Peace Vigil Notes #3

I didn't speak on Friday night. In the pot-luck meeting following the vigil, I mean. I chatted with people at the vigil and during the ride to where the meeting was being held (a house that, many years ago, and in conjunction with its long-time activist owner, once hosted Martin Luther King) and in the pot-lucky preamble, but in the meeting itself I held my silence. It's only the second such gathering in the many months I've been going to the vigil and it's not the country in which I grew up, so I still feel a little bit like an outsider, but I didn't feel actively silenced or anything; I just didn't choose to speak.

When they're not boring and ritualistic, activist meetings can feel overwhelming. Every statement made can trigger a dozen lines of processing inside me, body and mind, and it can be enough work just to keep up with that, never mind coming up with things to say myself. Every statement carries in it little hooks that connect to larger narratives and pull them, or at least parts of them, into the room. Through its content and the identities of the speakers, every statement holds the potential to illuminate and fill out little bits of the matrices of race and class and gender and sexuality and ability -- power and privilege -- in the room, in the community, in the world. Dominant media themes, political traditions, historical narratives all get pulled in. Every statement reveals (more than most people realize, I think) a bit about who the speaker is -- if you listen, there are echoes or even loud trumpets of ego and values and past traumas and other manifestations of self. Even to an outsider, hints of group history and past internal conflicts and personality clashes reverberate through the room.

The focus of the meeting was the proposed move to a different corner within the neighbourhood. The vigil has been at this site for nearly two years and someone suggested that a move would be useful. The specifics of the move are that we would be leaving a corner that is embedded in the middle of the more affluent, mostly white, mostly liberal (the ongoing harassment by one thrower of eggs notwithstanding) section of the neighbourhood to one that is an easy walk away and still technically part of the same neighbourhood, that is on a larger road with more auto and pedestrian traffic, and that is in an area that is much more Latino/a and working-class. This last appeared to be both part of the original motivation for the suggestion (under the rubric of "diversity") and a source of concern for some.

I don't think I'll talk about the details of the deliberations, except to note that it is always interesting how race and class are present in the conversation when those of us with progressive politics and privilege in one or both of those areas come together to talk politics -- always present, lurking, avoided and discussed at the same time, source of reflexive awkwardness that everyone pretends not to see, focus and blindspot, communicated through pauses and euphemism, and occasionally made visible in a naked shock like a swear word to which no one quite nows how to respond. It's not always that bad, of course, but in a group with no explicit, common understanding or what class and racial differences mean and why they matter (or don't) that is often how it feels. Anyway, a trial move was agreed to, starting in March and with plenty of preparation in the meantime. I agreed with that decision as of the end of the meeting but I am feeling more dubious about it now. It shall be an interesting process, in any case.

Last of the evening: She is one of only three of us present who is younger than middle-age. She wanted to share open-ended thoughts and questions on the movement in a bleak time. In responding to her musings on new tactics and her vague plea for the peace movement to rethink things, I think those of us assembled missed the point -- not the point as she explicitly presented it, perhaps, but the import of the core of her words. The essence of what she was communicating, as far as I could tell, was the pain of passionate struggle defeated and defeated and defeated again. I'm not sure how that could've been adequately addressed in that context; perhaps it couldn't. But I think it's significant that even if you remove the issue from that specific context, social movements don't usually have good ways of explicitly and collectively dealing with that pain.

Condemn Attacks on Iraqi Trade Unionists

Please sign an online petition organized by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy entitled Statement Condemnig Attacks on Iraqi Trade Unionists. The first paragraph of the statement reads:

We, who opposed the U.S.-led war on Iraq and who call for an immediate end to the occupation of that country, are appalled by the torture and assassination in Baghdad on January 4, 2005 of Hadi Salih, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). There are also disturbing reports of intimidation, death threats and murders targeting other IFTU members, trade unionists in general, and political activists.

Prominent signatories include Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, leaker of the Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg, Doug Ireland, The Nation's Katha Pollitt, and Noam Chomsky.

Revolutionary Journal

Got an email today about a new activist political journal called Upping the Anti, produced by a Canadian grouping called the Autonomy and Solidarity Network. I don't know anything about the ASN, and would suggest that it always pays to engage cautiously and critically, but at first glance the project sounds really interesting and the politics sound solid. The first issue is due out soon.

Here is the first paragraph from their draft first editorial:

Our name "Upping the Anti" refers to three interwoven tendencies which have come to define much of the politics of today's radical left in Canada: anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialism. These three political tendencies, while overlapping and incorporating various contradictory elements, together represent the growth of a radical politics in a space outside of the "party building" of the sectarian left and the electoral dead end of social democracy. Despite their limitations, the movements based on these "anti-" politics have been built out of a real process and practice of social contestation and mobilization, and they point towards ideas and activist practices which will have a significant role in shaping the form and content of new revolutionary movements born out of future cycles of struggle against exploitation and oppression. The contributors to "Upping the Anti" have been a part of these movements, and this journal is intended to provide a space to address and discuss unresolved questions and dynamics within these struggles in order to better learn from our collective successes and failures.

And here is one question and answer from the journal's FAQ:

What kind of audience is the journal aimed at?

The journal is aimed at people who would already define themselves as activists or oppositional to the current system. The level of writing is somewhere between a radical magazine like Canadian Dimension or Left Turn and that of a popular academic journal like Monthly Review. The publication will have the look and feel of a journal, as opposed to a magazine or newspaper, but we will make every effort to avoid using overly specialist or academic jargon. Footnotes and glossaries of words and terms will accompany those articles which need them. We are intending the publication to be primarily directed towards people that consider themselves to be active in the movements and supportive of the politics that we have outlined in our editorial. It is not our intention to make an entry-level publication for people who are only just becoming politically radical, although it is hoped that they too would find this publication useful. The primary goal of the publication is to clarify and define the politics of those of us already active on the anti-capitalist, anti-oppressive, and anti-imperialist left.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this to see what I can learn and what I can connect with.

Two Friendly Blogs

I thought I'd direct your attention to two blogs. The first is Humans In Science, a group blog to which my partner contributes. Look for posts by "ritzsa" which usually have to do with women and science. The second is Brown Rab Girl Fish, a personal/political blog by a friend back in Toronto.

Enjoy!

Insecurities of an Autodidact

It would not be inaccurate to say that I have not been adequately formally qualified for most of the professional-type jobs that I have held. Of course, it wouldn't be entirely accurate, either, without a fair bit of added explanation -- some of those were when I was a student, and the burden of providing 100% of the necessary skills was considered a good choice by the employers as a gamble that I would stick with them and return value to their enterprise later, or because hiring me (and others in my situation) was seen as a combination of "social contribution through pedagogy" and "source of cheap undergraduate labour." Some work since I have graduated has been professional activity as far as I'm concerned but has been in contexts that would traditionally be considered marginal, so formal qualifications weren't particularly relevant. In any case, I have always ended up being perfectly able to do the jobs, I just haven't usually had pieces of paper proving it in advance. And I do recognize that white and male privilege have contributed a lot in different ways -- ways I'm sure I'll talk about in future posts -- to the somewhat peculiar nature of my work/employment history.

My current work is, in a way, an outgrowth of what I have been doing since I graduated from university -- research, writing, and other media production related to social, political, and social movement issues. My degree is in biochemistry and I have never had any post-secondary education in any of these areas. What I know about society, history, social movements, theory, and related areas I have learned on my own. Now, in general I'm pretty comfortable with that -- I read what interests me, and I read a lot. The path of my understanding of the world has not followed an externally imposed curriculum but rather has been responsive to my own needs and interests. On the whole, I think that's how we should learn about pretty much everything, and I'm glad that I'm able to do that. In the long run it might allow me to have ways of thinking about the things that I write about that are novel and useful and different from where I might have ended up with a more traditional evolution of understanding and knowledge. And maybe that's just silly and an exercise in trying to make a virtue of a necessity, but even so it can't hurt. I'm pretty sure that the ecosystem of ideas churning around in my brain is no less coherent than those gracing the crania of lots of other folk of roughly my age who do intellectual work, including its academic variant.

The thing is, yesterday and today I have been preparing a proposal to submit in response to a call for submissions to a book whose origins are within academia, albeit quite far towards its more activist side. And I have been worried that my non-traditional intellectual path will stick out like a sore thumb and work to my disadvantage in some way.

My partner's advice of, "Say what you want to say however you want to say it, and if they don't want to publish it, well, screw them," was a useful dose of common sense, of course.

And in any case, the fate of this particular proposal is not the point -- it would be a nice collaboration to be a part of, but it really doesn't matter that much. What's interesting is the persistence of internalized (within me) nonsense about the connection between formal accreditation, on the one hand, and ability and/or intellectual value, on the other. It's silly, but it's still there.

Review: White Like Me

[White Like Me by Tim Wise. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005.]

Our reading operates the text; in our reading, it becomes active. The artifice of the text detaches it from the local historicity of living and activity, or seems to do so. But its making was work done in actual settings by one or more people and as part of a course of action, whether of an individual, a group, an organization of some kind, or of an extended social relation concerting the activities of many. And its reading also is in time and in an actual place, and enters again into someone's course of action and has, in that course of action, a speaking part; it becomes active in that course of action. -- Dorothy Smith, "Exploring the Social Relations of Discourse", Writing the Social

When I first read the essay from which the above quote was taken, it was a lightbulb moment to see her talk about how reading a text is a very embedded, material, historically and life-historically specific act -- you do it in a specific place, in a specific mood, at a specific time, and all of that actually matters in shaping what the reading of that text means to you. It has everything to do with how the words in the text in question become "active" (to use Smith's word) in your life. Though it is true for any kind of consumption (reading, watching, listening) of a text, I find it especially relevant to reading nonfiction books that are not primarily about facts but are rather mostly about ideas, especially ideas about personal/political aspects of various oppressions.

In reading White Like Me I felt quite aware, as I was living it, of the fact that this reading was occuring in a specific context, in specific ways, with specific impacts.

White Like Me is a short, personal memoir by Tim Wise, a white anti-racist educator and activist based in Nashville, Tennessee. He first became active in anti-racist struggle in the campaigns to defeat David Duke's bids for electoral office in Louisiana, and he has gone to develop a national profile and to write many articles and books.

This book, rather than statistics or high falutin academic jargon, is a straightforward look at what there is to learn about racism through looking at experiences of whiteness, specifically his experiences and his whiteness. He felt this was important to do, even though (to paraphrase him) there are lots of anti-racist activists and writers of colour out there who have forgotten more about racism since breakfast than he'll ever know, because so often even when white folk are willing to admit that racism exists, we see it only as something structuring the experiences of people of colour and not something that structures our experience as well, via privilege.

The basic ideas conveyed in the book are simple -- in a way, the basic concepts necessary for understanding racism and white privilege are always simple, wherever you come across them, at least in and of themselves and speaking purely in intellectual terms. But when you weave the threads of those ideas into the larger tapestry of life (which you have to do in order for them to have any actual meaning) they can twist and turn in constantly surprising (for white folks) ways. This book is about him following these twists and turns, and relating experiences and stories from which he has learned and which he has used to teach about racism and whiteness.

I expeience the specific moments of reading a book like this as a dialogue between the text and my own life, my own experiences, and the lives and experiences that others have shared with me. It is an exercise in taking flat words on a page and doing empathic modelling -- building self-contained, imaginative and empathic constructs in my head from the words on the page, and then relating those constructs to other constructs built from my experiences and from experiences shared by others, and seeing how they relate. What new perspectives can I gain from comparing them, constrasting them, letting them interact, speculating, reliving moments of my own complicity or support-of-resistance, allowing the new constructs to cast new light on the ones already in my head? It is dealing not with one-dimensional "facts" but with complex, three-dimensional concepts, things like the construct in my head of a specific person, or of my realtime experience of noticing (or not noticing) race and racism in daily life, or of interactions between a specific childhood experience and present-day gut responses to things.

It is the fact that the experience of reading a book is not so much characterized by the ingestion of a linear series of letters, numbers, and punctuation, but rather by this breathing of life into the ingested ink, and its interaction and partial integration with the universe already spinning inside one's head that makes specific time and point-in-life and even mood-in-the-moment matter, that make Smith's observation above more than just philosophical trivia. These imaginative and empathic models of life, people, concepts, the world, that spin around in our heads are constantly being updated and revised based on all the inputs of our senses. Each revision changes how the next input (including the next experience of reading) will further change it.

In other words, each experience of learning about racism (or other oppressions) is a disturbing of, an intervention into, that living system inside my head, whether that experience of learning is reading a book like this or hearing a friend's story or a critically analyzed experience of my own. A year from now I will have another year's worth of experiences -- observations, readings, interventions or non-interventions into the world of my own to ponder -- that will change the experience of reading it again. Learning from such texts is iterative: returning to it later, perhaps reading only a chapter or a fragment, or doing it all again from start to finish, is not simple repetition but rather an invitation to new learnings, to things unseen previously, or (and this is common for us white folks in learning about white privilege and racism) things previously seen many times but then forgotten or pushed to the side.

This is a much more honest way of understanding how we learn about such things than pretending it is a matter of standing outside of everything, seeing arrows and diagrams neatly drawn, and gaining instant understanding. It is a constant process of refining one's understanding of one's own experience, one's own local site; then of building these imaginative and empathic models of experiences at other local sites; and struggling to refine one's vision of the way these different local sites, often with very different local experiences, are coordinated. And, of course, it has to lead to wrestling with ideas for how to act in one's local, specific, material, historical site in order to change things -- from intervening in a family dinner conversation to parenting to functioning in white-dominated activist spaces to connecting to anti-racism work led by activists of colour.

It seems anti-climactic to end this review with an admonition to white readers of this blog to read White Like Me, but I think that's what I'm going to do. I'd be interested in seeing reactions and reviews by experienced anti-racist activists of colour -- I poked around on the web a little to find some, and didn't have much luck -- but as far as I can see, this is worth adding to the shelf of books with which you are in ongoing dialogue about race and racism and about how, as a white person, to participate in resistance to the structures of white supremacy.


[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Women Not Worth Counting

Wow. How about this crazy world of ours, and this crazy homeland I'm currently calling home. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has decided that it will no longer be reporting specifically on women workers in order "to reduce reporting burden on survey respondents." Well, you know, it's not as if the world of work and the economy more generally were gendered or anything. And I'm sure that employers will invest the money they save from the reduced reporting burden in making America great again, and winning this war on terror thing once and for all. Or something. (Via feministing.)

More Peace Vigil Notes

Another Friday, another stint standing on the corner with anti-war signs. Some notes from this week:

• Numbers were pretty low, even lower than last week. Perhaps people were worn out from attending anti-inauguration protests yesterday?
  
  
• Reception continues to be very positive, with many honks of support and only a handful of rude gestures and yells (including one carload of frat boys who sounded particularly indignant in their profanity).
  
  
• We were egged again. This time it was cars belonging to two participants that were hit. Incidentally, I got an email from a reader who gently questioned my choice to characterize the egging last week as "attempted violence," not so much for the characterization itself but to see how else I might apply the same label. Specifically, he wanted to know if I would label the "pie-ing" of prominent politicians and business leaders that has happened from time to time in Europe and Canada as "violent." I said that it probably is technically violence, but not of a particularly despicable kind. I would still regard the two quite differently because they function quite differently politically. "Pie-ing" functions as a media spectacle. Generally it is an intervention into a political process that is already based on spectacle, such as an election, and I'm not sure it really ever does anything useful -- to tweak an old anarchist slogan, "You can't pie a social relation" -- but I think it's relatively harmless. Egging, however, functions as a form of intimidation to ordinary folk engaged in political expression. It makes people think about safety issues and raises the spectre of (and implicitly threatens more significant) personal violence, particularly for people who have a personal history that involves the experience of violence. In a small way, it raises the psychological barriers to active dissent. What we've experienced at the vigil so far is at the relatively innocent end of the spectrum, certainly, but back in Ontario having experienced threats of violence myself and had fellow activists subjected to intimidation by skinheads while doing peace leafleting, I think it is worth contextualizing the egging as part of a continuum in which supporters of the dominant agenda feel such means can spontaneously and legitimately be used in response to dissent.
  
  
• I've been thinking about issues of visibility as a political strategy lately, probably because the chapter I'm working on at the moment for my social movement history project has to do with the gay liberation movement and visibility is an oft-pursued strategy in that context. In a way, the main function of these peace vigils is visibility. Pedestrian traffic is nearly nill at our current corner, so direct engagement with people generally doesn't happen. So is visibility sufficiently valuable in this instance to make standing on that corner time well spent? In a lot of cases I would be skeptical about whether this kind of visibility would be worth the effort but in the current political context in the United States I think it is. I think letting others see that there are people not rolling over in the face of the right-wing juggernaut is worthwhile. Sure, it's not ideal because I think most who see us would have trouble thinking beyond the Democrats as a response to the current situation, but even so I think the message of ordinary folk standing up and being counted as against the war in this country is worth doing.
  
  

Our Politics, Their Politics

I have been wondering: Do we spend so much time thinking, reading, writing, and responding to their politics that we neglect our politics? I ask this after thinking about what we talk about when we are at actions, what political activities we actually engage in, and particularly what our print and broadcast media produce, as well as what the progressive section of the blogosphere blogs about. I'll talk about it mostly in terms of media but it applies, as I've said, to thought, talk, and action as well.

That paragraph above needs a lot of unpacking, of course. Any time you start from a premise based on a simplistic "us" and "them", you're asking for trouble. In this instance, I think "them" is somewhat more stable as a category. Its edges are blurry and it is heterogeneous and encompasses contradictions, but the heart of the system that organizes power and those who inhabit its pinnacle are fairly clearly identifiable. Others among us, perhaps many, may participate often or always, but "their politics" belongs first and foremost to that clearly identifiable them.

"We", "us", and "our" are much less clear. Even at this early stage of analysis, "their" influence enters the equation -- part of what creates the variegated landscape of all that is "not them" is the ways that "their" system deprives or rewards us, causes trauma or blindness to trauma, based on who we are. "They" don't determine who we are in any complete deterministic way and the various "wes" mobilize and force change in the social meaning of who we are and how the power structure treats us. But even from this elemental stage of understanding the querstion above, their politics are present in ours -- theirs makes ours necessary, in a way.

So keeping in mind the provisional, even artificial nature of "we" and "our" as I'm using them -- the fact that attempts to widen "us" in practice to even close to the extent to which I am doing so in rhetoric in this particular instance can only ever be part of a concrete, difficult, painful, and incomple process of political work -- it is still meaningful to ask how "we" or the various "wes" allow their politics to take up our spaces.

So: Why is so much that I read and see in independent and alternative media and chat about with other activists and see in the progressive blogosphere about them?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against material about their politics produced from the diverse perspectives I'm grouping as "ours". Even the small differences possible within the constraints of their politics can cost or save lives, reduce or increase trauma. It is essential we understand the structures of power we are trying to reform and/or transform. In fact, a realization of the nearly absolute lack of such material on a local scale in Hamilton, Ontario, played a big part in shaping my productive life for several years.

At the same time, I want to hear more about us. Yes, we need to read/hear/talk about how awful it is that Alberto Gonzales will be Attorney General, but do we need to read/hear/talk about it so much? Of course it is important to identify the role of elite think-tanks in the world's current direction, but is the Project for New American Century really worth so much ink and hot air? I also agree that it's important to spread the word about the latest crazy-right attempt to chip away at reproductive freedom, the latest American boondoggle contract scandal in Iraq, the latest creationist lunacy, but in so doing are we sacrificing limited space that could be used to put ourselves at the centre of our own politics?

I want to read a blog from someone in a worker co-operative about the rewards and challenges of creating a liberatory work environment. I want to hear a roundtable of women working in anti-male violence institutions about how they balance direct support of women escaping abuse with other kinds of political action to achieve their objectives. I want to read the week-to-week experiences of a peace movement organizer in Mississippi. I want to hear the reflections on tactics by women and men doing community-based AIDS activism in communities of colour in Oakland. I want to get the sense that the world we want to build and the nitty gritty of how we build it -- one quiet conversation, one blocked freeway, one leaflet, one fundraiser, one community pot-luck at a time -- is important enough to grab our interest in the same way as an election or a piece of awful legislation or which retired general said what.

If you look and listen you can find some of that, and I'm not saying that is all we need. What we need is some kind of balance, and I don't think we have it at the moment.

I don't think I want to get too far into speculating about why this is the case. I think there are issues related to the fragmented nature of "we", issues of safety and confidentiality. I think it has to do with where in strikingly power-imbalanced landscape that I am folding together into "we" the power lies for creating collective priorities and narratives that get heard. I think it has something to do with the fact that "they" have held the initiative, at least on a global scale, since about the time I was born, and it's all the various "wes" can do to cope with what's thrown at us.

But I don't think it has to be that way. At the very least, all it takes to change that with respect to the blogosphere is the decision by individuals to do so. Bloggers, don't just talk about them. Talk about us! Tell us about the collective efforts at change which you are a part of. Tell us about what has worked and what has failed. Tell us about how the dynamics of oppression are functioning in your collective (like this great post from feministe), about how you're mobilizing the rank-and-file against a reactionary union local executive, about the cop-watch group that you started. Use the anonymity that the internet can provide and contribute to creating bodies of knowledge that focus on us. Only by doing so can we learn from each other, find new ways of acting in the world, build new shared narratives, and do so in a way that is doesn't let the lessons of one struggle get lost when it's over. Only by doing so can we ever grow as a movement of movements, can we ever turn "we" from a rhetorical device (and/or delusion of privileged progressives) into the unified but not uniform political force that "they" most fear.

War Is Stupid

Some visiting family rented Troy tonight. It's still playing. I just finished watching the first day of assault by the Greeks on the city. I am not squeamish about violence in movies per se, but for some reason my disbelief refused to be suspended and thoughts of current imperial aggression in that general part of the world would not leave my mind. Stupid and disgusting and evil: Bought or bullied or brainwashed ordinary men running around brandishing their physical proxy penises (swords and spears in Troy, guns and bombs in Iraq and Palestine today) because digusting and evil powerful men want to augment their metaphorical proxy penises ("honour", reputation, power, land, oil). No, I'm not blaming the occupied for resisting, nor am I losing sight of the structures and systems causing and caused by all the penis waving, but none of that makes it all any less depressing and stupid.

And apparently those in Washington in charge of brandishing penises for the advancement of neoliberal capitalism via racist and imperalist adventures have now decided to get more Iraqis killing each other as their next contribution to making the world a better place.

And the fact that according to Hollywood once you go back in history past a certain point everyone talks with badly done ruling-class English accents is pretty stupid too.

Peace Vigil Notes

Tonight I attended the weekly peace vigil in my neighbourhood for the first time since before our trip back to Ontario for the holidays. Some notes:

• We were egged. The consensus seemed to be that it came from a passing car, though noone saw it. It hit tree branches above our heads and fell just behind two vigilers standing next to me. This is my first experience of attempted violence against peace activists in the United States, though apparently two weeks ago at the vigil one woman's car was egged by a passing pedestrian and a bit over a year ago there were some youth across the street lobbing stones from the cover of some bushes. It's interesting that even in this neighbourhood, which is quite liberal and quite anti-war, such spontaneous mechanisms of suppressing dissent are a fact of life.
  
  
• The vigil is thinking of moving to a different corner. I don't know the neighbourhood well enough to weigh the pros and cons in terms of visibility and pedestrian traffic and so on, but on a personal level I'm not enthusiastic about it because the new site is significantly farther away from where we live.
  
  
• I really wish that the culture of the peace movement placed more emphasis on reflecting on how we function with each other. Some lessons in listening, dialoguing rather than debating, taking up less space, and not excluding women via posture and body language could be useful for some folks -- mostly men, but not exclusively (except for the last item). Not that I'm in any way claiming to be perfect with respect to such things.
  
  
• The return to vigiling amplified the always-running debate inside of me about how a relatively privileged, car-free, time-constrained Canadian living on the west side of LA can best contribute to radical social change. Still no answers that satisfy me, unfortunately.
  
  

Movement History Update

Just thought I'd let people know that I've updated the site associated with my social movement history project for the first time in almost a month -- take a look at it to learn about recent progress and directions over the next little while!

Judges Freed From Sentencing Rules

I don't usually blog about and link to material from mainstream news sources -- I think that's a useful service that some bloggers provide, but I don't have time to read a lot of mainstream news so I leave that task to others. However, at the grocery store this morning I noticed a
story on the cover of the LA Times with a headline worded the same as the title of this post. It describes a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to transform mandatory sentencing guidelines at the federal level into documents having only advisory status. I thought it was worth mentioning here because of the role that mandatory sentencing has played in the so-called War on Drugs (read: War on Working-Class Communities of Colour) and the exponential and racist expansion of the prison-industrial complex in the United States -- the most egregious example of that is to compare the mandatory sentences for a given amount of powder cocaine versus an equivalent amount of crack cocaine. I don't remember the jurisdiction(s) or the exact numbers, but the end result is that judges were required to give sentences for crack posession that were much longer than for powder posession, and coincidentally enough crack is found more commonly in working-class communities of colour and powder is found more commonly in white-dominated board rooms, universities, and suburban homes. This decision doesn't deal at all with the underlying political and economic forces driving the role that the prison system has come to play in the United States, nor with the systemic and cultural racism embedded in it, but it is still a rare (if small) piece of moderately positive news.

A good book for an introduction to relevant material on the U.S. prison system is Vijay Prashad's Keeping Up With The Dow Joneses.

New Journal

I recently received an email announcing an interesting new academic journal, which is available free online. It is called the Canadian Online Journal of Queer Studies in Education and it is produced out of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, a source of lots of interesting scholarship on educational issues. I've only had time to read about half of the first article, but the table of contents looks interesting and I intend to read more.

Fascist Culture

Here's another interesting article by Joe Bageant on the burgeoning culture of fascism in America.

A few random paragraphs from the article:

When I look around America’s barrooms, church suppers, swap meets and strip clubs, I see that “the American people” like the way things are going. Or at least half of them do. They like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat screen television and they like the idea of an American empire. “The people” don't give a rat’s bunghole about social programs or the poor or other races or the planet or animals or anything else. They LIKE cheap gas and making life tough for queers. They LIKE chasing Thanksgiving Day Xmas sales. And when fascism comes, they will like that, too.

Being a Southerner, I have hated in my lifetime. And like most people over 50, it shows in my face, because by that age we all have the face we deserve. Likewise, I have seen hate in others and know the thing when I see it. And I am seeing more of it now than I have ever seen in my life (which is saying something considering that I grew up down here during the Jim Crow era.) The neo-conservative hate I am seeing now is every bit equal to the kind I saw in my people during those violent years. Irrational. Deeply rooted.

The world is not a particularly noble place and never was, but it has become truly difficult to underestimate American crassness in these times. Especially our ability to unblinkingly suck up hate like it was free beer, and call it moral values.

Television Writing

My typical day does not include very much television, if any. But like most North Americans of my generation, I watched excessive amounts of it while growing up, and despite not watching much I still somehow manage to see quite a bit, if that makes any sense. These days, most of what I watch deliberately is series that have been released on video or DVD.

My question is, why is there so little television that is well written? Is the talent required to do so such a rare beast? Or is it that the structure and economics of television select against good writing?

I ask these because my partner and I just finished watching the second disc of the first season of The L Word. I want very much to like the show but the low calibre of writing is making it very difficult for me, and I'm feeling frustrated. (See this post by activistgradgal for an analysis of the show that I substantially agree with.) I suspect I will want to keep watching the show, I just wish I was going to enjoy that experience more.

I don't remember who it was that described television as a "vast wasteland" but they certainly hit the nail on the head. It is trite to complain about having 80 channels with nothing to watch, but on those rare occasions when I try to amuse myself with whatever happens to be on I almost never have any luck. I find this extra frustrating because television is a medium with a lot of potential for telling stories. It combines being a visual medium with being a serial medium. The movies only do the former and that's a big difference; comic books are actually the closest thing to television in terms of the way the medium shapes how stories are told, in my opinion. The fact that it is a serial medium means there is an opportunity to build characters that are much more complex than a two hour movie would allow, and the viewer can get to know them (and they can evolve) over a period of years.

By "good writing" I mean a few different things. I tend to view television writing as occuring on five different levels at once: the line, the scene, the episode, the season, and the series. It is rare indeed to see all five of those levels done well, in terms of the shape of the words and of the stories. More important than that to how I'm understanding "good", though, is the characters: well written television creates a little construct of each character in my brain that feels like and acts like the little constructs in my brain that are created from the real people I observe and interact with on a daily basis. I'm not sure I can explain it any better than that -- they either feel complex and coherent and three-dimensional and real, or they feel like made-up, cardboard entities driven hither and yon by the whim of the author and with no independent existence of their own.

So what are some examples of good and bad television? Well, first of all, I'm not really talking about the half-hour format. I generally can't stand sit-coms. There are a couple that do fit a subset of that definition of "good writing", for me -- Roseanne and Sex in the City come to mind -- but the half-hour comedy format even when done well does not allow the characters the same latitude to become real and stories to be told in a non-forumlaic way.

It is also important to emphasize that in my world, being well written and being liked by me are two quite separate (although often related) qualities. I can't think of any TV where this applies, but, for example, I can concede that the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley is probably a pretty good one, but because of my own quirks with respect to how I react to stories, I couldn't stand it and was in agony through most of it. On the other hand, there are some poorly-written television shows that I still get something out of -- Forever Knight and Queer as Folk come to mind. (See my earlier post on the latter show for more detail on my reasons in that instance.)

There are a few places, distressingly few, where I have found good television writing. I like much of the work of Joss Whedon, though the quality of his series tend to vary a lot depending on how heavily he personally is involved with a particular episode or season. That means I like all of the short-lived Firefly, significant parts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (particularly from earlier in the series), and very little of Angel.

The original series created by HBO and ShowTime seem to have more scope for good writing. I have only seen the first season of Oz but I thought it was great. I think Six Feet Under is amazingly well written. Years ago I saw the first season of The Sopranos, and I remember liking it, but I can't really remember much about the writing.

And then there is Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is an unusual one because there were some great and engaging characters (e.g. Picard, Q, Data) and some good and interesting writing on the level of stories, albeit mixed in with some mediocre and cheesy writing. However, it generally fell short in terms of dealing with characters as entire, complex, dynamic people. Characters either did not have arcs (i.e. the evolution over time we all experience) over seasons and the series, or they had simplistic or poorly-handled arcs. I think the fact that a handful of characters really stood out has more to do with the talent of those specific actors than with a real focus on characters by the writers. I still really liked the show, though.

Now, admittedly I don't tend to go flipping through the dial for new series to fall in love with, but it is both telling and distressing that only one of the shows listed above (Six Feet Under) is currently in production.

So what's the deal? Why is this so rare?

On the hand, I think there really is something to the idea that the talent is scarce. I believe that good writing of any sort can be taught/learned, but great writing cannot. In observing the impact of Joss Whedon's proximity on the quality of his series, I've concluded that the difference is his ability to see in his head what the finished narrative-plus-visuals is going to be, and to model the impact that will have on the audience an order of magnitude more effectively than the probably quite competent folks that comprise the rest of his writing staff. From my own limited experience with other kinds of writing, it's not about following rules or about being clever with words; it's about being able to hold an imaginative construct of the end product in your head, to be able to relate changes that you make in one line or scene or paragraph to changes in the overall entity, and to just feel how that's going to work.

On the other hand, we live on a planet with six billion people. I simply do not believe that the talent in question is so rare, even among the ample subset that speak English, to make it impossible to have a dozen or more excellently written television series in production at any given time. By rights, there should be plenty of low-budget series that are "deficient" in other ways -- they can't afford the best special effects, they're made in Toronto instead of Los Angeles, the actors are not well-known -- that are well written. Certainly there should be no high-budget dramas at all that are poorly written, though there are plenty. Writing skill is not that expensive, I don't think. Compared to the overall cost of an episode of television, writers are cheap, and from what I understand the ratio of interested individuals to opportunities in television writing is pretty darn high.

So perhaps it is the structure of television. Much writing is done by committee, and even if everyone in a committee is competent, that can completely ruin a final product if there is no strong, overarching vision (and talent) guiding the process. And perhaps the very inexpensiveness of writing labour leads it to be devalued by those who pay for television -- if you can get it cheap, it mustn't matter very much. Perhaps there is a perception by TV executives (and I don't know if it's true or not) that viewers care more about other aspects of production and therefore those other aspects are emphasized.

I don't know. It frustrates me. My partner's objections to the show are stronger than mine, but I will try and continue watching The L Word and keeping my eyes and ears open for well written television. And as for that holiest of grails, well written television that centres on counter-hegemonic ways of living in the world -- well, I can dream, can't I?

White Privilege

Here's a good, basic article on white privilege by white anti-racist activist and educator Tim Wise.

An excerpt:

Of course, what is ultimately overlooked is that denial of one's privilege itself manifests a form of privilege: namely, the privilege of being able to deny another person's reality (a reality to which they speak regularly) and suffer no social consequence as a result.

Whites pay no price, in other words, for dismissing the claims of racism so regularly launched by persons of color, seeing as how the latter have no power to punish such disbelievers at the polls, or in the office suites, or in the schools in most cases.

[This article is a ZNet Commentary, which are generally only for people who pay to become "sustainers" of the site, but Wise links to it from his home page so I feel justified in doing so from here.]

Festive Sexism

Over the course of our three week trip back to Ontario to visit friends and family for the winter holidays (a trip over since late Tuesday night) there were a couple of major ways that sexism made itself felt.

The first was actually in our parenting practices over this period, and it wasn't particularly optional. For whatever reason, our 16 month-old was extremely clingy to my partner. In our day-to-day life it isn't that unusual for him, when he is in distress, to prefer her over everyone else. This goes right back to his earliest days, when nursing was about the only thing he ever wanted, and when the next best thing to nursing to make him happy was her finger in his mouth -- sometimes it could be anyone's finger, but at other times it had to be hers. Still, I'm home with him every weekday and he is perfectly fine with that, and when both of us are around and we are at home and following our regular routines, he generally shows much less preference in terms of where he receives his nurturing than he did over the last three weeks.

I can only hypothesize that he was so demanding on the trip because usually when Mommy disappears it is at a predictable time during the day and for a predictable length of time, whereas on the trip his routine was completely disrupted and one or both of us were liable to disappear (from his point of view) at any moment for unknown lengths of time. And though he eats whatever we eat for the majority of his calories these days, the fact that the milk bar only vanished when Mommy did is still significant for him. Generally speaking, we (i.e. she) just gave in to his demands, and I'm not sure we could have done much differently. Minimizing baby distress is a pretty powerful compulsion when you are out and about and surrounded by people, and when the alternatives are appearing to embrace sexist approaches to parenting versus appearing to be indifferent to your kid's howling, the choice is fairly obvious. However, it is an interesting illustration of the way that gendered expectations around nurturing and care start very early in life.

The other was more traditional holiday sexism: the preparation of and cleanup from holiday meals. This works in different ways in different family settings. In the events involving only my partner's immediate family and only my immediate family, some sharing of responsibility for these things is expected. Men are not exempted en masse, though the actual sharing may or may not be equal (and probably usually is not). In these contexts, me contributing a couple of cooked items and some cleanup sweat at both sites was considered unremarkable. Of course, I doubt there would have been much comment if I hadn't done these things, either, though I know one or two folk would have quietly noted and (quite rightly) resented.

This is in contrast to one of the extend family events which we attended. In this particular social environment the prep and cleanup tends to be the responsibility of women of our parents' and grandparents' generations, with women of my generation and all men largely exempted. It is a standing joke that the men end up on the couch for a snooze after meals, though usually this is more a metaphor for "not working" rather than literal truth. However, at one of the events over our trip there was a very distinct point at which all of the adult men took off from the dining table to make sure various recliners and couches did not just up and float away, and to digest while dozing or reading. More out of boredom than any particular urge to be noble I broke with tradition and actually helped wash the dishes.

Here's what shocked me: From the rest of those who were engaged in doing the dishes (i.e. the traditional doers of this task) I encountered one quite active attempt to get me back to my proper place on a couch somewhere, and then two or three comments, at least a couple of which seemed for some reason to connect my ability to remove water from porcelain to my newfound identity as stay-at-home dad, and all of which were based in the notion that the combination of possessing a penis and wielding a dish towel on a holiday should be praised rather than assumed.

An interesting side note to this last incident was the subtle but distinct shift in the feel of the social environment when it transitioned from overall family space to women's space (plus me). I doubt I could effectively characterize the change, but there definitely was one. After, I was briefly worried at having intruded on such space uninvited, though my partner (who has occasionally participated in a similar way in the past, but did not on this occasion) assured me that my presence was not preventing any bonding beyond shared, not-paritcularly-optional labour on a supposed holiday.

Tsunami Commentary

A good commentary from Rahul Mahajan on the tsunami disaster.

Tsunami Donations

Via Toronto Action for Social Change:

As with much Canadian foreign "aid," it is likely that many of the funds committed by the Canadian government will likely be tied to hiring Canadian companies or subsidiaries in the tsunami-affected areas, so that the monies never reach those most directly affected. Once again, the poor get shafted by the rich who control the purse strings. (After years of starving these areas of the world with their "structural adjustment" poverty-creation policies, why would we believe that the IMF, World Bank, and major capitalist nations would actually be generous enough to provide funds directly to people on the ground and let them decide how to rebuild their lives?)

Via Campesina--an organization closely related to Peoples' Global Action--is collecting funds so that communities affected by the Tsunami can rebuild according to their own needs and visions (which are quite different than those of the G8 and their "aid" agencies)

Please see Via Campesina's appeal for more info on how to donate to tsunami relief through that organization.