In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: November 2008

Reminder: A Feminist Town Forum Tonight

Feministe will be hosting, so tune in here at 7pm to follow along and chat with participants. The details:

A Feminist Town Forum
Wednesday, November 5 @ 7:00PM

Lesley University Ampitheater, 1815 Mass. Ave., Cambridge

PARTICIPATE IN PERSON: Lesley University Ampitheater, 1815 Mass. Ave., Cambridge

PARTICIPATE ONLINE IN REAL TIME: Participate by logging on 11/5 at 7PM EST to any of our participating blogs, including Feministe, Feministing, Girl with Pen, CrossLeft, WIMN’s Voices, No Cookies for Me, Viva La Feminista, Writes Like She Talks, Heartfeldt Politics, TakePart, The Sanctuary, The Real Deal, or at our mogulus channel.

It’s been a long election season, and now it’s time to come together to figure out what it all means and what’s next.

At this culmination of our This Is What Women Want election project, join us, our panel of national leaders, and feminists around the country to discuss what happened on Election Day, and what we should be thinking about and doing now to fight for equality and justice for all.

This is a first of its kind event convening feminists from around the country live via the blogosphere! Watch live, converse with other audience members around the country and submit your comments and questions in real time.

Panelists will include:

BYLLYE AVERY
Founder of the National Black Women’s Health Project and MacArthur Genius Award Recipient

MICHELLE GOLDBERG
Journalist and author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism

ANNE ELIZABETH MOORE
Critic, activist, artist, journalist and author

PAULA RAYMAN
Founding Director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Center

LORETTA ROSS
National Coordinator, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective

ANDREA BATISTA SCHLESINGER
Executive Director, Drum Major Institute for Public Policy

Come optimistic, disgruntled, angry, or just exhausted. Come in person or online. But come. We need to hear every voice and idea!

No We Can’t

I can’t share the sense of celebration today.

Last night, I guest-blogged the election returns here and I felt pretty good. Obama won; it’s historically important, and he has both much better ideas and much greater competence than the mediocrity the Republicans ran against him. Both houses are firmly in Democratic hands, and hopefully we can start to undo the damage that the conservative ascendency did to the judiciary. That’s all good.

But I can’t cheer because it looks like Prop 8 passed. I know some folks still believe the uncounted mail-in ballots will make up the 400,000 vote margin. I don’t believe it. I think California, one of only three states to recognize queer folks as full legal equals, just amended its Constitution to take that away.

On a thread the other day I asked what I would tell my children if Prop 8 passed. With this tight feeling in my throat, I’ve been trying to answer that question all day. I have to tell them that that America will always break their hearts. That the political entity formed with such expansive promise has always fallen short, that the American people, in whole or in part, have had to be dragged forward to the light, away from division and injustice, step by step, for our entire history as an independent country: that even at this late date, we remain so, so far. I have to tell them that Americans, even in the blue states, are a tolerant but not an accepting people — we want to extend our tolerance, by our leave, and not to greet all of our own on equal footing. That we want to condition our extension of rights; to preserve the legal demarcations that ratify condescension.

We always know it’s wrong, and we always do it again. From the Trail of Tears to Korematsu to Gitmo, from the sellout of Reconstruction to the about-face on marriage equality, we so often do the wrong thing. We’re always sorry … after the fact. But so often when we’re at the point of doing the right thing, we turn our backs and do the wrong thing.

I keep writing “we.” I have to tell my children that we fail, that we do the wrong thing. This is a representative government; a whole polity. We is not the United States of Blue States. We rejected secession, and buried 660,000 people to make all of us live under the same Constitution. We are Massachusetts, but We are Mississippi. We are Washington, but We are Missouri. And today We are all California. And We failed.

No We can’t.

Kipling, arch-colonialist and racist but a damned fine poet at times, wrote in “If”:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

Today is a day of both triumphs and disasters. When we went to bed last night, We were not saved, if maybe a little more than We had been the day before. And this morning We are more broken than We were when We went to bed. But today as yesterday, We fail, and We fall short, and We do the wrong thing, and our country is broken. So I’m not celebrating. And that the ways We fail often benefit me personally isn’t a comfort — it’s a rebuke of my complicity. Every day I benefit from it I cheat people who’ve never wronged me; who I’ve never met.

I’m going downstairs now to the drugstore near my office, and I’m going to get some black electrical tape, and I’m going to wear it over my wedding band, and I’m going to tell people that what happened is wrong. I need to do whatever I can to fix this, so that when my kids are old enough to ask, I have a better answer than “No We Can’t.”

Update: Angela in comments pointed out that quoting Kipling, at this historic moment, shows a lack of judgment. I agree, and I apologize. Hiding the mistake, in my view, will do less good than acknowledging it, so I’m leaving it there, with my apology here.

#44: Thoughts From Around The ‘Sphere

JJP links to this article on Alternet showcasing thoughts on the impending Barack Obama presidency by black leaders such as Maya Angelou, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, and others. Maya Angelou, initially a Hillary Clinton supporter, says,

I never thought I’d see a black president in the White House in my lifetime. I didn’t even dare dream it. I feel like a child approaching Christmas, you can’t believe election day is finally here. It’s been so long since we’ve had people — Asian and black, white and Spanish-speaking — come together and say YES. Some did during the civil rights struggle but not as many as today. What it means if Mr Obama is voted in, is that my country has agreed to grow up, and move beyond the childish idea that human beings are different.

Read More…Read More…

The Good, The Bad, and The Downright Ugly

The Good

President Obama.  Of course.

The Democrats now have 56 seats in the Senate. Four seats are still undecided, according to CNN, but it looks like they’re all going to go Republican.  Our best shot to pick up one last seat is Al Franken in Minnesota — who, with supposedly 100% of the vote counted, is less than 600 votes behind.

The Democrats now have 252 seats in the House, which is a 16 seat gain.  Ten seats are still undecided.

Democrats have a majority in the NY State Senate for the first time since the New Deal. Wow.  Do you mean that we might actually get some shit done?

Kay Hagan got Elizabeth Dole out of office. Gotta love that.

The South Dakota abortion ban, Measure 11, was decisively knocked down by a 10 point margin. A huge congrats to all of my friends at SD Healthy Families!

Amendment 48, the so-called Human Life Amendment, was shot down by remarkable margins, with 73% voting No.

It looks like California has shot down Prop 4, the anti-abortion parental notification initiative, with 95% of the vote in and 52% voting No.

Michigan has voted to allow stem-cell research and possession of medical marijuana.

Anti-immigrant initiative Measure 58 was shot down in Oregon.

Read More…Read More…

A mixed bag in the states

I went to bed too early last night to see the results of all the ballot measures, but it looks like the results are mixed. Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, is being contested, although supporters are claiming victory. Gays and lesbians were also targeted with victorious hate legislation in Arkansas, Florida and Arizona. The good news is that South Dakota and Colorado voters rejected their states’ anti-choice measures. Washington passed physician-assisted suicide legislation. Michigan will now allow for the use of medical marijuana, and Massachusetts decriminalized small-scale marijuana possession. California passed an animal welfare law.

In other words, more good than bad — but what’s bad is really bad. I’m hoping that opponents of Proposition 8 are right and that once all the votes are in, California voters will have rejected it, mostly because I just can’t imagine what’s in someone’s mind when they’re in the voting booth pulling “yes” on 8. But I’m not optimistic.

Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress

Funny because it’s true.

After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

Trust me, you’ll want to read it to the end.

Oh Fuuuuuck Yeah

Yes we did.

I love living in New York, but this is maybe the night I’ve loved it most. Everyone is in the streets cheering. People are yelling “Yes We Can!” to strangers. I watched two girls hug on a street corner, and a smiled as a car full of cheering boys drove past me. Taxis are honking. Before the election was called for Obama, I was in my office in midtown working late, and every hour and a half or so, all the way up on the 30th floor, I would hear a huge swelling cheer from the street — and a quick click over to NBC would show that Obama had just won one state or another. I haven’t seen people this excited any other time in my life; I also haven’t ever heard a speech like the one Obama gave tonight. New Yorkers waited in two, three, and four-hour-long lines today to cast ballots overwhelmingly for a candidate we all knew was going to win our state. That’s an incredible show not only of patriotism and of support for this one man, but, to use a popular word this year, of hope.

My mom, a former Hillary Clinton supporter raised on the South side of Chicago, sent me two text messages tonight — one saying that she’s outside the house in our quiet, manicured suburb banging pots and pans to celebrate the victory of a south-side boy (she ended the text with “Only in America! The audacity of hope”), and another saying “This makes me proud to be an American again.”

In law school I studied for a semester in Hamburg, Germany, and lived with a pretty cool German dude. We keep in touch, and he sent me a message the other day to let me know that, at our little private (fairly conservative) northern German business law school, 1500 people turned up for an election party — the vast majority of them in support of Barack Obama. 1500 people. For Obama. In Germany. At one tiny school. I don’t even think 1500 people attend the school.

My best friend since I was 12 currently lives in rural Arizona with her husband, a former Marine. Her mother’s family was one of the first black families to live in our town. She was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and left the church a few years ago. This is the first election she voted in. She’s spent the past few weeks worrying that Obama had no chance — after all, we may have been raised in liberal Seattle, but now she lives in a place where the n-word is tossed around pretty freely and she’s the only Democrat in sight. She texted me intermittently throughout the night because, having never voted or followed an election before, she couldn’t really follow what all the conflicting and confusing results meant — so she wanted to know, “When can I be excited?” When they called the election for Obama, she was the first person I called, so that I could tell her as much as myself: “Now.”

Earlier we were talking about our states of mind. Right now, I feel nothing but pride.

Live-Blogging Election Night

Welcome Feministe readers! Here’s your election night live-blog. We’ll be moderating out the comments as often as possible, but since we all have various plans, some may be stuck for a while. But please feel free to participate, and we’ll clear you for posting as soon as we can. In addition to your Feministe regulars, our other Live Bloggers are:

Little Light: Little Light is a twenty-five-year-old able-bodied mixed-class trans dyke of color from the U.S. Pacific Northwest. A writer, preacher, media activist, street medic, and religion scholar, she has been holding her breath for a solid month waiting for tonight. Any allegations that she totally cried during the Obama infomercial are, of course, entirely false, and besides, you can’t prove anything.

DeviousDiva

Natalia: Natalia Antonova is editor of GlobalComment.com. She was born in the USSR, lived most of her life in North Carolina (c’mon and raise up), and is presently working in the Middle East.

Mikey: Mikey is a heartbroken young lawyer in Brooklyn. When people ask, he says he’s a community organizer. He just bought three huge cupcakes from Crumbs. He will eat them all right now. He misses David Foster Wallace and palls around with feminists. He was Lil’ Wayne Palin for Halloween.

Renee

Terrance

Daisy: Daisy is a 51-year-old feminist, grandmother, old-hippie herbalist and tarot-reader, redneck southerner, and lifelong political junkie. Her first presidential campaign involved leafleting door-to-door for George McGovern at age 15, in which she first learned what it was to have unpopular opinions! (That war threatened to go on forever, too.)

Katie: Katie Loncke, 22, spends her time healing from a recent four-year stint at Harvard, where she double majored in social theory and feminist studies, and co-authored a progressive/radical student blog called Cambridge Common. She works at a book store, cooks for her friends, writes letters by hand, and participates at a queer-and-POC-friendly meditation center near her apartment. Like Obama, she’s got the black-dad-white-mom thing going on. Unlike Obama, she has never danced on national television. Katie is a long-time fan of Feministe.

Allison: Allison Martell is a student and journalist in Toronto, Canada. Last summer she guest blogged about economics and feminism for Feministe, and her own site is at www.economicwoman.com.

evil fizz: evil fizz is attorney who works for the US government. She would tell you more about her work, but it is the government after all. She lives outside of Seattle.

Anna: Anna is a public high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York and the co-creator of Macha Mexico: A Lesbian Guide to Mexico City, an English-language blog about queer life for women in Mexico City. Even though she has some major reservations about the institution of marriage, as a dyke and a native Californian she is closely following Proposition 8 in addition to the presidential election.

Jessica: Jessica Stites is an assistant editor at Ms. magazine. When she’s not rabidly following election results, she likes sci-fi and word games. Geek the vote!

Thomas: Thomas MacAulay Millar is a cisgendered het white male, a New York – area litigator, a feminist, a progressive, a spouse, a parent and a Scottish-American, not necessarily in that order. He has commented and occasionally guest-posted at Feministe since 2004 as “Thomas” or “Thomas, TSID.”

Katrina: Katrina Lynne Baker is a Living Liberally National Director and National Organizer. Living Liberally is dedicated to creating communities around progressive politics. Through social networks and events, Living Liberally promotes political engagement, and facilitates collaboration among progressive organizations. The organization believes that our political identity should be part of our regular lives and creates easy entryways into progressive political involvement, where you can find a community that shares your values. Living Liberally has approximately 300 chapters, with at least one in every state, and chapters in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Its programs include Drinking Liberally, Eating Liberally, Reading Liberally, Laughing Liberally, and Screening Liberally. Katrina works in the area of employment law and previously founded and hosted Ithaca’s first weekly three-hour feminist radio show, Eve Outloud.

Enjoy! And go Obama!

It’s that time…

[This post will remain at the top of the page until the results are all in and we have a new president-elect; check directly below for the Feministe live-blog and other new posts]

Get yer up-to-date election results here: