Heartbreaking

I admit it, I was not in the mood to be the enigmatic instructor in the front of the room today. So instead, I asked students, via email, to bring in at least one song from the final projects they are working on about women, media, and narratives of self. One of my students brought in this Lauryn Hill classic:

Like many in the room, she did not know the history of this song and its direct comment on some of Hill’s less than positive relationships with other artists who tried to silence her creativity and sell out the sound. Instead, what she heard was the story of men who abuse women, profit from their intelligence, and keep them under control so that they don’t lose access to the power, intelligence, and creativity they bring to the table. She also talked about ambivalence in the song, i.e. that on the one hand it is an anthem for women who have the power to walk away from people who are enigmatic but shallow and the awareness that comes from realizing a person is more invested in their image and being worshiped than in real relationships, but on the other hand there is great cost to walking away from people who are idolized by the rest of your peer group. It was insightful presentation.

Unfortunately, it was also headed to a dark place. Try as I might, I could not preempt that in order to keep us on track and the student from having to face her peers post-melt down. Suddenly, she was comparing the engimatic figure in the song (he who shall remain nameless at least here) and several of her male professors in her other major, a discipline that is notoriously peopled with enigmatic men who are aloof and seemingly untouchable. She compared the shallowness of her relationships to said instructors to the availability, nurturing, and mentorship she had received in other departments and how the “cult of personality” in her discipline was surprisingly missing in others which made her think about how male egos intertwine with misogyny in order to create whole systems of power based on worship and abuse and the pathologizing of anyone who questions them. While the rest of her narrative was mixed with personal issues I cannot repeat here, suffice it to say that this crisis and insight were a result of the student trying to get her needs met from these largely than life men and being summarily smacked down because she wasn’t cute enough, thin enough, dumb enough to fall for their crap, etc. and also the more it happened the more she engaged in approach-avoidance (where you try to talk to someone and when they blow you off you avoid them until you can pull up the courage to do it again, ultimately reinforcing the idea that there is something wrong with you and your ability to be liked or loved instead of with the situation or the interpersonal dynamics that each of you has some responsibility in). For those who don’t know, approach-avoidance is one of the best tools of the abusive professor, because if they can get you on that cycle, then they can point to your neediness and erratic behavior as proof you are a giant nut bar and they are innocent.

Listening to her story in class and then later in my office, complete with email proof of some of her interactions, I began to wonder exactly how it is we continue to support these cults of personality in academe. Though some departments are certainly more guilty than others, and some genders perhaps more so than others, I think we can point to at least one person in every discipline who acts like this and in most cases their unbelievable narcissism is rewarded. In thinking about it, for the first time in a long time, from the student’s perspective instead of the colleague one, I began to wonder how many broken young women there are roaming college campuses because they don’t get called on or mentored by Mr. Fabulous, and then when they go to ask why … Mr. Fabulous makes them feel like the tiniest fleck of poo stuck in his brand new shoes, you know the fleck that stinks forever but can’t be washed out … Some girls go away and cry. Some girls try harder to please, helping build the very cult that dishonors them. And some girls, the really brave or really clueless ones, dare to ask why they are being treated this way or make it known that they see through this behavior, and those girls pay. They pay dearly. We’ve all seen it happen. Social ostracism doesn’t stop in high school; it isn’t part of 8 year old developmental brains. We do this. We let this happen.

I found myself asking the same questions I always silently ask said colleagues in these situations:

1. Have you ever asked yourself why you are in education?
2. If you think of students as the fodder to grade your papers, due your research, or even write those books you get raises on, what in the system prevents you from realizing you are a parasite and doing something about it?
3. How do you think learning works if you engage in your own version of approach-avoidance in which the chosen few are showered with a ridiculous portion of attention and the rest are relegated to the hinterlands of two word emails and bored stares?
4. If the only thing driving you teach is your ego, then have you considered local theater instead? perhaps a poetry slam at your favorite coffee shop? (people with real talent do this too, but we all know about the pompous pontificators who show up and have a forum, just think, that could be you!)
5. And if deep down, you really don’t give a sh*t what students think, then why do you have a syllabus that requires them to speak in class and/or interact with you in some version of a virtual extended classroom?

One word: Therapy.

While therapy is not cheap and it doesn’t pay you, in the long run

1. you will do far less damage to others in this world
2. you may actually like yourself when it is over
3. you can do much better in the world with an authentic self and an internal regulating system that doesn’t require you to feed off of others
4. while you may never be worshiped or adored again, you also won’t need to be and the people who offer you love and friendship will actually mean it and not just being waiting for you to write a recommendation or drop dead so they can move into your office

What I told my student in class, was to listen to another Lauryn Hill song in which she realizes that looking outside herself for validation is not worth it and where she points to all the ways we are told to put our faith, our learning, and our sense of peace, in the hands of others (including educators) when to be strong we need to take it into our own hands and build our own communities of strength that are based on mutuality, mindfulness, and genuine respect for each other.

My world it moves so fast today
The past it seems so far away
And I squeeze it so tight, I can’t breathe
And every time I try to be
What someone has thought of me
So caught up, I wasn’t able to acheive
But deep in my heart the answer it was in me
And I made up my mind to find my own destiny
I look at my environment
And wonder where the fire went
What happened to everything we used to be
I hear so many cry for help
Searching outside of themselves
Now I know His strength is within me
And deep in my heart the answer it was in me
And I made up my mind to find my own destiny
And deep in my heart the answer it was in me
And I made up my mind to find my own destiny

One of the students had brought the entire CD in to do her song, so we ended class with this song. I asked each student to think about the meaning of this song and how it related to their own lives and their own empowerment. I’m passing that on to you, even as I ask the academics among my readers to think of new ways of interacting with those colleagues who are little more than predators feeding on the innocence and trained need of young students just looking for one person to validate and encourage their intelligence.

 

This is Who You Handed the Reigns Over to

I really should have done this yesterday, when there was still time to help mobilize the vote. That failure is on me. While I took to twitter with a bunch of other progressives to try and rally young people to go vote and to remember that even if the choice was between a Democrat who sold out universal health care and ending the war, it was better than a Republican who circulated watermelon photos or had dinner with members of the Klan and certainly better than Tea Party folks who, among their many issues, still refer to “my America” to mean racial homogeneity and support things like ending equality in education and employment, not hiring differently-abled people or relegating them to the first floor, or simply not serving people in a restaurant, store, or other business just because they are racially or sexually different than you. The problem with our electoral system is often progressives and radicals are faced with voting for the people who have disappointed them just because they aren’t the people who want to lock them up in huge cages and put them on display on Main Street (and yes, someone in Ohio ran on such a platform a few years ago). The problem is exacerbated by a smug disregard for progressive politics that starts at the top, I watched President Obama on John Stewart too, and trickles right on down to snark said to entire Press rooms. The problem is a government system that makes being in government a lucrative career rather than a civil service, where career politicians worry more about the 30 misguided folks with incoherent signs than the 80% of voters who swept them into office. The problem is a government so bent on “bipartisanship” that they let Fox News tell them who to hire and fire and the only people compromised are the American people. So yeah, the Democrats threw away momentum like we have not seen in the last 30 years and they failed to carry the mantle of change they defined and we handed them, but this is what being disillusioned and staying home or voting for something “new” really means:

More Tea Party Signs

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

for original archive click link at top of blog

While neither progressives nor voting Democrats, ie not the politicians, can be blamed for the racism in this country (subconscious, covert, overt, or otherwise), we do have to ask ourselves what our decisions around voting helped sweep in to the halls of power both this election and the last one. By which I mean, when our “representatives” started to act like they were not going to uphold the mandate to provide affordable health care, end the war, support the poorest among us, etc. were we as vocal, strategic, and present as the Tea Party? Did we hold our own rallies, put them up on you tube, demand an audience with our Congresspeople, etc.? Or did we just send Stephen Colbert? And when it came time to vote yesterday, when voters across this nation ran to the polls in a racialized frenzy did we offer rides to the polls to our friends, neighbors, or even the guy on the street? Did we even vote? And I use “we” here, even though I did vote, even though I did participate in meetings with local politicians, and I did try and ensure my students knew where to register and the consequences of switching their registration if they are from out of state, because ultimately as a group we spend a lot of intellectual power critiquing the world around us and far less coming up with viable alternatives. The system is broken and the politicians on the Left are still just politicians, but if we want something different than it is time to build that and make it happen. Until then, we are all implicated in who won the elections last night and what all of us will ultimately lose because of it.

Related Articles

• Michael Moore: Today Is the Day (huffingtonpost.com)

Telling to Live: Natascha Kampusch New Book

missing poster for Kampusch age 10/AP/unattributed

In 1998, 10 year old Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped by Wolfgang Priklopil on her way to school in Austria. She was kept locked in his home, often in a small cellar in the basement, and emotionally and sexually abused for the next eight years. During that time she was often frequently denied food and suffered from malnutrition resulting in her being almost the same weight when she was found as she was when she was taken at age 10. The malnutrition impacted her physical and brain development as much as the sexual and emotional abuse impacted her emotional one. According to Kampusch, Priklopil referred to her as his “sex slave” and himself as “the master”. He made her clean his house half-naked when he was not humiliating or violating her in other ways. In 2006, she finally escaped when Priklopil took a phone call while she was outside in the garden cleaning his car. Despite her repeated calls for help as she ran through the neighborhood where she had been held, no one actually called the police, until Kampusch stopped at a 71 year old woman’s house and asked her to use the phone to call the police. The case sent shockwaves of  horror throughout the world and an SVU episode was loosely based on her story. Wolfgang Priklopil committed suicide shortly after her escape to avoid prosecution. When he died, so did the information about why he did what he did and how he had gotten away with it for so long.

Kampusch revisited her story recently when another girl, Elisabeth Fritzl, was discovered being held captive in a similar hidden cellar, by her own father for 24 years, also in Austria. Josef Fritzl did not commit suicide and continues to harass his daughter from behind bars. According to his friends and neighbors there had been some suspicions about his behavior and renters had also noticed things, but no one looked into it further. His wife, Elizabeth’s mother, continues to deny any knowledge of it though she helped raise several of Elizabeth’s children by Josef Fritzl.

Josef Fritzl, last known image of Elizabeth & the cellar apartment were he kept her for 24 years/unattributed

Kampusch shared her stories of rape, sexual humiliation, and captivity from childhood with Elizabeth in the hopes of showing her and the world that you can survive horrendous sexual abuse and enslavement. Telling her story, also prompted Kampusch to write a book about what happened to her to help other women and girls surviving childhood sexual abuse and rape. The book, 3,096 Days, chronicles Kampusch’s 8 years in captivity, focusing on her survival skills and her emotional process throughout the abuse. The book was published this month and is the first time Kampusch has told her story to the world.

When Kampusch first escaped, she did several interviews but was wary of news reporters digging into her abuse history. In an interview with the Sunday Times, she spoke about feeling violated by people looking at the small room where she had been kept and picking over the details of photos from Priklopl’s home and police reports in the national news:

“… above all, I’m annoyed about the pictures of my dungeon, because it is nobody’s business. I also would not look into the living rooms and bedrooms of other people. Why should people be able to open up a newspaper and look into my room?

…

The media interest is too much, but on the other hand through this fame I have some responsibility and I want to use to this advantage to help other people, to make a foundation and do charitable projects. For example to help lost people who were never found like me. And I want to work with the hungry [in Africa].” (Sunday Times 2006)

Like many survivors, Kampusch initially minimized her abuse and tried to keep details to herself. Her limited education, provided through newspapers and radio stations given to her by Priklopl also gave her a sense of worry for “the starving kids in Africa” despite having never seen any and actually having been motivated by her own starvation at the hands of her abuser. She later referred to them as primitives while again making a connection to her own thoughts as equally so because of hunger. The racism she expressed, especially in the context of being referred to as a slave by her abuser for 8 years makes one wonder about the racial overtones of her abuse and the connections between racism and sexism even in the life of an blonde blue-eyed Austrain girl who had likely never met any people of color or learned very little about the world before or during her capture and assault.

When she talked about gender, she also seemed to have internalized messages that women were weaker and/or powerless:

And this female lack of power that I couldn’t do anything against him.

These thoughts too, likely came from Priklopl to both subdue her and groom her for ongoing abuse. These gender disparities also made her identify with Priklopl’s mother and worry about how she would get on in the world if her son was prosecuted. At the same time, Kampusch talks about promising herself that when she got older and stronger, she would escape.

Much of her story about how he convinced her that he was harmless and that her parents did not love her, in those initial interviews, follow a similar pattern to the stories other kidnapped children and trafficked child sex workers tell. In these stories, kidnappers tell children their parents gave them permission and/or are coming to pick them up as soon as they pay a ransom or get a check they need or new job, etc. and then after time goes by kidnappers switch the story to say parents are still unavailable, finally following up with stories of how parents no longer want them, abandoned them, or even are dead all the while slowly grooming the children to trust or become dependent on them so that they will resign themselves to the abuse. In Kampusch’s case, Priklopl not only did all of this, but also forced her to take a new name to divorce her from her past and possibly hide her better.

Kampusch/The Star/unattributed

Now Kampusch speaks about her abuse with the insight of someone who has had time to talk and heal. She no longer looks at people’s interests in her case as invasive but rather an opportunity to help others avoid or survive abuse in their own lives. In place of her the survival skill of minimizing abuse, is a forthright tone that waivers at certain memories but is committed to telling her story and moving forward. While she still shows signs of what I would consider unhealthy attachment to her abuser, she bought his car and his house, she is trying her best to tell a story she spent 8 years being trained never to tell and she is doing, not for fame or fortune, but to help other women and girls.

Two other books about the incident were published prior. In  2006, an English-language book Girl in the Cellar was published by two journalists who had worked part of the case. Kampusch’s mother also published a book about her own story looking for her daughter two years later. Both books were controversial because Kampusch disputed the material in the former and even threatened suit. While her mother’s book capitalized on the media attention Natascha’s escape was receiving but did only tell her own story. Though both mother and daughter had a strained relationship at the time, Natascha did attend her mother’s release party and has never disputed information in her mother’s book.

So far, the 3,096 Days is not available in English and though there is a planned movie based on the book to be released in 2012, it is unclear if there will be an English language version of the film either. While there are things that are specific to Austria, like the basement cellars that so many predators seem to be using to hide their assaults on women and girls, the story of surviving child sexual abuse and rebuilding one’s life is unfortunately universal. While I have always worried about the way these two girls-now-women’s stories have been turned into spectacle by the media, I do think that hearing their stories in their own words is critical for rape survivors and people invested in ending child sexual abuse, rape, and torture of women and girls. There are lessons to be learned in how and why these men were allowed to continue abusing women and girls, despite some public unease, signs of potential involvement, and in Fritzl’s case previous conviction or suspicion of sexual assault. If we stopped talking about these cases as exceptions dominated by monsters and started asking how these men succeeded and how our investment in women and children’s inequality helps pave the way for heinous acts of violence we might make huge leaps forward in moving beyond the non-profit industrial complex, which, mind you, helps save women’s lives, to a world safe for young girls to walk to school or live in homes without every needing to fear their own fathers or male relatives. And while many of us are lucky to have lived in such homes and maybe even walked to school without knowing about predators, the fact is many of us were not and are not.

If an English-language version of the book comes out, I will update this post and/or announce it. (If you want to know more about Kampusch, there is an extensive link list at the bottom of the wikipedia page on her, though of course I would tell you to read those links and their sources directly, not just rely on the wikipedia page itself.)

Related Articles

• Austrian kidnap victim draws crowds to book reading (omg.yahoo.com)
• Kidnap victim describes ordeal as starved, sexually-abused ‘slave’ (today.msnbc.msn.com)
• Kidnap Woman Details 8 Years of Slavery, Abuse (abcnews.go.com)
• Austria kidnap victim: ‘I wanted to start a new life’ (today.msnbc.msn.com)

If You Win at this Bingo, You Get a Cookie

Because I am sick and tired of Scott Pilgrim fans coming on the blog to literally call me a “hater” for pointing out that all of the API people in the film are stereotypes and the jokes related to them are almost all based on racial stereotypes or ethnic puns and justify or excuse away racism with such classics as “racism is everywhere so what” and “you’re the real racist”, I thought we could all play a game today instead of the usual post. Pick any post on this blog about racism in the media, especially the Scott Pilgrim post, and look for all the comments that reflect basic racist tropes used by racism apologists to get out of addressing racism. The first person to fill their score card gets a cookie.

amptoons.com

I particularly like the Bingo card above because it is derived from comments justifying racism in science fiction and fantasy and I would describe most of the films I review on this blog as fitting into one of those categories. However, you may be more familiar with the version below:

Now seriously, I asked a series of questions after deleting comments that violated the comment policy in that thread that I think everyone who has to deal with anyone who has ever felt the urge to justify racism in the media could modify to fit their particular issues. The questions have to do with the motivations and benefits of supporting or excusing away racism in fandom. I’ve posted them below as well.

1. what is so disturbing about a 2 page movie review that mentions racism in 1-2 paragraphs that you feel the need to reduce it to a post about racism?
2. What do you gain by calling a person of color angry, bitter, or a hater when she brings up racism?
3. What system of beliefs do you hold that makes you think that as white people you are better qualified to determine what is and what is not racist than the people of color who experience it?
4. What investment have you made in Scott Pilgrim (the book or the film) and/or your view of yourself related to this narrative that it is so important to shut down any discussion of race or racism related to it? 5. Finally, why is it so important for Scott Pilgrim to be absolved of racism and for anyone who says otherwise to be vilified

Obviously, this post is a sign that I am sick and tired of reading the same comment written a new way by a new person as if this time they will convince me that smug comments about interracial dating broken up by a villain breaking into a Bollywood dance are not racist because the white person writing the comment says so.  One reader even tried to help by posting a link to a film review that talks about the depiction of APIs in the film in far more depth than my paragraph and a half, but no one bothered to address that either. So yeah, I am taking off my professor hat and being childish as a result; and I don’t doubt someone will use this as proof all those racism deniers were right all along. “Why are you so angry?”

Nevertheless, if you want your cookie, you just let me know.

On this Historic Day

newly revised edition

“to struggle together … to stand up for freedom together”

African Americans do not own Martin Luther King Jr., on this Glenn Beck and I agree. No one but slaveholders own people. But truthfully, aside from a few overly snide liberal pundits, I do not think anyone thinks Beck meant that literally. Instead he was referring to the legacy of King. A legacy of civil rights, social justice, and, nearing the end of his time on this earth, an increasing commitment to global equality and ending violence (including state sanctioned wars without end). In fact, it was his stance on these key issues and his ability to sway people from ALL races, religions, genders, and even sexualities (a feat, since he never spoke out for gay rights), to join in his cause that got him assassinated by white supremacist fearing a message of equality.

Martin Luther King Jr. changed the face of N. America. Along with the help of dedicated women, children, and men from across racial divides, Dr. King put an end to legal discrimination against black people in transportation, employment, education, etc. Yet, in the last few years, radio hosts like Glenn Beck have done their best to foster s well as harness long standing social discrimination and turn it back into law. Thus he argues against access to education, employment, or health care for hardworking indentured undocumented workers, more policing in black and poor neighborhoods because of the fear of black criminality, against marriage equality and even going so far as to criticize fluffy films about upper middle class cis white single working mothers; these are the very people Dr. King stood with and up for.  Worse, Beck and his ilk have tried to make this discrimination and fear the very definition of being N. American. Anyway who supports civil or human rights for the marginalized is transformed into anti-American, non-American, or members of that mythic “Other” America.

So no, African Americans do not own Martin Luther King Jr. but Glenn Beck and his followers will NEVER own another black man again no matter how much they wish they did.

Truthfully, I had not meant to talk about Beck today. You’ll note I seldom mention anyone on Fox News on the blog. I’m old enough to remember when news was somewhat apolitical (somewhat, because the crime reports were always “a black man did …” or “a man did” and often highlighted stories that reinforced similar long held believes about poor people and people of color even as they kept the editorializing about them to a minimum). And before conservatives line up to call me a hypocrite for using footage from MSNBC, one needs only look through this blog or my twitter feed to see that I am just as likely to call them out for race and gender issues as anyone else. More so than Fox news because I expect better of them, and often get it. In my mind the answer to most of Glenn Beck’s antics is: It’s Glenn Beck. Nothing deeper seems warranted when you think about it.

Yet here I am, writing.

There is something so inexplicably demented about a man who spends every day on his radio show inciting or expanding, or simply making space for existing, racism in this country daring to say that he is keeping a dream of equality alive by recreating a history that is only mirrored in the fall of the Weimar Republic and reconstruction in the U.S., particularly in 1865. Like a DW Griffith film, Beck and his ilk have hammered home the idea that there is only one people who can govern and represent a civilized nation and only one solution for everyone else. As a historian, I watched the information coming from Beck surrounding this rally with the knowledge of the history with which Beck has actually aligned. Looking at image after image of his 78-87,000 supporters, there can be no doubt where we are headed or that is decidedly away from any dream Martin Luther King Jr had for this nation.

Glenn Beck wants to make you think it is about a date:

Again, we’re arguing about the date.

He wants you to believe that such a historic date slipped his mind:

I had no idea August 28th was the day of the MLK speech when we booked it. I knew that MLK spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. I knew that it was about the content of character. I knew it was about civil rights and injustice. It knew all of those things, but I’m sorry, media, that I forgot the, oh, so important detail of the date.

And truthfully, Like Jon Stewart, I do find it possible a man who does not think MLK Day should be a national holiday would not know the exact date of the historic I had a Dream Speech. But given the way Glenn Beck has attempted to harness the image of King, Rosa Parks, and even Booker T Washington to advertise for the event, how could anyone believe that he did not know what he was doing? And according to HuffPo, when Beck started advertising this event a year ago, he made several comments on his radio show about the historic date. By calling up actual civil rights leaders he does what others have done with the n-word, ie incensed the opposition to his crusade so thoroughly as to make their arguments sound incomprehensible, condescending, or stuck on a single issue, a word or a date, rather than the much larger issues at stake. And like those people who play victim when caught using the n-word, or yelling “re-load” to those who do, Beck is using this supposed tunnel vision to claim victimhood:

At best, they’re operating in the same old political boxes they usually operate out of: Glenn Beck, bad; Sarah Palin, bad; must destroy.

While I don’t doubt there are a few people who have called for Glenn Beck’s actual destruction, they need mental health services, nor do they have access to a 24 hour network or nationally syndicated radio show. They have not been cited as a reason for actual physical violence involving the shooting of others, as at least two mass shooters and one targeted murderer in the last 2 years have cited Beck and his contemporaries at Fox news for their actions. Nor have they helped create and sustain a movement that includes people who have made threats against the president, against immigrants, queer people, and oh yes, black folks. Nor have any of the people Beck is actually blaming for saying he must be destroyed, actually been guilty of saying so. That is where liberal media and conservative media often definitively part ways. While the Olbermann’s on the left due wax indignant often, and often righteously, very few members of left media would use their radio or tv shows as a place to deify themselves in the name of hatred and violent gun imagery knowing that their supporters are armed and ready “to reload”.

And who exactly is it Beck has invited to stand with him on this historic day in which he claims he is taking the reigns of freedom back from actual civil rights leaders?

• A woman who responded to the use of the n-word & an angry tirade against interracial dating by saying the speaker should reload & that America was “unfair”
• A singer whose lyrics for the event include “you preach your tolerance but lecture me” … “we’re taking names; waiting for the judgment day”
• A country musician who has sponsored events under the title “taking our country back” that has not included more than a handful of people of color if any
• Members of the 9.12 Project whose racist, xenophobic, and homophobic signs have been archived at the top of my blog (and whose comments on that page further underscore them)
• A woman willing to bastardize her own family’s legacy to make a single issue point about denying reproductive rights ( a woman whose participation will no doubt be used to legitimate the date of the rally and the erroneous belief the audience and the event were integrated or diverse)

And let us not forget, that Beck’s rally is not only hiding behind the skirts of Alveda King but also the troops. You see, when all of his denials fall away, Beck resorted to calling the people criticizing him anti-American because they were “anti-Troops” and pointing to the fact that his rally supports an organization that helps widows and families of disabled veterans. Never mind that he could have given money to this group without such a rally or that no money will go to them until the expensive venue, advertising, and speaker’s fees have been paid. And let us be clear the Republicans Beck often supports on his show and at least one of his speakers ran with last election, have voted repeatedly against VA benefits, medical care, pensions, and even protective gear for troops all the while claiming to be the party that supports them. Does Glenn Beck rally around that on his show? no.

According to eye witnesses the event also included:

• a union worker passing out fliers with a picture of Dr. King that criticized the use of Asian laborers in the capital instead of “hardworking [white] Americans” – apparently he did not know Beck has continuously rallied against unions
• people who came out to prove “the backbone of this country is the family. Messing with the definition of the family is dangerous” – apparently they did not know that heterosexual families include incest, domestic violence, child abuse, and codes of silence that are often generationally transferred as much as they include happy and healthy people
• people who want to ensure there is no Mosque at ground zero but claim they aren’t anti-Muslim they are just “pro-American” – because apparently no one has told them that there are already Mosques in the area and Muslim Americans exist and have for a considerable amount of time in this country, some even died helping survivors in 9/11
• and people with genuine criticism for the state of the economy, the lack of community in this nation (tho they don’t note the irony in how this rally is furthering divides rather than healing them), and the cost of education (again failing to recognize that the Republicans tried to block a critical education bill that saved teachers jobs and ensured schools had funding)
• and people who sent emails or made comments out loud to reporters like these:

This is hardly a scene that mirrors any Martin Luther King Jr would have helmed nor one that reflects the basic principles of civil rights and social justice, something Beck has gone on record as saying he does not support anyway. (On Friday Beck told a radio show host that he did not support social justice.) Instead, 828 just like 912 highlights the growing racial divides and racial tensions in this country between white people and people of color, between white citizens + occasionally citizens of color and non-white immigrants, between white heterosexists + occasionally poc heterosexists and white + non-white queers and allies, between white arch-conservative women + woc pro-lifers and feminists, between arch-conservative protestants and every other religion represented in this country as well as those of us who are Catholic or Protestant who follow G-d’s highest commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. While the boundaries of these groups shift to make provisional room for those who can increase their numbers or be put in photo ops to claim diversity, and while people from either side of the binaries can find themselves on the other side because of a single issue that matters more to them than others, the reality is that unlike the diverse multicultural coalition of King, Beck offers us a vision of N. America that is decidedly hierarchical, homogeneous, and willing to police its boundaries with violence. The only thing Beck and his supporters have learned from their last march was to leave the signs at home so it would be easier to play victim when people called them racist, or homophobic, or violent. But he did not tell them, could not tell them, to leave their hatred at home, so it showed up in the things both he and they said to each other and reporters. As Beck said himself:

Make no mistake, the flame of freedom is dwindling. The shining city on the hill, the sun is setting. If you don’t want it to go out on our watch, then you must stand in the blaze. The fire of truth that does not burn those who stand in it, but consumes everything that is not. Point others to the truth.

. . .

If you think things are tough now, you ain’t seeing nothing yet.

“if an American, because his skin is dark cannot … enjoy the full and free life that all of us want, than who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed to stand in his place”

please note the quotes for this piece were taken from Glenn Beck’s broadcast yesterday and not the transcript of his speech today which was unavailable at time of writing

Related Articles

• Stewart RIPS Glenn Beck’s Civil Rights Rally: ‘I Have A Scheme’ (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

God Willing … A Spike Lee Joint

This week marks both the 5th year anniversary of Katrina and Spike Lee’s return to New Orleans and the people whose stories he helped bring to light in the aftermath of the Republican made disaster.

shadowandact.com

I have watched the 4 hour documentary twice now and am still processing the radical difference in tone Lee’s documentary takes from all the much more celebratory documentaries/news specials produced by mainstream media. (I am also still processing some of the personal stories and the flashbacks Lee’s documentary induced, so we are going to focus on other things in this post.) While some have dismissed Lee’s work as polemic, the results of recent studies on New Orleans cannot be ignored. According to one such research project, white people have returned to New Orleans in greater numbers than black people, mixed race and white neighborhoods have been largely rebuilt or sustained less damage so they were easier to bring back, and white transplants to the area are enjoying a middle class lifestyle that has actually made costs of housing, food, and other essentials inflate beyond the means of original residents. Black residents or former residents in the study have less housing options, less economic security, higher rates of suicide, drug addiction, violence, homelessness, and incarceration. Many cannot and have not returned due to widescale gentrification and intentional rezoning and rebuilding policies that have neglected rebuild in the 9th ward, closed down public housing, and failed to re-open schools in traditionally black, poor, areas of NOLA. There’s is not a story of recovery, it is one of intentional abandonment and current displacement. Add to that the BP spill, which Lee’s film shows is hitting working class and subsistence level creole and immigrant fishermen the hardest and the story of recovery begins to look a lot like a gigantic lie.

In fact, as I watching Spike Lee’s film, I found myself thinking about the tsunami. I was teaching an activism course at the time as well as participating in several Ford funded faculty reading groups. I remember that the campus lit up with concern for tsunami victims and that my class organized a donation drive as part of their final project. All of our book groups were redirected toward discussions of how to help and organizations to support. And all of this was done in the spirit of altruism and deep concern for fellow human beings, not some paternalistic charity model. But when the giving was done, the posters, updates, and discussions came to an end. When the world stopped looking, the government swooped in and used a little known or used statuette to reclaim beach front property and build high end resorts, restaurants, and other tourist oriented businesses to capitalize on the new found interest in the region. Like former first Lady Bush’s comment that the hurricane would help Nola finally get rid of its problems and her son’s belief that this was an ideal opportunity for big businness, the post-tsunami government felt the same way, displacing thousands of working class and subsistence survivors permanently in the name of “progress” “recovery” and “rebuild”. And also like Nola, the story is not solely about victims and re-victimization, many people received some aid or even enough to start to rebuild their lives, but the story only Lee seems willing to tell is about how many did not.

hbo.com

As someone who has kept a close eye on Katrina and its aftermath, someone who like many black Americans took to heart how easily the national and state government could turn on black people with guns, militarization, and life-ending indifference, nothing in Spike Lee’s film is new. There have been multiple rallies over the loss of low income and public housing in New Orleans reported here on the blog. The mental health crisis hit home for me as someone with family members who served both displaced Nola residents and then people still in the city during and after the initial crisis and I wrote about the clinics that were trying to make up the slack for the closing of the only mental health crisis center in poor black neighborhoods as well as what that closure meant over 1.5 years ago here on the blog. And while Lee’s film only touches briefly on women’s issues in favor of focusing on the violence being experienced by young black men in the city, I also wrote about the particular impact Nola had had on women and children and the work that New Orleans’ based feminists were doing to create women’s centers, health clinics (which granted could not find a trans positive physician but were not guilty of “killing trans women” as some claimed on the internet), domestic and sexual violence support groups and safe spaces, and feminist libraries here on the blog. So having spent so much time writing about what is going on in New Orleans, Spike Lee’s film seems fairly mild to me given what he could have included. He did not indict the Red Cross, who as I wrote here, sat on housing funds for displaced people until the cycle for that funding almost ran out. Nor did he talk about the 100,000s of pounds of aid that was never distributed, looted, or shipped elsewhere by FEMA when doing his comparisons to Haiti in the film, whose people, as I wrote here and everyone else wrote about in the news, suffered and died waiting for dispersal of aid. He did not mention the number of women who have been raped, beaten, or abused by their partners, strangers, or the police during and after Katrina as part of a predictable trend in crisis and crisis aftermath around the world; but of course, in this case, I think that was because Spike seldom mentions women’s issues in his films. Nor did his discussion of medical needs in the community extend to the discussion of what happened to both the HIV population and trans people whose access to meds was limited during Katrina until queer and inclusive clinics stepped in and whose access now remains under-reported or addressed.

So why such animosity or ambivalence about Lee’s version of events vs the happy-go-lucky promos flooding my tv every night for 5 years later specials? Why is it that when interviewers bring up the issues that remain, intelligent reporters like Brian Williams respond by talking about all the good going on in New Orleans? Is it because we need a feel good story after so much devastation? Or is it because, once again, we as a culture want to minimize longstanding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and transmisogyny and how it played out in the aftermath of Katrina, not just the event itself? And more to the point, we want to be able to blame the victims who are still suffering so that we don’t have to ask why they are suffering, who benefits from their suffering, and why prosperity seems to be mapped on racial as well as class lines?

Ultimately, I think it is both impulses. I think we do want to see a New Orleans that has returned to the magic and splendor of its hey day. We want to honor survivors of Katrina who say they want to talk about growth and recovery not pain and abandonment, they want their city to be remembered for the good times not the lows. But we are also invested in a narrative in which black people are always guilty and poor people have invited their own suffering and where the people and systems that abuse them go unnoticed or with a simple slap on the wrist. More so than ever, this nation has divided in ways that highlight racial hatred and victim blaming and shifted the language of oppression to crown the oppressors as the most oppressed. Spike Lee’s film refuses that narrative with a force that makes it hard to ignore and so we are left with the only dismal most people can imagine “polemic” because after all, it is Spike Lee. But I would encourage you to watch this film carefully. Pay attention to the cited studies and actions and then look them up yourself (using more than wikipedia and blog posts). I think you’ll find that Spike Lee’s “If God is Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise” is quite tame compared to what is really going on in New Orleans.

The film next airs on HBO this Friday and Sunday and will play throughout the month

—–

Some specific issues I will raise in a follow up post

1. the smugness of Brownie, which seemed to mirror BP
2. Lee’s discussion of BP which will forever stand for “Bitch Please” from here on out
3. LSU’s implication in the closing of the major hospital serving poor and working class people of color and mental health patients in the name of profit
4. why Brad Pitt seems to be the mainstream media’s take away moment from this film  … grrr …
5. how this event sent the message that black lives don’t matter & what Lee’s film tells us about the people left to survive after such an intimate lesson

Related Articles

• Spike Lee: New Orleans not progressing ‘fast enough’ (thegrio.com)
• “Spike Lee Continues New Orleans Story” (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• If God is Willing and The Creek Don’t Rise Official Synopsis (HBO.com)

If God is Willing … Katrina Doc

If you missed the first half of Spike Lee’s follow up documentary to the Katrina-Bush disaster in the Gulf, you should not miss tonight’s conclusion. While the first part revisited families and their traumas and rebuild, the second half is meant to address the BP spill and its impact on already struggling communities. I promised to review the film today on twitter, but that was before I found out it had more than 1 part airing on more than 1 night. So for now, take a minute to look at the preview for the film:

As you can see the documentary covers many of the topics decolonized and racial justice feminists have been blogging about since Katrina happened. Organizing continues and the need is still there.

The second half airs tonight at 6pm PST and 9 pm EST

WordPress Wednesday Aug 18: The Fail Continues

Think about this as you read these stats, blogging is not only the new way of publishing it is increasingly the way to access the old way of publishing as well, it is also second only to twitter as a go to source for media pundits looking for “the pulse of the nation” or the “important story”, and it is one of two media sites that form the basis for much electronic research. When we are not included in the places that legitimate and draw attention to the voices on the internet we are in essence once again being erased and shoved out. Since blogging is a medium that so many diverse people have made their home, and wordpress among the top places to do it, doesn’t it warrant at least a question about why they choose such a narrow focus in representing both their brand and all of us?

brittanica.com

Here are this week’s stats:

Images

• men of color: 18
• women of color: 6
• TOTAL PICS OF PEOPLE OF COLOR: 24
• white men: 40
• white women: 32
• TOTAL PICS OF WHITE PEOPLE: 72

The number of white people pictured on chosen posts outnumbered people of color by almost 3xs as much this week. All of these images were of able-bodied cis gender people. Images of white women were 5xs more likely than images of women of color and even more were likely to be seen on the Freshly Pressed page pointing you there because images of women of color appeared in posts with images of white people and the latter were almost always chosen for the Freshly Pressed page image. White men outnumbered men of color two to one and would also have been overrepresented on the Freshly Pressed page for the reasons listed above.

Authors

• men of color: 3
• women of color: 2
• TOTAL AUTHORS OF COLOR: 5
• white men: 12
• white women: 30
• TOTAL WHITE AUTHORS: 42

The number of people of color featured remained constant from last week representing an average of 1.7% of the total available bloggers for highlighting. The number of people of color blogging on wordpress is unavailable but they certainly make up more than 2% of the 280,000 bloggers from which to choose. There were also three authors of unknown race, only one of whom was a woman and one author who identified as asexual gender neutral, who was white.

Gender & Sexuality

• pictures of cis women: 37
• pictures of cis men: 55
• pictures of trans women: 1
• pictures of trans men: 3
• female authors: 33
• male authors: 17
• gender unknown: 1
• gender neutral: 1
• articles about feminism: 3
• articles about queer rights: 1
• articles about, related to, or otherwise assuming overt heterosexuality: 17

Interestingly, this week marked the first time since the study began where a photo of a white women used in the post was replaced by a photo of a white man not used in the post to highlight the post on the Freshly Pressed page. In other words, the blogger used an image of a woman and the wordpress staff replaced it on their page with a picture of a man.

On the plus side, this week marks the first time a post about transgender, gender queer, and transmisogyny has been highlighted during the study and in all the time I can remember glancing at the Freshly Pressed page. On the negative side, that post included 4 photos of transgender or gender queer people engaged in a photographic awareness campaign, none of whom where people of color. In looking at the source material I discovered that of the 20 photos in the exhibit the author had to choose from, there was only one person of color photographed. The failing then is both with the author of the blog post who failed to mention racially disparity or choose the only pic available of a person of color to include with the group of other images chosen and the project itself. I also noted that while this post was highlighted, there were several posts, including on this blog, about a similar project specifically highlighting the dual erasure of black trans people from mainstream society and trans communities, as well as highlighting their diversity across the African Diaspora, none of which were ever featured on Freshly Pressed.

There were an unusually high number of feminist posts this week as well given their general absence on the Freshly Pressed page. One of these posts highlighted global feminism but was actually a blog for an organization that features innovative speakers and puts the videos up on its website. The post was literally the name of an international speaker and the theme of her talk accompanied by the video. There was no analysis, no prose, nothing. Given the number of posts written by marginalized people on wordpress about global feminism this seemed like an odd choice to represent the best wordpress has to offer. Another post on feminism praised a movie that was essentially a colonial fantasy in which a white woman finds herself through a vacation in India, Brazil, and other exotic erotic places, complete with hooting at brown men, spending money to “save” poor kids, etc. The point of the post: anyone who disliked this movie was a sexist hater. The final feminist post critiqued the same film and originally questioned the classism and racism involved but was followed up by a non-featured post apologizing and claiming it was really a critique of narcissism.

While we are documenting the number of posts that reference heterosexuality outright, please do not take this to mean other posts are sexuality neutral. With few exception all of the posts highlighted on wordpress are written by or read as heterosexual posts due to their lack of queer content.

As white women continue to gain in the featured section, I wonder if this is why we cannot get any traction on this issue. Like the woman who sees critiquing colonialism as a sexist endeavor, is the fact that white women often dominate the freshly pressed section preventing them from engaging in a feminism or social justice mindset that includes the rest of us? And if so, why is this an all too familiar position for a group that would largely define themselves as socially engaged and inclusive? It should be noted that many of the people making decisions about features on wordpress are also white women who considered themselves social justice folks.

WordPress Criteria

• grammatical errors: 11
• copyright: 41

This category counts the items wordpress says will preclude you from being featured. Interestingly, this week wordpress published another post referencing the importance of copyright on images used on blogs at the same time that the number of copyright infringement based on freshly pressed images was at its highest.

This week also saw the largest number of blogs featured that had been featured before and/or were not actually blogs (company “blog” pages that simply pointed people back to the company and magazines that are hosted on wordpress.org) instead of looking at diverse authors who had not been highlighted prior. The number of professional journalists and photographers is also much higher in general on the freshly pressed page than people who blog as bloggers. Given the gender, race, sexuality, etc. disparities in print media, you can see how this would translate to similar disparities on the freshly pressed page.

WordPress Wednesday Aug. 4

brittanica.com

As promised, this marks week two of the raw data on the identities and subjects of bloggers highlighted by wordpress as the best bloggers on wordpress have to offer. While this week avoided outright racist posts about people of color the trend toward highlighting mostly white male authors and white heterosexual authors on Freshly Pressed continues. Among the things we found most interesting this week was that in order to give the appearance of diversity, wordpress staff used captured images from videos on several posts whose photographic images were all of white people; the videos were done by black artists. In another case, they used a captured image from a black artist’s video on a post that had several images relating to its actual subject matter, including a photo of children of color. In both cases, the captured images did not reflect the focus of the posts in question. In all cases, including one where the post was actually about a black artist and wordpress staff decided to use a more stereotypical looking captured image than the much clearer photos available in the post, the posts were written by white people so that the visual diversity they created on the Freshly Pressed page was dually misleading.

Also interesting was that in at least one case, a video capture of a black artist was used on the Freshly Pressed page for a post that focused primarily on Asians. At the same time the overwhelming majority of authors of color highlighted were either Asians (as in, APIs in Asia) or API Americans. Like last week, there were several days in which no authors of color were highlighted including today.

Another interesting trend that seems to be emerging is the fact that many authors addressing issues of language or race highlighted on the page are writing from outside of the U.S. The majority of these authors have been Australian but not all. Further their discussions of race are largely about imperialistic interplays rather than racial contentions and almost all are written from a white perspective. In some cases, this perspective has coincided with the desire to deconstruct colonial gazes while in others it has embraced them.

On the positive side, while women were seldom pictured this week, at least two images included “plus size” women. Both of these women were white.

Some Data Issues

The data on images in general is misleading this week because wordpress highlighted a post on India that was a photo essay so that people of color appear over represented in the sample this week when in fact they were only pictured in a few posts this week. Again, the author of that post was white and equally interesting, he had chosen a header image of a boy of color walking for his blog design.

The focus on animal and plant blogging also decreased the overall number of human images further inflating the number of people of color depicted this week beyond the actual reflection of representations chosen.

Also as implied by the beginning of this post, in order to cross-check this information you need to look at the posts since simply scanning the Freshly Pressed page can give the wrong impression about who and what is highlighted. Interestingly, wordpress is aware that I do these stats on Wednesday’s and today’s Freshly Pressed page is particularly misleading with regards to supposed diversity of highlighted posts.

News of the Odd

One of the outlined criteria for Freshly Pressed is that the posts be interesting, entertaining, or otherwise inform. While we ruled out counting posts we found “boring” because that was entirely too subjective, we did find it interesting that wordpress chose to highlight a flickr page and several magazines that are presumably hosted by wordpress rather than actual bloggers on the site. They also highlighted a blog post that seemed to imply it had been plagiarized, and one that, while fascinating, claimed that upper middle class students are more oppressed than anyone else. They also continued to highlight posts that had copyright infringements despite their express policy against doing so, and in one case the post amounted to one giant uncited photo and a paragraph of text.

The Raw Data

Here are the numbers for the week in their raw form. We are collecting more information than I have highlighted here but I want to focus on the identity issues that started this project.

There were roughly 278,000 bloggers and between 285,000 and 346,000 blog posts per day from which they chose 11 to highlight each day. This weekend no new posts were highlighted. We only counted actual photos of people not videos of people even when wordpress staff chose to ignore images in favor of video screen captures for the Freshly Pressed page. The reason for this was that we noticed how the video images they chose did not reflect the post & videos are rarely highlighted on Freshly Pressed posts which makes them less important to us as an overarching indicator.

Identity

• pictures of men of color: 11
• pictures of women of color: 3
• TOTAL IMAGES OF PEOPLE OF COLOR: 14
• pictures of white men: 19
• pictures of white women: 12
• pictures of white people where gender was unknown (feet, hands, arms, etc.):5
• TOTAL IMAGES OF WHITE PEOPLE: 36
• Images of white people in the header: 9
• Images with people of color in the header: 1
• men of color authors: 2
• women of color authors: 5
• person of color author where gender was not given: 1
• TOTAL AUTHORS OF COLOR: 8
• white male authors: 26
• white female authors: 20
• white author where gender was not given: 3
• TOTAL WHITE AUTHORS: 49
• authors who mention spouse or parenting: 14
• authors who mention queer identity: 0
• white identified or eurocentric posts: 3

You will note in this section that white people vastly outnumber people of color in both the images used for highlighted blogs and the people authoring them even with the issues of over-representation of images of poc this week.  You will also note that both with regards to authors and images, men outnumbered women overall while female authors of color outnumbered male authors of color. As implied there were no images or authors that identified as transgender and no mention of queer identity or couples. Images of older people in this week’s Freshly Pressed were also down, and those depicted were all men of color down on their luck in a photo essay in which everyone else appeared to be working class or higher reinforcing a eurocentric view of poc.

WordPress Criteria Stats

These stats include the things that wordpress has expressly said they would not highlight, like posts with grammatical errors or un-cited images or other copyright infringement.

• Grammatical Errors: 7
• Copyright Infringement: 17 (not counting youtube videos)

While this represents a small fraction of the highlighted posts, it stands to reason that in the 300,000+ posts each day that wordpress staff had to choose from, they could have found posts written by people of color and/or queer people that neither violated copyright or had grammatical errors to replace this posts.

Conclusions

Despite what one wordpress staff person said about the Freshly Pressed page striving to reflect the diversity of the bloggers who use their format, the reality seems indisputable. In the last two weeks alone the majority of blog posts highlighted have been written by and illustrated using images of white, heterosexual, cis people primarily from the middle or upper class. They have also assumed a white audience in many cases and in some recreated both sexist and eurocentric narratives.

If you are concerned about the lack of representation not only on the Freshly Pressed page but the way wordpress is ultimately crafting its image through that page, please link to this post using some of the data in your post and considering asking wordpress to be more inclusive.

Brotha Can You Spare Some Change …

UPDATE: A little before 5 pm EST, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Sherrod and offered her an alternative job. While Vilsack says he will be disturbed by his actions for some time, I’m sure it pales in comparison to how Sherrod feels now and will likely continue to feel if she in fact returns to work at the USDA in the new position, because she still can’t have her old one back. THE WHITEHOUSE ALSO APOLOGIZED, late this afternoon after the writing of this post, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs apologized to Sherrod on “behalf of the entire White House” and seemingly admitted that the firing was made based on calls to the WH immediately following the airing of the heavily doctored video by Fox News.

Shirley Sherrod holds her Family Farm Champion Award from farmers in GA

On Monday, Shirley Sherrod lost her job. An outspoken advocate for the rural poor farmers, Shirley Sherrod is credited for having saved many rural people’s farms. As seen above, she has won awards for her hard work on behalf of farmers.

Sherrod is also a woman who is secure enough in her beliefs about economic, racial, and social equality that she readily talks about her own racial awakening in mixed company. Her story has been a cornerstone of speeches about equality, service, and struggle that she has given around the country. In March of this year, she told it to the NAACP at a filmed dinner. It begins with her talking about how a struggling white farmer, worried about losing everything, still hung on to his racial superiority when faced with having to ask a black woman for help. Sherrod admits that in the face of his racial acting out, she considered using her position as GA’s head of the USDA Rural Development Office to deny him assistance for which he qualified. But unlike the myriad of documented cases of white USDA workers doing exactly that to black farmers throughout its history, Sherrod chose to see the humanity of the farmer and to do her job. The result was that the family kept their farm and both they and Sherrod learned a valuable lesson about looking past race and racial history toward the struggle for equality and survival that we are all engaged in.

Not only does the promise of shared struggle and commitment inspire but Sherrod’s story is the kind that plays well to both racist and non-racist audiences. For racists and racism deniers, Sherrod’s example is proof that “really we are all racist.” In this version, racism is not a systemic inequality running through the heart of our country (the United States) that ultimately infects all communities precisely because of the way the master’s tools are both utilized by oppressors and internalized by many of the oppressed but rather individual acts in a vaccuum in which 9 times out of ten black people are the problem because they won’t “let it go.” Since Sherrod did in fact “let it go” it further proves reifies in the racist mind that when “black people stop being racist, racism will stop existing.” It’s a cognitive nightmare version of what she said but never the less would make her story resonate in positive ways with people prone to racialized thinking who do not think themselves racist.

In a less cynical light, Sherrod’s story represents a stark reminder that when white people resort to racial tension in the face of their own anxieties about marginalization (in this case potentially losing their farm because of very real classism embedded in how we treat small farmers and rural people) black people do not often respond in kind. For people who understand how racism works in this country, her experience provides a counterpoint to the feared Fanonian moment in which oppressor and oppressed simply trade places. More than that, it shows us that by looking at each others humanity rather than the things that divide us we can actually end racism and racial tension in this country.

Whether you view her story through a racist lens or an anti-racist one, Sherrod ultimately reminds us of several things:

1. by engaging one another as equals, embracing our shared humanity, and investing in our shared success we can end racism and discrimination
2. that the investment in white supremacy in this nation is so ingrained that even when white people are the targets of classism, regionalism, or even homophobia, many will still fall back on whiteness to feel better rather than address the real oppressors
3. unlike the stereotype and growing fear of “reverse discrimination” most black people confronted with white racism will still do their jobs correctly and fairly
4. riding out fear and anger, regardless of your position (poor farmer/USDA rep), can ultimately lead to racial reconciliation on all sides and away from more oppression

So how does such a positive message get twisted to the point that Sherrod is monitoring her own hurt-propelled anger on national news as she talks about being called repeatedly on the road and then finally, cruelly, dismissed from her job mid-route? As she put it on MSNBC last night, “Shirley, they want you to pull over … They want you to resign.”

Shal Farley/ 2009

Andrew Breitbart, a commentator for The Washington Times, former editor of the Drudge Report, former researcher for HuffPo, and current blogger/journalist for his own website breitbart.com, aired a heavily edited version of Sherrod’s speech on Monday on his blog biggovernment.com under the title “Proof the NAACP Awards Racism.” The video of her speech jumped from her childhood commitment to serve rural black people in GA, a group traditionally exploited, harassed, and even physically threatened to this day, to her story of the white farmer whose racialization of their encounter changed her world. The edit of the video removed Sherrod’s discussion of how she actually did not discriminate against the farmers in the story or how her interaction with them ensured that she would not discriminate against anyone else. It also intentionally left out her philosophy about the humanity and equality of all people and how it is the government’s job to represent and help all people. Finally, it erased the real discrimination that went on in this story between rich young white male lawyers and a poor, white, elderly rural, family and how the former’s discrimination shed all to necessary light on why we need to stick together across racial lines if we are ever going to have real equality in this nation. In other words, Breitbart took a speech about equality and humanity and transformed it into “reverse discrimination.”

Fox news, then allowed the story to be posted on their website without doing any fact checking and reported on it on their network. Fox employees, like Rush Limbaugh also lambasted Sherrod and the White House without fact checking. The soundbite was simply “proof ‘reverse racism’ is the norm under Obama.” Neo-Conservative Pundits, talk show hosts, and tea party spokespeople finally had their whipping boy girl.

Instead of countering with reasoned and documented information, or even following basic legal procedures governing the hiring and firing of Federal employees, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack demanded Sherrod’s resignation. His racial indignation was so great that he harassed her with 3 separate phone calls while she was driving home from work, finally having his office request that she pull over to the side of the road so he could fire her then and there. Apparently, when a black woman says in public that a lifetime of racism against her momentarily colored the way she viewed white people, she does not have the institutional protection of facts or laws nor the humanity in the eyes of her employer to at least warrant allowing her to reach her destination before losing her job. Instead, the side of the road will do.

If you are a person of color in N. America, you have either lost a promotion, job, grant, publication, etc. or know someone who has on the basis of rumor and innuendo about your “anger” or “ability to play ball.” In academe we use the word “fit” and “fit” is used to deny outspoken people of color tenure, advancement, or even hire. The fear beneath the “fit” is often about the fact that these people of color make white colleagues uncomfortable because they talk “too much” about the realities of race, racism, and the meaning of equality. Often, if the school is as entrenched as mine, the discussion will sooner or later turn to “reverse discrimination”, ie the fear that white people will feel by black people in positions of power. In the case of academe that translates to white paranoia about exclusionary pedagogy and curriculum that amounts to little more than professors of color calling on everyone in the room equally and producing a syllabus that does not tokenize authors of color. Bad evals, much like doctored videotapes of speeches, are used devoid of context to “prove” that “reverse discrimination”, often called “bad teaching” or “lack of collegiality”, has occurred. It is a story so old, I am sure the first black people freed from slavery can tell it as easily as those of us living today. (image above: Kimberly White/Reuters)

So what makes Sherrod’s case so important?

In the wake of the NAACP posting Sherrod’s entire speech online and the white farmers in the story coming forward and saying how much help they received from Sherrod, the White House is refusing to reinstate her.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, continued to assassinate her character nationally late Tuesday night even though he now admits she was not guilty of supporting discrimination in her speech nor is there any evidence that she discriminated against anyone she worked with in her position. He went on record saying:

First, for the past 18 months, we have been working to turn the page on the sordid civil rights record at USDA and this controversy could make it more difficult to move forward on correcting injustices. … Our policy is clear. There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA and we strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person. We have a duty to ensure that when we provide services to the American people we do so in an equitable manner. But equally important is our duty to instill confidence in the American people that we are fair service providers. (Politico.com)

Like his Republican counterparts, Vilsack seemed to be implying that black people are somehow responsible for the “sordid civil rights record at the USDA.” Never mind that this would be impossible given that USDA’s history of discrimination in the region is about black farmers losing their land because of faulty loans, lack of loans or aid, bad seed shoved off on them, discriminatoryu siezure of their land or harrassment and/or intimidation, or their please for help falling on def ears at the offices meant to help them. In other words, Vislak is implicating Sherrod in the very history of white racial discrimination that spurred her into the position she had in the first place. She has worked for farmers for 3 decades to help ensure equality for all rural farmers in Georgia.

Worse, Vislack clearly believed that white fears of “reverse discrimination” trump the realities of black people’s lives. In this case, that reality includes the fact that this entire story stemmed from poor white farmers resorting to racial superiority against a black USDA employee, in order to mediate their own class fears, and that instead of shutting them down, she helped them save their farm. It also includes the fact that they bonded over the experience of fighting against the people who actually discriminating against the farmers and that these farmers stood up for Sherrod when people called for her head on a platter. These facts are apparently irrelevant in the face of white supremacist paranoia of which Vislak bought in.

The President has also refused to stand up and bring the Change we were promised. Though the President said nothing about the incident involving a Federal employee,  according to CNN the White House released a statement on Tuesday morning saying the President had been briefed on the Sherrod situation and supported the decision to accept her resignation. According to the same Politico post cited above, by Tuesday evening the White House was backing off from responsibility for the firing but still said nothing in Sherrod’s defense. This is the third time an African American public figure has experienced some form of discrimination or seeming discrimination in which the President has offered us minimization, beer summits, resignations, and/or silence. Like when he said “the policies to help unemployed people will help those men just like everyone else” in response to a black journalists questioning what he was going to do about the disproportionate number of black men targeted for unemployment and lack of rehire during the recession, it seems that the change the President has brought to this country with regards to the lives of targeted or struggling black people is race blind euphemisms in the mouth of a black man instead of a white one.

The idea that he needs to appear to be “everybody’s President” has quickly proven to be code word for being everybody’s President until dominant culture gets their undies in a wedge. Once that happens, then it’s every black man or woman for themselves. “Everybody’s President” means EVERYBODY.

The Democrats are not alone in crucifying Sherrod. Not only did Fox and Breitbart run with this story without doing even the most simplistic fact checking, but the conservative media has been milking it for all it is worth.

Brietbart went on Hannity and claimed the issue was not whether Sherrod was racist but that the NAACP is “racist.” In his mind, they attacked the Tea Party for being racist when they were not and he did not do anything worse than they did. Never mind that no one in the Tea Party was fired or even effected by the NAACP’s resolution to condemn racism in the Tea Party movement nor that many of their members have been caught saying racist things, circulating racist emails or messages on chat boards, or holding racist signs. (One might infer that Brietbart engineered the Sherrod incident to prove how easy video is manipulated these days with little regard for what would happened to the specific black woman he targeted; which I personally would call racist. Then again, I’m only inferring, maybe the unidentified and “unknown to him prior” white farmer he says called him and gave him the tapes really does exist and his only fault is failing to live up to the journalistic standards that he seemed to uphold in his jobs for multiple other journalism sites in the past …)

Rush Limbaugh, who retains his job after commissioning and playing “Barack the Magic Negro” on his show, calling the President racist, and feeding the racial tensions in this country through a series of racially tinged comments and tirades on his show, is also calling for Sherrod and the President’s head on a platter. On last night’s show, he argued that Sherrod was a symptom of a much larger issue ushered in by the election of President Obama: the era of “reverse discrimination” in which white people would now be denied health care benefits, farm aid, or anything else they had “earned through their hard work” because some black person was going to discriminate against them. Not only does he have no evidence for this supposition in general, the white farmers in question have said Sherrod helped them and the U.S. Government has said Sherrod’ record is clean of any accusations of discrimination.

Fox news also joined the picnic, pun intended, when Meg Kelly repeatedly stated Sherrod would be coming on to discuss the controversy throughout her show. Then at the last minute, announced that Sherrod was not coming, and then preceded to disparage the decision claiming that Fox had done the right thing trying to give her an opportunity to respond to accusations. Never mind that Fox news was the primary network responsible for spreading the rumors and employs most of the reporters engaged in Sherrod’s character assassination and the “reverse discrimination” fervor. (image left: http://www.cromwellburnsinhell.com)

Despite condemnation coming on both sides, the difference between Conservative Pundits and White House officials condemning Sherrod is huge. Conservatives see Sherrod as their poster child for finally proving that black people are the real racists in this country and that white people are “victims of a vast black conspiracy to destroy them.” Never mind the truth that according to the white farmers in question, and all records on the case, Sherrod’s helped them save their farm and Sherrod lost her job over doctored material proven to be complete lies. The White House on the other hand is supposed to be the shining example of what our nation is capable of, of its potential to overcome difference and strife and unite disparate people in the process of nation building, and under the leadership of President Barack Obama, it was supposed to be a new chapter in race relations. While I never expected President Obama to dawn a cape and save the universe, I leave that to Ms. Magazine and other misguided liberals who think one black man in a position of power means racism is over, I did expect him to take a reasoned and effective approach to the many issues impacting N. Americans, including those that take on racial, sexual, or gender dimensions. His inability to do this even amongst his own employees and especially in the context of racialized cries of “reverse discrimination” that make this country even less safe for black people and even less likely to employ and retain black people in middle class positions, cannot help but make me question “Brotha, can you spare some change?”

Please consider signing the Color of Change Petition to save Sherrod’s job and let the President know what you think of the decision to support blatant lies over an employee with a proven record of fairness. click here