By Arturo R. García

Last fall, MSNBC told Pat Buchanan to go have fun selling his new book. Today, it looks more likely the network changed the locks behind him.

The network’s president, Phil Griffin, was content to leave Buchanan twisting in the wind this past weekend, when he told The New York Times,“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.”

Of course, it’s been apparent for years that Buchanan’s views weren’t “appropriate” for any place outside of the right-wing fringe. But despite what Griffin said, his latest book might not have been the only factor in his apparent dismissal.

It’s not like Griffin had any room to be surprised by Buchanan’s latest round of printed bile, called Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Really, it’s the same tune he’s been singing since the 1970s. Because not much separates this speech:

There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.

From this passage in Superpower:

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.

At every turn, Buchanan has blamed the same groups of people – immigrants, LGBT people, Jewish people – for, in his mind, sullying his idea of what America should be. During his political career, the press at large gave giving Buchanan a wide berth, according to Slate:

Since Buchanan first ran for president in 1992, the press has largely treated him as a legitimate candidate rather than an extremist canker on American politics, á la David Duke or Louis Farrakhan. Part of the explanation for this is that he’s one of us. Though few journalists have any sympathy for Buchanan’s views, some find it hard to reconcile evidence of his bigotry with the friendly guy they know. For those covering his campaigns, there are other disincentives. Once you brand him an anti-Semite, a racist, and a fascist, it’s not much fun riding around New Hampshire with him in a minivan. What’s more, there is a dimension of self-conscious theatricality to Buchanan’s performances that makes his views easier to dismiss. He’ll uncork a zinger about not buying any more chopsticks until the Chinese quit dumping cheap imports, and then cackle at his no-no. You can write this kind of thing off as just Buchanan tomfooling around and building his brand for TV, rather than dyed-in-the-wool bigotry.

And that column was written in 1999, three years before MSNBC and Griffin gave him a national platform, where he would go on to claim that America “has been a country built, basically, by white folks;” that “only white men” died in the Battle of Gettysburg; and so on.

So what changed? According to an InsideCableNews column at Mediaite, it sure wasn’t Buchanan – it was the platform around him:

On the other hand, MSNBC has changed. It openly courts Progressive views and news. It puts out job ads asking for candidates with a progressive news background. Its pundit host class is all progressive and the network lets them show up en masse at the White House for off the record get togethers. The network is openly and aggressively courting the African American viewing audience so much so that it now notes how big it is in African American viewership in its releases.

Add all these things together and you now have a scenario where MSNBC, which used to be able to handle a Pat Buchanan and his intransigent controversial views, can no longer afford to do so without alienating core constituencies it covets.

The theory makes more sense now than it would have a few years ago: even after Keith Olbermann’s acrimonious departure, MSNBC has rebuilt a good portion of its’ talk show brand around Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Chris Hayes, and has added Melissa Harris-Perry, even if it keeps Joe Scarborough around in the morning.

Unfortunately, the nature of cable punditry virtually guarantees that even if Buchanan gets tossed on his duff by MSNBC, some other network will scoop him up and tout him as being “hard-hitting” or whatever the euphemism du jour is for reactionary bigotry. But even if this respite is brief, hopefully it leads to something better for his (apparently) former employers.

• Top image courtesy of Crooks & Liars
• For a more thorough collection of Buchanan’s views over the years, please visit Media Matters

Received word through social media that civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, best known for being one of the few people to openly defy the government’s unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has died. He was 93.

Hirabayashi was arrested, convicted and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the Supreme Court (Hirabayashi vs. United States) — the first challenge to Executive Order 9066. The Court ruled against him, 9-0. However, his wartime convictions were successfully overturned forty years later.

Rest in peace. Here’s the Facebook post from Mr. Hirabayashi’s son, Jay Hirabayashi, announcing his passing:

My Dad, Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who was ninety-three, passed away early this morning. He was an American hero besides being a great father who taught me about the values of honesty, integrity, and justice. My Mother, Esther Hirabayashi, who was eighty-seven, also passed away this morning about ten hours later. She was a beautiful, intelligent, generous soul. Although my parents were divorced, they somehow chose to leave us on the same day. I am missing them a lot right now.

Here’s a good summary of Hirabayashi’s landmark case:

During World War II, Gordon Hirabayashi was a 24-year-old senior at the University of Washington – an American citizen by birth – when, as acts of civil disobedience, he defied a curfew imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry and refused to comply with military orders forcing Japanese Americans to leave the West Coast into concentration camps. He appealed his convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in one of the most infamous cases in American history, held that the curfew order was justified by military necessity and was, therefore, constitutional. A year and a half later, in Korematsu v. United States, the Court relied wholly on its decision in Hirabayashi to uphold the constitutionality of the mass removal of Japanese Americans.

Forty years later, in 1983, represented by a remarkable and dedicated team of lawyers, Mr. Hirabayashi reopened his case, filing a petition for writ of error coram nobis in Seattle, Washington, seeking vacation of his wartime convictions on the ground that the government, during World War II, had suppressed, altered, and destroyed material evidence relevant to the issue of military necessity. In 1986, the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion authored by Judge Mary Schroeder, vacated both Mr. Hirabayashi’s curfew and exclusion convictions on proof of the allegations of governmental misconduct.
Hirabayashi v. United States, 828 F.2d 591 (9th Cir. 1987).

Next month, the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality will host a major conference to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Ninth Circuit opinion in the Hirabayashi v. United States coram nobis case. It’s happening February 11 at Seattle University. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, and to register, go here.

UPDATE: Here’s a statement on Gordon Hirabayashi’s passing from the Korematsu Institute and the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice: Fred T. Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education and the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice Remember Civil Rights Leader Gordon Hirabayashi.

There will be a memorial service for Gordon Hirabayashi this Friday, January 6 in Edmonton, Alberta:

Quaker Memorial Meeting for Worship
1:00pm Friday, January 6, 2012
Edmonton Japanese Community Association
6750 88 Street Northwest Edmonton, AB T6E 5H6
(780) 466-8166

In lieu of flowers for Gordon Hirabayashi, donations can be made to:

1. The CapitalCare Lynwood, where Gordon Hirabayashi was cared for in the last three years of his life.
2. The Gordon K. Hirabayashi Scholarship Fund within the Dept. of Sociology at the University of Alberta.
3. The Gordon K. Hirabayashi Endowment Fund at the University of Washington.

In lieu of flowers for Esther Hirabayashi, donations may be made to the Canadian Association of Medical Teams Abroad, c/o 103 Laurier Drive, Edmonton, AB, Canada T5R 5P6.

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)

“I remember your grandfather leaving the house in blackface to perform at the local Jewish community center,” my mom told me. “They just didn’t know what it meant back then,” she explained, “not until after WW II.” As an activist involved in contemporary solidarity work across racial lines, I was shocked to discover this racist history in my near past. As an Ashkenazi Jew* (of European descent) whose grandparents immigrated to the US around the turn of the century, I don’t always see myself implicated in the American legacy of slavery, but I was forced to reconcile the fond memories of my jovial grandfather with this haunting image of him performing racial minstrelsy. Trying to make sense of this image, I began researching the history of Jewish blackface between WWI and WWII and was surprised to discover a connection between my current activism and this history of blackface: When we are not rooted in our Jewish identities, we risk stereotyping, appropriating, and over-identifying with other cultures.

To understand the complicated history of alliance, disconnection, and overlap between Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans in between the world wars, I turned to Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, which considers how Jews negotiated competing claims on their identities and Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, which looks more specifically at the role of blackface in Americanizing Jews. As European Jewish immigrants arrived in the US, their presence intersected with the dominant black/white system of racial relations in various ways. At different times, Jews and African Americans were linked tightly together in American consciousness as evidenced by the case of Leo Frank (1913-1915), which sets the stage for Jewish-Black relations in between the wars. A Jewish factory manager in Georgia, Frank was accused of raping and murdering a white girl who worked in his factory. Frank was found guilty (in spite of flimsy evidence) and sentenced to death, but the Governor commuted his sentence to life in prison. A journalist warned in a headline: “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing we give to Negro rapists” (Goldstein 43). Frank was then kidnapped from prison and lynched by a white mob.

In the wake of the Frank trial, Jews who followed the case became “increasingly sensitized both to the danger of comparing blacks and Jews and the possibilities of deflecting anti-Semitism by emphasizing their whiteness” (Goldstein 65). During the trial, Frank’s legal team repeatedly emphasized Frank’s whiteness by downplaying his Jewishness and tried to shift the blame onto a black janitor who was also implicated in the murder. Even as they tried to underscore their whiteness in this time between the wars, Jews were being held responsible for a variety of issues that troubled Americans including communism, immigration, and the rising tide of war in the 1930’s. Articles about “The Jewish Problem” proliferated in the press, and quotas and restrictions were enacted to limit the number of Jews allowed into universities, clubs, and neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants had a contradictory relationship to African Americans. On the one hand, identification with whiteness allowed Jews to experience “what it was like not to be the focus of national hostility and resentment” as they were in Europe (Goldstein 145). On the other hand, Jews identified with the suffering of African Americans and continued to display empathy for them. The most assertive statements of identification with African Americans in the US occurred in the Yiddish press where non-Jewish readers could not chance upon them. The Yiddish press roundly condemned segregation and racism by comparing race riots against African Americans to the pogroms against Jews in Europe. At the same time, the Yiddish press read Jewish blackface solely as a means of identification by saying about that Jews “knew how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history” (Goldstein 154).

Blacking Out Jewish Identity in The Jazz Singer

In Blackface, White Noise, Rogin discusses how Jewish blackface plays out in The Jazz Singer, one of the first “talkie” films, which came out in 1927 and starred a Jewish actor, Al Jolson, whose life parallels that of the protagonist in the film. The film’s central character, Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a cantor at their synagogue on Manhattan’s lower East Side. Jakie Rabinowitz, however, wants to sing jazz, which enrages his father, who, in turn, disowns him. (Al Jolson, also the son of a cantor, turned his back on tradition by performing in theater and film). After running away from home, Jakie changes his name to Jack Robin, finds himself a Christian girlfriend, and becomes a singing success on the stage, often performing in blackface. When his father is dying, Jack is called to take his place to sing Kol Nidre, a solemn song performed on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days. Forgoing an opening night appearance on the stage, Jack takes his father’s place in the synagogue, and his father forgives him before he dies. The film, however, ends with Jack performing “My Mammy” in blackface at the Winter Garden Theater (where Al Jolson often performed) with his mother and girlfriend in the audience. Singing directly to his mother, Jack gets down on one knee and sings a song about coming home to his “Mammy” in “Alabammy.”

In Rogin’s analysis, he argues that politically oriented Eastern Europe Jews in the US between WWI and WWII identified with African Americans as a persecuted, Diasporic people. While this identification often resulted in political solidarity, it also took the more problematic “form of either cultural or literal blackface as Jews attempted to become American by taking on black-derived music, along with the plantation myth of American belonging” (66). Witnessing anti-Semitism on the rise in both Europe and in the US, US Jews attempted to escape their shtetl pasts by using the mask of blackness. Thus their ability to re-make themselves in the New World as white came at the cost of African Americans, who had to remain immobile and fixed in stereotype.

In The Jazz Singer, Jakie leaves behind his immigrant past (represented by his dying father) through his performance of blackface. Interestingly, very few movies at this time made by Jews (and often starring Jews) actually represented Jewish themes; Jews in Hollywood generally succeeded by erasing Jewishness in their films. Jakie’s story, however, is definitely a Jewish story—one of assimilation. And as Rogin argues, Jack can only express his sadness about leaving his cultural motherland (the lower East Side and Eastern Europe) through a black-white racial lens by equating his Jewish mother with a Southern “mammy.” In the final “Mammy” scene from the film, the camera keeps cutting between Jack singing with great emotion and the face of his crying mother.

As Goldstein observes, Jewish blackface became a means to express emotions that could not be expressed as Jews; blackface obscures the performer’s Jewishness through stereotyping African Americans who became a mask for Jewish expression. This performance blends identification and admiration with racism. Many of the Jews, including Jolson, who performed in blackface, began their careers as Jewish comedians and turned to black material as their urge to assimilate made it less desirable to do comedy about Jewish themes and personas. Of course what they end up taking on isn’t actually African American material, but the white culture’s nostalgia for an even more racist past of very clearly defined racial roles. The “Mammy” stereotype grew out of the reality that African American mothers were often forced to nurse the master’s children during slavery (and then, post-slavery, forced to take care of them as servants) often at the cost of their relationships with their own children. This reality translated into the stereotype of the happy, loyal, desexualized “mammy” whose happiness made white people feel that slavery was a benevolent institution.

Unmasking Jewish Histories

How, then, does my Grandfather fit into all this? His father Max (my great grandfather) came to the US from Poland in 1900 as a shoemaker because his house in Warsaw was burned down in pogroms. Enjoying his life in the New World, Max didn’t want to send for his wife Cecilia and six year old son (my Grandfather) back in Warsaw, but family pressure intervened. When his family did arrive, Max was embarrassed by his wife’s Old World Yiddish speaking ways and began isolating her. He wouldn’t give Cecilia any money, and he didn’t want her to learn English. He apparently refused to let her eat when she was pregnant. The family story is that he drove her crazy, and then put her into an insane asylum. It’s unclear how much English Cecilia could even speak and how much of her diagnosed “craziness” was a result of being an isolated immigrant with limited language skills. Max then put my Grandfather and his sister into an orphanage until he remarried years later.

During my mom’s childhood, her father Maurice–always quick with a joke–never spoke about his childhood, and told both my mom and my aunt that their grandmother (Cecilia) was dead. As an adult, my mom found out that her father and his sister used to go visit their mother at the asylum–a secret that only came out after Cecilia’s death. As part of his own assimilation, Maurice obscured his own sad family history by refusing to let his children meet their grandmother.

Although I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my Grandfather’s use of blackface, I wonder how or whether his own sadness about the loss of his mother and motherland played into it; was he singing to a “mammy” or was he just trying, like his peers, to become a white American? Given that my Grandfather came to the US as a child on a boat from Poland, he certainly didn’t have a plantation past in the South. Neither did Al Jolson, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was known for performing with and fighting discrimination against African Americans on Broadway and later in Hollywood. Was Maurice taking on white America’s nostalgic imagination for a racist past that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had little part in? What is gained and what gets erased by swapping out these histories? Taking on the history of American racism, Jews also lost connections to our own history and culture.

History Lessons for Solidarity Work

The image of Jews doing blackface represents a sad and pivotal moment in Ashkenazi Jewish American identity. At various moments because of historical cycles of anti-Semitism, Jews have been bribed with material privileges and public positions of limited power to appear as the visible face of an oppressive system. What does it mean that this time the face that they put on was blackface? In these exchanges, Jews are often encouraged to take on a middle “buffer” position, and thus get pitted against other oppressed groups. With blackface, Jews occupied the middle ground once again, this time the ground between African Americans and white Christian culture. We both chose and were encouraged to choose whiteness that came at a cost to our relationships with African Americans and disconnected us from our own culture.

As an adult, disconnected from my own family history, I began asking more questions about my Grandfather and learned even more about sadness and loss in his history. Most of his father Max’s siblings stayed in Poland, and most of my Grandfather’s cousins died in Auschwitz, probably around the same time that he was performing in blackface. It’s hard to fathom how both these things could be happening at the same time; in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were being encouraged to assimilate into whiteness, a process they probably accepted, in part, because in Europe they were being killed as a “race.”

The image of my Grandfather doing blackface embodies a moment when Ashkenazi Jews exchanged our deep connection to our cultures, histories and families in order to gain whiteness. While I want to be clear that blackface has obviously been the most damaging to its targets, African Americans, there has also been a cost to Ashkenazi Jews as well. We have inherited the privileges of assimilation—class and race privilege—as well as some incalculable losses–of culture, community and solidarity/connection with other oppressed people.

Through my involvement in Jewish anti-racist organizing over the last decade, I have come to realize that as Ashkenazi Jews who identify as white, we still face the dual dangers of distancing ourselves from other oppressed groups or over-identifying and appropriating their struggles. Jews doing blackface is an extreme example of this tendency: Ashkenazi Jews moved toward whiteness at the expense of African Americans while using the mask of “blackness” to explore alternative ways to express their emotions from the dominant white Christian culture. Because Ashkenazi Jews have more or less “achieved” whiteness, there is clearly still a tendency to distance ourselves and ignore other oppressed groups’ struggles.

But I have also seen the opposite force at work among anti-racist Ashkenazi Jewish activists. When we do not have any grounding in our own culture, however we define it, it is easy to over-identify with others’ struggles, whether those of Palestinians or other oppressed groups. In our attempts to build alliances, we sometimes overreach and take over other people’s struggles as a way to find culture and meaning for ourselves. At anti-Occupation protests, I have seen many Jews wearing Palestinian symbols, such as keffiyehs as a sign of solidarity. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as we are simultaneously working to make space for Palestinian voices in this conversation and not filling up all the space ourselves. I personally find it even more effective to see Jews wearing traditional Jewish symbols at these protests, thereby insisting that we can be our full Jewish selves as we stand up against the Israeli Occupation. Even as we reach out to work in solidarity, it is important stay rooted within our own histories and cultures, as complicated and compromising as they may be.

So while there is no simple lesson to be taken from this messy history of Jewish blackface, I believe that our challenge is to remain connected to Jewishness, whatever that means to us, even as we use our privileges to work toward ally-ship with others. Although I still feel a sense of shame when I picture my Grandfather in blackface, I also try to remember the historical context surrounding his losses and choices. As someone who has reaped the benefits of my ancestors’ compromises, I am lucky that I have the choice to attempt reaching toward solidarity, and resisting appropriation as part of my modern Jewish identity.

–
*Throughout this essay, I am referring to Jews of European descent who “became” white in the US through a process of assimilation at a particular historical moment. I recognize that not all Ashkenazi Jews identify as white; some folks are both Jewish and African American; and finally that Jews of color, including Jews with Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage, may have very different experiences.

On Sunday, three passengers at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport were detained after someone reported “suspicious activity on board.” Not long afterwards, one of those three passengers’ story has gained national attention after blogging about her treatment by Homeland Security officials.

According to The Associated Press, Shoshana Hebshi and two men were detained and questioned after the crew on their Frontier Airlines flight “reported suspicious activity on board.”

Hebshi, an Ohio resident who identifies as half-Jewish and half-Arab, wrote on her blog that she was sitting with two Indian men from Detroit when the flight was first diverted to a different part of the tarmac, then boarded by armed personnel. She and the two men were subsequently “pushed off the plane” and detained. Hebshi wrote that she asked, “What’s going on?” but did not get an answer.

She wrote:

They put me in the back of the car. It’s a plastic seat, for all you out there who have never been tossed into the back of a police car. It’s hard, it’s hot, and it’s humiliating. The Indian man who had sat next to me on the plane was already in the backseat. I turned to him, shocked, and asked him if he knew what was going on. I asked him if he knew the other man that had been in our row, and he said he had just met him. I said, it’s because of what we look like. They’re doing this because of what we look like. And I couldn’t believe that I was being arrested and taken away.

When the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11 and Arabs and Arab-looking people were being harassed all over the country, my Saudi Arabian dad became nervous. A bit of a conspiracy theorist at heart, he knew the government was watching him and at any time could come and take him away. It was happening all over. Men were being taken on suspicion of terrorist activities and held and questioned–sometimes abused–for long periods of time. Our country had a civil rights issue on its hands. And, in the name of patriotism we lost a lot of our liberty, especially those who look like me.

An airline spokesman told the AP the crew reported that two people were in the bathroom for “an extraordinarily long time.” Also, FBI representative Sandra Berchtold said security was heightened because Sunday was the anniverary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“All precautions were taken, and any slight inconsistency was taken seriously,” Berchtold said. “The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.”

According to Hebshi, she and the two men were taken to a facility and incarcerated while still handcuffed. Though she needed to go to the bathroom, she said, she was dissuaded by the toilet in her cell, which she said had “probably never seen the good side of a scrubbing brush.” Unbeknownst to her, the other 113 passengers on the flight were also taken to the facility for questioning. At least two other officers refused to answer when Hebshi asked for more information about her detainment.

Hebshi was later strip-searched by a female officer, before ultimately being questioned by two FBI agents.

The male agent proceeded to ask me a series of questions about where I had been, where I was going, about my family, if I had noticed any suspicious behavior on the plane. The other agent took notes while I talked. They asked if I knew the two men sitting next to me, and if I noticed them getting up during the flight or doing anything I would consider suspicious.

I told them no, and couldn’t remember how many times the men had gotten up, though I was sure they had both gone to the bathroom in succession at some point during the flight.

They had done some background check on me already because they knew I had been to Venezuela in 2001. They asked about my brother and sister and asked about my foreign travel. They asked what I did during the flight. I told them I didn’t get up at all, read, slept and played on my phone (in airplane mode, don’t worry). They asked about my education and wanted my address, Social Security, phone number, Facebook, Twitter, pretty much my whole life story.

Again, I asked what was going on, and the man said judging from their line of questioning that I could probably guess, but that someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity. What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough? Even considering that we didn’t say a word to each other until it became clear there were cops following our plane? Perhaps it was two Indian man going to the bathroom in succession?

Hebshi said she was allowed to use an officers’ bathroom following her questioning by the agents, before being returned to her cell and subsequently released. Berchtold told the AP authorities determined there was no real threat. And the Detroit Free Press reported that Kowalchuk refused to comment on whether Hebshi and the two men were racially profiled, saying Frontier was “following safety protocols.” Representatives of the Wayne County Airport Police, who were involved in the arrest, did not respond to the Free Press’ requests for comment.

Gaps between white experiences and non-white experiences pop up in the strangest places.

Raven-Symoné has a new comedy on ABC Family called State of Georgia. This is her first comedy series where she will be playing an adult role and it’s been interesting watching that transition. I had planned to tune into the premiere, but it moved up in priority when I read the producer, Jennifer Weiner, talking about Raven’s weight loss in USA Today:

Q: Tell us about the show’s star, Raven-Symoné, who plays Georgia.

A: What we were looking for was a larger-than-life, bubbly, exuberant, confident young woman who was convinced of her own worth even when the world couldn’t see it. I really think that’s what we have with Raven. She’s this incredibly natural comedienne.

Q: Is Georgia a classic Jennifer Weiner character?

A: The original intention was for Georgia to be a big, curvy girl, and that would be one of the obstacles she dealt with while pursuing her acting career. She wanted to play the ingénue and the bombshell, and people would want to cast her as the funny best friend. Raven has lost a lot of weight, and that’s been a challenge we’ve been dealing with. But in terms of her sense of humor and outlook on life, Georgia’s going to feel familiar to anyone who loved Canny in Good in Bed or Becky in Little Earthquakes and Addy in Best Friends Forever.

…

Okay. I’m very familiar with Weiner’s work, having read most of it, and I get it – Weiner writes curvy heroines. She is most comfortable writing about larger women trying to make their way in the world. And there have been a great many discussions (like this one from Women and Hollywood) on the debates around Raven-Symoné’s weight loss and how it impacted what they were doing for the show.

But I’m puzzled. Did no one ever point out that black, thin and thick actresses face that same problem in terms of always being cast as the funny best friend? Come on, now, it’s even got a TV Tropes entry. The same jokes wouldn’t fly, but I am sure there are plenty of women who could help the writing team come up with amazing bits about how screwed up the acting world is to women of color. They could call Angela Nissel and Aisha Tyler in for writing assistance, and ask for people like Gabrielle Union and all of the women on this list to provide real life anecdotes for the show.

Or is that just too scary of a topic?

When the news broke that the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was a hoax, I wanted to read a bit more about exactly what happened. The Washington Post notes:

And Sunday, the truth spilled out: The gay girl in Damascus confessed to being a 40-year-old American man from Georgia.

The persona Tom MacMaster built and cultivated for years — a lesbian who was half Syrian and half American — was a tantalizing Internet-era fiction, one that he used to bring attention to the human rights record of a country where media restrictions make traditional reporting almost impossible.

On Sunday, MacMaster apologized on the blog. “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground,” he wrote. “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

MacMaster, a Middle East peace activist who is working on his master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote that he fictionalized the account of a gay woman in Syria to illuminate the situation for a Western audience.

Essentially, this MacMaster fellow is Peggy Seltzer for the Arab Spring. (And, insert plot twist – LezGetReal, the blog that encouraged “Amina” to tell “her” story was ALSO run by a white man claiming to be a deaf, lesbian, mother of two.)

But the why of this intrigues me. While news organizations are in a tizzy about what this means for using blogs as sources, what I want to know is how the media environment got so skewed that fictionalized accounts by white writers get more media attention than actual accounts by people of color?

Reader Kat sent through this item from KABOBfest called “The Politics Behind the Role Play”:

More than just speaking for Syrian activists, or Syrian women, or Syrian lesbians, as so many righteous liberal Westerners “interested” in the Middle East so often do, Tom MacMaster, in his own words, “created a voice,” and in doing so redefined what representation means for Arabs in western media – we call it ventriloquism. In creating the “dummy,” Anima, through the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, MacMaster became the mouthpiece for an entire class of Syrian people while denying Syrians (activists/women/lesbians/all of the above) the right to a voice in an already one-sided global media.

In this violent act of representation in which language and meaning was appropriated, MacMaster detracted from the stories of REAL Syrians who risk their lives daily in opposition to the dictatorship of the Assad regime. Not only did the attention received by MacMasters fake blog rob Syrians of their own voice, it put them in danger in a very real way.

The entire Kabobfest piece is worth a read, but this part, in particular, cuts to the heart of the issue:

One shouldn’t need the sensationalized fictional narrative of a lesbian Syrian woman to affirm the rights of Syrian demonstrators who are being brutally repressed by their governments. But if the goal is to arouse emotion and entertain, then MacMaster has succeeded in proving that the truth about Arabs comes secondary to Western perceptions and feelings towards them.

I wonder how did Gay Girl in Damascus amass such a following, while other activists and bloggers did not? Probably for the same reason Peggy Seltzer’s memoir was a literary darling until they discovered it was fictional, and why a young white able-bodied male college grad could make headlines by explaining that poverty isn’t so bad after all. Writing from a white western perspective confirms a white western perspective. Or to put it more simply, like recognizes like. Clearly, people were able to find Syrian activists, writers, and bloggers to go on the record about this in the aftermath – where were their voices before?

This whole drama hearkens back to the enduring issue of diversity in media. Most people can see, visually, the lack of racial/ethnic diversity and a failure to incorporate women into the higher echelons of news and culture institutions. But the problem runs far deeper than that. Who do we consider an expert? Frustration is the only word that came to mind when the news coverage of the MENA region started and television networks could deliver me nothing that wasn’t filtered through a white man over the age of fifty (and in some cases, someone who may have directly contributed to the cause of the unrest). How can we adequately frame issues from around the globe without featuring voices from around the globe? Traditional news has always been about selection – what a roomful of men thought the world needed to know about. When I interviewed Derrick Ashong from Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, he mentioned:

Ashong pointed out that media has traditionally been a top down kind of business, where a handful of people were expected to curate what was newsworthy for the masses.

“If I turn on CNN, I won’t hear anything about [what's] going on in Africa unless there’s a conflict to be covered or a tragedy. As a person born in Africa, that’s unacceptable to me. It isn’t that there’s no news being created, it’s just that we won’t hear about that news.”

We have come to a sad state of media affairs when fictional creations receive far more attention than those actually putting their lives on the line, and that the stories of “others” are only worth telling once they have been co-opted.

—

Further Reading:

“The story of a gay girl in Damascus or, a straight guy in Edinburgh” [Daily Maverick]
Doree Shafir on White Intellectual Norms Post-Seltzer [The Doree Chronicles]
Daniel Nassar on “The real world of gay girls in Damascus” [The Guardian]
Liz Henry on Amina and Fictional Blogging [Composite]

By Arturo R. García

Another week, another head-scratching study result. Or so you’d think, right?

The study, conducted by researchers at Tufts and Harvard Universities, concluded that white people think the prejudices blacks faced during the Civil Rights era are literally in the past. But it’s not all rosy, apparently, for the majority of the 209 white people (alongside 208 blacks) surveyed. From the abstract:

We show that this emerging belief reflects Whites’ view of racism as a zero-sum game, such that decreases in perceived bias against Blacks over the past six decades are associated with increases in perceived bias against Whites—a relationship not observed in Blacks’ perceptions. Moreover, these changes in Whites’ conceptions of racism are extreme enough that Whites have now come to view anti-White bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-Black bias.

But, setting aside questions regarding the size of the survey group and the focus on white/black relations in an increasingly diverse country, one has to wonder: is this really a surprise?

Researchers Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers say as much in a column for the New York Times:

One outcome of granting rights to traditionally marginalized groups has been to leave many whites feeling marginalized themselves. What are the consequences of this sense of marginalization? For one, the very same developments that some would point to as evidence of progress toward equality (an African-American president, a Latina Supreme Court justice) are seen by others as further evidence of the threats aligned against them.

Consider the rhetoric associated with some members of the Tea Party, whose emphasis on the perceived values of the founding fathers implicitly centers on the notion that the founders were white heterosexual Christians. Or the oft-voiced concern that political correctness has stifled traditional American values, as with the idea of a “war on Christmas.”

As a result, there’s a “jockeying for stigma” among groups in America today. This competition is surprising because being marginalized often equates to being powerless, yet many whites now use their sense of marginalization as a rallying cry toward action. Already, this sentiment is affecting political discourse, as shown by the rise of the Tea Party and the growing number of lawsuits alleging “reverse racism.”

Besides the larger political and historical examples, though, haven’t we seen some of these fears play out on a smaller scale? Consider:

• People who makes it a point to tell you they “like all types of music, except rap,” and radio stations who use that statement to advertise themselves.
• Privilege-Denying Dudes.
• Basketball fans who call, say, Jimmer Fredette “a gamer” while decrying Allen Iverson as “a ballhog” and “a thug,” or lament that the game is “all about who jumps highest.”

But potentially even more disturbing is a Cal-Berkeley study highlighted by Joan Walsh at Salon:

In an experiment known as “Me/Not Me,” respondents were asked to quickly rate whether a series of terms having to do with race, ethnicity and diversity had anything to do with them personally. It found that the white students related more favorably to the terms associated with “colorblindness” — equality, unity, sameness, similarity, color blind, and color blindness – than to words associated with “multiculturalism”: diversity, variety, culture, multicultural, multiracial, difference and multiculturalism.

What does this tell us? The study authors (as do I) take for granted that it matters — it would be a good thing — if whites embrace diversity and multicultural initiatives, whether in schools, workplaces and community groups, and they therefore suggest that people designing such programs consider that “whites’ reactions to multiculturalism … are rooted in the basic social psychological need for inclusion and belonging.” Stressing that multiculturalism encompasses the wide variety of white ethnic and class experiences might help. Emphasizing words with positive resonance like “equality” and “unity” might too.

But when does inclusiveness become self-erasure? Did the white people in these studies ever learn to accept that there’s some experiences they probably just won’t get to totally understand because of their privilege? And what happens – for everybody – if they don’t?

On March 30 hip-hop producer Calvin “Mr.Cee” Lebrun—he of Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die fame–was busted by New York City police allegedly receiving oral sex from a sex worker. Reports said Lebrun supposedly received the sexual favors from “a man” .  This got some people feeling some kind of homophobic way, complete with saying that “we all should have seen this coming” because of his alleged “golden showers” kink.  As Sister Toldja wrote earlier this week :

To be totally fair, this isn’t the average gay rumor; not only was the other person in the case allegedly paid for the act, the writer who dropped this gossip also claimed that Mister Cee has a thing for urinating on female strippers. So while much of the chatter is about Mister Cee being (allegedly) infected with The Gay, folks are aghast by this pee thing, too. Considering our attitudes about sexuality, that’s no surprise.

With homophobia and anti-kink sentiments roiling—and Lebrun and his supporters doing the NYPD Hip-Hop Conspiracy Step —hip-hop artist and critic dream hampton provided some level-headed analysis about the situation:

While highly regarded in the hip hop industry and in New York, Mister Cee is not necessarily famous. Still, his arrest gave opportunity to talk about the persistent poking around hip hop’s “closet,” where speculation about sexual orientation is practically a sport. Charlamagne actually elevated the conversation by asking why a married 44-year-old man was seeking sexual favors from a 20-year-old, professional or otherwise, and if that, then why in a parked car? I argue that none of this would be a discussion, viral or anywhere else, had Cee been arrested with a 20-year-old woman, be she prostitute or not. I also don’t believe, 2011 or not, that hip hop is a safe space for anything other than aggressively heterosexual public behavior or affirmation. While obviously lesbian women MCs and personalities remain silent if not closeted about their sexuality, there is even less space for men to appear bisexual or homosexual.

I believe that Mister Cee’s sexuality is a personal matter, one he must reckon with himself and his wife. But Charlamagne’s co-host Angela Yee took the position widely held by heterosexual women—that closeted bisexual men are a health hazard, exposing trusting women to AIDS and more. While I’m not dismissive of those concerns, particularly in a marriage, where condom use is expected to be abandoned, I do know that we heterosexual Black women don’t exactly offer safe spaces for bisexual men to express their desires.

I’m also far more concerned that the transgendered 20-year-old who allegedly serviced him be safe, particularly if he is a sex worker. I wished aloud on my own Twitter feed that the discussion about Mister Cee would be one about decriminalizing sex work and focusing on harm reduction rather than speculating if Mister Cee is closeted.

Hampton is right in this respect.

The sex worker who is said to have provided the service, it turns out, is–based on the clues and cues I have picked up on from the media as well as personal education around trans issues and media literacy–a trans woman named Brooke-Lynn Pinklady not a “transvestite” that the first link’s source and other news and gossip sites—both cisgay and presumably cisstraight–thought to misgender as “a man.” (Even hampton refers to her as a “transgendered male.”) There’s a difference—a big difference—between a cis man, a “transvestite,” and a trans woman. (And, for the 50-11th time, the word is not “transgendered.” As several trans activists have point out, no one says “gayed” or “heteroed.” It’s “transgender” or “trans.” And I’m not going to go there about the word “trannie.” Suffice to say: don’t. It’s a slur. Don’t.)

To make the whole matter much worse, several outlets—and even the NYPD, never known at the bastion of tolerance, let alone acceptance and advocacy of trans people–refer to Brooke-Lynn by her government name instead of, like this post, honoring her as how she presents gender-wise.  Since too few people accorded her any sort of respect around her gender identity, we’re getting transphobia–specifically transmisogyny–twisted in the homophobia. Because of the constant misgendering of Brooke-Lynn as a “he,” out comes the assumption that Mr. Cee supposedly had sex with a “man.” No, Mr. Cee had sex with a woman, full stop—regardless of how he sexually identitfies. As Monica Roberts at TransGriot writes:

Many of us still have ID’s with mismatched name and gender code info or are in states that despite us having legal name changes, refuse to change gender codes until the person undergoes GRS.

…

SRS is not the end all and be all to determining gender identity or when a person transitions to the other gender.

As far as I’m concerned, the second you swallow you first hormone or take your first shot of testosterone, begin living in the opposite gender and make moves to harmonize your body with that gender role that may or may not include surgical options, you ARE that gender.

Many transpeople who would like to have it either aren’t able to afford genital surgery or have health issues that prevent it. There are many transpeople successfully living in our new gender roles despite possessing neoclits in our panties.

To break this point down for you: gender is between your ears, not your legs.

With that said, let’s bring this back to hampton’s concern.

According to a landmark report from the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force , sixteen percent of trans people of color (TPoCs) who responded to the organizations’ survey have turned to selling sex and drugs in order to survive. Furthermore, the report states:

• Respondents who were currently unemployed experienced debilitating negative outcomes, including nearly double the rate of working in the underground economy (such as doing sex work or selling drugs), twice the homelessness, 85% more incarceration, and more negative health outcomes, such as more than double the HIV infection rate and nearly double the rate of current drinking or drug misuse to cope with mistreatment, compared to those who were employed.
• Respondents who had lost a job due to bias also experienced ruinous consequences such as four times the rate of homelessness, 70% more current drinking or misuse of drugs to cope with mistreatment, 85% more incarceration, more than double the rate working in the underground economy, and more than double the HIV infection rate, compared to those who did not lose a job due to bias.

I agree the cruel parlor game of Suspecting Teh Gayz, especially on spurious reasons like being down with kink, needs to cease within some Black communities as well as a conversation around decriminalizing sex work needs to open up.  I also think what happened with Mr. Cee is a perfect opportunity to talk about transphobia, gender identity, and gender policing, too—which, as an ex-friend pointed out to me, tend to be the “what’s really going on” when some want to go homophobic because they want to judge what a “real man” or a “real woman” is supposed to look like and act like.

We’re wrecking too, too many lives with this basic disrespect.

Photo Credit: thesmokinggun.com

Readers, you can imagine our surprise when we received an email inviting us to the screening of CNN’s latest documentary for the latest in their In America series.

After all, we had a lot to say about the first few:

Thoughts on CNN’s Black in America Series
Going For Broke: The Racialicious Review of Black In America: Almighty Debt
Latinos Under Siege? A Look At CNN’s Latino In America
Latino In America goes out with a whine
The Fallout from Latino in America

But hey – they offered an advance screening, free breakfast, and a Q & A with Soledad O’Brien and the producers afterward. How could I resist? So Art RSVP’ed and I hopped on the Boltbus and made it to NYC in time for the 9:00 AM screening.

The newest addition to the In America family is called Unwelcome: Muslims Next Door. Here’s the trailer:

The Unwelcome: Muslims Next Door special revolves around the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, situated about 35 miles from Nashville. According to O’Brien, her team first heard about the tensions flaring in Murfreesboro when researching the “Ground Zero Mosque.” While the proposed Islamic Center in New York made national headlines, the drama playing out in Murfreesboro illuminated a different issue: how smaller towns were coping with the Islamaphobic rhetoric currently in vogue and how local Muslim populations were beginning to feel the heat.

Unwelcome begins by looking at the community of Murfreesboro, where even amid the fever pitch of hateful rhetoric, the citizens describe each other as neighborly, and defend Murfreesboro as one of the best places to live in America. For decades, Muslims in Murfreesboro have been free to worship as they see fit – there is one Islamic center in the town and around 250 currently practicing Muslims. Some of the Muslims interviewed in the documentary remarked that Murfreesboro remained peaceful and civil even after 9/11 – the idea of Muslims living and worshiping in the town was just a non-issue.

That is until plans to expand the existing Islamic center came to light last year.

The residents cited all kinds of issues to back up their claims as to why the Islamic Center should not be built – many of which were based in bias, ignorance, or just straight up bigotry. Here are a few quotes:

• “Here is this enormous building which is going to be occupied by people who are of the same religion that the people are who we’re fighting in Afghanistan.”
• “Why are they building a mosque and needing 53,000 square feet? That is a lot of square footage.  And it’s going to be a very expensive thing.  Now how are 200 families – or 200 muslims, however many there are – how are they gonna pay for it? I know when we expanded our church, we’re still paying for it.” [Ed Note: The documentary explains what the footage will be used for - in addition to a 10,000 square foot mosque, there will be a gym, cemetery, swimming pool, basketball court, tennis courts, and a small school.]
• “In a post 9/11 world, we should be a little suspicious of any group trying to relocate to this community.”
• “I didn’t say to hate ‘em – I just said we don’t need ‘em here!”
• “It wasn’t Baptists and Catholics that put bombs in the bottom of the World Trade Center.”

The documentary follows a few different people in Murfreesboro looking at how the controversy has impacted them.  Lema Sbenaty, a nineteen year old practicing Muslim sheds a crucial light on all of the controversy, noting that she’s grown up in Murfreesboro and is suddenly seeing an entirely new side of the townsfolk there. Sbenaty’s story is heartbreaking – numerous times during the show, people talk right past her or through her, ignoring her experiences to talk about Sharia Law and the oppression of women in the Middle East.  The documentary also speaks with Imam Osama Ballul (sp? – there were no titles for the correct spelling of surnames in the doc).  Imam Osama (as he is referred to in the doc) talked about his journey from Egypt to the US, landing first in Texas and then moving to Murfreesboro.  Along the way, Imam Osama wed Ivy, a white Methodist who had converted to Islam.  The two have a daughter and led a fairly peaceful life in Murfreesboro, up until recently.  The documentary also interviews opponents of the new center.  Most notable of these are Kevin Fisher (who sites traffic and corruption of the ground water by the cemetery as reasons why he would oppose the construction) and Sally Wall, a longtime Murfreesboro resident who doesn’t believe it is bigotry to oppose the onset of sharia law – which again, is not the issue at hand.

But facts don’t seem to hold the weight they should in the case. In addition to the marches in the street and heated community meetings, some people in Murfreesboro decided to resort to violence and vandalism. Initially, the vandalism began by someone spray painting “not welcome” on the sign proclaiming the site of the new Islamic center. The sign was replaced for free by the sign makers, but eight months later, it was hacked at until it broke in two. Then, after the groundbreaking on the site, someone set fire to the construction equipment:

We’ve often criticized the In America series for presenting stereotypes and providing little to no context for what is happening.  O’Brien and her team have acknowledged some of those issues, and responded by tweaking the idea – instead of doing a bad job of telling multiple stories simultaneously, they instead are drilling down to tell one or two stories that could translate into a variety of contexts.  The shift was immediately evident in this documentary.  The people who were profiled felt real and relatable – even the misguided residents of Murfreesboro reveal more about their own fears than they intend to.  We heard from women both in an out of hijab, from practitioners and imams, received a view of one of the most diverse depictions of Muslims ever seen on television. and

At the end of the hour, most of us in the room were impressed by what was covered, though a few questions arose that I will get to in another post.

Outside of the documentary, CNN’s Belief Blog seeks to fill in some of the stories that didn’t fit into the hour long special. One of these stories is Matthew Miller, a 30 year old convert to Islam who currently lives in Murfreesboro:

Ultimately, the special reveals how easy it is for bigotry to triumph over common sense – and the difficult road facing those in Murfreesboro, who are suddenly considered outsiders in their own hometown.

Unwelcome: Muslims Next Door will air on CNN on Sunday, March 27th, at 8PM ET.  Racialicious will be hosting a live chat and post the rules for the drinking game to those who wish to play along.

Who does Rep. Peter King (R-NY) actually represent?

According to his website, the 3rd Congressional District is:

• Overwhelmingly white
• Overwhelmingly involved in cis-hetero marriages
• Making more income per household (median income $56,060) than the national average (median 2010 income $49,777)

Has King always had issues with Muslims?

Not according to a profile piece on him by CNN: King reportedly supported then-President Bill Clinton’s military push to defend Muslims in the Balkan regions, and had close ties with the small Muslim community in his own district, but renounced them after he found local Muslims “covering up” for Al-Qaeda in the wake of the September 11th attacks, and refusing to cooperate with “police at all levels.”

That’s a pretty serious charge. How many law-enforcement officials does King plan to call on to provide evidence?

Zero.

Isn’t this hearing reminiscent of Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communism crusade?

King might know the answer better than we think; as Politico noted, he worked for McCarthy’s counsel, Roy Cohn, early on in his career. Of course, King also dismisses the comparison as “fanaticism.” Uh huh.

Who is Zuhdi Jasser, and what qualifies him as an expert on Islam?

According to The Washington Post, Jasser is the only witness King plans to call who isn’t a legislator. King also plans to call Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim. Democratic members of King’s committee plan to call Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca to respond to King’s allegations that Muslims are “not cooperating” with law enforcement.

Jasser has already made himself a favorite in conservative media circles, though, by being their Muslim Friend (even though he admits to not being “a formal expert” in Koranic Arabic) and through his work with the Middle East Quarterly with Daniel Pipes, a man described by Media Monitors Network thusly:

Daniel Pipes is as much a scholar on Islam and Muslims as David Duke is a scholar on Judaism and Jews. He does not seem to know where scholarship ends and where political advocacy begins. He does not initiate his research by asking questions for which he seeks answers, but by providing answers for which he cherry-picks evidence.

Pipes is wedded to his personal political agenda to such a point that it dominates his worldview invalidating his ability to act as a neutral scholar on Muslim-related topics. Concerned with the interests of Israel above all else, he consistently defines Muslim-Americans exclusively as a function of their position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Pipes, a “bad” Muslim is a Muslim who challenges his views on Israel and a “good” Muslim is one who agrees with them; in his “scholarly” lingo, the code terms are “Islamist” and “moderate” respectively.

Who else is King going to for advice on this subject?

At least one person we can confirm, thanks to Lee Fang at Think Progress, is Brigitte Gabriel, an anti-Islam activist who, though she will not be testifying, shed some light into what King will be talking about during the hearings:

GABRIEL: Glenn Beck is right in what he’s talking about and what I’m holding in front of me right now is the Muslim Brotherhood project for North America. [...] The Muslim Brotherhood wrote a plan in 1982. It’s a one hundred year plan for radical Islam to infiltrate and dominate the West and establish an Islamic government on Earth.

FANG: So what’s going on in Western Europe and North Africa, what’s going on in Egypt, this is all part of the plan?

GABRIEL: [nods] In the counter-terrorism circles this plan became known as The Project. [...]

FANG: Is Peter King, in his hearings, is he going to talk about this issue? And is he going to ask about this wider, global threat; its happening in Egypt, its happening in Western Europe and frankly it could be happening here?

GABRIEL: Exactly. He’s going to be talking about these issues.

Who’s standing up against this?
We’ve already seen protests being held against the hearings. And at least 28 members of the House of Representatives have added their signatures to a letter of protest being circulated by Reps. Pete Stark (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI). For his part, Rep. Michael Honda (D-CA) wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle calling King out:

Rep. King’s intent seems clear: To cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia. By framing his hearings as an investigation of the American Muslim community, the implication is that we should be suspicious of our Muslim neighbors, co-workers or classmates solely on the basis of their religion.

This should be deeply troubling to Americans of all races and religions. An investigation specifically targeting a single religion implies, erroneously, a dangerous disloyalty, with one broad sweep of the discriminatory brush.

Honda’s column speaking out against King, according to the Post, is part of a larger bond between some Japanese-Americans and Muslim-Americans on the West Coast, fueled by the similarities between the ethnic targeting both groups have faced.

What’s being ignored by the media because of King’s shameless plea for attention?

Lots of things, but here’s one particularly vile omission: the fact that, even after they went viral, the following public remarks by elected officials were not written about or dissected nearly as heavily by CNN, or MSNBC, or most major network outlets – at least online:

“A big part of the problem that we face today is that our children have been taught at schools that every idea is right, that no one should criticize others’ positions, no matter how odious. And what do we call that? They call it multiculturalism and it has paralyzed too many of our fellow citizens to make the critical judgments we need to make to prosper as a society.” – Congressman Ed Royce

“I know quite a few Marines who will be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise.” – Villa Park City Council member Deborah Pauly

Where’s that investigation?

by Latoya Peterson

Charlie Sheen is a fucking trainwreck.

I caught about five minutes of an E! True Hollywood Story on the man, and saw references to drug abuse and rehab, domestic violence, and a very pissed off Heidi Fleiss, noting that while Sheen is one of the top paid sitcom stars of our time, she was stuck in jail.

Charlie Sheen has been on a downward spiral for a good while now, and it’s clear from comments like these that things are only going to get worse:

Both Today and GMA asked Sheen, who says he underwent private rehab at home, if he is now on drugs. As he told the latter, “Yeah, I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen! It’s not available, because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body. … I woke up and decided, you know, I’ve been kicked around, I’ve been criticized. I’ve been this ‘Aww, shucks’ guy with this bitchin’ rock-star life, and I’m finally going to completely embrace it, wrap both arms around it and love it violently. And defend it violently through violent hatred.”

I could normally care less about the troubles of Charlie Sheen, but one of his recent verbal misfires is interesting on a few different levels. Sheen referred to Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre as Chaim Levine in an angry open letter, protesting the cancellation of the show, widely rumored to be because of Sheen’s erratic behavior. After receiving pushback for his remarks, Sheen offered this gem to TMZ:

While Charlie spilled his guts to TMZ yesterday about his hatred for Chuck Lorre, he referred to the “Two and a Half Men” creator as Chaim Levine — the Hebrew translation of CL’s birth name — which many people felt Charlie used in a mean-spirited attempt to denigrate the Jews.

Now Charlie tells TMZ … “I was referring to Chuck by his real name, because I wanted to address the man, not the bulls**t TV persona.”

FYI — Chuck’s birth name is Charles Levine … and his Hebrew name is Chaim.

Charlie added, “So you’re telling me, anytime someone calls me Carlos Estevez, I can claim they are anti-Latino?”

Oh, readers, where do we start?

“I was referring to Chuck by his real name, because I wanted to address the man, not the bulls**t TV persona.”

Number one – Chuck Lorre’s birthname is Charles Levine. So why not just address the letter to Charles? This is where folks are picking up an anti-Semitic vibe. It is a really ugly thing when folks point to your difference as a way to denigrate you, even if they try to play their way around it. Oh, I didn’t use a slur or anything… Uh-huh. It’s hard to pick up tone from a written document, but check out the context where Sheen is trying to address “the man:”

What does this say about Haim Levine [Chuck Lorre] after he tried to use his words to judge and attempt to degrade me. I gracefully ignored this folly for 177 shows … I fire back once and this contaminated little maggot can’t handle my power and can’t handle the truth. I wish him nothing but pain in his silly travels especially if they wind up in my octagon. Clearly I have defeated this earthworm with my words — imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists. I urge all my beautiful and loyal fans who embraced this show for almost a decade to walk with me side-by-side as we march up the steps of justice to right this unconscionable wrong.

Remember these are my people … not yours…we will continue on together…

Charlie Sheen

(Sidebar: Wait, I thought we were getting real here. So why not sign that letter Carlos Estevez, since we’ve gone to people’s government/Hebrew names?)

This isn’t a calm, rational discussion Sheen is calling for, especially if you start calling people maggots. Now, some folks have pointed to Lorre’s self-identification on a vanity card as the reason for Sheen’s usage of Chaim Levine. But once again, check the context. Entertainment Weekly explains:

…[S]pecifically, vanity card #327, that aired Feb. 7 after an episode of Two and a Half Men.

On the card, Lorre talks about his visit to Israel and feeling comfortable while “surrounded with DNA much like my own.” Then he concludes:

“Which raises the question, why have I spent a lifetime moving away from that group? How did Chaim become Chuck? How did Levine become Lorre? The only answer I come up with is this: When I was a little boy in Hebrew school the rabbis regularly told us that we were the chosen people. That we were God’s favorites. Which is all well and good except that I went home, observed my family and, despite my tender age, thought to myself, ‘bull$#*!.’”

So Lorre talks about examining his identity, after “a lifetime” of distancing.

And interestingly enough, this is where he and Sheen have common ground.

Charlie Sheen’s father, Martin Sheen, was born Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez. The elder Sheen uses both names, one for public life, and one for private. IMDB credits him as saying:

Whenever I would call for an appointment, whether it was a job or an apartment, and I would give my name, there was always that hesitation and when I’d get there, it was always gone. So I thought, I got enough problems trying to get an acting job, so I invented Martin Sheen. I’ve never changed my name; it’s still Estevez officially.

[on changing his name] I never changed it officially. I never will. It’s on my driver’s license and passport and everything: Ramon Gerard Estevez. I started using Sheen, I thought I’d give it a try, and before I knew it, I started making a living with it and then it was too late. In fact, one of my great regrets is that I didn’t keep my name as it was given to me. I knew it bothered my dad.

His sons chose different paths – Charlie Sheen chose to retain the Hollywood surname. Emilio Estevez, his brother, chose to use the name he was born with, but mentioned that is was more to avoid riding his father’s success – and because he liked the initials.

The common thread here is racism and discrimination.  While many people in Hollywood opted to take a stage name for a variety of reasons, actors of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds were under even more pressure to assimilate, in order to even get their foot in the door.  Names become anglicized, roles are carefully selected to avoid being typecast, and people are careful to avoid anything that would provide an excuse to discriminate.  Over time, these changes and deals become habitual.  Toning down one’s given name to be seen as more palatable or acceptable is beginning to fall out of style – but in this comment Sheen reminds us of why this practice began in the first place.  When the simple act of calling someone outside of their chosen name has heavy racial or ethnic undertones, it is because of our nation’s history and how we have historically treated people who were different.

So Sheen’s last line becomes particularly absurd.

“So you’re telling me, anytime someone calls me Carlos Estevez, I can claim they are anti-Latino?”

As with most things, context matters. And I have a feeling that if Sheen were the subject of a hate-filled rant, he would want us to consider the context as well.

But at this point, it appears we aren’t going to hear much out of Sheen, except for the same old, same old.  Check out this apology, which is begging for us to break out a racist apology bingo card:

He apologized to co-creator Chuck Lorre for referring to him by his Hebrew name in radio interviews (he said it was a joke). “Sorry if I offended you,” Sheen said during his sit-down with ABC News’ Andrea Canning (the full interview airs Tuesday on ABC’s 20/20). “Didn’t know you were so sensitive. I thought after you wailing on me for eight years, I could take a few shots back.”

By Arturo R. García

Kelley Williams-Bolar was released from jail on Thursday, a day ahead of schedule. But the attention – and outrage – over her case shows no sign of ending anytime soon, even garnering notice from some celebrities.

Williams-Bolar had originally been sentenced to 10 days in jail, out of a possible five years, on Jan. 18 after being convicted of forging documentation allowing her children could attend school in a more affluent, mostly white school district than the one she resides in in Akron. Williams was also required to two years of probation, and ordered to complete 80 hours of community service.

According to Change.org, which has been petitioning Ohio Governor John Kasich to pardon Williams-Bolar, her father said her decision to enroll her children in another district was made because of concerns over their safety – her house had been broken into, he said, and she’d had to file 12 different police reports because of crime in her neighborhood – and not the educational quality of her local schools.  Williams-Bolar told WEWS-TV, “When my home got broken into, I felt it was my duty to do something else.”

Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove, who delivered the sentence, told the Akron Beacon Journal that Williams-Bolar received jail time because local county prosecutors rejected lesser sentences:

Cosgrove said the county prosecutor’s office refused to consider reducing the charges to misdemeanors, and that all closed-door talks to resolve the case — outside of court — met with failure [...]

Cosgrove said numerous pretrial hearings were held since last summer.

”The state would not move, would not budge, and offer Ms. Williams-Bolar to plead to a misdemeanor,” the judge said in an interview Wednesday.

”Of course, I can’t put a gun to anybody’s head and force the state to offer a plea bargain.”

County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh declined requests from the Beacon Journal to respond to the judge’s comments.

Cosgrove also said she was not responsible for Williams-Bolar’s conviction preventing her from earning her teaching license, a process she was 12 credits shy of completing, and that she would write a letter to the Ohio Board of Education asking it not to revoke her license.

‘I did not mandate or order that her teaching license be suspended or revoked,” Cosgrove said Wednesday. ”That is absolutely inaccurate.”

Cosgrove said Williams-Bolar’s nonviolent felony offenses do not necessarily mean that she will lose her teaching certificate. She said Ohio law only states that a felony conviction ”may” be grounds for such action.

The judge said the Ohio Department of Education will hold a hearing and make the final decision ”whether or not they will revoke her license.”

”I have nothing to do with that as a matter of law. Once she was convicted by a jury of any felony, that conviction has to be reported to the state, and then it’s up to the state at that point in time to decide whether or not they’re going to revoke her license,” Cosgrove said. ”This is the Ohio legislature who wrote this law, not [this] court.”

Cosgrove said her reading of the statute leaves open the possibility Williams-Bolar can be a teacher ”because she was not convicted of an offense of violence [or] offenses of moral turpitude.”

In the week-plus after Williams-Bolar’s initial sentencing, her case became the latest cause célèbre out of Ohio, following the Ted Williams story late last year. Actor Donald Glover discussed his own empathy for her on both Twitter and tumblr:

This really hit me close to home because my mom did the exact same thing to make sure I got into a school where I could experience something as small as going to a county fair or just studying around people and places I felt safe.

One day the school found out and kicked me out. My mom argued with the principal for an hour, but I ended up going to a very shitty school for a couple years.  It sucked.

This sucks FAR more.  It really makes no sense.

Questlove, the twitter-active drummer for The Roots, also drew attention to the Change.org petition:

In the wake of her release, Williams-Bolar will reportedly seek to appeal her conviction, while the Akron chapter of the National Action Network has started a donation drive to pay for her legal fees. In another indication of how much attention the case has gotten, the Rev. Al Sharpton has agreed to help the Akron NAN in its’ efforts.

Fox News Latino has only been around for a few months, but it’s already become a hotbed of controversy. It’s less than a year old, and was created to target Latino audiences with news from both the U.S. and Central and South America. Yet while the it does the uncomfortable dance of trying to court more Latino viewers, that effort likely gets swallowed by the larger network’s venomous approach to important issues like the DREAM Act and border violence. Now, Media Matters is pushing for the network to make up its mind.

Fox News is the most-watched cable news channel in the country. In 2009-2010 the network surpassed CNN and MSNBC’s weekly viewership. A study released this week by Public Policy Polling found that PBS is the most trusted news outlet the U.S., followed by Fox News. (Fox News is the second-most trusted network, but also the most distrusted one, with 42 percent trusting it and 46 percent not trusting it.)

Last month they ran a story saying Spanish Actress Penélope Cruz was going to give birth to an “anchor baby,” but after some uproar from a group of Latino conservatives Fox News retracted the entire story, and today there is no sign of the story on their site.

Back when the network launched its Latino website, its leadership seemed optimistic.

“The launch of Fox News Latino creates an unprecedented opportunity to expand our reach by engaging the fastest growing minority audience and providing a unique platform for compelling and original content focused on the Latino community and the American dream,” said Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente in a statement.

But of course, very little of that optimism has shown through to any coverage that’s “fair and balanced,” to go along with the network’s slogan.

They provide airtime to hosts and pundits who are anti-immigration or “anti-amnesty,” as they would call it — views that could be in conflict with the same audience they’re trying to reach with Fox News Latino.

“I don’t think there’ll be conflict,” Clemente told Reuters in an interview. “We will do what we always do on the news side which is to be very fair and balanced on all sides of the issue in our reporting.”

Another study found Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about U.S. politics.

Take the DREAM Act, for instance. Media Matters found that from Nov. 23 through Dec. 1, 2010, Fox gave DREAM Act opponents more than 40 minutes of airtime versus about seven minutes for supporters. Host Sean Hannity called the DREAM Act a “free college education” and “basically amnesty.” Doug McKelway of Special Report called it a “free ride to college. But in fact the DREAM Act would’ve never provided any “free” grants to students.

And sometimes the hosts just go for knee-jerking acts. Bill O’Reilly dedicated several segments of prime time television to discrediting Nicky Diaz, former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s undocumented housekeeper. O’Reilley went as far as asking U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano what she was going do about “the highest profile illegal alien” in the country, and made her promise that she would look in to Diaz’s case.

But Fox News Latino told Diaz’s story in a completely different light. For starters, Diaz was an “undocumented housekeeper” and “mystery maid” ‘who “Whitman abruptly fired,” not an “illegal alien,” as she was identified on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor. Fox News Latino also painted Diaz in a good light when Whitman settled with her for unpaid wages. “Whitman settles with housekeeper for chump change” the headline read.

This week Media Matters looked at the dichotomy of the coverage on both Fox News and Fox News Latino when they reported news that the family of a Mexican teenager who was shot and killed by a border patrol agent for allegedly throwing rocks at them is filing a wrongful death suit.

Media Matters’ Simon Maloy points out that Fox News Latino reported news of the lawsuit in a “straightforward manner,” but on Fox News the tone was much more incendiary:

Yesterday on Fox News’ Happening Now, anchor Jon Scott conducted an interview with the slain teenager’s family’s attorney. In introducing the combative segment, Scott referred to undocumented immigrants simply as “illegals” — a dehumanizing shorthand frequently encountered on the network — and aired several grainy video clips of rocks being thrown at the U.S./Mexico border. Remember, the family attorney denies the claim that the boy threw rocks and that the video of the shooting corroborates this. But Fox News aired other video clips of other people throwing rocks at the border.

It seems like the “conflict” Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said wouldn’t occur has manifested itself. Their solution to avoid conflict may just be that Fox News Latino not cover all the news Fox News covers; current top news stories on Fox News Latino includes stories about childhood obesity, pop singers being arrested, physic octopus and political prisoners in Cuba, none of which are present on Fox News. The big lesson here? You just can’t have it both ways.

But, the results were not what I expected. Everyone rejected me. Everyone. Now, I understand and welcome rejection because it keeps one’s ego in check. Still, it was every single person I showed the slightest interest in, all in a row. Why? I mean, I was (and am) an ideal catch. I’m young, cute, have a great body, super-smart, and engaging personality. That wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t help but analyze myself and asked, “Why all the no’s?” It wasn’t until I saw how two friends of mine began dating monogamously (although my friend repeatedly told me she didn’t want anything serious; neither did I, dumbass) that it hit me like a punch in the face: the other friend is white.

Despite our similarities, my friend edged me out in that all-important category skin color. I was furious. Here I was, the happiest I’ve ever been, and my race literally clit-blocks me. Pretty soon after the insecurities crept back into my psyche. It was heartbreaking. I had worked so hard to build up my self-esteem about my color, and when faced with a swell of rejection, it crumbled. In retrospect, I see how fragile my confidence really was. My conviction was never reinforced; it was all self-supported. To have all that progress destroyed so drastically really worries and frightens me. I don’t know if I can get that girl back.

What pisses me off more than losing my confidence is that I can’t satisfy my very high sex drive. I love to sex; I love to do it and watch people do it (in feminist porn). What scares me is that I’ll never get the chance to enjoy it. My confidence is so low that I completely talk myself out of making the first move (which I always have to do; apparently nobody attractive desires dark girls). They never consider me dateable or fuckable because of my color. I can see the stereotypes appear on their foreheads like a ticker: asexual, ugly, stupid, dirty, masculine, on and on. And I don’t want to bother convincing them otherwise. I don’t deserve the burden of teaching possible partners about how I’m a multi-dimensional human like them. Is it too much to hope for that people will see me as a person without sitting down for an introductory lecture on race?

Moreover, I’ll be damned if I resort to opening my legs to any man or woman that pays me attention. Yes, I am desperate (it’s been six years, for God’s sake) but I want to want to fuck the person I sleep with. I want to do it with the lights on and watch as that person fucks me speechless. I want to watch that person cum. More importantly, I want that person to want to watch me cum. I want to be their sexual fantasy (and with my sex drive, that’s totally doable). I want someone to tell me how badly she wants to hold my legs apart as she pushes inside me. I want them to think I’m the sexiest woman alive with no qualifiers.

I refuse to believe that because of my skin color, I have to live with limited options and terrible sex, or no sex. How is that fair? Why should I lower my standards and be oh-so-grateful because some 35 year-old wannabe rapper or white guy with a fetish wants to do me? Everyone else is allowed their choice, and no one is asked to compromise. Besides, sex is an amazing act that achieves its best when the two people involved sincerely want each other. Regardless if it’s love or mutual attraction, there’s no better feeling. And I won’t deprive myself of that.

Sometimes, I wonder though. I wonder if I’m even allowed that option. I mean, who am I to think I have a right to be discriminate. I’m a dark-skinned black girl. I should be grateful anyone wants to fuck me, regardless of the reason, right? I mean, it’s not like anyone would ever want to touch or see my naked body just to revel in its beauty; that’s laughable. While I may be perfect in every other way, it’s not enough to change others’ perceptions of me, or make me attractive to them when everything else says otherwise. Realizing this truth makes me not to want to even try.

I worry that this is my dating future. That I will never have sex again. I worry even more that my self-esteem will go so low (really? Like it could be any worse than it is now?) and my options so few that I won’t have a choice but to fuck the next person that asks. My friend says that I should stand in front of a mirror naked and repeatedly say how I love my naked body. The funny thing is I don’t believe I’m ugly (despite what the previous paragraphs may lead you to think). I believe I’m attractive, but what’s causing my insecurities now is not a fundamental belief of my ugliness but a fundamental belief that others view me as such and what little say I have in changing that. No amount of education, swagger, or persuasion is going to change minds, and honestly I don’t know if I want to. That shit’s exhausting.

Lately I find myself wondering what might have been Quentin Tarantino’s approach to cinematizing Ntozake Shange’s seminal choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Once he had gotten over the initial shock of being offered the job, I can imagine Tarantino signing up for the challenge.   Known for penning screenplays driven by crisp dialogue and characters with quirky names (Reservoir Dogs, anyone?), he could have found an immediate albeit superficial connection with the source material. Since Tarantino is also an aficionado of Black cinema circa the time of the play’s original production, I’d bet he would have pursued a gritty 70s aesthetic and forgone imposing contemporary settings and storylines. And let’s face it – since the race and gender politics of his films are usually a muddle of contradictions, he might not have done any worse than Tyler Perry with regard to Black representation.

I mean, if the job of adapting For Colored Girls was not going to an African American woman, might as well as given Quentin Tarantino a shot at it.

Or Martin Scorcese. Or Steven Spielberg. Or Christopher Nolan.

You’re kidding, right?

Yes and no. Almost one month after its release, the blogosphere remains abuzz with equally strident critiques and defenses of Perry’s treatment of the Black feminist literary classic. One particular defense of Perry has inspired my absurdist train of thought: had not Perry been attached to write and direct For Colored Girls, a major studio would not have financed the film. The argument further implies that he guaranteed box office success that would otherwise evade the project if it were even made, stunting future writing and directing opportunities for other African American filmmakers.

This argument rests on several assumptions that keep Black cinematic representation so stagnant. To compel the film industry to take both the business and politics of our representation seriously enough to increase and diversify the stories it produces, we must reconsider them. Perry’s adaptation of For Colored Girls should urge us to question three assumptions in particular.

#1: The community needed For Colored Girls to be a major studio picture.

Anyone remotely familiar with my work knows I am a major proponent of infusing progressive sociopolitical ideas into unapologetically commercial entertainment.  My overall disappointment in For Colored Girls (some of which can be heard in my interview with Joan Morgan by Dr. Mark Anthony Neal) and this specific defense of Perry’s involvement reminded me of another vision I have: a day when there’s an Angelika in every ‘hood.  Or do not urban, working-class people of color deserve to have art house theaters in their communities?  The idea that such folks can’t appreciate never mind support films independently produced and distributed outside the studio system is elitist given that they have yet to be given the opportunity to prove otherwise. Especially when you consider that some of the more interesting (even if not progressive) depictions of Black life have not been financed by major studios nor screened at multiplexes.

And for those who champion having representations of Black life that crosses over to White audiences, such moviegoers are far more likely to support a critically-acclaimed, low-budget, character-driven independent feature. They rarely pack the stadium seats at the nearest AMC theater for a “Black” drama. Rather the liberal White folks who are willing to spend time and money on our cinematic representation are usually frequenting small theaters with names like the Rialto to see joints that screened at Sundance or Cannes. Regardless of who wrote and directed it, this is the approach that I believe would have done Shange’s play the most justice, both artistically and financially.
Perry generates profits for Lionsgate, in large part, because his films are relatively inexpensive to make.  Costing approximately no more than $20-million to produce, his movies have a low financial hurdle to clear. (And one must wonder what percentage of his budgets goes to pay Perry to write, director, produce and occasionally act.) Had For Colored Girls been executed as an independent feature i.e. made at half the cost of a Tyler Perry Production (as was Lee Daniels’ $10 million adaptation of the novel Push into the film Precious), its profit margin – not to mention its prestige – could have been much greater.

2: We needed the Tyler Perry fan base to make For Colored Girls successful at the box office.

The assumption that the film had to be a studio picture automatically entails that the movie had to generate major profits.  In addition to recouping the costs of producing a picture, a studio also expects that box office receipts reimburse its investment in marketing it. (Alas, the amount allocated for marketing is never included in a film’s reported production budget and is rarely revealed.) Still a film’s first three days in theaters remains the industry’s primary measure of both its director and stars’ ability to sell enough tickets to get a return on its investment, and therefore warrant entrusting this talent with future productions.

Enter Tyler Perry and with him the argument that an African American woman should not have helmed the picture because one has yet to command the opening weekend ticket sales to make investment a studio’s worthwhile. Even those who don’t care for Perry’s fare believed and conceded to his defenders that Kasi Lemmons, Darnell Martin et al did not possess the box office pull to entice a major studio’s backing. All of us, critics and fans alike, doubted that lovers of the 35-year old play were plentiful enough and so we also needed Perry’s diehard followers to flock to see For Colored Girls in order for it to succeed.

We all were wrong.

Yes, in the simplest terms, given that the film reportedly cost only $21 million to make, opening weekend ticket sales of roughly $19.5 million render it a success.  And in fairness to Perry, this performance is on par with that of most of his films. But let’s be honest.  Those who concluded that he was the choice to helm For Colored Girls to box office success had not set our sights this low. We weren’t hoping for the modest box office receipts of films like I Can Do Bad All By Myself or Why Did I Get Married? We were fantasizing an opening weekend more aligned with Madea Goes to Jail which also originated as a play, opened at $41 million, scored Perry his first appearance in the number one slot and held it for two weeks. Perry’s defenders were excited over the idea of Madea’s stans turning out in droves to support Perry then reading Shange’s seminal play, and they wanted skeptics to get excited, too.

Theirs was an understandable desire – a beautiful hope even – but an unrealistic expectation. While I never expected the film to deliver Madea numbers, its showing surprised even me.  Perry’s base – the ones who consistently buy $20-plus million in ticket sales on opening weekend even when Madea is not on the bill – plus the multigenerational and diverse fans of the written and staged choreopoem should have generated higher receipts.  According to Box Office Mojo, 19 per cent of For Colored Girls viewers were not Black. This tells me that Madea’s fans didn’t show up for Perry’s colored girls, handing him his second lowest opening weekend after Daddy’s Little Girls. (I’ll leave it someone else to ruminate on the possible implications on that coincidence.)
#3: Perry’s success creates opportunities for other African American filmmakers.

This is a freestanding assumption about the industry’s general regard for filmmakers that are not White that has yet to be proven whether the filmmaker is Tyler Perry, John Singleton or Spike Lee.  As often as it’s slung to shame critical members of underrepresented communities to support fare they find uninteresting if not outright problematic, there’s just no evidence that the film industry actually operates on this principle. If this were the case, we would have a bankable African American female director on the set by now.

On the contrary, the story of how Tyler Perry became attached to For Colored Girls shows just how unfounded this assumption is. Or more like the non-story. Not only had critically acclaimed music video director Nzingha Stewart optioned the rights and drafted a screenplay, she also succeeded in attaching Angela Bassett, Sanaa Lathan and Alicia Keys to attract major studio interest.  Only six months after Lionsgate announced the project and named Stewart as writer and director, it released a statement that Perry would assume those duties with no explanation for replacing her.*

Stewart received credit as executive producer For Colored Girls in a corporate move that strike me as at once conciliatory and patronizing. After all, personnel changes that occur for innocuous reasons are quite common, and studios are quick to reveal them to assure fans that their anticipation will not be disappointed. Even less than amicable partings on “mainstream” films (read: with White casts and crews) are attributed publicly to “creative differences.” In any event, some explanation is offered. But Lionsgate, Perry and even Stewart have dodged the question why the African American woman who brought the project to the studio, had packaged it well enough to get consideration and was granted initially the opportunity to realize that attractive vision was replaced by Perry. Of course, we don’t know what material compensation or future opportunities Lionsgate offered her, but given how the typical woman of color filmmaker tends to write/direct a feature every five, six years, I would be hard to convince that these plus the credit she received (which she had already earned) are commensurate with the loss of what was arguably a passion project.  A bird in the hand…

But never mind that. The fact the project did not originate with Perry when his juggernaut has been fully based on his own material is all we need to know to bust open this assumption.  His immense power and privilege in Hollywood shut a door that Stewart had worked diligently toward and succeeded in opening for herself, punto final.

I’m still waiting for proof that a rising tide lifts all boats in the mainstream film industry.  From where I sit, the opposite is true.  The powers that has yet to read Tyler Perry’s commercial viability as a call to produce more films by and for Black people.  Rather they narrowly interpret his popularity as a demand for more of Perry’s work and his work alone. How many other African American media makers release two features and have two TV shows on the air in the same year?

The industry’s penchant for hedging its bets with a handful of talent of color did not begin nor has yet to end with Tyler Perry. The tremendous success of straight-to-video hustlers-in-the-‘hood movies in the DVD market, for example, has yet to make an executive think, “Maybe if we offered some romantic comedies and psychological thrillers to our slate next year, we would make even more money.” Instead he greenlights even more hustlers-in-the-‘hood flicks.  Nor is this mindset confined to popular film as the publishing industry’s street lit explosion and practically every genre of commercial music dominated by African Americans illustrates. Yet many of the same people who make impassioned arguments against the dominance of street lit at Barnes & Noble at the expense of other African American stories are blind to the same phenomenon at work in the film industry.

Indeed, the saddest thing about the persistence of this unproven assumption is our complicity in it. As much as some of us may preach the gospel of supporting our filmmakers on opening weekend, where we the weekends Cadillac Records, Something New and Talk to Me – all studio-backed pictures written and/or directed by Black women – were released?  And when given the names of Julie Dash or Sanaa Hamri as alternative directors for For Colored Girls, too many responded, “Who’s that?” with no consideration that their unawareness was more part of the problem than a case in point in their defense of Tyler Perry. Clearly, an adamant supporter of African American cinema at the box office could stand to make a diligent effort to identify all the filmmakers who need this support and not place all their bets on one voice. If we are unwilling to bother, we can hardly expect a White studio executive with her eye on the bottom line to do the same.

This is not about Perry’s gender or talent although those things are fair game and continued to be discussed.   But when we unpack the assumptions on which the argument rests, to insist that he was the best option to write and direct For Colored Girls because he has proven to be a box office draw is to conclude essentially not only (1) aesthetic and sensibility are irrelevant but also (2) they have no implication for commercial success. If that’s the case, should we ever hear that Oliver Stone is on the shortlist to write and direct Native Son or that James Cameron was tapped to adapt The Bluest Eye, let’s rock with it. After all, they both have far better opening weekend track records than Tyler Perry.

*Editor’s Note: Check out this great interview over at Shadow and Act with Nzingha Stewart for more information on the Tyler Perry situation. – LDP

The Maynard Institute’s Fault Line Framework is a diversity tool that teaches people to talk to each other with the goal of understanding. Dori J. Maynard, who has been refining the framework, will write a regular feature about living on the Fault Lines. This is her first entry.

A few hours before the recent Rally to Restore Sanity, the general manager of a Hampton Inn in Washington, D.C. kicked me out of his hotel, forcing me to stand on the street to wait for my colleague in 39-degree weather.

The incident began when I arrived early for a breakfast meeting with a program officer from one of the major foundations that supports the nonprofit I run. We were in town for the Online News Association’s annual convention and wanted to catch up.

After looking around the lobby, I settled on a seat at a table where I could watch the elevators.

Right in front of me was an older white guy wearing a t-shirt with the word “eracism” emblazoned on the back. Given that the tenor of our national conversation these days has me increasingly fearful about where this country is heading, I was touched to see him making such a strong statement and got up to tell him so.

He was in town for the rally, and we discussed that and the general mood in the nation. When the conversation ran its course, I turned to return to my seat.

That’s when the general manager stopped me and asked if I was a guest at the hotel. I explained I was not but was there for a business meeting with a guest. “Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the hotel,” he said, leading me through the lobby and toward the doors.

I thought he had misunderstood, so I repeated that I was in fact there at the invitation of a hotel guest. “Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the hotel,” he repeated. Slowly, I began to realize that this was no case of “mistaken identity.”

The general manager apparently had deemed me so undesirable that he did not think I was fit to sit in the lobby of his Hampton Inn.

Somewhat disoriented, I managed to have the presence of mind to tell the front desk clerk to call my colleague and let him know that I would be unable to meet him in the lobby as planned because I was being escorted out of the hotel.

The general manager and I watched as she spoke into the phone. Clearly, I was there to meet a paying guest. But the general manager continued to repeat, “Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the hotel.”

People have asked why I did not refuse to leave and then insist that he call the police.

I think that the truth is I was blindsided.

My professional life is all about working with the news media to ensure that all segments of our society are accurately and fairly portrayed. I often speak of the corrosive effects of skewed media images on our public policy and personal lives.

As a person of color in this country, I have many times felt as if I am under greater scrutiny, so I compensate and arm myself as best I can. I consciously try to act in a way that reassures those around me.

Taking a cue from my father, I try to dress as well as possible, almost as if I’m sending up a silent prayer that if I look like this, maybe you won’t treat me like that.

But walking into a hotel lobby for a business meeting is such a mundane and common occurrence in my life that it never dawned on me to be on guard.

It wasn’t only the manager who blindsided me. Equally shocking was my own reaction.

We have programs that teach people how to talk across difference, including not internalizing another person’s negative reaction. Intellectually, I knew this had nothing to do with me. Yet all I felt was shame.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., was roundly criticized for screaming “you don’t know who you’re messing with,” according to a police report, as the Cambridge cop arrested him in his own home.

I wanted to shout the same thing, not as an arrogant assertion of my authority but as an anguished cry for recognition of our shared humanity.

“You don’t know who I am. I could be your mother, your sister, your cousin or your aunt. I am a fellow human, not something to be discarded on the street.”

I said none of that.

The closest I came was, “Why are you doing this to me? You know I am meeting someone here.” Even I could hear the weakness in my voice, further deepening my sense of humiliation. That was the only time the general manager deviated from his script, saying, “We have to protect our other guests. Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the hotel.”

I made one more lame attempt to assert myself and asked for his name. He thrust his card at me, opened the front door of the hotel and ushered me into the cold. The card identified him as Joseph Galvan, General Manager of Hampton Inn Washington DC Convention Center.

Stunned, I stood shivering on the street wondering what the heck had just happened to me.

People have asked me whether I want Galvan fired. The truth is I don’t want him ever to do this to someone else, particularly someone younger and truly vulnerable. But firing him won’t solve the problem.

As I pointed out after NPR recently fired Juan Williams, just because you shut someone down doesn’t mean you’ve lifted up the issue.

Our Fault Lines framework teaches that it will be very difficult for us to reach common ground until we learn to have the difficult conversations around charged issues. That’s what I would like to see happen this time.

I would like to sit down and have a conversation with the general manager and his colleagues. I want to know what and who he saw when he looked at me in the lobby of his hotel. I want to discuss his underlying assumptions and how he came to them.

After hearing about what had happened to me, my cousin Peter looked up the company on the Internet and learned that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had sued one of its Indianapolis properties about a month ago. I’d like to talk to company representatives and learn what happened and what they think about both of these incidents. I’d also like to know what the company’s guidelines are for escorting people out of the lobby.

This is what we teach and preach in our media work because we don’t think we have a chance to restore our national sanity if we can’t even determine how to have a civil conversation with each other.

“I’ve seen a lot in my life but to be degraded… not just stripped of my clothes, being stripped of my dignity, was what I had a problem with.”

Kurdish American Karwan Abdul Kader was stopped and stripped by local law enforcement for no reason other than driving around in the wrong neighborhood. This is one among many stories featured in a powerful new documentary “Face The Truth: Racial Profiling Across America”, produced by Breakthrough’s Restore Fairness campaign and the Rights Working Group, showcasing the devastating impact of racial profiling on communities around our country, including the African American, Latino, Arab, Muslim and South Asian communities.

Face the Truth: Racial Profiling Across America from Breakthrough on Vimeo.

The documentary brings to life a new report by the Rights Working Group released along with 350 local and national partners on the one year anniversary of the Face the Truth campaign to end racial profiling. Both the video and report urge Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA), and are featured in a Congressional briefing on Thursday, September 30th in Washington D.C. attended by advocates, police chiefs and community organizers.

Besides compelling personal stories, the documentary features interviews with notable law enforcement and civil society leaders such as Hilary O. Shelton (NAACP), Dr.Tracie Keesee (Division Chief, Denver Police Department) and Karen Narasaki (Asian American Justice Center), all of whom decry racial and religious profiling as a pervasive problem that is not only humiliating and degrading for the people subjected to it, but one that is unconstitutional, ineffective as a law enforcement practice, and ultimately damaging to community security.

Together, we can stop the erosion of our fundamental human rights. Watch the video and take action now.

By Thea Lim

I heard about Molly Norris for the first time last week, on Fatemeh’s blog. Fatemeh wrote that she had signed a petition in support of Molly Norris, and gave this reason:

I was unhappy to read that “Draw Muhammad Day” creator Molly Norris had voluntarily gone into hiding. While I thought the concept of “Draw Muhammad Day” was ridiculous and viewed it in the same light as the South Park episode that supposedly depicted the prophet, I recognize that Norris’ intent wasn’t to be offensive or malicious. In Islam, intentions count for something just like actions, and no one should be punished for simple naïveté. It’s atrocious that Norris has received threats and feels unsafe enough to go incognito.

I have to say that after doing a little bit of reading about Norris, “Draw Muhammad Day” and the outpouring of support for Norris, I am finding it difficult to be as generous as Fatemeh.

When Fatemeh writes that she supports Norris, what I understand is that Fatemeh supports Norris’ right to live a life free of violence and threats.  That, I find entirely reasonable – I too support Norris’ right to safety, as I support anyone’s right to safety.  But what I am struggling to understand is exactly what all the other people who say they support Norris, are actually in support of.

Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator writes:

Freedom of expression in America took another step closer to a slow death last week when the Seattle Weekly announced it would no longer be publishing the work of cartoonist Molly Norris because she had gone into hiding…I cannot help but wonder that if Norris had been more assertive in her own defense then others would have been more eager to stand beside her…So given the current political climate regarding Islam in America who among us could be the next Molly Norris?

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal writes:

Where is President Obama? Last month, speaking to a mostly Muslim audience at the White House, the president strongly defended the right of another imam held up as a moderate to build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero. The next day, and again at a press conference last week, Obama said he was merely standing up for the First Amendment. As far as we recall, it’s the only time Barack Obama has ever stood up for anybody’s First Amendment rights.

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Abigail R. Esman at Forbes writes:

Let me repeat: The U.S. government is suggesting that Ms. Norris change her name, strip away her past, possibly even change her appearance, because she has been targeted by Muslim extremists who are not amused by her work or her ideas. Rather than protect her, rather than defend her, rather than stand up for her Constitutional and democratic rights, declaring their intention to route al-Awlaki out and bring him (and others who are threatening her life) to justice, the American government, as it were, is itself in essence allying with him by taking away her freedom and her life.

Now listen. I will say this again: I emphatically support Molly Norris’ right to safety. I think it is terrible that she has to go into hiding, and I can only imagine the fear and distress that she is feeling right now.

But. I 100% do not support Norris’ right to mean-spirited mockery. I do not support anyone’s right to belittle, poke fun at, show insensitivity or thoughtlessness towards anyone else’s system of belief – but especially at Islam, seeing how it seems to have become some sort of Liberal American pastime to see who can make the most Islamophobic joke.  And this is while the rights of Muslims to pursue their system of belief is under attack, all across the Western world.

And of course I support free speech. I support informed dissent. But what Norris did – and South Park, and Jyllends Posten and any other fool who carries on creating images of Muhammad as if to do so is some act of inspired and noble rebellion – was not informed dissent.  It was a nasty and childish response to being told, for once, that there was something we are not allowed to do, or cannot have.

In her letter of apology distancing herself Draw Muhammad Day, Norris writes:

My one-off cartoon does not work well as a long-term plan. The vitriol this ‘day’ has brought out, of people who only want to draw obscene images, is offensive to Muslims who did nothing to endanger our right to expression in the first place. Only Viacom and Revolution Muslim are to blame, so…draw them instead!

I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this ‘day’ be called off…

That part of the letter I liked. This part of Norris’ letter I did not like:

My cartoon was the beginning and end of what I had to say about this creepy, historic censorship.

Creepy, historic censorship? How is a religious idea about how to show respect to your deity “creepy”? All religions have rules and ideas about the best way to show respect to God. In Judaism God’s name is never pronounced.  In Catholicism you must bow before the altar every time you walk in front of it.  I am sure any religion in existence has strict rules about addressing God and his messengers – after all, isn’t the very backbone of religion the idea of the sacred, where “sacred” means that which is entitled to veneration or respect?

Sometimes it appears as if  any benign request made by another power to the Western, white, (culturally) Christian world (WWCCW), is received as an affront. As in, how dare anyone else tell us what to do? WE RUN THIS PLACE! As in, this refusal is an extreme manifestation of the way that certain Western, white, cultural Christians think they are entitled to do anything and consume anything, because they are the West, the boss of this town, and ain’t no one ever going to tell them what to do.

Even if “what to do” is a rule relating to something that doesn’t concern the WWCCW at all – for example, depictions of Muhammad.  It is like watching a kindergarten bully stamp around the playroom knocking over other kids’ desks, because they have dared to do or have something that doesn’t include the bully – and then dared to ask that the bully respect the preciousness of those things. This is the core of entitlement.

Absolutely nothing entitles any non-Muslim to an opinion about depictions of Muhammad. If Islam had laws about the depiction of universal symbols, say, like any manifestation of God, and threats of violence were made whenever anyone drew these things, that would be one thing. But it is beyond me why the depiction of a solely Muslim entity concerns anyone who does not follow the teachings of Muhammad. And yet it feels like every few months another scandal rears it head where some a-hole decides to draw Muhammad. For what? For the pleasure of causing hurt and pain to Muslims by showing them you completely disrespect their beliefs, simply because you can?

I do not confuse my support and sympathy for Norris’ right to safety, with support and sympathy for her right to be disrespectful and mocking.  I do not believe that the latter right, is a right.

And if supporting only some rights to free speech and not others (namely, I don’t support the right to free speech that is arrogant and mocking) means that I don’t truly support free speech…well then, eff it. I don’t support free speech. Honestly, I’d rather be called a draconian censor than join the ranks of my fellow, select Westerners who have never truly learnt what it means to respect someone or something beyond their own worldview.

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Photo Credit: Ikhwan Web

When I first saw Off and Running I was immediately taken, but then again, my own personal investment in the film’s subject matter was considerable. Like Avery, I’m an adopted Jew of color from New York City. I see only dualities in my maturation, which has been a series of racially charged incidents quelled by moments of encouragement by people and institutions that worked together in a bizarre alchemy to create me.

As a young child my parents sat me down and explained it was important for me to find a faith of which to be a part. I grew up in the predominantly liberal and Jewish bastion of New York City called the Upper West side and at the ripe age of 9, it was Judaism that I felt most connected to; it was what I knew best. I began to attend a Schul after school where we were taught stories from the Bible, Yiddish and about our history and culture. I liked the friends I made and the stories I heard at Schul. The formation of my Jewish identity at that age was informed by Schul where there were transnationally adopted Jews to my right and left and by my neighborhood where I felt my family the apotheosis of what the 21st century family looked like. At 9 years old, I thought being bi-racial and Jewish was a magical marriage of identities.

At 13 years old, in the planning stages of my Bat Mitzvah, my Hebrew School teacher called a meeting at his home to discuss details. He opened his door to see me, my father who is an Ashkenazi Jew and my black mother. Upon seeing my family, without asking, he regrettably informed us that the synagogue, would not allow me to perform the right of passage in their temple because my mother wasn’t a Jew. My wily mother, coyly and smarmily responded “oh, but her mother is Jewish.”

Yes, it turns out my biological mother is a white Ashkenazi Jew.

And with these words, my Hebrew school teacher, as though I was caught in the Woody Allen version of my own life as a film, threw his hands into the air and exclaimed “it’s Bashert [it’s destiny] then! You’ll have your Bat Mitzvah in the Temple!” In that moment I felt a definitive rage. I wanted desperately to be a part of the Upper West Side’s most exclusive and popular clique, Judaism, but felt what would prove to be an indelible stake in this idea of blackness, something pitted against Jewishness. And so there it was, in the home of my Hebrew School teacher that the two were separated, like oil and water.

I was Black and Jewish but I couldn’t be both, I couldn’t be a Black Jew.

I chose not to have a Bat Mitzvah. I did not want play into the manipulations of the Jewish matrilineal system, making me Jewish because my adoptive mother, my actual mother, was not Jewish. My Jewish “blood line” felt tenuous and foreign and I did not want to take part in a brand of Judaism that did not accept that I was Jewish because my father was Jewish. And so I began to create my own rules.

My Jewish identity became an amalgamation of the cultural extensions of the religion. I ate bagels from Murray’s Sturgeon Shop on 90th and Broadway, sang Yiddish songs and memorialized the Holocaust in the “Culturally Jewish” Camp Kinderland and attended Seders at my aunts house. But my connection to the religion was jaded and superficial. It was as though I wore a “Jewish” badge when I felt as though it would benefit or help me to fit in better, but didn’t believe in it at my core, having been turned away because of my race. I could wear Judaism like a person wears a cloak, removing it when I came into my room, putting it on to perform for others.

Last December my roommate decided to throw a Shabbos dinner. It was also the first night of Chanukah. I created a makeshift Menorah in our kitchen, since we did not have one. When I emerged from the kitchen with my creation, I stood in front of it like a proud mother. I quieted the small living room and began to recite the prayer. Most people, even the one or two that weren’t Jewish knew (at least) some of it, the beginning, “Barukh atah Adonai” being the loudest, but by the third verse, the one that you recite only on the Friday of Chanukah, all but three of the twenty people dropped out; me, my roommate and one young man.

After it was over I began to exit the room and was stopped by the same young man that had accompanied me in the last verse.

He insisted, “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

I replied calmly, coolly “Yes, yes I am.”

He replied “But you’re not like, Jewish, Jewish, right? I mean, you don’t look Jewish.”

I walked out of the room. But not without overhearing him whisper to his friend “I mean, c’mon, give me a break, she looks Indian or something, did Sara teach her that prayer do you think?” I left the house after that. It was the first time I’d cried since the day I left my Hebrew School Teacher’s house and written off any formal tie to Judaism. It was then that I realized I was unable to remove my imaginary cloak. The cloak, the performance of Judaism, turned out to be a projection of real desire to feel accepted. I realized I the liberal isolation I had grown up with was not a reflection of race in America and if I wanted to be Jewish I had to make a concerted effort to make people accept me as such.

A few short weeks later I watched Off and Running. In it was one young woman’s unapologetically raw quest to join all identities. Instead of pushing her Judaism away, only allowing it to appear when convenient and comfortable like I had, Avery did not let it go. She allowed Judaism in, steadfast that it was a part of her fabric just as her blackness was becoming. Avery had an incisive understanding that identity is a construction, her blackness another layer of herself that she needed to explore and take from to create. In one of the most poignant moments in the film a therapist asks her “Do you feel black?” to which Avery responds “African-American? I don’t know what that means.” Avery’s transparent and unadulterated battle to find confluence urged me to do the same.

In the time since watching Off and Running I have approached my blackness and my Judaism as two of many other parts working together. I have encountered many Jews of Color who are doing the same. In a recent New York Times article well-known African-American Jewish blogger, Ma Nishtena, asserts that he eats his “gefilte fish as his mother prepares it, seasoned with Jamaican peppers and spices,” harvesting a Judaism that unites his other identities. The documentary Off and Running comes during a moment where American Jewry is at a crossroads. Its face, like Ma Nishtena’s mother’s gefilte fish, is sprinkled with color. The lockstep of conservative American Jewry needs to streamline their identities to complement the generally shifting American consciousness, away from exclusivity, toward sprinkled gefilte fish.

Editor’s Note: Off and Running airs tonight, at 7 PM ET, on PBS. It is also available on Netflix. – LDP