"All you fascists bound to lose: I said all you fascists bound to lose"

The women of the internet are tired, and I'm tired too.

Tired of the judgement and action of bystanders (which is to say, people who don't know shit about us and our lives).  Here, "The day I was almost arrested for having an autistic son," by Marie Myung-Ok Lee.

Tired of advice that does not fit our situations: here, from Black Girl in Maine.

Tired of wondering how it could possibly still be true that so many people reduce the worth of women to our physical bodies.  Here, Rebecca Traister's "I don't care if you like it."

Tired of having to worry that we are feeding the problems of judgement and disrespect when we celebrate our own lives.  Here, "Inside" from Breaking into Blossom.

Tired of the institutional and structural failures that allow women's bodies to be brutalized and are then unable to offer comfort to the victims or sanction to the victimizers.  Here: (a warning that if you have not read this article, it is devastating), "Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn't" by Walt Bogdanich.

In all these discontents, I hope I sense a new wave of women's activism coming on strong.

Unaccompanied Minors

The recent news coverage of unaccompanied minors, mainly from Central America, traveling across the US border alone and then being detained in federal facilities is incredibly distressing.  I guess the upsurge in young migrants has been building for awhile, see this 2013 piece in Mother Jones and this 2012 piece from the New York Times-"Young and Alone, Facing Court and Deportation," but I have to admit I haven't really paid attention until the latest news coverage.

Photos from the Houston Chronicle showing conditions in detention here.  The NYTimes answering readers questions about immigration here.  The DailyMail on conditions for detained migrant minors here.  Mother Jones on unaccompanied minors in adult jails here.  And reporting from the LATimes here.  Here's a short audio piece from Tell Me More.

A conservative blog take here. And analysis on Laura Ingram's comments on child migrants here.

Liberal analysis stresses the push factors of extreme gang violence in Central American and the humanitarian aspects of these young migrants, while conservatives stress the role DACA may play in motivating migration and use imagery of the US boarder overrun.  Clearly, I'm on the humanitarian side in this one.  I can't imagine how bad things have to be to send one's child on a journey a thousand miles long, illegally crossing multiple borders, to an uncertain future.  I can't imagine how terrifying it would be for a young person to make that journey and then to land in a detention facility.  But, I also find it hard to believe that DACA, in addition to other pushes and pulls, isn't a motivating factor in this wave of migration, and if it is, I don't think that means that it is a failed policy.

Tired now.

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.

Problems: Urban Schools/Urban School Reform Edition

We've got problems.

This morning brings news that yet another friend (a parent and a teacher) is fleeing city schools, in this case the whole family is leaving the US.

Demographically, maybe this is just a blip in the big data story of post-WWII white flight.  But though the flight may be the same, I'd like to think that we are different from our forefathers.  Although many of the people I know in this situation are white, class and educational background, rather than race seem to be the key factor.  When our grandparents fled to the suburbs, they (well everyone except my grandparents) were on a economic upswing.  Our generation is made up of non-profit workers, educators, freelancers, artists, lower level professionals.  We are the struggling middle class, worried about our benefits, not saving enough for retirement, chastising ourselves for buying that fancy cheese at Whole Foods.  What we are not-people who can afford private school tuition.  And we are also people who believe in a shared public good, people who went to public schools and believe in public education.

And increasingly, from what I'm hearing and what I'm experiencing, I believe that families like mine have not only been abandoned by public school systems, we are being actively rejected.  There is so much going on in public education that it's easy to get distracted.  For me the debate over Common Core is just a distraction.  I know a bit more about CC than your average non-educator parent, having built a teacher training class that was aligned to CC standards.  The standards themselves were good, more in line with the way I expected students to think when I was an instructor at elite colleges than what was expected of me as a public school student.  In the hands of a talented teacher, given time to learn how to teach to these new standards and resources to execute those lessons, CC could encourage teachers to do really interesting work with students.  The downside, CC has too many standards and is overly detailed and fussy.  As an educator, I tried to keep my objectives clear and simple for each lesson and focus on one key theme and topic and one key skill.  Trying to do too much (being pushed to develop lesson plan that show you are doing too much) confuses and frustrates students.  It also takes time for teachers to learn to teach in a new way and for students to learn to learn in a new way.  I taught some of the best prepared college students in the country, and trying to teach them to do a thorough textual analysis was arduous for all parties.

The bigger problem with CC is that it is expected to be a silver bullet for our education woes without any resources to address the structural inequality that, I would say, is the major underlying factor in low educational achievement.  I worked in a series of Chicago public schools as a tutor, schools that ranged from functional racially and economically diverse schools to dysfunctional segregated schools.  In the worst school, bathrooms did not have toilet paper, and obviously traumatized children were not only not given any services-they were also re-traumatized by harsh discipline, and there was no recess and no school nurse.  Because there was no school nurse and 1/3 of the children lived in homeless shelters that were closed during the day, very sick and feverish children were laid on makeshift pallets at the back of the classroom to wait for the end of the day when the shelter reopened.  I will never forget seeing an administrator who had been brought in as the enforcer for an out-of-control class scream in the face of a little boy because she thought he was giving her "a hard look" during her lecture.  Actually he was terrified.  I had gleaned that he had seen his father do terrible things to his mother, things for which the father was in jail.  The little boy was physically defensive and hated yelling.  As the administrator got in his face, I could see him completely shut down.  That's our America.

As a college instructor, would I expect a student who had just seen his uncle shot and killed, or a student whose mom had just gone to jail to function?  No, I would say-take the incomplete, get some counseling, come back when you're ready.  Poor, little children don't get that luxury.

After surveying my small sample, I would say decisively that middle-class parents bring resources to schools, and as long as they aren't allowed to segregate their children in gifted academies within the school, those resources benefit all children.  So, you might think that administrators who oversee urban schools would be working to get more middle class families.  B and I want to be those parents, most of our friends want to be those parents, and we don't have to send our child to a perfect school.  If the school is a little run down, if we have to send in supplies, if it's a little more regimented than we would like-we could live with all that.  But no educator can think it's acceptable to scream in a child's face.  There must be toilet paper and recess and a library.  There should be a school nurse.

What I'm hearing from parents, what we felt in LB's IEP experience, is accept or get out.  The system doesn't want middle-class parents with our critiques and standards and demands.  In the public sphere dissatisfied middle class parents are broadly painted as whiny, spoiled racists, which I find infuriating.  From my vantage point, urban school administrators have decided that reform will be easier if they get rid of all the parents like me, so they can conduct their grand experiment without interference-or at least without interference by those who have resources.

Why are middle class parents leaving urban public schools.  It's not because those school serve children of color and poor children, it's a much more personal experience of the failure of schools to respect children and their parents.  Friends have told me stories of preschool-aged children isolated in the classroom each day because they could not meet the developmental expectations of silence and hands-to-self.  And, the parent of a five-year-old in Chicago who brought her child to school after a Dr's appointment and was not allowed to walk her child to the classroom-distubing both from the child's point of view-having to navigate a huge, barely-familiar school building alone and from the parent's point of view-don't we have a right to enter and observe our child's public education on public property?  No attempt was made to address the concerns of these families, certainly no effort was made to keep them in the school.  Instead the clear message was: plenty of people want these spots-either accept or get out.

For committed and talented educators things are just as bad.  I know too many good teachers who are leaving because they don't want to teach from a script, because they don't want spend each year learning whatever new curriculum that the admins think will be the quick fix, because they get no resources to do the work that might actually make children ready to learn.  It's like when I worked at a certain coffee company and corporate told us that it was non-negotiable that we must have at least two workers in the store at all times, but the computer scheduler wouldn't allow (or pay for) more than one person to open and close.  Talented people don't want to be trapped in a low-paying, high-stress, dystopian environment where the standards are impossibly high and the resources incredibly low.

I work for an organization that serves low-income public school students-which in urban Rhode Island means that they are mostly people of color.  They are smart, good young people, I would be happy to send my own child to school with them.  I have dreams of helping LB's teachers develop lesson plans in African American history, of writing grants for her schools.  But seemingly, highly-educated and doting parents like us are just clogging up the machine of urban education reform.

What is my dream school: a public school where all children have access to resources that support their physical (food, health care, recess), emotional (counseling, social skill training), and intellectual (books, art, math, science, social studies) development.  A school were all employees like children and believe that children can succeed.  A school that sees parents, not a customers, but as partners.  A school that believes children are individuals and treats them accordingly.  A school where educators are empowered to solve problems.  A school where administrators, educators, support staff, and students feel respected.  That's all I want.

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em," Academic Job Edition

A UofC friend linked to Patrick Iber's devastating twitter feed before he wrote this piece for Inside Higher Ed.  As a fellow UofC History Ph.D., much of what he writes is familiar (minus the Harvard book contract).  My first year on the academic job market was truly horrible, despite getting a good response to my applications, and my first AHA was definitely a life lowlight.  The misery of my first academic job interviews will always be intertwined with the poor choice of Chick-Fil-A for my pre-interview breakfast.  Never mix spicy chicken on a biscuit, orange juice, and extreme mental duress (disclaimer: this was in 2007, well before the big CFA blowup.  I no longer buy food there.)

If year one sucked because of my nerves, year four (maybe) found me leaving my daughter in the NICU to fly to Boston to interview at the AHA (the major conference interviewing event in my field).  I went to the hospital in the morning to see LB, leaving directly for the airport, and returned the next day to head straight back to the hospital.  Because when you're on the academic job market you don't say "my baby is in the NICU and I don't want to leave her and I'm a physical and emotional wreck and I don't think I can do this," just like Patrick didn't say "my mom's in the hospital and we think she's okay, but it's serious and I don't want to leave town." If you get chosen from 400 or 800 applicants (and those are real numbers, much to the chagrin of hiring committees) and make it to the long short list, you can't give the committee any reason to pick someone who is just as good as you but doesn't have your "personal problems."  So you go, and at the time you think it's the right and normal thing to do.

My slow coming to terms with the fact that despite the fact that I slowly and painfully became a very good graduate student and a decent intellectual, I don't have the temperament to be an academic in the 2000s.  In the slower pace of 1965, I think I could have held my own.  Of course, having read hundreds of recommendation letters for graduate students in the 1950s and 1960s, I know that back then all the white ladies who got Ph.D.s were described as "high strung" at best, and "emotionally damaged" at worst, and shuttled off to appropriately non-glamorous jobs.  All the Black men were "not a top intellect, but certainly a fine fellow for your negro college."  I never came across any letters for women of color.  Funny (as in funny devastating, not funny funny) that as they threw open the doors to at least a few of us non-rich-white-guys, the conditions of labor within academia quickly degraded.

 Slow realization was punctuated by the "What the fuck am I doing" moment of realization that I was trying to get a breast pump through security at Logan while my baby lay in an isolette in Baltimore.  And the "Who the fuck are these people" moments of arriving at my office and finding the locks changed and someone else's name on the door, and then being told to move my thousands of books down a flight of stairs and through a building right quick while 6 months pregnant.  Or the flat rejections when I asked for help covering my class because I was on hospital bedrest at 29w trying not to give birth or have a stroke (although some people did help-women I barely knew, women on the lower rungs of academia, women of color and white women).  And if I'm starting to sound bitter, it's because academic life will make you bitter.

But lots of jobs suck, and lots of employment sectors are under pressure, and as much as I hated working at a university some days, it was better than my previous job at Starbucks, or baking bagels, or cleaning hotel rooms, or prepping meat at a Bar-B-Que joint, or any of the other awesome jobs I had before I became an soft-handed intellectual.

One thing that makes the problems of academic labor so frustrating is the seeming inability of people who spend their lives theorizing about "agency," "false-consciousness," and whatnot to even acknowledge that their choices have consequences.  Academics claim befuddlement and busyness as cover for their own part in the oppression of low-level academic workers.  In my experience, academics tend to be more concerned with protecting their own turf, however small, than acting as a group to protect labor.

Historians can deconstruct the hows and whys and wherefores of the boss man giving every woman three extra looms to watch and speeds them up x2, and understand that the workers suffer.  Historians can analyze the divisions of race, class, and gender, and the personal fears, that divide workers and keep them from collective action.  But they seem unable to turn that lens on the current conditions of academic labor.

The result isn't just the pathetic spectacle of very smart people acting completely helpless in the face of economic, political, and cultural forces.  I also see among academics an almost complete lack of teaching about the ethics of academic labor.  Established academics train the next generations, but, at least at UofC there is no training in the new realities of academic life.  It's not just the problem of suggesting that if you don't land an academic job, well surely you can go find work in a museum (good luck with that one).  It's the problem of receiving no training to recognize the difference between a fair wage and an unfair wage, reasonable working conditions and toxic working conditions, working for free that constitutes a reasonable apprenticeship and working for free that's just working for free. This training is important both for future faculty members who often become de facto HR officers (usually violating a few labor laws along the way), and for future contingent faculty who should be encouraged to draw the line against abysmal wages and working conditions-and I understand how hard that choice is when you could really use a couple grand.

I think this training and these conversation don't happen, at least in part, because there is so much shame in academia, and an inability to talk honestly about what constitutes success and failure in this age of Ph.D. overproduction.  Contingent faculty feel shame for not landing that tenure track position, for the feeling that they just weren't good enough.  Tenure track and even tenured faculty feel their own fears and shames.  The very real feeling that a position is always precarious, that it isn't prestigious enough, that one isn't hustling hard enough, and that hustling won't pay off.  It's never pretty to see a group of people struggling within an environment of scarcity.  And the worse one's situation is the less one is allowed to complain.  Faculty are unable to acknowledge the role that they play in the degradation of academic labor both through their choices, or votes, and by their silence and inaction. 

I guess I'm a walking-away-from-academia success story.  I have a job that I really enjoy in the geographic area where I want to live, and I have a reasonable approximation of work/life balance that includes family dinner most days, and hour or so for what I will in the evening, and some time to read for pleasure.  But, I wouldn't want to see my happiness turned into a narrative of "a Ph.D. is a great investment, you can always work outside of academia."  I got my current job by carefully omitting my Ph.D. from my resume.  Despite this state's significant need for highly skilled workers, there seemed to be no place for me.  There must be something terribly wrong with a society that is turned off by workers who are over-educated or over-credentialed.  If the issue is that the world can't afford to pay me like a tenure track faculty member at an R1 university, and certainly my current employer cannot, I can accept that-I didn't become an academic for the money.  However, like other workers, academics should live in a world where busting one's ass at work leads to a wage that makes a person ineligible for food stamps and includes or pays enough to cover health insurance.  But the distrust of academics seems bigger than the fear that we want a big check for sitting around cogitating, it's a strand of American anti-intellectualism that says too much education makes a person less capable.

Our current situationmakes me think of all the amazing artists and writers who were unemployed during the Depression and ended up working for the WPA.  The US found a place for them, and they paid back that government cheese many times over with novels, paintings, and research.  I have value.  Patrick has value as a teacher, a writer, and a researcher.  I want to live in a world that has a place for us to do what we do-work.

Books that should be written

I picked up this little gem from the library sale cart.  It was more appealing to me as a historian than as lesbian mom.  Zack's Story was published in 1996, and it's crazy to think that was almost 20 years ago.  At the company store, you can buy a new copy of this book for $119.00 or a used copy for 1 cent. 

1996.  B was a Sophomore at a Catholic high school, listening to Gansta rap, playing sports, etc. I was probably on my second break from college (not counting a "gap year," which at the time was just called "not going to college").  I was living in Boston with a bunch of people, working a crappy job, going to shows, drinking beer, eating tofu pot pie.  DOMA vaguely registered with me as yet another Clinton betrayal.  I had been a Rock-the-Vote-er in 1992, and Clinton's myriad betrayals (particularly on welfare "reform" and Don't Ask/Don't Tell) shaped my political self.  I kept voting in major elections, but Obama was the the first major party candidate I voted for after Clinton. 

Gay marriage did allow me to graduate from college.  I worked a minor scam, claiming to be gay married in order to live off campus, and therefore could afford my last two years of school.  Otherwise, gay marriage didn't mean much to me, I never planned to get marriage-having no interest in being bourgeois.  Ideologically, I'm still in that place, but live intervenes in one's non-bourgeois fantasies.  I was once talking to a woman who was a former Black Panther at a faculty dinner.  She told me "People your age, you can't understand.  We thought, we KNEW, the Revolution was about to begin-it was going to happen.  You don't save for retirement when you're planning the Revolution.  And here I am."

Zack's Story is a nice book.  The text is wordy for my taste, and the photos are old enough to be dated, but not old enough to be vintage, but it is nicely written.  I don't think LB will ever read this book, but I'm happy to have it for my collection.

I'd gone to the library looking for books about race and parenting.  I ordered from the library The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, although I think it's a book that many people have issues with-I wanted to check it out from myself.  The next book that came up was one published in 1929 that I used for my dissertation.  Nothing I found in the library system was really what I was looking for-more of a handbook about how to build coalitions among diverse groups of parents across lines of class, ethnicity, race, and language.  How do you do that?  If anyone out there has resources to suggest, I'd love to hear about them.

Random crap that totally annoys me

New England is not happy.  It's been a shitacular winter with no end in sight, and everyone I talk to is just done.  Major topics of conversation: potholes, snow AGAIN, sickness.

I reached my low point humping a BOB stroller and 26lb child over a glacier-thanks a-holes who don't clear a curb cut or even bother to shovel at all; City of Providence that does minimal snow removal; and f-ers who don't stop at stop signs when they see a crazy lady trying to pull a giant stroller over a mountain of snow and ice.  Just know: you are all on my list.

I also had a conversation with a police officer in which I tried to convince him to ticket (per city ordinance) a business that never clears their sidewalks.  He was happy to get a cup of coffee from that establishment, but declined to write a ticket.  And that is what's wrong with America.

Not in a good mood, so rather than snipping and sniping here and there, I'll just get it all out now.

There is this article "The New Forbidden Word," which created intense debate in my lesbian moms facebook group.  Summary: the word "gayby" is an offensive slur.  You shouldn't use this word, and if you do you are personally responsible for the bullying of children of gay parents.

The author did not win any points with me for this sentence, "My entire reason for becoming a voice within the gay community is to try to show the world that gay parenting is just parenting."  And lost even more when I noticed that his Twitter handle is @GayAtHomeDad.  So it's cool to be "Gay Dad" in order to monetize it, but otherwise you're just "normal" dad.

And then there's this: "The worst thing that could happen is that “gayby” catches on in schools and kids like mine are openly called “gaybies” in a negative way. This is a very real possibility if we continue to allow this word to exist." The worst thing?  As in, we could be executed and our kids could be sent to concentration camps for reeducation?  Or as in, we lead lives of constrained gay respectability, always monitoring our own actions to make sure our gay doesn't get too queer, and in the process we inculcate our children with a deep sense of shame about their own identities.

Gayby, bring it on.  Do I want my child to be teased?  No.  But, if she is teased by kids chasing her around the playground, B and I will impart a powerful life lesson: always "negotiate" from a place of power.

Then in same internet group, I was reprimanded for finding the infographic below incredibly silly.  And before you think I'm going for a 2fer mommy wars/feminist wars, let me explain myself.  It's precisely because I think the labor that women (and men) do in their own homes is valuable that I find this infographic so wrongheaded.  There was a time in the US when there was an actual movement to compensate women for their work in their own homes.  You can read more about in the books The Politics of Public Housing and Storming Ceasar's Palace: How Black Mother's Fought their own War on Poverty.  These books explore the efforts of poor, mostly Black, mothers to make the case that if they couldn't make enough money to lead a decent life (because their jobs paid to little, because family responsibilities kept them from paid employment, or because they were unemployed) the government owed them a living wage with which to raise their children.  This wasn't "welfare" but payment for the social good of keeping a home and raising children. 

That dream died at least by 1968, but in this age of the "the rent's too damn high" and "someone's got to pay that highly qualified wolf nanny," and we need something left over for a refurbished iphone, nebulizer, and bunk beds from IKEA, it's an idea worth thinking about.  My big problem with the graphic is that all the adults with kids who I know (and many of the adults without kids) work all the time.  If a child decides to sleep, my free time is between 9:00-10:00 at night (and it's awesome).  We all work more, and we mostly don't get paid more, and no one is going to pay you to pick up your own dry cleaning.  This graphic imagines a world in which a person (man) goes at works at job and then comes home to leisure world, while his helpmeet cleans his house, cares for his children, and fetches his slippers.  I guess that world exists somewhere, but it's dead to me.  Instead I live in a world where two adults scramble to survive financially and  care for a child and eat and stuff and no one makes 90 grand.  I think a better world is achievable, but living in a "mom salary" fantasy land won't get us there.

It was pointed out to me that the point of the graphic is actually to raise the self-esteem of women who do socially devalued work.  Cool, but I just can't relate.  I hate it when people offer me the trite self-esteem raisers.  "Aw, you're doing a great job mama!" makes me what to bust out an Amy Poehler style "You don't know me, bitch," followed by "you better vote like you care about a living wage."

End rant.
Love ya!

Debt Watch

It's the post-season, so B is cracking her knuckles and muttering curses at the tv.  That's how I feel about Congress.  No one around here seems very concerned, but I'm still recovering from the trauma of 2008.  We don't have a home, and have only the smallest of retirement investments, so we didn't lose much.  But the memory of sitting in a drafty room filled with rumors of layoffs and hearing the Dean tell us briskly that "the trustees think you're overcompensated," isn't easy to forget.

Recession shaped the trajectory of my adult life.  My dad got laid off my senior year of high school.  I had plenty of skills doing the work that you do when you grow up in a tourist town; cleaning hotel rooms, washing dishes, and making sandwiches (best teen job in town-hostess, worst teen job in town-fish processing plant).  By the time I moved to Boston in 1990, you had to know someone to get any kind of terrible job, which is how I got mine.

Work it out Congress, work it out.

Back to Reality

I've been using the library at our local university, which is good, but I've been overhearing a lot of awkward conversations among first year students.  At least, now that the semester's starting again, the coffee cart in the library is open again.  What kind of library doesn't serve coffee 24/7 in this day and age.

I spent a chunk of Labor Day writing angry letters to my representatives about why we should not be bombing Syria, or otherwise involving ourselves in that country.  And I feel for the people of Syria, there was an article in last week's New Yorker about the huge refugee camp over the border in Lebanon-crazy and heartbreaking, but, we, the United States, have failed all of our recent fixing-countries tests.  We have a gentleperson's D- in fixing countries.  Our motto should be America: We Break Countries!  Our leaders need to go back to remedial intervention school before we get involved in another conflict.  If I thought our involvement would save the people of Syria, that would be compelling, but everything I've seen in the past decade(s) suggests that we will only make things worse.  Syria is one of those weird issues were the left and the right seem to be meeting up, so I'm unclear about who exactly thinks we should get involved.  I'm not even posting any links because this is one of the few cases where I don't feel the need for nuanced arguments, I'm just going with my gut that we should not be involved in military intervention in Syria.

The interwebs also found strange bedfellows in reaction to this post (pics accompanying the post have been changed from shirtless young men to fully clothed family members, presumably in response to comments about ridiculous double standards for boys and girls.)

One response from the queer/feminist/consensual side here (I like this blog.)  And a response from the conservative religious/authoritarian/purity side here (While I wouldn't consider those terms flattering, I think they are accurate and the blog author would not object to being so defined.)

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.

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.

Dispatches from Liberal Land

Maine: Yes on 1

I've been thinking a lot about my brothers and sisters in the non-marriage equality states, and I though I'd give a report from marriage equality land.  B and I have lived in Maryland and Rhode Island, and I've previously lived in Maine and Massachusetts, which is to say, I have my finger on the pulse.

After bitching to my favorite taxi driver about the fact that B and I can't file taxes together, the response: "Are you sure about that? It doesn't seem right.  I mean, you're married right?"

Upon complaining to LB's speech therapist on the Tuesday before the Supreme Court released the DOMA decision that we would have to pay tax on the full amount of any insurance benefits I got through B's plan: "Really?  When are they going to change that?"  My response: "Maybe in an hour."

Our neighborhood has been ablaze with discussion about the public activities of a local Southern Baptist congregation.  They are undertaking a church-planting mission here in Providence in order to "bring light to the darkness."  Someone posted a bunch of their informational materials to the listserve, which state that fewer than 2% of the population of Providence attend an Evangelical Christian service in any given week.  In our neighborhood, there are certainly lots of secular folks like us, but there's also a large population of Orthodox Jews and Catholics.  In any case, the church planters have a hard road ahead.

Listserv responses ranged from: "exclusionary religious groups should not be allowed to have gatherings in public spaces like parks (including the throwaway line 'wasn't DOMA just repealed'),"  to "don't we have a right not to be evangelized, and the church is too sly with their promotional materials," to a majority arguing that all have the right to say what they wish in public spaces, even if we don't like the message.

So what's next on agenda?  From equalitymaine.org:

• Build community among and empower LGBT people in rural Maine
• Create a more inclusive, supportive, and affirming climate in Maine for LGBT, questioning and gender non-conforming youth
• Ensure LGBT elders are safe, healthy, connected in the community, and free from discrimination
• Ensure transgender and gender non-conforming people are safe, healthy and free from discrimination and bias

Read the full plan by clicking here.
Sounds good to me!

What the Other Side Says

The conservative Catholic publication, The Remnant, offers this analysis.  Synopsis: Blame Justice Kennedy because he is a REALLY REALLY bad Catholic and the Church should punish him.

From conservative Catholic mom Kendra at Catholic All Year, "An open letter to my facebook friends" is here.  Synopsis: I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but you (my Catholic friends) need to love the sinner a little less and hate the sin a little more.

A statement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints here. Synopsis: SCOTUS hates democracy, and traditional marriage today, traditional marriage tomorrow, traditional marriage forever.

From the Family Research Council: FAQs on the re-definination of marriage here, and a roundup of FRC press statements here.  Synopsis: Public opinion will now turn against gay marriage, as Americans  observe the devastating consequences of gay marriage (specific examples TBA).

National Organization for Marriage: "What you can do today to help save marriage" is here.  Synopsis: We didn't totally lose and now we're taking it to the people with our quixotic drive for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman.

Concerned Women of America responds here.  The money quote (and writing that makes me chortle like a 14-year-old boy): "Five Justices of the Supreme Court have just compromised the entire initiative process with this decision."

Analysis from MASSResistance here, with a particularly interesting section towards the end titled "How the pro-family movement botched these cases." Synopsis: The "pro-family movement" needs to take the gloves off and stop pretending they are cool with gay people and shit.

From Southern Baptist Russell Moore here. Synopsis: We are all sinners in the hands of an angry God, and if God is angry at the gays, don't worry he's also angry at you.

Pinterest board for Marriage: One Man One Woman Only! here.  Findings: for as much as conservatives seem to love pinterest, the anti-gay marriage pins seems sadly lacking.

And, of course, there is Call2Fall, an organization asking Christians to beg God's forgiveness for sin-y stuff (I'm not quite sure).  I'm just going to let the graphic do the talking (you should really check it out) here.

In my personal conservative blog watch, I've observed that the conservative chatter specifically about/against gay marriage has declined a lot since 2007 and the 2nd Bush election.  Some anti-gay marriage folks are really wrestling to reconcile their religious teachings with compassion for the actual gay people they know.  I would characterize the people who are posting in this vein as "the crisis of the compassionate conservative."

Other people who aren't posting publicly don't wish to appear publicly mean-spirited by expressing their beliefs, and some don't wish to open themselves up to public mocking, ridicule, or accusations.  Examples from The Loveliest Hour, C. Jane Kendrick, and an older post from the Prop 8 fight by Elizabeth Esther.

A particularly interesting subset of people are those who are now rejecting "government marriage" and instead pursuing only religious "covenant marriage," but I'm leaving that discussion for another day.

HomOsexuals on Voting Rights

First some camp:

From Black Girl Dangerous, "Calling in a Queer Debt" here.

Joint press release from a bunch of LGBT advocacy groups in support of voting rights here.

 A report from Transgender Equality on voting discrimination issues for trans people here.

 From the ACLU, "Voter Suppression is an LGBT Issue," here, and some broader analysis from the ACLU about why voter protections are still needed here.

 From the Center for American Progress, "Voter Suppression 101" here. And finally, from The Atlantic, "Why Progressives are still worried about voter suppression," here.

And a VIMEO video from New Southerners on the Ground (SONG) about the importance of organizing across categories.

 

 To recap: democratic societies must not only allow, but also encourage their citizenry to vote.  Voter suppression has a direct and negative effect on progressive politics.  Voter suppression hurts people of color, particularly poor people and elderly people, regardless of their sexual/gender orientation.  Voter suppression hurts trans people of all races and colors.

Now on to writing to my legislators.  It's great to live in a liberal state, but it makes it harder to motivate to write letters when I know my legislators will vote for the things I believe in even if I don't contact them, oh the burdens of representative democracy.

"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.

SCOTUS PSA!

If you're anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court decisions on Prop 8 and DOMA, and you haven't checked out SCOTUS Blog, you should definitely take a look.  You can find SCOTUS Blog here.  They usually start live blogging at 9:00am on decision days, and they will be doing so tomorrow (Tuesday, June 25).  They have a great live blog, which makes a weirdly addictive clicking noise every time that it updates.  They also take reader questions and provide both law-speak and regular-people explanations of the decisions.

And here you can find some analysis from The Onion, and here a for real LGBTQ response to today's voting rights ruling.

The Affordable Care Act and Me

This morning found me sweating and shaking on my front porch as I opened the envelope from MD Unemployment.  Thankfully the skinny envelope/thick envelope laws did not hold, and my skinny envelope held an APPROVAL!  Thank you safety net, thank you nanny state, please feel free to peek at my metadata as long as you keep those debit card payments coming.

The payments, less taxes, should be enough to keep LB in daycare*, and both me and LB in healthcare, perhaps with enough left over for a bag of groceries.  The health insurance is really the problem for us.  We can just about make it on B's salary, but add in $790/month for COBRA and the numbers stop making sense.  We Americans are a peculiar people.  Who would design a system where an adult making a salary could have very good insurance for one adult and one child for about $120/month, but an adult making $0 needs to pay $790/month for the same benefits?

As a middle aged asthmatic with an unmasked cardiac risk (thanks preeclampsia) and a 1/2 million dollar baby there aren't many good choices.  I've applied for our state subsidized insurance for both of us.  We'll only qualify if there's a "your marriage doesn't really exist" loophole.  I respect people who wouldn't take benefits only gotten through an anti-gay loophole (what was that they said in Women's Studies class about the master's tools and the master's house?), but my inherent cheapness would make me happy to stick it to the man by exploiting a loophole.  If that plan doesn't pan out, I'll be waiting anxiously for the final pieces of the ACA to kick in on October 1, 2013.

RI is definitely working on the state insurance exchange, but there isn't much specific information.  Information from the Governor's office is here.  In the few examples with actual dollar amounts, the subsidies are significant, but the actual cost is crazy high, making the cost with subsidy really pretty high.  Sigh.  I need a job...


* I used to wonder about people who were unemployed and still had their kids in daycare, but now it makes perfect sense.

"She Loves Me Like Jesus Does"

is my least favorite song in heavy rotation on country radio right now.  Crappy songs are bad enough, without crappy songs that make you spend way too much time pondering what it would be like if you life partner "loved you like Jesus."  Isn't Jesus all about the agape love, not the carnal love?

Could I suggest instead

B's been on a work trip since Tuesday, which means that my interactions with adult human beings have been limited to "Could I please have a large Deluxe with everything," and "How did she do today?"  Just me and the radio here.

I tried to distract myself from some super-productive cover letter writing with SCOTUS Blog, but the SC didn't release any of the exciting decisions today (next Monday at 10:00am, it's on!).

So as I wait, I've been trying to figure out what's happening on the ground with anti-gay (or anti gay sexual acts, if you prefer) attitudes.

The hard edge of anti-gay thought and strategy can be found on this list put out by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  These groups, NOM for example, increasingly seem to have trouble translating their arguments for a mainstream audience.  SPLC also finds that LGBT people form the group most likely to be targeted in hate crimes.

The rhetoric of MASS Resistance (homosexuals will indoctrinate your children in school) played well in the first gay marriage popular vote in Maine, but I saw little of those arguments in the second Maine campaign and the Rhode Island state house fight.  Although there will always be a whiff of Anita Bryant in the "Homosexuals!  And children!" arguments, overall that strategy seems to have shifted from "sex perverts!" to "religious freedom!" and "tradition!" You can find some real analysis here.  Broadly it seems that as gay folks have moved from a strategy of talking broadly about rights to a strategy that focuses on actual gay people, the anti folks have moved away from talking about actual (perverted) people and towards talking about broad principles of religious liberty.  The reason for those respective shifts is a big one, a majority of Americans feel some sort of sympathy for actual LG(BT? because I'm not sure if the sympathy really extends to the B and T)people, so says Pew, therefore it makes sense for pro-gay folk to stress gay=person and for anti-gay folks to focus on themes other than actual people.

On the many conservative Christian blogs that I read, there is not much discussion of gay issues or gay marriage, particularly compared with the issue of abortion, which is often discussed.  For people who are morally opposed to abortion, there is a clear (innocent) victim.  In contrast, who is the victim of a person walking through life with a gay identity?  Perhaps the gay person himself, but then how is a gay person different from any other sinner?  So what's a person who thinks gay sex is immoral, but doesn't want to persecute gay people, to do?  Our friends at Focus on the Family say "invite them over for dinner." Interesting.

The issue is likely most simple for conservative Catholics.  The Catholic Church has a long theological and cultural tradition of celibacy.  This fact means that conservative Catholics can offer their gay brethren an established path to a legitimate place in society, if those brethren are willing to be celibate.  This is an interesting gay, Catholic, celibate blog.  And some pieces by conservative, straight, Catholics trying to work it out can be found here and here.  Conservative Protestants and Mormons sometimes also espouse celibacy for gay (or "same sex attracted") people, but it's clearly a more marginal status within those religions, and, thus, the phenomenon of the "mixed-orientation marriage."  I know they don't want my pity, but, damn, that seems hard.

So much more to say, but daycare pickup calls..

Live Free or Die Trying

Last night was the last leg of my last extreme commute.  I find myself relived, very relieved, and sad, and excited, and scared.  I feel like the rest of my life has begun, but I don't quite know what that means.  The rest of my life got off to an inauspicious start today.  I kept LB home from daycare because she had an evaluation.  So we got a mellow start and ate oatmeal and mangos and I even took her to the park (I am supermom).  Then we came home to a smelly, messy house, our slowly dying dog, and a last minute assignment for a potential job.

The evaluation team arrived a hour later to a messy house, a dying dog, a fussy child, and me.  I don't know if I have ever so fully achieved the stereotype of "stressed out working mom."  I spent the evaluation urging LB on while I also frantically trying to compose appropriate emails about arcane matters.  If you've read here for any amount of time, you will know that I have a typo problem, one that should have been beaten out of me during my many, many years of education, but I guess I'm just an overachiever.

I kept it together with only a little fraying at the edges until the evaluators started asking important questions like, "what are some words you would use to describe your family."  I had a mini-freakout and got all quavery as I told them to just write down that I had declined to answer, and please move on BECAUSE I'M CLEARLY STRESSED AND I CAN'T DO THIS RIGHT NOW!.

LB did her stuff and scored similarly to her last evaluation.  This test included a picture of a rotary phone for her to identify.  Even my luddite parents don't have a phone like that.  Ridiculousness.  They gave her a "significant delay" for gross motor, which came as surprise, but she also wouldn't run or climb stairs for them, so we'll get another eval with a PT and see what's up.  Her other problem area was speech, particularly articulation, which we have noticed at home, so she'll also get a speech evaluation.

Meanwhile, in my home state there are conspiracy theories and conservative revolutions.

"because you look so fine/ and I really want to make you mine"

In breaking news, Same Sex marriage bill passed Rhode Island Senate by a wide margin. Easy passage is expected in the House, and the bill has support of the Governor.  B and I must have the touch, first Maryland, now Rhode Island.  If we moved to every state in the Union (and Puerto Rico), do you think they would all pass gay marriage?

Today was a beautiful Baltimore day, sunny and warm, with just enough cool breeze.  My students and I went on a tour of historic West Baltimore.  We saw lovely boulevards and historic homes, abandoned orphanages, vacant homes, schools loud with children, churches, brutalist buildings, housing project with attempts at modernist finishes, and the wide open spaces of urban renewal.  Through it all cherry blossoms rained down on us.

At home, LB got a diagnosis of pneumonia on Monday, after a few days of albuterol induced madness.  She is rallying, but it's not a time that I want to be away from my ladies.  As my time in Baltimore winds down, I find myself at the same hotel where B and I stayed when we first visited the city to look for a place to live.  I'm hoping I'll sleep the sleep of closure tonight.