It Was Racist

I was reluctant about today's class going in.
.
We read Mary Waters Ethnic Options and her book Black Identity. I reviewed
Black Identity which focuses on the process of West Indian Americans
coming to identify or avoiding identifying as Black.

The book contained lot's of qualitative interview's with West Indian
folks talking about why they don't like African Americans,
why they are Black, but not like Black Americans, that Black Americans
are lazy, expect handouts etc.

I had no idea how the class was going to react to this.

Fascinating stuff, though, right?

Especially when you look at the presence of African Americans vs. West
Indian Americans on four year college campuses and in graduate,
law and business school in the Northeast.

The book is awesome in how it gets at how first generation verses second
generation West Indian immigrants deal with assimilation, with proving
that they are not Black and also with identifying as Black. The most
fascinating part for me was learning that women who worked as teachers
and nurses in Jamaica, came to the Brooklyn, worked as teacher and
nurses yet, class wise their lives were not the same.

The material difference is the on their salary in Jamaica, they were middle class,
so they could afford nannies and house keepers, and their housing was more
spacious and safer. In the US, housing was more expensive, there was more
opportunity for jobs and education for their children but the housing dollar
didn't go very far.

Which brings me to my classmate.

Jamaica's system is based on the British system, which means that children
are tested and tracked at a very young age. They either go into vocational
track or academic track.

Apparently Germany and much of Europe is the same way.

My Black classmate said, that he agrees with this.

I responded saying that standardized tests are measures of familial wealth
not student aptitude. And the aptitude of a four year old cannot be measured
because they have only been on the earth 48 months. He responded saying
that the British system is better because it separates the students early
and that there are some who shouldn't be in school and college.

I said that this was racist. We do not know what children are capable of at 4.

They responded saying that it wasn't racist.

I said, it was both racist AND classist because of the disparate
impact that the same policy has on Black boys in the US. Ann Fergusons
Bad Boys talks about this at length, if you want to read more about it. It's
an awesome study on a public elementary school in Berkeley,
hones in on the ways in which school policy and teacher subjectivity
impact how Black boys are disproportionately disciplined and placed
in special ed classes.

I asked him how he reconciled his approval of early testing and prediction
with the fact that standardized tests measure familial wealth not student
aptitude.

He responded saying "Yeah, tests are culturally biased but math isn't."

My eyes rolled. That did NOT refute nor address my argument.

Another classmate, a white woman who is in marketing asked, "Isn't it
better for us to asses the children at 4 rather than at 12 so that they
don't languish in the system?"

I responded no. The issue isn't when they are assessed the issue is
creating a system that serves their interests not the interests of school
administrators or corporations. We need to move out of binary
modes of thinking and ask ourselves whose interests are served by
that.

She said aren't all children about the same at four? I said no, all children are not the
same. Each child's education attainment is related to how much money her parents
earn and how much social capital her parents have and lastly how much
intergenerational wealth a family has.

I only wish that I asked them, "What would you do if your child
tests into the vocational track at 4?" I imagine, I hope the responses
would have been more compassionate.

It isn't lost on me that these people will be future professors,
bureaucrats, marketers, political advisers, researchers etc.

I see it as my job to say something.

I was proud of myself for calling a spade a spade, at least I was earlier,
this evening. As the night has warn on I am tired. School is awesome,
but in some ways the more I learn the more it appears that
racism is manifested on a civilizational level.

In some ways, this experience showed me the racism runs on
a deep civilization level. I take this term from the paper "Coloring
Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?"

In the paper, James Sheurich and Michelle Young lay out three levels of racism.
I list them below:

The first is institutional racism, which exists when instituitons or ogranizations
have standard operating procedures, intended or unintended, hurt members
of one or more races in relation to members of the dominant race.

The second is societal racism exist when prevailing societal or cultural assumptions
or norms, concepts or habits favor on race over one or more other races. For
example, the OJ trial revealed societal racism.

The third is epistemologoical racism comes from or emerges out of
what we have labeled the civilizational level, the deepest, most primary level
of a culture of people. The civilizational level is the the level that emcompasses he
deepest, most primary assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology)...

On one level these experiences remind me of just how privilaged
I am, and have been, on another it reminds me of how other children
get screwed by bureaucrats on the regular.

It reminds me of how the teachers who stepped into my life when my city,
Oakland, and my family were both submerged by the crack epidemic.

It reminds me of how these angels saved my academic life.

I hope I can be an angel for someone else.

The social costs of being a model minority, of being a Black women are taxing.

I hope I don't go crazy trying to make sense of it all.

Pray for me.

The Futility or Perhaps the Profoundness of Whiteness

I searched for a Black and White image. I found Bobby K.
You know I LOVE Bobby.

Blackness can only be understood in terms of Whiteness.

I came to this conclusion after reading Elsa Barkley Brown's

"What Has Happended Here."

She writes,

We are likely to acknowledge that white middle class women
have had a different experience from African American, Latina,
Asian American,and native American women; but the relation, the fact that
these histories exist simultaneously, in dialogue with each other, is
seldom apparent in the studies we do, not even in those studies that perceive
themselves as dealing with the diverse experiences of women. The overwhelming
tendency now, it appears to me, is to acknowledge then ignore the differences among women.

Barkley Browns general argument is that we can only
understand Black women's history if we look at White women's

history because the two require each other to work.

Whiteness ONLY works in relationship to Blackness.

This kinda shook me up.

Because I believe this to be true, I am struggling with

the Sociology readings that I have. Shit, its even hard for me
to read news paper articles or even to have conversations

with people about race.

Because a conversation about Blackness without mentioning Whiteness can

only be half right.

In the same way that a conversation about Hip Hop without mentioning capitalism

can only be half right.

Much of the discourse around race treats Male Heterosexual Whiteness

as the norm and everything else deviates from that.

Part of my ideas around the futility of Whiteness stems from reading work

by Black people, about race, that either implicitly or explicitly ask's

for White folks to see our humanity, to include us.

I arrived as an intact human in East Oakland over 30 years ago.

Whether or not a group of people SEE or validate my humanity is none

of my business.

I haven't always been this way. Growing up in East Oakland, it was difficult

to remain an intact human being, especially after the crack epidemic.

Having just started graduate school, it has become clear to me the

ways in which my education has played a role in my ability to remain

intact because many of us don't make it and we simply charge it to the game.

Its difficult for any one who isn't a White Heterosexual Male (WHM) to remain intact,

because both our laws and our mainstream culture presume that WHM is

the norm.

This norm in our society is reflected by the need to have a Civil Rights Movement,
a Women's Rights Movement, a Gay Rights Movement, an Equal Opportunities
Council Commission, a Civil Rights Bill and Health Care Reform.

All of this brings me to a conversation I had on Twitter Friday with, @BlackNerds

about saving hip hop.

Normally I don't respond to these statements, because most likely

they prove to be futile. But I engaged and I am glad I did because I made a

connection that I hadn't seen before.

I asked him:

Saving hip hop from what?

Why is there such an investment in it?

What does it mean to "save hip hop" when most artist want

Black kids respect and white kids money?

As a result of our conversation, I then tweeted and this the important
connection that I made. The tweet said, "In some ways, I think our
desire to like hip hop is connected to our need to have White folks
recognize our humanity."

I am still working this out. What I do see today, is that both instances
involve looking for validation in places that have clearly stated they it
has not, and will not be offered. It can be struggled for, but it will
not be handed over. To struggle for it, would mean a new society.

You see the connection between Blackness and Whiteness?

Why is it so hard to accept that Rap music is now a tool to sell

products?

Why do we want to save it so badly?

It feels good to be back. Thank you for reading.

Graduate School vs. Law School

American Gothic by Gordon Parks

I have started school.

There are three material things that I see as being different
from grad school than law school.

In law school, I had to read material that was abstract
and philosophical, and rarely dealt with race, class or gender.

Now I get to read material that is abstract, philosophical,
and that deals with race, class and gender.

I wake up reading. I go to sleep reading. In law school, it took me
a year to engage with the material this way. This is a problem,
seeing that your first year grades in law school play a huge
role in your employment options after you graduate.

The second thing is that I have started school with the
understanding that it is my job to build community. To that
extent I have met with folks, to get institutional history so
that I can understand the lay of the land, who to stay away
from, who I must be in contact with, where the axis of power lies, etc.

The third material difference is being around men and women
who do not automatically presume that others are heterosexual.

I was kind of taken by surprise when talking to a colleague, who was
giving me the lowdown on a professor whom she suspects is homophobic
who said, "I don't know if you are LGBTQ identified but, this professor..."

I thought to myself, wow, that was cool and really progressive of her
to not only think but to say that.

I read all the time. In fact, had I not taken a train to see Birkhold
I never would have realized that I needed to (re)learn how to read
anywhere at anytime.

Last week, I had been telling myself, if I sit down to read, I need at least two
or three hours. FAGET THAT! Give me 1 hour and I am knocking out
at least one twenty page article with reading notes. ALL TIME IS VALUABLE.

Right now, I have estimated that I have 22 hours a week of reading.

Yup. 22. No joke, eh.

The school work isn't the hardest part of this. It's hard
but it's manageable. So long as you eat, sleep, don't party and
not have some tragic 'ish happen in an intimate relationship.

Oh, and a willingness to sit down and engage with the material. No
internet. No phone. No tv. Just you and the paper.

The most challenging part is engaging with humans, managing relationships,
keeping track of deadlines and simply just showing up on time.

Have you started school?

How is it going?

Any questions for me?

Twenty Questions Friday 8.7.09

1. Why bank fees make me almost have a coronary?

2. Why am I my fathers child?

3. Even though Manaen tells me, what seems like once a week,
why is it so hard to forgive, even if the act is for me, not the
transgressor?

4. Why when someone leave, you miss them, a lot, then you get use to it?

5. What if some of the "birthers" flipped out and got violent with an Asian, Black
or Latino white person?

6. Why people stay saying that poverty is why our children can't
read, yet Cuba as a 99% literacy rate?

7. Why did it feel good when I ran into the Graduate, (he has always treated
me like number two) who said I was glowing then proceeded to hit on me.

8. Why isn't there a Black Michael Moore?

9. Why I still be looking for a modern Pharcyde?

10. Why am I so competitive?

11. Why people try and make money off of everything, when everything
ain't for sale?

12. Why do i have to resort to crack game metaphors to explain capitalism?

13. Why do I still remember dig dugs pfn number?

14. Why do I want Tony Touch to DJ my going away/birthday party?

15. If Black people don't save Black children, who will?

16. Why do I love Bianybear for teaching me that I need to be vulnerable
and fearless?

17. Why my honesty make me feel vulnerable and free?

18. When will we have an honest conversation about the fact that
automation is eliminating jobs that will never return?

19. Why we so scared to stand up for what we believe in?

20. Why "he" say that I ain't follow my heart last night?

I got questions, you, have answers.

The End of Journalism, the Beginning of the Future

A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, Toure went back and forth with
several people, one of which was Aliya S. King, on the future or
the end of journalism.

Given the dismissiveness of Toure's tone, I was reminded
of calling Derrick Bell a couple of years ago, as I was fighting
being dismissed from law school. Yes, I picked up the phone
and called him, told him my situation and requested some
advice. My aunt was on me to advocate for myself, to not be
a victim and to show me how to be empowered. It is an
important lesson that I carry with me every day.

While Professor Bell, was kind and encouraging, he is also a
lawyer, and as such he asked me period point blank "Are you
sure you are meant to be an attorney?" My feelings were hurt
and I blinked back the tears. It felt like he was assessing my
ability, without knowing me very well. In reality, he was explaining
to me how I would possibly be perceived and, hence forced
me to think about what was the best option for me, not simply
what I wanted to do.

He also understood and explained to me the pedagogy of law
school and the ways in which it isn't beneficial to Black folks,
or so called "at risk" populations.

He changed my life that day. Professor Bell is a man who
resigned from Harvard's Law School in the mid nineties
over its unwillingness to tenure "a" Black woman
professor. I respect him. He put his money where his
mouth was, which influenced my willingness to call him and be
vulnerable. At that time, I was still considering going back to
law school. His point was that people, implicitly white
people, from my school with excellent grades can have
a challenging time finding work, so he urged me to really
think about my whether being an attorney was meant for
me.

Well. I told my then partner, *David, about our conversation,
and his response was, "You are a child of God, it is not for
him nor anyone to say what are you are to do with your
career or your life." I instantly perked up and felt protected
and little less sad.

I thought of this child of God moment when I read King's
piece on on her exchange with Toure.

I was also reminded of an editorial that I came across recently in
Art Voices Magazine. In April, Terrence Sanders, the publisher
wrote an eloquent, powerful and vulnerable editorial letter
last month, that in many ways captured the sentiment of the
you are a child of God moment. He writes,

I was told by my mother that when I was three months old, my biological father attempted to suffocate me while she was out shopping. She left him and relocated to NYC, where she re-married a Marine who had just completed a tour of duty in Vietnam. I was raised in tenements and housing projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I was exposed to asbestos and lead poisoning. I was categorized as a “have not,” I attended Head Start, I hated school, I was sent to schools that taught me just enough. My neighbors were Chinese, Jews, Italians, Hispanics; I was physically abused by my stepfather until I was 16 years old, when ran away from home. I slept in 24 hour movie theaters on 42nd street, park benches on the FDR drive, rooftops of housing projects, and trains. I was exposed to petty criminal elements during my informative years. I was lost, I had no skills to survive in a capitalist regime; my role models were actors, athletes and Jesus....

...In retrospect, I never gave up on myself, I didn’t want to be a slave or live in fear, I didn’t want to walk amongst the walking dead. I’m an Artist, my son’s an Artist in his 2nd year at Cooper Union. Art and Art alone saved my life; it completes me. It is my therapy, my weapon of choice; it helps me to cope with the day-to-day struggles of being a human being. My contribution to humanity will be my art, my voice, and in that and that alone I am alive.

Never let anyone tell you what you what you can and cannot do, let my life be an example. Listen to that inner voice, and not power-hungry elitists with hidden agendas. While they are the fraud, Artists are the truth. We are in the game, and they are on the sidelines. So, I stand before you stripped naked and not afraid to bare my soul. I created my own jobs, my own opportunities, and now I’m living the dream.

Best Regards,

Terrence Sanders, Editor & Publisher more here.

Yes. Terrence gets it. In many ways he is like Camus
in his understanding of how art and humanity functions.

Yet, that doesn't take care of the messiness of figuring out how
to make a living as an artist.

Don't get it twisted. I understand that the news, journalism and
advertising landscape will never look the way that it has in the past.
Three reasons come to mind, based on ideas from people who
are experts in their respective areas.

Kevin Kelly says that data linking is the future.

David Simon says that corporations screwed newspapers
by treating copy with contempt, worshiping advertisements,
and passing along corporate profits to shareholders instead
of investing in journalist who could and arguably would
create copy that people would WANT to pay for online.

Chris Anderson says that there will be two versions of
everything available on the internet. He was
quoted last week saying that, "Everything that becomes
digital will become free. There will be a free version,
either you will be competing with free or giving it
away for free and selling something else. If it is
not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow."

And lastly, The Washington Post just fired one of the most
analytical, largely bipartisan and accessible cats covering the
White House, Dan Froomkin.

The ground is in fact moving beneath us. But I was raised
with earthquakes, so we know what it is.
At the end of the day, If one wants to write, write. If you want
to write, and can't, don't do it. It will work its way out. For true,
if writing has gotten a hold of you it will not turn you a loose.

Trust me, I learned this the hard way. For example, last March,
I wrote about Honey Magazine, Kierna Mayo and my personal
process of accepting the fact that I am a writer.

Last fall, I used some of my blog posts on hip hop, feminism
and labor and other personal experiences as fodder for my
grad school applications. This is material because, if I am
passionate enough to spend my time blogging about it, then
studying the same issues in a classroom setting arguably
is for more enticing than say, civil procedure. I am happy to
say that I will be a graduate student in the fall.

I mention this because I had to accept that I was a writer.

No one could do this for me.

When I accepted this, I set out on a course to act like one,
to choose my goals and take the necessary steps to
try and achieve them.

I hope that this helps you accept the writer, the artist in you.

Related Post's
Is Blogging Journalism?
Cognitive Surplus: Did TV Kill the Book?
The Curse of Being a Black Artist


Thought about being an artist lately?

How do you shut out the critics, but take their advice
about being cautious seriously?

PSK, what does it all mean? <<<>

How has '09 been?

*Not his real name

Camus, Obama & Torture: That Right There is Hell Breakin' Loose

8 June 1972: Kim Phúc, center left, running down a road near Trang Bang

after a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack.

Last week, I couldn't figure out why the issue of torture
was consistently being presented in the media. I have
been busy, writing about other things, and preparing to
go to graduate school.

I turned to my colleague, Matthew Birkhold and was like
"Dude, why are they tripping of the torture documents
and the pictures, I don't recall torture being
made illegal. Is it in the Constitution?"

He then turned to me, and stared for a minute.

Then I said, "Oh, snap, the Geneva Conventions!"
You see, none of the articles I read mentioned
The Geneva Convention, so I was unsure as
to scope of the implications of a charge of torture. In
the article What is a War Crime?, Tarik Kafala describes
the history and historical context of War Crimes. He writes,

The concept of war crimes is a recent one. Before World War II, it was generally accepted that the horrors of war were in the nature of war.

But during World War II the murder of several million people - mainly Jews- by Nazi Germany, and the mistreatment of both civilians and prisoners of war by the Japanese, prompted the Allied powers to prosecute the people they believed to be the perpetrators of these crimes.

The Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 led to 12 Nazi leaders being executed.

A similar process started in Tokyo in 1948. Seven Japanese commanders were hanged, though the Allies decided not to put Emperor Hirohito in the dock.

These trials were essentially the precedents for the cases that the modern-day tribunal in The Hague hears.

In addition, individual governments, feeling that justice has not been done, have acted on their own initiative.

...Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including... wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."

To cover his behind, President Bush provided retroactive
immunity for himself and his entire administration for
war crimes. What an amazing move in light of the information
that is being revealed.

I then began to put the pieces to together.
The alleged terrorist have to be housed outside of American
soil, less they be granted due process and a a trial within the
United States court system. So long as they are housed in
unknown prisons around the world, they will not be charged
and there is no incentive to proceed with due process and give
them their day in court.

President Obama made a campaign promise to close
Guantanamo, however, Congress is saying, no can do,
unless he has a plan.

While writing this, the just reported that President Obama
has decided to transfer Ahmed Ghailani to New York and
try him in civil court. The main issue is that some members
of the Senate don't want alleged terrorist's housed in
American prisons. The fear seems to be rational and I
am unsure as to why.

Andrew Sullivan (aka Mr. Cantankerous and awesome) of
The Atlantic.com, has eloquently summed up President
Obama's reversal on releasing the torture photos. Sullivan writes,

Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors'
war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to prosecute
them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing
evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and
the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt
his successor.

The rationale for the suppression is fatuous:
"their release would endanger the troops."

You mean releasing evidence of war crimes would
render US soldiers more vulnerable to attack? How?

This IS a Democracy. There is due process.

I was sort of excited to write this piece, not because of
the topic, but because so many elements that I have been
thinking about this year have coalesced in this issue.

For instance, back in December, Thaddeus Clark sent
me an Esquire article, The Falling Man, by Tom Junod,
about photos of taken of folks who jumped out of the
World Trade Center. Thaddeus and I started having a
conversation on Twitter about Camus, whom I was
reading a lot
of at the time.

Camus was notoriously anti-death penalty. In his era, folks
decapitated using a guillotine. Camus's rationale was
that in order for the death penalty to be exemplary and
actually discourage other people from
committing crimes, then the heads of the the decapitated
folks should be displayed for the entire town to see.

Yes. Displayed. Camus was no joke. He was a big believer
in the transparency of death, if the purpose of the death was
deter folks from committing future crimes or vicious acts.

In the essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, Camus
writes about the death penalty and watching his
father return home and throwing up, after witnessing
a public execution. He writes,

When the extreme penalty simply causes vomiting on the part of the respectable citizen, it is suppose to
protect, how can anyone mistaken that it is likely, as it
out to be, to bring peace and order into the community.

....People write about capital punishment as if they are a whisper... But when silence or tricks of language contributes to the maintaining abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak

In the article, Falling Man, Tom Junod discusses a
comment left on the website, Here is New York, which
speaks to the discomfort that we have with death and
photos of dead bodies. Junod writes,

.....on the Here Is New York Website, a visitor offers this commentary: "This image is what made me glad for censuring [sic] in the endless pursuant media coverage." More and more, the jumpers -- and their images -- were relegated to the Internet underbelly, where they became the provenance of the shock sites that also traffic in the autopsy photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and the videotape of Daniel Pearl's execution, and where it is impossible to look at them without attendant feelings of shame and guilt. In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers' experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.

American's are interesting. We enjoy death as entertainment
but are incapable of being a witness to the actual death's in
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, death committed in our name.

If those photographs are released, the entire tone and scope
and conversation around the Iraq and Afghanistan war's will change.

The men and woman (are their any women in Guantanamo)
who are being held in Guantanamo will be seen as both
human beings and as alleged terrorists. If they are tried
and found guilty of these awful acts, then they need to be
punished.

The American men and women, the American troops, who
have died will go from being abstract entities, in the minds
of the mainstream public, to human beings who have
died in our name.

We are all human beings.

We all have a mother.

We have all been children.

Someone changed all of our diapers.

The same way the photos of the My Lai Massacre
and of Kim Phuc significantly changed public opinion on
the Vietman war, the release of the torture photos will
change how we feel and hopefully inform our choices
around the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars.

It is time to release the photos.


Should the president release the photo's?

What kind of country has one set of rules for its
citizens and another for its prisoners?

Did President Bush plan on keeping the detainees
there forever? It seems like it, as there was no plan
to deal with them via release?

What kind of Democracy holds alleged criminals
indefinitely?

What is So Wrong with Living in the 'Hood?

Former California State Assemblyman and former SF Mayor, Willie Brown

Below you will find a link to yesterday's podcast on Gentrification
and Black San Francisco.

Choosing to live in the hood, in many ways is like choosing to
send your child to private versus public school.

Given the fact that public schools are tax supported, we often move to neighborhoods
in order to send our children to "better" schools. That being said,
this is an interesting conversation to have in the midst of uncertain
economic times and when many of our high schools have a
50% drop out/push out rate. According to the America's
Promise website,

A report to be released today [April 1,2008] finds that only about half of all students served by the main school systems in the nation's 50 largest cities graduate from high school. Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation released today by the America’s Promise Alliance and prepared by Editorial Projects in Education Research Center further reveals that in the metropolitan areas surrounding 35 of the nation’s largest cities, graduation rates in urban schools were lower than those in nearby suburban communities. In several instances, the disparity between urban-suburban graduation rates was more than 35 percentage points.

There is an important connection between the health of a
community being tied to the health of its schools.

I have been having an interesting conversation with a reader, Ahmed, that I am
working on using as a part of a post. Basically the conversation is about
whether middle class Black people in Harlem, BK, and Chicago, who move to
working class neighborhoods, want to displace the current residence,
more so than White folks who move to the same neighborhoods. And for that
matter do intentions matter in race Capitalism demands that land goes
to the highest bidder.

Highlights from the Podcast:

• Medicine for Melancholy
• The North is as bad as the South, for African Americans
• California is a hot bed for testing Neoliberal Policies even though it is "seen"
  as being progressive
• Can Black people gentrify Black communities?
• Faith confronted SF Mayor Newsome about Gentrification in SF
• The Civil Rights Industrial Complex
  

Enjoy.

Thoughts, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

2 Train Wisdom

Last Tuesday, I ran into a homie, Simone, on the 2 train.
She is in BK now, but she is from Oakland, and we both know
common people.

We are cool, but not tight. This is important to note because
of the significance of what she went on to say to me.

I know Simone to be real down to earth and honest. We were chatting,
catching up on school and babies, then we turned to relationships. When
I last saw her in August, she said "M.dot, if you want a baby and
a partner, pray for both, because I prayed for a baby, and I love
my child but I didn't pray for and I don't have a partner to help
me raise her." I then gave her my relationship rundown.

Simone: You asked for God to take him out your life
and bring him back when he was ready.
Me: Yes.
Simone: Then you got what you asked for.
Me: What about what happened in the meantime?
Simone: It's none of your business.
Me: I also asked God to take him out my life and fill in the
hole.
Simone: Did God do that?
Me: Actually yes. I was able to get things done, I had company,
I was able to shift my recovery into high gear. But, I ain't feeling this.
He lied.All I have is my word, and when you have very little money, your
word is all you have with people. I didn't treat him like that.
Simone: He is not you. That is great that YOU are like that but
other people come to you the way that they are. Besides people
have to be given the space to tell the truth.
Me: Your right. I can be an idealist who expects people to deal
with things the way that I do. (Her statement about people being
given the space to tell the truth resonated with me because of my
gender politics and how I feel that many Black men who are gay, and choose
not to share that they are, do so because they are not given the space
to be honest with their lovers or families.)

I then mentioned that Filthy [Birk] had been coasting early our
relationship. He was checking for me, but not treating me like the
one that he "he won't let get away." She stopped me.
DEAD IN MY TRACKS.
"If he was coasting, then it was on you to mind your
business. If that means dealing with other people or
being exclusive, that was and is YOUR choice." Part of
me wanted to squinch up my face and stomp and scream.
But she was right. It was my choice to be involved, be half
involved or simply to walk away.

She left me no room to be a victim. While I didn't like the fact
that she was saying it to me at the time, I will forever love
her for it. Remember the victimhood post? Yes, well,
acknowledging how my choices brought me to my
current situation has helped me remained focused on
what God has for me, and not reacting to what another
person says or does.

Between this conversation, and thinking and reflecting on
what the healthiest choice for me was, I had decided to
leave the door cracked for Filthy to demonstrate how
love is an action, how love is work, courage or both.
I don't take this decision lightly. I was once engaged and I
came to conclusion after that relationship ended that it
mattered less to me how much baggage a person had,
and that it mattered more whether the person had the willingness
to do the work to deal with the past and recover from it. I
realized that this was a great theory to have, now was the
opportunity to practice it. (Sometimes, yo odio when theory
meets practice.)

Then I received an e-mail yesterday from the woman that he
had a borderless relationship with. When I checked
my inbox and saw the e-mail, I just looked up like, okay God,
you have messages for me today, I see. She called me and we had a
conversation and I realize that in some ways I was in a borderless
relationship as well. I learned that they hooked up in June and August.
I was tight. However, the past is that past and there ain't shit that I
can do about that today.

I wasn't sure what her intentions were in calling me.
The stated reason was to "share some things" that
she might have thought that I wanted to know.
I was lightweight suspect because I called her in Aug '08, in
response to an event invitation she sent. She was throwing an event
for Filthy and I wanted to surprise him with red velvet cupcakes.
I called her identifying myself as his girlfriend, stating that I wanted
to bring cupcakes and the shit hit the fan. Apparently I was the only
one that got the girlfriend memo. Ouch. Rather than call me back
she called him. (After this, Filthy and I went on to have a
conversation about relationship titles, etc.) That being said, who
knows what questions could have been asked and answered
then, but that wasn't Gods plan, right? Right.

This is important to me because sometimes we don't make
phone calls or ask questions because the answer may
mean that we have to change our path and walk away,
or stop our behavior all together.

For instance, I have a homie, Hot Momma Leo, and a few years ago,
I introduced her to a guy I was interested in. The three of us were having
drinks at a bar. A few days later she told me they mashed. I was
like WHEN? I just introduced you to him, and I told you I was
checking for him. She claimed that she didn't know, which
was ridiculous to me at the time. Assuming that she didn't
know, why didn't she ask? When he went to the bathroom,
all she had to say was, "Aye, is that you?" Done. Simple. Easy.
What eventually came out, is that if she asked, she
might hear no. So rather than hear no, she didn't ask, so that
she could continue doing she wanted to do.

I still maintain my commitment to leaving the door cracked. Armed
with more information, I have my eyes wide open, and I have a strong
faith that if there is anything else that needs to be revealed to me, it will be.
Having parents with addictive behavior has forced me to understand
both the power of forgiveness and the importance of understanding
that I cannot control others. I can only decide to be in a situation
or remove myself from it.

For now, I remain open to what young Filthy has to say.

For a long time, my father disappointed me, and it took him
15 years to get his shit together, deal with his addiction, recovery
and become a consistent presence in my life again. This doesn't
mean that because my dad struggled I make myself some dudes
doormat, but it does mean that we all need to be given space and
forgiveness if we are to address the past harms we have done to
others in life.

I have a tendency to beat myself up when I make a mistake.
It is a perfectionist tendency and a natural consequence of my
childhood. This of course is really problematic
because as humans we all make mistakes. Our mistakes remind us
that we are human. I see this as an opportunity to practice both
aknowledging my humanity and someone elses as well.

Filthy says he is a changed man. The future will confirm whether that
is the truth. I sit back, not reacting, letting life unfold. Can I tell you
how amazing that feels?

It also helps that I just learned that I am a finalist for one
of the graduate school programs I applied to. (So far, 1 Rejection,
1 Finalist.) Now I just need a writing gig that will let me afford
a membership at the Country Club Gym. Big {TEEF} Smile.

You forgiven anyone lately or decide enough is enough?

What stops you from asking questions that you know you need
the answers to?

Why is it so much easier to hold on to being angry than it is
to look for a solution?

Black on Black Murder and Oscar Grant

It is simply impossible to have an intelligent discussion about Black
male murder, without grounding it in political economy, history and
labor.

Over the weekend, the New York Times featured a piece by Tobin
Warsaw on the Oakland Riots which is essentially about the ways
in which the double standard that some Black people have on Black on
Black violence versus white on Black violence.

In the post, Warsaw quotes Stanly Crouch who essentially
maintains that Black men are killing each other because they can
and that more black men have killed each other in the history
of American culture than white men ever have. One could easily
infer that Oscar Grant's death is relatively small in the grand scheme.
There is nothing restorative, just or humane about this line of thinking.
This logic is flawed. Crouch writes,

Before the victories of the civil-rights movement, many of the murders of black people during the most intense redneck reigns throughout the South were committed by those once infamously known as "poor white trash." What is now so appalling is that the street gangs that currently terrorize black communities across the nation do so with astonishing levels of murder and mayhem, but they are so often defined by supposedly empathetic liberals—of any color!—as victims of race and class.

I never heard this glib hogwash when the murderers were white and the resultant corpses were black. No one ever explained that the lower-class rednecks, who were responsible for terrorist actions and murder, did so because their own wretched poverty made them feel desperately inferior to the white upper class of the South. When the killers were white, the issues were justice and injustice, not social station or income. Perhaps what they actually thought was that white people, unlike black people, have responsibility for their actions.

By shifting the focus from the murder of a Black man by the
police in a city and a state that is notorious for sanctioning violence towards
Black people to the murder of Black men, by other Black men, Crouch
runs the risk of making light of the seriousness of the murder of Oscar Grant.

Furthermore in the above quote, Crouch fails to take into consideration
that poor whites have always had something that no Blacks have
every had, their whiteness.

Crouch's stance is also dangerous because it serves
to create a hierarchy of murder that doesn't take into consideration
the historical violence against Black people in this country and the ways
in which the legal and political system have united to perpetuate
oppression towards Black people.

Redlining, 3 Strikes, The 1986 Anti Crime Bill, Welfare Reform, Jim Crow.
Call it "The Confluence."

Conflating the murder of a black man by a a white cop serves to only mystify
and conceal the issues at hand which are the historical violence that
Black men and women have suffered in this country, the financial
incentives associated with maintaining the prison industrial complex
and black anti black racism.

Crouch, however, does get into why financial incentives involved
in remaining apathetic to Black on Black murder. He writes,

The social and fiscal conservatives should be alarmed by—if nothing else—the billions this country has to pay for the murders, the rehabilitation, the mutilations, the disability, the psychological trauma, and so on. But no: whether on the left or the right, they are all pigs at a trough of clichés.

Crouch mentions how expensive it is, but he fails to make a connection
between the livelihoods supported by black crime.

I contend that one of the reasons why there is complacency around
the murders of so many Black men is that the murder and
imprisonment of Black men and women keeps a lot of people
employed. In small largely white towns around the country prisons
have replaced steel mills and other factories as large employers.
Fernanda Santos of the New York Times writes about the impact of
the closing of prisons on rural towns,

As rural economies across the country crumbled in the 1980s and the population of prison inmates swelled, largely because of tougher drug laws, states pushed prison construction as an economic escape route of sorts. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, an average of four prisons were built each year in rural America; the rate quadrupled in the 1980s and reached 24 a year in the 1990s, according to the federal Agriculture Department’s economic research service.

When we think about the economic incentives for policy decisions
surrounding the creation and privatizations of prisons then perhaps
we can have a different conversation about Black men, crime and
reform.

When I lived in Oakland last year and was looking for work, my cousin
who works at juvenile hall, offered to help me get a job. An entry level, the
position paid $60k. I was floored. To top it off, it was a union position
and because I had college and some graduate school I could have
probably earned more than $60K. $60K is a lot of money to someone
who is looking for a job.

There is a connection between high unemployment, the easy
availability of guns, the drug/gun/murder culture in the hood,
and black anti black racism.

I maintain that only when the ways in which these issues intersect,
and that the policy, budgetary and community decision address
the above issues, point for point, will we make any headway.

That being said, what would the non-profits, charter schools,
after school programs do if Black men weren't killing each other?
What would they focus on then? What would rappers rap about?

Furthermore, what would the non-profit industrial complex do
without the prison industrial complex?

While I think that Crouch's argument about black on black and white
on black murder is flawed, I agree that the senseless
murdering of black men by black men needs to be addressed,
discussed and eliminated.

Let me be clear, I find the murder of Black men, by black
men to be racist. They aren't killing the symbols of power
that play a roll in upholding the system that oppresses them.
They don't kill the judges, the correction officers,
the probation officer's, task force or state troopers or
FBI agents.

They kill other black men.

Lewis R. Gordon a professor of Philosophy at Temple University
lays out the notion of Black Anti Black Racism, wherein he describes
how black people can act racist towards other black people.
Granted it is a difficult notion to swallow, but it is what it is.

Hate is hate.

I think that it is time that we cultivate dialectical thinking and dual
accountability.

Contact Ella Baker Center if you want to help.

The Blues and Transformation

Still from I'm Through with White Girls

There is something to be said for The "Borderless Relationship"
post, as it was was a catalyst for change in M.dots world.

Out of a desire to both write in a way that reflects what we
have come to be known for, and to also avoid being
outta pocket (see that interest balancing, wink nod wink)
I won't go into the fine print.

Bear in mind that I wrote the above sentence a few times.
I was unsure as to which tone to strike. Anger? Thats
conceivable. Empathy? Of course. In trying to empathize,
at first it felt like, nah homie, I ain't doing that. But then again,
its one thing to talk that personal transformation
talk, but a whole other to practice it when tested. Besides,
aren't life's tests designed to show us what we hold most dear?

In many ways it reflects what many of us do when sorting through
something. We think. We talk. We think. One of the amazing things
about writing is that you do have the time to think, revise, and
rethink, which can drive you nuts, but it can show you things
about yourself that you were unaware of.

However, writing it has proved to be interesting. On one level I am
glad I had the courage to write, glad I was able to see The Graduate
and not rage at his borderless tendencies, glad that I could make a
connection between my borderless relationships of the
past and how it is playing out with Filthy right now.

Still it is hard, because their is a level of uncertainty, tension,
and proverbial sh-t hitting the fan, emotion wise.

I have always contended that "you don't want to bring me
around" if there are things that you want to keep from yourself,
because more than likley those issues will surface.

I think it comes from having seen the best and worse of my parents
at a young age. I survived by cultivating the ability to analyze intent,
capacity, anger and rage of adult human beings starting from the time
I was about 8. It was at that period that I realized that the people
that I knew my parents to be may or may not come back.
It has influenced that way that, perhaps in a way that I can't imagine,
I read see an interact with people in general.

As a result, I have to be careful to not "tell people about
themselves", simply because while it may feel like the right
thing to do at the time, it is, at the end of the day, it is none
of my business.

Blogging however gets me into that a gray area, because I am not just
writing about myself, but others as well, which may get me in that
sticky, icky, ooohhhh wee gray area.

When I write, I write to share, to make a contribution,
and many times simply to make a sense out of an experience
I may have recently had.

Many of you e-mail me to mention a post, to say thank you, or just to show
general appreciation for the fact that I shared something. It's wonderful,
as I know that we are all busy so it shows me that their are folks feel
the contribution being made, which is validating in and of itself.

In the spirit of that sharing, I will say that, ultimately this past week
has shown me that you never really know what life holds and that it
is incredibly important for me to remember that I am powerless over
all people except for myself.

How do you hold on when faced with uncertainty?

What coping mechanisms, if any, do you use to keep
your mind right, during uncertain times?