two new things

Brittney Cooper is my favorite news commentator.

She spoke at the Y a few weeks ago, and they taped it, so I watched it.

Two (of the) things I learned from her:

(1) The sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline.  I knew that many, many people who are incarcerated -- especially women --- are survivors of sexual abuse, but I'd never heard that term before, and I think it's a brilliant way of naming that reality.  Naming is so important.

(2) The critique of intersectionality coming from scholars arguing for assemblage as a more helpful construct.  I don't exactly understand the distinction, but now I want to.

Also, at 59:30, she gets asked about the 2016 election, and the way she responds is so YEAH YEAH EXACTLY YEAH.

Radical motherhood.

When Dad was here last Sunday, he and I went with Anne to see Spotlight, the movie about The Boston Globe’s investigative reporting on rampant sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests – and the deliberate cover-up by powerful Catholic officials.

In that cloud of context, we drove home, and Anne ran some ideas by me for the prayer she was writing for that week’s coming Bible study.  Harry had invited Jeralynn Brown Blueford, whose son was killed by the police, to speak with us as we looked at the Biblical connections to Black Lives Matter.  (Ultimately, I wasn’t able to be there.  Ricky said it drew in a lot of people.  We’re looking for some place to resonate our griefs off of one another, I suppose.  And this badass mother – who could stand up and lead in that group.  Dang…)

Having lost a son herself, Anne wondered how she could both express solidarity with the mothers of so many sons murdered by the police but in no way claim to “understand what that feels like.”

Dad said (and Anne didn’t hear, so we didn't go on about it) that he could really see the connection there to Mary, another mother who lost a son.  

Such a good point, Dad.

Mary’s son was also executed within an unjust criminal justice system. The Sadducees, Jewish leaders themselves, often get blamed for Jesus’ death, but it seems to me to be more like men (ahem) scrambling for some semblance of power under the crushing weight of the self-evidently more (much more) powerful and oppressive Roman Empire.

(Police today are for sure a horrific part of the problem [and I’m afraid that this analogy might be anti-Semitic because of my pronounced ignorance about Jewish history], but White Supremacy has been the name of the game for a lot longer than the NYPD, and etc.  [As the Roman claim for dominion was certainly not Jewish-only antagonism.] Our country came to be under conditions not possible if not for those White guys’ already undeniable commitment to White supremacy.  It’s how we do.)

AND Mary was no naïve, whimpering victim.  No no.  Mary was our comrade.  Even at the very beginning of her pregnancy with Jesus, she boldly claimed that our God is a God who cares for the poor, the downtrodden.  She sings out: Our God is not a God who feels the need to assert that “Blue lives matter!”  Duh, they matter, but God’s immediate concern is not for those with the power to execute at will with impunity.  (God seeks and waits for them, gives unearned grace, and will rejoice at their turn toward God, but) God calls us to make the oppressors see that the lives of the oppressed matter (, too.).

And Mary said:  

“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors.”

I got an email from a dear friend recently who made a self-deprecating joke about her plan to be “a stay-at-home mom” next year.  Nuh-uh.

I like the model of motherhood that Mary offers us.  Mother as freedom fighter.  Motherhood as a liberation movement.  A couple days later I saw this piece on the shackling of pregnant women in prison – a piece published by MomsRising (!).

I’ve thought a lot about how God created us to be in family to help us to understand better, to give us some framework, for understanding God’s relationship with us.  God mothers us all.  (And God values the work associated with motherhood.  We're the ones who think it feminine and thus base or undignified or disempowering.)

Thinking about motherhood this way brought me back to one of the most compelling for me scenes in the passion.  Here’s John’s:

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” 

Comrades, here you are. 

My child, here is my child.   Go out, as you are called to do, and help to restore God’s order, God’s (social) justice.

Black lives matter to God.

God cares about all of us as, for example, we care about one another in our family relationships. 

God worries about the way that we’ve designed “race” as a powerful construct by which we move away from God’s justice, by which we forget or ignore that God calls us all God’s children.  All lives matter.

God worries especially about those of God’s children who are poor, who are murdered, who are silenced.

And God calls those of us who are squandering, who are murdering, who are silencing, to remember that God worries about us, too.  God will rejoice when we give up our shit, nurture our create-ivity, and sing together.  Yeah duh all lives matter. Seriously duuuhhhhhhh.

God mothers us all.  God watches Black people getting gunned-down again and again (and again and again).

AND, WITH SCREAMING URGENCY:

Black lives matter to God.

these obscene questions

Here's the thing.  Here's what it comes down to:

A White man does not get to call "obscene" an account, authored by a Black woman, of the emotional fallout of the ubiquity of sexual violence against girls and women.

A White man does not get to call a Black woman's hurt "obscene."

It's obscene for a man to censor women's unceasing trauma because that trauma is "obscene."  That trauma is perpetrated and perpetuated by men empowered by the very White supremacist patriarchy that also empowers this particular censoring White man.

did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establishimmediate cause
every three minutes
every five minute
severy ten minutes
every day.
-- Ntzoke Shange, from "with no immediate cause" 

7 x 70

I was struck particularly, yesterday as I rode the bus to work, by the difficulty of finding something new to say about "Martin's dream and look at us now... no better," etc.  And yet it's worth saying every year.  Worth it, but it feels fucking futile.

Reports of police murders of unarmed People of Color keep coming and keep being infuriating.  And we should keep marching.

Mass shootings keep on happening.  And every time we say, "What's it going to take?," and "Something has to be done," and we keep pointing out, and we should, how coverage of White shooters leans toward mental illness and coverage of violence committed by People of Color condemns "terrorists" and "thugs."  I'd love to hear someone on the news call for moderate White people to speak out against White supremacist extremists; but we always hear how moderate Muslims need to take a stand.  And we should keep being pissed and saying so.

Though it usually doesn't get much new coverage, men perpetrate violence against women at outrageous rates.  And actually, not often enough do we make a big ol' deal about that -- which is why this interview about the rape of a woman by a bunch of teens in a playground is so gratifying.

CNN newscaster: She was drunk, combative, and bit a police officer.  What would you say about that? 

Badass: I would say that that's typical.  That individuals often talk about the woman.  We rarely talk about the individuals who actually committed the rape.  Those are the individuals we should be focused on right now... We need to focus on those five individuals who committed this heinous crime.  And what were the bad decisions that they made all throughout the day?  Had they been drinking?  Had they been smoking?  What would put something in someone's mind to make them think that that was okay?

So mundane and so exhausting and then so fucked up for being mundane and exhausting.

(And I want to be really clear that as a White person, I by no means claim the kind of exhaustion that I might be party to had I not this White body that keeps me safe from the same kinds of danger that I'm railing against.  I'm in no danger of being gunned down by a police officer who thinks I'm dangerous just by the look of me.  What a privilege.)

I sat on the bus wondering what was the point of it all, and I was struck with remembering the time when one of the apostles is sick and tired of being sick and tired and asks Jesus, "How many times am I supposed to forgive these fools? Seven times?"  And Jesus says, "Seven times seventy times."  -- Which I have to believe is a Biblical way of saying what I might call "a thousand billion trillion million times." Because it seems like he's saying so many times.  And it's 986 people that were killed by the police last year.  And that's more than 490.

How many times do we have to notice on Dr. King Day that White (patriarchal, homophobic, capitalist) supremacy has what seems like an impossibly firm hold on our lives? A thousand billion trillion million times.

the soul felt its worth

"Long lay the world / in sin and error pining / 'til he appeared / and the soul felt its worth."

Still my favorite.  I cannot get enough of this song.  I even listen to the Christmas song radio session, suffering through the likes of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” in case they play “O Holy Night” next.

“The soul felt its worth”

I’m writing this from 30,000 feet, on my way home for Christmas.  As we took off, I noticed that I was terrified.  That’s typical for me except that last year, I remember feeling that if the plane crashed, I would really be okay with that.  No fear.  Whatever.

“Appeared” and “Felt”

Past tense.  I love that.  Jesus has already appeared, has already helped us to make sense of the worth of our souls.  Reminds me of the Magnificat, Mary’s prayer upon learning of her pregnancy.  She praises a God who has already brought justice to our world – an audacious and almost praise given the continuing injustices in her world and in ours.  Her past tense praise claims an absolute faith in God’s intention to keep God’s promise to us – that we are Good and that God wants to be with us and wants to work with us to bring us in to closer relationship with God.

Mary’s prayer reflects and moves beyond Hannah’s prayer on the occasion of her own conception of Samuel, centuries before Mary lived.  Hannah finishes her own past-tense praise with a reiteration of her faith in God’s promise to the people of Israel; Mary finishes her prayer with the assertion that God’s promise extends to all people.  I went on and on about this here.

And Mary’s and Hannah’s past-tense prayers are reflected in “O Holy Night,” written in 1847.  And Mariah Carey killed it in 1994.  I mean am I right or am I right.

“Long lay the world / in sin and error pining”

Laying versus pining.  One passive, the other more active.  Both demonstrations of hopelessness.

I talked with Theon recently about a sermon on waiting that he was working on.  So difficult, he said, because it doesn’t seem like a time to wait.  I know what he means.  Each time I hear about another atrocity committed against Black folks by the state.  They executed Mario Woods.  He raped thirteen Black women. I want the world to change right now.  I so identify with the compulsion to break some fucking windows.  But the way that change happens is so much more annoyingly slow than that.  And I don’t just mean generation-by-generation.  I mean that right now, organizing a protest means sending out emails ahead of time, making phone calls, strategizing about where and when – all activities that matter to be sure but don’t exactly quench the urge for intense emotional release.  Even attending the protest, shouting and marching.  It matters, but nothing changes in the moment of the marching.  We gotta wait. 

We gotta lay there in our “sin and error.”  Sin is such a blaaaaaghhh word.  Ron always asks us to understand “sin” as“missing the mark,” as inadequately demonstrating the Goodness that God created in us.  So yeah, I sin.  Sometimes intentionally – and sometimes accidentally, in “error.”  We just lay there.  I just go to bed and sleep for hours and hours because I don’t have the energy, physical or mental, to face the world.  The afternoon that I learned of my banishment from the prison, I left work early, went to bed, and didn’t get up until two days later.

But we also pine.  We do organize those protests.  I did meet with the warden and get myself back in.  Waiting is not essentially passive.  We can actively wait.

Theon used Romans’ acknowledgment of our groaning in his sermon.  When we groan, we lay there and we try to pine, but we can’t find the words, the energy, the effective strategies.  We try and yet sometimes all we can manage is to groan, and God hears our groaning.

“O Holy Night.” 

The darkness, it’s still holy.

Donna told me a couple of weeks ago, as I feared aloud that I could feel the lowness setting back in, that it could take over again: Use the hopelessness.  Write about it.  Let it teach you.

At Bible study this week, a year from my first time at Bible study, we read again the story that we read and I wrote about last year.  This year, what struck me was the genocide caused by Jesus’ entry into our world.  He appeared, and the soul felt its worth, and Herod had all of the Jewish baby boys slaughtered, and the mothers weeped.

We got a genocide, and we got a baby.  And we’re supposed to accept that the baby is it.  That’s so hard.  They keep killing Black people.  They keep raping women.  They keep demonizing immigrants.  They keep refusing refugees.  And we get a baby.

Sara from Bible study collected money last week so that we could send baby toys and some cards to women incarcerated in the private prison up the street.  They’re there because they’re either in the last months of their pregnancy or somewhere in the first three months of their babies’ lives.  I can’t imagine.  We get a baby, and we get an incarcerated mother.  I’m not okay with that.

But we gotta wait.  And he’s already appeared.

Audre Lorde

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence.  It is self-protection, and that is an act of political warfare."

Not gonna apologize for watching The Bachelorette.

Kasey and Eric visited!  And you know that they are good friends because we were able to be very real with one another about wanting to make dinner at home and watch the whole season of The Bachelorette.

That's true love. ( I mean, between me and them, not between them.  They wouldn't even let me throw them a surprise wedding.)

Mostly we just laughed so much because of things like the guy saying, "I see the world through the eyes of a child.  I have the heart of the warrior... And a gypsy's soul."  And talked about how much they say "connection."  And giggled about how we could replace connection with erection: Always with the, "My connection with Kaitlyn is so strong right now."

Okay, but.

So at the end of the third episode, which is really the second week they've been there, they're all at the pre-rose-ceremony cocktail party.  (Don't I feel ridiculous for that pre-rose-ceremony thing.  Whatever.  I'll watch shitty + patriarchal and racist TV.  I'm of this world, you know.)

Kupah, one of the three Black guys left after the first week, says to one of the other Black guys left that he hasn't really had any conversations with Kaitlyn, while it seems like other guys have had multiple.   He says, "I don't know what she sees in me," while he makes his eyes big like, "You know what I mean?" and gestures to his face.  It's like, "Checking in, is she into you?  Maybe she's not into Black guys..."

It cuts right to an interview with him where he says, "I don't want to be here any longer than I have to be if, IF, if I'm the minority guy that fills the quota."  He says he want to know if there's a "connection," soon, and if not, he needs to go home.

Makes sense to me.  Except the part about wanting to be there to participate in this horrible, bizarre process.

So when he gets a chance, he straight up asks her.  "Do we have a connection[/erection]?" As soon as he says it, her eyes widen, then narrow, and her mouth gets small.  "Do you think you've even put yourself out there?" Rhetorical question.  She's pissed.  She complains that she felt like he didn't even notice her on their group date that day.

Um, it's a fucking group date.  You're the only woman, and you're with a group of ostensibly straight dudes.  And you're on The Bachelorette.  And you're thinking that it's possible for any of them not to have noticed you?  Dumdum.

She's like, "You were so into boxing" (which is the date she took them on).  He's like, not really, but we were being trained by Leila Ali.  I mean, that's kinda cool.  The Leila Ali thing seemed lost on Kaitlyn.

She says she didn't know that he wasn't into boxing, and she swears that she would have never made him do that if she thought it would make him uncomfortable.

I call bullshit on that since all of the dates involve the guys making idiots of themselves, mostly by reappropriating various cultural practices from People of Color (e.g. a rap battle, Mariachi singing, sumo wrestling.)  -- That way, the jokes gets to be both on the guys who are inevitably shitty at what they're being asked to do and on People of Color for their weird ways.  Hilarious!

He says that this is the most fulfilling interaction with her, and he seems genuinely relieved to know that she's noticing him.  She's pissed, though. Arms crossed, leans back, crosses legs, and sits motionless.  Lips pouted out.  

He's trying to smooth over the situation, and he really seems like he thinks they've worked out that yes, she dates Black guys.  He says, "There are things that are unfortunate. There are some things that I have to think about.  I don't want to be here because I look good on the roster of men that you still keep around."  

Her jaw clenches. No blinking.

He's leaning forward, talking with his hands in a way that makes him look extremely eager to chalk this all up as a misunderstanding. Finally, he's like, "Why am I here?"

Shrug, eye-roll, shakes head, while she sputters something defensive about how I did like you.  And there's "nothing more to it." (She shoulda said, "I don't even see color!")

He's frustratingly forgiving: "No, I appreciate that.  I just, I didn't come here to waste anybody's time.  I mean, I totally didn't."  He tells her that when I saw her last season, he thought she was "a real person, like 100." (Hello, Black Language.)  

She interrupts, maybe not understanding that he's in the middle of complimenting her. "You thought?  Or you still think?"  She tells him that he "came out of the gates questioning" her.  Honestly, she tells him, "I felt a connection until right now."  She shifts head on her shoulders in a "na-na-na-na-poo-poo" way as she avoids eye contact with him until "right now." "I didn't know you questioned me so much." Calm, cold.  Stark contrast with his animated movements.  He's been working the facial expression: showing sincerity, surprise, vulnerability, concentration.  He's listening.  

He tells her he thinks it would be dope ( <-- a="" about="" alled="" and="" asks="" bl="" can="" do.="" e="" ended="" fist-bump="" he="" him="" href="http://democracychronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/obama-fist-bump.jpg" if="" it.="" more="" nbsp="" needs="" or="" pound="" she="" target="_blank" tells="" they="" think="" time="" to="" together.="" up="">by mainstream media

, traditionally in BL it's giving daps.)

He leaves her alone to think about it.  She vents to the camera, "Kupah has some questions, and he kinda questioned me, and it set me off."  Why does she think that she is above being asked questions?  He's not accusing her of anything, just asking if she likes him maybe a little.  But because he's asking it in the context of knowing that the show gets heat for not casting enough People of Color, it's perceived as an attack.  Classic example of White fragility.  (Of course, she's not necessarily conscious of this context, or of how it's informing his frustration or her response; doesn't make it less true.)

Cut to an interview with one of the other guys, a White guy.  He's explaining it to us: "When Kupah speaks, he sometimes doesn't filter." (Classic denigration of a BL speaker.)

Cut to Kupah processing the conversation.  He's telling the other guys how it went down: "She wasn't looking at me, like, she was looking down, which sucks, man.  I flew, like, 3,000 miles."  As he's talking, we get to see that she's overhearing.  When he gets to the part about her not looking at him, she gets up with purpose and strides over to him.  "You don't have a quiet voice, I'll tell you that." (White person dismaying that Black people are so loud? Check.) She walks up, arms swinging, grinning, "Can I talk to you for a second?"  Kupah and all the other guys are like, "Wah?"

Kaitlyn: "I can tell you're upset, so I wanna..." 

Kupah: "I'm not upset," 

Kaitlyn: "You're clearly upset."

She pulls him into a private room and tells him that he's gotta go home.  In a bold move, he takes a breath, looks at her, and says, "I don't want to go."  

Ka: "It's week one, and we're already in this position. Like, this is bad."  

Ku: "I don't think it's bad."  

Ka: "No I'm telling you it's bad."

Ku:  "I mean, I hear you, but I don't think it's bad.  I think that people need to figure things out.  I'd rather have this conversation with you now than have it in two months."

Now this is interesting.  As a woman who has a hard time holding boundaries with men, I admire her.  She's like, "Nah, I'm in charge of me."  But not really.  Because he's trying, it seems, to work out whether or not she's up for an interracial relationship, something worth talking about, and she doesn't get it.  She's definitely not comfortable with a Black man doing anything but flattering her.

Eventually, he acquiesces, and we get back to Kaitlyn's interview: "This is the first week, and it's the time to be positive, and get to know each other, and see the good, and the fact that Kupah just kept questioning me, and arguing with me... So I had to send him home."  

Kept questioning?  Kept arguing?  He asked if you had a "connection" or not.  And then he tried to explain why it mattered to him to know that, and you flipped your shit.  White folks have such a hard time listening to people of color express their experiences with racism.  She feels attacked, but objectively, she hasn't been. (I think the ol' "foot on my neck" metaphor is helpful here.  White supremacy keeps a foot on the neck of People of Color, and when People of Color are like, "Ouch," White supremacy is like, "Stop attacking me!")

Whenever somebody gets sent home, they interview them out in the driveway, and they say things like, "Dang it!" and "Best of luck!" So cut to Kupah in the driveway getting interviewed, and he's pissed.  "You already know I'm not a part of this thing, man.  I'm not about this thing.  This is bullshit."  He's shaking his head.  He's clearly talking directly to the crew, "I think that your process works for some people, like Jared and Cupcake, you know what I'm saying? But not me. So come on, man!"  That "You know what I'm saying?" Jared and Cupcake.  Two White-ass White guys.  This show is inherently racist, and he's looking for affirmation that he's not crazy for noting that a Black guy is not going to "win" the Bachelorette.  No such affirmation comes.  He "uggghhh"s loudly.

Cut back to Kaitlyn being interviewed.  She's turned around, though, biting her nails and looking out the windows, going, "Ohmygod! Ohmygod!"  Hands up in front of her face like she's scared, peeking out, eyes wide.

Kupah: "Just ask me the questions, and let me go home.  Please, please give me that.  Just ask me the questions, and let me go home."  His hands are out in supplication. "What? I'm upset that I didn't get a rose.  I'm upset she sent me home."  His eyes are rolling, and he's letting this all out like, "ohmygod what do I have to sayyyyyyyyyy to get you to leave me aloneeeeee!?"

Kaitlyn: Flashes a look of terror/rage at the crew, and says, "If he touches..." as she gets up and runs out to the driveway.

This shit is so hard to watch.  At this point, Kasey, Eric, and I are sitting at the kitchen table, stunned.  "A thesis could be written about this episode," Eric says.  

Kupah's intensely engaged with someone from the crew:  "I lose immediately.  Immediately, I lose.  I lose."  I want to know what he said before that, because I don't think he's talking about losing on this fucked up game show.  Not when he's in the middle of filming a situation that he has to know can and will be edited and framed for a White supremacist audience that fears for the safety of a pretty, innocent White woman involved with a scary, violent, hypersexual Black man (He kept on talking about how hot she is...).

The episode ends there, not as they usually do with a rose ceremony, thereby further heightening the drama of the moment.

The next episode opens with his loud "ugggghhh" from the last one.  Primitive dude, huh? (WTF.)

Kupah's pleas for the crew to get what they need from him and let him go are interspersed with various White guys calmly assessing the situation:

Ku: "I'm upset right now. You should know that."

WG: "Kupah's been having a hard time with the process." 

Ku: "Are you kidding me?"

WG:  "Kupah just needs to walk away."

Ku: "Just ask me the questions and let me go."

WG:  "Kupah just needs to let it go."

Ku: "I go home in three days.  Now I'm the Black dude who's a sucker."

It's so fucked up.  So hard to watch.  And the gaze of the show is urging us to conclude, like the rest of the cast, that Kupah is just so out of control wink wink angry Black man wink wink.  

Kaitlyn comes out into the driveway (presumably just after her, "If he touches..." Now what in the fuck indication has he given that he's going to hurt someone? Scary Black man.) She's walking gingerly, holding up the edge of her glimmering evening gown. 

Under his breath, he says, "Oh my god.  What the fuck."

Kaitlyn storms up: "I'm sorry, but I can hear you screaming from inside, and I just want to know what's going on."  

He's got one hand in his pocket, the other holding his drink. His head is down, and his ear is up so he can listen to her without looking at her.  

Ku: Takes a breath.  "Just give me a second.  I didn't know you were coming."

Ka: "Well ,I was in there doing an interview, and I could hear you yelling."

Ku: "Yeah, I was yelling.  I'm sorry about that."  

Ka: "No, don't put on a different act. What was that about?"

Ku: "It's not a different act."

Ka: "This is not right.  Don't get in other people's faces. I don't know what's going on, but I heard you yelling."

Now she's talking with her hands.  He's motionless.  I'm like, "Oh my gosh how the fuck is he being so fucking tactful right now."

Ka: "Just accept this because now you're creating this, this uncomfortable situation.  And nothing is going to change right now. Nothing."  Real condescending-like.  As if it seems to her that this Black man doesn't know that he's supposed to take his nationally-televised humiliation (not for being sent home, but for being made into a caricature) the way she wants him to. 

He's swaying a bit, looking away, like this can't last forever.  Then he stops moving, locks eyes with her, and goes, "I won't yell anymore.  I promise."

Then he smiles like this.  (It's a two-part smile.)

She sighs an "Okay," and walks away.  Immediately he whips his head to the left like this:

That's the best part.

The camera's on him, and he goes, "We're gonna whisper now! Whiiisper! Whisssper!"  Clearly, he's flipped to like, Ohhmygod this shit is ridiculous."  He says some other mostly intelligible, sexist shit, then he gets into the back of a minivan with his drink still in hand.

Cut to final interview with Kaitlyn on the subject.  She was angry, and then even more angry, she said.  And now she's sad.  And this morning she was happy because she has such a good group of guys.  But "when people walk out of here insulting me or questioning my intentions," that really kills her. (He never insulted her or questioned her intentions.  He did ask if she felt a connection with him.  Real stupid Bachelorette-y question, but neither an insult nor a dig at her intentions.)  

She's crying: "Sometimes you learn a lot about a person in thirty seconds.  That's the scary part about this, you know, like, that just came out of nowhere."

"Scary," that's the clincher for me.  That was "scary."  She had reason to be afraid.  Because a Black man made mention of the fact that it's possible that he was chosen for the cast in order to appease the critics who have been pointing out for years the lack of People of Color on the show.

--- 

THIS IS WHAT ANTI-BLACK RACISM LOOKS LIKE TODAY.  Soooo much of the time.  Nobody says the n-word.  Nobody even says, "race."

But there's not a whole lot different, ideologically-speaking, from the way that Kupah's story was told to the way that Emmett Till's story was told among White folks in Mississippi fifty years ago.  Black man is dangerous.  Black man wants to have sex with White woman.  White woman is scared.  Black man must be put in his place.  I certainly don't take lightly the differences in the ways that this ideology played out in practice in Kupah's case versus Emmett Till's case.  I'm just saying that we're not living in a fucking post-racial society.

---

Okay, I've just been wanting to tell someone about that.  I can't believe how much time I spent writing this.

I'm only watching Star Trek from now on.

filing

I came across Anita, a documentary about Anita Hill's 1991 testimony to Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of her.  I was only five then, so I don't have any memory of it, but I'd heard it alluded to.  I'm glad I watched it.

There's such an air of, "Ohmygod why are you making a big deal of nothing," to the footage.  Actually, beyond that, it's like: "You are fucking up our shit by bringing this up! We are White men trying to do right by bringing in a Black guy! Why won't you shut up?!"  Putting her testimony on trial? What? 

(Although watching Senator Hatch come after her was not unlike watching White folks in the media and in local governments attack the characters of the Black men and boys that their police have murdered.  For example.)

There's a scene in the documentary where she shows all the file cabinets in her basement, filled with correspondence she has received over the years.  She randomly pulls one and reads it aloud, a letter of sincere support.  Earlier though, she shares that she has one file cabinet full of insults and threats she's received.

My former principal shared her file with me once.  I only read some of its contents; an anonymous letter shaming her for not shh-ing Black families cheering for their children at graduation stands out in my memory.

I have a digital folder full of screenshots from this whole incident.

---

There's something about filing.  About collecting.  Does cool-headedly putting mean messages aside help to restore a sense of dignity?  Like, in my case, I'm like, "...Hm... Alright, ya fucking asshole.  Noted.  I'll just keep that. shit. right. here."

---

My Facebook feed, perhaps coincidentally/perhaps because August is approaching, has had a lot of stuff about teachers and depression on it lately.  Once I noted the trend, I bookmarked this one and this one.  I take issue with several of the things these dudes have to say, but I'm feeling the need to start filing teacher depression stories somewhere.

Chinese English

I’m not gonna keep working at the bridal shop when it’s not fun anymore.  I pray that it remains fun until it’s time for the next thing – paid prison work? Full-time seminary?  Some other strange thing that I get it in my head to do?

Lately, the best part of working there is getting to know better the head of the alterations department, a woman from Hong Kong who knows A WHOLE LOT about design, construction, tailoring, and running a business.  She’s super bossy, which is lucky for me, since I love bossy women. 

Also lucky for me is that she's bilingual, so my monolingual ass gets to enjoy some of her jokes.  I really love (in what I hope is not just an exoticising way, but which I’m really having to check) the chance to get more familiar with the grammar of Chinese English – particularly the phonology and syntax.  I really wish I knew more about Cantonese so that I could recognize the ways that Cantonese grammatical structures are mapping onto her dialect of English.

A Google search brought me here, and Amy Tan writes about her mother’s English in “Mother Tongue,” and for a class on race and rhetoric I audited last year, we read this, but otherwise I couldn’t find much.  Curious.  I’d heard that Black Language was the most studied dialect of English, but I didn’t know it was like that.

Makes me think about this. "What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?" Yeah.  --- But it's really different when it comes to Asian cultural practices.  There were certainly kids of all races who were into anime, but none of those kids were “popular.” Whatever that means – but you know and I know that it means something.  That's all I can think of.  Or maybe my unknowing participation in an anti-Asian ideology blinded me to Asian cultural practices my students were taking up.

We have a tradition of making Asian people the butt of jokes in our movies.  Here’s the classic example, but it’s not like we’re done with that shit. And maaaaaan were there anti-Asian racist jokes rampant on the campus of UIUC where the number of Chinese students has dramatically increased over the past decade.

Why isn’t there more written about Chinese English(es)?  (Or are my Googling skills lacking? Maybe it's called something else?) I’m more curious now about how anti-Asian racism, including linguistic discrimination, works.  It’s not as if White America’s addiction to reappropriating Black culture in any way protects Black people from racist violence of the physical, emotional, and cognitive persuasions. (Probably has something to do with the simultaneous shaming of Black Language and cultural practices – e.g. “aks a question”)

So perceived demonstration of Black cultural practices earns somebody social power (but not enough social power to avoid being murdered by the police), while the perceived demonstration of Asian cultural practices is laughably uncool (but affords some privilege of safety)?  I’m thinking “out loud” here.  And I’m stuck.