After three years of living alone, I moved in with a family of five.  Living in their guesthouse was to be a temporary solution, until I slowly found myself falling in love. They were a fascinating cast of characters.  There was the father, a monosyllabic warm-hearted man, the wife, a Auntie-Mame style college professor, the teenage daughter, a giggling whirlwind, the teenaged son– the teasing younger brother I never had, and the ’surprise child’, a zoomy seven year old who fancied himself Harry Potter.  They came replete with warm house centered around the kitchen and lengthy dinners, a doe-eyed black lab, and a swimming pool.  And best of all, they seemed to love me back.  I was in heaven. 

Until I wasn’t. Somewhere around the three month mark… it changed. The kids went back to school, the wife got busy, and the husband had a family tragedy… and suddenly I was superfluous and perhaps even a touch…in the way. 

At first I was a little hurt.  I had had such a crush on my family.  They were intriguing; at times a whole huge personality woven together, at others wild, individual variations on the same theme.  Getting to know them– their social organization and cultural practices– was like watching a huge magnolia unfurling in front of my eyes, and then slowly closing up… tightening in to hunker down for the winter months. But, despite my hurt, I knew that it was fine.  I am a grown woman and need a grown woman’s apartment, and knew that quite simply, this is what it means to live with other people. 

We live with so many other people. Some of them are in our homes. Some of them waft by us on the street, some are memories, some are strangers.  Other people we take into the intricacies of our person.  Sometimes we don’t know that they are curling up in our hearts and we become startled by their presence.  Others, well, we work hard with them.  Others are like a great pair of shoes that pinch when we put them on, but we wear them.  We bought them afterall. 

Living with other people is a myriad of experiences.  On the one hand, the people in our lives are always distant to us.  The person I know best in this world is my mother.  I have known her for exactly 32 years and nine months and ten days.  Yet, she is still a mystery to me.  She had this whole other life before she brought me in to the world… a life in which she cried, and loved, and dreamed, and never knew that we would be unalterably each others.  On the other hand, the people in our lives can be closer than we want them to be.  They hold up magnifying glasses to our neuroses and idiosyncracies and push us to be different—when we just want to be left alone.  And so we vascillate on this continuum of intimacy and distance, sometimes drawing close to each other, sometimes pushing the people in our lives away. 

When I lived in New York I constantly marveled at the strange beast that was the city subway.  Of course it is a feat of technology and of course an incredible transport system. But more than that, the NYC subway system is the greatest multicultural democratic project in the entire world.  Forget Obama’s White House, this is the real deal. You see the whole world on the NYC subway. Drunks puking, Wall Street financiers, gaping tourist, Chinese schoolchildren, hip hop kids from the Bronx.  But even stranger than the visual and cultural array of such an assortment of people in one place was the issue of proximity.  I would sit on the subway for hours during my commute each day and think– all we are are just bodies in a moving tin box. Why don’t we talk about the questions at the bottoms of our hearts? Why can’t I just reach across the aisle and take your hand?

Look at us… look around at these people who we live with. What do we mean to one another?

And so, I have made peace with leaving my new family.  Like many romantic relationships, it didn’t survive the three month cut off mark. When the chips fell, we weren’t going to move across that continuum from distance to intimacy. And that is ok. Because it is a unwieldy continuum that we spend our lives trying to navigate. We move close and then away, and then close and then away– sometimes with the same one person over our entire lives. All of us, world roommates, trying to look at each other’s unfurled hearts… all of us, trying to figure out what that means.

I haven’t posted in a while, but have been getting amazing responses to this blog lately. Thank you so much, dear readers, for sharing your thoughts with me! Anyway, I have been feeling a little anxious about updating but am overwhelmed with writing my dissertation proposal. An amazing mentor and writing buddy of mine, Mike Rose, suggested excerpting some older material.  This is an excerpt from an article that I have recently submitted for publication on how we look at photographs of refugees and what our looking tells us about the nature of suffering.  

The UNHCR (United Nations’ Refugee Agency) estimated in 2007 that forces of globalization, war, economic disparity and failing infrastructures have created 16 million refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons) worldwide.  Some call this the era of the refugee; with the rise in statelessness, a rise in media and humanitarian attention has created iconic images of those survivors of war and genocide from Bosnia, to Rwanda, to famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, to Sudan and Somalia in the 1990s. Photography is a particularly salient cultural form that has become part of the system of knowing about atrocities.  The origin of photography in an era of Western expansionism and colonialism, combined with its’ straddling of art, media, historical record, and personal diary, make it a unique narrator of human interactions. As the critic Susan Sontag writes, in an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it.  The photograph is like a quotation, a maxim, or a proverb (2003, p. 23).  “A picture speaks a thousands words”; and yet pictures can only express a moment in the entirety of a life or an event.  Why do we look?, she questions. How are we awakened, shocked, or wounded by what we see?

            Because of the particular agency and limitations expressed through photographs, the relationship of the image to the situation of the displaced, refugees, has been highly contested by Western thinkers.  Social scientists, media, and philosophers question how “regarding the pain of others” affects us (Sontag, 2003) and whether our looking at violent images of dehumanized acts can be differentiated from voyeurism, or what Cohen terms becoming “tourists among landscapes of anguish” (Cohen, 2001, p. 169).   Some believe we are becoming immune to the imagery that proliferates: visual renderings of people made homeless by the perpetual conflict has left viewers with “compassion fatigue,” characterized as a moral fatigue and exhausted empathy in the face of an overabundance of sensationalized media picturings of disaster and human despair (Moeller, 1999; Cohen, 2001). As such, images of refugees can move from journalistic reportage to commodities. Media moguls know that suffering sells and pain is commercialized until suffering becomes “infotainment” (Moeller, 1999, p. 35).  It is here that an educational approach to images of suffering is imperative.  Moving viewers from a consumptive to an analytical position can enable dialogues that pose questions like those Sontag asked after looking at pictures of the charred remains of slaves:

What is the point of exhibiting these pictures? To awaken indignation? To make us feel “bad”; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)? (2003, p.92).

Some argue that we have lost our ability to respond correctly to images of suffering.  Yet these images have the potency to teach us something about ourselves and the world. Sontag asserts that the pronoun “we” should be not taken for granted when the subject is other people’s pain, as “we” don’t get it.  “We truly can’t imagine what it was like.” (2003, p. 125).  Her critique is crucial.  I cannot sit opposite a man who has been falsely imprisoned for 25 years and imagine I can understand or empathize with his suffering in totality. Still, and here is where I diverge slightly from Sontag’s line of inquiry, this doesn’t mean that “we” cannot still be a “we.” The prisoner and I both understand the basic emotions of loneliness, and fear, and hope.  Through our fumbled attempts at being united in suffering we can begin to move out of our isolated prisms and engage with other people’s pain in ways that might build a more humane world.  Indeed the point of exhibiting such images is not just to engage in an act of voyeurism or to attempt to elicit sentimentality.  Rather, it is to investigate the nature of suffering.  By that I mean, we look at images of suffering because we need to learn about what suffering is—our own suffering, the suffering of others–and through this investigation we might come to realize that suffering is not a static plane of despair. This investigation is an educational action that demands both emotion and reason, and involves the uncovering of simplistic notions of anguish.  As this essay attempts to demonstrate in the following proposals, suffering is a dynamic and complex site of pain, loss, marginality, and hope.  Sontag writes how modern expectations are that peace is normal and war is an aberration; extending her thinking one might consider how the expectations of the well-heeled set hold how an uneventful, “happy” life is the given, and suffering the aberration.  Yet historically war was considered a normative experience.  Suffering: the pain of war, the disorientation of migration, the loss of normalcy, and the response to the great drama of reality, must be repositioned within the discourse of the ordinary.

I am sitting in my little studio apartment with its barely there view of the Santa Monica mountains on my cheerful, yellow sofa for one of the last times. In a few days my meager possessions will be in storage and I’ll be renting a guest room from some dear friends in West LA for the summer. I am excited, looking forward to the move, feeling just dandy about not having my own things for a while; the move has been long awaited and is temporary until I sort out my life in L.A. and find a permanent home.  And yet, as I type these words, I trip over the word “permanent.” 

Permanence.  I have been looking for that for a while now. Each move is my “last move,”  I tell myself. “Just once more and then this wanderlust, this wandering eye will be calmed…”

I spent the last two weeks traveling.  I went up the coast of California to wine country, hung out at a Catholic mission in Santa Barbara, and flew to Brooklyn for five glorious, hard walked days.  I’ve been slightly depressed lately: finishing up my PhD coursework and taking my exams has taken its toll on me. Traveling was a welcome release, I lifted the stop valve and all the stress of the preceding months evaporated into the shifting winds of my journeying.  Yet, it was a welcome release in another, less expected way as well. 

Traveling was a release from permanence. These states of being– moving and staying– are like opposing magnetic poles that govern my heart and actions.  As much as I crave sitting still, being quiet, deepening relationships and my knowledge of the place where I am, I simultaneously yearn to be in perpetual motion, discovering the new, and seeking the unknown. 

Why?

Eating a slice of italian sausage pizza purchased at Two Boots in the West Village, I walked down the street pondering this question.  Why couldn’t I just stay put? Or– like my friend Sue– give up the stability and live a life of perpetual travel? Why am I constantly yearning for both, putting my emotions at the mercy of this impossible conundrum? I don’t have the fullest answer for this life question, but in the West Village that day I knew that there was something about that experience that helps certain parts of me unfold in ways that can only happen in that place. 

When I hit the streets of New York I feel alive, emboldened, tough, hot and smart. I love the person I become there.  Yet, in Los Angeles other parts of me emerge.  I become soft and sweet: wide open like the Pacific ocean on a grey morning and sunshiney  like the rose bushes punctuating the alleys of Venice Beach. Neither experience is replicable anywhere else and I need both to survive. On planes I am reflective and prayerful.  In Europe I am savvy. In the Middle East I am shy and wondorous. In India I am adventurous and sheisty.  Every place I go I tap into another layer of my chameleon-like self and I can’t imagine life without the richness, the surprise, the utter fulfillment of that experience.  Travel, then, is about myself. 

But permanence? Permanence is others. Permanence is getting to revel in my mother’s presence, in the mundane ins and outs of her daily routine, the way she lifts her fork to her mouth, the way she sighs at the dogs and laughs at my father.  Permanence is looking at a friend and realizing that she has three small wrinkles at the corner of her right eye that I have never noticed before.  Permanence is loving that point when your best friend is in a terrible mood and you can lie quietly together, without speaking, knowing that you’ll get up in an hour or two and make her a coffee with two sugars and a dash of cream, just the way she likes it. 

How do I give either up? How is it possible to live with out these poles, these tensions, these ways of moving towards myself and then back outwards towards others? 

And so, on this quiet morning of transition: On this morning that I drove my dear friend to the airport for his flight to Paris, unsure of whether I will see him in a year or in five; on this morning after a week in NYC that convinced me I have to leave California and move back to the east coast–but can’t for a least a few more years; on this morning after realizing my mother is in a tough spot and that I should spend as much time with her in North Carolina as possible; on this morning when I pack up my possessions to leave my very first Los Angeles apartment for a brand new life; on this morning….

On this morning, I realize that life is never solved, full of tensions and contradictions, and always, always, in transition.

This morning’s LA Times article about Arne Duncan’s (US secretary of education) visit to California was disturbing. For several reasons: the first because Duncan said that California is a disaster (agreed), the second because regardless of his opinion very little will change (voters shot down measures that could have allocated money to schools), and the third for this series of quotes:

Duncan said that although stopping teacher layoffs and reducing class sizes are important, the money must also be used to drive reform, such as using student achievement data to evaluate teacher effectiveness and turning around the most troubled schools.

“Investing in the status quo is not going to move the ball down the field,” Duncan told hundreds of people at a San Francisco School Alliance benefit luncheon.

He also said the state’s reluctance to use student achievement data to evaluate teachers — rewarding the best and getting rid of the worst — was “mind-boggling.”

“The data doesn’t tell the whole truth, but the data doesn’t lie,” he said. “This firewall between students and teachers is bad for children and bad for education.” 

Let me get this as straight as I can: Duncan seems to think that although cutting teacher’s positions (in LAUSD 3,000 teachers have received pink slips alone) is bad…. it is WORSE that we are not using test scores to evaluate teacher performance. 

Crickets chirping…..

In what universe does it make sense that a child could score well on a test if he or she is sitting in a severely overcrowded classroom? I have seen middle school classrooms with 40 students in them… what happens when 3,000 teachers lose their jobs?

Ok, let’s talk achievement scores and teacher quality.  Primarily, this line of reasoning is based on flawed thinking that the tests themselves are adequate assessment of what a child knows.  As educational research and teacher anecdotal evidence consistently demonstrates, these standardized assessments are poorly designed and often test a child’s ability TO TAKE A TEST.  Rarely do they assess the following: intellectual curiosity, the ability to make a logical argument, an ability to explain how you know what you know, the ability to write creatively and use varied vocabulary, artistic and musical talent, bilingualism, physical fitness and health awareness, an understanding of ethics, the interpersonal skills to work effectively in groups or manage people, a deep understanding of histories, cause and effect and multiple perspectives on the same event, or a familiarity with a breadth of world literature, how to conduct a scientific observation and collect useful data, or how to apply mathematical skills to an engineering problem.  

What they DO assess are: ability to effectively eliminate two wrong answers so that you can guess which of the remaining two are the right answer, how to pick out details from a supplied paragraph, and how to sit still for an hour and a half and hold a pencil. 

Ok, perhaps I exaggerate, but as a former teacher, teacher educator, assessment designer, and school testing coordinator, I gotta tell ya…. not much! 

WHY are K-12 standardized tests so poorly designed? Well, money of course.  It is much easier to design an assessment that you can feed through a bubble machine and calculate the percentage of right answers than it is to pay professional educators to read and evaluate essays, watch student presentations, sift through portfolios, or evaluate group dynamics.  We leave that kind of assessment to sophisticated fields like architecture, or business. 

But Christine, you say, if the tests are so lame, why can’t the kids pass them? Because they have taken over education… literally, months of schooling are devoted to drilling and killing multiple choice strategies to students. Because they are boring and killing kids’ brains. Because education has become a watered down version of a factory line up and nobody’s brain grows in that kind of environment.  Because are kids aren’t learning, aren’t developing, aren’t growing and certainly aren’t being prepared to be competitive in the global economy with new, important training in areas like language and group dynamics, but are instead sitting in overcrowded, hectic classrooms with tired teachers who are on the verge of losing their jobs. 

The drop out rate in LAUSD is around the 25% mark.  With a number that high, are we really still thinking that it is the KIDS’ faults that they don’t want to be in school?

Mr. Duncan, please. Do not tie teachers’ “quality” to how well their students score on bad tests.  Don’t patronize us by saying that losing teachers is bad, but scoring poorly on a standardized test is worse. The answer here, folks, isn’t to try to rachet up that factory line up to get kids to pass bad tests… let’s try something else. 

If you want to know how teachers are doing… give them a chance to succeed. Give them 25 kids in a room, all the resources they need, decent and effective professional development, and assessments that truly measure multiple forms of intelligence, global preparedness, and intellectual growth.  Look at schools that are high functioning… look at tony elite east coast prep schools, funky do-it-yourself mountain schools, university lab schools, and progressive urban schools…. check out how they “test” their kids. Glean some ideas.  Then, FUND those ideas and give teachers and students a chance to get excited about learning again.

Friends,

While I have been busy with my writing and exams and haven’t had time to blog lately, I do regularly update the activism page with upcoming announcements and issues of concern– so check frequently!

Besos,

Christine

I am deep into an investigation into why people are hysterical about illegal immigration. It is a major issue out here in California– so much so that you can barely say the word “immigration” without someone having a conniption fit over the so-called “illegals”. Frankly, I find the whole thing strange. Whether or not someone has entered the country illegally seems to be besides the point. Our economy is based in  a push-pull migration effect that is historic and globally determined (think capitalism), our borders are a mess and unethically run, our visa system is essentially broken and backlogged, and a cursory glance at the history of immigration laws shows that we have repeatedly restricted People of Color from emigrating to this country (the Chinese, the Mexicans– and lets not forget enslaving Black Africans) in order to favor Anglo-Saxon whites. So why do people cling to the “law” as the one and only moral decider of whether immigrants in general in this country should be treated well?  The law has barely showed itself worthy of such deference….

Now, let me make myself crystal clear here, dear reader, lest you think I am advocating anarchy.  I certainly am not.  I believe in just civil laws, an orderly society that creates fair and honest economic and social policies, and the right of a nation to control who comes in and out of her borders.  What I am saying is that it is bizarre to me that folks insist on screaming that illegal immigrants are the scum of the earth and positioning broken and unjust civil laws over our very clear moral imperative (in fact, a “law”) to “love thy neighbor”. 

I’ll be blogging more about this, including some survey work I am doing with middle school children in Los Angeles and their feelings about being recently arrived immigrants, but first I wanted to share an article I found on the World Hunger website.

The truth about illegal immigration and crime: immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are substantially less likely to commit crimes or to be incarcerated than U.S. citizens

Tom Barry

Anti-immigration forces have been hammering into our heads the dangerous link between illegal immigration and increases in violent crime. Their only problem: the facts don’t support their alarmist contentions.

(February 6, 2008) “Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens.” That’s the lead sentence of a policy report published by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, DC institute that provides intellectual ammunition to the anti-immigration forces.

Another CIS study led with a similarly impressionistic assertion about the immigrant-crime link: “In recent years, it has become difficult to avoid perceiving immigrants, legal or not, as overwhelming this country with serious crime.”

CIS is not alone in relying on impressions to form opinions about just how illegal immigrants are. On the basis of fear-mongering stories rather than scientific studies, groups like the Center for Immigration Studies have succeeded in convincing the media and the U.S. public that undocumented immigrants are criminals. A National Opinion Research Center survey found in 2000 that 73% of Americans believed that immigrants were casually related to more crime.

But, as in other dimensions of the immigration debate, the facts don’t support the alarm.

There have been dozens of national studies examining immigration and crime, and they all come to the same conclusion: immigrants are more law-abiding than citizens. A 2007 study by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) found that immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are substantially less likely to commit crimes or to be incarcerated than U.S. citizens.

Ruben G. Rumbaut, coauthor of “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality” study, said: “The misperception that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, are responsible for higher crime rates is deeply rooted in American public opinion and is sustained by media anecdotes and popular myth.” According to Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine, “This perception is not supported empirically. In fact, it is refuted by the preponderance of scientific evidence.”

The Immigration Policy Center study found that:

• At the same time that immigration—especially undocumented immigration—has reached or surpassed historic highs, crime rates have declined, notably in cities with large numbers of undocumented immigrants, including border cities like El Paso and San Diego.
• Incarceration rate for native-born men in the 18-39 age group was five times higher than for foreign-born men in the same age group.
• Data from the census and other sources show that for every ethnic group, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are least educated and least acculturated.

As the study noted, the fact that many immigrants enter the country illegally is framed by anti-immigration forces as an assault on the “rule of law,” thereby reinforcing the false impression that immigration and criminality are linked.

One of the most disturbing findings of the IPC study was that immigrant children and immigrants with many years in the country are more likely to become criminals than first-generation immigrants or those with less than 15 years in the country. In other words, the more acculturated immigrants are the more likely they are to become criminals—although still at lower rates than those for non-immigrants.

Indignant anti-immigration voices dominate internet discussions with their vitriol and misinformation, and even point to false data to bolster their case.

The anti-immigrant forces draw, for example, on the “2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants” with its array of alarming statistics about illegal immigrants and crime to make their case that undocumented immigrants not only break the law entering the country but also break the laws, with a proclivity to violent crimes, once they make their own homes here. Statistics from this study circulate on restrictionist websites and routinely appear in blogs and post-article comment sections across the web.

In fact, no such report exists. INS, the agency that supposedly produced the report, ceased to exist in 2003.

But facts don’t get in the way of those who are intent on demonizing undocumented immigrants or “illegals” in the vocabulary of the restrictionists. How do groups like CIS explain the gap between their impressions and the real statistics about crime and immigration? CIS asks the same question in a 2001 report: Why is it that studies don’t make the immigration-crime connection when “so much other evidence indicates they are responsible for a wave of individual and organized crime?”

Contrary to their prevailing argument that immigrant crime is terrorizing the U.S. general public, CIS argues that immigrant crime is unreported because it stays within the immigrant community as immigrant-on-immigrant crime. Furthermore, police departments tend to avoid enforcing laws when immigrants are involved because police are not the agency charged with enforcing immigration law. As Heather MacDonald argued in a report published by CIS, “In cities where crime from these lawbreakers ["illegal aliens"] is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status.”

CIS and other restrictionist think tanks argue that given their supposed criminal natures, the best way to solve the crime problem in cities like Los Angeles is to round up the illegal immigrants. “The police should be given the option of reporting and acting on immigration violations, where doing so would contribute to public safety,” wrote MacDonald, a scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

Taking off from the findings of studies that immigrant children are more likely to commit crimes than their parents, CIS argues that our society should root out the problem now by deporting the parents of possible future criminals. “On the issue of crime, the biggest impact of immigration is almost certainly yet to come,” warns Steve Camarota, director of research at CIS.

The great distance between fact and perception, reality and scenario was all too evident in Iowa and New Hampshire during presidential primaries, where fear of immigrants has made immigration a leading campaign issue, especially among Republicans. To hear the candidates and constituents rail against immigration, one would have thought immigrants were flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border on their way to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Stoked by anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which publishes alarmist state-by-state profiles of the purported negative impacts of immigrants, restrictionist fever has spread throughout the country. Both Iowa and New Hampshire have overwhelmingly white populations with only a small immigrant population. Even according to FAIR’s high estimates, the population of undocumented immigrants or “illegals” does not exceed 55,000 in Iowa and 15,000 in New Hampshire.

Certainly, immigration is an issue that merits public discussion and should be part of the electoral debate. But facts, not irrational fear and dread, should inform the national debate about immigration policy.

Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy.  This article was first published there and may be viewed athttp://americas.irc-online.org/am/4903 .

I watched this clip in class tonight. We had an amazingly powerful conversation afterwards. We talked about Eric Holder’s Feb. 18 speech in which he declared that America is a “nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race. Of course, he has received an incredible amount of backlash now that we have decided that race no longer matters. After watching the clip below, I realized how right Holder is. We can’t talk about race because it is so painful, so terrible, and so horrifying what we have done and continue to do to each other. How do we heal without talking about the pain?

I have been thinking and talking and writing a lot about race lately. The Atlantic Monthly came out with an amazing piece in their Jan/Feb issue by Hua Hsu on whiteness. It has got me thinking. Other things that have me thinking are terms like “post-racial” America. America is changing demographically, that is for sure. But are we beyond race? As critical race scholar Danny Solorzano tells us, “race matters because racism matters”. So how does race matter in this changing world? What are we becoming and how do we heal from a racist past– that is still very much present?

I am working on a piece on being bi-racial (which I am) and how categories both help and constrain us. I am excerpting part of it here, and look forward to your comments and thoughts:

Each individual soul eventually asks the question: who am I? If the answer lends itself more easily to a simple space, then it might take the shape of national or cultural boundaries: I am an American.  I am Nuahtl.  I am Israeli. I am German.  If the answer begins to become layered, then hyphens might present themselves as a logical next step: I am an American Jew. I am Mexican-Nuahtl. I am Russian Israeli.  I am a German woman.  Or even: I am an American German Jew.  I am an English speaking Chicana of Mexican-Nuahtl ancestry. I am a white Muslim Russian living in Israel since three generations. I am a female German of Greek descent who speaks Bavarian.

How do we navigate a world that demands definitions and categories?   Identity activist movements have had to cling to hard categorization in order to make their point; those of us with identities like water silence ourselves because we believe in the fight.  We believe in the overturning of oppressive conditions, but sacrifice something of ourselves in the meantime.  When African-American groups tell the rest of America that they claim Barack Obama as their own, we speak out loudly in support. While is nothing more redemptive than the election of a Black man to the highest office in a country that imprisons its’ Black and Hispanic youth with Orwellian regularity, we cannot—should not—ignore our racial past nor erase our legacy of slavery; we desperately need this pedagogy to inform our present. But, and I am whispering now, a tiny protest, he is of my tribe.  He has a white mother. He grew up like me—straddling worlds, writing and reading and reflecting his way through the trenches created by your categories, striving to find our place.

Education, writes John Dewey, is the process of a society communicating who it is to her children. What will we tell our minority children about race and how will we help them give voice to their inevitable feelings of loss and lack, of invisibility and difference? Our current answer, that we are a nation moving towards post-racialism, stems from old questions. We must find the courage to ask new questions in order to find new ways to communicate who we are.  One such question is about how we live out our contradictions.  How do we see (experience, live out, and organize) race—and yet not see it at the same time?

I cannot pretend to know the enormity of what we need to do to answer this question.  But I have a few ideas.

We need a new category.  A category of contradictions. And we need to examine its’ edges.

 I suggest that a borderland identity replace these notions of hyphens and hybridity. Hyphens and hybridity are predicated on assimilation—and the outcryings of communities who are losing their cultures and languages in our peculiar American obsession with sameness and equality over difference and equity– is an indication that we have headed into a terribly wrong direction with that concept.  Still, after rejecting assimilation, we need to live together and meet somewhere.  The tendency of both minority and majority cultures to segregate is self-destructive and terrible for our coherence in a fragmenting world.

A borderland identity is an identity of resistance to both monoculturalism and assimilationist diversity. I have borrowed the term “borderlands” from Gloria Anzaldúa, the lesbian Chicana poetess who wrote about her upbringing in the migrant culture of Texas and called such shadows the borderlands/ la frontera.  She writes,

“It’s not a comfortable place to live in, this place of contradictions.  Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. However, there have been compensations for this mestiza, and certain joys. Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element… there is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind. And yes, the “alien” element has become familiar—never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd.  No, not comfortable, but home.”

To have a multi-racial, borderland identity is a contradiction that puts two ideas in conflict with each other: it rejects our sociological insistence that we categorize ourselves, yet maintains a stance that categories matter in a society that is still battling entrenched, and growing, inequities.

It seems that most of my dismay these days come from what I view as a war on reason.  As a social scientist, I spend a great deal of my time trying to understand how we form, maintain, and improve cohesive societies.  As the culture wars continue in America, and physical wars flare up around the world, I find my self consistently coming back to the same line of thinking… where did our reason go? 

Extreme reactions are frightening.   Take Israel’s current bombing of the Gaza strip.  While I fully understand Israel tenuous position in the Middle East– after all, the majority of their neighbors refuse to believe the Holocaust happened at all– their response to their position is completely extreme and completely unreasonable. Five days (and counting) of excessive bombing of a virtually defenseless citzenry who have been starving their way through months of isolation is simply– unreasonable.  By anyone’s standards. It isn’t practical, it doesn’t solve anything, and it only increases resentment.  Palestinian children, already angry with little access to education or feasible work, will only grow up to find a target for their anger– Israel.  And while I can only base this on unscientific anecdotal evidence, it seemed to me that most of the young Israelis I met while traveling through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and smaller towns in both the north and south of the country, wanted some kind of lasting peace and empathized with the position of the Palestinians. 

Take the social issues embroiling the United States.  We have seemingly split into a nation that has lost its sense of nuance and rational debate. Ideologically trumps politics and screaming is socially acceptable as long as it is about a “cause”.  Pro- or anti- abortion? Pro- or anti- immigration? Gay marriage or not? Evolution or creationism?  Women– back to the stone ages or rampant, hyper-sexualization?

These are not good choices, and they are not good for us.  Have we forgotten that a diverse, pluralistic nation requires compromise and resiliency? I myself tend to be wildly progressive on some social issues and surprisingly conservative on others.  But regardless of my personal beliefs (which I of course attempt to convince anyone who will ever listen to me over multiple glasses of wine) I recognize our need to get ideology out of law and politics and make laws that protect all of us.

 It seems completely reasonable to me that we could base abortion laws on a scientifically accepted definition of when human life begins– for example, when the heart begins to beat.  It also seems very reasonable that gay couples receive the same full and equal civil protection as heterosexuals.  Immigration? Secure our borders and concurrently try to be as welcoming as possible to people already living here and their children.  Stop unreasonably criminalizing our new neighbors.  Evolution vs. creationism… again, can’t the two peacefully coexist? Can’t we teach our children that most people believe that science and religion complement each other  when explaining the same phenomenon– that the world has developed through ways that science explains… but that science is limited in it’s explanation of the original spark of it all? The position of women.. does it have to be “Housewives of Orange County” style sexuality versus the Islamic veil? Unreasonable! 

So why do we do it? Why do we seem unable to cooperate with each other to make concessions and laws that work for a diverse nation? 

I suppose once we answer that question we will have moved into what the Buddhists refer to as Enlightenment.  Reason would end wars, calm hearts, and bring us into greater intimacy with each other. Once we have reestablished a common middle ground and rational debate, we could begin to tease out the nuances of complex situations and finally begin to understand the reasoning of the other.

Browsing the debates and end of year round ups on Salon.com today, I came across a fascinating discussion. A writer posed whether or not it is possible to be both pro-life and feminist. As you might expect, the replies ranged from reasonable to vitriolic. To me, the abortion argument is exhausting and painful.  We have gotten ourselves so mired into set ideological positions that we can’t see or hear much common sense.  Arguing over abortion in black and white terms seems only to divide us further.  

With the coming FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act) decision, a decision which would radically alter our current abortion laws, our national debate on abortion needs new voices and new perspectives. Where ever you stand on the issue, I think educating ourselves in a range of fresh ideas is hugely important. To that end, I am reposting one of the more interesting responses to the argument.  I think many of my readers will disagree with some of the tenets expressed, and there are certainly many counter-arguments to the ideas covered below. BUT,  I think we need to continue examining whether we are creating a society that is socially structured to empower women.  If we simply accept the status quo without asking ourselves uncomfortable and tough questions, we are failing.  

Observations from pro-life feminists

By vasumurti, posted 9/30/2008 on salon.com

Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices contains observations by numerous pro-life feminists on the subject of abortion. According to these pro-life feminists, abortion is not the answer to the problem of unwanted pregnancy, it is merely a band-aid which prevents real reforms from taking place regarding society’s treatment of women.

Susan Maronek writes: “Abortion, in the final analysis, works to the advantage of the exploitative male, not for the female. It provides an end to any and all financial, legal or social obligation which comes with childbirth by eliminating the possibility of birth. Abortion provides the ultimate rationale when pressing for sexual favors. It makes the female a perpetual and re-usable sex object. When an unwanted pregnancy occurs, the female is potentially left without any social support…

“The male can remove himself from the situation, physically or mentally because abortion is ‘her’ right. The female is left with the sole and final legal responsibility for killing their offspring. It is her body and mind which bear the scars of this destructive operation and experience…Abortion is a male sexual fantasy come true.”

Pregnancy and childbirth are natural. The ability to bear children is the one thing which truly distinguishes women from men. Demanding the right to abort in order to achieve equality implies women must become males in order to compete and survive in a man’s world. Rosemary Bottcher points out that abortion reduces women to the status of sex machines which can be “repaired,” if necessary. She refers to it as the “castration of women.”

“What we need now,” writes Jo McGowan, “is a race of woman who will stand up and say NO! The violence ends here. The misogyny ends here. The destruction of our children ends here. No longer will our bodies be used to write messages of fear and hatred. We hold within our bodies the power of creation, the power to nourish and sustain life. We shall not pervert these to serve death.”

“Abortion is the destruction of human life and energy that does nothing to eradicate the very real underlying problems of women,” writes Cecilia Voss Koch. “The pregnant welfare mother begs for decent housing, a decent job and childcare or respect for her child-nurturing work. Instead, she gets direction to the local abortion clinic and is told to take care of ‘her problem.’ How convenient. Much less time and trouble than teaching her about authentic reproductive freedom and reproductive responsibility. Much cheaper than attending to her real problems: her poverty, her lack of skills, her illiteracy, her loneliness, her bitterness about her entrapment, her self-contempt, her vulnerability. After the abortion, these problems will all be there…

“By encouraging society to consider a woman’s child as a disposable piece of property, aborting reinforces the image of woman herself as disposable property and reusable sex object—a renewable resource. It is no coincidence that the biggest single financial contributor to the cause of ‘abortion rights’ is the Playboy Foundation. When abortion is available to all women, all male responsibility for fertility control has been removed. A man need only offer a woman money for the abortion and that’s it: no responsibility, no relationship, no commitment. And there we are—recycled and used again!”

Abortion is symptomatic of the rampant sexism within our society—it is not the cure. Television advertisements, sitcoms, women’s books, magazines, etc. are still sexist in nature. Most imply that women are nothing more than homemakers, or that their only goal in life is to catch a man. Women still earn only 60 cents for every dollar a man makes. The average pay of female college graduates is equivalent to that of males who graduated from high school. Only 0.8 percent of all working women earn over $25,000 per year. The majority of working women are unorganized and underpaid. Working mothers are also forced to pay for childcare and still tend to be segregated into women’s jobs. A 1981 survey, for example, found that 75 percent of all practicing physicians were male. Abortion itself is a huge practice run by entrepreneurs—mostly males—with $320 million in yearly profits.

In a 1989 opinion editorial on the subject of abortion entitled “The Bitter Price of Choice,” Frederica Matthewes-Green, wrote: “It is a cruel joke to call this a woman’s ‘choice.’ We may choose to sacrifice our life and career plans, or choose to undergo humiliating invasive surgery and sacrifice our offspring. How fortunate we are—we have a choice! Perhaps it’s time to amend the slogan—‘Abortion: a woman’s right to capitulate.’”

In her article, “The Feminist Case Against Abortion,” which originally appeared in the September 13, 1999 issue of The Commonwealth, Serrin Foster, Executive Director of Feminists For Life, wrote: “The feminist movement was born more than two hundred years ago when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. After decrying the sexual exploitation of women, she condemned those who would ‘either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born.’ Shortly thereafter, abortion became illegal in Great Britain.

“The now revered feminists of the 19th century were also strongly opposed to abortion because of their belief in the worth of all humans. Like many women in developing countries today, they opposed abortion even though they were acutely aware of the damage done to women through constant child-bearing. They opposed abortion despite knowing that half of all children born died before the age of five. They knew that women had virtually no rights within the family or the political sphere. But they did not believe abortion was the answer.

“Ironically,” noted Foster, “the anti-abortion laws that early feminists worked so hard to enact to protect women and children were the very ones destroyed by the Roe v. Wade decision 100 years later—a decision hailed by the National Organization for Women (NOW) as the ‘emancipation of women.’

“The goals of the more recent NOW-led women’s movement with respect to abortion would have outraged the early feminists,” concluded Foster.