Alcatraz

This weekend we went to Alcatraz, aka Muggle Azkaban. We'd been hearing it was a cool place to visit since we spent the summer here 2013, but it took us a few years to get our act together enough to finally do it.

I had thought Alcatraz was just a big rocky island with a prison on it, but I learned from the scale model on the ferry landing that it actually has a bunch of buildings on it:

In addition to the prison, there were also apartments and other housing for the prison staff and their families (including a big mansion for the warden),  a post office, an officers' club, a power plant, a few buildings where prisoners did various sorts of industrial labor, and a lighthouse. Apparently at any given time there were about 75 children living on Alcatraz, and they would take the ferry to school in San Francisco each day.

The ferry ride to the island is a nice treat in and of itself, since you have beautiful views of the Bay the whole way.

As you pull up to the island, the first thing you see is the famous "Indians Welcome" sign from the 1969-71 occupation:

Walking up the hill to the prison, you see another remnant from that time on the island's water tower:

I was most curious to learn about the Indian occupation, but unsurprisingly the tour doesn't address it at all - it just focuses on the active years of the prison (although apparently there is a short film about the occupation that plays in the small theater by the gift shop, we just didn't manage to catch it).

The walk to the prison revealed another thing I didn't know about the island - over the years its various occupants brought in lots of soil, and now it actually has surprisingly nice gardens throughout.

I found the prison itself to be not as bad as I expected - I think because my mental baseline for historical prisons is Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly, which is basically a giant stone dungeon of horror. The cells in Alcatraz seemed spacious and well-lit by comparison.

Of course, I don't think there's any amount of spaciousness and lighting that makes spending decades confined to a cell not horrifying.

The thing that seemed most outdated about the prison was its close proximity to San Francisco, since now prisons are increasingly being moved out of cities and into rural areas as a growth industry, which amplifies the racial inequity of the criminal justice system. It's hard to imagine what contemporary American cities would look like if they had to contain all the prisons necessary to maintain the modern carceral state, or if mass incarceration could have even become so extreme if its consequence weren't tucked away out of easy view.

Learning things: History part three

My normally rapid reading pace got derailed a bit with the road trip and the move, but now that we're pretty well settled into our new apartment, I am back on track! Since today is MLK Day it seemed appropriate for a history update.

What I've read since last time:

• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I had started reading this one as of my last history post, so already shared a bit about it. The central thesis is that the Americas were much more populous and advanced (technologically, politically, artistically... in every way you can think of, basically) than we have historically been willing to acknowledge in the face of overwhelming supporting evidence, given that the more we acknowledge the extent of pre-contact American civilization, the more horrific the ensuing genocide we also have to acknowledge is. The book also tries to reconstruct some of the history of various empires, wars, etc... in the Americas before 1492, which helps dispel the colonial misconception that American Indians were somehow these history-less people frozen in time at the moment of their "discovery."
• Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. I really loved this book! I learned a TON about the history of Asian American activism and resistance (and even the emergence of "Asian American" as a social category). It is incredibly engaging - the author interweaves the broader history with her own personal story of identity and activism (i.e. she went to Princeton in the first class to admit women, and worked to establish an Asian American Student Association there. She's also a lesbian and writes about the intersectionality of Asian American movements with LGBTQ movements). I didn't realize that there had been so much Asian American involvement in the labor movement, and how much of that involvement was done in partnership with Latin@ activism in multi-racial coalitions. One of the stories that really stuck out to me was that of the Wards Cove cannery workers - the Asian workers were restricted to the lowest-paid and most dangerous jobs, while the White workers got the higher-paid and safer jobs. They sued for discrimination and the case went to the Supreme Court, who basically said "okay yeah, the data shows all the Asian workers get crappy jobs and all the White workers get good jobs, but you can't PROVE discriminatory intent, so suck it." The ordeal unfolded over decades and there was never any justice for any of the involved workers.
• City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972.  This book was a bit denser than I anticipated - I think it was somebody's dissertation turned into a book? Anyway, it was still very interesting, especially because so many of the events happened in our old neighborhood in Philly. Growing up after mainstream acceptance for being gay was already starting to spread, I don't think I fully realized the extent of the oppression gay people had to live under not that long ago - large-scale police raids, mass arrests, and beatings were a fairly continuous part of the gay experience for decades in Philly.
• Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. I added this book to the list after I saw it recommended somewhere, and holy cow am I glad I did. It's about a rape case Thurgood Marshall took on when he was still a lawyer with the NAACP, before Brown vs Board of Ed. It was a pretty archetypal Jim Crow-era rape case - a white woman claimed to have been raped by four black men, and although there was zero evidence to support her claim and a ton of evidence to disprove it (example: two of the four men she accused weren't even in town when it allegedly happened), it was a white lady's word against four black men's, so all were convicted and sentenced to death (by an all-white jury, of course). A lot more stuff happens as well, but I don't want to give it all away - I highly recommend everyone read it. It's engrossing and enraging in many different ways; one of the most striking is how many of the quotes in it are virtually indistinguishable from contemporary ones. For example, in 1949 the (white) mayor of the town involved said, in reference to the NAACP getting involved, "[outsiders] are attempting to create race hatred and discord... where relations between whites and coloreds have always been good." This was the mayor of a town where the majority of Black citizens labored under debt peonage and the sheriff was literally a publicly active KKK member, not to mention all the regular injustices of the Jim Crow South, and yet if you update the word "coloreds," it could have easily come from the white mayor of Ferguson in 2014. And it's not just quotes that still resonate nearly 70 years later - there is literally a case in front of the Kentucky Supreme Court right now about the (un)constituionality of all-white juries.

The thing that most surprised me in reading this book actually had to do with gender, not race. In particular, I was taken aback by my own reaction to the white girl (she was 17 at the time) who accused the four men - the part of my brain that says things before I can consciously think about them pretty consistently reacted to everything she did with some version of "that whore" or "fucking slut," and I found that I hated her the most out of everyone involved. And yes, to be clear, what she did was reprehensible - but why did I hate her more than the sheriff whose literal job it was to uphold justice, and who instead refused to conduct an actual investigation and did all kinds of terrorist activity with the KKK? Why did I hate her more than the judge who, again, was legally obligated to uphold justice, and refused to admit any of the evidence that would have exonerated the men? And why did I hate her in such gendered terms? My brain never said "what an asshole," it was always "what a whore." I think part of my intense hatred comes from the sense of betrayal that I feel whenever a woman makes a fake rape claim, because it feeds into the popular narrative that rape is something women often make up, which in turn makes it so much harder for actual rape victims to be believed and get any sort of justice. But the fact that my automatic reaction was to express the hatred in such gendered terms tells me some disturbing stuff about the extent to which I have internalized patriarchal ideas about women. Ugh. I'm glad it forced that particular bit of ugliness to the surface so I could start to grapple with it, though.

What's still on the docket for future reading:

• Racism On Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice
• Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
• Working my way down Ta-Nehisi Coates's reading list
• Whatever other recommendations come my way!

Road Trip: Jackson

The first thing we did in Jackson was meet the new baby of the friends we were staying with:

Baby!

He's only three weeks old - you might think that most sane people wouldn't have house guests three weeks after having a baby, but these friends are serious about their Southern hospitality. For example, here's the cabinet in the guest bathroom:

There is at least three of each travel size item.

The next day we visited some of the historic sites around town, starting with the bus station where the Freedom Riders were arrested:

Medgar Evers' statue, which is next to a library and park named after him:

We also visited Medgar Evers' home, but didn't think it was appropriate to take photos with a murder scene.

It was unsettling to stand right in the driveway where he was assassinated in front of his family, especially given recent acts of white supremacist terrorism. There's not much there to commemorate it other than a plaque:

And speaking of white supremacy, this is what the Mississippi supreme court looks like:

I know it's the state flag of Mississippi, but it's still appalling.

In the afternoon, we went to the Mississippi Museum of Art, which was beautiful:

The art inside was all by Mississippians, and was incredibly diverse. There was everything from mechanized models of the constellations:

To gorgeous handmade quilts:

I also got a reassuring message in the gift shop:

We spent the rest of the day at home with our friends, playing board games and ogling the baby. It was a great third stop!

Learning things: History update

Since I first wrote about re-learning history from a more holistic perspective, I have finished all the next steps I initially committed to doing. I'm learning a ton and really enjoying it, so I am going to continue this project!

What I've done since last time:

• A People's History of the United States: I'm still struggling with how I feel about this one a bit. On the one hand, it was inspiring to learn about all the people's movements that have resisted governmental policies and actions throughout the country's history - I always thought that things like Manifest Destiny had fairly unanimous popular support, and that's why we fought wars and displaced people to take over so much land. On the other hand, it was pretty depressing to realize that despite all that resistance, most of the horrific and oppressive things in US history happened anyway. But, I definitely learned a LOT that I didn't previously know, so I am grateful for that knowledge.
• Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year: This one was from more of a narrative perspective, and was very engaging to read. I knew that Dr. King lost a lot of popular support when he spoke out against the Vietnam war and began working on an anti-poverty campaign, but I didn't realize that he also lost substantial support from within the civil rights movement. He so often gets painted as the patron saint of peace and tolerance, in a way that is used to try and shut down resistance to contemporary oppression (how many people chastised the Ferguson protestors with "what would MLK do??"), but that really does not align with how he saw his work and what he spent the last year of his life doing. He never wavered from his belief in nonviolence, but he also believed in "radical" policies like withdrawing American troops from overseas and using military funding for domestic social programs instead, and he stood by those beliefs at all costs.
• Online class on the history of American education reform: I didn't do any of the homework or tests, but I did listen to all the lectures for the whole term. Parts of it were pretty dry, but other parts were fascinating - it was particularly interesting to learn about how federal vs local control of schools has been a contentious issue going back as long as there has been a federal government. It was also interesting to learn about how most teachers' unions were radically liberal when they were first established, to the point that they were derided as communist infiltrators during the McCarthy era because they advocated things like ending poverty. It would be awesome if teachers' unions today took such strong stances on social justice issues.
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong: I added this one to my initial list after a friend recommended it. It's not a history book per se, but a book about how we teach history. The author read the most commonly used history textbooks in the US, then analyzed how they tell history - what they include, what they leave out,  and what they misrepresent. I definitely learned some history along the way, but I most appreciated his analysis of not just how history is (mis)taught, but why it is taught that way, the effects of learning one-sided and incomplete history, and what it would take to change it. This book was also much less dense than People's History, and I found myself staying up late at night to read it.

What I'm doing next: I want to zoom in on the histories of specific groups that are typically erased from mainstream historical narratives. I got a bit more information from People's History and Lies My Teacher Told Me, but they are overview texts, and they also aren't written by the people in the relevant group. So, here's what's coming up next:

• Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. The autobiography of Wilma Mankiller, former Chief of the Cherokee Nation, which tells the story of both her life and the history of the Cherokee people. A few different people have recommended this book to me, so I am excited to read it!
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I actually started reading this one already, because it was the first to come in from the library. The author spends some time writing against previously held anthropological/archaeological beliefs about pre-contact Indians that I didn't know about in the first place, so those parts are less interesting to me, but he also writes extensively about the advanced level of art, poetry, engineering, politics, urban planning, etc... in the Americas hundreds, and even thousands, of years before European contact. One of his main theses so far is that (mostly White) researchers have tried, consciously or not, to downplay both the population numbers and the level of "civilization" of Native populations to also downplay the extent of the genocide perpetrated against them, and therefore assuage White guilt.
• Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. Embarrassingly, almost all of what I know about Asian American history is about railroads and internment camps, which is a pitifully small piece of the picture. I'm looking forward to rectifying that.
• Racism On Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. I also know pitifully little about Latin@ history, so I'm going to start here. I know Mexican Americans are not representative of all Latin@ Americans, but I'm hoping this will be a good starting place and will lead to recommendations for further reading.
• City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. Aside from Stonewall I know almost nothing about LGBTQ history and the fight for LGBTQ rights, so I am looking forward to learning more, especially in the context of Philadelphia specifically.

If you have recommendations for additional reading, send them my way!