Recently in race & ethnicity Category

When my husband brought the Sunday New York Times home this weekend, I was so excited to see a piece from one of my favorite teachers and mentors in its pages.

"Beach Blanket Baja," by Helena María Viramontes, begins by delineating her family's class and ethnic position:

IN our East Los Angeles working-class neighborhoods of the ’50s and ’60s, no one thought of summer vacations or sleep-away camps as a possibility. . . .  My parents grew up in one of the largest and oldest Mexican-American communities in the nation. Immigrant belief prevailed, despite the fact that both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. We were poor, but it was a poverty that we were unaware of since everyone around us was the same.

Into this mix comes the "delirium" of a childhood vacation:

. . . [I]n 1964, when I was 10, my father announced that we were all to spend a weekend in Ensenada, Mexico, with José and his family.

My mother was, at first, skeptical: It would be no easy feat to transport a total of 16 people, the majority of them children, but Tío José had worked out a plan. He would drive his Pontiac, accompanied by his wife, Tía Lola, and his children. My father would drive Joe Junior’s clunky Chevy, and my oldest brother, Gil, would be in charge of driving our father’s white Ford pickup.

Gas and food? Everything was much cheaper across the border. Lodging? Camping under the stars!

Funny, frank, and unflinching about the economic woes she sees south of the border, the piece finally becomes a story about the nerve-wracking difficulties, the "anxieties" of "monstrous proportions," even for documented U.S. citizens, of crossing the literal border from Mexico back to the United States--an important thing to make vivid for readers across the country now that, as the Pew Research Center reports, "Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported," according to a nationwide survey of Latinos, and "Nearly two-thirds say the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill has made life more difficult for all Latinos."

Thanks, Helena, for bringing it all to life.

. . . before I get on the road.

First, my friend from grad school, Dave Pruett, wrote in about the Cixous/"Laugh of the Medusa"/ecriture feminine thread to say that he's been reading Nuala O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman and thinks it just might fit.  So for those of you looking for examples of ecriture feminine, you might check it out.  (I haven't read it yet, but I trust Dave's judgment.)

I remember loving O'Faolain's "7 Tips on How to Write a Best-Selling Memoir (even though nobody in the world is interested in you)" when it appeared in Ms. magazine a few years ago.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find an online version for you.  But it's a great piece, so track it down if you're interested.

Second, I mentioned Helen Elaine Lee's lovely story in a previous blog--the one she read at the Pine Manor residency that made me want to rush home and hug my husband, and I just wanted to tell you that it's called "Marriage Bones," and it appeared in  Ancestral House:  The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell (of Callaloo fame) and published by Westview Press/Harper Collins in 1995. 

There.  Now I can drive south with a clear(ish) conscience.

I just read the opening whirlwind manifesto on the blog Streetheart:  Ethics of Graffiti.  The writing's good, and the anonymous author really throws down:

The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?

He/she's not pulling any punches; see for yourself.  I'm curious to see what comes next.

One of my favorite books to teach at Wabash College, where I worked for ten years before moving to Lincoln, was the inimitable Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?  I love this book.  I loved teaching it to first-year writing students, not only because Tatum's writing is wonderfully logical, organized, and crystal-clear--a great model for students--but also, and more importantly, because she explains issues of institutional (structural) racism and white privilege in ways that anyone can understand.  It made me feel happy to be doing peace and justice work in the composition classroom, instead of talking only about paragraph organization and comma splices.

My father loved the book, too.  I gave him a copy and told him how excited I'd been to find it (at the GLCA Course Design & Teaching Workshop for multicultural education, which I'd taken as a junior faculty member).  He read it and was annotating it; he told me that it clarified things that had puzzled and hurt him all his life.  I found it on his little stand next to his armchair after he died.

One of my favorite students at Wabash, a young man named Daniel Zeno, who's now in law school at the University of Iowa, just wrote to update his friends on the work that he's been doing this summer with Advancement Project, a policy, communications, and legal action group in D.C. that works for racial justice.  Along with several other initiatives, Daniel has written a blog post for the Advancement Project's blog, Just Democracy, called "Undelivered Promises:  40 Acres and a Mule in 2008," about the new suit filed by over 800 Black farmers against the USDA.

He writes:

The persistent unwillingness of the USDA to address these problems of racism and discrimination, combined with the many other examples on the federal, state and local government level (Did somebody say Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans?) remind us all that structural racism is still alive. Structural racism is a direct result of a history of racism in the United States and continues to deny people of color equal opportunities.

Go, Daniel!

Malcolm X would have have turned 83 yesterday.  Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes at The Root:

. . . Malcolm's struggle to make his own authentic, political contribution reminds us that ideals are more important than personalities. Progressive political movements that engender lasting change are always bigger than the flawed human beings who lead them. . . .  He criticized the powerful rather than the powerless.  He pointed to the pathologies of the privileged instead of the failings of the oppressed. His own story of redemption was emblematic of the possibilities available to even the most disempowered, but when he pointed to solutions, they were consistently collective.

To read the rest of Harris-Lacewell's essay, go here, and many thanks to Daniel Zeno, activist and law student at University of Iowa (and my lovely former student at Wabash) for the link.

To read Veronica Chambers' new essay on the sexual wound, suffering, and shame of fistula--and how to help--go here, and go here for the New York Times story that first broke my heart about this issue.

And for my women friends who write and doubt themselves--and especially all my women writing students, who work so hard and are so talented--go here to Kore Press's blog while Gisela Telis's essay is still headlining.  You deserve to flourish with courage, confidence, and boldness.  With thanks to Tayari for the link.

Nation, I have to confide:  My husband and I were driving in the car when a radio news show sound-byted the words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor.  Prepared by the appalled newscaster's build-up for something truly horrific, we both just sort of looked at each other, like, "Yeah, so?"

But then it became a national issue, and it sparked Obama's thoughtful speech, and  I kind of forgot about my initially underwhelmed response.  So how grateful I was today to be reminded of it by Gary Kamiya in his Salon article, "Rev. Jeremiah Wright Isn't the Problem."  Kamiya first writes:

The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches?

But then he goes on to the meat of his argument: 

Wright isn't the problem.  Stupid patriotism is the problem. . . .  Today, after five years of a catastrophic war driven by patriotic vengeance, it's still not acceptable to disturb the myth of eternal American innocence.

Moving into his main points, he holds accountable not patriotism itself (though my post-nationalist friends might take issue w/that), but stupid patriotism:  knee-jerk, blind, rhetorical hails to the chief, right or wrong.  Is it more important to wear a flag pin or to value the lives of others (national others in Iraq, class others in our own military) as we do our own?  The essay is short, nicely put together, and well worth a quick read; the Susan Sontag quotation alone is worth the price of admission.

Whichever candidate you're supporting, you may want to watch or read in full Barack Obama's speech on race.  I got home late last night and only got to hear the CNN folks sound-byting the speech.  Although some folks were calling it "historic," their remarks had that slanted, reductive feeling that post-complexity commentary often has. 

This morning, I watched the whole thing online.  It was honest and smart, and it didn't pull punches in the interests of political expediency:

. . . [W]e do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

To watch the whole thing, you need 38 minutes; if you're a fast reader, the manuscript is available.  Go here for either version.

My favorite book about race relations in the U.S., which I've been teaching with for several years, is Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race.  It's a great primer on white privilege, racial identity, the complexity of social identity, and the necessity of being actively, rather than passively, anti-racist.  It's only about ten bucks, and it can affect your whole way of seeing the world.  Tatum, a psychologist who studies the development of racial identity, is the president of Spelman College--and one of my personal heroes.