Class – Page 6 – Feministe

American icon “Norma Rae” dies after struggling with her insurance company to cover her chemo

crystalleesutton_de54b

La Lubu already wrote about this (do check out her post), but I want to re-emphasize it: Crystal Lee Sutton, the woman who fought to unionize her workplace and inspired the film Norma Rae, passed away at 68. She died of brain cancer, after battling for her insurance company to cover her chemotherapy.

She could change the face of labor rights in the United States, but couldn’t get health care coverage until it was too late. Sutton’s life was inconic and patriotic; her death is tragic and all too American.

The Jill Question: What is the Role of Privileged White Women in the Reproductive Justice Movement?

Several years ago, a colleague and I were invited to speak at a conference of progressive law students at Harvard. We were there to share the results of our research project on young women of color, which made clear that the ways reproductive health and rights activists talked to young women did not resonate with them. Our research also stressed that young women were interested in a more holistic health agenda that emphasized not just reproductive and sexual health, but also mental health.

After our presentations, my colleague and I sat at a table in one of the meeting areas. We were interrupted by one of the law students who had heard our presentation. Her name was Jill. She had a question that she hadn’t gotten a chance to ask during the session. “How can a privileged, white woman like me do this work?” We were completely taken aback. That question seems to lurk just below the surface of these conversations, but rarely does anyone strike up the courage to ask it. My colleague and I looked at each other and decided to engage with Jill honestly. We were eager for a meaningful conversation that would challenge the power structures in the reproductive health and rights movement as well as long-held and firmly entrenched ideas about what our priorities should be and who we were fighting for.

For almost two hours we talked about the how the movement’s laser-focus on abortion, and to a lesser extent, birth control, neglected many other issues, concerns that were more salient and critical to women and communities of color. Issues like health care and economic security. We talked about how the language used in our messaging and other communications alienated women by focusing on privacy and individualistic frames, and failing to incorporate ideas of family and community. As time passed, more law students joined us. They surrounded us; some sat down; none joined in the conversation; but they all listened. This was clearly a question that many of them were struggling with. As law students and future lawyers, they were in positions of power that most of us are not, nor ever will be. How could they lend their skills to this movement in a different way? How could they contribute to a broad, holistic agenda without reinforcing the inequities around race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, etc?

In the time since that conversation, reproductive justice has emerged as a powerful frame to address many of the issues that we talked about on that winter day. Both my organization and I have undergone our own transformations, realizing that reproductive justice is inherently about power – shifting it, building it and leveraging it so that we can all lead healthy lives. We use the language of reproductive justice to anchor the lived experiences of marginalized communities, especially women of color, at the core of this fight. And we challenge the status quo by presenting a whole new vision for what the world could look like.

Yet the question remains. What is the role of privileged white women in the reproductive justice movement? The reason this question is so hard is because at its heart, this question is about power. It’s easier to recognize how we are oppressed than it is to articulate the privilege we benefit from. It’s not as if oppression and privilege cancel each other out. This isn’t arithmetic. And we have to figure out how we want to live our lives based on how both have shaped our world view. Ultimately, answering this question means we must acknowledge that the privilege white women benefit from continues to silence those most affected by reproductive oppression.

So back to the “Jill question”. These are my thoughts based on conversations I have had over the years. None of it is particularly innovative or earth-shattering but I want to put it out there as a way to continue what I think is an important conversation. Reproductive justice cannot succeed if white women, privileged or otherwise are not part of the fight.

Start with yourself. Come to terms with your privilege. Then reconcile that with how you have been affected by systems of oppression. A fuller, more honest understanding of how structures like racism and heterosexism dominate our society and undermine the health and well-being of our communities is critical to advancing reproductive justice for all people.
Do the work that needs to be done. You know best what you can contribute to the movement. Your skills, your resources, your very being are important to building a powerful, vibrant movement. Can you volunteer to make phone calls to your state representatives? Can you make a donation to an annual campaign? What about serving on the Board of Directors of a local organization? These are all ways that you can move the work of reproductive justice forward.

Organize in your own communities. We all come from communities, ethnic, religious, political, and otherwise. You can educate and organize others in your community, starting with friends, peers and family. Explain to them the importance of reproductive justice, why you are committed to that vision and get them involved in the movement.

Build and share power. That means working in solidarity with others to create a strong base of support and leadership to advance our agenda. This may mean also that the people and organizations that we have traditionally looked to for leadership, take a different role, and that we make space for new voices and develop new leaders.

Confronting privilege, in all forms, is a critical exercise in achieving reproductive justice. How do we support each other through that process, while we also hold each other accountable for the privilege we benefit from?

Embracing Justice, or How I Left Choice Behind

(Full disclosure: This is an update of previous essay I wrote. I still think it’s relevant and wanted to share it with you.)

I’ve been pro-choice all of my life. And yet, I remember the day that revealed what Choice really meant to me. I was seventeen and on vacation from my fancy boarding school, where I was a scholarship student. As usual, my friends and I were meeting at our junior high school to spend the day together. I was just back from visiting colleges that summer, and I had my heart set on going to an Ivy League school. My father dropped out of the ninth grade. Pop, my maternal grandfather, left school in third grade to support himself by running errands and doing odd jobs. Going to college, particularly an elite school was a big deal to my entire family, and my chances for going to one of those schools were looking good.

I hopped onto the train headed downtown and slid into an empty seat. Next to me sat another young Latina, and like me she was wearing bright red lipstick and hoop earrings. We both had long curly hair, which she wore loose down her back. I was much less confident and wore my mass of hair in a ponytail high on my head. She seemed deep in thought when I saw it – a neon green pamphlet. In big bold letters on the front it read, “After your abortion, then what?” My mind exploded. What was she doing with that pamphlet? This girl was my age, from my neighborhood; our families were probably from the same island. For all I knew we could have been related. Why her and not me? I could have just as easily been sitting in her seat holding that green pamphlet. Instead, I had dreams of making the honor roll and going to Yale, and she was considering her “then what?”

A few months later, I was back at school working on my college applications and dreading the personal essay I had to write. Then I remembered that day on the train. I went back to my dorm and searched my journal for the entry I had written about the Latina with the neon green pamphlet. She changed my life that day. In my eyes, she was doing the best she could to make her life better, to make the right decisions for herself. I wanted to reach out to her and hug her that day, let her know that she wasn’t alone, but I couldn’t. So I did the only thing I could think of – I pulled my journal out of my bag and started to write. I didn’t want to lose a single detail of that train ride or the young Latina, who could have easily been me. Later that year, I earned a place in Yale’s freshmen class, I think in large part, because of her. I never knew her name or the outcome of her “then what?” But I hoped that her life’s path had lead her to amazing places, and I was grateful an abortion would allow her a different “then what?” than might have been possible otherwise.

Since that train ride, I remained steadfast and loyal to the ideals embodied in Choice. But over time, my work with young women made clear to me that Choice and I were no longer a good fit. Choice is meaningless without access to information, funding or services. Choice doesn’t address classism, racism or sexism, for that matter. Choice doesn’t shift POWER to the most vulnerable. And I’m no longer confident that I alone can make the world better for women and girls. After years of being firmly rooted in Choice, I realized that it speaks only to a small part of the way I live in this world, and I must have more than that. I deserve more than that. Yes, we owe a tremendous debt to all those who fought for Choice, but I’ve realized that my relationship with Choice just isn’t enough for me anymore, and it shouldn’t be enough for any of us.

I have left Choice behind for something more. I have embraced Justice. Justice gives us the tools to identify power and talk about it, but it doesn’t stop there. Justice requires us to confront power when exercised against us, acquire it and use it to create change that benefits us all. Justice helps us understand whatever privilege we may enjoy without blaming us or pitting us against each other. Or without letting us off the hook. With Justice I can be a whole person, and not just the sum of my identities. And with Justice I can I bring all of myself to every issue I care about.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I often respond, “I’m trying to change the world.” Choice is not going to deliver us from the multiple oppressions we suffer as women, women of color, young women, immigrant women, queer folk, low-income women and disabled women. Justice just may. And that’s what Justice is at its core – about trying to change the world. There’s nothing wrong with Choice, we’ve simply outgrown it. We need something more radical, more revolutionary than Choice. We need Justice, not just for ourselves, but for all of us. Surely, we deserve that.

“Soy Aimée, la de Zaida.”

My apologies for being late with this first post, but Mercury in Retrograde has been kicking my butt. Anyway, as a guest-blogger, I realize that I need to introduce myself to the Feministe community. I thought I’d start out with an anecdote:

When I was younger, I spent summers in Puerto Rico with my grandparents. It was an opportunity to get out of New York for a while and meant my mother didn’t have to worry about what to do with me for the months that school was out of session. Aguadilla is a pretty small town, and my grandparents seemed to know everyone. I rarely knew these people, and by way of introduction, they would invariably say “Ésta es Aimée, la de Zaida.” Roughly, that translates as, “This is Aimée, Zaida’s daughter.” Even then I was fascinated by this idea that I didn’t stand on my own, but that my existence depended on my relationship to others, in this case, my mother.

That sense of self, that I exist in relationship to and with others has been a big part of my life and in many ways guides my work. As a reproductive justice activist (www.protectchoice.org) and general trouble-maker, I am rooted in the real lived experiences of the communities I come from. Whether it’s my ethnic community (Puerto Ricans), my sports community (Go Yankees!) or my political community (Radicals and Progressives), I see myself as part of a larger group of people with shared values and a shared worldview. I bring all those people with me to everything I do. So what does that mean? It means I focus on issues of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, ability, sexual orientation and sexual identity. I follow politics to understand how the issues I care about are dealt with (or more often the case, ignored) and how they impact our daily lives. I think about power constantly – who has it, who doesn’t, how is it being used to advance a more just world and how is it being used to keep people down.

And I think a lot about cancer. Ten months ago my mother, Zaida, was diagnosed with stage 3 gastric cancer. I’ll write more about that later. For now, let’s just say that cancer has become a big part of my life.

So over the next week that we’re sharing this space, I hope we’ll get to know each other, challenge other and support each other. Respectfully. In the meantime, allow me to introduce myself, “Soy Aimée, la de Zaida.”

Some thoughts on class and food

So, folks in the comment thread on yesterday’s post want to talk about class and the food system, and the ways in which conversations about sustainability are so very classed (and, often, classist).

To which I say: Word!

And then it’s kinda hard to know what else to say.

Ok, not really. But kinda.

Six Women Murdered, Three Still Missing, and Nobody Seems to Notice

NC Women Slain

There is quite seemingly a serial killer loose in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. And if there’s not, there certainly still is a murderous epidemic. Nine women have disappeared since 2005, and six bodies have so far been found.

Since 2005, nine women who lived at the edges of the poor community in this small North Carolina city have disappeared. Six bodies were found along rural roads just a few miles outside town, most so decomposed that investigators could not tell how they died. At least one of the women was strangled, and all the deaths have been classified as homicides. Three women are still missing.

Police will not say whether they suspect a serial killer, but people in the community about 60 miles northeast of Raleigh do, and they’re impatient with law enforcement efforts to investigate the slayings.

The community in which these women all lived is apparently a poor, rural one. Many residents suffer from drug addiction, and many women sell sex to make ends meet. It’s unclear from the article whether every woman who has gone missing so far was a sex worker, but it is indicated that at least several were. Many if not all were in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. And according to both the available photographs and an article in The Loop, all were black.

Had you heard this story? Until last week, I hadn’t. Until last week, at which point more media accounts began popping up, pretty much no one outside the town had. And I do believe that I just outlined the reasons why up above.

Is it a crime to be poor?

That’s what Barbara Ehrenreich asks in her latest New York Times op/ed, and the answer is a pretty resounding “yes.” Low-income people — and especially low-income people of color — are routinely targeted by police as communities continue to criminalize actions associated with the poor (sleeping on the street, receiving free food, walking into public housing without ID, etc). It’s a must-read piece.

Cirila Baltazar Cruz and The Plight Of The Unworthy

In recent weeks, the startling story of Cirila Baltazar Cruz has been stirring outrage and splitting spleens in certain corners of blogland, though it has yet to receive mainstream attention. Some details remain fuzzy, and we have yet to hear directly from the person at the center of the story, Ms. Cruz herself; and indeed we aren’t likely to hear from her anytime soon because her case is currently under a court gag order.

Here’s what we have so far: Cirila Baltazar Cruz gave birth to a baby girl, Rubi Juana, on November 16, 2008, at the Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It is, as you might imagine, a predominantly white area. The hospital provided Cruz with a Spanish interpreter. However, Cruz doesn’t speak Spanish; she speaks Chatino, an indigenous language from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Two days after the birth, the hospital reported the baby as a neglected child to the Department of Human Services, after which Rubi Juana Cruz was promptly taken from her mother and placed in the custody of an affluent couple in Ocean Springs.

According to court records obtained by The Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, the child was deemed neglected in part because Cruz “has failed to learn the English language” which “placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future”. In addition, the hospital report noted that Cruz “was an illegal immigrant” who was “exchanging living arrangements for sex”.

Of course, it’s a bit of a mystery how they were able to establish these facts when there were apparently no Chatino-speakers on hand. More to the point: it’s irrelevant. I’m no legal expert, but in my understanding, immigration status, language skills, and highly-questionable allegations of sex work are not grounds for snatching a baby from her mother and initiating adoption proceedings. But that’s exactly what’s happening. The case is currently in the Jackson County Youth Court, where Cruz is being represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center. As mentioned, the case is under gag order so it’s been difficult to get updates on the situation and the fate of Rubi Juana remains unknown.

Unfortunately, the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform’s Child Welfare Blog notes:

The case is not unique. In 2005, the Lebanon (Tenn.) Democrat, revealed that, at least twice, a local judge ordered Mexican mothers to learn English — or lose their children forever. […] In one case the child still lived with the mother, in the other the child was in foster care. In both cases, the mothers spoke an indigenous language rather than Spanish.

Over at Vivir Latino, Maegan La Mamita Mala places the story in the larger context of the “good immigrant vs. bad immigrant” narrative which has come to dominate mainstream liberal discourse in the immigration debate:

Quick. Choose. The house is burning and you have to choose. Your mother or your child? Who do you save?

Your mother, Maegan writes, “didn’t make it like Sonia Sotomayor. Didn’t graduate from college and in fact can’t even speak English”. On the other hand, your child has assimilated, can speak English, has received a formal education, and “won’t be a burden on the system”.

Is it the correct choice to abandon your unassimilated mother?

This is the morally untenable dead-end into which liberals propel themselves when they adopt tactical discourse which appeases the xenophobic forces of the right-wing for the sake of electoral expediency, rather than a discourse fundamentally grounded in universal human rights.

Now I’m not suggesting any less respect for the remarkable achievements of someone like Sonia Sotomayor. But when liberals hold her up as the shining example of The American Story — a model minority, a false compliment with which Asian Americans are all too familiar — they are actually Othering the majority of immigrants, ordinary hard-working people who have never had the opportunities or life situations or sheer good fortune to rise to such societal heights. The implication is that those less-accomplished immigrant stories are somehow less American, and therefore those other immigrants are unworthy of the magnanimous acceptance extended by the mainstream to a select few.

What is the plight of the unworthy? Ask Cirila Baltazar Cruz.

Please consider writing, faxing, or calling the presiding judge in this case and asking that (1) Rubi Juana be re-united with her mother, and (2) all adoption proceedings against the will of the mother be stopped. Here’s the contact info:

Honorable Judge Sharon Sigalas
Youth Justice Court of Jackson County
4903 Telephone Rd.
Pascagoula, MS 39567
Call (228) 762-7370
Fax (228) 762-7385

ETA: Thanks to Maegan for sending me this radio interview, recorded on June 1, in which we hear from Cirila Baltazar Cruz herself (in Spanish and Chatino).

Cruz says she doesn’t know why they took her daughter, though she calls herself “ignorant” for not being able to speak Spanish or English (though she does speak some Spanish, as you can hear in the interview). She’s a homeowner in Oaxaca with two other children being cared for by her family there. She works at a Chinese restaurant in Biloxi and lives in an apartment owned by her employer — an arrangement which the hospital interpreter either misunderstood or misrepresented. Cirila says that the interpreter told her that she must leave her Chinese employer or lose her baby; furthermore, the interpreter offered her a job with a wealthy family who would take care of the child. When she refused the offer, the interpreter became irritated with her, and we know the rest.

Cruz says she wants her daughter back. All the information she receives from the court is in English. It was her cousin Esteban who implored the Mississippi Immigrants’ Rights Alliance (MIRA) to get involved, which is how we now know about this case. Vicky Cintra of MIRA (also interviewed) says red flags went up at the organization when they learned that Esteban had been barred from serving as an interpreter for Cirila at the hospital, even though he repeatedly offered; he was told he would be arrested if he didn’t leave. MIRA claims that the family that took custody of Rubi Juana are lawyers with connections to the judge; they threw a baby shower to greet Rubi’s arrival.

November 18 is the next court date. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story.

I’m being taken over by the fear

“I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless/ cos everyone knows that’s how you become famous.”

Taking a side step away from specifically trans posts (cos y’all tiring me out already, and I have another week to go here), I want to talk about fear. Recently Mark K-Punk had this to say about Lily Allen’s “The Fear.”

“All Allen can do is point to her own inertia and complicity but awareness can only reinforce the very condition she is talking about [. . .] The verses are unsure whether they want to be satire or not, unsure whether they want to mock consumer-nihilism or celebrate it , unsure because – after all – what’s the alternative, where can all this mocked from? [. . .] Celebrity culture and its critique are coterminous; the jeremiads about its superficiality as cliched and empty as the culture itself, both appearing on the same pages of LondonLite. Only the negative capability of the choruses, only the admission of The Fear, breaks out of this circuit.”

What gets left out of this perceptive critique is precisely how sexed this is, how fear is produced as an affect on/in/through female bodies. What lies behind so much of our self-policing is fear.

The High Cost of Poverty

This won’t surprise people who have ever been poor, but poor people pay more for things that middle-class people take for granted.

Poverty 101: We’ll start with the basics.

Like food: You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 — $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

Prices in urban corner stores are almost always higher, economists say. And sometimes, prices in supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods are higher. Many of these stores charge more because the cost of doing business in some neighborhoods is higher. “First, they are probably paying more on goods because they don’t get the low wholesale price that bigger stores get,” says Bradley R. Schiller, a professor emeritus at American University and the author of “The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination.”

“The real estate is higher. The fact that volume is low means fewer sales per worker. They make fewer dollars of revenue per square foot of space. They don’t end up making more money. Every corner grocery store wishes they had profits their customers think they have.”

Of course it’s not just that groceries are more expensive — it’s also that there’s a dearth of fresh fruits and vegetables and healthy food items. Where those items are available, they’re significantly more expensive than frozen foods. If you have a family to feed and a box of frozen fish sticks is the same price as one pear, it’s not a tough calculus.

And food is just the start of it:

When you are poor, you don’t have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. You wait until Monday afternoon, when the laundromat is most likely to be empty, and you put all of that laundry from four kids into four heaps, bundle it in sheets, load a cart and drag it to the corner.
…
“When you are poor, you substitute time for money,” says Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed.”

The poor pay more in hassle: the calls from the bill collectors, the landlord, the utility company. So they spend money to avoid the hassle. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.

The rich have direct deposit for their paychecks. The poor have check-cashing and payday loan joints, which cost time and money. Payday advance companies say they are providing an essential service to people who most need them. Their critics say they are preying on people who are the most “economically vulnerable.”

“As you’ve seen with the financial services industry, if people can cut a profit, they do it,” Blumenauer says. “The poor pay more for financial services. A lot of people who are ‘unbanked’ pay $3 for a money order to pay their electric bill. They pay a 2 percent check-cashing fee because they don’t have bank services. The reasons? Part of it is lack of education. But part of it is because people target them. There is evidence that credit-card mills have recently started trolling for the poor. They are targeting the recently bankrupt.”

Read the whole thing.