Be a part of it, New York, New York!

The message I just posted to everyone I know who lives in the state of New York:

All my people in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, upstate, and Manhattan, too: New York's only chance to not be monumentally disappointing and fail to get gay marriage before 2010 is NOW. How embarrassing would that be, to be *behind* the tide of equality that's sweeping the nation?! Gov. Paterson's bill to institute gender-neutral marriage equality is in heavy lobbying in the State Senate, and it's going to be really, really close.

If you live in New York state, PLEASE, JUST GO HERE: http://www.nysenate.gov/, put in your zipcode, and find out your State Senator.

THEN GO HERE: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/whip-count-gay-marraige-faces-uphill.html, and see how they're expected to vote. If they're a supporter of the bill, shoot them an email and thank them! If they're undecided or against - especially if they're leaning, not firm - get on the phone or email and give them your most impassioned, most personal pitch as to why they should change their mind! Then tell your parents, friends, classmates, co-workers, cousins, anyone you know who lives in the state of New York - especially upstate and the outer boroughs! - and supports gay marriage to do the same.

I feel so homesick to be missing this fight, all the way out here in CA. As we learned the hard way out here (ahem, Prop 8), it would be SO MUCH easier and better to pass this democratically, with the state's popularly elected legislators, then to have it FAIL and have to rely on a series of court cases down the line! The No on 8 movement out here was disorganized, clueless, and un-courageous -- we failed to have those tough conversations with our neighbors and family members who are of a different class, or a different color, or a different religion, or a different political party from us, BEFORE the vote, when it would (not could, would) have made the difference. The right-wingers are orchestrating a well-organized push and dropping huge amounts of money on this late in the game, too, just like they did out here.

In the hot-and-heavy lobbying that's going on in NY right now, constituents' voices ARE the thing State Senators are listening to. What's changing State Senators' minds IS direct, concrete, anecdotal, personal appeals, like the ones described here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/nyregion/10gays.html.

Just take a second to double-check where your State Senator stands and email anyone you know who lives in a wavering State Senator's district.

I want this so bad you guys - I'm legally married in the state of New York, and I want to be able to feel proud, not sketched out and angry and ashamed, of that and of my state! Let's do this -- get on the email and the phone if you <3 NY!!


I wanna see THIS on the steps of City Hall!

police beat the shit out of 12 year old girl (they mistook her for a prostitute), charge her with assault

I would echo the comments I've read on the internet: I don't know why the national media isn't on this story. I found out about it from boing boing here. It has received some internet coverage over the past month, and you can read the facts for yourself at the Houston Press blog, and The Agitator.

In August, 2006, a 12-year-old girl in Galveston, TX, Dymond Milburn, was sent out into her front yard at 7:45 in the evening by her mother to flip a circuit breaker. Four plainclothes police officers jumped out of a blue van and grabbed her, saying "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me." She hid behind a bush, grabbed onto it, and started screaming for her Daddy.

The police were responding to a call about suspected prostitution 2 blocks from Dymond's house. They were looking for three white prostitutes who were supposedly soliciting a white man and a black man. Dymond is a black little girl, who was in her front yard 2 blocks away. They said they thought she was a prostitute because of the "tight shorts" she was wearing.

As Dymond held on to the tree, these four men beat and slapped her on the head, face, and throat with a flashlight -- she was hospitalized that night with two black eyes, head injuries, a ruptured eardrum, nosebleeds, and countless bruises, lacerations, and sprains all over her body. Her parents came outside and begged the police to stop, saying she was their daughter and she was 12; they said they didn't care if she was 22, 32, or 46. Her 5-month-old puppy ran outside and started barking at the officers; they threatened to shoot it.

Her father was arrested the next day and charged on very sketchy evidence with drug possession and assaulting an 'officer of the peace' -- when it doesn't sound like, from the court record, ever actually touched the cops. He pled guilty to the lesser charges in order to get the assault charges dropped.

And three weeks later, the police came to Dymond's school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant in front of all her classmates. She was tried for assault once and the case ended in a mistrial on the first day because of a remark made by an officer on the witness stand (the remark obviously isn't in the public record but I would love to know what it was). She was tried AGAIN, for assault, this week, and her trial ended today in a mistrial -- 5 jurors wanted to acquit her of the charges but ONE holdout would not relent - that person wanted to see her convicted of assault.

Her family has a high-profile ACLU lawyer - thank god - and has filed a federal suit, which you can read in full here. The details of the beating and the psychological trauma she continues to undergo from it are even more sickening than what I've just written out, so be warned.

Does something like this even need my commentary?

I could write something about how No -- even though we have this wonderful President who got elected even though he's black and everybody loves him, we do NOT live in some kind of 'post-racial society.' About how the number of people bandying around that phrase, coupled with the reality of what has (surprise!) kept happening since Obama's election, in Galveston and in Oakland, makes me want to puke. I watched the video of the point-blank execution-style murder of an unarmed man lying on his stomach on a BART platform (also be warned: it's really horrific), and now the cop who did that is out on bail when he already tried to flee the state once.

Do I even need to comment on the outrage of four cops seeing a 12 year old black girl and thinking "prostitute" -- because of her "tight shorts," that was their excuse -- when they were specifically looking for white prostitutes?

There's a lot that's really suspicious about the dad's subsequent drug charges, as well as the possibility, if you look at the entire court record, that these narcotics officers were actually trying to kidnap the girl to interrogate her about her father or just to get access to him by provoking him.

What this says about children, about little girls resisting when strangers try to grab them from their house, about race and the law and parents trying to keep children safe, depresses me beyond words.

The liberatarian magazine Reason ('Free minds and free markets') has done substantial coverage of this as a violation of constitutional rights, and to their great credit, even they are saying things like, 'I hate to say it, but I honestly believe if this family was white, this wouldn't have happened.' The commenters on Reason who have expressed (honest, Texan) sentiments 'wishing Mr. Milburn had had a clean shot' at the cops and attesting that if they were in his place, 'there would be a bunch of dead strangers decorating the front lawn' have even been called out and reminded -- NO, this family was black and there would have been no defense, no sympathy.

This story makes the most perverse contrast to the back-and-forth exchange about children and violence I was recently reading on this well-known mommy blog, in which parents end up agreeing that they want their kids to be taught smart, watchful self-defense tactics and encouraged to "use your fists, heels, knife, whatever you've got" if, god forbid, they were grabbed by a stranger. That that basic right to self-protection is a privilege only white parents can safely teach their kids makes me sick.

Four men jump out of a blue van, grab your 12 year old daughter, and tell her she's a prostitute and she's coming with them -- what would you want her to do? Law enforcement officers damn near killed this 12 year old girl as she held on to a tree, screaming for her father, then charged HER with assault and defended their assessment of her as a prostitute by her SHORTS -- and we wonder, when we hear about a girl or woman being raped, why she didn't "just report it"?!

Oh, and one of the cops who did this was named a Galveston Police Dept. "Officer of the Year" in June (from Reason - p.5, here).

the sexism thing and the racism thing

I've been getting really down about the sneaky, sneaky ways sexism gets naturalized when people talk about the Clinton campaign. American political discourse in the past several months has provided a stunning example of how differently racism and sexism operate, how deeply underground sexist sentiments can be buried and how often they can come to sound inevitable, even 'reasonable', when spoken.

(well shit, I'd been gearing up for a race-and-gender post, but as soon as I plan what to say the discourse shifts and it becomes dated. here goes!)

[E.T.A. The formidable Bitch, Ph.D. posted this intelligent post about her primary indecision the same day I wrote this. It addresses many of the same issues I've been pondering here: the sexist roots of objections to Hillary's nomination, women's historical paths to political office, and the criteria by which people decide on candidates and what relation those criteria might or might not have to identities... I don't talk about the substance of my actual political decisions so much in this post, as it's more about how I think racism and sexism have been at work in the campaign. See the comments, which put more pressure on how these are or aren't different issues...]

A few people are addressing what I'm talking about: Rebecca Traister, thinking aloud in this piece in Salon about Clinton v. Obama -- I find her indecision fascinating and kind of (heh) mind-boggling in what may be an annoying/cliched generational way-- phrases the conflict thus: that Clinton might actually have a harder time overcoming her '-ism,' sexism, to get elected, because the great many well-intentioned default-racist white voters can regard Obama as an 'exceptional' black man, 'not like the rest of them,' whereas for a great many men Clinton very much embodies all the uppity bitches coming to claim their entitled places in the male-dominated power structure.

Which kind of adds up to: yes, it might in fact be easier to get A black man elected President, one who embodied this kind of special-ness or exceptionalism (and could play into the concurrent imagery, also born out of American racism, of the saintly/heroic black male savior-figure - what gives us all those liberal-fantasy black male TV presidents: see 24, Deep Impact). In short, that they could see him as not the sign of a substantive sea-change in which a new class of people are going to come and claim their rights of representation and access to power, whereas they can't not see her that way.

This is also, as Traister points out, because of who this woman candidate is, i.e. NOT some tool-of-the-patriarchy Thatcherite but a real feminist, a real liberal, a real baby-boomer beneficiary of the women's movement, a real Second-Waver. Barack Obama's unusual family background, his rather one-of-a-kind position vis-a-vis race in America as a black man whose parents are a white American and a Kenyan, helps with this more than anything else. (I do NOT agree with critiques calling him a 'sell-out' or a black-exceptionalist figure based on his politics. I think he's done a pretty amazing job of articulating a position within, and a vision for, African American political life in this country despite not being African American by descent.) You could phrase it in more abstract terms and say: 'it might be easier to get candidates elected whom prejudiced voters can think of in exceptionalist terms, than candidates who solidly embody racist/sexist American stereotypes.'

This blogger, too, points out, in a way I had never really considered before, the "familiar stench" of sexism underlying the hysterical 'OMG we can't nominate Hillary because she'll bring out the conservative base to vote against her!' arguments that are so prevalent right now -- because the reasons imputed to this 'base' for their pathological Hillary-hatred are precisely that she is an unapologetically ambitious woman playing hardball to attain a position of great power, and the argument then frequently becomes that this 'base' feels this way, so end of story, we shouldn't nominate her, Q.E.D. I actually think that PLENTY of these anti-nominating-Clinton arguments from Democratic men (hi baby!) conveniently use this 'conservative base' as a cipher to ventriloquize their own sexist objections to her persona and her candidacy. (The comment on the linked post is mine though, arguing that descriptively speculating on what the unjust-but-real political effects of nominating Hillary Clinton might be, because of her history with the 1st Clinton administration more than anything else, can have some function other than re-iterating sexism's inevitable triumph.)

It's scary, though, how unquestionable, even how reasonable, arguments like this can sound to us, to me -- I'm writing a dissertation on the weird play of resistances to power available in the performance of gender and sexuality, in a period when things like heteronormativity and women's separate sphere are first solidifying -- and the way patriarchal oppression is taken-for-granted escaped me here.

The root issue, which no one is really going down to -- and which I have been thinking for a couple of months now -- is that women are not a minority. Sexism is kind of a special case because it is levied by about HALF the population against another HALF the population. It's everywhere, and it's so naturalized largely -- chillingly -- because so MANY men feel that it's not wrong. You don't have to look far on the internets or in the world to see how many men feel that they do, in some sense, have legitimate grievances against women; how many men feel that they are in some essential way better than women just by virtue of their being men.

Many white people can be quite easily made to feel guilty about being racist (which is different from making them not be racist). Like I said, running concurrently with America's racist narrative is a narrative of strongly-desired redemption from that racism -- Obama's smart to play on that. Saying things that are overtly racist, being regarded as a racist... these are things that are openly condemned as socially unacceptable in wide swaths of the culture.

In uncritical, moderately-conservative to moderately-liberal cultural venues -- like mainstream media and electoral politics -- objections pointing out racism are frequently better-received and given more credence as legitimate criticisms (people have to apologize for their comments) than objections pointing out sexism, which are too often still heard as the degraded, shameful, simultaneously unjustified AND futile ranting of the feminist harpy.

Many whites understand that black people are justified in a legitimate struggle against their own oppression (however problematically they might think about it); many men (and some women) do not think that women's struggles against patriarchy are so justified. I'd wager there are lots more people who'd tell you that sexism no longer exists than that racism doesn't.

It's a perverse paradox -- at the same time I DO think, as Rebecca Traister does, that race presents a bigger barrier to success than gender in this country. There are way more privileged women, by almost every measure, than there are privileged black people of any gender. I don't go where Traister goes, though, with this: she asks, "If Hillary's success is less exceptional, does she deserve my vote as much as Barack?" (First of all, um, no... like I said in the last post, this is a PRIMARY, not an oppression beauty pageant.) No. Because of the different way sexism works in this country, the relative un-exceptional-ness of her success is one reason her candidacy may actually force a bigger confrontation between voters and their prejudices.

The dark side of this analysis, unfortunately, is the problematic way in which white feminists have talked about it. Princeton prof. Melissa Harris-Lacewell referenced this back during the Democratic Race and Gender Shitstorm 2008(TM) in her Slate piece on black Americans rallying for Obama. She brought up Clinton supporters, incl. Bill, complaining that the media was "hard" on Hillary and "soft" on Obama, and pointed out how not only is that complaint not substantively true ("there are no public tears shed for the strain Obama must feel as a result of death threats, which caused the doubling of his Secret Service detail"), it recapitulates "a familiar American narrative of race and gender."

She means the narrative I've heard white baby-boomer feminists recount time and again, the one I've heard my own mother recount: 'Everyone always talks about racism and race, how hard African Americans have it, well what about women, don't WE have it hard? You never hear about how hard WE have it; anyone can say sexist things and nobody bats an eye, but let someone say a racist thing and all hell breaks loose...' and so on and so on. My god, this is so destructive! (Like Gloria Steinem's op-ed in the Times back in Jan., the most unintelligent thing I've ever read of hers.)

Dr. Harris-Lacewell is right: what has happened with Clinton and Obama and the whole media circus is a familiar narrative. White women have played on racism's being less socially-acceptable to plead oppression-under-estimation. At the same time, white women are diminutivized, patronized, emotionalized -- which means there's a cultural value on our being protected, not respected. The whole culture has a freaking crisis when white women are the targets of violence (witness the endless hit parade of missing-murdered-pregnant-blonde-women on FOX News; witness, in a rarified electoral-politics way, the backlash against the backlash against Clinton).

At the same time black men, conversely, can be respected, and even idolized as per the sacrificial myth, but not protected. Fact is, we as a culture do not care when black people are the targets of violence in this country; we show it every day, and we show it when there's no media outcry over the death threats Obama has received.

I'm posting all this tonight because there is *literally no telling* what tomorrow will bring -- something exciting, almost certainly nothing we expected, and something that makes history.

Yay, history!

weltschmerz wow

"That girl? Her eyes speak for us all," as they're saying at The Rude Pundit, where I got this priceless photo.

I assume it was part of a photo set taken by an official White House photog and then taken down off the White House website? Does anyone have a source on it?

blogging for choice!

It's Blog for Choice Day. (Read about it here too.) That means Roe v. Wade gets a 35th birthday... and it's not looking so good. Tons of brilliant people have posted brilliant things chock full of information and the power of their own experience all over the web -- those links above are a digest of some great writing on reproductive justice, gender, and self-determination. Another clearing-house of reproductive rights news and info is here.

Last year, this journal entry by artist and sex-ed activist Heather Corinna was my blog-for-choice citation on my livejournal, because I didn't have a proper blog. It's still great... But the intervening year for women's rights in this country has been one of the most dismal yet. Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart in April was truly one of the most infuriating, weltschmerz-inducing things that happened to me in 2007 -- and that is saying something! I wrote about it then:

If you look at the language in the Kennedy opinion today, it's really, really disturbing. I for one am glad to learn that the new test for demonstrating that a group deserves to have its constitutional rights protected is apparently whether a law is "unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases" -- excuse me, wtf?!! I thought the idea that we should worry if ONE person would be left out was part of the whole reason for constitutional rights in the first place. How many, I wonder, is a "large fraction"?? I love how he basically acknowledges that this ruling results in an unconstitutional burden, risk, and deprivation of autonomy and privacy in SOME cases, just not apparently a large enough "fraction."

Also, I love how it says this decision "does not impose an undue burden" on exercising your constitutional right to end a pregnancy, but also reflects the state's "legitimate, substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life." [So the state regards itself as having a legitimate interest in women who want to have abortions, not having those abortions. Just great--but we knew that from Planned Parenthood v. Casey.] I love how it says that if there's major uncertainty in the medical community about whether prohibiting this procedure "creates significant health risks" -- well, that's no problem! The legislature now has the right to decide definitively in the face of medical uncertainty, settling it once and for all. Doesn't that make you happy?!

Also, check this -- probably the most grossly offensive part of the whole idiotic opinion. It totally reveals the egregious presumptions from which Kennedy is writing:
"It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form." All of which lead up to this (unsurprising) statement, now the law of the land: "the government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman." But not, it's abundantly clear, for the woman herself.
--------[end 2007 weltschmerz / begin 2008 weltschmerz]

Yep, I was pissed, and I'm still pissed. Salon has a great interview right now with an abortion doctor who's written an amazing-looking book called This Common Secret, about the real people she serves -- it's really worth reading. All these other brilliant bloggers-for-choice have done a fabulous job of showing the facts and the consequences of this bullshit rollback of human rights in the area of women's bodily self-determination... but I'm pissed off. So this is my day-late Election-Year Weltschmerz Blog for Choice, and in it I am going to say exactly what I think, and it causes me great weltschmerz that the terms of public discourse have been so co-opted that my position sounds extreme.

Abortion has been around forever, and it is not "rare," no matter what centrist Democrats would like to think. Around 40 percent of women in American will have an abortion at some point in their lives! (I can't even get with some of the stuff Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice says about this. I appreciate all the work she's done, but some of her rhetoric is still rooted in moral, which is to say religious and prescriptive, thinking about abortion as a choice.) We need to have it around! ABORTION IS GOOD.

Abortion is NOT in itself "sad;" in further news it is neither "selfish" NOR "selfless." Any of these emotions or value judgments that might be present in the set of circumstances around a particular abortion inhere in the circumstances, NOT in abortion as a medical procedure. Abortion IS the act of a person doing what is right for her in the area of life with THE greatest consequences: reproduction, parenthood, personal life, family life. This aspect to it, that it is the act of a person acting in her own interest, is what makes it a morally good act. It is specially serious because pregnancy is serious -- without an abortion, pregnancy makes TWO people (2, remember?) PARENTS. Responsible for a child.

I don't know about everyone else (actually, I do know about a lot of folks, hence the weltschmerz), but I believe that what's good for a society grows out of what's good for its members, on every level. If I got accidentally pregnant right now, I would in overwhelming likelihood have an abortion. And the only thing I'd feel guilty about is that because I live in New York and am privileged, I could make that happen for myself when so many women can't.

And no, a fetus is not a "member of society." (If Colorado decides it is in November, I will scream.) A baby is a member of society. After it's born! (Remember those? We don't hear as much about them in the news these days, unless it's to beat up on women who are fucking them up by doing _____[fill in blank].) Whether a woman wants to abort a fetus or have a baby is up to HER, and no one else. Whether some fun factoid about fetal development (yeah, I loved the movie, but Juno's "It has fingernails!" really pissed me off -- for one thing it's totally untrue, Juno was nowhere near 20 weeks, which is when it gets fingernails) is a charming, moving aspect of the mystical creation of a life taking place inside an expectant mother -- or a totally irrelevant, oppressive, disingenuous, propagandistic ploy to force a woman to abide by the decision-making framework of someone who is NOT HER -- depends on whether the woman wants to carry the pregnancy to term and give birth, or not. And nothing else.

I think a lot of our fucked-up-ed-ness around abortion comes out of this weird dual nature. It is at once a medical procedure like any other that should be the province of health-care providers, and it should be criminal to interfere with it for political reasons. At the same time, because of the physical capacity to reproduce that has been used by men to subjugate women for most of human history, we have this situation where women's ability to exercise the basic human right to bodily self-determination depends on this medical procedure and all the whole modern medico-juridical apparatus standing around it. On one hand, modernity is nice that way. Safe abortion, less risky than pregnancy and birth, exists. On the other hand, patriarchy advances along with progress, devising up-to-the-minute modern and postmodern ways to keep women -- all over the world -- down.

So, this January 23rd, after a full day of reading about the legal and policy issues in play, I say: FUCK THAT. Fuck the new anti-choice ploy to get young men who might otherwise realize that being pro-choice benefits them on their side by masquerading as touchy-feely pro-compassion faux-emo men's movement shit (which when you scratch it, is usually sexist!). Fuck the apparent new romantic-comedy genre of people who decide to go through with unwanted pregnancies and it all turns out fine (there's way more to be said about this, but fuck it until we have a genre where people get abortions and are happy and it all works out ok in the end!). And fuck Anthony Kennedy and the horse he rode in on. (And Hang On, Stevens.)

And work like hell -- everyone -- for the Democratic nominee for president, because we're already stuck with the 5 who are on the court now and their insulting excuses for jurisprudence, some of them for another couple of decades, but another 4-8 years of Republican judicial appointees would usher in an era of violence to all kinds of rights that I truly just don't want to imagine.

Weltschmerz, mine and yours

Well, that's nice -- I have a blog. I hope that its name doesn't tread too intrusively on the toes of a very nice-seeming graphic artist in Ontario, whose bookseller/community activist friends I've seen in the blogosphere. I just found out about this guy's existence checking to see whether there was already a "weltschmerz" blog. There is a comic strip -- his book is entitled Weltschmerz: Attack of the Same-Sex Sleeper Cells (see link above), which is about the best title for anything, ever. This one does not equal it, because nothing ever could.

Weltschmerz literally means "world-pain," which is what I start to feel building up every four years, when conditions and trends I've successfully repressed to a level at which I can live a pleasurable life come roaring back to the forefront of my consciousness with a vengeance. This blog is the outlet for my election-year crazies, and for various other forms of weltschmerz.

The term, weltschmerz, appears to have been coined by a late 18th/early 19th-century German guy I had never heard of, Jean Paul, a politically-engaged educator and novelist who didn't make it into the canon. Wikipedia, apparently borrowing heavily from Encyclopedia Britannica, says about him:

"But in working out his conceptions, Jean Paul found it appropriate to express any powerful feeling by which he might happen to be moved. [ed.-I don't know if the encyclopedia entry-writer meant "inappropriate," or what this sentence might mean...] He made it his style to use seemingly out-of-the-way facts or psychological notions which occurred to him. Hence every one of his works is irregular in structure and his style lacks directness, though never grace. His imagination was one of extraordinary fertility, and he had a surprising power of suggesting great thoughts by means of the simplest incidents and relations."

As a totally-by-chance epigram for this blog, I like that.