I flicked my driver’s license casually.

“Citizenship?” asked the border patrol agent.

“American,” I said.

My best friend Cecilia and I were coming back from a fun weekend in Mexico and had just driven up to the U.S. entry gate at the Tijuana/San Diego border. I asked the uniformed man for the best route to northern San Diego, where I lived. He teased me about having to ask for directions. We both laughed.

Cecilia was not so at ease. She paused and was jittery when she answered the agent’s questions, leading him to briefly inspect our trunk before telling me the best way home. I quickly left Mexico without another thought. But next to me, my friend Cecilia started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t believe it was that easy,” she said.

This was one of Cecilia’s first trips back to Mexico, her homeland. She had spent more than 15 years living as an illegal alien in the United States before finally becoming a legal resident. The first time she had crossed the Mexican border wasn’t so easy. She had climbed into a tire, floated, and then waded across the cold waters of the Rio Grande into Texas. She’d walked overnight before landing in a safe house. Another time she’d hidden for hours inside the tiny secret compartment of a couple’s truck, holding her breath while a border patrol dog sniffed the outside, its damp nose searching for illegal cargo.

Five years ago Cecilia married a U.S. citizen and became a legal resident. Now she can travel to Mexico freely. But she knows she will cry when she crosses the border. She can’t help but think of the hundreds of thousands of people who did as she once did — risk their lives to live in this country.

“I didn’t really think about that just now,” I said. I then hugged her, an embrace for all the immigrants in this country, including my parents.

As a first-generation Mexican American, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, I basically grew up Mexican. My parents are often more traditional than families in Mexico — trapped in time, they are unaware that the country has moved beyond the 1950s and 1960s. While kids my age danced to Michael Jackson, I fell in love with romantic boleros from Mexican idols like Javier Solis. I became an expert on black-and-white film stars like Pedro Infante and Cantinflas.

Some parts of my culture I rejected. I was not allowed to go to sleepovers. I couldn’t talk to boys. English was banned at home, and I ate tacos for lunch while classmates ate sandwiches. Most of all I hated the work. I had to help my parents clean offices at night, falling asleep in the van while they worked until morning. On the weekends, while my friends got to see movies or visit the park, my parents and I sold food out of our home, collected cans, cleaned houses, mass produced paper flowers, packaged gift tissue, sold toys at swap meets, painted apartments, and mowed lawns or buffed floors.

“I don’t belong here,” I’d thought. Only when I visited Mexico did I get the childhood I yearned for. I could hang out on the streets without my parents beckoning me inside. I was free to flirt with boys and walk around the plaza arm-and-arm with my cousins.

Something magical happened to my parents in Mexico. They laughed louder, told funny stories, hugged relatives, enjoyed leisurely meals, and even danced.

“Why don’t we stay here?” I wondered. When we came back stateside, I missed Mexico, with its big mountains and wide beaches, its loud cities and colorful fruit stands. But it always came to an end, and we dutifully headed home to work and to school. At the border, my mother and I would cross by car. My father would always disappear and take another route.

“He has something to buy, “ my mother would say. “He’ll meet us on the other side.”

We prayed while we waited for him to cross. I would absorb my mother’s nervousness. We always felt relieved, and happy when my father walked up to us in Laredo, Texas — safe on the other side.

Today, my mother is a U.S. citizen and my father is a U.S. resident. They make few trips to Mexico now, ensconced by a lively Dallas lifestyle where they tend three small businesses. Mexico lives in my heart, but as I matured I began to embrace being American more.

Some of my relatives are very poor in Mexico, with little hope of getting ahead. Some of them are middle-class and believe keeping up appearances is the most important thing there is. I like it here where I can work hard to get ahead, and where it’s okay to be me — 31 and unmarried, living on my own, working on a career, experiencing other cultures, traveling alone, going without makeup, speaking up when I want to, being unfashionable, hosting martini parties. My family in Mexico would forgive me for my small indiscretions too, I’m sure, though I do get a lot of lectures when I talk to relatives there.

No, I am lucky to live here. As a reporter in San Diego, I often cover stories about undocumented immigrants. I read mail from readers who accuse me of not telling the story of how illegal aliens are crippling California, not to mention the country. I am often told to go back to my country too. I laugh off the most offensive comments because I can.

I am American.

I look at the immigrants here — who stand on the corner looking for work, who live in makeshift shacks in canyons because they lack affordable housing, who pile into cars to go buy groceries, who work 12-hour days for little pay, somehow managing to save thousands to pay back the coyote who brought them — and I’m not afraid of them. They are here illegally, I know. But they are here. There are an estimated 8 to 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. They are part of our society, and I am honored to tell their stories. Somebody has to. I approach them respectfully and I am glad when they talk to me.

Recently, U.S. border patrol agents began arresting immigrants in San Diego at bus stops, on corners and in grocery stores. I wonder if they will snatch me up if I somehow forget my I.D. — after all, I look so ethnic. It angers me that my civil rights as a U.S. citizen could be so easily violated. But then I return to my comfortable stateside apartment and do not think about immigration issues. I have that luxury.

Back in the car, my friend Cecilia cried. And when I hugged her, I began to cry too. I remembered the struggles my mother and father had gone through for me, the countless times they had risked their lives to cross the border, the dozens of jobs they held, the new language they studied, the hamburgers they learned to cook, the way they encouraged me to go to college, the soft words of love my father murmured when I told him I was moving away. They are proud of me, but I can only aspire to be as courageous.

My parents became American for me, just as millions of immigrants have done for decades and will continue to do so for their families. When Cecilia cried I could almost hear them panting, out of breath in the nearby deserts, walking through the night to reach a safe house somewhere in this country.

And I prayed for them.

In The Fray Contributor

Author Radhika Sharma performs a ceremony on her sister-in-law’s groom during a wedding in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India, in April 2004.

I often find myself mired in thought comparing and contrasting my new life in the United States to my life in India. Recollections and epiphanies come to me during mundane dinners, at supermarket checkout counters — even during spiritual discourses.

Each month I struggle to do justice to my position as a reluctant and informal ambassador, hoping fervently that as I vocalize my observations about both cultures I also reawaken and clarify my rather murky sense of self and identity.

Almost every week I struggle to explain fuzzy existential and far removed issues to folks back home: Why do Americans complain about housework despite having so many timesaving appliances? Why does the immigrant Indian community celebrate Diwali (The festival of lights) on weekends? Why this? Why that?

And almost each day, while I drink tea by myself, I remind myself to enjoy the richness and aroma of the tea and try to avoid listening to the voice playing in my mind: “You liked tea because it signified something. Does it still?”

That voice in my head repeats provocatively. Teatime was my time with my mother and brother; time spent relaxing, time spent bonding, time stolen from the onslaught of life’s perpetual errands.

In my early months as an immigrant, my lunches and teas would get the better of me — leaving me depressed, sometimes tearful, missing home. That doesn’t happen anymore. I am happy that a symptom has faded away, but has the disease, this looped drama, playing in my mind?

Disease is the state of being ill at ease. But on a cynical day, I feel that the word is synonymous with the state of being an immigrant. As my sense of powerlessness grows, I often marvel at the illusion I used to have that I could decide the degree of my assimilation and separation. Now that seems nearly impossible.

My first few months went by in a blur. “Learn this.” “Get here.” “Get there.”

Perhaps a part of it has now been accomplished. I know the difference between a Macy’s and a Nordstrom. I have trained my tongue to pronounce “schedule” the way the American ear likes to hear it. I laugh delightedly on jokes by American stand-up comedians. I have started reveling in the inescapable “Do-it-yourself” philosophy of my adopted country.

Yet I often wonder that in this process of learning, how much did I unlearn and how much more do I have to go? Each time this fear strikes, I try, in vain perhaps, to control the process of my adaptation — to never forget where I came from, to become only so much of an insider that I understand the issues of this new land while still remaining the outsider who can offer a fresh perspective.

The other day someone said to me: “So, you’ve been here for awhile. You should be well adjusted by now.”

I guess I am. With each passing year and each subtle adjustment I make, I become interesting fodder “back home” for extended family and acquaintances to analyze. An aunt hugs delightedly and tells me that she is so happy that I am still the same. An acquaintance spots a few of my “American” mannerisms within 10 minutes of association. They are both right. And wrong. For the truth is always somewhere in between.

For me, and perhaps for many others like me, the intangible fallouts of immigration started kicking in only after I seemed to have successfully wrestled with the tangible fallouts of immigration. After the mad rush to make sense of the system had subsided. After you have learned to drive on the freeway, navigate the healthcare system, and much more, you realize that your phone calls to extended family start feeling increasingly threadbare.

You rely on old memories and idiosyncrasies to craft conversations. And as soon as you set the telephone receiver down, you ruminate on this greater vision immigration has unexpectedly ushered. Longing alternates with pragmatism and then, perhaps, at parties with others who chose to live in the United States, you ponder the pros and cons.  Depending on your mood, you let one place win over the other.

Like characters in a novel which take on a life of their own, eluding the grasp of their creator, so too is the effect of this new geography. When blissful ignorance yields to unsettling realities, the mind grasps for acceptance of the new reality.

I rationalize. “Let us be grateful,” a voice inside me whispers. After all, this is a great century to be a nomad, a wanderer or an immigrant, as my older friends reassure me. Email, voice mail, snail mail, Web cam.

True, short of touch, I am there, wherever I want to be, deluding me into thinking that I know what is going on in that place I once called home. And should my longing get unbearable, the airport is barely an hour away!

Twenty-four hours on a Transpacific flight is all that that separates me from a once-lived world and a new world that gives me the seductive opportunity and the infrastructure to do cutting edge professional work. But one weekend as I got back from my first writers’ conference, I thought, “How lovely if this would happen in India!”

But it doesn’t. Not right now. And that is among the many reasons why I continue to stay.

This cutting-edge work wreaks havoc on my heartstrings, while giving me nebulous fears and joys. A little bit of geography and a boundless chasm of the mind keep the different pies of my circle apart. And only I know how exquisitely different each pie in my circle is. I know how my days are a crazy mish-mash of feelings. Sometimes I feel completely at home and wonder why we need to stick labels onto feelings like belongingness, while at other times, when I am forced to deal with prejudice, discrimination, and explain life choices like being a writer who writes in English, I wonder, “Why am I here?”

Each day I learn that nostalgia is like an uninvited guest who never really bids goodbye, and every couple of days when you open some closet in your heart, you will find it hiding there, waiting to pounce on you. And then it hits me that these feelings will not go away, and that I have no words with which to dress them.

Our adjustment to geography is unfortunately not as well defined as the geography itself. No matter how much we might try to keep in touch, to prop up our understanding of cities and scenarios miles away through the written word and the spoken word, there simply can be no substitute for our physical experiences. There’s no substitute for the here and now.

Radhika Sharma (left) visits San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge with her husband’s aunt, Sangeeta Sharma (far right), and Sangeeta’s daughters Nikita and Kareena in the summer of 2002. (photo by Nikhil Sharma)

With each month that I stay an immigrant I know more people in my new land. With each year that I stay away my nucleus in India shrinks to a highly dense mass. I see myself in my English friend who longs for London (“home”) the moment she sets foot in the San Francisco airport, yet feels strangely unsettled in London and wishes she could go (“home”) to San Francisco.

I see myself in my Indian friend who must buy Indian handicrafts when her craving for colors gets insatiable. I see myself in my Polish friend who prays for an alternative to seemingly interminable flight journeys. I see myself in my younger friend who has just discovered the joys of hopping on a fast-moving train from San Francisco to San Jose. Our names might be different. Our faces unique. Yet our secrets are the same. Despite the pitfalls, the world is our playground. All of us homeless and all of us home.

A few days ago I caught myself getting irritated at a jaywalker while I drove my car in my California suburb and remembered my unconditional acceptance of traffic chaos in my hometown of Jodhpur, India. I christened it “selective acceptance.” For immigrants thrive and struggle with this sense of a bifurcated identity that lets them create different switches in their minds. Switches that are turned off and on depending on their viability to the present moment.

Still, there are many other nameless mental switches longing to be named. Perhaps I could have devoured books on language and come up with some feeble attempts at categorizing them. But my purpose is not to see a few self-coined words as a part of the lexicon. My hope is to see a time when we will have a large working vocabulary on immigration coined by our collective experiences. For that is when its nebulous halo will get slightly better coordinates.

If we are to deepen our discussion, if we must ensure that the richness which our “diversity” has injected into the system, is not submerged into some dense mass of homogeneity, then we must take care to articulate and encapsulate all the insights our immigrant status has bestowed upon us. The mere act of such acknowledgement will reassure those newly uprooted and alone while opening the eyes of the non-immigrant to a world they shall then perceive with far greater empathy.

We must articulate the loss of a once familiar language, the joy of occasionally hearing a word once commonplace and reveling in all its contours and nuances, the reluctance of being put in a ambassadorial position (“So what exactly does this symbol signify …?”).

Physical distance places a slow, corrosive dilution on our relationships. The gain and loss of friends. Missed weddings. The resigned acceptance of an Internet-discovered home remedy as woeful substitute to a grandmother’s, which, physical proximity allowed, would be passed down through the generations.

Otherwise, those who have vicariously shared these experiences shall attempt, as they do now, to dissect and condense our imagery to fit the conformed dimensions. Reducing to caricature our struggles with a new language, new neighbors, and new workplaces; always focusing on the tangible, the easily perceptible; and tidily neglecting the harder and more elusive aspects of our journeys.

Language is fluid, and at times an imperfect tool. But let us not make it a highly imperfect one due to laziness. And while we find words to convey the gamut of emotions that well up inside us when we hop from one flight to another, all the while hoping to capture the creases on those faces standing across the terminal for posterity, we must understand that we measure our losses by their absences. We must accept that our quantification of our losses has stemmed out of a consciousness of their absences.

Nevertheless, those absences have been gifts, enriching our perceptions. The piercing pain of those losses and the richness of our gains is what we must more adeptly articulate.

When we choose to name something, we acknowledge its presence. We cannot describe or deal with what we do not know or will not admit. Loss and abundance have innumerable shades.

But it is time we added a few more shades to our palette. One word at a time. And even though there may be times when our hearts ache, we must chose to remember that this is a great time to be a nomad.

STORY INDEX

PEOPLE >

Profile of a young immigrant author
URL: http://www.masslive.com/living/republican/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1082452771112062.xml

A link to various immigrant authors (with bibliographies of their work)
URL: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Contents.html#Authors

Commentary >

NPR’s audio piece on the immigrant experience
URL: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3075005

Radhika Sharma’s perspectives on immigration in India Currents
URL: http://www.indiacurrents.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=7cc0e622759345fb7373b739077e5726
http://www.indiacurrents.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=d8f17cfd5b64be9c5fc5e969ee9bff19

A potpourri of the various facets of American immigration
URL: http://immigration.about.com/
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listmigratiodo.html

KQED FM San Francisco weeklong dedication to new Americans
URL: http://www.kqed.org/programs/program-archive.jsp?progID=RD62&ResultStart=121&ResultCount=10&type=radio

In The Fray Contributor

On May 17, during an appearance at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Bill Cosby made some colorful remarks about race and responsibility. For a few days last month — alright, let’s get the Jell-O reference out of the way — he was in deep pudding with the P.C. police.

During a celebration for the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in our nation’s capital of equivocation and obfuscation, and in the presence of the presidents of Howard University and the NAACP, “Combustible” Huxtable had the bad taste to make frank, critical comments about the state of black society in America.

Thankfully, he has yet to back down.

Howard University hasn’t released a full transcript of the speech, but according to numerous media reports, here are some of the greatest hits:

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.

These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 on ‘Hooked on Phonics’ …

They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t, Where you is’ … And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.  Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads . . .

You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!

As you might expect, there were mixed reactions about the propriety of his remarks. Is Bill Cosby giving ammunition to arch-conservatives who want to believe that blacks lack a sense of personal responsibility? Is a celebration of an historic milestone of equality the right occasion for airing such pointed criticisms?

Cosby was accused of being a classist and betraying his race. But ultimately, many people, black and white, applauded his frankness. He may not have been accurate or precise (generalizations never are), but in the antiseptic haze of national politics, where every word is calculated to offend the fewest people, it was refreshing to hear some uncensored honesty. For too long, the American obsession with political correctness — especially on issues of race — has crippled the national dialogue.

Americans are so thirsty for candor, we’ll take it any way we can get it.

“Nothing Cosby said hasn’t been uttered by other black people,” Renee Graham wrote in the Boston Globe, “but usually only among ourselves at dinner parties, on back porches, and in barbershops.”

“Had a white person made comments similar to those expressed by Cosby,” Graham wrote, “without fail he or she would be strong-armed into an apology.” She’s right. More accurately, if he or she were a politician, the P.C. police would be in full battle mode before you could say, “Confederate flag.” Remember Howard Dean?

On November 2, 2003, the Des Moines Register published an interview with Dean in which he said he wanted to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.” Like Cosby’s remarks, Dean’s comment was broad and open to misunderstanding. It offended some people. But the sentiment behind it was sound.

“We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats,” Dean continued. Hardly a contestable suggestion. Even so, Dean’s fellow democratic candidates feigned indignation. John Kerry and Al Sharpton demanded an apology. For all of three days, Dean stood his ground.

“I started this discussion in a clumsy way,” Dean said on November 6. “I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African American or Southern white voters.”

These are grown men. Howard Dean meant what he said. But instead of applauding Dean for being forthright, Kerry offered this disingenuous plea: “Rather than politics as usual, Howard Dean should have taken responsibility for his rhetoric and simply said, ‘I was wrong.’”

Kerry was right in one sense: Howard Dean should have taken responsibility for what he said — and stuck to it.

Unfortunately, you have to meet some lofty criteria to get away with being blunt in Washington, D.C. Who but Bill Cosby could be so candid about such an explosive subject? Besides being one of the most beloved entertainers of all time, he is a doctor (he got his Ph.D. in Education from the University of Massachusetts in 1977). Before he became a comedian and a gajillionaire, he was one of those “lower economic people.” He’s black. And most notably, he isn’t a politician.

Three weeks after the fact, we’re still talking about Bill Cosby’s thoughts on race. And he’s not even an elected official. He’s an entertainer.

We’re still talking about Cosby’s comments, not because the ideas weren’t around before, but because somebody we respect had the temerity to address it in public, rather than behind the doors of a cozy dinner party or local barbershop.

Agree with Bill Cosby or don’t. Dissect his statements and parse the exceptions from the rules. But don’t ask him to apologize for the pain he may have caused. Presumably, he thought about what he was going to say. And whether or not anybody thought it was appropriate, the national dialogue is better off for him having said it.

If only Bush and Kerry would follow his lead.

henrypb

(photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

Digging through my wallet today I have discovered — I never really thought about it before — that I have many kinds of cards; too many, I think. Some are credit cards and thus a constant reminder of the monthly burden I’ve placed on myself.

Many are flimsy business cards, some you might even call calling cards, and there are a few gift cards to various computer stores and book stores. I have membership cards to the few societies I am a member of and insurance cards that are there, I suppose, to give me some sense of security regarding my health or the health of my car. I have several security cards instead of keys: one for the building I work in, and another for the suite that houses the cubicle within the building I work in, and most recently I have acquired a parking pass (yet one more card) that allows me access each morning to the parking garage a block from the building that houses the suite which houses the cubicle I work in, and for which I pay the sum of $100 per month for this very privilege.

My driver’s license is a card, as is my Social Security card. I even have a debit card that parades itself as a MasterCard, but in reality gives me no credit whatsoever, no matter how well I treat it. I have discount cards and privilege cards. I have rewards cards that allow me to collect points for purchases, food punch cards that allow me to collect punches for purchases, and ink-stamp cards that allow me to collect ink-stamps for purchases  — all of which I summarily forget to produce from my wallet whenever I find myself standing in front of a checkout clerk. I even have something called a “universal access card,” but I have no idea what it could possibly access — the universe, perhaps?

We are a society of cards and they’re filling our pockets and our wallets and our purses and our landfills and the very desk I write these words upon. We need cards to access this, or cards to purchase that, or cards to even prove we are who we say we are — apparently no one’s word is good any longer. We have playing cards of all sorts, and packs of cards with pictures of sportsmen and heroes, of villains and heroines, all with a stick of hard, pink bubblegum.

We have catalogs of cards to find our way through the mazes of shelves and stacks in the public libraries. We have index cards for jotting down notes lest we forget our speeches or our thoughts or our recipes or how to make the perfect dry martini.

We send out a card to thank someone for a birthday gift that, no doubt, was itself a card for us to purchase ourselves the gift that someone hadn’t the insight or the time or the inkling of understanding to purchase for us.

How simple it is to walk into the video store and ask, “Please may I purchase a gift card?”

“Why certainly … how much would you like to spend?”

And then you wonder … what is this friend worth? $20, $50, $14.72? You don’t even know, so you say, “How about 20 bucks,” and then you get, “They only come in denominations of $5, $10, $25 and $50.”

So you wonder and you ponder and you consider and you contemplate and in the end you buy the $25 card because that sounds fair enough, and then you’re asked if you’d like to buy a discount card which would save you 10 percent on any purchase made today and so you ask the lady behind the counter, “Would I save 10 percent on the purchase of the gift card?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head, probably thinking to herself that you’re cheap. “Discount cards are no good towards the purchase of the gift cards.”

And, you think to yourself as you look around and spot the various sale items, posters, T-shirts, mugs, and other bits of movie paraphernalia that litter the store, they probably aren’t good for much else, either.

So out of embarrassment you buy the discount card anyway because you don’t think you’re cheap and you certainly don’t want her to think you’re cheap; the card costs you $25, but don’t worry, she tells you, you can make all that back in no time at all and save money, too … and of course you know full well, as you shake your head and smile to yourself (and as you attempt to stuff yet one more card into your bulging wallet), that you don’t watch movies let alone purchase them and you’ll probably never be back until the next friend’s birthday and it doesn’t matter anyway because the discount card that now occupies your wallet behind the sub-club card and your all American Big Bank Visa card is no good towards the purchase of the gift cards.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“America’s deepening credit card hole” by Jim Hightower
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=7979

“Calling all shoppers: On grocery store loyalty cards” by Deborah Pierce
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13684

“Charge now, think later” by Elizabeth Zipper
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12275

“Credit card companies close Muslim accounts” by Hillary Russ
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15659

“Letting consumerism get under your skin” by Jim Hightower
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18729

“

Thomas J. Clancy

View of Tiger Leaping Gorge from the hiker’s trail.

“Man man shou shi” called the bronzed and leathery man with a crew cut and a donkey as he waited for me to stuff my sweater in my backpack. He was telling me to take my time, as he was planning on following me. Since embarking on the trail winding along Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province, I had slowly peeled off the top three layers of clothing I had worn in anticipation of frigid mountain air. Betraying my background as a not-at-one-with-nature New Yorker, I found myself ascending a mountain as the daytime temperature rose rapidly. The jacket and two fleeces went first, followed by the wool sweater, but there was little I could do about the long underwear, at least not with the donkey man following closely behind.

The man tailing me was patiently waiting for me to collapse on the trail. He hoped that I would subsequently avail myself of his donkey and allow him to carry me in a formless, sweaty mass for the rest of the trip. Of course, this made me all the more determined to continue on the narrow, rocky footpath, wishing to match the ruggedness of my surroundings.

Below, the steep shoulders of the green mountain range shrugged into a glistening strip of the Yangtze. Yet as the trail grew steeper, I found myself hardly noticing the majestic scenery and instead focusing on my feet, gingerly feeling around for a firm foothold amid sand, pebbles, and gnarled vegetation. As my hiking companion pulled further ahead and disappeared around the sharp twists, the man stayed a few paces behind and offered the donkey for 10 Renminbi (approximately US$1.25).

“Do I look like I’m about to give up?” I grumbled as I shifted my weight from rock to rock, my knees growing increasingly numb with each step.

“Just about,” he replied. Partially in recognition of my exhaustion and partially to distract myself from the uphill battle as we approached the steepest portion of the trail, known to backpackers as the Twenty-eight Bends, I began to bargain with him. By the time we embarked on the first few bends, I had already talked him down to five Kuai. I’m aware that this amounts to a discount of about 60 cents, but I share the shameless disdain for getting ripped off of many other foreigners It’s not so much a matter of money, but of dignity; no one wants to be the sucker, and no one wants to be the stupid laowai who gets cheated. But perhaps our tenacity in haggling stems from our paranoia that being tricked is unavoidable — and indeed, sort of a right of passage here.

I allowed the donkey to carry my backpack, but remained determined to make all Twenty-eight Bends by foot, or hands and knees if need be. I continued talking with him as he rode the donkey with my pack on his back. Whereas other guides I had encountered at Chinese tourist destinations were mainly desperately impoverished villagers, he was surprisingly cosmopolitan compared to his humble surroundings. He was a miner by trade, since in his area, few people could rely solely on farming for income. He had two children in college and one in the army. The company he worked for had taken him to several Chinese cities on business and once to Thailand as a reward for his hard work.

“I haven’t been to America, though,” he said.

His “been there, done that” tone indicated that, having been outside the country, America didn’t hold the same fascination for him that it did for other Chinese, or maybe that he at any rate preferred Yunnan to any place abroad.

The homes we passed on the trail were scattered, drab brick huts with tile roofs overlooking terrace-farmed crops. I had trouble imagining that any of the inhabitants would leave Yunnan — one of the poorest provinces in China — in their lifetimes, but I suppose the donkey escort, along with the satellite dish hanging over a pair of old women shelling walnuts by the roadside, proved that the villages flanking the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail were as unpredictable as the terrain.

After about an hour of protracted agony, we reached the top of the Twenty-eight Bends, the apex of the trail, whereupon Donkey Man gruffly deemed me lihai or “powerful” and said he was impressed that I made it up by myself.  We edged down to a cliff overlooking the Gorge, where we were greeted by a scruffy villager who took “toll money” from those who used the path to the cliff, which he supposedly built himself.

Liberated from my oppressive layers and most unforgiving chunk of the trail, I could finally take in my surroundings. In the afternoon sun, the Jin Sha Jiang, or Golden Sand River spun a mercury thread between the bases of two chunks of velvety green and gray rock, the Jade Snow Mountain and the Dragon Snow Mountain. The Gorge’s namesake refers to a spunky tiger, the head honcho of the animal kingdom in Chinese myth who made the only successful dash in history across the 3,000-meter deep cleft. Since then, dozens of mortals (that is, overconfident Westerners) have misstepped into the depths of the Yangtze and floated into backpacker lore.

But the footprints that dotted the path before us were evidence that, the hike, which followed the precarious curves of an old miner’ trail, is becoming increasingly manageable, barring extremely bad fortune. The path varies in width from about two knees wide to just large enough for a local farmer and his cows to cross as the American tourist awkwardly yields onto the grassy shoulder. We passed only two other hikers in two days, so it seemed for a while that we had happened upon a place in Yunnan not yet invaded by the tourist industry. However, there were signs that the pristine trail had been deflowered since the rise of the Lonely Planet series. The farmers on the path were not surprised to see foreigners but rather smiled in amusement at hikers striving to “chi ku” or “eat bitter,” with the masochistic trek. The yellow and red arrows directing hikers where to go and marking the distance to various guesthouses (Woody’s, Tina’s, Sean’s) also betrayed the fact that the gorge had long since become an official destination.

Local tourist industry workers: the donkey man and toll collector.

Necessary self-deceptions

In 1997, Salon.com ran an article entitled “The Tragedy of Tiger Leaping Gorge,” by Simon Winchester, in which the English travel writer lamented that civilization was threatening to trample the natural treasures of the gorge.

“There is electricity,” he wrote. “There is talk of telephones. I saw a satellite dish.”
He recorded one villager’s gloomy prediction: “Soon … there will be no more walkers, only cars that will speed through the gorge in a matter of minutes. There will probably before long be a proper hotel in Walnut Grove, not the cozy inn that exists today, and it will no doubt take credit cards, and in its rooms will be color televisions that show CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV.”

Thankfully, six years later, the Gorge has not yet been totally ravaged by tourists, perhaps because the local industry self-regulates its development to keep things charmingly “rustic.” Yet we were not disappointed that our Naxi host at the Tea Horse Guesthouse knew how to make omelets (though the walnut pancakes we requested more closely resembled a plate-sized muffin). The menu, written in English on bamboo slats, also offered hot cocoa, oatmeal, and banana crepes alongside the traditional Naxi baba flatbread. And although CNN doesn’t reach most television sets in rural China, we spent the evening watching Chinese soap operas in our hostess’s living room.

The manager of the guesthouse, a contemporary Naxi matriarch, decided to open her own business when she realized that her house was perfectly situated at the point where many exhausted hikers, en route to other guesthouses, expired and came to her for a warm bed. Tea Horse is apparently the only true Naxi bed-and-breakfast on the trail; the rest, explained our host as she cooked dinner over a country-style wok about a meter wide, are now run by Han people who have settled in the area. Of course, cultural authenticity is a malleable concept when it comes to accommodating guests. Clad in gold hoop earrings and a traditional headdress, she giggled as she offered us a local specialty, Yunnan marijuana leaves in a white teapot.

In the morning, my New Yorker hamstrings still tender from the day before, I was thankful for the few Western amenities we were afforded, including a trickle of running water, before setting off on the remainder of the trail. Our route for the second half of the trail, mostly descending, hugged the craggy mountainside, snaking parallel to the sparkling rapids below. We were undisturbed except for the occasional goat or dog encroaching on our path, and the telephone poles that cut into our camera viewfinders.

As we approached Walnut Grove, the trail merged with a highway at the construction site for a bridge designed to reduce the great tiger leap over the Yangtze to a bumpy four-minute crossing by truck or taxi. But Walnut Grove, unlike Winchester’s grave premonition, was not replete with four-star hotels. It was rather a quaint example of the kind of rural prosperity that the Chinese government is trying to promote in the Western part of the country: lush green terrace farms, simple but well-kept stone homes with fluted tile roofs, and the fresh construction of glossy wooden houses inspired by ancient Naxi architecture. Winchester may have denounced the Gorge’s fall from sublime isolation, but for a peasant family who can put their children through college selling soft drinks to backpackers, the tourist industry is not only a welcome element of modernity; it may be the only chance to clamber at the wealth that the Reform Era has promised the masses.

Again, I encountered the ambiguous footprint of legions of backpackers, who like me sought the singular delights of Yunnan’s mountain landscapes but were not quite willing to admit that the experience was now hardly unique. The wooden signs on the road advertising the town’s guesthouses boasting cold beer and the only Western-style toilet in Walnut Grove did somewhat puncture the lofty pride I felt for having completed the two-day trek. Then again, I might not have completed the journey were it not for the small — yet upon closer examination, not so subtle — comforts that capitalism’s invasion of this once-virgin territory afforded me.

Likewise, if the journey had been any rougher, I’m not sure an urbanite like myself would have been able to appreciate thoroughly the sweeping beauty of the gorge. For the momentary pleasure of conquering the trail, I figured it was worth the slight shame of deceiving myself slightly with the idea of being a true adventurer. Like being duped out of a few kuai by local peddlers, harmless falsities can produce true emotional rewards. The idea is just to let go. The Gorge had been christened by many before me, but in my mind, the green terraces of Walnut Grove were the picture of the Yunnan countryside’s pre-Liberation nubility.

The only true Tiger Leaping Gorge purists may be the idealistic Westerners wrestling with the liberal guilt of their complicity in the tourist industry. The locals didn’t seem to mind, as long as every flapjack they flipped was the equivalent of a deposit in their children’s college savings account. Incidentally, the villager Winchester quoted in 1997, “a kindly man whom passers-by had once named Woody,” is now the proud owner of “Chateau de Woody,” a guesthouse noted in every backpacker guidebook for its charming vistas and Western snacks. The sign outside proclaims a motto befitting the backpacker subculture: “Eat. Drink. Live.” A simple plan for a corner of the world that is growing as complex as it is beautiful.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > ECONOMICS>

“Tourism Helps Boost Yunnan Economy”
Article by Feng Yikun
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/37548.htm

“An assessment of economic development policy in Yunnan Province”
Article by Andrew Watson, China Representative of the Ford Foundation
URL: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/china/AWP.html

TOPICS > PLACES >

“The Tragedy of Tiger Leaping Gorge”
Article by Simon Winchester
URL: http://www.salon.com/june97/wanderlust/china970610.html

China.org.cn’s report on Yunnan Province
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/e-xibu/2JI/3JI/yunnan/yunnan-ban.htm

TOPICS > PEOPLE >

The Han people
URL: http://countrystudies.us/china/41.htm

The Naxi people
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/e-groups/shaoshu/shao-2-naxi.htm

“

Michelle Chen

A line of African American and white school girls standing in a classroom while boys sit behind them at Barnard School, Washington, D.C. May 27, 1955 (Thomas J. O’Halloran, Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs)

The question, “Where are we 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education?” carries a note of despair.

We know where we are: Northern public schools have more segregated than they have ever been and are more segregated than their Southern counterparts, African Americans have very high dropout rates and, worse still, a damaging drug culture and mind-numbingly high incarceration rates. We have not achieved a racially integrated democracy, even if some African-Americans hold positions of significant power.

The question, “Where are we 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education,” frequently inspires the answer: “Tired.”

We have good reason to feel that the mountain is insurmountable. I’d like to remind us of those reasons, for they may help us see where we are, exactly, on the mountain, and where we are going, and thereby help us rally our energies again.

The question of what the Brown decision was really about opens out to a dizzying set of options. Was it about integration? Was it about public education? Was it about social equality? Was it about democratic law?

Sometimes we judge it on one ground; sometimes, on another. In truth, Brown addressed all of these issues, because the case was ultimately about democratic constitutions and what it takes to change them.

A constitution is more than paper; it is a plan for constituting political rights and organizing citizenship, for determining who has access to the powers of collective decision-making that are used to negotiate a community’s economic and social relations. Such plans always involve custom as well as law.

Indeed, a constitution need not even be written out as such. It may, as in Britain, rest on laws and customs that accrete over time to establish a particular distribution of political power through institutions. Or it may, as in ancient Athens, consist of laws and customs that determine who has access to the instruments of political power.

As it happens, the U.S. Constitution of 1787-88 by no means even then contained the whole plan for determining political rights and powers. It left the regulation of voting rights to the states. One can’t claim to understand the constitution (with a small “c”) of the United States without looking beyond the document that bears that title not to context generally, but very specifically, (a) to state laws and (b) to customary habits of citizenship (unspoken norms for interaction that constrain who can speak where in public and how). Both state laws and habits of citizenship help route the basic circuitry of political power.

The Constitution drafted and adopted in 1787-88 attached itself to cultural habits for organizing power-relations among the colonies’ inhabitants that had been under construction since the early 17th century. In 1630 the Virginia Assembly had, among its earliest laws, decreed that “Hugh David be soundly whipped, before an assembly of negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath day.” In 1640 they required “Robert Sweet to do penance in church according to laws of England, for getting a negro woman with child and the woman whipt.” Customs of racial domination and a customary illusion that racial purity existed and was a proper object of the law were, on this continent, born together with written law.

Over nearly two centuries, white inhabitants of the colonies grew accustomed to maintaining key public spaces as their exclusive possession; for the sake of preserving life and stability, black and indigenous inhabitants, all in all, grew accustomed to acquiescing to such norms and to the acts of violence that enforced them. Each set of customs, exclusionary on the one hand and on the other acquiescent, constituted the practical rules of democratic citizenship for a set of the new country’s inhabitants. Together the two sets of rules guided residents of the new United States into the diverse forms of behavior that secured stable (though undemocratic) public spaces.

An African American boy walking through a crowd of white boys during a period of violence related to school integration, in Clinton, Tennessee, December 4, 1956. (Thomas J. O’Halloran, Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs)

These customary rules that routed power were as much a part of the new constitution written in 1787-88 as was the newly conceived and justly privileged text. Those customary rules limited the text, as we all know, in places like the “three-fifths compromise” clause that not only wrote something less than personhood into the Constitution for non-whites but that also, more importantly, inflated the power of Southern whites relative to Northern whites.

The Constitution did not and could not answer all questions about how power would be organized; state laws and habits of interaction filled the gaps. Our constitution with a small “c,” like all constitutions, has always consisted of a complex, intricate web of law and custom.

When the country fought the Civil War and shortly thereafter passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, it undertook the project of undoing a racial constitution that had been settling into place for at least 300 years (since 1562 when Britain entered into the slave trade). A constitution 300 years a-building needs at least as long for its rebuilding. Now, 50 years after Brown, we are only 150 years into that process of remaking the complicated, intricate web of law and custom that put race at the center of our political experience. We probably have at least another 150 years to go.

I recommend that those of us who feel tired return to the transcripts of the oral arguments in Brown (recently reenacted at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and to be aired on Illinois’ PBS affiliate on May 17th), where one finds a tautness on both sides that arises from the lawyers’ intuitive knowledge that they were arguing about the entirety of a constitution. These oral arguments are more powerful, more significant documents, in my view, than the opinion itself.

One finds inspiration in Thurgood Marshall’s impassioned arguments in those transcripts. He had much farther to go than we do. We ought to make his energy our own and turn to resurrecting public education for everyone and to confronting the evils of the drug trade as well as the inequities and hypocrisies of our current responses to it. As Marshall must have understood, the work still ahead is for our children’s children’s children.

In The Fray Contributor

(Original photographs from stock.xchng, illustration by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

If MTV were your only source of news of the outside world, I’m betting you would think racism was dead and buried.

After all, here is a channel where nearly every time a black man appears, he is cruising down the street in a nice German import, wearing enough silver and gold to open his own Tiffany and Co.

And he’s dancing with black girls, with white girls, with Latino girls, and with Asian girls. Watching MTV it seems the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a land where his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin has come to pass — so long as his daughters, once grown up, are willing to flash that skin for the camera.

When the fact is a young black male in urban America is more likely to be arrested near a BMW than driving his own, I wonder what is the message of this particular brand of MTV Multiculturalism, this Dionysian image of all colors coming together and celebrating materialism and conspicuous consumption?

It’s not just MTV.  It’s Will Smith movies, it’s Tiger Woods golf, and it’s Jackie Chan movies. Through all these images runs a common message that says, “Hey, we’re not so different after all. We’re all dancing to Nelly, aren’t we?”

But phrased another way, it can also go like this: “Hey, shut up and stop talking about your own race, we’re all trying to dance to Nelly here!”

The particular brand of multiculturalism has an explicit motive. MTV – a corporation like any other – is selling advertising dollars. To get the viewers, it gears its product – that would be Nelly, N’Sync, and the rest – towards a target audience. But the herd of consumers are not the guys from Nelly’s neighborhood; they are, demographically speaking, the affluent suburban teenagers who blare Nelly and Jay-Z out the speakers of their parents’ SUVs on their way to schools and malls.

To hook this audience, MTV packages its “multiculturalism” with as little actual “culture” as it can possibly manage. It sells its “black culture” – or its Asian culture or its Latino culture – not as it actually is for the blacks, but as it is perceived by the suburban mob. Blacks are “gangstas” and “players”, Asians are kung-fu masters, and Latinos are Spanish-speaking homeboys or big-booty women.

Where are the real ethnics? Walk into the ethnic organization of any diverse campus, and you’ll see communities of young people trying to define more authentic identities for their group.

In the Harvard Asian American community, with which I am most familiar, the range of ethnic activities is astounding. Artistically, we have dance troupes that do everything from traditional ribbon and fan dances to contemporary J-Pop and break dancing. Academically, we have the prestigious Harvard China Review, run mostly, if not exclusively, by Asians. Socially, we have groups for Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese, Southeast Asian, half Asian students, and more. Together, they plan panels, Boba tea nights, or entire dance formals.

One of our students is planning a campus-wide Asian American magazine; another group is pushing for a new Asian American major to be added to the curriculum. Just a month ago I ran a panel on Chinese migration, where international students whose families had moved to everywhere from Thailand to Belgium to New Zealand came together and talked about what it meant to be Chinese.

These are the acts of self-expression that any ethnic group prides itself upon. Just don’t try to find it on MTV. For all its profanity, MTV content, along with the rest of mass media, is innocuous stuff. It has to be, for the advertisers’ sake.

Mass media is “race blind,” to borrow a term from college admissions, if by being blind it can avoid controversy. In the 1989 song “Fight the Power,” Public Enemy raps, “Our freedom of speech is freedom or death / We got to fight the powers that be” and, decrying Elvis, “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.”

In contrast, all Nelly seems to cry out for is a pair of Air Force One sneakers. “I like the all-whites high tops strapped wit a gum bottom / there somethin’ bout them dirty that’s why I got ’em,” he raps. It’s the same beats, with very different souls.

This is the general trend with MTV Multiculturalism: It does not seek to challenge its audience;  rather, it is aimed at delivering to them whatever they want, whether it’s rap or basketball, with no guilt attached. It’s not “racist”: it emphasizes stereotypes – gangster or athlete – only as far as it is able to use them as marketing tools. Unlike political conservatives, it doesn’t really believe that blacks are less intelligent or that Asians can’t speak English. Rather, it shows them that way because of its audiences’ expectations.

When Abercrombie & Fitch put out a T-shirt depicting a slant-eyed Asian laundromat owner, Mr. Wong, with the punch line “Two Wongs don’t make a White,” it genuinely wasn’t trying to offend Asians. It was trying to sell T-shirts. That the message itself was offensive to a whole race of people seemed only a minor inconvenience.

Of course, it seems cultural critics have been screaming about the dumbing-down of mass media since the beginning of time. This essay is not the first and certainly won’t be the last to lambaste MTV. What is significant though is that ethnic groups are especially vulnerable to MTV. From the angle of discrimination, the more that MTV sells the slant-eyed Asian or the ghetto gansta, the harder it becomes, on the part of ethnic groups, to overcome those perceptions.

We are what MTV tells people we are, whether we like it or not. To illustrate the extent to which these stereotypes still float around the popular consciousness, one only has to look at the April issue of the popular men’s magazine Details. Within its pages, a piece entitled “Gay or Asian” explores the similarities between gay men and Asian men with such observations as, “One cruises for chicken; the other takes it General Tso-style.”

The magazine called it “satire,” yet I’ve not talked to anyone either gay or Asian who gets the joke. It is inescapable that as of yet, ethnic groups are still being defined in the popular consciousness primarily by their MTV depictions. That has to change.

From the angle of the ethnic communities themselves, the temptation of MTV’s money and fame begins to weaken those avenues of self-expression. All artists, regardless of their ethnicities, begin to converge towards the MTV ideal. Talented rappers in the future will write songs about their favorite sneakers; talented minority actors will give their greatest performances in pretending to be non-ethnic, that is, to be “white.” Stereotypes will be milked for their comedic value, but won’t be challenged by thoughtful films. And oh, forget Spike Lee.

We will see a culture where cheap media depictions obscure the difficulties in all race relations. Ignore for a moment the negative role models: the celebrities who play stereotypes or live them out in real life; those make dialogue about race hard enough as is.

There are still the ostensibly positive ones, the Tiger Wood’s and the Michelle Kwan’s, the people who we do look up and cheer for. But they too cover themselves in Nike swooshes and advertising dollars.

Michael Jordan, in the 1992 Olympics, covered himself during the medal presentation with an American flag. Why? Because he had a contract with Nike, and his U.S. Olympic outfit had the Reebok logo on it. The consistent message is this: “We, your heroes, have accepted the status-quo. We have prospered because of Nike and MTV, why don’t you do the same.”

The end result is a multiculturalism devoid of all value. The America of 2004 is in many ways in much better shape than any other period in its history. Legalized discrimination has waned, institutionalized racism is weaker, and race relations have improved significantly from the days when whites were setting dogs after their black slaves and burning houses in Chinatowns.

But as we emerge into a new era, will we be able to hold onto what is unique and different about ourselves? Can we preserve the shared understandings and values that come with being the members of marginalized communities, or will we sell out and pretend that we are not who we are? Given that race will always exist, and that racism will always be a problem, how can we define ourselves as “communities” – as groups with the solidarity to fight that racism – if our group identity becomes lost in the flood of MTV music videos?

The greatest accomplishment of American culture, it must be remembered, did not come from mainstream whites. Jazz came from a black culture that drew back on its long-standing and uniquely African traditions. It was a movement that came from a marginalized, but cohesive community, one that supported jazz during its nascent years and from which it drew its inspirations. The same could be said for Motown, for rock and roll, for hip hop. The white mainstream only came later on, to appropriate it and to market it, so that today, we have former N’Sync member Justin Timberlake donning bandanas and doing his best to look, well, black.

If we, the “ethnics” of America, are too quick to embrace MTV Multiculturalism, if we trade in our individual identities for one we saw in a Nike commercial, then we’ve bought a lot more than we’ve ever bargained for.

As Nelly would put it, “Oh why do I live this way / Hey! Must be the money!”

STORY INDEX

MUSIC >

Lyrics to Nelly’s “AirForce Ones”
URL: http://www.metrolyrics.com/lyrics/42069/Nelly/Air_Force_Ones

Lyrics to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”
URL: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/public-enemy/fight-the-power.html

MTV website
URL: http://www.mtv.com

PUBLICATIONS >

“It’s all in the details”
URL: http://www.harvardindependent.com/news/2004/04/22/News/Its-All.In.The.Details-670114.shtml

In The Fray Contributor

By the time you read this, maybe we will have seen all the pictures from the Iraqi prison scandal and will not have to endure another shot of a grinning guard sitting on top of a prisoner who is sandwiched between two stretchers.

That’s a hope, not a prediction. Even as he apologized about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned the world that we haven’t seen all the photographs, or even the worst ones.

Still, the images trickling out have been horrific: a naked prisoner down on all fours while a guard holds a leash attached to the man’s neck; a pair of naked prisoners, one with his back to the camera and another seated between the man’s legs in a suggestion of oral sex.

Such images defy words.  

A citizen of Saudi Arabia searched for a way to express his shock and found a parallel in this nation’s history. He reportedly told the New York Times, that the pictures reminded him of photographs from a lynching.

Too harsh?  Go to “Without Sanctuary,” an online exhibit of postcards and photographs collected by James Allen.

Browse through postcard after postcard of smiling, even laughing crowds posed in front of charred bodies hanging from trees. Pause at the photograph of a naked black man standing before the camera documenting the final minutes of his life. His cuffed hands barely cover his genitals. A back view shows the scars and welts from the beating he’d received before his death.

See if you don’t flinch at this picture just the way you have probably flinched at their 21st century descendants from Abu Ghraib.

True, these aren’t the nods to lynching that have come from the Iraqi war.

We also remember pictures of a huge crowd rejoicing over the burned corpses of four Americans killed in Fallujah.

That photograph replicated many of the images in Allen’s collection. So why didn’t it stun us in the same way as this latest crop of photos?

The reasons rest on who we think we are, and who we really are.

In the Fallujah photographs, the Americans were the victims who died in support of a noble mission: bringing democracy to a Middle Eastern country.

Because we cast ourselves as saviors, we could place that tragedy in a religious context. It reinforced our belief that we, of all nations, always stand on the side of right.

The abuse scandal strips us of that illusion. The American guards are the perpetrators, arguably no better than the minions of Sadaam Hussein. Instead of uplifting a vanquished people, they are humiliating them.

And the guards are enjoying it immensely.

That fact, I think, is one of the most disturbing similarities between the old lynching postcards and the photographs leaked from Iraq.

There is no solemnity, no appreciation for the enormity of the situation captured by the camera. There was no sense that the Americans were engaged in a dirty business.

Instead, the guards are mugging as they point to the prisoners, posing and laughing as if at football game, or hanging out in a bar.

They were having fun. Big fun.

Some analysts have suggested that the snapshots were part of a propaganda war, tools to demoralize the insurgency and demonstrate the power of the American forces.

I’m not buying that. Those pictures were meant for albums and scrapbooks. They were souvenirs, just like the postcard of a “barbecue” — the burning of a black man — held in Tyler, Texas during the early 20th century.

In reflecting on his lynching postcards, James Allen noted that the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator. He insists the photographic art played a role as significant to the lynching ritual as torture was.

He could just as well be talking about the images from Iraq, for they were made with the same intention: to reveal the faces of the enemy and the substance of his villainy.

And they do that. They do that very well.”

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

Thirty years ago, the women’s movement was relishing a cultural shift that began with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and culminated with the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. A generation of women that grew up preparing for adult lives inside of the home gave birth to the first generation of girls groomed for self-sufficient futures in the workforce.

Hard-won legislation like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from gender and racial discrimination, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which gives equal opportunity to girls in schools receiving federal aid effectively created generation “You can do anything.” The expectations were high. The polarization of work and family had exploded. These girls could choose to have either or both. It was up to them to prove true the heart of every boycott, sit-in, and rally held by their feminist predecessors: that if given the chance to thrive without gender and racial discrimination, women could, in fact, do anything.

We didn’t disappoint. Women now earn the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. We still earn fewer doctorate and professional degrees than men, but are catching up fast. We’ve got Annika Sorenstam, Venus and Serena Williams, the WNBA and the LPGA. Working women over the age of 25 have narrowed the gender gap in the male-to-female earnings ratio to 85 percent in 2002 from 67 percent in 1979, giving us unprecedented purchasing power. Millions of young women are climbing executive ranks, saving their marriage vows for soul mates and ignoring their biological clocks.

Yet amid a lifelong sprint to the next promotion, many young women are realizing what working class, poor, and minority women have always been aware of: the implausibility of doing everything and the unhappiness that coincides with trying.

Reports of overstressed working moms trading in long hours at the office for quality time at home abound. Presidential Adviser Karen Hughes and Brenda Barnes, former president and CEO of PepsiCola North America, made headlines when they left their prestigious positions to spend more time with her family. And those are just the women who found the time to nurture meaningful relationships while building their resumes — or who are able to afford scaling back their hours or quitting their jobs. Many working class and minority women, who are disproportionately affected by poverty, do not have the privilege of gorging on the array of choices fed to the middle and upper classes. There’s a large part of generation “You can do anything” for whom a working mother was not a novelty.  

That women who have access to quality education should pursue — and perfect — a career path before taking on any other role — namely wife and mother —  was made clear from the start. This implicit message was infused into my generation’s television shows, magazines, and toys from the day we were born. Even our food said, “Get a job.” Lunchables debuted in 1988, sending a clear message that moms work — and so will you.

As aspiring career women, we responded by dedicating the fervor of our childhood heroine, She-ra, to securing our financial futures. A job is our “Sword of Protection.”

We’ve been less adamant about securing our emotional futures. We plan to pursue them more fully after years of slogging through grunt-work propel us to the top. But as we move up the ladder, there’s no guarantee that personal fulfillment is waiting patiently for when we have more time.

The work/family dichotomy that inspired Betty Friedan to identify “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is spawning parallel testimonials. The young women who have feasted on a lifelong diet of “girl power” are wrestling with their own unnamed problem. Friedan articulated the unhappiness some women felt about their role as wives and mothers defining their identities. Many of today’s young women are beginning to express frustration that our role as successful professionals is eclipsing our domestic aspirations. We feel like we never really had a choice.

A March Time magazine cover story featured the headline, “The Case for Staying Home: Caught between the pressure of the workplace and the demands of being a mom, more women are sticking with the kids.” The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article last fall about Ivy League professionals forsaking coveted jobs to be stay at home moms. Authors Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin make the case that young women have been fooled by the myth of “having it all.” Their book, Midlife Crisis at 30, explores the fantasy of “long careers, egalitarian marriages and children” versus the reality: “While old-school rules of corporate hierarchy have loosened up, they haven’t gone away.”

The work of earlier feminists has percolated. Many of the first girls to benefit are now women for whom raising a family and maintaining a challenging career are important, and who are learning that it is not feasible to do both within the pace of the modern workforce. Additionally, they fear that downsizing their careers in order to nurture a family will spur backlash from their peers and superiors and eventually will be spun as a thundering “I told you so” from a culture that a mere 30 years ago didn’t think women belonged in the office.

Women’s careers are hindered by the demands of family largely because women still do most of the work at home, and because many employers don’t have policies in place that help women to balance their dedication to work and family. Even the school-nurse reflex still speed-dials mom when a child is sick at school — though nowadays both parents typically work.

The problem has been named. It obviously resonates. Organizations and mom groups have formed in response. But it has yet to galvanize a revolution like The Feminine Mystique did. The recent March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. might instill the passion exhibited by Ms. Friedan and her cohorts into a new generation of women. If so, let’s hope we can learn from their successes, as well as their mistakes.

It’s disheartening that the first murmurings of our “problem” are coming from the same privileged perspective and demonstrating the same exclusion of working class, poor and minority women that the The Feminine Mystique did.

Fortunately, it’s still early enough to articulate that the stress of trying to nurture a family while working fulltime is every woman’s problem — if not even more so for working class and minority women. Squeezing in, let alone paying for, a doctor’s appointment for their children or themselves is tricky for women clocking 12-hour shifts at the supermarket. Having struggled without sufficient childcare, job flexibility, livable wages, health insurance, and education, these women know better than anyone what it’s like to feel caught in the work/family dichotomy. This time they belong in the forefront of any effort to change those things. It would be a disservice to all women to proceed otherwise.

A first front in demonstrating that it’s no longer radical for a woman to work like a man, but to change the way work gets done could be the persistence of the woman’s double-shift. Flexible hours would keep more talented women in the workforce and allow them to continue contributing to a benefits plan that they can rely on in old age. Stop-and-start careers, as well as divorce and longer life spans, put women at risk for impoverished retirement.

Women could encourage businesses to devise ways for their employees to slow down, stop and start their climb up the career ladder. They could demand that companies institute part-time workweeks, while still providing health benefits, and give women the option of working at home or provide on-site company daycare. We need better wages and universal healthcare for all working women, particularly those doing manual labor whose bodies physically give out earlier than office employees. Perhaps by revisiting some of that landmark legislation our predecessors won and tidying up the fine print, generation “You can do anything” might eventually be a realistic tagline.

In The Fray Contributor

I stepped onto the speakers’ platform at the Virginia Festival of Books in Charlottesville with Newsday editor Les Payne to discuss our chapters in his book When Race Becomes Real. Bernestine Singley, the other panelist, had edited the book.

As I walked to my seat, I was well aware of Payne’s impressive record. I had read his work, and I know he is a more experienced journalist than I am. He’s won more prizes and written more important books than me. Payne has traveled more widely and reported on more complex subjects. He is older than me, and has done more in his life than I have. I also have heard Payne speak before, and know that he is a more commanding and more forceful speaker than I am.

So, as I sat down at my seat, I did what came naturally; I felt superior to Les Payne. If it seems odd that I would feel superior to someone I knew to be more talented and accomplished than I am, then here is another relevant fact: Les Payne is African American, and I am white.

I didn’t recognize that feeling of superiority as I sat down, or as I made my remarks on the panel. It wasn’t until Payne started reading from a chapter in his book and explaining how he came to write his essays that my feeling became so painfully clear to me.

Payne talked about how, as a teenager born in the segregated South who attended high school in the North, he had struggled to overcome the internalized sense of inferiority which grew from the environment in which he had been raised. He talked with a quiet passion and power, about how deep that sense of inherent inferiority can appear in African Americans.

At some point, I made the obvious connection. Part of the reason that the struggle Payne described is so hard for African Americans is because white behavior is a constant expression of that feeling of superiority, expressed in a fashion both subtle and overt. My mind raced immediately to that feeling of superiority I felt as we had taken our seats. I had assumed, despite all that I knew about Les Payne, his record, and his speaking ability, that I would be the highlight of the panel. Why? It might be because I’m an egotistical white boy. Maybe I’m a white boy with delusions of grandeur. The former is almost certainly true. The latter may be an exaggeration. But whatever my own personal weaknesses are, one factor is obvious: I am white and Payne is African American, and that was the basis of my feeling.

The moment that particular feeling hit me, I was literally left speechless, fighting back tears, with a profound sense of sadness. I struggled to keep focused on Payne’s words, but it was difficult to do as my mind raced to cope with what I was feeling. Payne finished, and Ms. Singley started her reading. When the speaking period ended, I was forced to engage in the ending, and I did my best to answer a question asked of me. But I remained shaken.

One of the ‘good’ white people

Why all of this drama? It was because I fancied myself one of the “good” white people, one of the anti-racist white people. I am politically active, and have worked hard to incorporate an honest account of race and racism into my school’s teaching.

But in that moment, I had to confront that which I had not yet relinquished: the basic psychological features of racism. As Payne talked honestly of struggling with a sense of inferiority, I had to face that I had never really shaken a sense of my superiority. As I write these words, the feeling of that moment of sadness returns. Do not mistake this for superficial shame or guilt. Do not describe me as a self-indulgent white liberal. The sadness I feel is not for me. It is sadness about how deeply embedded in me is that fundamental reality of racism; the assumption that white people are superior.

That doesn’t mean I’m a racist. It doesn’t mean my political work or efforts in the classroom don’t matter. Instead, it means that what I say to my students about race — that the dynamics of domination and subordination run deep, affecting us in ways we don’t always see clearly — is true not only in theory. It is also true in my psyche.

I have long known that. On the platform with Payne that day, his words forced me to feel it. That wasn’t his intention; he was speaking to the audience — which was primarily African American — not to me. Whatever the intent, he did me that service. But I am most grateful to Payne not for that, but for something that happened later. After the event, I was planning to drive to Washington, D.C. When I mentioned that to Payne, he asked if he could ride with me and catch a flight from D.C. back to New York. I jumped at the chance, in part because I wanted to hear more about his research for his forthcoming book on Malcolm X, but also because I wanted to talk to him about what had happened to me on stage.

In the few we drove together, I took advantage of Payne’s experience in journalism and asked his opinion about a range of issues, in addition to pumping him for insights into Malcolm X’s life. And, finally, I asked if I could tell him about what had happened on stage.

It turned out, not surprisingly, that Les Payne is a gracious man. He listened to my story, nodding throughout. Nothing I said seemed to shock him. He is, after all an African American in the United States; I didn’t expect that I would shock him.

It was after I had finished that Payne did something for which I will always be grateful: He didn’t forgive me. That is, he made no attempt to make me feel better. He didn’t reassure me that I was, in fact, one of the good” white people. He simply acknowledged what I had told him, said he understood, and continued our discussion about the politics of race in the United States.

Part of me probably wanted him to forgive me. Part of me probably wanted the approval of African American person at that moment, to help eliminate the discomfort, which I was still feeling. But what would that have accomplished for him, for me, or for the world? Without knowing it, Payne during the panel had given me the gift of feeling uncomfortable. In the car at this time, perhaps with full knowledge of what he was doing, he gave me the gift of not letting me off the hook.

When I dropped him at the airport, I had no illusions. The day had meant much more to me than to him. He had been willing to teach me something, and then he went on to other things. His personal struggle with internalized inferiority was largely over; his chapter in the book made that clear, as did his interaction with me. It was easy to tell by the way he spoke and carried himself that Payne doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether white people are better than him. But I was left with the unfinished project of dealing with my internalized sense of superiority. And it was clear to both of us that such a project was my responsibility, not his.

The gender question

The story of that day in Charlottesville can’t end there, of course. On the platform with us was Bernestine Singley, who is every bit as black as Les Payne, and every bit as accomplished a lawyer and writer. Why am I focusing on him and not her? Why did he spark this realization in me and not her?

In part it was because of what Payne talked about on stage; his remarks and his chapter had pushed my buttons. Also, I have known Singley longer and have a more established relationship with her. We live in different cities and are not friends in a conventional sense, but I consider her (and I hope she considers me) a trustworthy ally and comrade in the struggle, and a friend in that context. Singley and I also have very different styles, and when we appear on panels together we clearly are
not competing.

With all that said, it’s also difficult to miss the fact that Singley is a woman and Payne is a man. There was not only a race dynamic on stage, but a gender dynamic. It’s likely that I was, in classic male fashion, focusing on the struggle for dominance with the other man on the panel. This perception of myself also is hard to face; in addition to being a good white person, you see, I’m also a good man. I’m one of the men who is on the right side. But I also am one of the men who, whatever side he is on, constantly struggles with the reality of living in a male-supremacist society that has taught me lessons about how to vie for dominance.

Introspection on these matters is difficult; people in privileged positions often are not in the best position to evaluate our own behavior. But looking back on that day, it appears to me I walked onto that platform with an assumption of my inherent superiority — so deeply woven into me that I could not in the moment see it — that had something to do with race and gender.

From those assumptions, it is hard to reach a conclusion other than: I was a fool.

I use that term consciously, because throughout history white people have often cast blacks as the fool to shore up our sense of superiority. But in that game, it is white people who are the fools, and it is difficult and painful to confront that. Somehow, I had allowed myself to believe the story that a racist and sexist society still tells. Yes, I know that Jim Crow segregation is gone and the overt ideology that supported it is mostly gone. But in the struggle to change the world, what matters is not only what law is, or what polite people say in public. What matters just as much, if not more, is what we really are, deep down.

All this matters not just because white people should learn to be better or nicer, but because as long as we whites believe we are better, deep down in places most of us have learned to hide, we will not feel compelled to change a society in which black unemployment is twice the white rate. And in which, as a recent study has found, a white man with a criminal record is more likely to called back for a job interview than a black man with no record.

In the United States, the typical black family has 58 percent as much income as a typical white family. And at the slow rate the black-white poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968, it will take 150 years to close. At the current rate, blacks and whites won’t reach high school graduation parity until 2013, nearly 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. That is an ugly society.

The first step for white people is to face that ugliness, to tell the truth about the system we live in and tell the truth about ourselves. But that means nothing if we do not commit to change, not just to change ourselves, but to change the system. We have to face the ways in which white supremacy makes white people foolish but forces others to pay a much greater price.

We have to stop playing the fool and start playing for keeps.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To To Abolish It”
By Noel Ignatiev
URL: http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html

Articles and essays on race, racism and white privilege
by Robert Jensen
URL: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/racearticles.htm

“

In The Fray Contributor

I swore I would never date a Republican. Ever. Then I met Miles. Alcohol and its logic-impairing effects were undeniably contributing factors. We met at some soirée in San Francisco’s Mission District, which served as a veritable breeding ground of multiculturalism before the dotcom explosion rocked the ‘hood into gentrification. It was during the rein of the first Bush administration, and with all of the glory and trauma of the Gulf War still a sore wound in my mind, it seemed unlikely that I would bond with someone so radically opposed to my progressive ideology.

But I did.

Three dry martinis into the evening I met Miles, a disarray of limbs and a blur of khaki and plaid. With a full head of wavy, auburn hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and alabaster skin, he appeared too straight, too conservative, too damn uptight for my taste. Oddly enough, Miles turned out to be a good kisser. A great kisser. A most supreme kisser with a killer physique to match. What he lacked in aesthetic appeal, he made up for with animal magnetism. He possessed that rare combination of child-like wonder and wanton virility that made me want to rip off his starch-white Polo button-down shirts with my bare hands.

He tried to convince me that he wasn’t like the rest of his ilk. Sure, he shared many neoconservative views, but he was definitely not racist, sexist, or homophobic. This, however, begged the question: why then are you a Republican?

And just because someone is a flag-waving, family-values, NRA-lovin’, pro-prayer-in-schools, three-strikes-you’re-out, say-NO-to-drugs-abortion-and-porno, capital-driven political aficionado doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid dating them. You have to keep an open mind and put your tolerant liberal theories into practice for a change, I told myself. Opposites attract. Look at Maria and Arnold, an ill-conceived convergence of brains and muscle, a couple who have remained happily married despite their political rivalry and his roving hands.

I tried. God knows I tried.

At first I desperately tried to overlook certain things, but slowly they began to fester in my head, causing what I feared to be a brain hemorrhage. When he attempted to regale me with diabolical sentiments such as “if it weren’t for Rush Limbaugh,” or lauded Ronald Reagan for his trickle-down economic policy in public, or lambasted “fat, lazy welfare mothers” for milking the system dry, I could feel the blood rush straight to my cortex. At moments like this, I would cringe my face into a spasm and walk to the nearest wall and hammer my head against it. Hard.

The fact that we met during a hell-ridden recession that left both of us out of work and flat broke didn’t help. Poverty, our common denominator, was the source of our bonding and dissension. Who’d pick up the tab was the terminal sore spot of our dates. Usually we’d end up splitting it in half, but more often than not I picked up the bill for no other reason than to avoid a scene. To my dismay, he was able to attend dinner parties, cocktail parties, pool parties, backyard parties, football parties, campaign parties, office parties, and rooftop parties without spending a dime. I held anti-party-parties. Parties where no one showed up — except me and a bottle of wine. I drank to forget him.

But it didn’t work.

At the time, I lived with three guys from Italy in a flat where the blow, the booze, and the women revolved through the front door 24/7. The first time Miles came over for a house party, I found myself avoiding him at every turn. I orbited the room in chronic circles, veering off into the crowd, dodging in and out of conversations, making small talk with complete strangers. Off in the distance I heard Miles’ voice rise: “Bunch of fucking illegal immigrants can’t even speak English …” I knew he was referring to my roommates. When Giovanni turned to me with a questioning look that said, “Where did you find this fucking whack job,” I did the first thing that came to mind. I ran. Down the hall, out the door, up the hill, and into the first place I spotted with lights on — an Irish pub. There I lingered, sunk deep in the dark recesses of the tavern until last call, and then stumbled home only to find the place completely empty except for a note on the refrigerator that simply read: “Dump him.”

But I didn’t.

While I spent my days as a Food Not Bombs volunteer doling out bread and soup to the lines of homeless snaking around the Civic Center, Miles would trek downtown in a three-piece suit to the swanky offices of the Republican Party. What he did there I never knew — and never cared to ask. When we met at night, both tired yet filled with an unwavering and often vying sense of purpose, most of our time was comprised of political discussions — which somehow led to sex. Miles rendered the brain an erogenous zone. It constituted mental masturbation: verbal intercourse as a form of foreplay. Tax cuts made him horny. Defense spending kicked his testosterone production into overdrive. For Miles, sex and politics were mutually combustible, and I often wondered whether he was tempted to jerk off whenever politicians debated issues like they do at the Republican National Convention. As a proponent of hand-and-mouth probing, I seldom found myself hot after analyzing Third World debt or the trade deficit. Occasionally, I marveled at his ability to get me so riled up that I would collapse on my back, screaming my lungs out, and kicking my legs in the air. Miles, ever the opportunist, would pounce on top and attempt to dazzle me with his latest trick. And it often worked.

Miles turned out to be pathologically ambivalent. Outside of the sack, I couldn’t tell if he even had a pulse. Void of an interior landscape, he averted his eyes, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and didn’t so much as even glance in my direction to meet my unrelenting glare whenever I brought up a topic remotely related to emotions. Seven beers later, he would gradually begin to respond, grasping at words, pausing between breaths, staring at the door, where long periods of silence filled the void while the shape of thoughts were still breeding in his mind. What an idiot, I thought; what a goddamn piece of work. Say something. Anything.

Nothing.

He sits in silence, jaw clenched, arms folded across chest.

If we couldn’t talk about politics or anything remotely related to matters of the heart, there was only one thing left to do. Around 12:30 a.m., we return to his over-priced, under-furnished, rat-sized studio in the Marina. We’re sprawled out on a florescent orange beanbag couch, some fleabag relic left over from the tacky 70s Partridge Family décor, watching Saturday Night Live in a drunken stupor. He crawls on top and soon we lie naked, tongues licking skin, mouths forming sounds, hands touching the most intimate parts of our being. Here, the lines blur, and there are no boundaries between us. We kiss, and our bodies entwine in a wordless conversation, a place where an unspoken language gives birth to a whole new territory. And, somehow, even this is not enough to keep our passion alive.  

We knew that we were headed nowhere, that we were traversing a hopeless trajectory. We will forever remain a half-read novel, with good dialogue but a weak plot whose ending we predict in advance without enduring a painstaking read of its final pages. Cut to the last chapter. Hurry. Read the last sentence, and then close the book. This how this story will end.

I will always be longing. For Miles, for San Francisco, for the years that passed like clouds racing through the sky, for the days when love seemed so close I could taste it in the air. I will always wish we could have conquered a bold new land, carved our names in it, and erased the borders with our own two hands. I will always be hoping for a new ending.

In The Fray Contributor

The more I follow the latest controversies over homosexuality — the furors over same-sex marriage and the consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop — the more I’m convinced that I am watching the latest civil rights struggle.

And the more I’m convinced that the emphasis is going to be on struggle.

Those of us who are geographically distant from events in San Francisco and New Paltz, New York, may be tempted to dismiss the lines at the city halls until they stretch into our town. We have a vague sense that something is happening, but we seem to take the instances as patches of trees, not a forest.

Television and newspaper reports contribute to this view. The events came across like sports stories as journalists tallied the increasing number of couples waiting to wed: first in the tens, the fifties, then the hundreds and thousands. Subsequent events were reported, in turn, with a breathless bit of surprise: it’s happening again, and again, and again …

But we haven’t made the jump to realizing that, in this case, a whole bunch of trees is really a forest. We haven’t put the events together to see them as components of a whole, as components of a movement that is emerging as we watch.

I wonder whether that inability rests on the way Americans have mythologized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That’s the Civil Rights Movement — in capital letters.

Those twenty-odd years of battles for racial equality have been condensed into sets of buzzwords. We talk about “the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,” where four little girls died in Sunday school, or “the first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina,” where four college students first challenged segregated seating at a dime-store lunch counter.

We remember the march from Selma to Montgomery and, of course, the bus boycotts in that same city.

But we don’t talk about the other campaigns, like Albany, Georgia, where the local sheriff successfully outwitted organizers who came to his city.

I’ve seen this first-hand in the civil rights history of my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Most recitations stop in 1960, when a young civil rights protestor, Diane Nash, confronted the mayor on the steps of city hall. Nash asked the mayor point blank whether he believed that segregation was wrong. He paused, swallowed and answered yes.
The tale ends there, as if segregation disappeared in a matter of days. In fact, boycotts, sit-ins — and overt resistance to integration — continued until 1965 when those upholding segregation accepted the inevitable.

This romanticization of the civil rights movement has deceived the generations who did not witness it. They think the movement was a series of brilliant skirmishes instead of a war. They think that a few well-placed assaults, and a nimble charge or two will yield total and lasting victory.

Because America has frozen the civil rights movement in time, we have a distorted view of its methods.

Rev. C.T. Vivian, an organizer for the Nashville campaign, warned about the dangers of that view when he spoke in Nashville on Valentine’s Day.

“Young people feel that if they just get a march together, the walls are supposed to come down. When they don’t, they get upset,” he said during a panel on the methods of the Nashville campaign.

He was reminding his audience that the civil rights struggle demanded preparation and strategizing. Protestors didn’t rush into stores to sit at lunch counters. They practiced, honing their reactions to the abuse they knew they would receive.  That’s why they didn’t flinch when hecklers jammed lighted cigarettes into their arms during sit-ins.

They’d prepared at workshops beforehand.

Rev. Vivian and his contemporaries understood the scope of their struggle. In order to win, they had to destroy entrenched values and beliefs about one’s place in society and in culture. The struggle affected folks on both sides of the protests, because the possible outcome would be the end of the world as everyone knew it.

In its way, the civil rights struggle was an apocalypse. Some welcomed it, and they weren’t all blacks.  Others didn’t, and they weren’t all whites. Those who welcomed it, marshaled their efforts for it. Those who feared it, waged a dogged battle against it.

In the same way, the pictures we’ve seen of a beaming Bishop Robinson in full regalia, hugging his partner and of a lesbian couple embracing, kissing and crying for joy, contest our notions of family and religion.

No matter what we believe, we’re going to grapple with the changes that are bound to come.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs