While I think Barack Obama has done a good job walking the tightrope of racial politics in America, I get the feeling that he is heavily constrained by racism and racial stereotypes. This was one of my reactions to the now famous speech–it is always important to think about what is, and is NOT being said. For the record, I think the speech was good as a political speech, but as a speech about race in American it was so heavily constrained by the politics of racism that there were some important points that Obama omitted. Furthermore, the reactions to the speech steer discussion in some unfortunate directions, which is where most of my critique lies. Now before anybody gets upset at me for saying this, I don’t blame Obama for the subsequent discussion of his speech.  My critiques are not about the man as an individual, they are about racism and racial politics in America.

Let me start with some things I agreed with and liked about the speech. Obama (and the speech writers because I’m sure there were some) asserted that we don’t talk openly and honestly about race in America.  I think that is true–people either tend to deny the realities of racism and or they exaggerate, stereotype, or misrepresent when it comes to our differences.

I also agree that history has created a great deal of racial baggage that we carry around with us as people.  Moreover, there is an acknowledgement in the “speech on race” that these effects linger in the form of institutional racism.  Check out these few paragraphs (I referenced the text from Daily Kos.):

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point.  As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried.  In fact, it isn’t even past.”  We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country.  But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.  That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.  And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.  They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.  What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.  That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.  Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.  For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.  That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends.  But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.  At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

With the exception of the comment about welfare policy, which echoes Ronald Regan, I think these are pretty bold statements for a politician to make.  Of course, they are not quite as bold when they are framed as products of past discrimination rather than products of both past and present discrimination, but given the conservative nature of political discourse, I can live with it.

A Few Critiques of the Speech and Reactions to It 

The comment about Obama’s white grandmother has been pulled apart and parsed by pundits, most of whom don’t have a clue about the dynamics of interracial families.  Later, in discussing this speech Obama described his grandmother as the “typical white person” and the same pundits went crazy. These pundits expect people to be racially consistent and they cringe at the idea of whiteness being discussed in any way that is not exceptional¹.  In the pundits’ minds, people can’t change their racial views over time, and they can’t hold contradictory views.  In reality, that’s exactly how people are when it comes to race.  I highly suspect that Obama’s grandmother is typical of most whites in her generation–they grew up with racial segregation both legalized and informal segregation as the norm and didn’t much question it.  Furthermore, intermarriage was illegal in many states during the much of his grandmother’s lifetime.  Although Obama has never spoken about his white grandparents reaction to his parents marriage and his birth, we know from surveys that during the early 1970s the vast majority of whites opposed interracial marriage and this opposition was still very strong even into the 1990s, when whites were asked about a family member intermarrying.  So it would be the least bit surprising if she had negative views of interracial relationships and black people.  It’s pretty clear that, like many white relatives of interracial couples and biracial people, Obama’s grandmother loved him and cared for him, and she held stereotypical views of black men.  That should not be hard to believe because it is the norm in many mixed race families, and in many people in general.

What bothered me about this part of the speech and the subsequent discussion of the racial dynamics of Obama’s family life is that I got the distinct impression that the underlying message Obama and some of his supporters were trying to convey was, “Hey, don’t forget; I’m/he’s white too” or “I’m/he’s not as black as you think I am/he is.”  To me that was a really sad revelation about the current state of racial politics in this country.

What made this worse was when it devolved into a common stereotype of mixed race people that I have discussed in the past (here and in papers I have presented at conferences).  The myth involves the belief that mixed race people are 1) signs of progress and 2) potential saviors who will somehow liberate us from racism because they understand “both worlds.”  On numerous occasions, people have treated Obama in this way.  They have viewed his mixed race heritage as something that bestows him with supernatural abilities, specifically the ability to transcend race and heal old racial wounds.  Having a mixed race family doesn’t not necessarily give an individual a special understanding of race, and being monoracial doesn’t preclude someone from being able to united diverse groups and develop an understanding of what it is like to be from “another race.”

I don’t totally blame Obama for reminding people that his mother is white–that is politics.  Obviously, his campaign thinks it will help him, and they are probably right about that.  I just don’t like the handful of narratives that we have developed about interracial families and mixed race people.  While the old narratives about tragic mulattos, the one drop rule, and sexually adventurous interracial couples are misguided, some of our new narratives–”the best of both worlds” and “the supernatural biracial uniter” are also misguided.

In the next post on the Obama speech, I’ll address two other problems I had with the speech and the reactions to it.  The 2 critiques/points are related to the following points 1) Are white “resentments” and black “anger” really equivalents?  Does the two way street anaology really work?  2) Why does “Working Class” mean white in our political discourse?  And what does it say that we single out white working class resentment (racism)?

1. Do you think they would have been mad if he described her as the “exceptional white person” rather than the “typical white person”? (back)

Once upon a time, social scientists showed that couples who lived together before marrying, were more likely to divorce than couples who didn’t live together until marrying. This was true in Europe, Canada and the USA.

This surprised a bunch of people, and seemed to disprove the “try it on before you buy it” theory of marriage.

This did, however, greatly please those social conservatives who prefer to go though life in a constant panic, screaming “the marriage rates are falling! The marriage rates are falling!” They felt this proved their theory that sex without God’s blessing introduces some sort of intrinsic rot into marriages and made them more likely failures.

Then the shacking up effect seemed to go away in some of Europe. For instance, a social scientist showed that although it used to be the case that shacking up made divorce more likely in Denmark, once shacking up became more commonplace, it stopped having any relationship with divorce. Couples who shacked up before marrying were no more likely to get divorced than couples who lived apart until the wedding.

This supports the theory that when shacking up is a radical, unusual thing to do, the people who self-select into shacking up are also the people who, due to their unconventional preferences, are less likely to remain married.

Now shacking up has become the norm in the USA; slightly over half of all American women live with someone before they get married. And the most recent data (.pdf link) shows that Americans who shack up before marrying aren’t more likely to get divorced.

This seems to put the kibosh on the “living in sin = doomed to divorce” theory.

Oh, and Americans getting married for the first time have a 33% chance of getting divorced someday — not “over half,” as is often claimed. In fact, the US divorce rate is lower than it’s been in decades — and it’s lowest of all in Massachusetts, home of same-sex marriage. Wait, wasn’t same-sex marriage supposed to destroy marriage rates?

For more discussion, see Pandagon.

Curtsy: Ezra Klein, Marginal Revolution.

In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has been lighter than usual since October. Well the main reason for that has been because I’m pregnant. I told my co-bloggers, so they wouldn’t think I was abandoning the site..

Now that I’m in just out of month 4, I’m finally happy to report that my life doesn’t revolve around the fear of throwing up on strangers. :) For a while, from months 2-4, I was battling morning sickness, and the usual first trimester sleepiness. I’m still concerned about a few things like the fact that at almost 19 weeks I weigh the same as I did when I got pregnant. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about pregnancy is the way it has altered my eating habits and my metabolism. When I was in the throws of morning sickness, for some unknown reason the more unhealthy the food the more likely it was to stay down. I’ve never eaten so many McDonald’s Big Mac’s in my life. What’s even funnier is the fact that I ate that kind of food and lost 6 pounds. I felt like I couldn’t possibly eat enough food to maintain my weight, and I was even more shocked when I read that I was supposed to eat 2600 calories a day (300 extra calories per fetus). I’ve always been a person who loves eating and food, and by medical standards I’m in the overweight category, but suddenly, I didn’t want to eat, and these two little fetuses were performing liposuction on my thighs and butt. My husband kept joking about the fact that I had the incredible shrinking booty, which he thought was bad and my mother and brother thought was great. (Now, there’s a cultural difference if there ever was one–West African ideas about booty beauty and White American ideas about booty beauty.) Fortunately, I’ve gained my 6 pounds back, but I seem to be stuck right at the same weight. I promise I’ll write more about this since it really seems to be the one issue that is bothering me the most–I keep wondering how I’m going to gain 30 lbs in 20 weeks.¹

Of course, I’m going to write about the pregnancy because there are so many juicy issues. The gender issues are obvious, but other issues like body image (which I alluded to above), medicalization, racism, and the rampant classism/materialism that surrounds birth and children. I already have some good stories to tell already, so be prepared. Plus, when the little ones are born, I’ll even have some baby blogging to do.

1. For those who don’t know the weight gain recommendation for twins is higher, but doctors also seem to be all over the place in terms of what they suggest. My OBGYN suggested a 44lb weight gain for a woman of my height who is of average weight. Since I’m overweight, she suggested 30-35 lbs. (back)

I still read various “marriage movement” blogs, out of habit and because it’s easier for me to walk on the treadmill if I can read something that pisses me off. A few have posted references to this story from Britland:

The harrowing story of twins who were separated at birth and married each other without realising they were brother and sister was revealed today. […] The couple’s plight was revealed by the former Liberal Democrat MP Lord Alton, who is fighting for children to have greater rights to know the identity of their biological parents.

The peer, who raised the twins’ story during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, said: “I learned of this heartbreaking story from the High Court judge who dealt with the case.

As Heresy Corner argues, it seems likely that Lord Alton either made the story up (purposely or through mishearing) or credulously fell for an urban myth.

Lord Alton told the House of Lords that he had learned of the case from the judge who decided it. Later, pressed by the Sun, he admitted that the judge he spoke to might only have been “familiar” with the case. To date, no judge has come forward, even off the record, to confirm having had such a conversation with the noble lord. The senior Family Division judge stated, on the record, that he was unaware of any such case. In any event, annulment cases normally only reach the High Court when there are complex financial issues at stake, or the legality of the marriage is in real dispute. Neither is likely to have been the case here.

(I agree with Alton, by the way, that children should “have greater rights to know the identity of their biological parents.” But there are legitimate reasons to favor that policy; no need to drag in the scary campfire stories.)

Great article in Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larson, whose daughter was adopted from Guatemala.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s been a lot of pushback against the “saving children from the benighted countries they were born in” narrative, led by those who were adopted.

The article covers much too much ground for me to sum up, so I’ll just quote the article’s comments on open adoption.

“One of the ways that wrongdoers hide their child-laundering schemes is by the closed-adoption system,” says David Smolin, a law professor who’s written extensively on corruption in transnational adoption. He and his wife adopted two sisters from India only to find out that they had been stolen from their birth family. Last March, a Utah adoption agency was indicted in an alleged fraud scheme involving 81 Samoan children whose parents were told that they were sending their children away to take advantage of opportunities in the United States—that there would be letters, photos, and visits, and that the children would return when they turned 18.

Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as “rescuing” children. “There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption,” he says. “But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment.”

As it stands, families who have forged relationships with birth parents often find it impossible to turn their backs on their economic needs. Some send a monthly stipend; others pay for the education of their child’s siblings, help finance businesses, or buy computers or cell phones to make it easier to stay in touch. And while all this is legal once the adoption is finalized, it’s a lot messier than writing a check for Save the Children. “We need to be careful what kind of impression that makes with other people in the village or area,” says Linh Song, the president of Ethica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparent adoptions worldwide. “Will they receive aid if their child is sent abroad?”

If you’re interested in reading further about Transnational Adoptions, there are a bunch of excellent blogs that write about this issue. Harlow’s Monkey is a great place to start, both because the blog is excellent and for the blogroll.

I have been home, laid up with a severe case of gout, and so I have had the time to work on this more than in the recent past. I have been gratified, really gratified, by the responses. Thank you.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year literature professor had made Walt Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next two months or so, we met a couple of times per week at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Cafe, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I’d like to come to her room that evening to help her drink it. I said I would.

She was already a couple of glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up our talk turned to a subject I was surprised to realize we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, more because I couldn’t imagine saying no than because I’d ever really thought about it. “Why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me. “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask her how she felt about hers, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “You know, are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”

A small edge of anger sharpened my voice, “What are you talking about?”

Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee and said, “Well, do you think you, you know, measure up?”

Finally, I understood, and I felt a little foolish for not having caught on sooner, but it had never occurred to me that a woman might actually ask this question. I had, as I imagine most young men do at one time or another, taken a ruler to my penis to see how big it was; and I would be lying if I said I did not think about how I might compare to other men or wonder if what I had heard about the relationship between penis size and sexual prowess and attractiveness to women were true; but so far the only girlfriend who’d ever seen me completely naked had been Jennifer, and while she had told me a story about a guy she’d been with whose penis had been so small that she laughed when she saw it, something she deeply regretted, she had never said anything to me about how big, or small, I was.

So Maria’s question, once I understood what it meant, not only took me by surprise; it also confused me. Looking back, I can smile thinking that perhaps the question was an honest one that she had asked at precisely the wrong moment. At the time, however, what I felt was a shift in the subtext of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship and what might come next to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. Anything I said–yes, no, maybe, let’s find out–felt like it would be a picking up of the gauntlet she’d thrown down, which I wasn’t interested in doing. On the other hand, to say nothing felt like it would be to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her, so I decided to buy time by turning the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?”

Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking expression with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for, and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes.”

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but we couldn’t. Maria was suddenly unable to look me in the eye, and when I finally stood up to leave, all she did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that, but never said more than hello, and Maria had only once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semester, I asked the only woman I could think to ask about what had happened between Maria and myself, my mother. This may seem strange to some people, but I’ve always been able to talk with my mother about sex, and I figured I could count on her to give me a straight answer. I was wrong.

“The size of a man’s ego,” my mother told me after I had finished my story, “can be measured by the size of his penis.” To illustrate her point, she related a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, finally, having had enough, loudly, so that all the people around them could hear, she offered him the following challenge. If he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she’d be his for the night. If he didn’t, he should just leave her alone. The man protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t…enough said.

Needless to say, the man walked away.

“Only small men,” my mother’s one suggested that this was her final word on the subject, “say that size doesn’t matter.”

I don’t remember anything else about that conversation, except that I understood her story to have been a cautionary tale, her point being that I should not become like the man in the bar. How precisely that point related to my failed evening with Maria was unclear, nor, at least as far as I remember, did my mother do anything to try to make it clear. Now, of course, I can see both in my mother’s story itself, and in the fact that she thought it was an appropriate answer to my question about what had happened with Maria, her own anger at men, and I know enough about my mother’s life to know that this anger is justified, more than justified in fact. I did not know this back then, however; nor did I know it five or so year earlier, when I was sixteen, and she and I were sitting after dinner, either Passover or Thanksgiving, at the dining room table in my grandmother’s apartment and I am telling her about the one and only time I remember my father trying to talk to me about sex, which had happened earlier that day.

We were walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train to my grandmother’s. He put his arm around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine and asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I told him no, which was a lie.

“Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead, turned to face me, searched my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know–even though my first experience of intercourse had not been at all a positive one–and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him, made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. I did not have a good relationship with my father at the time. In fact, I saw him as something of a buffoon, and laughing at his buffoonery–my mother shared this image of him–was one of the ways she and I bonded. This time, however, instead of engendering mutual laughter at my father’s ineptitude, my story opened up a divide between me and my mother that I had never felt before.

“Next time,” my mother was laughing–but the smile on her face was a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder–”Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap. Besides, what does he think he’s going to teach you anyway. You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, and I laugh with her, though I am laughing more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny. Something in her tone, something in the meaning of what she said, made me very uneasy, though I could not name what it was.

///

Fast forward about fifteen years or so. I am in my early thirties and sitting with my father in a very fancy steakhouse in New York’s financial district. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my brother’s funeral about ten year earlier, and we are seeing each other only because I have sought my father out. I want answers to questions I have had for a very long time about my parents, about myself, about why my father never tried to get in touch with me and more. We talk for a very long time, and I learn a lot that I did not know, but two pieces of what I learned are especially relevant here. First, I learned that my parents got married because my mother was pregnant with me. My father said that he approached her with the idea of getting an abortion, but she said no. I don’t know why she said no, but this was 1961, before Roe v. Wade, and so it may have been simply that she was afraid of the risks involved in getting an illegal abortion. Whatever her reasons, she and my father decided, once abortion had been ruled out, to get married. They didn’t really love each other, and so, especially knowing them as I do now, I did not find it at all surprising when my father told me that my mother decided she wanted a divorce just a couple of years after I was born.

The second thing I learned came in response to my asking why my father thought my mother was still so angry at him, even though they had been divorced for nearly thirty years. I once tried to ask my mother the same question. This is the conversation we had, as I recorded it in my journal later that day. In response to my asking why she was still so angry at my father, my mother said, “I’m not angry at him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think I’m more angry at myself.”

“Why?”

“For talking myself into marrying him in the first place.”

“Why did you marry him?”

“I though I was in love.”

“You thought?”

“Well, I convinced myself…”

“And?”

“And that’s why I married him.”

“Why’d you get divorced?”

“He bothered me.”

“He bothered you?”

“He annoyed me.”

“In what way?”

“He couldn’t hold up his end of a conversation.”

“What do you mean?”

“He always talked in circles.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he would talk about the same thing over and over again, constantly repeating himself, circling back over the same idea like a vulture waiting to descend on a carcass. Then you’d point him in another direction, and he’d do the same thing with that topic. It was infuriating.”

“What kind of a father was he?” It was a question I’d never asked before.

“I don’t think he was much of a father at all, either before or after the divorce.”

“Okay, but what kind of a father was he?”

My mother paused to think, “Well, he did change your diapers; I have to give him that. And he played with you guys—”

I reminded her that I’d seen the pictures of him feeding me and suggest that, at least as a father, it didn’t sound like he was too bad.

“But I was always the disciplinarian,” she told me, pausing again and sighing, “I guess I just didn’t have much respect for him.”

When I ask my father the same question, he tells me about how, not long after he’d moved out of our apartment–which is ironically just a couple of blocks from where I live now–but before their divorce was final, he called my mother to ask if he could come over and talk, to see if they could work things out. She said okay, but once he got there, everything went wrong. He would not go into the details of what happened, though. All he would say was, “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Even when I pressed him to tell me what he meant, all he would do was repeat those words. “Something happened that shouldn’t have happened.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “And, you know, Richard, your mother was the kind of woman who could goad a guy into it.”

Clearly, in other words, whether it was rape or some other form of assault, my father did some sort of violence to my mother. When he told me that, a lot of things began to fall into place, not only her comment about the steel jockstrap, with its allusion to the idea of a chastity belt, but other things my mother used to say to me as well.

If you look quickly at a picture of my father when he was younger, and if you didn’t already know you were looking at him, you might think you were looking at me. We look that much alike, and the resemblance made my mother very uncomfortable. “Grow your beard,” she started telling me almost as soon as hair appeared on my face, “You remind me too much of your father.” Even when I was well into my late twenties and early thirties, my mother sometimes has difficulty with my clean-shaven appearance. Once she even threatened—her tone was joking of course—to exclude me from a family portrait she was planning unless I grew my beard back. I didn’t; the portrait never materialized.

Now, I of course don’t know if the portrait really never materialized because I didn’t grow my beard back, but it is in my memory a telling coincidence that represents the stance my mother, as a parent and as a woman, took towards me, as a child and as a man (or a boy becoming a man), throughout most of the early years of my life: She did not want me to grow up to be like my father, not only in terms of the character traits she found so objectionable in him, but in terms of my body as well. Once I hit puberty, I was, I was becoming, I would eventually be, physically, sexually, a man, a man who looked very much like his father. She did not want to face me across the gender gap my growing up would inevitably open up between us. A man was what I had no choice but to become, and yet a man was precisely what my mother did not want me to be.

From the Daily Mail:

A woman who became pregnant after a one-night stand yesterday won the right to keep the existence of her baby a secret from its father.

In a landmark decision, three Appeal Court judges agreed that the 20-year-old single mother has “the ultimate veto” over whom should be told about the child, who is being put up for adoption.

Describing the case as “on any view extraordinary”, Lord Justice Thorpe ruled there was no justification for “breaking open the mother’s secret”.

And Lady Justice Arden said this was not a violation of the father’s rights to family life under the Human Rights Act because he had no rights to be violated.

The mother, who cannot be identified by order of the court, had kept her pregnancy hidden from her family, colleagues and the father.

She gave birth five months ago and left the baby girl, known only as E, in hospital shortly afterwards.

When she asked for the child to be put up for adoption, a county court ordered that her parents and the father should be told to give them the opportunity to apply to adopt.

But yesterday, the judges decided the father had no rights over the child, who is now in foster care, because “he was only a one-night stand”.

And they banned the local authority and guardian from taking any steps to identify him or telling him about his daughter.

What an appalling ruling.

I can imagine individual cases in which a court might justifiably rule to keep a born child secret from her father; for instance, if there was compelling evidence that an particular father, if informed, would be physically dangerous to the mother or the child. But from what’s said in this article, in this case there seems to be no justification for not informing the father and giving him the opportunity to raise his daughter.

This ruling contributes to sexism, by implicitly reinforcing the idea that men cannot be responsible for the upbringing of children. It also creates a short road to the conclusion that fathers of children conceived in one-night-stands shouldn’t have responsibilities to their offspring.

I hope this ruling doesn’t stand.

Last year I posted the story of Katelyn Kampf. Her parents kidnapped her in an attempt to force her to have an abortion. The parents were upset that Katelyn, who is white, was going to have give birth to a child whose father was black.

According to media reports, Katelyn is unhappy with the relatively light sentence that they received for the kidnapping. Fortunately, Stephanie has been keeping up with the story, or I would have never seen it. Unfortunately, the family is still torn apart by the terrible actions of the Kampf parents:

In a plea agreement with the district attorney’s office, reached over Katelyn Kampf’s objections, her parents pled guilty to misdemeanor assault charges and disorderly conduct. Felony kidnapping charges were dropped, and the Kampfs will not serve any jail time.

In court, her father Nicholas Kampf said, “The whole experience has been a sad ordeal. We as a family have lost so much … I am sorry.”

Lola Kampf also read from a prepared statement: “We have all made some bad choices in the past, and we will have to live with them. But we must believe with our hearts and soul that time will heal the wounds they have caused.”

But there was little evidence of any healing today. Neither one of the Kampf parents looked at their daughter or new grandson during the hour-long hearing. And Katelyn Kampf left the courtroom, crying, shortly after her parents arrived. She returned but then broke down and buried her face in her hands as she listened to her mother speak.

After the hearing, she explained her reaction, saying, “Even though she had done so many horrible things to me, I always looked up to her. I mean, she was my mom, you know.”

It’s hard not to have sympathy for Katelyn Kampf and her child. Not only does she have horrible parents, but she doesn’t have much help from the her child’s father. He is facing deportation to South Africa because he is an immigrant with a felony conviction. Furthermore, part of the conditions of the parent’s sentence is that they have counseling with their daughter. She still doesn’t want to be in the same room with them and who can blame her.

It is really sad to see cases like this where parents hatred of another race is stronger than their love for their own children. Sounds like another high profile case from last week.

I first heard about this case when I was listening to BBC radio on Tuesday. I tuned in during the middle of of this story, and it seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, now I got the chance to hear the whole story. It turns out that some foreign aid groups tried to take a group of 103 children out of the country. The aid workers are now accused of child trafficking and violating international laws.

Some members of the NGO Children Rescue/Arche de Zoe have been arrested for attempting to take the 21 girls and 82 boys - the youngest being about a year old and the oldest about 10 - out of Chad. The agency workers were French. Three journalists who were travelling with the volunteer workers and the Spanish crew who were to fly them back to France are also being held. In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, a prosecutor on Wednesday also charged Jacques Wilmart, a Belgian pilot involved in the affair, with “complicity in abduction”, before sending him to jail.

Zoe’s Ark says it wanted to rescue children from Darfur, but French officials and UN aid workers say they believe many were from Chad and were not orphans.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called the attempt to separate the more than 100 young Chadian children from their parents and then take them to France for adoption an “illegal and totally irresponsible move.” The UN said the children had family in the country.

“They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities,” Annette Rehrl of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters in Abeche.

UNICEF spokesperson Veronique Taveau told journalists in Geneva that what happened had violated international rules, such as The Hague Convention on international adoption and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taveau said the case was not an isolated incident but one that was highly visible because of the size of the group of children.

L’Express reports the Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage the children to leave their homes.

“My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were playing some Chadians came and said here are some sweets, why don’t you follow us to Adre and then we’ll take you home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre,” said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.

“We spent seven days in Adre and I’ve been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents,” he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.

Many European media outlets were putting a slightly more favorable spin on this, but as more information comes out, these so called aid groups are not looking good at all. The UN has said that most of these children were not orphans, which they found out from interviewing the older children. Now many of the children are separated from their families, and there are concerns that the youngest children may not be reunited because they are too young to talk. Needless to say this is not going over well with people all over Africa. As the International Herald Tribune article cited in this paragraph notes:

The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad.

The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur.

This history is one reason why adoptions by Westerners are not common in African countries. Incidents like this contribute to the destruction black families, and I suspect these aid workers felt no need to respect the rights of poor black African families.¹

1. Why oh why am I having flashbacks to this old Rachel’s Tavern post/comment? I was so angry at that woman. I could barely contain myself. (back)

A few days ago, Amanda wrote a comment on a thread at Pandagon that I thought was so smart that I wrote her and asked if I could make it a post on Alas.

The context: Amanda and other commenters were involved in an argument with anti-feminist Dana (male), during which Dana trotted out a lot of assumptions about how feminism is opposed to family values. Amanda went through each of Dana’s claims and debunked them — feminism is not breaking up marriages and causing teen pregnancy rates to skyrocket. Instead, as we see feminist values filter into society, we see that real family values are actually boosted.

Amanda:

The divorce rate has actually declined since the 70s, which means that your way—the stifling culture of the 50s—was the way that “broke homes”.

Also, this:

Dana assertion that “our way” has led “kids” to have children at younger and younger ages. Survey says:

In 1970, the average age of a new mother was 21 years old. By 2000, the average age was 28.

Dana claims that “our way” is what leads children to live in poverty. Survey says:

One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty…..

Today, the rate of poverty is half what it was in the 1950s. In fact, now if a husband is the sole breadwinner the family is four times more likely to be poor than one in which the wife brings home an income too. Dual income homes earn nearly two-thirds more than that of families in which the husband alone works. Consequently, the percentage of children living in poverty has decreased 50 percent since 1959. Money may not be everything. But it’s something.

Dana says that our way leads to unhappy and broken marriages. Survey says:

Not surprisingly, researchers in the ’50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ’50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy.

Dana claims that feminism and pro-sex philosophies have led to a surge in teenage pregnancy. Survey says:

With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion — the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement! — teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ’50s than today.

Conclusion: Dana is full of shit. And if you want happier, healthier families and situations where girls delay childbirth until they’re ready and the divorce rate to go down, there’s only one solution.

Embrace “our way”.

In our email conversation, Amanda also mentioned feminism’s positive effect on the economy, which in turn leads to positive effects for families:

It’s worth noting that the poverty issue has more to do with feminism than an improved economy—I’ve seen it noted by a lot of social scientists that women joining the workforce in large numbers has been the saving grace of the middle class. Without those women’s incomes, “free market” capitalism would have shrunk the middle class considerably and we’d probably be worse off than we were in the 50s.

Amanda’s facts lead to a couple of conclusions:

1) Feminism would be worthwhile even if it did cause divorce and teen pregnancy because women’s equality is a non-negotiable moral good. However, as we’ve known for a long time, increasing the wealth and happiness of women increases the wealth and happiness of families, so feminism is a win-win situation.

2) When “family values” are a code word for the religious right, they really have nothing to do with increasing the value and health of the family. They have to do with reinforcing the patriarchal model of family. If so-called “family values” proponents were actually concerned with the health of families (which include women as well as children and fathers), the conversation about family would look very different than it does now.

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)

Ok, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about the latest crime to become a media circus.  I’m sure by now most of you have heard about the murder of Jessie Davis, who was almost 9 months pregnant and was likely killed in front of her two year old child by the child’s father.  Since Davis and Cutts were a black/white couple and I am someone who studies black/white interracial relationships and who is in a black/white interracial relationship, I know many people are wondering what I think about this case.  I’m not here to offer any opinions on the particulars of the case¹ , but I do want to talk about the media coverage of the case.

I went around to a few blogs, and I visited AOL Blackvoices and a couple white supremacist message boards to see what they were saying, and quite frankly it was horrible.  Many people were saying that the victim deserved it; that she was “white trash;” that her child was ugly; and that she was a sleazy, homewrecking whore.  Not surprisingly, the accused murderer, who is the poster boy for anti-black stereotypes, was also being trashed as a violent womanizer who lusted after white women.  I can’t tell you how many racist and misogynistic comments I read; and not surprisingly the white supremacists were giddy over this case.² 

Terrence Says has a reasonable post, which anonymous bigots tried to take over in the comment thread, and in his post, Terrence engages with the question that many folks are thinking–is the media circus surrounding this case about race? Terrence cites a recent case of a white man who killed his white wife and three children:

Today, like Bobby Cutts, Jr. who was arrested in Ohio, Christopher Vaughn was also arrested. Christopher Vaughn was arrested two hours prior to the funeral of his family in St. Charles County, Missouri (suburban St. Louis) where the family originated; yet, so far, there has not been a mention of Vaughn’s arrest that I have been able to observe on the weekend news shows.

As sad and tragic as the Jessie Davis story is, I can’t help but wonder if this story had involved a missing pregnant black or Latina woman if it would have the same media traction.

Well several of the anonymous commenters went crazy, saying that the case received so much attention because Davis was pregnant, because Cutts was a cop, because the child was left in the house alone, and everything but race.  I certainly agree that all of those things make the story more sensational, but I really can’t fathom that it is much more sensational than the Vaugh family case mentioned above.  However, I find myself having a slight disagreement with Terrence.  I agree that white women victims get much more attention than Black, Asian, Latino, and American Indian women, and I agree that race is a big factor in the media attention the case has gotten, but I would be more specific than Terrence.

It’s about interracial sex.  Interracial crimes make big sensational news stories, but crimes that involve interracial sexuality arouse the deepest passions of American bigotry.  The OJ Simpson case, the Duke Rape, the Kobe Bryant rape case, and now this one–they all have tremendous sexual overtones.  For a long time, I was surprised at how much attention the Duke case received, because I was focused on the fact that the accuser in the case was black, but I missed the mark.  It’s more than the races of the people involved; if the crime is perceived as involving interracial sex, something snaps in people, suddenly they perk up.

The truth of the matter is that the US is a culture obsessed with interracial sex, but nobody will say this in polite company.  During the slave era and the Jim Crow era, white people spoke with repulsion and disgust at interracial sex even though many white men were routinely engaging in sexual encounters with black women. In the colorblind era, people are still obsessed with interracial sex.  However, they do not publicly say, “Wow, interracial sex is: bizarre, disgusting, exciting, adventurous, morally repugnant,” and so on.  That’s part of the reason nobody in the mainstream polite media is going to openly say–”Damn that negro had two white baby mama’s.  He must have really been packing some heat below the belt.  Why else would those white women be interested in him?” ³  Nobody is going to say, “Those white women are white trash, whores for sleeping with this black guy.  They probably only did it for his big dick.”  Nobody is going to say, “Why can’t these black men just take care of their kids and stopping hopping from bed to bed.  Only a white women with no self esteem will get with a guy like that.”  They are not saying these dispargaing comments publicly, but when they get home to their families and friends, they are saying it.  When they go on line to search for interracial porn, they are thinking it.  When they can leave anonymous comments on blogs, they are expressing it.

I think my traffic at this site is evidence for the American obsession with race and sex.  Within the last week here are a select few searches I have received:

• black men impregnating white women stories
• savages on blondes
• Biracial family pictures black and white
• BLACK ATHLETE MARRYING WHITE WOMEN
• Black men breeding white girls
• black negro slave woman naked pictures
• black women with white men in adult movies
• differences between white and black women’s breasts
• blacks in bed sexing
• george lucas in love black women
• how do you feel about interracial relationship

And this was a really slow week, I’ve gotten at least 100 searches over the past few months for “savages on blondes,” which was a popular racist pornographic website featuring black men who act like “savages” who want to have sex with white women.  I mentioned that site exactly one time on this blog, and I still get people looking for it. 

For some reason, people think interracial sex is exotic and daring, particularly when it involves Black men and white women and Asian women and white men.  Numerous people, who clearly have no random sample to draw from believe that race is correlated with penis size.  They believe race is correlated with a person’s level of sexual desire.  They believe people who engage in interracial sex are deviant, rebellious, daring, gross, odd, oversexed, and ugly. But, most of them will not admit it publicly.  Instead they go home and post horrible messages discussion boards. (Probably while masturbating to interracial porn.)  They try their best to hide their discomfort, but most interracial couples can see how the stares they get in public often belie the facade of tolerance.

When it comes to interracial sexuality, the US is still not ready to come to grips with our racism, and the discomfort with the intersection of race and sexuality fuels the public obession with many interracial crimes.

NOTE TO READERS: I know this thread is going to be an ultra-sensitive subject, and white supremacist trolls will likely be coming out of the woodwork, so I am limiting this thread to anti-racists and racial abolitionists only.  Moreover, this is not a thread to debate the merits of any of the cases mentioned in the text, so let’s focus on the larger issues.  Finally, anyone who leaves bigoted white supremacist comments will be banned immediately.

Amending The Note To Readers to include feminist posters as well.  So the thread is opened to anti-racists (or racial abolitionists) and feminists only.

1. I also want to say that my heart goes out to the family of Jessie Davis and her child.  I hope they are able to get justice in this case. (back)
2. I have a policy of not linking to organized white supremacist sites, but you can check out the big ones to see what they are saying. (back)
3. I don’t know if his wife is white or not, so I can’t comment on the third “baby mama.” (back)

Some paparazzi took pictures of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal breastfeeding her child in public. Somehow I missed this, when the “scandalous” photos were taken a couple weeks ago. They are posted all over the place at entertainment blogs. I thought I would pick out a few choice comments from sexist pigs for your reading (dis)pleasure.

Here are some comments from A Socialite’s Life

Here’s one from Conrad:

I am sure plenty of women find this beautiful, but thats a beauty that needs to be shared between mother and child in a quiet, discreet location. She had to know 1 million plus ASL readers would be viewing this spectacle. I never had much of an opinion of her, but now I know she’s an animal. It reminds of that childhood question - “what’s grosser than gross…”

Another from What Betheny said:

Gross. I like her, but this picture is gross. There are more private ways to breastfeed your baby in this country. We’re not living in Africa. I can’t stand the self-righteous breastfeeding moms who just show absolutely everything without thinking for one minute that just maybe not everyone is comfortable with seeing their body parts and their child sucking off of them. It’s a personal bond between you and your baby, so make if personal.

Now here is the good news: most people on the thread were supportive (at least the last time I read the comments a week ago).

Then, you have this site, where they put up a not safe for work warning and blurred out her breast (But apparently the pictures in this post are A-OK). Here are a few of the comments (out of 490+).

From eva:

hmmm… imo if you want to breastfeed in public, pump your tits at home, bottle it, and feed them that way.

From combustion8:

shes so ugly… look at that puppy sag.

From Frenchie:

Ewww…not good. She could have covered up a bit with a blanket. I know it’s a natural act but that is pretty tacky. Her tit hanging all over the place is not natural. She should be more conscientious of not offending the general public by being more subtle.

From Rebecca:

Discusting! I’ve seen women do that before but at least they had the decency to cover their breasts. What a freakin peasant! Yes breastfeeding is natural but so is urinating and defecating, does this mean we’ll catch people doing that in public too? This is what I call no self-respect. (Gee where has Rachel heard this one before.)

I couldn’t bare to read through all of the comments. This thread had many breastfeeding defenders even though it wasn’t quite as pro-breastfeeding as the other thread.

The fact that this was covered as a controversy reflects anti-breastfeeding attitudes. A few sites treated it as such, and I found a few that put disclaimers admonishing people to behave. A Hollywood actress is feeding her child in a public place should be a non-issue, and I even hesitated to post this. However, people do need to be reminded that many anti-breastfeeding attitudes are puritanical, sexist, and unhealthy. I think the number of commenters who feel the need to personally attack Gyllenhaal commenting on her appearance, her sexuality, and her morality (or supposed lack there of) is indicative of why breastfeeding is such an important feminist issue.

Shout Out to Jennifer at Black Breastfeeding Blog!

A reader (Sekou) at Rachel’s Tavern sent me a link to this fascinating article about a Black single mother who had to file a law suit several years ago to adopt a white child.  I have said before that I don’t personally know of any cases of white kids being adopted into black families.  That obviously doesn’t mean that it does not happen, but it is indeed rare.  The article from the Detroit News says between 2001-05 78 white kids in the state of Michigan were adopted by blacks, compared to 677 black kids adopted by whites.  So white kids raised by black parents are there, but they are uncommon.

There is one glaring problem with the article, and this is a common problem as I have noted in the past.  The article cites that National Association of Black Social Workers as a source of opposition to transracial adoption, but that really is not relevant here.  I can just about guarantee that the NABSW doesn’t have a problem with this case.  Their concern was about a black children being aopted by white parents in large numbers, while prospective black adoptive parents faced numerous hurdles. The article fails to cite one real life white person who was opposed to this adoption on racial grounds. (They do cite some stares by random white people at the end.) 

However, the article does a good job highlighting several other issues.  What is also interesting is that part of the reason the adoptive mother want to adopt this child was to keep her with her sister, who is biracial (black/white I’m assuming).  The adoption of the biracial sister appeared to be a non-issue with opponents.  Now this my friends points out the utter absurdity of conflating race and culture, which I have also addressed before. (Lyonside also helped me put the smackdown on a troll in the comments. It’s worth reading.)  How can you have two siblings being raised by the same biological mother, and people have decided that they somehow have a different culture?  Their difference is race, not culture.  If this was a cross cultural or international adoption, that discussion would be more relevant.  I also think it could be more relevant if this black mother knew absolutely nothing about white people in America, which would mean she didn’t watch any TV, read any magazines, get a job with whites, etc.  Do you realize how difficult that would be? 

What is even more interesting is the part where the black adoptive mother was asked–what kinds of (white) foods she would cook for the daughter.  The mother replied that all the kids eat hot dogs and hamburgers.

I also found the part about people asking her “why she talked black” to be quite fascinating.

Go read the entire article from the Detroit news; it’s really a good story.

For some reason this post at Women of Color Blog and this post at the way here reminded me of my childhood, and the social class dynamics of growing up poor.  In her post on Women of Color blog BFP mentions working at McDonalds, which reminded me of my own food service experiences.  I worked in fast food, but my first actual food service experience was in elementary school.  This is where Monica’s post fits in.  Somehow in a very long comment thread the subject turned to government cheese (or in Rosyln’s words “gubmint cheese”), which they served in the cafeteria at my elementary school.¹

How do I know what was served in the cafeteria at my school?  Well, like all of the other kids in the 5th and 6th grade, I worked in the cafeteria.  I can imagine the middle class mostly white suburban readers gasping now because no “respectable” middle class school would ever make their students work in the cafeteria, but my school did. 

Here’s how it worked.  There were a total of two 5th grade and two 6th grade classes.  Each week one of those classes had cafeteria duty, and most of the students in the class would go down to the cafeteria around 10:30 and start helping the janitors and cafeteria workers serve lunch to the students.  There were different jobs, which were gendered and assigned base on skills.  The most prestigious job was selling ice cream since it involved actually having to count money, and the teacher picked the smartest kids.  It was also cooler out in that part of the cafeteria, and only people who had an extra 30 cents to spend on lunch could buy ice cream, so there wasn’t any deluge of kids running to the counter.  The rest of the student workers were in three groups, which were assigned by the cooks and janitors.  You had the lunch servers, who put food on trays.  This was mostly girls with a few boys mixed in, and it was the moderate prestige position.  Then, there were the lowest prestige positions: dish washers, (mostly girls), and tray dumpers, (mostly boys).  The tray dumpers had to empty the trays after the students were done eating, and take out garbage.  Oh and I almost forget, that there was a person who had to wash tables, which I believe was one of those mid-level prestige jobs.  Lunch generally ended around noon, and we had recess around that time period. 

The students were paid for their work in free meals, and of course this work was also considered valuable job training because it taught us about hard work and responsibility.  Moreover, in a low income school, this was one more way to save money.  I don’t know that they could afford to hire that many people to work at the school because the local tax base was very low.  The school also saved money by getting government subsidized food, such as government cheese. (Which in my opinion was pretty good, but that’s for another debate.)

I suspect lunch was very different than it would be in a middle class school for other reasons as well. 

The majority of the kids in my school were eligible for free lunches, and very few kids packed their lunches.  How do I know this?  Because we had to line up for lunch based on how we were paying–free lunch kids went first, then reduced lunch ($.45), and full price lunch was last ($.75).  Most of the kids lined up for free lunch.  I also remember when my mother finally got a full time job teaching special education at the school because I got to move to the back of the lunch line with Jason and Aaron, who were the “wealthier” kids in my class.  My Dad said we were probably still eligible for the reduced price lunch, but my mother’s pride was not going to allow her to have her kids on reduced lunch while she was teaching in the school. I also knew many of our kids were eligible for free lunch because I looked at data when I was in high school and we were campaigning for a school levy.  All of the people campaigning were given a sheet of paper that had data comparing our school to other schools in the state of Ohio based on test scores, per pupil spending, teacher pay, and other relevant socio-economic indicators.  As I looked through the sheet all of the numbers were very low, mostly in the bottom 20% or bottom 5%.  Finally, I got to the end of the chart, and I leaned over to my mother and said,

“Hey mom we’re really high in this one.  What does AFDC mean?”  My mom replied,

“That’s welfare.”

We both started laughing because it was the only figure where the school was actually in the top 5%. (I don’t think they had teen pregnancy or drop out rates because we would have been in the top on those, too.)  

In junior and high school things were a little different.  The kids still served lunches, but it was only the kids in special education who worked in the cafeteria, and they did so almost every day.  Those of us who were not in special education were weeded out of food service, and we spent our time in the classroom.

I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on social class over the last 5 or 6 years, especially as it relates to education.  I know my own children are not going to grow up like me, and I have mixed feelings about that.  As much as I know that many middle income people would find it offensive to have their kids work in the school cafeteria for free food, I have more mixed feelings.  Poor kids and working class kids seem to grow up quicker, and they are not coddled in the ways that middle and upper income kids are.  I suppose many people are going to say having kids serve in the cafeteria is child labor.  I guess it is, but I’m more ambivalent about it.  I’ve been doing this type of labor since the 5th grade. I stuffed envelopes for my dad in high school, and I worked as a Whopper flopper at Burger King.  I think work is valuable, and I think we shouldn’t shame people because their jobs are low paying or low prestige, but the other side of me knows that we are really funneling kids into the occupations that we expect for their social class.  Middle class kids don’t have to grow-up as fast, in part because they will be starting their labor force participation later and because their parents know their incomes are going to be directly linked to having a higher level and better quality education.

I know I’m the exception.  I’m the person who grew up in the very poor environment and “made it out” thanks to my mother’s college degree, my smarts, my determination, help from others, and lucky breaks (I’ve written a little about thi