I've been on hiatus from not only my blog, but everyone else's, and I finally started catching up today, only to find that one of the most inspiring and influential activists/writers/theorists I've been introduced to has discontinued her blog.  (Feministe has links to background and further reflections.)

Essentially, BfP called out a white feminist blogger with a larger audience and more mainstream success for writing an online article about immigration as gendered violence that failed to link to the people of color bloggers who have advanced analyses of immigration in recent years.  BfP is one of those bloggers, and the writer she called out is known to be a long-standing reader and participant at BfP's blog.  As someone who struggled throughout postgrad to write essays in which every sentence wasn't footnoted because I was so zealous about attribution to the scholars who influenced my work, I can't understand this at all.  Why would you not acknowledge your influences, both to be intellectually ethical, and to allow your own readers to explore those influences themselves?  Why would you not use your platform to advance the work of people you read who others might not yet know about?

BfP pointed out the injustice of this situation and how it contributes to the marginalization of the work of people who are already pushed to the edges of the academy, the blogosphere, society.  She was attacked by men and women who identify as feminist, called names, and told she was divisive, a troublemaker, a traitor to the cause.  I am appalled, I am outraged, I am sadly not surprised.  And yet again, I wonder whether the identifier "feminist," which I've used for more than half my life, is one I want to continue to claim when it rolls me in with people who refuse to learn, who refuse to reflect, who refuse to treat others with dignity.  Do I want to include myself with people whose words and actions were intended to hurt someone I admire, and contributed to the loss of a space where not only one but many amazing writers and thinkers and activists came together and supported and challenged and advanced each other? 

Sudy speaks much truth: 

Read me clearly: there is no point to feminism if it does not actively address its racism with its agenda. There is no point to feminism if it does not address its racist history, racist matriarchy, racist icons, racist literature, racist imagery, racist publications, racist presence. To claim we're all female and unite under one cause of gender does. not. work. History never lies. This model has left more marginalized women in the road than we can count.

Immigrant communities are living in near-constant fear, with little "safety"; women and trans and gender-nonconforming people are suffering gender-based violence at the hands of federal immigration officials; and the movement for immigration-policy reform is arguably the largest mass movement in the United States today.

Where are white feminists?

- On Prisons, Borders, Safety and Privilege: An Open Letter to White Feminists by Jessica Hoffman (via Feministe)

And that's just the tip of the iceberg - Hoffman's challenge to white feminists is self-reflective and intense, and well worth reading, even for those who don't identify as feminist.  This will provide some intense fuel for the conversations I've been having with with friends lately about where, on a personal level, our energy is and should be going - how do we envision our communities changing, and how do we support that change?

And those wondering how exactly it all fits together, my favorite Easter TV moment, courtesy of YouTube and the late, great Sports Night:

Baby locked up at Honolulu airport dies

US immigration agent solicits sex from, and assaults, a green card applicant
  

When I got back to the States after my posting in Macedonia and moved in to my not-quite-gentrified northern Baltimore neighborhood, I spent a lot of time wandering around on weekends, getting reacclimated.  It's a nice neighborhood to wander in; there are lots of trees, long lines of brick rowhomes, some lovely postage-stamp front gardens - and, as I discovered one morning as I turned a corner on my way home, FREE BOOKS.  A handlettered wooden sign has never said anything sweeter. 

I followed its arrow, and in the concrete gap behind one corner house there were crates and crates of books stacked on the ground, and people clambering up and down a narrow concrete stairwell into a basement from which the odor of slightly damp print and paper wafted.  I didn't often venture into the basement after that first expedition. It was an entrancing mess, with books on shelves and in piles in every available nook, but too closed in for me.  I was generally content to have a quick browse among the crates outside on my way home from the farmers' market.  Even a quick browse often sent me home with more books than I could comfortably manage.  And I could visit all weekend, every weekend, whenever the urge to hunt up a new book struck. 

I soon learned that my little oasis was The Book Thing of Baltimore, a non-profit dedicated to "put[ting] unwanted books into the hands of those who want them."  Launched out of the back of a van in the late 1990s, by the time I discovered it, the Book Thing was already an institution, and soon became the home, or at least the transit point, for a large part of my book collection.  It was one of the first things I went looking for when I came back to Baltimore last year.  But the house was shut up tight, and the donation bin was gone.  I hurried home in a panic to hit Google, learned that the Book Thing was alive and kicking in a more spacious location and made it a part of my weekend routine again.

Now, the Book Thing needs help paying its mortgage.  They're trying to make a $120,000 balloon payment by 1 April.  Cash donations can be made through Network for Good.  Information about donating other items can be found here.  (Oh, and here's a good article about the Book Thing I found when I was looking for their website.)  The Book Thing is one of the best things about Baltimore - people from every walk of life come through its doors, and leave with as many books as they can carry.  It's unpretentious, improbably successful, and constantly struggling.  Please help keep it going!

While I was focused on a few narrow aspects of Obama's speech that crystallized for me why I have not found him an energizing leader, other people found a whole lot more to comment on.  I want to share what I've been reading, because my post was a narcissistic take on an important moment in the public conversation about race in this country.  I'm going to leave the post up because it was an important moment for me, but I wanted to point to more important things being said about Obama's speech.

On La Chola, BfP found Obama's speech stirring, but thinks that "Obama’s candidacy hangs on a thread at the moment. ... His patriotism, his loyalty–they are all suspect, and they are all suspect because Obama KNOWS somebody who believes in racial justice."  Read the comments, too: these are just a few I'm chewing on.

Anxious Black Woman describes Obama's speech as a call to conscience (and also has an excellent comments conversation - this post in particular raises some substantive, but fair, critiques of Obama's rhetoric).  She subsequently pointed to Cynthia McKinney's response, "A Conversation About Race Worth Having."  If you can't read the whole thing, here's the thought I would like you to carry away right now:

I am deeply offended that in the middle of a Presidential campaign, remarks–be they from a pastor or a communications mogul, or a former Vice Presidential nominee–are the cause of a focus on race, and not the deep racial disparities that communities are forced to endure on a daily basis in this country.

Myriad reports and studies that have been done all come up with the same basic conclusion: in order to resolve deep and persisting racial disparities in this country, a public policy initiative is urgently needed. A real discussion of race, in the context of a Presidential election, ought to include a discussion of the various public policy initiatives offered by the various candidates to eliminate all forms and vestiges of racial discrimination, including the racial disparities that cloud the hopes, dreams, and futures of millions of Americans.

... when Harvard University/The Kaiser Family Foundation did a study on White attitudes about race several years ago, it found that Whites have little appreciation for the reality of Black life in America, from police harassment and intimidation, to imprisonment, to family income, unemployment, housing, and health care. But without an appreciation of the reality faced by many of our fellow Americans, the necessary public policy initiatives to change those realities will find difficulty gaining acceptance in the public discourse.

"I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of [sic] children and our grandchildren."

I have trouble getting excited about Barack Obama's campaign.  I have this difficulty with presidential politics in general, but in an election year where Obama and Clinton are polarizing so many of my friends, I find they both leave me cold.  Reading the text of today's speech on the NYT website helped me clarify why I have that reaction to Obama:  I don't find him a persuasive thinker.  In fact, I object to Obama's deployment of false unity and the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. 

What do I mean by that?  The quote above is an example of false unity: "we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and grandchildren."  Not only do I believe that there are plenty of people who don't give much thought to their own futures, let alone those of their children and grandchildren, I'm skeptical of the idea that a critical mass of people share the same vision of what the future should be - I'm pretty sure they don't share mine, for instance.  In a microcosm, isn't an election (theoretically, at least) about a struggle among different ideas of what the future ought to be?  In Obama's rhetoric about "being a unifier" I tend to see a failure to honor difference and creative tension among people.  Perhaps that's too complicated a concept for the campaign trail - but it puts me off Obama.

What puts me off even more, though, and what I see as a curious point of tension with the support that Obama has generated among expatriate Americans and people around the world is his deployment of the rhetoric of American exceptionalism, as when he says things like:

I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Actually, this is a story that could, at least in theory, have occurred in Britain, or Canada, both countries where men of ancestry that includes African forebears have achieved excellent educations and entered high political office, and could have married women who number slaves and slaveowners among their ancestors.  Now, the legacy of slavery in the UK and Canada is different - neither economy was as dependent on the enslavement of Africans and their descendents within national borders for as long a period as in the United States - but Obama's point here is not to try to reframe mainstream perceptions of slavery (that it was bad, that it's over, and that the playing field is pretty level now since it's all in the past and America is such a great country).  What makes Obama's story exceptional is the extraordinarily negative impact slavery had on American society, especially descendents of African slaves, and the fact that that impact is not a thing of the past.  Obama's choice to frame his story as a triumph without situating it in that context (though, to his credit, he does address the ongoing legacy of slavery later in his speech) is to my mind an attempt to make America seem like something more than it is. Frankly, statements like these veer far too close to jingoism for my comfort.

Also, this passage bothered me:

"a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

There's a lot wrong with the US.  I think dealing with it sometimes requires people to point that out in pretty stark terms.  And one of the things I have problems with is some of the support that the US provides to Israel.  The state of Israel should not get a pass on its policies that are detrimental to peace, any more than the leaders of Palestinian extremism should.  Again, this framing, though carefully modified (Obama is, after all, an astute politician), swings close to the "Israel good/Islam bad" dichotomy that has poisoned US portrayals of politics in the Middle East for quite some time. 

Moments like these are why I find it hard to see Obama as more than an accomplished politician, and accomplished politicans - while far more interesting to watch work than the thugs and bullies that make up most of our current administration - are not the sort of people who generate a lot of excitement in me.