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“The UU Occupier,” who describes himself as “a Green, an anarcho-pacifist, a secular humanist, and a Scot,” and is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, has begun a blog called “I Am a UU Occupier.” It’s great to have an addition to the UU and economic justice blogospheres. Check him out!
He also has a passion for prison reform, and blogs at Angolathree and is raising money for The Innocence Project here. UU Occupier, how about a leading a study group with me on The New Jim Crow?
Last year I tried three Lenten practices: I refrained from one thing (Facebook), I engaged in one thing (daily drawing), and I gave money to justice work (abolishing human trafficking). I didn’t keep to the drawing practice very well. The other practices, I kept, and they were deepening. I’m going to follow the same structure this year: a negative practice, a positive practice, and the practice of generosity.
This year I have a somewhat different internet-related practice: not to use the internet as entertainment. In his poem “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot prayed, “Teach us to sit still.” It’s something I strive to learn, and the net is amphetamines for my monkey mind. So although I will appear on Facebook, I will endeavor not to fritter. Right now I want to go over there just to see what’s going on. That’s the kind of thing I’m planning to resist from now until Easter.
photo by JamesJen, used by permission (Wikimedia Creative Commons)
The line is fuzzy. Reading the week’s secrets every Saturday night at Postsecret seems like a spiritual practice, even though it sometimes affords all the satisfactions of gossip; reading others’ blog entries is serious but can easily drift into just fooling around; using Facebook to see how a friend is doing or take some political action honors the spirit of the practice, but can easily turn into mere entertainment. I will have to be attentive to what’s calling me to a webpage in order to know when to continue and when to stop.
My positive practice is to walk the labyrinth each day I’m at church. The first couple of days’ practice will be to restore it. It’s made of river stones, which are easily dislodged, and the path has actually been altered in at least one place, as I realized when I walked it the other day and discovered that once you get to the center of the labyrinth you can walk right out. There may be labyrinths with that design, but ours is the Cretan labyrinth and follows the same long path out as one took in. I for one need that contemplation time both going into the center and emerging.
I’m going to continue the support of justice work I began last year by putting much more time into the abolition work I’ve been neglecting. I have no desire, or evening time, to be on organizational boards. What I do best is write, speak, coach volunteers, and teach, so I think this is the time to dig out my notes for a UU abolition curriculum and get a draft done. I’ll also be helping the good folks at Aptos, which has the only anti-slavery action group of any UU congregation that I know of (if there are others, please chime in in the comments!), to have a strong presence at General Assembly (GA), where the Congregational Study Action Issue they proposed is being considered as the next official UU-wide issue and where they have a program on the GA schedule, bringing Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves to tell UUs what the problem is and what we can do about it. I already give to anti-trafficking organizations, but I’ll give a special donation for the season.
Do you have, or have you had, any practices for Lent? What are they?
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 6
Zumbi was a great military and political leader of African descent, known as Zumbi dos Palmares because of his legendary leadership of the quilombo (settlement of free Africans) by that name in colonized Brazil during the 17th century.
Zumbi, by Antônio Parreiras (public domain in the US)
One legacy of the quilombos is the martial art U. S. Americans of descent other than African or Brazilian may know: capoeira. According to the website Aruandê Capoeira,
Created by slaves brought to Brazil from Africa, during the colonial period, Capoeira is a martial art that grew from survival. People were brought from Angola, Congo and Mozambique, and with them, they brought their cultural traditions.
They hid their martial art and traditions into a form of dance. The African people developed capoeira not only to resist oppression, but also for the survival of their culture and the lifting of their spirits. After slavery, they continued to play capoeira.
Brazil’s Black Awareness Day (“Dia da Consciência Negra”) is celebrated on November 20 in Zumbi’s honor; his birthday is unknown but that was the day he died.
Here is Gilberto Gil singing the title song of Quilombo, accompanied by a slide show of this piece of black history.
Celebrating Black History Month with a related post each day of February.
The state office building has a “Jim Crow voting obstacle course” in its atrium for Black History Month. Each station explains one of the obstacles, and the choice it poses. You could skip the obstacle; for example, if you skip the “literacy test,” the good news is you’re spared humiliation. The bad news is you don’t get to vote.
The exhibit has polls set up where you can take the literacy test used in Alabama in 1965. There are 68 questions. It was up to the sheriff which questions to ask, and how many. That way, he could ask some people “What branch of government does the US Supreme Court belong to: executive, legislative, or judiciary?” and others, well, all 68. White voters usually didn’t have to take the test anyway, since a grandfather clause provided that anyone descended from a pre-1867 voter was exempt from new voting restrictions.
I said to the woman standing at the next poll, “This is a great exhibit.”
“Awesome,” she said, with feeling.
I took the test and got 49 right: 72%, a passing grade, I guess, since I’m white. Try it and post how you do!
A radio story interviewed prospective voters in the GOP Iowa caucuses, coming up in a couple of weeks, to answer the breathless question of who would be the Mike Huckabee of 2012–Rick Santorum? Michele Bachmann? Ron Paul? The reporter did not ask why anyone would want to be the Mike Huckabee of 2012.
Huckabee, of course, did not get his party’s nomination in 2008. Nor are Bachmann or Santorum or Paul likely to get it this year, even if one of them wins in Iowa. Caucuses, even more than most primary processes, favor the extremes, and the GOP has seldom gone with its rightmost option. Yet here is the Iowa caucus, threatening to knock out what passes for a centrist in the Republican party in favor of whoever can please right-wing evangelicals the most.
So I went and looked up just how much of a bellwether Iowa has been for the GOP. It’s not impressive, but it’s not bad. Asterisks indicate the winner of the nomination.
- 2008 – Mike Huckabee
- 2004 – George W. Bush*
- 2000 – George W. Bush*
- 1996 – Bob Dole*
- 1992 – George H. W. Bush*
- 1988 – Bob Dole
- 1984 – Ronald Reagan*
- 1980 – George H. W. Bush
- 1976 – Gerald Ford*
Six out of the last nine Iowa winners won the nomination. But it doesn’t look even that good when you take out the candidates who ran unopposed: Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and George W. Bush in 2004. That leaves six years of contested caucuses, with only three predicting the eventual winner.
- 2008 – Mike Huckabee
- 2000 – George W. Bush*
- 1996 – Bob Dole*
- 1988 – Bob Dole
- 1980 – George H. W. Bush
- 1976 – Gerald Ford*
I don’t think any Republican candidate should lose sleep over losing in Iowa. What we all might lose sleep over is why the party gives so much power to the extremists who can’t get their favorites to win on the national stage. In 2008, John McCain rose to prominence as an honorable moderate (a reputation he subsequently threw away by embracing every crazy idea, not to mention every crazy VP candidate, that came along–he’s scrapped the rest of his principles since, in his determination to oppose anything supported by the man who defeated him). This year, who of that description has survived even to the first primary?
I encounter a lot of new music via my drawing class, where the model chooses the music from the studio’s collection of over 1000 CDs. For two days solid, I have been singing to myself the bits I can remember from a folk opera of the Orpheus story, Hadestown, by the songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, with Greg Brown, Justin Vernon, and Ani DiFranco among the other singers (arranged by Michael Chorney). Since we usually change the music after each break, and the model takes a break every 20 minutes, I’ve heard the first half of a lot of albums, including this one. So I don’t know whether the end is as terrific as the beginning, but I will when the copy I’ve ordered arrives.
Hadestown puts me in mind of Neil Gaiman, which is always a compliment, as he’s one of my favorite writers. The connection is oblique: no explicit overlap, but a shared steeped-ness in mythology and Gaiman’s knack for moving fluidly between ancient myths and modern events, concerns, and language. Specifically, it’s reminding me of American Gods, even though the memorable underworld scenes there draw on Egyptian and Norse stories, and actually, of the dozens of gods Gaiman portrays and plays with in that brilliant novel, the Greek pantheon barely makes an appearance. But Greg Brown as Hades sounds like the kind of thing Gaiman would approve.
I am not a big fan of Mitchell’s voice, which can attain a level of cute-little-girlishness that makes Nanci Griffith sound gritty, but the opening lyrics were so arresting that I kept listening hard. That first song, “Wedding Song,” sounds like it must have grown over the centuries, as if Mitchell found it instead of writing it. It’s a dialogue:
Lover, tell me if you can
Who’s gonna buy the wedding bands?
Times being what they are
Hard and getting harder all the time
Lover, when I sing my song
All the rivers sing along
And they’re gonna break their banks for me
To lay their gold around my feet
All a-flashing in the pan, all to fashion for your hand
The river’s gonna give us the wedding bands
Lover, tell me, if you’re able
Who’s gonna lay the wedding table? etc.
Photo by Bob Tubbs, released into the public domain
The other song I can’t get out of my head is “Why We Build the Wall.” Mitchell has remembered that Hades, god of the underworld, is also god of money, and when I hear this song I think of all the walls we “haves” put between us and the “have-nots.” Literally walls–why else do I lock my front door, except to keep people with less property from making off with some of the stuff I’ve accumulated?–and then there’s the fence between the U.S. and Mexico, the wall between Israel and the territories it occupies, the Berlin Wall, the wall once outlining a stockade in New Amsterdam that probably gave its name to Wall Street, Robert Frost’s wall that his narrator keeps mending, though he would prefer to let it collapse. Figuratively, it’s about everything that these and other walls stand for: the way we shut others out and, in the same act, shut ourselves in; or shut others in, and in the same act, shut ourselves out.
This song is also in dialogue form: Hades catechizing a chorus that represents Cerberus. (Or as we Harry Potter fans call him, Fluffy.) (ETA: Now that I have the CD, I see that whatever website I pulled the lyrics from was wrong. There is a character Cerberus, but that’s not who is singing; it’s the chorus.)
HADES
Why do we build the wall?
My children, my children
Why do we build the wall?
CERBERUS
Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
HADES
How does the wall keep us free?
My children, my children
How does the wall keep us free?
CERBERUS
How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
HADES
Who do we call the enemy?
My children, my children
Who do we call the enemy?
CERBERUS
Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
Just as the “War on Poverty” turned into a war against the poor, the enemy seems to be not poverty itself, but poorer people. Hades says we build the wall “Because we have and they have not!,” and when he asks, “What do we have that they should want?,” Cerberus replies with chilling circularity:
We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall . . .
That same circularity is what keeps the poor always with us. Divide ourselves, conquer ourselves, and fight, not want, but those who want what we have got. That suits the powers that be (the powers that have the most) very well.
Mitchell evokes the irony of how, even while we cut ourselves off from each other and the vast possibilities on the other side of the wall, we’re often motivated by a desire “to keep us free.” The driven, chain-gang chanting of Cerberus makes it clear that it isn’t working.
An article of faith:
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do ingloriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
Please note that John Milton, who wrote these words in his Areopagitica, was not on any side of the debate about Israel, Palestine, and the occupied territories, because he died in 1674. I say this because I’m about to step out on the thin ice of that conflict and I don’t want old JM to be accused of taking sides.
Here’s my Miltonian suggestion to anyone who thinks a presentation on the Middle East (or anything else) is one-sided: put on a presentation giving your point of view. Let truth grapple with falsehood. Have some faith that it will prevail.
Recently I’ve heard of two cases of people seeking to shut down an artistic event that expressed views of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that they found disturbing. One was unsuccessful: the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, in Topanga, California, whose bottom-bruising benches I have had the privilege to sit on, came in for a lot of heat for showing a play that puts a spotlight on Israel behaving badly, but the production went forward.
Theatricum Opens a Controversy — and a New Space — With Rachel Corrie
The blame for Israel’s PR problem with the death of Rachel Corrie lies primarily with Israel’s killing of Rachel Corrie, but of course the play is political–it’s absurd to say it’s just “a portrait of a young woman,” as director Susan Angelo tries to spin it. However, it is just as absurd to accuse it of being a “decontextualized and one-sided portrayal,” as the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles protests. It’s a play about a controversial issue. Should Arthur Miller have shown McCarthy’s POV (or Judge Hathorne’s) as part of The Crucible? Should anyone stage Richard III without giving equal weight to the opinion that Richard was an innocent man demonized by Tudor propagandists? My church is about to host an exhibit of art about how awful the war in Afghanistan is; should we give equal space and time to art supporting the war? Should the Jewish Federation itself have made sure the Palestinian point of view was fully represented in the play it helped fund about an Israeli soldier, New Eyes?
The second case is more upsetting because those arguing “you must show both sides or none at all” have successfully shut down the event, and because the people they’re shutting down are children living in unthinkable conditions.
Oakland Museum Shuts Down Palestinian Children’s Art Exhibit
The exhibit was to show the art of children living in Gaza. Not surprisingly, it portrays destruction being wrought on their home by Israel and its allies, because that’s what these children live with. A group calling itself “Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers” complains, “This exhibit is without context and balance.” Well, if you want to provide a fuller context and more balance, stage another show. Solicit the art of Israeli children, if you want to show how this conflict affects them. I would like to know.
But don’t suppress what you see as falsehood because you think the truth can’t stand up for itself. If you think the truth isn’t being told completely enough, then don’t subtract from the account; add to it.
I’m sorry, this is not a balanced blog entry. It would be nice to show one case of pressure from the people who want to suppress criticism of Israel, and another from those who want to suppress criticism of the Palestinian Authority. Both my examples are of the former because this is the way all of the cases I’ve heard about have leaned. For that matter, I almost never hear this argument–“You have to present both sides”–in the context of any other political debate. But I hear it a lot when it comes to the issue of Israel and Palestine.
Of course both (or rather, all) sides should be out there to be heard, and they are out there to be heard. That’s why I’d like to hear what the children of Gaza have to say, rather than their voices, their experiences, being drowned out by people who have more power and money, which, as Bob Dylan reminds us, doesn’t talk, it screams. (I may still get the chance; the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which had been partnering with the Museum of Children’s Art, is looking for another Bay Area venue.)
I don’t quite have Milton’s faith that the truth will never be “put to the worse,” but I do agree that “licensing and prohibiting” opinions does more harm than good. The founders of our country, who knew their Milton (and also their John Peter Zenger), thought the same, which is why they considered freedom of speech and the press essential to self-government. We might reach the wrong conclusion (we often do), but the only antidote is more information, more opinions, more assertions of the truth as each person sees it. We each need to filter out the truth from competing claims. The goal is to choose the view upheld by reason and conscience, not by whoever shouts the loudest.
Last Sunday’s sermon. It will shortly be up at the UU Church of Palo Alto, along with a list of resources for further action and inspiration.
Sermons in Stones 
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