I feel like I have learned an enormous amount from the RaceFail posts. I have not engaged, except to occasionally thank people, because as I have watched other people make mistakes I would have made and be quite rightly corrected, I was able to understand the importance of just sitting back and listening, Of learning without burdening others with my slow steps.

But I face a dilemma. I am an academic, a grad student anthropologist, and I am writing papers and presenting at conferences. I have a responsibility to incorporate racism. I simply cannot sit back and listen, my career depends on me speaking up. And the big reason that this IS my career is because I WANT to speak up and make change.

That means that I'm going to try to make my slow steps public. It means that I'm going to try to benefit, professionally, from attempting to be anti-racist. And even though I am certainly not a white person whose social network is made up exclusively (or even predominantly) of white people, and even though there are WoC who write and work on issues related to racism who are helping me check my work, I am still painfully aware of how much of a novice I am in recognizing my privilege.

My problem is by no means a new one. Even though I'm not trying to speak for others so much as for myself and the world I want to live in, my failure, because of my privilege, will hurt others more than me. I am going to f* up, and I am going to hurt people in the process. And it is a fact of my privilege that I will be able to do this and it probably won't hurt my career. But the alternative, making my career about something else, is much worse. I feel called to educate. I feel called to make change for social justice. And I believe that it is my moral obligation (as a human being, as a Christian, as a future-mother of future-children of color, as well as my personal calling that I am morally obliged to follow) to make my life about this.

So, I am uncomfortable. As I should be. Discomfort is not fun.

--

P.S. Feel free to pat me on the back, this is MY lj, after all. However, if you're going to suggest that it's not a big deal that I'm going to hurt people, or that I shouldn't worry so much about my privilege, please refrain and read some of the amazing stuff by brilliant people on why that is not the case.

ETA: also feel free to disagree with me. Duh.

Okay, so there's like a million awesome school things to talk about today. So awesome, in fact, that I have to list them. (A great opportunity for a pretentious list, too! Can this day get any radder?)

(adviser) I met with SS today. She is a total beast. I've been wanting her on my committee but she's been in the field all year and wants to KNOW ME before she jumps on board. So, I'm taking her class on Women in U.S. Health next semester.
I want her because these are the research interests she lists: Identity, ethnicity and community in health care; United States; HIV/AIDS; governmentality; access to health care; social movements; gender and sexuality. Did I really not immediately identify her as THE NUMBER ONE PERSON I TOTALLY HAVE TO WORK WITH?
And I read one of her articles on the "Politics of Recognition" and she talks about getting away from bounded notions of identity and "cultural competence" in health care and towards a participatory model based on reciprocity and getting target communities involved in their health care instead of some hierarchical, "here's what your people need" approach. And, can we just review? Her work is totally theoretically grounded AND applicable in meaningful (politically engaged) ways! *dorky cry of glee*
And when I met with her? I was totally cogent talking about my research! 

(bootstrap bullshit) After that I went to a talk about welfare queens. That is, the scholar - a prof who opened by telling about her teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and use of welfare - debunked a lot of the ideas held about what mothers on welfare look like. She presented all of these amazing women - most women of color - who fate had shit on, standing up and getting degrees and pulling themselves out of poverty. She challenged the problematic scapegoating of teen moms, and the awful oxymoron of saying teen moms are too immature to be welfare recipients (cuz they'll just spend it on fake nails) - it was all very relevant to the lit review I did last semester. The PROBLEMS were that she really didn't ultimately combat the problematic bootstrap myth, the neoliberal discourse of choice, that underlies all of this demonization of poor women. And she reinforced a couple of things about Latinas (specifically that Mexican American families don't want their daughters to be educated). But, she said some really important things about higher education as, economically speaking, the best route for gov't intervention for poor people.

(committee) THEN I met with SL, my prof in the History of Anthro Theory and told him about my secret intellectual idea about writing an article type of thing defending tenure. I have this whole thing in my head. With a little more cross-cultural research, I think it could be really good. And it would be very differet from my main research, which could be good for showing my depth down the line.

(dissertation) And then there was ANOTHER talk, this one about undocumented students, and making schools safer places. They basically compared the problem with "color-blindness" (that is, teachers pretending that their students "don't have a race" and thereby erasing their identities and their real lives) to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell approach to legal status. On the one hand, I'm with it. On the other hand, however, I think that community work has to happen alongside this, because getting kids talking about legal status with OTHER kids who might tell their Border Patrol mommies and daddies is not cool. Also, I have my doubts about school as a safe space for immigrant kids of color, regardless of this silencing of legal status. I mean, as long as gang involvement is linked to immigrant status and ethnicity, and as long as suspected gang members are being targeted for policing (e.g., "go home and change that shirt, there's too much blue on it!"), I doubt that creating spaces for students to talk freely about a (stigmatized) legal status is very helpful. HOWEVER, the idea that there should be an oath for teachers protecting them from having to share information about students that might incriminate them seems like a pretty good one to me, as long as it puts no other student in danger.

(ethnography) And so I've been thinking about my research again, and I'm pretty excited about it, but that will have to wait for another entry since this one's already too long!

Despite the fact that the class I am TAing for, called Many Ways of Being Human, is an intro to anthropology and not intended to be about racism, I cannot envision doing anything without talking about racism. Given the history of anthropology, given where I am working, given who my students are, I simply cannot imagine it.

When I worked with Identity, Inc and the Spanish-speaking immigrant youth who participated in that program and talking about (surprise!) identity, racism came up. It came up because people experienced racism and because they had racist things to say. Usually they experienced racism from White people and Black people, and those who had had racist things to say said them about Black people (and occasionally Asian people). It was not my job to teach them how not to be racist, it was my job to support them in resisting the racism they faced.

Now, here, I have a very different job description. I don't know how many kids in my section identify as PoC. It could be as many as half the 3/4 of the class, it could be as little as 1/7. When I brought white privilege into a conversation (I tried to ease us in by talking about classed space), at least half the class was extremely resistant to the idea.

Last week, I spoke at length (outside of class) with a White female student who, in addition to living in Africa for a while, has a number of (adopted) sibilings of color, and went to high school where she was "one of three white students in her class of 120." Her response to this has been to decide (as I suspect her mother taught her) that the world should be colorblind, and that in fact, she IS colorblind.

We had a nice long conversation about it. I broke down for her a couple of the ways that being "colorblind" is so totally not anti-racist and challenged her both on the quotidian and ideal applications of her desire for a world that ignores the differences wrapped up in that symbolic word/concept "color."

I'm pretty sure she didn't get it. When she left, my parting words were, "don't get to comfortable with your resistance," but I don't think she's ready to be uncomfortable. It took me a while, too, so I still hope, for her sake, that even after she forgets this conversation entirely, some of the ideas nudge her in new directions.

But, after the conversation, I had to sit and think about my own advice. It's gotten pretty comfortable, sitting in front of a group of relatively uninformed students and challenging them to both stop exoticizing and reducing to white-for-all-intents-and-purposes. It's gotten pretty easy to forget that, informed or not, my words in the classroom and out of it (my words in my research in particular), however much they may INTEND to be anti-racist (as my student intended to be), may silence rather than support. In her good intentions, I saw my own, and it was an uncomfortable reminder. But if there's anything that reassures me, it is the fact that I am uncomfortable.

Now, back to work! 

I'm reading an article for my Ethnographic Discourse Analysis class called "Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant" by Rusty Barrett and it is bringing back all KINDS of uncomfortable memories.

I was 18 when I first worked at La Madeleine, a faux-French restaurant in chic Bethesda. When I started, I was the only U.S. born person and the only White person working there, including the managers, and the non-managers were split evenly between immigrant Africans (Cameroon, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, etc.) and immigrant Latinos (from El Salvador and Mexico). Because the Africans were more bilingual (French and English), and because my French was better than my Spanish, I began as friends with them, particularly a man named Omar from Cameroon who continues to be one of the most genuinely good and kind people I've ever met in my life. Although I'd taken two years of Spanish in high school, I was completely unable to communicate with most of the Latinos whose English was far better than my Spanish but still not enough to have real conversations.

I'm not sure why I was inspired to really get to know my Spanish-speaking colleagues, when (from Barrett's article), it is obvious that many white people would simply prefer to keep to the communities they already understood. Barrett mentions how other white people would come and ask him how to say, "Fuck off" and other words that they could use to "put Hispanics in their place" if they felt they were being insulted (179), and I have to say I fully understand the impulse. I was constantly the butt of some of my coworkers jokes (particularly two middle aged Salvadoran women who constantly brought me up in sexual contexts, even bringing a little wind up penis to work and asking me over and over if I liked it - I brought a great deal of this on myself* by shocking them with the information that I was attracted to women as well as men), and as in order to learn Spanish (getting people to teach me vocabularly constantly and children's songs and desperately trying to have conversations despite the language barrier) I was forced to play the clown, a foolish, sluttish outsider. I'd say that I took the whole thing good naturedly, I recognized how much I had to learn, and being the ONLY White United Statesian, as well as the youngest, newest employee surely shifted my expectations for power and authority. I recognized that I had more upward mobility than anyone else working there, but I was also very very young, emotionally and socially if not physically.

By the second summer, the restaurant was changing; there were more Latinos and fewer Africans and the new managers were all U.S. born and the GM was white. She was pretty awful and her treatment of the Spanish-speaking employees was shameful. I had grown close to some of my coworkers, had written letters to them in broken Spanish during the school year, and once I returned home, spent almost every afternoon hanging out, driving them on errands, and helping out where English was necessary. But I was still the butt of jokes, still the foolish outside, and I was not yet terribly competent at understanding the social expectations of such an environment. I drew constantly during the extended down times and teased back and forth with people, including the Latino bilingual manager. I recall with real deep shame when I drew a picture of a woman with big ears, a flat head, and droopy breasts, labeled it "Your Mom" and gave it to said manager WHILE HE WAS AT A TABLE WITH CUSTOMERS. It would have been over the line in any case - although I didn't fully understand that in part because of the way I was teased by some of my Spanish-speaking coworkers - but it was totally unacceptable the way I did it. His reaction was profound and utter disbelief and a clear reprimand. I was very confused and apologetic, but I really didn't get it.

Of course, none of this is really about restaurant Spanish language ideologies, except perhaps some of mine. But even though my restaurant experiences were quite different from Barrett's in Chalupatown, there is enough in common that I question some of his conclusions about the use of Spanish and Mock Spanish. Much of it rings true - Mock Spanish was certainly used both to feel good about one's "accomodation" of the inferior/ignorant Spanish-speaker while simultaneously signalling a non-Latino identity. I can't say a White identity, as Barrett does, because my experience of it came from Africans and Black United Statesians. But there were times that it wasn't used that way, that instead what is undeniably Mock Spanish was used as something different. That is, Spanish-speakers AND English-speakers would use some of these words, like "finito" (which referred explicitly to the end of one's shift: "finito?" is your shift done? "finito!" my shift is done). When I tried - over a couple of weeks - to get someone to teach me the RIGHT way of asking this, something like terminado? or te vas?, I was consistently rebuffed and retaught "finito" by my multiple teachers. Although I had initially identified "finito" as something like Mock Spanish, by the end I thought it might actually be a Salvadoran innovation. Perhaps I was being intentionally excluded from proper Spanish (that is, a fluid conversation between two Spanish speakers), but my sense was that there were a number of words and phrases that became a sort of pidgin and were used as powerfully by Spanish-speakers as by English-speakers. I do not suggest that there was not racial tension - there certainly was, though (at least my first summer) in different ways from Barrett's experience - but when communication broke down, there was obvious frustration and disapproval on both sides. It is no surprise that the English speakers had more power in those relationships, but I believe it is a mischaracterization to suggest that the use of these Mock Spanish words were simply indicative of a "can't-be-bothered" attitude on the part of English-speakers that served as an excuse to escape blame for communication breakdowns. Not being in a position to use such commands very frequently myself (as the youngest and newest I took orders, I didn't give any), this observation came from watching such interactions take place every day (and break down every day).

Of course, I was no anthropologist carefully versed in what to be watching, and I obviously missed a great deal (which I intended to illustrate clearly in mentioning my embarrassing well-intentioned racist drawing), but I don't think that necessarily makes what I did get completely useless. Beyond the simple difference of experience, I think it is important to actually bring up the possibility of a restaurant pidgin that worked in conjunction with Mock Spanish, rather than a simple instance of well-intentioned racism. I do not intend to contest the idea that racism was at play and at work in the language use there, but I do contest the idea that Latinos were only resistant in their use of Spanish to exclude English-speakers. Instead, I suggest that the use of Mock Spanish by Spanish-speakers became an act of resistance in itself, and was wielded against incompetent managers and coworkers.




* After a convo with my bud tatterpunk I feel like I should add here that I do not think sharing my sexual identity should have necessarily opened me to such sexual teasing, only that sometimes it does. And the experience helped me to learn what sort of places I need to be more wary. Again, not that queer people should have to be wary, but that sadly we don't live in that world most of the time. Also, this is nothing compared to the badness that could have come, and I am glad I learned the lesson in such a relatively harmless way.
----

I have decided to leave this a public entry for now. I'm a little nervous, as my presentation of myself feels risky, but if I took the risky parts out, you wouldn't be able to fully appreciate the context of these observations and ideas. I have often spoken up in favor of such risky anthropology, and even though this isn't anthropology I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is. That said, if I get too flamed, I'm exercising my privilege and friend-locking this puppy.

Y'all probably heard about the 7 young men who went "beaner-jumping" and killed Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero. You are, undoubtedly, horrified that such racial hate crimes are still happening. Talking about it with a friend, I learned about race-costume parties such as in Santa Clara University and Delaware, where students came dressed up as janitors, cholas, landscapers and pregnant teens. Of course it's problematic, but what it says about gender is really interesting, too. The options available to men were either really low-status low-pay jobs or gangbangers, for women, the options were a deprecated form of motherhood or gangbangers.

Of course, people were outraged and hurt. But what really interests me is that pregnant Latinas got recognized as representative. See, I've been essentially making the argument that it is something that we white United Statesians have been panicking about for quite a while now. We first saw it in the early immigration policies that restricted Mexican female immigration based on fears of hyper-fertility. But what's a little surprising is that Latinas don't get pregnant more often than, say, African Americans ages 15-19, but they sure as heck have more live births. Also, Latinas are by far the most likely of the three groups (Latinas, Blacks, and Whites) to be married as well as a teen parent.

So, bizarrely, Latinas are really doing a great job of successfully following the government funded abstinence only until marriage curricula that emphasize that the BEST sex (their capitals not mine) happens in marriage. They don't advocate waiting until you're a certain age to get married, but they do emphasize the misery of single teen mothers (and a number of other horrible things about appropriate gender norms that I won't get into here).

What's crazy is that the outrage is over a party that acknowledges stereotypes. Is the problem that it isn't merely acknowledgement but mockery? That in and of itself, such an event perpetuates the categories it shows? Because, of course there are plenty of Latinos who DON'T fit those stereotypes, but we who fight for equality fight because there are many who do. We recognize exactly what those partygoers recognized, that being a pregnant or parenting teen is stigmatized for women of color and thus limits your opportunities for economic success, that Latino men - especially immigrant Latinos - are stuck in the dirtiest manual labor. Does silencing the topic prevent it from occurring? (Michelle Fine, at least, would say no.) Does laughing at the problem, and mocking it under a strobe light, make it more prevalent? Or is it a way of accepting the status quo?

As much as I recognize the problems of this, and as much as I know that the intent was not to raise awareness of the political problems of these stereotypes, I cannot help but feel that this play did more to challenge these realities than it did to accept them. The violence done to Latinos was not the naming of the stigma, but the system that keeps people in the stigmatized roles, and, perhaps the stigmatization in the first place. And while I DO agree that the party reinforced the stigmas of teen pregnancy and landscaping, who among those calling foul would hope for those roles for their own children?

Discussion welcome.

Pro-immigrant advocates are annoying the hell out of me. We are allowing the debate to be framed almost entirely by the nativists. When I go looking on cafepress or even google for "immigration" I find thousands of things saying variants of "Learn English or Get the Fuck Out" and saying "Pay Your Taxes, Illegal Immigrants are Counting On You." Some of them have the balls to insist that they're not bigoted. Yeah, what's racist about conflating an entire ethnicity and continent with exploitation of social programs? *rolls eyes* It's expected, of course, but what upsets me is the total dearth of intelligent responses. "No Human Being Is Illegal" and some variant of "We Do the Jobs You Don't Want" exist, but they are few and far between.

The big defense of these anti-immigrant sentiments is that people "support" legal immigration. But, of course, for the most part, people really don't except in the most passive way. While ignoring that we have an immigration policy that allows virtually no poor (please, if you don't have a very well-paying and established job, you can't even get a visa to visit!), no tired workers, and certainly no huddled masses yearning to live free (Salvadorans trying to escape the violence, for example, don't count as refugees). Laws that come up - when they rarely do - that might expand legal immigration to come closer to recognizing the demand for entry are shut down with the same fears of racial swamping.

I support legal immigration and despise illegal immigration, but I recognize that the problem isn't the immigrants, it's the system. Here's my inadequate metaphor: If we suddenly made a law that children under the age of three had to spend at least 8 waking hours of the day with their parents, for example, it would immediately criminalize a huge segment of the population. It's an admirable ideal (well ... sort of), but is (in my imagination) put into place with no attention given to additional funding for child care, or changing business practices to allow parents to have their children at work. The immigration laws are similarly out of touch with reality and what funding and related policy does exist is aimed only at punishing people who break the law, not avoiding the situation that causes the law to be consistently broken in the first place.

I want to see bumper stickers, T-shirts, and ad campaigns talking about the awesomeness of immigrants. Talking about the potential of their children to make our country great (if only we wouldn't block them from higher education), highlighting adults' work ethic (but enough of the "we do the shitty jobs" line, for real) and the reinvigoration of family values. But what advocacy organizations exist are so overwhelmed by defending people who've had their rights shit on and doing on the ground work that they have no money or time for public relations. Meanwhile, the Minutemen and assholes like Sheriff Joe Arpaio go around showing off how they hold people at gunpoint for not having identification and parading immigrant detainees around in pink underwear.

WHY AREN'T PEOPLE HORRIFIED? WHY ARE WE SILENT? How can a country that tries to export democracy and women's rights, a country that made Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, ignore the human rights abuses, the systematic, explicit, and intentional relegation of millions of people living in the country to criminality and generations in hiding as an underclass? 

I don't get it. And I don't get why people aren't making more noise.

I understand the fear - my grandparents have told me about their experience of it - but I don't understand why people who understand that this fear is no different from the fear that allowed Jim Crow laws don't speak up.

This is worse than explicit racism, because at least no one seems to think that is defendable any more. Hatred and violence against immigrants, on the other hand, is being celebrated.

If you are a person who is on the fence about this issue, and have managed to read (or skim) this post 'till the end, please comment. What keeps you from speaking up? Do you feel like there's a lack of information? What anti-immigrant rhetoric resonates for you?

I promise I won't fight with you and I would dearly like to know.

Hey there. Do you ever find yourself thinking: why are there so undocumented immigrants? Why don't they just deal with the red tape and come in legally?

Well, thanks to Boing Boing, I found "Reason put together this excellent flow chart (beautifully illustrated by Suck.com alum Terry Colon!) that describes the various paths of the US immigration process." Click on it to see the original full-size.

(eugenics*) So life kicked into high gear last week. I lost my laptop (but recovered it) and realized that just because I'm keeping up with class readings does not mean I'm actually keeping up. Hello research projects! I struggled madly to figure out what I wanted to do (why must theses be clear and concise? why not vague and wide-ranging?) and more once I realized what doing it would entail.

(filibusters*) I realized that meditating can no longer be an "optional" part of my daily routine. I've been more consistent on meditation here (about 5 days a week) than I ever was back in D.C., but it just isn't enough. Those days when I lost things? (You remember: my debit card, school ID, driver's license, and laptop.) All occurred on days or the morning after days in which I failed to find time to meditate. Beyond that, and its obvious effect on my insomnia, it also simply makes me FEEL better. I can read more and longer. I understand things more deeply. I am more likely to do my pathetic little exercise routine (pushups, crunches and leg lifts on the floor of my office in between readings). And my shoulders feel less tense.

(growers*) I'm enjoying my Mexican Immigration class a lot, except I feel like a lot of the students are re-hashing stuff everybody should already know by now. Hello! We're in grad school! Can't we just take for granted that Manifest Destiny was a crucial part of U.S. history? I want to go deeper than blaming the media - it's too easy to say and too impossible to correct. And I'm annoyed that we keep trying to have a conversation about "why immigration policy is bad" instead of talking about the root causes (in my opinion, the "Zero Sum Game"/Culture War perspective that hypes xenophobic warnings of "racial swamping" and the basic question - not detailed laws - of how we define citizenship) and trying to come up with solutions. I realize this is only the third week, but the semester is short, people! (As I covered in point 1.)

(hyperfertility*) I am preparing to get started on research. At this point my research ideas involve interviewing (and/or surveying) high school nurses and/or teachers before, during, and after they teach sex ed. I'll be trying to elicit information about cultural values around sex and comparing them with what is already known about strategies in Latino families around pregnancy-prevention (the focus of my MA thesis and NSF grant proposal), differences in language choice between "sex talk" and other talk (the sociolinguistics project), and perspectives and opinions about the effects of immigrant status on academic success and sexual risk (for the Mexican Immigration class). As you can see, I'm trying to minimize the number of research sites I will have to develop. All this is dependant, however, on IRB (Institutional Review Board/Human Subjects) approval. I've passed the Human Subjects training, now I just have to get my proposal in.

(immigration*) This weeks list is all about immigration. Allow me to explain "One cannot divorce the Border Patrol's founding in 1924 from an era when eugenics was the rage." (Dying to Live, 111) Filibusters were the name given to expansionist raids from California and Texas into Mexico after the Civil War. U.S. growers had a major impact on immigration trends when it became their policy (supported by the Border Patrol) to recruit undocumented labor and bring them across the Border in huge numbers, growers are still a huge lobby impacting bad labor conditions (human rights concerns), unrealistic Border policies, and continued cycles of migration. And, as you may have heard, Mexican women have been a particular demographic threat because of their supposed hyperfertility.

Okay, greenity I didn't ignore your comment, I just wasn't ready to answer it yet.

My information about them is so profoundly limited that I have trouble imagining how my observations would be of much interest. So if, for example, I seem to condone what appears to be heinous, take it to mean that I simply do not want to condemn what I know nothing about and vice versa.

The experience in Colorado City (back from that trip to Northern Arizona last month) consisted of the following:
1) about 15 minutes of background info from a professor who has worked in the area for years (with the Kaibab Paiute, not FLDS)
2) going and buying snacks at a grocery store manned (actually womanned) by FLDS women with long hair french braided in the back and poofed up in the front and wearing long simple dresses. Just like the women whose kids got taken, if you want a popular image.
3) eating lunch at a little dive that sold FLDS tracts next to the register, one of which I picked up and read
4) more conversation afterward in the car with 7 other anthro people.

The time in the store was the most interesting to me. I immediately walked away from my companions and looked through the aisles alone. It was obvious that we were part of the same group, because of our clothes and hair and manners we stuck out like sore thumbs. Apart from the women at the registers, there were a number of women with small children doing their shopping. Despite sticking out, I was not apparently the object of their or their children's attention. But whereas my companions, who walked around speaking loudly (I thought), appeared to be pretty much ignored, when I smiled at someone or greeted them, they smiled back and talked to me as well.

The girl who rang me up struck me at the time as pretty young, but on reflection she was no younger than girls who ring me up at the Safeway in back home. What was different was my interpretation of her working and her youth. I saw her as "of a marriageable age" and working to support her family in a system that seems utterly foreign to me, as opposed to the youth I'm used to who are NOT of a marriageable age, although they are certainly old enough to have children of their own and are part of a system that I'm far more comfortable with.

In the restaurant, a young mother with two children allowed her little daughter - 2 years old? - to run to the front counter. The little girl slipped right in front of me and nailed her face in the counter. She ran back to her mother and who comforted her. What really surprised me though was that she barely made any sound as she sobbed. I glanced to my professor who tacitly confirmed my question about whether the relative silence of the girl was cultural. I can't IMAGINE a 2-year-old in my culture having that occur in that particular way and staying so quiet. It disturbed me more than anything else I saw. Certainly more than the huge vans for families with many mothers and tons of kids or than the half-built houses everywhere designed to evade taxes. I would like to think that the little girl was "naturally" like that, but her excitement, her energy in her run, suggest to me that was not the case.

Finally, the tract. It was, undoubtedly, screwed up. It begins with an explanation of the sexual evils of woman and appears to be aimed at men avoiding them, then the main part begins. The story is of a woman, dying of a disease in the most abject poverty possible with babies all around (also, apparently, starving and dying) who explains that all this has happened because she cheated on her husband (she was a second wife) with a bad (young) man.  Yes indeed. It's almost comic. My only question is whether, by refusing to accompany the FLDS preacher back to civilization to avoid people's attention (scorn? pity?) she is considered to be atoning (even though it will mean the eventual death of her children by starvation when she dies) or she is considered to be beyond help. At any rate the preacher leaves her and the thing ends with another exhortation to women to stop being such big sluts. It is beyond doubt that this is related to community conceoptions of marriage, gender, and theology, but if my experience reading ancient Greek myths has taught me ANYTHING its that what the men write ain't necessarily what the women think or live. Another example is of the FLDS women going with their children to some of the reservation casinos in the area.

So, what do I think? It sure as hell isn't a life I'd want, and I strongly doubt that the situation allows for polygamy in a happy healthy way for anybody concerned. Furthermore, I am quite concerned by the idea that people need help from the FBI agents constantly stationed there to be able to escape. I sympathize with them because they are certainly persecuted, but living outside the law means that there is no protection for those powerless INSIDE the society, and that gives me the heebee-geebies.

Now I am very curious, greenity , why you asked.

I would be HORRIFIED to have her as an executive (or vice executive) in the White House, but mostly for all the obvious policy reasons. At some level, Sarah Palin's personal drama really doesn't matter. That her daughter is pregnant, that she herself was a beauty queen, that she decided to go to a speech instead of a hospital when she was leaking amniotic fluid, these are all pretty irrelevant to her ability to be a good VP or even a good ticket-helper in and of themselves. It is the political context that makes them relevant.

The context, very broadly speaking, is that she has very little experience, executive or otherwise professional, that she is the second woman ever on a major election ticket when the other side's a little bruised about losing their female candidate, and that she is firmly esconced in the conservative religious right's social perspectives.

The first fact means that she is a liability when talking about Obama's inexperience, particularly when you realize that her time as mayor left her town in financial ruin.* The little bit of her political experience that IS relevant is her position on Oil and Energy, but as far as I'm concerned the GOP can wave that around as much as they want. If her's is an energy perspective that gets people to the polls in such numbers that McCain is elected, I'm moving to Canada. Generally speaking, however, the minimal existence of political experience means that we, the voters, should be paying more attention to other things about her. Like the fact that she's a woman and her social positions/values.

Her positioning as a Woman VP is, I must admit, totally fascinating and profoundly repellant to me. On the one hand, I must agree that it would be pretty damn cool to have a woman in that position, as I'm sure many others will agree, but I find it very hard to believe that this would tip someone over the edge in terms of voting for her unless they really found themselves at an impasse regarding the other stuff - like charisma of the two "real" candidates, their positions (for those who bother to find out), their social perspectives, etc. Some of the PUMAs have said they feel patronized by the choice, and I'm inclined to agree with them. But I just can't believe that McCain would really think that the simple fact of her gender would make the difference.

It is the third point, her social perspective, that matters. And her gender, previously so oddly emphasized, suddenly seems incredibly relevant. She is not just anti-choice, she is an anti-choice Woman and one who has lived her beliefs. The latter, in particular, is something that you have to at least passively respect. But beyond the reproductive rights issue, which I am loathe to leave despite knowing that you all have the details already, she represents a whole slew of "traditional family values." That means that she identifies not only FIRST as a mother but almost EXCLUSIVELY as a mother. It's a little weird, and a little hard to believe given that controversial plane ride, but the fact is she is not running as the Gov. of Alaska but as a "hockey mother" turned politician, phrased as though it were just a step or two away from the PTA. It's where her beauty queen status, reinforcing all the "traditional" stereotypes about what a really successful woman not only DOES but LOOKS LIKE, reminds people that she is "us" and furthermore, the "best" of us. It's where it starts to really matter that she's had as many kids as she had and still manages a baby with Down's while she does an incredibly demanding job. She isn't a super-politician, she's supermom from the paper towel commercials. 

And it is also in that third point that the critiques of Sarah Palin really start to get to me. Because, frankly, when we criticize her decisions regarding the amniotic fluid and the hospital, we are not criticizing anything even remotely policy relating, we're critiquing in parenting abilities. When we talk about her daughter's decision - however influenced by her mother - to have the child that she conceived so young, we are talking about 1) Sarah Palin's failure to "teach her daughter" (about abstinence or safer sex, depending on how you look at it). There are other ways we think about it - that she is creating with her policy stances a world in which her daughter should be ashamed, uneducated, and unsupported by the system - but at some level we cannot avoid her involvement, her PARENTING, of the young woman in question. And its not that a male VP with a daughter in the same position wouldn't be questioned in the same way, but if he were, we wouldn't be questioning his very gender identity. Sarah Palin's "failure" is her failure as a mother, the parent "in charge" of imparting this sort of information to their child, the one who (if she were around enough, the stereotype goes) should have been able to avoid this situation. And by raising questions of that sort, we are totally reinforcing the ideas that being a successful mother is all that is really ultimately important to a woman. Just the sort of thing that her social credentials are out their to inspire.


If you've managed to read this whole post, I'd love to hear your response. I'm a little isolated out here without my buddies and family to argue with, so your opinion is even more desirable than usual.



*I read all this stuff in various places published by the Daily Kos and AP. If you want to be credible, go look it up yourself, but no one official reads this blog so I'm not going to.




P.S. This philosophy stuff ain't so bad. And I like Kant's perspective.

If you're like me, you feel like Immigration Laws in this country are seriously fucked up, but exactly how or why or what can be done to improve them seems to lie beyond your grasp.

If you're like me, you have seen some of the effects of "illegality" second-hand and know at a deep level that criminalization of such an enormous group is ridiculous. The dangers seem to have been caused by the law itself creating an underground economy and legal vulnerability for the people it affects (except for the CEOs it affects).

But, if you're like me, you will have a sort of vague faith that the laws in the United States - or at least the really important ones that effect major chunks of the population - are well thought out, at least minimally consistent (even if they are moving consistently in one direction), and reflect reality to the best of our legislators abilities.

You'd be wrong about that last one.

I've started my reading for the class I'm taking on Mexican Immigration and the first article documents the history of U.S. immigration policy towards Mexico. It is too complicated and varied to summarize here (a couple of my favorite parts, though, include when the Border Patrol had a policy of actively recruiting Mexicans to illegally cross the border and when they capped Mexico's number of immigrants at less than a tenth - a twentieth? it could be much smaller - of the number that they had coming in at the time). I wish this article were available online, but its not. However, if you're interested, let me know and I'll send it for you. If you're even the LEAST bit interested in the future of immigration policy in the U.S. (and why it is so impossible to fix it) it seems like a good thing to check out.

Forgive the repost, but it says it more eloquently than I could, and I think it every day. Thanks to Trishie for the link.

Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. After the largest raid ever last month — at a meatpacking plant in Iowa — hundreds were swiftly force-fed through the legal system and sent to prison. Civil-rights lawyers complained, futilely, that workers had been steamrolled into giving up their rights, treated more as a presumptive criminal gang than as potentially exploited workers who deserved a fair hearing. The company that harnessed their desperation, like so many others, has faced no charges.

Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.

This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.

There are few national figures standing firm against restrictionism. Senator Edward Kennedy has bravely done so for four decades, but his Senate colleagues who are running for president seem by comparison to be in hiding. John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so. The American public’s moderation on immigration reform, confirmed in poll after poll, begs the candidates to confront the issue with courage and a plan. But they have been vague and discreet when they should be forceful and unflinching.

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

---

I really want my grandparents to read this. The link follows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/opinion/03tue1.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=The+Great+Immigration+Panic&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Clinton is out of the race, and I can hardly believe it’s over. I still have no regular access to the internet and read the news in the El Mercurio that Guille’s parents picked up when they went out for breakfast this morning. I was troubled that the last line of the article announced that, obviously, a large number of the people who SAY they’ll vote for a black man actually won’t when they get to the poll. I think that is much more likely to be a representation of the country we are in now than in the U.S., and it annoys me that in such a short article that would be the only line about how things will shake out in the major election. I think it furthers the misrepresentations of racial politics in the U.S. But, anyway, go Obama and bless Clinton for backing him now.


In more travel news, this vacation is a bit exhausting! Yesterday we left the house and ate a special lunch of cuy (COO-ee), or guinea pig, with Guille’s mom’s long lost cousin and his family, then went to there house to hang out until the sun was down. I wasn’t exactly feeling social when we left the house the first time, so it was a very very long day. I felt like I used to feel after church and I couldn’t get my parents to wrap up their conversations so we could go HOME already! But despite my anti-social tendencies, I did enjoy meeting them all. And it was pretty neat to eat cuy – Maria del Carmen (Guille’s cousin) says that the raising and cooking of cuyes is very labor intensive, and when you eat it you are symbolically getting “the best” of what the family has to offer.

Sunday we went on a recorrido – a drive, maybe? – from our house in Calyabamba to Gualaceo, to San Bartolome, to Paute, to a couple other places that I’m forgetting. I got beautiful silver jewelry in Chiruleg (?), where it is the specialty, including a silver rosary for my Virgin of Quito statue and a pair of traditional filigreed earrings called condonga (?). Guille was hoping to get a handmade guitar by one of the lutiers of San Bartolome, but they all seemed to be having their day off. Well, it was Sunday, so I guess that makes sense. Paute, where Guille’s mama was born, was no less beautiful and we stopped at a shop where Nelly’s aunt used to work, behind which she still lives. We talked for a while in her beautiful, antique home with lace everywhere and old European portraits on the walls. She lamented the influx of Peruvians to the area – a result of the job opportunities in the flower industry – and explained how the “quiet, simple, peaceful” people of Paute were unprepared for the thieving, raping immigrants. To be honest, hearing that was one of the most interesting parts of the trip thus far. Migration is a hugely important subject here, but not necessarily something you can approach directly if you want to really understand its effects, since there are so many politics surrounding it.

Read the whole post: Undocumented but not Un-American

Most of the kids I worked with weren't that eloquent, but I don't think that any would disagree with him.

I didn't watch it until it came out on YouTube, and I've been so down recently about politics with their dip towards attacks and negative associations that I wasn't sure I was going to. But then, when I went down for lunch, I saw Dad.

He started telling me about the speech - really ended up quoting chunks of it word for word - and by the time he got to the end, and the story of Ashley, he was crying. He felt like Obama had said everything he'd ever wanted to say about what we need to heal our nation around race. My dad isn't a stoic or anything, but I've never seen him so moved by a politician or a speech.

As the commentary on YouTube has already proven that it doesn't really matter what he says, people are going to continue to assign him the role of divider because he dared to speak critically about race, but I hope that my Dad is right and that this speech goes down in history alongside Lincoln's 2nd inauguration and MLK's.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!

Immigration is an incredibly complicated issue. It seems that there is no good answer. For me, the questions raised by the multitude of undocumented people in this country are primarily social justice concerns. And even if I do not have an emotional reaction to the idea of a border-wall (except, perhaps, of disdain), I do appreciate that there must be some way to regulate immigration into the country, lest the influx overwhelm the resources of the system. Which leads to the point that citizens of the United States are paying for those resources, and their objections are valid even if I strongly disagree with them.

The point that seems most defensible is not my emotional response of social justice or the xenophobic response of so many people I know. The point is, as Bill Richardson explained first and Barack Obama jumped on, one of public health, safety, and (beyond their specific point relating to drivers' licenses) success. If we don't provide access to health care for everyone, we risk an unhealthy underclass of citizens who - not living in isolation - threaten the health of the "rest of us". If we don't provide drivers' licenses, we risk more hit and run drivers. And, to extend it perhaps farther than our politicians are willing, if we deny educational opportunities, we are ensuring that the best and brightest will never be more than unskilled workers thus decreasing our comparative advantage in the cutting edge of science, technology, and even academia. The last one is why legislation like the Dream Act is so crucial.

I am pleased that Hillary Clinton supports the Dream Act, though disappointed about her flip on the driver's license issue. I am glad that Barack Obama's rhetoric for cracking down on employers of undocumented workers is to protect the "people living in the shadows" rather than to somehow protect the American people from those baddies, the scary immigrants out to steal their job. I am very glad that Barack addressed the emotional fear-laden response so many people have to the topic of immigration. I wish that it weren't political suicide for people to come out more unequivocally against the fear-mongering hype that extremists like the Minutemen have created against the refugees they have so effectively criminalized.

Ancient Greek virgins. Sounds crusty. It was my topic for my five minute audition at the Princeton Review this evening. I arrived almost ten minutes late, even though I left my house over half an hour early, but I don't think it mattered too much. I also ended up paying $7 for 37 minutes of parking. My presentation followed one on defensive patterns in soccer. He faced the board the whole time and lectured. I got three of the four people present up to participate as visual aids. I also had pictures of Athena, Artemis and Hestia - the three goddesses I was using to demonstrate my point. I actually wrote a little something on my website's blog when I got home, more or less explaining the points I tried to make in my audition. I had fun. I am pretty darn sure they'll hire me. I think they'd be foolish not to, with my teaching experience and my scores on the tests (if not their practice test).

I got a call earlier today from one of my Identity kids in tears. She asked me to come over, and I almost dropped everything (including the interview) to do it. Instead, I went after. Thank goodness. The girl's been through a lot of crazy junk in her life - it doesn't help that her dad was recently being held in a border prison in Texas, or that he was deported to a country where he had testified against military men currently holding power - but when I arrived and asked what was going on, her answer was that she wasn't allowed to borrow the car and her older brother was. Sure, she's overstressed and tired because she works seven nights a week and goes to school during the day, and her mom is having trouble coping and finding work because she's too honest to lie about her legal status. Plus, the real issue is a breakdown in communication, not the car. But part of it is just being a teenager. Which is somewhat reassuring.

I want to start looking for volunteer work in anthropology. I've looked at a couple of museums in the Smithsonian (like the National Museum of the American Indian - super cool cuz it's working with living cultures), but I can't really come up with much beyond that. Any ideas, buddies?

Now I don't usually repost stuff on immigration, cuz it just gets me riled. But taking a break from writing essays brought me to this from the Immigration Policy Center (IPC):
( STUDIES ON THE COSTS OF IMMIGRATION: SNAPSHOTS DON'T TELL THE WHOLE STORY )

The Immigration Blog on the Statesman has the article as well, but it isn't too many places online.

My quote of the day is: "They're not Klansmen, they're feminists!"

What? You may be asking. How the hell did that come up? Well, my friend, if you really want to know, go look at the picture on the Women's Movement page of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_movement).

So there's www.savetoby.com . It's a great idea and a fabulous gimmick and I believe that the site's owner will, in fact, have made his $50,000 by June. I even believe that he will kill his bunny - and eat it - if he doesn't. I buy it. But what is sad is that there is nothing nearly that neat about giving to, say, UNICEF. UNICEF's shirts are boring. They have no interesting/bizarre/funny/sick twists to them. There are no funny plots. Let's face it, non-profits aren't funny. And why the hell not? Frankly, it makes me want to set up a site - much like www.savetoby.com - and then donate all the proceeds to a charity. 'Course, that's a lot of work for free, but chances are I couldn't find a charity that would let me make an official shirt that was that cool. (With the exception of some of NARAL's shirts a few years ago - for which they received heavy criticism.) (Cool NARAL t-shirt below)



Anyway, enough on that tip. I'm gonna go study more Econ.