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The Brutal Beauty of Sister


Sister film posterAt the heart of Sister, Brenda Davis’s documentary debut, are three inspiring stories of an Ethiopian health officer, a midwife in rural Cambodia, and a traditional birth attendant in Haiti. When Davis met Goitom Berhane in Ethiopia in 2008, she was taken with his vivacious personality and dedication to solving the maternal health crisis in his country. Berhane’s example encouraged Davis to explore women’s health as an international human rights issue. Eventually, he became a central figure in her film.

We meet Madame Bwa in the poverty-stricken Shada neighborhood of Cap-Haitien, Haiti. An aged woman who struggles with basic survival, Madame Bwa has delivered more than 12,000 children with no formal medical training.

In an area of Cambodia that is littered with land mines, Pum Mach puts her own life at risk so that geographically isolated mothers and their children may live through the common event of childbirth. In one of the more ghastly moments of Sister, a nineteen-year-old girl delivers her baby by caesarean section thanks to Mach identifying the child as breech and securing transportation to the nearest hospital, which is several hours away.

These moments make Sister as beautiful as it is brutal. The film showcases the passion of health workers who overcome incredibly difficult circumstances to combat the alarming rate of maternal and newborn deaths occurring around the globe — deaths that, with adequate care, are almost entirely preventable.

In The Fray spoke with Davis about her family’s experience with child mortality and the challenges of filming a tragic topic.

When did you develop an interest in maternal and child mortality?

My grandmother gave birth to sixteen children in rural Nova Scotia. Four died during childbirth and one died at the age of two. She lost her first child when she was nineteen and her last at thirty-nine. I remember my cousins coming together to buy a gravestone for all the children my grandma lost. They spoke about it casually because this happened a lot where my grandmother lived, but it had a lasting impact on me.

Why did you choose to explore this topic for your film?

As an artist, I’m interested in storytelling. If a subject is compelling to me, I want to pursue it, but I don’t want to speak for people. I want them to tell their own stories.

I was very fortunate to find people willing to tell their stories in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Haiti. We were able to show similarities in women’s experiences, despite entirely different cultures, while also focusing on local strategies. The unifying theme to every story is a lack of access — access to basic health care, access to emergency obstetric care, and access to family planning.

How are health workers attempting to close these gaps in access?

It’s difficult to articulate just how important health workers are, and in many instances, it goes beyond the service they’re providing. In Ethiopia, Hirity Belay is a young woman who walks to places where there are no roads to provide women with the care they need to have healthy babies. While that service is invaluable, you must also consider what an amazing example she’s setting in these small villages. One of the things that inspired the name of the documentary was Hirity’s relationships. The women would often call each other “sister.” I thought this was so beautiful and warm.

Madam Bwa, a traditional birth attendant in Shada, Haiti.
Madam Bwa, a traditional birth attendant in Shada, Haiti.

In the case of Madame Bwa, being a traditional birth attendant has been passed down through her family. The work she does is important to her community, and for the most part Madame Bwa lives off donations from the families she helps. Traditional birth attendants fill a gap where there is nothing. I’m not a medical professional, but I don’t understand why so many people want to eliminate traditional birth attendants. They’re making a difference, and with a bit more support, they could be making a much bigger impact.

I found many of the scenes hard to watch, not because they’re graphic, but because they are heartbreaking. How do you approach filming people’s intimate tragedies respectfully?

In Ethiopia, we spent time in the hospital without cameras and became a familiar presence. The women often didn’t understand why we were filming or why anyone would be interested. I’d explain that we wanted to show what was going on in their communities.

Sister was definitely difficult to film, and the director of photography and I constantly struggled with the fear that we may be invading a woman’s privacy. When you’re meeting people in such intense and difficult circumstances, you constantly grapple with whether or not you’re being sensitive and respectful.

In some respects, I feel like Sister is a war movie. Women everywhere — but especially in developing countries — are fighting for their lives. What you see was exactly what was happening. The women, health workers, midwives, and birth attendants all speak for themselves and tell their own stories. It was a conscious decision not to narrate or pretend to know the answers.

What do you hope viewers take from the film?

I hope Sister encourages people to think critically about what the United States does that affects other countries — from a its inability to grow food to being littered with land mines. People should think about how they’re connected to what’s happening in other places, or how they’re complicit in it. Donating funds is awesome, but it’s not enough.

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Rebel Blues: A Review of Mojo Hand

By Olupero R. Aiyenimelo

Blues legend Sam Hopkins — known as Lightnin’ Hopkins to his fans — influenced everyone from musical giants like Bob Dylan and John Coltrane to activists like Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale. Long after his death, Rolling Stone named him one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Yet not much is known about him. Notoriously private, Hopkins fabricated and exaggerated details about his early life, preferring to keep his origins a mystery.

Mojo Hand, a new biography of Hopkins, details the obscure life and music of an iconoclastic bluesman who was the consummate musician’s musician, inspiring legions of artists across many genres. Born in 1911, Hopkins lived in rural Texas at a time when slavery was still fresh in the minds of those who would inherit its parting gift of Jim Crow. His grandfather, a slave, hanged himself to be free of its atrocities. His father was murdered when Hopkins was three, and his brother left home at fourteen to keep from avenging their father’s death. In his youth, Hopkins endured incidents of vicious racism, including the abusive treatment of white supervisors at the various plantations where he worked.

His was a family of poor sharecroppers with an affinity for music. Hopkins’s brothers, sister, and mother each played instruments, and Hopkins learned to play his older brother’s guitar. By age eight, he had made his own guitar with screen-door wire, and his prodigious skills kept him from having to inherit the “family business” of sharecropping.

Those skills also kept him from following convention. “He didn’t play with a clamp,” says drummer Robert Murphy, who worked with Hopkins. “He just played by ear, just like most of the old-time bluesmen.  He wouldn’t pay much attention to whether it was an eight-bar blues or a twelve-bar blues, just as long as it fit what he was singing and doing.”

The biography captures quite well Hopkins’s aversion to conformity. From his playing style to the way he carried himself, Hopkins was a law unto himself, choosing to do things his way no matter what people said or thought of him. Long before Dylan was rejecting autograph seekers, or band members of Van Halen were making bizarre demands about M&Ms, Hopkins was known for his idiosyncrasies. He was a raconteur, a heavy drinker, and a fancy dresser. He would not record, or rerecord, if he didn’t feel like doing so. He refused to honor contracts that restricted him from working with other record companies at the same time, and would either change the name of a song or change his name to sidestep any lawsuits. He did not like venturing too far from his home base in Houston, and refused to fly, which made life difficult for those who worked with him, and made him hard to locate when there were deals that needed to happen. He did things his way, or not at all, with very few exceptions.

Dick Waterman, who booked gigs for Hopkins, points out that most blues artists came from rural areas. Though Hopkins was raised in Texas farm country, he stood out because he also had spent time in the city and been influenced by its culture. He carried himself as an “urban man” and played his blues not acoustic, but amplified with a pickup. As Waterman says:

He came from a very different place socially and musically.  He was very cool.  Some of the other [bluesmen] would be overly polite and respectful around white people, but Lightnin’ didn’t have any of that.  Lightnin’ would just treat everyone the same, and if anything he carried himself with a sense of confidence and almost arrogance. He was Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Hopkins was also a loner. He would work with only one or two other bandmates, or just by himself. He preferred to be the focal point, and here he showed his nastier side. He would deliberately change the timing as soon as his band got used to a certain tempo or rhythm — in part to keep them from launching any ambitious solo efforts. Oftentimes, Hopkins would not rehearse, and the haphazard adjustments he made with every new performance made it nearly impossible to follow along while accompanying him.

Despite all these things — or, perhaps, because of them — Hopkins’s style is indelible. He made songs up impromptu, and hardly ever sang them the same way twice. His guitar playing was not easily mimicked: he changed it at whim and did not stick to any particular structure or chord style. He rambled through most of his concerts, telling stories that were at times incomprehensible, thanks to his drinking and thick Southern accent. And yet his performances thrilled his audiences.

Hopkins sang, in typical blues fashion, about women (short-haired ones, cheating ones, drunk ones). But his songs also had things to say about everything from work, to road trips, to politics. He often improvised lyrics, such as this freestyle take on astronaut John Glenn’s first orbit of the earth:

People always said this morning
With this on their mind
Said ain’t no livin’ man go around the world three times
But John Glenn done it

The main issue I had with Mojo Hand was the connection the authors imply between Hopkins’s illiteracy and his approach to business. Hopkins rarely signed contracts, and when he did he drew an “X” in place of his signature. He also preferred to be paid up front, in cash rather than royalties. Did Hopkins do these things just because he couldn’t read? The authors briefly mention the suspect business practices of music publishers back then, but they do not elaborate on how these practices often pushed musicians into destitution while the companies made money even long after their deaths. Royalties and publishing rights were rarely honored in those days, and many popular musicians were paid poverty wages for their work. These problems were rampant and well known in the blues and jazz worlds. Operating in a white-dominated industry, Hopkins clearly developed his own survival techniques.

The authors also could have dealt more with Hopkins’s influence on the generations of artists who came after him. Some of his fans included Ringo Starr, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Johnny Winter, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, and ZZ Top. How did Hopkins’s work inspire them?

Mojo Hand gives us some tantalizing details about a pioneering but private blues legend who, two decades after his death, remains an enigma. An alcoholic, an insatiable artist, and an understatedly temperamental man, Hopkins wound up becoming one of the greats, hailed by scholars as the “embodiment of the jazz-and-poetry spirit, representing its ancient form in the single creator whose words and music are one act.”  In the end, though, this biography is just a sketch of the complex man Hopkins was, a troubled artist with a life that, just like his songs, cannot be fully translated to the printed page. Perhaps that’s what Hopkins would have preferred.

Olupero R. Aiyenimelo is a freelance writer, poet, and lyricist based in Los Angeles.

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Photo by Saptarshi Chakraborty
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Power Failure

By Priyanka Nandy
Photo of the author sitting on a throne
Photo by Saptarshi Chakraborty

Lately, as a result of planning my wedding, there’s been a lot of talk among my buddies about what drives the expensive social conservatism we see during our various social and religious ceremonies in India. There is, of course, the cash-flashing, wealth-waving syndrome that leads to obscene shows of buying power, and the media-spurred my-fairy-tale-wedding delusion, but what spurs people with sensible plans and ideological commitments to chuck it all and take a nosedive into these pro forma spectacles of self-destructive wastage?

In a country like India, where power comes in many forms and from many different sources — age, caste, gender, class, senior social roles, perceived religious devotion, nobleness of profession — I’d say that, apart from the usual suspects, embittered failures in roles of familial power play an enormous role in enforcing socioreligious conservatism. This is not to say that successful people with genuine affection for their families cannot be socially conservative, but in the specific case of bitter underachievers, reverting to traditions crafted for the patriarchal family head in a very different economic era allows them, temporarily, to become directors instead of dependents. The more rules and strictures they reinforce, the more power and control they have.

Rituals and ceremonies are their particular triumphs, since during them, they can reduce their more successful kin to temporary penury (or close) by insisting things be “properly” done at enormous expense, almost none of which they bear themselves. The worst aspect of this entire situation, perhaps, is that we have an automatic pity-flavored weakness for the weak and dependent among us — and for these brief periods, give them free(ish) rein over our lives out of affection or sympathy or adherence to social hierarchy, not realising the undercurrent of malice that such indulgence feeds. Indeed, I would say that most people practicing such malice don’t realize they are being malicious either. They take their socially assigned roles seriously, and quite successfully hide their subconscious jealousy and vengefulness (even from themselves) by dressing them in the righteous garbs of culture, tradition, and propriety.

This is aided in Hindu society by a complete ignorance of what Hinduism accommodates and entails. A very practical set of scriptural directives have been drowned under a collage of folk practices over the centuries, and since firsthand knowledge of Hinduism requires actual scholarship — and a broad, receptive mind — most self-identified Hindus go with the flow of simplistic, homogenized inventions and outright aberrations, firmly convinced they’re treading the path of their ancestors a million times removed.

If today I get married and decide to serve roast beef and fried pork at the wedding feast, it would be an absolute phenomenon. I would find no caterers, people would nervously offer sorry excuses for not attending, and those who attend may think they’re being revolutionaries by breaking stupid “Hindu” rigor. But even for a few centuries after Buddha’s death, roast calves and fried pork were centerpieces of Hindu daily and ceremonial eating, in combination with deer, rabbits, boar, various birds, ghee, rice, barley, and honey-thickened, milk-based sweets. But I digress.

The point is, in a social system where there are competing structures of power, every time you mark a social milestone in your life — unless you have genuinely loving and/or sympathetic kinsfolk in positions of familial power, or people secure enough in themselves to either aid you or allow you the freedom of choice — be prepared to either incur considerable financial damage in the name of maintaining the social fabric or causing breaches in the family, for which you shall bear all the blame after you have spent a smaller — but still considerable — amount in marking the milestone anyway.

It’s called social living. Or the tyranny of the weak.

Priyanka Nandy works on structural inequities in public education and public health in India. She blogs at priyankanandy.com and photo shares everywhere.

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Photo credit: SayLuiiiis
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A Latina in Limbo


photo of a young woman with Mexican face paint.
Photo by SayLuiiiis

I recently read Lindsey Woo’s contribution to a series of writings about feminism and race on NPR’s CodeSwitch blog. In her piece, Woo discusses the frequent exclusion of Asian American women from conversations concerning race in the context of feminism and poses an important question, one I ask myself often: who is considered a woman of color?

I talk about race — a lot. I constantly initiate discussions with friends and colleagues, and find that even in our supposedly postracial world many still deem race to be an uncomfortable subject. Although I believe attempts to have a dialogue about race are important, another part of me does it for purely selfish reasons. These conversations help me to figure out my own relationship with race. They validate and invalidate my opinions, and give me a better understanding of where I fit as a light-skinned Latina.

My mother’s family is self-proclaimed “white trash” with roots in Tennessee. My father’s family is from the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. In the 1960s, my dad crossed the border into the United States, where he lived for twenty years as an undocumented immigrant before obtaining citizenship around the time I was born.

The legacies of two vastly different cultures live inside of me. One side of my family has former Ku Klux Klan members. The other has undocumented immigrants. Holidays meant a feast of fried ham, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese that was served alongside mole, tamales, and flan. Backyard barbecues featured Johnny Cash and Vicente Fernandez, Patsy Cline and Ritchie Valens. The blending of cultures is a beautiful thing, but it can also be confusing.

Being biracial means growing up with a keen understanding that your identity is not yours alone. It is something others feel entitled to foist upon you, including your friends and family. You carry the weight of racial tensions that not only exist in society at large, but also among those you love.

My mother’s family stopped talking to her because she had married a “wetback.” I didn’t know my maternal grandfather for the first eight years of my life because he refused to see me. According to my mom, when I was born he took to referring to me as a “mutt,” so she shielded me from his racist epithets and maintained a safe distance.

After members of my father’s family settled in the Los Angeles area from Mexico, they made many jokes at my expense. They told me I could never be a “real” Mexican because my mom was a gringa, but my dad insisted I proudly tell the world, “Soy Mexicana.” He now teaches the same to my biracial nieces.

It’s hard when neither side of your family embraces your blended ethnicity, and it set the stage for the identity crisis I’ve been having for twenty-eight years. As a Latina whose pallor matches my blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother, I don’t feel comfortable with the label “woman of color,” although it is often ascribed to me in the context of my work. In some ways my reticence is the product of not having the emotional bandwidth to defend my right to use the term when I come up against backlash, particularly from people of color.

I understand the discomfort some darker-skinned women feel when a light-skinned Latina identifies as a woman of color. After all, we are often the recipients of racial privilege that comes when we are (mis)perceived as being white. At the same time, my dark hair, ethnic features, and clearly Latina last name all place me squarely in the category of being raced. I try very hard to understand my place on the racial continuum, but knowing which side I’m supposed to be on isn’t always clear. And it is always shifting.

My identity has been shaped by my experiences as a Latina feminist. I resisted my father and brothers’ violent machismo, and also make sacrifices for my family that most white feminists don’t understand. Yet, fellow Latinas tend to have a deep appreciation for my family’s complicated love. Despite my skin color, identifying as a white woman was never an option for me.

A recent Census Bureau report shows that children in America are more racially diverse than they’ve ever been, and the fastest rate of growth is among children who are multiracial. Mixed-race people are rapidly becoming the new norm, but we still live in a world where we’re expected to choose and neatly conform to just one thing.

I often wonder if Chicana writer and feminist Cherríe Moraga, who was born just ten miles away from my hometown, underwent an exploration of her own identities that’s similar to the one I’m engaged in now. A woman of Mexican and Anglo ethnicity, Moraga is one of the foremost authorities on race and feminism in America. Her story gives me hope that I will one day reach the place where I no longer allow others to question my identity, the place where I determine for myself who I am and who I will be.

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‘Two Fragile Souls in the City’: Contributor Joshunda Sanders at TEDCity2.0


Joshunda Sanders, standing with microphone, at TEDCity2.0In The Fray contributing writer Joshunda Sanders recently spoke at TEDCity2.0, a conference focused on the challenges and innovations that cities across the world are experiencing today. Joshunda gave a moving talk about her mother’s struggle with mental illness (a story she also told for our blog), and the ways that cities can help, and hinder, the lives of the mentally ill — particularly those who are poor and homeless.

Joshunda’s mother resisted therapy and medication for her bipolar disorder, internalizing society’s view (especially prevalent within the African American community) that mental illness is a personal weakness. In her relationship with Joshunda, she veered between euphoria and depression, loving attention and violent abuse. The family ended up homeless because of her untreated condition, and Joshunda’s childhood was marked by evictions, stays in homeless shelters, and a perpetual hunger. Fortunately, their hometown of New York was generally benevolent in its benefits and its attitude toward the homeless — providing Joshunda with free breakfast in the summers when school was out (often her only meal of the day) and free transportation to and from shelters — even though it never really met their needs for food and housing in such an expensive city.

There are compelling reasons, Joshunda adds, that so many homeless individuals congregate in cities:

After my brother Jose got killed by a bus, my mother moved to the suburbs. So we lived in Chester for the first few years of my life. Chester is outside of Philadelphia. Most families there, in the suburbs — which are considered the heart of the American Dream — had cars, but because we couldn’t afford a car, we had to rely on public transportation. Often, without carfare to get into the core of the city, we would end up languishing in the isolation of the suburbs, and it was a little bit nightmarish. Sometimes the lights would be off, or the water would be off.

And one of the things people forget is the surprising truth about the visibility of the mentally ill in cities … there are real resources for them there. It’s not just the density and public transportation, but there is also this equal-opportunity solace from the cultural vibrancy of a city. So I urge you to think about that the next time you see someone who is mentally ill in the city. Before you think of them as a problem, consider how both they, and we, are transformed by our witness of them in the city. Think of me and my mom, just two fragile souls trying to make it through the city, with what little that we had.

Here is the video of Joshunda’s talk, which begins at the 49:09 mark:

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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The Long March: A Review of John Lewis’s Graphic Novel

By Cornelius Fortune

Fifty years after the March on Washington, we are well versed in the visual cues of the civil rights era: grainy black-and-white photos and footage of peaceful protesters being accosted by angry mobs, beset by dogs and water cannons, and enveloped in plumes of tear gas. John Lewis, one of the giants of the civil rights movement, not only lived those scenes of protest and violence — a beating by Alabama state troopers fractured his skull — but he worked to make sure the struggle led to real political and cultural change by the era’s end.

Now Lewis and his collaborators offer a new visual take on the protests and the people behind them, in the graphic novel March, an illustrated (and unconventional) autobiography of the civil rights leader and longtime member of Congress. In a way, the book brings Lewis full circle: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book published in 1956, helped inspire him to take up the nonviolent cause as a teenager.

There’s a long tradition of autobiographical comics, from Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor to Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (the basis of an Academy Award-nominated animated film). But Lewis is not just any other thoughtful voice of retrospection. One of the original Freedom Riders, he was a founding member and then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was instrumental in organizing some of the era’s most important sit-ins and other nonviolent protests against segregation — including the March on Washington. (The youngest speaker that day was Lewis, then twenty-three years old.) He also played a prominent role in another of the era’s iconic demonstrations, the Selma to Montgomery march, the source of the scars he still bears on his head. Lewis went on to a career in politics, representing Georgia’s fifth congressional district since the late eighties and now serving in the House Democratic leadership.

Lewis, we learn in March, was an unusual child. His parents were sharecroppers, and Lewis grew up on a farm in Alabama. As a boy, he raised chickens, not only giving them names but even devising a makeshift incubator because his family couldn’t afford the one in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His youth in the forties and fifties is captured in a series of panels: Lewis as a boy honing his sermonizing skills before a congregation of chickens (his first ambition was to become a preacher). Lewis as a young man first hearing King on the radio and becoming inspired to embrace nonviolence. As the narrative of Lewis’s life advances, March reminds us of the events transpiring in the background — from Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience to the killing of Emmett Till to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down school segregation — all of which shaped Lewis’s worldview and led him and others down the path to protest.

The best dramatizations carry a sense of dread, or anticipation, even when you know the outcome. Like a train slowing a moment on the tracks and, by degrees, gaining momentum, March crackles with a sort of inevitability. We watch as Lewis and other young protestors in the Nashville Student Movement, a nonviolent direct-action group fighting against segregation, subject themselves – and each other – to a series of humiliating tests, preparing them for not only the harsh words, but also the physical retaliation they were likely to encounter. As Lewis points out, “For some, it was too much.” The hardest part to learn, he adds, was “how to find love for your attacker.”

Cover of comic "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story"Once the book settles into the sit-ins by Lewis and his fellow activists in downtown Nashville, you’re firmly locked in — you’re enlisted. And, here, really, is where Nate Powell’s art takes off.

When the sit-ins begin, the artwork becomes darker, the pages soaked with dark ink, the lines sketchier, shadowy, conveying the pain and fears of the nonviolent protestors. Powell’s style is somewhere in between the worlds of photorealism and animation, the images at times seeming to move on the page. It’s detailed enough that each face is distinctive from the other, with exquisitely rendered backgrounds undoubtedly reflecting Powell’s research on the downtown buildings of that era. His use of black and white is not just an artistic choice; it intensifies the action by making the reader slow down to see the details.

Part of a planned trilogy, March ends right after Nashville Mayor Ben West announces to the press and a group of protesters at city hall that he will support the desegregation of lunch counters. On May 10, 1960, six downtown stores, the book tells us, “served food to black customers for the first time in the city’s history.” We’re left with scenes of black Americans sitting at a lunch counter some three years before the historic March on Washington.

In August, Lewis spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, sharing the podium with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama. The last surviving speaker of the original march, Lewis noted that the country still has “a great distance to go before we fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.” And yet, he said, change had come — as March itself suggests, in its introductory depiction of the inauguration of the country’s first black president. “Fifty years later we can ride anywhere we want to ride, we can stay where we want to stay,” Lewis said. “Those signs that said ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are gone. And you won’t see them anymore except in a museum, in a book, on a video.”

Sometimes I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them come and walk in my shoes. Come walk in the shoes of those who were attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail.

March invites the reader to walk in the shoes of Lewis and the many other men and women who sat down, picketed, and marched for justice, without violence and with a great love for their attackers — and for their country.

Cornelius Fortune is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Advocate, Citizen Brooklyn, the Chicago Defender, Yahoo News, and other publications.

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves


I didn’t expect a collection of stories about the inner struggles of psychoanalysis patients to be so much like a detective novel. Yet, in The Examined Life parallels abound.

Clues are uncovered slowly in each chapter and a mystery unfolds. Hidden motivations are unearthed by identifying the meaningful in the mundane. The skillful narrator walks the reader through his ruminative process of making sense of the clues. A truth is revealed that appears to have been there are along.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has penchant for storytelling. He knows when to showcase his professional proficiencies and when to let the tale tell itself. The truth, after all, is somewhere in-between.

What was your motivation in embarking on this project?

I am sixty. I have a ten-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. My father had two heart attacks by the time he was my age, and my mother died when she was sixty-four. If I’m not here when my children are teenagers or young adults, I thought about what I want them to know.

The thirty-one stories in The Examined Life address what I think of as some of life’s biggest problems — problems we all face. More than that, I wanted to portray a way of thinking, a disposition towards oneself and the world that might be useful to them and others. Also, psychoanalysis requires time and money, and many people won’t be able to afford it. I wanted to set down some of the important things I’ve learned in a way that may be helpful to those who are unable to have psychoanalysis or therapy.

Given that you have a twenty-five-year history to draw from, why did you choose to include these particular stories?

I chose these stories because they have a kind of urgency, and I felt I had something to say about these fundamental life issues. My patients had taught me something that I wanted to get down on paper. Of course, I also write with my patients’ privacy in mind. Confidentiality plays an important role in what I choose to write about, and how I write.

In some ways, The Examined Life demystifies psychoanalysis, which has become a part of popular culture — and not always in an accurate or respectable way. How did this influence the way you told these stories? 

Psychoanalysis has become something of a joke in our culture. In the book, I try to set all that aside and just give a simple picture of what psychoanalysis really is — and what actually happens between an analyst and patient.

The truth is, the people who come to psychoanalysis are in pain, and usually part of the pain is that they can’t articulate it well. They don’t have a way of telling their story. The author Karen Blixen said, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” But what if a person can’t tell a story about their sorrows? What if the story tells them?

In my work I try to hear the story my patient cannot tell and then to help them to tell it. To me, all the highfalutin psychoanalytic language — which is not in my book — is a diversion from the directness of our speech. So, I try to tell stories I think are important as plainly and directly as possible.

Change is a recurring theme in the book. People come to you because they desire change, because they have experienced an unanticipated or undesired change. People resist change. People succeed and don’t succeed in making changes in their lives. Does hearing other people’s stories of change make it easier to do so ourselves?

“I want to change, but not if it means changing,” a patient once said to me in complete innocence. Change is difficult for many reasons. One reason people resist change is that all change requires loss. This can be hard to see, and even harder to accept. But there are many things that help us to change. I believe one of those things is hearing other people’s stories.

Some stories touch our heart. A good story can help us to think differently. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree — these recent books made me think differently. If you are able to think in a new way, you can act in a new way. Thinking differently is the first step towards change.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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Photo by Battle Creek CVB.
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The Discomfort of #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen


photo of Sojourner Truth monument
Photo by Battle Creek CVB

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter.”

Thus began Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Or, at least, this is what we’ve been led to believe by suffragette and abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage. It’s her version of Truth’s extemporaneous oration that became popularized in American history.

According to one of Gage’s accounts of what happened at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, she granted Truth the opportunity to speak at the podium, in spite of protests from white suffragettes. They feared the emancipated slave would detract from their cause by bringing up the issue of slavery. Instead, in Gage’s telling, Truth acknowledged “negro’s rights” only in passing and focused on the rights of women.

To some, this account may come across as a heartwarming moment of white feminist solidarity in the face of race-based tensions. To others, like me, the story serves the suffragists’ agenda too neatly. A white woman gave a black woman a platform to speak, and she used that platform to support the cause of women who had just moments before called for her silence?

Historians have poked many holes in the accuracy of Gage’s retellings. In fact, much of what we’ve come to know about Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech may have been fabricated by Gage.

When #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweets began flooding my Twitter feed on Monday, I thought about the historical revisionism of Truth’s speech. Although a part of me wishes I still believed the rousing and monumentalized story, knowing the dubious purpose it served makes the words feel hollow. My enthusiasm for feminism long since waned in the wake of critiques from people who have been marginalized in the movement.

More than a 150 years after the delivery of Truth’s speech, many white feminists have yet to internalize the seminal theories contained in works like The Combahee River Collective Statement, This Bridge Called My Back, and the INCITE! anthologies. Our refusal to accept the perspectives of women of color regarding our shared history means white women continue to resist, dismiss, and ignore the same critiques when they are made today.

I was humbled by the magnitude of feminist history that was contained in Mikki Kendall’s spontaneous #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweet — its force enough to ascend the hashtag to trending in a matter of hours. But my delight quickly turned to dismay when the responses sought to divorce the hashtag from its historical context. So, I paused to remind myself that we all have different points of entry into conversations about race and feminism. After all, my own public introduction was something of a mess.

I stumbled into web-based debates about race and feminism in 2007 by writing a shamefully indelicate review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. My utter lack of humility was justly greeted with a rather harsh smack down from a number of influential feminist bloggers, including Valenti. With arrogant amusement, I fired back and people came to my defense.

Except, the exchange that occurred wasn’t happening because anyone wanted to defend me. It was happening because I’d unknowingly expressed similar critiques to ones that had been lodged long before my review. Because I’m a white girl it didn’t have to occur to me that there might be discord between white feminist and women of color bloggers. And once I did see it, I thought all anyone needed from me was a declaration of solidarity.

The thing is, my actions weren’t really about being in solidarity with anybody. They were about doing what I needed to feel good about myself, to be seen as a white girl who “gets it” when it comes to race. I thought differentiation and distancing from the “bad” white feminists would show that I understood what people of color have been saying for all these years. That was a selfish mistake. I should have realized that the work to end racism isn’t going to be comfortable — for me or anyone else.

Many of the responses I’ve seen to #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen criticize the hashtag for its supposed alienation of white allies, angry tone, and defensive divisiveness. But those allegations overlook the context from which the hashtag emerged. Hugo Schwyzer debacle aside, Mikki Kendall is not the first woman of color to point out that some white feminists claim to speak for all women while excluding the concerns of a great number of them. So long as white women dictate a revisionist feminist history, just like Frances Dana Barker Gage did with Sojourner Truth, the conversation about race and feminism will continue its circular path.

#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen wasn’t meant to be an invitation for white feminists to participate in a discussion about white women’s privilege — again. It was intended to be an outlet for a woman of color’s frustrations. It turned into a clever litany of injuries women of color have endured (and do endure) due to the actions (and inactions) of white women whose solidarity has been illusive. The anger some women of color have expressed through #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is justifiable in the face of white women’s consistent and systematic exclusion of what they say is critical for their survival.

Sometimes I think I’ve got this social justice thing on lock, but in truth, none of us do. We’re all fumbling through it and doing the best we can, hoping it’s better than those who came before us. In some ways, it is. That doesn’t mean we can allow ourselves to be seduced into complacency in order to meet our own needs and desires. It means that, although we are learning, we have the responsibility to be vigilant about how far we have left to go — and move things forward.

Whether we own them or don’t own them, our respective privileges are still there. We may not be able to eliminate their power, but we can mitigate their capacity for damage by making different choices. Sometimes those choices will be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is an indication that we are living into change. The discomfort is an opportunity to do something better that we have done it in the past. The discomfort is necessary for growth.

We all have the need to feel we are being heard, but it’s not enough for white folks to simply stop speaking and listen. We also have to learn to see and empathize with other people’s points of entry. We have to be honest about our own motivations when doing antiracist work, especially when we muck it up. We have to lift while we climb, but resolve to do this outside of our own cliques and communities. We have to stop denying that putting our own self-interest first is hindering collective progress.

In the process of learning to live with and learn from our discomfort, we may just find the means for healing.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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What Is Love


Americans in Bed hand-kissing couple


Part of the sweetness and intimacy of Americans in Bed, an HBO documentary that airs tonight, is the subtle things you learn when the couples who are interviewed are not talking. It is the silent gestures that matter: the wordless looks, the casual caresses.

In this way, similar documentaries in past years (such as the HBO series Real Sex) are simpler and more simplistic. Rather than focus on the physicality of the bedroom, director Philippa Robinson offers a nuanced perspective on what really keeps people together.

Robinson used the same approach for an earlier BBC documentary called The British in Bed, but it doesn’t feel stale. For context, viewers first see a few short lines about the state of our American unions: we have the highest rate of marriage in the world and the third-highest rate of divorce.

Through interviews with a handful of couples at various states of intimacy — boyfriend and girlfriend, domestic partners, married couples — Robinson captures the yin and yang of relationships: the affection and the bickering, the romance and the infidelities. Regardless of their racial, ethnic, class, or gender expression, these couples bring to their love lives a splendid assortment of baggage. Through all these pairings runs a common thread of early passion, too, and yet less certain is whether they each have the commitment to repair bonds broken over time. On one extreme is the polyamorous Leo, a 6’6”-tall man with the looks of a Disney prince, who has broken up with his 4’10”girlfriend Blanca twenty-six times in two years. On the other is Helen and Red, a couple that has been married for seventy-one years.

When couples are talking about how they fell in love and how they negotiate — or fail to negotiate — long-term commitment, the documentary is at its most interesting. The two same-sex couples express the most vulnerability, and their stories end up resonating the most as a result. Linda and Margie hold hands the whole time they’re interviewed. Linda describes having a hole in her heart that was filled by Margie, who was married when they first met and subsequently divorced. Her face turns red as she starts to tear up, yet she beams with pride and love the whole time. George and Farid are more subdued. Their love life started with lackluster sex, but as their level of intimacy grew that improved. And then they became parents to twins. This time, it’s Farid who ends up weeping, overcome with the love he has for his babies.

While there are moments of genuinely inspiring candor in their interviews, the African American and Latino couples in the film come across as tragically one-sided. The women are faithful martyrs; the men are unfaithful and lack remorse. One couple spends more time on screen bickering than anything else.

But what the film leaves unsaid is more compelling. Robinson turns the couples’ beds into background characters — sometimes hosting lovers along with the family dog or cat, and sometimes (tellingly) not. Each couple’s body language, too, is instructive. The ones who truly seem to love one another touch while they talk. They stare into each other’s faces.

Newlyweds Yasmin and Mohamed are the exception. Shy and reserved, they keep their hands to themselves. But as they open up on camera, she lovingly describes a marriage proposal that took her breath away. At another point in the interview, he speaks, with tears in his eyes, about the meaning of their love. “This is my person now and I am her person. I always wanted a person.”

That is the essence of Americans in Bed: we are all trying to find our person. Like the couples in the documentary, some of us have to try multiple marriages to get it right. And others of us are still trying, with varying degrees of success, to love, and be loved.

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Deferred Dreams from My Father


photo of Tina and her dadWhen I was growing up, I knew my father had become an American citizen around the time I was born in 1985. What I didn’t know was that until then he’d been living as an undocumented resident of the United States for more than twenty years. Never anxious to talk about this part of his life, my father simply didn’t volunteer the information.

Like many children of immigrant parents, I was told story upon story that began, “When I came to this country…” But certain details of my father’s journey weren’t shared until I was twenty-six. Even after all these years, the story of how he emigrated from Mexico isn’t one my father likes to tell. He came from a generation where one’s citizenship status was something not to be discussed. I only learned of the specifics because I poked and prodded until he finally gave in, saying, “Tell my story when I’m dead.”

To people like my father, in spite of being an American citizen, these stories remain unsafe to talk about publicly. In the back of his mind is the lingering fear that telling his story will somehow get him deported. If not deported, then he will lose his job, or some other bad thing will happen. Silence and secrecy are my father’s only means of protection.

When I told my dad about the Dream 9, a group of undocumented activists who openly defied US immigration law in an act of civil disobedience last month, he told me a story he had never shared before. After being in the United States for five years, my dad reached a point where he’d had enough. He was always hungry, tired, and on the verge of homelessness. Working under the table without papers resulted in constant exploitation, and all he wanted was to go home to his family.

Without a dollar to his name, my father walked along the Los Angeles highway with his thumb out, hoping someone would give him a lift to San Diego so he could cross the border into Tijuana. Once he arrived, he planned to find a job and save enough money to return to his parents, who lived in the Southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. But, as he puts it, fate intervened.

My dad walked along the interstate for an entire day, and not a single person stopped to give him a ride. Since it was the 1970s and hitchhiking in California was fairly common, my father (ironically) took the drivers’ unwillingness to pick up a poor, brown man as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to return to Mexico, after all. He resigned himself to whatever fate was keeping him in the US, and walked all the way back to LA. For the next fifteen years, my dad worked backbreaking jobs that kept him one paycheck away from homelessness, separated from every family member and friend he’d ever known.

It’s difficult for me to think about what my father’s life was like during those hardscrabble years, but still I ask him to tell me. He explains the ways he was able to scrape out a living in a country he felt didn’t want people like him and made it as hard as possible for them to survive.

When he shares his pain, I see my father differently than the angry, quiet man I associate with my childhood. My dad had every intention of living the American Dream, even after years passed and it remained out of reach. He’d wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, and to give my brothers and me opportunities that were never possible for him. Instead, each day was simply about surviving. My father worked hard as a janitor to support our family, but he and my mom were never able to climb out of poverty. There was no time for dream chasing, so my father acquiesced to a dream deferred.

As the Dream Act is adopted in various states and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows undocumented youth to obtain driver’s licenses and work permits, I think of the adversities undocumented youth won’t face that my father had to overcome. I think of how the Dreamers, as they’ve come to be known, represent the unfulfilled desires of my father’s generation. So many of our parents secretly came to the United States, where they hid and were silent because to do otherwise would mean giving up what little they had for which they’d sacrificed everything. To them, immigration is not just a political issue; it is a life force that is brutal and beautiful, full of pain and of love.

My dad still struggles with using the term “undocumented.” For him, the word “illegal” comes much easier. He spent twenty years in a country where his existence was criminalized, and that feeling of not belonging isn’t something that “papers” can fix. My dad still behaves like that twenty-something kid who wasn’t protected under the law. He fears men in uniforms. He can’t speak out against those who treat him unfairly. He is constantly worried that everything he’s worked so hard for can be taken away in an instant.

When there is no ability for you to speak openly, no politicized community creating safe spaces, and no internet to connect you anonymously, you’re an island that internalizes what you’re told. The Dream 9 is helping my dad connect to his chosen country, to heal the hurts of its past abuse. Perhaps that is too much to ask from nine young people. But as they risk their own livelihoods for the sake of their communities, people like my father, whose lives have been steeped for so long in silence and in fear, are reading about their courage with tears in their eyes, in awe of a generation that refuses to hide in the shadows.

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Without Papers, Without Fear


photo of Dream 9 marching to the US-Mexico borderOn July 21, nine Mexican nationals openly defied US immigration policy, and more than ten thousand people watched the event unfold through a live, global webcast. I held my breath as activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) — who are now known as the “Dream 9” — walked arm-in-arm through the streets of Nogales, Mexico. I felt the squeeze of anxiety in my chest as they neared the US-Mexico border. And I sent a silent wish into the universe that the gamble these young people are bravely taking won’t be in vain.

The Dream 9 are all longstanding residents of the United States. Six of them — Rosie Rojas, Maria Peniche, Adriana Gil Diaz, Luis Gustavo Leon, Claudia Amaro, and Ceferino Santiago — had been deported or left of their own accord prior to last Monday’s action. The other three — Marco Saavedra, Lulu Martinez, and Lizbeth Mateo — are prominent leaders of America’s undocumented youth movement. Before making her way to Mexico, Mateo paid her tuition for Santa Clara Law School, where classes begin in August. Martinez also expected to return to school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is majoring in gender and women’s studies.

If the Dream 9’s plan fails, each member will be deported. They will be separated from their families, and the lives they’ve built in the United States will be irrevocably changed. The danger they face is significant. Under President Barack Obama more people have been deported than any other president in US history. Still, they each chose to take the risk.

“In the United States, undocumented immigrants run the risk of being taken from their home, no matter where we are,” Mateo wrote in The Huffington Post. “We have won many fights against deportation, but not all of them. It’s time to take away the power deportation has over us.”

NIYA is a radical, youth-led organization working to ensure justice for undocumented young people living in the United States. Its members routinely participate in acts of civil disobedience to resist threats of detention and deportation that terrorize their communities. They also take cues from past social movement successes by conceiving and executing actions that will attract national media.

Last summer NIYA made headlines when Saavedra and fellow organizer Viridiana Martinez were intentionally arrested in order to infiltrate the Broward Detention Center in Pompano Beach, Florida. Once inside, the young activists began collecting the stories of dozens of detainees who qualified for release under President Obama’s 2011 prosecutorial discretionary guidelines, yet continued to be held for several months. When NIYA released their findings in a press conference, Saavedra and Martinez were swiftly released.

“My son is a warrior,” Saavedra’s mother, Natalia, told Colorlines. Despite her courageous words, Natalia fears the treatment her son will receive now that he has been transferred from Florence Detention Center to Arizona’s notorious Eloy Detention Center.

Although the Dream 9 knew they would be detained — the US Border Patrol had informed NIYA that the young people would be arrested and deported as soon as they reached the border — they did not anticipate having their phone calls restricted. (An Eloy representative has denied restricting the activists’ calls.) On Thursday, the six Dream 9 women began a hunger strike. Now, all of them are refusing food until they are released. Mateo, Amaro, Santiago, Martinez, Saavedra, and Felix have been placed in solitary confinement for refusing to eat.

NIYA’s strategy for the Dream 9 is to request humanitarian parole for the detainees. According to US Citizen and Immigration Services, “humanitarian parole is used sparingly to bring someone who is otherwise inadmissible into the United States for a temporary period of time due to a compelling emergency.” In an interview with NBC Latino, Kiran Savage-Sangwan, a member of the Dream 9′s policy team, explained that a humanitarian parole request is required to prevent the activists from becoming targets of kidnapping or other harmful criminal activity.

“Each will be interviewed by an asylum officer to establish each has a credible fear of persecution if they are denied admittance to the US,” said Savage-Sangwan. “These young people are certainly not a threat of public danger. They are not going to flee. They knocked on the door of the US to re-enter, so they should be released pending litigation of their asylum claims.”

A collective action this bold is unprecedented in the undocumented immigrant movement. If successful, it will establish a path for others who have been deported from and would like to return to the US. According to NIYA spokesperson Mohammad Abdolahi, the organization has a list of people willing to replicate this strategy. Just hours after the Dream 9 were detained, thirty people gathered at the US-Mexico border hoping to enter the country.

It’s been said that this is a publicity stunt, and the Dream 9 have been called audacious, disrespectful, silly, and petulant. But the young people are responding to an immigration system to which these words could be equally applied. People who have been torn from their families undertake perilous journeys in order to be reunited with their loved ones. As a result, hundreds of migrants die every year while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.

photo of eight of the Dream 9 activistsDuring their march through the streets of Nogales, Saavedra shouted, “When President Obama is deporting our families, what do we do?” His eight companions yelled in unison, “Stand up! Fight back!” This is what fighting back for the Dream 9 looks like. And to my eyes, it is a radical demonstration of the love they have for their community.

For the Dream 9, it’s not enough that undocumented students are provided with a pathway to citizenship. They won’t wait for Congress to gut and pass a toothless and elitist comprehensive immigration reform bill. Instead, they are fearlessly putting their own lives on the line to highlight the flaws of the system. They are holding the Obama administration and other politicians accountable for their unfulfilled promises.

If the Dream 9 are released, and this action is successful, it won’t be because President Obama and other elected officials came to their aid. It will be because undocumented activists and their allies demanded these politicians make good on their assurances to those at risk of deportation.

As I write this, petitions are circulating that call for the Dream 9’s release. Allies are sending letters to their state and national representatives. Sit-ins and vigils are cropping up across the country. The nationwide outpouring of support demonstrates the direct correlation between increased mobilization and progress. It was undocumented activists and their allies who demanded the passage of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the DREAM Act in twelve states. Don’t let politicians rob them of these victories by claiming otherwise.

As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who was undocumented in the US for more than twenty years, I feel an overwhelming connection to the Dream 9. I’ve thought of them several times a day since watching their march to the border last week. I wonder if they are worried or if they are in high spirits. I wonder if they can sense the deluge of gratitude and appreciation through the walls of their confinement. Most of all, I wonder when the American government will allow them to reunite with their families.

So, let’s bring them home.

UPDATE: On Tuesday, August 6, each member of the Dream 9 has successfully established the “credible fear” aspect of humanitarian parole.  Their cases now be heard by an immigration judge, who will decide whether to grant asylum.

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Still in Search of Justice for Trayvon Martin


photo of protestor holding a "Justice for Trayvon Martin" signI was never confident that a jury comprised almost exclusively of white women would convict George Zimmerman of second-degree murder, but last night’s not guilty verdict still left me breathless. I had wanted to believe that my worst fears weren’t true, that I am not living in a country where a man can get away with killing a seventeen-year-old child because that child is black. But the verdict sent a clear message: black people’s lives are not valued in America.

This case has been rife with racial tension from the beginning. It took Florida police six weeks to arrest George Zimmerman after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Their inaction brought to mind similar examples of legal injustice in US history, and many began to draw parallels between Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till.

During the summer of 1955, two white men brutally tortured and shot fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi because he whistled at a white woman while buying bubble gum at the local grocery. The white woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, enlisted the help of his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and the two men kidnapped and murdered the black child before dumping his body into a river. In a gross miscarriage of justice, which many credit as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, both men were acquitted by an all-white jury.

When I learned the story of Emmett Till’s lynching, I didn’t understand how it was possible for these two men to get away with murder. After all, America’s foundational philosophy is “liberty and justice for all.” But when a victim is black, and the accused and their jurors are white, accountability can be elusive. We learned that lesson fifty-seven years ago, and we are still learning it today.

The morning before the Zimmerman verdict was reached, journalist Aura Bogado appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show and pointed out that, although the Zimmerman trial is not about gender, the all-female jury is getting a lot of attention in the media. “It’s actually five white people and one person of color,” Bogado said. “They’re seen as women; their whiteness is not seen.”

This sentiment was echoed by Maya Wiley, president of the Center for Social Inclusion and another commentator on that episode of the show. Wiley pointed out that Zimmerman’s lawyers played to the racial fears they believed the white women jurors would possess by calling Olivia Bertalan as a witness for Zimmerman. Bertalan, a white woman, conveyed her appreciation of Zimmerman’s efforts to help her feel safe — including giving her a dog — after two black teenagers broke into her home.

“They called a white woman to talk about the two black men who terrorized her in her home,” commented Wiley. “That was to reinforce to white women on that jury that [they] need to be afraid [of black men].”

Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, understood the climate of race-based fear in a time of Jim Crow laws and legal segregation. To help white people understand the brutality that had been inflicted upon her son, she insisted on having an open casket at the funeral. Mamie Till is reported to have said, “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”

The world did see what was done to Emmett Till. Photographs of his bloated body and severely mangled face were featured in newspapers internationally.

Unlike Mamie Till, Trayvon Martin’s mother wasn’t given the courtesy of choosing whether her son’s dead body would be displayed publicly. Instead, MSNBC and Gawker made the choice for her. (Warning: This link contains graphic violence.) As a result, millions of people have seen Trayvon Martin’s lifeless body. Like the photographs of Emmett Till, the image haunts me.

After the verdict was announced, many Americans took to Facebook and Twitter to express their devastation, outrage, horror, and shame. Some pointed out the hypocrisy of Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict in comparison with last year’s verdict in the Marissa Alexander case. A 31-year-old, black mother of three, Alexander was found guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for firing a warning shot to scare off her abusive husband as he threatened her. No one was harmed, except Alexander and her children; she received a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty years in prison.

Amid talk of possible rioting after the verdict was reached, blogger Jay Smooth made this comment on Twitter: “The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George Zimmermans.” His comment made me wonder whether they were saying the same thing nearly six decades ago when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam got away with murder in Mississippi.

No parent wants their son to be the next Emmett Till. Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin now share Mamie Till’s pain of losing a beloved child in a national tragedy. After the verdict was announced, Tracy Martin tweeted this emotional response: “Even in his death, I know my baby is proud of the fight we, along with all of you, put up for him.… Even though I am brokenhearted, my faith is unshattered.”

For me, I will continue fighting until it is no longer the case that a man can walk free after killing a black child in America. Hoodies up!

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