Phillis Wheatley makin' me sad...

THIS LADY:

THIS LADY IS EPIC FOR SO MANY REASONS. Her name is Phillis Wheatley, 1753-84, and she was one of the first critically acclaimed Black poets in U.S. history. Since I'm a Black girl who has always liked to write, my mom used to tell me about Phillis Wheatley and how she was this fantastic Black writer under horrible circumstances. She gave me hope in my childhood that I could be the president/scientist/best-selling author! Now I'm feelin' betrayed. Check out this poem:

On Being Brought from Africa to America, by Phillis Wheatley"'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,Taught my benighted soul to understandThat there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.Some view our sable race with scornful eye,"Their colour is a diabolic die."Remember, Christians, Negro's, black as Cain,May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train."

Hem hem. We're going to have to break this down oppa AP English style.

'Twas not mercy who brought her from her pagan land. It was a genocide called the slave trade that resulted in the deaths of 17 million Blacks (and don't you dare ask me for a footnote). 'Twas capitalist greed, my friend. No one taught her to worship God, and it wasn't a blessing that colonists preached Christianity to individuals of color so as to pacify them and instruct them to wait for justice in the "next life" (according to Malcolm X in his autobiography-biography-thing). Then she claims that the saving grace of Blackness is that Blacks have the capability to assimilate.

This is very upsetting to me, but I should have guessed. "Critically acclaimed" is code for White-approved, and if Wheatley was popular with White during that time, it's no wonder her writings reflected such internalized racism. Her framing of slavery as merciful and Blackness as curable are clear reflections of the Sambo rhetoric White wanted to hear at that time. 

Sad, sad, sad. And disappointing. There's a part of me that wants to see her as the Tyler Perry of the 1700's. But she wasn't, because she paved the way for me, nonetheless. So I'm still grateful. Grateful and sad.

What do y'all think of role models and way-pavers that are imperfect in their social-justice-y ways?

Questions About Theism

So my favorite youtuber MrRepzion makes the distinction between Theism and Deism by saying that Deists believe that a god created the universe and Theists believe that that god still intervenes today. The generic internet agrees. The Abrahamic monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—are all theist (hence monotheistic).

My experience growing up has been with Christians so I'm going to talk about why I don't get theism through a lens of Christianity.


1) God sometimes intervenes?

So in Christianity, there are good-bad distinctions. We know that God considers punishments of misfortunes, like plagues and/or death. And sometimes, if you're a good Christian, God makes sure these things don't happen to you.

Lookin' out for ya

For example, God tests Job's faith by making terrible things befall him, and then rewards him when his faith remains strong (correct me if I'm wrong). In short, God rewards biblical characters for being good people by stopping bad things from happening to them. 

Or with a reward...

In 2011 there was a drought in East Africa* during which children and their parents had to trek across the desert in search of water. Theists might say that God ended their suffering by causing rain to fall. But what of all the people who died in this draught? Certainly, some of the casualties must have been infants.

"Just have faith... They died for a reason." But God makes it clear in the Bible that suffering is a punishment... Why is the baby being punished? And what divine purpose could the death of an infant possibly serve?

"They weren't a believer." It's a baby...

"Overpopulation!" The Bible definitely doesn't have any examples of God being that utilitarian. He's always rewarding good deeds and punishing bad ones... It's about cause and effect in almost every story.

"It's going to grow up to be Hitler." There were a lot of babies in that drought. At least one of them was not Hitler.

Someone please explain this mentality of an intervening god to me.

2) God is responsible for everything?

A) This doesn't make sense because of the reasons above... If he's responsible for things like drought and Hitler, I'm no fan.

B) Why does God create things, get mad and punish them? Because of the Garden of Eden? Then doesn't that mean he's not all-powerful?

C) Why shouldn't we believe that humans are responsible for some things? Don't we have free wil? And shouldn't we take credit for the good things that we do?

MrRepzion's take on it:

Lol his face

Forever correctable,

—AKB

*I know this example reinforces some exhausting stereotypes, but it's the example I always think of when I talk about this subject.

Complaint: War on Drugs, Prison Industrial Complex

I may have to send in a complaint to Obama about this, but his political capital is pretty...well...Black right now.

The government can imprison you and sell the fruits of your labor to Starbucks.

On my booklist

The war on drugs is a system that ultimately feeds into the prison industrial complex. It's triplets are immigration legislation and the functional abolition of the 4th amendment (racial profiling). It began in the 20's with legislators promoting the idea that cocaine gives Blacks super powers, and manifested itself as "tough on crime" legislation. We had/have insane sentencing limits for drug crimes. I mean, like, absolutely egregious eighth amendment violations. Soon the war on drugs was in full force, and had Reagan and H.W. Bush preaching about  the "enslavement" of crack cocaine users (do I sense a hint of racialization?)—all while drug use steadily declined. Center-left governors such as Cuomo of New York (and Bill Clinton) started pandering to their conservative voters by claiming to be "tough on crime," with no reaction from the left.

Cuomo has no Black friends.

The Corrections Corporation of America wanted in, too, so they set quotas for how many people they need to imprison per year (how optimistic) and started making prisoners to work for under minimum wage (~40 cents/hour) so that they could make pretty things for Starbucks, Motorola and Victoria's Secret. (All while the CCA was also co-writing Arizona's immigration legislation and filling quotas full of deportees).

This makes the country ultimately love imprisoning Brown* people because it's easy to convince people of color that they deserve to go to jail and work for the White man, but imprisoning the general White population has political consequences. However, this should still scare you if you aren't Brown because desperate economic times do call for drastic economic measures, and if you're poor, you're more valuable to the U.S. government behind bars.

As someone who is afraid of beer, LEGALIZE DRUGS.

*When I say Brown, I mean anyone who is of color. Social tip: if you're White, just say "of color." 

BAM sources:

Edgar F. Borgatta. “Drug Abuse.” The Encyclopedia of Sociology: Second Edition, Volume 1 (New York: Macmillan Reference, USA, no date).

Judith A.M. Scully. “Chapter Two, Killing the Black Community, A Commentary on the United States War on Drugs,” in Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization; Chapter Two, Killing the Black Community, A Commentary on the United States War on Drugs. (No Date): 55-72. Accessed January 2012. Url: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1649713&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1649713)

Michelle Alexander. “The New Jim Crow.” This article is adapted from two speeches delivered by Professor Michelle Alexander, one at the Zocolo Public Square in Los Angeles on March 17, 2010, and another at an authors symposium sponsored by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Open Society Institute on October 6, 2010. (March 17 2010, October 6 2010): 7-26. Accessed February 2012. Url: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/osjcl/Articles/Volume9_1/Alexander.pdf.

Eric Schlosser. “The Prison-Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic Monthly, (December 1998): 1-6, Accessed February 2012. Url: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/4669/.

Rose M. Brewer and Nancy A. Heitzeg. “The Racialization of Crime and Punishment: Criminal Justice, Color-Blind Racism, and the Political Economy of the Prison Industrial Complex.” American Behavioral Scientist Volume 51 Number 5 (January 2008): 625-644. Accessed February 2012. Url: http://minerva.stkate.edu/people.nsf/files/mina-82v5bl/$file/625.pdf

Earl Smith and Angela Hattery. “If We Build It They Will Come: Human Rights Violations and the Prison Industrial Complex.” Societies Without Borders Volume 2 (2007): 273 –288. Accessed February 2012. Url: http://www.wfu.edu/aes/pdf/If_We_built_it_Societies_without_borders_2-2007.pdf

Bartleby. Url: http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres63.html

History is a Weapon, url: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/hisprislacap.html.

Gun Control

Republican logic: Regulate drugs, deregulate guns. Because weed is so much more dangerous than a bullet to the chest...

"But think of the children!!"

Yeah, let's. Please.

So TheAmazingAtheist (whose views I do not typically support) pretty much sums how I feel about gun control here:

NSFW – I realize he's a dick, but he's also super smart.

But here are some things I do and do not believe:

"We need bigger guns than the criminals so that we can shoot them!"
Sorry, you can't have them. Sort of like how you can't have a fighter jet to shoot down the 9-11 airplane. That's an infinitely regressive concept. By that standard, we'd all just be armed to the teeth with rocket launchers and mustard gas, awaiting an attack.

Doesn't make sense...

"I'm a gun collector!"
And I'm a cocaine collector. Tough luck. (I'm not really a cocaine collector.)

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!

"But the second amendment!"
The second amendment was meant to promote self defense via a reasonably sized weapon (assuming we're all contextualists here), a right that isn't going to be taken away from you. It also was meant to preserve the right of the people to stage a coup, which isn't possible, no matter how many AK47's you have, because Obama is never going to give us nukes or drones.

You can't just have a rocket launcher in your house.

"Freedom!!!"
How much pathos is it going to take for you to realize that infinite freedom has costs? Costs like the lives of children...

Do you want to be an eagle or do you want to be dead?

Relax. No one is taking away your shotgun or pistol. They're just taking away your automatic weapons, hopefully.

The real question I have isn't whether guns are good, because I think they're bad. But I think we should keep them legal for the same reason we should legalize drugs. Heroine is bad, too, but a black market for heroine is even worse. Unlike heroine, however, guns have the potential to cause nonviolent crimes (You can't deny that, and all I need to prove it is a Kanye quote: "314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago.") So how many should we keep legal? However many ward off a dangerous black market, I suppose. We'll have to keep a balance between arming too many citizens and creating another War on Drugs. That plus background checks and hugely regulating the guns we do legalize should be a good start.

Forever correctable,

—AKB

Feminist Shenanigans: The Purity Myth

This week, I finished a book. 'Murica.

Dat Unapologetic Cover Page

In all seriousness though, "The Purity Myth" by Jessica Valenti was a super-fast and worthwhile read. An exerpt:

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer—the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a “good” (i.e., “moral”) girl and therefore worthy of praise. ...

Staying “pure” and “innocent” is touted as the greatest thing we can do. However, equating this inaction with morality not only is problematic because it continues to tie women’s ethics to our bodies, but also is downright insulting because it suggests that women can’t be moral actors. Instead, we’re defined by what we don’t do—our ethics are the ethics of passivity. 

It's one of those gem-like feministy things where the writing is blunt, the criticism is scathing and the analysis doesn't ignore other intersecting issues such as race and class! She also clarifies that patriarchy is harmful to people all over the gender spectrum—including men (shout out to MrRepzion, who's passionate about that issue). Valenti talks about how our fetishized ideas of virginity as an ideal state for women have eclipsed the truth. She advocates that women be ethical and sexual actors, and backs up her claims with institutionalized instances of virginity-based patriarchy. Although nonfiction, it reads like a horror story, of women in labor chained and forced to have C-sections instead of at-home vaginal births. (Speaking of chained women in labor, I'll be posting about the War on Drugs soon). And her remarks are often hilarious, despite the seriousness of the book.

I searched the book after I developed some ethical qualms with our society's worship of "The Virgin Mary." Valenti gave me answers about why we love virginity so much and, honestly, I've found that the idea of saving ones self (which is distinct from being sexually inactive—that's all good) is rooted in patriarchy. Asterix—according to earlier translation of the Bible, Mary was a "young woman," not a virgin. So to all of the rape apologists out there claiming that women should only have rights if they are virgins (ahem, Republican South Dakota representative Bill Napoli), think again.

Regardless of how much that last paragraph offended you (and I don't blame you if it did), read the book! Read it! And if you can't afford it, "obtain" it in the spirit of Aaron Swartz!

Forever correctable,

—AKB

In the Wake of MLK Day

Oh lawd, what is ah gon do? The massas bout tuh teach me how tuh protest tamarrah!

I think we all know MLK day haz a tendency to devolve into this uncomfortably tokenized ceremony dedicated to the supposedly docile side of the civil rights movement. My decidedly granola elementary school even had an assembly during which we all recited sections of his "I Had a Dream Speech." We learned about Black people who did not fight back while they were sprayed with fire hoses and beaten by the police. I was taught, at a very young age, that Dr. King advocated the ethics of passivity for Blacks, under which we should throw ourselves into the front lines of race-battles and wait for the White man to act. This was not, in fact, the case.

Worst. Assembly. Ever.

Teachingamericanhistory.org clarifies that Dr. King's nonviolent methods were meant to be spiritually aggressive, in that they evoked empathy—often entailed with horror—and made atrocities painfully obvious. I see it as having been about accountability. And prospect.org criticizes that we have perverted his vision and forgotten his radical ideas. Dr. King did not name legislation as the culprit—instead, he pointed out the often-de-facto institutions of "racism, materialism and militarism" as the enemy. He was not waiting for some desegregation law—he was an activist in his own right, fighting against all forms of injustice at their roots.

So, on Monday, let's not let MLK day become about pacifying the Blacks who would have otherwise joined the Nation of Islam or the Panthers. Let's make it about Dr. King's unique, non-passive message.

I, for one, plan to educate myself.

Forever correctable,

—AKB

***

UPDATE: I made a poor-quality, sarcastic video about it, too: