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When audiences see actor Michael B. Jordan get pulled off the BART train in "Fruitvale Station," they'll see the dramatized last moments of Oscar Grant's life, filmed at the actual station where BART police officer Johannes Mehserle killed him on New Year's Eve 2009. The feature film premieres nationally on July 12 to plenty of early buzz and rave reviews for director Ryan Coogler's debut effort, and for performances from actors like Jordan and Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer, who plays Grant's mother. But for many in the Bay Area who lived through Grant's death and the national outrage that followed, the real-life sets will be just as arresting. 

Fruitvale Station became a landmark in the community almost immediately after Mehserle gunned Grant down there. Situated in the middle of a bustling Latino immigrant neighborhood, Fruitvale is a popular starting point for protests and marches for a range of issues. But it will forever be tied to Grant's death. "Anyone in our community can point to other locations where somebody was killed or brutalized by the police," says Dereca Blackmon, an organizer and co-founder of the Coalition Against Police Executions, which was formed after Grant's death. "What Fruitvale actually memorializes is, 'Here is where a cop was actually caught and held accountable.' "

The film opens with the cell phone footage that lit up the Internet in the days after Grant was killed. Fruitvale's cement walls and faded beams are there in the grainy cell phone vidoes. So are the glass windows looking out onto the street below, turned into mirrors in the night; the staggered brown tile floors; the fluorescent lighting and cream interior walls of the BART train. Today many people wait for their trains exactly in the spot where Grant was killed. And that same cement wall and those same dark windows are there in the movie, when Grant and his friends and Mehserle are replaced by actors. 

It was New Year's Eve 2009 and Grant and his friends were on their way back to the East Bay from San Francisco. They'd taken public transit on his mom's suggestion, for safety. Along the ride a fight broke out on the train. At Fruitvale BART, transit police officers pulled Grant and his friends off the car while the train, packed with New Year's Eve revelers, idled with its doors open. Mehserle and other transit police officers were responsible for calming down the situation, but did exactly the opposite. After an officer named Tony Pirone kneed Grant and called him "a bitch ass n-----," Pirone and Mehserle moved to handcuff him--Pirone by pushing his knee down on top of Grant's neck. Mehserle stood, pulled his Sig Sauer P226 from its holster, and shot Grant in the back. Grant was lying face down on the platform. He was just 22 years old.

All of this was caught on video and uploaded to YouTube. It shook up the country. Police violence is nothing new for black and brown communities, but something was different this time. Mehserle shot an unarmed Grant at point blank range, while he was laying on his stomach. The cell phone videos provided unequivocal proof of the kind of police brutality that is an all too regular part of life for many young men of color.

In the days following Grant's death Davey D, host of Hard Knock Radio on KPFA in the Bay Area says he remembered seeing people in Oakland crying openly. "People were so angry and so frustrated and so in disbelief that this was happening," says Davey D. "You could see the look of pain in people's faces." Grant was killed three weeks before President Obama was first inaugurated, and the nation's glee over electing its first black president was still palpable. There was a sense that justice would be swift, the radio journalist recalls. So after the shooting happened and Obama never addressed it, and the Department of Justice's inquiry ultimately went nowhere, the letdown was especially bitter.

"Fruitvale represented a couple things. It symbolized the continuation of police brutality, and it was a stark reminder that even with a black president and a black attorney general, shit ain't changed and folks were gonna have to do it for themselves," Davey D says.

The very first community protest happened at Fruitvale Station, just over a week after Grant's death. At that first protest the energy of the crowd, so swollen with anger and pain, compelled BART officials to shut the gates to the station. (Watch YouTube footage of the protest.) Silence from the city's leaders compounded the community outrage, says Blackmon.

Organizers moved subsequent protests to the Alameda County courthouse to demand that the district attorney file criminal charges against Mehserle. But while the largest protests took place downtown at Frank Ogawa Plaza and in the streets of Oakland, Fruitvale remained a place to gather and protest and remember, and became a landmark.

The day before Mehserle was released from prison in 2011, hundreds gathered once again to demand structural accountability and an end to police violence. There was also a community push to rename the station Oscar Grant Station. "Some people wanted to remember that," says Davey D. "And some people didn't want to go back on BART for a long time. [Police violence] happens so much that there's a certain, I wouldn't say normalization, but you just learn to cope with it."

As common as police killings of black and Latino men are, accountability rarely follows. Even Mehserle's second-degree murder charges were a victory of sorts; it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with murder when they kill people, and even rarer still for a conviction to stick. In 2010, just three days after a judge sentenced Mehserle to two years in prison, which was the lightest possible sentence, Oakland police officers fired nine shots at a black man named Derrick Jones as he fled, hitting him six times. Jones died. In 2011 Oakland school police officers shot and killed 20-year-old Raheim Brown outside of a high school dance. Last year Oakland police officers shot and killed 18-year-old high school senior Alan Blueford after he and his friends were stopped by cops. The DA's office has declined to charge officers of those subsequent shootings with any criminal wrongdoing.

This ever elusive justice has activists questioning the utility of turning to the criminal justice system to demand accountability of its own members. "We've started asking the question: Does it make sense to ask the institutions that kill us for justice?" said Cat Brooks, a co-chair of the Onyx Organizing Committee, a group dedicated to ending police violence.

"For me, the most important conversation that is happening now is how do we grow this beyond any individual young man into a larger campaign against police terror? How do we come together to create enough pushback ... so they know they can't get away with it anymore?" Brooks said. Almost five years on from Grant's death, Brooks, who lives in West Oakland, still avoids the Fruitvale BART station as much as she can. "It is and forever will be where Johannes Mehserle executed Oscar Grant." 

Every year on the anniversary of his death, Grant's family and community gather at Fruitvale for a remembrance of his life. It's a tradition now. "But what ends up happening," Blackmon says, "is there's always five more mothers standing next to [Grant's mother] Wanda, every year." 

Is rape used to bully women out of the public forum in Tahrir? Yes. But does Egypt have a monopoly of sexual violence? No

On 30 June, as "the Coup That Must Not Be Mentioned" was being celebrated in Tahrir Square, Cairo, news of over 80 reports of mob sexual violence and harassment emerged as a reminder of an ugly undercurrent behind the two-and-a-half-year-long anti-regime uprising. Sexual harassment and violence in Egypt is a daily occurrence – an epidemic, even – with 99.3% of women (pdf) claiming to have suffered some form of it.

Mob sexual violence, however, carries a certain brand of particularity as a near-explicit political tool used to discourage women, who make up nearly half of the total population, from attending demonstrations. Maria S Muñoz, co-founder and director of the anti-sexual assault initiative Tahrir Bodyguard, traces the advent and use of organized mob sexual assaults to the days of Mubarak, pointing to the 2005 assault of journalist Nawal Ali by hired "thugs" during a demonstration. Despite being aware of the risk of attending political demonstrations, women, Muñoz notes, "have continued to share the public space in protests, becoming an essential part of the opposition's voice and presence."

The culture of sexual violence and harrassment, in Egypt, has received considerable media attention, often highlighting the efforts of groups such as Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault, HarassMap and Tahrir Bodyguard as people-powered initiatives tackling sexual violence and harassment head-on. Despite this, it is apparently still difficult to have an honest discussion over why it happens.

On 5 July, US author Joyce Carol Oates (whom I know primarily from her having never written this) decided to join in with the sea of insta-Egypt Twitter experts and opined:

If 99.3% of women reported being treated equitably, fairly, generously--it would be natural to ask: what's the predominant religion?

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) July 5, 2013

Despite the brevity of "Oatesgate", the rhetorical question of a well-respected literary figure highlights popular characterizations of sexual violence and harassment when it takes place elsewhere. Rarely does sexual violence and harassment in our own societies – as it is perpetrated, prosecuted and cultured – allow the sort of cultural reductionism that seems to come with ease when sexual violence is associated with "the other".

When a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern is brutally gang-raped and beaten in Delhi, we speak of "India's woman problem"; when an incapacitated 16-year-old student is raped, photographed and filmed for six hours by peers – who share the images on social media – the incident is treated as an isolated act of unfortunate deviance and not part and parcel of a larger endemic culture that normalizes rape and the appropriation of women's bodies as public property.

Child groomers of Muslim and South Asian backgrounds become cultural ambassadors raised on a steady diet of "savage" notions of sex embedded in anti-white biases and misogyny. Revered coaches and university administrations hiding decades of child sex abuse, on the other hand, become their own victims.

Thus there are no protests, no calls of a "woman problem", no "natural" inquiries into the predominant religion when a country has ranked 13th in the world for rape, 10th for rapes per capita (pdf) and where 26,000 military service members reported sexual assault in 2012 alone. There are no popular anthropological undertakings by stiff-haired anchors of the inner secrets and dark forces of American culture, religion and society. No white American woman asks why the white American male hates "us".

None of this is to provide a level playing field for discussing sexual violence. It is to highlight how understanding of sexual violence is reliant on how it is reported and how this, in turn, is reliant on who is involved. In the case of Egypt, the extent to which there is sexual harassment and violence is abysmal and even unique in how it occurs. Yet, this violence did not emerge overnight, nor does it occur in a political and socio-economic vacuum. It is the result of decades of state, legal and political decay. It is the result of a state that itself has created a culture of acceptability of violence and torture, often sexual, inside its own walls.

In the explicit act of violating bodily sovereignty, there is an active search for the conquest of power and control in a space where these have become vulnerable. This requires no sermon, book or belief to legitimize it; it only needs submission.

Greece is in crisis and fascism is on the rise, but it still falls far short of the 1930s Berlin chronicled by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin chronicles (and partly fictionalises) his time hanging out in the city between late 1930 and early 1933. Towards the end of the book, he urges a friend not to take Nazi death threats too lightly: the Nazis, says Isherwood, are "capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment."

Fascism is on the rise in Greece. It's the most perturbing political consequence of the current crisis. Golden Dawn, a far right party whose supporters are accused of violent and sometimes fatal attacks on immigrants, is now polling third. Many Greeks had never heard of them before the crisis. And, like the Nazis, those who knew them once thought them laughable.

I work in Athens and often hear the comparison. At its most pervasive, even Antonis Samaras, Greece's prime minister, likened Greece to the Weimar Republic in an attempt to guilt-trip German policymakers into giving Greece more time to meet the conditions on its loans. Perhaps Goodbye to Berlin's anecdotes from 1930s Germany match my own anecdotal experiences; what can rereading it in today's Athens tell us?

Golden Dawn could well be in Isherwood's book: thuggish beatings, big red flags with black (Hellenicised) swastikas, torch-lit marches, and paramilitary attire. I was recently at a rally of theirs in central Athens (on a church square) and for a party that denies any links with nazism, they do a pretty good job of giving off a neo-Nazi impression. The party uses immigrants as a scapegoat for Greece's problems, and bases its politics on the "ethnic purity" of Greeks (organising "Greek-only" blood donations, for instance).

Golden Dawn has tapped into flourishing anti-EU sentiment in a way that mirrors 1930s German resentment of the punitive treaty of Versailles. And, like the Nazis of the 1930s, Golden Dawn are accused of being in cahoots with the police. In 1932, walking down a busy street after a nearby Nazi rally, Isherwood witnesses two SA brownshirts (the Nazi paramilitaries later superseded by the SS), viciously stab a young man in a doorway in plain sight of the police, who "disregard" the attack.

Maddeningly, Golden Dawn are accused of operating with a similar impunity because, according to Nils Muižnieks, Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, as well as other human rights organisations and rough polls from the last election, the fascist party are supported by a sizeable faction of the police force.

The fearful atmosphere created by a deep economic crisis has, as in 1930s Germany, opened up the political field. Isherwood's landlady is introduced as typical of Berlin's now "bankrupt middle class". Like her, a once-comfortable Greek middle-class has been dragged into economic difficulties, if not into poverty. There's 27% unemployment, with 64% youth unemployment. And from most people you'll hear distressing stories. Golden Dawn has managed to turn some of this distress, and a good deal of fear, into votes.

So, on the surface, the comparison seems frightfully apt. Yet, the details clearly show that Athens is a long way yet from 1930s Berlin. Isherwood's book also chronicles the rise of the extremist left: lines of hand grenades hidden inside communists' overcoats; plans to strategically mount machine guns on rooftops, anticipating the Soviets' arrival; and so on. 1930s Berlin was polarised between anti-democratic extremism. Greece is not.

Golden Dawn acts in an anti-democratic way, yes, but Syriza (the coalition of the left currently polling a close second), is radical, not extremist, and thoroughly democratic. Although the once-mighty centre-left party, Pasok, is more or less finished (despite being in the coalition government, it's polling around 7%), the other ruling centrist party, New Democracy, remains popular. Unlike the end of the Weimar Republic, there hasn't been a complete decline in the popularity of traditional parties.

And unlike Germany, Greece is integrated with the rest of Europe through membership of the EU and the euro. It's tied, for better or for worse, to the fate of everyone else. 1930s Germany was, by contrast, isolated, and Europe was dogged by the threat of war which is, quite obviously, nonexistent today. Despite the suffering of so many ordinary Greeks, the stakes were higher in the 1930s.

Greece is undeniably in crisis. A walk around central Athens will give you a glimpse behind the numbers. And comparing Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin with today's Athens serves as a useful analogy, teaching us a simple lesson about economic malaise and its direct link with extremist politics. But Greece is not at the brink. To directly compare Greece with the Weimar Republic is, as things stand, misleading. Isherwood left Berlin because the Nazis were seizing power. If he were in Athens today, he wouldn't be saying goodbye; not for a while yet.

Those calling for the British ban on sex selection of children born through IVF to be lifted should look at India and think again

As we consider whether the British ban on sex selection of children born through IVF is ethically justifiable or not, in India a controversy rages on precisely this issue. Shah Rukh Khan, one of Indian cinema's biggest stars (often referred to as the King of Bollywood), is facing allegations that he selected the sex of his baby boy, born in May through IVF and surrogacy.

This unproven accusation has had media teams camped outside his house, because India has just been through some very raw and painful experiences linked to a highly imbalanced gender ratio. The brutal gang rape in Delhi last December is considered by many to be a consequence of years of unchecked sex selection favouring male children. In a very young country, where more than 50% of the population is under 25, there are simply not enough women – contributing to rising sexual violence, as many men have little hope of having a normal heterosexual relationship.

This silent gendercide is taking place behind closed hospital doors despite the fact that sex selection has been illegal since 1994. But thanks to lax policing and a laissez-faire judicial system, very few cases have ever been pursued. It is essential, therefore, that those who are urging the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to allow sex selection for family "balancing" examine the situation in all its complexity. Opting for a particular sex is only one aspect of choosing what kind of child one wants for "social" purposes.

This week, a report by medical ethicists concluded there was no justification for the UK's current ban. But the authors should consider the psychological and physical impact of these decisions at the family, national and global level. If we begin to commodify such a natural phenomenon it could lead to dangerous results, with individuals and doctors deciding together what the "ideal" child could be.

When I was researching my last novel, Origins of Love, which dealt with surrogacy and IVF, I found that the demands could, quite quickly, go beyond the sex of the child. These could include the colour of the child's skin or its probable IQ, or indeed any other feature that the parents might covet. Examining practices undertaken during IVF treatment, especially where the donor eggs and sperm need not be that of the commissioning parents, I came across some alarming examples. Parents and doctors often want more and more control of the "designer" baby they are creating. In the long run this could have unintended consequences, such as disappointment if the "product" turns out not to be as good as planned, and the desire for another designer baby to make up for the failure of the first.

Even if interventions are carried out purely for the purpose of selecting sex, these choices can affect other children in the family who might feel that they are of the unwanted gender, particularly in Asian countries where there is a marked preference for male offspring, creating a huge gender imbalance. A World Health Organisation report found that even in European countries such as Germany there is "a slight preference for boys over girls" as a firstborn child. This preference, however slight, has the potential to skew future generations. There is no telling to what lengths human intervention will go – and once it begins, it becomes harder to limit.

The main reason why sex selection still goes on in India, frankly, is thanks to sympathetic doctors who still feel (much like the ethicists behind the British report) that parents have a right to decide. Medical professionals tend to state they are rescuing mothers from a lifetime of oppression, because Indian women are under social pressure to produce a male child, and if they do not do so, their situation could become life-threatening. But in India, and in Britain, there are moments when the medical fraternity must step back from intervention and allow nature to take its course.

The Chilean dictator presided over the torture and murder of thousands, yet still the free-market right reveres his name

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled "After the Coup in Cairo". Its final paragraph contained these words:

Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took over power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.

Presumably, this means that those who speak for the Wall Street Journal – the editorial was unsigned – think Egypt should think itself lucky if its ruling generals now preside over a 17-year reign of terror. I also take it the WSJ means us to associate two governments removed by generals – the one led by Salvador Allende in Chile and the one led by Mohamed Morsi in Egypt. Islamist, socialist … elected, legitimate … who cares?

Presumably, the WSJ thinks the Egyptians now have 17 years in which to think themselves lucky when any who dissent are tortured with electricity, raped, thrown from planes or – if they're really lucky – just shot. That's what happened in Chile after 1973, causing the deaths of between 1,000 and 3,000 people. Around 30,000 were tortured.

Presumably, the WSJ hopes a general in the mold of Pinochet (or generals, as they didn't break the mold when they made him) will preside over all this with the assistance of Britain and America. Perhaps he (or they) will return the favour by helping one of them win a small war.

Presumably, eventually, the Egyptian general or generals – and we should let them have a junta if they want one, so long as it isn't like that beastly example in Argentina – will willingly relinquish power. After all, democracy cannot "midwife" itself. Presumably, the WSJ is sure a transition to elected government will follow, as it did in Chile. (Although, in 15 years' time the Argentinian writer Ariel Dorfman's words will, presumably, ring as true as they do now: "Saying Pinochet brought democracy to Chile is like saying Margaret Thatcher brought socialism to Britain." More of her later.)

Such quibbles notwithstanding, I'm presuming the WSJ envisages that the Egyptian general or generals will then be allowed to retire, unmolested. Possibly to Wentworth, where the golf's good. But if any molestation does occur, perhaps by some uppity human rights lawyer, they will receive further assistance from the governing classes of Britain and America. He or they will then retire and, unlike his or their victims, die a free man – or men – in bed.

And presumably, after another 20 or 30 years, when some other group of generals removes a democratic government upon which the Wall Street Journal is not keen, the people of the fortunate country in question will be told what is good for them in the same breathtakingly ugly way.

I am not an expert on Egypt, or Chile – most of my knowledge about General Pinochet comes from a book by a Guardian writer, Andy Beckett. But I know enough that when Margaret Thatcher died, reminders of her enduring support and praise for Pinochet left a nasty taste in the mouth. While people are dying in the streets of Cairo, to read an expression of the same sentiment from a respected, globally-read newspaper is repellent.

So just why does General Augusto Pinochet attract such nostalgic, unquestioning support from some on the free-market right? Do they simply overlook the accepted fact that thousands were tortured and killed under his rule?

Perhaps this might be a case of "Say what you like about Mussolini, but he made the trains run on time"? Bernie Ecclestone, the chap who runs Formula One motor-racing, tried it a couple of years ago – albeit he said it about Hitler (and Saddam Hussain), and we don't stand for that. Even Britain's Daily Mail was upset.

Presumably, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board believes that because Pinochet "hired free-market reformers", he should be excused the excesses of a few death squads. That is, presumably, why they think a business-friendly cold killer in the Pinochet mold is who Egyptians need now to manage their "transition to democracy".

But really, I'm at a loss. There must be some sort of justification for such a statement. I just haven't the slightest clue what it is.

(The Root) -- Sick of airport security's invasive checkpoint procedures? Tired of complaining about your Pert Plus getting confiscated before your flights? Well, the Transportation Security Administration is tired of hearing about it, and the agency has gone on the defensive with an Instagram account.

The account showcases pictures of dangerous items the TSA has found during those annoying airport security scans, from loaded guns to hand grenades. The underlying message is, "See? This is why we make you undress and search your scalp before letting you on your plane. You're welcome."

The number of weapons disguised as other things the TSA has confiscated is a bit unsettling. Here's a stun gun masquerading as a cigarette box:

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Did you watch "The Lone Ranger," only to regret it? Do you already know you don't wanna waste your money or your time on it? Then check out "Universal VIP." It was written, produced, directed by Natives, and features a phenomenal all-Native cast (hello, Tatanka Means!)--all based on a short story by Gyasi Ross. 

(The Root) -- Another day, another white Disney princess. The Internet is speaking out about Disney's latest tale, a reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. Promotional artwork for the retelling, entitled Frozen, reveals that the heroine is, again, white.

Incorporating diversity into Disney movies has been a slow climb. It wasn't until 2009 that the world saw the first black Disney protagonist with The Princess and the Frog. It seemed then that maybe Disney was ready to become more diverse in its movies, but for many, Frozen is proof of a return to the typical.

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By Guest Contributor Scot Nakagawa; originally published at ChangeLab

Image via sciencedaily.com

I’ve often pondered the question, why are white people so touchy about being called out for racism?

I know some of you will say that racism is much more than the hurtful prejudice of a marginal few. Agreed. Racism is also inherited structural and political inequity by race resulting in persistent poverty, health disparities, and deficits of opportunity in communities of color. And as with all kinds of oppression, racism is ultimately kept in place by violence and the threat of violence (think in terms of lynchings, cross-burnings, KKK raids, etc. throughout our history). Simple prejudice seems pretty minor by comparison.

However, the powerful effect of white people’s touchiness on this subject should not to be underestimated. In fact, I think it goes hand in hand with the threat of violence in perpetuating racism.

For instance, racial inequality nowadays relies more heavily on the intimidation and violence of the war on drugs and immigration enforcement than on the terrorism of vigilante groups. But, racist immigration and drug enforcement policies are founded on the widespread popularity of racial stereotypes that falsely criminalize black men as the source of the illegal drug problem in the U.S., and immigrants of color as drains on our economy. In other words, ordinary prejudice is as much a part of the oppressive equation for communities of color as violence and intimidation, and the fact that these ordinary forms of prejudice are expressed through major public institutions is possible because we deny that these stereotypes are grounded in prejudice at all.

We need to marginalize ordinary racist stereotypes and behavior, and this starts with calling racism out, even when those guilty of it get touchy because they are unable to recognize their acts as racist.

But, why so touchy?

At the risk of sparking a sh*t storm, here are a couple of proposals.

First, I think white people get bent out of shape by the label racist because being able to wield it means that, at least culturally speaking, people of color have power we haven’t traditionally had, specifically because of racism.

For generations even looking at a white person in the wrong way could get a person of color fired, harassed, terrorized or even lynched. Going as far as lodging an accusation of any kind against a white person could spark a race riot.

But socially conscious people of all races fought and even died in order to end the white cultural, economic, and political supremacy that led to this kind of intimidation and violence. Today, the degree to which we are empowered to speak out against racism is a measure of the erosion of unjust white power and privilege that was achieved through these historic efforts. When white people react defensively to people of color involved in the audacious act of calling them out for racism, they are, albeit usually unconsciously, struggling to reconcile themselves with lost white privilege.

That’s my first theory. Here’s the second.

Before the fall of Jim Crow, ordinary interpersonal racism was so commonplace that in order to organize against it, racial justice advocates needed another foil. Racism’s terrorist wing: people threatening students integrating Little Rock Central High School, segregationist governors wielding state troopers like clubs, and men like Bull Connor became that foil.

I mention Bull Conner by name because the way civil rights activists used his outrageous racism exemplifies this strategy. As the  Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, Connor turned attack dogs and fire hoses on children peacefully protesting for civil rights, inadvertently making himself into an international symbol of American racism. This display of naked hatred polarized white people, with many taking the side of civil rights activists in spite of harboring the kind of ordinary racial prejudices that create the climate in which vigilante racists derive their power.

Today, when we call out racism, powerful symbols of opposition to racial equality like Bull Connor are invoked. Ordinary racists contrast the everyday prejudice that was, out of necessity, let off the hook in the black struggle for civil rights, against horrific, Bull Connor-style racism. Then, for lack of a better term, they freak out.

That’s why I think white people are so touchy. It’s why begging to be understood as “good” and exaggerating the harm done to them by the accusation are so often part of the ritual of denial. They’re, more often than not, genuinely good people stuck in the belief that racists are exotic monsters, who are nonetheless resentful of conceding the privilege of being able to control the public consensus on race to begin with.

"The Lone Ranger" debuts in theaters in time for the July 4 holiday, and while Johnny Depp's decision to play Tonto--a fictional Native sidekick to the white cowboy--has drawn attention and criticism, the film's release means that all things Native are unusually relevant--and marketable. And that can be a good, bad, and very ugly thing, all at once.

Tonto action figures are already being sold as "Native American warrior spirit" caricatures. The Lego Corporation is pushing its "Comanche Camp" toys. And Subway is hawking plastic soft drink containers with Tonto snapshots that guarantee the image, which is offensive to so many Natives and non-Natives alike, will live on in consumers' kitchens for years to come. While "The Lone Ranger" film will come and go in theaters, and perhaps to be revived on DVD and in film awards, corporate promo deals will sustain the Tonto image for years to come--and will make millions off of retailing Native stereotypes while doing so.

But it's not just corporations that stand to make serious profit from the film. Just last week, Jezebel touted a $2,000 Lone Ranger belt created by an "actual Native American designer." Racked, meanwhile, reported on the same designer, stating that a "Native American chief" made the accessories. A project that features Native artisans would be a great thing (notwithstanding the problematic nature of dissolving all Natives into "chiefs"). Except the artist in question, called Gabriel Good Buffalo, is not a "chief," as Racked wrote. He's not "Lakota Sioux," as Jezebel wrote, either. In fact, Gabriel Good Buffalo is not even Native. Rather, he's a striking example of how the burgeoning market for Native appropriation and branding operates.

It might be easy to confuse Good Buffalo for a Native. The last name he uses is not uncommon among certain Natives. And his own website features "Cheyenne War Shield Yell" and "Sioux Turtle Clan" designs. In an email, Good Buffalo claimed that Will Leather Goods, the company that originally marketed him as a "Native American chief" did so without his knowledge. He said the company had informed him it would change that on its website (as of publication, it has not, and a phone call to the company store was answered by a clerk who explained that Good Buffalo is a "prestigious Native American craftsman.").

Individuals and companies marketing themselves as "Native American craftsmen" often make up clans, tribes, and nations that don't even exist--further fueling confusion. Journalist Simon Moya-Smith, who is Oglala Lakota, says he spoke with two elders; neither had heard of the "Sioux Turtle Clan" named in Good Buffalo's marketing. One of them, Maka Black Elk, is the great grandson of Holy Man, Black Elk. Moya-Smith affirmed, "none of us have heard of a Sioux Turtle Clan, and if anyone would know, Maka would." 

What might surprise most readers is that Good Buffalo is in apparent violation of federal law. Congress enacted the Indian Arts and Crafts Act in 1990, which allows for the prosecution of anyone who sells any good in a way that fraudulently suggests it was produced by a Native, when it was not. Just last week, a man who went by the name "Redhorse," whose real name is Andrew Gene Alvarez, plead guilty to peddling jewelry that he knew was non-Native. Alvarez claimed to belong to different nations throughout his counterfeit career in Santa Fe, and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years probation, with the explicit agreement that he never again sell jewelry he makes as a Native product.

Santa Fe Indian Market remains New Mexico's biggest cultural event--showcasing more than 1,000 Native artists who represent more than 100 tribes and nations annually, drawing more than 100,000 visitors to the market for a week each summer*. As such, the city has become known as a Native arts place. But the city is also a magnet for non-Natives like Alvarez, who sell fraudulent Native goods; Gabriel Good Buffalo himself is listed as Lakota in galleries there. While Good Buffalo did admit he's not Native when contacted directly, his claims about Cheyenne and Sioux belts remain suspect under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. As an individual, he risks a five-year prison term, with fines up to $250,000. Businesses like Will Leather Goods can be fined $1,000,000 for continuing to sell $2,000 belts made by a "Native American chief."

Adrienne Keene, a writer whose Native Appropriations site tackles the hijacking of Native culture by non-Natives, points out that what we're seeing isn't anything new--it's just on a bigger scale, from corporate promotions to boutique accessories. "'The Lone Ranger' is a Disney blockbuster, with big names," says Keene. "And that's changing the way the products attached to it are marketed."

For Keene, that's a result of a consumer society, where people expect everything to be for sale--and ideally, at a low cost. Along with Dr. Jessica Metcalfe at Beyond Buckskin, Keene has advocated for buyers to be prepared to pay good money for an authentic Native craft. And that, says Keen, is part of what makes Good Buffalo's marketing that much more insidious: well-meaning consumers will think they're paying $2,000 for a Native artisan's belt, when they're instead spending thousands on being duped.

And while the Indian Arts and Crafts Act exists to protect Native artists, Keene notes that, "it doesn't have a lot of teeth." That's because although President Obama signed an amendment to the act three years ago that allows any federal law enforcement agent the authority to investigate any violations, the number of breeches are far disproportionate to the number of agents that scrutinize them. "The Lone Ranger" provides an extraordinary chance to exploit consumer desire for something--anything--Native.

Still, Keene hopes "The Lone Ranger" can also be a learning opportunity. "Most people don't think about these things daily," says Keene. "But there are some exciting shifts happening in the ways that Natives are being represented in the media right now."

--

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that more than 500 tribes are represented at the Santa Fe Indian Market; it is more than 100 tribes instead. 

Citizenship Works is a free mobile app that launched this week to help guide green card holders through the process of applying for American citizenship. Though the app is designed to help people who are currently living in the United States as legal permanent residents, its designers hope that the approach could also be used to help the nation's more than 11 million undocumented immigrants once new immigration legislation becomes law. 

The app, which is available in English and Spanish, helps applicants determine their eligibility to apply for citizenship, understand the application process, find legal resources, and study for the English and Civics tests. 

It's available for free in the iTunes store and on Google Play for Android users. 

The app is funded by the Knight Foundation, the Silicon Valley community foundation, the New Americans campaign, and the Grove Foundation, in partnership with the Immigration Advocates Network.

SPOILER ALERT: Adrienne Keene, over at Native Appropriations, doesn't like it. But don't take our word for it, here's part of her review, which draws attention to the many, many problematic stereotypes featured in the film:

The Lone Ranger fails the Bechdel test. There are not two (named) women, who speak to each other, about something other than a man. The portrayals of the Chinese laborers who built the railroad are super problematic too, they have them in rice paddy hats, and the only time they speak is to tell the bad guys they won't go in the tunnel because there are "Indian spirits" in there. Then that guy gets shot. The only Black characters are one of Rebecca's employees (who gets shot defending the house), and the driver/bouncer of the "House of Sin" where Helena Bonham-Carter works. This is also supposed to be Texas, but I can't actually think of any Latino characters, besides a "Spaniard" (bad guy), and another of Rebecca's employees.

And that's just a tiny bit. You can read the review in its entirety here.

Still feel like you want to see the flick? Make sure you take Keene's Lone Ranger bingo card with you. She was kind enough to create it for "all your cliched stereotype needs."

In an interesting turn of history, the celebration of America's birth and the demise of Paula Deen's food empire are occurring at practically the same time. The Georgia-based TV cook landed in hot water due to the recent uncovering of her lifelong racist views and alleged employment discrimination. Key among these views is her desire to return to an era when American liberty rested upon the economic brutalization of millions through slavery.

As with the U.S. of yesteryear for which she longs, the so-called Butter Queen is falling apart due to an inherent conflict at her core. Mirroring the schizophrenia of America's original Constitution, which championed both freedom and slavery, Deen's sunny promise has a dark side, informed by race.

As Americans gather to celebrate our founding principles, the Deen controversy gives us the opportunity to examine our founding contradictions. Declaring that you're open to all even as you allow racial and economic injustice to thrive doesn't work. Had she had a better sense of her national history, Deen might have managed to avoid the current disaster.

Deen's plantation wishes and mint julep dreams burst back into public consciousness on June 19. That's when the transcript of her out-of-court testimony in a racial and sexual harassment discrimination lawsuit against the former Food Network star was released by the National Enquirer. During the course of questioning, Deen admitted to using the N-word on several occasions.

But had it stopped and started there, the firestorm might have blown over. As Lisa Jackson, the white woman who brought the suit against Deen and her brother Bubba Hiers said earlier this week, "This has never been about the N-word."

What's actually sunk Deen is her often stated desire to return to the days of the legal ownership of blacks from which her family got rich. Deen gives us two dramatic examples, but there are many others.

According to the transcript, Deen recounted an idea that she had come up with for a Southern plantation wedding replete with "slaves" dressed up in formal serving attire. She envisaged black men resplendent in white coats and black ties catering to guests' every need.

Deen said that the idea was sparked by her visit to a restaurant that represented a "certain America before the Civil War" that was "impressive." The pretend slaves, as she tells it, "not only black men, [but] women too" were "beautiful."

Sadly, this plantation fantasy echoes a similar whitewashed novella she told about her slaveholding great grandfather to The New York Times' Kim Severson last year.

Recounting the story as if she were an eyewitness, with a voice tinged with sadness and regret, Deen laid out how her forbearer had committed suicide at the end of the Civil War. He did so, she said, because he'd lost all of "his 30 workers" (i.e. enslaved people who won freedom) and could no longer run the plantation. Forced to actually work, rather than extract labor from other human beings, Deen's great grandfather ended his life. In her telling of it, our sympathy should lay with him.

What Deen misses is that as a slaveholder of 30 men, women and children, her great grandfather was actually in the top 2 percent of all whites in the South in 1860, according to data from PBS' Africans in America series. As such he formed a network of wealth that made the Southern region the nation's richest, the products of which fueled the development of the Industrial Revolution around the world and the rise of Wall Street in America.

The highest concentration of millionaires in the United States at the beginning of the Civil War was along the Southern half of the Mississippi Coast, and as Edward Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and author of the "Crucible of the Civil War" points out, the total dollar value of slaves in the South was worth more than that of all the railroads and factories in the Northern states combined.

But the slaves never received any of the riches from the economic juggernaut that they constructed. Working 14-hour days, subjected to torture, physical abuse, mental cruelty, family dissolution, substandard clothes and housing--as Ken Burns' "The Civil War" documentary points out--only four slaves out of 100 made it to age 60. Moreover, the devastating impact on black families didn't end in 1865.

The fact that whites currently have 22 times the wealth of blacks has its roots in slavery. When it comes to the economic legacy of enslavement, as famed Southern writer William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

But even if Deen is blithely unaware of the vicious racial reality behind her family's and nation's Antebelleum wealth, she's certainly seen enough of the recent past to be able to separate racial rights from racial wrongs.

Deen grew up in Albany, Ga.; a city which was at the heart of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s. Deen was a young adult at the time.

Albany was the only city in the South where Martin Luther King, Jr., registered a clear defeat. Albany so eluded King that he went to Birmingham afterwards where he thought the civil rights movement would have a better shot. In Birmingham, King ended up facing off with the violent legend, Bull Connor. Even with these difficulties, Birmingham was a better arena for King than Albany. Albany is where Deen spent her formative years.

Though she told Matt Lauer on "Today," "I is what I is and I'm not changin'," the bottom line is that Deen knows better. It's just that like the country she inhabits; sometimes she conveniently erases lessons already learned. The Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act last week reinforces the point.

The sad part is that, like everyone from the South, Deen is actually a product of the very black culture she scorns. She's built an empire valued at close to $100 million by profiting directly from that culture. Many of the dishes and cooking styles that scream "Southern" have their roots in Africa--black eyed peas, yams, red beans and rice, and bar-b-que are among the many plates that can trace their beginnings to the homeland of America's enslaved people.

The fact that she can't recognize and accept this reality is one of the reasons that her company, Paula Deen Enterprises, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Given the young, increasingly people-of-color demographics of the 21st century U.S., it's far too easy to castigate Deen, dismiss the horror of her comments and move on to the next thing. But that would be a mistake. The reality is that Deen embodies the selective amnesia that's allowed America to paper over and too often ignore its racial, economic, and political contradictions right from the start.

The inconvenient truth is that America's early freedom and global rise to prominence was underwritten by economic cruelty. Until Deen and every other American can accept this fact, the nation's past will continue to shape the country's present, and we'll continue fighting a "two steps forward, one step back" battle to live up to our most cherished ideals.

By Arturo R. García

This month’s issue of Uncanny Avengers served as the most explicit follow-up to the much-maligned “we are all humans” speech written by Rick Remender in an apparent stab at “colorblindness.”

Instead of taking to heart the critiques directed toward him, though, Remender seemed intent to “prove his point” via a debate between two of the book’s mutant characters, Rogue and the Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff). But don’t let the cover fool you. This may have been intended to read like a battle of wits, but Remender neglected to arm either combatant.

The sequence actually begins with a tete-a-tete between the returning Wonder Man and Sunfire, a longtime member of X-canon but never one especially called on to be a leader in the mutant population. “We’ll always be humans to you,” Wonder Man complains. “Always be something different.” Yes, that’s a white cis-male accusing a Japanese man of othering him.

“I love him to death, but Alex went in public and told Mutants to hide, to be ashamed of who they are,” Sunfire retorts. At this point, the Wasp (Janet Van Dyne) chimes in.

Now, before getting to her comments here, let’s look back to UA #7 and her business proposal for team leader Havok (Alex Summers):

Yes, that’s a white non-Mutant woman — Janet is a WASP in more ways than one — using iconography and apparel long associated with Mutants to create her own fashion line, arguing that “popular culture has a long history of helping ease people into accepting the different” — and oh yes, the money made from these sales will fund their squad. You think Cyclops will see a cut for the use of his signature ruby visor? Or Rogue for using her own green hood?

By Janet’s rationale, American Apparel should be heralded as a champion of civil rights. Now, let’s get back to her part in this new argument.

“He was asking people to judge him based on how he uses his powers, not how he got them,” Wasp argues. Well said, for someone seemingly using her abilities as a fashion designer to justify outright cultural appropriation.

“I’ll never understand why your gifts frighten people more than mine, or Reed Richards’, or Spider-Man’s,” she says next, which is supposed to be her token gesture of sympathy. But longtime Marvel readers already know the answer: Because the company wants them to. Being “hated and feared” is part of the X-Men-as-minority allegory Remender is supposedly subverting. Yet the statement is also inaccurate because Spider-Man’s been considered a menace just as often as a hero, thanks to the press machinations of former Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson.

(L-R) Psylocke, Colossus and Angel meet their new fans in San Francisco during the “Utopia” era. Image via sfgate.com

And way back in Astonishing X-Men #1, Cyclops stressed that his team’s return to wearing spandex uniforms (as opposed to the more practical apparel favored during the Grant Morrison era) was part of an effort to get the public to view them as regular old superheroes. That led to a meet-cute between the team and the Fantastic Four, as Cyclops led his crew to do more standard rescue missions, as opposed to the same old grudge matches. That, of course, didn’t last very long in that particular title. But the X-Men did have a brief stretch where they were taken in like regular superheroes: the Utopia era, when they were encamped in San Francisco. And Janet was off-world while that was going on. So she has almost literally no idea what she’s talking about.

From there we move on to the Rogue/Scarlet Witch clash, as Rogue snidely asks for her take, pointing out how Wanda, a longtime Avenger, is suddenly “such a devoted student” of X-Men founder Charles Xavier.

“How’d you have reacted if Alex asked you to hide your Romani background?” Rogue asks, which is not an altogether good question for her case. Because like Alex, Wanda always has the option of “hiding” her background.

“That theory overlooks the major differences between being born a mutant and being born into a religion,” Wanda says to begin her answer. “Religion is steeped in cultural tradition, shared ancestry, shared values, and most importantly, shared faith.”

And Wanda’s response, in turn, overlooks Mutants whose X-genes have not exclusively manifested as powers, per se. Like, say, Beak, whose “abilities” amounted to looking like a chicken. And though Nightcrawler and Beast both became known as heroes, their mutations also left them unable to “fit in” without the benefit of the Witch’s and Havok’s “I’m just a person” rhetoric. For that matter,Cyclops’ visors aren’t a fashion choice; they’re the only way he can open his eyes without blasting anything he sees.

In meta terms, Wanda’s — and Remender’s — answer ignores the existence of Mutanthood as a stand-in for race as an identification point. Which wouldn’t be so annoying if it weren’t for this:

“Mutants come from all races, all religions and all sexual orientations,” Wanda insists. “Having powers born into us is the only thing we inherently share.”

You have to figure Remender and artist Gabriel Acuña intended for that line to be the big “OH SNAP” moment, since they have her facing the readers. (It’s actually the second time they use this device in the issue; there’s a scene earlier where Wonder Man, having quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to justify his newfound pacifism, looks at the reader and asks, “Too preachy?”)

But the problem is, Wanda’s wrong. Mutants do have is a shared history — one that would be visible, if she or Marvel invested any time in the ones who aren’t wearing spandex for a living. The establishment of Xavier’s original School for Gifted Youngsters qualifies as a shared moment, since it was the introductory point for Homo Superior as a part of the Marvel landscape. One can also point at the destruction of Genosha as a shared moment – a concentrated genocidal attack against them.

Wanda herself was at the center of another tragic shared moment: the depowering of nearly the entire Mutant population at the end of the House of M miniseries, which led to the world’s remaining 198 Mutants to be forced  to live at the site of Xavier’s school, Reservation-style. This is why the arrival of Hope Summers and then of the five “Lights” were such a big deal to the community. Somewhere, there’s bound to be a Mutant whose quality of life is still endangered, physically or emotionally, because of what Wanda did. But we don’t read about those stories anymore.

It’s one thing for Wanda to “move on” from her role in that horror, even as she condemns Wolverine for being part of a death squad in Uncanny X-Force. But for Remender to position her as the “reasonable one” in this scene is either ironic or misguided, especially considering how Rogue is drawn as being near-irrational in her anger:

Earlier in the scene, Wanda asks Rogue not to “extrapolate” from Alex’s remarks in UA #5. Well, let’s look at what he said again:

For Alex to use his government-friendly platform to issue platitudes on what qualifies as “divisive” is marginalizing in and of itself. (And, again, note the emphasis on the religious allegory instead of race.) But as we discussed last time, the line, “We are all humans, of one tribe” is John Grisham-style faux-profundity, as has been pointed out over and over and over again. Protip for Remender: if Stephen Colbert says it in character, it’s not a good look for your would-be protagonists.

Making things worse for Remender’s book is the fact that one has to read another book, Brian Michael Bendis’ All-New X-Men, for  a proper counter-argument, albeit one that also comes from a white character:

Kitty Pryde shares her story with the rest of the younger X-Men in “All New X-Men” #11.

Here, Kitty Pryde is allowed to detail the intersection of both her religion and her Mutanthood: “I am Jewish. I am a Mutant,” she tells the time-displaced group of younger X-Men. “And I want people to know who and what I am. I tell people because, hey, if we’re going to have a problem with it … I’d like to know.” And all while acknowledging her ability to pass, to boot.

Bendis has a history of at least giving POC characters some space: Besides his introduction of Black Latino Miles Morales as the new Ultimate Spider-Man and his years of work with Luke Cage and his own multiracial family, he also penned Takio, which explicitly dealt with a multiracial adoptee family. And time has begun to show that maybe he should have been handed the UA assignment. Because for a series supposedly revolving around the forging of Mutant/Human unity, the skewed narrative stemming from Havok’s misguided speech has become an unwelcome distraction that leaves none of its heroes looking very sympathetic. This isn’t the next phase of Xavier’s dream. It’s turning into a sad parody of it.

By Arturo R. García

Maybe the most hard-hitting moment of CNN’s special The N-Word didn’t strictly involve it at all.

It’s tough not to cringe when LeVar Burton talks about the steps he takes to protect himself when he’s pulled over by police, for a number of reasons. The fact that, going by the ease with which he delivers his explanation, it’s become a routine. That he has to say it’s for the officer’s comfort. And finally, the stated reason he taught his son to exercise the same caution.

“I do that because I live in America,” Burton tells host Don Lemon and his panel. And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, those words seem especially resonant. Though Lemon interrupts with his story of being “an uppity you-know-what” before segueing to anti-racism advocate Tim Wise, Burton’s story provides the show with a lived-in context it otherwise lacks.

Otherwise, the show’s View From Nowhere approach doesn’t advance a “national discussion” on race, despite Lemon’s stated intentions. The segment purporting to debate whether the actual N-slur “is worse than” the term cracker, which resurfaced in the public eye during the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, sputters because nobody is there to actually defend the word. While that would seem like a no-brainer in progressive circles, to have someone attempt to explain why they feel aggrieved by the term (say, a member of Towson State’s infamous “White Student Union”?) would have a) answered the predictable call for equal time and b) illustrated the downfall of such a viewpoint to begin with.

Likewise, topics like Paula Deen and hip-hop’s use of “nigga” come and go with no real meaning. Deen is not facing a lawsuit just for using a slur; her white accuser, Lisa Jackson, told CNN itself that Deen created a hostile work environment for POC. Instead, the show deals with the effect of her use of the slur as a “career killer.” And another panelist, Wendy Walsh, brings up rappers’ use of the word, but without an active member of the hip-hop community — say, a Dream Hampton or Davey D — there to push back with the other side of that history, problematic as it may be.

Unlike Soledad O’Brien’s (admittedly much-maligned) Black in America specials, in fact, there’s no real sense of community anywhere in The N-Word. Everyone involved is a pundit, which leaves the program lacking in the sort of lived realities that show us why slurs hurt, and how they’re used to do so. The bright side is, the show performed exceedingly well for the network — so much so, one imagines, that the temptation will be too great for CNN not to do a sequel. Hopefully, one with its eyes and ears closer to the streets than to a studio.

Beyonce Knowles on her Mrs. Carter World Tour (Yosra El-Essawy/Invision/AP)

By Britt Julious (cross posted from WBEZ.org 91.5 Chicago)

You’re not good enough and you never will be and we need to remind you of this again and again. Do not get comfortable. What you’ve done matters little. For every act is just an act, existing in a vacuum, not representative of the whole, or even a part of who you think you are.

This is what I imagine is being said to someone like Beyonce or Rihanna or Michelle Obama by the media and by society at large. It might not be said explicitly, but it is implied forcefully and continuously. They are three of the most visible black female public figures and they are three of the most controversial. Controversy, I realize now, is largely a manufactured tool, one that is used to control the narratives of the people around us. And the narrative of the black woman – public or not – rarely changes: you will not be good enough. Do not forget.

Regardless of what Beyonce or Rihanna or Michelle Obama does, they will get criticized for their actions. To the public, there is no such thing as a good or respectable black woman. They are women who are almost “good,” but not quite. The ways in which society tries to find and develop these characteristics of “bad” rarely differ from figure to figure.

All of their actions are up for debate, even when they are personal and non-threatening. What has Beyonce done but work hard to be the best performer she could possibly be? Well, for one they say, she is not a good enough feminist. One of my friends said that she was uncomfortable with the fact that Beyonce named her tour “The Mrs. Carter Tour.” But why is a woman’s feminist cred eliminated because she changed her last name? Why do personal decisions that threaten no one eradicate one’s support of equality between the sexes?

My mother changed her last name and I can’t think of a better representation of feminism lived in the everyday world. Her strength, her work effort, her words about hard work and personal achievement, the visibility of shared responsibility … all of these things led me to feminism before I knew what that was.

Beyonce is not a good feminist. She is not feminist at all. This is what they say. A recent Ms.magazine article fueled the flames not for what it said about Beyonce’s feminism, but because anything was said at all. Readers were upset that anyone could try to relate the two. Beyonce is not a feminist because she dresses “provocatively.” Beyonce is not a feminist because she changes her last name, because she shows vulnerability, because she is proud of her motherhood and her marriage. Beyonce is not a feminist because she is not what a feminist looks like. She is not a feminist because we say she is not. If we seek to promote the value in feminism and challenge the negative connotations of feminism in the public eye, tearing down a performer who speaks openly about women doing right for themselves, who literally called herself a feminist, does more harm than good.

When I see Michelle Obama on the screen, I see a woman like the women I grew up around. She is poised and beautiful and intelligent. She is also real. There is an argument to be made about the decorum of the First Lady, but I don’t think Obama has ever questioned this.

Singer Rhianna performs (AP/Abdeljalil Bounhar)

 Perhaps it is because she exists not as a wallflower, but as a powerhouse that we are threatened by an eye roll. Perhaps because she is literal strength that we find her reaction to a heckler as a wrong. As an outsider, these reactions shock me. Why are we upset that Obama reacts? What do we expect of her?

As an insider (an insider of the black female experience), they do not. Black women can’t show their cards. If you have achieved something, the only way to continue rising is to keep one’s head down. Opinions? Emotions? Reflections? Please! Take a seat!

In a recent, ridiculous story for the UK’s Daily Mail, Liz Jones chastised Rihanna for not acting as a perfect role model. Ignore the fact that one of the most consistent things about the singer is that she refuses the label of “role model.” Why do we expect this of her at all? Why is she not allowed to live her life as she chooses? Yes, she has young fans. But why do we act as if good parenting is no longer a viable option in preventing our children from “bad” influences? If we are to talk about the actions of pop stars, why is Rihanna criticized more than her peer, Lady Gaga, who too speaks openly about drug use and recklessness? There exists a double standard, one that has become abundantly clear.

There exists, in the life of a black woman, public or not, the notion that the other shoe will drop. You are waiting for the challenge, the comeuppance, the moment in which others will tell you who you are and how you should live. This extends to the general female experience, too, and the Other experience as a whole. The other shoe waits. You wait.

This is why our interpersonal bonds are so important and public. I’m remembering a man who said that black women are catty. That made no sense to me. The ease in which I build friendships with women who look like me cannot be explained. But perhaps there is the reality of what we must face and what we have been told. One can never overstate the importance of knowing your stories and feelings are important and true.

I am reminded of what my parents – my mother in particular – used to say: You will have to work twice as hard to get half as far. You do not always have the luxury to dress down, to not always be your best, to mess up. Any sign of weakness, of humanity, is a reinforcement of stereotypes we have yet to eradicate. I did not know this to be true then, but I understand it now. The world reveals itself.

(The Root) -- Without a miracle intervention from Congress -- which is looking increasingly unlikely with each passing hour -- interest rates for student loans from the federal government will double as of July 1. This means that after today, a student seeking a loan will no longer enjoy a 3.4 percent interest rate; instead he will see his rate become 6.8 percent.

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In the absence of faith, death cafes can provide a space for us to talk about what a good ending might be

This is a familiar scenario. I am sitting at the side of somebody's bed in hospital. They are dying. It's not an especially comfortable bed, being designed for ease of cleaning and to help nurses lift patients safely. The sound environment is punctuated by the noise of other people's distress and intermittent bleeping from the apparently reassuring presence of technology – often referred to as life-saving, though of course it can never really deliver on that promise. The flimsy curtain provides little privacy.

Friends and relatives arrive and tell the patient they are looking "really well". This is often code for: we don't want to talk about the fact that you are dying. Anyway, the priest is here. He can do all that existential stuff. The people in white coats obviously have the physical aspect of things covered. The patient, emotionally drained by illness, colludes with this distressing lie through a simple "thank you". It's distressing because the patient often wants to talk about it. Not talking about it is lonely and thus all the more frightening. Is this really how we want to die?

When Jon Underwood introduced the idea of the Death Café into the English speaking world in 2011 as an offshoot of the Swiss Café Mortel movement, it was with the belief that we have outsourced all talk of death to medics, priests and undertakers. This displacement of death-talk from everyday speech, he suggested, robs us of agency over one of the most significant things we will ever have to face. First, he approached local cafes in east London to see if they would host a gathering to talk about death. They thought the idea bizarre, ghoulish. So he set up in his front room and asked his mum to lead the first session.

Since then the idea has caught on and more than a hundred meetings have taken place in the UK and the US. It's not a space for religious proselytising – though people of all faiths and none are welcome. It is not for the recently bereaved. It's more a way of addressing the ever-present reality of death among those for whom it is not a live issue. "It can be very liberating because the way our society shuts down conversations about death can be claustrophobic and stifling," says Underwood.

My own religious perspective on death and dying is that secular atheism is proving to be a very expensive and a terrible burden on the NHS. When we come to value life simply in terms of itself and "the amount of self-referential advancement obtained in it", as one commentator has put it, then death is seen as doubly frightening because it strikes not just at life itself, which is bad enough, but at the very core of our value system. Medicine thus shoulders the unreasonable burden of justifying our existence. So we charge the medics to do everything they can to keep us alive. And the bills pile up.

Most of us want to die quickly and before our physical condition deteriorates to such an extent that life becomes intolerable. But this is a comforting avoidance – the fantasy of "getting out of life alive", as theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it. As is all talk of euthanasia: the figures from those places where it is legal demonstrate that only a tiny percentage of people ever choose this route. In an aging population, most of us will die gradually. In the absence of religious belief, we need to develop a language that will help us address what a good death might look like.

Can we, for instance, start talking about having a natural death in the same way that we can now talk about having a natural birth? Or about dying at home, surrounded by our loved ones and not by machines? Discussions like this might enable us to get off the escalator to intensive care, that miserable and soulless place where more and more of us are now dying.

This country has already been dragged through the mud for sheltering Julian Assange, and it is willing to stand up to the US

If Edward Snowden can make it to Ecuador, it will be a good choice for him and the world. The government, including the president, Rafael Correa, and the foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, proved their steadfastness in the face of threats and abuse last year when they granted asylum to WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange.

The media took advantage of the fact that most of the world knows very little about Ecuador to misinform their audience that this government "represses the media". The same efforts are already under way in the Snowden case. Without defending everything that exists in Ecuador, including criminal libel laws and some vague language in a new communications law, anyone who has been to the country knows that the international media has presented a gross caricature of the state of press freedom there. The Ecuadorian private media is more oppositional than that of the US, trashing the government every day.

Unfortunately, groups like Americas Watch (of Human Rights Watch) and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which do good work in some countries, have joined Washington's campaign against Ecuador, publishing gross exaggerations. These groups should be a bit more worried about the chilling effect that the Obama administration's unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers has had on investigative journalism in the United States.

The great irony is not that Snowden should enlist help from Ecuador, or even Russia and China for that matter, in escaping political persecution. Has any journalist or human rights advocate criticised the thousands of Salvadoran refugees who escaped US-sponsored murder and repression in the late 1970s and 80s by fleeing to the United States, "the world's greatest purveyor of violence," as Martin Luther King once described it?

Political refugees do not choose their host countries according to whether they agree with government policy. The great irony in this case is that Ecuador gets dragged through the mud for considering asylum for a whistleblower who has been charged under the espionage act. Who – yes, ironically – probably could not even get a fair trial in the US because the media there has already convicted him.

Washington would almost certainly retaliate against Ecuador for granting asylum to Snowden. In addition to commercial sanctions, there are possible covert actions. In 2010 there was a coup attempt against Correa; although there is no direct evidence of US involvement, the police who led the uprising had a long relationship with US officials, including funding. Many in Ecuador's government believe that Washington was involved, and if it wasn't, this would be the first coup attempt in at least 60 years against a left-wing government in Latin America that Washington had nothing to do with.

The Obama administration has led a successful media campaign to reframe the Snowden case in cold war terms, and much of the media has gone along for the ride, portraying Ecuador as wanting to "poke its finger in Washington's eye". Correa must be doing this for some political gain at home too, they say. It's the exact same menu that was served up when Ecuador granted asylum to Assange, with the added primitive view that these "anti-American" troublemakers down south must have a new "ringleader" to replace Hugo Chávez.

But any of the newly independent left-of-centre governments in South America would have granted asylum to Assange. Brazil's then-president Lula da Silva was one of Assange's first (before Correa) and strongest defenders, and Brazil would likely approve an asylum request from Snowden too. Snowden, like Assange, has a well-founded fear of political persecution – especially after being charged with espionage, a crime he clearly did not commit. So as a matter of international law and of principle – including the principle of self-determination – none of these governments would participate in what WikiLeaks is correctly calling a "rendition" of Snowden to the US.

If Washington is ultimately forced to respect international law in this case, it will be because many countries, most strikingly in South America, no longer fear US retaliation. Since Snowden did a huge public service by revealing government wrongdoing, this is another example of how US citizens – contrary to what our media tells us every day – actually benefit from the development of a more multipolar world.

Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler are to 'reimagine' two of the Bard's plays by turning them into prose. I can't wait

I'd always suspected there was more to pushy, hand-washing Lady Macbeth than an obsession with revenge and hygiene. And I wait for the day when Guillermo del Toro makes a zombie sequel, Ophelia Undead: Scandinavian Revenge, in which Shakespeare's most pushed-around female stumps back to court, reeking of seaweed, to demonstrate that there is, literally, something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Now Hogarth Press, an imprint of Random House, is turning the plays to prose, stage to page, by bringing us Jeanette Winterson's take on the Bard's intriguing problem play, The Winter's Tale, while Anne Tyler tackles the still-perplexing, PC-or-not-PC romance of antipathy that is The Taming of the Shrew.

But why does Shakespeare require a "reimagining for a 21st-century audience", as Hogarth say in their press release? His work is hardly passé, nor does it require any big sell. It's adapted with multiple approaches in multiple art forms all over the world. This summer at Edinburgh the experimental theatre company The Wooster Group are performing a remixed version of Hamlet, synced with video footage from Richard Burton's 1964 Broadway production when it was directed by John Gielgud. Joss Whedon's film version of Much Ado About Nothing is out now.

Shakespeare's plays were performed in 38 languages at the Globe as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, then a few months later some of the history plays were given sumptuous television adaptations under the title The Hollow Crown. The plays are highly readable and endlessly pliable: the Palestinian Ashtar company's Richard II at the Globe depicted a volatile modern Arab despot, while Rupert Goold's TV version cast Ben Whishaw as an immature, wistful, delicate Plantagenet with a messiah complex.

Perhaps it's a question of inspiration: great art inspires more art, some equally great, some dreadful, some satirical, some expedient, some thrilling. We want to pay tribute, cash in, make the quiet characters speak, overcompensate for the underwritten and give the nice-but-dim some vim. This retelling has been done for centuries with unauthored works like fairytales, myths, legends and folklore, which morph according to the times and their tellers – even to the present day, as with Canongate's Myths series, which boasted contributors including Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt.

But writers also seem driven to confront, reinterpret and emend the canon. Sometimes, as in Jean Rhys's Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, it works triumphantly; sometimes, as with the official Peter Pan sequel Peter Pan in Scarlet, by Geraldine McCaughrean, it doesn't quite fly. Despite the witty sacrileges of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains"), Bridget Jones's Diary (whose plot mirrored P&P) and Lost in Austen, sometimes contemporary writers deliver a just karmic kick: in Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James, Wickham finally gets what he deserves.

But what happens when you tango with the Bard? Maybe the greatest potential for contemporary writers is in the least obvious parts. Tom Stoppard wrote a tender comedy about marginality, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, inspired by two minor characters in Hamlet, and created the clever screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, a mashup of the rom-com genre Shakespeare himself invented. But the freshest take has got to be the sinuous, sexy Manga Shakespeare series illustrated by comics megastar Emma Vieceli.

So, I'm intrigued. To appoint acclaimed, fully established writers like Winterson and Tyler is hardly some facetious gimmick. It's an opportunity to discover what the timeless geniuses of now make of a timeless genius of then.

By Guest Contributor Joy Ellison

Current executive producer Stephen Moffatt on the Doctor Who set. Image via WhatCulture!

Over the last few weeks, fans have called for a person of color and/or a woman to star in Doctor Who.  If you care about race and gender presentation in Doctor Who, then pay attention to who serves as the show’s next executive producer.

The impact of Doctor Who’s executive producer is obvious to fans who have watched the revival of the series.  When Russell T. Davies re-launched the show as executive producer, he brought with him an increased commitment to diversity.  Davies cast Christopher Eccleston, a white man, as the 9^th Doctor and David Tennent, another (surprise!) white man, as the 10^th Doctor.  Nonetheless, under Davies, fans saw a more diverse cast, full of many different types of heroines, as well as queer characters and people of color.  Davies didn’t handle diversity perfectly, but his influence demonstrates just how important an executive producer can be.

Under current showrunner Steven Moffat’s leadership, Doctor Who has become undeniably whiter, straighter, and more sexist.  Moffat hasn’t developed any recurring characters of color and his women characters leave much to be desired.  While both River Song and Amy Pond are competent and spunky, they are defined exclusively in relation to the Doctor and Rory.  In the place of women with independent interests and developed characters, Moffat substitutes bossy women and hopes no one notices.

Moffat presented women in the same way in his previous show Coupling, a situation comedy about dating and romance.  In light of Moffat’s own statements to the press, he seems to write his women characters this way because he actually believes that’s how women behave.  Take a look at this Moffat quote, which is almost breath-taking in its racism, classism, heterosexism, and misogyny:

“There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married – we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands. The world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level – except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male.”

Thank you, Steven.  This explains so much.

Contrasting Doctor Who under Moffat and Davies lays bare just how profound an effect the executive producer of Doctor Who has on the show.  It’s not just what the Doctor looks like that matters, though who portrays the Doctor does matter very much indeed.  If the role of the Doctor is finally given to an actor who isn’t a white man, that actor will need to be supported by an executive producer who able to write for such a character and committed to doing justice to a new vision of Doctor Who.

But why does writing matter so much?  Fans hoping for a more diverse Doctor should pause to reflect: A black woman doctor has already saved our planet once.  Remember Dr. Martha Jones?

Despite the consummate acting of the talented Freema Agyeman, Martha is one of the most maligned of the Doctor’s companions.  Some commentators have argued that fans despised Martha because of her race and gender – a well-documented phenomenon in geek culture.  Others have said that the writers didn’t give Doctor Who’s first Black companion a fair shot.  Both analyses are correct.  Martha is a kick-ass character who doesn’t deserve the racist misogyny leveled at her by some fans.  But, she was also written as a rebound for a lovesick Doctor who is still pining for Rose.  Martha, an otherwise brilliant woman with tremendous initiative, nurses an adolescent crush on the Doctor that seems out of character.  The Doctor, portrayed by David Tennant, is shockingly indifferent to her obvious feelings.  This aspect of Martha’s storyline is deeply disappointing.  It also reveals an important truth: diversity is important, but it needs to be supported by good writing.

Storytelling matters.  The problems of Doctor Who won’t be solved simply by casting a new actor in the starring role.  The show needs to tell new stories shaped by new visions.

Current showrunner Steven Moffat and executive producer Brian Minchin will likely be with the show for a while.  When it comes time for a new executive producer to take control of the TARDIS, I hope that fans will pressure the BBC to let what happens to our favorite time-traveler be decided by someone who isn’t white.

Joy Ellison is a writer and activist who is building a full-scale replica of the TARDIS. You can follow Joy on Twitter @j_in_tuwani.

(The Root) -- The George Zimmerman murder trial has captured the nation's attention since it began. When Rachel Jeantel, the last person to speak with Trayvon Martin (aside from Zimmerman), took the stand, it ignited a dialogue on race, class and the cultural shaming of our own.

Read full article...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determines what states and jurisdictions are covered by Section 5, is invalid after less than 50 years of protecting African Americans and people of color. The currently covered areas are places that historically have disenfranchised people of color, or those for whom English is their second language. But Chief Justice John Roberts has ruled that the formula, which was last updated in the late 1960s-early 1970s, must be updated by Congress so that it covers areas that violate voting rights today. Chief Roberts, who's had a beef with the Voting Rights Act since the early 1980s, wrote in the majority opinion:

"In assessing the 'current need' for a preclearance system treating States differently from one another today, history since 1965  cannot be ignored. The Fifteenth Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future. To serve that purpose, Congress--if it is to divide the States--must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. ... Congress did not use that record to fashion a coverage formula grounded in current conditions. It instead re-enacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day."

This is not a total loss for the Voting Rights Act. Section Five can still stand if Congress is able to fix the formula so that it covers areas they consider presently running afoul of voting rights. Meanwhile, here are the currently covered states worth watching now that this ruling affects:

• North Carolina: Republicans, who control both state legislative chambers and the governor's office, have proposed and/or passed bills that would require a narrow set of photo identification cards to vote, that would cut early voting, potentially penalize the parents of college students who vote away from their parents home, and would implement probably the strictest felony disenfranchisement law in the nation. None of these are law, but they would have had to pass federal preclearance review under Section 5. Almost 500,000 North Carolinians lack the ID needed to vote under the proposed law, a third of them African Americans. Hundreds of North Carolina citizens have been arrested over the past couple months while protesting these laws. 
• Virginia: Passed a voter ID bill that survived federal preclearance review last year, but then doubled down and passed an even stricter photo voter ID law this year, which had not yet been submitted for Section 5 review. Now it doesn't need to. Meanwhile, it's estimated up to 870,000 Virginians lack the ID needed to vote under the new law, a disproportionate number of whom are African Americans. 
• Alabama: Passed a photo voter ID law and a proof-of-citizenship voter registration law in 2011 that isn't scheduled to go into effect until 2014. It had been submitted for Section 5 review, but was withdrawn a month ago. Now it won't be reviewed for discriminatory effects. 
• Mississippi: No African American has won a statewide office in this state (nor in any of the states above)[CORRECTION: Virginia elected a black governor in 1986], and a voter ID bill it passed last year may make it harder for black candidates to get elected when those most likely to be disenfranchised by this law are African Americans. 

Other states like Texas and South Carolina, which Section 5 reviews blocked from passing racially discriminatory voting laws, could attempt to reinstate those laws. But as Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School, told Colorlines, it's not just the states we need to be worried about. 

"One of the most important pieces of Section 5 is that it prevents local efforts to discriminate in the allocation of local political power: districts for city council and county commission and local judicial offices that really affect the responsiveness of representation and justice in local democracies, in all of the kitchen-table issues that affect our lives most tangibly," said Levitt. "When Texas passes a discriminatory statewide law, there are lots of voices in the fight, but when a tiny municipality in southwest Texas does the same, it gets a lot less attention."

Civil rights groups that have fought both for the Voting Rights Act to be created, and to defend it in the decades after have expressed disappointment. Before the Supreme Court's ruling, Natasha Korgaonkar, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., the entity that argued the case, told Colorlines that they were "optimistic" that Section 5 would be upheld, and if not that Congress would have to "step in."

Meanwhile, Jotaka Eaddy, senior director of NAACP's voting rights program told Colorlines that the Court's decision "will not change our game plan." Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the civil rights law organization Advancement Project, called the decision "a huge loss" and that "the biggest harm is to the voters." Her organization's work would not be deterred though, she said.

"We will have to continue to do what we did in 2012 and bring our own affirmative cases," said Browne-Dianis. "We really will have to step up our efforts to do more affirmative litigation, which is a problem because the federal government has been an important player in stopping discrimination before it happens," through the Voting Rights Act.

Advancement Project and the NAACP have been embroiled in the civil rights struggle against North Carolina's proposed voter suppression laws. Browne-Dianis said that this decision "could hasten the changes that are being proposed in North Carolina to make it harder to vote."

In Texas, where the state filed its own challenge to Section 5 with the Supreme Court, Christina Sanders, state director of the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund, said, "This [case] shows us that it is important, now more than ever, to educate our neighbors and communities about building local power to ensure that all votes are protected."

In Florida, where voter waiting lines for African Americans were the longest in the nation, laws that cut early voting were blocked by Section 5 challenges. Election law professor Dan Smith, of University of Florida, said that challenges to discriminatory laws, like the cuts to early voting that disproportionally impacted black voters, would be more difficult without Section 5. 

"We're only talking about five counties out of 67," that are covered by Section 5 in Florida. "But when you have [Section Five] as a vehicle you can challenge the entire state law because of the uniform election code. With respect to the voting rights issues in Florida it has been a major piece of legislation that has protected the rights of minorities and I fear for that leverage to be pulled away from voting rights activists."

Myrna Perez, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, and co-author of their recent report "If Section 5 Falls: New Voting Implications," told Colorlines that they will  be working with a coalition of voters, advocates and members of Congress to come up with new measures "that provide robust and ample protections for voters."

Update: June 25, 2012, 2pm ET

The ruling does not necessarily mean that Baby Veronica will be placed back with the Copabianocos. The case is being bounced back to the lower South Carolina court. If it rules to terminate Dusten Brown's parental rights, the grandparents and the Cherokee Nation may still have a say in the child's placement. 

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In a 5 to 4 decision today, the Supreme Court ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) does not block termination of a Native father's parental rights. The court appears to have ruled as if it was deciding the issue based on race--when a better lens to understand the case, called Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, is through tribal sovereignty.

First, some quick background on the case and on ICWA itself (fuller background here). Christy Maldonado gave birth to a baby in 2009 whose father, Dusten Brown, is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Because of self-determination, the Cherokee Nation decides who its citizens are--and because Dusten Brown is Cherokee, his baby, named Veronica, is Cherokee as well. Maldonado and Brown lost touch by the time the baby was born, and Brown was never informed of the baby's birth. Maldonado decided to put the baby up for adoption, and a white couple named Melanie and Matt Capobianco took Veronica into pre-adoptive care.

Just to be clear, although the case is called Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, the Copabiancos never adopted Veronica. When Brown was served with Maldonado's intention to place the baby up for adoption, he immediately fought the decision. A South Carolina court agreed that a non-custodial Native father was, indeed a father for the purpose of the case, under ICWA.

So what does ICWA do? The act was created because of incredibly high rates of white parents adopting Native children; in states like Minnesota, that have large Native populations, non-Natives raised 90 percent of Native babies and children put up for adoption. Those adoptions sever ties to Native tribes and communities, endangering the very existence of these tribes and nations. In short, if enough Native babies are adopted out, there will literally not be enough citizens to compose a nation. ICWA sought to stem that practice by creating a policy that keeps Native adoptees with their extended families, or within their tribes and nations. The policy speaks to the core point of tribal sovereignty: Native tribes and nations use it to determine their future, especially the right to keep their tribes and nations together. 

But leave it to the Supreme Court to miss the point altogether this morning. The prevailing justices failed to honor tribal sovereignty in today's ruling. In writing for the court's majority, Justice Samuel Alito opened his delivery on the ruling with these words:

This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee.

What Alito (along with Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Breyer) is perhaps willfully missing is that the Cherokee Nation does not classify its citizens in that way. Baby Veronica is not a certain percentage Cherokee--she is Cherokee, as determined by her nation. The high court's first sentence, based in the colonial practice of blood quantum instead of the way that citizenship is determined by the Cherokee Nation, illustrates that the justices made this case about race--in their mind--and not about tribal sovereignty in the law. By this flawed logic, the high court ruled that Baby Veronica is somehow not Native enough to be protected by ICWA.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, and was joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan--and, in part, by Justice Scalia. In honoring the spirit in which ICWA was created, Sotomayor wrote:

Unlike the majority, I cannot adopt a reading of ICWA that is contrary to both its text and its stated purpose.

Baby Veronica has been in her father's care, and will now be ripped apart from her nation in Oklahoma, and taken to South Carolina, where she will be adopted by a white couple--continuing a practice that tears Native tribes and nations apart. And while this is very much a heartbreaking day for Dusten Brown, the Cherokee Nation, and all Native tribes and nations whose right to a future has been put in peril through adoptions, it's also a sad day for tribal sovereignty, which is clearly under attack in the high court in the land.

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Australia's first woman prime minister was subjected to vituperative, ugly, blatant sexism from the start of her tumultuous tenure

Three years almost to the day the Australian Labor party sharpened its collective knives, ousted Kevin Rudd as leader and installed Julia Gillard as the nation's 27th – and first woman — prime minister. At 7pm on Wednesday, in an equally spectacular and bloody knifing, Rudd returned the political favour, wresting the leadership from his nemesis by a decisive 57 votes to 45.

The poll, held behind closed doors, ends one of the most tumultuous prime ministerial tenures in the nation's modern history, and ensures that, if nothing else, the word "brutal" will become the default adjective to describe Labor politics, Aussie style.

Gillard's demise, viewed from afar, seems as surreal and extraordinary as her election on 24 June 2010. Then Australia – a nation still so defined by its predominantly male icons, from Ned Kelly to the muscle-bound lifesavers of Bondi beach – seemed ready to embrace a woman at the helm: a tough, unabashedly childless, "what you see is what you get" woman leader to boot.

And yet in retrospect, signs that female leadership of an Australian government would attract this unprecedented level of public opprobrium dished out to Gillard were already there in spades.

Just five years before her elevation to the leadership, Gillard, then deputy PM, endured an extraordinary savaging at the hands of the media when a series of photographs taken in the kitchen of her home led to widespread condemnation. Implicit in the criticism was an unsightly workaholism and ambition: that if her kitchen benches were so clean and tidy they could not be truly used. Not long afterwards, an MP from the conservative Liberal benches alleged she was "deliberately barren", apparently suggesting this meant she lacked proper qualifications to lead a nation. Incredibly, these were not one-off gaffes.

Since then, every aspect of Gillard the woman – from her voice and proudly broad Australian accent to her clothing (just last week a female newspaper reporter criticised her modest neckline for revealing "too much cleavage" for the parliament), and even the sexuality of her long-time partner – has been subject to public comment.

And not just comment but vituperative, ugly, blatant sexism of a kind that culminated two weeks ago, in a Liberal party fundraising dinner menu offering "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box." Those responsible ducked for cover while the stunt made headlines the world over.

And this week, indeed just 24 hours before her dramatic loss to Rudd, Gillard was once again in the news, not for a policy announcement but for a photo shoot in a women's magazine. It was apparently the idea of her spin doctors, desperate to build bridges with a demographic of conservative, older women deemed to have been alienated by the prime minister's robust discussion of feminism – but Gillard was pilloried for being snapped knitting.

In most scenarios Gillard's tenacity and courage in the face of a kind of scrutiny and ugly voyeurism no male leader ever had to endure should have played well with at least half the electorate. Instead, faced with a hostile media and leading a minority government, she seems to have been utterly unable to communicate her legislative achievements, seemingly drowned out by the maelstrom of attention to her gender – and the never-ending destabilising conjecture about her rival's ambitions. Wave after wave of opinion polls has suggested that Labor, under Gillard, would face catastrophic defeat in the September general election.

And so it is that on Wednesday night, a spooked Labor party allowed Kevin Rudd to wreak his karmic revenge.

Of course, few will remember that in 2007, as Labor celebrations roared into the night after Rudd toppled John Howard, the long serving Liberal prime minister, a Rudd insider was quoted as saying: "He will be a nightmare but he was the only chance of winning the election." Today, six years later, that prescient observation has been played out, and Rudd is once again Labor's only chance.

Meanwhile, Australia has shown the world that it is not yet ready for a woman leader.

By Guest Contributor Ellen Oh, cross-posted from Hello Ello

When I do my diversity presentation for high schools, I open with this chart:

It’s an immediate attention grabber. Why? Because this highlights the gap in diversity of caucasian and POC authors. This is an informal survey taken by author Roxanne Gay that breaks out authors reviewed by the NYT in 2011 by race. Nearly 90% are caucasian. This by no means shows a complete breakdown of publishing. But I would venture to say that a more accurate number of published books might even further compound the gap between caucasian authors and POC authors.

Ms. Gay states in her article that “These days, it is difficult for any writer to get a book published. We’re all clawing. However, if you are a writer of color, not only do you face a steeper climb getting your book published, you face an even more arduous journey if you want that book to receive critical attention. It shouldn’t be this way. Writers deserve that same fighting chance regardless of who they are but here we are, talking about the same old thing—these institutional biases that even by a count of 2011 data, remain deeply ingrained.”

I am a person of color, a minority, and I am a published author. Did it feel like it was harder for me than a caucasian author to get published? I can’t answer that. I have no idea what their path to publication felt like. But I can talk about my own path and the roadblocks that I came across. I can talk about being told over and over again by other writers and publishing professionals that no one would buy a book about ancient Korea. I can talk about having my writing ridiculed by saying it reads like a bad translation of a Chinese book, even though English is my native language, and I’m not Chinese. I have numerous tales of the type of dissuading I endured, but I didn’t give up because I believed that there needed to be more books like mine out there. And I was extremely lucky to get published by a wonderful publisher.

I wrote a children’s book. Historically, children’s books have always been a wonderful place to find multicultural books… at least compared to other areas of publishing. With librarians and teachers looking for diversity, there have been many more multicultural titles in children’s publishing. Although I would not say it is the same for YA. In this aspect, I am speaking most specifically about chapter, picture and middle grade books. Or so I believed. But now I have a new graphic to share in my diversity presentations.

This is a new graphic by Lee & Low books that put an end to my rosy colored view of diversity and publishing in children’s. The percentage of books by and about people of color has hovered around 10% for nearly 20 years. When I first saw this graphic, I was absolutely stunned. I had no idea how little had changed. And when I read the accompanying articlehere, I found myself nodding my head in dismay.

Betsy Bird, School Library Journal blogger at A Fuse #8 said “The public outcry for more multicultural books has so far been more of a public whimper.” And I have to ask, why? Is the problem supply or is the problem demand?”

From the viewpoint of a minority woman, I believe the demand is there. But maybe the default of “white culture” is so ingrained that even minorities don’t know to demand for more. We read what is there. What’s available to us. They say girls read boy books but boys don’t read girl books. Is the parallel POC read white books but whites don’t read POC books? I don’t think so. I think that the truth is, they are not exposed to them.

Publishers seem to believe that multicultural books just don’t sell as well. But do they get the same marketing push as non-POC books? Are all things equal when they are sent out into the world? I would hazard a guess that they are not. Because if you do not believe that multi-cultural books will sell well, then you will not put the marketing money behind them and thereby you create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now I have been lucky, my books have had terrific marketing support from my publisher. So the question then goes to the other side of the coin. Where are the booksellers, the librarians, the teachers on pushing the multicultural books? It’s not just enough to ask publishers to publish the books, there must be help from the other side. There has to be a support system for these books once they are published, to help get them into the children’s hands. And that is not all up to the publisher.

I once asked a YA librarian if she thought there were enough diverse titles and she said that they were there, but you just have to know how to look for them. Isn’t that part of the problem? That they are invisible and no one knows about them? How are they shelved in bookstores and libraries? How easy are they to find? Of the 112 titles chosen by YALSA for the 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults list, less than 10% were by POC authors. The 2013 list is looking like it may fare even worse. So if teen librarians are looking to these lists that are so woefully underrepresented, does this not aggravate the underlying problem?

One thing that really stood out for me is this series of questions by Ms. Bird, “Finally, we need to officially address how we feel about white authors and illustrators writing books about people of other races. Is it never okay? Sometimes okay? Always okay?”

To this – I want to offer up a response from writer Claire Light because I couldn’t say it better:

What I want to add to the debate is a small piece of truth that gets glossed over. In response to the complaint of white writers about writing about people of color: “Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t,” I want to say: Absolutely.

It’s absolutely true. You’re damned either way. Race and racism exist in this society, and if you ignore them, you’re expressing a racial privilege…

If you do do it and get it “wrong”, you’ll get reamed, and rightfully so. It’s presumptuous of you to think that you have the right to represent a culture you don’t belong to if you can’t be bothered to properly examine and accurately portray that culture.

Further, if you do it and get it “right”, or rather, don’t get it wrong, you’ll still get reamed by members of that culture you’ve represented who rightfully resent a white writer’s success representing their culture. After all, every American ethnic minority has its writers: good and bad. The good writers are mostly ignored. Inevitably, some white writer will come along and do a bang-up job portraying that culture and will get–in one book, in one section of a book–more attention than the poc writer got over the course of three or five or ten books.

You’re a white writer trying to do the right thing, but no matter what you do, it’s wrong. And that’s so unfair to you, isn’t it?
Welcome to a tiny taste of what it’s like to be a person of color.

I want to tell you an honest truth people, because of all the racism I have endured in my life (and even seeing the racism my own children have had to face) I cannot help but resent when caucasians write about Asian culture. Yes, I resent them. I absolutely do. Yet, at the same time, I appreciate them for at least trying to do it, when they do it right.

It is a complicated situation. There is no easy answer. We need diversity in literature. We need it desperately. Diversity is not only for the under-represented—the truth is, diversity is important for everyone. All people need to be exposed to other races and other cultures in positive ways. All people need to learn tolerance and acceptance of differences. When we promote only a homogeneous view of society in our literature and our media, and deem books or movies about minorities as unsuccessful, it harms everyone. And so it is important that all authors include diversity in their books.

But there is that part of me that wonders why is it that when I see a list about what Asian fantasy books are out there, the books are predominantly by caucasian authors. Are POC writers not writing them or are they being passed over for books written by non-POC authors instead? And why is it that books by or about POC don’t tend to sell as well as other “mainstream” books. What is the difference? Is it the difference in how they are marketed? Is it their cover art? Where they are placed in the bookstore or library? How they are pushed or not pushed by the booksellers, librarians, and teachers?

The reality is, there are just not a lot of POC authors out there. We are not representing the 37% of our population when we only amount to 10% of publishing. When you look at diversity panels or even the YA tag in racebending.com, the authors tend to be predominantly white because they reflect publishing.

This is why I can’t help but be resentful. I freely admit it. It sucks being a POC author sometimes. You feel invisible. You feel passed over. And true or not, it feels harder for us to get to tell our own stories. And that shouldn’t be the way things are.

I want to see more of me in publishing. I want to see more POC authors overcoming the publishing barrier and writing about their cultures. I want to see diversity panels filled with… diversity! We need to be performing on stage with our counterparts, not just watching in the audience.

We need to represent.

We need to belong.

The Atlanta Braves re-issued their racist so-called "screaming savage" logo on their batting practice cap in December. Although the team eventually pulled it from players, the caps remain available for those who want to willfully ignore how offensive the imagery is.

Part of the problem with stereotypes about Natives in particular is the perpetual myth that there are no Natives in urban areas. So what happens when an urban Oglala Lakota journalist based in New York City spots a guy from the Bronx sporting the cap on the subway? Well, here's how it begins:

"What are you wearing?" I asked.

"What?" he responded. He surveyed his chest. "This?" He then gripped a thin gold chain on his neck.

"No. Your hat, man," I said. "What does it mean?"

"Oh, I don't know. Nothing," he responded. "It just matched my shoes."

"Ah, OK. ... Hey, I'm Simon."

"Sean."

"Are you from New York?" I asked.

"Yeah. Born and raised in the Bronx."

"Right on," I said.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"The West. Denver, specifically."

"Ah, visiting then."

"No," I blurted. "I live here now--in Brooklyn."

"That's cool," he said, nodding.

"Hey, you know," I shouted over the groan of the zipping train, "... I actually do know what your hat means. I was just wondering if you did."

"Oh yeah? I thought it was just a [dope] hat."

"Well it's actually a batting practice cap that was discontinued. It's called the 'Screaming Savage;' it's an Atlanta Braves hat."

Read the rest of Simon Moya-Smith's exchange with the anonymous cap wearer on Indian Country Media Today Network here.

Yup, it happened. Way back in 1971.

(H/T Upworthy)

A woman working night shifts in graphics for a major bank, talks of the systematic abuse and poor conditions she faced

• This monologue is part of a series in which people across the financial sector speak to Joris Luyendijk about their working lives

She is a woman in her mid-30s, not British, who goes by the name of Nyla Nox, but worked in banks under a different name. She requested no further details be given.

"The systemic abuse in banks is still being understated and not named as the deliberate social Darwinist system it is. Even in your interviews the banks seem too glamorous, home to the "best and brightest" . I closely observed thousands of bankers when they weren't trying to sell themselves. Is it impossible to speak the truth or to believe it?

"I worked on the 'graveyard shift' in the graphics department four nights a week, from midnight to 8am. Two years in one major bank and five in another, 'The Most Successful Bank in the Universe'.

"Although some of us worked there for years we were officially contractors and could be fired at any moment (luckily I never was). We had no sick pay, holidays, severance, bonus, nothing. But I saw more secrets in a month than most bankers in a lifetime; upcoming deals, trade flows, projections, takeovers. I could have sold it all.

"Our job is mostly layout and high-end graphics. From text and figures provided by the bankers we create a 'book' (the only tangible product clients get for their fees). Fairly high-skilled – technical, fast, constantly evolving. I enjoyed playing with the beautiful colours.

"The department was open 24/7 every day except Christmas. After midnight was busiest. Everything was always super-urgent, deadlines at 3, 4 or 7am. Often impossible to meet. When it got too hectic a top banker weeded out the task list. This made the bankers very angry. Of course, without these deadlines there wouldn't have been a graveyard shift for me to work on…

"Presentations and books were changed many times by different people who often seemed to work against each other and gave conflicting instructions. The bankers had no understanding of (or respect for) our work and usually thought they could do it better – until it all went wrong and they had to ask us to fix it. Poor sods, they were constantly humiliated and 'brought down' by their own superiors, as in a British private school.

"The weekend graveyard shift paid around £24 an hour. Daytime shifts were £14 pounds. Holidays you sometimes got double.

"The greatest thing about the job? The office of the Most Successful Bank in the Universe has a fantastically beautiful view. The roofs of central London, the Thames, St Paul's. I loved to watch the sunrise. The beauty of that I will never forget.

"There were no breaks, none, in an eight-hour graveyard shift. If your seat was empty for more than seven minutes, they'd dock your pay. Taking breaks was also 'against the culture', we were told on our first day. Every two hours we had a five-minute 'eye break' – a legal requirement for working with screens. An eight-hour shift meant three five-minute breaks. 'Don't take six!'

"The toilets were quite far away and you needed your company pass to go through the glass doors. When break time came you actually ran. Many of us had cystitis (a bladder infection).

"The kitchen was unimaginably filthy, especially on weekends when the whole floor wasn't cleaned between Friday night and Monday morning. The same with the toilets. Can you imagine? Hundreds of people (there were at least 200 bankers on the floor) went through the kitchen and toilets, and they weren't cleaned for 48 hours.

"During the week cleaners came around 3am. Again an unbelievable contrast with how this bank presents itself to the outside world. They wiped my desk with very old rags and water so dirty it was black. The hoovers blew clouds of dust over us. There were fleas in the carpet and on the trading floor the mice came out at night. (I choose to believe they were mice, anyway…).

"Around 5am, if the work flow died down, they'd often 'short-shift' us, send us home without pay. That created such uncertainty! All those needless and wasteful revisions must have cost 10 times more than they saved by cutting our shifts. Ironically, the uncertainty may have contributed to my staying on. There was something almost addictive about it, hoping I'd get to work four full shifts. "Maybe this time I'll win …"

"There were about 30 of us on the graveyard shift, sometimes more. Psychologists, scientists, a theologian, even an economist, teachers, artists, hosts of media studies graduates and the headmistress of a secondary school. Those with a big mortgage, student debt, young children were so scared of losing their jobs.

"Most were in their late 20s and early 30s, like most of the bankers. So one population was living their dream, the other their nightmare. And both saw the other as living proof of all that's wrong with society.

"I believe the bank actually promoted anger among the bankers, to bring out the predator in them. Meanwhile, we were depressed.

"We called ourselves the humanities proletariat. With an advanced degree in humanities you are trained, conditioned almost, to analyse these processes. Then we had to endure them, night after night. We also called it Siberia.

"Some of your interviewees say 'I wish I hadn't been loyal to the bank'. I never felt any loyalty. It was constantly appealed to; help out, work faster – unpaid. We'd get weekly emails from the CEO, addressing us like buddies, stressing how success is a team effort and so on. On busy nights emails like that always raised a few laughs. It was just so far removed from reality...

"I often thought of the Milgram experiments – how far will people go in hurting others when given authority without accountability? The shift leaders (and the quality control or QC department) were the worst bullies. Many of them had risen in the bank through support functions. Some of them were the only ones without a degree. They could make life difficult for bankers, too. They accidentally found themselves in a position of great power over others. How were management to know what supervisors were up to in the middle of the night? They wrote the shift reports themselves.

"Each shift had a supervisor and a QC 'style guide' representative. The QC guy would sit on a higher platform facing the room, and when you were new, after finishing a job, you had to get up, walk past 30 people and hand it over. Then they'd publicly tell you what you'd done wrong. Sometimes you had to repeat it aloud. Five or six times per night. This could also strike a veteran at any time. Even when you weren't subjected to it yourself you still had to sit there and listen to it.

"The environment – yes, I think I would call it abusive. The shouting of the bankers resembled constant gunfire. Night after night they crowded around me, pushing my chair, calling me incompetent and stupid. This was all under the watchful eye of our supervisors who harassed us afterwards for not keeping to the guidelines.

"A colleague worked the 8pm-4am shift. This meant you had to pay for a taxi home. But after she'd called her taxi, they'd make her do another correction, then another one, and another one. She was kept there, unpaid, while the taxi downstairs ran up a huge bill.

"Have you heard about 'the cull'? It applies to everyone at the bank, including support functions, contractors, secretaries etc. Up to 25% of staff are laid off every year, regardless of circumstances. 'Weed out the weakest so the strong can lead'.

There we were, four colleagues sitting in a row, and I'd count: when the cull comes, one of us will go. Who?

"About every three months and without warning or preparation we'd be taken to the basement for a test; 'best practice' rules and skills.

"The test result sorted us into four groups. When the cull came we'd expect group 4 to be fired but often people from groups 1 or 2 would go instead. People were scared for months because they were in group 4... I saw many good operators being fired while less successful ones stayed on, so it clearly wasn't about performance.

"I still have no idea why or how I survived every cull.

"The bullying was always just on the right side of legal. I told you about the mandatory five-minute break. Well, it could be denied for 'business reasons'. So there I was, in the middle of the night, trapped in a huge iron chair, hungry and thirsty, haven't had a break in two hours, I need the toilet and it's cold. It was always very cold.

"While it is true that other big institutions brutalise junior staff, in my experience the big banks are up there with the most hostile work environments. I overheard many conversations with senior bankers or started them myself. They would openly state their social Darwinist principles. For them the bank was engaged in aggressive selection of the fittest. 'I am dominant all the way through' was a popular self-description.

"Pushing juniors to the breaking point, making them 'jump through hoops' and brutalising them was not an accidental byproduct. It was a major element in selecting and shaping future leaders. It took me a while to figure this out but when they say 'leader' they mean 'predator'. Senior bankers called themselves 'top predators', like sharks or lions. This made junior bankers the dogs, very afraid of them while fighting for dominance within their own group. We were prey.

"I don't say this lightly but it is a proto-fascist ideology. This idea that 'I am the superior species' and you, being losers, deserve to be brutalised. But by calling it 'leadership' they decouple the ideology from racism and sexism. It's simply the 'best and brightest' and the rest of us are inferior. Have lunch or be lunch. And they're so open about it! Not being successful is your own fault. It's a super-Calvinist universe. Americans believed it the most.

The overwhelming majority of bankers at the Most Successful Bank in the Universe are male. Especially higher up. But in nature, lionesses are the predators. Male lions just sit around looking beautiful. Ha ha. Now, this is the sort of joke you just couldn't make at the Most Successful Bank in the Universe.

"What intrigues me is how the self-promoted superiority combines with flagrant wastefulness and incompetence. The much hyped 'excellence' simply doesn't exist. Much of the astronomically expensive specialist 'advice' was copied from existing books for other clients. How I know? Because in spite of the 300 revisions they had failed to replace all the names! Frequently they'd lift stuff straight from the client company's own publications. I often saw emails going round 'stop feeding clients their own material'. Never made any difference.

"Page Two of all books advising clients on their deals contained a disclaimer that 'nothing in this document can be interpreted as advice'. So the client is paying millions for your brilliant advice which has to be prefaced by a disclaimer that, actually...

"We did receive training on the Chinese walls, several sessions. An elderly lawyer came in and told us some lame jokes at the end of a very long shift. I fell asleep a couple of times.

"We mostly worked for the investment bankers (deal makers) but sometimes a desk neighbour had a job from the Trading Floor, officially 'behind the Chinese wall'. We could tell from the project codes.

"There are rules to enforce the Chinese walls such as a ban on speaking about business in the elevator. I heard so much in the elevator! And the cafeteria… People on both sides of a Chinese wall would be sitting there within earshot.

"At one point the regulator came to investigate a bank-wide insider trading case. I remembered the company involved really well because I had spent hours, no whole nights, redrawing their company logo – the bank often had us do that. They scheduled the interrogations for 8am. The head of our department (whom I had never seen before) came in and said: it's routine, you are not suspects, and here's a lawyer. I went, wow, how nice to provide an expensive lawyer!

"Now you must realise that by the end of a night shift your emotions are all over the place. The graveyard shift has so many fights, breakdowns, love affairs; working all through the night under those circumstances does funny things to you.

"The interrogators were two very young gentlemen, in shirts and red braces like cops from a US TV series. And suddenly I got very, very afraid. You can go to jail for insider trading. I was desperately trying to remember details of the deal when one of them suddenly leant forward, looked me in the eye and said: 'Did you do it?'

"I turned to the lawyer, asking him: 'You said they didn't suspect me?' He said nothing. Only then did it dawn on me that he wasn't there to protect me. He was there to protect the bank.

"So why do so few people act on the insider information they have? My explanation is that most of us just aren't crooks. We want to do our best, be a good person. Even under the most difficult circumstances.

• If you would like to comment on this interview, please visit the accompanying blogpost