The Long Haul

The law has nothing to do with justice, and injustice can't be left unchallenged. So I decided to be a writer. Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

Leslie Marmon Silko, novelist who went to law school but quit after reading Charles Dickens' Bleak House

Tressie McMillan Cottom: Empirical Questions and "Big Tent Feminism"

Four days after the entire clusterfuck that was the 2013 Academy Awards (I am so glad I missed the telecast this year), specifically The Onion's offensive tweet about Quvenzhané Willis, Tressie McMillan Cottom posted an intelligent and reasoned look at the coverage of the tweet by feminist media. A highlight from her worth-reading post:

In the final analysis, the white out on Quvenzhané and The Onion is gradational. Some feminist outlets covered the issue, if only tangentially. The notable exceptions are the biggest brands and the most corporate outlets. What appears to be closest to the truth of what happened, and what feminists of color are arguing, is that white feminists ignored how race made Quvenzhané vulnerable to attack and that race muted the intensity of the response from white feminists.

and

For many black feminists, the extremity of the attack, satirical or not, demanded an equally extreme organizational response. If a movement was ever going to be unequivocal and resolute about anything I would like to think it would be about calling a child a c*nt. The response for me was visceral. The minute I saw The Onion tweet I was nauseated. I was not kidding when I said I was shaking.

I felt that for a host of reasons, I’m sure. She’s brown like my adorable younger cousin Genesis. God knows she has my god-daughter’s impish personality and preternatural confidence. I used to wear my hair like she had hers the night of the Oscars.

She looks like people I care about.

If she doesn’t look like people you care about, I have to wonder where your give-a-damn cuts off.

Being disgusted by sexualized attacks against a defenseless child is a function of a social construction, and likely a hypocritical one at that. Even though our society idealizes children we abuse them individually and structurally every day. Still, there remains a cultural norm that children are off-limits. When that norm is violated and it does not elicit a social response equal to the severity of the violation, it communicates that there are invisible limits to who is included in the greater social contract.

And then.

Within 24 hours of posting the commentary to my small blog, I was charged with deliberately publishing research designed to deny a “white male feminist” that wrote “arguably the most influential” article on the Quvenzhané attack his just due. Next, colleagues began forwarding responses from women’s studies scholars. The comments ranged from an argument that I am trying to brutally constrain what constitutes a feminist argument to I conflated feminists organizations with individual feminists to intentionally profit from a cottage industry of racist race-baiting as I plot to destroy feminism from the inside-out. I received long, personal emails from white feminists telling me the high price they have paid professionally and personally for being an ally. They said I spit on their sacrifice by asking how white feminist media responded to Quvenzhané.

I know how trolling works. This was not trolling. These were comments, emails and tweets from scholars who mostly signed their own names or acknowledged that they are in the academy. That is more than trolling; it is a debate among colleagues.

Some of my colleagues do not think that I should be asking questions about white feminist organizations.

and

As I posted in a response to the many angry commenters, I do not have the resources to make the argument that race matters. I also wouldn’t have the resources to convince you that the sky is blue and not purple. Like blue skies, I thought the idea that race matters is a pretty pedestrian argument at this point. Of course race would matter when the subject is an attack by a white media organization on a little black girl. Of course it would. I thought that went without saying.

And I was right.

It does go without saying when you are not allowed to say it.

I am not of the Academy. I'm not a timely blogger or even a consistent one. But I wanted to link to this discussion here as a good reminder that a feminist's "give-a-damn" must extend beyond just those women and girls who look like herself. A child is a child is a child.

Every Novel A Failure

You can never achieve what you truly want to achieve. That thing you dreamt on the riverbank is never the thing you achieve when you are back at the writing table, or when the paper is coming out of the printer.

Colum McCann, author

Amanda Palmer at TED: "The Art of Asking"

Love her work and thoughts so much.

For most of human history, musicians, artists -- they've been part of the community: connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough.

A Gorgeous Catastrophe

This. This piece, called "I Became a Mother and Died to Live," from Janelle at Renegade Mothering. I read it and my mouth gaped. Not every single word, especially as Chris and I share parenting and work so that both of us live those moments of being left as the other goes out into the world.

But so much of it feels true to me about my experience of becoming a mother. Especially these sparks:

Someday he will speak. And you know you know him better than everybody else, and always will, and you know when he’s sleeping you’re there when nobody else is there, and you’re watching him breathe so you can breathe and watching him sleep to drift into your own.

And you’re falling into a love you’ve never known. It’s like quicksand; the more you struggle the deeper you fall. Only you’re not struggling, because it’s a gorgeous catastrophe, and there’s nowhere else to go.

(I still find it hard to fall asleep if he's not beside me.)

At some point the reality will hit us: We are never alone again, no matter where we are, and we are the only ones in the world who have become this person toward this child.

A gorgeous catastrophe -- YES. When I was pregnant, I imagined that birth would be the crucible that transformed me into a mother. When it went so differently than I'd dreamed and planned, I felt that I'd missed out; I felt just like myself, still. I was disappointed.

But I needn't have been. The death of my old self and rebirth of my new self took longer than 24 hours, but it happened, relentlessly and irreversibly.

Kali. A phoenix. Nature itself. All the myths of dissolving into ashes and rising again, re-formed, apply here.

When I first read this post days ago, words flooded my head and I bookmarked it to write about here. Now, I have no memory of what I wanted to say. If life ever was linear, it is certainly not so now.