I’m stepping outside the usual fare because I saw something a few weeks ago that surprised me, and I was curious what others thought. I walked into a local discount store, and the first thing I saw was Big League Chew. For those who are unfamiliar, Big League Chew is bubble gum that is made to resemble chewing tobacco. It was really popular when I was a child, and at that time, chewing tobacco was popular with baseball players, so the idea was that if you had Big League Chew you could be popular like your baseball heroes. As the popularity of tobacco has declined, I haven’t seen this product as readily advertised or promoted–the same for candy cigarettes¹. However, I was under the impression that these products are not only less popular today, but illegal. I personally wouldn’t support a law against pseudo-tobacco products for kids because I think it’s too much government intervention, but I would be more than happy to launch a boycott or letter writing campaign against companies who produce and distribute pseudo-alcohol, tobacco, and drug products to children. I’m not sure what correlation there is between the use of pseudo-tobacco/alcohol/drug products as a child, and subsequent use of tobacco/alcohol/drugs as an adult. What do you think?

Would you allow your kids to buy these products? Do you think the products should be banned? Do you think they affect children’s likelihood of using the “real thing” when they get older?

1. Apparently there are also marijuana candies, but I’ve only seen them when a local TV station did an expose a few years ago. (back)

The Carnival is really growing, and Susan has managed to piece together a long list of posts for this month. Go check out the posts!

Next month’s Carnival will be held over at Kill Bigotry, and in November the Carnival will be at Eric Stoller’s place.

If you are interested in hosting a future Erase Racism Carnival or submitting a post, you can check out the Carnival Homepage for available dates and contact information.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that George Bush can’t open his mouth without saying something stupid:

This has received attention from “Bush is stupid” commenters around the world. But in commenting on George Bush’s inability to communicate even the most basic of concepts - they missed the fallacy in what Bush was trying to say.

Whatever Nelson Mandela has become, the ANC, and larger black resistance against apartheid, was not the movement that Bush wants to persuade us it was. Mandela was arrested as a terrorist. The ANC was not non-violent; they blew stuff up and killed people.

You can say the ANC should have stuck to non-violent resistance (although I think to do so from the comfort of your own home would make you look like a right dick), but to imply that the ANC was non-violent (even if no-one understands what you’re trying to do) is just lying.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

“Are you a virgin?” I”d been trying to ask Jennifer this question almost from the moment our relationship had become physical.

She looked surprised, but not–as I had feared–offended. “Are you?” she asked back.

“Yes.”

“So am I,” she said, “and I want to stay that way.”

“Me too!” I laughed out loud with relief.

Jennifer tilted her head back and looked at me with a gleam in her eye. “Do you trust me”

“Yes,” I said, and she undid the circle my arms made around her, took me by the hand, and led me through the quiet of a midnight snow to the far end of the yard behind the buildings where we lived. We climbed into a large fountain that hadn’t been used in years, the walls of which were high enough that you couldn’t see us once we sat down and, oblivious to the cold, tasted at each other’s lips while the snow continued to fall around us.

Jennifer climbed into my lap and unzipped my jacket. She was two years older than I was, eighteen to my sixteen, but almost half my size, and she fit neatly inside the front of my parks, which I zipped half-way up behind her. We sat like that for a few minutes, letting the heat between us build, and then Jennifer’s breath, warm and sudden, was in my ear. “Do you trust me?” she whispered.

When I nodded my head, she told me to unzip my jacket. Then she pushed me till I was flat on my back, knelt between my legs, undid my pants, and made love to me, slowly, with her mouth. The pleasure–it was my first time–seemed to fuse my flesh to hers, and for those moments I felt like were both me and we were both her, and I was open and vulnerable, grateful and shy, and I worried that maybe Jennifer hadn’t liked what she saw when she drew me out of myself, but her eyes were tender when she was done, and she held me in her hand, warming me against the cool night air till I grew soft. Then, the smell and taste of me still on her lips, she kissed my mouth and said, “You know, that took a lot of courage.”

“Yes,” I answered, choosing to hear in her words that courage had been required of both of us. She smiled and climbed on top of me. I wrapped my parka around her one more time, and we stayed like that until it was too cold to be outside any longer.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said as we got and kissed goodbye, and, just lie in a movie, I stood in the falling snow and watched her walk back towards her building until the white curtain of flakes closed behind her. Then I too went home to bed.

A month or so later, Jennifer visited me on a night my mother wasn’t home and I was babysitting my two younger sisters. She arrived just minutes after they’d gone to bed, and so we sat in the living room listening to music and talking, waiting until we were sure they were sleeping. Then we moved into my bedroom, where on thing led to our usual other, but this time, after I had made love to her, when Jennifer rolled me onto my back, instead of taking me in her mouth, as she usually did, she climbed on top of me and began to slide her vagina up and down the length of my erection. The warmth and wetness of coming so close to “going all the way” was tantalizing, but I still didn’t want actually to do it, and I assumed, since Jennifer had not told me otherwise, that she still felt the same way as well.

At one point, my hips jerked involuntarily, and since the bed was very narrow, I grabbed Jennifer’s waist to make sure she didn’t fall. In response, she swiveled her own hips and, without warning, the tip of my penis slipped inside her, and all I was was pleasure and flesh, flesh and pleasure, alive to the slightest nuance of her touch, and there was no way I was going to separate from that, and so I moved myself slowly into her.

Much too soon, it was over. Smiling, Jennifer asked me how I felt.

“A little strange,” I said. “It was fun, but I didn’t really want to go that far.”

“Then you should’ve said no!” An edge was creeping into her voice. “You should’ve made me stop.”

“I’m not sure what it was–maybe the tone of her voice; maybe the sudden hardness in her eyes–but as soon as the words left her mouth, I began to suspect she’d lied to me about being a virgin.

“I thought you’d want to think that you were my first,” she said when I got the courage to ask her some minutes later. “That’s what most guys want anyway.” She hadn’t told me the truth, she explained, because she was afraid I’d think she was a slut. The truth: She’d lost her virginity a few years before, when two men she barely knew got her drunk and fucked her several times each in a single night. “And don’t bullshit me! You’re no different from any other guy. You wanted to do that. You’re just not man enough to admit it!”

Given what I know now about rape, it wouldn’t surprise me if Jennifer’s story were indeed true, but at the time I was so angry and so hurt that I couldn’t imagine she was doing anything other than trying to make her deception it something I might accept and forgive. I didn’t care that she wasn’t a virgin. I cared that she hadn’t believed me when I said I wanted to stay one, and I cared that she’d lied to me about herself. I felt manipulated and dirty. How could I trust her after this?

I told Jennifer I didn’t want to see her anymore, and I didn’t care that she didn’t believe me when I said it had nothing to do with her virginity or how she said it had been taken from her. I hoped sincerely that when she left my house that night, she’d be walking out of my life for good. Some months later, though–I don’t remember who called whom–she ended up at my house one afternoon when my mother and sisters weren’t home. We were sitting on my bed talking, trying to find a way to patch things up, and then were were kissing, and then our clothes were off, and it was as if I’d never broken up with her; but then the urge came over me to be inside her again, and I climbed between her legs, clumsy with my own inexperience, and despite the fact that Jennifer tried to help me, what I had expected to be as smooth and effortless as it had been the first time became a struggle that embarrassed me, and I began to loathe myself for wanting her, this girl whom I realized I still didn’t think I could trust, and yet the humiliation of giving up, of not being able to fuck her, of not being able to get back from her what she’d taken from me–and I do not know why I felt that fucking her would accomplish that, but I did–was more than I thought I could bear and so I kept poking and pushing until, at last, I entered her.

I went into Jennifer that afternoon with anger and shame. There was no pleasure in it; it was over almost before it started; and the smile of cynical triumph I saw on her face when I pulled back made me feel like I might never want to have sex again–though of course I have. Sometimes it was great, transcendent even. Other times, it was simply fun; others, mundane; and sometimes it came close to being as bad as it was that last time with Jennifer; and it is a lesson I have learned over and over again that the quality of our erotic relationships, if not of our lives as a whole, often depends on our willingness to roll with the sexual punches thrown our way, hurting, being hurt, forgiving, understanding, learning, hoping, and then, against all odds, making the effort once more to unearth the life-sustaining connection that lies waiting in the bodies of those who offer themselves to us, and that we in turn offer them, using our own bodies to make them welcome.

And so I have a wife and a son. And because sex is also always about so much more, is so much more, than what happens when two people make love, I also have had two female students whose trust in me, if only because of what they were writing about, was sexual by definition. For it matters that I was a man and that they were willing not merely to tell about the abuse they suffered at the hands of men, but also to let me help them find the language with which they could give the meaning of that experience back to themselves, and to their readers, as something they chose. It matters because, just like sex, teaching and learning are about desire and the fulfillment of desire. It might be true that the trust my students placed in me–and, to be honest, that I placed in them when I decided to share my experiences–inverts the trust that lovers bring to the bed they share, i.e., we trusted each other not to sexualize our relationship. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think  that our relationship was not of the body. For to help those two women to understand themselves was, by definition, to help them understand how to live in their bodies.

Here’s a nifty stencil. While I might take issue with the limited image it paints of the resistance - but I understand the advantages of a simple image.

The condemnation of SLORC is coming from all sides, including Bush and New Labour in the UK (with Helen Clark bleating on behind). These are government’s that don’t exactly have a history of supporting democracy and democratic movements, unless there’s a buck or two to be made. Australia and NZ eventually supported East Timorese independence from Indonesia, but only because they got some natural resources out of it. We cannot see Western governments as the great white horses that will protect people who are being oppressed by their own government.

I recommend Lenin’s Tomb:

There has been a popular movement against the ruling State Law and Order Council for years, obviously, and this is part of a real revolt. The monks are an important and esteemed segment of society because they provide education and social services, whereas the dictatorship simply exploits people. So why should it be that the United States government has, for the last few years, been applying sanctions to Burma along with its allies? Why is it championing the main democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi? Only an ostrich would imagine it has anything to do with democracy. Well, it’s the same as East Timor in many ways. The West, after having backed a genocidal regime for years, has terrorised the opposition into accepting a neoliberal programme. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy has promised that, upon taking power, it will implement structural adjustments opening up huge parts of the economy to international investors. There is more than a parallel there: Suharto was one of the Burmese junta’s closest allies before an uprising threw him off, and a polyarchical neoliberal regime in both states will restore the symmetry to some extent. So, it’s another phase in the transition from anti-socialist dictatorships used by Washington to slightly less coercive regimes in which the opposition has basically been neutered. The experiment launched in Chile in 1973 was really that successful. Britain, which has been doing fine out of the old regime, now hopes to do even better out of the new one. And at the same time, it has a chance of re-moralizing its disgraced foreign policy. New opportunities for intensified capital accumulation will open up, and in all probability the health and nutrition indices - already so miserably poor that they contribute to genocidal levels of death in some segments of the population - will get worse. Of course, while the NLD are the natural beneficiaries of any successful rebellion, there is no guarantee that people will simply accept the neoliberal programme. It depends how much the overthrow of the SLORC is a result of mass mobilisation, and how much of it comes about as a result of the elite compromise and handovers that were prevalent in Eastern Europe after 1989, and in recent colour-coded revolutions. A recently victorious rebellious mass can be surprisingly disobedient.

I don’t think this analysis should change our support for resistance in Myanmar. But I do think it’s important that we challenge the idea that Western government’s could plan a benign, or even a positive role in Myanmar. It’s up to the people of Myanmar to decide how to fight against their government; it’s up to the rest of us to fight our governments to keep their greedy hands off Myanmar.

When I was in high school, I knew a 19 year old girl named Christina who had lived a sheltered life. Her elder brother died on a plane flight to Mexico when he was 19, so her parents kept her very close to home. She wasn’t allowed to go out late, and she’d never had a date.

Christina was something of a genius. She graduated from high school at 16, and by 19 she was in her final year of college.

At this time, she met a man.

He was 35. He was a sadist. Her parents were frightened of him. They forbade her to continue seeing him. She pretended to agree, but snuck out and continued seeing him anyway. When they caught her, they gave her an ultimatum, hoping to force her to choose them over him.

Instead, she dropped out of school and moved with him to another state where she knew no one.

He forbade her from contacting myself and our group of friends. A youth pastor who was friendly with us repeatedly offered her a safe house; he was the first to be banned from speaking to her. I lost contact quickly. We’d never been close.

Rumors trickled in from the single friend of ours who was still in contact with her. They snuck phone calls when her abuser was at work. They were careful to make sure the contact wasn’t discovered.

He had given her a collar, which she was to wear at all times. When he came home from work, she was to present herself naked for his inspection, on all fours and acting like a dog until he gave her permission to be upright and human again. He would examine her body, and then examine the house. If everything was not as he preferred, he would beat her.

My friend told me, “I asked her to stop telling me about it. He bashes her head into the sink, over and over again. She won’t stop it. She won’t let me help her. I can’t bear to hear her anymore.”

I saw Christina once after the abuse started, when she stumbled back to her home state for a brief vacation, after which she returned to her abuser. She was pained, and tired. Before, she had been mercurial and childish. Now, she flashed between moments of intense childlike pouting, and a kind of hard-used suffering when she would suddenly become still and talk about her life in a halting, labored tone.

I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’ve long since lost the last thread that tied us together. I very much hope that she is alive and safe.

They called their relationship BDSM.

Tonight, I spent some time talking to Myca about BDSM. As he’s mentioned here, he’s a practitioner. He and I have been chatting about the subject, and he’s been kind enough to let me interview him — with some interesting results that I hope to put up on the blog sometime when I feel like I can process the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: I don’t often share very personal stories, but I think there is something instructive in this story, so I am prepared to deal with the blowback.

I remember an argument I had with my mother a few years back. I had brought my boyfriend, a black man, who I had been dating for 4 years, to a family picnic. At the picnic, my grandfather and his wife refused to shake my ex-boyfriend’s hand because he was black. I knew something like this was going to happen, as my maternal extended relatives had made numerous bigoted comments going back to my childhood. I felt terrible for putting my ex in that situation, and I felt terrible that nobody in my family stood up and said something. They pretended like nothing happened. I was sobbing and furious, and he and I left the picnic soon after. We stopped at a fast food place, and he said, “I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. I’m so glad we left.” I was glad to be gone, too.

After leaving I had an over the phone discussion with my mother, where my mother suggested that it was unfortunate that we left because my young cousins were crying. They liked and missed my ex and could not figure out why he had left. Her tone suggested that my ex and I were responsible for my cousins being upset, and perhaps, if we came back, they would stop crying. I remember being furious with my mother’s reaction, and I blurted out, “They should be upset. Racism hurts people. The fact that they are crying is a good thing. Hopefully, when they grow up, they will remember this so they don’t ever treat people that way.”

Later that evening, my mother and some of my aunts and cousins who felt bad about the situation came over to my apartment. I guess it was their way to try to make up for not saying anything at the picnic. They brought my younger cousins, so they could actually talk to my ex and hopefully feel better. At some point, they tried to tell me how my grandfather felt uncomfortable, and he felt like everybody was looking to see what he would do, and he made the claim that this was why he and his wife refused to shake hands. They also reminded me that my grandfather was notorious for being an abrasive person outside of his racism. But I wasn’t having it. To me this was all bullshit. Racist bullshit. Yes, he had been an asshole on other occasions, but this time he was a racist asshole.

I had listened to him and some other relatives in my extended family say pejorative things about blacks and Latinos for years. These offensive comments ranged from using the word nigger, to talking about lazy “colored” people, and making all kinds of statements about Mexican migrant farmworkers. It was rare for anybody but me to challenge this, and I didn’t even do it every time. In fact, it reached a point where people didn’t saying these things around me anymore because they knew I would get mad.¹

The next Christmas my father and brother showed their solidarity with my ex (and me) by refusing to attend any events that my maternal grandfather attended.

I half forgave my grandfather and his wife even thought they never apologized and most likely they weren’t sorry for what they did. I’m not exactly sure how my ex dealt with this in the long run. By the time I saw my grandfather again, about 2 years later, I was no longer is that relationship. I had recently found out my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, and I sat at the table and bit my tongue, while trying my best to act friendly. I know my mother, who felt torn over these events, was happy to see me sitting at that table, and I cheered when I saw him again 6 months later, and he announced his cancer had gone into remission. But I can’t lie. I was happy to be living very far away from him; I knew I didn’t have to confront this issue over and over again.

In my first month in New York, he suffered a severe stroke and heart attack. He suffered a great deal for a month or two, and then he passed away. I was sad that he died, and part of that sadness was with the fact that he never confronted any of the pain he visited on others. That racist incident defined my relationship with him over the last few years of his life. It’s really hard to remember the jokes he made when I was a child, before I knew or understood the depth of his bigotry.

This incident didn’t only change my view of him; it still lingers in the background of the relationships with many of my relatives. Some people may believe the lesson in this story is that you should make up with your loved ones before they die, but I don’t see it that way. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I didn’t want to expend any more emotional energy fighting an uphill battle. It would have been nice to get an apology for my ex and myself, but the odds of that happening were slim. To me, the lesson is that racism destroys relationships. It makes, otherwise decent people, turn a blind eye to suffering. The theory that says many white people don’t care about racism because it doesn’t effect them or their loved ones makes sense until you realize that in many cases loved ones are either perpetrators or inactive bystanders when racism is directed at their loved ones.

Racism is so insidious that it anesthetizes people to suffering of others (even others who they care about). It destroys empathetic reactions to human suffering. The victims of racism are expected to be the “bigger people” while the perpetrators get the “Get Out of Racism Free” card. Even when they know racist behavior is wrong and harmful, many white observers of racism suffer from moral paralysis. Rather than doing what is morally right, they do nothing.²

Moral paralysis is learned. It is not something that you are born with. This is actually why I was happy that my little cousins were crying when we left that picnic. Even though they didn’t quite know what was going on or why this situation was bad, it showed me that they hadn’t quite learned to be immune the suffering that racism causes. I hope, nearly 10 years later, they still get upset in those situations. I hope they have the courage to respond to bigots inside and outside our family. It may be the more difficult path to take (as I can attest to), but it’s the right one.

1. I’d like to think that some stopped because they had a change of heart, but I’m not so convinced. (back)
2. I’m not saying that it is easy for people who observe racist behavior to speak out. In these cases of family racism, there are often long protracted battles where people choose sides, which is not easy to do when you love someone but don’t love their behavior. Personally, I chose to withdraw rather than lobby for support. Partly, because I knew I was right; partly because I had been fighting on this issue for years prior to this; and partly because I didn’t expect to get too much support. In fact, I suspect that the amount of sympathy my partner and I received would have been inversely related to how much lobbying we did. (back)

From Lawyers, Guns and Money:

As always when questions of motivations rather than actions come up, I think we have to return to George Wallace. Even politicians who make overtly racist appeals may be much more committed to winning elections than to racism. So I’m not sure it matters much what precise mixture of partisan advantage and racism motivates Republican efforts to suppress the African-American vote; the efforts are, in the end, racist even if wholly motivated by the former. Similarly, I don’t know how much racism and how much partisan advantage led to, say, Reagan kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, MS to deliver coded appeals to southern racists (as well, of course, as the 3 Americans consistently committed to “states’ rights” principles), but it’s indefensible either way. Attempts to figure out whether the tunes played on Nixon’s Piano are authentic expressions of subjective racist beliefs or mere self-interested cynicism are both impossible and beside the point.

While you’re at it, check out this column by Bob Herbert, focusing on the modern Republican’s party’s dedication to denying the vote to as many Black Americans as possible. Herbert ends his (otherwise excellent) column by writing “Blacks have been remarkably quiet about this sustained mistreatment by the Republican Party, which says a great deal about the quality of black leadership in the U.S..”

Actually, if it weren’t for black activists and leaders, I don’t think many of us would have heard about most of these problems at all. The problem is that no one listens to them. I wish Herbert had instead written: “Democrats have been remarkably quiet about this sustained mistreatment by the Republican Party, which says a great deal about the quality of Democratic party leadership in the U.S. ”

Curtsy: David at The Debate Link.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to international affairs, there is a major protest (estimates of 100,000 people) against the military dictatorship in Burma,which is now called Myanmar. The protest, lead by Buddhist monks, has been peaceful, but tension is rising, and as I writing this post I just found out that 4 monks have been killed by the military.

This dictatorship has been in place for 20 years, and the last major protest ended with the military killing thousands of protesters. You can learn more about the history of Burma/Myanmar in this article.

Here’s a photo of the protest from the AFP.

Caption: “Buddhist monks protest by marching with a banner that reads, “We shall replace (crackdown) unjustice with justice” before police conduct a crackdown in downtown Yangon. Myanmar security forces used batons, tear gas and live rounds Wednesday in a violent crackdown on mass protests against the military junta, killing at least four people including three Buddhist monks.(AFP)”You can also find more info. at Women of Color Blog.

The right-wing Washington Times, reporting on Bush’s speech at the UN, reports:

At the United Nations, Mr. Bush avoided talk of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bringing up Iran only as one of several briefly listed countries that squelch freedoms.

Outside, about a dozen people were arrested during a peaceful demonstration of about 400 opposed to the Iraq war and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Via Ezra.

By the by, I recently got interviewed about my short story writing.

Update: And since this is a place for self-promotion, feel free to promote yourselves here, too! Anything we should all pop over to your blog to read? Shower us with your fantastic prose.

You can also use this thread to post about anything else that catches your fancy.

Bottled water companies sell liquid water in plastic ice trays for you to stick in the freezer and freeze yourself.

I know this is like a sign of the consumer apocalypse, but it’s also absolutely hilarious.

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I think the answer is no. Nearly all of the Republicans would not participate in the Univision debate((If you don’t know, Univision is a Spanish language network; however, the debate was conducted in English.)), and now they are ducking out of a debate on minority issues hosted at Morgan State University by African American commentator Tavis Smiley. Here’s a summary:

Arizona Sen. John McCain, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney have declined to participate in the Sept. 27 debate at Morgan State University. “I feel good,” Smiley said, about the odds of getting former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson. Five candidates trailing in national and state polls will be there.

The Univision debate, co-sponsored by the University of Miami, was scheduled for Sept. 16, but canceled after only one candidate — McCain — accepted. “We’re looking for a new date,” said Univision spokeswoman Rosemary Mercedes. However, Romney and Giuliani already have declined.

Republican campaigns blamed scheduling conflicts for their candidate’s absence from the Baltimore debate, citing, for example, a McCain speech on Iraq and a flurry of fundraising events before the third-quarter deadline on Sept. 30. All eight Democrats participated in their PBS debate at Howard University — and that was on June 28, a similarly frenetic fundraising period.

Kevin Madden, a Romney spokesman, said his candidate has “a very heavy travel schedule” that has led him to decline invitations to several debates.

Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, chairman of the national party, has said GOP candidates are not snubbing Hispanics; they are just busy with other campaign events.

Smiley said he intends to press his case tonight on NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “We’re talking about one 90-minute conversation,” he said. “It gives these Republicans a wonderful opportunity. They complain all the time that black and brown voters won’t give them a chance. We offer a platform on PBS.”

Republican presidential candidates typically receive less than 15% of the black vote in general elections and tend to oppose policies important to some minority voters, such as affirmative action. Right now they are competing for conservative primary voters.

You have to wonder–is this 1900 or 2007? How can any reasonable person snub entire constituencies like this? We not talking about just two events. Only Tom Tancredo agreed to appear in an NAACP forum in Detroit, and they have rejected other forums oriented towards blacks and Latinos.

This is so pathetic that even a few of their fellow Republicans are chiding them. Check out this article from the Washington Post:

“We sound like we don’t want immigration; we sound like we don’t want black people to vote for us,” said former congressman Jack Kemp (N.Y.), who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. “What are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day? If we’re going to be competitive with people of color, we’ve got to ask them for their vote.”

Making matters worse, some Republicans believe, is that the decision to bypass the Morgan State forum comes after all top GOP candidates save McCain declined invitations this month to a debate on Univision, the most-watched Hispanic television network in the United States. The event was eventually postponed.

“For Republicans to consistently refuse to engage in front of an African American or Latino audience is an enormous error,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), who has not yet ruled out a White House run himself. “I hope they will reverse their decision and change their schedules. I see no excuse — this thing has been planned for months, these candidates have known about it for months. It’s just fundamentally wrong. Any of them who give you that scheduling-conflict answer are disingenuous. That’s baloney.”

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman urged candidates to “reconsider this opportunity to lay out their vision and other opportunities in the future.”

“Every one of these candidates I’ve talked to is sincerely committed to offering real choices to African American and Hispanic voters, and in my opinion have records that will appeal to many of these voters,” he added.

Mehlman, a longtime aide to President Bush, aggressively courted the minority vote as RNC chairman in 2005-06. He recruited black candidates to run for office as Republicans and condemned electoral tactics that showed hints of race-baiting.

Mehlman’s successor at the RNC was Sen. Mel Martinez (Fla.), a backer of legislation that would allow illegal immigrants now in the country to stay and eventually become citizens.

Except for McCain, the top GOP candidates have distanced themselves from that proposal, which Kemp worries will become another strike against the GOP with Hispanics. Bush received 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, but the Republican base remains inflamed about illegal immigration, leading the candidates to focus on border-control proposals.

Some may say, “Why try to court votes that you have little chance of winning?” However, this misses the larger issues. First, this will not only alienate blacks and Latinos. Many moderate whites will find this suspicious, so they risk alienating whites who would like to see the Republican party as non-racist and open to everyone. Unlike their black and Latino counterparts, I think moderate whites will be much more likely to bamboozled by the empty platitudes about reaching out to people of color. The second point is that this is demographic suicide for Republicans. The country is changing, and no matter how many border fences they try to build, they are faced the reality that people are color are going to make up half the population in this country within the next 30-40 years. When you spend an inordinate amount of time lambasting the largest minority group, then you could hurt your party’s future, as this article from the Hispanic Business Journal notes.

Before I end up writing a how to manual for Republicans :) , let me make a few more criticisms. The Republicans know that they have created policies that are harmful to blacks and Latinos, which is why they don’t have the nerve to tell Latinos to their face that want to cut immigration and incarcerate immigrants. They don’t have the nerve to tell blacks that they are fine with the fact that numerous blacks are sitting in jails on drug charges while whites with similar charges go free. If they really believed that their policies are helping people, then they don’t need to hide from people of color and pretend like they don’t exist.

There’s a good article in the NY Times on the growing and vibrant anti-Female Genital Cutting¹ movement in Egypt in the Times. (Curtsy: Feministe and Sly Civilian).

Previous “Alas” posts on FGC: 1 2 3 and 4.

From the Times article:

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1. AKA Female Circumcision, Female Genital Surgery, AKA Female Genital Mutilation or FGM. (back)

(This guest post is reprinted from Daisy’s Dead Air with Daisy’s kind permission.)

Left: Pfc. LaVena Johnson, photo from Essence

From the blog BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS comes a case that I have heard NOTHING about, which is pretty amazing, news-hound that I am.

Thus, the fact that I didn’t know, makes me instantly suspicious.

Private First Class LaVena Johnson, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005. The first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq, she was only nineteen years old.

Dr. John Johnson, Lavena’s father, was initially told by an Army representative, that his daughter “died of self-inflicted, noncombat injuries,” but initially added that it was not a suicide. The subsequent Army investigation reversed this finding and declared LaVena’s death a suicide, a finding refuted by the soldier’s family. In an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dr. Johnson pointed to indications that his daughter had endured a physical struggle before she died - two loose front teeth, a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home - suggesting that “someone might have punched her in the mouth.”

KMOV (St Louis) eventually aired a story which revealed details not previously made public: Parents question their daughter’s mysterious death in Iraq.

News 4’s Matt Sczesny took a close look at the evidence gathered by the military and asks the question, “was it murder or suicide?”

Among the thousands of graves at Jefferson Barracks cemetery there are stories of bravery, heroism, and proud service.

Among the thousands is the grave of Private Lavena Johnson, whose story is clouded in mystery and according to her parents, marred by murder and cover-up.

Lavena’s father, Dr. John Johnson, has waged his own personal crusade to find out what really happened to his daughter in Iraq on July 19, 2005.

The army ruled her death a suicide, the victim of a gunshot wound to the head.

In documents and autopsy photos obtained by the Johnson family and shared with News 4, more questions are raised than answered.

One strange fact was that Lavena was apparently abused, physically, and the autopsy didn’t address the physical trauma to her body.

Military documents also show no apparent indication of suicide, her company commander wrote that Johnson was clearly happy and healthy physically and emotionally, something her mother knew by a phone conversation the day before she died.

Johnson’s parents also question how their daughter at 5’1”, could handle a 40 inch M-16 to kill herself while sitting.

In fact, a military laboratory even concluded that based on a gunshot residue test, Johnson may not have even handled the weapon.

Additionally, Johnson’s military debit card was never found, even though she used it two hours before her death to buy candy.

No bullet was ever found where she died, and a trail of blood is seen in photos outside the tent. Even stranger, it appears as if someone tried to set her body on fire.

So if it wasn’t a suicide as the Army maintains, then how did Lavena Johnson die?

Based on the autopsy photos, her father believes that she was raped.

The military is unconvinced and consider the case closed.

A Pentagon spokesman says that the case was investigated thoroughly and that there is no evidence to reopen.

News 4 tried for weeks to get the Army to say more about the death of Private Johnson, but they’re only response is that the investigation is closed.

Certainly the documents military investigators have gathered seem to say a lot more.

Johnson’s father is now trying to have her body exhumed at Jefferson Barracks to have an independent autopsy performed.”

From BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS:

[Official]documents provided elements of another scenario altogether:

* Indications of physical abuse that went unremarked by the autopsy
* The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death
* Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her
* A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found
* Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire

The Army has resisted calls by Dr. Johnson and by KMOV to reopen its investigation.

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! Why haven’t we heard about LaVena?

… it takes moral outrage, family vocalization, and community involvement to the government, to bring to bear upon the Army to find the truth, to tell the truth, to honor the men and women who put on the uniform to serve their country, says alot about the callousness of this country which saw fit to send these young women and men into a war with a country which has done no aggression against America. No huge outcry has yet come to bear in the case of LaVena. There are no loud chorus of voices demanding that the military be held accountable for their actions, or lack thereof in the mishandling of this young woman’s case. Anyone, and everyone, can and should, speak for her. It may seem that the comparision between the cases of LaVena Johnson and Pat Tillman may seem unrelated, but both cases are the same. In both cases, the death of a young soldier in a dangerous place, in an unjustly declared rogue war, was not explained to the families they left behind, the families that gave them up to go halfway around the world to fight a war for oil, to put their lives on the line for those of us here in America. The Army should not be so cold and heartless in how it disregards its soldiers. It is not too much to ask that the Army take into consideration all evidence of this young woman’s death. (The attempt to set her body on fire; the trail of blood found outside of her living area.) That her family has many unanswered questions surrounding her death, and the inept handling of Lavena’s case (judging by the evidence left at the scene of her death )by the military, speaks volumes to military injustice in how it treats, or rather, mistreats its soldiers.

Please do not let this young soldier’s death be in vain. She took it upon herself to serve her country, with honor. Let her be honored by not letting her story fall into silence.

1. Sign the online petition to the Armed Services Committees in Congress asking them to direct the Army to reinvestigate the death of LaVena Johnson.

2. Find your Senator or Representative on the Armed Services Committees list and contact them directly about LaVena. (Thanks to the blogsite, http://www.lavenajohnson.com for outstanding work to keep Lavena in the public’s mind.)

3. For background on Lavena Johnson, please view the KMOV-TV news report from 02.21.07.

Please do your part, and again, thanks so much to BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS for truth-telling in this matter!

BRING THEM HOME NOW!

It’s so easy to take pretty pictures of toddlers!

This month’s Carnival will be held at Reading, Writing, and Living.  Due to some computer difficulties it’s going up a little late, so if you haven’t already submitted a post, there is still time.  It’s going up on the 27th, so you need to have posts in by the 25th.

You can send one to Susan at this email: susan@susanito.com

I’m not going to return to substantive blogging, but I’m going to experiment with doing occasional link posts, and posts that are composed entirely of quotes. Like this post.

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I’m a little hesitant to post this, because — although Campos never actually blames white women for the obsession with weight loss (in fact, Campos describes it as something done to white women — he describes anti-fat “neuroses” as something “middle- and upper-class American white women… are taught from a very early age”), he doesn’t do much to cut off that reading either.

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I haven’t covered this story thoroughly, mostly because so many others have done a great job. It’s great to see the power of African American blogger activists.

At this point, I’ve read so many posts on the story that I don’t even remember where I first heard about it.

Here are a few links. If you still don’t know the story, here’s a summary on the background of the race.

The Color of Change

FreetheJena6.org

Elle PhD has the list of contacts and the petition so you can support the Jena 6.

This case, and the Shaquanda Cotton Case are glaring examples of criminal justice inequality. Next stop the war on blacks drugs.