Monday, March 30, 2015

Staycation

As I mentioned, our staycation last week was hampered by the fact that we both got sick and ended up spending a lot more time on the couch watching TV than out exploring various Philly neighborhoods. We still did venture out a little bit, though - most notably to see Bob's Burgers Live, since we had already bought the tickets way in advance. We loaded ourselves up with DayQuil, brought a box of tissues and a bag of cough drops, and made it through the whole show even though it went until (gasp!) 10 pm.
Each of the voice actors is also a standup comedian, so the show started with each of them doing a bit of standup. The quality was pretty variable - but Dan Mintz ("It's hard to cry as a man... because things are going so well for us") and Eugene Mirman ("I saw a six year old boy in a fedora - you always think you'll know what to do when you see abuse") were both hilarious. Then they did a table read of an upcoming episode, which was the highlight of the evening - it was really fun to see how they played off each other.
It wrapped up with some audience Q&A, and someone used the opportunity to propose to his girlfriend, so that was sweet.

So, while the staycation wasn't quite as exciting as we had initially planned, we still had fun - and being sick while doing nothing for a week is definitely better than being sick for a week at work!

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Rear Window

Ben and I have the week off (yay!), but our plans of an epic Philly staycation have been hampered by the fact that both of us are sick (boo!). We've spent the last four days cooped up at home, eating soup and feeling generally cruddy, but the one somewhat cool thing to come out of it is that we have front row seats to the demolition of the old building behind our building.
That building has been abandoned for as long as we have lived here, and they are knocking it down to build a 40-story luxury condo/hotel complex - we aren't thrilled about the rapid gentrification, but it has been interesting to watch the demolition process. The white thing is spraying everything with water to keep the dust down, while the yellow claw thing just smashes at the building and pulls it apart. I would have thought the process would be more sophisticated than that, and probably there's some science to the order in which they smash the various parts of the building, but from our vantage point it really does look basically like a toddler destroying a house they built out of blocks.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Thinking about things: Comfort over truth

I am adding a new category to my posts about social justice - in addition to sharing about the things I am learning and doing, I want to occasionally share things I am thinking about and struggling with. I want to share more instances where I fall short of where I need and want to be, because just sharing the things (I think/hope) I am doing right is dishonest. It also perpetuates the idea that you either "get it" or you don't, instead of the reality that we must all constantly push ourselves to get better, knowing that there is no point at which you have "arrived" and can stop pushing.

***

A few weeks ago, I was spending some time reading up on President Obama's remarks at the national prayer breakfast and the ensuing backlash and I stumbled across an article on Christian motivations for lynchings in the Jim Crow South. I expected to learn a few things from the article, but I did not expect this:
What shook me wasn't the image itself, since (unfortunately) it's so familiar. What shook me was the caption: this picture was taken in my hometown, six years before I was born.

My first series of thoughts were horror and revulsion that I probably know some of the people in that picture. They could be my teachers, my neighbors, my friends' parents. They could be people I've passed on the street or in the grocery store, and exchanged smiles and pleasantries with. I know racism is ever present, but it's one thing to know institutional racism exists, and it's another thing to be confronted with people you actually know harboring such deep-seated racial hatred.

Next I became very self-righteous. I wanted to know who these people were and confront them! I wanted to print out the picture and take it home and show it to everyone I encountered, and demand if they knew who those people were! I wanted to weed them out of my life if they were in it, and - regardless of whether I personally knew them - I wanted to confront them, and publicize who they were, and make them atone for their sins!

While I was letting myself race down that mental path, and feeling bathed in the comfort of my own righteous indignation, another thought popped into my brain. Not from the conscious place where I have self-aware inner dialogue, but from the unconscious place where things I don't want to think about sometimes manage to break the surface. And that thought was: I don't want to know who these people are.

I don't want to find out my beloved teacher, or my friendly neighbor, or my childhood friend's parent, is under one of those robes. I don't want to find out that someone I have trusted and loved, someone who was kind to me and mattered to me, is also this other, horrible thing. It would be so much easier for me to just never have to find that out, and to keep believing that there are "good white people" and "bad white people" and myself and my own are all firmly in the "good" camp. And then my horror and revulsion turned inward, and I felt deep shame for even entertaining those thoughts. It would be easier for me to not know? Easier?? Since when was this work supposed to be easy? Since when was my own comfort worth not challenging the outright oppression and murder of my fellow human beings? Since when am I so quick to back away as soon as this work requires the slightest amount of risk to myself?

I tend not to wallow in guilt, and to get frustrated when other people get stuck there, because guilt doesn't accomplish anything. It feels almost self-indulgent to spend time mired in white guilt instead of actually doing something about it. But I want to actually sit in these feelings of shame and revulsion for a while, because right now sitting here is actually doing something - it is teaching me, painfully and not for the first time, that white supremacy affects all of us. It hurts all of us. Knowing that I am ready to consider, even fleetingly, prioritizing my own comfort over my sense of justice - that says something about what is in my heart as a result of growing up and living in a society that tells me, every way and every day, that my comfort IS worth more than the suffering of people of color. In fact, one of the tenets of white supremacy culture is the belief that those in the dominant group have a right to emotional comfort, at the expense of the truth for those in the oppressed group. The shard of that belief is lodged deep inside of me, no matter how much I don't want it to be there. That is what racism does to white people - as James Baldwin said, "one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." This picture is of my hometown - it's a part of me and I'm a part of it. My desire to not confront that uncomfortable truth is forcing me to instead confront the diminishing of my own humanity - it feels awful, but at the same time I am thankful because feeling how racism directly damages me makes me feel that much more urgency to dismantle it, starting with myself.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Sugar cookies

My parents were in town last weekend, and my mom brought up her baking supplies so we could making sugar cookies with my little sister. It was a huge success!
She had never made sugar cookies before and loved the whole process - rolling out the dough, punching out the shapes, decorating them with frosting and sprinkles. But her absolute favorite was adding the food coloring to the frosting; she had never played with food coloring before and thought it was the coolest thing ever. After the cookies were all done, we just filled a bunch of cups with water so she could further experiment with different food coloring combinations - she was very scientific about it, and tried every possible combination of the four colors we had.

Also - we had this funny exchange when I picked her up:
LS: My sisters and I stayed up until midnight last night listening to music!
Me: Wow! Aren't you tired?
LS: No, I never get tired!
Me: Really? You never ever get tired?
LS: Never! Except for at night, when I get tired.
Kids are the best.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Murder, She Solved

Tonight was my office's annual murder mystery party! The theme was basically Rocky - Philadelphia, 1975, the eve of the big boxing match between national champion Appollo Freed and local up-and-comer Rocky Samoa. Ben was Rocky's coach, and I was the boxing promoter - my character was described as being from Texas and very attention-seeking, so I wore white sequined pants, a red crop top, and a blue fringed vest. I was gunning for the Best Costume award and so was disappointed when someone else won it - but then I won Best Performance, and I also won the Super Sleuth award for being the only person to discover the murderer and her motives. This was my fifth year attending the murder mystery and my first time ever solving it, so I was pretty excited! It was Ben's first murder mystery ever, and he did a good job - in four more years he will win the Super Sleuth award too.
Each award came with a prize, so I ended up taking home an Apollo Creed bobble-head and a DVD of the first Rocky movie. Embarrassingly enough I have never seen it, so now that I own it I'll have to actually watch it!

Friday, March 6, 2015

Learning things: Other voices

While I continue to work my way through my history reading, I wanted to take a post to talk about all the reading I do that isn't as formal as books. Just like the dominant group gets to define history, the dominant group also gets to define current reality - or at least the most widely-known version of it. I think about the congressional hearing on birth control with all men and the race panel with all white people - the assumption is that dominant group members are so all-knowing that they understand the experience of the oppressed group just as well as the actual oppressed people do. I also think about much of the media I consume - even when it's not so explicit as an all-white race panel, there is no shortage of white, straight, cis, and/or male voices in the news that I have the easiest access to, or in the social circles where I discuss that news. Happily, there's the internet!

Specifically, over the past few years I've started being intentional about following blogs written by people in communities whose perspective I rarely get to hear. Hearing from a variety of diverse voices helps me gain more perspective on the world, and how many people experience it so differently than I do - which in turn leads to deeper and more holistic understanding on my part. It's sort of like a live version of "People's History of the US." I also appreciate that reading these blogs allows me to gain that valuable perspective without having to burden all the people of color in my life with the task of educating me - although I also try to keep in mind that the bloggers themselves are doing me a service pro bono, and so I also donate to them to fund their work.

What I'm reading so far:
  • Black Girl Dangerous: BGD is a blog written by many different queer and trans* people of color. I love that it has so many different voices on it - everything from nuanced intellectual analysis of pop culture to personal stories of joy, pain, and everything in between. Mia McKenzie, BGD's founder, also recently published a book that is great - I bought myself a copy and my sister bought me one too, so now I have twice the greatness if anyone wants to borrow one!
    • Great post to get started: Sooooooooo many! I especially like her posts about ally-ship and how not to suck at it - 8 Ways To Not Be An "Ally" and No More "Allies" both pushed me a lot in how I think about myself as a white person aspiring to act in solidarity with communities of color. I also love a new series they are doing called "Qraftish," which features a young Black queer woman who shares her thoughts on identity while making crafts.
  • Racialicious:  Also written by multiple contributors, Racialicious is a blog about race and pop culture. I particularly like that a lot of the pop culture they write about is nerd culture - they cover Comic-Con every year, and often live-tweet various panels and media events. Plus, a lot of their contributors are really funny.
  •  Angry Asian Man: The title is pretty self-explanatory. AAM is written by Phil Yu, but he brings in a ton of other blogs, magazines, youtube streams, etc... to cover a variety of Asian American perspectives on news and pop culture. He tends to write many brief updates instead of fewer, longer posts - which makes AAM very accessible and enjoyable, because if you aren't into one topic you can bet there will be another one posted later that same day.
    • Great post to get started: The about page is actually a pretty great post in and of itself.
  • Native Appropriations:Written by Dr. Adrienne Keene, who is a postdoc studying Native higher education and is a member of the Cherokee Nation. She write about the representation, and lack thereof, of Native people in the media, as well as how Native culture is often appropriated and represented in problematic ways. She's smart and snarky and just wonderful.
    •  Great post to get started: White tears and aggressive Indians, a paragraph-by-paragraph deconstruction of some of the problematic coverage of what happened when the Daily Show brought Native American activists to confront fans of the Washington football team who defend its name.
What I'm committing to start reading:
  • In compiling the above list, I realized I don't read any Latin@-focused blogs (although Racialicious and BGD both have Latin@ contributors). I found a list of Latina feminist bloggers, so I'm going to check out the various recommended blogs for a while and pick out one (or more) to follow permanently.
  • Similarly, I realized that all the people I read currently are able-bodied, so I'm also going to explore this list of Top 10 Disability Blogs to find some new people to follow.
  • Anyone else have suggestions? Let me know!

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

TRIUMPH

ALL THE BUDS ON MY ORCHID ARE BLOOMING!
THIS IS THE MOST PROUD OF MYSELF I HAVE EVER BEEN!!