Amazing Grace

If you did not see or read President Obama’s eulogy for Rev./SC State Sen. Clementa Pinckney on Thursday afternoon, you missed something unique and magnificent. The perspective of the President’s language was very Christian because he himself is very Christian and he was offering a eulogy about a minister, so that’s not surprising. But his tribute was particularly eloquent and filled with messages of basic humanism, the possibility for the evolution of human kindness, historic truth, common sense, and social and political necessity, all of which was entirely appropriate in the context of the eulogy and the time in which we live. If you missed it, I encourage you to click on one of the links above.

The President’s core message was that we are blessed by God with grace – the grace to be good people; people capable of love and forgiveness even in response to the most vile wrong-doing and the most heart wrenching grief; and that if we can learn how to live our lives and view others with a more open heart, anything and everything good is possible. Even if you take God out of that scenario and simply view the capacity for grace as something that is a central part of our DNA which we can choose to cultivate or ignore, the message still rings true and is worthy of contemplation and discussion.

As my regular readers know, I embody a great deal of anger, cynicism, and hardcore judgment about things and circumstances I don’t like. I apply this rancor to all the subjects this blog is primarily about: politics, contemporary culture, new technology, and the ruination of the English language. I try to reveal the sense of humor I have that keeps me relatively sane and has so far prevented me from committing acts of violence. But I’ve also discussed my considerable depression and misery.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve twice watched the President deliver the eulogy and read the text once. Besides increasing my respect and affection for him, I’ve thought a lot about the lack of grace I’ve cultivated within myself and wondered (1) if I have the ability to do so and (2) if even the effort would give me a greater sense of inner peace if not outright love, happiness and joy. I don’t know the answer, but I admit that I fear the process, not because of its difficulty, but because I’ve clung to these feelings like a teddy bear for decades.

Indeed, they remind me of a great Robin Williams scene in Moscow On the Hudson, in which he plays a foreign musician and he’s just jammed with a blues band and is talking to one of the American musicians: “When I was in Russia, I did not love my life, but I loved my misery. You know why? Because it was my misery. I could hold it. I could caress it. I loved my misery. You know, I have a whole family I will never ever see again. You see? Now you see. You know it. There it is. Now you know that the saddest thing in the world is life. Yeah, man. Now you see. Thank you. Thank you for a wonderful night. Boy, I feel great. Take care. I love you.”  “If that was wonderful, what happens when he hits deep depression?” 

The murders in South Carolina filled me with a hopeless sadness and fire-breathing rage. The ability of a number of family members of some of the victims to confront the killer in court and express their grace and forgiveness filled me with humbled awe. The President gave me a whole lot to think about. And the Supreme Court’s affirmation of national marriage equality gave me happy hope – and the sense that enough of the Justices had been blessed with true grace.

I don’t know what the lasting impact of the diverse events and language of the last couple of weeks will be for me – or others. I don’t know how I’ll feel or think or what tone my writing will take, especially as the 300-year campaign of the 2016 election moves glacially along. But whatever people’s different feelings about all this may be, none of us can deny that something extraordinary has happened. And that in itself is amazing.

Hue and Cry

As an extremely white-looking biracial person who was raised by my biological white mother and black father to “think of myself as” Colored, Negro and Black (the words changed over the years but the idea was the same), color me bemused and fascinated by the “racial scandal” surrounding Rachel Dolezal. She’s the woman who until a couple of days ago was a highly effective NAACP chapter president and is now a subject of curiosity and scorn, because she’s white (according to her white biological parents) but self-identifies as black. We might consider her transracial: a black woman who believes she was mistakenly born in a white woman’s body.

Ms. Dolezal is accused of doing some odd, even duplicitous things, including attending then suing Howard University (one of the country’s most famous black colleges) for racial discrimination because she’s white; assuming guardianship of one of several unquestionably black children adopted by her white parents; ticking several racial categories on official documents; marrying a black man (to whom she’s no longer married, but I don’t know why); and giving birth to a biracial child (biracial if indeed she’s white) who apparently looks unquestionably like a person of color.

Ms. Dolezal looks like a white woman with a tan and a ‘fro who says with no clear explanation that she identifies as black. Some black people resent this because they feel she has no personal knowledge/understanding of the black experience. But what is the totality of the black experience? American blacks come in a variety of hues because of the long history of the rape of black women by white men from Slavery until now, because there’s still a racial component to some rape.

Low self esteem still exists within the black community – less now, since some measure of civil rights success. But most people (black, white and “other”) know about the old paper bag test (if you’re darker than a brown paper bag you’re too dark); if you’re very light-skinned you’re “high yaller” (yellow); and there is still a measure of antipathy between dark and light skinned blacks, although with an interesting twist. Up until the 60s, light skinned blacks felt superior to their darker kin. Since civil rights that’s somewhat reversed. And now that there are an increasing number of biracial people there’s just a whole lot of racial confusion.

Race and racism are about color. It’s ironic but true that in many parts of Africa, American blacks aren’t considered black, because our historic coffee has been diluted with so much cream. “Pure” African blacks are black, what’s still called here “he’s so black he’s blue.” Whereas here, the economic construct of Slavery came up with the notion of the One Drop Rule (“one little drop of niggra blood and you’re a niggra too”). This made it easier and cheaper for Slave owners to acquire, even breed, more Slaves, rather than buy them fresh off the boat. It’s also true that there are millions of “white” Americans who have “black blood” in their family histories and don’t even know it!

But to get back to the beleaguered Ms. Dolezal: I personally feel a great sense of sympathy for her, as well as a kind of reverse empathy. Sympathy, because there’s obviously been a considerable amount of racial weirdness and confusion in her life and I think she does have a sense of the black experience. She grew up with a number of adopted black siblings, went to a black college where she majored in black studies, married a black man, has a “colored” child, and apparently did considerably beneficial work for the NAACP. If we accept (even if we don’t quite understand) that people can be transgender, is it really so hard to accept the concept of transracial?

My sense of “reverse empathy” comes from being told to view myself as black but my mirror told me I was not. It seemed insane that I had two parents of different colors and was told to identify with the one I didn’t look like. I had no problem seeing myself as  racially blended, but in my youth we didn’t have the terms “mixed race” or “biracial.” And when I gleefully discovered the word mulatto, which is a Spanish word for exactly what I am, I was told it was a derogatory term. I was basically told that my very being was an insult! I’m 63 goddamn years old and I still haven’t truly come to terms with my racial identity. And I think that says more about American society than it does about me.

The moral of the Rachel Dolezal story – like the moral of the Caitlyn Jenner story – is that identity is a personal and complex thing. Neither science nor sociology have a true, full understanding of human sexuality, or an explanation for the need for strong racial distinctions in a racially mixed society. What we have in both areas is ignorance, fear, polarization, habit, meanness, exploitation, and plain old stupidity. I doubt I’ll live long enough to see this stuff straightened out – and, for the record, it’s made much of my life miserable.

A Global Shame

The kidnapping of 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria happened three weeks ago. I’m glad the world is outraged now, but it took three weeks for American news media to pay any attention to this story. Fox News was busy obsessing about Obamacare and Benghazi, as usual; CNN was focused on every dim ping in the ocean in their can’t-let-this-story-go endless focus on the downed Malaysian jet; and MSNBC was still staring at the George Washington Bridge Over Political Waters, not to mention the political horse races of 2014 and 2016. I don’t know what broadcast network news was doing because I don’t watch them. But even the usually ahead-of-the-game PBS NewsHour let us down. In print…even the New York Times was asleep at the wheel.

Three hundred schoolgirls were kidnapped in Nigeria because a bunch of Islamist terrorist wackjobs don’t want girls to go to school – especially Western-style schools. They would rather sell them for $12.00 each, sending them off into the global child sex trafficking trade, or to individual men who want child brides, or someone, anyone, who wants free, hard labor. Only social media – primarily Facebook and Twitter – stopped sharing recipes and selfies long enough to sound an alarm loud enough for the news media and the public to hear. Good for them. Shame on us.

What happened to these 300 girls – yes, about 50 got away but more have been taken since – is a disgusting outrage. But it is part of a larger global shame that has been going on for years and has been shockingly under-reported, never mind addressed. Every year, a million children, mostly girls, literally from infancy to tweens, are trafficked worldwide, around 300,000 in the U.S. alone, primarily for the unimaginable misery of sex slavery, a lesser number for grueling manual labor. And these are just the stats on kids. The numbers for adult women are even more horrific, and men get roped into this travesty as well.

Throughout human history, human life has been regarded as pretty cheap in many quarters. But now we’re in the 21^st century, the bold progressive future, and it’s just as bad if not in some ways worse. Boko Haram may be a new name to us on the roster of terrorists who commit the unspeakable, but they’ve been around for years and our government, and the Nigerian government, and the governments of the world, have known about them – them and others, who pretend to act in the name of religion or culture or tradition or unashamedly in the name of greed run amok. Women, as always, are favorite targets, hardly regarded as human and certainly unentitled to autonomy or dignity. They’re fair game for brutality, especially sexual brutality, because men who are crazy are usually particularly crazy when it comes to women and sex.

And, not for nothing, another thing happened while world news ignored those Nigerian schoolgirls snatched from their beds. The wealthy, dapper, Sultan of Brunei decided that what his little oil-soaked country needed was the mania of Sharia Law, which has a special bug up its Islamist ass for women, gays, and anything resembling the rights of free speech or thought. Stone them! Mame them! It’s what Allah would want! Really?

Three hundred schoolgirls were kidnapped in Nigeria for the crime of being female and getting an education. Now, with international intervention, some of them may be rescued. But much damage will already have been done. The rest, the majority, will be forever lost in the anonymous swamp of child trafficking. Are we, the world, going to confront this issue now? I’m not optimistic. Just heartsick. And really, really pissed.

Old Passover, New Passover

Tonight, Jews around the world will gather with family and friends to celebrate one of Judaism’s three most important holidays, Pesach, which translates as Passover. They will share the traditional Passover dinner, a seder. There will be a seder at The White House, once again. President and Mrs. Obama have held seders there since the President took office, and it is a non-political event: personal friends and staff only. The Obamas are the only First Family to honor this Jewish tradition.

As detailed in the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus (chapters 1-15), Passover commemorates the escape from ancient Egypt of “a nation of Hebrew slaves.” For about 100 years (give or take...), Biblical scholars and archeologists have argued about whether or not The Exodus (said to have been led by Moses and lasted 40 years in the desert), really happened, where it happened, and how many people were involved – although the archeologists acknowledge that only a fraction of ancient sites have been found (many of them having been destroyed over the ages) and only a fraction of those have been minimally excavated.

The estimated head-count of The Exodus (from religious and secular sources) varies from approximately 600,000 men, women and children to anywhere from one to three million. But whether or not the Exodus actually occurred, it has been regarded as real and holy by Jews for thousands of years – including the world’s most famous Jewish rabbi (teacher), Jesus Christ, whose holy Last Supper was a seder. This is why Passover and Christianity’s Holy Week (from Palm Sunday through Good Friday and Easter) are religiously/historically linked. Speaking of which, here’s a bit of Americana trivia: Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865 – the first night of Passover, which always begins on the 15^th of the Jewish month of Nissan (usually April). (Jewish holidays traditionally begin the night before, which is why the 15th is considered the first day.)

Passover celebrates a number of other things and there are many rituals and traditions. But most important is Passover’s celebration of freedom from bondage, from slavery, which may be why, his sensitivity and respect for others aside, Passover is meaningful to our country’s first African American president and his wife, who is a direct descendant of American slaves.

So, while Jews along with non-Jewish relatives and friends celebrate Old Passover, it is urgent to remember that a New Passover is desperately needed, because slavery is alive and sick as ever worldwide, including here in the USA. Now it’s called by other names: human trafficking, sex trafficking, indentured servitude, debt bondage, attached labor, restavec: it amounts to the same thing. Slavery.

When people are held against their will, prevented from moving about freely, forced to live in disgusting, horrible conditions, beaten and tortured, forced to do unspeakable things (like making an eight year old girl have sex with more than 20 men a day), are bought and sold like inanimate objects, and are paid nothing for the misery they endure, they are slaves. And there are 21 to 30 million slaves in the modern world, suffering terribly and serving as the backbone of a $32 billion (annually) industry.

The U.S. has 60,000 slaves, ranking us 134 out of 162 countries with slaves. Many of these are women, teens and very young girls who are trafficked for sex (men and boys, too). So we’re not #1 in the slave business – India has 14 million and 4% of Mauritania’s population of 3,796,141 is enslaved – but how many is okay? Anywhere? For any reason? This is 2014!

I genuinely wish all of you happy holidays. I’m sure you and your families and friends deserve them. While our lives may not be the nightmares of slaves, many still-so-called-middle-class and working class Americans have been struggling since Katrina, Sandy, other natural disasters and the 1%-created Great Recession of 2008. I don’t have what I used to or live like I used to. But I am very grateful for my life as it is, because so many people have it so much worse.

I encourage you to keep today’s slaves in your hearts, thoughts (and prayers, if you’re so inclined) this holiday season. Then, as soon as you can, do some Internet research about modern day slavery and get the full awful picture. Figure out what you can do to help. It may start with simple things like not buying certain brands or shopping in certain stores. It may include contributing to an NGO or non-profit you trust to help support active work on the ground around the world.

But most of all, be aware of this issue and talk about it with others. And keep an eye on the people around you – your apartment building, your neighborhood, your place of work. If you see something or someone that doesn’t look right, feel right, call the cops. One or more of America’s 60,000 slaves or their slave masters may be somewhere near you. Don’t look away. Look trouble or evil in the eye and do what you can.

If our religious observances or secular social consciences mean anything, this has got to be  part of it, doesn’t it?

History, Language, and the Movies

Two important films connected to Black History were released in 2013: 12 Years A Slave, directed by Steve McQueen (not the dead one, another one) and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, directed, obviously, by Lee Daniels – who was not trying to be an egomaniac by inserting his name in the title, but was forced to by Warner Brothers, which holds the rights to a 1916 silent film entitled The Butler and wouldn’t let him use it without that name distinction.

I haven’t yet seen 12 Years A Slave, which has been highly praised and got nine Oscar nominations.  I look forward to seeing it, especially after watching an interview with screenwriter John Ridley, who greatly impressed me.  I have seen Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which I loved and feel deserved an Academy nod to Forest Whitaker for Best Actor, if nothing else.  This film is good (if not great) and it reveals the noble history of Black servants in the White House who hold a special place in Black History of long-term, impeccable, discreet service, despite the horrors of Slavery, post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, and the long hard road to Civil Rights.

I don’t think …Butler received the same kind of audience enthusiasm because (if online comments on reviews and other articles are anything to go by) the increasingly language-ignorant public didn’t understand the difference between “inspired by” and “based on” and therefore felt …Butler was somehow illegitimate.

…Slave was based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, a real-life free Black man who lived in New York in the 1830s, and was kidnapped in Washington DC in 1841.  He was forced to live and work as a Slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation until he was rescued in 1853.  He subsequently wrote his autobiography, which was published in 1853, and it was this true story that captured the interest of McQueen and Ridley.

It is worth noting that in the Ridley interview, he said his one fear is audiences will leave the theater with a sense of relief that the terrible days of Slavery are over.  They are not.  As he explained, the level of Slavery worldwide – including in the U.S. – is three times larger than the enslavement of Africans that brought them to America, the Caribbean, South and Central America and parts of Europe.  Today, tens of thousands of women and men and girls and boys are roped into Slavery, Sex Trafficking, and Indentured Servitude, which have yet to be adequately addressed by individual countries (including ours) and the United Nations.  If …Slave doesn’t inspire widespread indignation and calls for international intervention into contemporary Slavery, this fine film will only stand as a well-crafted bio-pic about the past.

…Butler was inspired by a Washington Post article about retired White House butler Eugene Allen, who served at the White House from the Truman through Reagan administrations.  Forest Whitaker’s character, Cecil Gaines, is not and was never intended to be Eugene Allen, nor was the film meant to be Gaines’ story.  Certain events in Gaines’ life are used in the film, because they’re typical of the privileges and indignities experienced by all Black White House servants, especially the butlers.

But this story tells the truth about the many Black men and women who had and still have unrivaled access to America’s presidents’ public policies and personal feelings – and who consistently protect the privacy of America’s chief executives and their families while providing top-notch service for which they are highly trained.  Most serve in these positions for decades and can sometimes hand them down to their children.

While some of those who saw …Butler were outraged by insignificant differences between Allen and Gaines – such as where they were born and worked prior to their White House careers, what their wives and children were like, etc., – they missed the important messages of the film.  One of Gaines’ two sons, Louis, is a Civil Rights maverick who sees his father as an Uncle Tom.  And much like Forest Gump, Louis finds himself plunked into the major events of his time: marching in Selma, being with Martin Luther King Jr. in jail and in King’s Memphis hotel room before he’s killed, joining the Black Panthers et al. 

When Louis tells Dr. King, clearly with a sense of shame, that his father is a butler, King says the following: “Young brother, the black domestic defies racial stereotypes by being hardworking and trustworthy.  He slowly breaks down racial hatred with the example of his strong work ethic and dignified character.  Now while we perceive the butler or the maid as being subservient, in many ways they are subversive without even knowing it.”  I don’t know if King ever really said this, but it doesn’t matter.  That’s language to pay attention to.

Welcome Back to Black History Month

It’s February in America – which means it’s Black History Month, a tradition that began in 1926 with “Negro History Week,” initiated by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  It became Black History Month in 1976 in conjunction with the celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial and the urging of then-President Gerald Ford.  It may surprise you to know that this occasion is also celebrated in the U.K. (starting in 1987) and Canada (as of 1995), because there are a lot of Black people in those countries, too, primarily (originally) from Africa and the West Indies.

In recent years, some Black Americans have taken to calling it African-American History Month.  This irritates me, because I have never liked the term, since most Black Americans know very little about the 54 countries on the planet’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent.  In addition, many Africans feel no sense of connection to American Blacks or even consider them to be Black, due to more than 200 years of interracial hanky-panky (both lovingly consensual and viciously imposed).

Other Black Americans have started to resist, even outright object to, Black History Month, because they see in what is meant to be a positive acknowledgment of long-ignored history, an unpleasant continuation of the separation of Blacks and Whites in the full picture of American history.  I myself fall into this category – sort of.  For one thing, so many people, events and milestone accomplishments are routinely left out of the telling of Black history – during this designated month and in general education.

 For another, if the widespread disrespect shown to America’s first Black President by both houses of Congress – indeed, the idea that he is not a legitimate President – is anything to go by, a new, more sophisticated racism is still very much with us and Black History Month does absolutely nothing to diminish that.  (I’m sure there are people who dislike Barack Obama because of what they perceive as his bad policies and ideas and nothing more.  But the ballyhoo about his birthplace, his college records and his religion demonstrates that there are a great many legislators and citizens who simply can’t abide the idea of a Black man in the White House.)

Last but not least, nearly 40 years of Black History Month has done very little to educate American Blacks about the fulsomeness of their own heritage – and virtually nothing to demonstrate to White Americans that Black history is an integral part of American history overall.  The young generations of Americans, Black and White, may be more accepting of each other than their elders – but they are still greatly uninformed about their country’s history, period.

So, what is the “appropriate” way to handle Black History Month: ignore it; celebrate it joyously no matter who does or doesn’t participate; or use it as an opportunity to expand the boundaries of American history at every level of education?  I don’t know what the answer is.  All I know is that we’re still a long way from having a complete and unified understanding of who and what we were and what we are as a nation, and that is a very dangerous and unhealthy state of affairs.

The Woman Issue

Since we’re just three weeks from Election Day, I think now would be a good time to remember that there are other important considerations besides The Economy (unemployment/debt/deficit/taxes) and the country’s biggest-ticket-items: Defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and health care.  Of course all this is critical – especially since the Presidential opponents have significantly different ideas about how to handle them.

But the “ancillary” issues that are dismissed in some quarters as "distractions" are in fact very important.  They literally define what our country is now and what it will be in the future: our culture, our values - not in some uptight religious sense, but having a collective, humane agreement about what matters.  Most of these issues have something to do with women, because the category of "woman" overlaps or underpins almost everything else.

All the major stuff, plus:
the future of the Supreme Court, green energy, effective foreign policy, youth and adult education, poverty, hunger, homelessness, the erosion of hard won civil- and voting-rights, Gay Rights and Marriage Equality, immigration and the Dream Act, progressive science, the environment, infrastructure, reforms and regulations, the arts and humanities, fighting voter suppression and the lie of voter fraud - all the things that are the essence of our democracy and literally civilize us and make us great.

Women’s rights, woes, and unbalanced status in America and around the world personify the very real culture clashes that define our times.  And it's an outrage that it's happening here in America.  After decades of struggle to earn the right to vote, not to mention personal autonomy, property ownership, professional opportunity, pay equity and more, women are now in real danger of losing control of our own bodies due to a growing lack of basic and preventive health care, and access to legal abortion and contraception, some of which require enduring intrusive, unnecessary medical procedures and stressful waiting periods.  The repeal of Roe v Wade is a very real possibility in a Conservative/Republican administration.

However, the greatest problem women face – to a much lesser extent here in America but to a vast extent around the world (particularly but not exclusively in the Muslim World) – is atrocious oppression, abuse and violence.  You’re no doubt aware of the 14-year old Pakistani girl who was recently shot in the head by a Taliban terrorist because she wrote a blog and spoke out against the Taliban and advocating education for women.  According to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “The United Nations mission in Afghanistan says it verified 34 attacks against schools in just the first six months of this year, ‘including cases of burnings of school buildings, targeted killings and intimidation of teachers and school officials, armed attacks against and occupation of schools, and closures, particularly of girls’ schools’.”

And let us not forget the routine honor killings, stonings, cutting off women's noses, acid attacks, indentured servitude, sexual slavery and rape as a tactic of war and cultural intimidation that are central to radical Islamic Shariah Law.  In addition, throughout Africa and elsewhere, female genital mutilation is traditional.  More recently, the gang rape of lesbians in order to “turn them into proper African women” has become common, as well as the rape of young girls (including infants and toddlers) because it’s believed that sex with a virgin will cure or prevent AIDS.

While most of this behavior is not an American issue per se, some of it is.  Rape, sexual slavery (of children and women) and severe domestic violence are very much American problems – particularly growing violence against girlfriends by teens and young men.  And there are millions of educated-but-ignorant young women who cluelessly ignore these matters and truly believe they're living a solid post-feminist reality.  The have no real understanding of history and are contributing nothing to the existing, still-valiant struggle - because "feminist" has become an old-fashioned, bad word.  They're the Starbucks Generation.

Which feeds in (you should pardon the expression) to America's benefits for the poor that so many people seem to bitterly resent: Welfare and Food Stamps.  Separately or combined, they barely provide the ability to survive.  Although many Americans picture Welfare recipients as burly black men laying around the house watching 60” televisions, and Food Stamps recipients as people using these benefits for non-nutritional purposes, like buying booze and frequenting strip clubs.  These stereotypes couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The vast majority of people on Welfare and Food Stamps are white women and their minor children and their lives are brutal.  These women are generally unskilled, under-educated to the point of illiteracy, and plagued by severe mental/ emotional problems, too.  (Abject poverty, constant worry and social disdain can do that to a person.)

Which brings us back to the fact that women’s health, safety, freedom and prosperity are very much an important part of the 2012 campaign – domestically and as a foreign policy issue.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made great efforts and some strides in the area of women’s rights by vocally supporting education, professional opportunity and personal freedom, and forcefully speaking out against horrific violence and oppression of women.  Republican John R. Bolton – George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N. and a specialist on security and arms control – is said to be Romney’s top contender for Clinton’s post should he win the Presidency.  Do you imagine Bolton would make the crises and needs of women a top priority as he travels the world?

How women's issues are addressed – and whether they are addressed at all – will, for years to come, be a revealing part of what kind of country we are and strive to be.  I don’t believe that Romney/Ryan support heinous violence against women here or abroad.  But I also don’t think they have the awareness, sensitivity, and concern we need in the White House, Congress and Senate.  For example, important legislation that would have helped combat extensive sexual slavery in America has been defeated numerous times by Republicans.  They want small government, but they want it to be just big enough to control women, especially sexually.  How long can women here and abroad be denied, defiled, and controlled by men with much power and little compassion?

Human beings are more important than money, but ironically, a greater empowerment of women in all ways would be a genuine boon to our economy and those of developing countries who are nonetheless determined to keep women in the Dark Ages.  So gentlemen, please don’t forget your mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and all the other women in your life when you vote next month.  And ladies, don’t forget the life and liberty you protect may be your own – and perhaps those of our sisters worldwide.

Celebrating King

Yesterday, January 15th, was the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s actual birthday.  Had he managed to live to the present, he would be 83.  For several reasons, I feel deeply motivated to write this year’s first Tower post about Dr. King, his influence on my life, and my less-than-happy feelings about his status in the present as well as the recently-dedicated King Memorial in Washington DC.

I was 16 when King was murdered on April 4, 1968 at the age of 39.  I’ve never forgotten (or entirely recovered from) the sense of loss, rage and helplessness I felt in response to what the King Family and many others (including the jury of a 1999 wrongful death suit) believe was a government conspiracy.

In addition to grief and anger, there were countless poignant moments in the initial wake of the assassination: for the nation, for the black community, within the civil rights movement, and in the lives of individuals.

The moment that occurred in my family was this: my [white] maternal grandmother, a poor, uneducated Russian-Jewish immigrant who, more than 50 years after emigrating to America could still barely speak English, was living with my parents and me at the time.  The night of the assassination, my folks and I were going to a neighborhood [activist] church for a memorial service and my grandmother said she wanted to go with us, because “he was a good man; this is a bad thing.”  At her funeral, my [black] father told this story, saying how moved he had been that this woman who had literally never set foot in a church in her life, willingly went and stood, linking arms with us, weeping and singing We Shall Overcome.

This year is the 25^th anniversary of the federal holiday.  In the spirit of this occasion, I am consciously grateful to have lived when King lived, to have witnessed his work to combat the racism he so deeply understood lessens America’s greatness and impedes its progress.  And I still marvel at the courage and foresight he displayed (and the criticism he endured, even from his colleagues in the movement) when he broadened his message to include opposition to the Vietnam War and the destructive, enormous poverty in America, both of which he viewed as essential components of championing non-violence, justice and economic equality.

Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly deserves to be lauded as a great African-American icon.  But it has long pissed me off that, even to this day, he is not commonly recognized simply and truly as a great American by all Americans.  It is a telling, distasteful reminder that racism is still very much alive and well that he is not regarded as such by the general public – meaning white people, a considerable number of whom, both ordinary citizens and federal legislators, fought for years against establishing the King holiday, then, years later, doggedly opposed having a King Memorial in the nation’s capitol.

And that Memorial, which was supervised by a racially-diverse committee and should be a handsome, inspiring tribute, is instead a peculiar structure that is quite unattractive: carved out of a massive slab of white granite, barely resembles him (among other incorrect features, King’s signature mustache is hardly-visible or just plain missing ), and displays what many critics regard as an inappropriate (and heavily edited) King quotation.

The designer has had the chutzpa to “explain” that the quote problem was because of space limitations.  But what can possibly justify a design that didn’t incorporate sufficient space for a longer, much better and intact quote?  Dr. King wrote numerous books and countless hundreds of speeches and sermons – and this was the best they could come up with?  It makes me wonder just how much that diverse committee actually knew about King, his work and his writings.

Which brings me to my primary King-related pet peeve.  Aside from his 1963 March on Washington “I Have a Dream” speech; his “Mountaintop” sermon, delivered the night before he died; and his book, Letter From a Birmingham Jail, many Americans of all ethnicities (particularly contemporary youth) are sadly unfamiliar with the content, even existence, of King’s extensive body of written work.  In essence, to the general public, King’s legacy has been reduced to a postage stamp’s worth of information, not unlike that about Honest Abe Lincoln and his log cabin, and George Washington’s chopped cherry tree.

I do rejoice today in the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the brave, tenacious efforts of his widow, the late Coretta Scott King.  I also applaud the subsequent individual and collective accomplishments of their children.

But the country’s general understanding of black history seems to consist of this inadequate picture of Dr. King, along with the fact that George Washington Carver did marvelous things with peanuts; Madam C.J. Walker was the first to invent and market black hair care products; and Rosa Parks wouldn’t change her bus seat.  Most people don’t even know that in 1872, feminist Victoria Woodhull and abolitionist Frederick Douglass were the presidential/vice presidential candidates put forth by the independent Civil Rights Party.

It is my great hope that from this day forward, there will be an ever-increasing interest, understanding and appreciation for all that Dr. King achieved and espoused, because it has enormous pertinence to present-day America – as well as a considerable increase in the public’s familiarity with the much wider world of black history.  Until that happens, we as a people will never fully “overcome.” 

Racial vs Racist

There’s nothing like getting your blood boiling first thing in the morning and thanks to yesterday’s news about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s “racist” remark – as revealed in the new book Game Change by Mark Halperin & John Heilemann (a critique of the 2008 campaign – I was seething well before 12:00 noon.

As you've no doubt heard by now, the book claims: “He [Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama – a ‘light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’.”

Naturally, Reid is now back-peddling in response to the heat generated by his comment, apologizing to the nation and the president personally; the Democrats have chided but absolved him; and the Republicans, ever alert to an opportunity to make themselves look good in comparison to the Dems, are calling for Reid’s head on a political platter.

This situation is both the height of stupidity and a sobering reminder that because we still haven’t dealt squarely with the issue of race in America, coming to grips with the history and nuances of racism, we’re literally unable to tell the difference between a remark about race vs a racist remark. They’re not the same thing. And when the media and politicians use every instance of racial observation to stir the pot and make trouble where none exists, it only serves to take us further away from understanding and confronting the truth.

Racism in America in regard to African-Americans is and always has been about color, and can both fairly and simply be defined as a generally-accepted idea that lighter is better than darker. This was true during Slavery, when light-skinned (biracial) blacks were given [relatively] special treatment, ergo “house Negroes” vs “field Negroes” (lights got to work in the house while darks toiled in the fields). After the Civil War and ever since, even, to some extent, in the present, abused blacks bought into this maxi-racist distinction, as well.

Any black person over the age of 40 knows about the old “paper bag test”: blacks believed that if they were darker than a brown paper bag, they were too dark. There is a long history of antipathy between light- and dark-skinned blacks, with the lights genuinely discriminating against the darks. Light-skinned parents didn’t want their light-skinned children to marry dark-skinned blacks, etc. This was an issue that Spike Lee tackled in his film School Daze, about the rivalry between two sororities on a black college campus, one made up of light-skinned girls, the other dark. It was one of Lee’s least successful and popular films, because white people didn’t get it and blacks didn’t want to cop to it. All puns intended, it got very mixed reviews.

This attitude among African-Americans took a brief hiatus during the post-Martin Luther King Jr. Black Power movement, when dark-skinned blacks shunned the light-skinned for not being black enough. But as Black Power got beaten down, some of the old attitudes returned – and never left. As far as white people are concerned, studies and experience have demonstrated over the decades that whites are more comfortable with, feel less threatened by, light-skinned blacks. Indeed, until the last 15 years or so, one rarely saw a black newscaster who was not light-skinned and they still remain the majority. And not until Sidney Poitier made an inroad in film did darker-skinned blacks have a respectable place in the movies, relegated to playing servants, pimps, whores, and other racial stereotypes. Again, this is still true to a discouraging extent. In every area of American society, light-skinned blacks have had a relatively easier time of it: in employment, education, housing, and integrated social interaction.

What Harry Reid voiced was a political reality. He wasn’t celebrating or condoning it, he was simply recognizing a racial truth: America was more likely to accept a black presidential candidate who didn’t look or sound too black. And he was absolutely right. Jesse Jackson’s presidential ambitions failed for many reasons, but not the least of them is that he comes off (especially sounds) too black. Who was the first black person Americans (white and black) were willing to consider for president: Gen. Colin Powell! Need I say more? There’s no doubt in my mind that if Barack Obama had the hue of a Sidney Poitier and the voice of a Jesse Jackson, we would now have either President Hillary Clinton or President John McCain.

As an extremely light-skinned biracial person myself, I know the truth of this much-hidden and little-understood dimension of racism. When I was in high school during the height of the Black Power movement, I was aggressively put down by the local Black Panthers – who later invited me to join what they called their Fifth Column: blacks who could pass for white (and therefore be useful as spies, infiltrators, etc.). I passed – on their offer.

America still has a lot of work to do in dealing with its racist past and present. And making a political boogeyman out of Harry Reid is not only not part of the solution, it only serves to highlight the problem. Until we learn to make the important distinction between racial and racist, we’ll never be able to get past the imposing racial barriers that make meaningful dialogue impossible, and which ultimately damage us all.

(A version of this article appeared on Blogcritics yesterday.)

The Fragility of Hope

I’ve been very sad this weekend, because of a synchronistic series of events that clarified my growing sense of dismay about Barack Obama’s approach to some major issues, and the promise of a unique, new, young president that is beginning to feel broken.

Friday afternoon, I gave a little editorial counsel to a friend in p.r. who’s working with a conservationist client, which naturally brought the many environmental problems that besiege us to the forefront of my mind. Then Friday night, I watched Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. His guests included two “radical” environmen-talists: Mary Sweeters, organizing manager of the controversial Greenpeace USA and Erich Pica, director of domestic programs at Friends of the Earth, an influential organization with 77 chapters worldwide.

Greenpeace USA recently staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience by scaling Mt. Rushmore and unfurling a massive banner from its famous presidential heads that said "America honors leaders, not politicians. Stop global warming." When asked to explain their purpose for the demonstration, Sweeters said, “Here you have four great presidents who really stepped up when they were faced with some of the biggest challenges that our nation has seen. And we felt like we wanted to send President Obama the same message. That we want him to step up in a similar manner and really lead the country the way that it needs to be led.”

Erich Pica seconded the emotion by explaining that the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill, which recently squeaked through Congress and will soon be further eviscerated in the Senate, is toothless and totally devoid of American global leadership, because it sorely lags behind the rest of the industrial world. He said: “The bill doesn't reduce global warming emissions in the United States fast enough…[and] the emission reduction targets are just inadequate… It strips away the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions…which is a key tool that environmentalists have been using to shut down coal plants. …It gives away a tremendous amount of money. Hundreds of billions of dollars to the polluting industries that have, essentially, caused the problem of global warming. The Duke Energies, Shells, Conocos of the world. Gives a lot of free giveaways in terms of permits…and…this is kind of overwhelming the entire system: it relies on Wall Street to help solve the problem of global warming…by allowing them to manage the trading system that's created underneath this bill.”

I’ve certainly known that there was grumbling in many quarters about the inadequacy of the bill, but I didn’t know any of the specifics until I saw this program, and I didn’t realize the extent to which the president has been actively advocating for [debilitating] compromise. Indeed, in his prelude to the interview, Moyers quoted a recent piece in The Economist that said of Obama, "Rather than shaping public opinion, he is running scared of it. And so, even more, is Congress."

On Saturday, I got a panicky e-mail from Planned Parenthood explaining that the Health Care Reform Bill currently being crafted in Congress is being lobbied against by literally dozens of anti-choice groups who want to see shocking restrictions on women’s health care (not just decreased access to abortion, but a lessening of basic, routine, women’s health care, including contraception) built into the program; in other words, giving more women even less than they’re getting now. I was naturally incensed. At Planned Parenthood's request, I sent letters to my congressman and senators. And I always use my legal Reverend title on such letters and petitions, to give the appearance that this is the sound of the status quo clapping...

Then Saturday night, I saw Anderson Cooper’s pretty-good CNN report on the president’s recent trip to Africa, during which he and his family visited Cape Ghost Castle in Ghana: a fortress, a port, an underground city of indescribable slave dungeons where, over several hundred years, literally millions of Africans were brought and gruesomely imprisoned and tortured before being stacked and stored like cargo on slave ships that took them to the Caribbean and The New World.

This is not part of the president’s personal history, but it is for the First Lady, a direct descendant of slaves and slave owners. The president spoke poignantly about the eerie horror that still lingers like a mist over the place, and what a powerful impact the visit had on him, his wife and their daughters – whom he told to try and imagine what it must have been like for the millions of free humans who were captured, torn away from everything they knew, were treated like beasts and transported like inanimate objects to a life of brutal slavery in a far away land. He also told them to imagine what it was like to be in the slave business or a slave owner, to have complete and ruthless power over the lives of others -- not to sympathize with them, but to better understand the human capacity for inhuman behavior.

Barack Obama is a man who understands pain and injustice and suffering and bondage. He’s a man with affection and respect for the earth. And, I still believe he’s a very smart politician who wants to be an effective and meaningful president, to do good, to do right. I believe he wants this just as much as he wants to make history with a magnificent legacy. You can’t be a shrinking violet and become president. You have to crave power and want to use it.

Which is why I, like a growing number of other Americans, am feeling disappointed, confused, even betrayed. In his effort to transform Washington into a place where law and policy are made in a spirit of unity and cooperation, with everyone having a place at the table where they can sit with dignity and feel they’re being heard, he’s losing sight of something important: he won! He has the power to make the kinds of changes he believes in and that he made us believe in.

But he may blow it, because he’s trying to show that he can play the game better and in a new way. How he achieves what he wants to achieve seems to be as important to him as the goal itself. I think that was a marvelous idea. I don’t think it’s going to work. I think the time has come for him to do the right things by (you should excuse the expression…) any means necessary. Force it down the opposition’s throats. That’s the power of power!

I got addicted to the NBC-TV series The West Wing (pictured above) when it went into syndication on Bravo a few years back. I watched it avidly, repeatedly. It was like comfort food. In the midst of the George W. Bush administration, the idea of an educated, eloquent, caring president surrounded by a staff of bright idealists was enchanting. Interestingly, after Obama was elected, when I watched The West Wing, the dream seemed to pale against the reality.

The series’ President Bartlett was also a liberal who wanted to play the political game smartly – and as a result, as the series progressed, he didn’t accomplish most of what he wanted. In a pivotal episode, “Let Bartlett Be Bartlett,” the president is chastised by his chief of staff for playing it safe, and for being more concerned with winning a second term than getting the job done. By the end of the episode, the president confesses to being weary of a sense of pointlessness and failure, and vows to do what’s needed, even if it means he doesn’t get re-elected (which, by the way, he does, of course).

I say it’s time to Let Obama Be Obama. Be the firebrand, the shaman, the Minister of Hope you were during the campaign. Don’t sell your constituency of believers down the river in an effort to win the support of those who will never be on your side. We need new climate policy. We need new health care policy. But they have to be good, meaty, make-real-change policies. We need to put people ahead of banks and corporations, to put Main Street ahead of Wall Street.

Let Obama Be Obama. Let the revolution begin.

Slave Shrimp – Time To Buy American Again

On Wednesday, just a few days after my Passover post about contemporary slavery (see Let All People Go, April 18th), there was an important story on CNN about the horrors of the foreign shrimp trade – particularly shrimp harvested in and exported by Thailand. I learned that America gets a full 80% of its shrimp (the #2 most popular seafood in the USA after canned tuna) from abroad, and a good deal of that from Thailand – where, good authority has it, young women are routinely forced into indentured servitude to process the shrimp and are subjected to cruelty and violence to prevent them from trying to escape and punish them when they do (one young woman was severely beaten and had her head shaved to “make her an example” to her co-workers).

I had shrimp on my dinner menu for Wednesday and promptly examined my unopened bag of frozen shrimp – and sure enough, it was clearly marked as being from Thailand. I cooked 1/3 of the bag that night and will finish it over the course of two more dinners, because I can’t afford to waste it (and doing so would accomplish nothing) – but there’s no way in hell I’ll buy Thai or other foreign shrimp again.

Indeed, I am beyond weary of looking at the labels on everything I buy or want to buy and seeing the words “Made in China” (that’s the one we see most often, of course). I don’t feel any better when I see that products have come from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and other “third world” nations where labor is cheap and human rights are an inconvenience. American workers have their troubles, to be sure, and as I said in Let All People Go, contemporary slavery is alive and well in America, too. But one has to start taking action somewhere.

I will stop supporting the export of American jobs and the importing of foreign goods whenever and wherever possible. I just bought an indoor, reversible, stove-top grill/griddle and found one made right here in the USA by a company named Lodge – and it was no more expensive than the ones made in China and sold with the name of a celebrity chef plastered all over them. From now on, I will be buying American shrimp (online if necessary) and I’ll be looking for other products, from groceries to clothing, from American producers.

Unfortunately, that’s no easy trick – but I’ve located a few Web sites that I hope will make it easier for me, and I’m pleased to share them with you:

Specifically for seafood, check out Wild American Shrimp, Wood’s Fisheries (based in Florida), Pearl/Louisiana Shrimpers, and Fish Ex Alaska Seafoods. For information about other American-made products, check out Made In USA.com and How Americans Can Buy American.

I also plan on contacting all the retailers I patronize, telling them of my preference for American-made goods and sharing with them whatever information I can gather about American producers. I’ll especially make every effort to support local/regional producers, particularly since here in NYC, we’re surrounded by fish and seafood from Long Island and fruit, vegetables and other food from New Jersey and Upstate New York (sorry, couldn’t find online resources for these). Lastly, I’m sending emails to all the Presidential candidates about this issue. It may not be a revolution, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Let All People Go

The celebration of Passover marks the Old Testament-period of Jewish enslavement in Egypt and the Exodus of the Jews, led to freedom by the prophet Moses. There are those who contend that Moses never existed and that Jews were never slaves, who claim there is no historical evidence to this effect, in the annals of Egyptian history, for example. I’m not going to get into that here, since I don’t know enough about this dispute to discuss it intelligently. Suffice it to say that the story of the Exodus is central to Jewish faith and tradition, and that the story of Jewish enslavement has, for millennia, inspired Jews to fight against the slavery of others and to champion human rights. (Yes, there were some Jews who owned slaves in Civil War-era America, but that’s beside the point; fighting slavery/championing freedom is a core element of Jewish morality.)

What is most important on this eve of Passover is that, according to the United Nations, 27 million people worldwide are entrapped in slavery today. In the U.S. alone, the trafficking of human beings for sexual slavery and indentured servitude as household domestics, garment workers and agricultural laborers involves 14,500 to 17,500 new victims each year and is a $9 billion industry annually. Another 800,000 people annually around the world, 80% of them women and children, are forced into chattel slavery, sexual slavery, debt bondage and forced labor, contributing to another $6 billion industry. Contemporary slavery is most prevalent in Africa, Asia and the U.S., but virtually everywhere on earth, someone is keeping someone else prisoner in a horrible, violent way.

There’s a lot of good information on the `Net about slavery today. iAbolish Slavery, America’s Anti-Slavery Group is a good site, as are NotForSaleCampaign.org and AntiSlavery.org, if you would like to know more or contribute to the struggle.

Tomorrow night – whether we’re gathered with family and friends to celebrate the Jewish Exodus, or just having a quiet, secular evening at home – I encourage all of us to remember that slavery is not history and our beliefs (whatever they may be) don’t count for much if we don’t increase our awareness of the contemporary plight and do our part as modern abolitionists.

Stop Destroying Women

Almost ten years ago, I had the privilege of working with the event production company that coordinated a special international video conference at the United Nations. It was sponsored by UNIFEM, the UN agency devoted to women’s issues around the world. It was the first such conference of its scope and status exclusively about the many forms of violence against women and girls, and the first to be held in the UN’s majestic General Assembly.

Hundreds of women attended in New York and thousands more at participating sites on every continent. Political celebrities and brave survivors spoke, live or via video messages. They talked about honor killings, rape as a tactic of war and terror, sexual slavery, female infanticide, suicide, genital mutilation, and the societal ingredients that facilitate these behaviors: longstanding social/political conflicts, poverty, lack of opportunities for education, and a lack of access to contraceptives, abortion and health care in general.

The conference was a great success, which is to say it generated a lot of attention in the circles of “civil society” (the UN’s core audience of non-profit charities and non-governmental social service organizations). But as far as attention by the mainstream media was concerned, it didn’t even raise a blip on their radar.

So it’s not particularly surprising that women in virtually every country on Earth, but most especially in countries twisted by war and destitution, are increasingly the victims of the most vicious kinds of brutality, the sort that when you hear about it is simultaneously unimaginable and unforgettable. Man’s capacity (and I do mean man) for indescribably sadistic violence against women is demonically ingenious and apparently boundless.

Against this backdrop, I draw your attention to an article by Jeffrey Gettleman that appeared in the 10/8/07 New York Times, “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War.” I beg you to click on this link and read it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/africa/07congo.html

As this article explains, the thousands of female victims range in age from three to 75. Many of the perpetrators are former members of Hutu militia forces who fled Rwanda in the 90s after torturing and murdering 800,000 Tutsis. The rest are home-grown forces known as Mai-Mai, who, armed to the teeth, stalk the countryside. The 17,000 UN Peacekeepers are no match for them.

Gettleman goes on to say that horrified medical personnel, social service providers and humane government representatives are non-plused by the quantity and ferociousness of rape that has been ratcheted up to an unprecedented level – even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide. He quotes a Congolese doctor who works in the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic, South Kivu Province:

“Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear, they are done to destroy women.”

Destroying women has been S.O.P. since the dawn of time. At the dawn of the 21st century, things are much better in some places than in others, but nowhere on Earth are women free from the possibility (or probability) of rape and other violence – from fathers, brothers, sons, boyfriends, husbands, neighbors, strangers and soldiers.

What can we do in the face of such heartbreaking, overwhelming destruction of women? Nicholas D. Kristof, in a 6/25/07 op-ed in the New York Times that he wrote while in Congo, offered some good suggestions:

“There’s no simple solution to the conflict, but we can lean on Rwanda to stop supporting its proxy force in eastern Congo, and also to work harder to repatriate Hutus who have destabilized Congo since they fled here after the genocide in 1994. We can push a peace process. We can support the U.N. peacekeepers. We can help with the reform and training of Congo’s security forces. And a six-hour visit by Condi Rice would help put the crisis on the map.”

I’m writing to Secretary of State Rice asking that she make such a trip and specifically speak out against what many are calling Congo’s “rape industry.” Won’t you please join me?

Unfortunately, emails for the Secretary and other staff members at State are not available to the public (!). However, you can snail-mail or fax as follows:

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice

U.S. State Department

Washington, DC 20520

Fax: 202-261-8577
(no street address necessary)

In addition, I’m sending a copy of my Rice letter to:

Ambassador Jendayi E. Frazer

Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs
U.S. Department of State

2201 “C” Street, NW

Washington, DC 20520

Tel: 202-647-4000 (24-hour service)

I would welcome receiving any further information about this issue and what others are doing to address it.