Category Archives: Notable Quotes

November Links Roundup: It’s Supposed to Hurt

I just finished a philosophy book that I loved in 1999, and found it equally rewarding to re-read from a new perspective. Marxist-feminist philosopher Robin May Schott’s Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Beacon Press, 1988) challenges the body-mind split that has constituted “objectivity” for the Western religious and intellectual tradition. I hope to devote a whole post to this book later. At the moment, I want to focus on how the ideal of dissociation from one’s body and emotions plays out in academia. Schott observes that women’s exclusion from educational institutions has been justified by the paradigm that identifies women with embodied emotion and men with dispassionate intellect. Though Schott doesn’t discuss racism, this form of discrimination relies on the same projective identification of nonwhite people with a lower physical realm. The diversity of bodies is particular and contingent, therefore beneath the so-called universality of true knowledge.

It comes as no surprise, then, that when members of historically excluded groups describe the trauma of ongoing discrimination in their universities, the liberal intellectual response is “Grow up and stop whining.” Bringing your whole emotional and embodied self into a discussion automatically undermines your intellectual credibility–even when the discussion is a debate over whether bodies like yours are fully human. Emotion-shaming works because of this centuries-old tradition of defining knowledge as that which cannot acknowledge the interpersonal.

Miles Johnson’s Slate News article from Nov. 10, “People Don’t Hate Safe Spaces, They Hate the People They Protect”, looks at this dynamic in the context of the University of Missouri students’ recent anti-racism protests. Many pundits criticized the black students for limiting press access to some of their events, while others noted that black activists have a well-founded fear of being misrepresented by the media. It’s become fashionable among the former camp to ridicule “safe spaces” as an immature demand from entitled, sheltered college kids. Johnson counters:

…how quickly we all forget that safe spaces are nothing new. Safe spaces belong to a tradition with roots extending far beyond the borders of college campuses, and is something that dominant, mainstream society is infamous for routinely imposing.

In May of 1989, the New York Times reported the complete eradication of graffiti in subways. Graffiti had long filled train cars, platforms, and tunnels, but, as a staple of hip-hop culture dominated by young black people, was seen as a public scourge. In fact, in a New York Times piece that would be published seven years later in 1996, graffiti artists are described as “vandals armed with cans of paint.” The removal of graffiti from subways was, quite literally, the creation of a safe space. You could hypothetically entertain an argument about whether graffiti constitutes speech or is simply vandalism, but that would require coming to the insurmountable conversational road block that goes something like, “graffiti is vandalism because we say it is.” The mere act of spraying paint onto a surface is not inherently malicious, but dominant American culture in the 1980s and 90s decided that it was—so it was…

Some would argue that using the preservation of the MTA’s karma as reason to spend public money to hire thousands of workers to clean trains is both hilariously ironic, and rather flimsy. Perhaps those sheltered New York subway riders should have just been able to confront a point of view different from their own, rather than cower in fear simply because it was not presented to them in a way they found tasteful. The graffiti was removed from inside trains (a quasi-public space, like the University of Missouri’s quad) to make riders, specifically those who found spray-painted messages to be inherently menacing, feel safe…

…after the state of Arizona rejected a proposal to make Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday a state holiday in 1990, Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get to Arizona,” released the following year, was played once on MTV before being banned. The censoring of speech orchestrated by MTV was, undoubtedly, to create a safer, more pleasing brand of MTV for its viewers and listeners—but safety for whom? Safety for fans of Public Enemy, or for people who would find the band’s criticism of the state of Arizona distasteful?

The examples are nearly endless.

Augusta National Golf Club refused to admit black golfers as members before 1990, and prohibited women from becoming members until 2012. What is a golf club that refuses membership to black men or any women but a safe space for white men?

I wish Schott’s history of emotion-suppression in religion hadn’t stopped at the Reformation, because I could see a straight line from ancient thinkers’ neurotic mind-body splitting to contemporary Christianity’s valuation of doctrine over psychological well-being. Tell Me Why the World is Weird is the blog of an American woman who moved to China for Christian missionary work, then began to question and reject her old belief system. I could quote all of her Nov. 17 post, “Church is Supposed to Hurt”, with an Amen! The blogger was attending an evangelical small group that made her feel depressed and unsafe, but felt duty-bound to keep going, until she thought about the problem from a different angle. Highlights are below:

I wasn’t paying attention to my body. I wasn’t paying attention to how I felt. My body and mind were telling me about my own needs (specifically, that it’s not healthy for me to put myself in that kind of Christian environment) and I didn’t realize it. (Until I actually wrote it all down.)

Because the church trains us to ignore our own needs. The church teaches that following God is supposed to be hard, and that we need to obey even though it will hurt…

…People come to small group and say “I haven’t been reading my bible because I wanted to sleep instead” or “because I wanted to watch TV in the evenings” and they feel as if those things are shameful and selfish. NO! Listen to your body. You need sleep. You need to do relaxing things like watch TV. We’ve created this culture where people claim to believe “spending time with God” is the most important thing, but then they don’t do it because their mind/body/emotions tell them it’s not actually worth it, and they can’t be honest about it. They feel bad and come to small group and talk about how weak and selfish they are, how they have to work harder in the future to ignore their own needs and do what the church taught them is the right thing for all Christians to do.

The same thing is true about going to church. Samantha Field’s post, the not-so-ridiculous reasons people leave church, does a great job with this topic. She writes about the memes and blog posts that get shared by Christians, mocking the reasons that people quit going to church. Those awful posts are all about how pathetic and selfish you are if you stop going to church because you don’t like it, or because it wasn’t actually a good thing for you, or because people judged you, etc.

Reality check: If you don’t like something, why on earth would you do it? But the church teaches it doesn’t matter how you feel- if you’re a Christian, you HAVE TO go to church. And if you don’t, you’d better have a damn good excuse, or rather, haha no excuse is good enough, you’re just being selfish.

Because we’re taught that our own feelings and our own needs don’t matter. If the church is hurting us, or if every week we think “this is pointless, why do I keep coming here?” it doesn’t matter. You have to just keep doing it, and eventually God will help you learn to like it.

Which is why it’s taken me so long to realize that, hey, since this church group is pushing me toward depression, I should stop going.

In a similar vein, I could see many of my current struggles reflected in the final post on Hännah Ettinger’s post-fundamentalist Christian blog Wine and Marble, “Love, Fundamentalism, and Endings”. Ettinger begins with the bell hooks quote: “Love and abuse cannot coexist.” Following the implications of this axiom, she came to see that what went by the name of “love” in her Christian upbringing was anything but:

In fundamentalism, ideology and hierarchy > person and emotional healthy relationships. Every. Damn. Time.

bell hooks writes that “abuse and love cannot coexist” because (as Christian theology teaches) love is about considering another person’s best interest.

…Love should not be mutable, but the terms of the relationship will be in order to be consistent with love. Love respects the other as a separate, autonomous individual with unique needs. Love does not require the other person to fix your emotional problems. Love is considerate, respectful, ethical, generous. Love is not craven, demanding, or manipulative.

This cuts two ways. Loving others well is easier (and probably better) the better you are at loving yourself well. It’s hard to love someone else well if you are abusive toward yourself, and if you try you’re more  likely to expect the other party to love you the way you should be loving yourself, and then resent them for not fixing your emotional disassociation with yourself. No person, no religious belief, no creature comfort will be able to fix the fundamental need for self-acceptance. I’ve been learning this, and it’s not easy. I can deflect and distract myself, but there is no substitute for sitting with my own emotions and owning them to myself and accepting that the me I’m living with is messy and not quite all who I want to be. I have to live with (and learn to love) me in real time, as I grow and learn, and not with my idealized future version of myself. This means also recognizing when I’m in unhealthy relationships or situations and being responsible for standing up for myself, and not expecting others to read my mind or know my needs and rescue me. Boundaries, communication, and actively engaging my day-to-day life and owning my responsibility to and for myself: these are ways I can engage in loving myself well.

Loving others well is an extension of understanding how to love myself. I need to respect the fact that others need different things and that what is good for me might not be good for them, that my perception of reality might not be their story, that they may be growing and learning faster or slower than I am. I respect them as individuals and not as caricatures or emotional food sources for myself, and that paves the way for healthy relationship.

This means: I cannot demand my more fundamentalist friends to change their beliefs on things, because their emotional needs (and reasons for holding on to various positions) are different from mine. I can, however, write about what I’ve learned and how various elements of religious fundamentalism have been harmful. I can also limit the ability of their more negative positions to affect me personally by reducing my exposure to toxic relational dynamics, and I can also appeal to their desire to love others when I see them hurting people close to me and ask for them to change how they treat people based on our shared assumption that they care about the other person’s best interest.

…In my pilgrimage to understand love and to heal, I’ve had to reconcile myself to the fact that church and Christian culture are antithetical to my emotional and mental stability. The solvency of Christianity for some, I believe, is viable and good. I think the church can be better and radically change lives for good. I think the teachings of Jesus are precious and radical and good. There is much that I love, but I have had to remove myself from it and remove it from me in order to be kind to myself. All things are lawful, etc. For me this means: I’m not a Christian anymore.

The damage done to my brain by code-switching in Christianese and by tiptoeing around emotional land mines from my time in the cult outweigh the worth of holding onto the Creeds for the Creeds’ sake. If Jesus is the Christ and all of that is true, then I’d rather be a Calormen in the end and be sound of mind and live ethically and love well than be a martyr for something that has fostered so much suffering.

I do not recant anything I have written. I still love the things I have always loved. I still believe in the power of radical love to transform. I still believe in the magic of community and the mystery of burden-bearing and communion. I still love justice and mercy and crave light and truth.

But it is the learning of the loving that calls me to keep exploring, and so I’m discarding things that are impotent or emotionally destructive. I’m not merely disassociating from the label of “Christian”or organized church in pursuit of being a “Jesus-follower.” I am closing that chapter completely.

 

Religion as Medicine, or Diversity Without Relativism

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s widely-shared TED Talk “The danger of a single story” (transcript here) links narrative hegemony and prejudice. When you only see a limited range of images of a community or social group, both your self-understanding and your empathy become stunted: “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” For instance, her American literature professor critiqued her fiction as “not African enough” because its educated urban characters didn’t fit our media’s depiction of Africa as uniformly poor and primitive. A single story, if widespread enough, prevents us from asking questions; we can’t imagine that the reality could be more complex. She goes on to say, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.“

With this in mind, I can’t help seeing a connection between Christianity’s claim to be the One True Story that explains everything, and the church’s persistent lag on civil rights. It’s hard to affirm the full dignity of women, gays, people of color, the disabled, etc., when your faith isn’t structured to recognize that there are diverse but equally valid ways of being a good person. On the other hand, when we speak about rights, justice, and empathy, we are implicitly appealing to common values, which presume some shared human experience in the midst of all this diversity. So relativism is not a good basis for a theology of liberation, either.

In religion, a third way between “There is ONE truth” and “There is NO truth” can possibly be found through the model of medicine. Different religions focus on different spiritual maladies and propose cures to match. To oversimplify quite a bit, Christianity is answering “How do I overcome my sinful separation from God and ensure an eternity in God’s loving presence?”, while Buddhism is answering “How do I achieve inner peace and escape the ups and downs of this impermanent world?” What gives us the right to say that one of those questions shouldn’t matter to anybody? Outcomes-wise, what’s the benefit of pushing a solution on someone who isn’t experiencing that problem?

In medicine, there are agreed-upon facts and observable causal connections. Certain interventions will probably fix certain problems: antibiotics are our current best remedy for an infection. The same interventions will not work if the problem is different: antibiotics don’t fix a broken leg. (A doctor who mechanically applied a single remedy to every patient, in the way that religious exclusivists prescribe one narrative for everyone’s life, would lose a lot of patients to their untreated actual ailments.) Interventions need to be adjusted for the diversity of bodies with the same condition: a person who’s allergic to penicillin should take a different antibiotic for an infection. And some interventions will be useless or dangerous in nearly all cases: eating rat poison isn’t the cure for anything. Diversity without relativism.

An empiricist religion–one that always starts by asking what people’s actual problems are, and continually corrects itself by asking whether its solutions work–would be grounded in empathy and humility, not stereotyping and speaking over other people’s stories. The metaphor of Jesus as the “great physician” and “wounded healer” merits further study by Christians who take Adichie’s words to heart.

October Links Roundup: Spiritual Bypass Edition

For a one-sentence statement of my personal philosophy, the Serenity Prayer can’t be beat: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” (Closely followed by Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” chorus: “You got to know when to hold ’em, Know when to fold ’em, Know when to walk away, Know when to run…”)

The Aristotelian golden mean suggested by these maxims seems dynamic enough to outsmart the duplicities and imbalances of human nature, whereas simplistic idealizations of a single principle can slow down survival responses when conditions change. When our earliest relationships don’t build a foundation of trust, for instance, our unconscious defenses can get locked on the “hold ’em” (love-addicted) or “fold ’em” (love-avoidant) setting. I was a holder so long with my abusive mother that I have to curb my enthusiasm for folding now. A personal mantra like the quotes above can remind us to question whether our instinctual response really applies to the present problem. Can I change this situation, should I accept it, or should I leave? What wisdom have I learned from the way I made these decisions in the past?

This process of nonjudgmental present-time inquiry is known as mindfulness. In the Buddhist meditation tradition from which it came, there is no pressure to feel happier, nor any bias against change (as there often is in Western religions). Unfortunately, as mindfulness has been lifted from its spiritual context and taken up by America’s “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” popular culture, its lingo can be used to gaslight people into a positive attitude about unacceptable circumstances. One of my friends, a trauma survivor and Buddhist meditator, calls this the “spiritual bypass”: when religion tries to convince you that you need an attitude adjustment instead of a revolution.

The online news and culture journal The Conversation said as much in this provocative article last month, “How corporations co-opted the art of mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable”:

While there can be little doubt that the practice of mindfulness can lead to significant health benefits, its current prominence in corporate culture is nested within a social, cultural and political context where stress is now seen as a failure of the individual to adapt to the productivity demands of the corporation. In other words, if you’re stressed out, you’re not working hard enough on your personal focus strategy. You’re letting the team down.

The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.

In this context, mindfulness is an ideal tool to induce compliance, with its focus on the individual management of our responses to forces we’re being told are well beyond our control.

And this is perhaps the crux of the problem of the mindless application of Buddhist meditation practice: the marketing of mindfulness as a solution to work stress and life balance rather than the complex spiritual approach to living it is meant to be.

Suspicion of people’s agendas, however well-founded sometimes, has sadly interfered with my spiritual openness. (That “fold ’em” personality at work!) I would like to stop worrying that letting go, being mindful of my inner state, handing over control to my Higher Power, etc., will leave me vulnerable to spiritual attack, or will serve the interests of people who want to shut me up. I’m sort of like a cult survivor in that way. The warning system that “someone wants to take over my brain!” is really ingrained. My emotional cell membrane is too permeable. This is reason number six hundred that I’m taking a break from close involvement in organized religion. Until I develop better discernment and psychic defenses, I’m safer being by myself (or with a trusted friend or counselor) in those moments when I descend to a deeper level of communion with God and my subconscious.

That leads me to today’s next link, “Screen Backlash is a Disability Issue”, by Sara Luterman for NOS Magazine. The autistic writer pushes back against those thinkpieces criticizing modern people for using smartphones in lieu of face-to-face conversation. Community doesn’t have to look the same for everyone:

People who were previously isolated because of mobility or speech issues can find friends with shared experiences and interests. They get to be less alone.

People who oppose the use of screens aren’t trying to silence disabled people. The problem is that they aren’t thinking about us at all. When confronted with what smartphones can do for disabled people, anti-screen folks will claim that they are not talking about us. The thing is, when they look at a café and see people using their phones, there is no way to distinguish between the people who use phones as disability aids and people who just happen to find speaking through social media a perfectly adequate or even preferable mode of communication. A false hierarchy is formed, and of course, the ways some disabled people speak is at the bottom of it.

By idealizing inflexible, narrow definitions of communication, we are dehumanizing the people who don’t make eye contact, the people who don’t speak. Social media just gives us more socially acceptable and normalized options for communication.

This resonated with me because I encounter many such thinkpieces in Christian media. Anxious about falling church attendance, these bloggers and pastors disparage online spiritual friendships as shallow and dominated by groupthink. But for folks who can’t find an affirming or accessible church, or who are in a contemplative phase of their spiritual life, social media is an essential third way between isolation and forcing yourself to be somewhere you don’t belong. The feminist and queer Christian Twitterverse is also a place for radical theological re-thinkings that may make the difference between hold ’em and fold ’em in some wavering believers’ lives. (Shout out to Dianna Anderson, Sarah Moon, Samantha Field–if you can stay Christian, maybe I can too.)

Speaking of Samantha Field, go read her new blog post, “The Not-So-Ridiculous Reasons People Leave Church”. She asked her Twitter followers “if you used to attend church regularly, but don’t attend anymore, why did you stop?” Many people weighed in with good reasons including homophobia, churches that protected abusers, stumping for political candidates and ballot measures from the pulpit, no charitable service to the community, and lack of accommodation for disabilities, especially less-visible ones like autism. So please, no more invalidating memes about “stupid reasons for leaving church”. Let’s listen to each other and create better spiritual communities, online and off.

September Links Roundup: The Faults of Forgiveness, Graduating From Church, and Other Radical Ideas

I keep having to come out on this blog. As a gay-affirming Christian, as an abuse survivor, and now as something I don’t have a name for. “Spiritual but not religious” doesn’t fit. I’m finding God in more traditions, even as I loosen my identification with a single one. Christianity remains important to me as one avenue for connecting with God, but I have to confess that I no longer regard it as authoritative.

Don’t put me in the camp of ex-Christian rationalists, or those who proclaim that “all religions basically say the same thing” (they don’t). I believe in magic. What I no longer believe in is all-or-nothing relationships. I used to think I had to choose between tying myself in knots to accept oppressive doctrines, or being cut off from the face of God that I encounter in Christian art and worship. But I’ve discovered that all traditions contain contradictions, a very human admixture of poison and cure, so that staying within the same “brand name” (so to speak) is no guarantee that all the components will be compatible or equal in quality.

If I have a particular doctrinal sticking point these days, it’s the gospel messages of forgiveness and nonresistance to evil. Setting aside all the corruptions of religious texts and institutions, I can’t honestly call myself a follower of Jesus, because my life doesn’t line up with some of his core teaching. Not just that I find it too hard, but that I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Psychologist Sherrie Campbell’s 2014 Huffington Post piece “The 5 Faults With Forgiveness” succinctly lays out the case against the moral-religious command to forgive abuse and atrocities. (Hat tip to the Feminism and Religion blog for the link.) She distinguishes forgiveness from the healthier goal of accepting reality and having all of our feelings about it: “In acceptance the healing is about you. In forgiveness the healing is about the perpetrator.”

I especially liked her fourth point, debunking the catchphrase that “a lack of forgiveness places you in an emotional prison”. I frequently hear this from liberal spiritual folks who want to square the modern concern for personal well-being with an ancient religion that had different priorities. One benefit of having a non-authoritative relationship to Christianity is that I no longer have to twist words out of their common-sense meaning in order to salvage both the doctrine and my sanity. Campbell writes:

Much information is out there about how if we don’t forgive we will only live in an angry, hateful place, and therefore, we have no power and are, in essence, giving our perpetrators even more power. We are shamed for having the naturally occurring feelings we should have based on our circumstances, because if we have them, accept them and express them we are told we are giving the person, situation or circumstance even more power and we are only hurting ourselves. This causes self-punishment. We feel guilty or weak for feeling our natural emotions. In reality there are things in our lives which happen to us which may always trigger a bit of anger as we think about them, but to be told we are responsible for making someone else powerful with these natural feelings only makes us feel inadequate, and it forces us away from the organic grieving process. This forcing of our feelings away creates what we are trying to avoid: a constant state of anger. In trying to keep our power we end up losing our power.

Progressive evangelical Christian blogger Zach Hoag wrote this risky, heartfelt piece this past summer, about the death of his old identity as a church planter and maybe even a church member in the typical sense. “On Graduating” asks us to acknowledge that a spiritual path may be God’s best plan for us now, yet have a natural finite lifespan–an especially bold realization for someone from a Christian culture that prizes inerrancy and universal truths. I identified with Hoag’s revelation that his shame from an abusive childhood was keeping him from growing and moving on spiritually.

It’s time to accept fully the experiences that have brought me to this point. It’s time to shed fully the season, the identity, the dream that has more to do with who I am supposed to be than who I really am now. It’s time to allow whatever additional elements of allegiance to an institution or organization or a form of religion to die, so that I will not stay too long, so that this will not need to become a messy(er) divorce.

Lastly, I want to recommend the online theology journal The Other Journal, Issue #25, whose theme is Trauma. It’s so refreshing to find intellectually rigorous work on trauma theology that’s not behind the paywall of an academic journal. Of special note is “The Spirit’s Witness: An Interview with Shelly Rambo”. Her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining is now on my wishlist. In this piece, the Boston University professor describes being troubled by the way that traditional apologetics forced survivors’ stories into a single narrative arc:

I was aware, however, that there was this triangle of clinical practice, literary theory, and Christian theology, which I found to be a very unique way of thinking about suffering, a distinctive phenomenology of suffering. I brought it back to Christian theology, and I asked more of those complex questions that my faith tradition had danced around with apologetics. How do we think about suffering, given the Christian plot—the story of creation, fall, and redemption? What happens when the human story and the story of our lived experience doesn’t fit the linear pattern of that Christian plot? What happens when there are certain dominant ways of telling that story which undercut many of our stories? More specifically, I came to believe that it is important to ask why certain ways of thinking about what happened on the cross come to be the one way of thinking. I brought all of the trauma readings, and all of these questions, back to Christian theology, and it led me to my doctoral work on the interdisciplinary study of trauma and to a corresponding theology of Holy Saturday…

…God’s Spirit is never separated from us, but experiences, such as trauma, can render this love—which is the central attribute of the Spirit and which still remains with us—altogether lost. Yet the pneumatology of Holy Saturday says that when all is lost the Spirit surfaces through the textured witness of those who remain. This is where the connection between God’s Spirit and the human spirit is most critical; the witnesses surface this love. Here I am pointing back to my comments about the surface of skin as significant, because I want to emphasize that this work is not just about words or language but, in very concrete terms, about tending to bodies. The theology of Holy Saturday is oriented less to those who experience trauma than to those who accompany others in this journey through the swamp. Finding one’s way in the swamp requires others who can witness it.

What I hope to emphasize about the descent into hell in the Spirit during Holy Saturday is that we have not yet known that Spirit before. And it appears distinctively here, just as the animating breath appears as the breath of life in Genesis. I highlight this distinctive vocabulary for the Spirit, which occurs in the Gospel of John, setting it apart from the Spirit of Pentecost, because it takes a different form. So I mean to demonstrate that it is not just that the Spirit appears in this part of the story but that the witness is a distinctive form of presence. The swamp, as you present it, may be a very real experience of God’s absence, yet the Spirit in hell is discerned not as pure presence but through the witness of the disciples.

And so that Spirit is always present, yet it has to get reanimated. You can go back to Ezekiel and the dry bones. You think these bones are the driest bones ever, that there is no life possible in them, but they just need to be summoned and given life again.

Wag’s Revue Goes Out with a Bang (and Four Poems by Me)

“I feel like someone just gave me some very good news!”

The online literary journal Wag’s Revue launched in 2009 with a manifesto promising to “marry…the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the Internet.” Over the next six and a half years, Wag’s published innovative poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews. Each issue also showcased grotesque, funny, and disturbing contemporary artwork, such as Dimitri Tsykalov’s portraits made of meat and Ana Teresa Barboza Gubo’s strangely romantic painting of a lion French-kissing (or perhaps preparing to eat) a woman.

I was honored to learn that a selection of my poems won their 2015 writing contest, now appearing in Issue #20 (alas, their last). Some of my literary heroes who’ve been published in Wag’s include Mallory Ortberg, George Saunders, Saeed Jones, Sarah Schulman, and Alison Bechdel. Browse the archives for hours of radical enlightenment and literary laughs. The editors’ list of faves is a good place to begin. My feature starts here.

The check is in the mail, but I’ve already spent the prize money. On what, you ask? Read on.

What I’d Do With Mine

Breasts are for public feeding,
lose your dirty mind.
So says La Leche League and town law agrees.
Well, I say the penis too is not always for sex.
My penis came in a box.
It was plastic like a president.
I wore it like a secret on national television.

This is not true yet.
So far my penis, like a 1975 Barbie Townhouse on eBay,
only furnishes my dreams.
Somewhere my future penis is riding up and down the elevator
of the cardboard house my mother threw away
because it was unfeminist and too big for the hallway.
It is peeping out the little heart-shaped window.
And it is exactly 11 1/2 inches tall in high heels.

I promise that my penis will fit into our daily existence.
It will not ring the doorbell of your vanilla manpussy.
I wear loose pants anyway.
My penis will not show up at family weddings.
The bride can keep the spotlight on her baby bump,
the little penis growing inside her.

But when my penis arrives, in its shiny pink wrapper,
happier than a tea party in a Christmas catalog,
I might walk down our street scratching an itch I don’t have.
Used to be, I had to go shopping for that.
I might pull it out like knitting during the sermon.
It’ll make me less threatening to the Reverend Mother,
who can sing her welcome solo
uninterrupted by other trebles.
I might use my penis as a mouthpiece
for all my novel characters.
How do children feel? Why do women lie?
It’s like a thumb drive with Wikipedia on it.
Men and women agree,
my penis is a likeable protagonist.

At night I’ll sleep with you, of course,
and my penis, after a useful day
of driving cars and explaining baseball statistics,
will sleep on my desk, in the warm spot the laptop makes,
lazing in the afterglow of news.
While you dream of nipples, and I, of deep-fried shrimp,
my penis may dream of returning to the woods
where the stag leaps beneath a horned moon.

Guidelines for Writer Care: Teen Writer Maggie Marsden-Sparrow Explains It All

An artist friend sent me this hilarious and spot-on list of things you need to understand about writers, by her friend’s 14-year-old daughter, Maggie Marsden-Sparrow. She is an aspiring author who shares her work in online forums for youth. Maggie and her mother have kindly given me permission to reprint it here. She’s certainly got my number. So please don’t ask me why I spent all my poetry prize money on comic books and fake body parts. I’m just researching the Endless Sequel.

Guidelines for Writer Care

For yours and your writer’s continued health and happiness, here’s a few guidelines for writer care. I don’t claim to be an expert, just a writer in my own right. I don’t imagine all of this will be the same for all writers either, this is just what I know to be true for me.
-Do not under any circumstances ask when their book will be done. Ever.
-Please don’t call the police or fear for your life if you catch a glimpse of their browsing history. I can promise you they aren’t planning a murder or becoming a prostitute, just doing some research.
-If your writer zones out during a conversation, PLEASE assume they are not bored with you, simply got an idea.
-On a similar note, if your writer looks/seems a bit off, they’re probably just in the middle of a story in their head. Approach with humour and/or food.
-If your writer has become depressed by their own writing, fear not, it will not linger. Simply comfort in any and all ways needed.
-If your writer is rambling about something story related, unless there’s an emergency or your self-care is in jeopardy, DO NOT INTERRUPT THEM. Don’t pop yourself in the middle and start talking about your own stuff, don’t tell them to “Hold that thought” while you go do the laundry. Nothing is worse than being suddenly shut down in a moment of excitement, and even if you do come back to talk to them, there’s a good chance they won’t have the initial readiness to talk about it anymore.
-In the event that your writer has been writing for more than 3 or 4 hours straight, pop by to check up on them. Don’t interrupt if they’re in the zone, but if they acknowledge your presence it’s safe to gently suggest they eat/drink/take care of any other needs. Self care can be hard when you’re inspired, and though they might resist, they’ll thank you for it later.
Probably one of the most important rules is to NEVER judge a writer by their:
-Research. As previously mentioned, just because they looked up different kinds of recreational drugs, doesn’t mean they plan on partaking in any.
-Characters. Characters are meant to be diverse, so if the main character thinks murder is “fun” or a supporting character is homophobic, that will basically never mean the writer shares the same thoughts or morals.
-Story board. Even if there’s people in chains or a picture of surgical knives, do NOT purse your lips or say “Why do you have pictures of this stuff” to a writer, because they will get anxious and probably never show you their story board again.
-Story. Even if your writer is the happiest, most delicate flower, they may end up writing horror or brutal fight scenes. Writing isn’t 100% meant to reflect the writers soul, it’s meant as a form of storytelling. And even if they write a scene full of colourful swear words, they’ll still be whoever they were before.

August Links Roundup: Content Warnings and Disability Activism

Understanding PTSD as a variety of neurodiversity has helped me feel less isolated and medicalized by the “survivor” label. I’m grateful to discover the work of disability activists and theorists who are radically re-imagining a world without rigid norms for how everyone should think and feel.

My recent drift away from organized religion owes at least as much to religion’s assumption of neurotypicality as to any doctrinal mismatches. Because of the great diversity of mind-body types and life experiences, the “universal” religious value-system that brings one person into balance tips another person further off. For instance, a depressed, dissociated person may sink deeper into that condition by following the Buddhist/New Age prescription to dis-identify with your desires and feelings, while the same advice may be a healthy corrective for someone who’s driven by out-of-control cravings. That’s not a problem if you know who you are and what you need. But every religion tends to shore up its authority by assuming that the type of person who is most helped by its prescriptions is the only real or preferable type that exists.

Except for pathologies that harm others, I think we should try to avoid value-judgments about the optimal human personality. In my book, that’s the classical Christian sin of pride that suppresses our empathy and puts us in place of God: “You should be made in my image.” We unconsciously assume that everyone is or should be like ourselves, and so we resist their requested accommodations with the criticism that they are trying to get extra privileges (rather than calling attention to the privileges we already have).

Would it be too hard to preach and teach with more awareness of neurodiversity? Would sermons sound too much like automated phone menus? “If you are self-centered and isolated, come work at our soup kitchen. If you are co-dependent and avoid your problems by doing good works, skip church next week and take your kids to the park. Press one…”

The links I’m highlighting this month are more hopeful that institutions can effectively acknowledge trauma and other kinds of neurodiversity. The hand-wringing over the logistics of accommodation is frequently a proxy for the real insecurity we feel when our personal sense of normalcy is challenged. It’s not pretty to realize that we have been too proud of our competence in an environment that was designed for people like us. Or the resistance may be simply that we worked so hard to stay on the acceptable side of the line–not too fat, old, needy, hysterical, stupid, poor–and now we’re being told that those metrics shouldn’t matter.

The blogger Feminist Aspie’s open letter, “Dear Anyone Who’s Ever Had Their Disability Accommodations Ridiculed…”, responds to Internet mockery of a decision by the National Union of Students (UK) Women’s Conference to request sign-language applause instead of clapping at their events. Sudden loud noises can make these events challenging for people who have sensory processing issues from autism, anxiety, and other conditions. I’m not autistic, but I do have a lot of sensory sensitivities, either from trauma or just how I’m wired. (It pisses me off that I’ll never know which, like there was some normal person I was cheated out of being–internalized ableism again.) The demeaning comments she critiques are ones that I’ve heard and internalized with great shame. Here’s an excerpt, but go read the whole thing. I also recommend her post The Illusion of “Neutral”.

“How do you expect to survive in the real world?”, they might tell you. “You just need to work on your difficulties!” What they don’t know (or wilfully ignore) is that you already are doing that work, more than they could ever know. Society or the “real world” (which, let’s not forget, is a human construct so shouldn’t be accepted as a given) is inaccessible and harmful in a multitude of ways. It is designed to exclude people like us, and even though it often goes un-noticed, you are working your socks off to live and to thrive in it anyway – and again, abled people don’t have to deal with that stuff at all. Most of them genuinely don’t realise this privilege, so it doesn’t occur to them that maybe they could move some of the way towards you. With apologies to Muse, they like to give an inch whilst you give them infinity. It is absolutely not selfish to more evenly distribute some of that load.

To disabled women: I’ve been saddened to see a lot of this ableism and bullying coming from abled feminists, who think that improving accessibility at the NUS Women’s Conference “trivialises feminism” or “makes women look weak”. I’m really sorry about them. I can’t believe this even needs saying, but you are not letting your gender down just by existing. You didn’t create a society which sees women as lesser – men did that. I think feminists really need to work on this ableist (and sexist!) idea that women have to be completely invulnerable, with no concept of emotions or physical or mental health or self-care, just to “earn” the respect that men automatically receive. You’re not trivialising feminism; in fact, by acting like you don’t exist and by holding women to an invincible-machine standard, it’s feminism that’s trivialising you. For what it’s worth, given that you’re facing patriarchy and ableism, and maybe some other oppressions as well, yet you’re still here trying to make a change, I think that if anything, you’re making women look amazing.

Going back to all genders now, I’m also really shocked by how many disabled people are willing to join in, say “but I have *relevant disability* and I don’t need this, they’re being ridiculous” and throw other disabled people under the bus; though maybe I shouldn’t have been, because a few years ago I probably would have been one of those people. Internalised ableism is something I’m still working on. Anyway: your access needs do not make other disabled people “look bad” – that’s based on the assumption that accommodations are a bad thing in the first place, and that assumption comes from abled people, not you. In addition, you are not the reason abled people don’t take disabled people seriously; abled people are the reason that abled people don’t take disabled people seriously. Your disability and related adjustments are not silly, cutesy or made-up just because they don’t match somebody else’s.

Everyday Feminism gives a quick, decisive take-down of arguments against trigger warnings, also called content notes, in writing and education. Basically, writers are like Spider-Man: with great freedom comes great responsibility.

If you don’t care about the impact that your work has on the community that you are serving –whether it’s with your articles or your films or a lesson you give in your classroom – what exactly is the point of what you’re doing?

As a writer, I’m concerned if there are people who can’t access my content and learn from it because each time that they try to, they are harmed by what I’ve put out into the world. As a writer, I’m concerned if my impact is way different than my intention.

I recognize that I won’t make every single person happy with my writing. There will always be individuals who are a bit disgruntled. But I also recognize that when a community calls on me to make my content better, I should tune in and see if there’s a way that I can do it.

Entire communities have called on us to include content warnings because it’s a significant enough concern to unite around. Instead of ignoring that, I feel that I and other content creators have a responsibility to tune in.

We should think critically about who our work is serving. And if our work is not accessible to everyone, and if there is a community that is negatively impacted by what we’re doing, we should think about ways that we can make our work better so that anyone and everyone can participate.

There’s a big difference between being displeased with your work and actually being harmed by it. And if there’s an easy way to prevent that harm, and to include more people in our work, I think it’s worth doing.

Otherwise, who are we serving? And more specifically, who are we excluding?…

…

Ultimately, the big takeaway that many folks have when you refuse to include content warnings is that the trauma that they have experienced isn’t important to you.

Whether it was a veteran who just barely made it out of combat alive, a black man who was the victim of a vicious hate crime, or a woman who was violently sexually assaulted, what you’re saying to them is that what they’ve been through and what they need to survive is completely and utterly unimportant to you.

And if you aren’t the slightest bit concerned about that message, there’s some deeper reflection that needs to happen.

Because while no one is asking you to fix their struggles for them or hold their hand, what they are asking is that you care enough to write a single sentence on that article or in that syllabus, just enough to give them the chance to opt out or put some self-care in place if they need to.

Their request isn’t ridiculous.

What’s ridiculous is that people are still debating about this, as if your convenience trumps their trauma.

Lastly, in Disabilities Studies Quarterly, Ph.D student Angela M. Carter takes a more academic but no less radical approach to the same topic, in “Teaching with Trauma: Trigger Warnings, Feminism, and Disability Pedagogy”. The footnotes and bibliography have great leads for further reading. Whether trigger warnings are the best solution or not, we must develop an understanding of trauma as a disability that deserves accommodations to make education accessible. Trauma is a social justice issue.

…First, I aim to situate the psychosomatic and affective shifts of trauma in relation to other kinds of neurodiversity such as Autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, epilepsy, Down’s syndrome or other mental health issues (Sibley). While I am focusing here on triggers within context of trauma, many neurodivergent people experience triggers in ways that often similarly impacts their embodied subjectivities. I am using the experience of a trigger then to call for solidarity between individuals typically understood as mentally disabled and communities who have experienced racial and post-colonial traumas. In doing so, I am purposely expanding the category of neurodivergence to include people who may never receive a medical diagnosis, or clinical recognition as such. This is an overtly political move toward an intersectional approach to trauma and disability. In fact, recent advances in neuropsychology have legitimized what critical race theorists, women of color feminisms, and post-colonial feminisms have long been arguing. Not only does trauma change the neurology of the traumatized individual, evidence suggests, “PTSD can be genetically transmitted to secondary and subsequent generations” (Sotero 99). We are fundamentally changed by trauma; and these changes bear legacies. By approaching trauma as an affective structure that may, or may not, be recognizable as a kind of neurodivergence, I seek to broaden our understanding of disability — not to further marginalize the marginalized, but rather to draw attention to the intersecting forces of white supremacy and ableism.

Second, I reference the above descriptions not to define trauma or delineate the specifics of being triggered, but rather to say what trauma and being triggered are not. As becomes clear in the descriptions above, experiences of re-traumatization or being triggered are not the same as being challenged outside of one’s comfort zone, being reminded of a bad feeling, or having to sit with disturbing truths. I am attempting here to distinguish between trauma and injury. While the latter can indeed lead to the former, they are not one in the same. An injury can be healed; redress can be given. To be triggered is to mentally and physically re-experience a past trauma in such an embodied manner that one’s affective response literally takes over the ability to be present in one’s bodymind. When this occurs, the triggered individuals often feel a complete loss of control and disassociation from the bodymind. This is not a state of injury, but rather a state of disability. Because others understand this lost of control and the other related affects as emotionally disproportionate, the traumatized individual is no longer seen as reliable, or as having the ability to “make sense.” Margaret Price argues in Mad at School that individuals with mental disabilities are “rhetorically disabled” in instances where they are stripped of their “rhetoricity” or “the ability to be received as a valid human subject” (26). This is precisely what happens in instances of re-traumatization. Alongside other people with mental disabilities, when those of us who live with the affects of trauma became triggered, “we speak from positions that are assumed subhuman, even nonhuman, and therefore, when we speak, our words go unheeded” (Price 26). In these moments we may struggle to make sense of our bodyminds, but what is most disheartening is that we do this in a world that has so often already dismissed us.

The depths of this misunderstanding, and dismissal, are no more apparent than in the August 2014 report entitled “On Trigger Warnings,” by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In this report the AAUP argues unwaveringly against the use of trigger warnings. What is most thought provoking about this report are not its various assertions — most of which had already been debated online for months beforehand — but rather the level of unfamiliarity with the psychosomatic effects of trauma. The AAUP’s misunderstandings of the concepts of “trauma” and “triggers” are far reaching. Throughout their report, the AAUP repeatedly equates trauma with being offended, made to feel uncomfortable, or responding negatively with a claim of injury. As noted above, being triggered or re-experiencing trauma entails a fully embodied shift in affect wherein any number of psychosomatic responses may occur without one’s cognitive control. This is not the same thing as, for example, the discomfort that comes with confronting one’s white privilege, or the feeling of personal injury that may come when someone challenges your belief system. With this fundamental misunderstanding grounding their response, it is no wonder the AAUP argues against trigger warnings.

Similarly, in their original petition, Oberlin students suggested trigger warnings when “issues of privilege and oppression” arise in the classroom (AAUP). Such suggestions also conflate potential discomfort, or personal injury, with the disabling affects of trauma and being triggered. However, an opportunity arises when students make these conflations. As educators, rather than dismissing trigger warnings outright, we could engage students about how systems of oppression work and explain the difference between pedagogically productive discomfort and trigger-induced re-traumatization. As educators, we could use this conversation as an opportunity to discuss the use of trigger warnings before the Internet. Historically, trigger warnings, Andrea Smith reminds us, began as “a part of a complex of practices” within the anti-violence movement working to recognize “that we are not unaffected by the political and intellectual work that we do” and that “the labor of healing has to be shared by all” (Smith). Indeed, this conversation could have been one about the intersections of ability with race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship. Instead, the mainstream rendering of this “debate” has accomplished very little outside of perpetuating the conflation of trauma with that of discomfort and the ableist logics of oppression that tell the marginalized to “get over it.”

The extent to which both sides of the debate operate with a limited perception of trauma is telling, though not unsurprising, given the extent to which we live in an ableist and trauma-centered culture. Following Anne Rothe, I argue that it is precisely because we live in a culture oversaturated with “mass media employments of the pain of others” that our understanding of trauma is so diluted (5). The narrative structures of these traumatic experiences are quite familiar, especially to disabled people, as they rearticulate the quintessential American anecdote of “pulling yourself up by you bootstraps” (Rothe 8). Just as other “supercrip” stories focus on disabled people “overcoming” their disabilities, popular trauma discourse reinforces “the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind” by focusing on overcoming traumatization (Clare 2). People who have experienced trauma are culturally expected to turn their pain into a narrative of inspiration for others. These trauma-and-recovery narratives position the individual as one who “eventually overcomes victimization and undergoes a metamorphosis from the pariah figure of weak and helpless victim into a heroic survivor,” with little to no contextualization of the historical and socio-political forces that underpin their experience (Rothe 2). As with other disabilities, dominant understandings of trauma are framed by an individual or medical model of disability. Like other neurodivergent people, those who have experienced trauma are considered “deviant, pathological and defective” until they have undergone the “proper” treatments needed to adhere as closely as possible to the norms of able-bodymindedness (Kafer 5).

I, in no way, wish to dismiss the intense physical and emotional pain that comes with traumatic experiences. Nor do I want to downplay the very real need to address this pain in order to make life more livable. However, I am aiming here to follow Margaret Price in thinking through trauma outside of the medical model of disability, in order to emphasis the normalizing and oppressive forces at play when we discuss trauma and trigger warnings in the classroom…

Go read the whole thing. I can relate to the frustration of being pressured to turn my history into “a narrative of inspiration for others”. As Christians, we are told that the Cosmic Story is a redemption story, with the resurrected Jesus as the ultimate trauma survivor turned inspirational figure. And yet he still had his wounds… I feel that the ethics of Jesus include resistance to the conformist, normalizing impulses in prideful humanity, so I continue to search for other ways to mesh my story with his, without being erased in it.

Juvenile-In-Justice Gives At-Risk Youth a Platform to Tell Their Stories

I met prison librarian and youth advocate Jane Guttman 10 years ago when she invited me to teach a poetry workshop at the Juvenile Court School in San Bernardino, CA. Before then, I’d never had personal contact with prisoners. I unconsciously accepted the myths and fears that popular culture promotes about people who wind up behind bars. But I said a prayer, walked in there, and all those mental barriers dropped away. They were just kids–vulnerable, troubled, painfully sincere about their writing, grateful for books that could give voice to their feelings.

Jane has been working with criminal justice professor Richard Ross on his new website, Juvenile-In-Justice, which collects the stories of at-risk youth in their own words. Poverty, racism, under-resourced schools, and dysfunctional families create a deadly undertow that few can rise above. The system often fails them by throwing them in jail instead of providing support services. They become statistics and stereotypes to justify extending the prison-industrial complex. Juvenile-In-Justice shows us their faces, and their souls. Read these stories and let your heart be opened.

From “Welcome Home, Ronald”:

…At seven PM on Saturday night Ronald called. “I’m free Richard…I’m breathing free air.” Ronald Franklin, age 20, is now free after seven years—all of his teen-age years. Four and a half were spent in TGK while Ronald awaited adjudication. This isn’t a misprint. Yes, there is a sixth amendment and the right to a speedy trial, but in the case of adolescents, this is often compromised…

…I went to visit Ronald at a facility run by G4S, a private corporation that’s contracted by the state of Florida. In spite of being approved by his public defender, his mother and Ronald himself, I was turned away at the gate. Ockachoobee has 55,000 residents and 33,000 are incarcerated—but that’s another story and another time.

Ronald is free today, reconciled and living with a mother who was addicted for decades. Living around some of the roughest communities in the country: Miami Gardens, Liberty City, a Miami far from South Beach where privation and poverty are the norm. He is no stranger to subsistence living. For the past seven years the State of Florida spent $1.95 a day to feed him. Ronald will make it. He is planning on enrolling at Miami Dade Community College. He wants to do something with his life.

From “We Almost Starved to Death”:

This is the second time I’m here. I’ve been here three months now. The first time I was 15 and here for a month. I got tired of the stuff at home so I ran away. I survived by breaking into houses. So I’m here mostly for B&E and burglary. I live with my mom and stepdad. My sisters are both 6. And then I have a younger sister. My mom’s about 40. My dad died of heart attack when I was 4. My mom was doing crack and abandoned me and my sisters. I was staying in a foster home for two or three years. My little sisters and me were abandoned. We almost starved to death…

…They said I had behavioral problems and would break toys, push around my sisters, and go off by myself. I was so angry I would strip the bark off trees. They put me in children’s hospital. I was angry at the situation and my mother. I sometimes don’t want to see her, most times. She would badmouth my grandmother. She’s a tough one. Several times she would leave us all without food. I would get extra food at school for the twins and I got in trouble for that. She would leave my 8-month-old sister unsupervised. Where was DHR? I don’t know.

Follow Juvenile-In-Justice on Facebook for the latest posts plus news stories about prison reform. Now through May 17, you can also support Jane on Kickstarter to fund the creation and distribution of her book KIDS in Jail.

May Day: Political Links Roundup

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” sums up the state of social justice in America this week. Attorney Mary Bonauto of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) eloquently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that denying marriage rights to same-sex couples violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. Meanwhile, African-Americans and allies took to the streets of Baltimore to protest the never-ending death toll of black men killed by police brutality.

The Baltimore protest was sparked by the April 12 death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed 25-year-old who panicked and ran after police made eye contact with him, and who died from a spinal injury sustained during his arrest (and possibly from police withholding his medication). It continues a nationwide groundswell of outrage that started with the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner in NYC last year. See the story at Colorlines, a black-owned news site. For reasons I’ll get to in a minute, I don’t trust the mainstream media on this one.

As many supporters of the protests have pointed out, there’s been more outrage over property damage than lost lives. When white college students trash their town because…uh, something about football? or St. Patrick’s Day? whatever, dude…the media portrays it as a big carnival. But black citizens standing against injustice are labeled “thugs”.

At the Poetry Foundation website, Jericho Brown rips into this racist double standard in “How Not to Interview Black People About Police Brutality”. Brown’s numerous poetry honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a nomination for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Poetry. Watch the 4-minute CNN clip of Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Baltimore activist Deray McKesson (linked in his essay) and then read Brown’s tremendous takedown.

If you want to see nonviolence that’s anything but passive, it’s McKesson not blowing his stack in reaction to Blitzer’s persistent race-baiting questions. A superhuman effort that should never have been required. Contrast that to the white interviewer’s self-serving invocation of Martin Luther King Jr. to tone-police the protests. It reminded me of the way that Jesus’s message of nonviolence is twisted by abusers to keep their victims passive, as described here by Christian feminist blogger Sarah Moon.

From Brown’s essay:

Let’s be honest about white people’s attraction to Dr. King in the 1960s and your attraction to him today. If King’s mode of protest was the only protest occuring during his time, white people would not be such huge champions of him. He helped to create for you in your early adult years and for me before I was born a possibility for living in this nation without it being burned down. I think you know as well as I do that plenty of King’s contemporaries had ideas other than non-violence.

Your love of King is not a real love of him. Instead it is a fear of violence (and dare I say, of retribution). You NEVER mention his name on your show until you see the threat of violence. But as soon as someone in an understandable rage sets something on fire, you have the nerve to say “Dr. King” like he’s the token he never meant to become. Aligning yourself with King in this way in 2015 makes you an apologist for police brutality against black people, an apologist for police to murder black people and get away with it, and an apologist for a system that continues to structurally support these injustices.

Your point of view, your smug tone in this interview with Deray McKesson and other interviews suggests that Dr. King’s example of getting harassed, beaten, and arrested SHOULD be anyone’s ONLY option. Don’t you think people put in dire circumstances should at least have more options than what was available to them 50 years ago?

Before we reach the age of 20 in classrooms around this country, we learn how violently the Americas were colonized, and we learn how violently our founding fathers revolted against the Crown. When are you going to bring up the fact that the violence of rebels that founded this nation is taught as justice? When will you be honest about the fact that we are free to owe violence a great debt when that violence is perpetrated by white people?…

…Please stop saying Martin Luther King, Jr.’s name if you’re not going to be honest about his existence on this planet. You throw his name around like he was some sort of saint who never wanted to whip a white cop bloody. Certainly, you have to know that this would have been impossible. Restraint is the exception for any human being who lives at risk.

The non-violent arm of the civil rights movement that white people love so much consisted of highly trained men and women capable of taking a beating. While I am glad those men and women did the work they did on this planet, I am always hurt to know that’s the work they had to do. Wolf, I want you to have the sense to be hurt, too.

And now for some good news. GLAD’s website summarizes the high points of oral argument before the Court on Tuesday. At issue in Obergefell v. Hodges was whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The full transcript is also a worthwhile read, and not too technical for non-lawyers. Justice Ginsburg astutely observed that the definition of marriage has already changed from legalized male dominance to equal partnership, so there’s no longer a reason to restrict the partners’ identities by gender. Even conservative Justice Roberts chimed in with the suggestion that this was “a straightforward question of sexual discrimination”. This framing would avoid the need to create a new protected class based on sexual orientation in Equal Protection law, a move that the Court’s conservative bloc wouldn’t buy.

My favorite zinger came from Justice Sotomayor during the respondent’s oral argument. John Bursch, an assistant attorney general from Michigan, made the case on behalf of state marriage bans. He argued that if our culture starts defining “marriage” based on adults’ feelings for each other, rather than their duty to their biological children, straight couples won’t feel that it’s important to get married and support their kids. To which the Justice replied, “Why would a feeling, which doesn’t make any logical sense, control our decision-making?”

Justice Sotomayor and Abby the Fairy wish you a happy Northampton Pride tomorrow!

Haitian Artists Create the Ghetto Tarot

In a previous Tarot-related post, I expressed concern about the white European flavor of standard Tarot decks. The Ghetto Tarot is a beautiful and inventive project that showcases Haitian art and culture. Documentary photographer Alice Smeets re-created the classic poses from the Rider-Waite Tarot with a group of Haitian artists known as Atiz Rezistans. Read this interview with her in the photography webzine 500px ISO, and buy a copy of the deck (32 euros=approx. $37). The article includes a video of the local artists talking about what the project meant to them. They’ve reclaimed the word “ghetto” to mean a community where everyone looks out for one another. Hat tip to Caleigh Royer, the blogger who inspired me to look into Tarot, for posting this on Facebook.

From the interview:

The spirit of the Ghetto Tarot project is the inspiration to turn negative into positive while playing. The group of artists “Atiz Rezistans” use trash to create art with their own visions that are a reflection of the beauty they see hidden within the waste. They are claiming the word “Ghetto,” thus freeing themselves of its depreciating undertone and turning it into something beautiful.

Their act of appropriating a word loaded with unfavorable sentiments by altering its meaning in a playful way is in itself an act of inspiration. This undertaking of the Haitians made me realize that it lies only within us to assign value or judgment towards a tangible or intangible thing, which creates a positive or negative emotion.

If we realize that it’s a choice whether we look at destruction and see despair or to regard it as the start of something new, we can change the meaning of every word, action and sentiment. The consciousness of this choice is something I learned from the Haitian artists and we are sharing it together with the world through the Ghetto Tarot….

…As a photographer, my main motivation has always been to bring change using my camera as a tool. As a witness of injustice in this world, I have always wanted to share my emotions and experiences through my pictures and was hoping for people to act as a result to stop the unfairness.

I photographed people in seemingly hopeless situations, people stuck in a circle of poverty, destruction and pain. And I accomplished my wish to touch the viewers feelings and observed that the emotions that my documentary photos brought up were emotions of pity, sadness, and depression. Finally, I realized that the negative feelings that my images projected onto the audience as well as onto the subjects created a sensation of disempowerment instead of an inspiration towards the act of change. With this realization came an understanding unveiling the continuous exposure of my own state of mind in every picture frame and the awareness that the change I desired for this world could only thrive within myself.

As a consequence, I put the camera down for a while and turned my attention towards my inner self. It seemed like a long and difficult path in which I tried out many different methods, including reading tarot cards until I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel: The revelation that I don’t need to be the observer of my and the world’s problems and destiny, I am a creator.