Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, while learning of yet another hate crime incident - the burning of a cross in the yard of an African American family in Westchester County, New York - I tuned into an episode of Bill Moyers' Journal, which featured black liberation theologian, James Cone, who recently lectured at Harvard Divinity School on "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree." A truly provocative piece, Cone asks us to reinterpret Jesus' body as a lynched body, and the cross as one and the same as the lynching tree. His conversation with Bill Moyers, who seems to be getting more and more radical with age (rather than conservative) also reminds us that, this particular history of lynching prevents America from maintaining our "innocence," despite white America's insistence on how "innocent" they are. In other words, as long as we hold onto our so-called "innocence," we will never face the sins and the crimes that we have committed, which means that we will not, as a nation, as a culture, be able to move on and progress beyond racism. Somehow, tuning into this program prevented me from posting on my blog when I learned of yet another hate crime to add to the year's growing list.
Meanwhile, this week, NBC Nightly News has decided to do a special report on African American Women: Where They Stand. Tonight's report concerned how we outnumbered African American men by 7 to 1 in colleges and far outranked them in terms of black businesses. It's hard to determine if the report was of the "Go, Girl!" variety or the "Look out! The Black woman's gaining power!" threat since it seems that the black woman is surpassing the black man in many ways. I'll save my full critique at week's end, after tuning in. In the mean time, let's keep a critical eye on what's on TV and to not overlook public programming, which introduced me to a truly profound and poignant thinker who has given me a useful metaphor to ponder the latest outrages in nooses, burnings, rape, and torture.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Hate Crimes and Hate Symbols
This is the latest chart representing the 8% rise in Hate Crimes in the U.S., according to the FBI. If it were any other government agency, I would link to their website, but I prefer instead to just present their chart. It looks like 2001 was the bonanza year (September 11 related?), but what accounts for the latest spike between 2005 and 2006? (Keep in mind that these statistics from 2006 do not include the Jena incident.)
In other news, I came across a two-week old story about the racist symbol of the University of Illinois's American Indian mascot, Chief Illiniwek. The university had made progress earlier this year when they finally resolved that the mascot was no longer appropriate to represent the school. Yet, on October 28 this year, school officials decided to reverse this policy and allow Chief Illiniwek to return. Come again? Curiously enough, this symbol made a comeback around the same time that different white supremacists (from college campuses to members in the Homeland Security department) chose to show up in blackface at Halloween parties. All this happening in the midst of noose incidents; incidentally both nooses and Native American mascots symbolize white people's triumph over the annihilation of black and red bodies.
In other words, these hate symbols correlate with hate crimes. If you dehumanize and demean us in cultural representations, the easier it is to target us for violence in the social world. Meanwhile, I'll be showing my students today a video, In Whose Honor?, which documents the struggle of one Spokane woman, Charlene Teters, who stood alone and courageously to protest the Chief Illiniwek mascot while a student at the University of Illinois. Her brave stance eventually spearheaded a national movement to end the racist display of Native American mascots in sports.
Curiously enough, in the same video, a university trustee is interviewed defending the school's "right" to recall and honor an early symbol of a "vanishing tribe of Indians, who were probably killed off by another Indian tribe." I kid you not!
So, as we prepare to celebrate yet another national institution - Thanksgiving Day - let us keep in mind how such holidays are designed to whitewash and erase certain histories about race relations (in this instance, the coming together of Europeans and Native Americans in "peace and goodwill" while conveniently ignoring how this was the beginning of the end of one group of people) and how, even today, if we let certain people do it, they will revise the history of what happened just yesterday.
I document on this day, Tuesday, November 20, 2007, that the FBI has finally displayed evidence that many of us in the black blogosphere have seen saying all along. We are under siege by a threatening hate crime wave, and we all need to be vigilant. Let us recognize the symbols, lest we get caught off guard.
So, as we prepare to celebrate yet another national institution - Thanksgiving Day - let us keep in mind how such holidays are designed to whitewash and erase certain histories about race relations (in this instance, the coming together of Europeans and Native Americans in "peace and goodwill" while conveniently ignoring how this was the beginning of the end of one group of people) and how, even today, if we let certain people do it, they will revise the history of what happened just yesterday.
I document on this day, Tuesday, November 20, 2007, that the FBI has finally displayed evidence that many of us in the black blogosphere have seen saying all along. We are under siege by a threatening hate crime wave, and we all need to be vigilant. Let us recognize the symbols, lest we get caught off guard.
Let's Start a Student Debt Cancellation Movement!
As I read this morning's headlines, I was struck by France's decision among students, postal workers, teachers, air traffic controllers and hospital staff to stage a walk out today, all to put pressure on the conservative government, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, which has been hard at work in attempts to bring reform to many social programs.
I'm inspired, as always, by the French's efforts to exercise "people power" and "rule of the streets" and all that, even when their strikes are most inconvenient (the first time I visited Paris, I had to deal with retrieving my own bag from the plane - due to an airport baggage workers strike - barely missed visiting the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay - due to a museum workers strike - and spent the first week navigating the streets of Paris since the Metro wasn't running - due to a rail workers strike). So, I figured Sarkozy was going to have a huge battle on his hands when trying to touch social programs in a country where the people love to strike because, there, workers and unions still have power.
On the other hand, part of me wants to smirk because I knew that the same "people power" that helped put Sarkozy in office, since his party took advantage of "the people's" anti-immigration sentiments, was going to lead to today's showdown. See how racism comes back to bite everyone in the butt?
Nevertheless, I raise this issue of the growing French protest because, while reading various stories relating to today's protest - and the protests from days of old - I realized they have something that we don't have here. They have a certain "security." Not one of these workers in France (I'm assuming the majority to be white) seem to be worried about reprisals from jobs, benefits, education, etc.
In fact, one of the protests that I'm most interested in is the one led by students, who refuse to let the government "privatize" their university system. Their protests are based on the premise that, if they let the government privatize university education, the doors to these schools will be closed to the poor forever.
I'm struck by the student protests because I cannot even begin to imagine university students here in the U.S. organizing protests around issues of educational accessibility. And, yet here we are, fast becoming "Generation Debt" because so many in the U.S. are graduating with hefty student loans that many will not be able to pay off, even past retirement!
Fortunately, I'm so pleased that I was able to pay off my student loan debt three years ago. Most of what I accrued was from my master's education at an Ivy League that all my undergraduate faculty advisers convinced me to go to (because of the prestige, never mind that the "prestigious" fellowship they offered barely covered tuition and fees). See, from their "state university" position, the "debt" would be worth it right? Never mind that the scholarship I received at my undergraduate institute was enough to keep me out of student loan debt. And, fortunately, I received a tuition-waivered, monthly stipend at the institution where I did my PhD (that's right, students - if you pursue graduate studies, go to an institution that will pay you for your education).
So, in two years, my Ivy League MA education accrued so much debt that it took me over twice the number of years to pay it off. Still, despite my relief that my student debt woes are over, this doesn't mean that I should be free to ignore the woes of others. I have so many friends and relatives sinking in student loan debt that it's worrying. It's what Michael Moore said in his documentary, Sicko. Personal debt keeps people enslaved to their jobs and to a crummy government system, as very few would dare take to the streets for fear of reprisals. So, what does this mean for Generation Debt?
I have one friend who has over $100,000 in student loans and knows this will compromise her ability to be as radical and as agitative for social justice as she can be. Still another friend once sent me this email about a recent student loan crisis:
See what I mean? And I agree with my friend: Something needs to be done about this. I see my current students, slaving away at some job to help them pay tuition, even while they work in addition to taking out student loans! Baby boomer colleagues of mine are always asking: whatever happened to the radical student left, who were instrumental in leading protests against Vietnam back in the 60s and 70s? Why haven't they risen up, they keep asking, to protest the War in Iraq and other problems? "Because they're in debt," would always be my response to these same colleagues, who seem so far removed from the woes of my generation and the generation coming after us.
And, as a friend of mine once said, if students are going to be radical or empowered to rise up in protests, they first need to do so without worrying about finding a job or keeping a job, since they've got monthly loan bills to pay. Of course, this same friend of mine also believes that the current anti-immigration laws to kick undocumented immigrants out of the country is just the beginning of a sinister plan to force the indebted citizenry to take over the jobs that illegals are doing, once the undocumented are kicked out. Is she paranoid? Perhaps, but as my mother always says, paranoia is simply a heightened sense of awareness.
So, while the university students of Paris take to the streets, trying to preserve the free education that their government provides, what will we on this side of the Atlantic do to protect our educational accessibility? Had we not become so accustomed to a capitalist view of education, in which we've all been conditioned to believe that only the best things in life should be paid for (including paying the highest price for the "highest" quality education), I imagine we should have already begun this fight to keep tuition fees from spiraling out of control (because they are ridiculously overpriced, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm perfectly comfortable saying so as a professor who gets paid by my university). In the meantime, I'd like to see a free standing democratic citizenry. But how can we be free when we're in debt?
If Africa is suffering from all the IMF loans that the world has placed on them, let's think about the microcosm of this effect on the individual. Just as we've formed a global World Debt Cancellation movement, I think it's high time we start a Student Debt Cancellation movement here in the U.S. How to begin this?
I'm inspired, as always, by the French's efforts to exercise "people power" and "rule of the streets" and all that, even when their strikes are most inconvenient (the first time I visited Paris, I had to deal with retrieving my own bag from the plane - due to an airport baggage workers strike - barely missed visiting the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay - due to a museum workers strike - and spent the first week navigating the streets of Paris since the Metro wasn't running - due to a rail workers strike). So, I figured Sarkozy was going to have a huge battle on his hands when trying to touch social programs in a country where the people love to strike because, there, workers and unions still have power.
On the other hand, part of me wants to smirk because I knew that the same "people power" that helped put Sarkozy in office, since his party took advantage of "the people's" anti-immigration sentiments, was going to lead to today's showdown. See how racism comes back to bite everyone in the butt?
Nevertheless, I raise this issue of the growing French protest because, while reading various stories relating to today's protest - and the protests from days of old - I realized they have something that we don't have here. They have a certain "security." Not one of these workers in France (I'm assuming the majority to be white) seem to be worried about reprisals from jobs, benefits, education, etc.
In fact, one of the protests that I'm most interested in is the one led by students, who refuse to let the government "privatize" their university system. Their protests are based on the premise that, if they let the government privatize university education, the doors to these schools will be closed to the poor forever.
I'm struck by the student protests because I cannot even begin to imagine university students here in the U.S. organizing protests around issues of educational accessibility. And, yet here we are, fast becoming "Generation Debt" because so many in the U.S. are graduating with hefty student loans that many will not be able to pay off, even past retirement!
Fortunately, I'm so pleased that I was able to pay off my student loan debt three years ago. Most of what I accrued was from my master's education at an Ivy League that all my undergraduate faculty advisers convinced me to go to (because of the prestige, never mind that the "prestigious" fellowship they offered barely covered tuition and fees). See, from their "state university" position, the "debt" would be worth it right? Never mind that the scholarship I received at my undergraduate institute was enough to keep me out of student loan debt. And, fortunately, I received a tuition-waivered, monthly stipend at the institution where I did my PhD (that's right, students - if you pursue graduate studies, go to an institution that will pay you for your education).
So, in two years, my Ivy League MA education accrued so much debt that it took me over twice the number of years to pay it off. Still, despite my relief that my student debt woes are over, this doesn't mean that I should be free to ignore the woes of others. I have so many friends and relatives sinking in student loan debt that it's worrying. It's what Michael Moore said in his documentary, Sicko. Personal debt keeps people enslaved to their jobs and to a crummy government system, as very few would dare take to the streets for fear of reprisals. So, what does this mean for Generation Debt?
I have one friend who has over $100,000 in student loans and knows this will compromise her ability to be as radical and as agitative for social justice as she can be. Still another friend once sent me this email about a recent student loan crisis:
I should say that I was extorted by a collection agency who helped me
consolidate my student loans. To make a very long story short, a woman who
worked for a collection agency that represented my undergraduate university
helped me consolidate my student loans. In addition to this, she went over my
credit report with a fine tooth comb for two years to help me repair my credit
because I defaulted on my loans. I did the consolidation and have been
very proactive about keeping my credit clean. However, this same woman,
behind my back, hired a law firm to sue me on a private loan that wasn't picked
up in my consolidation. She knew how proactive I was with my credit repair
because she was instrumental in helping me. As such, she purposely kept this
outstanding debt off of my credit report. Because I never knew
about this, and didn't receive any papers or notice, the law firm went and
entered a default judgment against me in court. Of course my due process rights
were violated as I never received notice. The collection agency then tried
to extort me and say that they would remove the judgment in court if I would
agree to paying them an additional $2500 in collection fees. I wrote a
long letter to my school, as the loan in question happened to be one that I was
forced to take out 1 day prior to my graduation or else they wouldn't graduate
me. I told them I was aware of all the predatory loan scandals. My undergrad called me up, agreed to vacate the judgment and then fired the
collection agency. They removed the interest of the loan, and just asked
me to pay back the principal. I had to deal with this for well over 1
week. A fucking nightmare! If I told you how much student debt I
have, I suppose it wouldn't shock you. But, something needs to be done about
this.
See what I mean? And I agree with my friend: Something needs to be done about this. I see my current students, slaving away at some job to help them pay tuition, even while they work in addition to taking out student loans! Baby boomer colleagues of mine are always asking: whatever happened to the radical student left, who were instrumental in leading protests against Vietnam back in the 60s and 70s? Why haven't they risen up, they keep asking, to protest the War in Iraq and other problems? "Because they're in debt," would always be my response to these same colleagues, who seem so far removed from the woes of my generation and the generation coming after us.
And, as a friend of mine once said, if students are going to be radical or empowered to rise up in protests, they first need to do so without worrying about finding a job or keeping a job, since they've got monthly loan bills to pay. Of course, this same friend of mine also believes that the current anti-immigration laws to kick undocumented immigrants out of the country is just the beginning of a sinister plan to force the indebted citizenry to take over the jobs that illegals are doing, once the undocumented are kicked out. Is she paranoid? Perhaps, but as my mother always says, paranoia is simply a heightened sense of awareness.
So, while the university students of Paris take to the streets, trying to preserve the free education that their government provides, what will we on this side of the Atlantic do to protect our educational accessibility? Had we not become so accustomed to a capitalist view of education, in which we've all been conditioned to believe that only the best things in life should be paid for (including paying the highest price for the "highest" quality education), I imagine we should have already begun this fight to keep tuition fees from spiraling out of control (because they are ridiculously overpriced, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm perfectly comfortable saying so as a professor who gets paid by my university). In the meantime, I'd like to see a free standing democratic citizenry. But how can we be free when we're in debt?
If Africa is suffering from all the IMF loans that the world has placed on them, let's think about the microcosm of this effect on the individual. Just as we've formed a global World Debt Cancellation movement, I think it's high time we start a Student Debt Cancellation movement here in the U.S. How to begin this?
Monday, November 19, 2007
Creeped Out: Something of a Post-Sunday Sermon
Last night, I watched for the first time the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which was on TNT. And was so creeped out that I stayed on the phone with a friend of mine all hours of the night (to keep from being alone during the "witching hour," which the film revealed to be 3:00 am). You see, when it comes to horror movies, I can deal with slasher flicks, crime thrillers, mysteries, vampire movies, even some forms of supernatural stories, like ghost hauntings and the paranormal. Demonic possession? Not so much.
I of course attribute this to my church upbringing, but I think it's deeper than that. I don't care if you're Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, or atheist, surely you have not lived in this world and not seen that evil is real. That evil is a dark, powerful presence, and that demons, whether you want to believe in them or not, are just an embodied (or disembodied) representation of those forces. They can't be proven or disproven, but there's a wonderfully apt quote from the movie, The Usual Suspects, in which our hero says, "The greatest thing the devil ever did was to convince others that he doesn't exist."
I believe in goodness, which means that I would also have to believe in the opposite: I believe in evil. So, when I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which begins with "this is based on a true story"), I was already willing to take the movie seriously, in a way that, no matter how creepy and scary The Exorcist is, somehow, all those special effects of pea-green soup spewing out of a girl's mouth and her 360-degree head spin seriously prevents you from taking that movie seriously IN ANY WAY!
As the great American writer James Baldwin said about The Exorcist, which he wrote about in a book called The Devil Finds Work: "I can say only that Satan was never like that when he crossed my path(for one thing, the evil one never so rudely underestimated me). His concerns were more various, and his methods more subtle." He also says, and this for me is the clincher: "The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks - many, many others, including white children - can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet."
In The Exorcism of Emily Rose, you never for one moment thought that the demonic possession could not have happened, and even it were the result of a psychosis, honestly: what's the difference? Whether it's "spirit possession" or "mental breakdown," it doesn't change the fact that Emily Rose was a sick, sick woman, and she could not be saved. There is nothing "mindless" or "hysterical" or "banal" about this.
As such, I believe this was a movie about the triumph of the devil, which is what really creeped me out. You see, with all of the histrionics surrounding the demonic possession, it wasn't until Emily had a sighting of the "Virgin Mary" that told her to accept this suffering so that she can be a "sign" of God's existence that really gave me pause. Yeah, tell me that wasn't the Devil talking!
As James Baldwin said about the "evil one," his "concerns are more various...his methods more subtle." Unlike a lot of creepy-crawly, ghostly movies, which I tend to view as cartoonish horror flicks, anything pertaining to demons scare me because I do believe that evil forces like demons, just like benevolent forces, like angels, really do exist (I'm not some backward person - I believe there are supernatural forces that we can't prove but neither can they be unproven), and based on biblical teachings, the lesson is ALWAYS, ALWAYS that Satan appears to you like an angel of light, NOT like a dark scary creature who scares you out of your ever loving mind.
So, when Emily Rose, after that intense "failed" exorcism, suddenly sees the "Virgin Mary" telling her to succumb to her possession, I was like, "Oh my God! That's the Devil talking!" I certainly interpreted all that to mean that when the evil one confronted the Priest, who was willing to do battle and to do it on unshaken faith, the "six" demons in Emily pretended to depart from her body and into the horses, only to bide their time later. So what does the Devil do? He decides, okay, if the scary, schizophrenic control of Emily's body isn't enough to secure her soul, then I'll just show up as something she'll believe in. Hence, the Virgin Mary sighting.
The fact that the filmmakers end the movie, convinced that they too believed in the message that the Virgin Mary told Emily Rose - that her possession and suffering were so that people in our modern age will begin to believe in the spiritual realm - I was horrified, because I understood, with the movie's end, that the Devil had won this battle. Plus, if seeing Emily Rose doing some crazy things was enough to convince the priest and her family that she was possessed by the Devil, why on earth would they believe the things she wrote, as somehow being a message from God? Come again?
Unfortunately, from what the movie tells us at the end, most people who heard her story now believe that demons are real and scary, and not that if you turn to the benevolent forces out there - God and Her/His angels - then you can triumph over evil. I just don't believe, from my own religious background, that God would ever let one of Her/His faithful servants get killed by the Devil, if those "faithful servants" called on Her/His name. In the Book of Job, God allowed Satan to cause Job severe suffering, but God specifically told Satan that he was not, under any circumstances, to kill the man. But, in this instance, God allowed the Devil to kill Emily Rose? I don't think so!
Why? Because the Devil spoke through the sighting of the Virgin Mary and, unfortunately, tricked poor Emily Rose into accepting her fate. Talk about letting your "personal demons" take over! I also don't believe that we should create a false division between the scientifically proven state of mental psychosis and the spiritual state of demon possession. As far as I'm concerned, these conditions are one and the same.
The problem is that Emily Rose was sick in her mind, and she was in no state to heal herself. Her taking of the epilepsy medication may have prevented the ritual of exorcism to have its power, but most scientists concur with spiritual healers that the mind is a powerful thing, and if you BELIEVE in getting healed, or if you BELIEVE you're going to die, then whatever you believe is going to happen will happen.
I think poor Emily Rose's faith wasn't strong enough, and that her mental health was severely fragile. The first time she encounters demonic forces, she feels some invisible force weighing down on her (I have had those experiences in the night, which scientists can explain away as the mental state and our nervous system heightening a certain state of our REM sleep, while more religious and spiritual communities refer to that "invisible" force as an incubus, or demons, or vampires). Either way, it doesn't change the fact that, while in sleep or in the night, you feel like some invisible "thing" is on top of you, squeezing the life out of you. And, whenever this happens, I instantly start praying, because my church upbringing told me that that's what you do. And, inevitably, the "thing" that's on top of me immediately gets off of me as soon as I start praying. Why? Because I BELIEVED in the power of prayer.
I noticed that when this first happened to Emily, despite her Christian/Catholic upbringing, she did not start praying. And just like that, the evil one recognized that he had an easy prey. Or, if you go by the scientific explanation, she instantly became vulnerable to her psychosis. And that's what "personal demons" really look like!
This story felt real in a way that The Exorcist didn't, which is why it still bothers me to no end that the movie didn't recognize the Devil when he appeared in his more subtle form (The Virgin Mary sighting). How sad that we as a society still don't recognize what evil really is. It's not going to show up as some scary looking dark shadowy thing appearing at the witching hour of 3 am. It's not going to be some whacked out girl eating insects. Instead, it's going to be a smooth-talking, easygoing, attractive-looking male/female telling you in the most "rational" talk why you should accept a certain action or behavior that requires your complete and utter destruction.
Let's think about that. We wondered why someone like Megan Williams found herself in a house full of evil white supremacists who tortured her for weeks in West Virginia. It turns out that she was dating one of her tormentors. When the Duke Lacrosse story first broke, we learned that, of the two strippers who initially left the house once the drunken party attendees started getting loud and nasty and hurling racial epithets at them, it took one of the "gentler" guys who said to them, "Sorry, sweetheart! We didn't mean anything by it. Come on, sweetheart. Come back inside. We'll behave. I promise!" The accuser went back into the house; the other stripper didn't because she knows that that's just the subtle and cunning way the Devil talks to you.
As the Albert Brooks character in Broadcast News said: "The Devil is going to look all smooth and cute while, little by little, he lowers your standards." What's the root word for the word "devil"? "Destroyer." Beware of the subtle people and forces whose words drip like honey, who convince you in the sweetest, most charming way that, only by destroying yourself will you be saved. And that's what makes The Exorcism of Emily Rose a tragic story and not a horror story. She accepted a "lie" about her salvation, all because that "lie" was told out of the mouth of someone she believed would have her best interest at heart. Because she believed in the lie of the sighting.
Let's stop pretending these evil forces aren't real, or that evil only appears a certain way.
I of course attribute this to my church upbringing, but I think it's deeper than that. I don't care if you're Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, or atheist, surely you have not lived in this world and not seen that evil is real. That evil is a dark, powerful presence, and that demons, whether you want to believe in them or not, are just an embodied (or disembodied) representation of those forces. They can't be proven or disproven, but there's a wonderfully apt quote from the movie, The Usual Suspects, in which our hero says, "The greatest thing the devil ever did was to convince others that he doesn't exist."
I believe in goodness, which means that I would also have to believe in the opposite: I believe in evil. So, when I watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which begins with "this is based on a true story"), I was already willing to take the movie seriously, in a way that, no matter how creepy and scary The Exorcist is, somehow, all those special effects of pea-green soup spewing out of a girl's mouth and her 360-degree head spin seriously prevents you from taking that movie seriously IN ANY WAY!
As the great American writer James Baldwin said about The Exorcist, which he wrote about in a book called The Devil Finds Work: "I can say only that Satan was never like that when he crossed my path(for one thing, the evil one never so rudely underestimated me). His concerns were more various, and his methods more subtle." He also says, and this for me is the clincher: "The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks - many, many others, including white children - can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet."
In The Exorcism of Emily Rose, you never for one moment thought that the demonic possession could not have happened, and even it were the result of a psychosis, honestly: what's the difference? Whether it's "spirit possession" or "mental breakdown," it doesn't change the fact that Emily Rose was a sick, sick woman, and she could not be saved. There is nothing "mindless" or "hysterical" or "banal" about this.
As such, I believe this was a movie about the triumph of the devil, which is what really creeped me out. You see, with all of the histrionics surrounding the demonic possession, it wasn't until Emily had a sighting of the "Virgin Mary" that told her to accept this suffering so that she can be a "sign" of God's existence that really gave me pause. Yeah, tell me that wasn't the Devil talking!
As James Baldwin said about the "evil one," his "concerns are more various...his methods more subtle." Unlike a lot of creepy-crawly, ghostly movies, which I tend to view as cartoonish horror flicks, anything pertaining to demons scare me because I do believe that evil forces like demons, just like benevolent forces, like angels, really do exist (I'm not some backward person - I believe there are supernatural forces that we can't prove but neither can they be unproven), and based on biblical teachings, the lesson is ALWAYS, ALWAYS that Satan appears to you like an angel of light, NOT like a dark scary creature who scares you out of your ever loving mind.
So, when Emily Rose, after that intense "failed" exorcism, suddenly sees the "Virgin Mary" telling her to succumb to her possession, I was like, "Oh my God! That's the Devil talking!" I certainly interpreted all that to mean that when the evil one confronted the Priest, who was willing to do battle and to do it on unshaken faith, the "six" demons in Emily pretended to depart from her body and into the horses, only to bide their time later. So what does the Devil do? He decides, okay, if the scary, schizophrenic control of Emily's body isn't enough to secure her soul, then I'll just show up as something she'll believe in. Hence, the Virgin Mary sighting.
The fact that the filmmakers end the movie, convinced that they too believed in the message that the Virgin Mary told Emily Rose - that her possession and suffering were so that people in our modern age will begin to believe in the spiritual realm - I was horrified, because I understood, with the movie's end, that the Devil had won this battle. Plus, if seeing Emily Rose doing some crazy things was enough to convince the priest and her family that she was possessed by the Devil, why on earth would they believe the things she wrote, as somehow being a message from God? Come again?
Unfortunately, from what the movie tells us at the end, most people who heard her story now believe that demons are real and scary, and not that if you turn to the benevolent forces out there - God and Her/His angels - then you can triumph over evil. I just don't believe, from my own religious background, that God would ever let one of Her/His faithful servants get killed by the Devil, if those "faithful servants" called on Her/His name. In the Book of Job, God allowed Satan to cause Job severe suffering, but God specifically told Satan that he was not, under any circumstances, to kill the man. But, in this instance, God allowed the Devil to kill Emily Rose? I don't think so!
Why? Because the Devil spoke through the sighting of the Virgin Mary and, unfortunately, tricked poor Emily Rose into accepting her fate. Talk about letting your "personal demons" take over! I also don't believe that we should create a false division between the scientifically proven state of mental psychosis and the spiritual state of demon possession. As far as I'm concerned, these conditions are one and the same.
The problem is that Emily Rose was sick in her mind, and she was in no state to heal herself. Her taking of the epilepsy medication may have prevented the ritual of exorcism to have its power, but most scientists concur with spiritual healers that the mind is a powerful thing, and if you BELIEVE in getting healed, or if you BELIEVE you're going to die, then whatever you believe is going to happen will happen.
I think poor Emily Rose's faith wasn't strong enough, and that her mental health was severely fragile. The first time she encounters demonic forces, she feels some invisible force weighing down on her (I have had those experiences in the night, which scientists can explain away as the mental state and our nervous system heightening a certain state of our REM sleep, while more religious and spiritual communities refer to that "invisible" force as an incubus, or demons, or vampires). Either way, it doesn't change the fact that, while in sleep or in the night, you feel like some invisible "thing" is on top of you, squeezing the life out of you. And, whenever this happens, I instantly start praying, because my church upbringing told me that that's what you do. And, inevitably, the "thing" that's on top of me immediately gets off of me as soon as I start praying. Why? Because I BELIEVED in the power of prayer.
I noticed that when this first happened to Emily, despite her Christian/Catholic upbringing, she did not start praying. And just like that, the evil one recognized that he had an easy prey. Or, if you go by the scientific explanation, she instantly became vulnerable to her psychosis. And that's what "personal demons" really look like!
This story felt real in a way that The Exorcist didn't, which is why it still bothers me to no end that the movie didn't recognize the Devil when he appeared in his more subtle form (The Virgin Mary sighting). How sad that we as a society still don't recognize what evil really is. It's not going to show up as some scary looking dark shadowy thing appearing at the witching hour of 3 am. It's not going to be some whacked out girl eating insects. Instead, it's going to be a smooth-talking, easygoing, attractive-looking male/female telling you in the most "rational" talk why you should accept a certain action or behavior that requires your complete and utter destruction.
Let's think about that. We wondered why someone like Megan Williams found herself in a house full of evil white supremacists who tortured her for weeks in West Virginia. It turns out that she was dating one of her tormentors. When the Duke Lacrosse story first broke, we learned that, of the two strippers who initially left the house once the drunken party attendees started getting loud and nasty and hurling racial epithets at them, it took one of the "gentler" guys who said to them, "Sorry, sweetheart! We didn't mean anything by it. Come on, sweetheart. Come back inside. We'll behave. I promise!" The accuser went back into the house; the other stripper didn't because she knows that that's just the subtle and cunning way the Devil talks to you.
As the Albert Brooks character in Broadcast News said: "The Devil is going to look all smooth and cute while, little by little, he lowers your standards." What's the root word for the word "devil"? "Destroyer." Beware of the subtle people and forces whose words drip like honey, who convince you in the sweetest, most charming way that, only by destroying yourself will you be saved. And that's what makes The Exorcism of Emily Rose a tragic story and not a horror story. She accepted a "lie" about her salvation, all because that "lie" was told out of the mouth of someone she believed would have her best interest at heart. Because she believed in the lie of the sighting.
Let's stop pretending these evil forces aren't real, or that evil only appears a certain way.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Beyond U.S. Borders, Hip Hop Is Still Political!
We say we love hip hop, but does hip hop love us?
That is a statement one of my students made during a public discussion on campus last month concerning the connections between hip hop music and violence against women of color. What I found intriguing and yet heartbreaking about my student's assessment, is the way that so many young Black and Latina women felt betrayed, not just by the prevalent misogyny in hip hop, but also by the simple fact that hip hop - which was once so revolutionary and representative of the lives of urban people of color - has completely sold its soul to the interests of Corporate Music. They were all convinced, at this public forum, that hip hop, as we once knew it, was dead. And that this new "thing" that we're now hearing on the radio and on TV stations like BET and MTV no longer represented the political edge that gave hip hop its meaningful bite.
So, imagine my glee upon discovering that the hip hop of old is still alive outside the U.S. Little did I know that the political consciousness in hip hop, which I thought had been banished from mainstream pop culture in the U.S., had merely taken up residence in the deeper, undiscovered trenches of urban and rural Black America as well as in other marginal, subaltern "third world" spaces like Palestine and Cuba.
Check out this site, which features information on the Palestinian hip-hop movement, or "The Palestinian Lyrical Front," as documented in the film, Sling Shot Hip Hop.
See also this promotional video from Guerrilla Radio on the feminist Cuban rap group, Las Krudas:
There's also this link to a video featuring Australian Aborigine female rapper MC Trey, who raps about racism in Australia.
Or, learn more about the Senegalese feminist rap group, ALIF - Attaque Libératoire de l'Infanterie Féministe (loosely translated to mean "Attack of the Feminist Infantry Liberation Front" - that's right!)
Mzbel, female rapper in Ghana, broke the silence about statutory rape in her country in the song, "16 years," while her music video (see below) depicts a feminist response, as it were, since a group of women support and embrace a victorious 16-year-old who comes forward to testify against her would be rapist.
The taboo-breaking impact of this song was such that Mzbel, who was threatened with rape and other forms of violence, was eventually exiled from Ghana, as she now resides in the UK. Let us hope that she continues to make more hip-hop feminist-themed music.
While Corporate Media may control who gets air time on the radio and on TV, let us maintain the free information that the Internet represents, as I'm able to access these consciousness-raising hip-hop songs via the web, which I can then share with you all. I'm just glad to find out that the old-school virtues of hip hop still live on, having found new life beyond our own borders.
That is a statement one of my students made during a public discussion on campus last month concerning the connections between hip hop music and violence against women of color. What I found intriguing and yet heartbreaking about my student's assessment, is the way that so many young Black and Latina women felt betrayed, not just by the prevalent misogyny in hip hop, but also by the simple fact that hip hop - which was once so revolutionary and representative of the lives of urban people of color - has completely sold its soul to the interests of Corporate Music. They were all convinced, at this public forum, that hip hop, as we once knew it, was dead. And that this new "thing" that we're now hearing on the radio and on TV stations like BET and MTV no longer represented the political edge that gave hip hop its meaningful bite.
So, imagine my glee upon discovering that the hip hop of old is still alive outside the U.S. Little did I know that the political consciousness in hip hop, which I thought had been banished from mainstream pop culture in the U.S., had merely taken up residence in the deeper, undiscovered trenches of urban and rural Black America as well as in other marginal, subaltern "third world" spaces like Palestine and Cuba.
Check out this site, which features information on the Palestinian hip-hop movement, or "The Palestinian Lyrical Front," as documented in the film, Sling Shot Hip Hop.
See also this promotional video from Guerrilla Radio on the feminist Cuban rap group, Las Krudas:
There's also this link to a video featuring Australian Aborigine female rapper MC Trey, who raps about racism in Australia.
Or, learn more about the Senegalese feminist rap group, ALIF - Attaque Libératoire de l'Infanterie Féministe (loosely translated to mean "Attack of the Feminist Infantry Liberation Front" - that's right!)
Mzbel, female rapper in Ghana, broke the silence about statutory rape in her country in the song, "16 years," while her music video (see below) depicts a feminist response, as it were, since a group of women support and embrace a victorious 16-year-old who comes forward to testify against her would be rapist.
The taboo-breaking impact of this song was such that Mzbel, who was threatened with rape and other forms of violence, was eventually exiled from Ghana, as she now resides in the UK. Let us hope that she continues to make more hip-hop feminist-themed music.
While Corporate Media may control who gets air time on the radio and on TV, let us maintain the free information that the Internet represents, as I'm able to access these consciousness-raising hip-hop songs via the web, which I can then share with you all. I'm just glad to find out that the old-school virtues of hip hop still live on, having found new life beyond our own borders.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
What Happened to the "Care" in Healthcare? Cautionary Tales for All Women, Especially Black Women
I was saddened to learn of the news of the death of Kanye West's mother, Dr. Donda West, who died last Saturday, due to complications from cosmetic surgery. I'm equally saddened by some of the more insensitive comments all over the blogosphere and Internet in which people think this is the time to jump on their soapboxes and preach to all the misguided women out there about where our "vanity" will get us.
I don't know if Donda West was an incredibly vain person who wanted to defy gravity's pull on her flesh since she went through the procedures of getting a breast reduction and tummy tuck. I do know, however, that the decisions to undergo "elective" surgeries are never just as cut and dry as "vanity." I had an aunt who underwent breast reduction surgery, because she was tired of living her life with incredibly enormous breasts and being subjected to all the sexual harassment that comes with it. Unfortunately, after the surgery, she developed some nasty scars, has claimed to have lost all her sensations, believes this loss also contributed to a reduction in her sex drive, divorced her husband because she felt that he didn't care enough about her and the way she looked to prevent her from doing the surgery, and has since called the doctor who performed the surgery a "mutilator" of women. For she believes only a misognynist would have done what he did to her, and she always expressed regrets about the surgery. She also repeats this story because she believes that, as black women, we don't get equal treatment and healthcare workers don't always treat us with "care."
I think about this when I reflect on Dr. Donda West's death. Did she get all the "care" she should have? Is this an issue for all women, especially black women, to be concerned about, regardless of how famous and successful our children may be?
I know from my mother, who works in healthcare, that many professionals in the industry don't treat black women with any "care," that we immediately undergo mastectomies instead of being given other options when getting treated for breast cancer, that our bodies get sliced open through the abdomen when we get surgeries for hysterectomies and C-sections, rather than get a neat "bikini cut" that white women tend to get. We don't always get the appropriate advice and necessary care, and because so many healthcare workers immediately assume that we're "noncompliant," they treat us very defensively, and we in turn, react accordingly.
I'm usually "compliant" because I care very much about what the doctors say about my health. Yet, I'm now in a battle over doing a follow-up procedure that feels exploitative rather than "for my own good." I try not to get too personal on my blog, so I didn't share with my readers how I was put through the ringer all of last month when dealing with a breast cancer scare. I guess I didn't want to get everyone on the web caught up in my drama and really turn this blog into a "Diary of an Incredibly Anxious Black Woman." Fortunately, however, I got a fairly clean bill of health. This, after going through two mammograms, one ultrasound, and one MRI (thank goodness I have good insurance, but I think the clinic that I went to was glad I had good insurance too!)
I'm now dealing with these people who put me under a great deal of stress, who are insisting that I make yet another appointment to get a second ultrasound. Why? I countered, soon becoming the stereotypical "noncompliant" black woman. Well, they just want to be doubly sure and cross all t's and dot all i's. At what point does "care" no longer reflect that? Why am I getting a weird vibe that this is all about generating more money since my insurance can cover these visits?
Because of this, my friends have told me to get a second opinion, which I will do eventually. But now, I want to take a deep breath before subjecting myself to this process all over again.
In the meantime, I only hope we all can learn from this story of Donde West's death, which, to me, is more about the lack of great "care" and the need to protect our bodies from a profit-driven healthcare system and less about the "vanities" that lead to our destruction. Sure, in her case, this surgery was not necessary, but at what point can others working in healthcare really work with their patients to help them make the best decisions about our health? Take out the "profit" and replace it with real "care" is what I say!
I don't know if Donda West was an incredibly vain person who wanted to defy gravity's pull on her flesh since she went through the procedures of getting a breast reduction and tummy tuck. I do know, however, that the decisions to undergo "elective" surgeries are never just as cut and dry as "vanity." I had an aunt who underwent breast reduction surgery, because she was tired of living her life with incredibly enormous breasts and being subjected to all the sexual harassment that comes with it. Unfortunately, after the surgery, she developed some nasty scars, has claimed to have lost all her sensations, believes this loss also contributed to a reduction in her sex drive, divorced her husband because she felt that he didn't care enough about her and the way she looked to prevent her from doing the surgery, and has since called the doctor who performed the surgery a "mutilator" of women. For she believes only a misognynist would have done what he did to her, and she always expressed regrets about the surgery. She also repeats this story because she believes that, as black women, we don't get equal treatment and healthcare workers don't always treat us with "care."
I think about this when I reflect on Dr. Donda West's death. Did she get all the "care" she should have? Is this an issue for all women, especially black women, to be concerned about, regardless of how famous and successful our children may be?
I know from my mother, who works in healthcare, that many professionals in the industry don't treat black women with any "care," that we immediately undergo mastectomies instead of being given other options when getting treated for breast cancer, that our bodies get sliced open through the abdomen when we get surgeries for hysterectomies and C-sections, rather than get a neat "bikini cut" that white women tend to get. We don't always get the appropriate advice and necessary care, and because so many healthcare workers immediately assume that we're "noncompliant," they treat us very defensively, and we in turn, react accordingly.
I'm usually "compliant" because I care very much about what the doctors say about my health. Yet, I'm now in a battle over doing a follow-up procedure that feels exploitative rather than "for my own good." I try not to get too personal on my blog, so I didn't share with my readers how I was put through the ringer all of last month when dealing with a breast cancer scare. I guess I didn't want to get everyone on the web caught up in my drama and really turn this blog into a "Diary of an Incredibly Anxious Black Woman." Fortunately, however, I got a fairly clean bill of health. This, after going through two mammograms, one ultrasound, and one MRI (thank goodness I have good insurance, but I think the clinic that I went to was glad I had good insurance too!)
I'm now dealing with these people who put me under a great deal of stress, who are insisting that I make yet another appointment to get a second ultrasound. Why? I countered, soon becoming the stereotypical "noncompliant" black woman. Well, they just want to be doubly sure and cross all t's and dot all i's. At what point does "care" no longer reflect that? Why am I getting a weird vibe that this is all about generating more money since my insurance can cover these visits?
Because of this, my friends have told me to get a second opinion, which I will do eventually. But now, I want to take a deep breath before subjecting myself to this process all over again.
In the meantime, I only hope we all can learn from this story of Donde West's death, which, to me, is more about the lack of great "care" and the need to protect our bodies from a profit-driven healthcare system and less about the "vanities" that lead to our destruction. Sure, in her case, this surgery was not necessary, but at what point can others working in healthcare really work with their patients to help them make the best decisions about our health? Take out the "profit" and replace it with real "care" is what I say!
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Race, Class, and Gender Privileges of "Living Deliberately": A Review of Into the Wild (Spoilers)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...- from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Of the various movies I've seen this fall season (this tends to be my heaviest movie-going time because I like to keep up with the latest "serious" movies, you know, the types that are hoping to be considered for Oscar nominations, whether they deserve to or not), I almost forgot to review one that came out a month or so earlier. It stars a very cute Emile Hirsch (who reminds me of a youthful Leonardo DiCaprio - back when he was adorable - with more meat on his bones) whose performance I found to be pretty effective. Hirsch portrays the real life Chris McCandles in a sympathetic and likable light, so no matter how naive and ignorant and just plain arrogant Chris was in thinking, after graduating with his BA from Emory, that he could trek his way across country on up north "into the wild" of Alaska, and live to tell about it (which he did not), you felt for the guy and was almost convinced his untimely death was worth the spiritual enlightenment he found when "going into the woods to live deliberately" in Thoreau-like fashion. Almost.
I say almost because I recently came upon an interesting online movie discussion about Into the Wild, in which several posters were railing against the original poster for commenting that he found this movie to be pointless and why should he "give a good goddamn" about someone like Chris McCandles, whose journey was a very selfish, privileged experiment not unlike the daredevils (usually well-monied white boys) who travel the world over seeking the latest thrill (like bungee-jumping off of bridges and jumping out of airplanes, rock-climbing, hang-gliding, you name it). The argument became heated because many interpreted the original poster as a "racist" just because he found it tedious to be told yet another story about how some young white boy - who was bored with his privileged existence - thought he could give up all his material possessions and just walk his way (or hitch-hike) to the wilds of Alaska, as if it was going to be some fun time in the sun (or cold as the case may be). It never ceases to amaze me how many online participants (presumably white) get easily riled up because someone mentions the dreaded word "white privilege." Because this is essentially what Chris McCandles' journey, and the movie's storyline, is really about - even if it ends tragically (the real life Chris died at age 24, after a two-year journey traveling as "Alexander Supertramp") in the wilds because he mistakenly ate some poisonous berries and starved to death.
For me, however, I'm not so quick to dismiss Chris's privileged experiment to go out into the wilds as "pointless" because Chris did have a point: he wanted to prove that the modern trappings are not essential to living. I learned a different moral watching this movie, however, from Chris choosing to forgo graduate school at Harvard Law (let's think about this disavowal for a moment) to choosing to give away all his monies to Oxfam (to feed the poor and starving in Africa - how patronizingly big-hearted of him) to choosing to not get a new car as a graduation from his sucky parents (because, you know, they're big time hypocrites for wanting to provide him with an easy existence of education and money, even if they failed with the emotional part of nurturing) and instead, chooses to journey along in his used Datsun, until Mother Nature damaged it in a flood, thus prompting Chris's on-foot journey from hereon in (at one point in the movie, Chris even burns the last few bits of cash he has on him because "money makes you cautious" - funny, because no sooner does he toss away money than he needs to make some more since he has to work various odd jobs at a farm or in a fast food joint because he still needs to finance his trip to Alaska - only an economically privileged idealist could act in this fashion! Unless the point is that he wanted money that he earned and not what was given to him.)
Interestingly, I could see this misguided kid, who tries so hard to disavow his race and class privileges, sitting in a classroom like mine (we learn, in the course of the movie that, while at Emory, he took courses on racism and South African apartheid, and various other courses that pretty much revealed to him that the world sucks). So, what does Chris do? Rather than attend law school to then make a conscious choice to work to defend multinational corporations or to work to defend the marginal and oppressed (because, as a lawyer, the choice is still yours), he decides, after taking one too many courses on the evils of racism in the world, to just chuck it! He concludes that society and the human beings in it are just too irredeemable to live among, and he'd rather just live in seclusion in the "wilds," as romantically constructed by the likes of Thoreau and Jack London. Would I be disgusted with such actions from one of my students? Of course, and then, I would pass him Peggy McIntosh's "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (to contrast with the heavy one he travels with on his journey) and Alison Bailey's "Despising an Identity They Taught Me to Claim," to complicate the readings of his various literary texts that he has taken with him.
And this is the issue I have about the Chris McCandles of the world. All I have to do, as a black woman, is put myself in his position - should I be so romantically driven post-graduation at age 22 - and seriously think how easy that journey would have been for someone like me. I've always had the desire to travel the world over, and I know I couldn't just up and backpack across this great nation of ours in the same manner. Unlike Chris, I would not encounter easygoing hippie couples, redneck farmers, and lonely old men who would willingly open up their homes and lives to me. I couldn't travel across this country as freely as Chris without worrying about meeting hostile (rather than friendly) strangers on my way (and that's just race). Being a woman means that I'd also become prey (very few strange men would offer me rides and a place to stay without expecting me to sleep with them).
All we need, as a contrast, is to compare Chris's "Supertramp" journey to the one of a real "tramp," say, Aileen Wuornos, as portrayed in the movie Monster, a woman who truly lives on the outer edges of society, who was homeless and turned tricks to feed and clothe herself. As a poor woman with no job skills, who was abused in childhood, she couldn't get to the wilds of Alaska, even if she had such a notion. The one time Chris even deals with the issue of sex (we presume that he's been celibate on his journey since he is very much a loner type), he politely turns down a trailer-park, sexy 16-year-old who was throwing it up in his face. As a woman, no way could we depend on the kindness of strangers and not think that some man, seeing us traveling alone, wouldn't try to get some (even if he forced the issue through rape).
So, just race and gender allow him to move through the world very comfortably and very freely. This isn't to say that someone who isn't white or who isn't male couldn't take the same kind of journey, but the world wouldn't be as friendly and as kind in their reactions to us. Imagine, if you will, another scene from the movie, in which Chris steals a kayak (because he couldn't obtain a rowing license legally) to ride down the rapids of the Colorado river (just by chance he's able to do this and survive). However, in rowing and evading the river patrol officers, he ends up sailing across the border in Mexico. And just like that, with no papers, no passport, no birth certificate, nada, he shows up all dirty and disheveled at Border Patrol, and his whiteness and his educated use of the English language gains him reentry into the United States. Can you picture any brown person getting back in? This is what I mean about the ways that race and gender allow certain bodies to move freely and comfortably.
And, yes, his class privilege allows him to develop the kind of philosophy that he does have. There's a moment when he is forced to stay in a homeless shelter when he arrives in LA; he's surrounded by many poor men (many who are black), but Chris decides that this isn't the kind of society that he needs to be in. So, he continues on his backpacking journey, escaping from the city (as if the homeless black men he encounters have the same resources to "escape") while still depending on the kindness of strangers who are all too willing to help out some young, white kid with an easygoing smile (that can only come from living a comfortable life) who speaks college-educated English.
Curiously enough, this same affable young man, who makes easy friends doesn't even try to befriend one of the homeless at the shelter. Obviously, there are limits to living life "in the wild," for I'm sure he thinks the homeless in LA are far more dangerous than any big bear he encounters in Alaska. Not to mention such individuals would immediately destroy any illusions that he has about escaping the materialist society that he so despises. Surely, the homeless shelter would have left a different impact on Chris about what being "poor" and "dispossessed" really means. For me, that was the moment that all of Chris's "spiritual" quest lost its meanings.
If we can't see the way that we're privileged, then how can that privilege be challenged and used to tackle the very same society we find problematic? Had Chris been more interested in society, I imagine he would have realized that he had so much to learn from all the "dispossessed" he came across, instead of recreating the same elitist education learned at institutions like Emory, in which he seriously thought that his "book smarts" would help him out in the wilds. This point is ironically driven home when he takes his scientific manual on edible plants out into the wilds with him, and just by misidentifying one plant from another is what led to his downfall. Where were the indigenous and local folks to listen to about what he would need to survive?
While I admire this character for wanting to seriously explore what "living life deliberately" really means, beyond a life of modernity, he still represents yet another white liberal who, so driven by the guilt of what they've consumed or what have been passed down to them in their "invisible knapsacks," that they engage in romantic pursuits of rebellion and "spiritual" quests, never realizing that, if there is any redemption to be found in this world, they need to take an account of the rest of us. Until that happens, these rebellious pursuits will only lead to their own demise.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Transcending "Race" in Cyberspace? Yeah, Right!
It never ceases to amaze me the kinds of experiences my students share in class about their virtual experiences. This time, one of the assignments I gave students as an ongoing,semester-length project, is to participate in any online community of their own choosing and document the ways that they are treated based on whatever race, gender, class, or sexual identity they created for themselves (or for a fictitious avatar representing themselves). Invariably, my black students are always reporting some crackheaded behavior when somebody online interacts with them.
One of my black female students last semester reported being sexually harassed in Second Life, when she created her avatar to reflect herself (interestingly, she was at first annoyed that she couldn't create an avatar that accurately reflected her skin shade, which already says something about the kind of racial exclusion the "game" already practices), but once she wandered around Second Life as a "black woman," she kept getting sexually harassed. Which, of course, was reason enough to leave the online environment because, you know, we can experience that OFF line. Granted, Second Life offers individuals various opportunities to "escape" their real lives, like creating an avatar that's not even human or even an Earthling, but still...what does it mean to reproduce the same experiences that one encounters offline in cyberspace, especially if someone doesn't want to "escape" their racial and gender identity, in fact wants to represent themselves similarly but in a digitized format?
This semester, another black female student recounted an experience she received today on Second Life, when some fools got into their virtual cars and proceeded to chase her for a full 10 minutes! They did not succeed in running her over. I of course told my student that she did not need to do her assignment on Second Life, that she can in fact choose a different online community. However, she is not taking this virtual world nearly as seriously as I am since she's getting a kick out of the experience (namely because she has created more than one avatar, and she finds these different interactions worthy of a larger sociological project on race and gender. By contrast, her white male avatar just got an invitation to join some mock World "Shock" Exchange group, in which he'll learn how to acquire property and money in Second Life - um, yeah. He's getting red carpets rolled out for him, while his black female counterpart is getting chased down!)
My main concern, however, is that, this cyberspace car-chasing incident is not unlike the experience of some women of color who were harassed in a similar fashion this past summer. So, if we're going to treat online environments like Second Life as a "game," I would at least like to envision the space being able to be more progressive and more transcendent of the real-world politics that so many of us deal with.
It is with this “reality” in mind that Morpheus from The Matrix “welcomes” Neo to “the desert of the real.” However, contrary to the myopic visions of our racial future, as offered by twentieth-century science fiction films, those of us who belong to communities of color have not really resisted the technocracy as showcased in this movie. Rather than try to get "unplugged," we have willfully and happily turned ourselves into coppertops. But now that we're all plugged into the Matrix, will we basically conjure up a "dreamworld" that feels very much like the "real world?" I guess I don't see the point in creating a Second Life of the same old oppressive systems. One life is enough, I think!
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
It Gets Worse...
As the story of the predatory teacher, Kelsey Peterson, develops, it has been revealed that her 13-year-old victim, Fernando Rodriguez, is undocumented, and because Kelsey kidnapped him and took him across the Mexico border, the young boy is not able to re-enter the United States. On top of this, Fernando's parents are now facing the threat of deportation! All because a schoolteacher couldn't keep her hands off a child.
I would offer a more salient and critical piece, but I just wanted to provide an update and showcase how victims - especially of color - are now more vulnerable than ever. This unfair treatment of Fernando and his family will only encourage other perpetrators to prey on vulnerable populations, who will now be deterred from reporting crimes if, when victims come forward, they face punishment. Here's a link to Professor Black Woman's Commentary, which links this case to the criminalization of Megan Williams, the rape-and-torture victim in West Virginia.
I would offer a more salient and critical piece, but I just wanted to provide an update and showcase how victims - especially of color - are now more vulnerable than ever. This unfair treatment of Fernando and his family will only encourage other perpetrators to prey on vulnerable populations, who will now be deterred from reporting crimes if, when victims come forward, they face punishment. Here's a link to Professor Black Woman's Commentary, which links this case to the criminalization of Megan Williams, the rape-and-torture victim in West Virginia.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Predatory Female Teachers, If You Mess with My 13-Year Old Nephew...
I'll tear you apart!
Okay, let me tone down on the violence, but really! What is going on? I learned today about the arrest of yet another middle school female teacher, Kelsey Peterson, a 25 year old who sexually abused (because we need to call it what it is: CHILD ABUSE) a 13-year-old student. Not long ago, in my home town, we're dealing with a similar situation of a female teacher arrested for sexually abusing a young boy of the same age.
Incidentally, in both cases, the teachers are white females, the underage students are boys of color. I'm getting tired of news reports using words like "love" and "intimate relationships," as if the two involved are consenting adults. I reference my 13 year-old nephew in the title of this post because he seems so innocent, and he is definitely immature. Yeah, like many young black boys growing up in urban environments, he's learning to front that "cool pose," that hip-hop code of masculinity, he's learning to look "hard," but he so isn't. In fact, my nephew is pretty much on the nerdy side. Apart from constantly playing video games, he loves to read, he's getting into a lot of scientific projects, and he loves to assemble those toy train and roller coaster type building block thingeys, and back when he was 12, he was still sleeping with a teddy bear (he of course would be mortified that I would write this on my blog).
But all this is to say: I can't imagine my 13-year-old nephew having any kind of sense or maturity to get involved with a 25-year-old woman! It is beyond sickening! And, yes, I would go ballistic if I learned that some beeyotch, who wasn't properly screened out of the education system, got her predatory claws into him.
Yes, I realize this post does not capture much of my feminist sensibilities, but this issue is getting out of hand. I mean, can you imagine if the predators who were preying on these middle-schoolers were men? Can you imagine if these teachers were males preying on underage male students? We'd have this huge scandal the way we saw with the response to the Catholic church scandals. We'd be having congressional hearings about sexual abuse in schools, we' d have protests and lawsuits, we'd be having emergency townhall meetings about protecting school children from pedophiles. We'd never hear the end of it.
But, these predators are women. And we're talking like these women are "in love." What?! If we reverse the races involved, what repercussions would a female teacher of color face if she "seduced" (or, let's be real hear: RAPED) a 13-year-old white male student? She'd be tarred and feathered! Because, of course, their mothers would be drawing blood.
The fact that we could be so cavalier about all this is proof that feminists have not done enough to question these gender roles and gender relations. Because we have framed sexual abuse in such a gendered narrative (the female as victim, the male as predator), we are missing opportunities to address other aspects of power, including age, class, race, and sexual orientation.
It's time to get outraged, folks! And, I'm really disturbed to think that my nephew could become prey to some female predator teaching in his school and still not get taken seriously as a victim of child abuse.
Okay, let me tone down on the violence, but really! What is going on? I learned today about the arrest of yet another middle school female teacher, Kelsey Peterson, a 25 year old who sexually abused (because we need to call it what it is: CHILD ABUSE) a 13-year-old student. Not long ago, in my home town, we're dealing with a similar situation of a female teacher arrested for sexually abusing a young boy of the same age.
Incidentally, in both cases, the teachers are white females, the underage students are boys of color. I'm getting tired of news reports using words like "love" and "intimate relationships," as if the two involved are consenting adults. I reference my 13 year-old nephew in the title of this post because he seems so innocent, and he is definitely immature. Yeah, like many young black boys growing up in urban environments, he's learning to front that "cool pose," that hip-hop code of masculinity, he's learning to look "hard," but he so isn't. In fact, my nephew is pretty much on the nerdy side. Apart from constantly playing video games, he loves to read, he's getting into a lot of scientific projects, and he loves to assemble those toy train and roller coaster type building block thingeys, and back when he was 12, he was still sleeping with a teddy bear (he of course would be mortified that I would write this on my blog).
But all this is to say: I can't imagine my 13-year-old nephew having any kind of sense or maturity to get involved with a 25-year-old woman! It is beyond sickening! And, yes, I would go ballistic if I learned that some beeyotch, who wasn't properly screened out of the education system, got her predatory claws into him.
Yes, I realize this post does not capture much of my feminist sensibilities, but this issue is getting out of hand. I mean, can you imagine if the predators who were preying on these middle-schoolers were men? Can you imagine if these teachers were males preying on underage male students? We'd have this huge scandal the way we saw with the response to the Catholic church scandals. We'd be having congressional hearings about sexual abuse in schools, we' d have protests and lawsuits, we'd be having emergency townhall meetings about protecting school children from pedophiles. We'd never hear the end of it.
But, these predators are women. And we're talking like these women are "in love." What?! If we reverse the races involved, what repercussions would a female teacher of color face if she "seduced" (or, let's be real hear: RAPED) a 13-year-old white male student? She'd be tarred and feathered! Because, of course, their mothers would be drawing blood.
The fact that we could be so cavalier about all this is proof that feminists have not done enough to question these gender roles and gender relations. Because we have framed sexual abuse in such a gendered narrative (the female as victim, the male as predator), we are missing opportunities to address other aspects of power, including age, class, race, and sexual orientation.
It's time to get outraged, folks! And, I'm really disturbed to think that my nephew could become prey to some female predator teaching in his school and still not get taken seriously as a victim of child abuse.
More on Masculinity and Wars: My Review of American Gangster (Spoilers)
The swagger, that signature walk from Denzel. I'm thinking of that scene from Malcolm X when he gathered his Nation of Islam posse in the streets to inquire about a case of police brutality. It was the moment when Malcolm showcased that he was an important man, a man of influence, a dangerous man.
Sigh. My adolescent memories come flooding back when I was so into Denzeeeeeeel!!!!!
So, imagine seeing the same swagger, this time
not from a man of righteous reformation and racial uplift but from a street thug, a drug dealer, a capitalist.
Sigh. My adolescent memories come flooding back when I was so into Denzeeeeeeel!!!!!
So, imagine seeing the same swagger, this time
not from a man of righteous reformation and racial uplift but from a street thug, a drug dealer, a capitalist.In Denzel Washington's latest role, he plays Frank Lucas, a major drug dealer in Harlem during the Vietnam era, who ran a lucrative business, in which he showcases his shrewd business skills by cutting out the "middlemen" and establishing high powered relationships between Southeast Asian suppliers of heroine, military personnel who are enlisted to smuggle drugs into the U.S., and his own relatives to set up elaborate systems to retrieve the illegal exports and get it onto the streets of America. At a bargain price.
Surely, Frank Lucas could offer lectures at any esteemed business school, and this film does an adequate job of exploring the intricacies of the "American dream," gangsterism, and what war might have to do with these issues. We learn in the end that Frank has been smuggling the drugs into the country by hiding them underneath the coffins bearing dead U.S. soldiers (let's not pretend that this isn't occurring even in our own present war).
And the way Ridley Scott directs this picture, he never lets you forget the subtext of Vietnam as each month and year is marked by the TV in the background announcing the latest travesties of early 1970s Nixon-era policies - both domestic and foreign.
It's great seeing two powerhouses like Denzel and Russell Crowe come head to head in this film, but part of me wishes that Ridley had done more with some very talented cast members (like Ruby Dee and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who are both wasted in the roles they play).
Still, it's a rather smart and "intellectual" gangster film, even though it does have some false notes here and there. But I, of course, attribute this to the problems inherent in having a white filmmaker trying to capture "black life" without knowing a damn thing about it.
For example:
- Frank Lucas is fond of presenting a "respectable" facade, including taking his beloved Mama (played by Ruby Dee, whom he buys a Westchester mansion, and she of course doesn't really want to know how he could afford this "gift") to church every Sunday. And, I don't care how uppity and bougie-boo a Black Church might be, they don't sing hymns like "A mighty fortress is our God/A bulwark never failing." They just don't! Nor do they sing "Amazing Grace" like they belong to some Presbyterian congregation in New England. THEY JUST DON'T!! But, you know, Ridley Scott has got to be smarter than this. He like everyone else in this country is familiar with what Black Church music sounds like. Did he create this incongruous mismatch of Presbyterian-church-sounding music with Harlem bourgeois life to offer an ironic critique or what?
- What the hell is he doing giving Ruby Dee lines like "Why, she's so beautiful! She's like an angel that was sent down from heaven!" to describe her son Frank's girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife, Miss Puerto Rico, a very white looking Latina with flowing brown (not black) hair. That struck me as so false, me and my friends let out a very audible groan that caused many of the white audiences to look back at us so we quieted down (no wonder, if our white viewers saw nothing jarring about that scene, they get totally shocked when they discover that black people might not want them joining their families if they happen to date and be engaged to somebody black). Even if her character was one of those "light is right" type, who treasures long flowing hair and fair skin, I can't think of any black mother who would say such shit if their son brought home any woman who "couldn't use her comb." Honestly, the film didn't do much to develop her character (if I were directing, I would be far more interested in the dynamic between this mother and this son because Frank Lucas, as dangerous and as criminal minded as he was, really cared about and loved her), so I really don't know if that line was supposed to be delivered with irony. But, it really sounded as fake as a three-dollar bill.
- And maybe because I had seen Talk to Me so recently, that I could not help but compare that film to this one, since they both cover the same time period, but somehow American Gangster felt rather anachronistic. The fashion, the scenery, everything felt so non-70s, and again, I don't know if Ridley Scott was intentional about this. The Vietnam War references are obviously about our time and our own War in Iraq. Still, even if you're just using another time period as metaphor, do some historical research, man! What's with the false notes?
All in all, apart from these flaws, this is a movie that gave me much more to think about than, say, The Departed, last year's Best Picture winner. So much testosterone and scripts about masculinity and war (and of course female nudes and female ties that always send the message that men's weakness are their relationships to women - it was Frank Lucas's flamboyant trophy wife that tipped the cops off since she thought to give him a pimpified coat to wear at a Muhammad Ali boxing match (violating his own code about dressing too "loudly," thus calling attention to his wealthy lifestyle), and it was one of his cousin/henchmen, who eventually turned him in as a deal he made with the cops when he was arrested on attempted murder/domestic violence assault charges. So, the moral of the story is: women ain't nothing but trouble and will be the downfall of every powerful man following his capitalistic dreams of being The Man.
Nothing new in that story, of course.
Friday, November 2, 2007
So Many Levels, So Many Levels
Just diverting from my usual interest in only promoting feminist-themed and antiracist-themed images and videos, to just share a very popular music video, "Ayo Technology," passed on to me by a student of mine.
I don't know what disturbes me most: the fact that, now the white male and black male have come together - via Justin and 50 Cent - to create this interracial brotherhood of male dominance, the fact that so many subliminal (and not even!) images of cell phone video and other hi-tech surveillance of women's bodies (presumably taken at strip clubs or male-themed parties featuring strippers) encourage men to surveille and invariably violate the private boundaries established between sex partners that are later uploaded onto the Internet (think Paris Hilton's sex tapes), or the fact that, even underneath this text is the other subtext of what happens in incidents that mirror the Duke Lacrosse party, in which many cellphone images captured the accuser's bodies and later circulated in mainstream news reports, and other scandalous videotapes (featuring R. Kelley and his violations of underage girls).
The lyrics - "I'm tired of using technology" - suggests desires to break those boundaries between fantasy and reality, to merge the symbolic capture of women's bodies on camera, on strip club stages, on Internet porn sites with "real" sexual encounters, only for "real" sex acts to be recycled into the symbolic realm when video surveillance cameras (Big Brother's or your lover's cell phone) reproduce the sexualized female body in the space of music videos, YouTube, MySpace, etc.
As I said, so many levels, so many levels...
I don't know what disturbes me most: the fact that, now the white male and black male have come together - via Justin and 50 Cent - to create this interracial brotherhood of male dominance, the fact that so many subliminal (and not even!) images of cell phone video and other hi-tech surveillance of women's bodies (presumably taken at strip clubs or male-themed parties featuring strippers) encourage men to surveille and invariably violate the private boundaries established between sex partners that are later uploaded onto the Internet (think Paris Hilton's sex tapes), or the fact that, even underneath this text is the other subtext of what happens in incidents that mirror the Duke Lacrosse party, in which many cellphone images captured the accuser's bodies and later circulated in mainstream news reports, and other scandalous videotapes (featuring R. Kelley and his violations of underage girls).
The lyrics - "I'm tired of using technology" - suggests desires to break those boundaries between fantasy and reality, to merge the symbolic capture of women's bodies on camera, on strip club stages, on Internet porn sites with "real" sexual encounters, only for "real" sex acts to be recycled into the symbolic realm when video surveillance cameras (Big Brother's or your lover's cell phone) reproduce the sexualized female body in the space of music videos, YouTube, MySpace, etc.
As I said, so many levels, so many levels...
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Social Protest Events: More Dates to Mark on Calendar
Yesterday's event for "Document the Silence" on my campus was most illuminating. It was an opportunity for women of color (and a few men of color and white women, those who cared enough to participate) to gather and voice our growing concerns about violence against women of color locally, nationally, and internationally. I also welcomed the opportunity to give a talk to students and local community members outside the context of my classroom. Here is where I'm so glad that I took this year to start my blog, for it allowed me to comb through different posts on the issue and put my talk together. The audience responded enthusiastically.So now, I'm using this blog, not only to formulate my views, but to also spread the word about upcoming events and protests. Let's all remember that the nation-wide "Document the Silence" started through a blog and through bloggers' growing concerns about an issue. I'm now beginning to see that it's not so much that the "Revolution Will Not Be Digitized," or as is said over on what I call "This is Not a Black Feminist Blog (But It Is)," "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, It Will Be Blogged," it's more an issue of we use our blogs to theorize and our feet to protest. Let's recognize there is this combined joining of theory and practice that must be maintained.
That said, here are two more events/protests that are closing out the week:
- Friday, November 2, is Blackout Day (learned about this on Professor Black Woman's Blog) - let's use this opportunity as African Americans (and those who support us) to "buy nothing" and show our spending power.
- Saturday, November 3, is a Protest Against Hate Crimes, in honor of Megan Williams who suffered unspeakable crimes at the hands of white supremacists in West Virginia.
Join in the struggle! Spread the word!
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