January 15th is Martin Luther King day in America. I think that he deserves better. Like Rosa Parks he has become a safe symbol, of what was certainly not a safe movement, and he got more radical, not less, as he got older. I was glad to see Idiot/Savant giving voice to some of Martin Luther King’s more radical ideas.

But, as I’ve said before, I think it’s important to remember that the movement was much wider than one great orator.* So I’m not going to quote Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream Speech” - instead I’m going to write about another speech that was to have been given at the March on Washington.

John Lewis gave the speech for the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee that day. He had written an angry speech, that criticised the governemnt, and didn’t preach patience. Other organisers put immense pressure on him to remove the more radical portions of his speech. He gave into that pressure, and the speech he gave is available here

This is the speech he was to have given:

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages—or no wages at all.

In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s civil rights bill; for it is too little, and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.

This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens in Danvllle, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges. What about the three young men in Americas, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?

The voting section of this bill will not help thousands of black citizens who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama, and Georgia, who are qualified to vote, but lack a sixth grade education, ‘ One man, one vote’ is the African cry. It is ours, too. (It must be ours.)

People have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to resister to vote. What is in the bill that will protect the homeless and starving people of this nation? What is there in this bill to insure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?

For the first time in 100 years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action.

We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their career on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say ‘My party is the party of principles𕲁? The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?

In some parts of the South we work in the fields from sun-up to sun-down for $12 a week. In Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by Dixicrats but by the Federal Government for peaceful, protest. But what did the Federal Government do when Albany’s Deputy Sheriff beat Attorney C. B. Kine and left him half dead? What did the Federal Government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?

It seems to me that the Albany indictment is part of a conspiracy on the part of the Federal Government and local politicians in the interest of expediency.

Moreover, we have learned—and you—should know—since we are here for Jobs and Freedom—that within the past ten days a spokesmen for the Administration appeared in a secret session before the committee that’s writing the civil-rights bill and opposed and has almost killed a provision that would have guaranteed in voting suits, for the first time, a fair federal district judge. And, I might add, this Admistration’s bill or any other civil rights bill—as the 1960 civil-rights act—will be totally worthless when administered by racist judges, many of whom have been consistently appointed by President Kennedy.

I want to know, which side is the Federal Government on?

The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The non-violent revolution is saying, ‘We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure that could and would assure us a victory.’ To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait’, we must say that, ‘Patience is a dirty and nasty word’. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually, we want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.

We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about. In the struggle we must seek more than more civil rights; we must work for the community love, peace, and true brotherhood. Our minds, souls, and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all the people.

The revolution is a serious one, Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the street and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, Listen Mr. Congressmen, Listen fellow citizens, the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a ‘cooling-off’ period.

All of us must get in the revolution. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village, and every hamlet of this nation, until true Freedom comes, until the revolution is complete. In the Delta of Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in Alabama, Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation. The black masses are on the march!

We won’t stop now. All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, and Thurmond won’t stop this revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—non-violently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you , WAKE UP AMERICA!

* To be fair in most mainstream portrayals of the civil rights movmenet the great orator has a tired side-kick and an angry opposite.

Here are two graphs representing the most and least populous US states.  The third column indicates what percentage of the population is White (non-Hispanic), and the fourth column shows how many people are represented by each electoral college vote.

Data on the electoral college votes and state population ranking can be found here, and the data on race comes from the 2000 Census, which was used to create the current voting districts connected to Electoral College votes.

Figure 1 Represents the Most Populous States

Figure 2 Represents the Least Populous States

Jan 15, 2006 Teaching About Racism: My MLK Day Essay

My early college years really marked a shift in my thinking about race. After teaching college students for the past several years I realize that I am certainly not alone. For many young people this is the first time they are really forced to confront racism and actually engage in conversations across race. I had purposely chosen to attend a college that was racially mixed and was in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and I thought that I would be able to learn and put much of the racism behind me. Of course, I was 18, and I was wrong. However, most young adults are different from me. My experience is that they would prefer to go on living a largely segregated life just as long as there is no one else there to remind them of it. This is the difficulty teaching about racism in the colorblind era. Many students believe racism is over, or they believe that it is confined to Neo-Nazis, the KKK, or “Hicks.” I would say the vast majority of my White students and at least half of my students of color think racism is not a problem, and it is something they have no experience with. One of the reasons they think this way is because they do not have an understanding of institutionalized racism.

One of the problems is that prior to college, students learn almost nothing about racism. Many students learn about diversity and multiculturalism, but not racism. This distinction is significant because the terms diversity and multiculturalism, have become synonymous with the notion that “we are all a little different, but we should all like each other.” The problem with this way of teaching is that it ignores the fact that racism is not about how different we are or who we “love or hate.” The primary manifestation of racism is structural, which means that our social and economic opportunities are profoundly connected to race. If we all love each other and know that we are different, we will still have racism. People can love people and truly be racist towards them; moreover, racism isn’t just something located in individuals. Some times the rules themselves and their outcomes are racist. Take the education system as an example. Even the most nonracist teacher must contend with the fact that school districts are generally drawn based on town lines, and towns are often racially segregated. Certainly, racial attitudes shape neighborhood segregation, but these institutional arrangements take on a life of their own. Many of my students will say they don’t have many friends from different backgrounds because there were no people from different background in their neighborhoods. When I say that racism causes this, the immediate reaction is “I’m not racist. I just didn’t have the opportunity to meet people from other races.” Whether that individual person is racist or not doesn’t matter from my way of thinking. Racism has an impact because of the structure, and the individual person doesn’t much matter regardless of whether or not he or she is racist. I know this sounds defeatist, but it doesn’t have to be.

In my own experience the hardest thing to teach students about racism is that it exists in individuals, groups, and institutions. At the individual level, racism is about a particular persons attitudes and behaviors. At the group level racism is about collective attitudes and behaviors, and at the structural level racism is about the fundamental organization of society. One very good example of structural racism would be the electoral college. Superficially, the electoral college is a raceless policy, but in the end Whites’ votes for president count more because of it (not to mention the wholesale disenfranchisement of predominantly Black Washington, DC.). Bob Wing, former editor of Colorlines magazine details a few of the ways this works. He says:

The good news is that the influence of liberal and progressive voters of color is increasingly being felt in certain states. They have become decisive in the most populous states, all of which went to Gore except Ohio, Texas, and (maybe?) Florida. In California an optimist might even envision a rebirth of Democratic liberalism a couple of elections down the road, based largely on votes of people of color.
The bad news is that the two-party, winner-take-all, Electoral College system of this country ensures, even requires, that voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored.

“The two-party, Electoral College system ensures that almost half of voters of color are marginalized or totally ignored.”

The Electoral College negates the votes of almost half of all people of color. For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90 percent Democratic. However, white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state (and every border state except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While nationally, whites voted 54-42 for Bush, Southern whites, as usual, gave over 70 percent of their votes to him. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black (and Latino and Native American) vote for Gore in that region.
Since Electoral College votes go entirely to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state, whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes, the result was the same as if blacks and other people of color in the South had not voted at all. Similarly negated were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, and Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails.

Wing goes on to detail how racism shaped the development of the electoral college,

The Constitution provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person (but given no citizenship rights) for purposes of determining how many members each state would be granted in the House of Representatives. This provision vastly increased the representation of the slave states in Congress.
At the demand of James Madison and other Virginia slaveholders, this pro-slavery allocation of Congresspersons also became the basis for allocation of votes in the Electoral College. It is a dirty little secret that the Electoral College was rigged up for the express purpose of translating the disproportionate Congressional power of the slaveholders into undue influence over the election of the presidency. Virginia slaveholders proceeded to hold the presidency for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years.

Since slavery was abolished, the new justification for the Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to retain some impact on elections. And so it does–to the benefit of conservative white Republican states. As Harvard law professor Lani Guinier reports, in Wyoming, one Electoral College vote corresponds to 71,000 voters, while in large-population states (where the votes of people of color are more numerous) the ratio is one electoral vote to over 200,000 voters. So much for one person, one vote.

This year the Electoral College will apparently enable the winner of the conservative white states to prevail over the winner of the national popular vote–a tyranny of the minority.

This election system continues until today, in spite of how open minded modern politicians, political parties, or racial groups may or may not be.

To some extent when people learn about institutional racism, it can be very defeating because institutional racism is much more difficult to challenge. But there are also advantages. One major advantage is that it removes some of the guilt students (especially White students) have about racism. Once young people realize racism is less about blaming individuals (not that there isn’t some blame to go around) and more about strucutral organization; their defensiveness goes down a little. However, discussions of structural racism must also include examples of how strucutral racism can be challenged. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950-1960s provides such an example.

Because racism is pervasive and institutional, it needs to be attacked at the individual, group, and structural levels. I think this is highly relevant when we discuss the legacy of Martin Luther King because Dr. King always understood the institutional nature of racism, particularly at the end of his career. People often forget that when he was assassinated in Memphis, he was trying to help low income predominantly African American workers organize. Certainly, we can work on changes our individual attitudes, but in order to challenge racism today we cannot forget the important of social movements as a means of changing the social structure. A movement to end the electoral college, DC disenfranchisement, and the structure of the criminal justice system would be a few areas where we can begin a modern Civil Rights Movement.

I recently wrote a post which included reference to a scenario from a NZ rape crisis schools education programme:

Jo is a Year 13 Student at XX High School. She is at a party on a Saturday night. Jared is going to be there and she’s been trying to hook up with him for awhile. She’s wearing a short skirt, boots, and a low cut top –she’s sure to catch his attention –She looks great. Jo and her friends drink a few bottles of wine before they get to the party and she feels pretty drunk by the time they arrive. At the party she starts talking with Jared, he asks if she wants to go up to one of the bedrooms –they walk up the stairs followed by comments from Jared’s mates as they close the door.

In the room they start kissing, and Jared is putting his hands up her top and down her pants, she likes it and starts touching Jared. Jared then takes off his pants and hers. Jo starts to feel uncomfortable and pulls back a bit, and pulls her underwear back up. She doesn’t want to have sex with Jared but doesn’t know how to stop it. Everyone at the party thinks they’re having sex, and she doesn’t want Jared to think she’s tight. Jared pulls her knickers back down and they have sex.

I deleted a comment from that thread, but I’ve decided it illustrates a point rather well, so I’m going to write a post about it:

what is of concern is that one can get the impression that women reward such behaviour as opposed to punishing it. a lot of men claim that it does work (and presumably they wouldn’t if it didn’t). Ie you proceed assumiong you have consent to avoid asking for it and opening the door to rejection.

This is actually a reasonably common argument when people discuss consent. You let a thread go on long enough and some man will make some sort of argument that boils down to: “men who don’t seek consent get more sex than men who do, women shouldn’t let that happen.”

Now I’ve no idea if the premise is correct. How would you know if men who ignore consent have more sex than men who seek consent? But the argument reveals some really disturbing thought patterns.

The first is that men are only motivated by their dicks, and so must be trained, much in the way you would train a dog. Women can control men by depriving them of doggie treats and if they don’t do so then it’s inevitable that men will continue to poo on the carpet and ignore consent.

Now we’re just going to stop for a second and put the blame for rape where it belongs - on men who rape. Of course the moment we do that the argument falls apart. Women should not have to centre their sexual actions around discouraging men from raping.

I want people to think a little bit about what it would mean for women to centre their sexual actions around encouraging men to seek consent. Women who freeze or disassociate because of past sexual abuse would have to stop. Women who don’t have a language to describe consent would have to learn. Women who have learned that their sexual role is to please men would have to unlearn. Women would have to ignore almost everything mainstream society tells us about sex.

I’m not saying that many of those changes aren’t desirable, but you can’t make that change in the hope that men will stop hurting you. It’s not claiming your sexuality as your own if you’re doing it to stop men raping.

The other disturbing aspect to this comment was also common on other on-line discussions of these scenarios. Here’s an example from Anarchia

Well that makes it harder. About a hair harder. She didn’t consent, so it’s rape. What should happen next is going to depend on things we weren’t told in the story.

It’s really common on discussions on rape scenarios for people to switch straight from a discussion about whether or not it’s consent, to a discussion about consequences. Sometimes people start talking about whether or not someone should be prosecuted, sometimes people are implying that the repercussions should be that the guy doesn’t get sex.

What seems missing from this is any idea that women are people, and the reason you shouldn’t have sex with someone when you don’t know if she really wants to have sex with you is because you could really hurt her. To be honest I don’t care about rapists and what happens to them, I just want them to stop.* Even if I supported the justice system in any form (and I really don’t) I know that they’re never going to catch and convict every rapist. I know that the only way we can stop rape is by convincing men that women are people, and our desires are as important as their desires, and our right to our bodies is more important than mens’ rights to our bodies.**

Every time someone skips straight to ensuring there are consequences to rape they’re implying that they think it’s more likely that we can catch and convict every rapist, than we can change men’s minds. That belief depresses the hell out of me.

* I’m fairly certain that the only rapist I’ve ever argued should go to jail is Clint Rickards.

** I can’t put into words how much this sentence scares and depresses me.

Note to commenters this thread is open to feminist, pro-feminist and feminist friendly commenters only. I would also point out that discussion of the scenario is off topic. If you think it’s fine to ignore consent then I don’t want to hear about it (plus read the first sentence a few more times and decide not to post).

I’ve just finished Women Workers and the Trade Union Movement, by Sara Boston. It covers women in the trade unions (I know, what a surprise) in Britain in the late 19th century, and most of the 20th.

I really enjoyed reading it - it is so amazing to discover what people had been able to achieve by working together - these huge strikes and victories.

But my main feeling while reading the book was anger - over and over again women workers were being sold out by their male comrades. Men would complain that having women workers on a lower rate undercut their wages, and instead of getting pay equity and a rate for the job they’d try and keep women out. Sexism and misogyny was so deeply ingrained that male workers and trade unionists would act against their own best interests as workers in order to maintain their power over women.

Don’t get me wrong there were some really great examples of solidarity, and strength across gender lines, but not enough.

On the left, one of the most annoying arguments you hear is that if women (or anyone else) organize separately then it’ll ‘divide the working class’. If people paid any attention to history they’d realize it wasn’t the women organizing against sexism that were dividing the working class - it was the sexism and misogyny of men.

*She had the audacity to suggest equal pay at a National Union of Women Teachers conference.

Note for Comments: This is a pro-union thread. Please do not post right-wing criticisms of unions in this thread.

In California, like in most states, all it takes for a bride to take her new husband’s last name is filling out a form. But for Mike Buday to take his new wife Diana Bijon’s last name, Buday “must file a petition, pay more than $300, place a public notice for weeks in a local newspaper and then appear before a judge.”

Rather than going through all that, the Bijons sued California for sex discrimination. As a result, a state legislator is proposing a new law making it equally easy for husbands to take wive’s last names, as vice versa.

Only six states — Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota — have statutes establishing equal name-change processes for men and women when they marry. [...] The Census Bureau does not keep figures on how many U.S. men are taking their brides’ names. But clearly it happening more and more. Milwaukee County, Wis., Clerk Mark Ryan estimated that one in every 100 grooms there now takes the name of his wife.

1 in 100 is, frankly, more than I would have guessed. The article also mentions that about 20% of brides elect to keep their own last names, up from about 3% in 1975.

Thanks to Bean for the tip!

Birds over a junkyard in Kosovo, photographed by Reuters photographer Damir Sagolj.

Ta-da! My ten favorite posts written by me in 2006. (I’m not going to attempt to rank the posts of other “Alas” contributors - but Maia has already done a “best of Maia 2006” post, and perhaps Rachael will do the same.)

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Both myself and Dumi from Black at Michigan are cited in this article in US News and World Report. The article discusses racist incidents on college campuses around the US, focusing on how new technologies have created greater awareness of campus racism. Here’s a brief quote from the article:

“Having a decent knowledge of history, I sort of lost it,” says Knott, one of only a small number of students of color at Whitman. She was not the last to be outraged. Over the course of the semester, racially charged photos, videos, and Facebook pages offended students at more than a dozen campuses across the country–from the University of California–Los Angeles, where a video of police shocking an Iranian-American student with a TASER gun sparked a rally against police brutality, to Tufts University outside Boston, where the editor of a student journal just apologized for a satirical poem called “O Come All Ye Black Folk.” One widely forwarded Texas A&M video shows a white student painted with shoe polish getting whipped and sexually assaulted. The NAACP found the trend so disturbing that it announced a Campaign to End Campus Racism. Over the past 15 years, colleges have become more racially diverse, but students and observers say campuses remain segregated–and, for minority students, racially tense. Survey data tend to miss that tension. “People know how to say all the right things [in a survey],” explains Rachel Sullivan, a sociologist at Long Island University.

All seeing. What’s made it more visible is new technology, from Internet sites to cellphone cameras. “I can go on the Internet,” says L’Heureux Lewis, who studies campus race relations at the University of Michigan, “and within a few clicks I can find out who you know, where you hang out, and what you do on a Saturday night. I have 24-hour access to your offenses now. So if I didn’t hear about what you did last night, or I wasn’t there two months ago when this happened, there is a chance that I may see it now.”

You can follow the link to site to read the full article and come back and give your two cents in the comment section.

Children of Men is a distopian movie, about a world where no woman has given birth for 18 years. It contains the most powerful scene I’ve ever seen on film. Kee, a young black woman is going into labour on a bus at the entrance way of a refugee camp. We’re watching her fighting the contractions and out the window we see refugees being tortured by the police.

What made this sequence so powerful was not that it showed us a distopian future, but that it showed us our distopian present. The images of refugees who are selected as dangerous at the entrance to the campis deliberately evocative of photos we’ve all seen from Abu Grahib. The camp they then enter is Gaza with British signage. The most potent political comment, in this amazingly political film, was the message refugees heard as they entered the hell-hole of a refugee camp: “Do not support terrorism, we are here to help you.”

The set, and the world-creation, is truly remarkable in its detail, and there’s barely a frame that doesn’t contain information about the world of the film, and criticism of our world.

What makes Children of Men’s critique of our world so radical and thorough- is it takes the world that is usually hidden from those of us who live comfortably, the experiences of Iraqis, palestinians, illegal immigrants and so on, and makes it the centre-piece of Britain’s future. Our government’s are as racist and as brutal as the world, but at the moment they can hide it from a good portion of their population.

I did have a minor problem with the movie, and that was it’s characters - or lack thereof. It is a really sign of the quality of the movie that the fact that the major characters are completely unmemorable is a minor problem rather than a reason to demand my money back. While some of the minor characters were well drawn, the main characters - particularly Theo and Kee very under-developed. This was probably a deliberate choice, which would have worked better if they hadn’t given Theo a back-story from cliche hell (guess what? It involves a girl).

One of the reasons that the movie can sustain characters who don’t hold your interest, is because it is incredibly well-paced. Like Theo we are taken, a little bit reluctantly, along a series of events we have no control over, and we don’t know what’s coming next. I get very jumpy in action movies (actually I got jumpy in Happy Feet), and my friend Betsy grabbed my hand to reassure me that it was OK. Then, once they reached the refugee camp I grabbed her hand, and it turns out that we really needed that.

Children of Men is full of horrors, but it does offer us hope. I may write more about it’s politics of change. But for me, the hope didn’t come from the Human Project, a For me, the hope wasn’t about the group that Kee was trying to reach - an organisation we knew nothing about. The hope came from watching people who kept fighting for a better world, even though they had no reason to believe that anyone would be alive to live in it.

I do recommend this movie, it is an astonishing piece of film-making. It wouldn’t have stayed with me so much, if it wasn’t real. We must fight for a world where women don’t have to give birth in these situations.

From The New York Times, via The Economist’s View blog, we learn that small business owners in Washington state have not been harmed by Washington state’s relatively high minimum wage — not even businesses in tows that border Idaho, where the minimum wage is $3 lower.

The article is anecdotal, but it matches a lot of empirical evidence showing that modest increases in the minimum wage don’t increase unemployment, either by forcing employers to hire fewer people, or by forcing small employers out of business. One possible reason for this, alluded to in the article (and by Mark at Economist’s View), is that better-paid employees tend to value their jobs more, and so work harder and quit less often.

I don’t there is any serious evidence-based case against raising the minimum wage any longer. The only reasons to oppose the minimum wage left are reasons of pure ideology, or of class warfare.

There’s an extensive quote from the article below the fold.

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This is an excellent educational project. Not only is the information fascinating, but the presentation and style of the site is accessible to a popular audience. There are several academic papers as well as resources for families and children. For anybody trying to win an argument about race, it’s a good source of data : ). They even have a blog. The sociologists, academics, and primary and secondary teachers who are reading this blog, can use this in their classes. The site explores the history of discrimination and racism, human variation, and the lived experience of race.

In addition to the site, there is an exhibit that is traveling the country that accompanies the project. This could be a great field trip/outing for families and schools. Currently, the exhibit is running at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul from January 10, 2007 - May 6, 2007. The Exhibit will is scheduled to appear throughout the us including the following cities: Detroit, MI; Wichita, KS; Jersey City, NJ; Hartford, CT; Cleveland, OH; Cincinnati, OH; St. Louis, MO; Kalamazoo, MI; Boston, MA. Hopefully, they will eventually make it to the West Coast and the Southeast. (If anyone from Minnesota is reading, gets the chance to go. I would love to hear about your experience with the traveling exhibit.)

In an earlier post, I discussed immigration history in the 1800s and early 1900s. In this post, I would like to discuss the most recent wave of immigrants, specifically those who came after 1965. As I stated in the previous post, a National Origins quota system was put in place in 1924. These quotas were designed to maintain the current ethnic make up of the US population, keeping the balance in favor of northern Europeans and stemming the tide of immigrants from southern/eastern Europe and other parts of the world. This system was in place until 1965, and during this time period the rate of immigration decreased markedly. By 1960 only 5% of the US population was foreign born, compared to 15% of the population in 1910 and 12% of the total population in 2004 (US Census Bureau).

The Immigration Act of 1965 (Hart Cellar Act) scrapped the national origin quotas, and replaced them with other methods for gaining entry/residence into the US. While less restrictive than the national origins system, it was more restrictive than very early immigration policies (pre 1870s).

What were the provisions of this new immigration policy? One of the key goals of this immigration policy was family reunification of immediate relatives–spouses, parents, and children. Families were given preference and were not subject to the new quotas that were set as were several other groups: “certain ministers of religion; certain former employees of the U.S. government abroad; certain persons who lost citizenship (e.g., by marriage or by service in foreign armed forces); and certain foreign medical graduates.” Immigration quotas were shifted from nations to hemispheres. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, this act

Allocated 170,000 visas to countries in the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 to countries in the Western Hemisphere. This increased the annual ceiling on immigrants from 150,000 to 290,000. Each Eastern-Hemisphere country was allowed an allotment of 20,000 visas, while in the Western Hemisphere there was no per-country limit. This was the first time any numerical limitation had been placed on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. Non-quota immigrants and immediate relatives (i.e., spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens over the age of 21) were not to be counted as part of either the hemispheric or country ceiling.

Additionally, those immigrants with “special skills” that were needed in the US were also given a preference. This would include people such as highly trained scientists, athletes, artists, and people who can fulfill high demand jobs (i.e. nursing). Finally, refugees were also granted slots (especially those from communist countries and the Middle East.).

There have been important subsequent immigration policies, including amnesty for undocumented immigrants; however, many of these policies are slight adjustments on the Hart Cellar Act. The Center for Immigration Studies highlights several post 1965 reforms in this list:

1976 Amendments to Immigration and Nationality Act — Extended a version of the seven-category preference system previously applied to Eastern Hemisphere countries to all Western Hemisphere countries. Also imposed an annual ceiling of 20,000 immigrants from any one country in the Western Hemisphere.

1978 Amendments to Immigration and Nationality Act — The two hemispheric ceilings were combined into a worldwide quota of 290,000. The U.S. now had a policy that, on paper, applied uniformly to the people of all countries.

1980 Refugee Act — Established a separate admissions policy for refugees, eliminating the previous geographical and ideological criteria, and defining “refugee” according to United Nations norms. It abolished the seventh preference category for refugees (see Details). It set a separate target for refugees at 50,000 and reduced the annual worldwide ceiling for immigrants to 270,000.

1981 Report of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy — The 16-member commission was created by Congress to evaluate immigration and refugee laws, policies, and procedures. The Commission’s recommendations were summed up as follows by its chairman, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh: “We recommend closing the back door to undocumented, illegal migration, opening the front door a little more to accommodate legal migration in the interests of this country, defining our immigration goals clearly and providing a structure to implement them effectively, and setting forth procedures which will lead to fair and efficient adjudication and administration of U.S. immigration laws.”

1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) — Tried to control and deter illegal immigration by providing amnesty and temporary status to all illegal aliens who had lived in the United States continuously since before January 1, 1982; extended a separate, more lenient amnesty to farmworkers; imposed sanctions on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens; increased inspection and enforcement at U.S. borders.

1990 Immigration Act (IMMACT) — Modified and expanded the 1965 act; it significantly increased the total level of immigration to 700,000, increasing available visas 40 percent. The act retained family reunification as the major entry path, while more than doubling employment-related immigration. The law also provided for the admission of immigrants from “underrepresented” countries to increase the diversity of the immigrant flow.

In spite of these alterations, basic immigration policies still follow the 1965 Immigration Act’s basic guidelines. This policy change dramatically changed the US population. The rate of immigration dramatically increased, and many groups that had previously faced high level of discrimination, especially Asians, were now entering the US in much larger numbers. Many of the post 1965 Asian immigrants were recruited to the US specifically for their skills in fields such as medicine, a stark departure from the early Chinese immigrants who were working class/low wage laborers. Overall, the new immigrants come mostly from Latin American and Asia. Contemporary immigrants tend to be more highly educated than immigrants of previous generations because of the 1965 immigration preferences; however, there is still a noticeable immigrant working class (especially for Latin American immigrants). In fact, it is probably fair to say that immigrants are disproportionately part of the working poor (especially those who are undocumented or refugees) and the upper middle class.

What does the future of immigration policy hold? I don’t feel qualified to predict the future, but if we want to talk about meaningful immigration policies and reforms, we need to understand what the current policies are. The 1965 law set the basis for current policy, and thus, it is imperative to reference it in the immigration debates.

I think it was a New Year’s Day party that my parents were holding; I would have been thirteen or fourteen. It was near the end of the party and all my mothers’ closest friends were talking, trying to get up the energy to round up their kids and leave. One of the women started explaining this great diet she was about to go on and even though it was fifteen years ago I can still remember the details she described. But what I remember more was noticing other people’s reactions. None of the men cared about the conversation, and my little sisters and their friends just kept on playing, but every single woman in the room was treating this as important information that deserved respect. Then I noticed that I was paying attention to the conversation - did this mean I was a woman?

Jill from Feministe wrote a really good post on the proposal to print children’s BMI on their report cards. It’s not her argument that I want to respond to (although I agreed with 99% of it), but the position from which she wrote. She starts: “When I was in elementary school, we had annual weigh-ins. I dreaded weigh-in day more than just about any other day of the year,” and continues:

From there, I spent most of my life engaging in restrictive eating behaviors, and volleying back and forth between extremes of “being skinny will make me happy and so therefore I’m only going to consume 800 calories a day” and “this is ridiculous, I’m a feminist and I’m not going to buy into this shit, so I’m going to eat whatever I want, even if that means binging and gaining 10 pounds in a single month” (that’s where I was at last month, and now I’m miserable). Even at 23, I still feel completely out of control when it comes to my weight, and I still go back and forth between a desire to be thin and an ideology which conflicts with that desire.

What I think is so important in what Jill wrote is that for many women feminism does not solve our relationship between food and our bodies, it just helps name the problems. It’s also a lot easier to talk about food and body politics in the abstract, which can leave everyone feeling that they’re a bad feminist for not figuring out this stuff by themselves.

A lot of women on this heartbreaking, rage-inducing, thread that piny started, talked about the conflict between feminism and their feelings about their body. Or going further, that feminist analysis just adds a level of guilt to what they’re doing, that they should be strong enough and smart enough not to let this society get to us.

Which is bullshit, we do the best that we can, but none of us are strong enough and smart enough to deal with all of this on our own. (I say “all of this” deliberately, because I think body and food issues are about society’s image of women, but they’re also about so much more. They’re about control and losing control. They’re a way of conforming with what women should be, and a way of resisting.)

If we’re going to do anything that allows us to take up space, we’re going to have to do it together.

As a feminist, that much is clear. I’m just not sure what I do with this analysis; what it means for the way I talk to other women. I am reaching the breaking point in terms of listening to the female dialog around food and our bodies that exists among the women I know. If I never again hear someone insult her body, or what I’m eating, it’ll be way too soon. I don’t want to listen anymore for me, and I don’t want that to be around for other women to hear.

That doesn’t get me anywhere much. Being comparatively noisy about the fact that I think the common discourse about food and our bodies is really fucked up makes that noise a little quieter when I’m around. Which is great for me, but it doesn’t help build anything new.

But I’m not sure we can build anything new within this environment. I’ve seen how activists can make mainstream diet advice look alternative. It’s a hegemony so perfect that we can’t say anything about food and our bodies that doesn’t reinforce the status quo.

More than that, I don’t know how to have this conversation without hurting other women, without hurting myself. I’ve been told that the reason I hold the views I do is because of my size, so challenging a woman who is smaller than me on what she says feels really risky. Food and our bodies are systems that are left to women to police, which works only too well to give us extraordinary power over each other.

I write about collective action, but I don’t know how to get there on this issue. I don’t even know how to get from where we are now to a point where we can have the conversation that would help us take the next step.

I’m still angry with the women who were at the party that day (feminists all). I’m angry that their feminism didn’t even stop them hating their bodies in front of us. I want the generation of feminists I am part of to at least recognize the harm we could do to our daughters (and each other). But I want to go further than that, I want to find a way to stop the harm we do to ourselves, and I don’t know how to do that. I’m worried that if we start by asking that women stop degrading themselves and the foods that nurture us, we’ll never get any further, because we’ll just drive those thoughts underground.

* From a commenter on feministe.

The Koufaxes, for those of you unfamiliar, are the annual awards the lefty blogging community gives to ourselves. They’re run by the good folks at Wampum, who give of their time and money with incredible generosity to make the Koufaxes happen each year.

You can go here to leave nominations. At this stage in the process, there’s no limit to how many nominations you can turn in. I’d like to encourage any “Alas” readers who feel inclined to do so to nominate us. :-) (And remember, “Alas” qualifies for both the “Best Blog” and “Best Group Blog” categories, among others).

Also, my fellow bloggers, remember that the “best post,” “best series” and “best new blog” categories are categories in which bloggers are encouraged to self-nominate.

The nominations process is my favorite part of the Koufaxes: the part that’s less about picking just one winner, and is more about doing a lot of nominations as a way of patting our favorite bloggers on the back and saying “good job!” (Plus, “Alas” virtually never wins in the final round, although did win “best design” once. :-P)

Speaking of which, congratulations to occasional “Alas” comment-writer Holly, who has already been nominated for a best comment-writer Koufax this year!

I’m sure I’m forgetting lots of great stuff and leaving out lots of great bloggers, but nominations are inevitably like that. If you see someone deserving that I missed, why not go nominate them yourself?

Aaaargh! It’s even worse than I thought - Our connection crashed and I lost a lot of open tabs. Screw it. I’m going with what I already had done.

Here are the folks I’m nominating for a Koufax for 2006:

Best Blog:
Obsidian Wings.

Best Blog — Pro Division:
Broadsheet.
Barbara’s Blog
Our Bodies, Our Blog

Best Blog Community:
Culture Kitchen

Best Writing:
Hilzoy, Obsidian Wings.
Brownfemipower, Women Of Color Blog.
Amanda, Ballastexistenz.
Michael Berube, Michael Berube.
Flea, One Good Thing.
Suzanne Nossel, Democracy Arsenal.

Best Post:
Ebogjonson, “Should I Use Blackface On My Blog?”
One Good Thing, “Letter To Alex And Chris, Ten Years In The Future”
Michael Berube, “Academic Freedom.”
Having Read The Fine Print: “I Ain’t Having It.”
Shaenon Garrity: “Why I Hate Anthony.”
Political Saffire: “El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, Race, And Politics.”
Official Shrub.com Blog: “How To Be A Real Nice Guy.”
Alas, a Blog: “Do They Really Believe Abortion Is Murder?”

Best Series:
Fattiepatties: “The Top Ten Things I Am Tired Of Discussing.”
Alas/Rachel’s Tavern: “The Sky Is Falling On Black Men?” Part 1 and Part 2.
Pinko Feminist Hellcat: “The OC Rape Case Series.”
Alas a Blog: Refuting Men’s Right Activist Myths About Child Support: 1 and 2.

Best Single Issue Blog:
Big Fat Blog
The Gimp Parade
The Well-Timed Period

Best Group Blog:
Pandagon
Feministe
Alas, a Blog (Yes, very shameless.)

Most Humorous Blog:
Most Humorous Post:
Damned if I know. Everyone knows I have no sense of humor anyhow.

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition:
Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty
Super Babymoma
Racialicious
Angry Brown Butch
The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum
Shrub.com

Best Consonant Level Blog:
Women Of Color Blog.
Echidne of the Snakes
Fetch Me My Axe
Tiny Cat Pants
Reappropriate

Best Expert Blog:
Democracy Arsenal
Junk Food Science

Best New Blog:
Super Babymoma
Racialicious
Junk Food Science
The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum

Best Human Equality Blog:
Women Of Color Blog.
The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum
The Gimp Parade

Best Coverage of State or Local Issues:
Blue Oregon

Best Commenter:
[I'm taking the fifth on this one -- Amp]

I doubt its any surprise that i support stem cell research. For me, there’s really not much of a question. As you can see below, there are 71 known diseases that may be treated or cured through stem cell research. Many of these ailments affect people i know and love. How can you argue with allowing someone you love to live and to live without unnecessary pain?

Then there is the animal lib perspective. For a specific example, one of the diseases on the list is HIV/AIDS. Numerous chimpanzees and other primates have been and continue to be injected with HIV, then killed in a failed attempt to find a cure. Thing is, chimps can’t get HIV (hello, its the HUMAN immunodeficiency virus). So why are we killing so many animals to find a cure for a disease they can’t get? Well, there’s a lot of money and academic prestige in animal testing (even if you fail), but that’s another topic. (editor’s note: see comments. thanks again, RonF) Surprise, surprise, the most effective research methods are also the most humane. No one has to die in the name of stem cell research.

Yet for years, stem cell research has been attacked and its development hindered. On January 11, however, the House will vote on HR3, possibly overturning the hindrances. Because it is suspected that Bush will veto the bill if passed, StemPAC is asking people to contact their representatives to push for a two-thirds majority.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ya’ll know the drill….

VeganKid presents: Radical Progressive Carnival #8!

Every Woman Has An Eating Disorder: Response to being told “An eating disorder—now that’s something I’d like to have.”
I forget who pointed out this blog to me (Maia, perhaps?), but it’s excellent. Gotta add this one to the blogroll.

The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum: Why The Pursuit Of Happyness Is Unfair To The (Ex-) Wife Character
This is one of my favorite posts that I’ve read all week. A definite addition to the ever-growing blogroll.

Confined Spaces: Top Ten Workplace Safety Stories of 2006
I really can’t recommend this blog too strongly. Always fascinating (and infuriating).

Women’s ENews: ‘Eve-Teasing’ Makes India’s Streets Mean for Women

Rachel’s Tavern: Is It Racist To Say A Black Woman Has Good Hair?
There’s some really excellent discussion in the comments.

Violet Blue Blog: 2007 Will See Several Small Publishers Forced Out Of Business
The bankruptcy of a major book distributor might be very costly to American books. Galley Cat has more.

Google Video: Tickle Me Elmo Burns To Death, Laughing
Disturbing.

Obsidian Wings: Beautiful Take-Down Of Right-Wing Attack On Silly-Sounding College Course Titles

If you not only stop to think, but have even a tiny bit of self-awareness, you’d have to notice one more thing: that writing a column like this exemplifies all the faults it is supposedly opposed to. Lack of intellectual rigor? Check. [...] Political correctness? Check. The “hollowing out” of the op-ed pages and “replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable”? Check. Offering what’s “trendy” “at the expense of actual academic content”? Check.

There are things one might legitimately criticize about academia. But this is not the way to do it. And it bugs me to see someone pretending to stand up for academic standards, which are dear to my heart, while betraying them so completely in what she writes.

DaRain Man: Autobiographical Post About Being Bullied
Despite being on an anti-feminist blog, this post is excellent, and describes a very real harm done to boys in our society.

Women’s ENews: Discrimination Against Women For Their Marital Status Is Legal In 28 States
From what this article says, this may be a particularly severe problem for single mothers.

YouTube: Louie Anderson’s West End Blues might be the most perfect three minutes of music you’ll ever hear
Curtsy: Brownfemipower.

Tiny Cat Pants: Apparently The World Owes Wintermass A Perpetual Hard-On
Beautifully written, angry response to a misogynistic internet asshole.

Google Video: College Classroom Prank: The Musical!
Oh, I am awed. This is amazing. I love the prof cracking up, too.

Latina Lista: Mexican University Prepares To Outfit Undocumented Migrants With GPS Devices
The idea is, if they get lost in the desert or otherwise get in trouble crossing, they can activate the devices and be rescued by the border patrol folks, thus preventing deaths. It’s a neat idea, I hope it works.

NY Times: There’s Been A Big Drop In Breast Cancer Rates

Transadvocate Blog: More Thoughts On The Feminist Arguments Against Trans
Marti bounces off a post I wrote, adding thoughts and analysis.

Canadian Court Legally Recognizes Three Parents Of One Boy
His two lesbian mothers and his father. I think this development is wonderful.

Junk Food Science: “Fat Children Cost More In Health Care” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Turns out the higher costs aren’t due to fat kids getting sick any more, or using more emergency room trips. The higher costs are due to doctors assuming that being fat is a disease and thus ordering more tests for fat child patients.

NY Times: Illegal Drug Use Is Up — Mainly Among Middle-Aged White People

Why are so few Americans aware of these troubling trends? One reason is that today’s drug abusers are simply the “wrong” group. As David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse, points out, wars on drugs have traditionally depended on “linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society.” Today, however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation.

PoliBlog: American’s Biggest Cash Crop: Marijuana

Balkinization: The Laziest Son
I’m not usually a poetry reader. But this thirteenth century poem by Rumi, and the blogger’s discussion of it, was both entertaining and fascinating.

Feministe: New York Public Schools To Start Issuing Obesity Report Cards.
Because the fat kids aren’t given enough shit about their weight already. See this post at Majikthise, as well.

5 Weight Loss Myths

Echidne: The Hairy Armpit Wars

The reactions to the armpit hair revolution were swift and of the expected type. The hairy armpit wearers were condemned as ugly (why not talk to Mother Nature about that?), as manly (ditto) and as unable to attract men and therefore giving up on the fight. But the hairy armpit wearers were also labeled as focused on a trivial matter, on something that has to do with body grooming, on something that was so silly as to endanger the whole feminist movement.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Alone in the darkness of a state mental hospital, Sarah Crider, 14, lay slowly dying….”
Well-researched, horrifying news story about pattern of neglect and abuse in Georgia state mental hospitals. Curtsy: The Gimp Parade.

Racialicious: Will UC Berkeley Become A, Um, Historically Asian College?

Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology: Everyone Seems Smarter On A Little Screen
A study finds that, all else held equal, job candidates are more likely to be liked by employers if they interview via a videoconference rather than in person.

William Saletan: The Ongoing Failure Of The 30-Year Search For The Harms Of Lesbian Parenting

Black Britain: Blacks Fell Less Pressure To Obsess About Their Weight
Alas, the article-writer seems to think this is a bad thing.

Pandagon: Mean, sarcastic take-down of anti-sex right-wingers. I loved it.

Boing Boing: Microscopic fungus practices mind-control on ants.
What is there to say, except: Keeewwwlll!

Box Turtle Bulletin: Respected Study Finds That 95% of Americans Have Had Pre-Marital Sex
And check out “Breaking News: Having Sex Is Normal” at Sometimes Feminists Aren’t Nice, too, for another excellent post about the same finding.

OMWO: Breastfeeding follies: Baby Attempts To Nurse From Bare-Breasted Statue.
With pictures! Curtsy: Boing Boing.

Planet of the Blind: Waiting For The Bus, Part II

I’m having a revery on the bus. Someone will shortly lean toward me and say that they once had a dog like mine. They will tell me a long and pointless story about their dog. They will not imagine that I have heard approximately four hundred and twenty five thousand dog stories from assorted strangers over the past decade.

Replace The Lies With Truth!: Anti-Gay Christian Group Provides Hilariously Textbook Example Of An Ad Hominem Attack.

Queer Dude Formerly Known As…: Dinesh D’Souza really, really, really hates liberals.
Every time I think that right-wing bestselling authors have reached the limits of their irrationality, I’m amazed anew.

The Morning News: Being Christopher Hitchens
What if Hitch were a professional wrestler? Or a children’s book reviewer? Or stuck in a room with several other Christopher Hitchenses? Curtsy: Truly Outrageous.

Because Sometimes Feminists Aren’t Nice: Round-Of Of MSNBC’s Advice About Eating and Weight

Damn Cool Pics: Amazing Manhole Cover Art From Japan
A couple of examples are on the right side of this blog post. Damn, are we lame in comparison. Curtsy: Obsidian Wings.

Crooked Timber: Contrary To Conservative Belief, That People Own Playstations Doesn’t Prove Inequality Isn’t A Problem

Balkinization: Constitutions are most effective when they do not appear to be doing anything.

As is the case with a good shot blocker, the constitution functions by creating a kind of consciousness that prevents issues from even arising in partisan politics. A corollary to this thesis is that issues are likely to arise and prove relatively enduring only when standard constitutional sources do not provide clear answers to the relevant constitutional questions.

From The Archives: How Shy Young Men Ought Nicely Ask Women For Kisses, Or Sex
Indirectly via Ezra, who discusses how excruciatingly horrible small talk is. I quite agree.

BBC: The Tower Of London Has Appointed A Female Beefeater For The First Time In History
Very cool. And as Jack at AngryBrownButch points out, it’s supercool that they’re having her wear the same uniform as all the other beefeaters.

I’m Not A Feminist, But…: Being Given Shit For Caring About Men Sucks And It’s Wrong

Wonkette: Amazing NRA Graphic Novel Revealed!
The politics are awful, but the drawings are wonderful. (Curtsy to Echidne).

The View From (Ab)Normal Heights: Anti-Gay Activists In Virginia To Target Divorcing Straight Couples

Shakespear’s Sister: First Muslim Representative Sworn Into Office On Tom Jefferson’s Copy Of The Koran
A slap in the face of bigot Virgil Goode, the Representative from Jefferson’s home district, who loudly called the use of a Koran un-American.

NY Times: The Financial Costs Of Caring For Elderly Parents
Curtsy: Family Law Prof Blog.

Iambored.com: Condom Plant!
It’s a science project! Curtsy: Bint.

Shakespeare’s Sister: Quote I Really Liked, Click Through To Read The Whole Post

Realistically, the breadth of allies in a comprehensive challenge to the patriarchy is vast and varied. Though all of us, sans rigorous philosophical exertion, are hapless conduits for every limiting and oppressive archetype upon which the patriarchy depends, conveying the bars of our own cages, very few of us are its unconstrained beneficiaries. Even the average straight, white, middle class American man exchanges privilege for severe limitations on his personal expression and emotional life—and he is encouraged never to examine that devastating trade-off too closely, lest the veneer on the alleged bargain prove thin enough through which to see. We all serve the same callous master, and there’s little to celebrate in being the favored slave—especially compared to a life of freedom.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Name Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Nonfiction Book Of The Year
This is in addition to the Time endorsement I blogged about a week or two ago. I find it thrilling that Bechdel is having such mainstream success, after years of being one of America’s best unknown cartoonists. Late Reviews has a review of Fun House, if you’d like more info.

Google Video: Laurence Lessig Lecture On Copyright Reform And New Technology
Long, and probably only of interest to people who already believe that the US approach to intellectual property desperately needs radical reform, but I enjoyed it. It’s worth sitting through the one or two dull Q&A bits at the end to get to the more interesting ones that follow, too. Curtsy: Boing Boing.

Do you ever read an argument written by someone you agree with, and find yourself saying, “please, please - get off my side!”

I’ve seen a few people commenting on Ashley’s case say “I’d rather be dead,” or saying that if they were in an accident that left them in a state similar to Ashley’s, they’d like to be allowed to die, or even that their living wills will call for them to be killed in that situation. And they’ve usually been people who, like me, are generally supportive of Ashley’s parents’ decision to give the “Ashley treatment” to Ashley.

There are several problems with this view, in my opinion.

First of all, it’s advocating murder, or at the least implying that someone else — Ashley — would be better dead. (Even if that’s not what folks mean, that’s what it implies.)

Ashley is not, from what her parents describe, miserable. She’s engaged with the environment around her, she enjoys watching TV and listening to music. She enjoys being with her family and being held. She’s a person, and saying that people like her shouldn’t live, or that if you were like her you wouldn’t want to live, is (imo) ablist. And it’s rude.

Second, it’s irrelevant. No one who’s capable of speaking or writing in a discussion about Ashley, is in Ashley’s position. The position of someone who was once capable of participating in internet discussions, but who then for whatever reason becomes cognitively disabled to an extent similar to Ashley, is still significantly different from Ashley’s position. Ashley is a person of her own; she doesn’t appear to regret being herself.

Since it’s not relevant, it’s best not to bring it up. And if someone asks “what if you were in an accident that left you in Ashley’s position” or something like that, it’s more logical to say “that’s not relevant” than to say “I’d want to be dead!”

Third, non-disabled people who say “I’d rather be dead” have mistaken assumptions of how people feel after they become disabled. Research has shown that people who lose the use of their limbs — even if they previously believed that they could never find life worth living as quadriplegic — are usually (after a period of adjustment) about as happy with their lives “after” as they were “before.” Being able to move unassisted is not, in practice, what makes life worth living.¹ There’s no reason to think that someone with a mental state similar to Ashley’s couldn’t experience contentment, happiness, and a life that is worth living.

Finally, some people are likely to respond to this post by reminding me that I was in favor of letting the courts and Michael Schiavo decide that Terri Schiavo would die. I think Terri’s case is completely unlike Ashley’s; Ashley is conscious, has a central cortex, and is capable of experiencing the world around her. Terri could not have any experiences at all; her cortex, the area of her brain that thought and felt and experienced, was completely destroyed. Terri was profoundly dead in a way that Ashley is profoundly alive.

More importantly, Terri was at one time in her life capable of making her own decisions — and she decided to make Michael Schiavo her legal next of kin and decision-maker were she ever incapacitated (and vice versa). That decision is the only one we know for sure Terri made, and it should have been respected; just as if she had left a living will that said that if comatose she’d want to be kept alive as long as possible, that decision should have been respected. So in these two respects, the Terri Schiavo case and Ashley’s case are completely different.

Updated to add: This post is a response to stuff I’ve read all over the blogosphere, not just to what I’ve read in comments on “Alas.”

1. This is what makes a movie like Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby so dangerous; it suggests that immediate suicide is the right response to becoming disabled. (back)

I posted last week about why I consider the common anti-trans arguments invalid. My comment was inspired by a thread on I Blame The Patriarchy, Twisty’s blog.

One thing I didn’t talk about was the issue of Twisty’s culpability for the thread. I didn’t discuss that because I wanted to separate out the issue of anti-trans arguments — which I consider an important issue — from the issue of blog moderation techniques, which is an issue that I consider extremely petty.

It appears that Twisty wasn’t paying attention to the thread when the anti-trans hatefest exploded. She posted twice without, apparently, having actually read the thread in any detail at all. The third time she posted about the thread, she described herself as having just read the thread for the first time; she then condemned the transphobia and (if I followed events correctly) banned the disgusting hatemonger Luckynkl from her blog.

It would be one thing if IBTP was a constant hive of anti-trans hatred in the comments, in the way a blog like Little Green Footballs is a constant hive of anti-muslim hatred. If the problem goes on constantly for years, and the moderator never makes any attempt to address it, it’s fair to assume that the blog is that way because the moderator finds that acceptable. But that’s not what happened in this case. What happened is that Twisty didn’t pay attention 24/7, one thread exploded and got out of hand, and it took Twisty a while to correctly observe how fucked up the thread was and react.

Especially for those bloggers with busy comments sections, it’s not always possible to monitor what’s going on closely¹, and it’s guaranteed that we’ll sometimes fail to react as well to situations as we should have. To blame bloggers for everything that people post in our comments is unfair. And people who think that there’s only one politically valid approach to running a comments section are overpoliticizing what shouldn’t be a political issue, and practicing the politics of personal denunciation.

I don’t agree with that. Twisty didn’t react as well as she should have, and she didn’t initially understand the situation — but who does, all of the time? Twisty didn’t herself say anything hateful about transsexuals, and the condemnations of her are in my opinion unfair and misplaced.

Along similar lines, I recommend this post at Tiny Cat Pants.

1. There are sometimes days at a time when I can’t look at “Alas” comments, or can’t do more than skim. And the comments on “Alas” aren’t as busy at the comments on IBTP. (back)

Not much to say, really, except: Why aren’t I having this much fun? Seriously, to enjoy myself this much I pretty much have to take drugs.

Maddox is a super fun baby to watch and play with because she just plain enjoys herself so much.

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