Thoughts while I break from bar

After reading this post on white feminism & thinking about privilege playing itself out in the immigrant rights' movement and various legislation campaigns:

Thought: in discouraging police cooperation with ICE, is there something problematic/privileged in focusing on police as gatekeepers to protection from DV?

NaBloPoMo (this edition)

you’re privileged if you can discuss rape and violence and anti-gay slurs as if they exist in a dark, secret corner of humanity, and they aren’t something that people deal with every day

this.

Justice, finally, for Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala

I have blogged about Luis Eduardo Ramirez on this blog and on my other blog.

Last year when the perpetrators of the violent beating that took Luis Ramirez's life were found guilty of mere simple assault, I was heartbroken and dumbfounded at the miscarriage of justice that had taken place from the moment the police were called to the scene of the crime.

Today, I am happy to report that two of the assailants, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, were found guilty of committing a federal hate crime. Interestingly, the local bias is still quite evidence in the local paper's coverage of the trial.

The sentencing phase will be coming up next, and these boys may be given up to life imprisonment for their crimes. I don't wish that on them. Just as I wrote a few posts back, in an exploration of the recent 28-year sentence handed down to a 14-year old who raped and robbed his neighbor, I think their ages need to be taken into account. And I believe in rehabilitation, not punishment. But I am just so 100% pleased that Luis's family finally got a fair accounting for what happened that July night. Justice, finally, is served.

Primitive Africans

I don't have it in me to write anything right now. But I have to post this blog post from Stuff White People Do (currently on hiatus) after I just had an infuriating, yet refreshingly blunt, conversation with a friend about "Africans" being more "primitive" and thus closer to our biologically-driven gender roles, since they do a lot of f**king and fighting.

Stuff White People Do - Homogenize people from over fifty country into one group: "Africans"

From that post, I'd like to quote a particular passage that was apropos to our conversation. The passage is itself a lifted from a lecture given by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe.

In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to [my roommate], in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.

...[A]fter I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner.

My friend said there's nothing wrong with being primitive. But I take issue with his completely ignorant view that all most people in Africa (and, he later said, in South America) being primitive to begin with - not having telephones, carrying around spears and following their primal urges wherever those urges may lead them (HIV, population explosion, war). He said that because I don't see "Africans" as primitive that I am idealistic and refuse to acknowledge that US Americans live in a bubble and that not everybody is like us.

EEEEERRRRGGGHHHH. Sometimes I want to scream.

This is not a post about weight

In high school, I was proud of the fact that I didn't care about weight. I was a 95-pound skinny girl who looked like she was still waiting for the puberty train to roll around. When my friends would talk about how little I weighed, I would roll my eyes and remind them that at our 10-year reunion (ha) I'd probably be the heaviest of all of them. After all, being skinny meant I didn't think about what I ate, so I was clogging those arteries and fast! Being in high school, everyone seemed to be self-conscious about something and for many of my girl friends it was about their arms, their thighs, their hips, or whatever. I never understood why they cared about those things. Didn't it only matter what we were like on the inside? Weren't they all pretty, regardless of their shape? Wasn't it good enough to just have fun together? I didn't care when a friend obsessed about her looks or the number on a scale, per se, but I was definitely baffled. And I'll admit it: I was smug. I could rise above such petty matters.

And that, I now realize, was privilege.

I've been paying more attention to issues of privilege lately. It could be because I've stumbled upon some really awesome blogs that talk about important social/cultural issues from perspectives I'm not used to. For example, I had never given much thought to naming and language issues in intercultural adoptions. And shamefully, I'd hardly noticed, much less thought much about, the ways in which mainstream society persistently "others" people with disabilities.

But now I'm noticing things that I do, and those around me do, with much greater frequency. Things like fetishize people of different ethnicities or heritages. There are some things I've long noticed but haven't been able to put a finger on... like the overwhelming dominance of male-ness in punk rock discourse and the persistent hate of "girl singers" -- of which I am quite guilty -- as if all girl singers have one single voice that can be hated on.

Looking back, I can see how easy it was for me not to care about weight when I didn't have any of the cultural repercussions of being outside the socially acceptable weight range. I had a flat stomach, clear skin and plenty of naievete. I didn't have to notice weight because it didn't affect me in any way. But I made no effort to try to understand the concerns of my friends who struggled with eating disorders and low self-esteem. Instead, I just thought they were hung up on something that they shouldn't be hung up on. And that line of reasoning sounds too damn familiar.

There are ways in which I am part of an oppressed minority. I am a woman, part of a class of people that are being systematically oppressed all over the world: laws (or social norms) dictating what we can/can't wear, normalization of domestic violence and rape, slut-shaming, denial of reproductive rights (no condoms for you!), undervalued work, etc. etc. I'm also a Hispanic American at a time when conservative talking heads have a love affair with portraying Latinos as criminals, perverts and dishonest sheisters who come here just to spit out anchor babies.

But I am also an oppressor. I have so much privilege it spills out of my mouth in the things that I say without my even realizing it. I come from a relatively well-off family. I'm college educated. I am light-skinned. I'm American. I am (temporarily) able-bodied. I'm young(ish). I'm straight. And yes, I'm still thin (ish). And that's what interests me more. How am I benefiting from the status quo? What do I stand to lose as people of color, people of other nations, people with disabilities, the poor, the working class, the queer claim a bigger space in the world? What do other stand to gain? How do we all stand to gain? I don't spend enough time listening to other voices on these issues. It's all well and good to think about it and talk about it with my like-minded friends. But thanks to some amazing blogs, I have been hearing from people I might never have heard from otherwise. And for that I'm grateful.

http://resistracism.wordpress.com
http://www.racialicious.com
http://www.feministe.us/blog
http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com
http://www.tigerbeatdown.com

In the Matter of S-G-

S.G., potential ghostwriter of 9th Circuit judicial opinions, is sending emails to her fellow HLS friends just to clarify that "hey! you guys! i'm not as NOT-RACIST as i came across at dinner! really! i am absolutely NOT convinced that 100 black babies would be as smart as 100 white babies if they all grew up together on Space Mountain."

Okay, okay. That's not exactly what she said. I mean, she didn't say "black," she said "African-American"! But, seriously, here's part of it:

"African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders.

This suggests to me that at least some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner."

To read the whole thing, (click here.)

This woman is on Harvard Law Review and has a Judicial Clerkship in the 9th Circuit. And I'm not saying that a private e-mail she sent to her friends should disqualify her from those positions. It happens, as often does, that her offensive emails landed on a pair of eyes that didn't like what they saw, and someone took it upon him or herself to share what they read. The point... ahem

THE POINT is that there are so many people, so many very intellectually capable, white bright people, that go to law school and remain so IGNORANT of how basic concepts like ethnocentricty and socioeconomic status work. And so many of these people, sadly, never become AWARE... because you just don't need to know about racism* or privilege to do well in law school. You don't.

And considering the legal system is so deeply entrenched in privilege and social problems, that's just effing sad.

And by the way... a shout out to Above the Law. Because wow. This guy is for serious? Really?? Don't get me started on the commentary by America's next generation of Hot Shot Lawyers. (Sample: "Why is it fine to say that most African-Americans have better sprint times and are quicker, due to a higher proportion of Type II muscle fibers, and have bigger junk (come on, does anyone doubt this), yet it's not fine to acknowledge what decades of research have shown over and over again regarding African-Americans' IQs?")

* Or sexism or ableism or genderism or classism or any of the other -isms that Lat over at ATL think are so darn unhelpful to talk about in an academic debate

ETA: I took out the (publicly available) name of the person who wrote the email because I wish to focus on the culture of law schools, not the individual whose remarks sparked this particular controversy.

Who you are when nobody is watching

dylan says:

Now the Baracki Boy decides in time to dump the Wright to save his own political career
another deceitful black who will lie to win back white votes
you've lost mine you ignorant black boy!!!
...
who is this ignorant black scum OBAMA kidding??

He just found out his spiritual mentor for twenty years is a nut job??

You are despicable Obama

You & your big butted fat lipped wife who hates America should go back to Kenya & look for all the other kids your dead beat dad had & take care of them instead of running for president

YOU ARE ONE UGLY HUMAN BEING!!!

Sound familiar?