Melvin Dixon,

A Visitation of Spirits

Well, this morning I was greeted by a story on crimes against the LGBT community in Newark, NJ, “In a Progressive State, a City Where Gay Life Hangs by a Thread.” The story is by Andrew Jacobs, who’s on the Newark beat at the NYT. It’s not a terrible story, and it does a nice job of outlining a broad picture of options for the lgbt community in lower and working class communities of color in Newark.

The story got me thinking, though, about how difficult it is to talk about sex and race– especially when we barely have language for sussing out race and class. So what happens when, as in most cases, we need to talk about all three at once? Often, it seems, we latch onto the one that best serves our own needs, a need fed by our perceptions “what counts” and “what matters.” But, again, what does this mean for the possibility of

understanding and transforming our social world? And how do we thus honor the lives of those whose death’s motivate such transformations?

As the title suggests, the narrative of the aforementioned NYT story emerges out of a contrast between gays’ lives in Newark and in other parts of the state. The article gets a little murky at times, as it conflates anti-gay bias as a class issue–as a result of a lack of resources for the community in a famously poor city, and as a race issue–as a result of the anti-gay bias endemic to black and Latino communities.

Don’t get me wrong, it is striking that over the past few years our attention has been repeatedly drawn to Newark, and there is something particularly compelling that these crimes against gay POC have taken place in the shadow of the most gay-friendly bastions. But does the fact of proximity mean that there is a larger story here about resources for the poor, and how there is more at stake than we imagine, or is it a story about intolerance in communities of color? Is it a story about insides or outsides? Or, if the answer is both, where do we locate responsibility for change?

I do think that in coverage that comes in the wake of such events, I’m thinking specifically of Sakia Gunn’s murder or of the Newark lesbians case, we often see media and legal establishments unable to deal with the chimera of race, class, and sex, unable to address one bias without enlisting the aid of another. Were the men who killed Sakia Gunn homophobic because they were black, or because they were “street”? Were the lesbians who fought an attack on the streets of Greenwich Village “just” thug chicks from Newark, who shouldn’t have been there anyway, or were they gay women, fighting back against street violence?

Or, if we are to believe reports that the Newark schoolyard killings were also anti-gay crimes, as well as (?) the murders of Shani Baraka and Rayshon Holmes, then there is a sense of hiding the hate crime (hat tip to Kenyon Farrow, who has links to more good posts on this; also a story in The Washington Blade.) It’s like there is a sense that if this were to emerge as an anti-gay crime, then the event would lose meaning as a watershed urban crime– thus also losing its status as a catalyst for both grassroot and governmental action in Newark.

Blue Jersey (“all the news that slips from print”) has put it best,

There are well-meaning and deeply caring people who don’t want any of this public. And they are right to be concerned that talking about this publicly may put the families through additional pain. This is a delicate situation involving young students, and it makes the decision to write this a very difficult one. In the end, because of the possible implications, remaining silent isn’t an option. We need to talk about this.

While it’s important to respect the wishes of the families in their time of grief, it’s also important to determine with certainty whether this was a crime based on sexual-orientation. The challenge we all face is to get to the bottom of things and to ensure these tragic events aren’t repeated. To do otherwise is unthinkable.

We still have vulnerable young people whose freedom we are honor-bound to safeguard. They live in the city of Newark and in every town, city and suburb in this state. How can we ensure they have every chance for a long, free life if we do not do everything we can do now to understand all that happened to Terrance, to Dashon, to Iofemi and to the fragile Natasha. And why.

Indeed. Pursuing the circumstances of their deaths in ultimately about honoring their lives in all their possible meanings. Theyy are listening for their names.

As Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard, stated soon after Sakia Gunn’s murder in 2003:

It is as if we are living in two Americas — one that tunes in to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy but turns a blind eye to the injustices gay and lesbian people still face.

“It is evident that with progress comes inevitable attack by those who are threatened by our work. In 2003, more than 30 cities and towns reported crimes against gays. Most of them do not garner national headlines like my son’s murder did. Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old lesbian, was fatally stabbed in Newark, N.J., on May 11 this year. F.C. Martinez, a Navajo, transgender 16-year-old, was murdered in a hate-motivated attack in 2001. The list goes on and on…

(Curtsy for the quote above to Professor Kim, who also has a post on the differences in media coverage of the Shepard and Gunn stories, and a chart thereon.)

I am sure you are well-apprised of what I am going to call “The Michelle Obama feminism challenge.” But just in case, Mirror on America did a very nice post last week, outlining some of the most notable sites of contestation, particularly as they’ve been crystallized in Debra Dickerson’s recent article in Slate, and Maureen Dowd’s syndicated op-ed piece, reproduced here from the San Jose Mercury News. Racialicious also has a great post outlining the Dickerson and Dowd articles (amongst others). It’s redundant to rehearse the Racialicious and Mirror on America points, so check them out!

What I find interesting is the way Dickerson’s and Dowd’s pieces are in fact quite different from each other’s, but nonetheless show a striking similarity in the feelings of irritation each seems to elicit from people of color!

It has been my experience that many women of color find feminism immensely tiresome, tiresome in its disavowed self-interest and in its refusal to be held accountable for other -isms that it is not itself immune to. Reading Dowd and Dickerson, I felt the irritation; I felt the tiredness. And I teach feminism. I actually am a feminist. So what gives?

“Feminism,” as a political movement nascent in the suffrage movement and blossoming in the late sixties and early seventies, has a history of not being attuned to the specific concerns of women who are not white and/or not middle class. Out of this, in the eighties, came the notion of womanism, which seeks broaden the perspective and interests of feminism. (You can find a nice historicization of feminism and womanism here).

But it is important to note that feminists quite often disagree with being characterized as out of touch. To my mind, however, it’s the very insistence that they are in touch that signifies their out-of-touchness (like how I just unintentionally slipped into ‘us’ and ‘they’? I’m going to keep it for a while). The reason we so often think of feminism as ‘white,’ then, isn’t necessarily because all feminists are white, or because feminism necessarily excludes women of color– it’s because feminism just doesn’t know how to listen. How to pay attention to difference and to imagine women’s options accordingly. Historically, ‘not listening’ to others with less privelage translates to ‘being white.’ That is why The HNIC Report’s take on the matter resonates so well: “The White Lady Just Doesn’t Get It.”

This is one of the reasons why woc who might otherwise identify as feminists risk feeling shut out from feminism. And this is also why feminists must also remember that all things do not mean the same things to all people; that feminism might be more of a position than a movement; and that the work of looking out for women’s interests is ultimately ineffective if it misses or consistently misreads other elements that make up our social experiences of the world, like race, class, and religion.

My challenge to you, feminism? Think away from yourself. What I find so immensely irritating about both articles is my nagging sense that neither woman is particularly committed to making a point about Michelle Obama. Simultaneously released with big profiles on M’bama, I am suspicious that each article is simply taking an opportunity to “bring gender” to the table. No one really believes Obama is “giving up her career,” i.e. leaving the workforce. And I just don’t think anyone truly believes Mr. Obama is being henpecked out of the presidency. By claiming M’bama isn’t feminist enough (Dickerson), or that she is too much woman (Dowd), each writer manages to overlook anything specific to Obama, who she is and the kinds of decisions she is responsible for making. Kinda reminiscent of the whole “is Obama black enough” debate, no?

Both Dowd and Dickerson dropped the ball on Michelle Obama. And if I were reading this more fully in terms of race, I would even go so far as to say that to serve their own interests, as feminist and Democrat, they are actually bouncing said ball off M. Obama’s back. (Ouch! I think it nicked me.)

Sometimes it seems like America works on some kooky law of conservation, powered by a difference engine, adding and subtracting, adding and subtracting. In this instance, it seems that we might want to elevate a black man to the presidency, but we might be willing to use Michelle’s back to get him there.

And oh, by the way, Michelle Obama would likely never call herself a feminist. See, now I’m feeling all feministy again… My challenge to lady Obama? You can leave the word, but don’t leave the game.

Six minutes, Six minutes, Six minutes and Obama you’re on…

Last weekend, on the bucolic Quad at Harvard University–typically, the site of a casual game of Ultimate, or perhaps an afternoon reading of some Shakespearean sonnets before English class-an unusual and, to some, frightening scene was played out. There were people throwing things! And running! And jumping! And most scary of all, every single one of them was black. So the Harvard students watching from their dormitory windows, growing increasingly agitated at the sights below, did what any normal, white Harvard student would do when they saw a large, seemingly unruly group of black people: They called the cops!

Uhm, what?

And here is some reporting from The Harvard Crimson:

Bryan C. Barnhill II ’08, president of the BMF, said that police officers asked the students whether they had a permit to be on the field, and left after students explained that they had gained permission.

Barnhill said that many of the participants had been wearing Harvard paraphernalia and the event had been approved by all the Quad House masters. He said the call to HUPD was “disturbing” because of the “assumption that we didn’t belong there.”

Seguing from one of our discussions in the last weeks of classes, I found this story particularly striking. Of course the students who called would never call it racism, because we still often think racism only has meaning in overt violence. It also speaks to how our ideas of race and racial meaning are tied to space: unexpectedly present on the Quad, those black students were not perceived as being the right bodies in the right space at the right time.

But, of course, they are students, meaning they were exactly the right people in their rightful place in the school’s historical and metaphorical center. And it is racist to assume they are in the wrong place, no matter how unfamiliar the scene may seem. If their appearance had been contextualized as a “black event” that everyone knew about, the response may have been the opposite; it’s so great they’re here! But don’ t they too have a right to their randomness? Or is that still a luxury for people of color?

And it is interesting, no? The students on the Quad say that many of them were wearing Harvard clothing. What would it mean to look right at them, but nevertheless manage not to see them as they are? Just kind of being there, playing dodgeball and capture-the-flag; could you get a more Seventh Heaven vision of college?

This is like some post-King, “hey weren’t you going to vote Obama for president?” page out of Ralph Ellison’s prologue to Invisible Man!

But really, Barnhill puts it best:

“In this day and age, racism rears its ugly face in ways that are much more subtle,” he said.

“We just want to show that subtle forms of racism exist, such as seeing a group of black people on Harvard property and assuming they don’t belong there,” he added.

Oh, and by the way, I know Gawker is just being snippy, which is the kind of thing I want from them, but this time, doesn’t their title, “Blacks Terrorize Harvard Students” kinda over-reinforce the race dynamic the article is criticizing?

And the aftermath: here are two more Crimson articles, Ashton Lattimore in an opinion piece, and an Editorial letter.

Anyway, on my way out, I just happened to catch sight of a Natalie Angier article from 1993–”Fashion’s Waif Look Makes Strong Women Weep” (If you don’t get TimesSelect, you can click here to read it). It shot me back to college, to when waifs–and their attendant “poverty chic” and “heroin chic“–were new and news.

Angier, a New York Times science writer, sets it up like this:

After a long spell of the lusty, towering glamour queens, of the women with physiques hammered out at the health club and often perfected at the surgeon’s office, of the Cindy Crawfords and the Claudia Schiffers, the fashion industry has pulled another of its tectonic shifts and declared this the year of the gamine. Now it is time to celebrate the saucy little street urchins, the winsome starvelings. The mature, big-haired and big-breasted look is out, and the short, waiflike and wafer-like look is in….

Huh. It’s a good point. It didn’t seem so at the time, but looking back to the eighties, Crawford and her ilk look positively BBW next to the constantly youngering and smallerifying models who would come to define the next fifteen years. I mean, Dakota Fanning for Marc Jacobs? Cute or Creepy indeed! (thanks tweenscene and eccw.) Faced with the newest trend, Angier asked some good questions back in 1993:

Fashion is supposed to be part fantasy, of course, and its every attempt at novelty probably should not be taken to heart. But the latest paradigm switch in body type is so extreme that it cannot help but raise the question: What does the gamine girl mean for real women? What does she say about the culture’s judgment of women, of how comfortable it feels with the power they have seized? Are women once again being portrayed as skinny and childlike because the larger and more sophisticated images became too threatening?

Some good questions, no? Intrigued by this article, I went back through her NYT archive. I love her stuff! In fact, I might do a whole post on how she has already written with authority on everything I have ever thought of thinking about. (She was well into her career while I was still working to disavow Kriss-Kross!)

Back on track: What I found most interesting about the article was my own response to how Angier’s questions still stand fourteen years later. Historicization is always a relevant concern for cultural studies: what are the questions we should be asking? And how are those questions addressed, suppressed, or expanded over time?

In that vein, it is interesting to map other pop culture shifts, which really over time index historical shifts, alongside this one that Angier has named. In the article, for instance, we are reminded that the waif-look was supposed to be seen as anti-establishment, as

in keeping with [the day's] more liberal tone, a rejection of conspicuous wealth and an embracing of the organic, the gritty, the ethnic — poverty chic, as many call it.

In observing the many ways celebrity-watching has become a mainstream obsession– and how uber-thinness, if anything, signifies wealth and whiteness– how might we talk about the ways in which the waif look quickly moved from being countercultural to being an absolute signification of capital, in every sense, but particularly as social capital?