It’s a particularly difficult situation to navigate from afar, personally, because I have friends that work and play in the bar and I go there in my free time because it’s such an awesome, quirky place, because I have also been party to well-founded complaints by friends of color for consistently unfair treatment by local police, and because I also have friends and family in the local police department. I’m relatively vocal about challenging discrimination when I see it, for both personal and political reasons (except perhaps at work, where my voice is limited for professional reasons), and I’m incredibly sensitive to how these things play out in our community as a typically concerned citizen and as a mother of a child of color. This situation is messy, to be sure, and the relative silence by local media is unhelpful.

The bar is an old one, and has undergone some major changes in the last decade. It has always been openly, unapologetically a hole-in-the-wall, Small Town Gay Bar as far as I can remember. I started going there when it joined the circuit for regional punk bands to tour, and found its unassuming air quite refreshing for a college town bar. It was an unglamorous, unpretentious place populated by townies, an older crowd, mostly men, a jukebox, folding chairs and tables then. My favorite kind of place. Since its most recent marketing conception, the bar is heavily associated with the local GLAAD office and the new OUTfest, an area festival celebrating the Lafayette area queer community. The crowd is changing, and lots of Purdue traffic is seen there thanks to their weekly drink specials, dance lessons and drag shows. It’s generally pretty awesome. This is a movement that is badly needed here and is gaining traction against local homophobia after years of activist community work.

Meanwhile, the NAACP in this area is generally regarded as a weak chapter, which is unfortunate considering the kinds of racial tension experienced in the Lafayette area. As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, there is a general suspicion in the white community here that the two primary communities of color on the influx (that are permanent residents, and unrelated to the transient university population) are criminal, undesirable elements here to suck away at “our” resources and jobs, one being the Latino influx from the southwest and the other being the African-American influx from Chicagoland (ironically, neither of which racist concerns consider the enormous, consistent, if transient, international population drawn in by Purdue University). And while the local university community has multiple anti-racist, anti-discriminatory groups dedicated to protecting all sorts of people aside from the NAACP, they tend to preach to the choir, and aren’t nearly as vocal as the Bible-thumping religious conservative radicals.

In any case, what I can gather from the story reported about the bar is thus: A student went to the bar with her friend, arrived around last call, which by state law is at 3:00am, and ordered and paid for one drink. She was reported to be quite intoxicated when she arrived, and was asked to leave the bar on no less than three occasions before the bar closed at 3:30am. She refused, the police were called, and she refused to leave the bar peacefully at police request, in which case she was taken by force. They cuffed her and she was hurt in the process of being taken from the bar to jail, when her shoulder was reportedly broken. She believes she was discriminated against by the police and the staff at the bar, and so she contacted the NAACP, which called a public meeting between them and the bar staff. The woman who was arrested did not attend, nor did the police (because of the ongoing investigation?). The woman who was arrested is a black, heterosexual graduate student at Purdue, and she was forcefully ejected at a mostly white-populated, mostly male gay bar.

My first reaction is to take out the identity-based factors and recognize that we all live in a college town, one wherein alcohol-related complaints are a common nuisance, i.e. where most criminal complaints are alcohol-related. Because the first rule of drinking in a college town is to pay for your drinks and go home after last call. If the woman in question did not do so, and was defiant with the bar workers and police, it’s no wonder they used force to remove her from the premises. Or: When you’re asked to leave an establishment at 3 in the morning, just call a cab and go home.

I’m biased. I’m good friends with a bartender there. I know the gross gossip and all the other mess that revolves around the story.

So my next reaction isn’t so clear. The local NAACP chapter didn’t say that the calls were “too numerous to handle” on this complaint alone — and reportedly there were few left at the bar at this time — and it could very well have intended to address multiple complaints against the police department, not only the bar, in their handling of people of color in arrest situations. Which is very well-founded. But the police didn’t show up to the community meeting. The police appear to be passing off the handling of the complaint against a black woman on the gay bar owners.

I don’t know. It’s a shame. I’m waiting to see what results from the complaints.

Uniontown, PA, was the site for this year’s W****** Family Reunion, which is really less a reunion than it is a genealogy trip exploring my mother’s family lineage. My uncle’s baby, the reunion takes place biennially in a place that is historically relevant to the family history. All kinds of relatives, close and distant, showed up to participate, many of whom can only be considered relatives if you go back six or seven generations.

Things
Christian Klay Winery has excellent dry white wine. Try the Blanc de Lafayette if you’re ever in the area. We rolled up our sleeves and bought a case.

Fallingwater was ridiculous. It’s absolutely beautiful and extravagant, still contemporary by today’s standards, and our tour guide sounded something like this:

This kind of family reunion is really an exercise in white privilege. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time and I don’t want to minimize the importance of knowing one’s roots, especially for my own family who have had a hand in organizing many of these gatherings, and especially with additional emphasis on “the importance of knowing one’s roots”. First it assumes you (in the present) have the time and money and access for extensive research, which secondly depends on whether your historical relatives had the privilege of accurate record-keeping, marked graves, proper burial records, i.e, rights of existence that were not available to most non-white, non-privileged people in early American (as we know it) life. Because much of genealogical research is based on record-keeping such as family Bibles and school, Social Security, military, and city records and the like, you have to assume that the infrastructure existed in the first place and secondly that your ancestry was able to take advantage of it. Moreover things are made that much more difficult if someone along the way changed your family surname to better assimilate and/or subjugate your ancestry.

That said, after some discussion, it became clear after some discussion with my father that we know nothing about his family before his grandparents. In their area of the country and in their social class, it would be incredibly difficult to trace back much further, even knowing that his lineage would have emigrated from the old country (presumably Germany, GB, or Scotland) and emigrated again from the east coast of North America to Arkansas and Mississippi River country. Chef’s family too knows little about their lineage past Chef’s great-grandparents, and what they do know is their Irish and German surnames and very German settlement in this area of Indiana.

Just some thoughts. I have no strong feelings or judgments on these facts, but it is what it is.

If I were so inclined, I could join the Daughters of the American Revolution. Why I won’t.

I have some really cool relatives, past and present. I won’t go into details because I want to preserve familial privacy.

We spent part of Saturday at Fort Necessity, the site for the first engagement for the French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War, which is apparently the only battle that George Washington ever surrendered. There isn’t much at the park except a replica of the original fort and a refurbished historical tavern that sits on National Road, but I did go through the park center’s small museum which explains the events during the Battle of Jumonville Glen.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been to a historical museum, even one of this size, so I was surprised to see a few unexpected truths especially considering the many grossly inaccurate mythologies that surround American historical narratives. First, they represented the warring factions — French, British/American, and Native American — as equal players in a world war, as opposed to lumping the Native American players as unequivocal add-ons to French political interests. Secondly, they also included a comprehensive display on how the battle was one of the first in a colonial disaster, emphasizing the destruction done to global native populations as the British built a world empire from the Caribbean to India.

Finally, despite the impressiveness of the above, what I found most interesting was a little meta-narrative on the museum and reproductions themselves. The museum ended with a historical display on previous incarnations of the Fort park, and how these representations supported a jingoistic view of American history in lieu of accuracy by representing Washington as a war hero instead of this battle as one of his greatest embarrassments, building a massive fort replica instead of properly representing the fort as the travesty it was, and even displaying previous versions of commemorative brass plaques that codified these purposeful inaccuracies.

I strongly identified with Sybil Vane’s observation on that “squeamish conflict between the kind of idealism and awe a city full of landmarks and history can inspire… and the cynicism she feels when she considers what goes on in [national landmarks] and what it has come to mean for her” when she wrote this last week, because look, I love history and I even unintentionally got a history minor in college when I discovered I’d fit in enough classes to qualify for one, but I’m tired of the willful ignorance that goes into history displays when the opportunity to represent historical nuances fully, with all their messy details, is cast aside in favor of another cherry tree fable. I can only hope this is a national trend.

Big ups to the Fort Necessity National Park for including commercial titles like “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “A People’s History of the United States” in the gift shop.

I don’t know if it’s the whole state or the county we stayed in, but we were goddamned if we wanted to buy booze. Liquor is not for sale outside of a bar or tavern, and the area beer stores only sold by the case. You could, however, drop into a bar and buy a six-pack, thus with the full bar, sweet karaoke gig, and copious bottled options, the Holiday Inn seemed to be the coolest hangout on that side of town. Sadly.

I did discover, however, that my mother is very fond of Yuengling, and if prompted will break into spontaneous cheerleading during unrelated conversation.

It could be a Southern thing, but there are a whole lot of nicknames circulating my family. Personally the most amusing is that my sixteen-year-old, 6’2″ 220 lb. nephew is still referred to as Baby James.

It was a good trip, better than I expected it to be, and I got to re-meet some relatives I haven’t seen since I was a kid. Also, lots of excellent wine.

“Resolved” trains an eye on high school debate competitions and the peculiar traditions that make them so competitive, also basing a large portion of the movie on the fact that the upper eschalons compete on arguably classist and racist terms. But most interesting is the introduction of the underdog team, Louis and Richard, a duo of African-American students from inner city Los Angeles whose debate coach introduces them to Paolo Freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed, and in addition to a meta-narrative questioning debate tradition itself, Louis and Richard interject a radical streak into the classical banking-style debate model that turns the tournament of champions on its head. Sadly the trailer above doesn’t highlight the underdog team as much as it should, especially since they are the overall focus of the film, but trust me, it’s well worth your time to see these two in action.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in social change — especially for Freire-philes — because, though some of their results are frustrating, it demonstrates how effective and moving are our attempts at remodeling culture from the inside out and outside in.

So what keeps the movement [Feminism --ed.] from realizing its demographic potential? First, it’s divided along lines so old that they feel like geological faults. Long before this campaign highlighted the divides of race, class and age, feminism was divided by race, class and age. As early as 1973, some black feminists formed a National Black Feminist Organization; in 1984, the writer Alice Walker coined the term “womanism” to distinguish black women’s liberation from feminism, the white version. In the early 1970s, writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich argued on behalf of “socialist feminism,” saying that the women’s movement couldn’t succeed unless it attacked capitalism. The movement was barely out of its teens when Walker’s daughter, Rebecca, announced a new wave to distinguish her generation’s feminism from the already divided feminisms of the people who had spawned it.

This would have been enough to weaken the movement. But it still could have been like many other reform movements, which manage to remain effective by using such traditional political tools as alliances and compromises. There’s an old-fashioned term for it — “log-rolling.” Put crudely: First I vote for your issue, then you vote for mine.

The mostly white, middle-class feminist organizations could have established relationships of mutual convenience with groups such as the black feminists. An alliance like that might have been able to prevent the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991. White feminists opposed him, but he had enough support among black voters — who are heavily female — to induce four Southern Democratic senators who were heavily dependent on black votes for reelection to cast the crucial votes to confirm him.

But feminists weren’t going to do things the old-fashioned, “political” way. Instead, faced with criticism that the movement was too white and middle-class, many influential feminist thinkers conceded that issues affecting mostly white middle-class women — such as the corporate glass ceiling or the high cost of day care — should not significantly concern the feminist movement. Particularly in academic circles, only issues that invoked the “intersectionality” of many overlapping oppressions were deemed worthy. Moreover, that concern must include the whole weight of those oppressions. In other words, since racism hurts black women, feminists must fight not only racist misogyny but racism in any form; not only rape as an instrument of war, but war itself. The National Organization for Women (NOW) eventually amended its mission statement to include interrelated oppressions.

Although other organizations work on women’s issues when appropriate, none of the other social movements were much interested in making intersectionality their mission. The nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP, which co-sponsored the 2004 march in alliance with women’s groups, says nothing about feminism or homophobia or intersectionality in its mission statement. The largest Hispanic rights organization, National Council of La Raza, unembarrassedly proclaims that it “works to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans.”

Hirshman also stupidly puts her foot into the feminist blogosphere to prove some point on the danger of “intersectionality” (her quotes), feminism, and mainstream politics.

[via]

That being said.

You know, by blogging standards I guess I’m an old timer, but I do remember several years in the beginning of this mess where the biggest feminist blogger was a man (Barry at Amptoons) and the most irritating thing a blogger could do was to be Kevin Drum asking where the women bloggers were again (apologies to Kevin). There were numerous frustrations, flame wars, and divisions created that can still be seen throughout the liberal blogosphere, feminist or not, that resulted from women being ignored and looked over. Some of us banded together and worked our asses off to create visibility and bring traffic to smaller, newer blogs written by feminist-minded women, and in turn had a hand in building the feminist blogosphere that implodes today.

What I don’t get is how so many of us that were irritated by what often seemed like an intentional oversight are suddenly scandalized to be called out on our own biases, blindnesses, and lenses of privilege. Put your big girl panties on and take notice.

I have immense respect for BlogAds because they allow people to finance what they love to do, and additionally the host and the advertiser filter the ad content based on their own preferences, but Google Adsense seems to be more of a crapshoot. Google’s keyword advertising pulls keywords from the blog and pairs them with “matching” advertisements, some of which are really disappointing.

Tonight while optimizing the ad content and filtering inappropriate ad material, I discovered a few things:

• Posts discussing race and racism will include advertisements for Date-An-Asian/China Love personals sites (literally, one of them is called China Love) and DOWNLOAD THE HOTTEST RINGTONE.
• Posts discussing feminism and the pro-choice movement will include advertisements for crisis pregnancy centers, gravestones (!), and minister-cum-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
• All of them include ads on how to get rid of “stubborn belly fat,” presumably because a feminist website focuses in part on women’s issues, and women are fatty weight-obsessed fatties.

One of the things that makes ad hosting so difficult is that advertising aims to hit the most common denominator, which means many advertisers rely on stereotypes and generalizations to hit their targets. This is obviously problematic on a site professing anti-racist and anti-sexist politics. The thing that makes it that much more difficult online is that the web-savvy can play the computerized system to their own advantage and thereby put gravestone advertising on all blog posts related to abortion on a pro-choice, feminist website. Which wastes my damned time.

My online searches have been really unfruitful. All I can find online are fictional narratives for older kids, like these, and essays on how to scan your children’s books for racism, sexism, and intolerance, which is something I already do anyway and nevertheless doesn’t address the immediate need at hand. I need something more explanatory for an advanced reader in the second grade, and preferably, something extra inclusive that deals with racism against all people of color.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

UPDATE: I refined my search and came up with the series Asian Americans of Achievement, which isn’t quite what I’m looking for, but it’s a start. I also want this one for myself.

I’m dropping money on this book on pay day.

UPDATE II: Lubu has a fantastic round up on Asian-American resources thanks in part to Rethinking Schools.

via Educe Me