History – Page 5 – Feministe

En Lucha, In Gerangl: On Edens and Utopias

The Garden by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
(Black Valley Films)

At Home In Utopia by Michal Goldman
(Filmmakers Collaborative)

Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden opens with aerial shots of South Central Farm, the 14-acre community garden founded by Latin@ immigrants and other citizens of Los Angeles; against the backdrop of gray warehouses and the L.A. skyline, we see a rectangle of green, bursting with nopales, corn, vegetables, herbs, and trees. South Central Farm has been compared to Eden probably a million times – hell, the allusion is right there in the title of the documentary – but it’s with good reason. To see land being used in a healthy, loving way in an urban environment really does feel like a return to Eden.

By now, the story of South Central Farm is (or should be) legendary among American activists. The land was originally supposed to be used for a garbage incinerator – a move that would be rightly horrifying in wealthy parts of town, but seems to be considered only natural in poor and working class neighborhoods – but, after Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. successfully fought it, and after the 1992 L.A. Riots galvanized the citizens of South Central to revitalize their community space, it was transformed into a cooperative collection of garden plots. It was more than just a place to grow food; SCF grew into a tight-knit community, a haven amidst the blight of L.A. But racism and greed ensure that good things never last, and SCF was destroyed in 2006.

Women, Power and Politics Exhibit at The International Museum of Women

The International Museum of Women, an online museum dedicated to the “value the lives of women around the world,” has a really new and interesting exhibit up called Women, Power and Politics. The curator of the exhibit says in the Welcome:

As a counterpoint to these one-dimensional depictions, we wanted to collect and share real stories about how women are making change. In particular, we wanted to show inspiring tales of how women from all walks of life dare to believe the world can be different – and put their passions and ideas into action.

Despite what the evening news and our high-school history books tell us, women are powerful, and they always have been.

Though I haven’t had time to extensively comb through the entire exhibit (it contains quite a wealth of material!), it looks to be incredibly informative and diverse. Rather than focusing majorly on obvious and U.S.-centeric examples such as the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the exhibit seems to give equal time and energy to the experiences of women all over the world, and how they have made a difference in their own countries/regions.

Topics discussed include, but are not limited to, the ways that women have won and exercised power to make a difference, the effect that both biology and appearance have on the way that women in politics are often viewed by the public, how women are organizing, and the right to vote. There’s even a toolkit with ways that you can get involved.

Check out the full exhibit here.

Black History Month

This is a guest-post by Renee from Womanist Musings.

I was reminded via e-mail that February is black history month. A regular reader of my blog was astonished to find that I had not done the obligatory “celebration post” and instead posted what they deemed nonsense. Apparently this is a glaring omission on a blog that regularly deals with race.

The omission was quite purposeful on my part. At no time throughout the month will you find a post especially dedicated to the celebration of Black History month. I will continue to discuss race and the ways in which it intersects with all of the isms however, celebrating a false feel good month is not my idea of treating Blacks as equals in society.

Black History month gives people an excuse to claim tolerance and understanding, without doing any real work to change the ways in which the races interact. For a brief 28 days of the 365 that make up a year, people will briefly acknowledge the contributions of blacks and then return to privileging whiteness in every single social institution. Even while we are in the middle of said “celebration”, whites continue to complain about how racist Black History month is. “Imagine if you had a white month”, is what gets repeated continuously during the month of February, while the fact that every month, is white history month gets ignored.

The ironic part about the above statement is that Black History month is indeed racist, but not because there is no equivalent white history month. It is racist because it turns blackness into a mockery. If Black History and accomplishments were truly appreciated we would not need a special month to celebrate them; it would be integrated into our lives in the natural course of events. Black history month continues to exist because of racism.

Complicated and Conflicting Thoughts on Bill Baird

The other night, for the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I attended an event in Rochester, NY with reproductive rights activist Bill Baird. Until this event, I had never really heard of Bill Baird. I had heard of his famous Supreme Court case, Baird v. Eisenstadt, though I couldn’t cite it by name. But upon learning who Baird was, I was immediately intrigued.

Who is Bill Baird? Well, as stated, he was the defendant in Baird v. Eisenstadt, a very important case that not many people know. Baird v. Eisenstadt built off of the famous Griswold v. Connecticut case, which said that the right to privacy means it is unconstitutional to outlaw contraception for married people, to rule that the same was true for unmarried people. The case came up after Baird was arrested for giving contraceptive foam to a single 19-year-old woman (who was, at the time, considered a minor). The decision contains the famous and significant line “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” Importantly, its conclusions regarding privacy are the basis for the Roe v. Wade decision, where it is quoted several times, as well as the gay rights ruling Lawrence v. Texas.

Baird has been arrested 8 times in 5 different states for lecturing on birth control, including once where he was accused of endangering a minor because there was a 14-month-old infant in the audience. He claims both to have introduced the first gay rights bill in 1969, and to have set up the nation’s first abortion clinic, illegally. He is on anti-choice hit lists, has had a bullet come through his living room window, and had his health clinic firebombed by an anti-choice zealot. He was also the defendant in the important Belotti v. Baird Supreme Court decision, which struck down a strict Massachusetts parental consent laws for minors seeking abortions. Throughout all of it, he was refused the help of reproductive rights organizations, and publicly mocked and condemned not only by them but by prominent feminists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

I learned all of this during his talk, and much, much more, which I am still turning over in my head.

Baird is, in a word, eccentric. Of course, there’s a lot more to say about him than that. After all, if the only thing you can say about a person is “he’s eccentric,” you’re almost certainly using the word wrong.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, Barack Obama is going to be our president.

Can you believe it?

Image via Jack and Jill Politics

Lego President of the United States

This really does have to be just one of the coolest, cutest, and most fun things I’ve ever seen. Legoland has created a mini, Lego inauguration for Barack Obama in intricate — and I do mean intricate — detail. Check out the video below for more information on the lengths they went to to create as similar of an experience as possible.

From presidential procession, to lines for the restroom, to making specific Lego people for each VIP (and building them out of actual Legos rather than just using those stupid Lego figures), I have to say that I’m really impressed. And like the guy they interview in the video seems to be, I really am turned into a little kid again with awe at what they’ve done here.

I’m sorry, it was just too glee-inducing, not to post. All hail the Lego-in-Chief!

h/t List of Now

Are You Popular?

Via Sociological Images, I thought this video 1947 educational video “Are You Popular?” was a real riot:

While discussing dating etiquette for boys to a small extent, it mostly explains how good girls and bad girls each behave — with good girls of course going out of their way to “look nice” and make everyone around them feel comfortable. Perhaps most importantly of all, it explains how the girls who “park with all the boys” aren’t really popular, but just think they are. Of course, going parking with a girl they’re not committed to seemingly does not not cause the boys’ popularity to suffer. But hey, they do have to pay for everything on the dates.

Rigid gender role policing for all involved — what nice, wholesome fun.

NC Panel Recommends Reparations for Victims of Forcible Sterilization

A North Carolina panel has recommended that reparations be paid out to some 7,600 people who were victims of forced sterilizations:

A state House panel recommended the state give $20,000 to victims of the eugenics program, which sterilized about 7,600 people between 1929 and 1975 who were considered to be mentally handicapped or genetically inferior. Though North Carolina and several other states have apologized for such programs, none have offered reparations.

“Yes, it is ugly. It’s not something that we’re proud of,” said state Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, who has been working on the issue for several years. “But I’m glad that North Carolina has done more than any other state to step forward and not run away from it.”

Lawmakers in the full General Assembly will have to approve the idea. They convene next month.

Illinois was the first state to offer a eugenics program in 1907 as social reformers advocated for a way to cleanse society of the mentally handicapped and mentally ill. Many states curtailed their sterilizations after World War II, recognizing it was similar to the actions taken by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

North Carolina, however, moved ahead aggressively after the war, conducting about 80 percent of procedures after 1945 and growing the program to be the third largest in the nation, behind only California and Virginia.

Most of those sterilized in the 1960s were poor black women.

There are strong intersections here between sexism, racism, classism and ableism. Though people of all genders were forcibly sterilized, women were generally seen as the ones responsible for fertility; those with mental disabilities were seen as unfit to reproduce; and those who were of color (especially but certainly not entirely black) and/or poor were more likely to be seen as having a mental disability, even if they didn’t, and unfit to parent for a variety of reasons.

The history of forced sterilizations is one that’s highly important to modern understandings of systematic, violent discrimination, reproductive justice, and how social movements, certainly feminism, have often failed to help those burdened under the weight of more than one type of oppression. In fact, though much less common, forcible sterilizations and attempts at forcible or coerced sterilizations continue in America today.

For a much more comprehensive introduction on all of this, I can’t more highly recommend both Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

As is always the case with reparations, they don’t actually right a wrong. With something so serious and irreversible, the wrong cannot in fact possibly be righted. They do, however, act as an acknowledgment of the suffering that was inflicted, and the fact that it had very tangible results. If the state approves the idea of reparations, as I certainly hope they will, $20,000 for each survivor will not heal the wounds that NC created, but they will act as an important symbol of how people, all people, should and should not be treated. And no one should have their reproductive rights and their bodies violated. Ever.

h/t CripChick

Teacher Binds Students in Lesson on Slavery

A white teacher taped together the hands and feet of two 13-year-old black female students and then ordered them to climb underneath a desk as a “demonstration” while she taught a lesson on slavery. At least one of the two girls did not volunteer for the demonstration, cried during it, and was deeply traumatized by the experience. The teacher still has her job, and even better commentators are referring to Eileen Bernstein’s actions as “misguided” rather than racist and abusive.

Christine Shand says it was a terrible experience for her daughter, Gaby, descended, like most Jamaicans, from slaves.

“She burst into tears, she was crying and she was horrified,” Shand told CBS 2 HD.

In a social studies class at Haverstraw Middle School, teacher Eileen Bernstein chose Gaby and another girl for a demonstration of conditions on ships that carried slaves out of Africa.

One African-American student raised her hand to volunteer for the demonstration. Gaby did not volunteer, but was chosen anyway.

“She taped their hands together, taped their feet together, and she had them crawl under the desk as if they were on a slave ship,” her mother told CBS 2.

Mrs. Shand said Gaby was traumatized. She questions the teacher’s judgment.

“There are other ways to demonstrate slavery. There’s movies, you don’t actually have to grab two kids and like put shackles on them,” she said.

Wilbur Aldridge, the regional NAACP director, went with the Shands Thursday to meet Bernstein.

“She said she apologized for causing any problems for the child, but she was not apologizing for using that simulation during the class,” Aldridge said.

But Principal Avis Shelby apologized, calling the slave ship demonstration a “bad decision.”

“And we have things in place to make sure it doesn’t occur again,” Shelby added.

Actually, it was a little bit more than a “bad decision.” It was a horrible thing to do to a child, and saying “but oh, I was teaching about slavery so of course I had to use black students” doesn’t excuse the racism. There’s a reason that Bernstein felt that it was perfectly okay to bind those students and humiliate and traumatize them in front of their peers. There’s a reason that she’s not sorry. And there’s a reason why she still has her job.

Worse, the impression is given that Gaby will remain in the classroom with Bernstein. Of course, with Bernstein still in a job and no statement on whether or not she has even been reprimanded, the other option is to remove Gaby from the classroom as though she is the one who has done something wrong here. Nice situation.

School is supposed to be as safe a place as possible for students. And teachers are the last people who should ever make students feel unsafe in a place where they are supposed to be learning.

Renee has a really excellent post on the matter. Go check it out. She also shares the contact details of the school’s principle, and has written a letter asking him to treat this situation with the seriousness it deserves. I join her in encouraging you to do the same.

cross-posted at The Curvature

Civics Fail?

A new report has come out showing that average American citizens scored a failing grade of 49% on a test about American history, civics and economics, and elected officials did even worse at 44%.

At first this did disturb me, based on many of the questions that the article highlights, until I looked at the test. I took it, and scored a 75.76%. That is, of course, significantly better than the average reported in the article. But looking at the questions, a lot of the time I just had to ask myself “who the hell cares?”

I mean, we’re supposed to be upset that our elected officials don’t know the answers to these questions — and I personally am of the frame of mind that we should seek people to run our government who know more than most of us do — but in the end, who really cares what the Puritans believed, or what the main issue debated by Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas was regarding slavery when all were important questions, or what statement Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas would all agree with? I don’t, even if I do think they’re points of interest, nor do I particularly care whether most other people know these things.

The additional good news is that most public officials are going to be at low levels — city counsels and such. Though these people certainly have to be smart and know a lot of things to do a competent job, I don’t think that many aspects of national history are hugely relevant to those positions.

On the other hand, I think that there are real implications to people not knowing whether it’s Congress or the president who has the power to declare war. I’m also worried when people don’t know what the Electoral College is, let alone the basic aspects of how it works. I think there are further implications regarding the effectiveness of our school system when so many people can’t name two of the U.S.’s World War II enemies in a multiple choice question. And while some of the economics questions are ideologically driven, I do think that people ought to know what a profit is.

So, what do you think? First of all, how did you do on the test? And secondly, how much do you think it matters?