Blog Against Disablism Day: May 1

Thanks to Chris of Creek Running North for the link to this event. Please join in if you feel so inclined…

I was just at a Code Pink meeting; one of the things we discussed was the fact that a lot of disability attorneys are pushing hard for Debold voter technology for the vision impaired. Natalie says she feels a bit like a traitor to the disabled community in standing up against voter fraud for ALL citizens.

Rock and a hard place: this is why this is an important issue, and why there are no easy answers…

Three Years On

We attended a peace vigil yesterday in Davis marking the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

I have felt increasingly helpless over the course of these years. We were not able to stop the madness before it started; getting out now seems impossible. So many people dead; so many hatreds kindled; so many missing limbs. It’s overwhelming. Hope seems distant, a dream. The thing with bedraggled feathers, shot through, torn.

Yet:

Fadhil Al-Kazily, an Iraqi-born American who lives here in Davis, just last week lost his 81-year-old uncle in Mosul. His uncle was driving to pick up his wife. He was shot in his car by American soldiers.

Onstage with Fadhil was Laurie Loving, a lifetime peace activist whose son enlisted despite her attempts to dissuade him and who is now stationed in Mosul. Her horror is that her son might have been—could easily have been—the one who shot Fadhil’s uncle.

Joining them was Pat Sheehan, father of Casey Sheehan and former husband of Cindy. On St. Patrick’s Day, he said, was when the 1st Cavalry was due to come home. Not Casey. I can’t expect you to keep him in your hearts, he said, but please keep him in your minds. Do not forget. Don’t stop.

They all held hands onstage and said how the administration would like them all to hate each other. No, they said. We will not let that happen. Ever.

Fadhil stressed that occupying troops must leave NOW if there’s any hope of fixing this, and that the only way that could happen was if we all continued to work hard for peace.

May peace become our priority, not an afterthought. May it be something we work for instead of expect to happen on its own. May we not fall to despair. May we reach across divides and work together.

Rumsfeld's Song

I woke up in a fury about Rumsfeld’s strategic communications speech this morning. Better to do art than to seethe, say I, especially if you’re deficient in zen skills. I am submitting this for Illustration Friday’s theme of the week, which is song when I scan this tomorrow on a large-format scanner. Click on the thumbnail for a legible version. This piece is dedicated to all those people who have suffered or died at the hands of this administration’s “communication.”

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

There are more prisoners on death row in California—specifically, in San Quentin, just down the freeway from here—than in any other state. Tookie Williams is scheduled to be executed in three-and-a-half hours, Schwarzenegger having rejected his appeal for clemency.

Granting clemency wouldn’t have meant overturning Williams’ verdict, or letting him go free, or anything like that: it would simply have sent him to a different prison to serve out a life sentence.

Apart from the terrible chance that this man may not have committed the crimes of which he’s accused—and remember, he wasn’t accused of co-founding the Crips, he was accused of murdering four people—I just have to wonder what good executing him will do. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t make anybody safer. It has cost the California taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars to have kept him for 25 years in a maximum security prison designed to hold one-third of its current capacity. The average length of time a death-row inmate has to wait for a lawyer is fifteen years. AVERAGE. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like.

I despair of this, of a culture that can read of this upcoming execution over cornflakes and think nothing of it. It’s a bad night.

Many superb posts in response to Blog Against Racism Day. If you haven’t had a chance to blog about this yet, it’s not too late.

Here’s the most helpful thing I’ve found so far, by Ampersand in Alas (A Blog):

How not to be insane when accused of racism

Blog Against Racism Day

... was yesterday, but it wasn’t my turn to blog.

Thanks to Chris Clarke of Creek Running North for getting us going on this. I haven’t had a chance to read the 100 or so blog posts linked to on his entry and comments so far; I hope this is not merely duplicating what twenty other people have already said, but if it is, it means it’s a common experience.

Through an accident of history my skin is white. (Well, okay, pink.) People who share my skin color have a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth and power. This is partly an accident of history and partly of our own making. In the United States, being white means having privilege that is CONTINGENT on others not having it. Not having had it historically, not having it now. The rise of this economic superpower would simply not have been possible without slavery.

This is not to say that there are not an awful lot of white people here who are poor and miserable and who will die this winter from cold and malnutrition and a lot of other things that shouldn’t exist in a land with this many resources, but on the whole, being white in the United States means having privilege. Unearned. Unbought. Unperceived.

So: Being white means I can drive a car and not be worried that I’ll be pulled over just because of the color of my skin. I can go in a store and not worry that I’ll be arousing suspicions of security guards. I can apply for a mortgage and be sure that the only thing that might get in my way would be an apparent inability to pay it (though with the housing craziness of the past few years that wouldn’t be much of a barrier either). Being white means I can go where I want and if I get lost I can ask a cop to help without fear. I can do a thousand things I and people who look like me take for granted, every day.

White privilege means I can say things like “anyone can make it in this country” and “why don’t you want to come and live in my nice, white, neighborhood, so we can have a little more diversity” and be completely oblivious to the fact that for people who are not white, just getting out of bed in the morning is a huge ordeal. Dealing with us. With our white world. White privilege is about having the right to continue to be clueless, because after all it’s no skin off our nose.

White privilege is about not noticing that even when well-intentioned, our efforts to help people of other races are patronizing and will not lead to change.

White privilege is about expecting our brothers and sisters of color to explain to us, one more time, the millionth time, why they don’t want our pity or our affirmative action programs or our welfare or our charity. They just want to be treated like people. And the most we can do, the most and the least we can do, is have this conversation.

Not with them. They are sick to death of it, are tired of our good intentions that always somehow leave them where they were. No, with other people who look like us.

Thanks, Chris.

Postscript, Saturday, December 3: It’s not the most we can do, it’s just the least. The most we can do is give up our unearned privilege. We can also speak up when we see a racial slight, a racial injustice, hear a racial joke in a cab. We can demand that our employers treat everyone fairly, even if it’s really hard and costs them money, money that might otherwise make its way into pay raises for us. We can demand a real level playing field, not a cosmetic one.

Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way, has said that the way to level the playing field here in the U.S. would be to have 100% inheritance tax.

Now THAT would be giving up some of our privilege. Not all, but it would be a good start…

Thirty Years Ago Today...

... Franco died. Amnesty International has calculated that about 30,000 people disappeared and were buried in mass graves either during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or under Franco’s long rule.

I was in boarding school in England in 1975. I remember worrying about my family in Madrid, about whether there would be some kind of violence. I remember wondering how many people would emerge from the woodwork, people who had been in hiding pretty much since the War. About who’d return from exile.

The running joke of course was that nobody was ever really sure if Franco was dead, or when he had died, or whether he’d be coming back in some grotesque parody of the resurrection (a book did in fact appear a couple of years later entitled Y el Tercer Año Resucitó.) The war memorial he built (well, his prisoners of war built) into a mountainside northwest of Madrid was his own mausoleum. His tomb lies just below the mosaic image of Christ Triumphant in the cupola, which is a few centimeters smaller in diameter than St. Peter’s (lest the Caudillo be accused of being bigger than his boots).

There was a huge mass yesterday in the Valle de los Caídos for Franco. Hundreds of arms raised in fascist salutes. They are upset, it seems, with the Socialist government’s systematic dismantling of the temporal power of the church in Spain.

Multivariate Fun

Every several years the Pew Research Center publishes a political typology study in which they divide up the American electorate into nine different groups based on values, political beliefs, and party affiliation. I like these sorts of cluster analyses. It’s even better if you get to play with the original data. The Pew folks are very good about releasing the original datasets: you just have wait six months after the report was published. The typology dataset came out last Thursday, and I’ve been having fun today going through their analyses. I’ve reached no conclusions yet, though.

Election Tidings

It’s a windy night; the storm that went through yesterday left 0.62” of rain and took the power down across the street. I’ve been following the election results all evening—the polls here closed at 8 PM. Measure X, the Covell Village development issue, looks like it’s headed to a fairly decisive defeat. At this moment, all of the propositions in the California election are losing as well, though a couple of them are still close. Since this was a special election only called because Governor Arnold wanted several of these propositions to go through, this is going to turn into a significant political defeat for him.

A New Department for UC Davis?

We can always dream.

This is in fact an art project by a student here. The sign moves about campus in very anarchist fashion, being tracked currently on the Davis Wiki. It looks in every way like the signs you see ubiquitously on campus (UCD stands, of course, for Under Construction Daily).

Goldman Dance Studio? Sacco and Vanzetti Memorial Learning Center? Kropotkin Cafe? Count me in.