athletic career AFTER having gone through pregnancy, labor, and post-partum, damn straight I would be celebrating with my ENTIRE family, especially my child.

So, I am now officially backing Clijsters.  Go, Kim, go!

[It's not a secret that I am a huge Clijsters fan and a big part of my love for her is that she is a mom.]

Over at the Washington Post, they are reporting that Washington Redskins’ cornerback, Deangelo Hall, is so insecure of his short stature, that he will only do interviews with Comcast’s Kelli Johnson if she isn’t wearing heels:

“Did you actually get Kelli Johnson to take her heels off for that interview?” Chick Hernandez asked Hall during Comcast SportsNet’s post-game show.

“I did I did,” he admitted. “She was too tall. If I was 6 feet like [Carlos Rogers], I wouldn’t have to do that, but I’m 5-11, so she definitely had to take them heels off for me.”

“He demands I do this every time,” Johnson pointed out.

“She ain’t about to make me look bad,” Hall said.

I think maybe the problem here, Mr. Hall, is that you are too short.  And, besides the point that this is your issue and not hers, how does she make you look bad, exactly?  Oh wait.  I know.

As I read in the comments at one blog‘s reporting of this bullshit sexism, because a lady may possibly be taller than Hall, his name should be Deanglina, not Deangelo.  Get it?  It’s funny.  That’s humor.

Simply being shorter than a woman who is near you makes you a lady-man/feminine/weak and that, my friends, is the ultimate insult.

[Trigger Warning for violence.]

It can be a hard thing emotionally. And I imagine it is an unending struggle for historians of slavery (at least, I really hope it is) to process the reality of the institution and the people whom they study. Since I am reviewing lots of documents that I looked at last summer, I came across one of the most upsetting things I ended up transcribing last summer. Before I quote it, I want to do a little set up.

At the British Library, you are not allowed to photograph documents in the manuscript room (which sucks, especially for people like me who are there with limited times and limited means. Your ability to view documents is just much more circumscribed. It is a policy that certainly favors people who live in London or who have hefty fellowship packages that allow them to travel for substantial amounts of time.) So, you sit there with your document on the table and your laptop. You read the document as quickly as you can (which with 17th-century documents may not be a quick process) and you type up what you are reading. You almost split your brain. You are reading but you aren’t really processing. It’s when you go to type the words onto your computer (or write them on your pad of paper) that you actually realize what it is that you are reading. There’s a delay there.

This one day in the Library, I was reading and typing, the story revealing itself to me as I typed the words onto the screen. I had been reading lots of upsetting things about slaves/slavery for days (and, of course, for years in my preparation for being a historian of slavery). But this passage was too much and after typing it, I immediately had to get up from my seat, leave the manuscript room, walk around outside, drink some water, sit and process. I may have even decided to eat lunch before returning to the room and the document.

Without further ado, here is a story that a brother traveling from London to the Caribbean (via Africa) is writing to his sister around 1713. The English have purchased slaves in Africa and are preparing to leave. To get out to the ocean, they must first navigate the rivers that take them there.

After we had purchased 360 Slaves, about 200 Women, 100 Men, & the rest Boys, & Girls, we prepar’d to leave the River. All the men had shackles on their legs, to prevent them from swimming to shore, as we went down ye river, which were taken off, when we got to Sea.

Not suspecting the women, we left them at their liberty, but before we got out of the River, 3 or 4 of them shew’d us how well they could swim, gave us ye slip, though we took one of them again, they could not swim so well as the rest, being big with child.

The author immediately goes on with his story about navigating the ship out to the sea, showing just how not important this story is. Capturing a pregnant woman attempting to flee slavery was nothing special in the larger scheme of their travels. Within lines of this story, though, he again shocks me with his nonchalant description of the slaves and the brutality of the middle passage on their lives:

We caught plenty of fish almost every day, especially Sharks, which were salted, & preferred for the Negros, they eat this fish with much greediness. We brought Horse beans, & Peas from England with us, but most of them were spoiled, the Negros not caring for them.

They [the slaves] now began to sicken very much, & sometimes we threw overboard 4 or 5 in a day; their common distemper was the flux, with a swelling in their limbs. Their opinion is that when they die, they go to their own country, which made some of them refuse to eat their victuals, striving to pine themselves, as the expeditious way to return home.

To put a stop to this danger, the Captain used this Stratagem, to show them he could prevent their returning to their own country. He ordered the Carpenter to cut off the head of a dead Negro with his ax, & fix it on a pole made fast to the Ship’s side, & to throw the limbs about the Deck. He threatned the same to all that would not eat their victuals. This took but little effect, they were yet forced to be flood over with whips to oblige them to it. They were messed by Tens, & over every Mess was placed a white man to keep them in order, for they were much given to fighting, & biting one another; & some of their Bites proved mortal; their victuals was cheifly Yams.

Again, from there he goes on to describe their sea voyage. This was just how it was when you had a ship full of slaves crossing the Atlantic. And even knowing that, these passages are so jarring.

[Side note: the Captain's strategy - that was a common one in Jamaica and Barbados because suicide was a common "problem" for English slave masters.]

Beyond my complete understanding that those 4 or 5 slaves that they threw overboard every day were actual, living people, I am taken aback every time I read this document by the casual nature with which the author writes this journal. It makes it all feel even more callous.

It is this kind of moment when I must really try to step back from my material and must actively force myself not to judge this historical actor. Or, at least, to not let my judgment affect my understanding of the history. It’s hard. Because those descriptions of the enslaved are fucked up. And that legacy of brutality is still with us, the way Americans still view black people as animals, violent, vicious. The privileged are completely casual in their judgments of those whose histories are full of oppression and hate, they are blind to the why, and purposefully ignorant of their own role in all of this.

I had heard about this but Misty at Shakesville brought it fully to my attention today.  Here’s the story:

Students at a Mississippi public middle school looking to run for class president this year need to maintain a B average, obtain 10 signatures from their classmates – and be white.

At Nettleton Middle School, students last week received the rules for the upcoming student government elections. Students could run for president, vice president, secretary-treasurer and reporter, but some positions were off-limits depending on race.

In all three grades, only white students can run for president. In eighth grade black students can run for vice president and reporter. In seventh grade blacks can only run for secretary-treasurer, and in sixth grade only for reporter.

There are no assigned positions for students of other races and no mention of students who are mixed race.

The policy appears to be a holdover from late 1960s desegregation orders, but is one of several school district policies that smack of Jim Crow, including crowning separate black and white homecoming and prom queens in high school.

Say, what?  Huh?  This hurts my head and heart.

The school board has fixed it, at least: The school board in Nettleton, Miss., voted Friday to reverse its policy under which race determined whether a candidate could run for class positions, including president.

From Mother Jones (found this via Color Lines):

But I find the righteous outrage of those contending the former World Trade Center site is “hallowed ground” amusing, because they have no idea just how right they are. Before the World Trade Center was even designed (with Islamic architectural elements, incidentally), the ground was indeed sacrosanct: The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. As at least 10 percent of West African slaves in America were Muslims, it’s not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of at least a few Muslim slaves. That is to say, hallowed Muslim ground.

Okay, confession. I have a deep, deep, deep love for Kristen Bell because she was Veronica Mars.  And VM is perhaps my most favorite show ever, in large part because of Bell.  Her timing is incredible.

This clip with her, Betty White, Sigourney Weaver, and Odette Yustman (all costars in the new movie You Again – which also stars Kristin Chenoweth, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cloris Leachman) is pretty damn funny. I like when actors play really annoying versions of themselves.

Of course, I don’t like that this clip’s theme is women fighting. But I guess I will take it just to see a clip that destroys the Bechdel Test and cracks me up.  And at least it is called a “Cast Fight” and not a “Cat Fight.”

Here’s the teaser for the movie. Betty White has the best line in the whole thing there at the end. The movie, unfortunately, is all about women hating on other women. I will still see it. I know I will. Maybe there will be a really good resolution to the movie at the end? And we know it will pass the Bechdel test. Yay?

and I’m damn proud of it.

Please visit Fair and Feminist for their young feminist Blog Carnival.  Going on now!

P.S. Now that I wrote that I am wondering if I am still considered a “young” feminist.  Man, I hope so because I am really not that old.  I (*fingers crossed*) have many decades left on this planet.  This weird generational split in the movement and this need to define ourselves against the “older” generation seems so strange.  I get that the impetus is a response to being defined by that same older generation.  But maybe in the same way that I believe mothers and child-free feminists need to stop discussing who is being oppressed more by society’s judgment of them (cause we ALL are because we are ALL women), I believe we get no where when we are trying to prove our worth and our significance to each other.  It feels simple to me.  I realize it’s not.  But a girl can dream, can’t she?

of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana (this upcoming Sunday), I want to remind everyone about Dave Eggers’ incredible book, Zeitoun.

Here is what I wrote immediately following completing this book in July:

I feel like there is so much to say about this book, almost too much.  It’s completely captivating.  It’s non-fiction, which I didn’t know until I was about 80% of the way through.  It truly is a story that shows that truth is stranger than fiction.  It’s sad, it’s hopeful, it’s shocking, it’s upsetting.  It’s about Katrina, from the perspective of a man, Abdulrahman Zeitoun (a Syrian immigrant turned US citizen), who lived through the hurricane, its aftermath, and beyond.  It’s about his family, his wife, Kathy, and their four children.  It explains by showing, not by pedantic lectures.  It is powerful.  And it is a must read.  Thank you to Dave Eggers for writing it down.  And thank you, more than anything, to the Zeitouns for sharing it with all of us.

I love this book even more as more time passes.  It sits with me, in my mind and my heart.  I think of it often and I am infinitely grateful that I read it.

More on Katrina, 5 years gone:

• Obama to commemorate Katrina on 5th anniversary (AP)
• The Levees Failed, But The Spirit Of New Orleans Prevails (NPR)
• Gulf Coast grapples with post-Katrina mental health issues (Miami Herald)
• Life After Katrina: Bold Promises, Many Broken (CNBC)
• Hurricane Katrina anniversary: Ways to help with on-going rebuilding efforts (USA Today)
• Federal Agents Open Inquiry Into Order Authorizing NOPD Cops to Shoot Looters (ProPublica)
• Katrina Five Years After: Hurricane Left a Legacy of Health Concerns (Fox News)
• The Legacy of Katrina’s Kids (Newsweek)
• Laura Bush says every president faces unfair criticism (Reuters)
• New Orleans schools stage impressive turnaround after Katrina (Yahoo! News)
• Hurricane Katrina: ‘Brownie’ Winced at Bush’s ‘Heck of a Job’ Line (Politics Daily)
• Eating in New Orleans, Five Years After Katrina (Riverfront Times)
• The Most Heart-breaking PHOTOS From Hurricane Katrina (Global Grind)
• Katrina: Here’s a ‘Meet the Press’ not to be missed (Baltimore Sun)
• 5 years later: Does George Bush care about black people? (NBC)
• Five Years Later: A Letter To New Orleans (NPR)

Brian Williams did a Dateline episode that aired a week or so ago about the five days surrounding Katrina, including his own personal experience in New Orleans reporting at that time. NBC can’t actually run the special on Sunday because there are more important things going on, namely the Emmys. But it is on YouTube. Part 4 (of 6) is here [Trigger Warning for really, really upsetting stuff. It made me cry, gasp, look away. This was/is America.]:

Spike Lee talking about his new documentary about NOLA, Katrina, and BP that has recently aired on HBO (which I, unfortunately don’t have), “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise“.

The end of Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary about Katrina, “When the Levees Broke“:

A “sneak peak” of the Frontline/ProPublica PBS “Law & Order” special they showed this week:

Let’s Never Forget.  Oh, please, let’s never forget.

———————————————————

And in case you are thinking that we are in post-racial America, never underestimate the racist spew from commenters at Fox News, especially on a Katrina story about how little progress has been made in the Lower 9th Ward since the hurricane.  For example (and these are all different comments from only the first of 5+ pages):

“I’m sick of the Katrina whining.”

“It is unfortunate that they survived the flood but I hope they die where they are and never come back.”

“Put the residents that went to Houston on buses and send them back. Make them earn their keep for once.”

“The difference between Betsy and Katrina is not the amount of destruction that occurred, but the will of the people after Betsy to take matters into their own hands and rebuild their lives instead of depending on the government to do it for them. Like many have said in their comments, the 9th Ward was a welfare state at the time of Katrina and all those people only know how to depend on the government and can’t do for themselves. This is a sad example of the direction the current government wants to take the rest of the country.”

“I don’t mean to be ignorant but didn’t the people in the ninth ward have insurance?”

“If the welfare folks who waited on the government to rescue them rather than take responsibility for themselves would return from their cushy welfare life in Houston perhaps they could be put to work rebuilding……But, no! They would rather remain where they can deal dope and destroy the once nice apartments they were provided. New Orleans has not recovered……well, neither has Houston.”

“Who cares.  Get a Job.”

Today on NPR’s Morning Edition, I heard a report about how the LA Times is going to release the test scores of LA teachers on the internet so that parents can make informed decisions about their child’s teachers.

Here was the intro to that report (taken from the transcript online):

Any day now, 6,000 elementary teachers in Los Angeles will see their names published online, along with data showing how much their students improved on standardized tests.

The Los Angeles Times has promised to release the information to help parents measure teacher effectiveness. The database has sparked a national debate on how to evaluate teachers.

The Times stories use some fancy number-crunching to compare the effectiveness of teachers in the nation’s second-largest school system. It has led to an explosive controversy in the city — some argue it’s about time parents had an objective measure to compare their kids’ teachers. Still, others say, this is just a way to humiliate educators.

I think it’s more the latter than the former.  But more than anything, I think all of this is just covering up larger, systemic issues in our national education system that a focus on individual teacher performance will not fix.

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