Last Minute Gift Guide for the Social Justice Set

This is the one where I lay down the guilt trip in the hopes of getting you to give twice, three times if you use your gifts as a way to open discussion about women’s rights globally, this holiday season.

Remember the days of North American decadence when people named stars they weren’t even sure existed after their partners or friends and gave away the galaxy as gifts as if everything was up for grabs and everyone had the right to own and sell? Well those days are gone. However, the continued traffic in conflict goods that show the a similar reckless abandon for consumption without conscience and some other feminist bloggers, namely Bianca Laureano and Feminist Texican, have inspired me to offer up an alternative holiday guide both fluffy and political. Instead of giving the gift of neo-colonialism, ie diamonds, electronic items made from materials illegally mined in the DRC, or “earth friendly” gifts that were either unfairly traded or equally made from products harvested during government instability or under neo-colonial trade agreements, why not buy some things that might help make the world a little better and won’t break your piggy bank?

Arts and Crafts

Hand Made Cards and Book Marks

buy hand made cards by Columbian feminist collective Taller de Vida ($6 each or set of 5 for $25) – cards, and bookmarks not pictured, are made by a feminist collective in Columbia that is empowering women through art and self-sufficiency, run by and for Columbian women. They make the cards exclusively out of flowers and plants, by hand, images vary. These cards not only make great art work, killing two birds with one stone, they support the work of indigenous feminists.

Jewelry from the Mitra Bali Artist Collective ($20 and up) – These beautiful gifts support subsistence level artists, primarily women, who use sustainable local resources to meld artistic vision and skill with the desire to be self-sufficient and they are as gorgeous as any conflict diamond you might be tempted to buy otherwise.

African Mudcloth bags and totes from One World Projects  ($14-$40) – these wallets and bags are helping Mali women and men become self-sustainable, they encourage a discussion of cross-gender cooperation as traditionally men make the cloth and women do the intricate designs and they look good when you have drag books from class to class or office to home

Love Shrines from Crafty Chica ($12.99)- these gifts are unique because they meld the basic design of the kit with your own mementos. You can make one for the person you are gifting in advance or sit down with them and make it during the time when the holiday gets too be to hectic and you need arts and crafts to bring you back down from tensionville, they also make great healing arts work and can help teens work on their issues creatively opening the door for a joint project that could help you talk to your teen without prying, and they support a Latina artist all at the same time.

Shirts/Blouses from Shona Crafts ($15.99-22.99) – These shirts are made by differently-abled women in the DRC to help turn the tide of ableism against women and ensure sustainable development that includes them.

Window flower Journals from General Welfare Pratisthan and Free A Child ($14) – These journals not only give your gift recipient the chance to explore both their inner and outerworld but help provide needed sustainable sources of income for young women and girls escaping sex-trafficking.

Handmade Jewelry from Swaziland Women’s Artist Collective ($12 and up) – You can get a unique piece of Jewelry and support over 750 women artists working to sustain themselves and participate in discussions about women’s issues and women’s rights.

Jewelry and Bags from Conserve India ($12 and up) – These beautiful items are not only made by women but are made out of discarded plastic bags that are ruining the environment.

Peace Baskets from Darfur ($38) – These baskets are made primarily by female refugees in Darfur looking to escape the poverty of displacement and refugee camps and the make great heavy duty alternatives to shopping bags at the grocery store (ie helping you help the environment) or stand alone art pieces in your home.

Silk Bags from Vietnam ($38) – handcrafted silk bags from Vietnam are made by women, helping to revive artistry from pre-Vietnam war era, and ensuring rural women and girls have alternative economic choices to trafficking and hard labor.

Tortilla Holders from Mujeres por La Dignidad ($10) – handcrafted, simple decoration, keeps your food warm and supports women.

Jewelry from Native Harvest ($9.95 and up) – these items, and other more expensive items in the Native Harvest store, help support Native American Education, Fair Trade and Environmental activism by indigenous peoples, and the feminist work of Winona LaDuke.

Magazines For the Reader and/or Budding Activist in The Family

Gift Subscription to:  Left Turn Magazine ($25) – Left Turn Magazine is one of the oldest ongoing independent magazines of its generation, and covers decidedly activist, radical, feminist, critical race, and class issues. It is made by activists around the world engaged in critical praxis for social justice. You can pick up a few choice editions for $5 each, bundle them with pretty wrapping and a little card promising a full year of enlightment. Might I suggest bundling Issue 32: Igniting the Kindred (LGBTQ), Issue 24: Say it Loud (black left), and Issue 18: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (the feminism issue is sold out). Even if you just give a card with a not about getting the subscription, you can always type up a nice note on a card stock with the words “better than money” at the top and put in the money pocket of one of those cards pre-designed for you to insert money.  Either way, this gift subscription will not only provide hours of enlightenment and news for the person you are gifting, but it will also ensure the continued survival of one of the last truly independent media magazines of its caliber.

Gift Subscription to: Make/Shift ($20) -  Make/Shift is an anti-racism,  transnational, pro-queer rights feminist magazine produced by a women’s collective (which includes woc, trans women, differently-abled women, etc.) and featuring many of the women of color and LBTQ feminist bloggers who are traditionally overlooked by mainstream-”alternative” publishers and feminist magazines. Again, you can do a bundle with a card for $5.95 per back issue; might I suggest issues 3, 5, and 6 (but any issues would delight). Or you can use the card stock/money card idea to make a subscription sans issues look fancy. Either way, this gift subscription will not only encourage critical thinking about women and feminism from a perspective that centers all women, you can trust that you are giving to a magazine whose main head quarters are not in a gentrification hotspot that has shoved out most or all of its elder residents and residents of color like other feminist magazines, and know that you are helping keep decolonized feminist thought in print.

For the Young/er Adult Reader (& a few adult reads as well)

How about a bundle of books that don’t reduce women to self-abusing whiny girlfriends or mask their considerable intellectual talents by centering the stories of the boy/s they hang out with? Each of the sets listed below feature strong girls and young women who never give up who they are to make friends or date. Forthcoming reviews of all of these bundles will be on the blog.

The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld ($34.99 for 4 books) – The Uglies is about two girls trying to find there way in a world that privileges beauty and conformity. On their 16 birthday, everyone in the world receives plastic surgery to become “pretty” and part of the surgery also includes the loss of their will to question or engage in advocacy of any kind.On the eve of their 16 birthdays, two girls find themselves face to face with the authorities behind the procedure and they must decide what kind of world they really want to live in. As the series unfolds the conflict between the two girls, and that they have with themselves about who they want to be and how, unfolds amidst a back drop of intentional and unintentional revolution. Westerfeld’s world is white and his characters are described in detail so there is no imagining your way out of it, the third book includes people of color outright and the fourth offers a multicultural world, including Asian American main characters, but is largely unconnected to the central plot of the other three books. There are no centered queer characters either.

The Morganville Vampire Series by Rachel Caine (1st 2 books 9.99/ series is 6.99/bk) – Young Claire Danvers arrives in a dead-end town with a low ranked college hoping to do her two years there as she promised her parents and move on to MIT, unfortunately, she falls afoul of the meanest girl in town and finds herself living with a ghost, a goth, and a slacker trying to avoid her and the vampires who protect her. Unlike other vampire stories, Rachel Caine creates a world where vampires are unapologetic, ruthless, and yet markedly vulnerable and human beings are neither infatuated with them nor ignorant of the prices they have to pay to stay alive and free in a town run by them. Claire Danvers is strong, intelligent, and willful and she often weighs all sides with insight beyond her years while always coming across as a typical teenage girl, falling in love, making friends, and wanting to live her life free of nagging parents. Morganville is a decidedly white world that suffers from mildly offensive stereotyping when the occasional character of color arrives; However, Caine leaves much of the description of the characters to the reader to fill in which means you can imagine them anyway you’d like (except for Michael and Eve who are described in detail), and she does try to bring in pivotal African American characters closer to the end of the story whose centrality to the plot cannot be overlooked. (There are no queer characters, but Caine did choose an out gay actor to depict Sam Glass, a key secondary character, on her website, which cracks me up).

An Octavia Butler Bundle ($9.50/ book) - You will have to make this one yourselves as they are not bundled together or part of an ongoing series, but these books by Octavia Butler all feature contemporary themes in Sci Fi fantasy with African-American main characters and multicultural, and some times queer, casts of characters. For the vampire lover, Fledgling, a world populated by vampires and genetically modified 1/2 human and 1/2 vampires who are being hunted by pure breds who don’t like them or the humans. It’s a complex world that weaves issues of race, gender, and environment together with a battle royale near the end. Post-Apocalyptic fans will enjoy The Parable Sower and The Parable of the Talents, like other great works in this genre, Butler creates a wide tapestry of critique about consumerism, environmental degredation, and the rise of gated communities into a scifi meets fantasy thriller. Unlike many of these stories however, Butler also offers a tale of hope and rebirth rather than just the simply myopia of self-centered community fail that has become the norm in this genre. All three of these books center black women and girls, make diversity a key imperative to our survival, and the latter has a strong critique about the way the world views black female leadership. They also include queer characters.

A Nalo Hopkins Bundle – again, you will have to make the bundle yourself which makes it more expensive. Start with Brown Girl in the Ring ($11.89), an Afro-Caribbean Canadian novel set in a future where the rich have abandoned the inner city except to harvest body parts from the poor and one young Afro-Canadian girl learns to fight back through old ways and new spirituality, Midnight Robber ($7.99), a story of an Afro-Caribbean girl who has to find a way to transform herself into the Robber Queen in order to save herself from magical world of New Half World, The New Moon’s Arms ($9.60) , the story of a young girl who develops psychic powers as she approaches puberty.

Multi-Culti Magical Realism Bundle: Esperanza’s Box of Saints by Maria Escandon ($14), tells the story of a grieving mother’s search for her presumabl,y dead daughter after a saint comes to tell her she is still alive, When Fox is a Thousand by Larissa Lai ($5.95) a novel that combines Chinese mythology, real historical female figures, and API women’s stories through time and space in a trickster tale, by Eva Swan ($7.95), the story of a Native American girl who is knowingly caught between two world, rez and western world, and unknowingly caught between two others, human and supernatural, as she comes to terms with one she learns how to navigate the other, and Cimmerian City by Rae Lindley, Pharmacuetical companies search for ever increasing prophet has split the world into two “races” the vampire-like people changed forever by bad meds and the human beings where medical companies are the aristocracy, a secret agent in the vampire-like race is about to change it all, ideal story for today’s current issues. Night Biters by AJ Harper (), the author wanted to provide a multicultural series of alt fiction for YA b/c she missed it herself, this is the first novel in her proposed series featuring a multicultural cast of vampires and vampire slayers living in LAHere are some other places to look to make your bundle: La Bloga “The Bone WhistleSci Fi, Latinos, Chicanos and Aztecs in Outer Space” and SciFi Latino Blog (note, many of her posts are similar to mine in the sense that they find minor or secondary Latin@ characters in the U.S.)

Mystery Bundles

For older readers who can’t get enough of female centered mysteries these bundle or some combination of them should work the trick:

Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place ($6.95) and Stay ($8), these two books tell the story of lesbian feminist detective Aud Torvignen and her investigation into both homophobic and domestic violence related criminal cases, they are packed full of pain and haunting, intense mystery, and astute feminist critique on violence against women. They are among my favorite lesbian detective novels, though they have no characters of color.

The Virginia Kelly Series by Nikki Baker (between $2-$6.95/book), black lesbian detective Virginia Kelly tries to manage a hit or miss love life with female centered mystery cases in a series that has been called a breath of fresh air in a decidedly segregated genre.

Blind Eye Mystery Series by Diane & Jacob Anderson ($12 each), these intensely pulpy detective fiction novels center lesbian detective Yoshi Takamoto who is going blind but still more competent than her perfect vision friends. If you buy the trilogy you also get the added knowledge that 10% of the profits are going to a queer youth shelter.

Chicana Myster Bundle – Mary Beal’s Angel Dance ($1.50) detective Kat Guerrera is former military turned PI who is trying to solve a case while also wooing a feminist writer in a mystery that once again centers violence against women, sexuality, and feminism and The Conquest by Yxta Murray ($12.30) a literary mystery in which  a female book restorer who endeavors to prove that the memoir of a lesbian Aztec woman who plots ways to stop Cortez from destroying the “new world.”

Direct gifts

Instead of donating money in someone’s name or simply donating money in your own name this year, why not give gifts to women that will help them empower themselves and move beyond the cycle of charity and poverty that has become all too normal on the left?

Tool kit ($25) – this basic carpenter kit by Women for Women International, includes the tools and training a woman needs to become a basic skilled carpenter in her own country. Not only does this gift help a woman become self-sufficient, it challenges gender norms in most countries, and invites the recipient of your gift (if you give the donation in some else’s name as a dual gift) to think about what decolonized feminism really means.

donation to Danish School for Girls in Afghanistan ($25 and up) – RAWA run Danish school for girls is the only girls school in rural Farah Province. It has been educating and empowering rural young girls since 2002. A gift to the school helps curb teenage pregnancy, female poverty, and exploitation of girls all of which go down when girls educated at similar rates to boys, it also supports internal efforts to educate girls divorced from U.S. war interests, and finally, when given in the name of someone else as a dual gift, it empowers your gift receiver to not only think about decolonized feminism but also to invest in learning about Muslim feminism.

Sterile Childbirth Kits from Partner in Health ($15 for 3 women) – These kits provide basic sterile equipment (exam gloves, razors, umbilical cord clamp, sterile gauze, washcloth, and soap or antibacterial wipes) for rural clinics in Haiti, Rwanda, Malawai, or Lesotho. These kits will help up to three rural women hoping to give birth to healthy babies and turn the tide of avoidable infant mortality while encouraging your gift recipient (if you donate in someone else’s name) the opportunity to discuss what real decolonized reproductive rights look like.

Scholarship to Women with Disabilities and Development Leadership Program ($10-$100)- You can donate directly to Mobility International and earmark the donation to support their women’s programs, which include the Leadership Program to train and share information about supporting differently-abled women around the world and has previously funded women’s sustainability projects like building functional wheelchairs in developing countries or advocacy for accesible roads, sidewalks, and housing. Not only does this donation help women become self-sufficient, it helps women train each other for self-sufficiency and ensures your gift recipient remembers that women includes both temporarily able bodied and differently abled women and that ensuring their success globally means more than exporting discarded aids from the “first world.”

Time Lord Victorious (Dr Who Waters of Mars Review)

By now you have all seen Waters of Mars, the latest installment of Dr. Who and the third to last episode staring David Tennant.  For me, despite the hype surrounding this episode, it is the most uneven episode of the season so far.

fan art for Waters of Mars/Lazy John

The Plot

Dr. Who arrives on the first human run Mars base in history moments before a virus/alien race begins infecting the crew.  While the Doctor makes a point of saying that he needs to leave the base because there is nothing he can do, he ultimately interferes with a time line both he and the Daleks have determined is fixed in time and must not change.

The Cons

On the negative side, the “monsters” and the “companion” in this episode leave a lot to be desired.  We are told Captain Adelaide Brooke inspires human exploration of space and her descendants even start a new race of people. Though the Doctor clearly idolizes her in some ways, Capt. Brooke comes across as a stand-offish woman who barks orders at her crew, is invested in a top down model of leadership, and is most of all, afraid to die. When it comes time to make critical decisions about the base, Capt. Adelaide has to be reminded about protocol from her second in command, a male officer who clearly thinks he knows better than she does. And when Dr. Who tells her she will eventually have to blow up the base in order to save the Earth, she initially refuses on the basis of not wanting to die. By the time Captain Adelaide begins to live up to the Doctor’s expectations she has already come across as dictatorial, unapproachable, and afraid. Her moments of heroism on the base, from her attempts to save the crew to her ultimate decision to blow up the base even as the Doctor is trying to work his magic, all ring a little hollow as a result.

The monsters are also a disappointment, partially because they seem like an after thought. Within moments of the Doctor’s arrival one of the botanists working to create sustainable food on Mars becomes infected with a virus that transforms him into a cracked-face, crazed-eyed, water producing creature that wants to infect the crew.  He quickly infects his female counterpart and then the only physician on the crew. Visually, they just aren’t scary. The make up is something more akin to a bad SyFy Saturday Z rate movie than Dr. Who and their motivation, though frightening, never really rings true to the episode. It would have been much more effective to simply see the shifting of water to break through various barriers they remaining crew erect without close ups with the infected crew while Dr. Who’s explanation of the infection “water waits” “water always wins” “one drop will change you” played in the background. That, coupled with a slightly longer, slower shot of the ice, while Dr. Who explained that it may have been the Ice Warriors who trapped the aliens/virus on Mars and then the scene of the ice cracking  would have been up to par with the terror and intensity we were supposed to feel.

As it was, I seldom cared about the threat nor connected with the fear that the crew was feeling.

The pros

However, I would argue that the virus was never the point of this episode. Instead, Waters of Mars asks us to consider what it means to be the last of the Time Lords. By this point in the new series, Dr. Who is a broken man in many ways. He has survived a great war that left him torn and shaken. Even though his companions have all helped him begin to heal from the loss of his people and his planet, they have also all torn a piece of his heart. From the loss of his great love, Rose to his shame about the dual  failures to look out for the feelings of his equal Martha and the destruction of the empowered woman Donna had become, Dr. Who is a traveler unhinged from time and companionship. He is man accountable to no one and mourning everyone.

Into this profound sorrow comes a moment in time that cannot be changed and yet, we are told, is a great tragedy.

Much more than a companion, Captain Adeliade is a mirror. Like the Doctor, she wants to live even when she knows she is meant to die. And like him, faced with the facts, she fights again reason, time, and even the future to stay alive. But unlike the Doctor, Captain Adelaide ultimately realizes that there is more at stake than her fear of death. Where the Doctor stumbles, believing in his own unchecked power, she puts him and time back on track by making the ultimate sacrifice.

One could also argue that the virus/aliens in the water are an equal mirror to Dr. Who’s dilemma. They too want only to live in the face of a kind of death. Like Dr. Who, they have lived and died and have hope of living again. And also like the Doctor, they have decided that their survival is more important than the lives of others. This is why they are the monsters in the story. And while I have argued that the makeup on this episode is sub-par, one could easily argue that the infection of humans and the slight but disturbing alteration of their appearance is a metaphor for the ways that the Doctor we have come to love has been infected by fear of death and that slight alteration transforms him from hero to potential monster.

Ultimately, the Doctor is reminded of his role in time and the universe. Like a child who falters, he stands alone in the snow and asks “Does this mean it is my time?” And though he gets no answer, he knows that the end is around the corner.

While it is hard to see the Doctor this way, especially since what makes him so endearing after all this time is the bravado and the bravery that comes with knowing you are essentially immortal, it is a take that is both unexpected and ultimately poignant.

Other points of interest

• The base is named Bowie Base One a clear nod to David Bowie in the good old days (I’m surprised there was no Major Tom)
• The crew is multicultural and includes both men and women in prominent roles – though the two highest ranking roles are both white
• There are no queer characters nor queer window-dressing which is always too bad b/c Davies does it so well
• There is an adorable reference to K-9 both verbally and visually

Major Spoilers

• Davies has seemingly gone back on his snipe about killing Ianto, when he responded to criticism about killing major characters by saying people die and that fans who didn’t like it could watch Supernatural instead, by bringing back The Master
• There is also some indication that characters from the past will make an appearance in the two part finale

—–

all images are the property of the BBC except where indicated

Goodbye Brittany

Brittany Murphy died today at the age of 32. The initial coroner’s report says she died of a heart attack but the police have already requested an autopsy. It is frightening to lose anyone in the 30s to heart disease, but it is more frightening to me when I was just speculating about her health a few days ago.

Britney Murphy is one of many female actresses I highlight in my course on Women, Media, and Body Image. In that course, I show my students before and after photos of female actresses that have gone from a healthy size to unbelievably thin, from “ethnic features” to “white or whiter”, from sexually ambiguous to hyper-heterosexual and/or from androgyny to hyper-feminine. These transitions follow a specific pattern some have masked as the shift from childhood to adulthood in Hollywood. As most women know, however, bodies get larger and generally proportional not smaller and top heavy. More than enough has been written about how adult-female-body hating fatphobia driven myths of the female body permeate and warp Hollywood. And it is this myth that Brittany Murphy, who went from a round faced, dark-haired, white ethnic young girl to an emaciated, blonde, ocassionally duck lipped woman helped perpetuate to her own detriment.

In fact, Brittany Murphy’s transformation has garnered some of the most negative attention of her contemporaries. No other woman rapidly losing weight has been called a “crack whore” in a rap song or “meth addict-chic” by movie reviewers for similar transformations. And yet, Murphy’s often hidden talent and the unspoken understanding that it was better to look like a famine victim than a healthy N. American woman, kept Murphy in film. Despite the criticism that surrounded her, she went from critically acclaimed supporting actress, to inconsistently praised leading one. Murphy herself openly mocked the irony of Hollywood’s expectations of women in one of her better romcom’s, Love and Other Disasters, when her character states that “if this had been a movie, she would be blonde.”

One has to wonder if the level of criticism her rapid weightloss, or rather the vehemence with which some spewed that criticism, has more to do with the roles she played than any real concern for her health. While her career has gone from playing complicated characters in dramas and thrillers to wide-eyed romcoms that have been largely hit or miss at the box office, Murphy has always gravitated toward complexity. In her short life, she has played a young woman dealing with ongoing sexual abuse, a girl trying to survive and thrive despite being crushed by the weight of an alcoholic and abusive mother, and a girl suffering from PTS.  A large number of the young women she has played were working class and most were trying to find there way and maintain their dignity in a classist and sexist world. And though she has made an endless slew of throw away romantic comedies, many of her films also highlighted the stories of marginalized women trying to find not only love but also to love themselves or make their single mothers’ proud. In 2009, she seemed to be trying to get back to the complexity she had once embodied in her career with films like Deadline and Across the Hall that dealt with domestic violence and infidelity.

In her own life, Murphy eschewed Hollywood for family. Though she married a screenwriter, he was neither famous nor unusually attractive; in fact, horror of horrors, by US standards he was overweight. His appearance was under so much scrutiny that people even speculated it was “a green card marriage” despite Brittany’s repeated interviews doting on him. No doubt this intense criticism reinforced the cult of thinness that seemed to surround Murphy. And while she put on a public smile and talked of love and happiness, her mania in interviews and on movie sets raised red flags for those of us used to the tell-tale signs of addiction. (Murphy herself claimed the manic episodes were related to her diabetes.)

When Murphy was fired from her latest film in Puerto Rico this past month, many trades said it was because of “diva-esque sporadic behavior on set.” But I found myself wondering if perhaps it was because the woman who had once made a living playing mentally disturbed young girls who were abused or shoved to the background b/c of the intersections of ableism and sexism had finally broken under the weight of trying to be “normal.”

While there is no concrete evidence that Brittany Murphy used drugs to get thin, several people referenced drug use when she emerged as a dirty blonde emaciated woman from the shadows of her pudgy, brown haired,  haunted youth. In 2005, Murphy was summarily dropped from representation by both her agent and her publicist right when she was co-starring in the box office hit Sin City amidst rumors of drug addiction; Murphy denied the rumors on Jay Leno.

Yet, it is common knowledge that many actresses and women in the public eye have been encouraged to lose weight by using meth or coke and several high profile women in Murphy’s age group, from reality tv stars like Nichole Ritchie to former top rated tv show stars like Mischa Barton, have all gone to rehab after following that advice. Murphy’s own mania seemed to reek of addiction at one time or another, and her recent firing and attempts to keep her husband from medical attention when he was thought to be having a heart attack by physicians (she claimed it was asthma), are also recognizable flags.

We won’t know what really happened until the autopsy. What we do know is that an incredibly gifted child actress, who took complex roles depicting women’s issues that are largely ignored by Hollywood mainstream, wasted away before our eyes while the media mocked her. When I show her before and after pictures to my students, I am horrified to see them pick over her bones with comments like “well she might be too thin, but I wonder how she did it?” and “well she needs to get her roots done, but she looks better; she used to be fat.” It seems that talent has very little sway and that an emaciated, sporadic, Murphy in crappy romantic comedies was still better than an average sized Murphy exposing classism, ableism and violence against women. And while we will never know with what demons she wrestled or the extent of her actual physical health issues (like diabetes, flu, etc.), I think we can be clear that the need for thinness that surrounds actresses, and women in general, ultimately cost a 32 year old woman her life and any number of girls there sense of safety in their own bodies.

Say what you will about her, there is a lesson in Brittany Murphy’s short life that I hope we can finally learn.

——

images

• Britney Murphy as Tai. Clueless. Paramount, 1995.
• Unattributed
• Britney Murphy & Simon Monjack @ airport after “heart attack” incident/TMZ

I’m Tired of Saying It

On twitter, they have this thing called 6 word stories. The point is exactly as it sounds, tell a story that people can immediately recognize in 6 words or less. I have written a ridiculous amount of posts on the meaning of “woman” in women’s studies or the feminist blogosphere or even in the mainstream feminist movement from the perspective of a feminist scholar and activists, as have so many of my blogging peers and intellectual goddesses/foremothers. So I thought I’d respond to a new post, on a highly decorated blog, that claims female directors just need to clit up and take their rightful place in Hollywood instead of complaining about female exclusion, bad scripts, and chauvinist directors, with 6 words:

When you say women, mean everyone.

You can read my series on black female directors and the extensive body of work they have done while being largely shut out of Hollywood by clicking on the African American Herstory page at the top of the blog. You can also read about many female directors who have refused to define their success by Hollywood inclusion in my movie reviews. And if you are feeling really ambitious, you can read Yvonne Welbone’s dissertation turned documentary and website Sisters in Cinema or give money to Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project.

There are a lot of women who have spent their whole lives working on making films while shut out of Hollywood, including Maya Angelou. Some of those women were critically acclaimed directors or even won awards with no subsequent embrace from either Hollywood or the “new female power” in Hollywood. (Though many others were aided by the now replaced female studio exec at one of the big 5 studios in 1980s-90s) More than that, there are a lot of women who would never define their success by how many Hollywood films they have made. Do you really think Daughters of the Dust would be recognizable if Paramount had funded it?

And the next time you get the urge to write a post about “a great women’s movie” or “cool women directors” or “what women need to do to be successful in Hollywood” etc. ask yourself:

• is there any diversity amongst the women depicted in this film or their stories?
• If there are diverse women, do they fill non-stereotypical roles?
• does this film’s female director or producer hire or work with a diverse groups of women behind the scenes on this film?
• does this film actually show empowered women?
• Is their empowerment bought on the backs of marginalized women or other marginalized groups or include jokes or stereotypes about marginalized people, including women?

After all Katherine Hiegl’s latest anti-feminist disaster romcom was produced by a woman and written by a woman, tho directed by a man. Honestly, I’m grateful none of those women thought about anyone but people who look like them to be in it.  However, I still wouldn’t call that film a Hollywood female success story anymore than I would call the Drew Barrymore backed He’s Just Not That In To You, with its female screen writers, female producers, and female star power behind it & also based on a book co-written by a woman a feminist bildungsroman. Not only do both of these films posit an outdated-sexist and heterosexist view of women but the latter not only includes a pack of gaggling gay men but repeated racist encounters between Latino construction workers and a rich white woman losing her husband to infidelity meant to highlight her breakdown not her racially tinged elitism and its pack of gaggling gay men.

I could give a synopsis of many of the failures of both fluff films like these and the more “serious feminist” films that have failed to think beyond the navels of the privileged folks behind them, but I do that enough on this blog as it is. Instead I go back to my six word story:

When you say women, mean everyone.

or if you prefer:

If you’re a feminist, mean it.

Racist Hit List at Oregon High School

Is it Christmas break for high school and middle school youth yet? Because it seems to me with all the racially charged incidents happening from Coast to Coast, these youth need a break if for nothing else than to get some body armor together.

Parkrose High School mural (moves from Egypt to Rome to Enlightment to wagon trial to cowboys & pic of Khan)/Larry Kagas

This morning, Oregon high school Park Rose joined the list of schools with racist incidents this semester. An African-American freshman reported that he saw his name written on a stairwell wall surrounded by swastikas and the word “Kill”.  The school confirmed that there were at least 5 student’s names written under the word “kill” and surrounded by racist images. They also said they were taking proactive steps to deal with the situation. So far those steps include:

1. an ongoing investigation of who was responsible for the graffiti
2. notifying the parents of the targeted students
3. an existing safety plan for “incidents such as this”

There was no reference to racial tensions at the school or addressing any climate of racial conflict. However, African Americans in the community have indicated that Parkrose High School has “never been a particularly safe place for African American students.” While they have pointed to no particular incidents to back these claims, people seemed confident in believing that both the school and the neighborhood in which it is located have not traditionally been particularly “friendly areas of town.” The presence of swastika graffiti in the area is one indicator; it was not only present in the current hit list incident but also spray painted near Portland Christian High School, another Parkrose neighborhood school, by arsonists who tried to burn the school down. In that incident, both students and police minimized the presence of both racist and sexist graffiti as “the work of punks who probably did not know any better” (see East PDX News for full story on PCHS). The neighborhood was also one of a handful embroiled in the rise of neo-nazis in Oregon in the 1980s.

Parkrose has been the site of racist incidents in the past as well. In 2003, an Asian American student yelled racial slurs at an African American student off school grounds. The African American student found the Asian American student at lunch with several of his friends and a fight broke out. Several other fights primarily between African Americans and Asian Americans erupted throughout the end of the day as a result. By day’s end, a white student had threatened to kill all the African American students in the school. (oregonlive has taken down its free link to this story and the only copy is on a white supremacist site, where a white Parkrose student used the incident to disparage African American students and to a lesser extent Asian American ones, hoping they would kill each other so the school could “go back to being majority white.” He was also proud that he and his friends were known around the school as “the racist kids.”)

At the same time, Parkrose High School administrators point to the fact they crowned an African American this past Spring as the Rose Festival representative of their school. They also note that the school has been becoming increasingly diverse not less so. Both the current Principal and Vice Principal of Parkrose High School are also women of color, though none of the people of color in administrative roles are African American.

At least one mother has said she does not feel safe returning her child to the school and it is unclear if he, and others named, will in fact return.

In Praise of Women of Color Poets

I’ve highlighted a lot of different woc poets on this blog in the past, each of whom has a different definition and relationships to the words “woman,” “feminism,” “race,” and “desire.” On Dec. 6th while working on a proposal to link local Latin@ artists and the social sciences on campus, I found myself coming back to these poems in my head.  For me they bridged forms and spoke of creation in ways that resonated for me in terms of the project I was working on, ie being in the middle of taking creativity and creation back from institutions that demean and twist them and rebirthing them as wholly ours, women of color creating art and using that art to cross forms and communities.

Here are the poems:

Poet Kantuta reads her poetry about Indigenous women’s empowerment and finding strength to open the June film showing of Bringing the Circle Together Native American Film Series:

Artist “Queen GodIs” poem at Brave New Voices 2009 reworks the Madonna figure while critiquing modern intersectional oppressions, all while embedding hope and rebirth:

Youth Poets Alysia and Alysha poem “hir” discussing the struggle of a transgendered youth to be seen and heard at school and his world

(There has been a lot of advocacy on the internet against using gender neutral terms because they ungender people who have chosen a gender identity; I want to point out that though this poem is about a person who also has a chosen gender identity, the poets were using the double entendre of hir/here to make a point about being seen, heard, and acknowledged as real in our society.)

Anti-Asian Racism in South Philly Schools

NBC Philadelphia/unattributed

Racial violence at South Philadelphia High School has been at the center of a month long discussion/struggle for Asian American students’ safety at the school. According to students, the situation began over two weeks ago when 30 API students were attacked at South Philadelphia High School sparking an 8 day boycott of classes.

According to members of the Asian American community who are helping students heal and organize, the December 3rd attack was actually day two of the violence. They believe the same African-American students, 14 in total, attacked a lone Vietnamese student off school grounds on December 2nd and then brought the violence into the school the following day. (see Philly.com)

What was initially reported as widescale violence against Asian American students by African-American students may have begun with an attack on a differently-abled African American student off campus. According to school officials, some API students harassed and subsequently beat up a lone African-American student off school grounds sparking racial tension inside the school. That tension erupted on Dec. 3 when 30 API students were brutally attacked in the cafeteria and the hallways of the school by a multi-racial group of assailants, many of whom were African-American.

Several of the attacked students had to go to the hospital and many API students were too scared to return the following day for fear of being targeted again. Their parents worried that the violence was not over and that it was becoming all too common. While advocates warned that the language barrier many of the students targeted experienced in the school meant that they could not or would not accurately report everything that had happened to them; they also pointed out this is an ongoing problem in getting clear documentation of violence against API students in the school.

Very little is known about the differently-abled African American student because the school chose not to disclose this information in the initial days of reporting on the Anti-Asian violence within its walls. The failure to address this student’s rights and the combination of ableism and racially motivated unilateral violence from the API community has made it that much harder to address the increasing racially faultlines in a school run by an African American principal.

A History of Anti-Asian Sentiment

However, the idea that South Philly High would have been safe for API students if it hadn’t been for the off campus incident is inaccurate at best. Regardless of what sparked the incident, several things have become clear in its aftermath:

1. According to students, there is a consistent pattern of anti-Asian discrimination at South Philly High
2. API students were targeted on Dec. 3 regardless of their involvement in the incident against the differently-abled African American student, ie they were targeted for being Asian
3. newly arrived first generation immigrant students bore the brunt of the Anti-Asian violence

Philly.com/Jason Melcher

According to Ellen Somekawa, Executive Director of Asian Americans United, students at South Philly High reported several racist comments against them by school teachers and administrators. These comments included references to speaking English, derogatory analogies to Asian American characters in the media, and a general sense that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are not “real Americans” or perpetually foreign. (You can see some of the comments here.) The fact that these comments were allegedly made by teachers and administrators is not only reprehensible, it also helped to create a climate in which targeting of API students would seem acceptable.

That climate seems to be coming from the top. While school Principal La Greta Brown is new to South Philadelphia High, she has already gotten into trouble with various racial and ethnic groups at the school according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. A Jewish teacher says he was harassed by Brown for asking for a religious holiday off and Allan Wong from the Mayor’s Commission on Asian American Affairs says he tried to schedule a meeting with Brown to discuss last year’s anti-Asian school violence but got nowhere.  Other members of the API community said Brown had appeared open to discussing the problems in the school, even setting up a community meeting schedule, but when it came time for the meetings themselves Brown appeared to have forgotten about them and after keeping the attendees waiting for 40 minutes had failed to schedule additional meetings. (see Philadelphia Inquirer, link above, for full story) While Brown has not commented on these complaints, she vehemently denied Somekawa’s accusations at the meeting where the two discussed the Dec. 3 attack with the rest of community leaders.

If both the principal and teachers are accused of being anti-Asian and/or minimizing anti-Asian behavior amongst their peers than will they really stand up against students who are also Anti-Asian?

According to both students and community leaders, the answer is: No.

According to Xu Lin, a community member who helped students recovering from PTS related to the attack, violence against Asian American students has been a regular part of the school day since he was a student at South Philly High.  He reported being beaten up in what was implied as racially motivated incidents himself.

Current student, Wei Chen, Founder of the Chinese American Student’s Association at the school, also reported ongoing violence. In fact, he started CASA after racially motivated violence in the school last year (see NBC Philadelphia). Those incidents were supposed to have sparked improvements in the school to ensure that anti-Asian violence did not erupt again. Despite violence, school officials claim that the violence agaisnt Asian American students is down 50% (see NBC Philadelphia)

Given the failure to ensure students’ safety from last year until now, the question of what tone the administration had set was at the forefront of some 50 API students who boycotted the school in the hopes of getting concrete lasting reform and an end to racism in the school.

Policing Solutions?

What started as 5 students being scared to return to classes the following day after the violence(Philly.com), swelled to 50 students on an 8 day boycott of the school and active community involvement demanding the school be made safe. API students and community leaders asked that the school:

1. install more cameras
2. hire more security guards
3. report racially motivated violence as hate crimes
4. implement stricter punishments for students involved in violence against other students on or off school grounds

In a rally and march against anti-Asian violence in the school, API students from South Philly High also made it clear that they were less interested in racial narratives about the incident on December 3rd as much as they were invested in a radical paradigm shift amongst the administration. In other words, unlike the media that was reporting the incident as unilateral violence between Asian Americans and African Americans, the students felt the issue was a failure of the school itself. Many of them carried signs that said “It’s not a question of who beat who, it’s who let it happen” and, as pictured at the top of this post, “Grown Ups Let Us Down!”

After tensions rose between the school and community leaders, civil rights organizations filed suit against the school for failing to protect API students. The school district responded by holding several community and student-faculty meetings and committing to the following:

1. hiring 4 new security guards including one who speaks Cantonese
2. installation of 60 cameras throughout the school, especially in identified hotspots like outside the bathroom and inside the cafeteria
3. transferring the already suspended students believed to have instigated the in school violence to other districts & reporting them to the police for criminal prosecution
4. the creation of The Task Force for Racial and Cultural Harmony which will include members from the community, students, parents, and faculty

Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman also issued a statement at a community meeting on the incident, disavowing racism in the schools and the “larger community.” She pointed out that this recent round of violence began with an attach on the differently-abled African American student and ended with the violence against 30 Asian American students and was a symptom of ongoing racial tensions in Philadelphia. She said the School District is committed to addressing these racial tensions and ensuring the safety of all of the students at Philadelphia schools and pointed to how the Task Force could help schools across the district address racism both in and outside of the school system.

Like many other stories of racially motivated violence in the schools, the issues at South Philly High seems to have escalated in part due to administrative in action and a climate of oppression. A critical part of the aftermath is the public documenting of violence against API students for generations at South Philly High that mirrors complaints of oppression in the schools in other cases. What is becoming clear is that many of our schools are unsafe, if not the least safe, places for youth. While underfunded schools have glaring problems that make national news, like those of South Philly High, many of the students dying because of the intersections of racism and transphobia or racism and ableism or the individual oppressions of racism, homophobia, sexism, and transphobia are happening in private schools. While we have developed a language for discussing oppressions that language has not brought us any closer to addressing actual oppression, and in many schools that failure has had dire impact on youth.

The South Philly High example also serves to draw attention to two other problems in our so-called post-racial world. On the one hand, the myth of the model minority continues to mask racism against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in national discourse. This myth has prevented critical intervention on many levels and has encouraged people to ignore anti-Asian violence. It has also masked the ways that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are also targets of anti-immigrant violence as perpetual outsiders in the U.S. The majority of the API students targeted in South Philly High were first generation, newly arrived, immigrant youth and the advocates quoted above indicated that these students were the least likely to report violence because of language barriers. It is entirely possible that lack of cultural competence amongst new immigrants and African Americans that painted both groups as offensive and potentially racist in the eyes of the other led to some of the racial tension in the school. Teachers and administrators’ own reported anti-immigrant sentiment prevented them from providing this cultural competence to students and further exacerbated institutional racism. It is equally possible that anti-immigrant discourses that paint immigrants as unfairly sucking up limited resources resonated particularly well with subsistence level African American students, transforming this conflict into a decidedly anti-immigrant one.

On the other hand, the emphasis on addressing long buried anti-Asian violence at South Philly High has nearly erased the story of what happened to that differently-abled African American student. That student’s story has yet to be told.  But what has become clear is that the references to the students who instigated the anti-Asian violence in the school as “a gang” or certain parents expressing their fears about the school a long implied race lines, ie that there are a lot of black people in South Philly High therefore it is an unsafe and unruly school, belie as yet unaddressed racial tensions. And while school administrators appear to have hid behind these tensions in order to silence API students complaints, the solution is not to simply flip the script.

Finally, while it is true that API students called for increased policing at the school, I find myself concerned about the increasing presence of the prison-industrial-complex in the school system. Working class and subsistence level students of color are already over-policed as it is. The presence of increased policing in the schools has shown no real track record of decreasing violence or tensions in the schools, and in some cases has increased it. And like other policing forces, questions have arisen about the cultural competence of security guards in the school as a direct result of their involvement in racist and sexist incidents. While the school has committed to ensuring the language competence of 1 of 4 new guards there has been no similar commitment to their racial competence with either API students or African Americans (or Latinos in the school for that matter). while I agree that the youth who instigated this violence should be punished, including with applicable hate crimes laws, I don’t think an increasingly prison like school environment is an answer. Put another way, I am concerned that the answer to school violence is often to adjudicate and permanently brand children rather than to do what schools are meant to do, ie educate and provide youth with the ability to think critically about oppression. And I am not sure the false sense of security these measures will provide will do anything toward addressing the underlining issues at the school or, as the Superintendent put it, the communities these students live in.

There were many lessons that South Philly High could have learned from this incident. The one key lesson they seem to have learned was to listen to, honor, and protect the voices of the API students in their school. Given how long they have been silenced through fear, retaliation, and violence, this cannot be underestimated. But I fear the other lessons available here have been lost. And each time I write these kinds of posts, I watch the narrowing of the discourse surrounding them in the media and know that we as a nation are also losing these key opportunities as well. At least the API students of South Philly High now have an organizational structure, public presence, and finally recognized voice in the school with which to advocate for themselves in the future. It is just too bad that they had to have this instead of the school doing everything it can to make South Philly a safe place for all of its students.

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image on right: Principal LaGreta Brown. ALEJANDRO A. ALVAREZ / PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

A Quick Note

It seems like I came back to blogging full time just in time to write a bunch of posts disparaging education … Let’s be clear, I am an academic and have been longer than I have not been at this point in my life. However, as someone entering from the margins and intentionally teaching at a marginalized and supposedly margin serving school, I’ve never really gotten on board with the idea that problems in education are intellectual puzzles to figure out instead of institutional forms of maintaining embedded divisions in society. So when I write these posts, it is less about some deep seeded disdain for education, which some trolls think I share with them, and more about shinning a bright light on the places where we continue to fail in the hopes that light will lead us out of the darkness. I just felt like I should say that given how much time I’ve had to spend on deconstructing education’s failures this week on the blog and twitter.

Femme Tats to Swoon At

I have started an introductory sentence or two to the images below and simply kept erasing them. Suffice it to say, these decidedly femme friendly tats have left me tongue-tied and perpetually swooned; I don’t ink my body but somehow I think Michele Worthman could easily convince me that these would up my femme game and honey, you should know, no one out femmes me.

The beautiful work of Michele Worthman:

See more of her amazing work here

Teacher Emotionally Assaults Student & Still Gets to Come to Class

The website for Congress Elementary School in Wisconsin proclaims its lofty mission statement with pride:

Congress Year Round School is committed to creating a well-prepared and caring community of learners, where students work hard to be successful and the learning never stops.

and images of happy black children smile out to website visitors as if to confirm both the schools diversity and its stated commitment.  No doubt a week ago, there would be no irony here.

This week however, is different.

An unidentified teacher at Congress Elementary humiliated a 7 year old black child in front of her peers for playing with her hair. According to the 7 year old, her teacher called her to the front of the room after she did not stop playing with her braids during class. The teacher then took out the large scissors issued to elementary teachers from her desk and cut off  one of the child’s braids. The 7 year old went back to her desk and cried. Her peers laughed while the teacher is reported to have said “Now what you gonna go home and say to your momma?” (see KCCI) a clear threat to already broken child.

If the story ended there, it would already be inexplicable. In the state where I teach, you cannot touch a student for any reason except an emergency. In most states, there are rules governing how you can and cannot touch your students even when they are adults in university. On the basis of these rules alone, the teacher was out of line. But even if these rules did not exist, the blatant violation of this black child’s bodily integrity for the sole purpose of humiliating her in front of her peers would be inexcusable.

Or would it?

According to the 7 year olds mother, Helen Cunningham, the teacher attempted to explain away her behavior by saying, “I was frustrated” (ibid) though she did also offer an apology.

The school claims to be “pursuing district policies” with the handling of the teacher but so far, they have allowed her to remain in the classroom. Instead of putting her on leave pending an investigation (hello look into the garbage can, find the braid, case closed), they have moved the 7 year old child out of the classroom. While this certainly will help mediate anxiety the child likely has about returning to school it sends the message to her and to her peers that there are no consequences for violating the physical integrity of little black girls.

To add to the insult, the little girl’s name and photo have been circulated by the media, as they contacted the media after hearing the teacher was not being suspended, but the teacher’s name and image have been withheld. The official website for the school no longer has a viable link to the staff roster either. So the offender is being protected while the victim is on display. And while the child’s mother has given consent, one has to factor in that Helen Cunningham felt the media was her better bet after the school failed to do anything to remove the teacher from the classroom. (I was able to find a backdoor way into the staff roster, unfortunately, there are 11 different 1st and 2nd grade teachers at Congress Elementary, so I am not sure who the teacher in question is.)

The Wisconsin police on the other hand, have been trying to resolve the issue with appropriate sanction. Initially they referred the case to the District Attorney’s office for possible criminal charges for mental or physical abuse charges. THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY DECLINED.  So the police, believing this incident needed to be reprimanded, cited the teacher for disorderly conduct. The crime carries with it a $175 fine.

Ultimately, this is a story that has become all too familiar. Congress Elementary is a school with 94% black student enrollment and 78% of students qualifying for free lunch, ie the bulk of their students are black working class and subsistence level children. (see student stats here) At the same time, slightly less than 1/2 of their teachers have 5 years or more of teaching experience and less than 40% have an Masters Degree of any kind, including an Masters Degree of Teaching. (see faculty stats here) In other words, this situation is a reflection of an ongoing problem in which schools that serve primarily poor and working class children of color are taught by underprepared and under-educated teachers. Teachers who are easily frustrated by common childhood behaviors. And in this case, as in the case of the black child handcuffed by her teacher in NYC last year and the black child beaten by a school security guard in CA last year, it is becoming far too common to respond to one’s frustration with violence against black youth.

While many have commented on the racial overtones of this case, the teacher’s race has been withheld. It would be impossible to argue that cutting a black child’s braid was not an act of racial violation. Whether that violation was enacted by someone understood how profound that violence was because they internalized the history of auction block and the meaning of interfering with a black girl’s hair or because they simply understand it, is irrelevant.

However, regardless of the teacher’s race, this case crosses intersecting oppressions of gender, class, and race. It highlights a growing problem of emotional and physical violence against both poor children and children of color, especially in poor neighborhoods, by school officials. Given the high profile attention that the President and several long time, high profile, community advocates have placed on unsafe schools the boldness with which this teacher, the District Attorney’s Office, and to some extent the school itself (which did issue a public apology via the media) have handled this case cannot be ignored. The message sent is that black children are not safe in school and when they are abused, it is their fault or at least, no one will punished for it. Ultimately, we must decide as a society that violence against any youth for any reason is unacceptable and that violence against black girls is not some proof of black barbarity but rather proof that schools are failing all of us.

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images

• the child, whose name you may note I am not using on purpose, whose hair was cut/AP
• Milwaukie County District Attorney John T. Chisholm/unattributed