TWO UNEASY PIECES

(Praying mantises in Kahramanmaras, Turkey; taken by Mehmet Karaca)

 

After my mother died at age 56 and my father’s next hasty remarriage failed, he lost his house and his job.  He moved into a crappy apartment near my youngest brother and got a security officer job.  He began giving full vent to all the racism he had been forced to keep in check living with Mama, and started buying guns. 

He finally married again, an alcoholic Baptist widow older than him who owned her home, and spent his days on his recliner in front of the TV watching Walker Texas Ranger and Bonanza reruns.  He had caddies over each arm rest.  In the right hand one was the remote, a large sportsdrink cup filled with iced tea and bourbon, and a loaded 9 mm with the safety off.  In the left hand one was a men’s urinal bedpan jug so he didn’t have to keep running to the toilet.

 

He warned me often that if I came to visit, I was to give him advance notice and a firm arrival time, and NEVER to let myself in without loud knocking and much calling out of my name.  He’d say sorrowfully “I’d hate to have to shoot you, honey.”

 

I liken his unveiling of what must have been there all along, unchanged by my mother’s influence, as analogous to what has happened in this country since the Right made it publicly acceptable (again) to articulate open violence against niggers and bitches.  People of colour and open-eyed women could have told you that the ugly reality of hate was there all along, and indeed is the foundation of American mythic superiority.  Churches and the military tend to support this resurgence.  It’s where the money and the troops are to be found.

 

At his funeral, everybody talked about what a kind, generous old man he had been.  Law-abiding and a pillar of the church.  White men get every pass in the world, and we all ignore how scared we are of them.

 

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Joan Annsfire recently posted a thought-provoking piece at her blog about how Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris had been important role models for her, and the devastation she felt when it was revealed that Michael had molested their children before he committed suicide.  I likewise felt a terrible, personal betrayal about this man in whom I had placed so much faith.  Even more, I wondered how on earth Louise was bearing it.

 

Louise kept a public quiet as she recovered.  Finally, on 5 March 2001, she released a short story to The New Yorker called "The Shawl".  I was still rereading it and trying to take in its message when my little brother Bill died under terrible circumstances.  The two became linked together in my memory.

 

I talked about it last night with Margot, and this morning she tracked down the story to read it.  I just reread it, too, for the first time in a dozen years, and I am weeping at the power of this woman’s art. 

 

This is how we go on.

 

 

© 2014 Maggie Jochild.

 

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DUST BOWL MEMORY

Margot just sent me an MP3 of a new Allison Krauss tune, "Dust Bowl Children". I am moved to tears by memories.

My Great-uncle Allie was a farmer in Tillman County, Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. His father Tom (my great-grandfather) had gotten their land by running for it as it was stolen (a second time) from native peoples, him and all his kin trying to make a new start away from the ravages of the Cilvil War in southern Tennessee. Tom's wife Sarah was 1/4 Choctaw, though she didn't at all look it, thin-faced with blue eyes and sandy hair. Her brothers Ace and Shep did, though, looked pure blood native in the family photos. They were in the land runs as well: How did they sort it out in their minds?

Allie was mostly a bastard. His treatment of nonwhites and women was equally contemptuous, and his only child Obbie Tom lived in terror. For some reason, though, Allie liked me and treated me well. My strongest memory of him is sitting at the table with all the older folks after a meal, when we kids had been released but I was the sort who stuck around for the stories. Those Okie farm folk had a habit of ending every meal with a biscuit or slice of bread spread thickly with salty butter, then crumbled and drenched in blackstrap molasses. They ate this whether there was dessert or not. Mama said it was a way of getting iron and minerals when diet was otherwise inadequate.

My grandad Renza Barnett lost his farm during the Depression, couldn't keep it going. He collapsed emotionally and retreated into nearby Frederick all day, playing 42 for money and at least he broke even. Grandmother Villa somehow started a cafe and kept the family together, although she never let him forget what a failure he'd been. During World War II, Renza finally got a job at one of the new airfields, and after the war he went to work for the Oklahoma Highway Department. After he retired at 60, he got a job as a local cop where he terrorized the black population of Frederick.

Allie somehow held onto his farm, maybe because it was snugged up right alongside the Red River. He liked to rub Renza's nose in it as well.

This night, the overhead light was off, with only light coming in from the adjacent kitchen. There was the usual haze of cigarette smoke, a pot of strong coffee, and unfastened belts on all the men. Somebody mentioned the Depression, and Allie reached out to the sugar bowl -- it was a dark green cheap ceramic -- and poked it with a blackened nail, saying with his ever-present but not really friendly grin "We woulda never had a bowl like this without a lid on the table."

"How come?" somebody younger asked.

He swiveled his dark eyes in their direction. "They call it the Dust Bowl, didn't they? The wind never stopped, and sand blew in every crevice. We'd wet burlap sacks at night, roll 'em up and line the winderpanes, under the doors, every cranny we could, like chinkin' a cabin, but still in the morning, the table'd have a film of dust on it you could write your name in. And the sugar bowl lid wan't quite tight enough, neither, so you'd taste the grit you spooned into yer coffee."

We sat in silence for a minute. Then, to our complete shock, Allie choked out "It was our farm we was swallowing each morning at breakfast" and burst into tears. For sure it was the only time I saw him cry. All the adults abruptly fled the table, as if he had crapped on his plate, and suddenly it was just me, Mama, and Allie. Mama blew a smoke ring and looked away. Allie caught me looking at him as he sucked back snot and said "What're YOU staring at?" I didn't answer. He went outside, and that was that.

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FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE SAYING NO TO ARIZONA'S COMMUNITY DESTRUCTION

The O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective, whose members participated last Friday's occupation of Arizona Border Patrol Headquarters, have released a video of their action.




The O'odham Solidarty Across Borders Collective is made up of "Akimel O'odham and Tohono O'odham youth who are pressing the attack against the ongoing colonization of our traditional lands (i.e. U.S./Mexico Border policies), environmental racism from transnational corporations and the state, and all colonial polices aimed at destroying our O'odham Him'dag (Traditional Way of Life)." The group organizing the occupation included "members of Indigenous Nations of Arizona, migrants, people of color and white allies." Their peaceful resistance at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson resulted in arrests and citations for trespass.

According to their press release, "Six people used chains and other devices to lock themselves in the building. These Arizona residents disrupted the Border Patrol operations to demand that Border Patrol (BP), Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), their parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Obama administration end militarization of the border, end the criminalization of immigrant communities, and end their campaign of terror which tear families apart through increasing numbers of raids and deportations."

For an in-depth look at what SB 1070 will look like to people on the ground, check out Uri Lerner's analysis via HispanicLA at Behind The Vote: SB 1070's Risk To Citizens.

To read more about this particular resistance and to assist with the fines and possible criminal charges they are facing, go to O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective or contact Leilani Clark at (520) 982-5687.

Below is an excerpt from their statement:

Border militarization destroys Indigenous communities.

The development of the border wall has lead to desecration of our ancestors graves, it has divided our communities and prevents us from accessing sacred places.

Troops and paramilitary law enforcement, detention camps, check points, and citizenship verification are not a solution to migration. We have existed here long before these imposed borders, my elders inform us that we always honored freedom of movement. Why our communities and the daily deaths at the border ignored? The impacts of border militarization are constantly made invisible in the media, the popular culture of this country and even the mainstream immigrants rights movement which has often pushed for “reform” that means further militarization of the border, which means increased suffering for our communities.

Indigenous communities such as the O’odham, the Pascua Yaqui, Laipan Apache, Kickapoo, and Cocopah along the US/Mexico border have been terrorized with laws and practices like SB1070 for decades. Indigenous people along the border have been forced by border patrol to carry and provide proof of tribal membership when moving across their traditional lands that have been bisected by this imposed border; a border that has been extremely damaging to the cultural and spiritual practices of these communities. Many people are not able to journey to sacred sites because the communities where people live are on the opposite side of the border from these sites. Since the creation of the current U.S./Mexico border, 45 O’odham villages on or near the border have been completely depopulated.

On this day people who are indigenous to Arizona join with migrants who are indigenous to other parts of the Western Hemisphere in demanding a return to traditional indigenous value of freedom of movement for all people. Prior to the colonization by European nations (spaniards, english, french) and the establishment of the european settler state known as the United States and the artificial borders it and other european inspired nation states have imposed; indigenous people migrated, traveled and traded with each other without regard to artificial black lines drawn on maps. U.S. immigration policies dehumanize and criminalize people simply because which side of these artificial lines they were born on. White settlers whose ancestors have only been here at most for a few hundred years have imposed these policies of terror and death on “immigrants” whose ancestors have lived in this hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, for time immemorial.

In addition, the migration that the U.S. government is attempting to stop is driven more than anything else by the economic policies of the U.S. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA have severely reduced the ability of Mexicans and others from the global south to sustain themselves by permitting corporations to extract huge amounts of wealth and resources from these countries into the U.S. This has led to millions of people risking the terror and death that so many face to cross into the U.S. looking for ways to better support their families. Thousand of women, men, children and elders have died crossing just in the last decade. If the U.S. really wants to reduce migration it should end its policies of exploitation and wealth extraction targeted at the global south and instead pursue policies of economic, environmental and social justice for all human beings on the planet, thus reducing the drive to immigrate.

The protestors are demanding:
-An end to border militarization
-The immediate repeal of SB 1070 and HB 2281
-An end to all racial profiling and the criminalization of our communities
-No ethnic cleansing or cultural genocide
-No border patrol encroachment/sweeps on sovereign native land
-No Deportations
-No Raids
-No ID-verification
-No Checkpoints

-Yes to immediate and unconditional regularization (“legalization”) of all people
-Yes to human rights
-Yes to dignity
-Yes to respect
Yes to respecting Indigenous Peoples inherent right of migration

 

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SIX RULES FOR ALLIES

Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones gave 6 rules for allies (cross race/ gender/ sexuality/ nationality/  religion etc) in her keynote speech given 19 February 2010 at a luncheon sponsored by Abriendo Brecha Vll Conference and The Seventeenth Annual Emerging Scholarship In Women’s and Gender Studies Conference, University of Texas, Austin.



A complete transcript of her speech is available at Sharon Bridgforth's site by clicking here. I'm excerpting a portion here, but it will not do complete justice to the moving and brilliant words of Dr. Jones, so please take in the entire message from the video and/or the transcript -- and pass it on:

"I take this opportunity to speak with you very seriously. The times require that I use every moment of public presentation to speak the truth as I know it. That is my job as an artist, a scholar, a teacher, a committed human being seeking to make a world of peace and justice for everyone.

"This truth telling is dangerous business. It leaves one vulnerable — but our vulnerability is our strength. It leaves one exposed, but exposure allows the wind to whip through all those dank and musty spaces of terror and blow away isolation and fear. Truth telling leaves us free—and that is, after all the point.

"This truth telling is especially dangerous for a Black queer woman, for me. My very safety is at stake when I speak the truth, the truth of my life, and the truth of the world as I know it. My truths challenge the very foundation of the systems around me, systems that variously support and denigrate me, systems that applaud and slap me.

"So, as I walk, I look for mirrors, for allies who are also committed to everyone’s freedom, allies willing to risk their own safety in order to insure mine."

"I offer some reflections on what it means to be an ally to queer people, to women, and to people of color."

(1) "Allies know that it is not sufficient to be liberal. In fact, the liberal position is actually a walk backwards...The liberal position supports the status quo of the academy which means that racism, sexism, homophobia, the perils of nationhood, and a commitment to class structures cannot be undone in the academy—unless we move toward a radical rather than liberal position."
(2) "Be loud and crazy so Black folks won’t have to be! Speak up! Say it! Name it!" (Likewise men, straights, and Christians.)
(3) "Do not tell anyone in any oppressed group to be patient."
(4) "Recognize the new racism, the new sexism, the old homophobia. It is institutional and structural."
(5) "When called out about your racism, sexism or homophobia, don’t cower in embarrassment, don’t cry, and don’t silently think 'she’s crazy' and vow never to interact with her again. We are all plagued by racism, sexism, and homophobia. Be grateful that someone took the time to expose yours—remember, exposure allows the wind to whip away isolation and fear."
(6) "Allies actively support alternative possibilities."

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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KICKIN' ASS AND NAMIN' NAMES

(Dale Robertson, a Tea Party activist, holding his sign at the Feb. 27, 2009 Tea Party in Houston)

The conservatism which took hold in America during the cultural devastation of Ronald Reagan, the Neocons who successfully married the Religious Right, depends on conning the working class to benefit the owning class by actively maintaining or advancing two bedrock values: woman-hating and white supremacy. It's a one-two punch that sucks in otherwise progessive males who are covertly terrified of powerful women and otherwise intelligent women who are covertly terrified of brown folks. (Or not so covertly.)

I agree with Katha Pollitt that I'm personally relieved we are not sitting in the raging floodwaters of woman-hating sewage that would fill all the airwaves if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency. The backlash would be horrific.

But equally horrific is how white supremacy has come out from under wraps (well. it never was concealed for those of us without privilege or choosing to not accept denial) and has fueled a 250% increase in terrorist organizations whose raison d'etre is race hatred. And make no mistake about it, to quote Bob Cesca's essay at Huffpo today, "The Tea Party is all about race."


I'm going to quote a few sections from his post to whet your appetite but I hope you'll go read it for yourselves. We must continue challenging the media coverage which acts like these people have a rational agenda and force exposure of what actually brings them together -- why separatist, eliminationist Sarah Palin is their darling. Why Rick Perry is running for Governor of Texas with TV spots openly declaring his support for Tenthers, a code for white supremacists who want to roll back federal civil rights protection in "their" states. We have to decode their dogwhistles at every turn and organize that majority of citizens for whom race hatred is un-American. We are the real patriots, and we must not let them steal that term.

From Bob Cesca The Tea Party Is All About Race:

"...when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

"...The tea party is an extension of talk radio. It's an extension of Fox News Channel. It's an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party -- the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad and the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It's an extension of the race-baiting and, often, the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres.

"...In the final analysis, when you boil away all of the weirdness, it becomes clear that the teabaggers are pissed because there isn't yet another doddering old white guy in the White House -- like they're used to. That's what this is all about."

(Hat-tip to Brilliant at Breakfast for pointing me toward the Cesca post.)

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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MINSTREL SHOWS

("Drinking melted snow water in Richmond, Vermont", photo by Oak LoGalbo)

A day with physical limits at the forefront, so I will push elsewhere.

The whole question of "should white people do art based on/coopted from POC culture" is on folks' minds today. It's a big question with a complicated answer. As a writer myself who creates nonwhite characters (main characters), I constantly revisit my assumptions, my sense of entitlement, my intentions. Who am I writing for? What would (insert various friends) think or say about this scene? Am I challenging the status quo, raising the energy, or simply perpetuating existential hopelessness? Can I find a similar lesson from my OWN culture and use that instead, with more integrity?

After watching the first episode of White Teeth this weekend, I assumed Zadie Smith was Jamaican, i.e., the character Clara. Turns out, she is more or less Irie, the daughter of Jamaican Clara and white working class British Archie. I haven't finished the series, but it has thus far gone off into Pakistani culture as experienced by Irie's family friends Magid and Mallat. The writer clearly knows it inside out, and thus far I'm willling to trust her as the voice bringing us this other world.

But is that because I'm white and my ability to experience "the other" is most comfortably brought to my doorstep by border crossers?


I have noticed that Archie's character is rather one-dimensional, and benevolently dim despite his early suicide attempt and history of a war crime.

In my scifi world, I slice through the Gordian knots of gender, race and class by constructing a post-cataclyscmic, isolated culture where values attached to physical differences have been eliminated. The productive tension of diversity comes from elsewhere. The feedback I'm getting is that it works. But it is serious internal work to give authentic voices to these characters, and I'm well aware they may be off in ways I cannot imagine. The fear of all writers.

In Ginny Bates, my POC characters are frank border-crossers who have picked some "good white folks" to make family with but never entirely lose their irritation with the conditioned whiteness of Myra, the character based on me. I modeled this after how I approach gender, how the men I love and trust must still occasionally encounter in me a wall put there by our different gender upbringing and I expect them to do at least half the work of scaling that wall. At LEAST. It's the lesbian-feminist in me that won't make excuses or cut extra slack. I find it an ethical, if challenging, way to live, and I respect that mirrored choice in the POC I know.

I agree with Jill Cozzi that the ice dance pair doing a traditional Indian dance showed smarts and ethics by having it choreographed by an Indian expert. But the show itself, especially the judging, is overwhelmingly white -- how does that not make it a sophisticated minstrel show? My gut rebels, in the same way that watching middle-class drag kings portraying their take on the brutish masculinity of working class males for sexual arousal of screaming mostly middle class (or aspiring thereto) women struck me as sick-making cooptation.

"Queering" or "subverting" in contexts where permits have been issued and "we're all the same really" is the mandatory message is not contradiction enough, and almost always tends to reassure the imagined liberal default, instead of fomenting actual thought-provoking discomfort.

The route to actual parity of voice will not be found by white folks going on travel adventures or Avatar-like saviors who become Lakota because they can't bear their own culture any longer. It will mean ripping out at the root (i.e., radical) all the gender, race, and class-based constructs of our current "reality" and shivering naked in the floodwaters that come to reshape our social terrain.

Some art takes us in that direction. Some does not. I can only tell you what works for me, and share it with you here.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog]

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TURNING IT OVER

Samuel Mordecai Turner, circa 1885, Montague County, Texas -- my mother's mother's father

I stayed up til 2:00 despite being very tired, but slept 8 hours. I didn't get done yesterday what I wanted, I got sucked into the genealogy hole, chasing a new approach to getting around an old family brick wall: The Turner/Smith lines.

My cousin Sally (mama's sister's daughter, four months older than me) has also done some genealogy and likewise finds this bunch interesting. She's a convert to Judaism and her theory is that the Turners emigrated from England to near Memphis in part because they were Jews. Family naming tradition and a few photographs make this idea plausible. A single frail record states our great-great-great- grandfather Joseph Turner was from England, and a couple of scanty census records plunk him in Fayette County, Tennessee in 1830 and 1840, where he had a son (Joseph Turner II) before apparently dying just as the 1850 census would have given us some real data on him.


Joseph Turner II married in 1841 to one of the more emotionally powerful women in my lineage, Matilda Clementine Smith. They had two sons before Joseph died, again before that magic 1850 revelation point. Matilda went on to remarry twice, have two more sons, migrate to new land in Arkansas, and establish herself as a solid property owner and community leader. She outlived three husbands and all but one of her sons, extremely rare for a woman in that place and time. She also never owned slaves in constructing her middle class security, again rare for the place and time.

Her sole surviving son, Thomas Joseph "Tom" Turner, married a doormat he bred into an early grave, came back from the CSA with a mean glint in his eye, and had trouble finding one of his many children willing to take him in during old age. He died penniless, but his son Samuel Mordecai Turner (my great-grandfather) was beloved in the community, married a brilliant and outgoing woman, and is part of the "good line" on mama's side.

For a couple of generations, all we knew was Tom Turner's name and his claim that his father had been born in England. Turner is a surname as common as Jones in the South, and it took me a very long time to find him as a fatherless child on the 1850 census, living with widowed young mother Matilda, her father Jabez Smith, and no doubt the next of Matilda's husbands already stopping by for dinner. Adding the surname of Smith to the mix didn't help one iota.

Fayette County, Tennessee is one county over from Memphis and borders Mississippi. It's Delta land, flat, saturated with extreme racial oppression, white class stratification, and not much civic wealth to go around. Records available from a distance were extremely scarce, and remain so even now with the internet because they weren't created in the first place except to document ownership of property.

So, in 1985, I included Fayette County on my family history research tour. It stands out in my memory for how shut down its white inhabitants were (generally, the more a rural place had once relied on slavery, the more hostile its white people were now, I discovered on that trip). I spent one day digging around before fleeing back to Memphis to sleep.

I went to the courthouse first, to find a marriage record for Joseph Turner and Matilda Smith. I was lucky that the courthouse had never been burned -- about half of all Southern courthouses were deliberately torched by Union troops during the civil war as part of community disruption and terrorism. The marriage records didn't begin until 1840, which is common for the South away from the Eastern seaboard: Southern genealogy holds piecemeal records for whites, much less for blacks and natives. But 1840 might be early enough to find Joseph and Matilda, I hoped. The register had never been indexed, so I began looking through the dusty, oversized pages one by one, standing at a corner counter, glared at by the Mary-Kay-aspiring white women who worked as clerks there.

No luck. I went on until 1860, tediously copying all the Smith and Turner marriages into my notebook, but with no hope they'd connect to my line. As I was closing the ledger, I noticed a couple of loose partial pages at the back which had fallen out of the binding. I pulled them out to look at them -- I am thorough -- and there it was: Mr. Joseph Turner to Miss Matilda C. Smith, October 21, 1841 The paper was crumbling but I made a gentle copy, told the clerk about the possible loss of precious data if the pages weren't cared for, and went outside into bright sunshine for an exultant break.

I decided to walk a block away, to an old grocery store within view, for a snack. What happened next is an incident I wrote about almost verbatim in Ginny Bates, an episode of revelatory racism that I failed to address to anything like my satisfaction. [Excerpted at the end of this post.]

When I eventually returned to the courthouse, my connection to my ancestors had been altered. I found no further solid records on my people that day -- they had been tenant farmers, owned nothing, their deaths were not registered, and in a decade everyone migrated westward into stolen Indian lands whose soil was not yet played out. What I got from Fayette County was the marriage scrap and a hint of black/white relations as they must have been when Joseph and Matilda lived there -- all in all, what I most needed to be given.

Thus yesterday, when I found a hint on how I might follow the Smiths despite inadequate records, I was off and running. I did manage to accumulate a fair amount on Matilda's cousins, but in the end this foundation was not a springboard further back. That's what usually happens in this kind of research, you leave nothing undone in retrieval and collating but the bigger mystery remains. So I still don't know where the Smiths came from, beyond "North Carolina", or why the Turners came from England to the Delta in 1830.

I think I have Sam Turner's eyes, though, and his love of community. I have Matilda Smith's perseverance, and if either of them are guiding my curiosity, maybe further glimmers will come my way. Today, however, I'll focus on the 21st century.

-----------------------------------------------------

Excerpt from Ginny Bates referred to above. Background: Myra is the main character loosely based on me, a working-class white lesbian. Her partner is Ginny Bates, a middle-class white Jew. Her best friend is Allie, a working-class black lesbian raised in the South. Myra and Allie have gone back to Mississippi to research Allie's ancestry with Myra's genealogical expertise. The location and events in this episode, however, are drawn entirely from my own experience in Fayette County, Tennessee, one county north of Mississippi.

Myra showed Allie the ropes, how things were organized: It was the same for every county in the South, seemed like. Allie wanted to begin with marriage records, which thankfully here had a bride as well as a groom index. But there were separate indexes for whites and "colored" prior to 1960. Allie's lips tightened again. Myra decided to take on the deeds, which tended to be tedious and full of bad handwriting to decipher.

It was peaceful in the basement. Full of lovely old paper and massive bound books, with light from an airwell at the side: Myra began to have fantasies of a study this sequestered and quiet. But, she noticed after using her inhaler a second time, it was also dusty and likely had a high degree of ambient mold.

"Al? I need to go up into the air, get something to drink, I think" she said.

"Is there a break room in the courthouse, you think?"

"Well, on the square near where we parked, by the corner, was a little grocery store -- looked like something from the fifties. I'll walk down there, you want to go with?"

"No. But bring me back some orange juice, and something to snack on" said Allie, her eyes glued to the index on the table in front of her.

Myra told the clerk on her way out "I'm going for a Co-Cola, back in a bit", noticing how she had pronounced the word. There was a cluster of cars near the tax assessor's office, and one in front of a discount store. Otherwise, the square was empty.

The grocery store had high stamped tin ceilings obscured in shadow. All of the dairy cases were behind thick glass doors. She got Allie's juice, then found a case containing chilled soft drinks in real glass bottles, including RC Cola in a bottle shape she hadn't seen in over a decade. She grabbed two.

The candy aisle, disappointingly, did not hold vintage favorites she had hoped for -- no little wax bottles full of colored liquid, or Blo-Pops. She got a bag of Tom's peanuts for herself, roasted cashews for Allie, and headed for the front.

There were only two registers, one empty and one with a teased-hair white woman at the register. Another customer was ahead of her, a frail-looking black man in faded slacks and neatly-pressed tan shirt, buttoned up to the collar and at the cuffs. His hair was a snowy frizz, and when looking at his skin, she instantly remembered the line from Zora Neale Hurston that Allie quoted often: "High yaller, yaller, high brown, vaseline brown, seal brown, low brown, dark brown". Myra would guess him to be seal brown.

He had just done his shopping for at least a week, maybe two weeks. It was the 30th: Just got his Social Security check, she bet. With trembling, knot-knuckled hands he was carefully lifting items from a wire cart to the counter -- no conveyor belts here. A 10-pound bag of white rice, big can of Crisco, smaller can of blackstrap molasses, bag of chicken necks and backs, 5-lb bag of Gold Medal, bottle of light Karo (If he's got a pecan tree, that's a pie, thought Myra), baking soda, can of Maxwell house, quart of sweet milk, two cans of evaporated milk, pound of bacon, box of Spic'n'Span...No veggies or eggs, which means he's got a little bit of land, thought Myra.

She had been standing respectfully back and had apparently not been noticed by the woman at the register. When the old man asked for a can of snuff, however, the woman changed position enough to see Myra.

"Here, now" she called out sharply. "You come on up here, I'll check you out first."

Myra began to protest as the woman shoved aside the old man's last few items, saying "Oh, no, I'm not in a hurry and he's almost done -- "

But the old man shrunk even smaller into his already shrunken frame and stepped back from the counter, pressed into the corner. He didn't look up. Myra froze in horror.

"Give me what you've got there" commanded the woman, her voice not at all friendly. Myra's eyes were on the old man, willing him to make contact with her, as she numbly complied, dropping her bottles onto the counter. The woman voided her register with the push of a button and began punching in Myra's prices.

"I'm sorry" Myra said to the old man. He didn't acknowledge her at all.

"He can wait" said the woman shortly. She took Myra's money, counted out change, and bagged her items in impatient silence. Myra said "thank you" to her and then to the old man, but only the woman responded, saying "You're very welcome" before picking back up the Crisco and starting his checkout again.

Out on the sidewalk, Myra fought the impulse to vomit. She tried to find a way to believe that what had just occurred wasn't what she thought it was. She pulled out one of her RC's, only to discover she needed a churchkey to open the top. Well, she wasn't going back into that store, that's for sure. Maybe the car glovebox would have something to open her bottle.

No luck with the glovebox, but she had a dim memory from her teenage beer-drinking years that led her to find a leverage spot inside the open car door, popping off the cap on the second try. She drank down to the shoulder of the bottle, poured the peanuts into the neck, and sat down inside the car, closing the door as a kind of shield against the square itself. She glanced back at the store: The old man wasn't visible yet.

When he emerged, she could idle up and offer to give him a ride home. But she suspected that would send him into complete panic. She wasn't sure what the rules were, so how to intelligently break them was beyond her. She couldn't believe this was 2004, that his instant subservience could be still happening. If he was in his 70s, then he had been born maybe around 1930 -- well, if he lived through the Depression here, with his parents, that told her a lot.

She took slow sips, crunching a peanut or two with each drag, savoring the mix of syrup and salt. She didn't know how to back in and face Allie. She had a strong urge to see Chris walk up: She could tell Chris about what had just happened, and if Chris chewed her out, got mad at her, it would help ease her guilt.

But that urge made her feel even more guilty. Leaning on one woman of color to deal with her guilt about another woman of color. Nope, she had to deal with this on her own. Well, and with Ginny, when she got that chance.

She finished her drink and put the empty bottle in the back floorboard, along with her second RC. She hid Allie's snack inside her pack and returned to the courthouse.



Copyright 2010 Maggie Jochild.

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KEEPING CLEAR OF THE POD-PEOPLE: AFTER LAST NIGHT'S SPEECH

(Ant With Acorn from Tugboat Printshop)

I was once friends with someone who is a direct descendant of Edmund Ruffin. For those of you who don't recognize the name, Edmund Ruffin is the South Carolina slaveholding farmer who is credited with fining the shot which began the Civil War. My friend was, among other identities, an anti-racism activist. She spent a great deal of personal energy coming to peace with her family history, her white Southern identity, and her owning class roots.

According to my friend, her family's version of events is that Ruffin was definitely a fierce advocate of slavery and secession, but he was not a nutjob. In particular, they claim the men around him got him liquored up and then convinced him the Yankees were attacking in order to persuade him to be the first to fire. After the war, Ruffin committed suicide, and his family believed it was because of shame rather than an inability to adjust to a changed world.


But believing in slavery, advocating secession, and choosing suicide are all clear indicators of an inability to handle reality. They all exist on the continuum of crazy. So, alcohol aside, Ruffin was living in a particular zone of denial which won't allow his actions the excuse of an unforeseen accident. Any more than Republicans can claim there was no warning Al Qaeda would attack the U.S. in 2001 using domestic airplanes.

Richard Blair at All Spin Zone has a post up today which begins "It’s hard to believe the 'lone gunman' theory of Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) outburst yesterday evening during the president’s address to congress. Someone put him up to it. Low level hit men in crime families don’t freelance."

I agree with him. The larger point is that while there is a solid 30% functional delusional segment of our population (see my post of yesterday), there is also an organized, highly orchestrated effort being made by the Republican Party, their mouthpieces on hate radio, and the corporate elite who fund them to persistently exploit that Crazy 30% to keep change from occurring. They used fake terror alerts and trumped up wars during Dubya's tenure. Now they're relying on more "grassroots" means to scare the shit out of the rest of us and immobilize us enough to keep their dominion going.

What happens in a democracy when nobody listens to each other any more? What happens when guns and camouflage are commonplace sights in public settings? What happens when you can shout absolutely anything at an elected official? This is not protecting or promoting freedom of speech, this is tyranny by the few at the expense of information reception by the many.

And, let's be clear, the Right will be thrilled if the progressive response is to start putting curbs on public expression, because those laws will be enforced by the status quo and will not come down in our favor. (Just like hate crime laws, which I oppose because they are overwhelmingly be used against poor and/or nonwhite people rather than the most flagrant perpetrators of hate.) I think the best reaction is going to be one which comes from us, the masses, rather than through courts or g*d forbid taser-wielding SOA trained urban cops.

The tools at our disposal are education, thinking on our feet, humor, community, common decency, and, most importantly, our liberal belief that respect for the individual trumps blind adherence to authority.

There's a joke among lesbians of my generation that when you came out to your family, a day later it was as if you'd said nothing at all -- not through acceptance, but because the news was so disturbing to them, they blocked it from family consciousness. This would occur simultaneously with someone, usually your mother, saying "All right, but don't tell you're father, it'll kill him."

Alix Dobkin, famous singer/songwriter, became intrigued with this notion of lesbian as a word that is so powerful it passes by without registering and concurrently can strike men dead. As a result, she wrote one of her most famous hits, "View from Gay Head", which uses the word lesbian 22 times. The rollicking chorus goes
Lesbian, lesbian,
Let's be in no-man's-land
Lesbian, lesbian
Any woman can be a lesbian.

Thus, one mechanism of oppression is preventing certain words or kinds of speech from occurring -- though not all restriction of speech is oppression. Oppression, remember, has to be part of a systematic and institutionalized imbalance of power, not simply reflecting a difference of opinion. Another mechanism is ignoring reality, such as how the corporate-controlled media is simply not reporting on the large numbers of people currently meeting for/organizing around their need for a public option in health care reform. On a daily level, this plays out in households when someone can reel off sports statistics in minutiae going back decades but cannot recall how to load a dishwasher or separate laundry. Such deliberately obstructed learning and listening is common currency to Republicans, and if it can be linked to an underlying vein of culturally-embedded oppression -- sexism or racism, for example -- it seems "normal" enough to often not be challenged as attempted domination.

Here's a few immediate actions you can take regarding the extreme disrespect and obstructionism displayed during last night's speech on health care reform by our President:

(1) Progressive Change Campaign Committee has launched a petition asking Congress to censure Rep. Joe Wilson: "Enough is enough. On an issue as critical as health care reform, it's time to stop the lies, the misinformation, and the uncivil disruptions. Rep. Joe Wilson went way over the line by yelling 'You lie' during President Obama's speech, and Congress should censure him immediately." You can sign it by going here.

(2) Since Joe Wilson's outburst on the House floor his Democratic opponent, former Marine Rob Miller, has received over 11,000 individual grassroots contributions raising over $414,000. If you want to contribute, you can go to his Act Blue page here.

(3) Make sure this is not simply attached to Rep. Joe Wilson, but that it is linked to the overall Republican effort to bring down Obama and stop ANY reform from occurring. Alex Koppelman, writing for The War Room at Salon.com, in his post Joe Wilson Wasn't The Only Disrespectful Republican points out: "There's video of Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the Minority Whip, on his BlackBerry during the speech, for instance...When Obama addressed the charge that he plans 'panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens,' someone on the GOP side shouted out 'shame!' The president went on: 'Such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical.' 'Read the bill!' someone shouted back. Obama mentioned those who accuse him of a government takeover of health care. 'It's true,' someone shouted back .... Even as Obama delivered a tribute to the late senator Ted Kennedy, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga), a leader of House conservatives, perused his BlackBerry. Shortly before the speech ended, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) walked out to beat the rush."

Call your Member of Congress today at (202) 224-3121 to express your outrage.

Longer-term, it's important to keep naming what's going on for what it is. Identify crazy when it is crazy, and don't let them shout you down that you're not being fair. The ability to scream at a President while s/he is speaking to Congress is not a right granted by the rules of that body. The assumption that this long-standing rule could be broken is NOT DIVORCED from the fact that the President in question is African-American and the Representative in question has been a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans. As researched by Dave Neiwert at Crooks and Liars, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a white supremacist organization tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center which, among other things, defends slavery as a benign institution. What Wilson was calling a lie was Obama's denial there would be health care coverage for undocumented immigrants, a key recruitment issue for the Republican Party's white supremacist base.

It's also important to keep our eyes on the prize, which is not simply countering their terror, nor is it Obama's appeasement path (doomed to fail).

Our goal is No more loss of life or livelihood because health care is currently rationed by profit-obsessed death panels (called insurance companies) rather than being acknowledged as a basic human right.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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SEEING WHAT'S BEEN BROKEN FOR CENTURIES

Rick Perlstein absolutely nailed it last month: "In America, crazy is a pre-existing condition."

I want to take this extremely useful reminder one or two steps further. We need to ask ourselves (1) When dealing with manifest mental illness, what is an effective and humane form of behavior that doesn't make things worse, for us or for them? and (2) Let's be explicit about what kind of crazy we're facing here.


Once I was having dinner with an old friend who had retired to a rural area for a while after an extended, messy break-up. She was back in town and we were catching up. She looked much brighter and happier than she had when she'd left town, and I was relieved to see it. Before we got to dessert, however, she confided that she'd finally gotten over her heartbreak after having visitations from aliens -- she could name the planet and galaxy -- who let her know she'd been born there, not on Earth, and she would always have problems relating intimately to Earthlings. I broke into giggles, but she was dead serious. She had come up with a way to cope, a narrative which worked for her, and I had about twenty seconds to figure out what to do.

That sort of situation, once the shock passes (take several sips of tea), is not so hard to handle. Ask questions, stay kind, remind yourself what they -- any of us -- really want/deserve is love and interest. Easy to remember when it's your friend. She didn't have any children she was responsible for, she was clean and eating well and driving okay, and she wasn't going around telling everybody she was from Planet X, only the folks she trusted, so she wasn't about to get locked up. Functionally delusional.

I'm thinking, at this point in America, about one out of every three people is functionally delusional. I think we've always had more than our share because of the nature of our immigration here -- folks who can healthily adjust to and remain in their home communities don't leave those communities. And being persecuted doesn't mean you haven't also become pretty messed up along the way.

On top of that revisitation of the great American myth, I also believe that white supremacy, woman-hating, class exploitation, and child abuse are all concrete forms of mental illness. They are interlinked, they have for millenia been fostered and supported by European governments and the Christian Church, and they are the bedrock upon which our country was founded. When Che said he envied us because we live in the belly of the beast, the point is not whether he was being sarcastic: The point is that living in the belly is a very poor strategic position from which to fight the beast unless you first acknowledge all your sustenance is coming from the beast.

To put it another way, if you say you are not a racist, you most definitely are. Racism is a core value in our culture and nobody escapes the conditioning. And the basic tenet of racism is not that "there are differences between the races" or whatever Websterian bullshit semantic game you want to trot out: The basic tenet of racism is white supremacy. If you are not white, you are second-class (on a good day). You are the Other. You are a risk to the American Way of Life.

Yes, some white Europeans got labeled not-quite-white or The Other for a while, but that merely proves the point. You can lose your position of safety in a system built on racism by associating with/defending/or becoming not-white. It keeps white people in line, this risk; most especially working-class white folks who are already on thin ice.

So, because of a brilliant campaign in which one of the subliminal messages was "I'm not entirely black, I'm not black like Jesse Jackson or Jeremiah Wright, I've picked up enough class polish to not embarrass you like Dubya, and I will NOT make America deal with its bedrock racism", we've elected an African-American to the Presidency. I'm not saying those are the only reasons Obama was elected, but for too many white people who cast the deciding votes, I believe the hope that we could simply side-step racism and Just Be Together made Obama someone they voted for.

Plus: The mess about to handed to the next President was godawful. Who do we get to clean up our messes for us in this country? The really terrible messes, the ones that make you need to gag? Women and/or People of Cullah. Goes without saying.

But for that 30% who are functionally delusional, part of their functionality vanished when the Presidency didn't go to a white guy. They simply cannot cope with what has actually occurred. They are, to use jargon, decompensating. I happen to believe the impact would have been just a great if Hillary had been elected, and if there's one bright lining in all these, it's that I'm not having to listen to the non-stop woman-hating jag that would be going on if she'd been elected. Not Sarah Palin, because she is a Real Woman, according to the delusion, which means she's under the thumb of a man. But in comparison to all the horrifying racism that has bubbled up to the surface (didn't have far to go, let's be honest), if it were Hillary as target, it wouldn't just be the Right. It would be all our nice liberal boys who get twitchy at the mention of her name.

You'll see their flecks of spittle start appearing in the comments as soon as I post this. Until I delete those comments for being unhingedly off the point, that is.

Thus, the racism that was always there, always running the show, has been unmasked for a lot of white people, and we can't live in the same comfortable pretense that we had before. Even those of us who have other labels which make us pitchforks-and-torches targets -- dykes, fags, Jews, crips, poor and not upwardly mobile -- have had a jolt, seeing how much crazy is pouring from the seams. To quote Madge, "We're soaking in it."

And the only way to clean it up thoroughly is to scrub down to bare wood. Otherwise, we'll keep having what we've got.

It won't be Obama and his inner circle who does this work. It's going to be so-called progressives (which is not a cohesive, clearly defined community, either) who will help steward our culture from about to self-destructive Crazy to admitting-we-have-a-problem-and-maybe-we-can-work-on-it Crazy. What I've promised myself in this process is to not lie just because what I'm criticizing Obama and his crew for may remind me/us of the hate pouring from racism. I have to remember, I voted for him, I want him to succeed, I want him to find a way to live up to ideals that he may have only mouthed for political expedience, but people can change.

And here's a few thoughts I've had over the last couple of weeks.

(1) The Birther insanity is code for "There is no such thing as a legitimate black birth." Admitting that black children can be born with as much legitimacy as white children strokes a sledgehammer blow at white supremacy. ESPECIALLY if it's the result of miscegenation, which was still illegal in this country for a chunk of my lifetime.

(2) The school speech "controversy" is code for "We don't let our children see or hear black people who speak well and with pride." This is no joke: Families built around authoritarian principles don't let African-American images in television come into their homes, unless they are being arrested by cops, clearly poor and/or "know their place", or the parents are there to make sure the kids hear non-stop racism instead of noticing the black people look/sound like people. White people who have been raised with this kind of isolation and deliberate poisoning are all around us. Continuing that practice is the real point of not letting their kids hear Obama speak in a non-racist, public setting. Contagion, you know -- if they find out they can be lesbians, their daughters will never choose men, and if they find out black people can be smart and powerful, they'll insist on living in a world where that's the case.

(3) Having lots of people openly carry guns makes public settings extremely unsafe for everybody present. Statistics have proven it over and over again: Add a gun to a crowd, and the odds of somebody innocent dying go way up. The point of having armed presence at public forums is to scare away the non-crazies, to get us used to further militarization of our discourse and community environments, and to have weapons handy in case somebody goes off the deep end and DOESN'T HAVE ONE OF THEIR OWN TO USE. "Hey, I was just carrying for self-defense, how was I to know that lunatic would snatch it from my holster and fire at the President?"

(4) Recruitment and glomming together of the deranged can be subtle. During the 1980s, the activist group I worked with finally figured out how come the Klan and Nazis kept having rallies in places where they were absolutely going to be shouted down by the opposition. They didn't hope to persuade any of us to change our minds, and they knew they were pissing off the neighborhoods they intruded upon. But because of that antagonism, they had to be surrounded by cops two or three rows deep, cops who were facing screaming commies, Jews, lesbians, and POC. Those cops were the Klan's recruitment target. These days it's cops plus the military.

(5) If somebody says, in any translation, that they cannot handle what is actually occurring -- and we're hearing that now, 24/7 -- we need to point out over and over again that THEY are the ones with a problem. Crazy people seldom admit they are crazy.

(6) You don't argue with crazy people. We go on with our work, and if they interfere, we say "Nope, I don't have time to help you right now with your emotional imbalance" and MEAN IT.


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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MATCHLESS VALOUR

When I was in fourth grade, our beloved teacher, Frances Wilmeth, told us about a new program which would provide free school lunches for anyone who needed them. In that small South Texas town, each grade in elementary school comprised an A class and a B class totaling about 60 students altogether. The A class held whatever white children there were (around 8-15) and Latino children who were not from migrant families, who had arrived at first grade able to speak some English, and/or were the children of "important people". All the other Latino children were in the B classes.

Yeah, it was that overt.

Children who registered for first grade without being able to speak English were held back for a year to be taught by an elderly white man whom every one of us knew was the meanest teacher in any grade. We heard him screaming at his kids all day long, interspersed with whacks from his wooden ruler on terrified small hands and shoulders.


My family, new to town, was at the very bottom of the white social register. This meant one of the unspoken rules that we cling fast to our whiteness, not associate with any brown children, and try to prove our worth by being "good poor". Mama herself was conflicted by these pressures, facing ends of month (each month) when there wasn't quite enough to feed us, and her not eating didn't close the gap. I responded by becoming anorexic, which only upset her more. My only refuge was in books and learning. This made me a favorite among teachers, not so much other kids.

We ate mostly beans and rice at home, whatever vegetables Mama could grow, lots of macaroni and homemade red plum jam which I complained about but I'd give anything for one of those jars now. These sorts of meals didn't translate readily into lunches Mama could pack in a metal box. (This is before the days of Tupperware.) Bread, bologna and bananas cost money at the grocery store. Thus, each Monday morning was a tinderbox of tension as Mama tried to find enough change to send us off with the 1.20 cents it cost to eat in the cafeteria for a week. My brothers stayed out of her way. I didn't. I was already making the choice to allow her to dump on me rather than face our situation alone.

Once every two weeks, Daddy came home with a paycheck and, usually, steaks or chicken he'd bought along the way. I didn't enjoy those feasts, because I understood instinctively what came out of his pocket for the steaks would have to be made up by us after he was gone.

So, Miz Wilmeth's offer of free lunches arrived like a hand from g*d. I carefully folded the mimeographed sheet she handed out to every one of us and took it home after school with enormous excitement.

Mama was in the kitchen, trying to make rice and beans into something different. She was a consummate cook, and often succeeded. I stood out of her path and opened the hand-out. "How much money does Daddy make each month?" I asked. "Is it less than $250?"

"Shit yes" said Mama, distracted, giving a bitter laugh. Then she realized who was asking and focused on me. "What do you have there?"

I began explaining. I can still recall my extreme joy: I'd found a way to help. Painfully skinny and shy, asthmatic, only nine years old, I was at last going to be able to contribute something to the survival of my family.

She snatched the sheet from my hands and read it swiftly, disbelief on her face. "This is about that goddamned government program Johnson signed off on!" she shouted at me. "This is charity, do you understand what charity means? Ever la-di-da shitass in this town will be able to spit on us if we take charity!" She ripped up the paper and threw it on the floor. "Don't you EVER bring home one of these goddamned forms again, you hear me?"

However, by the following year, the school had become smarter in handling the issue. Not only were free lunches offered, but also free breakfast and a free mid-morning bottle of milk. Families were given a form where they could apply for a "discount", and enough folks did that there was no longer such a stigma attached to it. Furthermore, it was done privately, at the principal's office, not through the teacher collecting lunch fees at the start of every Monday.

The difference this make can hardly be described. Kids stopped falling asleep in class by 10 a.m. Boys having fist-fights virtually stopped. Test scores climbed. I'm crying as I write this, because it is graphic proof of how much hunger there was in that small town, and how many children were suffering.

In fifth grade, we passed from everybody's favorite, Miz Wilmeth, to the care of Eula Farmer, who was reputed to be strict but fair. That is, those of us in the A class did. All the B class teachers were allegedly mean and bad-tempered. Miz Farmer was as tall and lean as Miz Wilmeth had been short and round. She was grey, hair color, eyes, clothing, even her skin seemed to be slightly metallic. But she was a fabulous teacher, it turned out.

She worked us hard in the mornings. After lunch and a raucous recess, however, she had us lie our heads on our desks and she read aloud to us from a book. I think she probably instituted this practice after decades of teaching hungry children who might have had their first meal of the day half an hour earlier and needed a chance to let their systems crash in relief.

Some of the kids did, in fact, take a nap on their desktops, without shame or reprisal. But a lot of us lay with closed eyes listening to Miz Farmer's surprisingly expressive voice take us magical places. That first semester, she read us The Wind In The Willows. It remains one of my favorite books of all time. The second semester, she read us Magnificent Joe and made blazing animal rights activists out of us all.

But back to The Wind In The Willows: I imagined the four friends, Ratty, Mole, Badger, and Toad, as leading the kind of all-one-gender unmarried lifestyle I dreamed of having one day. Messing about in boats, having picnics, keeping each other in good spirits. They had plenty to eat and community respect. It was all I dared allow myself to want.

Toad was a problem, of course. Impulsive and unable to learn from his mistakes, he was like Daddy, but Badger and Ratty had a handle on the situation. It looked grim when weasels and stoats moved into Toad Hall. But I can still remember the afternoon when the four friends used one of Badger's mysterious tunnels to come up under the Hall itself, burst in and retake the place. Nobody napped that day; we were all sitting upright in our desks, fidgeting with tension, then giving a loud spontaneous cheer when at last the vile vermin were handcuffed, beaten senseless, or driven away into the Deep Woods.

I was reminded of that satisfaction today when I read Lance Mannion's post Everything I Know About Writing, I Learned From Beatrix Potter (hat-tip to Batocchio at Mike's Blog Round-Up, who published the link). Mannion writes about Pat Buchanan's scorn of Sonia Sotomayor learning English from stellar children's books, how misplaced his sneering is, and only a thin veneer for woman-hating and racism.

I realized we've been cheated, in this country, from the redemption we'd feel at our own taking of Toad Hall -- in our instance, reclaiming the Constitution and real American values. We need to see Rummy in handcuffs, Rove frog-marched to the stationhouse, Cheney rained about the head and shoulders with Ratty's cudgel, and Mole confiscating all their weapons for none to use again. I'm not talking about revenge, I'm talking about simple justice and setting the house to rights.

Think about what a difference that would make.

Or lay your heads down on your desks and follow the words of Kenneth Grahame himself. We'll start in the middle of Chapter XII, "The Return of Ulysses", where the four friends have prepared themselves and plunged into Badger's dark tunnel, following him in the direction of Toad Hall:

So they groped and shuffled along, with their ears pricked up and their paws on their pistols, till at last the Badger said, `We ought by now to be pretty nearly under the Hall.'

Then suddenly they heard, far away as it might be, and yet apparently nearly over their heads, a confused murmur of sound, as if people were shouting and cheering and stamping on the floor and hammering on tables. The Toad's nervous terrors all returned, but the Badger only remarked placidly, `They are going it, the Weasels!'

The passage now began to slope upwards; they groped onward a little further, and then the noise broke out again, quite distinct this time, and very close above them.

`Ooo-ray-ooray-oo-ray-ooray!' they heard, and the stamping of little feet on the floor, and the clinking of glasses as little fists pounded on the table. `What a time they're having!' said the Badger. `Come on!' They hurried along the passage till it came to a full stop, and they found themselves standing under the trap-door that led up into the butler's pantry.

Such a tremendous noise was going on in the banqueting-hall that there was little danger of their being overheard. The Badger said, `Now, boys, all together!' and the four of them put their shoulders to the trap-door and heaved it back.

Hoisting each other up, they found themselves standing in the pantry, with only a door between them and the banqueting-hall, where their unconscious enemies were carousing.

The noise, as they emerged from the passage, was simply deafening. At last, as the cheering and hammering slowly subsided, a voice could be made out saying, `Well, I do not propose to detain you much longer' -- (great applause) -- `but before I resume my seat' -- (renewed cheering) -- `I should like to say one word about our kind host, Mr. Toad. We all know Toad!' -- (great laughter) -- `Good Toad, modest Toad, honest Toad!' (shrieks of merriment).

`Only just let me get at him!' muttered Toad, grinding his teeth.

`Hold hard a minute!' said the Badger, restraining him with difficulty. `Get ready, all of you!'

` -- Let me sing you a little song,' went on the voice, `which I have composed on the subject of Toad' -- (prolonged applause).

Then the Chief Weasel -- for it was he -- began in a high, squeaky voice --

`Toad he went a-pleasuring
Gaily down the street -- '

The Badger drew himself up, took a firm grip of his stick with both paws, glanced round at his comrades, and cried --

`The hour is come! Follow me!'

And flung the door open wide.

My! What a squealing and a squeaking and a screeching filled the air!

Well might the terrified weasels dive under the tables and spring madly up at the windows! Well might the ferrets rush wildly for the fireplace and get hopelessly jammed in the chimney! Well might tables and chairs be upset, and glass and china be sent crashing on the floor, in the panic of that terrible moment when the four Heroes strode wrathfully into the room! The mighty Badger, his whiskers bristling, his great cudgel whistling through the air; Mole, black and grim, brandishing his stick and shouting his awful war-cry, `A Mole! A Mole!' Rat; desperate and determined, his belt bulging with weapons of every age and every variety; Toad, frenzied with excitement and injured pride, swollen to twice his ordinary size, leaping into the air and emitting Toad-whoops that chilled them to the marrow!

`Toad he went a-pleasuring!' he yelled. `I'll pleasure 'em!' and he went straight for the Chief Weasel. They were but four in all, but to the panic-stricken weasels the hall seemed full of monstrous animals, grey, black, brown and yellow, whooping and flourishing enormous cudgels; and they broke and fled with squeals of terror and dismay, this way and that, through the windows, up the chimney, anywhere to get out of reach of those terrible sticks.

The affair was soon over. Up and down, the whole length of the hall, strode the four Friends, whacking with their sticks at every head that showed itself; and in five minutes the room was cleared. Through the broken windows the shrieks of terrified weasels escaping across the lawn were borne faintly to their ears; on the floor lay prostrate some dozen or so of the enemy, on whom the Mole was busily engaged in fitting handcuffs. The Badger, resting from his labours, leant on his stick and wiped his honest brow.

`Mole,' he said,' `you're the best of fellows! Just cut along outside and look after those stoat-sentries of yours, and see what they're doing. I've an idea that, thanks to you, we shan't have much trouble from them to-night!'

The Mole vanished promptly through a window; and the Badger bade the other two set a table on its legs again, pick up knives and forks and plates and glasses from the debris on the floor, and see if they could find materials for a supper. `I want some grub, I do,' he said, in that rather common way he had of speaking. `Stir your stumps, Toad, and look lively! We've got your house back for you, and you don't offer us so much as a sandwich.' Toad felt rather hurt that the Badger didn't say pleasant things to him, as he had to the Mole, and tell him what a fine fellow he was, and how splendidly he had fought; for he was rather particularly pleased with himself and the way he had gone for the Chief Weasel and sent him flying across the table with one blow of his stick. But he bustled about, and so did the Rat, and soon they found some guava jelly in a glass dish, and a cold chicken, a tongue that had hardly been touched, some trifle, and quite a lot of lobster salad; and in the pantry they came upon a basketful of French rolls and any quantity of cheese, butter, and celery. They were just about to sit down when the Mole clambered in through the window, chuckling, with an armful of rifles.

`It's all over,' he reported. `From what I can make out, as soon as the stoats, who were very nervous and jumpy already, heard the shrieks and the yells and the uproar inside the hall, some of them threw down their rifles and fled. The others stood fast for a bit, but when the weasels came rushing out upon them they thought they were betrayed; and the stoats grappled with the weasels, and the weasels fought to get away, and they wrestled and wriggled and punched each other, and rolled over and over, till most of 'em rolled into the river! They've all disappeared by now, one way or another; and I've got their rifles. So that's all right!'

`Excellent and deserving animal!' said the Badger, his mouth full of chicken and trifle. `Now, there's just one more thing I want you to do, Mole, before you sit down to your supper along of us; and I wouldn't trouble you only I know I can trust you to see a thing done, and I wish I could say the same of every one I know. I'd send Rat, if he wasn't a poet. I want you to take those fellows on the floor there upstairs with you, and have some bedrooms cleaned out and tidied up and made really comfortable. See that they sweep under the beds, and put clean sheets and pillow-cases on, and turn down one corner of the bed-clothes, just as you know it ought to be done; and have a can of hot water, and clean towels, and fresh cakes of soap, put in each room. And then you can give them a licking a-piece, if it's any satisfaction to you, and put them out by the back-door, and we shan't see any more of them, I fancy. And then come along and have some of this cold tongue. It's first rate. I'm very pleased with you, Mole!'

The goodnatured Mole picked up a stick, formed his prisoners up in a line on the floor, gave them the order `Quick march!' and led his squad off to the upper floor. After a time, he appeared again, smiling, and said that every room was ready, and as clean as a new pin. `And I didn't have to lick them, either,' he added. `I thought, on the whole, they had had licking enough for one night, and the weasels, when I put the point to them, quite agreed with me, and said they wouldn't think of troubling me. They were very penitent, and said they were extremely sorry for what they had done. but it was all the fault of the Chief Weasel and the stoats, and if ever they could do anything for us at any time to make up, we had only got to mention it. So I gave them a roll a-piece, and let them out at the back, and off they ran, as hard as they could!'

Then the Mole pulled his chair up to the table, and pitched into the cold tongue; and Toad, like the gentleman he was, put all his jealousy from him, and said heartily, `Thank you kindly, dear Mole, for all your pains and trouble tonight, and especially for your cleverness this morning!' The Badger was pleased at that, and said, `There spoke my brave Toad!' So they finished their supper in great joy and contentment, and presently retired to rest between clean sheets, safe in Toad's ancestral home, won back by matchless valour, consummate strategy, and a proper handling of sticks.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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JOIN LA RAZA IN STOPPING THE HATE SPEECH

("I Remember Mama" by Xavier Viramontes)

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) are fighting back against the Right Wing racist, sexist smear campaign which is designed to permanently tarnish the reputation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. In addition to statements in every venue they can reach, they've set up an online petition to demand leaders of the Republican Party stop these hate-based attacks. I'm going to copy in below the e-mail I received from them. The links embedded in it will take you to their website which has the same information as the e-mail plus a message form for you to complete.

I'm thrilled to live in a city that is approximately 30% Latino/a and a GREAT place to be as a result. This crap has to stop.

The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court was an historic and proud moment for Latinos and the country as a whole. But her ethnicity has proven too much of a temptation for the voices of hate and extremism, who instead of looking at her judicial record have launched a vocal rampage that has reached new heights of absurdity.

Take action to put a stop to it.

Rush Limbaugh, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and others are claiming that Sotomayor is a "reverse racist" because she believes that more judges with diverse backgrounds and experiences would be a good thing for the judicial system. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (the "think tank" of Tanton's web of anti-immigrant extremist groups) and his pals at the National Review online are just beside themselves that Judge Sotomayor had the temerity to pronounce her own name correctly. They basically said that if she was a real American, she would butcher it. In an article that appeared in The Hill newspaper, Republican insiders are quoted as being "concerned" that Sotomayor's avowed love of arroz con gandules and other Puerto Rican delicacies will cloud her judicial decision-making.

This one, however, takes the cake:

Former Congressman, failed presidential candidate, and anti-immigrant extremist Tom Tancredo, unable to provide a shred of evidence for his assertion that Judge Sotomayor is a "racist," went off the deep end on CNN, saying Sotomayor belongs to "the Latino KKK without the hoods and nooses."

That's what Tancredo called NCLR-a 40-year-old, national Latino civil rights organization that works with community organizations all over the country to help Latino families achieve the American Dream. NCLR has been recognized by members of Congress and the media, has hosted presidents of both political parties, and works hand in hand with other national civil rights organizations in a bipartisan way to
improve the lives of all Americans.

Act now to stop this nonsense.

Raising questions and concerns about Judge Sotomayor's 17-year record on the bench is legitimate. Resorting tooutdated stereotypes, defamation of character, and outright falsehoods is not.

Please join us and send a message to Chairman Michael Steele of the RNC, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asking them to denounce these statements and restore the nomination process for Judge Sotomayor to a more appropriate and civil discourse.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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FOLLOW THE POWER, STUPID

(Photo by ©Liza Cowan.)

Once again, it becomes necessary to do some ABC training on the actual definitions of oppression and "isms". I do this not to answer all the white Right currently throwing around charges of racism -- because we know they are, in fact, racists by belief and deed. Nor do I seek to educate those who would listen to such opinions, because if you look for insight about race from the likes of Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter, you are looking for confirmation of a bias you already hold. It is akin to asking Hugh Hefner for insight about respectful relationships with women.

I'm going back over this ground to correct profound misunderstanding within progressive communities about how to effectively work against oppression, especially in a collaborative, non-guilty manner.


I use the theoretical framework taught to me by anti-racism activist Ricky Sherover-Marcuse. One of her fundamental definitions is: "Oppression is the systematic and pervasive mistreatment of individuals on the basis of their membership in various groups, which are disadvantaged by the institutionalized imbalances in social power in a particular society."

Point one: Note the key words systematic and institutionalized. It is not an oppression if those factors are absent.

Point two: All "isms" are referring to oppression, not preferences or discrimination in the sense of differentiating between two things. "Ism" means a power imbalance, i.e., it has a systematic and institutionalized mistreatment aspect.

Thus, any of the well-understood oppressions or "isms" have one group advantaged with regard to power and all other groups in that category disadvantaged. Power does not flow in both directions when it comes to oppression. There is no such thing as a "revere"-ism. When people of color talk about white people, no matter what they say, they are not capable of being racist because there is no systematic and institutionalized mistreatment of white people in this society. There is no threat to back up their language or beliefs. The power goes in the opposite direction.

This is simply not that hard to understand. When we are growing up, we learn very early which groups are "real people", i.e., advantaged by the power structure and which groups are not. We KNOW who these groups are: Males, whites, middle to upper class, adults (but not elders), Christians, able-bodied, and heterosexual. Or convincingly appearing to belong to those groups, since our culture values appearance far above actual content of character.

As children, when we are being taught these systems of oppression, we are powerless to completely hold onto our own clarity and sense of justice. We resist to the point where our own survival is at stake before we capitulate and accept lies into our world view. This is true of every human being who has ever lived. As we take in the lies, many different kinds of confusion can and do occur. Once we become adults, we have an opportunity (and responsibility) to clear our confusion, as best we can. It will take the rest of our lives, the burden of growing up under oppression.

The lies we ingest are just as likely to be about the groups to which we belong as they are about the "other". When we absorb as truth forced misinformation about our own identity, this is called internalized oppression. But if we act on those beliefs, we are playing into the system, not "becoming the oppressor to our own people". The "oppressor" is the system. Yes, it is human beings who maintain the system, but it will also be human beings from every group who will ultimately dismantle it. We are all allies in this task.

Another common form of confusion is personalizing our mistreatment to the individual doling it out. For example, many boys grow up with abusive mother figures who use any tool available to act out their adultism. Such a boy, when grown, may insist that "women" are equally oppressive to men in the realm of sexism. But humiliating a boy because of his gender is, at baseline, adultism using gender as a tool. It is critically important that each of us sort out our growing-up experiences into actual systems of oppression rather than relying on anecdotal experience, however devastating that experience may be. Empowerment comes from taking on a system, not from simply naming past hurt and remaining mired in confusion. This is particularly necessary if, as adults, we acquire membership in groups which are privileged by the institutions of oppression.

This practice requires maturity, of course. It requires a mindset that can embrace something other than polarities and binaries (including so-called subverted or queered binaries, which are still binaries if you believe they have a basis in reality). It requires accountability and reciprocity, not rhetoric or intentions. It requires street smarts in equal measure to academic theory. It requires a comfort with or preference for pluralism and diversity. It is, thus, a practice found among liberals, if it is found at all.

Dismantling an interrelated system of institutionalized oppressions will require we never engage in trying to compare oppressions -- for instance, is it harder to be a black man or a white woman. (Sound familiar?) There is no way to quantify oppressions against each other, and anybody who engages in this activity is, to put it charitably, giving us a roadmap to how they have been hurt and confused.

Dismantling an interrelated system of institutionalized oppressions will require we not confuse "biological/cultural/ethnic/sexual/religious/age differences between human beings" as a reason or excuse for oppression.

Dismantling an interrelated system of institutionalized oppressions will require we identify all those arenas where we as individuals are non-target for oppression and then act as allies to those who are target in every way we can imagine, not from charity but because it is our liberation we seek.

Begin by interrupting any charge of racism or sexism being leveled against those targeted for these oppressions by those who are non-target. It is bogus and designed to perpetuate confusion. Once we actually HAVE a level playing field, we can at that point discuss whether power is flowing backwards. But that day is not going to arrive in the spring and summer of 2009.


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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