You can’t afford to lose your temper when you’re poor

A few things about the extraordinary vulnerability of being a parent who is poor:

• You can’t afford to lose your temper. (You could lose everything).
• You can’t afford to unwind by sharing your problems with someone.
• You can’t afford to be tired and stressed and making less than perfect decisions.
• You can’t afford to cobble together solutions; for your own protection cobbled together solutions are illegal.
• You can’t afford to take time off work to deal with your kid, who is now stressed and tired and making not so great decisions, too.
• You can’t afford to pay fines, even ‘reasonable’ ones – so you end up being imprisoned.

No prizes for guessing the race of this mother who is now in jail in New Jersey.

 

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On hypocrisy and feminism and men

Kiese Laymon’s debut novel, Long Division has just been published and I can’t wait to read it. Laymon is an incredibly perceptive writer (I’ve talked about him before here) and I don’t want to fangirl him too much but even his Facebook messages make for thoughtful reading.

Here’s an essay from last year by Laymon in Gawker – “Kanye West is better at his job than I am at mine (but I’m way better at being a fake-ass feminist)” that reminds me that if we aren’t finding our social justice politics a struggle then we probably aren’t really living them and that our personal relationships are usually where our most brutal hypocrisies present themselves. I wish we talked more about that part of our lives.

A month or so later, I sat in front of a computer screen in New York and wrote a piece critiquing Les for reducing my Grandma to a cat and Kanye for the destructive gender politics in his art. I ended the piece with what I thought was a harpoon to Les’s gizzard: “I should have asked Les if he deserved to ever have his hand held by a woman.”

The essay generally, and that sentence specifically, helped me run away from truth, reckoning and meaningful change. I don’t want to run any more.

I am better at fucking up the lives of women who have unconditionally loved me than Les is at lying and Kanye West is at making brilliant American music. And even worse than the bruising parts of Kanye’s art, the paranoid femiphobia of HaLester Myers, or the pimpish persona of Stevie J, the abusive gender politics of Paul Ryan and Todd Akin, the thousands of confused brothers out there who think “misogyny” is the newest Italian dish at Olive Garden, I have intimately fucked up women’s lives while congratulating myself for not being Kanye West, Les Myers, Stevie J, Paul Ryan, Todd Akin or the brothers who like that misogyny with a few breadsticks.

Even before the essay, I wanted the fact that I’ve read, and taken notes, on everything ever published by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Imani Perry, dream hampton and Rebecca Walker to prove to everyone — especially women I’m interested in — that I’m way too thoughtful to be a dickhead. I wanted folks to know I’ve made my male students reckon with being born potential rapists, that I have defended black girls in need of abortions from rabid pro-lifers at abortion clinics in Mississippi. I wanted women to know I was a man who would always ask, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to do this?”

I couldn’t wait to tell some men –- but only when in the presence of women — how sexism, like racism and that annoying American inclination to cling to innocence, was as present in our blood as oxygen. When asked to prove it, I’d dutifully spit some sorry-sounding mash up of Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West and Mark Anthony Neal. But just like them, I never said that I know I’m sexist, misogynist and typical because I routinely fuck up the lives of women in ways that they can rarely fuck up my life. I never said that I’ve used black feminism as a convenient shield, a wonderful sleep aid, and a rusted shank to emotionally injure human beings who would do everything to avoid emotionally injuring me.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. And of course there are all kinds of qualifications and conditions I want to explore, but beneath all of that conditional bullshit lies a lot truth, a bit of reckoning and the possibility of change.

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Best t-shirt

Willow Smith in a t-shirt celebrating feminist icons. Image via For Harriet: celebrating the fullness of black womanhood.

UPDATE: Rats, it’s photoshopped, but there’s a link for where you can buy the t-shirt.

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Always stay rooted somewhere

This poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.” You must read it.

(I have very fond memories of my childhood in the Middle East and it has been very sad for me to see the blanket distrust of Middle Eastern cultures that has emerged in the West in recent times).

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“A world that is threatened by any display of Black boys and Black men bearing pain”

Rosa Cabrera (who also wrote this piece I admired) has written this wonderful essay in The Feminist Wire, “Black Feminist and Dominican: How Black Male Writers Shape My Practice”. She’s not only the daughter of a black man, she’s also the mother of a young son so loving and understanding black masculinity is right in the heart of her feminism at the moment and she’s a terribly introspective writer. Lovely stuff.

I can’t really know what its like to be conditioned to suffer privately.  The world seems pretty comfortable with the image of the damsel in distress, although to most people I’m close to, its an insult. So, to be forced to suffer privately I think has something to do with the way Black men respond to guns aimed at them by manic police or their own brothers, being publicly shamed for writing about what they see, the word nigger being delivered with inflicting threat, being pushed out of school, and being told by their mamas that they need to be better at being white than white people themselves, for their own safety.  I think Black Southern writer, Kiese Laymon’s decaying emotional checkpoint, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” echoing within him as he strikes back with fists, suicidal dares, or becomes trapped in a blazing instability in the face of these life-threatening moments as described in “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance,” and Baldwin’s freezing blood before he flings that water filled mug, has something to do with needing to shout back at a world that is threatened by any display of Black boys and Black men bearing pain. When I read the line, “I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America,” I feel like Kiese Laymon takes the gun he has turned on himself, the gun the world has turned on Black boys and men, and instead aims it at that bodiless, aggregating villain that’s been keeping an apartheid wall between the hearts of men I attempt to love, beginning with my father, and my own heart.

The concluding statements in her essay, where Cabrera ties her questions back to her feminism, are incredibly thought-provoking but I won’t give them away here. She also has a kickstarter running at the moment for her memoir which you can support here. Hurry, final days.

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Looking for Aboriginal feminism?

I’ve always been ambivalent about having children, and whilst I have been told by far too many people that I have a natural nurturing side, I haven’t necessarily felt a need to channel that nurturing in to children of my own. Yet at this point in time I am feeling an extraordinary amount of pressure to become less ambivalent about child-bearing, whether it’s from society wondering what the hell a 35 year old woman is doing showing no signs of settling down, or family who have taken it upon themselves to make comments on my childlessness.

Honestly, as part of an Indigenous Australian family I thought I may be buffered from this a bit due to the fact that culturally I’m already a mother, and a grandmother, but apparently I am missing out on something huge, or so I’ve been told, and I won’t be complete if I don’t have children. Yep, even with kinship at play, it still seems to be rather unthinkable that an Aboriginal woman hasn’t given having her own children much thought.

From Celeste Liddle’s guest post, “Turning 35 and the quandaries of “reproductive choice”" at Crikey. I really like the perspective she provides in this excerpt on ‘mothering’ in Aboriginal culture. We’re very individualistic in Anglo Saxon culture so ‘mothering’ is defined in a restrictive way reflecting those cultural values. If maternal feminism only gets written about by white feminists then you can see how our insights will be limited.

More of Liddle’s writing can be found at the fantastic Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist. Looooove.

(Thanks so much to Claire B. for the link).

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Twitter and decontextualising

Here is a truly wonderful interview in Mother Jones with Teju Cole about his drone strike tweets and our empathy gap, but he also ends up saying some very clever things about Twitter, too. I’m a huge fan of Twitter, which for me is a place where pop culture, politics and conversation converge. The 140 character limit also makes it all a bit like an artform. And Cole’s ability to inject real and stunning social justice into that heady mix is quite extraordinary.

Part of the appeal of Small Fates is that I could put something into people’s day that I knew was completely different from what they were seeing. It wasn’t the only serious thing in their timeline, but it would be the only thing that would arrive with this extreme lack of context—because you have a context for the jokes, you have a context for the news reports that had links, and then the usual “I’m reading this book” or “I just ate the most delicious pizza” or whatever. That’s sort of the voicing of Twitter. And then, you know, the Small Fates sort of arrive with a kind of intricate and decontextualized detail about lives that you knew nothing about. Each Small Fate was completely new and completely out of context, and that sort of helped them stand on their own.

MJ: Why did you stop doing Small Fates?

TJ: I had wrote a few thousand of these, and I felt like I had sort of delivered. I didn’t want to be tied down to—how do I put it…the more followers you have, the more interesting it gets what reader response means. It’s almost as if it was time to stop because too many people were enjoying them. You know what I mean? The temptation to now entertain is absolutely not what I’m doing. I’m trying to do the opposite of entertaining.

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Parenting anxiety and pop culture

The whole interview between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Harold Pollack in The Atlantic is worth reading but I especially liked this bit where they examine the anxiety we have about young people and the pop culture they consume. I am re-thinking some of my own ideas about feminist parenting at the moment, like I said in this article - I want to parent in the world I live in more than I want to shield my children from that world, and this discussion was very relevant to that. My children are quite young so their consumption of pop culture is still easily controlled by me but I hope I can avoid being too reactionary to their choices when they’re old enough to exercise them while also communicating my values to them.

Harold Pollack: What shall we make of the tougher edges of hip-hop and pop culture consumed by young people? One can over-react to this. Much of the raunchiness of hip-hop is a reflection rather than a cause of the tough conditions in urban life. Still, I do worry that American youth are fed some pretty toxic messages about gender, violence, and other matters. I’ve always thought that immigrants and outsiders enjoy a real advantage because they are a bit more insulated from the dreck of American youth culture.

It’s not crazy to worry that African-American and Latino youth are particularly harmed by this stuff. The youth workers I know are quite concerned, for example, when rappers such as Chief Keef clown around with guns on video.

As a parent and as a social commentator, how do you think about these issues? Are they overblown? Is there some sensible sense that avoids Tipper-Gore-style prudishness but that also avoids naïve cultural complacency?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: So glad you asked this question — especially given my full-throated endorsement of Kendrick Lamar. I don’t think they’re overblown, so much as I think they’re misunderstood. I can’t really vouch for Chief Keef. I haven’t given him a good listen. But one major mistake that I think people make with hip-hop — and perhaps with pop culture at large — is that they tend to think of it as promoting certain values. It’s easy to make that assumption given the actual lyrics which do involve exulting the life of the urban outlaw and all its attendant aspects. Mastering and dispensing violence is a large part of that. But I think it’s worth asking, “Why do kids listen to violent hip-hop?” I highly doubt the answer is “To find an applicable value system.” As someone who had NWA’s first album, and has fond memories of the Geto Boys, I would suggest that what the kids go there for — beyond the beat of the music — is fantasy.

I don’t think hip-hop so much reflects these violent neighborhoods, as it serves as therapy for the young boys who live in them. It offers a vicarious world where every puerile desire is instantly met. If you listen really closely to music, you will hear it pulsing with teenage insecurity and the angst of the youth. In hip-hop, young people are able to express sentiments and feelings, many of them negative, which they can’t really express elsewhere. Living, from the time you are born, with the threat of existential violence is stressful. Stress leads to anger and fear. We don’t generally express our anger and fear by saying, “I love the world” or “I pray for an end to world hunger.” Living around violence might make you say those things. But the stress of it more often will probably leave you with a string of curse words on your tongue. Moreover, it might even make you want to convert all of those negative feelings into a persona which can’t be killed by other males, which never feels rejection from females, and is generally free to engage all its hedonistic desires.

I think that’s right. Of course, much of the critique of hip-hop confuses effects for causes here. The nihilism in the music stems from the nihilistic real-world environment, not the other way around. There’s also certain troubling feedback loop, whereby the music you turn to for release and otherwise-forbidden expression of your reality may be psychically problematic. Adults figured out a long time ago that there’s a buck to be made on MTV or BET from calibrated excesses that hit the lowest common denominator in youth culture. You can make more money hawking sex and violence than you can by depicting what happens two years after the bullets go flying, when a shooter sits in an 8×12 cage, and the victim is left wearing a colostomy bag.

I have to say, I’m 37 now. And there’s certainly stuff I can’t listen to. But when I was in the target age rage I was boiling over with angst. Hip-hop was where I went to work it out. My son listens to a lot of bad music that does the same for him. I would never stop him from doing that. But I do try to engage him. I’ll tell you a story: When I was 14 I had an NWA album which included a song about oral sex which was really degrading to women. I was listening to it in my Walkman one day in the car, while my dad was driving. He asked what I was listening to and then told me to put it in the tape-deck. I reluctantly did this. We listened and then he gave me a long forceful talk about how women should be regarded. But more importantly, he handed the tape back to me. He left me with a choice and the choice wasn’t over where to get my values from, it was over what fantasies I would countenance and what fantasies I wouldn’t.

This is a great story, which underscores (among other things) the role of the actual adult human beings in kids’ lives. We’re the ones who ignore, moderate, or aggravate whatever broader influences reach our kids from other places. As I mentioned, I have two daughters, age 18 and age 16. I hate to think that their boyfriends and future marriage partners are learning about women from music videos or the Sports Illustrated bathing suit issue. Yet what really matters is what these young men hear and see among the adults around them.

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A couple of things to bear in mind with the ‘slacker mum’ movement

Jane Caro has just written a rather charming article, “Over-mothered? No, over mothering” for the Sydney Morning Herald.

For birthdays, I bought two packs of 12 lamington fingers and stuck a candle in each one. They served a whole class.

I was very bad at any sort of preparation. I only once helped a daughter with a project – we couldn’t find a ruler, the glue had dried up, as had the textas, and the eventual product on creased blue cardboard looked like the cat threw up on it. The only photo we could dredge up of a marine creature was of brain coral. ”That’ll have to do!” I screeched at her. I think she’d had fantasies of whales, dolphins or seahorses. I went into the classroom a few days later only to see it displayed on the wall alongside other pristine, laminated dissertations on more glamorous sea creatures. Surprised to see it so honoured, I asked the teacher why it took pride of place. ”Ah,” she said, ”because she so obviously did it all by herself.” Once again, sheer incompetence came up trumps.

When it came time for the weekly swimming lessons, I invariably realised I hadn’t unpacked the cossie from last time. ”Oh well,” I reasoned as I forced them to don their damp, mouldy, smelly togs, ”they’re only going to get wet again anyway.”

There’s a lot I love about this piece but it reminds me that I am also a little skeptical of this stuff. I’m a big fan of slacker mums and relate to much of what the movement is expressing about unrealistic standards in mothering. But I want to raise a couple of cautions here given such confessions are becoming big in the media at the moment. Firstly, there’s a lot of in-built classism in slacker mothering, as I noted way back in 2008 when I first wrote about the ‘slacker mothers/mothers who drink’ phenomenon.

Almost certainly, a mother from a low socio-economic group wouldn’t get away with a book of this kind of humour, she’d risk being seen as neglectful rather than endearingly chaotic – imagine if the mothers in that New York Times article were drinking bourbon and cokes instead of Cavit pinot grigio, would this be seen as the emergence of a trend in sophisticated motherhood?

And as I also observed back then in 2008, the slacker mum movement often neglects to directly acknowledge the debt it owes feminism. It’s frequently liberation without the radicalism. This means the discussion can lack perspective and a sense of purpose. And that becomes particularly apparent when you read supposedly confessional pieces that are pulling their punches, something I refer to in this article of mine at Daily Life. If your ‘revealing truths’ reinforce how much you belong to the most powerful income/class groups of mothers then while you’re taking a risk in revealing them it’s not a particularly big one, and you’re probably not liberating a genuinely marginalised mother, such as a teenage mother, or a mother with a drug addiction, or a mother in poverty who wouldn’t get away with that same slackness without facing the threat of more serious repercussions.

Finally, the slacker mother movement seems to be taking a nasty turn lately towards judging mothers it sees as being too dedicated to the pursuit of motherhood. This begs the question what business is it of yours how another mother does her care work, because it’s inherently sexist that we routinely consider women’s lives our business and that we also have so many ways to criticise women? Also, are you sure she isn’t the oppressed minority, rather than you? In which case, step off her neck you big bully, she’s got enough on her plate. Lauren Rosewarne’s piece for The Drum was a classic example of this problem, in my opinion, as was Mia Freedman’s piece about birth activists, which I tackled in this article of mine at Essential Baby. Even Caro’s piece, which is notably about “over-mothering,” pictures ‘intervention-free birthers’ as some dominating group of mothers she is bravely breaking free of when, actually, having a medicalised birth is hardly taking the path of most resistance in Australia. (I should probably disclose here that I have a foot in both camps having chosen a birth centre ‘intervention-free’ birth for my first baby and a hospital birth with an epidural for my second baby).

If you actively engage with the feminist parenting community then you’ll find that breast-feeders, baby-wearers, home-birthers and even, the organic food types aren’t all the stereotypes you believe them to be. I’ve found many of these mothers have the more radical feminism of parents in the feminist community. And they are often political and quick to defend marginalised mothers, too. Maybe this is because I’ve found that quite a number of them are also, themselves, black or single or disabled or very young or a multitude of other identities that lead them to be marginalised. Mothers are rarely simple stereotypes. If slacker mothering is about liberating mothers then it’s important that it actually does.

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

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It’s not just the private sector that preys upon the poor

It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration…

.. I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net.

Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

From Barbara Ehrenreich with “How the poor are made to pay for their poverty” in The Guardian. Essential reading for policy makers. The slippery slope where extra government fines, fees and policing ensnare the poor and if they can’t pay these charges they begin to land in jail is one of the key factors behind the over-representation of Aboriginal Australians in prison. Traffic violations as a conveyor belt to incarceration.

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