You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘uncategorized’ category.
photo by Edsel Little
I popped into a dim sum place today, all by myself. It was past my lunchtime, I had done the grocery shopping that I needed to do, and I had an hour at most before I had to pick Munchkin up at a birthday party. And I was jonesing for dumplings, as I frequently do, and was in the neighborhood of a very good dim sum palace I’ve been to before. Service is fast–as soon as a cart comes by with something you want, you’re eating. It would be the perfect quick lunch.
Except that it wasn’t, because on my own I can only eat about six dumplings, and that means only two dishes. That somewhat defeats the purpose of small-plate eating, of which dim sum is the cuisine par excellence: to have lots of little dishes and taste a bit of each one. Some foods are just meant to be shared with many friends. Which, now that I think about it, is one of the charms of dim sum.
Edna St. Vincent Millay is speaking for me right now.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains–but the best is lost.The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,–
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Black History Month, day 17
I gave blood today (thank you, Stanford Blood Center!), which always puts me in a good mood and gives me reason to reflect on Charles Drew, the surgeon who developed blood-preservation processes such as the separation of plasma that made blood banks possible.
Charles Drew (Drew is sitting on the table on the right). Collection of the National Library of Medicine.
His research came just in time to save thousands of lives in World War II–the “Blood for Britain” program sent US blood donations to English soldiers and civilians, and would not have been possible a few years earlier. However, when the US entered the war, the US military requested that the American Red Cross only accept blood from whites, and they complied. When humanitarian groups protested, the policy was changed so that all blood was accepted, but it was segregated so that white people would receive only white people’s blood, black people only black people’s, a ludicrous and dangerous form of discrimination that Drew publicly protested.
Drew died at age 45 in a car accident. The legend that he bled to death for lack of medical treatment–specifically, being refused blood–at a whites-only hospital is just that, an urban legend that sounded probable enough but, according to reliable witnesses, was not true. It got its legs not only because the painful irony makes a compelling story, but because of its plausibility: African-Americans were routinely turned away from hospitals, with many deaths as a result. Spencie Love, author of One Blood, pairs the story of Charles Drew with that of Maltheus Reeves Avery, another man who died of car-accident injuries in the same county, in the same year, because the hospital to which he was taken–a different one–had no remaining “black beds.”
African-Americans’ warranted mistrust of doctors and blood banks still keeps many African-American potential donors from giving blood, piling tragedy upon tragedy.
A bright spot in the story, however, is that hundreds of millions of people have received donated blood since the development of the blood bank. It is a safe bet that if you’re reading this, someone you love is alive today because of Drew’s research.
Black History Month, day 15
Michelle Alexander’s recent book, The New Jim Crow, picks up the tale told by Slavery By Another Name. As she writes in her eloquent opening paragraph:
Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
She goes on to write, “An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history.” Today’s disenfranchisement of African American men has come about through a system that is formally color-blind: the criminal justice system.
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind [with Jim Crow]. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.
And the new criminals–almost ten times as many as there were before the “war on drugs” was declared–are disproportionately black. Here are some things I thought before I heard Alexander speak last November, and what I now believe to be the truth.
What I thought before: black people use and sell drugs at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Sure, there’s racism in the criminal justice system, but one reason the prison population is disproportionately black is that African-Americans commit a large percentage of crime.
What I think now: black and white people use and sell drugs at about the same rate. The National Institute of Drug Abuse reports of its studies of secondary-school students: “Contrary to popular assumption, at
all three grade levels African-American students have substantially lower rates of use of most licit and illicit drugs than do Whites. These include any illicit drug use, most of the specific illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.” (Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use: Overview of Key Findings, 2006) “Contrary to popular assumption” has to be the biggest understatement of the year. Why was this report not the top story of every newspaper in the country?
What I thought before: the “war on drugs” was declared because drug use was on the rise. It’s misconceived, but we had to do something about all that crack.
What I think now: drug-related crimes were falling when Reagan declared the war on drugs in 1982. The word “crack” was barely known–it certainly was not a media buzzword, or an epidemic of black neighborhoods.
What I thought before: the penal population has gone up somewhat over my lifetime.
What I think now: In the past thirty years, the population in the penal system has not risen gradually or modestly, but rocketed from 300,000 to over 2,000,000.
What I thought before: the United States’s high rate of imprisonment is due at least in part to its having a higher crime rate than other countries.
What I think now: “Between 1960 and 1990 . . . official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period” (7). We don’t have a higher crime rate–we just deal with crime via much higher rates of incarceration.
What I thought before: Racism is present in the criminal justice system, the way it is present everywhere. It’s a problem that concerns me, but calling it the equivalent of Jim Crow is nothing more than a rhetorical flourish.
What I think now: The criminal justice system has been pressed into the service of an agenda that has changed form over the years but has not diminished: the social control of racial minorities, especially African-Americans. The means was once Jim Crow; now it is mass incarceration, which is truly, not just rhetorically, the new Jim Crow.
I’m devouring this book, even though every bite burns going down. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you get a chance to see Michelle Alexander in person, don’t miss it; her presentation was riveting.
Black History Month, day 14
I knew that terrible conditions continued to oppress black Americans after Emancipation, of course. I knew that lynchings and the unequal application of the law kept a boot on their necks. I knew, for that matter, that slavery is still going strong around the world. But I didn’t know half the stuff documented in Slavery By Another Name, aired yesterday and available for viewing here now.
If you want to place someone beneath the notice of the public, declare them a criminal–it will give you lots of leeway for abusing them without anyone being willing to intervene. If they haven’t done anything illegal, make new laws that criminalize things they are already doing. The former slaveholding states would tolerate neither the equality of black people with white nor the loss of all that free labor. And so the law against vagrancy–the inability to prove that one has a job–was “dredged up from legal obscurity” and used to sweep black men into prison. (Once again, in our own wave of high unemployment, we have political leaders proposing penalties for being poor: Judson Phillips, president of the Tea Party Nation, recently spoke approvingly of the 18th century law against voting if one did not own real estate. Last November would have been my first election! And actual prison sentences for debt are on the rise, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal, and despite federal debtors’ prisons’ having been abolished 180 years ago.) Defendants were required to pay for the expenses the state incurred in convicting them. If they couldn’t pay the fees to ” the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses,” they were in debt and had to work it off–again, laws created in order to manufacture criminals, i.e., slave laborers. Furthermore, contract laws were in place to penalize anyone attempting to leave a job before an advance had been worked off”–another form of thinly-veiled enslavement, practiced frequently today in countries such as India and the United States.
I wrote 1865-1945 because the author of the book Slavery By Another Name, Douglas A. Blackmon–another journalist with the Wall Street Journal–focuses on the scope of 80 years. It seems to me that this practice is far from over, but that’s for an upcoming post.
For today, please be aware that there are more slaves in the world today than there were in the entire 400 years of the African slave trade. Chocolate and flowers are industries with a lot of slave labor. If you want to give a Valentine to children in West Africa and women in South America, buy the chocolate or flowers that profit their ethical bosses, not the exploiters. Look for the fair trade symbol. One World Flowers is a good option for roses, and your local natural foods store probably carries non-slave-produced chocolate brands, such as Divine, Tcho, Theo, and Equal Exchange. (Whole Paycheck is not my favorite food store, but they are a good source for fair trade chocolate.)
Black History Month, day 9
Dan Harper, our Associate Minister of Religious Education, and I offered a class at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto called Current Issues in Liberal Religion. On January 24, 2012, our topic was “Race and Liberal Religion,” and I gave this presentation.
Black History Month, day 7
Project Implicit is a Harvard-based project studying the differences between the attitudes we think we hold and those we really do hold. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by the researchers, claims to “[demonstrate] the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods.” If you’re interested in the workings of your own mind, it’s fascinating.
I believe some of the barriers to racial equality are subtle racism, fear, guilt, and shame, all of which keep us from candid conversation. Certainly many of the white liberal and progressive people I know are afraid to talk about race, because they fear that they will be perceived to be, or discovered to be, racist. Knowing ourselves more fully can help us move through these barriers and toward a more honest conversation with others.
One question that interests the research team is whether people’s stated views on race match up with their unconscious attitudes, revealed through the IAT. To find out something about whether you prefer white or black people, or to take another test–others include one’s views on age, weapons, and various ethnicities–click here. And congratulations on taking the Delphic advice to know thyself.
Black History Month, day 5
A letter from a man named Jourdon Anderson, emancipated from slavery, to his former master, in 1865, has gone viral over the past few days. If you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy it, and if you have, enjoy it again:
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
Naturally, the question immediately arose whether this letter was genuine, as well it should considering the frauds that circulate the ‘net. As established by links from the wonderful website Letters of Note, there was definitely a person named Jourdon Anderson in the stated time and place, and the letter was printed in the newspaper at the time, with a preface explaining that it Mr. Anderson dictated it, as illiterate people do when they want to correspond with someone far away. (In Mexico City there is a plaza known for its many typists set up at small tables, to whom people bring their letters to be read, and to whom they dictate the responses, for a fee. Its use has declined in recent years, though I don’t know whether that’s because more people can read and write, the service has shifted to internet cafes, or almost everyone has access to a phone.) That doesn’t resolve the question of whether the letter was actually composed, or the language made more sophisticated, by the person who wrote it down, as some commenters have pointed out.
And so we move effortlessly from racism to classism: the assumption that someone illiterate and uneducated could not use language that is so clever and ironic. What percentage of the world’s population over history has never learned to read and write, both within literate societies and within oral ones? Is it so unimaginable that many of them have used the spoken word with style and subtlety, despite (or even because of) not using written language? I find it unimaginable that they would not, not just because of obvious examples such as (the disputed) Homer, but because developing the necessary into an art is what people do. Look at the gorgeous baskets and pottery people made thousands of years ago, not content to create something functional but making them works of the highest skill and art. Mr. Anderson was an artist with language, and I’m glad his letter has survived for us to read.
Black History Month, day 3
Another obstacle in the “Jim Crow obstacle course” was driving to the polls. The exhibit said that rumors would circulate on election day that black drivers would all be stopped; they were plausible enough, since harassment by the police and vigilantes was common. It also featured this chilling photo, from Life, showing a Clinton, Tennessee mob harassing black drivers. I believe the photo dates from when twelve black students in Clinton integrated the high school. I always wonder who the people in these pictures are and if they are proud, or ashamed, to show them to their grandchildren now. What must it be like to have one of your cruellest moments recorded in Life Magazine?
I also learned about the Green Book, the guide to where to find gas, lodging, food, and restrooms if you were traveling through places restricted by race–which included plenty of northern sundown towns, not just the Jim Crow South. Of course one would need something like this, but I never thought about all the things people did to accommodate a humiliating and potentially dangerous situation. Mark Knopfler wrote this song about a traveling band of gospel singers–clearly, the issue spoke to him decades later, as it does to me.
The lines “We’re a long way from home, just let’s pay the man and go” are such a concise expression of the weariness of living under daily discrimination.
You know the feeling you get when you go to another room for a distinct purpose and the moment you walk in, you forget what it was? I now get that with websites. “I know I opened this particular window for a reason . . . now what was I doing here?”
Recent comments