empty box of tampons

I don't know why I can't get over Michelle Wolf's monologue at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but I can't. It was so funny. And rad.

I particularly liked the jokes that felt like they had women as the target audience.

The "smoky eye" one. I wonder if there are a lot of men who didn't get the Maybelline reference. I mean, I've probably seen hundred of car commercials in my life, but I can't tell you the taglines of any of the major car companies. I haven't been socialized to give a shit. Most of those commercials are made for men, what with their need for speed. So I'm wondering how many men actually recognize the Maybelline tagline and how many of them don't because they tune out completely during makeup commercials.

I confess, I've bought eye shadow palettes that advertised themselves as smoky eye kits. To get the joke, you have to know (1) what the smoky eye is, and (2) you also kinda need to have some sense of how many smoky eye tutorials show up in women's magazines. Enough where it's possible to get the sense that we're all actually just on the quest for the perfect smoky eye.

The focus of the joke is Sanders' incessant lying in press briefings, not her eye shadow. But if you see how "burning facts and using the ashes as eye shadow" plays on the silly, upbeat tone of the smoky eye tutorial ("So resourceful!"), you get the added perk of a little satirical riff on women's socialization to be hyper-focused on our appearance.

A man couldn't make the eye shadow joke because they don't have to know about the work that goes into creating those sexy, smoky eyes of which they are the beneficiaries (if they are straight and buy into dominant beauty norms).

Also, the "Ivanka is as useful to women as an empty box of tampons" joke. We're the ones who know how annoying it is when you are sitting on the toilet, see that you got your period, reach into the cabinet under the sink for a tampon, and realize that the box is empty. It sucks so bad. Toilet paper wadded up to make do until you can get to CVS. That joke was for us.

All these men and anti-feminist women are crying about how she shouldn't make jokes about Sanders' and Ivanka's appearance (Oh, the diaper genie one!) as if they give a fuck about the ubiquitous reduction of women to their looks. She made no jokes about any woman's appearance. In fact, the kerfuffle over the jokes that aren't about women's appearance, but not about the ones that were actually making fun of individual men's looks, suggests that they really do equate women's value with their appearance. Make fun of Christie's and McConnell's nasty selves, and that's okay, because everyone knows that they're big, respectable men with big, respectable jobs. But if you go after a woman's appearance, you're leaving her with nothing! 

Time to Do Better

My friend Lillian and her friend are starting a website called Time to Do Better, and Lillian asked me to write something about being white. Why is it easier to write when something is "assigned"?

-

Without a doubt, I grew up at-risk – of being a racist asshole. If not for a few patient, caring teachers who taught me to take seriously my own humanity and the humanity of others, I would have graduated and gone on to living a comfortable, upper middle-class life, absolutely ignorant to the historical and systemic injustices that afforded me such a privilege.

I’m not being facetious. A favorite thinker of mine, a man whose work one of those humanity-saving teachers asked me to read, is Paulo Freire, a teacher who worked with adult students living in poverty in Brazil. Freire posits that in an oppressive system, both the oppressed and the oppressors are dehumanized. In other words, when we passively accept or actively participate in the dehumanization of others, we make monsters of ourselves. We become less human.

As a white American, I occupy a space in the oppressor class. That doesn’t mean that I’m never presented with obstacles. Living with unearned privilege does not mean living without pain. It just means, for example, that I’m not afraid that I’m going to be killed if I get pulled over for a broken tail light because my reaching for my license and registration is mistaken for my reaching for my gun.

Another one of those teachers who was concerned with my humanity asked me to read the work of literary giant James Baldwin. In the biographical notes that open his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explains, “I love America more than any country in the world, and, for exactly this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Word.

The United States became a global superpower largely because folks who came to be known as white people deployed white supremacy for their economic and political gain. America may have been founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all, but it was also founded on a lack of integrity because they didn’t really mean “all.”

European immigrants with the capital and chutzpa to “own” land used physical and emotional violence to force African and indigenous people to work for free and other, poorer European immigrants to work for very little, harvesting a product that made the “landowners” very wealthy. As the wealth of those who thought that they could also “own” humans accumulated, they became increasingly afraid of losing that wealth and therefore increasingly determined to quash any efforts by the people producing it to claim some of it for themselves. Thus came the campaign to codify “whiteness,” both legally and in the court of public opinion. African and indigenous people – already coping with the trauma of having their homes, languages, and traditional ways of life stolen from them – lost any hope of organizing in solidarity with the poor but now “white” people toiling alongside them who had chosen – out of economic and religious desperation, to be sure, but chosen nonetheless – to come to what we call America. In claiming their “whiteness,” those poor European immigrants, exploited though they may have been, at least had the legal rights to “own” themselves and their children.

And as time went on, “white” folks established a growing number of protections and opportunities for themselves. Like, for example, in 2018, white police officers – the professional descendants of slave patrols – can kill people of color with almost guaranteed impunity.

My own ancestors didn’t think they owned any humans. My dad’s ancestors came from Ireland during the famine about a decade before the American Civil War. My dad actually moved back to Ireland to marry my mom, and there they had Michael, Johnny, and Conor, my three older brothers; they came back to the US in the 1980s and had me and my little brother Neil.

That our ancestors were in Ireland when “whiteness” became a thing doesn’t change the fact that we live now in a country that was built for “white” folks like us.

My brothers and I grew up in a fairly quiet collar suburb on the southwest side of Chicago. We lived frugally, I thought, but all of us kids went to Catholic school and we never let two years go by without a family trip home to Ireland.

The first indication I saw that this country wasn’t built for everyone came when I was in high school. Before my family had moved back to the States, Conor, at nine weeks old, had contracted meningitis, which severely damaged his brain and left him with profound disabilities. As he approached age 21, my parents discovered that unless we were willing to send him off to live in an assisted living facility, he was going to be summarily exited from the public school system with no place to go and no right to any further public services in our state. At the time, Illinois was ranked 51st in the nation for services for adults with disabilities, behind all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

My mom, looking at having to quit the part-time job she went to when he was at school, sought out training in political advocacy so she could learn to lobby our representatives on Conor’s behalf. With her new-found comrades, she also worked to keep closed a state mental institution that was notorious in the disability community for abuse and neglect, and she enlisted 15-year-old me to collect petitions from my friends at school.

Looking back, I can see how daily life with Conor – who needs to be fed and dressed, who wears diapers and doesn’t speak or otherwise communicate but makes seemingly random loud noises, who drools constantly, and who has frequent seizures – instilled in me the understanding that all people’s dignity and humanity must be respected and preserved no matter the efforts involved. If I let my brother sit in his own shitty diaper, for example, what does that say about me, about my dignity and humanity?

In his graceful, unconventional teaching style, Conor taught me how to communicate with people in power as a proxy for him, and even more importantly, he taught me that people in power would, if they could, ignore his rights. Ableism and racism aren’t the same, but understanding the former, I think, increased my chances of being willing to understand the latter.

Eventually I became a teacher, too. But thankfully, I didn’t stop getting taught.

Jamarrio sat in the front row in my third period class. One day early in the year, we were reading from the first chapter of Night, Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, when I noticed Jamarrio throwing his book down and laying his head on the desk. For some lucky reason, instead of telling him, “Head up, hun,” my go-to gentle admonition, I crouched down and whispered, “What’s up?”

“I can’t read this,” he told me. I figured that he was having difficulty reading the text, and I “knew” that I needed to respond in a way that would de-escalate his frustration and prevent the situation from turning into an issue of defiance.

Before I could respond, though, he continued, “These people are going to be killed. They can’t stop it, and no one is going to stand up for them. I’m not reading it.” I was stunned into silence. Not a lack of skill nor discipline, the reason he “couldn’t read” this book was the depth of his empathy for the victims of the Holocaust and his unwillingness to be another complicit witness to their story.

Guiltily, I realized that I had made the racist assumption that as a black teenage boy he must be a struggling reader. I had narrowly avoided reducing him to a negative stereotype; he had saved me from myself by letting me in on his emotional experience, gently teaching me that he was a fully complex human being just like me.

Countless studies demonstrate that the descendants of European immigrants in the US, rich or poor, continue to benefit politically and economically from the idea of whiteness, even when we’re not particularly powerful or wealthy.

There is, after all, lingering political power in being descended from a human legally affirmed as human rather than from a human legally made property. Look at how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted in 2013, making it demonstrably harder for the descendants of Africans to participate in the US democracy.

There is, after all, lingering economic power in being descended from a human who was allowed to own himself (if not herself) rather than from a human who was legally owned. Look at redlining, the deliberate racial segregation of Chicago starting in the 1930s, which created the ghettoes where the descendants of Africans continue to live without the public resources allocated through the higher property taxes of historically white neighborhoods.

White folks in the US have resources afforded us by the European immigrants who used white supremacy to establish the way we do things in this country, and we bear the pain, whether we feel it or remain numb to it, of having our dehumanization – and the dehumanization of people of color – normalized.

Having power – or not having power – isn’t what makes us human. But having power and using it to dehumanize others, or having power and not using it to defend those without it from dehumanization, makes us monstrous.

!

I just finished reading Lies My Teacher Told Me which I'd heard a lot about in the last few years. I was surprised to see that it was actually published thirteen years ago.

I learned that the first Thanksgiving was actually in 1863; Lincoln proclaimed the third Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving because they were in the middle of the Civil War, and he sensed that the Union could use an upswell in patriotism. Just the kind of thing that an origin story celebration could do.

Huh.

I learned other stuff, too.

"It's great to be back in America!"

Welcome Back from ImprovEverywhere on Vimeo.

White people talking about race? Weird.

During the school day today I had to have private conversations with two different white students who were really worked up, borderline angry, at how "the African Americans" were responding to Obama's election.

"How come if a black person is elected, they can make a big deal about it, but if I made a big deal about a white person being elected, that would be racist?" one of them asked me.

"How come right after they announced his victory, the TV stations only interviewed African-American people? Why can't white people have an opinion?" the other student asked.

In each case, I talked to the student about how it was okay for them to feel frustrated at what feels like a pressure for white people to not talk about race as a way of avoiding the "racist" label. I get that. These kids go to a school with a fairly diverse student population, and they don't want to act like everyone's the same. And they shouldn't. That's not the way anti-racism works. Anti-racism isn't colorblind, and it's not non-confrontational. These kids' ideas were racist, but these are not "bad" kids. Racism and big-jerk-ness are not the same. Their awareness of an oppressive forced silence is legitimate, even if their notions of "reverse racism" are not. And yet their lack of knowledge about the ways that racism works, and their lack of satisfactory vocabulary for describing their hurt feelings, led them to say things that made them, for sure, look like big jerks.

I finished the school day with the hopeful thought that Obama's election may really serve as a catalyst for many more honest, personal, and productive discussions of race and racism like the ones I had with these students.

I love having uber-smart friends.

As I was walking down the street on campus today, I ran into a guy I met last year when I was considering the Peace Corps. He was the recruiter then, and now he's a full-time grad student in journalism. We got to talking: he was asking me why I didn't go; I was telling him about my job. Then he wanted to know what kinds of things UHS was up to in terms of NCLB. Blah. blah, blah. He asked, "So what do you think of what the candidates are saying about education?" And I was thinking, "How much time do you have?"

Anyway, I should have referred him to Susan's latest post:

Tonight, one of the debate questions was about education reform, and I happen to be a professional in the field (still a bit weird) so I thought I'd make a list of reforms I find to be most pressing to the educational world (and ps John McCain- your claim that we have reached equality in education is bs. I'm calling you out on that).

1. Better continued professional development support for teachers: Education is a fast changing field as far as our understanding of what the students need, but a slow-changing reality in the classroom. A lot of this has to do with the continued professional support for teachers. Yes, there are people who are just bad and need to get out, but a lot of teachers were good and can be good again, they just need the updated training. I may be a good teacher now, but without continual support to get better, I can easily become a bad teacher.

2. A strategic plan for closing the achievement gap through early education and culturally relevant programs: The fact that there is an achievement gap makes me sick to my stomach. The fact that people ignore it makes me sicker. We need a specific plan for how we can close that and I think increasing early education to get kids the same opportunities from the start and culturally relevant so students can pick up the tools they need to learn any culture are two of the most important ways. (getting better measurements of achievement is another...)

3. A careful examination of the assessment tools used to measure standards in American children and the research about assessment: Standardized tests are not a valid measure of what our students know. Time and again this gets proven and then ignored. Pay attention people. Other countries have come up with much more valid measures to test a child's achievement.

4. Easily available grants for teachers trying to get resources: I can understand people's fuss about money being wasted. I don't agree with the way money gets pulled from schools that are failing, but I get this want for accountability. How about instead the government offers a website like donorschoose that allows teachers to apply for resources they need to fix their classroom? I just talked to a middle school librarian tonight whose students are going to massacre him because the circulation in the library has doubled but there aren't enough books for the kids to read. That is a person trying to make a difference for good with his hands tied because of the wonderful backwards way our schools get funding.

5. Mandate a larger amount of school funding be state-wide and more of it be nationwide: I know schools have traditionally been locally run, but if we are held responsible to anyone outside of the local than someone outside of the local should be paying up. This one I am particular about since a local referendum failed at my high school. Schools in Illinois are funding by property taxes (many states are this way) since property values are linked to the quality of schools and keep the control city wide. The problem is we have Ethel here on a fixed income who owns some property. If she's on a fixed income she can't pay any more on her property just to keep the property value up- her income is FIXED. Make it an income tax and you are taxing the money people have to be able to give and are more likely to give it. This also closes the gap between the haves and have nots. Just because the city doesn't have a lot of money doesn't mean the students should suffer. It's already hard enough convincing students who live in down and out towns that they should take pride in where they came from.

6. Valid teacher accountability: If you don't perform on any job you get fired. For some reason teaching has gotten exempt from this rule. I get the purpose of this in colleges, so professors can calm down from the cutthroat competition and focus on more important issues, but in high school I should be held accountable for what I'm doing. Things such as evaluations, standards of continuing education, better national requirements are ways of holding teachers accountable. Comparing students' test scores is not.

7. Create more cross-curricular learning: Do you know how many times you have to hear a word before you learn it? I have it written down from some Dressman lecture, but it's a lot. And we want our teaching to be relevant to the students, but how often do you sit down outside of school and say I'm going to do some history and then some english and maybe a little chemistry experiment? We mold all of these into all of these fields. Math people write, and English people do math. Some of the most interesting work is in the fusion of various fields where we can really get to the crux of the problem from multiple angles. (And for the love of god- math and science are not the only fields in the world)

8. Stop trying to fix things in some schools rather than all schools: Sure we can bus a kid to another school, but what about the 1000 kids left at the school who don't want to get bussed because they won't know anyone anywhere else? Charter schools may work and vouchers may be turning around the system in DC, but those aren't solutions for my school that still has students who need to learn.

9. Class size nationally mandated: You want a positive mandate coming at the national level then make the class size a nationally mandated level at 25. I know the research shows that class size doesn't matter past a certain age, but it does matter when you are trying to create universal design and have to worry about 40 kids. 25 allows you personal time with all students. It's for the teachers' sake as much as anything.

10. This one isn't so much a policy change as a mind-set change: Recognizing that every student has the potential to change the world in a positive way, and our teachers have one of the greatest chances of influincing that as long as we can change the idea that education is for wimps and only bad things happen in our schools. (two different sides of the fence there, but equally damning.)

Can I get a "TRUE THAT!"?

cultural divide

One of my cousins in Dublin sent me a message via bebo this morning that read:

i'm thinking about coming over for a few months, i cant get a job for my placement n i think im gonna start lookin over there!!!

Hit me back...

So I responded:

you have to!

when would you come? (that's what she said)

And she wrote back:

thats what who said??? what are u talkin about??

Since I don't really believe that Americans actually get the perks that we so often broadcast about ourselves (i.e. all are created equal, land of opportunity, the American Dream), at least I can get excited about this perk of being an American: that's what [s]he said jokes.

Can I get some first amendment up in here?

I was at the library near my parents' this morning, getting some stuff done for work, and was unable to check through all my friends' blogs. I got this:

I got over that, but then when I wanted YouTube, I got:

What the F? What is this, censorship? Are not libraries supposed to be bastions of free speech? When I inquired, the librarian assured me that this was not usual, and that she really had no idea why these sites were blocked. She said they block things for kids on the library's own computers, but that adults and laptop users shouldn't have any filtering going on. Color me suspicious.

Call to Freedom

This is not a joke. This is an actual 7th grade social studies textbook.

I wish the sheen of the goldleaf had come out better on the scanner.
I'd be fucking pissed.

Seriously? What an interesting question!

Another thought-provoking one.

1 in 9

I think I'm going to be sick.

a bright idea!

Governor Schwarzenegger creates a new cabinet position in Cali, Secretary of Volunteering and Service? Um, awesome. The only downside is that now what you see below can no longer really be called "subversive citizen beach-cleaning."

Dear Guy-sitting-next-to-me-on-the-plane,

You have got to be kidding me.

You wanna know why I don't want to talk to you?

Well, just to name few reasons: (1) you made mention more than once of your desire to physically harm all hippies, all Yankees, any guy that wears a pink shirt, all persons from California, and all persons from Oklahoma; (2) one of your life goals is to "talk to every person in Texas" (What?); (3) you prefaced more than four statements with, "This is going to make me sound racist, but..."; (4) as you got drunker, you edged your legs and arms closer to me, until I, trying desperately to just not have to touch you, found myself plastered against the wall of the plane, which was I guess a good thing; because (5) if I had been taking up my whole seat, you would have spilled your glass of whiskey on me and not just on two-thirds of my seat; (6) you stared at me while I was reading my book, and asked me each time I underlined something or made a note why I was doing that; (7) you stared at me for minutes at a time while I watched a movie and yelled loudly at me "Why are you laughing at me?" every time I smiled at the movie; (8) you woke me up to ask me "Do you prefer Mandy or Amanda?" and when I replied, "I'm not sure what you're talking about," you heatedly responded, with your face an inch from mine despite my desperate attempts to back away, "Listen, Erin, I want to see you again. I like hanging out with you, and I want to see you next week."

I don't like "hanging out with you," and I don't want to see you next week.

Very sincerely,
Ellen

the battle cry of my generation:

"Don't tase me, bro!"

Seriously, if we had a "Remember the Alamo!" I think it would be "Don't tase me, bro!"

I mean, someone even re-mixed it:



Andrew wrote about this when it was actually new news. I think he's particularly poignant with his closing, "So be warned, young Americans, we may participate in the democratic process, but only for 45 seconds at a time."

Why am I writing about this now? Well first, a couple weeks ago I read this article for Campus Progress in which Tim Fernholz rips into journalist Courtney Martin for her article "The Problem with youth Activism" that blasts American college-aged activists for going about things all wrong.

"[Typical youth socio-political activism today] is sweetly collaborative, mainly focused on raising awareness among students, very keyed in to particular dates (Love Your Body Day, Earth Day, Black History Month), and most of all, safe," she writes.

He responds, "Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by 'the man.' We’re just not angry enough, she argues. But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs." And he goes on to chastise her for calling it "Youth Activism" when really she only addresses activists on college campuses (campi?). Nice point.

Last night, in a totally unrelated conversation, a friend of mine quoted, "Don't tase me, bro!" Since we all got the allusion, we laughed knowingly and moved on. It's some kind of joke. But come on. "Don't tase me bro!"?

As much as I think it's funny, re-watching the video this morning made me sad.They seriously tased him. And I can't understand how he was in the wrong. And nobody responded to his cries of, "Will somebody please help me!"

For young activists like us, this seems to be pretty quintessential The-Man-is-so-fucked-up. But then at the same time, for The Man, it's probably quintessential these-kids-are-morons. "Don't tase me bro!" What the fuck?

from the NY Times "The Geography of Hate"

See the accompanying article here.

(Click to enlarge.)

WTF

I leave town for just a few months and come back to find this most ridiculous display of tax-payers'-money-spending I've seen in a while.

I mean, come on. There are not words for this:

Didi : Ellen :: Jon Stewart : Rep. Jan Schakowsky

Funny, but I wish Stewart would have defended "the rappers" against Rep. Marsha Blackburn's remark (that she "finds it very, very sad that there has been such a societal failing that you would choose to write such filth") with a little more eloquence than a cut to clips from MTV's Cribs.

...It's comedy... "puppets making crank phone calls"... I know...

yikes

http://www.anti-war.us/gallery/gallery8.php

Although really, "would'nt" should be "wouldn't." I'm just saying...