Tag Archives: race

Black, Queer & Here

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From a book review of Thomas Glave’s book, Words to our Now: Imagination and Dissent:

“The word ‘faggot’ itself is to me as nasty a form of violence as the perennial spit-nastiness in that classic American word ‘nigger.’ As a black male who is also gay, I and my brothers and our black lesbian sisters are considered ‘disposables’ in our own black communities and in white ones.

To this day I’m still extremely wary and skeptical of those black men who in convenient circumstances glibly call themselves brothers… who then, in their own peculiar type of fear, loathing, and hypocrisy often inflict violence on black gay men and lesbians whenever we are found either not to be useful or, far worse, too close to home.”
—Excerpted from Chapter 1

If you think it’s tough enough being a black male in America, you might want to consider the plight of the gay black male. For as Thomas Glave describes it, he feels alienated not only from mainstream white society but rejected by blacks, too. Glave, a Professor of English at SUNY Binghampton happens to be particularly adept at describing that sense of isolation in Words to Our Now, a series of essays which condemn a variety of prejudices which have persisted not only in the U.S. but around the world.

Although he weighs in eloquently on an assortment of international concerns from ethnic cleansing to Abu Ghraib, the author is most effective when reporting on or recounting incidents of gay bashing, a subject with which he is well acquainted. For one cannot help but empathize when he recalls from childhood the “wicked pugnacity” of “boys my age and older.” He describes the daily slamming of fists into his face unleashed by the meanest hoodlums, beatings invariably accompanied by a long line of harsh expletives which began with the word “faggot.”

There is something truly touching and deeply saddening about a book which has to make a case for the embracing of black homosexuals by their own community, when acceptance has been the prevailing theme around which the rest of African-Americana has rallied for generations. Who knows, perhaps it is a holdover from mistreatment during slavery which causes his own people to exhibit such severe intolerance for a minority within their own minority.

As a consequence, guess who now has the highest AIDS rate transmission, due to so many scared brothers on the down low choosing to work both sides of the sexual-preference street?

Glave’s intriguing answer to the crisis arrives in the form of a clarion call for social change, arguing that we are at a critical crossroad, that we must all put our bigotries behind us, and that time is of the essence. If nothing else, in emerging from the shadows via such a compelling, well-written opus, he has succeeded in humanizing the issue by lending his face to it, and by proudly putting a personal spin on ACT-UP’s unequivocal, defiant anthem of liberation.

“I’m here! I’m black and queer! Get used to it! “

This evening, Glave launched his latest book, The Torturer’s Wife, at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.  From the TWB website:

Author of the acclaimed story collection Whose Song?, award-winning Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. Here he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus—explicitly and allegorically—on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire and intimacy.

THOMAS GLAVE is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now:Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction), and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Komunyakaa

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From a reflection on the personal politics of race written by Yusef Komunyakaa on the eve of Obama’s inauguration:

One of the earliest memories I have that directly regards skin color and racism takes me back to another family of blacks who were almost white. The Lorence family had light hair and eyes — mother and father, two girls and one boy. We children weren’t close friends, but sometimes we’d play together. I remember most vividly one summer when I was about 9. It was a Saturday afternoon. Leonard, the brother, wasn’t with us. His two sisters and their cousin visiting them from Detroit were there.

Three of my brothers were with me. All seven of us were sitting in the back of the public bus where “colored” people sat during those Jim Crow years. Maybe we were talking about Superman or a soul music group called Little Anthony and the Imperials. I remember that we were going to see a matinee at the State Theater — maybe “Hop-a-long Cassidy.” And I also remember the bus driver hitting the brakes and leaping to his feet. He charged to the rear of the bus, yelling, “You little girls gotta come up front.” The bus sat on the side of the street, pulsing like a big, striped turtle. The girls sang out all at once, saying: “We have to sit back here with our cousins, our friends.” I remember the driver’s face turning scarlet. I remember him stomping back up to the front of the bus, mumbling cusses and throwing himself into the driver’s seat. I remember him leaving rubber on the August pavement. I remember feeling hurt inside. I remember a jolt of anger, and I remember not knowing why.

Read The Colors in My Dreams

via Silliman’s Blog

Invisible Women

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From Susan J. Douglas at In These Times:

… ironically, women are now overrepresented as having achieved “it all,” so that the notion that there might be the need for ongoing feminist struggle seems, well, quaint.

Women who earn the median income — $35K for females in 2007 — working-class women and poor women have been erased from the national, public imagination.

In the real world, most women are not doctors, lawyers or TV reporters. What were, in 2007, the top jobs for women? Secretaries, nurses, elementary and middle school teachers, cashiers, retail salespersons, nursing and home health aids, waitresses, maids and housekeeping cleaners and hairdressers.

While some of these jobs provide a decent living, others pay minimum wage — or less. According to Sara Gould, president of the Ms. Foundation, two-thirds of the minimum wage and below-minimum wage work force in the United States is female. Of the 37 million Americans living in poverty, 27 million are women. The National Council for Research on Women reports that the subprime disaster disproportionately affects African-American and Latina women.

White women still make 77 cents to a man’s dollar (it’s 62 cents for African-American women and only 53 cents for Latina women), and a 2007 American Association of University Women study showed that after one year of employment, female college graduates earn 20 percent less than their male colleagues. After 10 years in the work force, they earn 30 percent less.

Many mothers face discrimination at work, some of it subtle yet costly. We have the flimsiest support network for mothers and children of any industrialized country, with, still, no paid maternity leave and no nationally funded and regulated day care system. African-American and Latina women, still vastly underrepresented or stereotyped in the media, endure more poverty, brutality, crappy healthcare and disease than their white counterparts.

The foundational role that female poverty plays in the health of a nation’s economy is a fact not only for the United States but for developing countries around the world.

So, I’m hoping that, as secretary of state, we might get Hillary “It Takes A Village” Clinton who — in addition to all the post-Bush disasters she’ll have to confront — will see the welfare of women and children as central to her statecraft.

And I’m cheering Michelle Obama on in her efforts to advance a variety of policies that support women and families.

The legions of invisible women, struggling without any acknowledgment and erased by a media that makes them seem the minority when they are the majority, need to be made visible right now. Maybe we can make the 2008 campaign about women after all.

Read the whole thing here

Obama & History

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Really interesting post at 3 quarks daily:

How, one might ask, could a country born of Enlightenment ideals, and built on slavery, be, as Obama has said it is, perfectible?  And why do so many have the sense that he is the one to finally set us along this path, that, as has been grandiosely claimed, the Civil War finally ended on November 4, 2008, and Reconstruction finally began?

Go see

Only In America?

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I’ve heard that phrase four or five times tonight (this morning!) and Spike Lee just said it in an interview on CNN.  I want to know, what do Americans mean when they say that?

Americans are feeling proud of themselves after this historic election and I’m not one to begrudge them that, certainly not after the last eight years.  But what do they mean?  That a black man could only be elected to the highest political office in America?  No, that can’t be it.  That only Americans could elect a black man after years of racial apartheid?  Can’t be that.  What then?

Everyday Torture

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From John Buell:

In Portland Phoenix articles, Lance Tapley points out that about 35,000 U.S. citizens are held in solitary confinement at “Supermaxes” (including Maine’s). Many are subjected to torture in the form of beating, sleep deprivation and mental abuse that rival practices at Guantanamo, according to Tapley.

Torture’s political invisibility is remarkable given its counterproductive consequences. Tapley points out that the torture of Supermax prisoners, most of whom are mentally ill, leads to high rates of recidivism and poses great public risk.

Frank Rich, commenting on [Jane] Mayer, suggests: “torture may well be enabling future attacks… false confessions and [an] avalanche of misinformation since 9-11… compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases.”

Some Americans do oppose torture, but even many who are opposed won’t acknowledge that “we” torture individuals not privy to secret bomb information. For example, prison authorities, major media and political leaders have not challenged Tapley’s specific factual assertions. Nonetheless, none have acted on his findings. Many national leaders even engage in tortuous redefinitions of torture.

These responses may have deep origins. Our world now presents shrinking employment options, rapid changes in neighborhoods and complex interdependence. Social turmoil leads many Americans, steeped in traditional notions of the U.S. as “a city upon a hill” in possession of unique truth, to embrace a problematic conviction: individuals whose differences in religion, lifestyle or ethnicity pose no direct threat really are dangerous.

The world is seen as irrevocably divided between a virtuous “us” and a dangerous “them.” We would never torture or would do so only for overwhelming reasons. When victims of our torture attack or murder us, their actions merely confirm our conviction that they are “basically evil.”

Greater equality and adequate security might blunt xenophobic responses to economic crisis. Nonetheless, especially in a world becoming ever more multicultural, achieving progressive reforms is unlikely without also challenging some prevalent forms of fundamentalism. These dogmatic and exclusionary creeds blind us to the limits of our own intelligence, deny opportunities for full self-development, and preclude social justice movements across racial and religious lines.

Read the whole thing here

Talk Without Talking

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Joan Walsh interviewed Bob Somerby and John Heilemann about Barack Obama’s presidential run and the politics of race.  Heilemann came up with the best advice yet:

Not surprisingly, since Heilemann thinks race is a big problem for Obama, while Somerby just isn’t sure, their prescriptions for what to do about it differ. Heilemann says “ignoring race is not an option for Obama. Nor is simply changing the subject.” Yet he doesn’t really have a clear approach. He thinks Obama has to elucidate his very American identity without focusing on race, “to talk about race, in other words, without talking about race.” It may be a measure of how tough this issue is for Obama and Democrats that I walked away from Heilemann’s provocative article having no idea how his vision translates into action for Obama in the real world.

Hmm, yes, I’m as confused as Joan.  I can’t imagine why Obama and his campaign spokespeople haven’t figured this out yet.  Or, maybe, you know, the fact that they’re not talking about it but everyone else is – maybe that’s talking about it without talking about it …… drifting off here ……

We Are In Our Hands

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We are in a state of global emergency that not enough people recognize:

Few would doubt that we are living at a time of emergency. The world’s population presently stands at 6.7 billion, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. That figure is projected to rise to 8.5 billion by 2030. It is understood now just how quickly the earth is warming, because of the increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases arising from human activity. If the earth continues to warm at its present rate, we know what our fate will be, and yet we seem set on destroying ourselves. Meanwhile, we are experiencing a fundamental shift in power away from the West; the emergence of China, India and Brazil, with their new wealth and aspirational middle classes, is putting an intolerable strain on the world’s finite resources. As I write the price of oil has reached $128 a barrel. It has never been higher. One need not be a pessimist to predict some kind of Malthusian denouement to the human story if we are unable or unwilling to alter our ways of being: scarcity wars, famine, large-scale environmental degradation.

Likely not a day goes by that I don’t ask myself why there does not yet exist a critical mass of people who are demanding that our governments, local, national and international respond to our state of global emergency.  I believe the answer is complex and thus multi-faceted as well as perhaps still partly hidden.  Perhaps some of us are too comfortable, yet that explains neither the inability of the comfortable to perceive adequately the threat to their comfort and the comfort of their children and grandchildren; nor what is sometimes understood to be the quiescence of those who are far from comfortable yet not powerless.

Just to get started on an answer to that question, for myself, I think that the interests of the very comfortable are fatally aligned with the source of that comfort: global capitalism.  Joel Bakan has written convincingly about the psychopathy of the large scale, usually multi-national and interrelated corporations that advance mercilessly toward the goal of maximum profit with little to no ability to respond to long-term degradation of both the labour force and the environment.  [See The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and The Corporation Film]

Those who are identified with global capitalism by virtue of their own ability to maximize personal profits may well be engaged in folly or their own psychopathy, having convinced themselves that unregulated capitalism will inevitably prove capable of handling any difficulty thrown in its path, despite the facts; or simply because they’ve lost their ability to care about anything but enriching themselves.

What of those who are merely comfortable and increasingly  less so?  And those who are assumed, by many, to be simply too ignorant to know better, or powerless to do anything about it, though their “comfort” has been seriously compromised?

 From that psychological viewpoint used by Bakaan, I wonder if we aren’t all either suffering from some horrible combination of mass post and ongoing trauma, accompanied by combinations of dissociation, numbness, and learned helplessness; if many of us aren’t simply overwhelmed by the fuel crisis, food crisis, global warming crisis and other forms of environmental threat, unwinnable wars all over the world, various forms of oppression caused by totalitarianism or legitimated coercion and resulting inroads into the power of democracy and the rule of law as well as failing economies in the West and just general malaise.  To what should we pay attention?  Whom should we believe about both the proper identification of the sources of our problems and adequate resolutions?  What avenues of power can we access to force our leaders into addressing our problems?  What forms of organization will draw us into effective alliances across lines of gender, race, “class”, ability, ethnicity and nationality?  Can we address all of the emergencies at once or do we need to prioritize them?  If the latter, how do we prioritize such an impressive and pressing batch of emerging issues?

Just asking the questions can be overwhelming and depressing in itself.  It can lead to outright despair when we realize that our means of collective thinking, decision making and action have been seriously eroded by the advances of “post modern” capitalism.  We are more and more forced back upon ourselves.  We no longer live or meet together as communities of people living or working together in the same numbers that we did when we actually had cohesive neighbourhoods and communities; fewer and fewer of us are organized into unions of working people who can identify interests and act together to force the changes we need.  The complexity and amount of information  we need to gather and synthesize in order to craft realistic solutions is unheard of in history.  Post modern life keeps us busier and more distracted than we’ve ever been.

At the same time, we are discovering new ways of organizing and connecting with each other through advancing technologies.  I do believe that we will, inevitably, act on behalf of humanity and the planet and all it holds.  My question is, will we do it in time?  And when I ask that question, yet another question surfaces:  in time for what?  At this point in the questioning, I come to rest on hope and the small contributions each of us makes to the greater good.  And at this point, I wish I believed in a beneficent creator who has the best in mind for each of us and for all.  But I believe that “we” are in our own hands.  And I believe that is the most difficult thing to accept of all the things we face.

“Black Responsibility” Meme Spreads to UK

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Great, bloody great.  First it’s Barack Obama telling African American fathers to just right get back to their patriarchal duties and kick their kids’ asses hard enough to get them “A”s, not “B”s, at school.  Now UK Tory party leader David Cameron has climbed on board the “why didn’t I think of that” train:

David Cameron joins the bitterly contested argument over family breakdown and race today by praising Barack Obama’s warning that too many black fathers have abandoned their responsibilities to their children.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, the Tory leader says that many black church leaders have expressed the same anxiety to him, and that it is time for a “responsibility revolution” to change patterns of behaviour.

Referring to Obama’s speech, in which the US Democratic presidential candidate warned that absent black fathers were behaving like teenagers and shirking their responsibilities to their children, Cameron said: “I think he’s absolutely right. I mean I think it’s a very brave thing to do. And it will have a huge influence that he has said it. I’ve had a number of meetings with black church leaders who make the same point. They are concerned about family breakdown and social breakdown, and want to see what I call a responsibility revolution take place.”

His comments were broadly welcomed last night by leading British African-Caribbean figures, including the educationalist Tony Sewell and the Reverend Nims Obunge, chief executive of the Peace Alliance, one of London’s main organisations working against gang crime.

Cameron insists the appalling discrimination and economic disadvantage black people experience have to be recognised and changed, but at “the same time we will never solve the long term problems unless people also take responsibility for their own lives”. He was speaking to the Guardian to mark the end of a parliamentary year in which he has established a poll lead of 20 percentage points over Labour.

Victim blaming is so much easier than social responsibility.  Obama has quickly become an influential man.  Expect to hear more of this drivel coming out of the mouths of conservative leaders of all sorts.

Bogus US War on Drugs Comes to Canada

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Canadians fail to notice as the US exports its drug war to this country:

This month an invasive species crossed the border from the US into Canada with the introduction of the draconian omnibus federal crime bill (C-2) that no opposition party dared oppose. This law seems designed to fill Canada’s jails beyond capacity, with its minimum sentencing and tough parole provisions. It could even lead to a call for private prisons, which have always been a pet project of Justice Minister and Attorney General Rob Nicholson, a former Mike Harris crony.

Along with the American-style get-tough-on-crime approach C-2 embodies, its less-heralded invasive cousin is the War on Drugs. This War has been an even more spectacular waste of lives and money than the War on Terror.

The War on Drugs has filled America’s prisons with black, young and poor people. It has enriched and engorged organized crime, the prison industrial complex, police departments and their suppliers, while driving US foreign policy and military action in lethal directions. No one seems to think it’s done anything to reduce drug use.

Bill C-2, however, introduces the War on Drugs to Canada. Roadside drug testing — framed as the moral equivalent of keeping drunk drivers off the road — opens the door to many abuses of power. With no form of drug testing able to distinguish between recent, driver-impairing drug use and drug use in the past by drivers, the new police powers will be used as a fishing license.

Anyone who police think looks fishy can now be shaken down.  […]

American and Canadian experience indicates it is far more likely these kinds of observations will be made about people of colour, young people, poor people and Aboriginal people than about middle-class, middle-age white folks. And since we know a high proportion of Canada’s population uses marijuana — especially the young, the poor and the non-white — and half of Canadians actually approve of its use it’s easy to predict the outcome. There will be more searches, yielding more arrests, charges, convictions and people in Canada’s prisons under our tough new law.

Our roads are safer because the drunks have been removed from them. There is inconclusive evidence, however, that anyone is safer due to these new police powers and plenty of evidence pointing to problems down the road.

The Canadian federal party that has the guts to take on the Harperites over the War on Drugs and insist on an end to it will be rewarded by voters who want the left to stand for something rather than waffling to the centre.

Remember that Bill C-2 was passed, not just by the Conservatives in the House of Commons, but also by the Liberals, who were afraid to face the electorate.  The Bill contains provisions for mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes which will have the effect of increasing the numbers of Canadians in prison without accomplishing any increase in safety and security.  The study of the impact of mandatory minimum sentences is complex and very little Canadian research is available.  So we go ahead and implement them, based on ideological and mythological notions of crime prevention, of course.

With respect to drug crimes, there is research that shows that mandatory minimums don’t work.  [download pdf] and this [download pdf]  And see this (where you’ll also find an interesting discussion on the provision which raises the age of consent for sexual activity).

Here’s what the Sentencing Reform Committee at the Department of Justice had to say on MMS:

Criminologists agree that the likelihood of apprehension and conviction can deter offenders, but not the severity of the penalty they might face. Most offenders have no idea what penalty they might face. That is why the police community, so well represented here today, needs more resources in the detection and apprehension of those who would use guns in serious crime.

We know that the U.S. uses mandatory minimum sentences more than all other western democracies combined. If mandatory sentencing worked, America would be the safest society in the world. We know it is not, and that there is virtual consensus among American sentencing scholars that mandatory minimum penaltieshave had no discernible impact on crime. They have unintended consequences, which are negative: long sentences for less serious crime; wide prosecutorial discretion, resulting in uneven and unfair application of the law; huge financial costs for trials and custody; and, in the United States, racial disparity, with something like two out of five African-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 being in custody among the 2.1 million people in jail in the United States.   [download pdf]