August 2009 – Feministe

Eno Road

Writing about the Kingston Ash Spill reminded me of the whole Eno Road situation, which is another instance of environmental racism and the stupidity that results (I wrote about it last year, better than I am doing now). Here you have an instance of blatant racism, where white people were told of the dangers of the dump long before black people were. But you also have the kind of racism that bites white people in the ass, where now that a public face has been put on the problem and that public face is black, white people run around acting immune from the problem.

So while the poor Holt family is still trying to get some justice (justice which would benefit everyone in town, let me add), white people are building lovely homes right on the back side of the dump, a dump that has never been properly dealt with, which may still be leaking toxic chemicals.

I mean, what do you even say in the face of that?

Fallout from the Kingston Ash Spill

Last December 22, a retaining wall at the Kingston Fossil Plant (run by the TVA) gave way and dumped over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry across a great swath of Roane County, Tennessee. It was one of the worst, if not the worst, man-made environmental disasters in our country’s history. People’s homes were swept away. Nearby rivers and streams were poisoned. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, or what you’ve heard about it.

The experience, even over here in Nashville, was that it was just a little something that happened, not that bad. It’s only been in the ensuing months, as the TVA’s obfuscations have become clearer that the scope of the disaster is coming into focus.

All along the way, it seems, we have made deals with the Devil.

Oh, the TVA. Yes, it brought electricity to the South and with it, air conditioning, and with that, modern civilization (I over-simplify some, but only a little). In exchange, though, there are towns sitting at the bottom of vast lakes, ‘lost’ cemeteries filled with loved ones. And we haven’t even touched on coal itself, a devil’s bargain if ever there was one. Yes, it brings money into regions that otherwise would be dirt poor, but at the cost of people’s health and their lives. They sometimes blow the tops off of mountains to get to it. And, in order to burn it for electricity, the TVA has to have somewhere to put the fly ash that’s a byproduct of the process.

And then the TVA gets a couple of decades of lax oversight and the ability to be a private enterprise when they need to be and a government enterprise when it suits them and before long you have 5.4 million cubic yards of muck spilling out of a pond the TVA claimed only held 2.6 million cubic yards.

And now, the TVA is shipping the coal ash they’re cleaning up from the site to Perry County, Alabama. The New York Times article is interesting and heart-breaking.

To county leaders, the train’s loads, which will total three million cubic yards of coal ash from a massive spill at a power plant in east Tennessee last December, are a tremendous financial windfall. A per-ton “host fee” that the landfill operators pay the county will add more than $3 million to the county’s budget of about $4.5 million.

The ash has created more than 30 jobs for local residents in a county where the unemployment rate is 17 percent and a third of all households are below the poverty line. A sign on the door of the landfill’s scale house says job applications are no longer being accepted — 1,000 were more than enough.

But some residents worry that their leaders are taking a short-term view, and that their community has been too easily persuaded to take on a wealthier, whiter community’s problem. “Money ain’t worth everything,” said Mary Gibson Holley, 74, a black retired teacher in Uniontown. “In the long run, they ain’t looking about what this could do to the community if something goes wrong.”

It’s true that Roane County, Tennessee, is whiter than Perry Country, Alabama, but I was a bit taken aback by the claim that Roane County was richer.

And then I remembered that Oak Ridge is in Roane County, which does indeed mean that the residents of Roane County are, on average, richer than the residents of Perry County. But I don’t think I have to spell out for you what the citizens of Roane County had to accept in order to get that higher income. Another devil’s deal.

So, when it comes to putting this fly ash someplace, the charges of racism have been flying–environmentalists are claiming environmental racism because the fly ash is going to a predominately black community; some folks in the community are claiming that it would be racist to deny them the fly ash, like “Here come the white folks to protect the black folks from themselves.”

And, frankly, from where I sit, both claims seem to be oversimplified but also probably true. Isn’t that the pernicious thing about how we do racism in America? There can be racism on both sides and probably is.

Still, I like how Southern Beale puts it: there is something really fucked up about asking anyone to choose between poverty and poison.

(Cross-posted at Tiny Cat Pants)

Hi there! And an intro and some thoughts on food.

Greetings, Feministe folks. I’m excited to be guest posting here again.

Some of you may know me as the founding editor and publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. Since leaving Bitch I’ve done a bunch of different things, many of which are too boring to talk about. But one of interesting ones (if I do say so myself) is that I wrote a cookbook. It’s called Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy Local Eating, and its goal is to give people who want to eat more local and unprocessed foods the tools they need to put their food politics into practice.

A lot of people who know me from the earlier part of my professional life have been kinda surprised by this turn of events. So I thought I’d start this week with a little background on it all came about.

About six years ago, when food miles and hydrogenated oils were both starting to make news, I had a new coworker who was superhardcore in her commitment to veganism and whole foods (that would be eating unprocessed things, not the union-busting grocery chain with the anti-health-care-reform CEO). As she and I became friends, we talked endlessly about the politics and ethics of food, the connections between those politics and seemingly unrelated social justice movements, the health benefits of unrefined food, and all sorts of tasty cooking ideas.

As my interest grew in the consequences of our industrialized food system both macro (the carbon footprint of wintertime plums flown in from Chile, oceanic dead zones caused by manure-filled runoff from factory farms) and micro (eating sugar and white flour makes me sleepy, and if I eat one piece of candy I usually end up eating 12 and feeling like I’ve poisoned myself), eating locally was becoming a trend and the news was full of stories about salmonella-tainted spinach and tomatoes, melamine-tainted milk and eggs, meat recalls, and popcorn-factory workers getting lung disease from artificial-butter fumes.

A bunch of high-profile writers have been covering this for quite a while lately, so it’s likely not news to you, but it all bears repeating: The average bite of food travels 1,500 miles from where it’s grown to where it is eaten. Monoculture crops and centralized food distribution vastly increase the likelihood of outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. U.S. farm subsidies benefit massive corporate farmers using huge amounts of chemical inputs on their monoculture crops—much of which will be processed into animal feed, high-fructose corn syrup, and other products of dubious value—at the expense of small farmers growing food that can be eaten, by people, without further ado. These subsidies enable the processed, packaged food that fills the middle of the supermarket and derives its nutrition, if it has any at all, from vitamins added back in after they’ve been stripped out in processing. Farmworkers labor under dangerous conditions for very little pay. With only a few hard-to-find exceptions, animals are raised on factory farms under hideous conditions. In short, the U.S. food system—which, through globalization and other related forces, reverberates worldwide—has been designed and built by agribusiness to maximize profits. People who eat food and live with the consequences of this food system (not to mention the animals that are used for food by those of us who choose to eat meat, eggs, and dairy products) lose big.

But knowing all this doesn’t necessarily mean you can put any of it into practice in your own life unless you have some other skills as well. And the chef-worshipping, refined-palate-fetishizing aspects of foodie culture make cooking out to be this rarefied skill set beyond the reach of average people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cooking a tasty, wholesome meal is easy, and anyone who learns a few simple techniques can do it. I wanted to make a quick tool to teach those techniques.

I’m also really excited by the fact that thinking about food this way intersects with so many feminist/social justice issues, from general and huge ones like labor practices and environmental health to more specific ones like the struggle to relate to our bodies through making them feel strong and good rather than making them look “good” as defined by a dysfuntional culture.

So that’s the short version of how Cook Food came to be.

A few other things I’d like to mention: There’s an interview with me on Salon today, by the ever-awesome Jaclyn Friedman, coeditor of Yes Means Yes and all–around smarty-pants. (Plus, there are already some fat shamers and MRAs commenting there, so feminist support would be much appreciated!)

Also, I’m blogging about food and stuff at www.cook-food.org, where there are also places to talk about your favorite foods, share recipes, and whatnot—I’d love it if you stopped by. And I have also gotten over my social-media aversion and gotten to tweeting, so you can follow me, @cook_food, if you’re so inclined.

Next up: fat.

Thanks Feministe and Good-Bye

I would like to thank the Feministe bloggers for so generously sharing their space with me. I really appreciate the opportunity to engage with such a large audience. Thanks everyone for the great conversations that went on in comments. Remember that we cannot always agree but if we are engaging with each other, there is always the possibility of change.

If you enjoy the work that I have done here, don’t forget to look me up at my blog Womanist Musings. I will continue to examine the serious issues, as well as have weekly silliness like Sunday Shame and a weekly True Blood break down. I can also be found at Global Comment and Anti-Racist Parent.

Thanks again and I hope to see you all soon.

Nice to Be Here

Whew, I am thrilled and nervous to be here. Let’s see. What do you need to know about me off the bat? I blog primarily at Tiny Cat Pants, which is rapidly approaching its 5th Anniversary. I also blog under my given name, Betsy Phillips, at Pith in the Wind, which is the Nashville Scene‘s blog, the Nashville Scene being our local alternative newspaper.

It’s funny, when I first started blogging, I felt so certain about things. But being on the internet, even with a small audience, for five years has really humbled me to how much I don’t know. Which I think has lead my writing to be a lot more place-specific, I think, a lot more, “This is what I see, and this is how I understand it.” So, I imagine the same will be true of my writing here. Y’all are probably going to hear a lot more about Nashville and Tennessee in general than you ever cared to.

Still, I think it’ll be useful. A lot happens here because of the fucked up ways we think about race and gender and hierarchies of all sorts.

I’m a heathen, though not a very formal one. I hope we can talk about that, too, why I, the daughter of a Methodist minister, left Christianity and became a polytheist. I know paganism, broadly, is loaded with feminists, and yet, it seems to me, we rarely talk openly about what we pagans believe and why to other feminists. And for good reasons. I know I feel like a damn fool when I talk about it, but it’s important to me and a lot of the reason I left Christianity had to do with being a woman, so maybe we can just try it and see how it goes.

I read tarot cards (though I don’t think that’s actually a “woo-woo” skill, at least not 99.9% of the time), and I think we might talk about that, some, too.

I’d also like to talk about my recent forays into genealogy. I don’t know how common it is among white people, but I had grown up with a pretty strong dose of “Well, that wasn’t us!” I’m sure you know it. We didn’t own slaves. We didn’t hang witches. We didn’t… blah blah blah. We sprang from the Midwestern dirt fully formed and became railroad people and farmers and fought for the Union purely because slavery was wrong! Don’t blame us.

Well, it turns out…

Yeah, it was us.

So, that’s me. My comment policy emerges directly from my religious beliefs. I believe in establishing a feeling of “frith” a term we can stretch to mean the everyone working to establish and maintain the luck, or well-being, of the community. Raucous disagreements and smarty-pants comments and wild tangents for the sake of trying to get at something you didn’t understand before are all welcome. But the good fortune of the community should be first and foremost on everyone’s minds. I don’t make it a habit of deleting comments, but, of course, I’ve never had an audience this big.

So, we’ll see how it goes.

Moni’s Ground Rules

sistah on computer
Hello Feministe!

I’m Monica Roberts, AKA the TransGriot for those of you who have yet to be introduced to my writing either at my home blog, the Bilerico Project, or various places such as Racialicious, What Tami Said or Womanist Musings.

For the next two weeks I’ll be guest posting here thanks to the gracious invitation extended to me by the Feministe editing team.

So that we have a relatively smooth period of discourse here, I’m going to lay out the basics of my thought processes, my beliefs and my pet peeves.

I am a Texas born, African descended liberal progressive trans woman who grew up in the 70’s. I’m proud of my Texas and African roots and being a Phenomenal Transwoman. The way I look at issues is unapologetically filtered through a chocolate tinted prism.

To borrow the words of the late African-American DJ Jack ‘The Rapper’ Gibson, I’m tellin’ it like it T-I-S is.

Translation- I’m brutally honest and straightforward with my opinions on various issues of the day, so what I put on this electronic page is what I think and believe, and I stand behind every word of it.

I’m not into sugar coating crap to make it palatable for people. Some of what I write about is going to make people uncomfortable.

But to quote the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks, “truth tellers are not always palatable. There’s a preference for candy bars.’

That’s a nice segue into the next rule of mine. I borrowed it from my Canadian homegirl Renee, and if you haven’t heard it, here it is.

If it ain’t about you, don’t make it about you!

When I write about issues, I think in broad terms and rarely use the word ‘some’ unless it’s absolutely necessary.

You’re a bright bunch of people here at Feministe, so I know you can discern for yourselves that whatever critique I write over the next two weeks is aimed solely at the people who exhibit said behaviors.

When I talk about racism, it is with the racism= prejudice plus power formula in mind. Racism is NOT an individual act, it is a systemic one.

I embrace the definition of it as prejudice combined with power (economic, social, military or police) used by the majority group or individuals within the majority group to retard the social. political or economic forward progress of a minority group or persons within that minority group.

As a child of educators I abhor ignorance. If you wish to rationally debate me, bring it on. But note I said RATIONALLY debate me.

Oh yeah, I get to define rational..

And finally, I have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic comments.

If you try Moni on this and think you’re slick enough to slide some racist reference by me, don’t. I will not hesitate to have you banned.

So now that I’ve laid out my ground rules and a sense of the person behind the monitor, hope you’ll enjoy the thought provoking and discussion stimulating posts I have planned for you over the next two weeks.

But my goal here, as it is at TransGriot and anywhere else you’ve seen my writing on the Net, is to get you to think.

Looking forward to an interesting two weeks

The Fiction of Binary, Fixed Gender

Though I have long been a supporter of organized sports for young women, I cannot let Kai Wright’s piece on Caster Semenya go unnoticed here, particularly not after the comments produced on the Beauty and Power post on gender presentation in the women’s bodybuilding set late last year:

[…] the reality is that Semenya may be neither “boy” nor “girl,” or could be both. And who cares? It happens. Our social certainty about the male-female divide is not supported by biology. As Northwestern University bioethics professor Alice Dreger told the New York Times last week, “As I like to say, ‘Humans like categories neat, but nature is a slob.’ ”

Children are routinely born with cellular variation on the XX and XY chromosome sets that define boy and girl status. Hormone levels vary, too, as do the secondary traits we associate with a given sex. People have large, protruding clitorises; scrotums divided such that they look like labia; inactive hormone receptors and on and on. Anywhere from 1 in 1,500 to 1 in 2,000 births require specialists to assign a child’s sex, according to the Intersex Society of North America. After these assignments are made, cruel plastic surgeries to “correct” perfectly natural physical variations are often performed for no medical purpose whatsoever. Kids are mutilated to ensure they fit comfortably inside our mythical gender boxes.

We cling to this lie of binary genders for the same reason we fantasize about the essential nature of race: to make unjust social hierarchies seem natural. But they’re not. They’re man-made, and competitive sports have long been a tool for keeping them in place.

Check out the full piece at The Root.

Man charged with kidnapping 11 year old girl and imprisoning her for 18 years suspected in serial killings of 10 prostitutes

(via Bound, Not Gagged)

This story is beyond sickening. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a man named Phillip Garrido and his wife pleaded not guilty to abducting Jaycee Lee Dugard 18 years ago, who they had allegedly kept imprisoned on their property since then. During this time, Dugard had two children, allegedly fathered by Garrido. Apparently authorties were notified recently after Garrido brought these two girls to the UC Berkley campus to discuss “holding an event related to God, the FBI and other topics.” Campus police were sketched out by Garrido and the “robotic” behavior of his daughters. Officer Ally Jacobs did a background check and discovered that he had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in the 1970s. She called his parole officer, who further freaked her out by revealing that Garrido supposedly had no children. A parole officer (presumably the same one Jacobs contacted, though the article is unclear,) visited the Garrido house and interviewed the family, including Dugard, who revealed that she was the 11 year old girl who had disappeared 18 years ago, and presumably was like “get me and my kids the fuck out of here right now.”

Supposedly here reunion with her parents has gone “well.” I can’t even imagine. At least she and her daughters are out of there and Garrido and his wife are in custody and being charged with a lot of things.

Police are now searching his house for evidence that links him to the unsolved murders of 10 prostitutes during the 1990s. Garrido worked in an area where some of the women were found.

The horror here is beyond words, and I hope that Dugard and her daughters will receive the help they need to heal and move forward. I would also like to echo a commenter on the Bound, Not Gagged post who argued that this guy would probably not have been able to get away with all this for so long if prostitution was not criminalized. Criminalization kills sex workers. I am tired of anyone arguing otherwise in the name of paternalistically “helping” the very population their prefered policies endanger and drive underground.

Adios, Feministe!

My two weeks of guest posting are up today, a big thanks to Jill and everybody here at the Feministe community for welcoming me.

You can find me over at Amplify, where (in my highly biased opinion) we have some of the best young feminist bloggers you’ll find on the internet tubes.

I leave you with some video from Nebraska yesterday, where Dr. Carhart’s allies outnumbered Operation Rescue almost 3:1. Yes, the clinic will stay open, for a long, long time.

So Long, Farewell

It’s been a lot of fun – you all have kept me on my toes and made me think. I haven’t had time to post as much as I’d have like, but then I haven’t had time to sleep as much as I’d have liked or spend as much time with my kid, so at least that’s all in a weird sort of balance.

I appreciate the larger soapbox and am reminded, again, how much comments mean to bloggers. I wil try to be a more active commenter here and elsewhere if I can. Thanks so much to the regular Feministe bloggers for inviting me and for maintaining and supporting this wonderful place.

Be well.