White Feminists Must Speak Out Against the Deaths of Black Men at the Hands of the Police

Sometimes, those of us on the left who are white get ourselves so worried over being accused of appropriation, or accused of thinking that our discourse is the normal discourse, that when the time comes for us to be making a lot of fucking noise, we are quiet. And with our silence, we end up supporting the status quo in this country, which is that ALL black men are suspect, and if the cops shoot a black man, well, what did that man do to deserve it?

Do you know where I've heard that kind of bullshit before?
Yes.
You guessed it.
Rape Culture.

At the campus where I teach, when a rape gets reported, the first question out of other students' mouths are, "Was she drinking?" followed by "What was she wearing?" followed by "What was she doing walking around outside alone at two a.m." Followed by the grandaddy of them all: "Well, what did she expect was going to happen? She must have wanted it."

Similar questions get asked when a black man is shot. Did he have a gun? Was he wearing a hoodie? What was he doing in that neighborhood at night? Followed by the grandaddy of them all, "He must have been a thug."

I have two white daughters growing up in rape culture. I am a woman who has been raped on a date. While I cannot know the pain of sending my African-American sons out into the world and hoping that they make it home each night, I do know the pain of waiting for a phone call from an emergency room, or from a dorm room on a Saturday morning. I know what it's like to hear your child sobbing because of what happened.

So, as a white feminist, why would I not say something about the wholescale slaughter of young African-American men in this country? I am ashamed that people with whom I share a skin color believe that they are the only people who matter in this country. I'm tired of arguing with students who think it's okay to use the "N" word because it doesn't mean what it used to mean in "my" day. No, because young black men use that word with one another does not mean you get to use it, too. What on earth do you gain, white boy, by being able to use that word?

If, young man, you really want to be part of African-American culture, then get out there in the streets and march with your brethren. Protect young African-American women who are just as susceptible to rape culture as your own sister is. Listening to hip-hop does not make you understand the plight of black men and women. Stop telling me, student who lives in an all-white town on Long Island that racism doesn't exist anymore.

On Wednesday, a white female student who told me on the first day of class that she hadn't read a book over break, who doesn't read the newspaper, who doesn't understand climate change, or racism, or who refers to feminists as "they," rather than "we," tell me to my face that she thought her generation was the greatest, and that they were doing more to change the world than any generation that had come before hers.

I nearly swallowed my teeth.

I found it hard to believe that she believed the words that were coming out of her mouth.

So when I asked her what had happened in North Charlotte over the weekend and she couldn't tell me, I just sucked my teeth and counted to ten.

If white feminists out there are not making NOISE about the murder of African-American boys; if we are not linking arms with our black feminist sisters and crying with them; if we are not writing letters to our representatives, or having these discussions with our students -- again, and again, and again -- then we have no room to bitch if we are accused that our silence makes us complicit.

Stop hiding behind the walls of the categories that we construct that keep us from assuming someone else's voice. I'm not assuming anyone else's voice but my own. And I am telling you today that what is happening to African-Americans, what has been happening to black Americans is a stain on our national character. The United States is covered with the blood of the young men who keep getting shot down in the streets.

Next time, don't ask what that young man did. Ask why that cop did what he did. Just as it's the rapist's fault--not the woman's--when she gets raped, neither is it the young man's -- but the cop's fault -- when another African-American lies dead in the street.

I will not be silent. We are in this together. Let's focus on forging alliances instead of keeping our side of the street clean. The blood on the other side of the street stains us, and we have no way to wash our hands if we do not offer ourselves as allies.

John Donne was right 400 years ago. "Don't ask who those sirens are after, where that coroner's cart is going to. It is coming for all of us."

What are you going to do to make it stop?

Why Make Tourism Out of Observing the Suffering of Others?

 Come See the Mountain by Tom Zoellner (DECA: 2014)

I've been blown away by the quality of the work published by DECA in its first year in existence. While I hate telling anyone that anything is a "must read," I will break my own rule to tell you that COME SEE THE MOUNTAIN is, in fact, a must read. Some of you are aware that, bored by tourism where one travels to a place of beauty, or to relax in the sun, or to learn where one has come from, or any of the various things we do on vacation to escape the mundane qualities of the 9-5 life, certain privileged travelers have opted to see how the other half lives.

As a way of doing something "interesting," this new wave of tourists goes to places where they can observe horror. Auschwitz has long been on the horror tour, but these days, one can tour the slums of Mumbai, the favelas of Brazil, the charnel houses of Rwanda, places where something "interesting" happen(ed). Zoellner documents his experience with a group of tourists who come to Potosi, a silver mine in South America where it is estimated that eight million miners died between 1545 and 1900 in order to sate our lust for silver.

The tourists are not interested in saving anyone. They don't go to these places with the intention of doing something about suffering on such a scale; rather, they venture to such a place as Potosi to have the experience. And later, when they're back snug and warm in their bars and pubs, they can tell their friends that they have seen true suffering--they've experienced it--because of the 2.5 hours they spent crawling underground where men spend their entire lives digging out the silver.

Zoellner does a fantastic job of writing in that, while I was outraged, again, at the lengths that people with too much money and not compassion will do to entertain themselves, Zoellner is not overtly critical of those he traveled with. He tells the story and leaves it up to the reader to fashion his or her own reaction to the idea of tourists who mistake profundity with observing the suffering of others. The miners are objects to be examined, and, as if the miners were trained animals, tourists are encouraged to buy them treats that they can give to the miners for their willingness to let themselves be looked at.

Zoellner's writing is first-rate. My only critique was that I wanted to know more about this topic. When I finished the essay, I wanted to read more about these types of tourism. Perhaps that's the purpose of the essay. It made me want to know more while also moving me to sympathy for the miners, and disgust with the tourists for whom verisimilitude is close enough to real suffering for them.

When DECA did its original crowdfunding campaign over a year ago, little did I know that my $25 would bring me so much good writing. I anticipate each piece. My hope is that, after they have published their first ten or so long-form journalistic pieces, they will collect them and publish them in a hard copy book. Last semester, I wanted to assign this particular essay to my class. Since many of them did not have e-readers, it wasn't possible. But I hope that they are so successful that they will be able to offer hard copies for those who haven't gone digital.

Thinking with Travel

This book could not have come for a better time for me. I teach creative nonfiction at a small university in New York state. This summer, I had intended to teach travel writing as I took students through Spain and France. A couple of logistical issues, mostly having to do with university bureaucracy, has delayed the class for at least six months. Which turned out to be a good thing.

On the application for the class, students were asked why they wanted to learn travel writing? Almost without exception, they wanted to travel; they had no interest in writing about it, which means most of them would have been miserable when they realized that they had signed up for a six-credit course where the instructor intended for them to earn those six credits.

This was the context in which I asked to read this book. And I like it so much that I am thinking of assigning it next semester in the creative nonfiction (on-campus) course that I will be teaching on the subject of traveling.

Most travelers are happy to be tourists. They pile on to cruise ships or tour buses, happy to have someone keep them safe by arranging all of their accommodations, getting them menus in their native language, making sure the wait staff that are waiting on them speak their language, and getting to believe that the countries where they are being tourists are delighted to have visitors walking around and looking at things as if they were at the zoo. Or worse, a zoo where everyone is deaf, so tourists don't think about the fact that just because they're speaking in their native language, doesn't mean that no one else can understand their language. You would not believe what people speaking English on board a TGV will talk about, with their assumption that no one can understand them.

These are among the dozen or so issues to consider about the travel experience. Why do people travel? What do they expect to see? What are they hoping to gain? Why, if they are traveling to a foreign land, do they search out the places where they can find people just like them?

After a month spent in Barcelona and southern France in January, my new question is: why are people spending all of their time (now with selfie sticks) taking selfies of themselves? It's not as if they are taking photos of the architecture in front of them, or the statue, the natural wonder, or the street scene. They are taking photos--over and over again--of their faces while the things they came to see blur out in the background.

Whenever someone starts in on one of their "people are so rude in ____" stories, I usually find out that it's because the person relating the tale KNEW that the person they were struggling to communicate with must have spoken English; they were just refusing to speak it so they might embarrass the traveler. My usual response is to ask how many McDonald's or WalMart employees speak French, or Italian, German? So why do they expect every person in another nation to speak English?

The best thing about this smart book, which does a fantastic job of pointing out that the historical precedents established by travelers years ago have carried forward into the present age; that the seeing the world through the lens of a camera is a problematic issue; that cultures that overvalue long work weeks have a tendency to turn leisure time abroad into time to continue working, just in different countries.

And, at the heart of it is the difference between travel and tourism:

"The degrading slide from culture to commodity, from leisure to free time, from authenticity to phony reproduction--described with such visceral disgust by Adorno--is similar to the way many have described the transition from travel to mass tourism....[Adorno says] Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work."

While this book is published by a university press, that should not scare off any person who thinks about their participation in traveling. It's important to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what you hope to get out of going to another country.

Reading this book gives one a great field guide of questions to ask yourself before you set off on your trip.

The Perfect Gift for the E-Reader Owner Who Wants to Experience Poetry (Wait! Really! It can be done!)

Even though my own attempts to write poetry have convinced me that I am a prose writer who should stick to what she does best, I often long to be able to write poetry. I envy a poet's ability to make language sing. I feel as Flaubert did when he complained that all he was capable of doing was banging on cracked pots when what he longed to do was to move the stars. So, while April is the cruelest month up here in northern New York, I  love April's tribute to poetry.

For those who are not familiar with poetry, this book is a perfect amuse-bouche or several for the neophyte to curl up with. And, for the veteran fan of poetry, it's a wonderful collection of some of poetry's brightest stars' greatest hits. I would consider teaching this book in one of my writing courses. I have started having students in my "writing for magazines' course read a collection of poetry each semester, because I want to make certain that I produce students who will feel comfortable reviewing poetry collections, and to affirm for the poets among the group that I think the genre is deserving of being taken as seriously as we take prose. Perhaps even more so.

What makes ESSENTIAL POEMS so wonderful is that the publishing company, Open Road Integrated Media, has unlocked the key that allows a poem on an electronic reading device look like a poem  that you would see in a paper book. Poets lay out their words in a particular way for serious, not-to-be-messed with reasons. It would be frustrating if one were to open a book of poetry to find the words scattered or jumbled on the page or a sonnet that looks like a prose poem instead of its distinct shape. What a shame it would be if Robin Morgan's "Arraignment" were not to be in the shape of a voice gaining courage as it declares its "J'accuse!" against Ted Hughes?

How can
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of what the entire British and American
literary and critical establishment
has been at great lengths to deny,
without ever saying it in so many words, of course:
the murder of Sylvia Plath
?

Whether one thinks Morgan's accusations against Hughes to be unfair, or if one sees him as the husband who drove his wife to suicide, the ability to read the poem as it was intended allows the reader to notice the build-up of Morgan's voice.

Or the incomparable May Sarton, who taught us about solitude. Her lines are presented as she intended.

Read between the lines.
Then meet me in the silence if you can,
The long silence of winter when I shall
Make poems out of nothing, out of loss,
And at times hear your healing laughter.
Or the anguish conveyed in the poem without punctuation as "No Goodbyes" by the too-soon gone Paul Monette:

for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we'd
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I'd breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you

and so on, until he breaks our heart:

my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night's gone

This book should be a great gift for the new e-reader owner. Perhaps a chance to appreciate that poetry can be read on the new technology without losing any of its magic will make even the most ardent tech head make room for the poet in his or her collection.

THE LENS OF WAR: Still foggy after all these years

Books of photographs occupy a strange position in the average American's house. Many of them are marketed as "coffee table" books; their very existence a testament to  the taste, the intellect, and the personality of the owner of said coffee table. LENS OF WAR (University of Georgia)  is most definitely not a coffee table book, although perhaps it should be, as the photographs and the commentaries upon them would be certain to provoke discussions.

As someone who was not born in the United States, but went through the American educational system from kindergarten to graduate school, I'm aware of the unique position that the Civil War occupies in the popular imagination. Photography books are not cheap to produce, but University of Georgia press is probably not wrong in banking on this collection making a profit for its publishers. Its drop date of April 15, 2015 is conspicuous, being the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's death from an assassin's bullet the night before.

The premise behind the book seems simple enough. The book's editors--J. Mathew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher--contacted a number of Civil War historians and asked them to each pick a favorite photograph from the war, along with an essay that explained the significance of the photo.

Most of the writers respond with remarkable candor. For those who think that all historians engage in parching prose best used as a sleeping pill, prepare to be surprised. Writers use colorful language in presenting these black-and-white images. And the choice of photograph reveals as much about the historian as his or her biography in the back of the book.

The book opens with a series of portraits of some of the "great men" of the war: Lincoln, Lee, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and Sherman. On at least two of the occasions, historians proclaim that it was the portrait of the great man that caused them, at a young age, to "fall in love" with the Civil War, statements that I find troubling. While accepting that perhaps they are referring to their child selves who saw in the romanticism of the portraits the same window into an adventurous time that others experienced looking at portraits of the Tudors--Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, in particular. I admit to reading every book that I could lay hands on about the Tudor court between 1509 and 1603; the Holbein portraits creating larger than life images sure to capture the attention of an eight-year old girl.

But falling in love with a war strikes me as insensitive, given that portraits of great men were not far removed from the famous battleground images of the war's dead. It is not surprising, therefore, that the historians who chose portraits of great men possessed different attitudes toward the war than those who chose some of the more graphic images of suffering, deprivation, and destruction that followed in the remaining sections.

If you pay attention to the stories told by the historians, one gains a view into where each historian sits in the range of theories of the war. Whether identifying themselves as members of the "Lost Cause" school of thought to the newer theories of the "Destructive War," one finds a number of occasions where professors, many of them affiliated with southern colleges, painting the Union armies as punishing and blood thirsty. In an example of sloppy scholarship, Joan Waugh, writing about U.S. Grant says, "without attribution," "The battles of the six-week Overland Campaign, where Grant's and Lee's armies fought to bloody stalemate across Virginia's countryside, gave rise to the nickname of "butcher," for the general-in-chief whose main strategy seemed to be throwing bodies at the enemy."

LENS OF WAR is a great book to add to any Civil War student's collection. Photographs are not objective documents that simply record what is there. In some cases, what is there was stage-managed by the photographer who sought to drive home a point with his newspaper audiences. In some cases, the analysis of the photographs turns the lens upon the historian as much as the war itself.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the official end of the Civil War, LENS OF WAR does a great job of illustrating William Faulkner's observation of history itself. "The past is never dead," he wrote, in REQUIEM FOR A NUN "It's not even past."

Daily Beast Reveals Its Inhumanity with Germanwings Headline

Today, while checking my e-mail, I noticed that an update from The Daily Beast indicated that it had posted a new article about what they were calling the "kamikaze" pilot. (I will not link to the article. It can earn its own clicks.) My gut seized. Why would anyone trivialize such a tragedy by using a word that has lost its original meaning and has now become a word we use to describe either a belly-flop into water, or a mixed drink that we use to get drunk. What could they have been thinking?

I sent them the following. 

Dear “Editors,”

I have put your position in quotation marks because if the decision to refer to the air disaster that is currently playing out in the Alps as the work of a “kamikaze” pilot was your own,  then I find myself wondering just what you have to do to be qualified to hold your position. Did you spend more than a fraction of a second thinking about the implications of the title? Do you know what kamikaze means in Japanese or what its meaning has come to be in American culture? Did you think about the fact that 150 souls—yes, they refer to them as souls, so it’s their word, not mine—that 150 souls were on board that plane? Did you perhaps assume that no one who had lost someone on that plane would ever see the callous treatment of mass death as if it were some cartoon spectacle for you to sell for a cheap click? Are you ashamed of yourselves yet?

You should be.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that I am removing myself from your mailing list today. Now. At the moment that this letter is sent.

The human thing to do would be for the “editor” among you who made this decision to apologize.

The purpose of being a writer is to increase understanding in this world. To add to the empathy we have for one another. If you cause other human beings pain in order to make a buck, why not admit that what you are publishing is not writing or journalism or anything worthy of reading. You’re selling death porn.

In a way, your headline vivified reading that I had been doing just last night. I was reading a Nobel Prize winner, a writer whom I have admired since I was a teenager. He was criticizing writer friends of his who had attacked  him for his public criticism of the murderous behavior of a country’s government that many in the artistic community thought should be above reproach because it was under attack from right-wing enemies who wanted to bring that government down.

He wrote:

“But it seems to me that there is another ambition that ought to belong to all writers; to bear witness, every time it is possible, insofar as our talent allows, for those who are as enslaved as we are. That is the very ambition that you questioned in your article, and I shall consistently refuse you the right to question it so long as the murder of a man angers you only when that man shares your ideas.”

It’s funny that the words written by Albert Camus in 1948 should feel so relevant now. Would you have perhaps shown a shred more decency if this air crash had taken place in the United States? Or do you only laugh and point at others if they’re foreigners?

Sincerely,

I realize that The Daily Beast doesn't care what I think of it, and my disappearance from its daily subscription list, and my decision to never visit its site again, will not do any damage. Unless, of course, those of you reading this were to make a similar decision. I can't speak for you.

But I refuse to add to a culture of death as entertainment. I refuse to support writing and editorial decisions that erodes the humanity of all who come into contact with its skeevy approach. It does no good to complain about this sick culture if one is willing to continue to patronize its merchants. I'm not willing to do that. I hope that some of you join me. Let editorial@dailybeast.com know that it has lost one more viewer. Sure. It's a grain of sand on the beach. But at least it might make you feel less polluted by having come in contact with its rot.

Lorraine's Reading Salon is opening its doors

Years ago, when I stood at the trailhead and looked at the sign, I knew I wanted to follow the trail that would take me to that place where I would recognize that I had become a writer, that I had earned that title. I have broken into the clearing and those of you who want to read me can do so in a number of places. You may have followed me here from there, which is great. And while I am a firm believer (ask my students) that if you want to write, you must read, this is not going to be the place where you'll see the sorts of political posts that once garnered me attention.

Here, I want to talk about one of my great loves: books. I'll tell you about what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about reading, what I put down and couldn't read and which book kept me from blogging because I couldn't lift my eyes off its pages.

So in the coming days, look for my thoughts on books. I haven't yet decided what the inaugural book I discuss will be. But I hope you'll come back and talk about books with me. My only rule about posting comments is that you can't be a troll. This is a no troll zone, and violaters will be booted. You're in a literary salon, not hanging out in the parking lot of a strip club. Don't take a dump on my carpet. Feel free to offer thoughts about a book or books that that are contrary to mine. I will love that. We'll be having a discussion, a conversation, an exchange of ideas. Sometimes, I get lonely when I feel as if I'm the only one who has read a particular book. That's why I'm welcoming you to my salon. The furniture is comfy and we're casual, so go ahead and put your feet up.

Stay a while.