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)

I’m going to organize this as bullet points for each episode. 

Gods Jewish Warriors

• I thought this was the best one of the series. 
• It was balanced in showing both the extremist settlers, and the more mainstream Jews who were opposed to the extremists.
• They gave ultra-orthodox Jews a free pass on the sexism issue, which was unfair.  They noted the treatment of women by Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, but mentioned nothing that I recollect.
• I was also impressed with how they discussed the international dimensions of the settler movement, and the fundamentalist Christians and right wing Jews who provided money and support to the settler movement.
• They also discussed the changes throughout history and covering the various peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors.  One of the most disturbing parts of the special was the discussion of the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  If you don’t know the story, you can click on the link.

God’s Muslim Warriors

• I felt like this one was a little more predictable because we are quite accustomed to critiques of Muslim fundamentalists–people promoting violence, Jihad, etc.  I do wish they would have highlighted more of the moderate leaders, and more people opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.  They did interview a few people who left extremist groups, which was interesting, but I wish they would have talked with people who were fighting these extremists all along.
• I thought the scenes of the Iranian women protesting were the most moving.  Heart has several postings on the women’s movement in Iran; you can find them here.  Many of the Muslim countries in the Middle East have draconian anti-women policies, and these policies are often justified in the name of religion.  By far one of the most consistent trends with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish extremists is their disdain for the rights of women.
• They did very good at focusing on the international dimensions of the movement; in particular the growing movement in Europe.  What I also found interesting was how both the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists were obsessed with the “cultural decay” in the West, focusing mostly on the decline in traditional definitions of family, materialism, and hedonistic popular culture. 

God’s Christian Warriors

• This was by far the worst of the three.  First, they didn’t show any of the Christian fundamentalists who advocate murder and violence.  There was a brief mention of bombing abortion clinics, but I wish they would have had an in-depth interview with someone like American terrorist Eric Rudolph or any of these people who have engaged in violence at abortion clinics. What about the Christian Identity movement?  What about Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his family?  They did talk with Christian fundamentalists, but they didn’t talk to the ones who engage in or promote violence like they did in the first two parts of the series.
• I was happy to see them discuss gender, and the treatment of women, especially when Christiane Amanpour told the one minister that the Taliban said the same thing as him. That was classic.  But they didnt get into the depth that they could have– discussing churches who barred women from being ministers.
• There were not enough interviews with people opposing Christian fundamentalism.  They had two ministers who stepped away from some parts of the movement.  I liked the Minnesota minister, who couldn’t figure out why these groups were so obsessed with homosexuality as a sin, but not materialism, greed, or gluttony.
• There was no coverage of the international nature of Christian fundamentalism.  You would think it is only in the US, but there are places like.  Several of the countries in the pink on this map prohibit abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, and Christian fundamentalists are responsible for promoting this in many countrries.  This list also includes some of the various Christian based terrorist groups around the world.

What do you think?

CNN is airing a special on relgious fundamentalism; it is a 3 part series.  Tonight is God’s Jewish Warriors, and in the next two days they will cover God’s Christian Warriors and God’s Muslim Warriors.  If you are watching, what do you think?

I’m still not certain if I like this caption; if I think of a better one, I might change it.

Tariq sent me this link from a NYT article, which I later read in my backlog of post vacation newspapers.  The article discusses Dr. Mary Bucholtz’s research on the connection between nerdiness and whiteness.  The article says,

Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.” 

Later the author, Benjamin Nugent, makes the following argument based on Bucholtz research,

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

I personally would like to read more about the methodology of the researcher before I make too many criticisms of the actual research, but at the same time, I worry that this research and the article could be misinterpreted.  It could be misconstrued as saying “black people are hip, cool and in style.” One problem potential problem with making any generalizations from this work is that the research comes primarily from California schools, which are not representative of the US.  The reporter also doesn’t discuss the distinction between being in a predominantly white school, a mixed school, or a predominantly Black/Asian/Latino/American Indian school.  I suspect the racial make-up of the school could make a difference in how race and nerdiness or hipness is constructed.  I’m not sure exactly how nerdiness is operationally defined in this study, but it seems to me to be more a set of behaviors and images that transcend race.  Additionally, if we are talking about nerdiness, we also need to address it’s counterpart coolness/hipness. 

I’m not sure we should want any racial group to be cool or hip after all fashions come and go.  For example, a few years ago many pop culture pundits were talking about the “Latin explosion.”  According to the “Latin Explosion” proponents, Latinos were hip and cool, and they were taking over American pop culture.  This claims was based on the success of about 4 or 5 musical artists and actors.  Do 4 or 5 people really make a trend?  Not really.  In fact, just a few years later you don’t even hear about the Latino explosion, unless it’s some bigot lamenting how many Latino immigrants are entering the US.  Does this mean that Latinos aren’t hip and cool anymore?  Would we ever hear the claim that whites and whiteness are hip and cool?  Probably, not. 

One reason whites aren’t cool, hip or trendy is that we are always in style.  Cool whiteness is usually coded as the All American or Preppy style and it is epitomized by thin white people with blond hair and blue eyes¹.  Perhaps hyperwhiteness, whatever that is, is not cool.  I have heard people on occasion pejoratively say–”That’s so white.” But what is most striking to me is that in American culture there are always white celebrities and pop culture icons who get to define the trends.  There are a few token blacks, Latinos, and Asians as pop culture makers, but whiteness always gets a place at the cool kids table.  In fact, it seems like many people of color aren’t really cool until they are embraced by the “mainstream,” which is usually a code word for whites.  Two artists that exemplify this are Jamie Fox or Queen Latifah, both of whom have been well established actors and musical artists for at least 15 years.  Now that they are embraced by a whiter audience; they are Hollywood A-listers.  Some would use this example to say, “Well, many Black Americans were way ahead of whites in noticing how cool these two artists are.”  I’m reluctant to make such a claim because I think cool is a moving target, and it is obviously very subjective.  Moreover, if being cool means being in style or being someone who is very popular than it is mostly whites who dictate coolness because there are more whites here in the US than other groups and whites disproportionately own and operate media outlets and other businesses that strongly influence coolness.  So, if black people get high cool points from pop culture makers, it’s because a critical mass of whites say black people are cool not because black people see themselves as cool. 

The other question I’m left asking is, “What about black nerds?”  I know some, and of course, most of us know America’s favorite black nerd Steve Urkle.  Are they labeled nerds because they allegedly “act white” or is it something else?  To me it’s something else.

Unlike Blacks, Asians don’t fair so well when it comes to the hip and cool portrayals in pop culture.  The last time I checked “the racial stereotypometer,” Asians were scoring very high on nerdiness.  I’m not sure how the Asian students fair in Dr. Bucholtz’s research, but I’m having trouble imagining that whiteness is considered less cool than Asianess, given the very common racist stereotype that Asians are nerds.  I suppose one could argue that Asians are stereotyped as both cool and nerdy, but it is clear that many portrayals of nerds and geeks include the token Asian². 

I don’t know exactly what this author’s methods or study found, so I can only comment on the New York Times write-up about her research, but I personally think that most of what defines nerdiness is not racially coded–wearing thick glasses, being clumsy and nonathletic, being bookish, and being socially awkward.  To the extent that race enters our discussion of nerdiness it is more about racial stereotypes than it is about racial realities.  Thus, we need to tread lightly into this territory, focusing on how racial stereotyping creates images of hipness and nerdiness.  We also need to discuss how media and business influence pop culture, keeping in mind that most businesses and media outlets are run by whites and those arbiters of taste are catering primarily to the tastes of a predominantly white audience.  If we don’t make this clear, then many people in the audience, are going to come away from the article saying yeah blackness is hip and cool, and whiteness is not.

1. Undoubtedly, this is class coded was well–middle and upper income whites get way more cool points than working class or poor whites. (back)
2. My own sense is that Asian cultural products are considered cool, but Asian people are not as cool.  I haven’t studied this, so it is just a anecdotal observation. Perhaps the same distinction could also be made for African Americans–African American cultural products are cool, and African American people are not as cool. (back)

YouTube: Journalist Refuses To Lead News With Paris Hilton Story

Good for Mika Brzezinski!

What the video doesn’t make clear is that this is three different incidents, each taking place an hour apart; Brzezinski reads the news at 7am, 8am and 9am, and each time the producer handed her a script with Paris Hilton as the lead story. Each time she refused to read it; the first time simply refusing (the male co-hosts goading her on), the second time trying to set the script on fire (the male host physically grabbed the script from her hands), and the third time theatrically shredding the script.

Kinda a shame that the co-hosts (or whatever) on the program marred her protest by acting like sexist, condescending buffoons throughout.

Check out this interview with Brzezinski about the incident (apparently she’s gotten overwhelmingly positive reactions). And a thematically related Youtube Link, in which MSNBC makes it crystal clear what they think the real news of the day is.

Curtsy: Pandagon.

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)

Rumors are swirling around everywhere, but the biggest news, which is not a rumor, is that the Congressional Black Caucus member Diane Watson introduced a bill (link is to s PDF of the full text) to sever federal ties with the Cherokee Nation.

The bill is the talk of the message board over at Cornsilks, and Principal Chief candidate Stacy Leeds has a statement about the bill on her site.  Time magazine is also covering the Freedmen debate, but they didn’t say much at all about the election. 

Time had a good interview with a professor, Tiya Miles who is a Native American Studies professor at the University of Michigan.  I strongly agreed with her assessment of the Native American/Black relations:

Perhaps more importantly, they (the Freedmen) have considered themselves Cherokee their whole lives. “There’s a tremendous amount of cultural identification that former slaves felt with Native tribes, of shared homeland, food, familial ties,” says Tiya Miles, a historian who runs the Native American Studies program at the University of Michigan. Cherokee had slaves. Cherokee also married, and slept with, blacks. And there were blacks who were adopted into the Cherokee tribe though they had no blood or slave ties. They all walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee, from the Deep South to Oklahoma.

These are the facts, but for blacks, especially, the mythology holds equally strong sway. A kinship with Native Americans has been a logical way to claim some sort of “non-black” status in a society where black is the most demeaned racial category. It’s also helped ground many black people searching for an original homeland, says Miles. “Native America was connected to freedom,” says Miles. “It was said slaves could run away to tribes and find shelter.” Clearly that wasn’t always the case, and the Cherokee controversy is, for Miles, “the end of innocence about what the historical relationship between African Americans and Native Americans really consisted of.”

The article author also made the following statement, “And it creates new complications for the relationship between blacks, who have long held a romantic view of their kinship with American Indians, and Native Americans, some of whom owned black slaves and fought for the Confederacy.”  I think there definitely is a difference in how African Americans and Native Americans view their relationships with each other.  I have very rarely heard any anti-American Indian sentiment from Blacks who I know. ¹ Most African Americans may be ignorant about the issues facing contemporary Native Americans, but I tend to agree with the professor; many African Americans do have a romantic notion of Black/Indian relations, and with this whole Freedmen issue, the romance may be over.²  I’m afraid that anti-black sentiment among Native Americans is much stronger than anti-Native American sentiment among blacks; of course, someone needs to do an actually study of this, but for now that would be my hypothesis.  I will also add that there are many Native Americans who are not anti-black and see this Cherokee fiasco and the Seminole Freedmen case as evidence of Native Americans engaging in self destruction.  The people in this group generally believe that American Indians should not base tribal and national identity only on “blood quantum” and race, opposed to culture and history.  The idea here is that blood quantum was created by Europeans as part of the genocide against American Indian people and cultures, so continuing to use it, is racist and self destructive. ³

Having followed this very closely, I think it is fair to say that the mainstream media (MSM) hasn’t done well at covering the complexities of this election and the Freedmen issue.  My first critique would be that many MSM outlets consistently ignore Native American political issues, so the Cherokee election is completely off the radar for many media outlets. ⁴  A few MSM outlets have covered the Freedmen issue, and very few (mostly local Oklahoma papers) have covered the election.  What so many of the mainstream media articles miss is how Cherokee politics play into these debates.  They usually let Chief Smith give his “we are a tribe of Indians” answer, but they don’t talk to the council members and the other candidate for Chief.  I’m glad they talked with David Cornsilk, but they also need to bring in other elected officials, so people realize that this view that the Freedmen need to be ousted is highly contentious, and it hasn’t even been supported by the Cherokee Supreme Court.⁵

With the Freedmen issue at the forefront, the election will be held tomorrow.  There has been some preliminary voting, and if I have any Cherokee voters reading this article provides a list of polling places, and a phone number to call for people who are having voting problems.  I will probably be back on Monday or Sunday to talk about the election results.

1. The same could not be said for Asians and Latinos; I’ve heard plenty of African Americans make disparaging stereotypical comments about these two groups. (back)
2. I’d venture to say that very few blacks or whites know that some Native American tribes had black slaves. I suspect many Native Americans don’t know that either. (back)
3. If you really want to see this debate play out go read the comments in this thread over at Wampum, where MB Williams and The Local Crank take on a commenter named Charlotte. (back)
4. One very obvious example of ignoring Native American politics would be the Jack Abramhoff scandal.  Many of his clients were Native American Nations, and he was caught making many disparaging remarks about his Indian clients and stole millions of dollars from them.  That angle of the story was buried in much of the coverage. Of course, there are other issues not so directly connected to white politicians, including sovereignty issues, poverty, racial identity politics, and numerous other issues that we don’t even hear about at all. (back)
5. It really makes the Cherokees look like a huge mass of racists, with only a few dissenters, but I think there are many more dissenters, including powerful political people. (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!

Two Nigerian writers have garnered major prizes in literature within the past week. 

Renowned Nigerian author Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction, which is awarded biannually for a body of work. If you are not familiar with his work here is a little summary from the AP article announcing the prize:

The author began work with the Nigerian Broadcasting Co. in Lagos in 1954 and studied broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corp. in London.

During Nigeria’s 1967-1970 civil war, Achebe’s Ibo people of the eastern region tried to establish an independent Republic of Biafra, and Achebe tried publicize the plight of his people.

Achebe is currently professor of languages and literature at Bard College, New York, and has lectured in universities around the world.

In 2004, he refused to accept Nigeria’s second highest honor, the Commander of the Federal Republic, to protest the state of affairs in his native country. Nigeria held a presidential election in April that marked the first time one elected leader handed over power to another in a country plagued by military rule and dictators since gaining independence from Britain in 1960.

Achebe, who was paralyzed from the waist down after a 1990 car accident, is married with four children.

“Things Fall Apart” has sold more than 10 million copies around the world and has been translated into 50 languages, making Achebe the most translated African writer of all time.

Achebe was not the only Nigeria write to make news in recent weeks.  A writer, much his junior, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Organe Prize, which is given annually for the best full-length novel by a woman author written in English and published in the UK.  Here’s a excerpt from a interview with Adichie:

Adichie resists stereotypical views of Africa. “We have a long history of Africa being seen in ways that are not very complimentary, and in America [where she has been studying for the past 10 years] being seen as an African writer comes with baggage that we don’t necessarily care for. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn’t believe my first book [Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003] because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren’t starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn’t authentically African.”

 Adichie makes several other important points in the interview about race, media coverage of Africa, collective memory, and the middle class in African countries.  It’s well worth the read.

I also found it particularly interesting this has been framed as a great success for “African” writers, and it is.  But is shouldn’t be lost on people that both writers are Nigerian; they are both from the same ethnic group–Igbos, and they both have similar subject matter in their work.

If anyone has read the works of either of these authors and would like to add any reviews or discussion of the works in the comments section, feel free.

I posted this a while back on Ambling Along the Aqueduct, and Amp linked to it in one of his link farms, but given my tendency to post about political narrative, I thought it might be good to have this post around for people to refer to if they’re wondering about my positions.

Collective Unconscious

My anthropological theory of literature, basically, is that through reading a large sampling of a culture’s literature, it’s possible to deduce some of the basic concerns and narratives running through that culture’s subconscious. This is especially true when a subject becomes trendy in science fiction.

For instance, the way that we (as science fiction writers) explore virtual reality as a social space reflects our anxieties about social spaces in the “meat” world. Depictions of virtual reality tend to cleave to older cultural dialogues about cities. They’re seen as freeing, a place for people to move beyond mundane concerns — much as the theorist Simmel saw cities — or they’re seen as oppressive places where human interaction is traded for fetishization — much as the theorist Durkheim saw cities.

I see art as our culture’s roiling subconscious. Our beliefs and anxieties bubble to the surface. Especially in the fiction of ideas.

Narrative and Society

I think that one of the strongest effects of culture on the human psyche is to shape the narratives that we use to dissect the world. These narratives give me a lens for interpreting what happens to me. I, as a western woman, am likely to interpret my choices from an individualistic perspective. I decide things. I make them happen. In Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal, Laura Ahearn discusses the ways in which Nepali women will talk around the concept of agency; saying, for instance, that they were forced to make a love match because of a magic spell, rather than that they chose to make a love match.

Narratives obviously shape our interpretations of gender as well. The ways we view the actions of men, and the ways in which we view the actions of women, are subtly but importantly different. This is one of the major reasons, I believe, why people are so disturbed by gender ambiguity. When presented with an individual who does not visually present as male or female, people have trouble figuring out what narratives to apply to that person, and thus how to interpret or interact with hir.

Cultural narratives are shaped in manifold ways, of course. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to look at novels and short stories (and plays and television shows) as direct ways in which we shape our narratives. When The Simpsons presents an image of a boorish, stupid husband who is too stupid to be trusted with simple tasks, and his competent housewife who is content to be his helpmeet — they are tapping into those narratives. At times, they manage to use the narratives to mock themselves, in a complex weave of upholding and subverting the paradigm.

Roseanne, on the other hand, presenting complex individuals who do not so easily fit into the standard narratives of male and female, breaks the paradigm for a moment. It pries open our narrative space just long enough to give us a framework for talking about fat, bossy, but extraordinary women, and men who are both involved in manly work and not always in control. (Hat tip to Myca at Alas, a Blog for those examples.)

In literature, we see this with something like Delany’s Trouble on Triton, which poses some alternate methods for categorizing sexuality. Rather than gay and straight exclusively, we see people categorized by whether they prefer younger or older partners, their inclination toward sadomasochism, and so on.
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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.

(cross posted at Ambling Along the Aqueduct*).

Awhile back there was a thread at I Blame the Patriarchy about feminist science fiction. Here’s an incredibly incomplete list of some feminist-minded science fiction that I love. The stories and novels won’t be shockingly new to most people who are well-versed in fantasy & science fiction, but I think they’re newish to people who don’t really watch the genre. I’m also going to skip some of the more obvious feminist canon, such as Tiptree, Butler, Delany, Russ, LeGuin, Atwood, and Piercy. If you haven’t read them, go out and read them!

With those provisos in mind, I’m confining myself to three short story recommendations, and three novel recommendations, so please don’t take this list as representative of anything except the first few wonderful things that occurred to me. I’ll probably revisit the topic later. :)

SHORT STORIES:

	Knapsack Poems by Eleanor Arnason “Knapsack Poems” by Eleanor Arnason is what I’ve been calling my favorite short story since I ran across it in an anthology last year. It’s about some convincingly alien aliens whose physical presence involves a radical reinterpretation of gender and body. Since it’s online, I’m not going to say more. Go read. :)
	Love’s Body, Dancing in Time by L. Timmel Duchamp Love’s Body, Dancing in Time is a short story collection by L. Timmel Duchamp, the editor of the feminist publisher Aqueduct Press. In this collection, she explores gender, sexuality, and self-definition, through interesting characters, worlds, and extraordinarily beautiful imagery. All of the stories reflect a deep engagement with feminist ideas, rendered striking and moving through Timmi’s unique interpretations. Timmi’s work has an academic cast which the pedant in me really enjoys; one of the stories in this collection is an alternate history examination of Abelard and Heloise, written as an academic paper. My favorite story in the collection is “The Gift,” the story of a woman from a world with a binary gender system who travels to another world and falls in love with a man who is a member of a third gender.
	With Her Body by Nicola Griffith The stories in this collection are striking and dark, with strange, beautiful imagery. My favorite story in the collection is “Yaguara,” the last story, which carried me away — past writer brain, past self reading the book. In the afterword, L. Timmel Duchamp writes a fascinating analysis of Griffith’s stories; she discusses Griffith’s exclusive use of women as sexual creatures which creates a world where women are not othered in response to men’s sexuality. She also talks about the constructs our culture has built around feminine versus masculine fiction — for instance, how universality is constructed as masculine, so that feminine characters are seen as ‘limited’ and ‘embodied.’ While Nicola’s stories were so beautiful as to carry me past the intellectual interpretation of the work while I was reading, I was pleased to have the concepts brought to my attention by Timmi’s afterword when I was done.

NOVELS:

	Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson This book weaves through the consciousnesses of three black women in different places and historical periods: a slave in the Carribean; a dance hall girl who was the lover of Charles Baudelaire; and an Egyptian slave girl who worked in a brothel, and later became a saint. I found this book utterly seductive. Reading it was a profoundly moving experience, for me. The prose is gorgoeus, and there’s a kind of fiery, driving strength that propels the tension through disparate places and events. The reader gets to know each character intimately, and Nalo’s deft, insightful, poetic prose allows each storyline to carry the weight of untold and unwritten histories. Unsurprisingly, it’s really smart about the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, spirtuality, history, and the tension between colonized and pre-contact reality. For more good reading, check out Nalo Hopkinson’s blog.
	The Slave and the Free by Susie McKee Charnas The Slave and the Free seems to be a rerelease, compiling the books Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines which were originally released separately. I wasn’t sure whether or not to include these books, because they seem to me to be just as much feminist classics as Tiptree or Delany, but I don’t think I’ve met many non-science-fiction-oriented people who’ve read them. And that’s sad. These books postulate a post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which women’s oppression has become literal slavery, homosexuality has been naturalized, and the men interact according to the hierarchical guidelines of age cohorts. A female slave escapes the dystopian society at the same time as it begins to collapse. Leaving the boundaries of the country where she was born, she joins the Freewomen who live outside. Among them, she finds not utopia, but an ambiguous society. The novels raise sophisticated questions about what utopia and dystopia are or should be, always choosing the complicated answer over the simplistic one.
	China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh I wasn’t sure whether or not it was fair to call this book explicitly feminist — not that it doesn’t reflect feminist ideas, but feminism doesn’t seem to me to be one of its projects. And then, as I was poking around on the internet, I saw that it’s a recipient of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award — which is given to science fiction work that plays with gender. The characters in this novel are indeed portrayed with deep characterization that doesn’t abide by gender roles, but I imagine that the Tiptree committee may have been drawn by this book’s portrayal of a world in which homosexuality has been heavily stigmatized (in America) and made illegal (in China). In this novel, China is the major power, and America is a colonial backwater, which has significantly altered the political and cultural landscape of the world. The novel is told in episodic bursts. The main character has three or four chapters, but the people who wind through his life get to tell their own stories, often in ways that don’t relate directly to the main character’s plot. I was drawn in by the book’s simple imagery and prose, and by the effortless way in which it drew deep characters and a startling world. The prose is both deceptively light and emotionally evocative. Each turn on world politics, race relations, and gender, feels effortlessly smooth and accurately drawn.

–
*Two of the books mentioned on this list were released by Aqueduct Press, a press I have obvious ties to. I bought a slough of their books last year and I’m still working my way through them. The work is at the front of my mind. :)

I’d like to comment on this recent cartoon from the webcomic xkcd.

This cartoon was brought up on a message board that I read and participate in, at the end of a long conversation about politics (although the point of the message board is non-political, the board does deal with politics sometimes). The conversation was about “tolerance,” and I voiced my opinion that I’m very suspicious when people bring up the topic of “tolerance” as an abstract, because in my experience, people who are talking about tolerance in that context often want to coopt the language of civil rights in order to draw false equivalence between non-equivalent statements. “I support rights for gay people” and “gay people are immoral” are not equivalent statements.

While I like and respect the two people who posted this cartoon, the effect* of introducing the cartoon into the conversation is to minimize anyone who is passionate about politics by saying that their opinions are based not on clear thinking, or passion, or reaction to oppression, but on “rationalization.”

There is a legitimate point being made in this cartoon, as any teacher well knows. Teaching in front of a classroom is a tricky business. It’s difficult to be endowed with so much trust, and I appreciate that people struggle with that.

Outside of math, there are rarely objective and concrete facts that can be pointed to with absolute certainty, by anyone, from any place. 2 + 2 = 4 is not, or at least should not be, a controversial statement.

But the simple fact that someone can argue with me when I say “I support gay rights” is not an indication that I am simply “rationalizing” my position. To suggest it is so is to dismiss the concerns and oppression of gay people.

To say that caring about and debating politics is all about “smart people rationalizing” is the epitome of a priveleged statement. People who are fighting for their rights and survival do not have the privelege to say “oh, well, it all doesn’t really matter” or “I guess this is just a difference of opinion.”

In this country, black women have been sterilized for the color of their skin. I strongly doubt that my interlocutors in that discussion would have agreed that it was acceptable behavior. For me to argue against it — for black women to argue against it — would they call this an exercise in rationalization? I certainly hope not.

People suffer. Queer people suffer. Women suffer. Poor people suffer. People of color suffer. Our suffering is not a cheap political point, to be argued away by saying that our justifiable anger is merely an example of “smart people rationalizing.”

But I don’t really want to pick on the people who posted this cartoon. They’re nice; they’re smart; and I don’t think either one of them intended to offend me. On a personal level, I’m not upset with them. But politically, I want to address the message behind that maneuver, and behind this cartoon, because it’s larger than a single exchange in a debate.
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Curtsy: Objectify This.

Last semester, I was privileged to take a fiction workshop with Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead. In one of our later class sessions, we were looking at a beautiful story by one of my favorite writers in the workshop, Jill Wohlgemuth. The story was in the form of an informal essay about kissing, written by a thirteen-year-old girl who wandered away from her academic thesis to meditate on her own impressions of love and desire, framed around her burgeoning sexual attraction to a boy named Theo who she described several times as being incredibly smart — which is ironic, because of course any thirteen-year-old girl who could write an essay as beautiful as this story was would have to be a prodigy herself.

Marilynne watched patiently as we students gave our opinions of and reactions to the piece. Then she sat back and said, “I’ve noticed a problem in the writing of young women.”

Instead of giving character traits to their female characters, Marilynne argued, young women writers give those traits to male secondary characters — in this case, repeatedly describing Theo as intelligent when it was the narrator who was brilliant.

I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot lately.

Now, I don’t think that the particular story we were looking at was actually a black and white case of this happening. There are a lot of reasons why a particularly smart thirteen-year-old girl would fixate on describing the object of her affection as “so smart” — I did that a lot as a kid, particularly with boys I had crushes on, because I had swallowed some line that men needed to be smarter than their female partners. Still, I think that Marilynne’s observation is keen and insightful. Looking at broader media trends, it’s definitely possible to uncover cases where a female character’s personality is rendered through male characters, or not rendered at all.

Girl Detective talks about one such case in her review of Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The plot of the novel literally revolves around the female main character, Lucinda. She acts as a middleman, conveying McGuffins (sought-after objects) and witnessing plot points. However, the story is happening to other people. Her characterization — personality and praxis — are deferred onto male characters.

Girl Detective writes, “Although Lucinda’s consciousness is what binds the novel together, her actual place in the story is minimal; her only motivation is superficial attachment and lust, and she spends the entire story either having sex, wanting sex, or masturbating while wanting sex. All the male characters in the story have traits, interests, and personalities… Lucinda, however, is completely devoid of any desires, aspirations, thoughts, or goals that don’t involve finding a penis to put into her vagina.”

“What’s really sad,” Girl Detective continues, “is that our culture is so ignorant of women’s inner lives (50% of the population, people! Seriously!) that this substitution of sex for psychology still very often passes for legitimate characterization in even the highest ranks of literature.”

And now that I’ve discussed a high brow example, you know what this reminds me of? Lost.

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Hey y’all,

This is Mandolin. Amp has invited me to guest blog for a month or two. In real life, my name is Rachel Swirsky. I’m a fiction writer and I just finished up the first year of my master’s degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

I write literary fiction sometimes, but I’m very interested in how narratives that include the non-real (science fiction, magical realism, fabulism, slipstream) can create a heightened sense of reality and social commentary. I’m fairly active in the science fiction community. I used to describe my work as trying to write like surrealists paint, although I’ve been publishing more mundane stuff as I learn.

You can read more about my writing at my needs-to-be-revamped website. I’m also a poster at a new blog on feminism and science fiction called Ambling Along the Aqueduct, and I even have my own personal blog where I post memes, rant incoherently about politics, and whine about writing. My first published short story is online in Subterranean Magazine #4 which was edited by John Scalzi of the Whatever; it’s a meta-fictional piece considering the embedded class and gender assumptions in dystopic novels.

And that should be about it, in terms of introduction. :) I’ll throw up the post I’m working on as soon as it’s done.

On Rachel’s thread about ‘tween girls and shopping, Mandolin and Joe had this exchange:

Mandolin: We’re talking about a society-wide pattern of representation, wherein shopping and materialism have, yes, been condensed as part of a larger narrative wherein women are portrayed as frivolous (interested in unimportant things) and unable to handle money. Check out a few episodes of I Love Lucy.¹

Joe: I think the simpsons/everbody loves raymond/king of queens/life according to jim/whatever have done a decent job of spreading that stereotype across gender lines. Fat dumb lazy guy married to thin pushy competent woman has become a staple.

It’s conventional for both feminists and (more frequently) MRAs² to construct playing the frivolous, lazy and incompetent character in sitcoms as a sign of oppression; that is, feminists say the incompetence of the Lucy character (are her need to always be rescued by level-headed Ricky) is a sign of how women are denigrated in society, while MRAs point to the incompetence of Homer Simpson or Raymond (and their need to always be rescued by level-headed wives) as a sign of how men are denigrated in society.

Although in this instance a feminist, Mandolin, brought it up first, in my experience MRAs bring this argument up more often than feminists, presumably because the male-idiot-spouse is much more common on TV nowadays than the female-idiot-spouse. As “Mens’ Rights Online puts it, “Turn on your TV and you will see the sitcoms and advertisements that portray dads as speechless dolts in the face of the superior wisdom of their wives and 11-year-old children.”

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1. I disagree with Mandolin here; I think that I Love Lucy, which portrayed women as constantly constrained by an enforced housewife role, was actually quite subversive and feminist for its time. I far prefer Lucy, who was constantly fighting against the constraints of her life, to the “happy to be secondary” housewife character found in many older family sitcoms. (back)
2. MRA = Men’s Rights Advocate. I’m not assuming that Joe is an MRA, or that he’d necessarily disagree with anything I say in this post; his exchange with Mandolin just brought this stuff to my mind. (back)

I read this in the New York Times yesterday, and it didn’t sit well with me. Here is a quote:

But on this day I’ve come not to bury Abercrombie. I am here to observe my daughter and her two friends make their way around a suburban mall to help me understand why shopping seems to have become an acceptable hobby, even an obsession, among some young girls. And to see how stores like Abercrombie and American Eagle Outfitters, as well as luxury brands, successfully court these young girls and turn them into customers.

This is why it bothered me:

1) It seems to be promoting the idea that girls are materialistic and superficial, and I don’t know that young girls are any more materialistic than boys.

2) These kids who don’t have a job or any money are getting designer clothes. Why would any parent pay for a 10 year old to have “Juicy Couture”? Why?

3) It is the most class biased piece of writing I have seen in a long time, and the author seems utterly unwilling to acknowledge that.

There are other things that I just can’t put my finger on since my brain is toast (always happens at the end of the semester). BTW, I love Juliet Schor, the sociologist mentioned in the article. Here is a really good article I have the students in my mass media class read on the politics of consumerism.

Go read it and tell me what you think.

From Reuters, under the headline “Catholic politicians must oppose gay marriage: Pope”:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Church’s opposition to gay marriage is “non-negotiable” and Catholic politicians have a moral duty to oppose it, as well as laws on abortion and euthanasia, Pope Benedict said in a document issued on Tuesday.

In a 140-page booklet on the workings of a synod that took place at the Vatican in 2005 on the theme of the Eucharist, the 79-year-old German Pope also re-affirme