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Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts

Friday, August 2, 2013

The UK Conversations, Part III: Minority relations

"Andrew," a member of a  UK-based production of The Laramie Project,  had some questions about Laramie life that would help him and his colleagues prepare for their roles.  The third question had to do with out patchy race relations in Wyoming: 
I was wondering if you might have a few words on the prison. I'm playing, as well as Dennis Shepard, Andrew Gomez the convict who met Aaron inside Jail. What was the Latino community in Laramie- very small? Thought of as outsiders, criminals? What jobs did they work?
In order to answer your questions on the jail a little better, I need to clarify: do you mean the county lockup, or the state prison where McKinney and Harrison sent after their conviction?  The one is in Laramie and basically a little side building next to the courthouse, but the other is in Rawlins. 

As for the Latino community, this is a question that I've been asked before, and don't feel super confident in answering, but I'll do my best.  The truth is that Laramie's Latino community was rarely thought about at all, almost an invisible population of sorts.  In fact, when I asked my husband Badger about their position in Laramie, he smirked and said, "you mean, they existed?"  That's a telling comment: even though the Latino population is the state's largest minority, they don't really "stand out," so to speak.   When I was in Laramie, I had almost no interaction with the Latino community per se on the campus, and this is where my isolation from the rest of the town makes it harder to speak with confidence.

If their treatment is anything like some of the other ethnic minorities in Wyoming, however, a lot of their status depends on whether they were born native to the region or not.  If you grew up in the region and understand its mores, you are largely accepted as part of the community, at least to a certain extent.  There's also a class difference, too: many of Laramie's minorities come in as highly educated professionals at the university and therefore have a privileged status in the community.  But those Latinos moving from other parts of the country without those credentials, and especially the 2% who emigrate from Mexico, are very much on the margins.   And, since Laramie's economy is not based on Wyoming's more prosperous mining, farming, and oil industries, that limits the number of good-paying jobs available to a population already pushed to the edges.

My sister Sparrowhawk was a foreman for a road construction subcontractor, and for a while my brother Coyote worked in the same company.  Sparrowhawk often had Latino crew members working as flagmen and maintainers. The rest of her road crew usually comprised of high school dropouts and recent parolees, if that gives you some idea of their relative social standing.  I think that many of them, like Aaron and Russ, also worked in roofing and construction.  As you can imagine, this leaves those families working these jobs in a precarious spot, especially if they have a language barrier working against them.  Construction is heavily seasonal work and often leaves people unemployed for months over the winter.  This marginalization seems all the more stark to me when you realize that the Mexican vaqueros (or "buckaroos" in my lingo) were the first and finest cowboys in North America, but to my very limited knowledge I never saw that many break into ranching around there.  

I have been told that some Native American and Latino families left Laramie after the Shepard murder because they felt physically threatened.  I can't vouch for that, but it makes a lot of sense to me.  As you may know, McKinney and Henderson were arrested initially for getting into a fight with two young men the day after they kidnapped Shepard; the cops found Shepard's identification and shoes in the truck, and that connected them to Matthew's beating.  What you may not know is that the two men McKinney attacked were Latinos.  Tiffany Edwards wrote an article on the confrontation in the Laramie Daily Boomerang after Matthew died: less than a day after attacking Shepard, McKinney pistol-whipped one of the young men, Emiliano Morales, after he slashed McKinney's truck tire.  The victim's father said that "[McKinney] would have done the same thing" to Emiliano that he had done to Shepard if he, like Matt, had been alone at the time.  Laramie Latinos, therefore, might very well have interpreted Matthew Shepard's murder as a warning against them just as much as the gay community did.  I can't confirm that this was the case.  But I could see why it might be true. 

The second reason is that our cultural landscape has never granted much of a place for displaced minorities.  Although Native Americans are also a minority in Laramie, they have a very clear place in the Western mythos; we need them to play a specific role in the stories we like tell about ourselves as a culture.  That doesn't translate to better social treatment, but they are at least recognized.  The Hispanic migrants don't have a historical role to play in our cultural memory, and that causes its own problems.   We overlook their contributions.  We take them for granted.  Sometimes we view them as dangerous.  Southern Wyoming has a very long history of bringing ethnic minorities in to work construction on our transportation lines and then brutalizing them.  If you have some spare time, just look up the phrase "Rock Springs Massacre" and you'll see what I mean. 

That's about all I have time for tonight...  I'll write again soon.   Until then,


Jackrabbit

Monday, August 30, 2010

Confessions of a conservative expatriate

I have a confession to make: I find myself perversely fascinated by the whole Park51 debate.  I often teach my freshmen about framing narratives in my 101 course, and the story frames surrounding this erstwhile "community center" for reasoned Islamic outreach turned "9/11 victory mosque," and the public flap which erupted with the change of story, is a perfect example of that. It just  goes to prove that it's not really events or circumstances that we often react to, but rather how we are told the story.  Although the article at Salon.com doesn't quite put it in those terms, Justin Elliot does a great job of showing the change in public opinion based on how the information was preached. It's interesting how nobody cared about people praying in that building for two years until someone connected it to 9/11 and went on a rant-fest. 

Ground Zero Mosque Supporters 4So anyhow, since I was at a protest a couple of weeks ago, I've been looking at the way the protest has progressed on Flickr just to compare notes.  In one picture, I saw this picture of a couple of little kids supporting the Park51 center with American flags in hand, and I smiled.  Then I saw a picture of a man across the street in a military T-shirt holding a crude drawing of the prophet Muhammad as a pig.  It had the word "pedophile" written across the top.  Then I really wanted to throw up.

Certainly, the whole Manhattan mosque debate isn't the only reason for my recent political ambivalence, but it sure crystallizes a lot of issues I've had with my moral place in the political universe recently.  You see, I have come to realize over the last few weeks that, while I still feel like I still have a lot to offer a conservative political philosophy, I look around at our rapidly-approaching mainstream Tea Party movement and the wackos who cling to its sides like remoras, only to discover that it has absolutely nothing to offer me.   I see hate and intolerance, violation of freedom out of fear, decisions gauged by reflex instead of reason...  what the hell just happened?  Where's the voice of reason in all this madness? If she's calling out, I can't hear it through all the static I'm getting from the hate-mongers. 

Certainly my dis-ease has been brewing for a while, but what has finally pushed me over the edge has been the response to the immigration and Islam debates.  There are no ideals backing up these ideas anymore.  It's entirely about fear.  We're terrified of the threat of the "other" so we try to force them into hiding with a noisy show of force. We make them out as less than human, and this entrenched fear, ironically, scares me.  For the sake of my own sanity and the people I am trying to help, I realized that I couldn't stay here any more, and I am now essentially a woman without a country.  It's time for me to pack my philosophical bags, move into exile, and pine for the loss of my homeland. I am no longer a conservative; I'm a refugee. 

Don't get me wrong: my identity as a "conservative" has always been an uneasy fit.  (Heck, I stopped being a "Republican" years ago.)  It's not always easy for a rabidly pro-gay justice freak who doesn't support the death penalty and supports affirmative action (though I would prefer that it be governed by socio-economic issues instead of race) to fit in even in the big-tent ideology of the conservative movement.  I still like the idea of fiscal responsibility.  I still think you can get things done better on the state rather than the federal level.  I'm still convinced that a tightly regulated capitalism is the best way to improve the lot of all people in the world (although that stance requires a lot of explanation, I know.) I see immigration reform as a necessity because it's a huge human rights issue; you can't turn a blind eye to people being shipped about and slaughtered like animals in the desert by coyotes just to make them second-class citizens without legal protections in the US.  And I truly feel that the Constitution is our best judge of how to protect the rights of both the greatest and least in our society.  We just have to let it do what it does best-- protect freedoms and limit interference of persons and institutions against the inalienable rights of the individual. 

But it's that last issue, the Constitution, that's been the last straw for me. I think what finally pushed me over the edge was all this talk about changing the Constitution on the one hand and ignoring what it says on the other.  There are mainstream conservatives-- some whom I have respected even when I haven't entirely agreed with them-- who have seriously considered looking into changing citizenship requirements listed in the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to people born on American soil.  And when Americans start protesting the right of other Americans to peacefully practice their faith-- and offering state land to a religious group to make everyone happy-- I really start to fret.  On the one hand, that interference in Park51's right to exist under the rule of New York law is a violation of the separation of church and state.  On the other hand, so is an elected official offering to give state land to a religious entity to incentivise the move, and both of these should have bothered true conservatives deeply.  But they're the ones promoting it. 
Ground Zero Mosque Protesters 7
I have yet to hear anyone patrolling the border or arguing against amnesty talk about the plight of those immigrants-- they're a "cancer" or a "drain."  Real American citizens are "anchor babies."  When asked where she'd like the Cordoba Initiative to move their Islamic center to if she didn't like it at Ground Zero, one woman said "they ought to move it to the Middle East."  When asked what injury or injustice building a moderate-leaning mosque would cause two blocks away from the WTC, the only response I've seen from opponents like these guys is that it's "offensive" or that their feelings are hurt.  The last time I checked, getting your feelings hurt wasn't a violation of your civil rights.  Preventing the free exercise of one's faith, however, in a privately owned building set aside for that purpose is. Besides-- let's take the whole WTC fiasco out of the equation entirely and look closer to home.  If that's the only reason this mosque is an issue, then why are two similar projects in my home state in Appalachia getting this same kind of resistance, with protesters in one nearby town bringing their dogs just to offend the Muslims? 

I wish that I could blame this on just a few crazies in the conservative movement, but I can't.  Conservative politicians whom I used to respect have weighed in on the mosque conflict, asking for it to be moved; Franklin Graham, whose charities I had previously supported, not only viciously opposes the Park51 mosque but recently called Obama a "Muslim," and he's extremely influential in my circles.  That makes him part of a too large minority in the conservative movement who seem to be calling the shots more and more.  Add that to the entire state of Arizona, several other states considering similar statutes, and the score of mainline conservative leaders seriously considering changing the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to native-born people based on the crimes of their parents, and I'm absolutely flummoxed.  I feel like I woke up on another planet.     
DSC_8879
I can no longer consider myself a member of an ideology whose fear has made them do violence to the First Amendment and seriously consider dismantling the Fourteenth.  With the exception of Prohibition (which was rightly fixed), basically all of the additions to the Bill of Rights have been to extend freedoms to the people, not to limit them.  And the proposed change to citizenship standards, as well as for a proposed Constitutional amendment preventing gay marriage, do the opposite.

I certainly hold no ill feelings towards those who, unlike me, have the fortitude to stay behind and fight this out on the front lines in the conservative movement; rather, I wish them well, for I know that if I were to stay it would wear me down.  All I know is that I can find no leadership who represents me, and I don't really know how to stay behind among them without tacitly supporting the same civil cancers I'm fighting against.  As such, I feel it's time for me-- at least for a little while-- to leave this homeland behind, not to reject it, but to kneel here at the waters of my American Babylon and lament its descent into madness. Welcome to exile, Jackrabbit. 


PHOTO CREDIT:
1)  Two young girls protesting on behalf of Park51, from david_shankbone's Flickr photostream. 
2)  NYC protesters against the Park51 mosque, from david_shankbone's Flickr photostream. 
3)  NYC protesters against the Park51 mosque, from asterix611's Flickr photostream.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Laughter may be the best medicine, but can it destroy hate?

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING 
FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED: 
There are pictures of both neo-Nazis and their opponents doing stupid things below. Let the viewer beware. 

Knoxville Protests the Nazis, 8/14/10
These kids were AWESOME.
A very strange thing happened here in my college hometown this past weekend-- we had about fifty National Socialists from freaking Michigan descend on our downtown and hold a rally against illegal immigration.  I really have no idea why they bothered coming to Appalachia, but they caused quite the gridlock in the downtown area because it took 400-500 police in riot gear to protect fifty Nazis from getting creamed by the enraged locals.  It was just so surreal-- I felt like I was on a different planet. 

They had a short (as in four block) parade down the main drag in our downtown area (which is called Gay Street, mind you) and parked their sorry neo-Nazi butts on our old courthouse lawn to spread their message of hate from an itty-bitty PA system.  Yours truly, along with about 100-200 other people, showed up for a counter-protest across the street.  Since I've written about the ethics of using humor to combat hate previously (but with Fred Phelps) I thought I'd show you the varieties of response I saw to the Nazis as they made total fools out of themselves.  I saw a lot of love, a little bit of hate... and a whole lot of humor.  And the humor really interests me, I have to admit. 

Okay, so if you don't want to be offended by racist people doing nasty things, go no farther. For the rest of you, let's start off with some pics of the so-called "master race" to set the mood for you...

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Laughing at the Devil

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING 
FOR THE EASILY DISGUSTED:
I am personally offended by my own post.  So proceed at your own risk.  :-)

So, in my last written post I shared with you a rather hilarious trend in Fred Phelps counter-protesting: silliness.  Irresponsibly, horrendously fun silliness.   From what I can tell, many protesters have realized that 1) Fred Phelps makes no sense, and 2) they like to protest because they just want the attention, so the counter-protests are making fun of these same two traits.  But if we compare these kinds of civil protest to operation "Angel Action,"  many of the counter-protests don't seem to have coherent message anymore. Others take the opportunity to undercut the power behind the one-two punch of hate that Fred Phelps dishes out by distorting his message, satirizing it to the point of absurdity.  You know, like these fellas.  (No points for originality there, fellas, but you get a B+ for style and an  A+ for chutzpah.) 

Part of me, I have to admit, absolutely loves this trend because it's so subversive.  Part of the power of hate is the ability to control somebody else's emotions or actions by making them feel small, or even worse, making them hate back.  That's the wonderful thing about satire: it breaks the blade of hate and sharpens the handle instead.  If nobody takes Fred Phelps seriously, if he has no emotional impact, then he doesn't have any power to hurt people anymore.  He just becomes the desperate, masturbatory attention slut he really has been the whole time. (Sorry for the language.  Just sayin'.)

On the other hand, I look at these protesters' refusal to take Phelps seriously, and I think that they don't understand how dangerous of a game they're playing.   Just pretending that a rattlesnake doesn't have fangs isn't going to keep people from getting bit.  The problem with Fred Phelps' rhetoric is that it leads to things with very real consequences: gay-targeted violence, intolerance, racism.  You can't make those real-world problems of evil go away by holding up a "FRED PHELPS IS GAY" placard in a protest.  To borrow a cliche from The Usual Suspects, the biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn't exist-- and convincing people that he's merely a buffoon isn't too far off.  Likewise, the worst thing that could possibly happen to social justice in this country is to convince the world that rhetoric like Phelps's doesn't matter.  It'd be too easy to ignore him, let this hate fester, and then when it breaks forth in a real way, wonder where it had come from.

For a different example: are you offended by "Emo Hitler?" Good-- he offends me, too.  That's why I put him in this post.  In some ways, pulling out Hitler as an exemplar in any debate feels like "jumping the shark," but that picture crystallizes so many of the ethical dilemmas of satirizing Phelps: how is the picture at left any different than what those two guys are doing to Phelps above, I have to wonder?  In a weird way, I kind of think they are equally dangerous-- and the humor in the satire undercuts the seriousness of the threat they pose. 

There's no good way to talk about the following subject without offending at least somebody, so I'll just let "Emo Hitler" and his Flock of Seagulls haircut ask the question for me: when is it okay to laugh at the devil? Or, do we have a moral imperative not to laugh, but to combat evil seriously, and head-on? That's what I'd like to explore today. 


Monday, March 29, 2010

Sometimes a Fruit is Not Just a Fruit

It seems that my campus has been having some race-related issues recently, which came to a head last week when somebody chucked a banana at a group of visiting African American students and their parents.  I am absolutely steamed.  I found out about it from an e-mail sent out by our university chancellor a couple days ago.  Here's what I read in the Chancellor's own words:
We have had an increase in the number of reported incidents of actions and language that reflect bias on our campus. These actions include derogatory and racist language found in our dormitories. We also had an incident where someone threw a banana at visiting African American students, their parents and guidance counselors. This incident was witnessed by some of our own UT ambassadors.

I am saddened and outraged by this behavior because it does not reflect our campus values or the mission of this great university. We will not tolerate disrespect, racism or bias on our campus.
I have to admit, the more I think about this, the more outraged I get. 
Okay, so it's a college campus full of undergrads, and it is in fact a huge land-grant university in the American South; things can get crazy here. I know that.  I've seen things get crazy here before.  They'd get equally crazy at home, too.  I mean, I've had fruit thrown at me by stupid, hulking boys running on Wild Turkey, testosterone and instinct, too.  Heck, somebody even left a butchered elk leg on the Honors house's front lawn once.  But there's a huge difference in this case.  When a couple PKA frat boys threw that orange at me and the other honors students in Laramie, it was just an orange.  It was rotten and smelly, but just an orange.  When that jerk tossed that banana at a group of black students visiting the campus, it was a symbol-- and in this case, the symbol hit a lot harder than the object itself.   That symbol said, you are one step lower than a human.  It said, you don't belong here with rational creatures. GTFO. 

Right now, I just absolutely burn with shame for those kids and their parents, mostly because a sacred, long-standing illusion about college just got ripped away from them: they can't think of the campus as a safe haven anymore.  I went to high school in Wyoming, and when surrounded by the stupidity, racism, sexism and intolerance typical of your average group of sixteen year-olds, I'd say to myself, only two more years and I can get out.  I had seen friends harassed or pushed into fights, and I'd count down the months: just 18 more months to college...  then I went to college and somebody bludgeoned a gay student to death with a pistol two months later.  I never again had a feeling of having a safe haven at college.  Laramie was a battleground instead, and it wore me out.  Everyone has the right to a space where they can feel safe, don't they? 

I was talking about this incident with a co-worker, an undergraduate, the morning after the letter went out, and his frustration was palpable.  For him, that act shattered the illusion of safety for him, too. "Look," he told me, "I was one of, like, three black kids in my entire high school.  I always kept telling myself that things would be better once I got out of town, and I got to college.  You know, that not every place was like my high school."   He said that he wasn't angry so much as deeply disappointed.

Maybe we don't get to pretend this kind of ugliness in the world doesn't exist when we're on a college campus; maybe we don't get to be that naive, to live in our nice, cushy ivory tower and be more enlightened than everyone else.  But in the words of my co-worker, if you don't get to open up and feel free from that kind of humiliation and bigotry at a university... is any place safe?  Where can people just be ourselves? 

So, I would just like to say to the jerk who threw that banana: if I find you, I'm going to throw something at you, too, but it isn't going to be a piece of fruit.  It's going to be a copy of the student Honor Code.  Oh, and it's going to be wrapped around a dead skunk.  Read into the symbolism of that all you want, you bastard. 



PHOTO CREDIT:

"it is not a banana," by/from -eko-'s Flickr photostream:

"Keep the Dream Alive," by Drew Myers: