To be clear, Rosa Parks left us a deliberate legacy of activism, not an accidental activist moment. Furthermore, she, like many other Black women, should not be remembered in the shadows of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or any other Black male civil rights activist, but rather right alongside of them. We must realize and teach that when Rosa Parks was helping lay the foundation for the civil rights movement, Dr. King was still in high school.

- From “Black Herstory: Rosa Parks Did Much More than Sit on a Bus,” in Ms. Magazine

By Arturo R. García

He was both the host and the ambassador for generations of artists, dancers, and music lovers. He was a journalist and an activist. And he was the conductor of “the hippest trip in America.”

Wednesday, everyone who ever listened to him wish viewers “love, peace, and soul” mourned the death of Don Cornelius, who was found in his home by police after apparently committing suicide.

Cornelius developed and hosted Soul Train, the kind of show that makes words like “influential” seem small. Soul Train ran for 35 years, making it the longest first-run syndicated show in history. But the show almost didn’t grow out of being a successful local program on WCIU-TV in Chicago.

As Christopher P. Lehman wrote in his book A Critical History of Soul Train On Television, however, Cornelius set out to show broadcasters the best the show had to offer:

When Cornelius decided to take “Soul Train” into nationwide syndication in 1971, he made a very savvy choice of which Chicago episode to pitch to broadcasters. he took to California the episode that featured the Dells, the Staple Singers, Tyrone Davis, and the Chi-Lites. At the time all four acts were very popular on urban radio. Moreover, three of them had crossover hits in the 1970-71 season. The Chi-Lites’ “(For Gods Sake) Give More Power To The People” was among the top thirty songs for at least one week. The Staples Singers scored with “Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha Na Boom Boom).” Davis had the biggest hit with “Turn Back The Hands Of Time.” Cornelius contacted all the group leaders to inform them of his decision to use their appearances in order to try to sell the show on the West Coast.

Cornelius’ canniness paid off: production on the national version of Soul Train, based out of Los Angeles, began that summer. However, for the next two years, he continued to host the local version of the show alongside the national one. But as the syndicated version of the show grew, so did its importance–not just to an audience that Cornelius correctly predicted was looking for what he called “a black American Bandstand,” but for the performers; as Lehman noted, in the days before Black Entertainment Television, black acts had to choose between playing to the all-white audiences on Bandstand or rely strictly on radio exposure.

The show’s platform went beyond the artistic: early acts brought with them feminist and anti-Vietnam War messages that wouldn’t have flown on other shows. And as The Roots’ Questlove wrote on OkPlayer, the presentation that Cornelius introduced to American television made him, “The MOST crucial non political figure to emerge from the Civil Rights era post [19]68″:

To say with a straight, dignified face that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL was the RISKIEST radical life-changing move that America has seen. And amazingly enough for one hour for one Saturday out the week, if you were watching soul train….it became contagious. Next thing you know you are actually believing you have some sort of worth.

The whole idea of Afrocentrism in my opinion manifested and spread with “Soul Train” in its first 6 years.

Besides the performers, fans also found a new platform on Soul Train: young people of color got the chance–the first chance, for many–to see their peers on-screen, showcasing their own moves. As Lehman writes, the show’s exposure also yielded benefits for the Chicago-area dancers on the WCIU version of the show, where Clinton Ghent took over as host after Cornelius moved west. For one dancer, Crescendo Ward, his turn in the spotlight literally saved his life:

He once had to take home a girlfriend who lived in the Cabrini Green projects, which the Vice Lords gang claimed as their territory. After he had parted from her, some of the gang members approached him and demanded, “Represent!”

He responded, “No love,” which meant that he did not belong to a gang.

They proceeded to pat him down and take his money until one of them yelled, “Yo, wait a minute – that’s that “Soul Train” motherf-cker!” As the others recognized him, they stopped the mugging and began taking a collection for his bus fare home.

By contrast, interactions between fans and performers on the L.A. version of the show were tamer, but in at least one instance, more pivotal: an oft-told story mentions that, after one appearance on the show, Michael Jackson–by that point already a longtime friend of Cornelius’–spent time with several of the show’s better dancers, so that he could learn some of their moves.

In his book, Lehman points out that Train outlasted many of the shows it influenced, like Club MTV, Yo! MTV Raps, BET’s Video Soul and Fox’s In Living Color. But the changing musical landscape wrought by his successors led him to step down from his signature role in 1993. The show carried on with rotating guest hosts thru 2006, with MadVision Entertainment buying the property two years later.

“I took myself off because I just felt that 22 years was enough,” he told The New York Times two years after switching to an off-camera role. “The audience was changing and I wasn’t.”

The audience might have changed, but it never forgot him: last July, the show’s set and memorabilia was enshrined in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Courtesy of Illume Magazine

By Guest Contributor Sara Yasin

The Arab Spring shattered everything that I thought I knew about the Arab world. As unrest broke out in the region, and regimes fell, I realised how little I knew. As a Palestinian-American, it has been routine to reference my heritage, from explaining why I do not look like Princess Jasmine, or distancing myself from suicide bombers. The politics of the land of my parents always frustrated me, and I suppose what I understood was mostly gleaned from exhausted conversations overheard in our home or headlines.

To my shock, even though I proved to know very little about what caused the Arab Spring, many seemed to automatically think that the first half of my hyphenated identity automatically made me an authority on the region. While I feel tied to and interested in the struggle for change across the Middle East and North Africa, this is not my Arab Spring.

I last visited my family in Amman around 1995, as a pint-sized feminist homesick for cereal and episodes of Boy Meets World. While I seemed to be fluent in some Southern variation on Arabic, my cousins lived in an entirely different world than I did. The most noticeable difference involved religion; my own culture seemed to incorporate more Muslim values, and I remember my cousins being shocked at my declaration that I would soon wear hijab. Visiting my relatives made me realize I would forever be caught between two worlds.

Despite being identified through my Arab identity in the United States, I was “the American” abroad. Growing up in my hybrid Muslim and Arab American communities, my peers and I routinely referred to new immigrants as “boaters,” swearing that we would never marry a “FOB” (fresh-off-the-boat), in fear of a wife-beating stereotype who could not speak English. Since I never felt that I could entirely belong to the Palestinian or American communities, I launched myself into the world of the mosque, and – particularly after 9/11 – I spent much of my time harping on the fact that Muslims were diverse in faith and views, and blamed a lack of progress on culture, rather than religion.

I eventually learned that the lines between religion and culture could not be as easily separated as I would have hoped. The Arab Spring, as well as meeting friends that actually grew up in the Middle East made me realize I was projecting my own experiences onto an entire region. It did not occur to me that the world that my parents spoke about, and perhaps many of the cultural norms they adopted were part of a world that they left long ago – one that grew and changed after they left. Their views of culture are stuck in nostalgia, embalming their history and identity in a foreign world.

Courtesy of Associated Press

My parents, and many of their friends, had resigned themselves to the fact that the Arab world was rife with corruption and inconsistencies, and that mentality was passed along to us. I did not think that would change, and I suppose I thought that the Arabs without hyphens resigned to the same inevitability. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, I remember calling my stunned father, who said that he never thought he would see such a thing during his lifetime. While attempting to express his trademark amount of pessimism, I swore that in that moment, I heard hope in his voice. That was when I realized how out of touch he and I really were.

Though previously disengaged with the politics of the region, I feel passionate about expanding my understanding. However, I think it is important to make a distinction between my own culture, and that of those in the Arab world. As the children of immigrants, our lives are complicated by a number of cultural notions, rules and norms that can be tied to the lands of our parents, but they grow and change on an entirely different plane. Therefore, my lived reality is far different than that of a cousin living in the West Bank, despite our shared heritage. It is dangerous to fall into the trap of thinking that my shared heritage would automatically make me understand the situation better, or have the authority to speak on it.

I think it is also important to make this distinction, because I feel that many changes need to occur in the respective Arab and Muslim communities that I grew up in. I am proud of the victories of the Arab Spring, but I do not take ownership of them; not only because they are not my lived reality, but also because we need our own shake ups and changes in many Arab-American communities. We cannot claim those victories as our own – if anything, they just show how much work we have left to do.

While I still have an opinion, take an activist interest in the Arab Spring and continue to learn more, this still is not my reality. My childhood involved a world of hummus, fried chicken, Islamic studies, Southern Baptist churches and a world away from war and dictators. While being identified as an Arab in the United States is a large part of who I am, treating me like a voice of Arabs across the globe encourages a static notion of culture, a detrimental thing to reinforce when thinking about issues of history and identity. Treating me like I am not American, only serves the right-wing, closet-Jihadi fantasies of the Anne Coulters and Newt Gingrichs of the world, and only serves to hasten our Arab-American Spring.

By Arturo R. García

The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival contacted us with the heads-up: the submission period has opened for this year’s event, scheduled to run June 16-17 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

There is no submission fee for entries sent before Feb. 15, but entries submitted between Feb. 16 and March 15 must be accompanied by a $50 fee. We’ve got information on each category, and links to the required submissions forms, under the cut.

Film Submissions

• Subject matter may include but is not limited to: interracial/cultural relationships, transracial/cultural adoption and the exploration of multiracial/cultural identity.
• Please note that there may be a Q&A session at each screening of the Festival on June 16 or 17, though participation is not mandatory.
• Participants are responsible for their own transportation and lodging. The festival is unable to provide an honorarium. (This applies to all categories.)

Performance Submissions

• Open to comics, actors, musicians, and spoken word artists with self-contained, portable acts suitable to a black box theatre.
• Submissions must be complete and run under five minutes. (Performers must be off-book.)
• Performers must be available for both a mandatory rehearsal on June 15 and a performance during the festival.
• No props or furniture will be provided.

Literary Submissions

• Besides filling out the submissions form above, applicants must send a 10-15 page writing sample and a high res jpeg photo of themselves as attachments to mxrootsfest@gmail.com with “Literary” and the applicant’s name in the subject line.
• Participants must be available to read from their works during the festival.

Workshop Submissions

These submissions may address only one of the following:

1. Creation of literary content
2. Creation of film content
3. Providing a historical context for inclusion in film/literary content.

• All presenters’ attendance must be confirmed by applicants at the time of submission.
• Presenters are expected to arrive at the Festival site no later than 45 minutes prior to the scheduled workshop time.

Created by Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey (and boosted by the star power of Juliette Lewis), “Shit Girls Say” went viral by taking a male perspective on common things “women” do and presenting it as humor. Internet forums filled with comments like “Omigod, all my friends do that” or “that is so me.” The sketch proved to be so popular, there are now three episodes, probably with more in the pipeline.

However, everyone wasn’t laughing at “Shit Girls Say.” Quite a few people noticed that the “girls” referred to in the top video were a certain type of woman, an experience that was not shared by all. Others noted that the humor that made the video funny was actually rooted in sexist stereotypes. Over at Feministing, Samhita explains:

While, I usually applaud men in drag, I can’t help but be critical of these characterizations of women. Are some of these stereotypes uncannily true? I’m sure they can be. But that’s the problem with stereotypes, it’s not about whether they are true or not, it’s that they are used to disempower people or deny them certain privileges. And I get that it is comedy, but it’s like the most boring and lazy comedy possible. You know, let’s make fun of girls cuz we already know everyone thinks they are dumb and annoying tee hee. These videos might as well be beer ads.

And Lynn Crosbie, writing for the Globe and Mail, notes:

Girls, or young women, who already speak largely in the interrogative and treat the world of men as another, completely inscrutable species, have enough on their minds already. They are already sexualized to the maximum. Must their every word be a potential joke?

Girls speak casually about inane things. Girls speak, too, about sexual violence and quantum physics. They talk about fear and art, children, murder and opera; philosophy, blood, sex and mathematics.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is also some stuff a girl said.

In an interview with the Onion A/V Club, the two creators explain their reasoning:

AVC: Formally, the videos are great because they work like the Twitter feed—they’re just little one-liners stitched together. The obvious precedent would be something like Shit My Dad Says, and the TV show, which spins these sayings into 22-minute episodes. Were you trying to keep things a bit more rapid-fire, in the spirit of the Twitter feed?

GS: I think we were aware of Shit My Dad Says, and we wanted something that would live in the same Internet world as the Twitter feed. In a way, with Shit My Dad Says, it makes sense to do something longer and more anecdotal, because that was Justin [Halpern]’s story: his life with his dad. It was biographical, and there was a lot more material. But [our] tweets aren’t necessarily a single character. They’re not one woman. They’re a specific kind of woman. We don’t in any way purport to represent all women, and I think people understand that. I think our next video goes a little further than the tweets. It’s not a narrative, necessarily, but it’s a little more abstract.

AVC: Some of the criticism your project has received seems to miss this “certain kind of woman” concept that you mention. Something that refers to “girls” as an idea is essentializing, but it doesn’t seem like the concept would work if it were called Shit A Certain Kind Of Woman Who Has Been Socialized To Behave A Certain Way Says. How are you responding to criticism suggesting that the project is sexist or misogynist?

GS: You can’t really respond to it, other than positively. We respect women; we love women; we grew up around women; the people who helped us on the project were women. Obviously we can’t critique anyone for critiquing us in this way. Everyone has the right to critique it. It’s a really interesting dialogue that has come up because of the people criticizing it. It’s tricky territory. It’s sensitive territory. But people have the right to be offended. It’s par for the course, especially if something goes this big, which we never thought it would.

But I’m gay, and Kyle’s gay, and people put things out there about gay people. There are television shows about gay people, and I think we try to not let that define us. We know they don’t necessarily speak for us. I think it’s a really interesting topic. We’ve been learning a lot.

So while there was critique, there was also quite a bit of creation. The next sensation to hit YouTube was a racialized version of the first, “Shit Black Girls Say” clocking in at close to 5 million views.

Comedian Billy Sorrells portrays a character named Peaches, which also proved to be a sensation, though for more puzzling reasons. Naima Ramos-Chapman flinched at some of the humor, noting:

When the meme got a racialized twist with Billy Sorrell’s “Shit Black Girls Say” version, I choked mid-chuckle. Both videos refer to adult women as “girls,” and portray them as weak, stupid, silly, bad with technology, and helpless. And in Sorrell’s version, a part about black women being stuck in abusive relationships is too disturbing given that they are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than white women.

Then came “Shit Asian Girls Say,” which surprisingly saw very little in terms of critique:

Some of these videos sparked heavy internal debates, like “Shit Spanish Girls Say:”

The comments on the YouTube video ranged from “This video = all my Spanish friends” and “I am puertorrican and I found this video extremely hilarious and right on! :0 OH MAA GAAD MAAAAAAAA! I do it all the time!” to “BTW all this shit is Nuyorican and Dominican shit. Don’t disgrace my island.” Many commenters tried to distance themselves from the video:

@mymailbox4404 Yeah, I agree. It’s super embarrassing for Latinos. Caribbeans in particular. Now with that title, they get to attach some ghetto to my people too, lol. No biggie though. Most people on here know these are not Spanish people. But even to classy Puerto Ricans, this must be embarrassing. Did you see all the comments saying “This is sooo my family” or “I talk and act just like that”, like they are proud of this trashy lifestyle. It’s embarrassing.

IslenoGutierrez

And some good old ethnicity and nationality based prejudice:

@mymailbox4404 You are right. It’s taking the title of my people (Spaniards) and attaching ghetto trash to it for the world to see on youtube. All I can say is wow. que vamos hacer? Lol.

But while there are some interesting interpretations of racial stereotypes (white girls eat chips, black girls eat Cheetos, Asian girls eat Pocky, and I couldn’t quite make out what was on the bag in the Spanish video) and some annoyingly persistent gender stereotypes (CAN NO ONE USE A COMPUTER WITHOUT ASSISTANCE?!?! Oh wait, Spanish girls can.) I’m a bit more interested in the aftermath when people started using the meme for social commentary. While there were definitely people using the meme to advance their racist opinions of certain groups of people say, without the wink-nudge insider cred that the above videos rely on to be funny, the meme started mutating, turning the stereotypes in on themselves.

First, the original videos sparked some rebuttals, from women parodying men. Reminiscent of battle (of the sexes) rap popular in the 1990s, the videos featured women performing in drag giving commentary on the men in they know (accompanied by the inevitable “women just aren’t funny” comments).

There’s “Shit Guys Say” – which I have to admit feels like a quicker version of Jersey Shore:

And then there’s “Shit Black Guys Say:”

(Notice the commentary on how often men comment on women’s bodies in both of the videos.)

There are also challenges to the ideas of a unified experience for any group. Look at all the variations on “Shit Gay Guys Say”.

There’s this one:

There’s “Shit Black Gays Say:”

And a part 2:

And “Shit Southern Gay Guys Say:”

It’s notable that these videos are the principals representing themselves (as opposed to someone else’s interpretation of them) – perhaps since these groups are still so invisible in the public eye that no one else but them could speak to their experience.

With a slight tweak, the meme becomes social critique. Just by adding “to” and a second group, the meme found new life.

There’s the hit “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls, ” which we’ve pointed out before:

and the follow up:

There’s also “Shit White Girls Say to Arab Girls:”

“Shit White Girls Say to Asian Girls:”

“Shit White Girls Say to Brown Girls:”

And “Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls:”

As our own Thea Lim recently explained in The Guardian:

[T]hings took a turn when Franchesca Ramsey released Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls, which quickly inspired Nicola Foti’s Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys, and Sameer Asad Gardezi and Kosha Patel then unleashed Shit White Girls Say … to Brown Girls”. Each video showcases a bewigged Ramsey, Foti and Patel reeling off a list of the most awful things your best white girlfriend has ever said. These videos skewer that verbal equivalent of friendly fire: friendly prejudice, if you will.

What’s friendly prejudice? The most common defence of racism is: “But I didn’t intend to be racist.” This response relies on the idea that if we didn’t intend to offend someone, then their feelings can’t possibly be hurt. The Shit X Says to Y videos are delightfully validating because they show that those with the genuinely lovely intentions of being your friend and seeking commonality with you can still be rude and hurtful.

Unsurprisingly, the Shit X Says to Y meme has itself been called offensive. As a commenter on the NPR blog says, “if the roles were reversed … Jesse [Jackson] & [Al] Sharpton, would be involved, lawsuits filed, perhaps riots …” But the roles can’t be reversed. The reason why relationships between white and non-white people, or straight people and gay people are fraught, is because of our history – long gone, recent or ongoing. Racist, homophobic or simply thoughtless comments are insulting not just in and of themselves, but because they are a bilious reminder of the times when straight, white people have dehumanised and denied other groups their human rights. Of course, non-white and gay people can say nasty or even prejudicial things to white and straight people, but those things don’t deliver the sting that comes from decades of being on the wrong end of an unequal relationship (and could I recommend further viewing on this topic: comedian Kumail Nanjiani’s “Racists”).

What bothers some viewers about the Shit X Says to Y meme is that it targets only white women. Critics have said of Foti in particular that it is always sexist when men use women as the brunt of any joke. But privilege does not work in debits and credits, whereby your lack of cultural power as a gay person is paid back by your stores of cultural power as a man. A white woman can be racist to an Asian man, just as a straight black woman can be homophobic to a gay white man. These videos are important because they ask all viewers – regardless of what power they have and what power they lack – to reconsider if their best friendship with non-white and gay people grants them licence to cross the line.

Due to the popularity of the meme, people are reconsidering the impact of their words to their friends, which is the point of this next batch of takes. Exploring the dynamics of relationships between friends can be painful, but what these users created basically amount to humorous public service announcements.

“Stuff Cis People Say to Trans People:”

“Shit Girls Say to Gay Guys:”

And, finally, the ultimate activist mutation of the meme, Shit Everybody Says to Rape Victims:

Outside of “Shit Black Girls Say to White Girls,” none of the other videos got anywhere near the amount of play that “Shit Girls Say” and “Shit Black Girls Say enjoyed.” Maybe that’s because, as a culture, we are accustomed to laughing at stereotypes, but we aren’t prepared to unpack how we perpetuate them.

In September, I wrote a piece describing my perspective as a disabled woman of color and psychiatric survivor. I explored how race-specific self-killings are differentially represented by the media to demonstrate how public perceptions of suicide depend on social and political contexts. My intention was to de-sensationalize model minority suicide in order to draw attention to how particular non-white bodies are often presumed to be volatile and violent.

This month, I look more closely at clinical explanations of ethnic minority suicide and respond by citing current non-clinical and community-based anti-racist reflections on the significance of emotional pain and anger.

Before I proceed, I would like to draw attention to how the term suicide is invoked by the viewer rather than the subject of suicide: the neighbor who calls 911 rather than the person exhibiting suspicious behavior. This can have negative repercussions on the “allegedly suicidal” that we don’t often think about. In fact, daily we are surrounded by public campaigns that encourage us to report at-risk behavior with the intention of saving lives: we believe it is our civic duty to do so. This is especially true in communal living environments such as campus residences.

The “peril of help” arises in (1) how we, as the public, determine what is suspicious or at-risk behavior and (2) how our social infrastructure then deals with the people we “call out.” Behavior can be “cut out” of context, of an individual’s life history, when it does not make sense to onlookers, including family, friends, and employers. Behavior might not make sense and alarm us because an individual’s actions are inconsistent with social rules and, furthermore, associated with narratives of harm we are taught to recognize daily by institutions around us. For example cutting is strongly associated with suicide. Seen in the absence of context, most of us would be compelled to stop this action and probably call on professional expertise to intervene and solve what we identify as a threat.

However, a growing number of self-advocacy groups and allies assert that attention-seeking and attempted suicide are professional myths about self-harm. According to Mark Cresswell, these groups critique the underlying pathology and disease assumed with self-harm, despite there being socially acceptable forms of self-harm such as smoking, body modification, and waxing. More importantly, he notes that people with experiences with self-harm identify strongly with the concept of survival. Activists such as Louise Pembroke have spoken about needing to self-injure to stay alive and survive the pain of sexual violence and institutionalization.

Thus, when a mobile crisis intervention team is called because someone appears to be a danger to himself, it is important to reflect on the potentially negative effects this can have on self-harm survivors because of existing mental health laws.

When mobile crisis teams work jointly with the police, the police — regardless of the outcome of an intervention — may keep a record, which can affect civil liberties. According to Ryan Fritsch, legal counsel for the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office in Ontario, there have been eight recorded cases of non-criminal contact between police and Ontarians with various psychiatric histories appearing in the Department of Homeland Security in 2010. None of this actually benefits the well-being of persons in distress and can create numerous lifelong barriers, all thanks to one phone call. By equating mental health records with violence and criminality, border control has prevented people from traveling and immigrating.

Combined with the criminal justice system’s unsavory history of racial profiling, this link has at times produced deadly results. For instance, in 1997 police shot and killed Edmund Yu after he raised a small (toy?) hammer over his head on a bus in Toronto. Psychiatric survivors in Toronto have remembered Edmund Yu through memorials such as Edmund Place, which provides supportive non-medicalized housing to ex-users of psychiatry, who are typically discriminated against in other forms of housing.

As someone who has a psychiatric history and who identifies as “mad,” my survival hinges upon having a network of loved ones who can approach the subject of distress with an open-mind and willingness to learn about other “rhythms” to our existence — on knowing people who will not assume that X or Y thought or behavior will equate with danger to myself or others. Besides the everyday violence of medical records and police reports, increased suicidality has been associated with the use of various anti-depressant medications, such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine.

This kind of evidence complicates the professional consensus that ethnic minorities are at higher risk of suicide in North America and in need of specialized services. McKenzie and Crawford argue that rates of ethnic minority suicide have been consistently higher than those of the majority group in the USA and Australia, especially in areas where there is a lower concentration of ethnic minorities. They suggest this is because of “a relative lack of support by people with similar social situations or the perception of a more hostile social environment,” and that on an individual level “socio-economic stress, thwarted aspirations, racism, acculturation, culture clash with parents, loss of religious affiliation, difficulty with identity formation, and loss of family and community support may have effects on suicide risk.” While I would like to examine these claims carefully in separate post, what concerns me are the solutions that McKenzie and Crawford propose.

They suggest that untreated mental health problems in ethnic minorities (due to factors such as a reluctance to seek services, conflict with services, and poor compliance) exacerbate rates of ethnic minority suicide. They combine the above with “skewed age distribution” towards “younger age groups,” and recommend further investigation of risk factors to develop youth-focused prevention strategies.

The ever-expanding circle of “risk” factors turns an increasing number of people and whole communities into disabled targets of mental health services, and helps to justify psychiatry’s expertise and expansion at the exclusion of suggesting or fostering other kinds of explanations for distress or other types of support for racialized communities. McKenzie and Crawford assume that the community is incapable of developing its own strategies to prevent death and that they have already failed due to second-generation suicides. What if we reconsider rates of “death” beyond sensationalized self-killing and reflect on how we get to live day to day — what Jasbir Puar refers to as the unevenness of our rights to a certain lifespan? For example, poor housing infrastructure changes the everyday bodily comportment of marginalized communities, displacing long-term goals such as education with the immediate need for shelter.

In the context of the myriad ways in which racialized people slowly die, educating “at-risk” individuals redirects us to be happy in conditions that are reasonably unhappy. What possibilities exist for us to grieve this everyday struggle without the imposition of becoming normal — indeed, “civilized” — and okay with our conditions? I don’t have any fast answers. However, I can say that non-clinical modalities such as community acupuncture can illustrate some of the possibilities growing across North America. In an account I shared with Six Degrees Community Acupuncture, I described how community healers who work in solidarity with queer, Indigenous, and people of color political organizing are sensitive toward the bodily labor of resistance and anger, accepting rather than rejecting the need to put our bodies in potentially compromising situations for social change. Here acupuncture has served as a tool to mediate how strong, yet informative emotions register on the body. I am amazed by how acupuncture can be a thread of connectivity between different communities of color who all want alternatives to Western medicine — a source of dialogue.

There have also been non-pathological ways developed by artists and activists to talk about and speak out about our distress, such as Yolo Akili’s perspective on emotional justice. Rather than drawing conclusions about how oppression leads definitively to illness or suicide, Akili encourages people to explore the emotional texture of social inequity by transforming the way that activist work typically occurs. In activist spaces, Akili suggests we challenge misogyny by revealing our feelings and intuition, as a way to begin our intellectual work while at the same time mediating that expression by avoiding hurtful tactics such as interrupting, yelling, and belittling. His objective is to address, but not remove, pain by thoughtfully expressing it within our support networks, which include activist networks.

On the West Coast, there is also Creative Collective Access (CCA serving the Bay Area), a group of disabled queer and trans people of color working to create interdependent care networks. One of their goals is to resist the culture of individualism through resource sharing. Their most recent project is The Living Room Project, a multi-disciplinary space for healing, wellness, art, and youth events — founded by Micah Hobbes, a somatic doula and healer.

Anthropologists such as Miriam Ticktin have begun to trouble how “biology plays in the politics of immigration,” determining who is worthy of citizenship and asylum. Scholars should likewise trouble “psy” technologies (such as the criteria for “competency”), as they are deployed by institutions like mental health and law to determine who has freedom of movement — to determine who is fully human. This relationship between psychiatry and detention, from forced institutionalization to border control, particularly affects the lives of people of color.

Ironically, as social workers and psychologists (many of whom are African American and Asian American themselves) seek to use mental health as a tool to fund anti-racist community services, their research fortifies an ever-growing body of knowledge about race-specific mental illness, knowledge that can be appropriated by other institutions to increase the surveillance of ethnic minorities. We are left with the question of how service providers who are critical of the power relations between helper and user can be better allies to (take greater ‘risks’ with?) patients who are looking for support, and not be another source of barriers. Though the alternatives I have described are largely grounded in social justice movements (which may or may not appeal to your needs), they demonstrate just some of the possibilities that exist for living.

* * *

Louise Tam is a graduate student in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

(Image Credit: “Image of a Lonely Lady,” Low Chin Han, via Shutterstock)

By Guest Contributor Nicole Cunningham Zaghia, cross-posted from Muslimah Media Watch

One of the main criticisms of TLC’s All American Muslim was that the show’s characters were representative of only a small part of the American Muslim community.  If you felt that way, then a great antidote is Me, the Muslim Next Door, a web documentary produced for Radio Canada International.  Filmed in Montreal and Toronto in both English and French, Me the Muslim Next Door is over two hours of audio, video, and still photography, broken up into 4-6 minute segments, with each of the show’s participants having several segments.  These segments took place in the participants’ personal landscapes – at home, on the street, with their families.

Me, the Muslim Next Door is cast like a cross between the United Nations and a Benetton ad. I love it.  We have:

• Eduardo, a Brazilian convert who, by his own admission, used to hate Muslims;
• Dania, whose father is Eritrean and whose mother is a convert from  Quebec;
• Mehdi, a Moroccan married to Laila from Afghanistan; they met on Facebook;
• Suad, whose mother is Syrian and whose father is part Palestinian, part Bosnian and, to add some fun to the mix, her husband Karim is part Finnish, part Egyptian;
• Rizwan, of South Asian background, who lives in Toronto and takes us to his neighbourhood masjid.

One of my recurring problems with Muslims in the media is that we are often portrayed answering the same questions in the same ways. Every show has something about polygamy or hijab or “fitting in.” We either go on tape with platitudes (“oh but you can only be polygamous if you afford it, isn’t it great that widows can be taken care of”), with statements designed to shock the middle classes (“jihad is ok for the kuffar!”), or with instant fatwas about how our religion says things in black and white (“Islam says music is BAD”).

These topics show up in Me the Muslim Next Door, but the  “personal landscape” format of the videos allows a fresh, personal light without bringing down the level of the discourse.

Mehdi and Laila, a mixed Sunni-Shia couple, explain that for them, the most important part of Islam is at the level of the shahada. If you say the shahada, you’re ok, and sectarian or other differences don’t matter.  That spoke to me. Jamila, part of a large family, explains why she stays close to her parents – because they made sacrifices for her when she was a child, so she will make sacrifices for them as an adult. Suad and Karim had a marriage semi-arranged by their MSA, “but” played the piano at their wedding. And Dania’s 23^rd birthday party was alcohol-free. She mentions alcohol – that she has never had it, but doesn’t see what it could bring to an already good time. These are people and situations I can relate to and the type of Muslims I want people to see when they ask me about my religion. The show’s participants leave out “Islam says this” and instead talk about these topics in the terms of personal choices they have made in their private lives.

As a francophone Louisianian who lived and studied in Canada, I absolutely LOVED seeing normal Muslim people I could relate to in their living rooms talking about their families, hopes, jobs and dreams. I found my place more in this show than I did in All-American Muslim. The difference is that the goal of Me, the Muslim Next Door isn’t sensational. It nails the fine line between “educating the mass market” and giving Muslim viewers characters who are different enough to be interesting yet similar enough for all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to find common ground.

By Arturo R. García

TRIGGER ALERT for subject matter relating to rape

For the sake of their safety, we don’t know the race, or any other identifying detail, of any of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged victims. But the tweet above is still right: what happened at Penn State University Wednesday night was about privilege. And it’s time sports fans started owning up to that.

On Wednesday, the university fired beloved football coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier, in the wake of not only 40 counts of alleged felony sex abuse against Sandusky, a former assistant of Paterno’s, but grand-jury testimony revealing that Paterno, Spanier and other coaches and administrators were seemingly more concerned with protecting their own asses than the well-being of the children Sandusky allegedly terrorized.

What followed was maybe the single biggest display of stupidity undertaken by members of a college population: they rioted in the streets supporting a man who continue to employ a possible sex offender, even after being informed of “something inappropriate” happening in his team’s very facilities. And like schoolyard bullies, some had the nerve to portray themselves as victims:

“I think the point people are trying to make is the media is responsible for Joe Pa going down,” said freshman Mike Clark, 18, adding that he believed Mr. Paterno met both his legal and moral responsibility by telling university authorities about Mr. Sandusky’s alleged 2002 assault on a boy in a school shower.

Demonstrators tore down two lampposts, one falling into a crowd of students. They also threw rocks and fireworks at police, who responded with pepper spray. The crowd undulated like an accordion, with the students crowding the police and the officers pushing them back.

“We got rowdy and we got maced,” Jeff Heim, 19, said rubbing his red, teary eyes. “But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”

The platitudes are as commonplace among sports fans as they are nauseating: The media is responsible. Our coach. The Us vs. Them mentality that has bred a million Jocks Vs. Nerds cliches, fueled endless hours of talk radio trash-talk – and let’s not forget, made billions of dollars for both Penn State and kindly ol’ “JoePa.” He was bigger than the institution, people said; he was an institution. After decades of exemplifying the most gratifying of sports homilies, his coaching career ends proving another truism: Power Corrupts.

Improbably, Paterno is the second “icon” to sully his own legacy within the past few years. His downfall was preceded by that of former womens’ basketball coach Rene Portland, revealed to be a raging homophobe during her 30-year tenure, as chronicled in the documentary Training Rules:

As Outsports’ Cyd Zeigler Jr. wrote in 2009:

The point of the film isn’t to simply tell the story of Rene Portland’s homophobic reign of terror and the young women she tossed into the gutter: It’s meant to make you feel it. When former player Lisa Faloon says, “Rene explained to all of us that we weren’t to talk to a lesbian, and if we were a lesbian, she specifically said, I will take your scholarship away and you will never play basketball again,” it lays the foundation for a series of stories of heartache from women who didn’t have the strength to stand up to Portland and the juggernaut of Penn State athletics. The film focuses on a half dozen other women, straight and gay, who were victims of Portland’s intolerance. Hearing women who played for Portland from 1980 to the late 1990s talk about how Portland undermined their self-confidence, attacked them, and shattered their lifelong dreams is heart-wrenching.

Portland’s transgressions were more direct, to be sure, and it’s good to report that she was also removed from her position – for me, particularly, because I met her after PSU played my alma mater years ago and it makes my skin crawl to think I was that close to well-hidden prejudice – but it operated from a similar place as Sandusky’s transgressions: I have the control and you do not.

This is far beyond the “lack of institutional control” cited by the NCAA when it comes to penalizing athletic programs. Penn State has tacitly engaged in institutional abuse of women and children who came to it because they felt they’d be safe there. If Southern Methodist can lose its’ football program for paying players under the table, then how can Penn State’s possibly be allowed to continue?

Some have argued that the idiots caught on camera Wednesday night will come to regret their actions, once they have kids of their own. I sincerely doubt that. It’s just as likely that they will become the sort of people who engage in ever-escalating acts of vandalism to prove their “loyalty.” The kind who will blame “the media” and the victims for daring to speak up. They will become the bullies who teach their own kids to “man up” and Listen to Coach. They will become the people who harass women online. They will become precisely the kinds of people who create the Rene Portlands and (allegedly) the Jerry Sanduskys of the world.

By Guest Contributor Jaymee Goh, cross-posted from Silver Goggles

I’m currently re-reading Angela Davis’ Abolition Democracy, and her interviewer, Eduardo Mendieta, in response to her reiteration that “we need a new age–with a new agenda–that directly addresses the structural racism” (30) about multiculturalism: “very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism” (31).

Over the last year or so, I’ve become incredibly disillusioned with how the term “multiculturalism” is used in various spaces, including steampunk.

I’ve always loved the term, and multiracialism as well. In Malaysia, we are openly a multi-racial society; you see food stalls with Chinese lettering and Indian mamak shops. Wherever you go, there are clear signs that any given space caters to the needs of specific races, and it’s only hyper-consumerist spaces that cater to as many people as possible, that are, ahem, “race-less”. (Neocolonialism, you see, strips a country of its cultures, and replaces it with a singular culture of buying and selling and marathon window-shopping.)

We’re super-imperfect, and there are a ton of things I do not know about the different races and cultures within Malaysia alone. Partly because it’s simply not part of regular interracial interaction and thus it never comes up in conversation. Partly also because sometimes these practices are deeply private and specific to certain groups, and we kind of don’t see why we HAVE to tell others about it. But at functions, we are fairly happy to see each other dress appropriately, and in the cultural clothes associated with the race of the host.

Contrary to the politics of Malaysia, I really do think that the Malaysian people get it right sometimes, or at least, it did. Recently I’ve come to believe that our taciturn attitude towards talking about our cultures has become a wall and now we stand around awkwardly and don’t really know how to talk to each other about our cultures anymore.

Multiculturalism is much unlike what France and Britain’s leaders think. When those prime ministers bleat about how multiculturalism has failed, they’re really saying, brown people refuse to get in line. Non-white people are refusing to learn the language properly (by abandoning their own and their funny accents) and they are refusing to integrate properly (by entering and staying in white spaces that alienate the shit out of them). Multiculturalism to these people has failed because these immigrants have refused to play by the rules set by the white people who so nicely let them into the country. (Sara Ahmed’s chapter on the Melancholic Migrant in her book The Promise of Happiness talks about this.)

I’ve said this before, but it is worth saying again: culture is about the people, not just the stuff. A culture isn’t just about the clothes and the language and the literature. It’s also in the way people interact and behave, the way we think, the way we live.

And I just don’t see this happening in steampunk very much.

Now, I get why. If you’re white, you can’t very well pass as someone of another race without engaging in some squicky, racist-as-fuck colour-face. And I don’t deny that some folk do some fine work adapting the fashions of non-Western European cultures into workable, lovable clothing that looks good, makes sense, stays true to the original garb, and doesn’t bank on racist stereotypes.

But here’s what bothers me most: the fact that when we say “multicultural” in steampunk, I’m often hearing “non-white”. It’s just another way of saying “ethnic” which is also code for “not white”. And “exotic”, which means “foreign.”

This bothers me, partly because it’s semantically incorrect (there are various ethnicities associated with people lumped into whiteness, and multiculturalism includes interacting with whiteness as well, or European-derived cultures, but from what I can see, “multicultural” currently signifies anything that’s not Western European), partly because it’s another way of celebrating some mythical post-racial state (“we’re all human! let’s celebrate each other’s cultures by raising awareness about them through these clothes we are wearing on our white bodies!”), partly because… I just don’t see anything that really engages with what it means to be multicultural.

Multiculturalism, in its very name, indicates the interaction between multiple cultures. Which could be very different cultures. With some major disagreements between them. Living in one space.

And, in our racist world, these disagreements have some shitty consequences that include but are not limited to work discrimination, disproportionate crime rates, exclusionary laws, and flat out shitty behaviour that receives no punishment or is outright supported. In our world, the presence of multiculturalism means that certain cultures get to be dominant, and stick the others into disadvantaged spaces (aka ghettos).

I have never encountered a space which consists of a plurality of cultures living alongside each other, elbow to elbow, where each community has the wherewithal to take care of itself, and members feel free to speak to other communities without fear of reprisal or discrimination. A space where any neutral ground has rules negotiated upon by representatives of different groups (like in Nancy Fraser’s articulation on public spaces in plural societies, as opposed to hegemonic societies).

And let’s face it, this shit ain’t happening in steampunk. Non-white people are expected to play by the rules. We’re expected to mess around in the Victorian era. We still come in by way of Western European, specifically English, frameworks and paradigms. If we’re there as purposefully non-white, we’re nifty, but… beyond that? What do we mean to white steampunks who dominate the scene? How is someone like Monique Poirier supposed to comfortably do Native American steampunk if random folk will joke about the “steampunk Trail of Tears” around her?

That is why I can’t get behind a celebration of multicultural steampunk that really seems to bank on being able to create and dress in costumes and clothing and props of other cultures. Something different and something fun to do. Something cool to research. Something interesting to get to know, and maybe learn something about a different culture. But for all your knowledge about how we dressed and what the gender norms of 19th century China were, what is being done to ensure POC steampunk feel safe? Feel more than just tokens? Tony Hicks of Tinplate Studios said to me at GearCon, “sometimes, you just want to be.” And sometimes, that being also means being able to talk about some of the dumb shit we experience and being understood for that, being comfortable that no, we’re not alone.

Before you start bleating about how it’s a multicultural world and ain’t we all human and race doesn’t matter and we should all be free to use different things from different cultures, let me reiterate once more: culture is more than just things. It’s about people. And people of colour live in the still very racist system that dictates the discourse on what multiculturalism should be like. And thus multiculturalism is co-opted, not to begin critical conversations between peoples, but so white people can get their jollies off dressing like an exotic non-white person, eat weird foods, learn about foreign cultures, as a nifty thing for the day, without necessarily doing the hard work of confronting how difficult living in a multicultural world can be, when certain cultures are privileged over others.

And this needs to change.

Longtime Racialicious readers know this time on the calendar has prompted the R to read someone (or several folks) about their racist costumes or some other Halloween-related foolishness. Well, this year, Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) put on posters what we’ve been putting into words for quite a while.

I think that, for the most part, the campaign deserves the accolades, coverage, and support it’s been getting around the web, from Angry Asian Man to the 17,575 (and counting!) responses on the STARS president’s Tumblr to The Root to Bitch to the former Racialicious owner Carmen Sognonvi .

Of course, we can argue, among other things, that phenotypes don’t equal culture and cultures aren’t static or even talk about the historical-religious appropriation of Halloween itself.

My only quibble with the campaign is that I may have chosen photos where the models conveyed different body language. Not that the models didn’t pose how they wanted, being a student-driven campaign. What I do think is quite a few photographers rarely get The Shot in one shot; in fact, several photographers submit several photos for clients/collaborative partners to choose from.

I would have chosen, say, the Latino looking down at the photo, the East Asian woman giving the “geisha” picture the side-eye. Or all of the models giving their respective photos the side-eye. Or all of them looking out at the viewer. Or all of them looking down. As is, the photo of the East Asian woman looking down may suggest non-confrontation (“meek Asian girl”)

juxtaposed with the men of color (the photo at the top of the post and this one)

and the Black woman

may  inadvertently suggest stereotypes of anger and aggression (“angry Arab,” “Latino with a temper,” “aggressive Black woman”). Just a thought if and when STARS decides to tweak this incredible campaign.

But, again, that’s my only quibble. STARS did a wild-applause-and-rose-tossing job with this campaign.

Others, however, have taken this serious and timely message and parodied—if not downright attacked–it. (Color me unshocked by this, Racializens.) Now, some of the parodies made me chuckle, like this Avatar-based one

and the zombie one

mostly due to the ideas of the creatures being symbols for people of color.

The ones about white people, especially poor whites, produced mixed results mostly because the parodies don’t quite grasp that, yes, poor white people do have a mitigated privilege via their skin color and that white people of various class standings making fun of poor whites may be viewed as “inside joking,”

but white poverty is also thoroughly ridiculed and dismissed—and, therefore erased–in US society by that very same mitigated privilege.

Oh, and let’s not forget the sexism and the fatphobia in these parodies.

As we’ve witnessed in our posts about racism in costuming, people have rushed to defend their choice to dress up in racially offensive Halloween garb in some of the comment sections about the campaigns, with the usual mixture of the “I got my rights!”, “my best [insert race and/or ethnicity here] friend/partner/co-worker/neighbor didn’t find my costume offensive,” (bonus points if the person saying this is a person of color wears the stereotyping costume of a PoC culture), “y’all are being oversensitive/overemotional/hostile,” “you’re the racist for calling out my racism,” and other derailing techniques.

Some of the Derailing/Apologist/Other-Blaming hits and remixes?

From “Jerry Stein” at Autostraddle

OMG, get a life. This is pathetic. Would an Asian woman be OK to go as a Geisha on Halloween? If not why not? And if so are we now saying that only people of the exact origin or race can have fun dressed as a CHARACTER on Halloween? Stop being so sensitive. If America is to get passed all of this nonsense then it needs to get some perspective and start smiling again.

Watch any movie or TV show and you will see a racial stereotype. Are all stereotypes negative NO! Why is it that this campaign only sees that.

This country is dividing itself. Nobody wants to be American. Everyone is so narcissistic and self important it makes me sick to my stomach. Bring back people with humility and a sense of humor before we all end up selfish deluded idiots thinking the world owes them something.

Based on this all costumes which feature Cowboys, Irish Leprechauns, Michael Jackson, Lady GaGa, Bin Laden, OJ Simpson, Madonna, Jersey Shore cast members will all now be banned because they offend the Irish, African Americans, Italians and Muslims. Thats pretty much Halloween cancelled.

This country is becoming a laughing stock for the wrong reasons.

Mohamhead from GOOD

I am not white myself but I don’t see what’s wrong with people doing that kind on stuff on Halloween. I might even dress up as a white guy. Is that racist too? Or is it only racist if white people do it? Hypocrites.

didimydoe3, also at GOOD

I don’t mind stereotypical costumes of my race because I’m mature enough to know it’s a costume.

Sometimes it is offensive. Mine is. It’s the only reason I’m doing it. I’m going blackface.

Oh, I could go on and on and on with these kinds of comments–because these comments are out there ad nauseum–but you get the jist.

But see, here’s the thing, People Who Defend Racist Costumes: you all are proving STARS’—and Racialicious’—point…and quite well. You’re welcome.

As Bitch’s headline says, don’t mess up as you dress up, and have a Happy Halloween!

Image credits: Uproxx and Hard to Be Humble When You Stuntin on a Jumbotron

By Guest Contributor Jen Chau, cross-posted from The Time Is Always Right …

In the past couple of years, I have noticed a certain complacency that I never noticed before, in my eleven years of leading Swirl. The same passion and the same excitement around building multiracial communities had faded a bit. In the one year leading up to the Presidential election, we launched five new chapters (the norm had been a chapter every year or every other year). People were excited by the energy created by Obama’s campaign, and they were motivated and eager to be a part of creating supportive and inclusive multiracial communities.

And then once Obama was firmly placed in the White House, something happened. It got quiet.

My theory was that it was all related to the claims that we were now in some sort of post-racial wonderland. I think it very much had to do with the fact that Obama is of multiracial heritage. This fact resulted in a sort of sitting back. A sentiment that sounded like, “we’re good now.” The idea that Obama understood so many of us, and that he cared about diversity was something that gave people a reason to relax. Take a breath. Stop pushing so hard. I understood this and even felt a bit of it myself. The other reality is that in an individual’s development, one may feel a strong desire to connect to community at one point and not at another. Swirl has always understood and been supportive of this.

Organizations, academics, student leaders still continued their work, but it was clear that a lot of people – our members, our “audience” – were….gone. I heard the same from other groups – that membership started to lull. Student campus groups folded. It seemed that people didn’t need our mixed groups in the same way they had, previously. Before Obama. Before “check all that apply” on the U.S. Census.

But had things changed all that much? Yes, we are counted now. We know the numbers of multiracial people and interracial couples in this country. But do people start understanding one another and become supportive overnight just because we have a tally? Do things feel different for a multiracial person or a mixed family on a day to day basis?

Yes and no. I have heard from many people that things are better. That they are not questioned nearly as much. That people no longer stare in awe as they talk about the fact that their mom is black and dad is white. That they feel comfortable being all of who they are, at all times. It always makes me happy to hear that this is what people are experiencing. It means that progress is being made.

But others still experience the awkward questions. The demand by strangers to “prove” they are one thing or the other. Moms being asked how long they’ve been babysitting their own children. Stares, rude comments, family tensions and sometimes divisions. This is all still real and still happening.

And your experience, in part, is impacted by your context. Your circle, your larger environment. Where you live. In pockets, multiracial people and families are supported, recognized, understood. In others, far from it.

There are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance. It’s absolutely critical that things happen on the institutional level, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the corresponding changes automatically happen at the cultural or individual level. And vice versa. Just because a change occurs on one level doesn’t mean that the others follow neatly in line. We have the ability to “check all that apply” on the Census (which is huge), but that doesn’t mean that individuals immediately understand the complexity of multirace. Things don’t change overnight. We know this logically, but it seems that we sometimes want to pretend it isn’t the case (see “post-race”). I want to live in bliss too, believe me. But a real one, that we work hard to create for ourselves…not a superficial one that we wish into being.

This piece was prompted by a New York Times article on a mixed family. I hope that their story (and others) help to illustrate all that still needs to be understood.

I’ve been to a great many plays on race. Some, like August Wilson’s Jitney, manage to survive through the ages and provide a stunningly timeless view on the problems of the colorline.

Others, like David Mamet’s Race or Neil Labute’s This Is How It Goes, make me realize how much of an abstract concept racism’s pervasiveness can be for white people. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream art world is controlled by white people, and therefore what is considered worthy of production is shaped by white perceptions.

Trouble in Mind has been resurrected, but there are always complications. Over at the Arena Stage website, Irene Lewis speaks to the cause of the persistent racial gap in evaluation of material:

For years, the play Trouble in Mind, by African-American playwright Alice Childress, was recommended to me as a show that, as artistic director of CENTERSTAGE, I should produce. I had read the play several times over the years and found it to be “old-fashioned/old hat,” especially concerning the depiction of the character of the white director. Finally, I decided to ask the opinion of an African-American actress whose judgment I have always valued. She read the play and told me that she liked it. When I asked if she found the role of the white director dated and unbelievable, she said, “No.” So I came around to the opinion that this was another case of – what should I call it – whites (me) being “out of touch” with the experiences of African-Americans. I decided to produce and direct the play at CENTERSTAGE in Baltimore. It subsequently transferred to Yale Repertory Theater. I am delighted that Molly is bringing this groundbreaking piece to Arena Stage.

“Out of touch” is the last term I would use to describe Childress’ noted work, considering it was originally performed in 1955. Considering the play was created more than five decades ago, it should not be so fresh and contemporary. And yet, we live in an era in which a white woman’s tale about a white woman and the black maids she liberated swept the bestseller’s list and the box office – clearly, things haven’t changed that much. So why the disconnect between black and white theater aficionados? As Childress herself has stated:

“There aren’t any black critics who can close a white play. But in black theater, black experience has been fought against by white critics. The white critic feels no obligation to prepare himself to judge a black play.”

And so, here we are.

Trouble in Mind is a play within a play, designed to explore racism in the theater industry by allowing the audience to peek at the inner workings of a troubled production. Wiletta Mayer (E. Faye Butler) is an aging starlet, who has spent her life toiling in mammy and sidekick roles, desperate for a big break. She is cast in Chaos in Belleville, along with five other actors – three black and two white. John (Brandon J. Dirden) is a young, black upstart, determined to make it in the business despite the cost. Sheldon Forrester (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) is an older black actor who refuses to rock the boat, for any reason. Mille Davis (Starla Benford) is a friendly rival who boasts about her husband’s desire that she give up acting in favor of homemaking. Of the white cast, young Judy (Gretchen Hall) is the classic ingenue type and Bill (Daren Kelly) is a set in his ways older white man. They are all drawn together by director Al Manners (Marty Lodge), who is mounting a large production against the odds and hopes to make a play “that says something.”

Unfortunately, the play was written for to appease white audiences, causing a key conundrum for the black actors in the performance. Wiletta struggles with the play most of all, coming to the conclusion throughout the play that there is something terribly amiss with the script – and having trouble finding an ear for her concerns.

Reviews of the play frustrated me, almost as if I was playing bingo. I heard about the “sassy” back and forth between Millie and Wiletta, and the “stirring gospel renditions,” which made me wonder if the reviewers had read Black Culture for Dummies before scribbling together their responses. These things are in the play, but they are also the examples that appear in review after review – ignored are the more subtle discussions of black cultural frameworks, or the broader idea of the ongoing plight of black actors choosing between regular work and acting on principles of racial justice. And there wasn’t a single reference to Robert Townsend’s “Black Acting School” sketch from Hollywood Shuffle, a more modern update to Childress’ core concepts.

There are other moments gone unnoticed by critics. Of particular interest to me was the relationship between Henry (played by Laurence O’Dwyer) and Wiletta. Initially, Wiletta is unable to voice her dissatisfaction with the director’s commands, and Henry attempts to provide some comfort and support. Henry, a former crew member turned doorman, speaks with a heavy Irish brogue. But Henry is also one of the only whites in the play that does not bother with pity, condescension, and naivety – he just commiserates, person to person. One would be tempted to think that this is a reference to the complicated history that Irish Americans have with whiteness – however, a major part of the acceptance of the Irish into the white majority was abuse and separation from black Americans. Unfortunately, answers are not forthcoming – I couldn’t find any critical analysis of Henry in this context. Taking the play at face value, though, Henry embodies human connection and friendship transcending traditional racial boundaries – even if the two leads had to wait until the stage was dark and their coworkers had gone before they could speak freely.

But the most electrifying part of the play comes from the exchanges between Wiletta and Al Manners, each pushing the other farther and farther outside of the bounds of polite racial conversation, where the ugly truth often lies buried under the veneer of polite society.

Most telling is this monologue, delivered from the beleaguered white director of the production after being accused of prejudice:

Get wise, there’s damned few of us interested in putting on a colored show at all, much less one that’s going to say anything. It’s rough out here, it’s a hard world! Do you think I can stick my neck out by telling the truth about you? ‘

There are billions of things that can’t be said… do you follow me, billions! Where the hell do you think I can raise a hundred thousand dollars to tell the unvarnished truth?

(Picks up the script and waves it) So, maybe it’s a lie…but it’s one of the finest lies you’ll come across for a damned long time! Here’s bitter news, since you’re livin’ off truth… The American public is not ready to see you the way you want to be seen because, one.. .they don’t believe it, two.. .they don’t want to believe it…and three… they’re convinced they’re superior.. .and that, my friend, is why Carrie and Renard have to carry the ball! Get it? Now you wise up and aim for the soft spot in that American heart, let ‘em pity you, make ‘em weep buckets, be helpless, make ‘em feel so damned sorry for you that they’ll lend a hand in easing up the pressure.

In Plays by American Women, Judith E. Barlow notes:

Manners is surely right that few directors in the period would be willing to work on a show about racial themes with a predominantly Black cast, and that White audiences “don’t want to believe” or see people of color as they really are and “want to be seen.” (The failure of Broadway producers to risk showing Trouble in Mind is ironic proof of his claim.) Yet he cannot understand that a White liberal “version” of African American life is no substitute for Black people defining who they are and what they have experienced.

The fraudulence of “Chaos in Belleville” is most obvious when the elderly actor Sheldon offers a moving account of the lynching that he witnessed as a child, a description at sharp odds with the sanitized melodrama of “Belleville.” The ring of authenticity in Sheldon’s account points up the shabby cliches of the interior drama. “Chaos in Belleville” is not only a bad reflection of reality, it is an example of how drama by White authors differs from, and usurps the place of, drama by playwrights of color. “Chaos in Belleville” purports to contain “an anti-lynch theme,” yet it bears little resemblance to the anti-lynch dramas written by African Americans, particularly women. In Angelina Weld Grimke’s Rachel (1916), Rachel’s mother is helpless against the mob that brutally murders her husband and son. The mother in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Blue-Eyed Black Boy (ca. 1930) appeals to the governor of the state (who raped her long ago) to save their child, while the grandmother in Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (ca. 1925) desperately tries to rescue her unjustly accused grandson. In none of these plays does a mother blame her son for White bigotry and turn him over to an angry mob, and none offers as hero a White man like Renard, who preaches tolerance and pity after Job has been killed. “Chaos in Belleville” is a distorted mirror not only of actual events but of the way those events have been interpreted for the stage by African Americans themselves.

The metatheatrical structure of Trouble thus allows Childress to write a critique of the history of the American stage, where plays by (usually male) White writers purporting to show the Black experience have been embraced while dramas by African American writers are ignored.

Trouble in Mind is currently playing at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC through October 23, 2011. Tickets are $70-85 per show; however, there are student and senior matinee priced tickets, as well as Pay Your Age tickets, military discounts, and Hottix, which are half-priced and first come, first serve thirty minutes before showtime.

By Arturo R. García

In 1957 she had a Billboard-charting single called “Love Is Strange,” a duet with ace guitarist Mickey Baker. The song has been used in movies from “Dirty Dancing” to “Mermaids” to “Casino.”

But after “Love Is Strange” the Harlem-born musician moved to New Jersey with her husband to raise their children. Sylvia and Joe Robinson were ambitious. They built a nightclub favored by boxers and Motown stars, and a recording studio where Robinson began writing songs for other artists. Al Green rejected one because he found it too sexy. So Robinson sang “Pillow Talk” herself.
- Neda Ulaby, NPR

However, it was in 1979 that Robinson began forging her indelible mark on an emerging art form that began taking shape at clubs and dance parties in New York. Inspired after listening to people rap over instrumental breaks, Robinson formed the Sugarhill Gang. Comprised Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien and Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, the trio rapped over a rhythm track that sampled Chic’s 1979 R&B/pop hit “Good Times.” It was the first commercial hit for the burgeoning rap revolution and for Robinson and her husband’s post-All Platinum label Sugar Hill Records, named after Harlem, NY’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.

Robinson later signed seminal rap act Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five to Sugar Hill. The group struck top five (No. 4) status on the R&B charts with the socially conscious “The Message,” featuring Melle Mel and Duke Bootee in 1982. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

“‘Ms. Rob doin’ the job’ was a rhyme boast on recordings from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D recalled to Billboard.biz. “Sylvia’s artistic talent and public notoriety have been mimicked without due credit for the past 30 years in the recorded art form she birthed. She was a black woman who pushed the button and turned the key to crank up a billion-dollar industry.”
- Gail Mitchell, Billboard Magazine

By 1979 Flash was approached by legendary record producer/store owner Bobby Robinson of Enjoy Reords, who wanted to Rrecord Flash and the Group. During this same period Cowboy, Melle Mel, Kid Creole and former Funky Four member Raheim had recorded a record for Brass Records called “We Rap More Mellow” under an assumed name, The Younger Generation.

Soon After, Flash and the Furious Five (with Raheim now a member) began recording for Robinson, with their first 12-inch single for the label being “Superappin’.” Disappointed with Robinson’s inability to get them on radio, the group soon signed with Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records, on the strength of her promise to get them to perform on the backing track of a record that was a DJ favorite at the time, titled “Get Up and Dance,” by the group Freedom. Flash and the Furious Five’s first record for Sugar Hill was, in fact, titled “Freedom,” and was a hit with the Hip-Hop crowd. During that same year the group recorded the song “Birthday Party”
- Grandmaster Flash bio on Sing365.com

ESPN has certainly hitched its’ promotional wagon to Michael Vick, but first things first: don’t blame Touré for the question, “What If Michael Vick Were White?” – or for that pic above of said hypothetical “White” Vick.

“I had no knowledge of or say in the title of the story and the horrific, misguided picture of Vick in whiteface, which dismayed and disgusted me when I saw it,” he explained in a column for CNN. “I think careful readers will note that the story and the image don’t really interact. They’re like two people who kinda know about each other but don’t really know each other. But this has happened to me before.”

He made a similar disclaimer on Twitter, according to Colorlines:

My essay on Vick is nowhere near as inflammatory as the pic of him in whiteface which contradicts me saying you can’t imagine him as white.

I wrote an essay about Vick & race. ESPN the mag titled it & added art without me (normal procedure). Judge me on the story not the art.

In his CNN piece, Touré also mentioned that he wanted to talk about football more in his Vick column, but that ESPN “was less interested in that.” Reading his essay on the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback again, I think his editors let him down in the process.

Touré’s column starts by describing the “deeply African-American approach” of Vick’s game:

Vick’s style reminds me of Allen Iverson — the speed, the court sense, the sharp cuts, the dekes, the swag. In those breathtaking moments when the Eagles QB abandons the pocket and takes off, it feels as if he’s thumbing his nose at the whole regimented, militaristic ethos of the game.

Denied the chance to place Vick’s game into a historical context, this graf makes Vick seem like the NFL’s answer to Julius Erving, when really he’s not even the first mobile black quarterback on his own team. Surely Touré didn’t forget about Donovan McNabb or Randall Cunningham?

Instead, it’s David Fleming who gets to make that connection in an otherwise hagiographic profile of Vick’s comeback, mentioning that he has become “the next link in a quarterback chain that runs from Fran Tarkenton to John Elway to Steve Young to Randall Cunningham.”

Crucially, three of the four quarterbacks in that chain are white. And all but Cunningham are in the NFL Hall of Fame. What would probably be different, if Vick were white, would be that the gaggle of football pundits ESPN employs to opine on the National Football League – always referred to by its’ first, middle and last name, like it was an unruly child or a serial killer – would frame his exploits differently: instead of showing “preternatural poise,” as Fleming puts it, White Vick’s mobility would show “how hard he works in the off-season;” his on-field celebrations would show us he’s “just having fun out there.” And so on.

So what Vick is doing on the field isn’t new; he’s just doing it at a higher level than anybody else right now – in large part because he’s a team that encourages him to do so, a fact Vick himself acknowledges (even if, as he told GQ, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell nudged him in Philadelphia’s direction.) So it’s unfortunate that Touré didn’t get the chance to discuss Vick’s professional good fortune in his column.

It’s also unfortunate his editors stuck that column with not only the re-colorized Vick pic, but a headline asking a question Touré himself shoots down:

This question makes me cringe. It is so facile, naive, shortsighted and flawed that it is meaningless. Whiteness comes with great advantages, but it’s not a get-out-of-every-crime-free card. Killing dogs is a heinous crime that disgusts and frightens many Americans. I’m certain white privilege would not be enough to rescue a white NFL star caught killing dogs.

The problem with the “switch the subject’s race to determine if it’s racism” test runs much deeper than that. It fails to take into account that switching someone’s race changes his entire existence. In making Vick white, you have him born to different parents. That alone sets his life trajectory in an entirely different direction.

But would it, really? I’m not so sure, and neither is Caperton at Feministe:

Switching someone’s race does not change his “entire existence” – it changes his race. And that’s not for nothing. Take a guy in Michael Vick’s childhood neighborhood and turn him white, and he’s going to have different experiences than his black neighbors. Pick any white kid at an almost entirely white high school and turn him black, and his experiences will be different from those of his classmates and of kids at majority-black schools. But that’s not everything. It’s not the entirety of existence. Flipping a man’s race switch from black to white doesn’t also put him in a four-bedroom home in Peoria with a CPA for a father, a librarian for a mother, a brother, a sister, and a pomapoo, and it doesn’t stop an indescribably busted person from torturing dogs in his swimming pool for fun and profit.

Touré claims to have speculated, “What if Michael Vick were white?” He really speculated, “What if Michael Vick grew up in a two-parent home in a better neighborhood with better friends and no dogfighters around?” and then assigned that as his working definition of “white.” In his mind, White Michael Vick never would have had a dogfighting ring in the first place, because in his whiteness he would have grown up free of the poverty, negligence, and violence that defines Being Black.

Touré, in fact, asks a question similar to Caperton’s later in his ESPN piece: “If Vick grew up with the paternal support that white kids are more likely to have (72 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers compared with 29 percent of white children), would he have been involved in dogfighting?”

Though that “72 percent born to unwed mothers” stat is questionable, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote two years ago, it’s not guaranteed that a two-parent household would have dissuaded White Vick from doing something criminally wrong away from the field, as Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger has (allegedly) shown us. If Vick’s dog-fighting operation had been located in the right county, he might have run into an (allegedly) more-forgiving police force. But how much of that is race and how much of that is geography?

In the end of his ESPN column, Touré asks us to look at Vick as “someone in the third act of the epic movie that is his life,” calling his return “heroic.” Personally, I can’t go that far – not just because of what he’s done, but because of moments like this one, captured by GQ’s Will Leitch, who talked to Vick after the quarterback is asked at a speaking engagement, “Are you mad about what happened to you?”:

I ask him if he buys this argument, if he believes he was treated unfairly. Most people convicted of dogfighting don’t spend a year and a half in prison. They aren’t forced to declare bankruptcy. I ask him if he was sent to prison for too long.

“One day in prison is too long,” he says.

Yes, but I mean for this particular crime.

He sighs. I’m not the first person who’s tried to lead him down this road. “For a while, it was all ‘Scold Mike Vick, scold Mike Vick, just talk bad about him, like he’s not a person,’ ” he says. “It’s almost as if everyone wanted to hate me. But what have I done to anybody? It was something that happened, and it was people trying to make some money.”

See, no matter what ESPN wants to tell us, there is a middle ground when it comes to Vick. Nobody can deny his ability, his intelligence, or his dedication to getting his career and his life back. But white, brown or black, remorse is remorse. And not even a Super Bowl trophy can make its’ apparent absence in that explanation any shinier.

So, I’m writing this piece for Spin on Nirvana, Nevermind, and the Death of Cultural Angst, really focusing on the 90s. And one of the cool things about writing about Nirvana is that I generally don’t get asked to do so. I write about race, I write about gender, I write about class. So most people don’t peg me as someone who felt really strongly about Nirvana or any other rock movements – despite the fact that I was a black girl growing up in the suburbs. So Nirvana had a very interesting cultural effect on me and people that I knew. One of the big things was the fact that Nirvana was an anti-racist, anti-sexist band. Their liner notes from Incesticide* , after they started to get super popular, they put in this note that was like “If you don’t like women, blacks, or gays, leave us alone.” A really, really bold move. But at the same time, we wonder is Kurt Cobain really and truly as iconic as we say?

He’s important to note in our culture, but whose culture exactly are we talking about? How do we define culture? How do we define this nebulous “we” that makes up American culture?

For me, a big part of my culture was Tupac, and more broadly, hip-hop culture. N.W.A., Notorious B.I.G, all these people also dealt with cultural angst in the 90s. They also talked about society. They also talked about racial struggle, state violence. And yet, they aren’t seen as universal. TLC was part of the beginning waves of hip hop feminism. Back in 1992, they were rocking condoms, as a way to promote safe sex, they were talking about being the girls they wanted to be. That was culturally significant and important to me. But is that reflected in the wider culture? It’s even things like magazines that matter. Did teens in your area read Word Up magazine, like my friends? Or did they read Tiger Beat?

Where is your place in the culture, and how do you define it?

People try to say “this is the 90s” or “this is the 80s” – but whose culture are we talking about?

I interviewed Mimi Thi Nguyen for my article, and she described herself as a punk turned academic. And she talked a little bit about being completely off the corporate radar in the 90s. She was just like “Why? It didn’t mean anything to me.”

So on one hand, you have these things that were extremely iconic, that we form connections around. But at the same time, we have people who were around in the same time, same era, who got completely different messages – if they felt that this was important at all. And so, we start looking at these questions of movement, this question of culture. And how do we define it.

As media makers, we are in charge of shaping these perceptions. The voices that we leave out are the ones that help us determine what our culture is. We are the ones that are leaving this record, this documentation, for ages and ages to come. And so, when we leave people out, when we start erasing voices that don’t fit the narrative that we think they should fit, we start missing these large pieces of the puzzle. And over time what tends to happen, is that we’re so used to writing from one perspective, this thing Edwidge Danticat calls the single story**, that you forgot that other stories exist. Right? So then we start getting more holes, and more gaps in our cultural narrative.

The thing that people forget to understand is that the idea that culture will be nebulous, and can be something hard to define is actually a good thing. It’s a huge benefit for America. We are not homogenous and we aren’t supposed to be homogenous. We weren’t founded in an homogenous way, and we are supposed to be diverse and reflective of that in our media and our culture. And those of us who are arts and culture makers need to reflect that. If not, we just have incomplete sketches of who we are. And when we go to look back, and we wonder about things – like “What was Nirvana’s impact on the queer community?” – we can’t get that type of information, because we never thought to record it.

So the idea becomes how do we talk about our differences, and yet still talk about our culture?

How do we make room for every single person to speak?

And again, those of us who are in this room have access to some of the highest levels of media. We are the culture creators, even if we don’t have as direct of an impact as others do, we are still part of this field.

And one of the things I notice a lot when we talk about diversity, when we talk about these ideals, is that “I don’t have the time. I can’t work this other thing into the story. I can’t figure out how to make this diversity angle work.” As if diversity is this handcuff around you, instead of something that’s actually a benefit, instead of something that’s actually freeing. Because if we were to look at the world, through all of these different prisms, we would realize that the onus is off of us to provide the one definitive experience that will define out culutre, and instead we can start to talk to each other. We can start to understand each other. We can acknowledge that we are carriers of information. And we can acknowledge that every time we leave out a story – though we can’t get to it right then – but if we acknowledge that it’s missing, and we each work a little bit extra each day to start weaving in new narratives, things that we haven’t seen, articles we haven’t thought of yet, we will truly become one nation, under a groove.

—

*Was talking too fast. In the clip, I say insecticide. Corrected here for obvious reasons. Also, what they actually said is in the link, women, people of color, or gays, not specifically black folks.

**This was a misattribution. The writer who actually said it was Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED Talk.

Fun fact: The founding editor of Punk Planet, Dan Sinker, was in the audience. He is also the person behind the super popular @MayorEmanuel twitter feed.

So, last week Jill at Feministe has a post up on the first real-time spanking study.

Time Magazine reports:

[I]n the course of analyzing the data collected from 37 families — 36 mothers and one father, all of whom recorded up to 36 hours of audio in six days of study — researchers heard the sharp cracks and dull thuds of spanking, followed in some cases by minutes of crying. They’d inadvertently captured evidence of corporal punishment, as well as the tense moments before and the resolution after, leading researchers to believe they’d amassed the first-ever cache of real-time spanking data. [...]

The parents who recorded themselves represented a socioeconomic mix: a third each were low-income, middle-income and upper-middle-class or higher. Most were white; about a third were African-American.

Researchers broke down the data, detailing each spanking or slapping incident, what led up to it, what type of punishment was used and how much, how a child reacted immediately and then several minutes later.

“The idea is this data will provide a unique glimpse into what really goes on in families that hasn’t been available through traditional methods of self-report,” says Holden.

About a year ago, I got a request to talk about spanking on Racialicious, from the perspective of a black parent wondering why other black parents were so quick to put their hands on their children.

Renina has written about this in the broader context of policing masculinity with violence. She said:

In this video I just watched today a Black Uncle whoops his presumably 13 or 14 year old nephew with a belt for “Fake Thugging” on Facebook. He then forced the young man to put the video on Facebook. #triggerwarning.

I have long been reluctant to talk publicly about Black parents beating Black children, however, it needs to be done. Honestly, its one of the things that I have been scared to write about and I don’t scare easily.

bell hooks has said Black feminist’s lack of writing about how some Black parents, spank, whoop and beat their children is one of the ways in which Black Feminist have failed Black families. We analyze domination between men and women and Black folks and White folks and even global violence but we don’t closely analyze how parents dominate children.

Conversations around spanking, particularly in progressive spaces, take a very hard line around corporal punishment. Renee, of Womanist Musings, has written dozens of posts about why spanking is wrong. Some of the commenters on Jill’s post (somewhere back in the 100s) brought up differences in what is considered culturally acceptable. Most of Jill’s commenters came to an agreement dominating the thread – there is never, ever a reason to discipline your child physically. But most of these conversations assume certain things. That these are interactions solely between adult and child, and that generally, the household is in an atmosphere of peace. What isn’t raised is the reality of raising children in environments where random street violence or drug use is commonplace.

One of my favorite movies – we’re talking top 10 of all time here – is I Like It Like That, written and directed by Darnell Martin. There are a thousand and one reasons for why I love that film so much, but the scene where Chino (one of the protagonists) finds out his son has been dealing drugs and taking new clothes from the local drug dealer is one of them. The beginning of this has been removed due to copyright claims from Sony, but the action starts after Chino finds out that Lil’ Chino is dealing drugs, strips him of the shoes and jeans, and spanks him with a belt in the middle of the street. The sign Chino is holding Lil’ Chino up to is a memorial to his deceased brother, a cop who was killed by drug dealers.

Chino stops beating the kid who deals drugs (note – AFTER knocking the gun out of his hand) because he hears what the kid is saying. Through his tears, the kids is saying “he can’t hit me man – he’s not my father.”

Chino lets the kid go, and leans against the wall with his dead brother’s mural. He slams his fist against it – shame, rage, anger, frustration all play on his face. He walks away and the camera cuts to Lil’ Chino under the stairs, scared and remorseful, waiting for his mother.

This isn’t the end of the scene, but I want to stop here and talk about the fear and consequences in families struggling to raise their children against a backdrop of violence.

The assumption of peaceful environment probably makes sense. I grew up in a mostly peaceful area – you weren’t fighting for your life all the time, like my cousins had to. But at the same time, it was kind of unfathomable to me to not learn how to fight and defend yourself. I lived in DC around the time when they were warning parents to make sure your kids weren’t wearing brand name clothes (anyone else remember that?) because there were way too many crimes happening over Northface Jackets and Timberland boots. I couldn’t afford these things anyway, but wearing no brand names was a step to reduce the likelihood of violence happening to you, even if it didn’t reduce it completely.

So that’s one aspect of the question. Despite some parents desire to be peaceful, their children are still operating in a violent world. So even if you raise a home that is nonviolent, how do you keep violence away from your door? How do you teach your children to respond to a violent world? The idea that violence begets more violence is a true one – but at the same time, blocks and neighborhoods can be taken over by very small groups of determined and violent people. Suddenly, all the neighbors live in fear of a handful of people. That public spankfest Chino initiated in the video above would be really welcome in communities I know and remember, though some would probably cringe to hear that said aloud. But I think it’s important to reflect on the place that violence has in our lives, and ways in which we navigate its boundaries.

I’ve heard quite a few of the grown folks talk about gun violence by discussing the way fights used to work. A certain type of fight is prized above all others – the one on one show down kind of fight, just fists and stamina. The way they tell it, there was no need for gun violence since conflicts were resolved through fisticuffs. I don’t think reality was ever that neat or honorable. But earlier this year, I watched kids from a nearby high school gang up repeatedly on their classmates, 6-on-1, 8-on-1. Everyone in the neighborhood was concerned. On three different occasions, a child cut up my block, running for his life, pursued by an angry gang of classmates. Other times, the fights started a few blocks from school grounds. Each time, adults had to figure out how to intervene. We would all come out of our houses. Some neighbors took the initiative to call the police, which we all had mixed feelings about, but all of us together couldn’t have broken up a group of 30 or so kids. With smaller groups, a few of the adults would go out yelling. Sometimes I would come downstairs with my dog, who is a good visual deterrent, and who accidentally broke up a few of these when we were out on walks. But all spring, the violence kept increasing. Quite a bit of it made the news. I am not yet a parent, but I wonder about this often. How do I teach my child to exist in this world? And how do I teach them to defend themselves in environments like this?

But then, I need to flip the question around. For every child that is targeted by bullies, there are the children who are acting as the bullies. Or the young drug dealers. Or the young adults that got set in their ways and have grown up to be the drug dealers. So when you are raising a child, and they head down that path, I often wonder: what do you do when words don’t work?

I was raised by, with, and around black men. My father, uncles, cousins, grandfathers and their friends rarely ever disciplined us girl children – that was a task left to mothers and aunties. But the boys? The boys got in coming and going.

My cousin used to have to wake up at 7 AM on Saturday to cut the grass, and help do yard work. This was part of my father’s hopes to impart discipline, and he would often say things like “Real men take care of their responsibilities.” (This was probably a way to compensate for the fact that my cousin’s father was on and off drugs and in and out of jail for most of his life. It is very easy to start repeating destructive patterns.) I’ve overheard story after story from all of my grandfathers talking about their time in the drug game, why they got out, and why it isn’t worth it. I saw my uncles teaching them to play football, basketball, fishing – anything to keep them away from the streets of South East, Washington DC in the crack era and it’s aftermath.

So discipline wasn’t all physical. Large parts of it are modeling, intervention, appealing to reason. But sometimes, kids don’t want to hear it. And it’s one thing to ask an eight year old to heed what you say – yet another to ask a willful fifteen year old to do the same.

So what should parents do, when words fail and their children are on a collision course with the criminal justice system?

This problem becomes particularly necessary for communities in crisis. I wrote about NAACP’s report on Misplaced Priorities for the Root, noting:

In 1988 President George H.W. Bush created the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was elevated to the Cabinet level during the Clinton administration. The policies championed by ONDCP actually opened the floodgates for nonviolent offenders to become institutionalized, a trend that resulted in the war on drugs taking an outsize toll on black and Latino communities, as well as impoverished communities around the nation. “Misplaced Priorities” reveals:

While Americans of all races and ethnicities use illegal drugs at a rate proportionate to their total population representation, African Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses at 13 times the rate of their white counterparts. [...]

According to “Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population,” if African Americans and Latinos were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, today’s prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50 percent. [...]

There are a variety of reasons for racial disparities in the prison system — the NAACP cites disparate sentencing for crack- and powder-cocaine offenses and a greater focus of public spending on imprisonment than on subsidizing drug-addiction treatment. “Misplaced Priorities” also notes that low-income whites are starting to suffer also from the rise of incarceration culture; it is estimated that one in 10 low-income white males will also be incarcerated, some because of the rise of methamphetamine.

I am an adult now. Most of my friends (luckily) made it to adulthood with me. One was incarcerated. Most are now in the military, or working various jobs. Some have families. But it is always amazing to me how many of my black male and Latino male friends have had terrible, terrible interactions with police. Most of them were not doing anything in particular – when I was sixteen, my friend was harassed for sitting on a park bench with a discarded cup underneath it and was threatened with incarceration – he chose to end the issue by throwing the cup away, even though he did not place it there.

My other friends have drawn police interactions from speaking too loudly in public places; have been arrested over disputed traffic stops; have been dick checked* for drugs in their neighborhood since the officer claims they saw them throw drugs in the bushes after giving a friend dap. One of my friends was almost extradited to New York on someone else’s warrant for arrest. He was searched after running a stop sign, caught with a joint in the car (clearly, his fault), sent to lock up, tagged with the wrong name and social security number, spent 72 hours in jail begging everyone to believe him and to go check his ID in his wallet back at the precinct , hauled off to court anyway, and held until finally, some prosecutor decided to just run the check and found out he was not the person on his ID cuff.

And this doesn’t even start discussing all of the other things that happen. Women and transpeople in my neighborhood (many of the transkids are black teens) have also felt harassment from increased police presence and patrol. (This is why our neighbors has varying opinions on calling the police to intervene in the violence I referenced earlier.) DC also has a curfew in place for teens, meaning anyone who looks young on the street after midnight can be stopped and asked for identification. (This has happened to Renina.) We just have so many more encounters, and with every encounter is the chance that your life will alter forever. (R.I.P Oscar Grant.)

So the question for parents in these environments is a terrifying one – how do I prevent my child from being caught up in these huge systems, being caught up in this life that will ruin them?

To some, spanking is a cut and dry issue. Some will never, ever believe its necessary. Some people will never, ever believe you can raise a decent person without spanking. But its that scene from I Like It Like That that cuts the closest to how I understand why some parents choose hit their kids. Sometimes, you need your child to fear you because they cannot understand the consequences of the life they are choosing. I watched this happen time and time again, particularly with the men I knew. There was discipline, there were beatings, but then there were also those beatings with the undercurrent of fear behind them. Fear that you are going to lose control of your child to this other, evil, more seductive world. Fear that despite your best efforts as a parent, your child is heading down a path that leads to prison, drug addiction, or life as a drug dealer or street thug.

I know parents who regret not taking harder lines with their children. They watched them spend decades on drugs. They watched them screw up their own kids, throwing multiple lives down the toilet. They wonder where they went wrong, if they could have changed something.

I don’t think these parents are thinking “I should have kicked his ass when I caught him with weed back in the 8th grade.” But I have watched the desperation in the eyes of those who see that the streets are more alluring than the boring ass life of working hard at school and finding a job, and I can understand why people would turn to violence when words and logic aren’t enough.

I’m not saying I condone physical punishment. But I am not yet a parent, and I’ve never been confronted with those kinds of issues. I still carry scars of a parent’s abuse from my childhood, and spent the last decade on my own learning not to hit people. Not to solve problems with violence. Forcing myself to swallow all the things I want to do and say, because I’ve learned that a lot of what I internalized as normal is wrong.

However.

If the choice ever came down to putting my hands on my child because I am fighting for their life? I’d probably do the same thing I’ve seen all my relatives do.

I’m ultimately not inclined to use any kind of violence other people these days. I know how seductive and easy that starts to feel, the exertion of control through physical means. And I know how easy it is to just allow yourself to react and react and react. So my solution is not to do it at all.

But I’m not going to take some Leave It to Beaver style moral high ground. I’m going to be raising black children, and I need to make sure they survive. If my child is on the path to start having run ins with the police, they’re going to have to go through me first.

Because unlike the criminal justice system, I care.

The problem, though, still persists. Violence is (at best) a temporary solution, and it carries with it a very high potential to slide over from discipline to abuse. So remember, the clip above? Lil’ Chino’s auntie, Alexis, is the one who takes the child and begs Chino to stop hitting him. She’s the one trying to reconnect Lil Chino with his mother. And she’s the one trying to advocate for not hurting the child – based on her own history as growing up with a father who didn’t want to accept that his little boy wanted to be a girl.

The story of Alexis is an interesting counterbalance to Lil’ Chino’s. Later in the story, after Alexis fights with Lisette about rejecting her son, she decides to confront her mother and father about her life, and how she has chosen to live as a woman. Her father comes to the door – and delivers a punch in the eye. Lisette is horrified – but Alexis points out that she was treating Lil’ Chino in the same way their parents treated them. To the viewer of I Like It Like That, stories of violence are told in complicated, complex ways. Should Chino have spanked his child on the street? Should Chino have spanked a child not his own, who was luring other kids to deal in the drug trade? In some ways, it was interesting to see how quickly that tough-kid facade fell away when Chino didn’t back down – which ruined his reputation with the other neighborhood kids. But by the same token, if we can accept that violence, the violence involved in trying to “save” a child, then how can we condemn Alexis’s father for trying to beat his queerness out of him? And if we say we accept no violence at all, how should Chino have solved the drug dealing problem? And, would he have been able to solve the situation without losing his son or becoming a casualty, like his brother?

Violence is a way of asserting power. Violence is also a method of communication. And this is what makes this conversation around spanking so complicated. The questions around spanking mirror the questions we have around use of force – and how we cope (both on a personal and a societal level) with the messiness of life.

–

*Edited to Add: A dick check is when police check your genital area for drugs. Occasionally, officers will do this in public, as a power thing or a humiliation tactic. It is normally done after someone is incarcerated, similar to the cavity check. Yes, the friend this happened to filed a complaint. No, nothing came of it.

Thanks to the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress (APAP) for the heads-up: you can now watch the seminal 2009 documentary Vincent Who? for free online at vincentwhomovie.com through the end of July.

The film will also be screened live on the following dates:

Friday, July 8, 8 p.m.: Renaissance Hollywood Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif. Salon 5/6. Free screening as part of the inaugural Japanese American Citizens League conference.
Wednesday, August 3: Queens College, Queens, NY. Details TBA.
Saturday, August 13, 10 a.m.: Detroit Chinese Community Center, Detroit, Mich.. Free screening as part of the Asian American Journalists Association national convention.

Of course, we also encourage you to buy the DVD. If you’re not familiar with the film or the story behind it, here’s the details:

VINCENT WHO? (2009, 40 min): In 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit by two white autoworkers at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments. The culprits received a $3,000 fine and no jail time. Outraged by this injustice, Asian Americans around the country galvanized for the first time to form a pan-Asian identity and civil rights movement.

VINCENT WHO? explores this important legacy through interviews with the key players at the time as well as a new generation of activists impacted by Vincent Chin. It also looks at the case in relation to the larger narrative of Asian American history, in such events as Chinese Exclusion, Japanese Internment, the 1992 L.A. Riots, anti-Asian hate crimes, and post-9/11 racism. Ultimately, the film asks how far Asian Americans have come since the Chin case, and how far we have yet to go.

By Guest Contributor Kristen Wright

On June 15, the Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks 4-0 in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. And on the previous Sunday, June 12, the Dallas Mavericks beat the Miami Heat 105-95 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals to secure the franchise’s first championship. The media has celebrated both victories as a triumph of grit and hard work over finesse and pure talent.

The streets of Vancouver may have erupted after the Canucks’ loss, but the team’s most potent offensive weapons – twin brothers Daniel and Henrik Sedin – were relatively silent throughout the Finals. The twins combined for two goals, three assists, and a minus- 4 rating during the Finals, but multiple writers came to their defense when commentator Mike Milbury referred to them as ‘Thelma and Louise’ (an inaccurate and offensive reference to their poor play) during a broadcast. Miami Heat superstar LeBron James has his defenders, but much more ink has been spilled over his shortcomings. While Dallas role players like JJ Barea and DeShawn Stevenson played over their heads, LeBron failed to live up to his hype.

Drafted 1st overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2003 NBA Draft, James was supposed to be the savior of a struggling franchise. He initially appeared to deliver on this promise, leading the Cavaliers to the playoffs every season between 2006 and 2010. The Cavs even made the 2007 NBA Finals, where they were swept by the San Antonio Spurs.

Last summer, LeBron became a free agent. After being courted by numerous NBA organizations, he announced his decision to join the Miami Heat during an hour-long special entitled The Decision. The program was widely ridiculed as a lengthy and unnecessary spectacle, and basketball greats like Michael Jordan argued that it was inappropriate for LeBron to join a team of rivals in an attempt to chase a championship.

But other criticism of James has come from the hockey world. Sam Fels, a Chicago Blackhawks blogger, wrote a piece on his blog Second City Hockey entitled “Viewing LeBron” (on NBC Chicago later cross-posted the piece under the title “What Hockey Fans Think of LeBron”). In his piece, Fels argued that hockey fans are turned off by the “bombast” of LeBron’s free agency and of the basketball culture in general.

Fels’ argument is not completely without merit. Many people believed that LeBron should have committed to Cleveland for a few more years. And if the team still did not appear to be championship material by the end of this period, he could have left with a clear conscience. I believe that if he was set upon leaving the Cavaliers organization, he could have informed them earlier (instead of minutes before the ESPN special aired), and avoided the televised special entirely.

It is important to emphasize that LeBron’s mishandling of his free agency was a personal mistake. Yet, Fels believes that the “bombast” of LeBron’s free agency is endemic to the culture of the NBA. The scandal surrounding LeBron’s free agency could be compared to the fracas surrounding Wayne Gretzky’s 1988 trade from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings, or Bruins legend Ray Bourque’s 2000 trade to the Colorado Avalanche. Yet, the reputations of Gretzky and Bourque have remained intact. This is partly because the trades of Gretzky and Bourque were engineered by third parties. Gretzky had no idea that he was about to be traded, and during his tearful press conference, he was clearly reluctant to leave the Oilers. Bourque had expressed a desire to win a Cup before he retired, but Boston’s GM set up the trade with the Avs without consulting his star player. And in his piece, Fels argues that there is nothing wrong with leaving a cherished team to pursue a championship; LeBron and his fellow NBA players just lack tact.

Fels argues that some hockey fans’ disdain for the “bombast” of basketball comes with an “undercurrent of racism,” but for most fans, it is the ‘me first’ ethos of the NBA – its emphasis on becoming ‘The Man’ – and not its black players, that is a turnoff. Hockey is a team sport, not a sport that is intertwined with hip-hop culture and the “glorification of oneself.”

I believe that the NBA sells the game by marketing its stars, but any team sport requires contributions on all levels. Dirk Nowitzki may be the star of the Dallas Mavericks, but when he struggled to hit a 3 during the first half of Game 6, Jason Terry’s scoring touch bailed the team out. Jason Kidd is not a flashy player, but he is one of the NBA’s finest point guards. And Brian Cardinal, a career role player, used his body to foul Heat players at crucial moments.

And despite his self-expressed appreciation for ‘hip-hop culture,’ Fels’ analysis of basketball culture is limited. The “bombast” that he identifies in basketball players is often a form of self-expression. For young, disenfranchised black men (and women), the basketball court (or blacktop/parking lot) is a place to come alive, a place to vent frustration, and a place to learn about life. For many of these young people, the court is a place where they can be irreverent, and where they can show flash and swagger without fear of censorship. The black socks, bald heads, baggy shorts, and courtside celebrations of the University of Michigan’s ‘Fab Five’ (Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson, Jalen Rose, and Jimmy King) were eviscerated in angry, racist letters by ignorant alumni (go to the 3-minute mark of the linked video). What these alumni failed to realize was that these young black men were injecting a new freshness into an old game.

Ice Cube reflected upon the cultural impact of the Fab Five in the titular ESPN documentary, arguing that “in the cultural sense, the [Fab Five] represented the homeboys and the homegirls.” Their undiluted boldness was appropriate for an era characterized by the Watts riot, the Rodney King beating, the twilight of crack epidemic, and, of course, NWA. And at the time, the Fab Five harbored a special disdain for Duke and its star forward, Grant Hill. Jalen Rose generated a huge amount of controversy when he called Hill an “Uncle Tom” in the documentary. Hill was also a young black man, but he was the product of a wealthy, two-parent home, and attended an elite, private university with a reputation for recruiting clean-cut players. The tension between Rose and Hill ignited a conversation about class dynamics within the black community, but it also showed that there are multiple ways to be a black basketball player, and that generalizations and stereotypes are fruitless.

There are many criticisms that could be leveled at the NBA, but Fels’ essay does not make those criticisms. He uses evasive language to express his discontent with the NBA, but the disdain that he feels for NBA players is the same disdain that the Michigan alumni felt for the Fab Five. The sentiments expressed in Fels’ essay are culturally racist; that is, they operate under the assumption that black NBA culture is fundamentally flawed, and inferior to the predominately white NHL culture.

The cultural landscape surrounding hockey is very different. NHL fans celebrate the grittiness of their athletes. Hockey players are expected to play through severe pain, and in the playoffs, injuries are not disclosed until the end of a series. NHLers are supposed to be polite to reporters and fans, and controversy is avoided at all costs. There aren’t supposed to be any characters in the National Hockey League (i.e., Ron Artest). The reality doesn’t always fit the image, but regardless, it is embraced wholeheartedly.

On average, hockey fans are wealthier than NBA, MLB, or NFL fans (with an average yearly income of $104,000), are more educated than fans of other sports (68% of hockey fans have attended college), and are more likely to be fully employed than other fans (64% hold full-time jobs). 2010 data from SportsBusiness Journal Daily shows than NHL fans are more likely to be male (63.6%) and white (86%) than MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, or NASCAR fans. And these fans gravitate towards athletes that display the white, male upper-middle class propriety that they probably attempt to replicate in their own lives.

It is worth noting that there are prominent blacks in the NHL. Biracial Canadian Jarome Iginla is the captain of the Calgary Flames, and has won every major hockey award except the Stanley Cup. Iggy, as he is called, is beloved for his on-ice grittiness and off-ice generosity. Canadians PK Subban and Evander Kane are promising young talents. All three men are well-respected, though Subban has received heavy criticism for being “a pest” on the ice (many have also wondered if the controversy surrounding Subban is racially motivated).

When I connected hockey fans’ dislike of basketball to racism in the comments section of Fels’ piece, I was met with immediate backlash. Some commenters did acknowledge that hockey fans’ animosity towards basketball could be connected to racism, but they expressed similar disdain for NASCAR and white ‘Southern culture’ (which varies from state to state), or expressed frustration with what they perceived as poor NBA officiating.

Another commenter believed injecting race into the conversation was “insulting,” and he was rewarded for calling me out by another individual who believed that people are afraid of sticking up for their “actual thoughts because they are afraid of being called racist.”

Others argued that hockey players are more respected by their communities than NBA players, and that players would “knock [each other] down a peg” if they displayed the selfishness of NBA players. The same man said that one could “call him racist, envious, or whatever,” but that he “could not get behind the theatrics of the NBA and its players.”

Similarly, another commenter said that NBA culture does transfer “the worst traits of American society like no other sport does.” The Vancouver riots – both the 1994 and 2011 editions – incurred over a million Canadian dollars in property damage, and showed us that people of all races can embody the ‘worst traits of American society.’ But the discourse surrounding the riots has focused on the cleanup efforts. There have been no sweeping calls to change hockey culture, and no one would suggest that the population of Vancouver is fundamentally depraved. Some rioters have been demonized on social media sites – incriminating Facebook statuses have been reposted and ridiculed on Tumblr – but public disdain has focused on the rioters’ deeds and not their racial identities.

The racially-charged comments about Fels’ piece continued. One commenter argued that he couldn’t be racist because some of his favorite Chicago athletes were black. And my favorite quote expressed frustration with NBA players who were “ensconced in their own bubbles of luxurious isolation, replete with a retinue of hangers-on and mooches from their younger days.” This particular commenter said that NBA players were incapable of showing generosity like Washington Capitals forward Brooks Laich, who stopped to change a woman’s tire after being eliminated from the playoffs last year. (Laich is also a prized UFA, and the embodiment of the NHL aesthetic).

I don’t know of any NBA players who have pulled over to change a fan’s flat tire, but retired Alonzo Mourning’s foundation, AM Charities, is one of the best-run NBA player organizations. Under the auspices of AM Charities, Mourning has raised funds to build the Overtown Youth Center in Miami and sponsors the Honey Shine mentoring program for girls. AM Charities’ flagship event is “Zo’s Summer Groove,” a five-day event – in its 15th year – that has raised over 7 million dollars for youth programs in South Florida. Many current and former NBA stars, including Mourning’s former Heat teammates Dwyane Wade and Gary Payton, have participated in the event. And Mourning’s work has also inspired younger NBA players like LeBron James and Chris Paul to do charity work.

However, none of the Second City Hockey commenters mentioned NBA players’ charity work during their critiques of the league. They continued to insist that hockey fans are not racist, and argued that any discussion of race and sports was only meant to “ratchet up angst” by people who did not have a strong argument to make. Yet, their comments tell another story. There is nothing wrong with disliking basketball, but the commenters used code words (and sometimes didn’t use them) to mask contempt for black NBA players. If Sam Fels and the SCH commenters can express admiration for the gritty, ‘team-oriented’ ball of the Dallas Mavericks, they can surely acknowledge the positive actions of other black basketball players. And maybe, they’ll see that LeBron isn’t such a bad guy.

Top image courtesy of Barstool Sports

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

Joanna Shawana is Anishnawbe from Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve.  Author of Voice of an Eagle, Shawana makes and sells Aboriginal crafts and works at a women’s shelter. Her poetry shows us all that there is beauty beyond abuse. Voice of an Eagle is a collection of poems and aboriginal teachings that walk us through her struggle of abuse and show us that no matter how dark the situation looks that we can break free and be with the “eagle’ to find our voice and say NO MORE! Joanna plans on writing another book explaining the signs of abuse and how both men and women can break free from the chains holding them.

BCP: Why poetry?

JS: Poetry is the only way I can express my feelings, my thoughts, what I see, and what I hear.  And when I write, it is another form of releasing; this is the only way that I can  express. The more I write and I have never really re-read what I have written till months later, this is when I started putting my writing in a form of poetry.

BCP: What is your process?

JS: Process…just sit and write. No, really, at times it just comes to me and I just start writing till all the thoughts and feelings are gone. Other times, the city is so busy, I’m unable to think, unable to write when something comes to me and at those times, I need to be around the water, around nature, so that I can concentrate on what I need to write.

BCP: How long have you been writing poetry?

JS: The first time I started writing was in the late 80’s and back then I never kept anything that I had written. I would tear up my writings, burn them and the reason for this because I did not want anyone know how I was feeling, what my thoughts were. I kept all these feeling deep within. But, the poetry writing did not start coming to me till the mid 1990’s.

BCP: Who are your influences?

JS: My influences? I would say my father (who passed away in 1993) and my children. My father was a believer in the church and by that time, I had started to learn my culture and for myself I was not much of church person.

One day, a gift was given to my father for donating game meat (moose, deer and fish) to Anishnawbe Health Toronto to help feed the homeless that were living on the streets but, also for the memories that took place. He never asked for money for this game meat, so in return he received a gift, this was given to me to hand to him. This gift was a book, a book which was called Wisdom of the Elders; man I kept this book for a few months, too afraid, too scared to give him the book, knowing how he felt in the life I have chosen to follow and which he did not believe in. But, I knew I had to give him this book, it took a lot of courage to hand him this book.

A month later, I went back home to the rez to visit him. As I walked in he had two books with him, one was the black bible and the other Wisdom of the Elders. I sat quietly waiting for the lecture from him, but the words that I heard that day was, “This is what I have been trying to say” (putting his hand on the book of the Wisdom of the Elders) but I had been following this one (hand on the other book, the Bible) When I heard those words, I felt some relief coming over me. When I heard those words, I knew he was fine in what life I had decided to follow. Through our visit, he showed me what he had written based on his own teachings he had learned throughout his life, based on what he had read. He wrote, “These Are Our Responsibilities”, and this is what he believed in and tried to teach his children and grandchildren.

A month later after I had the visit with him, he passed away. For me this meant, he had come to terms within himself, what he believed in. And this is when I started writing.

Other influences are my children; they have always encouraged me to start putting a book of poetry together. Till this day, they still give me that support and encouragement.

BCP: Why did you title your book Voice of an Eagle?

JS: Coming up with a title for this book was hard, a lot of thinking things through. In my early years of writing, putting all my poems together sharing them with people in my life. I called it Heart of Gold. The Heart of Gold was based on the person whom I have become. A woman that shares what comes from her heart. After sharing the writings with the publisher, and as we went through all the poems, she asked me to find another title for the book based on a voice of a First Nations woman, and me being from the Eagle Clan. With those two combined together, I decided on Voice of an Eagle.

BCP: Your poetry is emotional, honest, and stimulating. What do you try to convey to your readers?

JS: I guess, what I am trying to say is, “Don’t be afraid to speak up, don’t be afraid to share your experiences in what you have been through, only by sharing, it’s one way of letting go the negativity that one is feeling”. There as too many women, men and children that keep holding on to their negativity and this negativity only destroys who we are. But, we need to keep in mind by letting the negativity go, we replace it with the positive things that we experience in life.

BCP: Your spirituality plays a large part in your writing. Is that intentional or does it just happen that way?

JS: Native Spirituality is not what I grew up with. I remember the first time when I heard spirituality, cultural teachings, I was so against it, I did not want to learn. As time passed learning the culture, the teachings, it grew in me and now it will always be with me.

When I start writing (poems) the spirituality just comes out, there is no intention, the poems just come the way they do.

BCP: Do you see poetry as a form of prayer?

JS: There are a couple of poems, I can say “yes” too. The one that I can share is the one that I wrote when I went on a hunting trip with my brothers and my father. This is the same year that my father passed away. On this hunting trip, I was too sick to travel with them throughout the weekend. I stayed in a tent while the others went out. As I was going through my sickness, I prayed to Creator to give strength, and as I was going through this, I heard nature around me, heard water rippling, the birds sing and I gave thanks to Creator for what I heard and experienced. This poem is called I Offer. This poem was also used in a documentary back in 2008 and this documentary is called Living through Dying.

BCP: Is poetry a form of healing for you?

JS: All my writings are healing for me. As I mentioned earlier, I did not have anyone to talk to about my thoughts and feelings, the struggles that I had encountered throughout my life. The other part of me is, I am a very shy individual, I get nervous when I start sharing with people that I meet. So, when I am writing I don’t have that shyness within myself, I don’t get nervous because there is no one there to judge me in what I am writing about. The only person that would judge me is “myself”. So, I am free to express myself the way I want to in my writings.

BCP: Do you share your poetry with your clients at the shelter you work at?

JS: I like to share a bit of this work. I remember the first time I did my placement work with Nellie’s, I felt I was out of place and being a First Nation’s woman, I really felt odd. The women that I worked with had more experience in this field of work and it did not help much being “shy” and not outspoken. Years went by and each month I was getting comfortable working in this field, the women were very encouraging, gave me confidence within myself that I can do the work.

The first time I shared my poems and writing was in a group that a co-worker and myself started. This support group (Violence Against Women) would help the women to have a better understanding, gain knowledge, feel confident within themselves to have a voice. Each week we would have different topics and women would share their stories and this is when I would share one of the poems that would help the women. Each time I did this, it helped them to be a bit stronger within themselves.

So, yes I do share my poems with the women that I work with. When I work with women, I need to keep reminding myself to be compassionate, to be understanding, to be respectful and listen to the women when they share their stories of abuse. I work with them at their level, I don’t talk to them, I don’t feel superior or have that authoritarian way of speaking to them. I bring myself to where they are because I have been in their shoes before. Working with the women in the past 10 years has been challenging. I learn from my co-workers and the women that come through the doors.

I would like to share this poem which came to me as I was sitting in a workshop:

All I Ask

My fellow woman

My sister’s

I am weak

I am hurt

All I ask of you is

Please

Hear what I have to say

Hear what I have to share

I am not here

To be looked down

I am not here

To be judged

For what had happen to me

All I ask of you is

Please

Hear what I have to share

My fellow women

My sister’s

Listen to my words

See the pain in my eyes

All I ask of you is

Please

Hear what I have to say

Hear what I have to share

Help me

To get through my pain

Help me

To understand what is happening

Help me

To be a better person

So please

Hear what I have to say

Hear what I have to share

©Joanna Shawana 2005

BCP: A lot of your poems are personal. Was it a hard decision to have them published where everyone can read them?

JS: One never thinks of sharing their personal work with the world and that was on my mind when I started writing poems; I only shared with people who were close to me like my children and my family. And yes, it was a hard decision to get them published. Even at the end of it all, it was still hard receiving the book after it was published. All I thought to myself was, “Oh God, now everyone is going to find out what I have been through in life. They are going to judge me for the wrong doings, the struggles, the obstacles and the abuse I had encountered later in life.” But, through my own healing in ceremonies, counseling, the teachings from the Elders/Healers, I have learned that part of healing oneself is to be able to share stories (poems) through any form. As my father use to say “Don’t judge me for who I was, judge me for who I am today.” This saying will always stays with me. Now, I feel comfortable sharing this with people.

BCP: Many of the poems in your book are dedicated to family members. What did your family think of the book?

JS: My family is my children, my grandchildren, brothers and sisters most of all my parents and grandparents. Family is very important to me, they will always be. It does not matter what we go through in life, whether we have misunderstandings, disagreements, we will always be a family and learn to take things in value in what we share in each others life, and not to look things as a lecture.

Each poem is dedicated to my children, grandson’s, brothers, sisters and my parents. They were excited after all the encouragement they have given me to start sharing my poems. The only regret I have is that my father did not have a chance to see this happening, but I know deep within he is watching.

BCP: What are you working on now?

JS: Right now, I have “writers block” as they call it. All my writings, I have put aside waiting for the momentum to start writing again. I do have enough to put a second book together. One other wish I have is to be able to reprint Voice of an Eagle and this will eventually happen; maybe when I win a lotto.

I would like to share this for the ones that know me: my second book is based on a little girl growing up in her community living with her family. The little girl writes about what she had witnessed, what she had heard while growing up, and wonders what will the people think. So for now, my writing is on hold.

At the moment, I do have a project happening. For me another form of healing is to be creative, so I do a lot of custom jewelry, one of kind, unique work with porcupine quills. When I do this work, it helps me to release any stress that I have encountered, to let go of any negativity that I feel, and I put a lot of positive work into my jewelry and I’m proud what I have accomplished.

Right now, my daughter Joni is developing a website for my work, where people can view the work that I do and they can also place an order. Joni helps me a lot in the work that I do, there are many nights and days that she will sit by the computer make business cards, bookmarks, and many other things. And I am totally grateful for all her work.

BCP: When do you expect to have your second collection of poetry published?

JS: Second book? I am hoping in the next few years. In this book, I will be sharing poetry that my family members have written which they have already sent to me years ago.

Again, this is going to be another hard decision to make, to be able to share my stories through poetry.

BCP: What do you want the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities to get from reading your poems?

JS: Honestly, I have not really thought about that. I guess what I can say is, “To all the ones who are afraid to speak, who don’t have a voice, don’t be afraid to speak.  You are not only helping yourself, you are helping others to feel confident within themselves to speak. We have been silenced from people that we love, from the people in our society, people we have trusted in our lives, let us not hide anymore, let us speak up and say that is enough.”

BCP: It’s Aboriginal History Month now. What does that mean to you?

JS: What it means to me is to be proud of who we are as First Nations Peoples. It’s a time to celebrate and to honour our heritage. June 21 was declared National Aboriginal Day, but we as First Nations, I believe we celebrate our heritage every day.

BCP: What advice do you have for other Aboriginal writers out there who are having difficulties with their writing, or who have yet to see their work in print, or who are afraid to perform their poetry?

JS: The only thing that I can say is, don’t give up, even though we have come up with a “writer’s block” just keep on trying. When we try to make a mark in the world we live in, it’s the hardest thing to do, it takes patience and commitment. Writing is a voice, a voice that calls us from our dreams, telling us to open our eyes, to open our hearts and let our voice be heard.

Most of all, the gift that we were given by Creator is a beautiful gift, a gift of writing and through these writings, we encourage ourselves to continue to do the work that we need to do, and by doing this we are encourage others too.

The ones who afraid to speak, to voice themselves, or afraid to perform their poetry, we are afraid that our words will not be heard or accepted. So we feel its best that we live in silence rather than voicing out. We should never be afraid to sit and think and write our thoughts down, we should not be afraid to put our work out there for the people to read and see. The best solution or advice is, don’t be afraid of life, believe that life is worth living, and that we can share our own experiences in life so that others can gain the strength to let go of fear. So it is better to speak.

On this note, I will need to remind myself not to be afraid.