And if anyone wants to read about what’s going on in my neighborhood and what I’m starting to feel doomed about, here. I don’t like dogs to begin with, never have, but especially when a suburb with its own notorious drug problem (but it’s mostly white kids so we don’t talk about it) has sent a K-9 unit into my neighborhood and the dog is barking outside my window at 5 a.m. while people are being pulled out of bed and I don’t know who they’re going after or why.

The largest-ever federal criminal sweep in Connecticut history netted 35 more alleged crack-dealing New Haven gang members Tuesday, and at least one man was hauled out of bed in a case of mistaken identity.

The fast-paced day began with predawn busts in the Fair Haven and Dwight-Kensington neighborhoods as well as some suburban communities. It continued with dozens of assembly-line appearances in U.S. District Court on Church Street, featured a near-brawl on the courthouse steps, and concluded with the state’s top prosecutor joining federal and local police officials in declaring victory.

“This,” the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney David Fein, said at a 3 p.m press conference, “is the largest federal criminal case in state history.”

The operation is called “Operation Bloodline.” The federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) ran it along with New Haven’s cops. Police from Hamden, North Haven, Milford, Ansonia, North Branford, and Branford took part, too.

It began a little more than a year ago, targeting the group accused of dominating the New Haven crack trade and having a hand in much of the tit-for-tat deadly violence on the streets: the Dwight-Kensington-based Tre Bloods gang.

Building on intelligence gathered by New Haven cops and DEA agents, the investigators had a potent weapon in their arsenal: court-authorized wiretaps on 22 different telephones.

They gathered enough evidence to obtain 105 indictments on charges related to crack and powder cocaine dealing as well as marijuana and oxycodone peddling.

Last Thursday agents conducted a sweep that netted the 32 arrests. (Another 14 defendants were already in court on other charges.)

…

Most of those arrested were indicted on charges of taking part in a conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. They face minimum sentences of 10 years in jail, up to life; and up to $10 million in fines. Some face heroin and powder cocaine charges as well as possession with intent to sell narcotics and possession of illegal firearms.

“We put a big dent in the gang violence in this city,” New Haven Assistant Police Chief Archie Generoso declared Tuesday. “We’re going to continue doing that. We’re not going to stop here.”

One of my friends who has been stressing about this with me pointed something out: a combination of New Haven police plus several other towns, plus the DEA, got most of these indictments based mostly on wiretaps over the course of a year—but the best they were able to get on the majority of the people was conspiracy. How guilty am I supposed to think anybody is, if the most you can catch over a year of spying is conspiracy?

I posted this link on facebook today, pointing out that Shepard Fairey has made his career from exploiting work by people of color, that he’s been allowed status as a gallery-worthy artist for doing what is considered vandalism when done by youth of color (and let’s face it, with considerably less talent), and that I’m disappointed that Ebony missed the opportunity to commission a piece by a Black artist. A white dude responded that he understands it’s problematic, but maybe it’s a good thing to make a piece that “transcends racial lines”. I have been on edge with race shit lately, enough that I haven’t been able to write anything. I’ve seriously been race-depressed and feeling like people of color are fucking doomed—my students are proof that we aren’t, but they’re also stressed out with end of the year catching up or giving up, and realizing all that they should be taught but aren’t.

So my roommate made me a cup of coffee and I spit all this out finally in response to the dude on facebook:

————————————

I can see where you’re coming from and appreciate the sentiment, but I think it still misses the point. Heads up though, because I am having an even more race-anxious couple weeks than usual, so this hits a raw nerve for me.

First off, it definitely isn’t the only piece of art I’ve seen about Trayvon; that’s part of why it’s disappointing. Black artists respond to our conditions all the time and are often passed up on commissioned work and other opportunities. Most other magazines (read: white-centered media) doing this wouldn’t faze me, but I would expect better from a magazine like Ebony. There’s actually a portrait of Trayvon in the hallway at the school where I work that a Black girl made for an art assignment, and it’s infinitely more moving than something sterile and disconnected like this. And that isn’t the only piece I’ve seen some of my students make about this, but when they do it they are making art about their own experiences and their communities’ experiences and how disempowered they usually feel in a city like this. Once I get my silk screen stuff set up better, I promised to help some students make “DON’T SHOOT ME” hoodies they designed—that’s what we’ve come to. At the very least I want to affirm their idea that they don’t deserve to be profiled, followed, shot, and then posthumously vilified—something I don’t have to put energy into affirming in my white students, and something that no one had to affirm in Shepard Fairey.

But about making it more palatable for white audiences (who are specifically NOT the audience of Ebony, and it’s rare to pull off media that isn’t implicitly geared toward white audiences), I think that’s really dangerous and disrespectful. Black people need space to mourn and defend ourselves and take care of each other. I spend way too much time fretting over my brother and my students and my neighborhood and all the ways they are targeted for this kind of violence. Trying to make race less a part of the telling of Trayvon’s story is dishonest. It doesn’t even make sense. It isn’t a story that transcends race, because it isn’t a story that would happen to just any youth regardless of race. Racial profiling isn’t a universal experience, and neither is the picture the media tried to paint of him being a “thug.” None of that would have happened to a white kid, and pretending it does is an insult to what youth of color deal with.

If white people need to be eased into respecting, understanding, and listening to Black people’s lived experiences, then go ahead and do the work of easing them into it, but don’t expect us to tell our stories dishonestly to make them easier to swallow—we don’t have the luxury of toning shit down when we’re living it. It honestly scares me that we’ve internalized white people’s desire for us to whitewash and tone down our stories so much that we’re now doing it in our storytelling to each other in our own media.

I’m kind of unsure about the thing about Fairey’s Obama posters being iconic. Of course they are, but Obama means lots of complicated things for Black people that he doesn’t for white people. Again, not feelings and experiences that are going to transcend racial lines. You might have said more than you realized by choosing the word “iconic”—these are more than icons to Black people. (ETA: I’m pretty grumpy about Obama personally, but again, it’s way more complicated than an icon can be and I can understand Black people who support him for equally complicated reasons.)

And it’s specifically because of Fairey’s race politics (or lack thereof) that I don’t respect him as an artist. You can read a whole lot more on Fairey’s exploitation of people of color’s art and histories here: http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm

Federal agents and DEA just came through my neighborhood and arrested over 100 people, almost all black men, including some I know. Yale and its real estate interests are literally demolishing Black kids’ playgrounds and Black families’ houses to make condos. My students are at the point in the school year where they’re realizing just how much they’ve been denied by the school system and learning how to point out the whitewashing of their textbooks (well, if we had the money for textbooks). This is the shit I’m losing sleep over. I can’t guarantee my students that they will be safe from racial violence, since many of them have experienced it already, or that our school will value their lived experiences as young people of color, but I’m at least not going to be dishonest with them and pretend we’re not talking about race when we are, that we’re not talking about violence when we are, or that we need to put anything on hold for white people’s idea of what’s polite and palatable and slowed down enough. Our shit is way too urgent for that.

strugglingtobeheard:

lovewashername:

nor is there discussion about how this is a growing happening in other countries like Canada, where I’m at.

The only stats you find are about white girls and white women. Only research you find has very little to do with black women and girls interaction with the criminal justice system, legislation and penalties. The connections and intersections to be made and spoken of are missing like i don’t even know what.

i hope to do more research on this focusing on Black women because we are the top growing group of people being incarcerated at an increasing rate. and as someone who has experienced this shitty system, it is very personal for me.

Resistance Behind Bars by Victoria Law is on my summer reading list, and I’m reading Assata currently.

teenboystuff replied to your post: got into an argument with my parents about referring to black americans as a group called the ‘black community’ I was wondering if you know of resources about why or why not this would be a racist assignation. the context was in referring to voter demographics and I got fed up with them referring to black obama supporters as ‘the black community.’ in lieu of resources, maybe just an opinion?

This isn’t a problem specific to the black community (it works here because it’s not a generalization!)—folks are just so general about everything. They want to lump women together, men together, gay people together and speak for all of them.

Okay, sure. But we are talking about generalizations made about a group of people oppressed by race. I could also argue it’s unfair to make generalizations about cats or sandwiches or whatever, but that is beside the point right now.

The point was the way black people are constructed as being two dimensional—same class, same appearance, same interests, same intelligence level (or assumed lack thereof), same influences, and in this case same political opinion. Look at the lack of dimension black people are allowed on TV or in the news, look how many stories are told about black people in popular music, look how black characters are developed in books. Look at racial profiling and the prison industry. Look at neighborhood segregation. Hell, you should (hopefully) flinch when black people are confused for one another for no reason beyond them each being “the black one.”

So yes, you are correct that many groups of people are lumped together without basis. But that really doesn’t matter right now, because we are talking about a specific effect of a specific oppression, one that non-black men, non-black women, non-black gay people, non-black anybody do not deal with, so those other groups are really not relevant here. It’s not just a coincidence that this happens.

bluestalkingstitches:

cosmicyoruba:

sensationnalisme:

battle-studies:

m0roccan:

mayflowrs:

*All skin colors are beautiful

^THANK YOU

A Black woman made that post empowering herself and other Black people who are deemed inferior by Euro-centric beauty ideals. Correcting her post is derailing and inappropriate.

lol, I don’t understand these ppl sometimes.

#cant have anything

OP CORRECT. All skin colors ARE beautiful, but pale skin wasn’t, for five seconds, the topic of conversation. IT’S PRETTY OKAY TO MAKE DARK SKIN THE TOPIC OF POSITIVE CONVERSATION FOR FIVE FUCKING SECONDS WITHOUT BEING TOLD TO ADD WHITE PEOPLE (or any non-white light skin tone, for that matter).

Uggggh light-skinned WOC, why must we do this! I’ll say it again—just like sometimes things aren’t all about white people (srsly, it happens), sometimes conversations about people of color are not about the lighter-skinned folks among us.

If we wanna talk about empowerment & liberation—that shit isn’t gonna get too far in a bubble. How are you gonna get there if you’re ditching your folks? How are we gonna do POC liberation but expect that light folks get to still be at the forefront? Or take offense if we aren’t mentioned for a minute?

When I go HAM for black women, I know it’s largely because I can. Because I am lighter I might get taken more seriously when I speak up. I have an academic background that means I can make my arguments as strong as they need to be and back them up. Same for the amount of cultural capital I’ve got that I can bring into what I do.

Do we really think that if we split ourselves apart from dark skinned POC enough, that we’ll become honorarily white? Hell no. So cut that shit and stick together and let’s do liberation all together.

positivelypersistentteach:

savesteveholt:

there is no such phrase as “wouldn’t of”.

I think you mean “wouldn’t have”. 

Learn to speak your own language, thanks.

I suggest you read the book The Skin We Speak by Lisa Delpit.  It might teach you a little bit about language, different venues we use it and the “rules” that we follow based on the situation, and how better to approach “correcting” someone’s use of words in various contexts.

K?  Thanks.

Yeah! I’m reading a book right now by Lisa Delpit also, The Real Ebonics Debate. That’s what I was trying to talk about in staff meeting today when white people jumped down my throat and instead of making my point well I ended up crying in my office.

Whose language are you assuming this is? And what language have you decided “we” all need to speak, and which one is correct? Because, my students speak a whole lot of languages, and many of them are Englishes, and I respect them in every single one of those languages. As a Midwesterner in New England, I wouldn’t presume to force students to use (not) silly phrases and phrasings that are correct to me where I’m from; so as a person of color among students of color, I defend my students’ diversity of languages that are also correct without trying to impose one standardized one on them.

(Fixed the formatting so this posts legibly.)

Complicating the Wage Gap in the US—looking at sex and race

I’m trying to study up on ways to visualize important information like this, and to bust myths with facts instead of just griping about them (although griping is important too).

All statistics come from US Dept. of Labor. I made all charts in LibreOffice.

The purpose of looking at these statistics is to know more about what is meant when we talk about wage gaps between men and women, or when we talk about unemployment rates. Some questions to think about:

•     What is considered an unemployment crisis? Who needs to be experiencing this level of unemployment before a crisis/recession/depression is declared?
•     Likewise, whose categorization of “working poor” is considered normal, and whose indicates an economic crisis?
•     Does economic crisis come from a sudden loss of economic security rather than an ongoing lack of that security? How could this be reassessed to support communities that have historically been in poverty?
•     Whose income is used in measuring wage gaps? What gaps exist within those categories?
•     What is done in the name of feminism to close the wage gap between white women and women of color? Why has this gap been allowed to increase over time?
•     Why is there a resistance to specify race when talking about wage gaps, if white women earn around the same as black and latino men at different education levels, whereas white men far out-earn all groups at education levels beyond high school graduation?

Putting this information together is what I wanted to do instead of just complaining about women of color being often ignored by white-centered feminism and rhetoric of wage gaps, and likewise people of color being often ignored by white liberals and progressives in discussing economic inequality. I’m all about putting resources together and complicating seemingly static categories, so here we go.

miswritten:

some gross white dude asked if he could “ask me something” as i was walking to the BART with a friend and i said no.

later:

i was at a taco truck a couple blocks from my house w/ some friends earlier, we were waiting for our order, some white guy smiles at me and i don’t smile back. he makes this puppy dog pout and i still don’t smile back. i am disgusted by my own compulsion to smile back whenever white people and men give me attention. you are not entitled to my affirmation, approval, or friendliness. ever. i am done giving that shit away for free. done being yet another asian girl smiling for white men. done with being pleasant and sweet. i’d rather be remembered as that bitchy asian girl who took shit too seriously and gave attitude than be forgotten as yet another sweet asian girl that made them feel good about themselves. i hope every whiteboy i don’t smile back at walks away and doubts himself. doubts his desirability, his power, his relationship to asian women. at least for one fucking moment. i hope they talk shit about that mean faced korean girl wearing too much eyeliner to their friends, about how unfriendly and hostile she was. i hope it bugs the shit out of them. i hope that whenever they see an asian girl face like mine they’ll remember that feeling of failure, of smiling at me and expecting my gratitude or approval, only to find revulsion, disdain, and boredom.

Bolding is mine. That’s something I’ve felt but haven’t quite been able to put into words. Whatever dudes say to me on the street, I’m just tempted to want the opposite. Like if they call me pretty, that’s too bad because I’m not pretty and have absolutely no interest in being pretty, or being attractive in a way that is gendered in that specific way. Like if you’re gonna bother me on the street, at least fucking get me.

It is situations like this that make me have no problem with being a bitch or being seen as such. I know a lot of people don’t want that word applied to them, so it is very very rare that I use it about someone else, but I’ll take it on for myself. I will be that bitch with stupid hair and raggedy shorts and a big butt saying how you to old people but not responding well to any catcalling unless maybe if you call me handsome. Even then, it isn’t guaranteed.

What I need to work on now is feeling like I can respond loudly and negatively if I feel like it, instead of letting it stew up in me. Even just a simple, “I know I’m cute, but you’re gross right now.”

janedoe225:

some of my best friends are white

i like johnny cash

i dated a white guy in the 9th grade

you just tend to be racist.

a lot

most of the time

all the time

for the past 500 years

In a nutshell. White people accuse me of hating them when I talk about racism, and I take note that I wasn’t the one who was equating being white with upholding white supremacy; they were. Freudian slips.

Yahoo news/Good Morning America is really gonna give me a content warning for graphic content because of a picture of George Zimmerman’s head with blood on it, but black kids being followed and killed isn’t graphic content? The 911 tapes of him being killed aren’t graphic content?

Have you ever been around a teenager before? They’re fucking obnoxious just for the sake of it!

When I was in high school I used to go downtown and play pranks on strangers and make messes and break things that I didn’t intend to clean up and try to buy porn and yell at boys to suck my dick and sneak around the cops when they tried to kick us off school property for loitering after school and say really stupid shit really loudly. Then I went to school and got almost straight A’s and did my homework and only got in trouble when it was for political rabble-rousing and graduated and went to an ivy league college.

These things are not mutually exclusive; they were all going on concurrently. That is how teenagers develop and learn what boundaries to push and what ones to respect and where to set my own. Like if I had had any money, best believe I would have had a ridiculous grill while I was sitting there in AP Calculus. And best believe if facebook existed when I was in high school there would probably be photos in the ether of me giving the finger with one hand and reading political philosophy with the other.

None of that would have made me a bad kid.

And if those photoshadbeen on the same Trayvon that was killed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have been a bad kid, and he wouldn’t have deserved racial violence from the police.

Our goal needs to be supporting black youth—not the “right” or “good” black youth, butallof them. What are we saying to that other Trayvon Martin, the one who actually was the one photographed giving the finger and wearing a grill? That he would have deserved to be profiled as a criminal?

Fuck that. One of my favorite students, one of the smartest people I know (not just in the school, but in general), picked the wrong battle recently. I can’t give details on it but I had to defend him to someone not affiliated with the school who wanted to just brand him a criminal based on a few actions and profiling him as a young black man. This was just before the photos were put online of the other Trayvon, and I had to start worrying even more then about my students being labelled murderable in that same way. I’m sure every one of the high schoolers I work with and adore can be seen on facebook giving the finger or something similar. But they’re all so much more complex than that.

So what is the black community doing to tell the other Trayvon that had he been in the “wrong” place at the wrong time, he also wouldn’t have deserved to be murdered? What are we telling young people when we say that the Trayvon that was killed was a “good” kid, that he got good grades, that he stayed out of trouble—especially when those are markers of succeeding in a system that is set up against black youth?

The students that I’m most excited to work with are the ones that get in trouble, the ones who are angry and have outbursts and aren’t afraid to yell at authority figures and who have hobbies besides getting good grades. I’m really open about that with both students and staff. Those are not “bad” kids, and they are no more deserving of racist violence than “good” kids are. (And, if anything, my tendencies toward following the rules made me a hell of a lot more boring than my students now who make their own rules and get their own shit done, but that is a whole nother project to get into.)

Building a black community that really fights, that is a culture of resistance, means we gotta get complicated and we gotta let people be complex. And young people are really fucking complex. That’s why I love working with teenagers, they’re at a point of figuring out how the world treats them and how they want to move through it and making sense of what they’re up against. Sometimes that involves flipping off a camera, and in the age of facebook that’s gonna end up on the internet.

So when I want justice for Trayvon, I mean both Trayvons, but I also want justice for all black youth who aren’t allowed to be complex multifaceted developing people the ways white people are. And I want justice beyond labeling someone a token “good” black kid and settling for that, and I want justice beyond putting one token individual in a racist prison system that is generally set up against black people. Basically I don’t want to settle for anything that doesn’t deeply feel like justice, that isn’t clearly enough.