[W]as he wrong? Should he give himself up? Would he be able to tell everything he knew and dump the problem into the laps of others?

To give himself up would be an act of self-destruction. He would be confined, isolated. He would be prevented from doing the one thing he must do: seeking out new hosts for the alien micro-organisms that had made themselves such fundamental parts of his body. Their purpose was now his purpose, and their only purpose was to survive and multiply. All his increased strength, speed, coordination, and sensory ability was to keep him alive and mobile, able to find new hosts or beget them. Many hosts. Perhaps three out of four of those found would die, but that magical fourth was worth any amount of trouble.

The organisms were not intelligent. They could not tell him how to keep himself alive, free, and able to find new hosts. But they became intensely uncomfortable if he did not, and their discomfort was his discomfort. He might interpret what they made him feel as pleasure when he did was was necessary, desirable, essential: or as paon when he tried to do what was terrifying, self-destructive, impossible. But what he was actually feeling were secondhand advance-retreat responses of millions of tiny symbionts.

The woman touch him to get his attention. She had brought him a tray. He took it on his lap, trying, and in the final, driven instant, failing to return the woman’s kindness. He could not spare her. He scratched her wrist just hard enough to draw blood.

It’s hard for me to articulate how I feel about Clay’s Ark. Sandwiched in as the third of the Patternmaster series, Clay’s Ark feels dramatically different from the pacing and tone of Mind of My Mind and Wild Seed. In many ways, Clay’s Ark functions as a bridge to explain the events that lead to the creation of the Clayarks and their eventual war with the Patternists. There were no standout characters to wrestle with, in this one – the main thrust of the novel is the series of extraordinary circumstances that bring about the end of (a) world.

We’re a bit behind in the book club, so let’s call this one the “winter break” read. We’ll do a summary post in January, and then roll right into Patternmaster.

“Are we going back home?” Vivan asked.

Karl glanced at her, then looked around. He realized that he was heading back toward Palo Verde. He had left home heading nowhere in particular except away from Mary and Doro. Now he had made a large U and was heading back to them. And it wasn’t just an ordinary impulse driving him. It was Mary’s pattern.

He pulled over to the curb, stopped under a NO PARKING sign. He leaned back in the seat, his eyes closed.

“Will you tell me what’s the matter with you?” Vivan asked.

“No.”

She was doing all she could to keep calm. It was his silence that frightened her. His silence and his obvious anger. He wondered why he had brought her with him. Then he remembered.”You’re not leaving me,” he said.

“But if Mary came through transition all right–”

“I said you’re not leaving!”

“All right.” She was almost crying with fear. “What are you going to do with me?”

He turned to glare at her in disgust.

“Karl, for heaven’s sake! Tell me what’s wrong!” Now she was crying.

“Be quiet.” Had he ever loved her, really? Had she ever been more than a pet-like all the rest of his women? “How was Doro last night?” he asked.

She looked startled. By mutual agreement, they did not discuss her nights with Doro. Or they hadn’t until now. “Doro?” she said.

“Doro.”

“Oh, now – ” She sniffed, trying to compose herself. “Now, just a minute – ”

“How was he?”

She frowned at him, disbelieving. “That can’t be what’s bothering you. Not after all this time. Not as though it was my fault either!”

“That’s a pretty good body he’s wearing,” said Karl. “And I could see from the way you were hanging on him this morning that he must have given you a pretty good – ”

“That’s enough!” Outrage was fast replacing her fear.

A pet, he thought. What difference did it make what you said or did to a pet?

“I’ll defy Doro when you do,” she said icily. “The moment you refuse to do what he tells you and stick to your refusal, I’ll stand with you!”

A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing.

“You’ve got your nerve complaining about Doro and me,” she muttered. “You’d climb into bed with him yourself if he told you to.”

Karl hit her. He had never done such a thing before, but it was easy. She screamed, then foolishly tried to get out of the car. He caught her arm, pulled her back, hit her again, and again. He was panting when he stopped. She was bloody and only half conscious, crumpled down on the seat, crying. He hadn’t controlled her. He had wanted to use his hands. Just his hands. And he wasn’t satisfied. He could have hurt her more. He could have killed her.

Yes, and then what? How many of his problems would her death erase? He would have to get rid of her body, and then still go back to his master, and now, by God, his mistress. Once he was there, at least Mary’s pattern would stop pulling at him, dragging at him, subverting his will as easily as he subverted Vivian’s. Nothing would be changed though, except that Vivian would be gone.

Only a pet?

Who was he thinking about? Vivian or himself? Now that Doro had tricked him into putting on a leash, it could be either, or both.

He took Vivian by the shoulders and made her sit up. He had split her lip. That was where the blood came from. He took out a hankerchief and wiped away as much of it as he could. She looked at him first, vacillating between fear and anger; then she looked away. Without a word, he drove her to Monroe Memorial Hospital. There he parked, took out his checkbook, and wrote a check. He tore it out and put it in her hands. “Go. Get away from me while you can.”

“I don’t need a doctor.”

“All right, don’t see one. But go!”

“This is a lot of money,” she said, looking at the check. “What’s it supposed to pay me for?”

“Not pay you,” he said. “God, you know better than that.”

“I know you don’t want me to go. Whatever you’re angry about, you still need me. I didn’t think you would, but you do.”

“For your own good, Vee, go!”

“I’ll decide what’s good for me.” Calmly she tore the check into small pieces. She looked at him. “If you really wanted me to go – if you want me to go now – you know how to make that happen. You do know. ”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Your making a mistake.”

“And you’re letting me make it.”

“If you stay, this might be the last time you’ll have the freedom to make your own mistakes.”

Mind of My Mind is the second book I ever read by Octavia Butler, and the one that stands out in my mind the most clearly. This is probably due to the heavy ethical questions explored within the text.

The scene above looks at dynamics of abuse, contrasting the physical abuse Karl deals to Vivan with the mental abuse they both live under with Doro. In that small scene, Karl wrestles with the main questions of the book. Can you truly love someone you can control? Is the idea of benevolence a lie? After all, after Mary discovered her pattern, Karl accused her of fostering thoughts very close to Doro, who has been the series antagonist up to this point. This scene in particular is painful foreshadowing – both for Vee, who does eventually lose her free will, and all humans after the Patternists rise to power.

The idea of free agency vs. a benevolent God is one heavily tapped in Mind of My Mind. Mary is put in a God like position, where her transition instantly gains her control of the formerly divided gifted. However, most of her first family initially resist her control, rightly fearing the amount of control she has over their lives. They soon realize death is their only true escape, so they eventually come around to the benefits of the arrangement. Still, Doro rightly feels usurped from his position as lead person in control, and battles Mary for control. When Doro casts the declaration of war, he notes “I can’t afford her unless she can obey me.” The theme of obedience in lessers returns time and time again, and often, it’s difficult to know what side to be on. The Patternists want freedom (of a sort) for themselves and to live under Mary; however, they easily deny this type of freedom to the humans (often referred to pejoratively as mutes) who live and work alongside of them.

Still, relationships are complicated in Butler’s worlds. Doro and Mary approach their face-off, resigned to an ending, but not taking much pleasure in each other’s destruction until the heat of battle. After Doro is defeated, Emma (Anyanwu) chooses to die alongside him, despite their initial differences. And Mary’s ascension to Patternmaster alters the world.

Readers, what stood out to you most in Mind of My Mind? What themes did you see?

(Apologies on missing September, folks!)

[Doro] glanced at Rina in annoyance. Rina shrank back against the wall.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Do you think you’re safer over there?”

“Don’t hurt me,” she said. “Please.”

“Why would you beat a three-year-old like that, Rina?”

“I didn’t do it! I swear. It was a guy who brought me home a couple of nights ago. Mary woke up screaming from a nightmare or something, and he-”

“Hell,” said Doro in disgust. “Is that supposed to be an excuse?”

Rina began to cry silently, tears streaming down her face. “You don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t understand what it’s like for me having that kid here.” She was no longer slurring her words, in spite of her tears. Her fear had sobered her. She wiped her eyes. “I really didn’t hit her. You know I wouldn’t dare lie to you.” She stared at Doro a moment, then shook her head. “I’ve wanted to hit her though –so many time. I can hardly even stand to go near her sober anymore…” She looked at the body cooling on the floor and began to tremble.

This month’s selection is Mind of My Mind, the second in the Patternist series.

Some free floating framing questions:

1. How does Butler depict the post-slavery world?
2. Are our minds inherently fragile or resilient?
3. How are people shaped by violence?
4. Approaching this book, after reading Wild Seed, what do you think about Doro’s humanity or inhumanity?

Happy reading.

Next week, we will move on to the second book in the Patternist series, Mind of My Mind.

But first, let’s close out Wild Seed.

I found myself coming back to two main ideas after reading. (Spoilers ahead – but you should be keeping up with the reading.)

The first was a question for myself: How do I see the evolution of Doro and Anyanwu’s relationship? Was it ever anything besides a relationship predicated on how he could use her abilities? I label it abusive, but at the same time, there is something else there. It’s something close to a shared loneliness, but not fully. Kind of like the bond that passes between people who truly understand each other, yet are fundamentally different. As if Doro and Anyanwu are like magnets – repelling each other for most of the book, but still drawn to each other in the end. Then I would read over a chapter and hate Doro all over again. His views on morality may have made perfect sense to him – but they caused so many people pain. Can one ascribe humanity to a being such as Doro? If we can, we can wonder about his final reveal of vulnerability; if we can’t, then there is no use appealing to something that was never there to begin with.

Also, strangely, the Willie Lynch letter keeps surfacing in my mind. Despite having long been discredited (by multiple scholars at this point), the central question the false artifact purports to answer – “How do we create a slave?” – is a tantalizing one. Doro is a slave trader. Doro’s associates are slave traders. And he proves to be quite skilled at persuading others to submit to his control, through physical or psychological violence. Anyanwu’s final decision plays into that question as well. There are many times in the book where Anyanwu follows Doro’s orders, but her final submission felt different somehow. Again, if we look at this through the prism of humanity, and Doro’s expression of vulnerability as an expression of love, perhaps it is understandable. However, if we do not see Doro as human, it feels like Anyanwu submits, fully, to slavery. Did Doro create a slave? Or did Anyanwu choose to be one? Or did she chose something else entirely?

What are your thoughts, readers?

So, Book Clubbers, I need to resolve a little problem that’s popped up.

Over the weekend, I read Survivor using the link that commenter FtrYBFMD provided.

On one hand, I can see why Butler hated the novel. Her novels are generally known for complicated morality – this one reads pretty clearly. There aren’t really good guys but there are clear bad guys, and it’s more in line with a lot of the other sci-fi I read. (As a matter of fact, it’s forcing me to reflect on how easily I accept the idea of colonizing other planets, lands, and worlds – and how easily authors accept human superiority, even when they question it.) Jo Walton, writing for Tor, provides some context for Butler’s distaste:

Survivor (1978) is part of the Pattern series, but has not been reprinted since 1981. Butler repudiated the novel and refused to allow it to be reprinted:

When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way. They were a little sly, or a little like “the natives” in a very bad, old movie. And I thought, “No way. Apart from all these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage.” People ask me why I don’t like Survivor, my third novel. And it’s because it feels a little bit like that. Some humans go up to another world, and immediately begin mating with the aliens and having children with them. I think of it as my Star Trek novel.

All I can say is, she clearly watched a better grade of Star Trek than I ever did. I can understand her problem with the biology, but what she seems to be saying there is that Survivor is a dishonest novel. Well, I kind of like it. I’m sorry you can’t read it.

Oh, but we can. In addition to the link, Racialicious readers have emailed in and volunteered to scan their copies. So if we wanted to, we could. But there’s a couple ethical questions here.

First in my mind – respecting the wishes of Butler herself. Octavia Butler did not want this novel back in rotation. (And, aside from that, posting it in full violates copyright, which could get us in a whole kettle of mess if we officially endorse reading the pirated copy and her estate objects. Though, we could just ask her estate…)

Second, though, is the whole idea of why we are reading her in the first place. Survivor may be much more in line with sci-fi norms, but it also is stamped heavily with Butler’s complexities. Most compelling for me is how much Survivor is a story of a mixed race, transracial adoptee. Considering the community here, I think readers would have a lot of fun applying their own interpretation of Butler’s work with their own experiences, and how they think the novel symbolizes that type of environmental tension.

And this area is ripe for debate. Walton believed that a scene in the book where some of the human settlers ask Alanna’s foster family to allow her live with one of the black settler families was an act of racism – but I heavily disagree with her take. To me, it seemed like Butler was illustrating the futility of social norms. The black settlers didn’t really trust Alanna’s past (she was a feral child, raised outside of the settlement), but still felt obligated to offer her refuge from what they saw as racism in the settler community. There are other references to race mixing, and the idea that all the settlers were not in favor of it – and this is before we get to the Garkohn and the Tehkohn. So, yes, race is an issue, even in space. Because we’re still human.

So, think there is a lot of value in the conversation. If we do read it, I would probably have us read Survivor between Clay’s Arc and Patternmaster. But I want to know how we feel about it. If there’s enough folks who want to do it, I will write the Butler estate for permission and accept their decision. (Conversely, we could just hold a conversation for folks who want to read the book and find some way to obtain it. Some library systems have copies.) Or, we could respect her wishes and skip it.

Readers, the floor is yours.

I saw this comment and just about fell out with laughter.

sci-fi writer
JULY 1, 2011 AT 10:28 PM
I am happy to see so many women getting interested in the male-dominated sci-fi genre. Octavia Butler is a great writer and I have enjoyed her works myself. I would like to offer some warning, however. Before you read Octavia Butler believing it to be “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in space, you should know that Octavia Butler was a good -science fiction- writer. That means her works may have some really weird stuff in it. For example, one of her books describes humanity being assimilated by an alien race that must have 3-way sex with a tentacle monster in order to reproduce. The book was riveting and very well-written though. I just wanted to give the ladies a heads up. “The Parable of the Sower” did read like “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” set in the year 2050 (I couldn’t get into it), but some of her works read like typical, fantasy, space opera, science fiction stories. Octavia Butler was an exceptional Black writer who blazed a trail for science fiction writers like myself to follow. If, however, you don’t like weird stuff, be wary.

Remember: It’s tentacle monsters, not Terry McMillan.

(Image Credit: Selling Out for Fun and Profit)

(Back story on the image: Okay, so I put in “tentacle monster” to see what popped up – and yes y’all, I know exactly what was gonna appear on my home computer – and this cute little thing came up. Since I was resigned to an image of something mildly pornified, imagine my delight to find this cute little thing. Then I checked to see what it is. It’s called Rape-kun. O_o. So then I’m trying to figure out what the hell that’s all about, and apparently it’s a gag in a webcomic called Errant Story and spin off series called Fun with Familiars. In the ES wiki, it’s described like this: “Rape-kun is Bani Igaaru’s familiar. He is a small, pink, “affectionate” micro-tentacle monster that enjoys sitting on Bani’s head. Despite the fact that Bani is a schoolgirl, Rape-kun does not, in fact, live up to his name. He was apparently protected by a password, which Bani did not know back during her days at Sashi Mu Academy of Thaumaturgy and Conjuration, that enables his “adult mode;” it hasn’t been revealed whether or not this state of affairs has changed since Bani’s graduation.” So I have no idea as to the appropriateness of using this image, but it’s gonna have to work at the moment.)

Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mud-walled palace surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized before he reached it that it’s people were gone. Slavers had been to it before him. With their guns and their greed, they had undone in a few hours the work of a thousand years. Those villagers they had not herded away, they had slaughtered. Doro found human bones, hair, bits of desiccated flesh missed by scavengers. He stood over a very small skeleton – the bones of a child – and wondered where the survivors had been taken. Which country or New World colony? How far would he have to travel to find the remnants of what had been a healthy, vigorous people?

Finally, he stumbled away from the ruins bitterly angry, not knowing or caring where he went. It was a matter of pride with him that he protected his own. Not the individuals, perhaps, but the groups. They gave him their loyalty, their obedience, and he protected them.

He had failed.

He wandered southwest toward the forest, leaving as he had arrived – alone, unarmed, without supplies, accepting the savanna and later the forest as easily as he accepted any terrain. He was killed several times – by disease, by animals, by hostile people. This was a harsh land. Yet, he continued to move southwest, unthinkingly veering away from the section of the coast where his ship awaited him. After a while, he realized it was no longer his anger at the loss of his seed village that drove him. It was something new – an impulse, a feeling, a kind of mental undertow pulling at him. He could have resisted it easily, but he did not. He felt there was something for him farther on, a little farther, just ahead. He trusted such feelings.

He had not been this far west for several hundred years, this he could be certain that whatever, whoever he found would be new to him – new and potentially valuable. He moved on eagerly.

The feeling became sharper and finer, resolving itself into a kind of signal he would normally have expect to receive only from people he knew – people like his lost villagers whom he should be tracking now before they were forced to mix their seed with foreigners and breed away all the special qualities he valued in them. But he continued on southwest, closing slowly on his quarry.

- from the first page of the first chapter of Wild Seed

This is the first week of the Octavia Butler book club, and we are starting with the first of the Patternmaster series, Wild Seed. It is a little challenging to think of a question that will challenge new readers to the material and re-readers at the same time, but here’s the question to ponder while you read this week:

What ideas inform our conversations about slavery? What themes inform our conversations about romantic relationships? Are there places where the themes and ideas overlap?

Feel free to discuss in the comments. Readers should expect spoilers in all comments sections to these posts, though I will hide any questions that reveal particular plotpoints behind the jump. Our next discussion will be next Thursday. To stay on target, you should read up to page 67 (or whatever is equivalent to 1/4th of the way through your copy) before then.

Feel free to chat among yourselves, and happy reading!

Octavia Butler was Racialicious before we even existed.

The late author is a cult icon, being a boundry breaking black woman in Science Fiction who infused her writing with rich societal commentary on race, gender, dominance, and much much more.

Last year, the University Press of Mississippi was kind enough to send me a review copy of Conversations with Octavia Butler, a collection of her interviews, edited by Consuela Francis. The interviews (some of which I will excerpt in later posts) were illuminating, revealing Butler’s damn near prophetic grasp of the underlying challenges facing our society. Quite a few of these interviews are from the 1980s and 1990s – her words still apply in 2011.

I savored the book as long as I could, but when I finally finished, I felt a deep and profound sense of loss. As just a casual reader before, I was suddenly confronted with the magnitude of exactly what went with Octavia Butler when she departed from this earth.

So I decided the best tribute would be to read, share, and enjoy her work.

Readers, welcome to the book club.

I’ve had a somewhat haphazard approach to Butler’s work. At first, I had only read Fledgling, on a recommendation for more black supernatural fiction. Then I read Conversations, and finished both Mind of My Mind and Bloodchild last week.

So, in a sense, I am starting over. (Hopefully, others long familiar with Butler’s work will do the same.)

Officially, we will start July 1 with the reading of Wild Seed.

As a new collector of Butler’s work (most of what I’ve read so far were borrowed from the library), I am going to purchase Seed to Harvest, a collection of the Patternmaster series. For those of you working the library, it may take some doing to locate all of Butler’s works – many of the books only have a few copies system, so use this extra week to start tracking things down.

We will also attempt to read Survivor, if we can locate it. Butler declined to have the book reprinted, since she felt like it wasn’t up to her own standards.

We will read one book a month. Each week, a post will go up around the book, perhaps some interesting dialogue, a question on themes, or an essay on a particularly interesting topic bridged in the books. We will also throw in some scholarly works on Butler, and, if I can, take the next logical step…develop a show pilot around her work. The talent pool on Racialicious is huge, and it would be fun to crowd-workshop a pilot, I think. And at least we know we won’t have the same drama as Earthsea.

So here’s the schedule:

July – Wild Seed
August – Mind of My Mind
September – Clay’s Ark
October – Patternmaster
November – Kindred
December – Survivor?; If Not, Bloodchild
January – Dawn (Xenogenesis/Lillith’s Brood)
February – Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis/Lillith’s Brood)
March – Imago (Xenogenesis/Lillith’s Brood)
April – Parable of the Sower
May – Parable of the Talents
June – Fledgling
July – Conversations with Octavia Butler

It’s a whole year of reading. Book club membership requires nothing but you reading the books – you don’t have to follow our order, but this shows the shape of the conversation.

Also, a note. My religious education is rather lacking in the finer details, and I’ve noticed that Butler (despite her own ambivalence toward organized religion) plays a lot with biblical style themes. So if someone notices a particularly interesting religious correlation, please speak up and help host a discussion. I will probably miss it.

Last year, at a Poynter function, I had the privilege of meeting Jose Antonio Vargas in person. Both charming and interesting, with a huge drive to make journalism a true tool of democracy, he seemed like someone I wanted to get to know.

Last week, Vargas wanted the world to get to know exactly who he was. So he took the bold step of writing a piece that could change his life forever. Called “My Life as an Undocumented Worker,” Vargas used the New York Times platform to reveal his secret:

Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Vargas artfully describes the pain of the political becoming personal:

The debates over “illegal aliens” intensified my anxieties. In 1994, only a year after my flight from the Philippines, Gov. Pete Wilson was re-elected in part because of his support for Proposition 187, which prohibited undocumented immigrants from attending public school and accessing other services. (A federal court later found the law unconstitutional.) After my encounter at the D.M.V. in 1997, I grew more aware of anti-immigrant sentiments and stereotypes: they don’t want to assimilate, they are a drain on society. They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have something to contribute.

Something that I adore about Vargas’ piece is how he quietly discusses class in the context of immigration. As he describes the hurdles he jumps through to obtain forged documents or to participate in society, he makes a few disclosures:

Lolo always imagined I would work the kind of low-paying jobs that undocumented people often take. (Once I married an American, he said, I would get my real papers, and everything would be fine.) But even menial jobs require documents, so he and I hoped the doctored card would work for now. The more documents I had, he said, the better.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local Y.M.C.A., then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at The Mountain View Voice, my hometown newspaper. First I brought coffee and helped around the office; eventually I began covering city-hall meetings and other assignments for pay.

For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an alien registration number.)

Something I noticed, while working in higher class gigs – the subtle indignities of working are mostly removed. At a certain professional level, you are no longer subjected to random drug tests. You have access to an HR department. And most importantly, there are a lot more assumptions that you are who you say you are. I work in DC, where a security clearance is worth your weight in gold – but outside of that, employers aren’t very strict. They may ask to see your documents once, but that’s all. There is no further interrogation. Especially if you possess the highest work document of all, a US Passport. Then, nothing else is needed.

I think about this gap often in terms of Ana. I mention her from time to time, the woman I used to babysit for. Ana fled the civil war in El Salvador and landed in America, only to flee the abusive husband that had come with her. She and her two kids had made a life for each other, but it was one ruled by fear – fear that their father would arrive in the night, and they would have to run again, and fear that others would show up at their door and ruin what she had worked for. I’m not sure, to this day, of Ana’s legal status – since she was a refugee, she could have been admitted to the United States under legal pretenses – or there may not have been time for that. What I remember the most clearly was Ana’s doctorate degree hanging on the wall. One day, as she was going to work as a nanny for a wealthy white couple, she saw me looking at it and informed me she had been a doctor in El Salvador. She often wanted to practice English with me, in hopes of practicing medicine again one day.

Class factors heavily into perceptions of undocumented workers – so I am glad Vargas chose to share his story. The profile that people who are anti-immigration like to paint are people who come to draw on government benefits or people who just commit crimes. Vargas has ascended to the white collar elite – a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, currently employed at The New York Times.

But Vargas explores still more aspects of the immigration debate through one more disclosure:

Later that school year, my history class watched a documentary on Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city official who was assassinated. This was 1999, just six months after Matthew Shepard’s body was found tied to a fence in Wyoming. During the discussion, I raised my hand and said something like: “I’m sorry Harvey Milk got killed for being gay. . . . I’ve been meaning to say this. . . . I’m gay.”

I hadn’t planned on coming out that morning, though I had known that I was gay for several years. With that announcement, I became the only openly gay student at school, and it caused turmoil with my grandparents. Lolo kicked me out of the house for a few weeks. Though we eventually reconciled, I had disappointed him on two fronts. First, as a Catholic, he considered homosexuality a sin and was embarrassed about having “ang apo na bakla” (“a grandson who is gay”). Even worse, I was making matters more difficult for myself, he said. I needed to marry an American woman in order to gain a green card.

Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming out about my legal status. I kept my other secret mostly hidden.

Read the whole thing.

Vargas’ decision to embrace the truth so publicly hasn’t been easy. His editor, Chris Suellentrop, posted to the Times’ 6th floor blog about accepting the piece:

That afternoon, Peter called back with the news: Jose Antonio Vargas is an illegal immigrant. He had been planning to tell his story in The Washington Post, but for reasons unknown to him, The Post killed his story on Monday. [...] I called Peter and told that we wanted to see Jose’s story, but if there was any chance of closing it in time — of editing it, fact-checking it, photographing Jose, designing it, etc. — we needed to see it right now. Just before 5 p.m., 48 hours before the magazine is supposed to close, Jose e-mailed me a draft of the story.

And within a hour, we decided this wasn’t a story we were going to give to anyone else.

The Washington Post passed. There statement was unsatisfactory to me, but hey, it’s my hometown paper. My heart really wants to believe that the piece was killed because they were worried about Vargas’ safety and legal status – but my more cynical gut says they are worried about seeming too liberal friendly going into 2012.

NPR has been digging up bits and pieces of the story. First they checked in at the Washington Post, to see why they passed.

Post reporter Paul Farhi does give us a clue, though, to the reason the Post spiked the story:

“Given the subject — a reporter’s dishonesty about his personal life — The Post subjected Vargas’s story to an unusual degree of scrutiny. One red flag popped up during weeks of checking: Vargas hadn’t disclosed that he had replaced his expired Oregon driver’s license with a new one issued by Washington state (the license had enabled Vargas to pass airport security and to travel to distant work assignments). Vargas later conceded that he had withheld the information on the advice of his attorney. The disclosure set off internal discussion about whether the newspaper was getting the full story from its former reporter.”

Then, they checked the likelihood of Vargas being deported for his admissions. NPR doesn’t think the odds are high, based on changes in ICE policy:

In memorandums issued by ICE Director John Morton, the agency clarified that its priorities are to focus on illegal immigrants who present “a clear risk to national security.”

In one of the memos, released June 17, Morton said ICE is focused on felons and repeat offenders, gang members, and those with numerous immigration violations such as illegally re-entering the U.S. and committing fraud.

The memo also directs ICE officials to avoid proceedings against a wide array of individuals, including U.S. military veterans, minors and seniors, pregnant women, those who grew up in the U.S. and “long-time lawful permanent residents.”

The Washington Post’s Ombudsman has a better take, asking “Why Did the Post Deport Vargas’s Story?”

Why would The Post punt to a rival a riveting, already edited story that could provoke national discussion on immigration — an issue that sorely needs it — and that also included possibly illegal, and perhaps forgivable, conduct by a former Post reporter and current member of management?

Beats the heck out of many in The Post’s newsroom and beats the heck out of me. The cardinal rule of journalism, or politics, is that if there’s bad or questionable information, put it out yourself, be thorough and transparent, and don’t pull any punches.

Brauchli said in an interview with me and in other public statements that he prefers not to discuss internal Post deliberations about news judgment. “We made a judgment not to run the piece,” he said. Fair enough. Few editors go on the record about internal deliberations over a published news story, unless the story later results in accolades and awards.

And, I, too, see cautionary notes about Vargas that might have led to Brauchli’s decision. He left behind a reputation in The Post’s newsroom for being tenacious and talented but also for being a relentless self-promoter whom many colleagues didn’t trust. Editors said that he needed direction, coaching and constant watching.

It’s also disturbing that Vargas has formed a nonprofit group to advocate for immigration reform. He has crossed the line from journalist to advocate.

There is so much to parse here, but for now, I’ll leave the discussion to you readers. Some things I’m wondering:

1. Are we still trying to hold on to the tattered notion of “objectivity” – or did Vargas usher in a whole new take on radical transparency?
2. Seriously, a relentless self-promoter? Have you met any journalists in DC? Everyone, this writer-advocate-sometimes-journo included, is guilty of that. Or is it only cool when the approved new members of the boys club do it?
3. Considering our changing global realities, shouldn’t America be grateful cultivating talent like Vargas? Why do we want to force out a person who I would consider to be a true patriot?
4. ICE may be under directives to leave undocumented workers like Vargas alone, for now – but how will that change in 2012?

(Image Credit: Business Insider)

Save the date! Feminism for Real is landing in NYC next week!

Join us on Thursday May 19th from 6pm to 8pm to celebrate the New York City book launch of Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee.

Where: Streetwise and Safe/Queers for Economic Justice
147 West 24th Street, 4th floor
New York City, New York

There will be a traditional Indigenous opening acknowledging the territory, and the evening will feature presentations and round table discussions from the editor and several of the book’s contributors. Venue is wheelchair accessible.

Proceeds from the evening will go to support Streetwise and Safe (SAS) Project for LGBTQQ Youth of Color.

For more information about the book go to the official site or contact Erika Shaker at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives at erikas@policyalternatives.ca

Also, check Andrea Plaid in person!

The book will tour the following week in Kingston, Ontario on May 25th:

Join us on Wednesday May 25th from 7pm to 9pm to celebrate the Kingston book launch of Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee.

Where: The Artel
205 Sydenham St.
Kingston, Ontario

There will be a traditional Indigenous opening acknowledging the territory, and the evening will feature presentations and round table discussions from the editor and several of the book’s contributors. Co-presented with the Levana Gender Advocacy Centre. Venue is wheelchair accessible, we regret that the washroom area is not.

Proceeds from the evening will go to support the Sex Worker Action Group of Kingston (SWAG).

For more information about the book go to: the official site or contact Erika Shaker at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives at erikas@policyalternatives.ca

In the wake of the Steampunk Kurfluffle that started with Charles Stross’ complaint against steampunk, Tobias Buckell wrote an interesting response about fantasy’s tendency to romanticize the past and mentioned his own work:

But ultimately, I share Stross’s discomfort, which is why my steampunk plays have often been about adopting the style and nodding to the history. Crystal Rain, what I called a Caribbean steampunk novel, is about Caribbean peoples and the reconstituted Mexica (Azteca in the book) of old with a Victorian level of technology, using the clothing/symbols of steampunk, but making their artificiers black.

Sadly, Crystal Rain, written in 2006, seems to have come out just before all the hotness, as it rarely gets mentioned as a steampunk novel whenever these celebrations happen.

So, now that my curiosity was piqued, I had to go out and get the book to see for myself how he handles steampunk before “the hotness.”

What’s so refreshing about Crystal Rain, besides the setting, is its clear positioning as a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. The book takes place in the multicultural, multiracial country of Nanagada, a land outside of our known history. Little touches hint that Nanagada is a society rebuilding itself from a cataclysmic disaster that occurred centuries ago. A mysterious object called the Spindle drifts in the sky. Barren areas exist that sicken the men who attempt to cross them. The Preservationists work to restore some of the lost technologies from “the old fathers” from long ago under the authority of the new governess Dihana and engineers have just started taking advantage of steam technology. Over the mountain range beyond Nanagada, however, lives the society of Azteca, a fearsome rival. Equipped with air ships and goaded to war by their gods called the Teotl, the Azteca are preparing for invasion with Nanagada in its sights.

Our protagonist, John DeBrun, gets caught in the middle of this looming struggle when the Azteca finally breach the mountain pass safeguarding Nanagada and start their brutal march toward Capital City. John just is an ordinary village fisherman, except for two notable things: he can’t remember anything from his past before he washed upon this country’s shores, and his accent is noticeably different from everyone else’s, who all speak in a Caribbean-esque dialect.

But there is more to John than anyone, even the Azteca, realize. The Teotl are looking for him and have sent the warrior-spy Oaxyctl on a mission to capture him. A mysterious, preternaturally strong fighter named Pepper is also seeks John out. As John evades the Azteca forces and crosses paths with both men, he soon discovers that only one thing can save Nanagada from destruction: a weapon known only as Ma Wi Jung, located in the icy north.

Okay, I’m going to get a bit spoilery here, but what makes Crystal Rain fantastic is that the plot shies away from the mystical and leans heavy on the sci-fi. The Teotl and the rival gods the Loa advise opposing sides of this war, and these aren’t figurative beings, but flesh-and-blood creatures. And one of the reveals is that both groups aren’t gods at all, but enemy alien races that are using human beings as pawns in their own intergalactic battle. In the plethora of steampunk books that populated with werewolves, vampires, and magic (usually based on golems and alchemy), a steampunk book with space aliens—that aren’t Lovecraftian—makes it stand out. Other sci-fi aspects include the incredible powers wielded by John, Pepper, and others which are explained using nanotechnology, the unveiling of the forgotten history of Nanagada, and discovery of what Ma Wi Jung really is.

Buckell is a Caribbean-born author, and you can tell that he writes about the tropical world of Nanagada and its diverse peoples from personal experience. I enjoyed the fact that all of the main characters are non-white, and that the cultural setting is firmly Caribbean and indigenous and not a European-inspired setting populated by people of color. Race relations play out in a fascinating way, especially since the central conflict is between two non-white peoples whose cultural histories are drawn from completely different time periods. In Nanagada, multicultural and multiracial groups live together – the “Afrikan, Carib, Chinee, Indian, Frenchi, and Bridish”—but the Frenchi and Bridish tend to live in their own enclaves, while the non-white majority settled most of Nanagada. The different communities commingle, but the separation is treated more like ethnic neighborhoods rather than one stemming from a past history of slavery and oppression. The main differences were drawn between the Azteca and Nanagadan cultures: one is in a state of perpetual warfare and the other is peaceful and diverse, but stubbornly conservative. While the Azteca base their society around the human sacrifices they perform, the Nanagadans are not spotless either. The Capitol City citizens as just as capable to unleash violence against their Tolteca neighbors, the political refugees who fled Azteca society.

Besides its remarkable setting and worldbuilding, Crystal Rain’s characterization is also deftly handled by Buckell. Governess Dihana is a strong but vulnerable woman who must deal with distrust from council elders and traditional Loa priestesses. Oaxyctl the double agent forms an ambiguous friendship with John but remains fearfully loyal to his god and his society to the bitter end. I thought he was the most complex character of all, and Buckell was able to make Oaxyctl extremely sympathetic without giving him any desire to be converted to the Nanagadans’ side. John himself struggles with self-doubt and disability—he lost one hand during an past voyage to the north—but he doesn’t descend into perpetual angst. The kick-ass and brutal Pepper, however, outshines them all in his single-minded determination to find John and get to Ma Wi Jung, ripping apart (at times, literally), anyone who gets in his way. From his first standout appearance–dashing in his top hat, dreads, and trench coat–Pepper steals every scene he’s in. And it doesn’t hurt that I imagine him looking like Paterson Joseph’s Marquis de Caraban from Neverwhere.

Crystal Rain is full of bloody action and strife, a fast-paced adventure tale that doesn’t sugar-coat violence and its consequences. Like the society that had to be rebuilt from post-apocalyptic destruction, none of the characters in the book have it easy. Major sacrifices are made by John, Dihana, Oaxyctl, Pepper and many others, and there is no sunshine ending. But what the ending does show, however, is the capacity for human beings to survive and fight for their way of life. Overall, Crystal Rain is a thrilling read and truly a unique forerunner to the current steampunk explosion.

***
Interested in reading Crystal Rain for yourself? You can read the first third of the book for free online (and the same goes with its sequel Ragamuffin).

Note: I had mistakenly referred to Buckell as a Caribbean-born white author initially, but Jaymee pointed out that he identifies as PoC. Thanks for the clarification!

The literature on sex equality is shot through with accounts of this predicament, variously described as a “double bind,” a “Catch-22,” or a “tightrope.” In many workplaces, women are pressured to be “masculine” enough to be respected as workers, but also to be “feminine” enough to be respected as women. (I put the adjectives “masculine” and “feminine” in quotation marks when otherwise unmodified because I use them to describe perceptions rather than realities about traits held by men and women.) The sheer mass of evidence further persuades me that demands for conformity made of women are not generic, but target them as women. I also become convinced these contradictory demands mean the story of contemporary sex discrimination is more complex than a single narrative of forced conformity to the dominant group.

To see how distinctive this Catch-22 is to women, consider the absence of a gay equivalent. If gays were in the same position as women, straights would constantly ask me not only to cover but to reverse cover. If I dressed conservatively, I would be asked to wear edgier attire. If I “acted straight,” I would be urged to be more flamboyant. But I do not think gays occupy this position. With significant exceptions of the “queer eye for the straight guy” variety, straights generally only ask me to cover. In my experience, the reverse-covering demand is more likely to be made by gays themselves.

Racial minorities are more like gays than women in this regard. If I, as an Asian-American, “dress white” and speak “perfect unaccented English,” I will find safe harbor. Whites make occasional reverse-covering demands – “Speak Japanese so we can hear what it sounds like,” or, “No, tell us where you’re really from.” But again, I have fielded reverse-covering demands more often from other Asian Americans, who tell me to get as politicized about Asian American issues as I am about gay issues.

When gays or racial minorities are caught in the crossfire of covering and reverse-covering demands, it is often because we are caught between two communities. The majority community (straights or whites) makes the covering demand, and the minority community (gays or racial minorities) makes the reverse-covering demand. Recent literature on African-American “oppositional culture” illustrates this dynamic. In response to white demands that African-Americans “act white,” some African-Americans have developed a culture of “acting black.” An African-American could easily be caught in a Catch-22, but not one generated by whites alone. More generally, negative epithets for racial minorities who cover – such as “oreo,” “banana,” “coconut,” or “apple” – seem to come from minority groups rather than from whites.

What makes women distinctive is that the dominant group – men – regularly imposes both covering and reverse-covering demands on them. Women are uniquely situated in this way because their subordination has more generally taken a unique form.  Unlike gays and racial minorities, women have been cherished by their oppressors.  Men have long valued the “feminine” traits women are supposed to hold, such as warmth, empathy, and nurture.

The mind-set through which men limit women in the name of loving them is known as “separate spheres” – an ideology  under which men inhabit the public sphere of work, culture, and politics, while women inhabit the private sphere of hearth and home.  The two spheres ostensibly track the different characters of men and women – men are thought to be suited for the public sphere because of their “masculine” attributes, women for the private sphere because of their “feminine” ones.  This ideology permits men to cherish and to confine women at the same time – women are revered, but only in the home.  In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes this arrangement with the approval typical of his period: “I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. ”

For centuries, separate-spheres thinking barred women from the workplace.  In 1872, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois statue prohibiting women from practicing law.  Concurring in that judgment, Justice Joseph Bradley observed women were unfit to be lawyers because of their “natural and proper timidity and delicacy.”  He concluded: “The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.  This is the law of the Creator.”

Notice how Bradley does not exclude women by devaluing them.  Instead, he underscores how much he admires women – their attributes of “timidity and delicacy” are “natural and proper” and the offices of wife and mother are “noble and benign.”  ”I really like women,” Justice Bradley seems to say.  ”And I really like wives, and mothers.  It’s because I like women and wives and mothers so much that I don’t want women to be lawyers.”  It’s hard to imagine a justice denying the rights of any other group using such affirming language.  I would be more reconciled to my exclusion from the military if the courts would admit my “natural and proper” sodomitical tendencies better suit me for the “noble and benign” office of law professor.

A century later, the Court changed its thinking.  In the 1973 opinion that began the Court’s sex-equality revolution, a plurality of the Court observed that the tradition of cherishing women so long as they remained in the home put them “not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”  That recognition gradually swept away the most obvious barriers to women’s equality in the public sphere.  Today, few places exist where the state or employers can post a “No Women Allowed” sign.

Nonetheless, separate-spheres ideology has contemporary traces.  Men often require women who enter traditionally male workplaces to display the attributes of both spheres.  If women are not “masculine” enough to be respected as workers, they will be asked to cover.  If they are not “feminine” enough to be respected as women, they will be asked to reverse cover. Separate-spheres ideology has modern life in the Catch-22.

A cottage industry of advice manuals has sprung up to address this generation of sex discrimination.  Grooming manuals for professional women – blazoned with titles like New Women’s Dress for Success – promise to help women satisfy both demands.  They instruct women to avoid pastels or floral prints lest they be perceives as too “feminine,” but also to wear make up lest they be perceived as too “masculine.”  They recommend shoulder pads, but not “shoulder pads on steroids”; earrings, but not earrings that dangle; and hair that is neither too long or too short.

Work-style manuals similarly tutor women in the art of acceptable androgyny.  Consultant Gail Evans’s bestseller Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman begins with the premise that to work in corporate America is to play a game whose rules have been written by men.  She encourages women to assimilate by following rules of “masculine” behavior, such as “Speak out,” “Speak up,” “Don’t expect to make friends,” and “Be an imposter.”  At the same time, Evans stresses “things men can do at work that women can’t” such as sexualizing their work demeanor, behaving rudely, or looking unkempt.’

— Kenji Yoshino, Covering, pp. 145-149

I would think, I wish I were dead.

I did not think of it as a suicidal thought.  My poet’s parsing mind read the first “I” and the second “I” as different “I’s.” The first “I” was the whole watching the self, while the second “I” – the one I wanted to kill – was the gay “I” nestled inside it.  It was less a suicidal impulse than a homicidal one – the infanticide of the gay self I had described in the poem.

My only consistent foray from my rooms was to the college chapel, where I prayed to gods I did not believe in for transformation.  No erotic desire I had ever felt exceeded my desire for conversion in those moments.  It is hard now to recall that young man at prayer.  To see him clearly is to feel the outlines of my present self grow fainter.

An older American student [also studying at Oxford at the time] tried to help.  Arad was struggling to come out himself, but seemed, I thought enviously, much more self-possessed.  He was the prodigy of his class – his intellectual feats, in medicine and philosophy, were reported in hushed and reverent tones.  Tall and angular, he accentuated his forbidding demeanor with a black coat that billowed out like the wings of a predatory bird.

Arad was kind to me. I never named my malady, but he knew its ways better than I.  I remember sitting in his rooms, listening to him describe the deadlines he had set for himself – to come out to his parents in three months, to go to a meeting of the college gay group in six months, to begin to date in a year. It was important, he said, to be a creature of will.  Unable to meet his eye, I looked over his shoulder at the wall behind him, which was tiled with diplomas and awards.  In the center were some framed black-and-white photographs he had taken.  One caught my eye – a statue of a kneeling angel weeping with her head buried in her arms.

It was a portrait of abject perfection, a portrait of him, and it terrified me.  I recognized the striving impulse in Arad as an attribute of my former self, and felt shame for having lost the discipline he possessed.  Yet I was also frightened by the harshness of that will.  I thanked him and left, never to return.  I could not help him, and I knew he could not help me. [...]

[After a year of disconnection] I surfaced back into my life.  I made decisions with percussive efficiency.  I chose the American passport over the Japanese one, the gay identity over the straight one, law school over English graduate school.  The last two choices were connected.  I decided on law school in part because I accepted my gay identity.  A gay poet is vulnerable in profession as well as person.  I refused that level of exposure.  Law school promised to arm me with a new language, a language I did not expect to be elegant or moving but that I expected to be more potent, more able to protect me. I have seen this bargain many times since – in myself and others – compensation for standing out along one dimension by assimilating among others. [...]

The month I was hired [to teach law at Yale], Arad killed himself.  It would wrong the grief of his intimates to make too much of my own feelings.  Yet I was shaken, especially when I read the eulogy his friends had written.  Rather than continuing the narrative of perfection they thought had contributed to his isolation, his friends sought to humanize him.  One detail was unforgettable – as a child at boarding school, Arad had been discovered in a broom closet with a bottle of bleach, trying to dye his skin white.  As I read that story, I thought of Arad’s absoluteness.  I thought of the alabaster angel in his photograph and knew, with some combination of guilt and relief, that I was imperfect and able to survive.

For even that far out of the closet, I was still making bargains.  While closeted, I micromanaged my gay identity, thinking about who knew and who did not, who should know and who should not.  When I came out, I exulted that I could stop thinking about my orientation.  That celebration proved premature.  It was impossible to come out and be done with it, as each new person erected a new closet around me.  More subtly, even individuals who knew I was gay imposed a fresh set of demands for straight conformity.

When I began teaching, a colleague took me aside.  “You’ll have a better chance at tenure,” he cautioned, “if you’re a homosexual professional than if you’re a professional homosexual.”  He meant I would fare better as a mainstream constitutional law professor who “happened to be gay” than as a gay professor who wrote on gay subjects.  Others in the vigorously progay environment in which I work echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations.   Be gay, my world seemed to say.  Be openly gay, if you want.  But don’t flaunt.

For a short time, I acceded.  When I taught mainstream courses like constitutional law, I avoided gay examples. I wrote articles on nongay topics.  I didn’t bring the men I was dating to law school functions.  I chose my political battles carefully.

I soon grew tired of such performances.  What bothered me was not that I had to engage in “straight-acting” behavior, much of which felt natural to me.  What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture – as if this were the love of which I still had to be ashamed.  I knew I would be breaching some pact with myself if I stopped writing on gay issues out of a desire to conform. [...]

In the new generation, discrimination directs itself not against the entire group, but against the subset of the group that fails to assimilate to mainstream norms.  This new form of discrimination targets minority cultures rather than minority persons.  Outsiders are included, but only if we behave like insiders – that is, only if we cover. [...]

This covering demand is the civil rights issue of our time.  It hurts not only our most vulnerable citizens but our most valuable commitments.  For if we believe a commitment against racism is about equal respect for all races, we are not fulfilling that commitment if we protect only racial minorities who conform to historically white norms.  As the sociologist Milton Gordon identified decades ago, the demand for “Anglo-conformity” is white supremacy under a different guise.  Until outsider groups surmount such demands for assimilation, we will not have achieved full citizenship in America. [...]

When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the “angry straight white man” reaction.  A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue.  Why shouldn’t racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help, like skin color or chromosomes or innate sexual drives.  But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control – wearing cornrows, acting “feminine,” or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time.  I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my schizophrenia, or my shyness, or my working-class background, or my nameless anomie.  I, too, am one of the mass of men leading a life of quiet desperation.  Why should classic civil rights groups have a right to self-expression I do not?  Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree.  Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional civil rights groups, such as racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities, and people with disabilities.  This assumes those in the so-called mainstream – those straight white men – do not have covered selves.  They are understood only as impediments, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are themselves struggling for self-definition.  No wonder they often respond to civil rights advocates with such hostility.  They experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have been refused – an expression of their full humanity.

Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register.  That ascent begins with the recognition that the mainstream is a myth. With respect to any particular identity, the word “mainstream” makes sense, as in the statement that straights are more mainstream than gays.  Used generically, however, the word lacks meaning.  Because human beings hold many identities, the mainstream is a shifting coalition, and none of us is entirely within it.  As queer theorists have recognized, it is not normal to be completely normal.  All of us struggle for self-expression; we all have covered selves.

For this reason, we should understand civil rights to be a sliver of a universal project of human flourishing.  Civil rights has always sought to protect the human flourishing of certain groups from being thwarted by the irrational beliefs of others.  Yet that aspiration is one we should hold for all humanity.

—Kenji Yoshino, Covering

I’m starting to love air travel. It is really the only time where I actually have to disengage from the internet, which becomes time to read actual books.

On this trip, I packed Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, a book I had been intending to read for quite some time. In Yoshino’s gut-wrenching combination of memoir and legal study, he brings a lost concept back into the lexicon to allow us to use new language when discussing issues of race and assimilation. The term he uses is called covering.

“Covering” is sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for how we try to “tone down” stigmatized identities, even when those identities are known to the world. In my work, I describe four axes along which individuals can cover: appearance, affiliation, activism, and association.

Appearance concerns how an individual physically presents himself to the world. Affiliation concerns his cultural identifications. Activism concerns how much he politicizes his identity. Association concerns his choice of fellow travelers — spouses, friends, colleagues.

So a person with an X identity can cover by making sure he doesn’t look like a stereotypical X, disaffiliating himself from X culture, not engaging in activism about X causes, and distancing himself from other Xs. It’s probably easier to see how this works in concrete cases. Those can be found below.

But why do we cover?

As Yoshino explains in his introduction:

Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life. For this reason, every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost. [...]

I recognize the value of assimilation, which is often necessary to fluid social interactions, to peaceful coexistence, and even to the dialogue through which difference is valued. For that reason, this is no simple screed against conformity. What I urge here is that we approach the renaissance of assimilation in this country critically. We must be willing to see the dark side of assimilation, and specifically of covering, which is the most widespread form of assimilation required of us today.

Covering is a hidden assualt on our civil rights. We have not been able to see it as such because it has swaddled itself in the benign language of assimilation. But if we look closely, we will see that covering is the way many groups are held back today. The reason racial minorities are pressured to “act white” is because of white supremacy. The reason women are told to downplay their child care responsibilities in the workplace is because of patriarchy. And the reason gays are asked not to “flaunt” is because of homophobia. So long as such covering demands persist, American civil rights will not have completed its work.

Over the next few weeks, we will discuss in depth the ideas posed in Yoshino’s book.

Ideas on format or requests on specific sections are welcome.

To understand civil rights, you must understand how it feels…to be trapped in someone else’s stereotype.” – Deval Patrick

During the year of 2008, people loved to talk about change, normally as a positive outcome righting a wrong or correcting a historical slight.

However, change never comes easily. Friction always occurs between the different groups who are advocating for their view of the world to become the dominant one. In The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, Gwen Ifill probes deeply into the causes and creation of political friction, dubbing the phenomenon “sandpaper politics” and documenting the lives and stories of those African American politicians who found a way to live through the heaviest friction point and manage come out polished and battle ready.

The Breakthrough’s title is a bit misleading. Ifill’s book isn’t really about Obama – it is the story of a generation in flux, an exploration of the rise of post-civil rights black leadership using Obama’s amazing political journey as a symbol of the shifting power dynamic. While telling Obama’s story, she also interviews dozens of young black leaders on the cusp of their own breakthroughs while navigating the tricky realm of crossover politics.

The new groups of young black politicians are a small piece of a larger division in black political thought. Termed “the post civil rights generation,” the new generation of up and coming leaders has different memories of America. Instead of sit-ins, soda fountains, and overt forms of racism like segregation, we now have multiculturalism, hip-hop, and covert forms of racism.
The Civil Rights Generation ushered in a completely different world for their children to grow up – one in which we would never know what is was like to be denied a seat at a lunch counter or forbidden from applying for certain jobs due to the color of our skin. They braved all types of horrors in order for us to be where we are today.

As Ifill writes,

Breaking through has its costs. John Lewis was hit in the head with a break at Selma. Vernon Jordan was shot. And families play a price as well: Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife and children were threatened, and shortly after [Deval] Patrick moved into the corner office on Beacon Hill, his wife, Diane, dropped out of public sight to receive treatment for depression. (p. 195)

Earlier in the book, Ifill referred to the high cost of ambition for black leaders, grimly counting off the death toll – Malcom, Marvin, and Medgar were all murdered at the heights of their careers, before any of them had reached the age of forty. A grim reality of working and agitating for change is having that reality hanging over head and knowing that we are just a slim 40 years from when this type of violence against civil rights leaders was common place.

However, the major theme of The Breakthrough is overwhelming optimism in the face of difficult odds.

Cory Booker, the subject of chapter seven and mayor of Newark, New Jersey, summarizes the attitudes of many young black politicos when he says,

“My parents used to tell me as a young kid that we were a country that was formed in perfect ideals but a savagely imperfect reality,” Cory Booker said. “You had people that were enslaved and in chains seeing the most horrible and heinous realities, but yet, somehow, they saw freedom and they saw liberty.” (p. 144)

The Post Civil Rights Generation is still coming into its own. Jesse Jackson Jr. spoke to Gwen Ifill about “the movement in the black community towards accountable leadership” – a marked change away from media domination and sound bytes (characterized by the tactics of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson) and towards measured results, community involvement, and follow through.

Bakari Sellers (son of civil rights leader Cleveland Sellers) confirmed that we are rapidly learning about the modern convergence of race, class, and gender. “The struggle has changed,” Sellers informs Ifill. “If you’re poor and black in South Carolina or poor and white in South Carolina, you face basically the same issues.”

Indeed, the struggle has changed a bit from the days of marches and fire hoses. Cornell Belcher, an Obama pollster was almost moved to tears as he explained:

“Here you are in South Carolina, three blocks from where the Confederate flag is still flying in front of the state capitol and all the history that has held in that state,” Belcher, who is black told me later. “And you have a group of young white people shouting, ‘Race doesn’t matter.’ Now, do they think there is no racism? No. But were they screaming and shouting the world they wanted to exist? Yeah. That is powerful and profound and very different.” (p. 159)

While Belcher is incredulous at the swiftness of change, The Breakthrough often reminds us of how some parts of the process haven’t changed much at all. Ifill’s writing is informed by the intrinsic understanding that comes when one has to be twice as good to go half as far; and provides examples as to when if all other factors are equal, black candidates still find themselves holding the short straw. She interviewed Natalie Davis, a white contender for the US Senate in 1996. The Alabama native pulled no punches.

“In the general election, for a Democrat to beat a Republican, a Democrat has to get about 40 percent of the white vote,” says Davis. “I do not know how you get there. If you’re white, I don’t even know how you get there. If you’re black, it’s that much more difficult. (p. 107)

For the post Civil Rights generation Artur Davis, this perception is a surmountable obstacle. His optimism has put him on a path to run for governor in 2010. However, older politicos are more weary of his chances. Alabama state representative John Knight admired Davis’ ambitions but noted “I would say, realistically, that this is Alabama.”

Pointing out that often the ideas and prejudices that color politics are often left unspoken, Ifill makes a point to mention,

The only thing more politically debilitating than the “black enough” question is the “too black” question. The latter is seldom asked out loud, and it is never asked by black people. It is, however, the question that can cost mainstream black candidates an election. (p. 172)

Later in the breakthrough, Ifill spends a significant chunk of time with the relationship of Barack Obama and Reverend Wright, parsing out how Obama’s association with right became a nightmare for his campaign. As a candidate seeking the Presidency on a platform of unity, Wright’s words and actions began to push Obama into “too black” (or as others note, too angry) territory.

Ifill also painstakingly describes the balancing acts that black candidates have to walk, being accessible enough to other blacks while not alienating white voters. Ifill spoke to David Paterson, the governor of New York about some of the emotional tight ropes black politicians walk.
Once Clinton conceded, [David] Paterson embraced Obama with the understanding that, in many ways, both men were playing the same game – trying to meet expectations and test that never face white candidates.

“In my short time – and I know I am just sipping at what Barack Obama has to go through gallons of every day, Paterson told me, “the energy that takes away from your effort is immense.” (p. 119)

Internal divisions within the black community also fall under Ifill’s laser focus. In “The Politics of Identity”, she devotes an entire chapter to the amorphous concept of blackness and the reality of black politicians who must prove time and time again that they fit some arbitrary determination of “black enough.” Ifill introduces the historical root of this internal conflict:

Governors, mayors, and lawmakers of all stripes I spoke with have been confronted with the question – especially early in their careers and especially if they were new to the game. Even Walter White, the founder of the NAACP, who campaigned against lynching and in favor of equality in education, was deemed inauthentic in some quarters because of his fair skin. (p. 159)

She also examines the demands placed on black candidates by their black constituencies. After noting “when race was a factor [in community issues], [Deval] Patrick was a factor,” Ifill spends some time describing the heavy burden of expectation black communities place on their elected officials:

In late 2007, when thirteen year old Steven Odom, a black boy, was shot to death on his way home from playing basketball, all eyes turned to Partick. Why hadn’t he stopped the violence? Why hadn’t he paid prompt respects to the boy’s mother? No one had asked this of previous governors. The difference was that Partick was being held to a new standard, one dictated by race. (p. 201)

In addition to the needs of their community, black upstart politicians also have to contend with Civil Rights era leaders, who are often still active within their communities and are reluctant to pass the baton to the next generation. This also leads to friction, as one of the biggest differences between the Civil Rights generation and the post Civil Rights generation is the attitude toward paying dues. While leaders like Obama, Patrick, and Booker often want to step up and start assuming responsibility, older leaders often push back, requesting that these new leaders need to temper their ambitions.

“Here’s the catch,” the younger [Steve] Adubato told [Gwen Ifill]. I don’t believe that Cory [Booker] has ever really mastered, or understands there is a need to master, showing the proper respect. Touching the right bases. Frankly, kissing the right asses to put himself to put himself in a position where he could, if not ameliorate, just minimize some of that negativity.” (p. 152)

Members of the post civil rights generation chafe at this idea, about needing to bow to legacy and establishment, instead aching to create a new way forward. Part of the reason for the age based gap is the understanding of the evolution of race and racism. For example, while Booker concedes there are “persistent and insidious divisions between black and white” that still plagues society, he ultimately believes that a comprehensive strategy to beat racism will involve a united coalition:
Racism is not a black problem,” he adds. “It’s not a white problem. It’s our problem. I think that’s the kind of dialogue we’re looking for on race.”

Ifill notes that an “eager and growing audience among citizens of every race ready to embrace the notion that the end of race based politics is near.” Indeed, much of this friction Ifill describes is just a part of the changing times.

In addition to racial coverage, Ifill takes a chapter to quickly cover “The Race-Gender Clash.” Courageously wading back into the superficially hashed out race-versus-gender meme that fluttered around the primaries and spilled over into the election, Ifill grabs polling data to note:

In exit poll after exit poll during the primaries, voters who said race mattered voted against Obama, while voters who said gender mattered voted for Clinton. In a conservative state such as Kentucky, where Clinton hoped to do well, more than one in five voters in the preelection survey viewed Obama’s race as a negative. When asked about gender, however, 63 percent said it didn’t matter and 11 percent said they viewed it as a positive. (p. 76)

(It should also be noted that earlier in “The Race-Gender Clash” chapter, Ifill quotes Donna Brazile saying “We spent precious time debating race versus gender, as if racism and sexism are not both toxic.”)

The Breakthrough reads like a serious of well reported newspaper articles. However, Ifill rarely inserts herself in the narrative, which is unfortunate. While the book is written loosely in the first person, she rarely dedicates space to herself and her story.

For example, when discussing the stigma candidates face for having a little too much education, she explores the idea of “talking white,” an accusation that lands with a sting for many educated blacks as it is a backhanded slap suggesting that they have been accused of that as well. Ifill notes this dynamic, and adds a small sentence about how she too has had this accusation leveled against her. Ifill also provides a memory of attending a Gridiron Club organization where she, Donna Brazile, and Vernon Jordan were the only blacks in the room. She writes,

When these clubs were created we were expected to be serving, not dining. Even now, I’d bet most people in that room possessed not a single black friend. And if they did, it was likely to be Vernon or Donna or me. (p. 65)

These tantalizing glimpses of Ifill’s life provide some excellent background for her discussion of change and politics. As a person reporting on the front lines of race and politics for so long, The Breakthrough would have been enhanced by a little more reflection from the author. While Ifill’s role and training for the last thirty or so odd years requires this objective eye toward the world, there are a few places in the book that could have benefited from a personal narrative to illustrate her point.

Another element missing in the book is moving the racial discussion a little beyond the black and white binary. This is difficult, because our country was founded in this way, that blacks are the underclass and whites are the ruling class. However, part of the change that post Civil Rights leaders are ushering in is the idea of multiracial coalitions. It is not until the end of the book that Ifill ponders the role of other races in these new developments.

We know that race pride helped fuel black turnout, but less explored is the question of how the white voters who control the franchise went from resistance to acceptance in a single generation. How were Latino voters moved to speak so forcefully on Election day, delivering two thirds of their votes to Obama? (p. 237)

Asian Americans also voted overwhelmingly for Obama, providing him with 62% of the vote. However, this oversight in the book accurately reflects exactly how large of a change has occurred in the last forty years – something that many leaders of the new school understand. While it would have been beneficial to see some further racial analysis, particularly dealing with the perception that Obama would privilege blacks above all other races if elected, it is understandable that it is omitted. Perhaps in another ten or so years, we will have a book that accurately depicts the full racial landscape in America – as for right now, we are all just trying to keep up with all the changes.

Ifill’s work is a good starting point for racial discussions in America which tend to languish outside of community focused discussions. Often, people are communicating across a gulf of understanding, without shared reference points to guide the way. The Breakthrough provides a thorough accounting of black political upheaval in the last 40 years and delves into some very unpleasant realities.

The Breakthrough’s conclusion is forward thinking, and in line with the aims of the post-civil rights generation when she writes:

[T]here is little question that we in this country may be reaching the end of the “firsts.” Perhaps breakthroughs are on the verge of becoming enough of a part of the national political landscape that at some point we will cease noticing them all together. (p. 246)