Schools, Schools, Schools: Part 1

We signed LB up.  She is officially a 6%er having gotten into her new school by lottery. It's a small community charter dual language school (they offer Spanish and Portuguese tracks, and she will be in the Spanish track). Our little unicorn baby.  I feel cautiously optimistic about our choice, but I can also see the messed up ways that our current distressed system of public education structured our choices. I like our neighborhood school a lot.  It offers some things that the charter does not: gym every day, a gym that can be used for indoor recesses, a big (if seriously rundown) facility, a stage, a community of people who live nearby.  But the way the system is structured, we can only choose the charter now.  And if it doesn't work out, we can go back to our neighborhood school, but we can't move the other way.  So LB will start out as a unicorn.

And the class and race dynamics: the school LB got into is a school White People Want (WPW).  As a district 80% of kids in Providence Public Schools are classified as low-income, and 91% are kids of color-although in terms of total population, Providence is slightly less than half white people.  Latinos make up the majority of kids in the district.  Our neighborhood school has long been both the blackest and whitest elementary school in the city, but lately has been drawing fewer white kids (although there are still plenty of white kids in the neighborhood) and more latino kids.  At least in Elementary, Providence schools work on an 80/20 formula.  To register your child, you go to the office in South Providence, take a number, sit in a spartan room full of rows of chairs, with a big sign that says "do not form a line, wait for your number to be called." When you go back into the office, you submit say yes or no to the lottery for the public (not charter) dual language option, and then you submit 3 ranked choices.  Your zoned school is established by your address, and zoned schools draw 80% of their students from their zone and 20% from out of zone.  As our zoned school has become less popular, the zoned spots don't usually fill.  It is all very complicated.  And schools don't seem to do a very good job of outreach (and clearly don't have resources to do a good job of outreach).

The result: the most desirable school among people we know is the other Eastside elementary that is out of our zone, and it's 40% white (likely the whitest public school in Providence).  Our neighborhood school is about 20% white, and I believe African American students make up the largest single racial demographic group-and I can't help but think that a rising percentage of African American students correlates with the school becoming less popular among white parents, although white parents don't say so.  LB's new school will be both highly diverse (majority latino, 25% white kids, 10% black kids, slightly majority low-income kids) and unrepresentative of the district.

Providence loses wealthy white families (WWF) (and I'd lump me and LB in that category even though the feds say we qualify as a low-mod family) at every point.  Demographically whites in the city skew older than other groups, so more elderly whites and more young latino families, white families move out to the suburbs to afford more house, to avoid city taxes, and to send their kids to suburban schools, the city has a strong culture of independent schools-so there are 5 independents and at least 3 religious schools within walking distance of my home.  Charters like LB's  are among the most racially balanced schools in the city, but they take more than their share of white kids and not-poor kids.

So here we are in a district with big, old, crumbling schools, full of poor kids, kids who are learning English, kids who have experienced trauma and dislocation (at my own work, I hear about life in wartime, refugee camps, families separated, from our high schoolers). And the kids have problems, but the problem is not the kids.  For reasons I still don't understand, the state pays RI cities less per pupil than it does in the suburbs.  And the money follows the student here, so charters pull more money away from urban schools with their fixed and expensive crumbling physical plants.

So what is diversity in a school system where most of the kids are low income and most are kids of color?  What moral responsibility do WWF have to stay in the system?  And what special sauce do WWF bring to the system?

I can see the ways that diversity benefits the high schoolers I know in Providence.  That diversity does not necessarily include WWF kids.  Instead kids who came here from the DR a few years ago, get really into KPOP and start learning Korean on the internet.  These kids are cosmopolitan in a way I certainly never was.

I don't like the cultural arguments that tell us in more or less veiled language that poor kids of color need to learn with white kids of privilege so that they can learn the cultural habits of whiteness and wealth, so they can get respectable, so that the rising tide will lift their boats.  But there are ways that being in proximity to wealth and power help people glean wealth and power (and by glean I do mean, collect the leftover bits after the harvest).

A school with more WWFs likely have more people who have easy access to lawyers, politicians, and high-level administrators.  When they complain about unequal funding formulas and rundown schools, their voices are amplified.  In the best case, access to power benefits all the kids in the system.  In reality, it often means more resources for the schools and programs used by WWFs, but even then perhaps there is a marginal benefit for all.  But if WWF bring resources, they are also remarkably good at segregating those resources for themselves and people like them.  The whitest and wealthiest school in our district is a neighborhood school-because it takes most of its students from the wealthiest and whitest neighborhood.  Other schools consolidate WWFs in "gifted programs" which are based on tests that measure a child's relative advantage in life.  And we have an exam high school, which is the last in the city to hold onto WWFs.

Without those opportunities to segregate resources, even fewer WWFs would stay in the system, and likely the system would be in even worse shape (and when WWFs leave for the suburbs they take their tax payments with them, and the district's per child money is for kids who enroll, so when kids go to independents, the public school system has to deal with its heavy sunk costs with even fewer dollars).

And the issue of public schools and individual morality: I don't think WWFs should be too quick to claim the high moral ground for choosing publics.  Most of us who do have a decent public option, as well as kids who are able to function within that option.  And I don't think moral responsibility requires us to keep our kids in a situation that is miserable.  I definitely judge parents who call out public schools as crap, rough, failing...without ever visiting those schools-and I think many of those judgements are based on evaluations of the race/class makeup of the school, and of WWF peer pressure.

But even as I have sympathy for parents who choose charters (that includes me) or independents or "better" publics, it troubles me to make the comparison between opting out of public schools and residential white flight in the 1950s through the 1970s.  When white people fled to the suburbs, some of them did so because they didn't want to have black neighbors, others feared the loss of value in their properties, some were moving for other reasons-to get a shiny new house, to be close to family.  But in the end it didn't really matter whether WWFs moved because of racist motivations, mixed motivations, or motivations unrelated to race, what mattered was that most of the white families left and they took everything of value that they could carry, and that loss of white wealth massively destabilized american cities.

And also helped created our underfunded urban schools (my school historian friend tells me that before the 1960s, urban schools were the best and best funded in the nation).  When we act as individuals, we are also acting as a group.  That collective action has power beyond our seemingly individual act.  Even if our individual action is based on motivations other than race, if the collective result of our individual actions perpetuates and increases the inequality in a society structured by racial inequality, then the effect of our individual action is to perpetuate racism.

Sometimes

"Did you know that sometimes people are mean to other people just because those people have brown skin?"
"I have light skin, like Elsa! Mama has light skin.  Mommy has light skin.  L has brown skin. M has brown skin. C has brown skin. Miss T has brown skin.  Miss J has brown skin.  Lots of people have brown skin."
"Do you know that sometimes people with light skin hurt people with brown skin, just because they have brown skin?"
"That's mean. You can't hit someone because they have brown skin.  If someone hits me I say "NO!" and if they don't stop I tell the teacher. It's not nice to hit."
"You're right Lovie, I'm glad you know all that."

Or does it explode

My facebook feed has been full of two streams: anxious anticipation of the Supreme Court's hearing of a challenge to state bans on gay marriage.  This morning brings two and half hours of oral argument.  The best place to follow the action is always SCOTUS blog, and they have helpfully included some "in plain English" coverage.  Check it out here.http://www.scotusblog.com/

The other stream is the Baltimore protests/riots/uprising/as well as some kids being kids.  While I don't think of the Baltimore Sun as the best newspaper around, their coverage of present events includes important details not covered in national outlets.  The Sun has made all of their coverage freely available and it also includes timelines of the death of Freddie Gray and investigative coverage of the 5.7 million dollars the Baltimore Police Department has quietly paid out since 2011 for beating and otherwise brutalizing the citizenry of Baltimore. And if you want to know what that brutality looks like on the ground, check out Conor Friederdorf's article in the Atlantic, "The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore."

If you're looking for some analysis, Ta-Nehisi Coates does it again with his article "Nonviolence as Compliance." If you are watching coverage of the Baltimore protests on CNN and you're horrified and you are telling the tv "you're doing it wrong!" "why are you destroying your own city!" (I'm not even going to touch the "they are all animals!" commentary) then this article is a must read.

If like me, you feel like you're trapped in the way back machine, you can check out the Kerner Report, commissioned by LBJ in 1967 to explore the causes of riots (Watts, Newark, etc.) it was released shortly before the massive nationwide riots after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. The famous quote from the report is "Our Nation is moving toward two societies-one black, one white-seperate and unequal." There is a lot of video of the 1968 riots available online-the most interesting thing about these videos is, once you get past seeing armed troops on the streets of an American city, they are boring.  Most of what happens is people standing in the street.  This video does illustrate the role the 1968 Baltimore riot played in the mass incarceration of black men that now decimates cities like Baltimore.  If you look at arrest rates by race historically, 1968 shows a huge bump that just keeps rising over the following decades.  Here's some NPR coverage from 2008 on the 1968 riots and their aftermath.

Baltimore's the only city where I've felt so freaked out walking that I turned around and went back.  And that was after years spent traversing the South Side of Chicago.  Baltimore just has such a high percentage of busted/broken/non-functional compared to the parts that do work. Despite that I've spent a good amount of time in parts of Baltimore where white ladies don't usually go, and, as is my usual experience, people have always been good to me.  Shortly before I left Baltimore for good, I was walking a group of my students through a historic old black neighborhood in Baltimore, telling the history through the architecture.  Looking at abandoned buildings, an open middle school with its huge windows thrown open and no screens, the few limping businesses.  A neighborhood still filled with apple and cherry blossoms. Wondering what the Dean would say if anything bad happened.  Nothing happened.

My Baltimore was filled with love and threat and suffering.  Filled with the friendly and loving people, who could not fix the crumbling infastructure, the massive disinvestment.  Baltimore is a colonial outpost where the wealthy extract what they can-the University studies the local population, where strong young men go to prison to work for free.  Baltimore is the most civic-minded place I have ever lived, where local people know that if you want something done you have to get your neighbors together and do it, because the city will never show up to help.  My Baltimore was one of compassion fatigue, where every educator, health care worker, law enforcement officer created a hard shell to survive in the face of so much suffering-and so did I.

B and I were once driving through some shitty neighborhood in East Baltimore-not the one that looks like London after the Blitz, a different one, with people.  I was in the passenger seat fiddling with the ipod as B pulled up to a light.  I looked out the car window and a young Black man caught my eye. As he looked a me, he moved toward the car reaching.  I looked at him and my arm moved to hit the lock on the car door.  He drew his hand back and laughed, and I laughed.  We had both played our parts pitch perfect, the way we were born to do.

Violence isn't the answer, but neither is peace.  When I see the young people of Baltimore throwing rocks, I see Palestinian children, I see the children of northern Ireland.  When you've got nothing, when you'll never have anything, when your only recourse is to gather the gleanings of the wealthy and powerful, you pick up a rock.

We are all bound together in this world.  I hope for a Supreme Court ruling that will be LGBTQ people closer to equality-closer to fundamental protections for our families and our bodies.  But even as we get more, we must remember that we are still "the least of these." Our strength as LGBTQ people is that we are a cross section of everyone.  We are rich and poor, people of all races and religions, of all genders, of all political orientations.  Our shared oppression, throughout history and in the present, can have meaning if it makes us more empathetic and compassionate to the suffering of others.  We are all bound together and our victories only have meaning if they make the world more just, more equal for all people.

Trigger Warning

For the past little while, academics have been getting snarky about trigger warnings.  Exhibit A is Laurie Essig's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education linked here.  Essig complains "It was my duty, apparently, to make sure no one was ever disturbed by my class." And she's also pissed that students didn't laugh at her Abu Ghraib joke.  Around the same time, Oberlin released institutional guidelines about classroom materials that should have a warning, and then backed down on those guidelines: coverage here.

As a college lecturer for some number of years, I do understand faculty discontent on the subject.  Faculty meetings, random service, mentoring, prep, research, incomprehensible administration, and then you have an 18 year old complaining that you're a jerk because you taught standard texts in your field.  It's understandably a "how long was I in school and how much debt did I rack up for this?" moment.

That said, I think I'm with the students on this one.  I've taught many classes about horrifying topics, and I've never had a student complain about the way I presented those materials.  I've rarely censored my choices (I thought about assigning the novel Precious one semester, but decided I just couldn't stomach it).  Instead, my classes are generally one long trigger warning-that is an extended meditation on what it means to read and think about painful topics.  

One the first day of class, I usually talk about how personally painful it can be to study topics like racial discrimination and violence.  How, as a scholar, I find the need to balance empathy with the people I study (trying to imagine what they thought and felt) with the protective qualities of intellectualizing when feeling the pain of my research starts to weigh on me.  I encourage my students to both try and feel what they study at an emotional level, and understand that sometimes, particularly in heated classroom discussion, they need to set that emotion aside and speak from the head.

Texts and topics I've warned my students about reading include, but are not limited to: Native American genocide and removal, anti-gay propaganda, Lincoln's speeches, Civil War poetry, lynchings, most topics in African American history, the books Native Son, The Street, The Women of Brewster Place, and Narrative of Frederick Douglass.  As I've grown as a teacher, I've done more work to prepare students to engage with the painful themes in these texts.

I don't necessarily seek to protect my students from pain, rather I want to prepare them to sit with that pain.  I want to encourage them to develop a radical empathy.  For me, that is the point to teaching history to future doctors, teachers, government officials, and lawyers.   I encourage my students to see history as a discipline that teaches humility, as we see very smart, well intentioned people make choices that sometimes have terrible unintended consequences.  As we study history, we have the privilege of see the past from multiple points of view, and understanding history from the point of view of historical losers can teach us empathy.  I hope that those perspectives with make my students more complex and compassionate thinkers in their professional and personal lives.  

I like to think that my students have been willing to engage with difficult materials because I've made my classrooms a place where that discussion is always on the table.  I can't fix the individual traumas that my student bring the classroom, but I can make my classroom a reasonably safe place to wrestle with pain.  In one of my first years teaching, I assigned a group of students to watch a viciously anti-gay propaganda video and analyze if for the class.  None of those poor gaybies complained, but if they had they would have been right.  Not that I had given the assignment, but that I hadn't given them any preparation for what they were about to see and what they should do with their feelings.  I came to my own realization of my error after seeing their presentation about the video, and it changed the way I taught.

For me, the point is to channel students' pain as they encounter painful subjects into reflection.  There are students who will not be able to engage with some materials because they bring experiences that make that engagement too difficult.  Now, if a student is unable to engage with topics of racial violence and discrimination, they probably should not take an African American history class, but if they don't want to look at a lynching photo (which has happened) or don't want to read a chapter in book with a rape scene, that is not a problem for me as an instructor.  It's easy enough for me to find work arounds for those students.  I think the most problematic issue with trigger warnings, is that they may discount the everyday triggers that people with PTSD or other trauma disorders may experience, and they reduce and simplify the complexities of trauma.  And, there is little I can do protect students from those everyday triggers.  

“You know what’s worse than images of torture? Being tortured.”   That was Laura Essig's Abu Gharib joke.  I think that some of the young professors who are most dismissive of trigger warnings are operating under a very old school model of education.  If one chooses to pour knowledge into students, who am I to say that's wrong, but professors in that mode need to expect push back.  Student have been actively fighting to engage in the classroom since sometime before, say, 1968, and I see the current discussion of trigger warning as an extension of that fight to be in a conversation with faculty.  Personally, I don't particularly want to encourage students to see terrible images and then "put on their big girl panties" and push their emotions away.  I want them to be moved and horrified, and to say "a person did that to another person."  That's the lesson of history.  If they don't like what I assign.  If they think my class is turning into trauma tourism.  If they think I'm too glib or the text don't add to their knowledge, I want them to say that--preferably in class and to my face--so that we can have a discussion about it.  At the beginning of each semester, I tell my students that our class is now an intellectual community.  We need each other, we learn from each other, and that's why I require attendance.  If I truly expect students to contribute to the classroom, I also need to be prepared for their critiques of me.  That's not to say that I will always find those critiques compelling, but I do need to engage with them.

[Aside: A story from an older faculty member: he was teaching at a big state school in the late 1960s.  One day in a big lecture class a hippie girl raised her hand and he called on her.  She said, "This class is a bunch of bull and you are totally out of touch man! " He replied: "Young lady, if you are going to say something like that you need not raise your hand first."]

In closing: the kids are alright.

Karl hates Thomas: in honor of International Workers Day

May 1 came and went here with a lot of labor, but not a lot of celebration.  But I didn't come here to talk about my May Day, I came here to complain about Thomas the Train.  LB became obsessed with this show (from chatter at daycare maybe?) a few months ago.  She loves some Thomas.  At first I didn't mind, after all it's got to better than whatever Sparkly Fairy Disney Princess Barbie Pink Craptacular little girls are supposed to be watching.  But there's the Thomas theme song with its inevitable earworm, and there's the oversensitive and whiny trains who can't let even the littlest slight just roll of their train backs.  Dislike.

Then there's the maleness and whiteness of Thomas.  Emily is now the token lady train, and all the bosses and conductors are men.  Then there's the whiteness.  Of the human characters, I've seen a black mayor have a bit part (in our racial TV taxonomy, he should have been Prime Minister or King, because surely if you have a show with a black King you can't be racist).  And maybe there is one black conductor?  I haven't been able to force myself to watch closely enough to be sure.  Perhaps this whiteness is supposed to harken back to the historical moment when railroads mattered (and I'll get to why, if that is so, it also sucks)?  But really, this is a show about talking trains, surely historical white supremacy isn't the detailed realism to which the creators need to cling?  In addition to the human characters, I also think the trains are meant to read white (their "faces" are grey). See my previous musings on the "race" of non-human characters in kids books here.]  [And see Bionics additional info about race and trains on Thomas in the comments, clearly I shouldn't be as annoyed as I am because I've been tuning out a lot of the show.]

Why can't the trains and humans on Thomas represent the racial realities of modern Britain.  And I don't mean that there need to be normal trains and then a Jamaican-Me-Crazy-Jar-Jar-Binks train.  How hard would it be to have train faces and humans in a variety of hues with a variety of non-stereotyped accents?

But maybe the racial representations of Thomas are just a nod to an imagined Industrial Revolution utopia, and if so-dislike.  I can't seem to find my copy of the Making of the English Working Class, but I can remember the vivid description of scrawny children sent into the mines, kept half-naked in darkness for 12 or 18 hours only to emerge like scrawny, blinded little moles.  And there are the children in Sweetness and Power, raised on sugar water, cheap treacle, and bakery bread as their mothers worked long hours in the factories.  And that my friends is your bedtime story about the Industrial Revolution.  Feel free to thank me for excluding details about industrial scalpings and limb loss.

If Thomas is visually a celebration of early capitalism, its message is a celebration of late capitalism.  I opened my Marx-Engels Reader to this passage: "Rather it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso...."  A page later Marx goes on to say that in this context "the worker appears as superfluous."  Like Thomas, perhaps, where there are owners and managers and machines, but no workers of the kind that gets dirty-no one who develops lung problems from breathing coal dust, or a bad back from shoveling coals, or losses a leg under a train wheel.  And in this world of bosses and machines and work, no one ever goes home.  There are no "8 hours for what you will."  For the trains work is self, and the workers who make trains go are invisible.

Luckily for LB, I don't think Thomas will warp her view of the value of workers than The Little Rabbit with Red Wings warped my view of the value of individuality.  And for better or worse, I'll make sure to provide plenty of indoctrination about the value of workers.

Christopher Robin is white, and some African American children's books that should be classics

Most people trace the beginnings of African America children's literature to the activism and art of the Civil Rights Movement.  Books like The Snowy Day (1962) and Corduroy (1968) brought young black protagonists into the mainstream of American picture books.

However, before the 1960s there was a small and lovely body of African American children's books.  The first of these books came from small Black-owned publishing houses, while later books were published by the big white-owned firms (and written illustrated both by black and by white artists), sometimes with financial subsidies from foundations committed to interracial understanding and to African American education.

The books below present some challenges for present-day readers.  Some have a scene, a theme, or an illustration that would be considered problematic by most teachers and librarians.  Arna Bontemps, Sad-Faced Boy has one in scene in which the African American boys in the story kidnap a little white boy and dress him up in blackface.  I don't mind having it in LB's collection, we'll just talk about it, like we'll talk about blackface in the Little House books, but I can understand why an educator would think it inappropriate for a children's collection.  Rowena, Teena, Tot is a very cute story, but it includes an illustration of a little boy eating a huge leg of chicken and African American women with old-fashioned kerchiefs on their heads-racially stereotypical images that Black librarians weren't entirely comfortable with even in the 1930s.

These books were created in a world where the vast majority of books featuring Black children were viciously racist.  Black child characters were almost always stupid, cowardly, supersticious, subservient, and ugly.  Against that backdrop, the books below are beautiful and life affirming

Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, Popo and Fifina (1932).  Aren't these illustrations beautiful!  I'm not sure all editions have these illustration.  Bontemps and Hughes often complained about getting stuck with illustrators who did not know how to draw beautiful black children.

Arna Bontemps, Sad-Faced Boy (1937).  Three boys from the rural south runaway to Harlem.  I love this book, it is such a fun story.

Arna Bontemps, Sad-Faced Boy (1937).  Bontemps (and Hughes) were always short of money, and kept a little bit coming in with their juvenile titles.

Fannie Blumberg, Rowena, Teena, and Tot and the Runaway Turkey (1936).  I love some of the illustrations in this book, although as I said above, some are racist by today's standards.

Eva Knox Evans, Araminta's Goat (1938)  Evans also wrote the Jerome Anthony series.  These are just nice fun books.  If I remember correctly Evans was a teacher and wanted to provide books about the everyday lives of Black children, similar to the existing books for white children.

Ellen Tarry, Hezekiah Horton (1942).  A story about a car-crazy boy in Harlem.

Marguerite de Angeli, Bright April, 1946.  Most of the other books included in the post take place in all-African American communities.  Bright April is one of the first books for kids that shows interracial friendship and racial prejudice.

In the 1930s, when these books began to be published, Black educators (and white fellow-travelers) were concerned that Black children would learn to hate books if they continually saw negative representations of Black people in books (if books lied to them).  (In his New York Times piece, Walter Dean Myers shares his own experience of hating books that didn't represent his experience.) They also worried that Black children were being denied a cultural heritage-finding a history in which they were either absent or slaves.  Despite the statistically sad state of African American children's books, Black children can find some books in which they are represented in positive ways.  But despite the fact that a lot has changed in 100 years, Black children are still being denied a literary heritage of their own. 

Racial Rabbits and Other Problems in Multicultural Kid's Lit

[Following up on my previous post here, with more obscure questions.] In 1959, Alabama sought to ban The Rabbits' Wedding from public libraries because of it's celebration of interracial (rabbit) marriages.  True story.  Here's a little more about the librarian who sought to keep the book on the shelves.

Even in 1959, the effort to ban The Rabbits' Wedding was supported only by the harder edges of the  segregationist fringe.  But the incident raises an interesting question, do animals in children's literature have race?  Or maybe the question is, do child readers perceive animals to have race?

Of course in naturalistic portrayals of animals in animal habitats, race as a human construction is irrelevant.  Then there are books like the Arthur series in which some of the highly anthropomorphized characters have distinct racial/ethnic/religious identities.  These identities are signaled primarily through a limited set of distinctive cultural practices, so the reader knows that the Brain is African American because he celebrates Kwanza and Francine is Jewish because she celebrates Hanukkah and attends a bar mitzvah.

But what is Arthur's race?  Like most of the characters in the series, aside from the very white Buster, most of the characters are some shade of brown.  Does that make Arthur a character of color?  Do characters that don't signal cultural practices or language associated with a particular race or ethnicity leave child readers a space to ascribe or not ascribe a race to the character as they see fit.  Or does Arthur  represent a normative whiteness-a race that need not speak its name?  Or maybe Arthur just represents normative middle-classness without representing any particular race.

Who creates the race of anthropomorphized animals?  Maybe an animals race is in the creator (author and/or illustrator) or maybe it's in the reader-like those people so offended by and a black rabbit and a white rabbit joined in Holy matrimony. 

I'd love to know what young readers think.   B may have gently suggested that they would think I was a little bit crazy. 

More on some African American children's books that should be classics here.

In the News: Multicultural Children's Lit

Today's New York Times brought two editorial about the dearth of children's books about people of color,  "Where are the People of Color in Children's Books" and  "The Apartheid of Children's Literature." The authors have different approaches to the topic, but both agree that lack of representation of children of color presents problems for those who aren't represented in books and for those who never encounter people different from themselves in books.

We live in a small New England city that is now a majority minority city.  For LB, that diversity is normal in her everyday life, but I've realized that diversity isn't as normal for her in books.  Aside from Dora, Black and Brown characters are unusual enough that she will point them them out and ask if they are related to one of the Black or Brown kids she knows in real life.  At three LB has internalized the idea that white people are the norm in books and people of color are the exception.

Apparently it's not just us, the Times states that only 93 of 3200 children's books published in 2013 were about African Americans, city a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at Madison.  You can find the study here.

I've always thought our book collection was pretty diverse, but it's about to get EVEN MORE DIVERSE.  It should not be so hard to find kids books featuring people of color, and it's frustrating how quickly the books that do get published go out of print, but their are some good options out there.  Below are some books that we already have and others that I am ordering now.

This was my favorite new book of 2013.  It's a family story from the 3rd Great Migration with lovely illustrations.

I think these Lola books are super cute, and address issues of interest to LB (we met a support dog named Fletcher at the library this weekend and got to read with him).

 Rachel Isadora does a lot of nice books.  I particularly like this one:

I Can Do It Too! is a very compelling message for LB these days.

There are quite a few Civil Rights Era-related kids books out there.  The book about Claudette Colvin in one of my favorites, but too old for LB, so I'm taking a chance and ordering this book.

More to come about some of the multicultural kids books that should still be in print.  And if anyone has suggestions for other books, I'd love to hear them.

Can I be "an Indian" for Halloween?

For me, the clear answer is "Oh fuck no!"  I need to come up with a response for the younger set.  I've been struggling for a more toddler-appropriate phrase that expresses the sentiment "you are shit out of luck."  So far, nothing seems quite satisfactory.

This page of monstrosities comes to us from the monstrosity that is the Chasing Fireflies company (I'm not even going to link to them).  If you aren't familiar with CF, they seem to specialize in sparkle/fairy/princess of the something-about-that-outfit-seems-inappropriately-sexualized variety.  But, at least I know if I need to buy LB a costume befitting a child prostitute in a 19th century bordello, CF will be there for me.  Maybe they can get Brook Shields to design a Pretty Baby line of costumes.

Until LB is old enough to earn her own money and sneak out of the house with her party clothes in a bag she will not be dressing as "a Native American," "a Black," "a Jew," "a Chinese," or any other racial or ethnic group.  Not surprisingly, CF seems to have missed the memo on the Urban Outfitters "Navaho" underpants controversy.

My family has a lot of pictures from back in the day of little kids in "Indian" costumes.  One of my great uncles was a proud member of the Order of Red Men (there was a Red Men lodge in our old neighborhood in Baltimore), and he was also the direct descendent of an Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) woman.  It's so interesting to think of this man who had lost the Haudenosaunee part of his cultural heritage and then embraced a white faux indian-ness.  So if perfectly nice people dressed up as "Indians" as children and remained perfectly nice, and if people of indigenous heritage participated in fake "Indian" culture, then can it be so wrong?  What if a white woman is invited to a South Asian wedding, is it racist for her to wear a sari?  What if a black man is invited to a Scottish wedding, is it racist for him to wear a kilt?  [These examples are plucked from some of my favorite cultural commentators.]

To which I would reply: A) Try holding your breathe until your Navaho "best friend" offers you some sacred garments to wear as your Halloween costume.

B) For me, the question is do I want to make other people feel demeaned or disrespected over a costume, when there are an infinite number of alternatives that would not be demeaning or disrespectful.  People have a wide range of opinions, and certainly there are people from all groups that wouldn't be offended by this sort of dressing up, but I wouldn't want to have to look someone in the eye who was offended and explain myself.  And clearly cultural boundaries aren't absolute.  We cross and mix and borrow constantly, but that borrowing should be a conscious choice, not the perception that another person or their culture is a thing that can be purchased and discarded.

The Word that Shall Not Be Spoken

There's one word I heard a lot this week that I will not type for fear that it has some Voldemort-type properties.  There was also a lot of online conversation about the lines between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation, like this piece on Jezebel (interesting links and comments also), and this piece on Slate.  The author of the Slate article, Tressie McMillian Cottom, also wrote this academic looking article about Country, Hip Hop crossover and representations of black women's bodies.  I haven't read it yet, but it looks really interesting and hopefully it will answer so many questions that I've been kicking around as I listen to the country station.

At our house, M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" has been in heavy rotation at our house (LB says "Play again? Play again?"), a year after everyone else.  When it came out, the video for the song was heavily critiqued for its orientalist imagery.  Here's a nice balanced discussion.  Video aside, M.I.A. is ethnically Tamil, Sri Lankan, raised largely in London performing music rooted in Black America.  And she does it well.  So does M.I.A. have credibility because she's good, because she's not performing class, because her body is covered, because she is brown? (I'm not even trying to have answers to all those questions.)

And then there's this monstrosity (below).  I think what I said when I watched this with B was "is this performance art or something."  I don't even understand how Lil' Debbie manages to fit so many offensive images into one video, but she does.  I need to keep this one on file for future exhibit As about race, gender, sexuality, and cultural appropriation.

More than a Dream: March on Washington Resources

I'm wishing I was in D.C. for all the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington festivities, although I don't know if I would have braved the train trip from Baltimore to DC alone with LB.  I have a love hate relationship with the March.  It is such a cool and moving historical event.  So why hate?  King's "I Have a Dream" speech (with a little Rosa Parks feet were tired thrown in) is the sum total of instruction in African American history for many kids and youth in this country.  And by the time those young people show up in my classroom, they're pissed, and rightly so, that no one bothered to talk to them about the richness and complexity of the Black freedom struggle.  [So here's a little Robert F. Williams, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Bob Moses, and a lot of Black Panther coverage.]

I've listened to this Footage of Mahalia Jackson singing "How I Got Over" at The March about ten times, and LB has been dancing to it.  And a version with better audio quality here.

Cool footage from the National Archives, which includes Odetta's performance. (This is a restored copy of the documentary The March produced in 1963, and it includes King's speech.)

King's full speech,  and why it's hard to find free full video.

Eyes on the Prize, March on Washington clip from youtube.

NPR has had some great coverage of the anniversary, including this nice piece about Bayard Rustin.

They could have developed it more, but I still like this piece from The Root on fashions of the March.

The NYTimes has made their original coverage available here, as well as some lovely photos, and memories from attendees.

Planning documents from 1963 for "How to Organize a March" via Slate.

Bob Dylan performing here. This is a fun clip because Dylan looks like what my mom would call "a hood," and the audience is milling around and looking bored until Joan Baez and Len Chandler jump in for "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize."

Lesson plans from PBS.

And of course, to keep it kind of gay, netflix has a good documentary, Brother Outsider, about Bayard Rustin, March organizer who was pushed out of a public role in the Movement both because he was gay and because of his long leftist political ties. You can read a piece on Rustin here at Buzzfeed, and here's Rustin debating Malcolm X (Rustin first appears at about 1.15).  (Rustin was a committed pacifist who had gone to jail for refusing to serve during WWII.)

I'm hoping there will be some TV coverage as well. LB got sick as soon as B left for the weekend, so I need to get off the blogs and hold my sick girl.

Talking about Terrible Things (with young people)

I read this post, "When do we teach our kids about hate," over at VillageQ with interest.  Historical hate is pretty much my bread and butter.  Today I spent a couple hours researching the derivation of an antiquated used racial slur.  And as a teacher, a big part of my job has been introducing students to terrible events in history.

So maybe I should be pro-"teach all the hate and teach it now."  I remember as a little girl growing up in New Hampshire, meeting another little (brown) girl on the beach and playing with her.  She told me that she was afraid of the Ku Klux Klan, who were bad men who would come out of the woods.  I wasn't afraid because that had no meaning for me.  So there's the problem of telling children things that will make them afraid.  In some situations fear can be protective, but if your children aren't in danger, perhaps they can be spared that fear.

But as we teach our children only the fears closest to them, fear becomes an unequal burden.  Some children need to know that when you hear a loud noise you hit the floor, and others don't.  Some children need to hear that "sometimes people don't like people who are different and want to hurt them," while for other children that lesson feels as irrelevant as the Klan was to my eight-year-old self.

The fear issue is a big one, but, for me, I think the larger issue is one of honesty.  I'm all for honesty, but I don't think honesty means telling kids a lot at a young age, rather I think it requires waiting for a pretty high level of emotional and intellectual maturity before discussing really difficult topics.  When we try to explain terrible things to young people who aren't able to comprehend them, our instincts to remove the brutality and despair are so strong that we end up telling a dishonest version.  Or we tell a story that kids can understand in the way that they would understand a horror movie, but not on a deeper level.

I suppose there are people who teach college courses without crying.  I am not one of them.  And I'm not alone.  I've been in a lot of classrooms with crying professors, and I think for many of us that is a deliberate vulnerability among those who teach difficult subjects.  If you can look at the photos from Without Sanctuary, or watch children being deliberately attacked with police dogs without crying maybe you're not fully understanding that this is what real people chose to do to other real people.  That's a devastating lesson.  It may never be fully understandable, but to even begin to comprehend requires some time on this earth.

And having said that, sometimes life catches us and we have to have conversations our kids aren't ready for.  I can understand why a black parent in Chicago in 1955 would send her child to view the body of Emmett Till.  The horror of that viewing was burned into the minds of a generation, and they turned it into action.  I'm more likely to have to explain to LB why there are small children holding "God hates fags!" signs.  Hopefully by the time she can read I'll have a better answer than "haters gonna hate."

Awkward Conversations with Toddlers about Race: Hanna Anderson Edition

After my recent posts about white kids and race, LB decided to give me some additional content.

Imagine the scene: two white ladies relaxing with microbrews (LB doesn't partake, but she does run over with her sippy cup and yell "CHEERS"), listening to The Clash, and reading the new Hanna Anderson catalog.

Eventually LB decided she wanted to see the catalog and immediately pointed to one little girl:

LB: "That Amy! That Amy!" (not her real name).
Mary: "No, that's not Amy."
LB: "THAT AMY!"
Mary: "That little girl has brown skin like Amy, and curly brown hair like Amy.  Does she look like Amy?"
LB: "AMY!"
Mary: "She's not Amy, but she has brown skin and brown hair like Amy."  "Is Amy your friend?"
LB: "Amy fwiend!  Amy nice! Elmo fwiend!  Kittycat fwiend!"
Mary: "Who does that look like (pointing to a redhead)?  Who looks like you?"

When LB fixated on one little (brown) girl in the catalog and compared her to another little girl she knows in real life (who does have a similar skin tone and hair color), B and looked at each other and it was awkward.  If you are a reasonably sensible white adult, you know that "Hey [insert name of person of color], you look just like [this other person of color]" is right up there with "can I touch your hair" in the taxonomy of racial shit you shouldn't say.

Let me make a very smooth transition here with the announcement that I know nothing about teaching small children about race.  Yesterday, I also knew nothing about dealing with a dog who was on the losing end of an encounter with a skunk.  But I learned.  That learning was quite painful, involving multiple changes of clothing, sitting fully clothed in a full bathtub pouring diet coke over the head of a terrified dog, but I did it because my only other option was to live with a dog who smells like skunk.

If I won't talk to LB about race, race becomes the skunk dog in our living room, because no matter how much I would rather not deal, race is part of our world.  So, for the two-year-old set: people have different skin colors and hair colors, hair styles, and eye colors. Our friends have different skin colors. Our friends are nice. Repeat."

But, I have to say that in this whole learning process, that Hanna Anderson catalog really isn't doing us any favors.  I once spent a day in an archive sorting and cataloging all the cards sent to a prominent African American family in the 1950s congratulating them on the birth of their son.  There were hundreds of cards, and every single one had a white baby on it.  My young friends, that was what people used to call a "click." These were wealthy, powerful people who knew a lot about their own history, but every single card had a white baby.  So, things have changed in 60 or so years.  At least where I live, you can go to Target, or Hallmark, or Walgreens and buy a greeting card with a brown baby, or bride, or graduate.  But, Hanna Anderson isn't making my life as a white parent any easier by having a catalog that 85% white models.  And I guess you could say: oh it's a Scandinavian company, or is there something wrong with white kids-should our kids no longer be seen in public?, or even, last I checked there was still a white majority in this country-so the models just reflect reality.

I grew up in a place where almost everyone was white.  In my school pictures, there is usually a lone kid of color.  That's not LB's reality.  Her reality is one where kids come in lots of different colors, which was one of the reasons that it was so weird to us when she fixated on the fake Amy.  It's not wrong to see white kids in catalogs, or even lots of white kids in catalogs, but would it be so terrible if sometimes white kids were the one making the token appearance?  Someday, my friends.

LB rocking out to The Clash last year, when she was just a little girl.

White Kids and Race: NurtureShock and Civil Rights Music

Our house, this morning:

M: "Yeah, he's a white man."
B: "Really? He's a white man."
M: Basically, they're all white men."
LB: "White guy!  LB's a white man! LB's a white man.  C(r)oc shirt.  LB has c(r)oc shirt.  Kittycat lub you!  Elmo lub you!"
Dancing ensues.
End scene.

So, I'm trying to put together some resources related to my last post on white parents, white kids, and race.  This post talks about the book NurtureShock and some music of the Civil Rights Movement. I've also gotten some great suggestions for kids books that I will share later.

There are many conversations I don't look forward to having with my child.  If she could live in a world without death, guns, poverty, sexual violence, hatred of people of color, gay people, women, people with disabilities, that would be wonderful.  But we brought her into this world, and this world requires uncomfortable conversations.

Specifically for white parents teaching their white kids about race and racism, there are some web resources you can find by googling "raising anti-racist kids," and such.  I've not really looked at these site enough to have solid recommendations.  What I didn't see, were any handbooks on Amazon for white parents.  You would think there would be such a thing, someone should get writing.  One interesting resource is the chapter "See Baby Discriminate," in NurtureShock.  Review here at Salon.

The short version of the NurtureShock argument is that white parents are uncomfortable talking to their white kids about race, so they usually fallback on "we are all the same underneath," and encourage kids to be silent about race in order to keep them "color blind." However, the lesson white kids take away from growing up in a racially stratified society is that maybe white people are just better than people of other colors.  So, white kids need to learn about racism in order to have some response to racial structures that shape their worlds.

For a little girl like mine that means talking about skin color, and our friends who are all different colors.  It also means hearing that "Some people are mean to people who have brown skin.  That is not nice.  We should never be mean to someone because they look different than us."  For many white toddlers and preschoolers that is going to be a really random life lesson, one which may not make any sense to them."  But, our lives as parents are all about preparing our kids for future experiences before they encounter them.

We want our kids to know about guns and bad touches before they ever encounter such a thing.  Our kids will encounter race and racism.  We only help them by teaching them early the lessons we want them to carry through life.

You'll notice in the phrase above I said "are mean" rather than "were mean."  Both phrases are correct, but I think it's important to not only present racism as something historical.  Teasing out the differences of racism as it operates today, versus histories of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation is really challenging, a project for a lifetime.  Kids need to think about both what happened in the past and what happens today, of course, in an age appropriate way.

Some Resources:

I really like music as a teaching tool, and I think this anthology Sing for Freedom is a great way to talk about the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.  It's mostly songs, with some short spoken word pieces.  It's music you can just enjoy that can eventually lead to conversation.  LB was stomping around to some of these songs this morning, and if she doesn't yet understand why people were "marching to freedom," at least it will be a familiar concept as she grows older.

I love this video of The Roots doing "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," it does include some archival footage that might be scary to the younger and more sensitive set.

Raising White Kids While White

The death of Trayvon Martin has provoked a lot of public conversation about the lessons that Black parents teach their children.  Lessons about safety in a dangerous world, and the burdens of a culture structured by racism.  LB is 2.5 and still in the rainbow coalition stage of life, but I've spent a number of years teaching African American history, and having many related conversations with young people about race. Below is my primer (i.e. starting point) for talking to white kids about what race means for their lives, and the lives of their Black and Brown friends in the US.

Notes for my (white) daughter

• Know our history.  The racial history of the United States belongs to all of us.  White kids need to know the long history of police brutality in Black communities, the history of racially disparate incarceration, and the history of racial stereotypes in American popular culture.  Without that history, you can't understand the dangers your Black friends face.  Without that history, a white parent is a lot more likely to get a call from a college dean and find out that a beloved white child was just found at a college party dressed in blackface (and Babydoll, I don't ever want to get a call like that about you.)
• Stay out of trouble, think about yourself and think about others.  I know a lot of white girls who have run from the cops, and the worst result was a skinned knee and a stern talking to.  White kids need to understand that their Black friends may have a smaller margin of error when it comes to teenage rights of passage like smoking weed in the park, shoplifting, and pulling pranks. 
• Know when to speak up. What will you say if your white friend makes a racial joke?  If your white friends say all people of color are "like this" or "like that." If you don't like these comments, respond.  Try some difference responses. Speaking up might not change minds, but put it out there in the universe, because you respect yourself, because you love other people.
• And when to stand back. You may find yourself in situations when you're with Black friends where your well-intentioned intervention can make things worse.  The police likely don't want to hear your analysis of structural racism.  Know that there are situations where you need to stand back and be quiet because you can't fix it.  You can still be a witness.  Pay close attention to everything that happens.
• Listen and learn.  It's hard to empathize with people if you don't know what their lives are about.  Listen to people tell you about their lives without defensiveness.
• Know that you will make mistakes. I doubt that anyone in a racialized society like this one can go through life without offending someone of another race.  As a white person in our society, you will find yourself acting out the role you were born to play.  It will happen.  If you realize you've said something hurtful, done something because of some racist part of you that you didn't know was there, stop and think about what happened, think about what you would do differently.  Consider whether it's possible or appropriate to make amends.  Don't let guilt or embarrassment weigh you down, let it motivate you.
• Understand affinity groups.  Sometimes your moms want to hang out with other gay people.  This doesn't mean that we hate straight people, but that as a minority it can be really comforting to spend time in a group of people who are like you. Sometimes your friends may want to hang out with people of the same race, that doesn't mean they don't like you, that doesn't mean you can't be friends.
• Cross-cultural respect.  You know we're are pretty casual at our house.  Not everyone is like us.  When you meet your friends parents, ask them how they would like to be addressed, and follow their house rules.  When in doubt, say Mr. and Ms., keep your feet off the furniture, and don't take the Lord's Name in vain. 
• Equal doesn't mean the same.  If your white friends say that Black people get special rights, that Black kids get into college over white kids, that it's okay to use the word n***** because Black people do, please come talk to me.  We can look at some data.  We can talk more about structural racism.
• White privilege.  What does that mean in your life?  Historically that means that you and your family are still reaping the benefits of government programs that helped (mostly) white people: the GI Bill, and FHA loans.  Our family benefited from redlining and discriminatory college admissions policies.  Our home, our financial cushion, and your education are the direct result of this preferential treatment.  That's life in a racially structured society.  I'm not asking you to be consumed by guilt.  I'm not saying that our family hasn't worked hard.  I just want you to know that your success will be due to both your hard work and the extras our family got because we are white.
• Love yourself, respect yourself.  Once you know all about structural racism, it can be hard to trust your instincts.  This is one of the hardest things about living in a society structured by race as a white person.  Trust your instincts, and know that they can be wrong.
• Please don't be Abigail Fisher.  See above

"Dance with the one who brought you"

When I got my hair done today, the salon was abuzz...with discussion of the murder charges against Pats player Aaron Hernandez.

Everyone else in my world was on SCOTUS Watch, and B, LB, and I all went down for the little celebration rally they held in Providence.  Personally, we are among the clear winners in today's decision along with other married gay couples in states that have gay marriage, gay military families, and gay federal workers.  Other gays are wading through the state-specific morass, and the answers to their questions are likely to be negative, or at least unclear, for a long time to come.

And then there are the other decisions.  Not such great times for voting rights, racial diversity on campus, the rights of employees.  Until today, I spent my SCOTUS Watch saying, "it could have been worse?"

The title to this post is a quote from a very smart friend of mine (and Shania Twain), in reference to this video of John Lewis speaking in support of gay marriage in 1996.

One of the surprising victories of the recent gay marriage fights at the state level has been the success of progressive coalition politics.  A wide range of progressive activists came together to fight for gay marriage because that fight is tied to a broader vision of a nation that values equality, toleration, and the protection of minority groups.  If gay issues are going to matter to straight people of diverse races, religions, classes, and regions, then racial equality and workers (just to name a couple) need to matter to gay people.  And since I'm likely preaching to the choir, consider this a note to self to keep me honest.

City of Hate/ City of Love

Like everyone else I was horrified and freaked out and saddened by the bombing at the Boston Marathon.  I'm also a bit mystified by the city that responded to that horror, a city, apparently, where people are helpful and kind and behave admirably in a crisis.

I moved to Boston in 1990 as an eighteen year old.  My city was the city of hate.  In 1990, 152 people were murdered in Boston, almost three times the number murdered in 2012.  My Boston was violent, grubby, insular, and angry.  It's strange to think back, because I don't really remember those years as bad times, but when I enumerate the "incidents," they were many.  I was punched in the back of the head for no apparent reason, choked at a show, cursed out so many times-the most memorable time was being called numerous versions of "ugly white bitch" on a long, long trip on the Green Line.  So many men exposed themselves to me-for me Red Sox will always mean gross men in dirty sweatpants.  I was offered money for sex many more times than a mousey, bookish girl would really expect.  In Boston, there were places I didn't go because my friends who had grown up there warned me that those were places where they would jump you for being an outsider and a freak.

The day we moved in to our first apartment, a guy came stumbling out of the nearby park bleeding from his stomach.  Before cell phones, we ran to the frat house next door to try and find a phone.  In my Boston, I looked out my window one night and saw white frat guys and Vietnamese kids fighting in the streets with baseball bat and pipes.

In my Boston, someone always seemed to bust out with a racial epithet.  During the Clarence Thomas hearings, I rode the Green Line with a crowded car of BU students.  One Black girl doggedly focused on her textbook in car filled with white boys making jokes about Black bitches.

My Boston taught me.  It taught me to be safe in the city by becoming invisible.  It showed me what never having enough does to people and spaces.  Boston made me want to know the world in all its violent, horrible glory.  In Boston, I learned that any stranger who speaks to you is probably a sociopath, and I've spent decades trying to unlearn that lesson.

Time, the economy has softened Boston, but it still has hard edges, and in hard times people put those edges to good use, love in the city of hate.

Our Morning in America

In 2008, I spent election eve nervous and excited.  Even if I didn't like Obama, he would be the best choice for a person in my situation, but I do like him.  B and I have often said in the past four years that he should be a little less JFK and a little more LBJ, but I think he is a good man and a smart man, and those thing count for a lot with me.

The morning after the 2008 election I had a dentist appointment.  I took the bus through Baltimore cursing my stupidity; why wasn't I home basking in the glow rather than hustling though the city.  The bus was full of the usual suspects, people down on their luck, and those who probably never had any luck.  But that day, the bus was also full of hope and joy and pride.  When I got on, three men jumped up to offer me a seat, I think, just because their mood was buoyant. Baltimore gave Obama 87.5% of the vote in 2008.  Looking around that bus, we all knew we had done it, we had done it together.

After that moment, I was struck by the sadness of the situation.  Poor people who would always be poor and sick people who would always be sick.  No one is coming to save Baltimore, and no one good and smart man can save that city.  And people will carry on, but their lives will be hard.  This is what our morning in America looks like.

Despite all that I'm proud to vote for a good, smart man, proud to vote for marriage equality, proud to live in this crazy, ridiculous, tough country.  Thankful that my girl was born on this day two years ago, and that we are both healthy and whole. Four more years and many, many more!

"Home is Wherever I'm with You"

The heat broke.

And a baby watched the rain with glee.  The adults are busy trying to organize ourselves for the big move.  Baltimore has been a decent city to us for the past five years.  I love the way this city looks.  I love the rowhouse with its endless variations on a theme, and Baltimore has particularly good rowhouses.  Sometimes I'll see a block that is a mix of natural brick, painted primary colors, painted pastels, and even some formstone, and it the right light it is amazingly lovely.  Our neighbors are good quirky people, and I don't think it would be possible to be pretentious and live here, at least not in this part of the city.

And then there's the part that sucks.  Like many people here, we live close to home.  That is we shop and socialize within blocks of our house.  Our little piece of the city is functional, although I seemed to remember being shocked by the disfunctionality of basic city services when we moved here from Chicago.  "The City that Works," Baltimore is not.  Currently there is a massive water main break downtown, which is just one little piece of a crumbling infrastructure.  And there are the vacants, in some parts of the city blocks and blocks of them.  I've seen a lot of crumbling city landscapes, but Baltimore is such a small city to house so much destruction.

With those crumbling landscapes come suffering people.  I remember being on the bus on the morning after the Obama election, and everyone was joyous.  Three different men stood to offer me a seat.  The mood was buoyant, and I was just as happy as everyone else.  I looked around at the usual crowd of decent, happy people with broken bodies that told the stories of their hard lives, and I knew that Baltimore wasn't something that Obama, or any man, could fix.  I learned the party line that cities break because people make choices, therefore people can make other choices an unbreak them.  But when I look at Baltimore I just don't know how that will happen.  It is possible to fix this place, but there isn't enough will or enough money.

In order to function as a person of privilege in the city, you have to harden yourself.  You have to create distance so that young looking prostitute, that lady who is high out of her mind, that dude with no legs who doesn't look like he's doing so well, is not your problem.  I once read a blog post by a woman living in rural Virginia, who described sitting in a coffee shop in Manhattan and watching as all the other patrons studiously ignored a young child begging for money.  She used the incident to contrast the christlike generosity of (Christian) rural folk, with the hard (secular) amorality of city folk.  I guess if you see one begging child a year, you are highly motivated to help that child.  If everything outside your door is a gristly seething mass of cursing, addiction, and weeping sores, you learn to turn away.  That's why I saw two (white) junkies (mom and daughter, I think) fighting on the street and laughed.  Then I realized I had become that person who sees two living human beings and laughs because they're junkies fighting on the street.  I know so many good, interesting people here, people who want this city to live, but the city fights us at every turn.

The Black, White, Gay Thing

I'll just say in advance that this post may be more unfocused than usual.  I've become interested in straight African American attitudes toward gay marriage, and here I'm trying to keep track of the links that I've been collecting.  I think this Slate article was representative of a lot of the post-Prop 8 coverage of the issue-basically that Black people had provided the margin of victory for Prop 8.  Just based on my own experience (as a white lady) talking to people about gay marriage, it's hard for me to see any strictly racial divide in attitudes.  It seems to me that Black and white folks break along the same lines-age, education, and religiousity.

From Pew, support for gay marriage by religious affiliation, and by race.  This polling shows more support for gay marriage among whites than Blacks overall, and that Black Protestants support gay marriage at higher rates than white Evangelicals, but at lower rates than white mainline Protestants.  This link goes to a long scholarly article from Gregory B. Lewis titled "Black-White Differences in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights," published in 2003.

One of the post-Prop 8 critiques of pro-gay marriage strategies was that the state's predominately white gay advocacy organizations had done a poor job of outreach and coalition building with African American activists and communities.  In Maryland (with 30% of people defining themselves as AA), activists of all races seem to be learning from that lesson.  Unless something really crazy happens, MD will have a referendum on the November ballot, which will decide whether the legislature's vote on gay marriage goes into effect.

The two major local pro-marriage organizations are Marylanders for Marriage Equality and Equality Maryland.  MME has many videos from locally prominent people, including this odd video from
Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire).  I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes at these organizations, but from the materials they are putting out, it seems like most of the current action on gay marriage in MD is among African Americans reaching out to other African Americans.  [Edited to add this article from the Times about Black/Gay coalitions (and also mentioning the existence of Black gays).]

People have also been talking about the "Obama Effect" in Maryland since Obama's statement in support of gay marriage.  Public Policy Polling reports recent movement in the polls on gay marriage.  Rachel Maddow has analysis here.  While I don't want to ignore Obama's influence, I wonder if he isn't, at least partially, reflecting a larger cultural shift rather than driving that shift.

Some final links: a nice piece on the problem of Black/gay invisibility.  And a pro gay marriage statement from Rev. Dr. William J. Barber.