Monthly Archives: January 2010

phoning it in.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates touches on something that I’ve been stuck on too with respect to the ‘freeze’ and POTUS most recent comment about his presidency:

Andrew also notes that it’s largely a symbolic measure, but has faith that Obama will eventually move to the hard choices around defense and entitlement. I don’t know. I think the way Obama has evidently decided to fold on health-care leaves me with little faith that he’ll actually do the hard work.

It is, potentially, like this with all presidents. And I heard his point the other day about being happy with serving as a great one-termer. But I’m struggling to understand what he deeply, truly believes in. What he believes must be done right now. What he’d fall on his sword for. Again, maybe it’s this way with all presidents, and maybe my larger beef is with electoral politics. I’ll sort it out over the next few weeks.

I feel a lot of ambivalence too. On one hand, I really hope that the freeze is a strategic boondoggle, symbolic as Andrew Sullivan says, to weather the midterm election season. Yet, I know that this ‘strategy’ won’t necessarily yield any substantive results in deflating the Right’s objections to the Democratic Party’s governance.  A freeze on discretionary spending won’t silence POTUS most vehement objectors. I’m not sure if anything will. If this is in fact a fake pass, that will allow POTUS to effectively quarterback the real work of governance -creating policies that support job creation and restore some balance to our economy– by canceling out aspirations for a second term, we’d be lucky.  It’s a leap of faith in taking that tact.

I’m not sure what Obama’s doing right now.  Junot Diaz wrote a piece for the New Yorker last week bemoaning the loss of story in Obama’s rhetoric as he moved from Candidate to President.  And although there’s some validity to that in terms of connecting the message of candidate and man capturing the imagination of the electorate (election platforms are aspirational), governance is an entirely different beast. I don’t need Obama to tell me a story to tuck me in at night. I need him to reform the banking system. There’s nothing inspirational about debating the merits of Glass-Steagall. I need for him to reform the banking system so my friends who run small businesses can secure loans to build and grow and hire people (ahem, job creation). I need for him to push for diplomacy that will inevitably lead to our military withdrawal out of Afghanistan and Iraq, which would reduce defense spending. There isn’t a pretty story for that. I need him to put a foot up the ass of the leadership of the Democratic Party to pass. the. damn. bill. already. Jeez.

This question about the state of our democracy, the state of our union, is invading my dreams. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed I had 8 missed calls from David Plouffe? And the only meaning I can derive from that is that these guys need our help.

bookmarks.

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As I read/edit submissions for an upcoming project that I’ll announce at later time, I’ve come across an assortment of interesting items on the internets.

I think that’s enough procrastination for now. *smile* Go Jets!

lost in translation.

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Warning: This is an extremely meta post.

In response to a recent NYT article in which I was quoted, a very clever reader I assume, googled me, found my Facebook profile and proceeded to send me the following message:

Speak for yourself. Asian and Indian men are raised pretty much by doctors and engineers, and doctors and engineers only. They get married relatively young, don’t cheat, don’t even look at other women, do more household chores than anyone and everyone, and expect their women to be equal (if not greater) partners who achieve at a similarly high level.

There are a lot of things problematic about this statement. One, I AM speaking for myself. Two, that generalization is sort of racist.

I feel like I grabbed the third rail of some conflict I’m not sure how to define. The Pew Report is interesting, however, as a culture, our response to its findings is fascinating. And not in a good way. At all. Some people are downright Catty McBitchy.

Others are misogynistic:

This is a disastrous trend. Can anyone name one society in history that has been dominated by women and which has prospered and survived. I can’t.

Others are comedians:

Big buff dude, who is for some reason shirtless in a library (who may also be carrying an axe in order to appear lumberjack manly): Hey babe, are you done with the microfiche?
Syreeta (turning slowly, flicking her hair, pushing her glasses down to the tip of her nose): Why yes, yes I am? Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a passport handy now would you?

Others just think I’m bitter:

‘I read the article in the Times that you were quoted in and looked you up online. Were You quoted correctly? “With men of any ethnic group, it’s a little intimidating for them to encounter smart women.”
Really? All men? All ethnic groups? The stereotypes that you generate are worse than the stereotypes than men generate about women, but you went to Sarah Lawrence, so I know that you are a bitter, angry, unbalanced and unpleasant young lady who will spend most of her life contriving ugly things to do and say about men (how’s that for a stereotype?)’

Um, WOW.  And regardless of whether or not I was quoted correctly, or because I went to one school over another and that says how I feel about everything is also a bit ridiculous. I also love the internet for encouraging some seriously bold assaults from people who wouldn’t dare say any of this to my face. Many of whom are women. Seriously. I’ve had more women assault me with vapid commentary about what they *think* I meant rather than engage me seriously about the conversation. People were angry, cynical, bitchy, frustrated, bitter or assumed that I and my lot are. *kanye shrug*

Continue reading →

remaining awake through a great revolution.

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The first words of a Martin Luther King speech I learned is from a speech he gave the night before he was murdered. My father knew this speech from memory. And on one cloudy Saturday afternoon in January 1982, he wrote it down and made me sit with him to memorize it.

There’s always a story that comes with a gesture like that. This is my father’s: he was 14 years old in 1968 and lived in Memphis. He had joined the sanitation workers march earlier in the week. He heard MLK give this speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis.  The rest… is history. I can assure you at 7 I didn’t fully understand the weight of these words. I knew they were important. I knew my father’s story in relation to those words were important. My father tried to teach me MLK’s intonation and inflection in his turn of phrase. In my little person voice, he wanted to evoke as much as possible the language and moment. So some weeks later, LP recordings of Martin Luther King’s speeches surfaced. I remembering listening to The Drum Major Instinct often.

I haven’t thought about those lazy Saturday afternoons in years. Or even the essays and speeches I wrote from elementary to high school for the Milwaukee Public School’s annual MLK Speech and Essay contests (yeah, just when you think it couldn’t get any nerdier in my past, booyah). But today, I’ve read some great posts from other writers about the other words he said beyond I Have A Dream that you can read here, here and here.  I’d also point out that the arc of the I Have A Dream speech in our sanitized canonization of King ignores the a key detail about  the March on Washington. The 1963 March was called the March on Washington for JOBS and FREEDOM. That was not a mistake.  A. Philip Randolf, a prominent union leader, was also a keynote speaker that day as well (something I also learned from recorded LPs of great black men in history courtesy of dear old dad) and according to some stories I’ve heard, was a better speech than King’s.  Yet, in King’s speech, he also clearly made an argument that not only addressed racial inequality, but also quality of life for workers. Civil Rights and unions have long history in mobilization and action.  A fine detail one discovers in college seminars or in documentaries.

I got the title of this post from a lesser known King speech given in the weeks before his death. It still carries a profound resonance today:

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

All of this is a longer way of saying, if you haven’t read his other speeches, please do. The social justice agenda is a common thread in all of his writings and speeches and worked  in concert with his philosophy regarding racial inequality and human rights. The call to action and the deep understanding that change takes great effort and perseverance.

there’s a party at the crossroads…

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A few months back this earworm invaded my mental mind and prompted me to post it as a stub. Today, it’s my writing prompt as I re-read Pygmalion and think about the code/switch.

For the uninitiated, here is a sampling of X-Clan’s tome to the complexity of black identity in the black and white imagination:

Let me tell you about blackness,
Grits and cornbread how can you act this?
I exist on a plane, where the jar is my brain, I’m livin’ to retrieve
cells,
Antenae my stick, picture bigger, made of liquor, figure,
The pull of the trigger goes zoom not boom,
Not a bunch of sissies, but saviors braver,
The red, black, and green,
It’s just so much more than red, black, and green,
You ask what I mean, but yet the sundial shades on lights and dreams,
Watch too late, oops, upside your head!
You drop through abyss like lead,
Where you goin’, what’s your speed, what’s your pleasure, what’s your
need,
Trees to branches, roots to seeds, forwards, backwards many
degrees,
Questions answers, what’s the sum?
We have come.

Continue reading →

#gentrification.

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cross-posted to postbourgie.com

”This is the spiritual capital of the African diaspora. Something had to be done.”

IBO BALTON, the housing department’s planning director for Manhattan, on Harlem. February, 2001

Ibo wandered in my office and was flattered that I had a photocopy of his NYT Quote of the Day taped to my wall when I worked for the city’s housing agency back in 2001. I remember telling him that I needed to have it there to remind me why we do what we do. He had come to ask me for a copy of the Bradhurst Negative Declaration (he was always asking me for a copy of the Bradhurst Neg Dec) but instead, he posed a question that clearly had been weighing on him, “Maybe we really are gentrifying Harlem?”

To be clear, we asked ourselves this question frequently.

Manhattan Community Board 10 is probably the regional equivalent to everyone’s idea of what Harlem is.  Bounded to the south by 110th Street, to the north by West 155th Street, to the west by Morningside Avenue and to the east by Fifth Avenue, Community Board 10 covers roughly 60 city blocks. Maybe more. And in 1998, the Community Board asked the City of New York to fight to bring middle class residents back into Harlem. One of the oldest residents and members of the board who had lived in Harlem all of her life, and was fortunate to own her home, knew that to make her community remain sustainable, meant that those acres of vacant lots along Frederick Douglass Boulevard and across West 116th Street, on the east end of Marcus Garvey Park (Mount Morris) needed the middle-income families.  She had already seen her share of public investment in her community, which unfortunately included a heavy saturation of low-income housing. And while there were a disproportionate amount of African-Americans who’d benefit, the black middle class had all but disappeared. Where were their housing opportunities? The best and brightest who were born and raised in Harlem leave and then return to see their community remain stagnant? Property taxes pay for infrastructure. Infrastructure supports communities. When wealth disappears from a community, how will it pay for itself? Public safety, street repair, all things that makes communities run? A mixed income community spends cash in their neighborhoods, creates and sustains jobs for local residents, spurs investment in open spaces and parks. It means that there’s a tax base to support the services the community demands.

So when an elder and owner of Harlem brownstone curses you out and tell you to make sure 55,000 square foot vacant property contain affordable AND market rate homeownership apartments because it brings an influx of stakeholders to her community, regardless of what color they look like, you do it.

All of this comes to forefront of my memory in reading the recent Times article about greater Harlem’s shifting demographics and the subsequent reactions to it. Many folks were offering compelling narratives of housing’s discrimination past, a history of institutional and economic racism. I get that and don’t dispute that legacy. However, I know and have been active participant in a different story. Continue reading →

rumors of death have been greatly exaggerated

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At least according to Alice Munro. The Guardian declared the short story form victor in 2009.

For us short story writers, this is quite encouraging news.  Yet, I’ve got some mix feelings about that declaration. Alice Munro isn’t necessarily a benchmark of the resurrection of short story. To some she IS the short story form, in all its glory. Any writer, or rather, any MFA student or graduate knows that, or  is taught to believe so. And that isn’t to say there isn’t merit to that declaration, I do actually like some of her stories (Labor Day Dinner), but I’ve widened my view on this over the years. I also feel that there is a lack of diversity of voices and experiences in what has become the canon for instructive fiction writing.  I realize I’m being obtuse; I’ll say more on that for another time.

Another long awaited short story collection made its debut last year, Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Ruined. And after reading so many of his stories over the past 5 years in literary magazines, I think it may have stole my thunderous excitement for the actual book when it was released in March. Still, if you haven’t read Tower, the title story gives you everything you need and more.

Personally, I’m still waiting to see Danielle Evans’ collection,  Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (knock on wood, Riverhead will publish later this year) while I wonder when ZZ Packer’s next project emerges from the ether.