What Tami Said: Social capital and denying the pain of black women

This is SOOO good. I hope you will read it! Plleeeezzzz!

What Tami Said: Social capital and denying the pain of black women

What Tami Said: Lady Antebellum and the glorification of the pre-Civil War South

I (heart) Tami. Just sayin'.

What Tami Said: Lady Antebellum and the glorification of the pre-Civil War South

I could, however, do without some of the generalizations about southern whites that show up in her comments section, but I've run into that A LOT, and that certainly isn't Tami's fault. She ALWAYS manages to make you think and to make a great point, but without stereotyping all whites - Southern or otherwise - either.

The Conflation of Race and Class

So true. As long as white people think black = poor, then they don't need to be particularly concerned about poverty-related social services - after all, it's just for "them."

The Conflation of Race and Class

Penny Red: Carnival of Feminists, 23/12/09: Tidings of Comfort and Joy

There is great stuff at the new Carnival of Feminists.

Penny Red: Carnival of Feminists, 23/12/09: Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Racism on the Elevator?

I don't care for calling the woman "stupid bitch," (I don't think using sexism is good for fighting racism), but this is funny.

McCain's Mansions : The Real Elitist

From Brave New Films

More from Robert Greenwald at Brave New Films: The Real McCain

And my mother, a Democrat for Hillary, told me last week that Obama is an elitist. I told her about him trying to attend the 2000 convention and having his credit card rejected, how he owed lots of student loans until two years ago when his books became best-sellers, how as a child Michelle and her family lived in a one room apartment. So then my mom got sarcastic and said, "Okay, you're right. He owed student loans so he's wonderful, he's a god, and he'll be a great president." Uh-no. The point I successfully made was not that he's wonderful or a god but simply that he was not elitist - certainly no more so than Bill Clinton, and she adores Bill Clinton.

Yet again, whatever mental acrobatics it takes to avoid voting for a black man, Mother (see previous post on the old family plantation - I guess the family has moved away from River Road, but we haven't really moved away from the plantation, have we, Mother?).

Random Observations on News Items

First, I can't wait until the Olympics are over. I won't watch some grand pageant from human rights abuser China, yet everywhere I try to watch or read news, it seems to be all Olympics all the time. Yawn.

So, celebrity chef Julia Child (follow previous link to a very fun short video of her!) was, it turns out, a spy. How cool is that! My daughter really wants to be a spy. She also really wants to be a chef! It's just too bad she's too young to know who Child was. Maybe I'll find get film footage somewhere and show it to her. I don't know if she'll really watch though. I seem to be becoming less cool in her eyes every week.

In England, a man has been banned from his girlfriend's apartment because they were too noisy during sex. I have a friend in the Pacific Northwest, where his home, like most homes there, does not have air conditioning. One summer evening, he was making love to a new acquaintance who turned out to be very loud. Having taken a break and resumed their love making, they heard his next door neighborhood yell up to the second story window, "All right, enough already, huh? Some of us have kids out here." He had forgotten that the window was open! Oops.

NBC News just reported what we all already knew. A study out today says that shit is getting really expensive. I knew potatoes shouldn't be $4 a bag! It turns out that the price of potatoes has risen 20%, bananas 20%, and rice a whopping 35%. A chain of dollar stores in California is going to start charging more than a dollar for the items it sells (I remember when the "dollar show" near me had to raise its movie ticket prices to $2.50. After that, we never could figure out what to call it - "...the dollar show...the used-to-be-dollar-show...the $2.50 show..."). The report says prices have increased at the highest rate in 17 years while wages have increased at their lowest rate in 18 years. Wages have fallen 3%. Seventeen percent of the homes on the market are there because the owner is going through foreclosure.

But, hey, what the fuck, let's just keep focusing on politics as playtime because that's what the media wants to do - and what the Republican party needs us to do. They have no ideas. They offer working Americans nothing except perhaps many more years of military enlistment as a career option. No help with health care. No end to George Bush's war. No restoration of our shredded Constitution. No plan to pay down the national debt so our leaders could openly criticize China's human rights record, which they should be doing right now but can't because we are now the world's biggest debtor nation and our national credit card has "Bank of the People's Republic of China" imprinted on it.

No, they offer more offshore drilling leases to the oil companies, even though the oil companies already hold leases on lots of federal land on which they aren't bothering to drill (meaning this isn't about drilling but rather about land-grabbing) and there are hundreds of wells in the Gulf off the Louisiana coast that are perfectly viable but are currently capped; even though it would take decades to drill enough new oil sources to affect prices; even though continuing to find new sources to feed our current addiction will do nothing to solve the climate crisis; even though if the oil companies do get their new leases, the American steel industry has been so thoroughly decimated that our country now lacks the means to build new oil rigs promptly anyway; and even though, as a Baton Rouge caller to the Ed Schultz show pointed out the other day, those of us here in Louisiana already know that offshore oil drilling jobs are definitely not McJobs. The work is brutally tough. Country singer Trace Adkins, who was an ordinary blue-collar Louisiana boy before becoming an "overnight" success in his forties, has talked about working offshore and actually sweating black from the oil. A taste of what the life is like from his song "Missing You:"

An hour into my shift
I'm covered from head to toe
Drilling oil from the bottom
Of the Gulf of Mexico
Sun's on the rise
Sweat rolling black down my face
Work until I can't move
Another back-breaking typical day

Chorus:
I've weathered waterspouts and hurricanes
Hailstorms and driving rain
And missing you
I've worked through broken drills
And busted hands
Weeks without seeing dry land
And missing you
I'll work as hard as any man
But until I'm home with you again
The toughest thing out here
That I go through is
Missing you

I lay down on my bed
And stare at the picture of you
Barefoot on the beach
Looking at me the way you do
I fall asleep with your letter in my hands
Dream about you until
That ol' whistle starts screaming again

(repeat chorus)
Ill work as hard as any man
But until I'm home with you again
The toughest thing out here
That I go through is
Missing you

Yeah, so let's just go find a bunch more people to work on those rigs, right away! It is dangerous and difficult. Injury rates are so high that some Louisiana attorneys just specialize in such cases. It requires weeks at a time away from home and is notoriously destructive to family life. Still, people (men? I think it's all men) take those jobs because they pay well and that was the Schultz caller's main point - these are highly skilled jobs. If there were to suddenly be a bunch of new oil rigs, where would the oil companies suddenly find enough qualified offshore workers to get them going? This is not a field in which an employer just goes to Manpower and hires a crew of day laborers! So, it would take time to find lots more workers, time to get the steel industry able to build the rigs, time for new refineries to be ready, and years for the oil from new sources to hit the market and possibly affect the prices. And this is an energy policy?

But the games continue in the political arena. From Senator Kerry came the following email today:

The Liars Are Back:

Pick up the New York Times this morning and read the headline: "Book on Obama Hopes to Repeat Anti-Kerry Feat."

Yes, Jerome Corsi, the right wing fringe author who made his bones smearing the Catholic Church and lying about my military record, is back atop the best seller list with an anti-Obama book chock full of lies.

If your blood isn't boiling yet, read this: "This is a fact: Today Barack Obama is subject to what is probably the greatest concentrated attacks of smears, lies and innuendo in the lifetime of anyone who reads these words."

Those are the words of Brent Budowsky in Editor and Publisher. He knows what he's talking about.

And it's not just Barack: up and down the ticket and all across the country, the rightwing smear machine is ramping up attacks on Democrats.

We've seen this movie before. The Republicans, without ideas, start running a negative campaign filled with personal attacks and misleading ads. The attacks get condemned, but they get lots of attention and get played on TV endlessly.

Kerry then goes on to say that he is starting a new website:

We're launching a new website that empowers you to fight back across the country in ways no campaign has attempted. It's called truthfightsback.com, and we can use all the help you can give.

By signing up, you'll stay on top of what the rightwing is doing and help fight for the truth. And you can report smears when you see them to keep us on track on what the smear machine is up to at every moment. You will be our eyes and ears.

We know the game, we've learned some things, and we have a fired up movement of activists like no party has had in decades, all networked together with great Internet tools.

So sign up to help. This is a massive undertaking, so we need your help to pull it off....

You can't just play defense against smears, pointing out how they aren't true. You've got to play offense, too, exposing the whole cynical game for what it is: an attempt to keep us from talking about the real issues and ultimately changing our country for the better.

The Republicans have nothing to run on, no ideas to push, no solutions for America. They'll run a campaign of laughable gimmicks and outright distortions and lies. But we can fight back with the truth - and the truth can win this time.

Let's do it.

Thanks,

John Kerry

See Senator Kerry confront Senator Kyl on live television, demanding to know what the hell the Paris Hilton celebrity attack ad has to do with anything important:

The AP tells us about the new book by "swiftboater" Corsi:

Jermone Corsi's anti-Obama book, "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president. The book is a compilation of all the innuendo and false rumors against Obama — that he was raised a Muslim, attended a radical, black church and secretly has a "black rage" hidden beneath the surface....

Corsi's book is off to a swift start and is No. 1 on The New York Times' hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, even though Obama's campaign would argue the book should be listed as fiction.

Obama's campaign says the book is full of factual inaccuracies that include the wrong date for the Obamas' marriage. Corsi also writes that Obama left much of his family background out of his autobiographies — his father's polygamy and alcoholism, his sister's birth in Indonesia and that his then-fiance Michelle accompanied him on a visit to Kenya — but the campaign points out page numbers from "Dreams From My Father" where Obama discussed all those things.

In "The Obama Nation" — the title is a twist on the word abomination — Corsi catalogs various allegations that have haunted Obama on right-wing blogs and anonymous e-mails.

Corsi suggests, without a shred of proof, that Obama may be using drugs today. Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a teenager but says he quit when he went to college and hasn't used drugs since.

Corsi makes an issue of the fact that, before he quit smoking cigarettes, Obama didn't want it widely known that he smoked. "If Obama takes pains to hide his smoking from us, what else does he take pains to hide?" Corsi asks in the book.

He smoked cigarettes? Oh my god. I wonder what's really in that Nicorette gum he's been chomping on the campaign trail! Maybe it's really some halucenogenic!

Corsi also dwells on Obama's mother marrying Obama's African father and later marrying someone from Indonesia — whom Corsi describes as "a second man of color to be her mate." The Obama campaign says the description is one of many examples of Corsi's "offensive language" in the book....

Before I comment further, I probably should admit that my mother has been married - at different times, of course - to three different white men! Three of them - can you believe it? And my father has been married - at different times, of course - to three different white women. I really hope people of color aren't offended by that! Oh, and there was alcoholism and abuse involved in some of those marriages too - just tring to be totally honest. I hope no people of color get the wrong idea. There are some white men who are decent husbands and fathers. Just because my white father beat my mother, was a drunk, dressed in drag and kidnapped me, psychologically tortured his children, was unfaithful, and refused to ever pay a dime of child support for the three children he fathered doesn't mean all white men are like that. I promise - some are pretty decent, you know, especially if genuine economic opportunities are available to them.

He accuses Obama of wanting to weaken the military even though Obama's campaign calls for adding 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Corsi defended raising the issue of drugs without any evidence.

"I don't need more," he said. "I'm putting this question forward. I'm putting the evidence forward. Voters can make up their own minds."

Corsi writes for World Net Daily, a conservative Web site whose lead headline Thursday was "Astonishing photo claims: Dead Bigfoot stored on ice." In a series of Web posts several years ago, Corsi said Pope John Paul II was senile and unconcerned about sexual molestation of boys, referred to Islam is "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion" and suggested Kerry was secretly Jewish.

Corsi apologized for the remarks and now says he didn't mean them and was simply trying to provoke discussion.

"Obama Nation" is published by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster that is run by Mary Matalin, the former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Corsi readily acknowledges the political goal of his book. He considers Obama a "radical leftist" who should not be elected president. Corsi said he has no plans to work against Obama with groups comparable to 2004's Swift Boat Veterans for Truth but said he would be willing to consider it....

Hey, man, you say "radical leftist" like it's a bad thing!

Here is camp Obama's forty page rebuttal in pdf format.

For a minute, I thought it couldn't be true that this trash is number one on the New York Times bestseller list, but it is.

Did I mention that potatoes are $4 a bag, that the price of rice is up 35%, that 17% of all homes for sale are there because of foreclosure, and that wages are down 3%? Oh, and it now takes $50 to fill up my little Hyundai.

Play on.

"They" Aren't Supposed to Live in the WHITE House, Right?

(All photos can be enlarged by clicking on them. A reader has informed me that the photos were throwing the text out of line, with photos sometimes covering part of my text. Very frustrating! So, I've reduced the size of all the photos. Hopefully that will help. Now, they're just too small to really see while reading through, so you may have to click on individual photos & enlarge them that way. Damn blogger!)

When I was a child, a teacher of mine, learning that I aspired to be a doctor, warned me that because I was a girl, I could only hope to become a nurse. Soon after that, I was with several family members at a reception for Democratic party volunteers when my mother, outraged by my teacher's comment, introduced herself to Congresswoman Lindy Boggs and told her the story. The congresswoman did exactly what my mother hoped she would do - encouraged me to think that girls could aspire to do and be anything. As my mother tells it, "Lindy Boggs, in a navy skirt and navy stockings, knelt down, getting white chalky floor dust on her stockings. She took your little face in her hands and told you that she was a girl AND a member of Congress and that YOU could be anything too - not just a nurse, but even a doctor." And so, over the years, I have paid attention to the Boggs family, including the life and work of Lindy's daughter, Cokie Roberts.

Unfortunately, Roberts seems to become more of a flake every year. Check out this latest. Roberts, asked about Obama vacationing in Hawaii, says that although she understands Obama went to high school there and has a grandmother there, it still is an "odd" choice for his vacation because it will make him seen too "exotic" to voters.

And she had said this twice in the last two days. Does she not know Hawaii is just part of the United States?

Hey, Cokie, why are you spouting Republican talking points about Obama being "exotic" (which is code for "black")? Are you yet another fair-skinned daughter of the old South (and it's not just fair-skinned daughters of the South, actually) who just can not, will not vote for a black man? I know maman was born at Brunswick Plantation in Pointe Coupee and that papa, Congressman Hale Boggs, was a signer of the Southern Manifesto (which, in response to Brown v Board of Education, condemned desegregation), opposed the 1964 Voting Rights Act, and that decades before that, he had led the movement to break the power of populist Huey Long and Long's political machine. Is it still that kind of thing, Cokie?

I come from slaveholding people too, Cokie. And for several months now, I've been thinking of posting my photos of the old plantation on my blog, and I'm not exactly sure why. I just know I am furious about the racism I am still hearing from Democratic members of my own family who just will not vote for Obama. Maybe I want to hold a mirror up here - to ask those of us who descend from slaveholding people to really think about race and oppression, to demand that we be honest and look fearlessly and relentlessly at what dwells deep in our hearts, to challenge us to join the fucking twenty first century here. Are we going to do it? Are lifelong Democrats going to actually vote for McCain now? Mother? Little sister? How 'bout you, Cokie? "Exotic" indeed, Madam Roberts. Our people have been on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of humanity for far too long.

the plantation (with my daughter on the porch)

It's called St. Amelie. It's on the River Road, on the east bank of St. James Parish. It was a middle class sugar plantation back in the day. It was one of several such homes in the area that my family, German and Acadian settlers of the German Acadian Coast, owned from the time the Germans settled as indentured servants in 1724 through when the Acadians settled as refugees from French Nova Scotia in the 1760s to the time of the Hymelia Crevasse of 1903 (Hymel - pronounced "E-mel" - was the family name. Hymelia was one of the plantations they owned. A crevasse is a levee breach and resulting flood. The Hymelia Crevasse of 1903 was a levee breach that sent floodwaters from my family's riverfront property across hundreds of miles. For many old time planter families who had struggled to keep planting profitable post-slavery, including mine, this loss of crops, land, possessions, and farming implements was what finally pushed them out of the farming business forever.).

St. Amelie is the only house my family owned that is still standing. The rest of the houses ended up in the Mississippi River as the river changed course over the centuries or ended up just crumbling over time, abandoned or unprofitable after the Civil War. One, Minnie Plantation (thus named by Clairville Himel because Minnie was the nickname of his bride, Lavonia), is now just a chimney in the middle of a muddy cane field (thank you to my husband for tromping through the mud to get this photo for me, and for thinking to bring me back a single brick):

what's left of Minnie Plantation:

Minnie Plantation's chimney from a distance:

The following reports regarding slaves involve Drausin and Clairville Himel (uncles to Mary Himel Blanchard, see below)

Assumption Parish, 1852: Virginie, a nineteen-year-old woman of color, seeks to recover freedom for herself and her five-month-old daughter named Philomène. Virginie represents that she, her mother, and her two sisters were formerly the property of the late Joseph Bernard. During his lifetime, Bernard took the three women to Cincinnati, Ohio, where in 1835 he legally emancipated them. Bernard and the three women then went to St. Louis, where in 1836 Bernard took steps to ensure the validity of the deed of emancipation. Virginie contends that she and her family lived free “publicly and openly” from 1835 until 1847, with the knowledge of Bernard’s heirs. In 1847, however, she was sold back into slavery by one Théodule Mollère at the instance of Bernard’s heirs. She is now in the possession of Drausin Himel. Virginie seeks an order declaring her and her daughter, born since her emancipation, free and commanding Drausin Himel to pay compensation for her services at the rate of $180 per year until she is restored to liberty. She seeks the appointment of a “curator ad hoc” to represent her daughter.

Assumption Parish, 1852: Celesie, a twenty-three-year-old woman of color, seeks to recover freedom for herself and her two mulatto children, Victorine and Gustave. Celesie asserts that she, her mother, and her two sisters were formerly the property of the late Joseph Bernard. In his lifetime, Bernard took the women to Cincinnati, where in 1835 he legally emancipated them. Bernard and the women then went to St. Louis, where he took steps to ensure the validity of the deed of emancipation. Celesie contends that her family lived free "publicly and openly" from 1835 until 1847, with the knowledge of Bernard’s heirs. In 1847, however, she was sold back into slavery by Théodule Mollère at the instance of Bernard’s heirs. She is now in the possession of Clairville Himel. Celesie seeks an order declaring her and her two children, born since her emancipation, free and commanding Himel to pay compensation for her services at the rate of $180 per year. She seeks the appointment of a "curator ad hoc" for her children. A related petition describes Celesie, her mother, and her sisters as "mulatto" women.

St. James Parish, 1849-1850: Clairville Hymel represents that Henri Baudet falsely and maliciously accused him, in an affidavit before a justice of the peace, of having incited a slave named Valery to run away, and of concealing and stealing him. Hymel further claims that he was “publickly arrested” as a result of the charge and arraigned before a grand jury, although later released. Hymel contends that Valery is not Baudet’s slave but his and, inasmuch as the accusation was “without reasonable or probable cause,” he has suffered damages. He prays the court to condemn Baudet to pay the damages plus costs of suit.

Drausin's grave in Labadieville cemetery

An oak tree stands where a plantation called Welcome belonging to my family used to be. Whenever you find an oak tree in the middle of nothing on the River Road, a plantation once stood there.

St. Amelie is not particularly impressive by modern housing standards. It's much smaller than most modern homes, with just two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room (no grand rooms like Tara in "Gone With the Wind" or anything). And it's probably much less impressive than Brunswick where Lindy Boggs was born, but even so, it's still nicer than what poor whites had in centuries past and far nicer than what slaves had.

slave quarters in St. James Parish

St. Amelie from the side:

The other side view. My great-grandfather's uncle, Dr. Numa Himel (all lived at St. Amelie together), visited patients by horse and buggy until well into the twentieth century.

River Road residents who needed a doctor would hang a white flag outside, and the doctor would know to stop. Most families had no cash and the doctor often got paid with chickens or eggs. As Dr. Himel aged, he wanted a partner to join him in providing medical care in the area, but it was difficult to entice another doctor to come work in the country for mere chickens and eggs, so he offered a young doctor from New Orleans a free spot on his land on which to build a home if the doctor would relocate to St. James. Here you can see the newer brick home, built by the younger doctor, Dr. Campbell. Notice the wire between the two houses - this ran between the two doctors' offices and was, in the days before telephones, how the doctors summoned one another.

This is the front porch, which my mother remembers being washed with ice water daily by maids so that it stayed really shiny. My part of the family was not generally welcomed at the old Creole plantation because we were, scandalously enough, Irish half-breeds, but my mother was once sent here for the summer as punishment because she had failed her Catholic school French class. As a result, she had to spend three months out in the country, bored to death, with two old maid great aunts who only spoke French to her (although they were bilingual schoolteachers - talk about learning a language by the immersion method!). The aunts found it shocking that their brother's own grandchild had actually failed French and took that fact to be further proof of the folly of his having married a lowly Irish woman. Said they of their sister-in-law, "She can scrub her floors and wash her clothes as much as she wants, but she will always have the taint and smell of the Irish."

My Irish great grandmother, Catherine Caroline Mullen Blanchard (1897-1977; seated, right)

This is an old sugar kettle that is now being used as a planter behind St. Amelie. In the old days, slaves cooked down the cane over intense heat through a series of kettles until only granulated sugar remained. Because Louisiana has only a semi-tropical climate and does sometimes get freezing temperatures in winter (while sugar is usually a cash crop only in frostless tropical climates because the crop takes many months to mature and can not survive a freeze), the cane crops here had to be feverishly harvested round the clock as soon as they matured, lest the stalks be turned to mush by a single overnight freeze. And so during the harvest season slaves on Louisiana sugar plantations worked in exceptionally brutal conditions. Seven days a week, they worked at least two eight hour shifts a day and sometimes twenty hours a day (the Code Noir required that slaves be given Sundays off, but that law was routinely ignored on sugar plantations during harvest season). As a result, slaves on south Louisiana sugar plantations had fewer live births, suffered more illness, experienced more fatigue-induced accidents, and faced much shorter life expectancy than did other slaves of the era.

In one of the two bedrooms, my great grandfather's crib, already an antique when he slept in it, can still be seen (bottom of the photo). Another family now owns the home and lives in it. Luckily, they have kept EVERYTHING original except for, they say, hanging their clothes in the closet. They did have a kitchen added on to the actual house; in the old days, kitchens were always separate buildings because of the risk of fire. In their old age, the aunts sold this place to proper French strangers because they found that preferable to having Irish halfbreeds inherit it.

I should mention that all photos of the interior of the home were taken when I just knocked on the door and introduced myself one day. Mr. and Mrs. (very French surname) understood right away who I was and how I was related to the previous owners, but even so, their graciousness in allowing a stranger to walk through and photograph every inch of their home was extraordinary.

my great-grandfather, Arthur Eli Blanchard II, as a baby (1891-1971)

wash basin

These days, few families farm in this area, although agribusiness does still grow some sugar cane here. Large blocks of land - former plantations - were sold decades ago to petro-chemical companies like Exxon, Shell, breast implant and Agent Orange specialist Dow Chemical, Union Carbide (responsible for a 1984 chemical release in India that it admits killed 3,000 people and Green Peace claims ultimately killed 20,000), and Monsanto (if you don't already hate and fear the evil Monsanto, click on the links to find out more about their genetically modified food, their terminator seeds, the recombinant bovine growth hormone in your dairy products and how they've sued farmers advertising rBGH-free products, their efforts to get patents on the breeding and herding of pigs, their responsibility for 56 environmental superfund sites in the U.S., and how they sued a 70 year old Canadian farmer for "seed stealing" because their genetically modified seed was carried by the wind onto his land - after years of their assurances that genetically modified seeds knew how to stay in their own designated spaces and would never contaminate naturally occurring species). The companies purchasing the land have sometimes destroyed grand homes of great historical significance, but in a few cases of relatively responsible corporate citizenship, companies have paid restoration costs, and old large plantation homes on the grounds of sprawling petro-chemical processing plants now serve as on-site meeting rooms.

The families who remain here - mostly the descendents of slaves - face extremely elevated risks of miscarriages, birth defects, cancer, and other ailments due to water, air, and soil contamination from the chemical plants (as The Who might say, meet the new boss, same as the old boss). Near St. Amelie is a large plantation open to tourists that is called Oak Alley. Here in Louisiana, however, this entire region is now known to us as Cancer Alley.

the entrance to the Monsanto plant (notice the row of oak trees, indicating that this was once the entryway to a plantation):

chemical plants have been built around the old cemetery...:

...down the street from St. Amelie and tourist mecca Oak Alley (below):

the aunts' gravesite in St. James cemetery (Himel and Blanchard):

the dining room fireplace with original tools, clock, and mantel knick-knacks:

another fireplace, still more Victorian basins (there were some in each room):

This is the dining room. To the left is a sideboard that was used as an ice cart. My grandmother vividly remembers from her visits that during meals, a maid would take each diner's drink and keep it on ice in the cart, then hand the drink over each time the diner wanted a sip.

This is the Persac map in the dining room. Most plantations on the River Road had a copy of this map. Persac had surveyed the area, and the map showed every plantation along the river and named the owner of each. The names are difficult to read because the river turns so many times and because land grants were, in the French custom, long and narrow so that each plantation had access to the river, where goods were shipped and people could travel by boat (the long, narrow strips make reading the owners' names very difficult).

A hallway bookcase with the original books belonging to my great grandfather's uncle, Dr. Numa Himel. My great grandfather and his two sisters returned from New Orleans to this house, the childhood home of their mother, Mary Himel Blanchard, when they were small children after their father, Acadian riverboat pilot Captain Arthur Blanchard, died suddenly in his thirties. When her elderly great aunts sold this place, my mother was permitted to choose one thing from the home for herself (the custom was that when a plantation was sold, the furnishings went with the house). My mother chose a set of books - the complete works of Sir Walter Scott. The books were originally given to my great-great grandmother, Mary Himel Blanchard, by her brother, Dr. Numa Himel, one or two each Christmas, over about a twenty year period in the second half of the nineteenth century. Inside each book is an inscription with the siblings' names, "Merry Christmas," the date (December 24 or 25 and the year), and sometimes a brief note. These books were the bestsellers of that period and greatly influenced the worldview of white antebellum southerners. The books, such as "Rob Roy," presented themes like honor, chivalry, and gender in ways that epitomized the values of white southerners - particularly the planter classes - on the eve of the Civil War. My mother still has them, although some sustained a little water damage during the famous "May third" flood of 1978. When my mother fled south Louisiana ahead of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she packed only necessities. In the final hours before Katrina made landfall, as the winds were already frighteningly intense and the electricitiy had already gone out, my husband drove sixty miles to my English teacher mother's home to rescue her important documents, photographs, an antique set of the complete works of William Shakespeare, and the Sir Walter Scott books from the old plantation.

My great-great grandmother, Mary Himel Blanchard (1865-1945)

My great-great grandfather, Arthur Eli Blanchard (1858-1895)

Below is the steamship G.W. Sentell (G.W. as in "George Washington"), purchased in July, 1891, as a joint venture of the Blanchard Brothers (one of several steamships owned over the years). It was owned by C.J. Blanchard, the eldest brother, who served as her Master; by Arthur Blanchard (above) who served as Chief Engineer; by Max A. Blanchard (who was considered Max, Jr., although the brothers' father was Maximin Telesphore Blanchard, a son of Acadian refugees from French Nova Scotia); and 2 friends or investors: Frank Dunos & Nicolas Burg. Max, Jr., & Edgar served as pilots. In August of 1892, according to the Daily Picayune, C.J. had a large B mounted between the stacks, which had already been painted a bright red. The Sentell was a sternwheel packet with a wood hull built in Jeffersonville, Indiana. On December 28, 1894, while docked near Hillary St in Carrollton, she burned & sunk. The exact cause of the fire was unknown.

Federal records of shipping-related deaths and accidents show the Blanchard brothers were peculiarly prone to losing black deckhands and screwmen during the night, without witnesses, to fatal accidents or drowning. Granted, the river trade was very dangerous in those days, but the Blanchard brothers seemed to lose black sailors in particular with alarming frequency. Eventually, the respected and well-known C.J. Blanchard would face trial for murder over one such case once his ship had docked in St. Louis, apparently outraging New Orleans newspaper reporters and editorial writers.

Below, another steamboat owned by Max Blanchard, Sr., the E.W. Cole. Max Blanchard purchased this boat in 1886 from Captain Thomas L. Morse. In 1888 (after winning the state lottery) he spent over $8,000 to overhaul her. She then began to ply Bayou Lafourche as a regular packet. The Cole was 201 ft long, 31 ft in the beam with 5.4 ft depth of hold, reportedly the largest boat to regularly steam on the bayou. The Cole was built in 1880 at Jeffersonville, Ill. She was snagged and sunk on January 1, 1891. At the time of the sinking, Max Blanchard was master; O. Blanchard and Frank Hymel were mates; Max Blanchard, Jr., and Camil Jacobs were pilots; A.E. Blanchard and Charles Gillham were engineers; Amede Blanchard was carpenter. As with the Sentell above, a large "B" can be seen between the smokestacks.

hallway at St. Amelie - wash basin

The camel hide sofas in the living room. My mother remembers that children were not allowed to play in this room or sit on this furniture (which was fine with her since apparently camel hide is really scratchy). I can't imagine any other space inside where kids could have played; I guess they just stayed outside most of the time. My grandmother relates that when her father was disciplined as a boy, his mother would dress him as a girl and force him to stand on the levee for all passersby to see. In his teens, my great-grandfather's idea of fun was to line up "pickaninnies" and see how many he could jump his horse over. God. Maybe "American Idol" is not such hideous entertainment after all.

The hallway, facing the front door and porch. The piece of furniture on the right was for holding hats and coats, obviously, but my mother remembers that the drawer in the bottom was the only place in the house where the aunts kept anything fun for children. On rainy days they would open it, and inside were hundreds of scrolls the aunts had made from newspaper comics. Each one had two sticks, and my mother would hold the sticks to unroll the scrolls and enjoy reading the comics inside (hey, the aunts didn't have television).

bedroom 2 - wardrobe

bedroom 2 - dresser

In bedroom two, a tester bed (pronounced "tee-ster"), which was basically a canopy bed and had mosquito netting draped over the whole thing, although someone has in recent years chopped off the four corner poles.

So, there it is - Cokie, Mother, little sister - our past, as a people. Take a good look - at the shiny porch floor and the ice cart maintained by maids; at the slave quarters; at the cane fields; at the old sugar kettle that meant backbreaking, round the clock labor and early death to so many human beings; at Mark Twain's beloved glamorous Mississippi River steamboats on which black sailors who displeased could simply disappear.

When will we finally move beyond who we as a people, as a region, have been?

Why are lifelong Democrats I love doing what you're doing? Cokie says Obama is "exotic." My mother says he "can't be trusted." My former Carter delegate aunt is horrified by the prospect of his being the nominee.

He's not supposed to get to live in the white house, right? I mean, not St. Amelie on River Road, not Brunswick in Pointe Coupee, and not the other white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue either, yes?

Sunday Reading - the Serious Stuff

A great review of Congressman Wexler's new book "Fire Breathing Liberal" at Daily Kos serves up some great tidbits from the book:

First, on a childhood with which any political geek can identify:

Norman and I would play a game titled Mr. President. Other kids were playing All-Star Baseball or Electric Football. We played Mr. President for hours at a time, five days a week. I grew up believing this was the most phenomenal game ever devised, which in many ways describes me. The object of the game was to win the presidential election. How many nine-year-olds knew that New York State had 43 electoral votes? Norman and I did. That fact might well sum up my childhood.

On the disgusting cowardice of fellow Democrats who actually voted for a resolution condemning an ad by moveon.org:

Many Democrats voted for the resolution [against MoveOn] to distance themselves from MoveOn and the substance of the newspaper advertisement. Just imagine the furor that would have resulted had we proposed a resolution to censure the right-wing Christian Coalition or Pat Robertson for one of their more outrageous proclamations, such as blaming 9/11 on homsexuals. I voted against the resolution, but unfortunately many of my colleagues did not, and it passed. It was not our proudest day.

On his outrage over the Supreme Court selection of George Bush as pResident:

Every politician learns how to lose as well as win--and as a Democrat I had a lot of practice losing. Through most of my career I'd tried to salvage what was possible, stand up for my constituents, and use the influence I had as a member of Congress in areas where partisanship played less of a role, such as foreign relations and constituent services, where I could do some good. But this Supreme Court ruling infuriated me. I was just outraged by it. Like many of my constituents, I feel it is a wound that will never completely heal.

And on why impeachment of George Bush is still a good idea:

Certainly there were legitimate arguments made against these proceedings. Many people reasoned that we'd been through this gut-wrenching process with President Clinton and it had ripped apart the nation. I responded by suggesting that the worst possible legacy of the Clinton impeachment would be to discourage future Congresses from examining valid allegations of constitutional violations against members of the executive branch. Should that happen, the tragedy of Clinton's impeachment would be compounded.

I have to get this book (which is $30 for the hardback right now). I just checked and my library doesn't have it - although they DO have eleven titles by Bill O'Reilly. Geez.

A great diary on International Day of the World's Indigenous People, which is today.

While doing research for another story, I came across this film clip that every American should watch to see how our government today treats Americans. The film involves some of the Western Shoshone, who for years have been fighting our federal government's seizure of livestock and land for gold mining, water and nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, which is located within the treaty-recognized territory of Western Shoshone lands. There are 60 million acres of Western Shoshone lands located in Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California. The federal government claims 90% of the lands as public or federally-controlled lands, which are then privatized for corporate raping of our environment and degradation of spiritual lands. Greedy profiteering corporations then swoop in to stake mining claims in the "third largest gold producing area in the world."

The federal government has been doing the dirty work of corporations by assaulting people, seizing livestock, and privatizing ancestral lands for the sake of mining companies. Years ago, President Truman tried to seize the steel industry but the US Supreme Court held that was unconstitutional. Today, government seizure is permissible when done to enable, for example, mining in Mount Tenabo or storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

The diary refers to this film:

The film shows an armed, brazen cavalcade raid of agents in helicopters and jeep/semi truck caravans in the dark of night and in the daylight seizing the Danns' horses, wild horses and their cattle to enable corporate gold mines which are spreading through Western Shoshone sacred lands. It also shows the dead horses caused by the government's rush to roundup without listening to warnings that the cold and low food at this time of year would kill the horses. So, horses died on the range. And, horses boarded by BLM died of starvation. All so the government could privatize their range for gold mining. We hear about foreign governments seizing private land by force and raise our voices. But, the silence in America when our government does the same is almost deafening.

The federal government claimed that they lost their lands by gradual encroachment. After the US signed the treaty, it then obtained de facto "title" to the lands not by law, but by simply "treating" the land as federal land. When the Danns' case reached the US Supreme Court, the court did not even address how this title had been transferred from the Danns to the US because the Secretary of the Interior had accepted the money award on their behalf. The court concluded that the Danns had been paid, which took away their right to argue before the court that they had title to these lands. Thus, a shuffle of money between two federal agencies constituted the "sale" of the Shoshone land to the government.

Next, an interesting diary about what racism does to white people. I disagree with the author's claim that racism may be most damaging to whites, but I am 100% in agreement on the rest:

Bell notes in Silent Covenants, his recently published analysis of the context and consequences of the famous civil rights case, Brown vs the Board of Education, that "from the nation’s beginnings, policymakers have been willing to sacrifice even blacks’ basic entitlements of freedom and justice as a kind of political catalyst that enables whites to reach compromises that resolve differing and potentially damaging economic and political differences." In fact, "policymakers recognize and act to remedy racial injustices when, and only when, they perceive that such action will benefit the nation’s interests without significantly diminishing whites’ sense of entitlement." Landmark twentieth century works as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment, C. Van Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and David Roediger’ 2005 study, Working Toward Whiteness, support this argument.

Simply stated, it would appear that white people have been offered supremacy among peasants in exchange for their passivity....

As it turns out, racism may be even more psychologically damaging for the social class that "enjoys" its benefits, than for the class victimized by it. Fromm and his colleagues argued that authoritarianism, the soil of racism, makes dominant white culture in the United States an easy pawn of fascism. Post Modernists such as Michel Foucault and Jacque Derrida fully agree. They perceive a citizenry rendered passive and ineffectual, incapable of effectively interacting with much less restraining a power elite grown less democratic and more corrupt in direct proportion to its immunity from real criticism. Jurgen Habermas, the least pessimistic of the Frankfurt School scholars, finds the situation to be less hopeless. With resolve and proper knowledge, people may be able to free themselves of debilitating mind-sets and beliefs systematically inculcated by the powerful, exactly as predicted by Antonio Gramsci more than a century ago.

A new blog called Inside Orwell has just begun that will reproduce, one entry per day and on the same days of the year as the originals, the diaries of George Orwell. It will be interesting to follow. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

A diary at Daily Kos on rape in the military illustrates what some of us already knew - that at dudely liberal places like Kos, the liberal dudes are still mostly typical dudes and they just don't get it, which is why I rarely read sites like Kos anymore. Of course 1 in 3 military women experience sexual assault. At Kos, a few male former soldiers deny the statistic, but I've never heard of a former female servicemember denying the figures. Why? Any woman who has ever actually spent time on a military base knows exactly why - the entire culture of misogyny, an entire ethic of warfare based on the "otherness" of woman. When I lived at a base overseas, there were lots of sexual assaults that were covered up (which I routinely heard about through a close friend whose husband worked at the command post). There was woman-hating behavior that was constant and crazy - strippers at every birthday, retirement, or promotion party; adultery by most of the married men I knew; crowds of British women sent to the base nightclub on buses every Saturday night (this club was once named by Playboy magazine "once of the top ten best pickup spots for American men worldwide"). And, of course, the entire carnival of misogyny was fueled by an endless supply of cheap booze. As I have often said, my mother raised me to be a liberal feminist, but it took four years on a military base overseas to make me a radical feminist.

Next, a very nice diary on the U.U. church shootings in Tennessee. I am a Unitarian Universalist and my daughter's naming ceremony was in a U.U. church. Unfortunately, when I heard, with the television on in the background while I was doing somthing else, that a man had shot in a church and had wanted to "kill liberals," my first guess was that we U.U.s were the target. It isn't the first time. It, unfortunately, won't be the last. The following refers to the Sunday service the week after the shooting:

In the homily, Buice laid a minister's stole, a strip of cloth showing the Celtic cross' motif of violence combined with the symbol of hope, the rising sun, across the ministerial pulpit and "gave" it to the congregation, to "a good church," as it had been given to him by the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, "a good man." He thundered, "Today, we are all Presbyterians. We are all Jews. We are all Muslims. We are all liberals. We are all conservatives!" If there is one hallmark of Unitarian Universalism, it is the thoughtful response to problems of great complexity. Buice's statements cut to the quick of divisiveness, hatred, and bigotry. The congregation roared back in approbation.

The ministers past and present then moved to the back of the church, where the shooter had come in and begun to fulfill his self-appointed mission to kill liberals until he was killed by the police (he reckoned, in error, that people who work for peace are too weak for war, so he never anticipated that he would be brought down almost instantly by brave members of the church who did not hesitate). Standing in the same spot, the ministers reclaimed the space for peace, for justice, for love, and for strength....

The tone of the service was one of bravery, of defiance, of the conscious choice of thinking people to choose peace, and of the importance of community. The shooter may have taken two lives, but he left without taking the spirit of the church, which, as was printed on hundreds of t-shirts sitting out in the fellowship hall for distribution, is "love."

I was reminded by the UUs that it takes the strongest kind of people to love by choice, instead of hating by default or in desperation.

It was pretty magnificent, all in all.

Finally, a very good - and quite long (although it gets better and better as it goes on) - article on John McCain by a Phoenix reporter who has covered him for years. The title is Postmodern McCain: The John McCain Some Arizonans Know and Loathe and it really is good - check it out (hat tip K).

To White Women For Hillary Threatening to Vote McCain

The following is by Tim Wise. It's not a coincidence that his last name is "wise." He is a brilliant antiracism activist and the author of "White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son." This comes from http://www.timwise.org/. Emphasis, where used, is mine.

Your Whiteness is Showing:An Open Letter to Certain White Women who are Threatening to Withhold Support From Barack Obama in November

By Tim Wise

June 6, 2008

This is an open letter to those white women who, despite their proclamations of progressivism, and supposedly because of their commitment to feminism, are threatening to withhold support from Barack Obama in November. You know who you are.

I know that it's probably a bad time for this. Your disappointment at the electoral defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you--who rightly point out that the media was often sexist in its treatment of the Senator--is raw, pure and justified.

That said, and despite the awkward timing, I need to ask you a few questions, and I hope you will take them in the spirit of solidarity with which they are genuinely intended. But before the questions, a statement if you don't mind, or indeed, even if (as I suspect), you will mind it quite a bit.

First, for those of you threatening to actually vote for John McCain and to oppose Senator Obama, or to stay home in November and thereby increase the likelihood of McCain winning and Obama losing (despite the fact that the latter's policy platform is virtually identical to Clinton's while the former's clearly is not), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and increase the odds of his winning (despite the fact that he once called his wife the c-word in public and is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom and gender equity initiatives, such as comparable worth legislation), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and help ensure Barack Obama's defeat, as a way to protest what you call Obama's sexism (examples of which you seem to have difficulty coming up with), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque.

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women--you know, the ones who aren't white like you and most of your friends--but rather, like white men! Needless to say it is high irony, bordering on the outright farcical, to believe that electorally bonding with white men, so as to elect McCain, is a rational strategy for promoting feminism and challenging patriarchy. You are not thinking and acting as women, but as white people.

So here's the first question: What the hell is that about?

And you wonder why women of color have, for so long, thought (by and large) that white so-called feminists were phony as hell? Sister please...

Your threats are not about standing up for women. They are only about standing up for the feelings of white women, and more to the point, the aspirations of one white woman. So don't kid yourself. If you wanted to make a statement about the importance of supporting a woman, you wouldn't need to vote for John McCain, or stay home, thereby producing the same likely result--a defeat for Obama. You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she's progressive, and she's a feminist. But that isn't your threat is it? No. You're not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton's birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? Could it be...?

See, I told you your whiteness was showing.

And now for a third question, and this is the biggie, so please take your time with it: How is it that you have managed to hold your nose all these years, just like a lot of us on the left, and vote for Democrats who we knew were horribly inadequate--Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, right on down the uninspiring line--and yet, apparently can't bring yourself to vote for Barack Obama? A man who, for all of his shortcomings (and there are several, as with all candidates put up by either of the two major corporate parties) is surely more progressive than any of those just mentioned. And how are we to understand that refusal--this sudden line in the proverbial sand--other than as a racist slap at a black man? You will vote for white men year after year after year--and are threatening to vote for another one just to make a point--but can't bring yourself to vote for a black man, whose political views come much closer to your own, in all likelihood, than do the views of any of the white men you've supported before.

How, other than as an act of racism, or perhaps as evidence of political insanity, is one to interpret such a thing?

See, black folks would have sucked it up, like they've had to do forever, and voted for Clinton had it come down to that. Indeed, they were on board the Hillary train early on, convinced that Obama had no chance to win and hoping for change, any change, from the reactionary agenda that has been so prevalent for so long in this culture. They would have supported the white woman--hell, for many black folks, before Obama showed his mettle they were downright excited to do so--but you won't support the black man.

And yet you have the audacity to insist that it is you who are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and the one before whom Party leaders should bow down, and whose feet must be kissed?

Your whiteness is showing.

Look, I couldn't care less about the Party personally. I left the Democrats twenty years ago when they told me that my activism in the Central America solidarity and South African anti-apartheid movements made me a security risk, and that I wouldn't be able to get clearance to be in some parade with Governor Dukakis. Yeah, seriously. But for you to act as though you are the indispensible voters, the most important, the ones whose views should be pandered to, whose every whim should be the basis for Party policy, is not only absurd, it is also racist in that it, a) ignores and treats as irrelevant the much more loyal constituency of black folks, without whom no Democrat would have won anything in the past twenty years (and indeed the racial gap favoring the Democrats among blacks is about six times larger than the gender gap favoring them among white women, relative to white men); and b) demonstrates the mentality of entitlement and superiority that has been long ingrained in us as white folks--so that we believe we have the right to dictate the terms of political engagement, and to determine the outcome, and to get our way, simply because for so long we have done just that.

But that day is done, whether you like it or not, and you are now left with two, and only two choices, so consider them carefully: the first is to stand now in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters and welcome the new day, and help to push it in a truly progressive and feminist and antiracist direction, while the second is to team up with white men to try and block the new day from dawning. Feel free to choose the latter. But if you do, please don't insult your own intelligence, or ours, by insisting that you've done so as a radical political act.

V-Day

Well, V-Day in New Orleans starts at 10 Friday morning. There is going to be a special blessing ritual to cleanse the Superdome of the energy of those awful post-Katrina days. There will be lots of speakers and panels. Also, there will be massages and yoga and other such relaxation-related goings-on for the women of New Orleans (fabulous - I just wish some of the visiting counselors would be staying for good, since we now have only about 1/4 of the counselors we had here pre-Katrina - and we have LOTS more need now).

Alix Olsen, whom I LOVE, is going to be there tomorrow afternoon.

I will be attending the actual Monologues Saturday night with my cousin, which is truly in the spirit of sisterhood because I adore her and she's one of those busy, busy superwomen with whom it's difficult to schedule social time. So this will be a rare treat.

On top of that, I was expecting cheap tickets in the upper nose bleed section, but Mr.Me surprised me with more expensive tickets near the stage - for me and my cousin.

He also surprised me yesterday by setting up what had become a junk room into a real office. I have a desk, an adding machine with tape, the printer/copier/fax right there, four file cabinets. He set up files for all of my genealogy stuff, which had been in boxes for three years. I can now find all the tax stuff, all of the bills. Geez, I'm in danger of becoming a grown-up! Somebody save me from myself!

I guess maybe the office thing finally got done because Tuesday night at 7:30, the law school to which I recently applied called. There are one or two more things they need (proof that I paid my speeding ticket!?), but it sounds like I'm in. This school offers a public interest concentration, which could lead to some great non-profit, political, administrative, or other advocacy work. The school also has several different clinics in which third year students can work - and one of them does nothing but domestic violence work. Another does environmental justice work, which is just huge here in Louisiana. Not only do we have these terrible environmental problems caused by the petrochemical industries, but because the companies in those industries bought up land along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that was once all sugar plantations, there are these African-American populations there, descendants of slaves, who are suffering the health effects of the pollution. Most of the white people who want to leave have left. In this area, around the antebellum home called "Oak Alley," has sprung up "Cancer Alley." The locals - primarily African-American people, sometimes living in relic "freedmen's" shacks - suffer shocking rates of miscarriages, leukemias that are rare in the rest of the American population, skin rashes, eye and nose irritations, and birth defects. I would love to do some environmental advocacy work. The law students at Tulane have actually won some cases in this region, have managed to keep some new industries from locating here. Of course, the evil state responded by changing the rules under which law students can handle these cases - requiring that the citizens form a non-profit BEFORE coming to the clinic (no, they need lawyers FIRST to help them form the non-profit!), that they prove the average income level of the plaintiffs is below poverty level, all kinds of hoops, things unheard of in other states - all because some law students won some cases against the petrochemical industry!

Ramble, ramble, ramble. And to bed.

My Comments Policy

Some very disturbing readers' comments at a blog I frequently read prompt me to offer the following:

I blog mostly about New Orleans; antisexism activism and theory; antiracism activism and theory; and liberal/radical politics. Sometimes, I just write about being a mom and being me.

I very much appreciate visitors to my blog and welcome their comments on all subjects.

When it comes to racism and sexism though, I am really not interested in debate with people who deny that those things are institutionalized and ubiquitous. As I see it, we exist within social structures, and the social structures in our country are deeply informed by racism and sexism (and agism, ablism, and heterosexism too). Arguing with me about the existence of these things and their profound impact on individual lives would be like arguing with Neo about the existence of the matrix - because once you know, you know. Exchanges about these things are not going to change your mind or mine - and would not be productive for either of us.

My blog is not a free speech zone (I couldn't believe the men who swarmed the site I mentioned above, called her a bitch and a cunt and then insisted on their right to free speech! "What about my sacred right to abuse you...."). When it comes to racism and sexism, the purpose of my blog is to faciliate networking with other activists and theorists in these fields, and perhaps also to reach out to those who are somewhat interested in these subjects but still kind of on the fence. If you find that you profoundly disagree with me about something as rudimentary as racism or sexism being rampant in our country, your time would probably better be spent commenting at blogs hosted by people who share your worldview. I respectfully encourage you to have your free speech and activist networking in those places. There is room for lots of opinions in the world, but this blog comes from a particular perspective. I've heard all the arguments many times before about how the so-called tolerant are actually so intolerant because we won't entertain viewpoints that we see as sexist, racist, or homophobic. Whatever.

Yes, too many times I have seen viciously misogynist comments offered at feminist blogs. There are men who swarm women's blogs with threats of finding women bloggers in real life, cutting off their heads, "grudgeraping" them, even kidnapping their children because feminist bitches must be bad mothers - just horrible, monstrous, crazy stuff (more about attacks on women's blogs here).

I'm also on to the whole "concern trolling" thing that so often shows up in the comments at feminist blogs. Too many times, I've seen these comments derail conversations. The poster pretends to be interested in debate, but really intends to silence women (or - even if that wasn't the intention - that is the effect).

So, I'm setting up rules for comments. When the subject is racism or sexism and if I think someone is just playing games or wasting my time, the submission will be deleted with no comment from me (I know that attention is the mother's milk of trolldom; you won't get that here, ever).

If you have GENUINE questions about racism, sexism, or homophobia, and you are white, male, and/or straight, the best way to start becoming an ally is to begin by educating yourself rather than asking a woman or a person of color to take time from their own work to debate you. Please understand that members of minority groups have lots of work to do when it comes to protecting and healing their own communities. If you really want to delve further into these subjects and want to become an ally, the best way to start is by spending time educating yourself rather than asking someone else to explain the basics; please recognize that this work is not and can not be focused on you. There is so much great educational material out there, and if you are genuinely concerned and are not just a concern troll, you will indeed educate yourself.

On the subject of racism, here are some great sites for white people to begin examining race and race privilege:

For White Folks: How to Become an Ally

WhitePrivilege.com

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

Tim Wise's "White Like Me"

On sexism, here are some sites for beginners:

Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog

XY: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Politics - an especially good resource for male allies

How Not to be an Asshole

Anti-Feminist Bingo

Anti-Feminist Bingo 2

Another note: any comments offered that can already be found on Anti-Feminist Bingo or Anti-Feminist Bingo 2 will be deleted without reply. The reason those things are ON those bingo cards is because what you're saying is so unoriginal and predictable.

Also, women bloggers may find Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance a supportive resource.

One final point: This blog is also 100% anti-porn. I used to be one of the sex positive, "fun feminists," and a lot of horrible, painful stuff in my own life, leading to my SO being in treatment for sexual addiction - together with the brilliant analysis of so many radical feminists - changed my mind. I won't post a pornography apologia of any sort. The pro-porn position utterly dominates in our culture now. Ads on city streets are pornified. Television is pornified. Highway signs promise "adult entertainment" just off the next exit. Women who publicly challenge pornography consumption have their names (and in one famous case, a private email to a peace rally organizer in which the woman questioned the event's being partially underwritten by Flynt publishing) sent to Larry Flynt, who uses his mass-distributed publications to viciously attack them with photos and cartoons of them dismembered, bound, raped in every orifice. These days, "we're oh-so enlightened about sex now" academic panels on pornography usually don't include any members who bring a critical feminist analysis. Women's Studies departments have been taken over by the sex-pos cool kids, so that anti-porn feminist academics are having difficulty getting hired and getting published. In fact, "feminist" journals these days won't even accept porn-critical articles (they also ask would-be authors not to use the word "patriarchy" - WTF? When did we sell out to the rest of the academy, and how much did we get paid?). So, this blog is my own space; pro-porn arguments, which dominate everywhere else, are not allowed on anti-porn blogs like mine. It's where women - and male allies - against porn can safely speak our minds; they are precious few such spaces. I hope you will check out the many anti-pornography links on my blog; there are many thoughtful, bright people out there eloquently explaining exactly how pornography is not good for us - men, women, or children. If you disagree, that's fine, but just realize pro-porn comments will be deleted without publication.

Thanks again for visiting my blog.

The Fuzzy Math of Racism and Sexism in Recruiting

What does putting the focus on recruiting minorities - into a firefighting service that is over 95% white male - add up to in the minds of the dominant majority? Discrimination!!! That's right. White males are already 95% of this profession, yet taking the focus off of them, just for a couple of days, is "discrimination."

Got that?

Let's do the math.

training session 1 - ethnic minorities only +
training session 2 - women only +
training sessions 3 and 4 - women and ethnic minorities +
training session 5: everyone, including white males
= total new recruits -
already existing total force of over 95% white and male
= SCREAMING HEADLINE - "WHITE MEN ARE BANNED"

Note this was not even an example of affirmation action (which apparently is called "positive discrimination" in England). Nope, this strictly had to do with who attended the recruiting drives. Once the sessions were over, there were no promises made about who would get hired.

Results?

Hysteria ensues. Cries of "discrimination" reverberate through the chambers of the British Parliament.

And one writer offers the following in a letter to the Daily Mail:

As I watch my blond, curly haired, toddler grandson I feel sad that his genes, and mine, will dissapear but it is inevitable unless we take a stand and demand England for our own.

Yep. A couple of days of targeted minority recruitment = the end of the Aryan race.

Fuzzy math indeed.

via "The F-Word"

Mission Accomplished

Back during the South Carolina primary, Bill Clinton tried to marginalize Barack Obama by comparing the latter's victory in that state to Jesse Jackson's decades before.

Most white Americans can not stand Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I'm sure about this because I'm around white people a lot, what with being white and all. Bill Clinton's putting Obama's name out there with Jackson's was calculated - and despicable.

Bill Clinton is a sharp pol. From what I've read, even direct quotes over the years, the man can calculate electoral percentages quicker than you or I can figure up how much to tip a waitress (Catholics plus X percent of Protestants on this issue, X percent of red state support on that issue). He knows the different demographics and how they will break around various issues. He knows these as well as he knows the insides of his own eyelids. I am certain of it.

Bill Clinton knows the demographics - and he knows how to split them too. For instance, remember his infamous Sister Soulja moment? As recently as 2004, he was, we now know, still up to his old tricks:

Clinton Advice Spurned. Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the Red States, former President Bill Clinton, in a phone call with (John) Kerry, urged the Senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides, "I'm not going to ever do that." (Pam's House Blend).

So, Clinton knows how to split different demographics for political advantage (right - and my next insightful post will be on the imporant topic of "the world is indeed round"). He is willing to throw minority groups under the bus if he sees a potential electoral advantage to doing so.

After spending my Katrina evacuation in Little Rock (which we chose so we could tour Clinton's presidential library...it beats Houston!), I decided to take a detour through Bill Clinton's boyhood home of Hope, touring some of the sites linked to the childhood of the former president.

Truth be told, there wasn't that much to see. There was Clinton's mother's home, his grandparents' home. There was the Blythe/Kelly/Clinton cemetery plot, an unremarkable looking school he attended (long since converted to another purpose). Finally, there was a little train depot that functioned as a museum.

That was it.

Still, I am so glad I took that detour. It was deeply moving, not because any of the designated sites of interest were in any way remarkable, but precisely because none of it was remarkable. As a southerner, once I'd walked around in Hope, Arkansas, I felt I understood some things about our nation's forty-second president. The southerness of the place was palpable. It looked quaint and tidy in places, shabby and unkempt in others. There was no large-scale commerce, no industry. There was poverty. And, to this New Orleans girl, the racial mix of the residents looked like that in my hometown (indeed, census figures show that the town is about 42% white and about 42% black).

From this place came Bill Clinton, this humble place, a president born of working people. I admit that tears came to my eyes because for all that I bitch about what's wrong with my country and engage in activism against the status quo, there is, truly, something right about a country in which a white man so humbly born can become president. (I know, I know. Radical critics are supposed to hate America, right? Well, actually, as Dr. King said, "I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a shining moral example to the world."* No, I'm not an America hater, no matter what my brother-in-law says about me. In truth, I'm a woman whose idea of a great vacation is to go to Washington, D.C, to wander the grounds of Mount Vernon giving thanks for the light rain shower so that no one will notice that I'm crying, to visit the Library of Congress and find that I have to locate a bench on which to rest because standing just on the other side of the glass from Thomas Jefferson's beloved book collection has literally made me lightheaded. I confess to all of that even though, in the context of the rest of this essay, said confession puts me firmly in the camp of white American nationalists I'll be criticizing a few paragraphs hence - just one of the many paradoxes inherent in trying to do antiracism work when you're white like me. Please forgive me my absurdity while I flirt with radical honesty. As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.")

In this place called Hope, Clinton has oft told us, his grandfather taught him to reject the racism that was as much an ordinary part of life for whites as were warm, ripe tomatoes and oversized, iced watermelons. Clinton's grandfather taught him by example to do business with local blacks the same as he did with whites, a habit quite different from other white shopkeepers of the day.

So, I've been to Bill Clinton's hometown. I know he and I share the same roots, roots in a beloved, schizophrenic South - a South of sweet tea and relic slave shacks, of casserole-bearing funeral attendees and still-segregated churches, a South of unfailing manners as well as fierce racism both personal and institutionalized (I've lived up North and out West too, and white people there need not check their mental compasses for due South when they think about racism).

And so I've seen where Bill Clinton grew up. And I know. I know that Bill Clinton knew exactly what he was doing when he made that comparison of Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson. He knew, and for personal gain for himself and his, he was willing to fan those racist flames, always there, always hot, always bright - and denied by whites even if maintaining that denial requires us to stay in our skivvies and wander blindfolded while denying the existence of the fire.

Oh, he knew.

And it isn't just that Clinton compared Obama to Jackson, Jackson is someone most whites don't like, therefore the association could hurt Obama. It is that, but it's also more.

Hearing about what's happening with Obama's polling numbers beginning to decline now that lots of oh-so inculpable white people have seen film of Obama's pastor speaking his truth, I was thinking today that about how this process, this process of making Obama black enough to make whites consciously uncomfortable, began with Bill Clinton's comment in South Carolina. Now, I'm sure someone - a bunch of someones - would have eventually begun doing that anyway. So this thought came to me: they intended to morph him into "the angry black preacher," to link Obama in the minds of white voters to Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton. It ended up being Reverend Jeremiah Wright instead.

Mission accomplished. Heckuva job, Billy.

And it's no coincidence that in order to morph Obama into those two "angry" black preachers so dreaded by whites, they went through....Obama's preacher.

That was the only way white culture, really, could finally go after Obama.

You see, most white people - and I am a white person - don't know black people. Sometimes, it's overtly racist whites who don't want to know black people. Sometimes, we move to the suburbs, shop at Whole Foods, vote for Democrats, and tell ourselves we just don't have that much opportunity for interracial interaction, but that if we did, you know, we're sure we would be "good" white people who are culturally colorblind. After all, in our reality, race isn't a problem, ergo racism isn't a problem in America.

And even if we know some black people, we don't know black people. How can we, running around the racist bonfire I described above, stripped down to our skivvies and blindfolded so we can deny the heat and the light that are right there? Blindfolded is no way to see. So we don't see.

And when we, blindfolded, hear someone like Jeremiah Wright, ranting apparent madness out there in the beyond, we are shocked. We are appalled. We are angry. We can't imagine why they are being so racist!**

Why don't we know black people? Simply because, to borrow from the boorish Jack Nicholson, we can't handle the truth.

I'll borrow from someone far wiser than I to explain further (his name actually is Tim Wise, but that actually isn't why I consider him a wiseman):

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots....

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. (please for the love of god please read the rest of this***)

So, there it is. We don't know black people and Tim Wise has explained why we don't.

And what happens when we don't know or know them? Well, apparently the best we can do is to rely on what we've seen.

What have we seen? Well, each of us has been provided through American culture with a rather limited range of black archetypes. There is what Spike Lee calls "the magical negro, there is "Mammy" (yep, still), there is "the driver" a la Morgan Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy" - those are the classic archetypes.****

In addition to archetypes, whites commonly hold stereotypes of blacks and despite our being supposedly oh-so postracial, surveys show the list hasn't change much in the last sixty years.

In 1933, the top ten stereotypes of blacks were "superstitious, lazy/slovenly, happy-go-lucky, ignorant, musical, ostentatious, very religious, physically dirty, naive and unreliable."

In 1995, the top ten were "athletic, rhythmic/musical, unintelligent/ignorant/stupid, poor, loud, criminal, hostile, very religious, disloyal to family, and physically dirty." (source)

So I submit that whites individually, mainstream culture, and the media have been struggling to find a category - an archetype or stereotype, something for heaven's sake, it's all so disorienting - a hole into which we whites could peg Barack Obama because, once again, we rely on racist cultural shorthand since we don't really know black people (and we really can't recognize that we don't know because the whole system of white privilege is so invisible to us).

For months, Barack Obama was broadcasting to white America as an individual (well, who doesn't, really) and seemed to be being received as such. He wasn't Mammy (or, to be gender precise, Uncle Peter), the driver, Sambo, "the magical negro" (although some have attempted to link him to the latter). He is clearly not, to return to the list of top ten stereotypes, unintelligent/ignorant/stupid, poor, loud, criminal, hostile, disloyal to family, or physically dirty.

He is athletic, and the media has treated us to a number of "Barack plays basketball" stories, but I think white voters were also seeing in those stories the Obama who is competitive and a fighter, who is focused, who is young and vigorous (although I heard some time back that, should he be the nominee, Republicans will run campaign ads that show him playing basketball).

He did joke during one of the debates about his dancing abilities versus Bill Clinton's, and he also danced on the Ellen show.

I offer these last two items with tongue-in-cheek. The point is that I believe whites and our media have been working down a list of "black people we think we know" to try to know Obama.

One item remains on the list of top ten stereotypes - it's "extremely religious." Somehow, the (white) public has very quickly begun morphing Obama into his minister (even as the Clintons previously tried with Reverend Jesse Jackson). And if the (white) public can successfully do that, can think "angry black minister" when they think of Obama, then we will have finally, after these long months of bumbling around, found one of our holes into which he can be fitted. "Angry black minister." Then maybe Obama too is "angry." And then maybe he hates us. In fact, maybe he can't be trusted; maybe he's acting nice around us and hating us behind our backs and plotting against us (these were the big fears during slavery, obviously, and I think we still fear these things today). AND, Hillary is here to explain to us that he isn't even qualified for the job he seeks - she will give that much to the likes of John McCain, experienced political whore in more ways than I care to list at the moment, and not to Barack Obama. I notice too that the red phone ad has lots of racist fearmongering potential - nighttime, white kids sleeping sweetly all snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums dance in their heads - virtuous white women of America, can you entrust this man with your precious children? (NY Times noticed too).

THERE! I think that'll do it. Yep, he's finally fitting in that hole! Whew, what a relief, my white brothers and sisters. Life as we understand it can now continue! We now return to your regularly scheduled oblivion.

Enjoy your recession. Buy a bikini to celebrate global warming. Keep those kids safe and send them to America's fine institutions of learning; McCain says we'll be needing them in Iraq years from now. Keep a month's supply of, well, everything in case there is a levee breach near you (yeah, you, non-Louisianians, I AM talking to you too; check out the links). Stock up on the duct tape because it looks like for the indefinite future they will be hating us for freedoms (apparently "they" haven't heard that our freedoms ain't what they used to be).

Submission accomplished. Barack who?

UPDATE: A WHITE FRIEND WHO READ THIS SAYS HE HAS A BLACK FRIEND WHOM HE BELIEVES HE REALLY KNOWS. WHEN I WROTE THAT WHITES DON'T KNOW BLACK PEOPLE, I GUESS I WAS THINKING PRIMARILY IN BROADER, CULTURAL TERMS. WHEN IT COMES TO INDIVIDUAL FRIENDSHIPS, I CONCEDE THAT I MAY HAVE OVERSTATED THE CASE. I GUESS I WOULD HAVE TO TALK TO HIS FRIEND, WHOM I ALSO KNOW, AND ASK HIM WHAT HE THINKS.

* Tim Wise's essays don't seem to have individual URLs, so I can't link to them directly. All I can get is the URL to his homepage. From there, click on "essays" and then "A Dream Distorted: Reflections on the Hijacking of Martin Luther King Jr."

** from the link, click on "essays" and then "Another Batch of White Whine:
Obama, Black Voters and the Myth of Reverse Racism"

*** from the link, click on "essays" and then "Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth"

**** It occurs to me that in each of those examples, African-Americans are defined strictly according to their utility to white people - mammy, driver, "magic negro." This is also the case with female archetypes - wife (in relationship with a man), mother (in relation to a child), virgin (not yet penetrated by man), slut/whore (penetrated by too many men), femme fatale (man can't resist), damsel in distress (needs protection from or rescue by a man), and so on. This tendency toward what I'm calling for the moment the archetype-in-relation illustrates the extent to which women and people of color are still viewed through the lens of the dominant culture (women as seen by men, people of color as seen by whites).