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

Uncivil Unions: Why This Jesus-Lover Didn't Sign the Manhattan Declaration

A few months ago I was part of a Veritas planning team to bring in a speaker to our campus.  (If you haven't heard of Veritas, it's a great Christian scholastic organization.)  We brought in a eminent early Christianity scholar to talk with one of our religious studies professors about the creation of the idea of the "heretic" in Late Antiquity.  He was a wonderful speaker.  We also asked him to speak to Christian students about being a Christian academic and how to balance the two.   This speaker, whom I helped bring to campus and whom I genuinely like as a human being, humanitarian and scholar, announced to a room of my colleagues that some moral issues are universally recognized as critical to the Church, like abortion and gay marriage, and that he had therefore signed the Manhattan Declaration as a result.  He implicitly suggested that we as good Christians and role models should do the same.  I flinched. 

The truth is, even though I'm an evangelical Christian for the most part (I do have some liturgical tendencies), I'm no real fan of The Manhattan Declaration.   If you haven't heard of it, this is a religious manifesto created, in their own words, "in defense of the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty. It issues a clarion call to Christians to adhere firmly to their convictions in these three areas."  I was originally interested in it because this is the first time in a while that I've seen Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist and Charismatic Christians of every stripe actually agree on something. 

Normally, I'm a huge fan of such ecumenical movements because 1) I don't believe in divisions in the body of Christ and 2) I spent six years in a denomination where the lion's share of its members doubted whether any the other denominations were actually Christians.  But this brand of ecumenism... well, I'm not sure I like this one.  On the one hand, I am a firm pro-lifer (with reservations about approach) and I'm a huge proponent of religious freedom for all faiths.

But then there's that third tenet: the "defense of traditional marriage."  As you all doubtlessly know, I find myself stuck between the two main communities on this one.  On the one hand, I am a straight evangelical.  I know what the traditional interpretations of Scripture says on this one, and that's something I'm still struggling to understand for myself, and the more I do, the more I find myself on the other side of the issue from my compatriots.  On the other hand, I know intimately the degree to which the Christian moral conviction against sexual sin is really a veil over a deep-rooted homophobia.  I've seen it.  That's why I'm actively participating in our local LGBTA and trying to get my co-religionists to realize that they have a moral obligation to reach out to the LGBT community with love, compassion, and acceptance no differently than we're supposed to be doing to the rest of the world.  And I firmly believe that the church as a whole needs to reach out to the gay community to ask for forgiveness for our sins against them.  The most horrible "coming out" stories I've heard nearly always come from the most zealous Christian families and congregations.

Secondly, I don't like the entire premise of their argument, their reason for drafting the declaration, and the assumptions it makes.   It's based upon a premise that I simply can't accept, Biblically speaking, and one that has been bothering me for quite a while now, long before I'd heard of the Declaration. Besides,  I think it odd that Christians who can't even always agree on the first seven councils of the Church can all agree that gay people shouldn't get married.  So, we can't even agree on the procession of the Holy Spirit or the nature of the Trinity, but we can all agree that we don't like gay couples?!  There seems to be a strange disconnect here with the Manhattan Declaration and the relationship between God and society they create, so that's what I want to spend some time thinking about for a few posts as I work on some more material for TLP.

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:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekosystem/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

"Keep the Dream Alive," by Drew Myers:

I Cannot BELIEVE What I'm Looking At...

Governor of Wyoming, originally uploaded by micdsphotos.

Okay, so I've spent a lot of time prowling Flickr over the last few weeks looking at theater shoots of TLP and TLP: 10 Years Later just to look at things like staging and whatnot. For the most part, I've been rather impressed at what I've seen, and it's ranged from full-scale professional productions to shoestring budget high school productions. And then I ran into this and just about gagged.  I now know how bad a bad production of The Laramie Project can actually get. 

The cultural travesty you're looking at above is from a St. Louis production of The Laramie Project in 2008 put on by the Mary Institute and St. Louis Day School (yes, I'm calling them out). You can view the entire set here if you like (and hilarity will ensue).   If I can believe the caption, that's supposed to be the former Governer of Wyoming, Jim Geringer, pictured above. What.  The.  Heck. 

First of all, what the hell is this guy wearing? Even the Brushpopper shirts that got really popular about fifteen years ago, which can be pretty darn loud, aren't usually this extreme.   I haven't seen anybody wear a shirt that ugly outside of a rodeo ring or southwestern Texas (I mean, the embroidery and cut do have a traditional Tejano flair to them, no?).  And then there's the snaps.  It's a freaking snap shirt.  Anymore, snap shirts are mostly for old people with sore fingers like my father or fratboy Kid Rock wannabes who like to pretend they're all cowboy in their beat-up straw hats and ostrich skin boots.  And then the hat....  it's got to be at least one full size too big for his head.  Besides, usually those enormous ten-gallon affairs only show up on Texans; if you wear a sail that big that on your head in the Wyoming wind, you're just asking to lose it.  And a bolo tie?  With a concho on it?  If you dress like that in Wyoming and you're under a certain age, it's usually because you're trying to play it up.  You know, at a rodeo or a livestock auction.  It's just not a part of the everyday wardrobe anymore. 

Second of all, where the hell did he dredge up those glasses? I mean, seriously? Highway patrolman reflective aviator's glasses? With that sneer on his face, he looks like Cartman off of South Park taking about people "disrespectin' his authoritah."  (Although I have to admit, I thought I saw a picture of Doc Connor wearing a pair of those once.)  It's like that scene in Back to the Future 3 where Doc dresses Marty up like a rhinestone cowboy in a fringed lamé shirt to go back in time and Doc reassures him with something like, "Of course this is accurate.  I based this outfit on painstaking research."  (Please tell me somebody else remembers that movie...)

Okay, so I know that this is a (big budget) high school production, so I shouldn't get too wrapped around the axle about this.  But there was an adult directing this thing, right?  You know, one that knows the difference between an insulting, culturally insensitive parody of Wyoming and an insulting, culturally insensitive parody of Texas?

Anyhow, I had better shut up. But just to add to the jocularity, here's a picture of the REAL former Governer of Wyoming, Jim Geringer, with no bolo, no sunglasses, and no cowboy hat.  No kidding:

Keynote Speaker, Geringer, originally uploaded by WyGISC. (via Flickr.)

This rant has been provided for your reading enjoyment by a very indignant Wyoming Jackrabbit.   Thankyouverymuch.