"This is Panic Attack Rap"

Title thanks to Das Racist.

We are in a crisis that happens to be playing out in schools but isn't only about schools. It's about white supremacy, and those cuts run deep.

I assume NWF readers are aware of big events and generally keeping up with the news, so you probably already know about the ABSOLUTE FUCKING RACISM happening in Arizona schools right now. Here's one recap, and more from Common Dreams:

Arizona is closing public school ethnic studies programs that accuse whites of oppressing Chicanos and Native Americans on the grounds that these historical lessons constitute racist hate speech. But scholars and activists are protesting the state’s latest move as racist itself because it keeps students from these communities from learning about their own history and heroes.

As Paul Ortiz - a fellow radical historian at my university - says:

These people want us to mow their lawns, pick their crops, clean their public restrooms, teach their kids, and truck their consumer goods from coast to coast and yet they will not allow our children to read books about their own histories? What is the problem with this country?

And then:

What I'm trying to figure out is this: what is happening today in white American culture that is driving this kind of rage towards children of color? Many of us experienced these types of abuses in the 1970s as kids but had hoped that the nation had moved beyond pulverizing the minds of its children. Guess not....

Right?!

The Tucson kids didn't take this shit lying down. Students from three high schools organized a walk-out. They met in a park, marched to the Tuscon United School District, and held teach-ins on the lawn. It's tear-jerking, it's awe-inspiring, it's heroic.

So, I didn't let this shit go untouched on my own Facebook wall. I had a conversation with Alert Reader Steve, who correctly pointed out that this is all part of the system and asked what I'd do to change it. I said this:

I want colleges of education and [the American Educational Research Association] and [Teach For America] to be less attached to assimilation, for instance. Instead of asking, "What's wrong with the brown kids that's keeping them from succeeding in schools," and placing the blame on communities of color, they could do some self-reflection and ask what's wrong with The System, and what they're doing to create schools in which only some kids can succeed. All the big research money goes to asking the "what's wrong with brown people" question, and when you ask the "what's wrong with the schools/system/us" question, you're a radical and they don't have to listen to you anymore. It's easy for colleges of ed and AERA to look at what's going on in Tucson right now and say "that's wrong," but haven't looked at their complicity in the system that allows it. They're still working under assumptions that the system that works for white people should work for everyone, for instance. They still, in general, marginalize other narratives of success and draw lines around what it means to be a "good kid" or a "productive adult." There is too much meritocracy at work. You should see the reactions that happen when you get white grad students to read Faces at the Bottom of the Well, for instance. I've seen it. It isn't pretty.

As for queer stuff - because, let's be real, the patriarchy is both white and hetero - AERA has been almost militantly silent. They have said they "don't take stances on political issues," even as kids are dying. Queer kids aren't a political issue. These institutions sanction a system that allows the queer kid to be kept out of school for "his safety" but lets the bullies have access to school. That happens all the time. They perpetuate a system that requires cis/hetero gender conformity. Etc.

In the cases of queer and/or of-color populations, schools are forces of colonization, socialization, and assimilation. That's gotta stop, because it's a milder form of what's going on here. Tuscon is a really visible attempt to silence and erase people, but in many ways it's more of a quantitative difference than a qualitative one.

#I'mnevergoingtogetajob

We should be panicking right now.

Image via.

Read Heldman's "The Truths of Katrina" Right. Now.

Today the Hairpin directed me to "The Truths of Katrina", in which Caroline Heldman describes, in great detail and with many citations, how the 2005 flooding of New Orleans is less the result of a hurricane and more the result of rampant corruption and racism. It's a year old, so forgive me if you've already read it. I hadn't.

The first part of the article presents what is apparently an honest-to-god real-life government conspiracy. Put away your moon landing concerns and check this out:

The judge chided the Army Corps, noting that they "not only knew, but admitted by 1988, that the [Mississippi River Gulf Canal Outlet] threatened human life ... and yet it did not act in time to prevent the catastrophic disaster that ensued with the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina."

Mayor Nagin received nearly $20 million to establish a workable evacuation plan in plenty of time for Katrina, but it’s questionable whether it was ever developed, and it was never disseminated (Palast, 2006).

Prison officials deny that anyone died in the crisis, despite several reports of deaths from both police officers and prisoners (Onesto, 2006).

After the massacre, the NOPD actively covered up the shootings (Maggi & McCarthy, 2010), including falsifying reports, planting a gun, and recruiting phony witnesses (FBI, 2010).

That referenced article from Greg Palast is even more damning; I recommend reading it as well:

Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: No one can find it.

Heldman then discusses the racism that accompanied the disaster:

The "looting" frame was racially charged as evidenced with the now infamous AP photos of a black man described as “looting a grocery store” and a white couple described as “finding bread and soda from a local grocery story."

When those stranded at the Convention Center marched a long, hot three miles across the Gretna Bridge to get out of the City to a neighboring town, they were stopped by police officers with dogs who shot guns over their heads (Riccardi, 2005), called them racial slurs (Witt, 2008), and told them "we don’t want another Superdome."

At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher ... Roland Bourgeois ... allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot."

The judge in the case concluded that "on average, African-American homeowners received awards that fell farther short of the cost of repairing their homes than did white recipients." Nearly 20,000 Road Home Program grant claims that qualify for funding have yet to receive it, and these applicants are disproportionately black.

Overt acts of racial terrorism are also being employed: the letters "KKK" burned into the lawn of a young, black couple who moved to Gretna; the torching of a home in St. Bernard Parish that was to be rented to a black family.

The city has shifted from 67% black pre-Katrina to 58% black now (Jung, 2008), and, for the first time in two decades, the City Council is now majority white (Chappell, 2007).

It goes on and on, in amazing detail. It ruined my day, and, forgive me for saying so, but I hope it ruins yours too, because everyone should read this. The systematic neglect and violence that led to the deaths of so many black New Orleanians now has me wondering if this event might not be better labeled as the 2005 New Orleans Genocide.

If you're white, though, I hope you don't read Heldman's article thinking, "Oh, those poor black people." Because I agree with Helman that that's part of the problem:

"White people clearly understand Katrina as a racial issue. If we didn’t, whites would have experienced elevated anxiety about the possibility of it happening to us (as happened after 9/11)."

Those of us who are white need to start identifying with black Americans, not othering them.* Stories of 30,000 innocent people unconstitutionally and inhumanely incarcerated in the Superdome should not incite pity, but rather PANIC that this can happen to us. If, for some reason, one has trouble identifying with one's fellow human beings, perhaps it would help to remember that while some of us are protected by white privilege, our neighbors, friends, family, and future descendants may not be.



*And we really, really need to chill the fuck out about "bad neighborhoods." The Lower 9th Ward was considered a "bad neighborhood," and I'm sure that had a great deal to do with the violent reactions exhibited towards influxes of evacuees from the Lower 9th.

Neanderthals Were Totes Refined, Apparently

So, comparing Africans and those of African lineage to animals is a thing. It's a totally fucked-up thing, but it's something we see again and again in representations of black people both in the US and internationally. You should definitely check out the link above, because Sociological Images recaps this trend pretty well.

So when I saw this news item about how the genetic code of Eurasians may contain a bit of Neanderthal DNA, the phrasing got my attention. Instead of "white people totally interbred with cavemen," we get something quite different. Neanderthals, despite being traditionally depicted as primitive caveman types (accurately or not), are described here as "the physically stronger Neanderthals, who possessed the gene for language and may have played the flute." Then there's this BBC graphic that shows black racial groups splitting off from the evolutionary track in much the same way that we're used to seeing invertebrates splitting off from the evolutionary track to mammal-hood.

Both kind of bug me. Some of the adjectives just seem ... cherry-picked. I suspect that if a different species were discovered to have similarly contributed to the African gene pool, said species might be described a little differently. And it's also possible that the corresponding evolutionary diagram might still show more detail on the Eurasian side of things. Admittedly, I don't have any examples of this, but my spidey-sense is tingling.

Which Nomadic European Ethnic Group Do You Hate, Exactly?

Okay, I've had this conversation now with several people, so I might as well write a quick blog post about it. Y'all, it's racist to talk about "gypsies" stealing your shit.

I get that some people may not realize that "gypsy" is an ethnic slur, but it is. It lumps together a large number of ethnic groups under one pejorative term: Wikipedia will tell you that. I don't care if you've met folk who belong to one of these groups who call themselves "gypsies;" that's called re-appropriation, and they get to do it, and you don't.

I have a bigger beef with the representation of all members of these ethnic groups as "thieves." Look, making generalizations about any ethnic group is generally a bad idea. Even supposedly positive stereotypes are often problematic. So just knock it off. We can talk about how things vary by nation or by culture without relying on stereotypes. "I've heard there's a lot of pick-pocketing in Barcelona" is fine. "Watch out for all the gypsies in Paris" is not.