scATX: Speaker's Corner in the ATX

[Today is the 6th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landing near the city of New Orleans.  Here is my post about it from last year, including some clips from Spike Lee's two documentaries.  There is still so much recovery that needs to happen there, so much healing.  Today, I am posting a story written by a good friend of mine who lived in New Orleans when Katrina struck.  This is her story.]

By Anonymous

INTRODUCTION

I want you to know a true story about Hurricane Katrina.

But I must start with saying that I’m not from New Orleans.  New Orleans holds a special place for me, because it is where I began a career that I am deeply passionate about—teaching.  New Orleans is also the first place I lived away from my family; I left the city I grew up a year after college to find “an adventure.”  In many ways, I feel that New Orleans helped mold me into the adult that I am today.  I faced some of the hard the questions I needed to ask to grow up:  can I make a difference in society?  Why do racism, classism, and sexism exist?  What is my relationship with money?  Men?  Drinking?  I struggled with all of these questions during my time in New Orleans.

Have you ever noticed that New Orleans is more than a setting in a book?  It’s almost like another character in literary work.  Well, that’s how I felt about New Orleans too.  It was like another person that was in my life.  And I was fascinated by her.  I wanted to be a New Orleanian.

There are notions that we hold true for New Orleans that everyone seems to agree on and accept.  New Orleans is a place of indulgence.  Good food and drinks are in abundance.  Music fills the bars, streets, and restaurants.  Celebrations are important and extravagant. These things are apparent to even the occasional traveler.  But something I’m not sure the average person considers about New Orleans is how important history is to New Orleanians.  Family history, neighborhood history, and traditions play a huge role in the lives of people from New Orleans.  There is great pride in explaining how everyone is related or knows each other, and who has known who for how long.  Where families come from in the city, and what schools they attended, are very important as well, even for the families that no longer live in the city proper.  Nearly everyone has roots in the city, and they want you to know it.

It is this deep sense of history and tradition that brings me to sharing my story with you.  As you read my account of Hurricane Katrina, I want you to keep in mind that I have limited roots in the city, and that my experiences differ greatly from those whose history with the city is deeper than my own.  I can’t imagine losing every sense of home I ever had in one tragic moment.  I feel as though it is also important to reveal that I am an educated, middle-class, Catholic, white woman from the Southwest.  As you can imagine, these identities shaped the way in which I experienced Hurricane Katrina.

I also want to introduce you to one of my best friends, B.  B and I were roommates the entire time I lived in New Orleans, and she is one of my favorite people in the whole world.  I asked B to write about her experience for this blog as well, and she wanted to.  But B just moved to San Francisco and is starting a new job this week, so her account of this is missing as of right now.  Maybe we can get her to write about it someday soon.

I have decided to write two parts to my blog.  I want to first share a narrative about life during and after Hurricane Katrina—that is my entry today.  I am in the middle of writing a separate blog entry to discuss more in depth what it has been like coming to terms with a Post-Katrina existence.

I hope you will find yourself somewhere in my story.

Read the rest of this entry »

40 people riding a bus.

Last night I finally started watching the Freedom Riders’ documentary that aired on PBS in May (Oprah did a big lead up to it, also).

At the beginning of the documentary, a historian discussing the Jim Crow South remarks that the entire system was so incredibly precarious that EVERYTHING in the society, down to where people sat on a bus, had to reinforce the inferiority of people of color and the superiority of whites.  If one thing, even a tiny thing, suggested that a different type of society was possible/better or that people of color did, in fact, share the humanity of their white counterparts, the whole system could quickly come crashing down.

So, in reaction to this fear of the unstable nature of the Jim Crow system, white people often acted in ways that were shocking, violent, and completely disproportionate to the apparent threat.

For example, when a group of a dozen or so people (both white and black) rode through the south on a bus attempting to de-segregate some bus terminals, a mob of white people did this to bus (luckily no one was killed):

I’ve only made it through half of the documentary.  And so far, forty people have participated in the Freedom Rides (the number eventually rises close to 400 – at this link, I am talking about the May 4 and May 16 riders).  The level of violent response from white Southerners to these bus riders was so high that it got the ear and eye of the President of the US (JFK) and his attorney general (RFK).  In Montgomery in 1961, a mob threatened a church full of 1500 people who had gathered in support of the Freedom Riders, during which MLK spoke directly on the phone to RFK, and JFK and RFK forced the governor of the state to provide military protection to those people held hostage in the church.

40 people riding a bus.

Here’s the thing: those racists in the South were right.  The Jim Crow system was incredibly precarious.  Obviously.  Because all* it took to get JFK and RFK to really pay attention to what was happening to people of color in the South was for a few dozen brave, young adults to climb on board a bus and dare to ride it through Alabama and Mississippi.

*By “all” I am talking about people literally putting their bodies and their lives on the line.  By “all”, I am mainly referring to the very small number of people who very openly and vocally put their bodies and lives on the line (because, of course, in the every day of the Jim Crow South any person of color especially or any ally was constantly in danger and always threatened).

Also, ironically (or, perhaps, nicely) by reacting with such a high level of hate/anger/violence (which is, in and of itself, implicitly admitting to the shaky nature of the system in place), white Southerners gave this small group of Freedom Riders the power to affect change.  It showed the rest of the country and even large portions of the world how much the South depended on violent underpinnings to function, how dangerous life was for people of color, and how easily things could unravel.

40 people riding a bus.

It took years, much more violence, much of it at the hands of the government that supposedly existed to protect all its citizens, and the sacrifice of many more people before there were major legal advances in civil rights.  And certainly that struggle has not ended.

But these Freedom Riders, by refusing to be violent in the face of violence and by doing something as simple as riding a bus, showed the very precarious nature of the racist Jim Crow system.

How brave.  How breathtaking.

How simple an act, how large a consequence.

How incredibly awe-inspiring.

How important. How necessary.

40 people riding a bus.

So, Jim Carrey does this and he’s funny?  And Gaddafi owns this and he’s creepy?

Here’s the thing: both are gross, in my opinion.  But at least Gaddafi made his photo album for his own private issue.  Jim Carrey made a video where he basically sexually harasses Emma Stone and releases it publicly.

And while I don’t actually give a shit about a 49yo person dating a 22yo person, in this case, Carrey has a 23yo daughter and you would think that he could have maybe -possibly – for a second (just long enough to NOT post the video) have empathized or simply sympathized with how a young woman would feel as the recipient of such a “funny” public video that sexualizes her.

Just ugh.  Ugh. ugh. ugh. All around.

P.S. This is NOT me supporting Gaddafi in anyway ever in any thing.  Just interesting that these two stories were released at the same time, both are trending on Twitter, and the difference in the response is telling.

Some spam posted on an old, old post:

What speaker stands will work with my Infinity Entra One bookshelf speakers?

Ha!  You don’t know what my blog is about at all, do you spambot?

Today, the West Memphis 3 (Arkansas) were freed after spending 18 years behind bars.  One of the three men was on death row.  The case against them was built on circumstantial evidence, the coerced (and later recanted) testimony of one of the three men, and the need of a community to make sense of the brutal murders of three young boys.

This whole fiasco is a massive injustice for many reasons, including (but certainly not limited to):

• These men (who were young when they were arrested and convicted) have lost decades of their lives and certainly the trust in the system and the state that is supposed to protect the innocent (holy shit, one of them was supposed to be KILLED by that system and state).
• Instead of locating and putting behind bars the actual killer(s) of the three boys, money, resources, and many years were wasted prosecuting and keeping the WM3 in prison.
• The deal that got the WM3 out of prison today.

According to MSNBC, here are the legal machinations that were at play in order to free these men:

Friday’s move was a complicated legal proceeding that protects Arkansas from a potential lawsuit should the men win a new trial, get acquitted, and seek to sue the state for wrongful imprisonment, Prosecutor Ellington said.

The men agreed to what’s known as an Alford plea. Normally, when defendants plead guilty in criminal cases, they admit that they’ve done the crime in question.

But in an Alford plea, defendants are allowed to insist they’re innocent, says Kay Levine, a former prosecutor who now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta.

In summary: The WM3 were allowed to go free by pleading guilty so that if they are ever able to prove their innocence in a court of law, they cannot sue the state of Arkansas for fucking them over and holding them in prison (and on death row) for decades.

This makes me literally sick.

The way modern nation-states function is most often through the implicit threat of force.  But there are moments (like today’s plea deal) where that threat becomes explicit.

Even if we don’t recognize that threat of force and violence all the time, we always have a vague understanding that it exists out there in the ether.  We know that breaking the law could mean that we could end up in jail, our hands bound by handcuffs, our cavities searched, our bodies encased in tiny, dangerous, dirty spaces.  Some (illegal?) acts can even cause you to be tasered, beat up, shot at, raped or killed by the police (or other groups that exist in order to keep people “safe” and “secure”).

Certain groups, of course, are much less likely to be aware of this threat from the state than others (that is a HUGE privilege for those with the right skin color, the luck to be born into the right class, etc.).  But the threat is ALWAYS there.  Don’t pay your taxes, you could (theoretically) go to jail.  Run the red light and fail to pay the ticket, you could (theoretically) go to jail.  In the wrong place at the wrong time, you could go to jail.  Falsely accused and happen to be an outsider in the community, you go be scapegoated and go to jail (of course, the forces that come together to delineate insider and outsiders in a community are a whole mess in and of themselves).

When the WM3 were offered a deal, they were told by the state (via the prosecution) that if they wanted their freedom they had to plead guilty despite their innocence (which doesn’t seem to be a point that is up for debate).  All so that they couldn’t sue the state if they ever prove their innocence.  Failing to do this, they had to stay in prison and take their chances in a system that had already royally fucked them over.  Damian Echols was making this decision from the incredibly weak position on death row (is that a position at all?).

In reality, these men had no decision.  The state was metaphorically pointing their guns at the heads of the WM3 and telling them that they either plead guilty or the state would continue to use physical force and the real threat of death against them. Who chooses the latter?  No one.  And Arkansas knows that.  The state knows that.

The state had already abused the power it had.  It had jailed these men for decades.  It had promised one of them death.  When finally it admits its error, instead of attempting to offer some sort of reparation or a fucking apology, it continued to use and abuse its power to protect itself from having to ever say it did anything wrong to these men, the families of the victims, and the victims themselves (those 8-year-old boys deserve an apology as much as the WM3).

The state exists because it has guns.  The state exists because it can threaten to throw us all in prison and then can use the system that is in place to keep you there (reminds me of this recent This American Life report about the psychopath test).  The state exists because if you go up against it, it can fuck up your life without ever having to admit it that it did so (and if you demand that admittance, it will just force you into a position where you have to keep your mouth shut or it will fuck your life up even more).

These realities were on full display today in the plea deal for the WM3.

The other side of this, of course, is that there are communities in this country who experience this violence and force of the state MUCH more often, including and especially the state-sanctioned death penalty (and who don’t have stars like Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp vocally fighting for them).  Their relationship with the government is predicated on the reality of this violence.  They expect it and they know it and they see it in their daily lives.  For them, it is mundane, explicit, obvious, everywhere:

I hope and pray that all of the good people who fought so hard for the WM3 remember that, were Damian Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin black, all three of them would have received the death penalty, and all three of them would have been executed years ago, quietly and with little fanfare.

I hope and pray that everyone who followed this case so closely understands that the WM3 situation is more likely the rule than an anomaly for black and brown people in the United States. The same small-town, good-ole-boy, kangaroo, star-chamber system that railroaded the WM3 in the name of mob justice because they were “weirdoes” has done the same thing to black and brown people for years and years and years, with no cause célèbre attached. Few HBO documentaries are made about these other cases (The Execution of Wanda Jean is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, and it should be obvious how that one turned out. Spoilers: she dies).

As Zathara says in the post I just quoted, if you want to know about all of this, start with the Innocence Project.

And keep paying attention.

And keep advocating for a just system, a system that doesn’t have a death penalty, a system that fights for the innocent and doesn’t privilege the wealthy, a system that protects everyone.

There are people alive OLDER than US women’s right to vote (today is the 91st anniversary of ratification of 19th amendment).

For making me feel like I need to defend Bachmann in any way at all ever.  But this picture of her on your cover – it’s bullshit.  And it’s what happens to women who dare to do the unthinkable – run for public office.  Conservatives can cry all they want about this being an attack on conservatives via their female candidates – it totally is but it’s not some new tactic devised by liberals, it’s a product of our misogynistic and patriarchal culture that is constantly reminding ALL women who venture in the public and political sphere that they are in the wrong place.  Shakesville has made it clear over and over again that the the woman who bears the biggest brunt of this pain is Hillary Clinton (case in point last week).

Maybe Newsweek does have a bias against conservative female candidates, though.

Also, Newsweek’s tumblr can’t get enough of their super hilarious, couldn’t-be-funnier picture of that batshit crazy lady, Michelle Bachmann.  I love seeing a beautiful woman get trashed by the MSM via her picture (/sarcasm).

On ProducerMatthew’s Tumblr I saw this quote from Scott Pelley, the CBS news anchor, in the Montreal Gazette.  I have bolded the part I find most interesting:

“Original reporting and a unique insight into the news are things that span all generations,” Pelley said. “Why shouldn’t a young person be interested in those things, just as much as a person my age? We believe doing a proper newscast and telling the story correctly, great storytelling in the tradition of 60 Minutes, are the kind of things that are going to bring in a wide, wide section of the public. Every single day we get together and ask, ‘What are the most important things that happened in the world today? How can we cover them? How can we tell the story and give it a unique insight?’ Those are the standards we use. We do not sit around asking ourselves, ‘Is this going to appeal to a 19-year-old?’ or, ‘Is that going to appeal to a woman?’ We are covering the news.”

Quotes like this are always interesting to me.  If you are an older man, you are considered part of the audience – that’s natural, it’s assumed, you are a viewer.  Plain old “news” does not pander to you but that news is what just so happens to count as verifiable “news” to people like Pelley (funny how he imagines the obvious or normal audience to be made up of people just. like. him).

But if a news program dares to venture into news that someone would primarily consider important or relevant to a 19yo or a woman, then that is a special audience who needs their own special version of news.  Because it couldn’t possibly be that CBS would ever air a story on their network that is primarily important or relevant to a 19yo or woman and say, “Why shouldn’t an old person be interested in these things? Why wouldn’t a man care about this?”

While Pelley and the CBS people may actually care very much about providing stories that appeal to huge swaths of the viewing public and try not to, in fact, favor one type of story over another OR imagine their audience’s demographics in a specific, limited manner – I would argue that this quotes shows that those things aren’t true.

I mean, seriously – why won’t those 19yos and those women just shut up and listen to the “NEWS” that affects us all?

Two articles from MSNBC:

Football practice in the heat: Should moms worry or relax?

Those stupid worry wart moms.  Jeez.

Child a handful? Laid-back parenting can make matters worse – Kids with poor self-control whose moms parented in a laissez-faire way had higher rates of depression and anxiety, found a new study that looked at the impact of parenting styles on kids with different temperaments.

On this second one, they pretend they are going to direct an article about parenting to, you know, parents.  But they then IMMEDIATELY target moms.  Of course, the study that the article is based on didn’t even consider fathers when looking at the behavior of children.  Moms can single-handlely fuck up their kids, thank you very much.  And if a kid is fucked up, why look any farther than the woman who did it to them?

Love you so much, mom!

P.S. In case you were wondering what that second article is supposed to teach you about parenting:

“The main take-home message,” Lengua says, is that “it’s not one size fits all. The same parenting might not work with each child.”

So glad we have this mom-blaming garbage article to drive that point home.  What would parents moms do without the media to tell them what to do?

[UPDATE: I was thinking about this over the weekend.  And one more thing I noticed about the second article (the one on parenting styles) is the title.  While it makes it seem like this study is about how a laissez-faire style of parenting (whatever the fuck that is) is the problem, the article and the study it is based on is actually more balanced than that (the conclusion that I quoted above is an example).  But I think this title is relevant because it points to this more general conservative streak now in how we should relate to each other - the title is premised on this idea that we need to return to some hard-ass, take-no-prisoners version of parenting.  That, in fact, the problem is the hippy, love-will-conquer-all, touchy-feely, care-about-emotions type of parenting that is associated with attachment parenting movements and other such liberal parenting ideas.  For me, as a parent who does try to be compassionate, to listen to my child, to teach instead of lecture, to guide instead of force, I take titles like this so personally.

And I see this type of thing as an affront on my larger political position – STOP trying to make me believe in harsh conservative ideas about fruitful and useful relationships via my parenting style (especially using fucked up gendered ideas about parenting to do it).  Women are so soft nowadays that they are making their children soft and, in turn, society soft.  Liberalism and Progressivism have supposedly created the crisis in which we find ourselves because there are people in this society who, lawd forbid, care about the well-being and lives of their fellow citizens.  And if we could just make people harder then we would be okay (or maybe that we would simply be better).

Maybe if we INSTEAD taught compassion, the art of listening, the magic of empathy, and the brilliance of love AT THE SAME TIME that we establish boundaries and provide guidelines then we would actually be better off.  Why the dearth of compassion nowadays?  How come when so many are struggling so much of our response in so many arenas (including stupid and seemingly innocuous parenting articles on the web) is to call for less compassion?  Fuck that.  And fuck these stupid articles, especially the second one and its dumb title.

My partner’s optimistic response: “It gets cooler.”  And then we both laugh because we can’t cry – the heat has dried up all our tears.