liquornspice:

so-treu:

Black Internationalist Feminism

Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995

Radicalism and Black feminism in postwar women’s writing

Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left’s “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Black internationalist feminism critiques racist, heteronormative, and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance of national liberation movements for achieving Black women’s social, political, and economic rights.

Cheryl Higashida shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, Higashida illustrates how literature is a crucial lens for studying Black internationalist feminism because these authors were at the forefront of bringing the perspectives and problems of black women to light against their marginalization and silencing.

In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, Black Internationalist Feminism contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women’s movements.

source.

oh wait who was that the other day saying that black feminism lacks transnational voices? b/c there’s no critical engagement with the power structures used to oppressed you?

(answer: cosmo-fascist. forever rong.)

You mean Black women exist internationally and have ALWAYS had an international concept of Blackness that informs our theorizing wherever we may be???????????????

(via latinegrasexologist)

72 Percent of

African-American Children

Are Raised in

Single Parent Homes

December 23, 2012

Posted by Kevin Webb

 

A staggering number of African-American children are raised in single parent homes, compared to the rest of America, and the rest of the world. A study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 25.8 percent of American children are raised by a single parent, a number high above the 14.9 percent average seen in the other 26 countries surveyed. Among African-Americans the rate nearly tripled, with 72 percent of black children relying on a single parent.

“The in-work poverty is higher in the U.S. than other OECD countries, because at the bottom end of the labor market, earnings are very low,” said Willem Adema, a senior economist in the group’s social policy division. “For parents, the risk is higher because they have to make expenditures on childcare costs.”

No doubt the prevalence of divorce has introduced single-parenthood as common place in the U.S., but the figures are disproportionally high for African-Americans. Reasons for the disparity among blacks could stem from any number of reasons, ranging from the American justice system, to pregnancy among young unmarried couples. In addition to the number of black single parents, almost three in four black children are born outside of marriage. The reality is that recognizing or even curbing the trend does not work to the benefit of young single mothers already raising children.

American single mothers find themselves challenged by high living costs, even though the U.S. government provides more child welfare spending than other countries. Employment is also more common for U.S. single parents, with 35.8% earning an income compared to 21.3 percent internationally, but single mother families still suffer from a poverty rate of 63 percent.

The plight of the working mother is compounded with a lack of childcare, which can affect childhood development. University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia went so far as to link minority underachievement on standardized tests to single parent households, characterizing the parents as “usually female, uneducated and without a lot of money.”

Though Graglia’s statements are certainly not based in fact, the economic and social trends attributed to single-parenthood are should be discomforting to African-Americans. It may be too late for a return to the traditional family for Americans, but considering the weight of single parent child rearing can never be understated.

September 23, 2011

Dahomey’s Women Warriors

One of Dahomeys' women warriors, with a musket, club, dagger—and her enemy's severed head. From Forbes, Dahomy and the Dahomans (1851).

It is noon on a humid Saturday in the fall of 1861, and a missionary by the name of Francesco Borghero has been summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey. He is seated on one side of a huge, open square right in the center of the town–Dahomey is renowned as a “Black Sparta,” a fiercely militaristic society bent on conquest, whose soldiers strike fear into their enemies all along what is still known as the Slave Coast. The maneuvers begin in the face of a looming downpour, but King Glele is eager to show off the finest unit in his army to his European guest.

As Father Borghero fans himself, 3,000 heavily armed soldiers march into the square and begin a mock assault on a series of defenses designed to represent an enemy capital. The Dahomean troops are a fearsome sight, barefoot and bristling with clubs and knives. A few, known as Reapers, are armed with gleaming three-foot-long straight razors, each wielded two-handed and capable, the priest is told, of slicing a man clean in two.

The soldiers advance in silence, reconnoitering. Their first obstacle is a wall—huge piles of acacia branches bristling with needle-sharp thorns, forming a barricade that stretches nearly 440 yards. The troops rush it furiously, ignoring the wounds that the two-inch-long thorns inflict. After scrambling to the top, they mime hand-to-hand combat with imaginary defenders, fall back, scale the thorn wall a second time, then storm a group of huts and drag a group of cringing “prisoners” to where Glele stands, assessing their performance. The bravest are presented with belts made from acacia thorns. Proud to show themselves impervious to pain, the warriors strap their trophies around their waists.

The general who led the assault appears and gives a lengthy speech, comparing the valor of Dahomey’s warrior elite to that of European troops and suggesting that such equally brave peoples should never be enemies. Borghero listens, but his mind is wandering. He finds the general captivating: “slender but shapely, proud of bearing, but without affectation.” Not too tall, perhaps, nor excessively muscular. But then, of course, the general is a woman, as are all 3,000 of her troops. Father Borghero has been watching the King of Dahomey’s famed corps of “amazons,” as contemporary writers termed them—the only female soldiers in the world who then routinely served as combat troops.

Dahomey–renamed Benin in 1975–showing its location in West Africa. Map: CIA World Factbook.

When, or indeed why, Dahomey recruited its first female soldiers is not certain. Stanley Alpern, author of the only full-length Engish-language study of them, suggests it may have been in the 17th century, not long after the kingdom was founded by Dako, a leader of the Fon tribe, around 1625. One theory traces their origins to teams of female hunters known as gbeto, and certainly Dahomey was noted for its women hunters; a French naval surgeon named Repin reported in the 1850s that a group of 20 gbeto had attacked a herd of 40 elephants, killing three at the cost of several hunters gored and trampled. A Dahomean tradition relates that when King Gezo (1818-58) praised their courage, the gbeto cockily replied that “a nice manhunt would suit them even better,” so he drafted them drafted into his army. But Alpern cautions that there is no proof that such an incident occurred, and he prefers an alternate theory that suggests the women warriors came into existence as a palace guard in the 1720s.

Women had the advantage of being permitted in the palace precincts after dark (Dahomean men were not), and a bodyguard may have been formed, Alpern says, from among the king’s “third class” wives–those considered insufficiently beautiful to share his bed and who had not borne children. Contrary to 19th century gossip that portrayed the female soldiers as sexually voracious, Dahomey’s female soldiers were formally married to the king—and since he never actually had relations with any of them, marriage rendered them celibate.

Dahomey's female hunters, the gbeto, attack a herd of elephants.

At least one bit of evidence hints that Alpern is right to date the formation of the female corps to  the early 18th century: a French slaver named Jean-Pierre Thibault, who called at the Dahomean port of Ouidah in 1725, described seeing groups of third-rank wives armed with long poles and acting as police. And when, four years later, Dahomey’s women warriors made their first appearance in written history, they were helping to recapture the same port after it fell to a surprise attack by the Yoruba–a much more numerous tribe from the east who would henceforth be the Dahomeans’ chief enemies.

Dahomey’s female troops were not the only martial women of their time. There were at least a few contemporary examples of successful warrior queens, the best-known of whom was probably Nzinga of Matamba, one of the most important figures in 17th-century Angola—a ruler who fought the Portuguese, quaffed the blood of sacrificial victims, and kept a harem of 60 male concubines, whom she dressed in women’s clothes. Nor were female guards unknown; in the mid-19th century, King Mongkut of Siam (the same monarch memorably portrayed in quite a different light by Yul Brynner in The King and I) employed a bodyguard of 400 women. But Mongkut’s guards performed a ceremonial function, and the king could never bear to send them off to war. What made Dahomey’s women warriors unique was that they fought, and frequently died, for king and country. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that, in the course of just four major campaigns in the latter half of the 19th century, they lost at least 6,000 dead, and perhaps as many as 15,000. In their very last battles, against French troops equipped with vastly superior weaponry, about 1,500 women took the field, and only about 50 remained fit for active duty by the end.

King Gezo, who expanded the female corps from around 600 women to as many as 6,000. Picture: Wikicommons.

None of this, of course, explains why this female corps arose only in Dahomey. Historian Robin Law, of the University of Stirling, who has made a study of the subject, dismisses the idea that the Fon viewed men and women as equals in any meaningful sense; women fully trained as warriors, he points out, were thought to “become” men, usually at the moment they disemboweled their first enemy. Perhaps the most persuasive possibility is that the Fon were so badly outnumbered by the enemies who encircled them that Dahomey’s kings were forced to conscript women. The Yoruba alone were about ten times as numerous as the Fon.

Backing for this hypothesis can be found in the writings of Commodore Arthur Eardley Wilmot, a British naval officer who called at Dahomey in 1862 and observed that women heavily outnumbered men in its towns—a phenomenon that he attributed to a combination of military losses and the effects of the slave trade. Around the same time Western visitors to Abomey noticed a sharp jump in the number of female soldiers. Records suggest that there were about 600 women in the Dahomean army from the 1760s until the 1840s—at which point King Gezo expanded the corps to as many as 6,000.

No Dahomean records survive to explain Gezo’s expansion, but it was probably connected to a defeat he suffered at the hands of the Yoruba in 1844. Oral traditions suggest that, angered by Dahomean raids on their villages, an army from a tribal grouping known as the Egba mounted a surprise attack that that came close to capturing Gezo and did seize much of his royal regalia, including the king’s valuable umbrella and his sacred stool. “It has been said that only two amazon ‘companies’ existed before Gezo and that he created six new ones,” Alpern notes. “If so, it probably happened at this time.”

Women warriors parade outside the gates of a Dahomean town, with the severed heads of their defeated foes adorning the walls.

Recruiting women into the Dahomean army was not especially difficult, despite the requirement to climb thorn hedges and risk life and limb in battle. Most West African women lived lives of forced drudgery. Gezo’s female troops lived in his compound and were kept well supplied with tobacco, alcohol and slaves–as many as 50 to each warrior, according to the noted traveler Sir Richard Burton, who visited Dahomey in the 1860s. And “when amazons walked out of the palace,” notes Alpern, “they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell. The sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way.” To even touch these women meant death.

"Insensitivity training": female recruits look on as Dahomean troops hurl bound prisoners of war to a mob below.

While Gezo plotted his revenge against the Egba, his new female recruits were put through extensive training. The scaling of vicious thorn hedges was intended to foster the stoical acceptance of pain, and the women also wrestled one another and undertook survival training, being sent into the forest for up to nine days with minimal rations.

The aspect of Dahomean military custom that attracted most attention from European visitors, however, was “insensitivity training”—exposing unblooded troops to death. At one annual ceremony, new recruits of both sexes were required to mount a platform 16 feet high, pick up baskets containing bound and gagged prisoners of war, and hurl them over the parapet to a baying mob below. There are also accounts of female soldiers being ordered to carry out executions. Jean Bayol, a French naval officer who visited Abomey in December 1889, watched as a teenage recruit, a girl named Nanisca “who had not yet killed anyone,” was tested. Brought before a young prisoner who sat bound in a basket, she:

walked jauntily up to [him], swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk… She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.

It was this fierceness that most unnerved Western observers, and indeed Dahomey’s  African enemies. Not everyone agreed on the quality of the Dahomeans’ military preparedness—European observers were disdainful of the way in which the women handled their ancient flintlock muskets, most firing from the hip rather than aiming from the shoulder, but even the French agreed that they “excelled at hand-to-hand combat” and “handled [knives] admirably.”

For the most part, too, the enlarged female corps enjoyed considerable success in Gezo’s endless wars, specializing in pre-dawn attacks on unsuspecting enemy villages. It was only when they were thrown against the Egba capital, Abeokuta, that they tasted defeat. Two furious assaults on the town, in 1851 and 1864, failed dismally, partially because of Dahomean overconfidence, but mostly because Abeokuta was a formidable target—a huge town ringed with mud-brick walls and harboring a population of 50,000.

Béhanzin, the last king of an independent Dahomey.

By the late 1870s Dahomey had begun to temper its military ambitions. Most foreign observers suggest that the women’s corps was reduced to 1,500 soldiers at about this time, but attacks on the Yoruba continued. And the corps still existed 20 years later, when the kingdom at last found itself caught up in the “scramble for Africa,” which saw various European powers competing to absorb slices of the continent into their empires. Dahomey fell within the French sphere of influence, and there was already a small French colony at Porto-Novo when, in about 1889, female troops were involved in an incident that resulted in a full-scale war. According to local oral histories, the spark came when the Dahomeans attacked a village under French suzerainty whose chief tried to avert panic by assuring the inhabitants that the tricolor would protect them. “So you like this flag?” the Dahomean general asked when the settlement had been overrun. “Eh bien, it will serve you.” At the general’s signal, one of the women warriors beheaded the chief with one blow of her cutlass and carried his head back to her new king, Béhanzin, wrapped in the French standard.

The First Franco-Dahomean War, which ensued in 1890, resulted in two major battles, one of which took place in heavy rain at dawn outside Cotonou, on the Bight of Benin. Béhanzin’s army, which included female units, assaulted a French stockade but was driven back in hand-to-hand fighting. No quarter was given on either side, and Jean Bayol saw his chief gunner decapitated by a fighter he recognized as Nanisca, the young woman he had met three months earlier in Abomey as she executed a prisoner. Only the sheer firepower of their modern rifles won the day for the French, and in the battle’s aftermath Bayol found Nanisca lying dead. “The cleaver, with its curved blade, engraved with fetish symbols, was attached to her left wrist by a small cord,” he wrote, “and her right hand was clenched around the barrel of her carbine covered with cowries.”

In the uneasy peace that followed, Béhanzin did his best to equip his army with more modern weapons, but the Dahomeans were still no match for the large French force that was assembled to complete the conquest two years later. That seven-week war was fought even more fiercely than the first. There were 23 separate battles, and once again female troops were in the vanguard of Béhanzin’s forces. The women were the last to surrender, and even then—at least according to a rumor common in the French army of occupation—the survivors took their revenge on the French by covertly substituting themselves for Dahomean women who were taken into the enemy stockade. Each allowed herself to be seduced by French officer, waited for him to fall asleep, and then cut his throat with his own bayonet.

A group of women warriors in traditional dress. Picture: Wikicommons.

Their last enemies were full of praise for their courage. A French Foreign Legionnaire named Bern lauded them as “warrioresses… [who] fight with extreme valor, always ahead of the other troops. They are outstandingly brave … well trained for combat and very disciplined.” A French Marine, Henri Morienval, thought them “remarkable for their courage and their ferocity… [they] flung themselves on our bayonets with prodigious bravery.”

Most sources suggest that the last of Dahomey’s women warriors died in the 1940s, but Stanley Alpern disputes this. Pointing out that “a woman who had fought the French in her teens would have been no older than 69 in 1943,” he suggests, more pleasingly, that it is likely one or more survived long enough to see her country regain its independence in 1960. As late as 1978, a Beninese historian encountered an extremely old woman in the village of Kinta who convincingly claimed to have fought against the French in 1892. Her name was Nawi, and she died, aged well over 100, in November 1979. Probably she was the last.

What were they like, these scattered survivors of a storied regiment? Some proud but impoverished, it seems; others married; a few tough and argumentative, well capable, Alpern says, of “beating up men who dared to affront them.” And at least one of them still traumatized by her service, a reminder that some military experiences are universal. A Dahomean who grew up in Cotonou in the 1930s recalled that he regularly tormented an elderly woman he and his friends saw shuffling along the road, bent double by tiredness and age. He confided to the French writer Hélène Almeida-Topor that

one day, one of us throws a stone that hits another stone. The noise resounds, a spark flies. We suddenly see the old woman straighten up. Her face is transfigured. She begins to march proudly… Reaching a wall, she lies down on her belly and crawls on her elbows to get round it. She thinks she is holding a rifle because abruptly she shoulders and fires, then reloads her imaginary arm and fires again, imitating the sound of a salvo. Then she leaps, pounces on an imaginary enemy, rolls on the ground in furious hand-t0-hand combat, flattens the foe. With one hand she seems to pin him to the ground, and with the other stabs him repeatedly. Her cries betray her effort. She makes the gesture of cutting to the quick and stands up brandishing her trophy….

Female officers pictured in 1851, wearing symbolic horns of office on their heads.

She intones a song of victory and dances:

The blood flows,

You are dead.

The blood flows,

We have won.

The blood flows, it flows, it flows.

The blood flows,

The enemy is no more.

But suddenly she stops, dazed. Her body bends, hunches, How old she seems, older than before! She walks away with a hesitant step.

She is a former warrior, an adult explains…. The battles ended years ago, but she continues the war in her head.

Sources

Hélène Almeida-Topor. Les Amazones: Une Armée de Femmes dans l’Afrique Précoloniale. Paris: Editions Rochevignes, 1984; Stanley Alpern. Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011; Richard Burton. A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. London: RKP, 1966; Robin Law. ‘The ‘Amazons’ of Dahomey.’ Paideuma 39 (1993); J.A. Skertchley. Dahomey As It Is: Being a Narrative of Eight Months’ Residence in that Country, with a Full Account of the Notorious Annual Customs… London: Chapman & Hall, 1874.

CASSANDRA WILSON

& DAVID MURRAY

CASSANDRA WILSON - voix
DAVID MURRAY - saxophone ténor, clarinette basse
LAFAYETTE GILCHRIST - piano
JARIBU SHAHID - basse
MARK JOHNSON - batterie

Track List:
1. Banished
2. The Prophet Of Doom
3. Africa
4. Let The Music Take You
5. Sacred Ground

Frank Ocean

– Wiseman Lyrics

Although the soundtrack for Django Unchained did feature the likes of Rick Ross, John Legend, Anthony Hamilton and a whole host more, there was one man missing who’d previously been announced as being a part of it and who’s song was more anticipated than anyone else on the record, that of course being Mr. Frank Ocean.

When recently queried about the situation, the movie’s director Quentin Tarantino commented “Frank Ocean wrote a fantastic ballad that was truly lovely and poetic in every way, there just wasn’t a scene for it. I could have thrown it in quickly just to have it, but that’s not why he wrote it and not his intention. So I didn’t want to cheapen his effort. But, the song is fantastic, and when Frank decides to unleash it on the public, they’ll realize it then.” and it looks as if that time has come, with Frank ending the year in true Frank Ocean style, taking to his tumblr to upload the track simply stating “django was ill without it”, before following up with the equally familiar screenshotted lyrics.

What a year it has been for Frank Ocean, but he has not changed one bit.

Frank Ocean

– Sweet LIFE

Sung by Frank Ocean, produced by Pharrell Williams and co-written by both of them, the best songwriter and best producer in music right now have finally spoken.

Channel ORANGE drops July 17th.

Download: Frank Ocean – Sweet LIFE.mp3

Paterson Poetry Prize

 

Deadline:

February 1, 2013

Website: 

http://www.pccc.edu/poetry

E-mail address: 

mgillan@pccc.edu

A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a book of poetry published in the previous year. The winning poet must participate in an awards ceremony and give a reading at the Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey. Books of at least 48 pages with a minimum press run of 500 copies are eligible. Publishers may submit three copies of books published in 2012 by February 1. There is no entry fee. Send an SASE or visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

Passaic County Community College, Paterson Poetry Prize, The Poetry Center, 1 College Boulevard, Paterson, NJ 07505. (973) 684-6555. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Executive Director.

Poetry and Fiction Prizes

Deadline:

February 1, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$10

Website: 

http://www.english.wisc.edu/madisonreview

E-mail address: 

madisonreview@yahoo.com

Two prizes of $1,000 each are given annually for a group of poems and a short story. The editors of Madison Review will judge. For the Phyllis Smart Young Prize in Poetry, submit three poems totaling no more than 15 pages. For the Chris O'Malley Prize in Fiction, submit a story of up to 30 pages. The entry fee for each award is $10, and the deadline is February 1. Send an SASE, e-mail, or visit the website for complete guidelines.

Madison Review, Poetry and Fiction Prizes, English Department, 6193 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. Ron Kuka, Faculty Advisor.

Literary Prizes

Deadline:

January 31, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$20

Website: 

http://crazyhorse.cofc.edu

Three prizes of $2,000 each and publication in Crazyhorse are given annually for a poem, a short story, and an essay. Using the online submission system, submit up to three poems or a story or essay of up to 25 pages with a $20 entry fee, which includes a subscription to Crazyhorse, during the month of January. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Crazyhorse, Literary Prizes, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424.

It’s Not The Load

That Breaks You Down;

It’s The Way You Carry It

October 31, 2012

By Kamilah Aisha Moon

Five strong, consistent years as an adjunct professor. So what? So what you spend extra, unpaid hours assisting students who arrive needing far more than a semester in your class could ever provide. So what you need surgery to literally keep from bleeding to death from a condition that was exacerbated by all of the hustling you have to do just to stay afloat.

It gets tough. The greatest and most diligent of black women warriors we revere also got tired, struggled with hopelessness and the urge to surrender despite keen awareness about the necessity for self-preservation. Too busy fighting the good fight, it is possible and likely that vacations weren’t taken, key appointments were deferred and warning signs may have been missed, allowing cancers and other ailments to claim some of them at the height of their powers.

“I need you to thrive. Your work is too important.”

This simple, profound sentence in an email from a dear friend echoes in my head. I would say she has no idea how much I needed to read that, but she does. One of the reasons we are close is because of the ways we see and affirm each other constantly while telling each other the truth, lovingly. In a highly-competitive environment, it is a worthwhile commitment to nurture each other—to never forget that we weren’t initially welcomed, nor meant to thrive—especially when health-related issues arise.

Approximately five years ago, I developed fibroids—one of the most pervasive, rotten fruits of sacrifice that is rarely discussed but widely suffered. They gradually began to take over my body and well-being. For the last two years before surgery, severe anemia blanched my skin and stole oxygen from my organs, making breathing and everyday functioning very difficult. At its worst, I would have excruciating chest pain, become dizzy and blackout—a terrifying prospect navigating the city, especially the subway. Monthly, my home resembled a vicious crime scene. These fibroids were the culmination of “benign” neglect (until they began to wreak havoc), ballooning stress and pressures at work and dealing with the aftermath of a few regrettable personal decisions.

If one is brave enough to prioritize wellness after stepping over and around the internal landmines that often complicate that journey (i.e. denial, fear, esteem issues), the struggle for adequate care is its own Kilimanjaro. What should have been perhaps a six-month process at the most to diagnose and remove these vampires of the womb, ended up taking years—harrowing years that took a hefty toll in every realm of my life. Several doctors outright dismissed or minimized my symptoms, blamed my weight without ordering standard tests and took a “here’s some birth control and let’s monitor this” approach, despite every indication of an acute situation that was worsening with each cycle.

I found myself reasserting my humanity over and over again. So many times I’ve spoken in my best diction and name-dropped where I went to graduate school in clinics and hospitals; made sure to mention my parents’ concerns as they waited to hear the news in TN, letting them know I am a daughter, a sister—a patient worth taking seriously. Desperate after my second hospitalization for dangerously low hemoglobin, I took a gruesome picture of my scarlet, beet and plum-sized evidence-filled shower with my cellphone camera that finally shocked the ER internist into calling a specialist and advocating on my behalf.

Many of us believe we are strong enough to tolerate illness and stress and keep going. Who will do what needs to be done otherwise? Who will teach our children and young adults?  Who will take care of our elders?  Who will lead the church, give the keynote address, and govern the city? The doctors who refused to be proactive in my care plan apparently believed that I could keep going, regardless. And certain loved ones who blamed me, resented my worsening health and ultimately abandoned me, also agreed that I should keep going somehow. I started to feel like it was my fault and maybe I didn’t deserve help in resolving the problem. Beyond frustrated, I half-joked to a friend, “does my womb have to fall out first to get surgery?!” Outrageously, that was almost the case. After the third postponement of the myomectomy the doctors finally determined I needed, I began to hemorrhage badly during a professional conference. It led to a six-day hospitalization with as many blood transfusions to get me stabilized.  I was finally rushed into surgery.

Despite the support of my department, once the HR office of my college became aware of the situation, I was essentially fired and later rehired. This meant a sharp decrease in pay for the remainder of the semester, and cancellation of the puny health benefits I had, just as I began follow-up care. Prior to this medical emergency, I hadn’t been paid for all of my classes due to a paperwork error.  Focusing on recuperation was quite a challenge.  To say I was in dire straits is a vast understatement.

The microaggressions and invalidations inherent in low-status academic positions are notorious and well-documented. Not unlike the reaction to poverty in big cities, there is a mass desensitization that happens. To quote Run DMC, “it’s like that, and that’s the way it is.” As a result, most walk by and don’t even notice people sleeping on sidewalks anymore; they step around streams of piss without missing a beat. Many of us shake our heads and don’t say anything when we see each other in peril in these settings because fury, pity and sympathy are hard to sustain.  And, we choose silence as a tool of self-preservation, not wanting to end up in the same predicament (although Lorde pointed out it won’t protect us).

Great strides have been made, elevating the numbers of black women across every rank and position, which has been wonderful to witness. Ironically, the other side of increased numbers is increased apathy. It seems that some of us have stopped seeing each other and stopped seeing the need for solidarity now that it’s not an extreme novelty to encounter another black female academic in hallowed corridors. To quote Elizabeth Alexander, “many things are true at once.”  Some learn the ropes too well, and the critic never sleeps. Deconstruction is for theories, ideas, systems…not people. Why not show more compassion for colleagues traveling this peculiar journey, rather than contempt?

The sentiment is often you should know better, thus do and be better. No excuses. Crushed in the grip of a long-suffering martyr trope that won’t die, it is more than a notion for many of us to fully live. Like a bad relationship with a narcissist, shady institutional policies convey thanks for your dedication—but to hell with your concerns, support for your goals/advancement and desires, the most basic of your needs. This is the humiliating reality of the indentured servitude of the adjunct faculty experience, requiring so much for so little in return.

I can only imagine from the stories I’ve been told about what happens once one reaches the upper echelons of academia—the politics one must navigate and the pressures endured, especially as a black woman garnering respect while maintaining a strong sense of self in what is often a Darwinian culture. As I gain credentials and publications that allow me to move further into this world, I am so grateful to have sister-allies already there who readily help me finesse and brace for the new devils on each new level, so to speak.  It can’t be said enough that we are our own wealth, first and foremost.  By virtue of our own eyes and breath, we are seen and heard.  We need each other more than ever as academia and the rest of the planet slowly trudges toward progress.

Our individual and collective work is too important.  We must ensure that we thrive as models of wellness, not wither away as cautionary tales. We must honor our foremothers by actualizing and building upon the best of their mighty, courageous offerings, while heeding their missteps and warnings.  Since Hurston’s mule metaphor continues to haunt us, let us be stubborn and tenacious about our care— insisting on the best treatment in every realm of our lives.

I admit to being so overcome with anger and righteous indignation at appalling conditions and injustices that I made mistakes analogous to those who riot in their own neighborhoods; adopting detrimental coping mechanisms like not eating well, exercising regularly or getting enough rest, and turning to vices that hurt this precious body sorely needed to think, teach, act, write and love at full capacity.  Since the load isn’t lessening, we must remember as Lena Horne so eloquently stated, “It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” Many black women intellectuals have carried their loads with much grace and continue to do so. And each day is a chance to forgive self and others, to be accountable and begin anew.

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Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of She Has A Name (Four Way Books, 2013). A recipient of fellowships to the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, the Vermont Studio Center and Cave Canem, her work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou’wester, Oxford American, Lumina and Villanelles. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, Drew University and Adelphi University. She has also led workshops for various arts-in-education organizations in diverse settings from schools to prisons. Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. http://www.kamilahaishamoon.org

When Did Neil deGrasse Tyson

Start Using the Arguments of

Christian Apologists?

April 25, 2012

By Hemant Mehta  

 

***Update***: Dr. Tyson has responded to this thread here.

…

This is weird for me to say: Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t get it.

In the video below, he claims to be an agnostic… but when you listen to his reasoning, it doesn’t seem like he knows the difference between an agnostic and an atheist.

 

 

[Agnostic refers] to someone who doesn’t know… but hasn’t yet really seen evidence for it… but is prepared to embrace the evidence if it’s there… but if it’s not, won’t be forced to have to think something that is not otherwise supported.

So he’s someone who won’t say definitively that god doesn’t exists, but he open to the evidence.

In other words, he’s an atheist… at least that’s the term I’ve always used for that definition.

Without going into (boring-to-me) philosophy that breaks the categories down even further (“He’s a weak atheist,” “He’s an agnostic atheist”), it sounds like Tyson is just trying to back away from using the A word.

To some extent, I understand that. He doesn’t want to be known to the public as an “atheist scientist” (like Richard Dawkins). He wants to be known as a scientist, period. There’s a huge advantage to that.

But one of the reasons so many of us respect Dr. Tyson is because he tells it like it is (and he’s so effective in the process). I have a hard time believing he just misunderstands the terminology (at least as it’s used by the general public).

He goes on to explain that one of the reasons he’s not an “atheist” is because the atheists he knows are fervent activists, fighting for that cause, debating god’s existence, etc. But again, that’s not what makes someone an atheist. You can be an atheist and never talk about it with anyone. If you don’t believe god exists, you’re an atheist. End of story. What you do with that belief is your business, but you don’t become a “bigger” atheist because you talk about it openly, and you’re not a “lesser” atheist if you don’t come out of the closet.

At the end of the video, he talks about how he wouldn’t join a group for people who don’t enjoy golf… as if all atheists do is sit around and not pray. As if there is no anti-atheist discrimination to fight against. As if we’re not opposing attempts to make this a “Christian nation.”

If people who didn’t play golf were discriminated against, then we’d make a bigger deal about that, too. But people who don’t play golf can still get elected to Congress all across the country. People who don’t believe in god are banned from even running for office in several states (at least in the books).

I’ve never said this before, but I’m really disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson after watching that video.

Had he just stuck to his opening statement of explaining that he doesn’t like labels — “the only ‘ist’ I am is an ‘scientist’” — it would’ve been fine. A copout perhaps, but a respectable copout. But hearing him elaborate on those ideas, he just fell into misguided definitions and false accusations we so often hear from Christian apologists. He should know better than that.

Am I off base?

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About Hemant Mehta

Hemant Mehta is the chair of Foundation Beyond Belief and a high school math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He began writing the Friendly Atheist blog in 2006. His latest book is called The Young Atheist's Survival Guide.

__________________________

 Neil deGrasse Tyson • 8 months ago

 

I'm impressed by the fervor with which this thread has proceeded. Thanks for your interest in my (and each other's) views. In response to some of what has been said, I offer a few perspectives:

0) The opening sentence to this blog: "Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t get it" should instead have said "we don't see eye to eye" or "we don't agree on important points".  As worded, it implies that you "get it" while I and everyone who agrees with me does not.  That's a strong assertion, which, in my experience, is hardly ever justified.  As a minimum, it does not allow there to be an argument you have yet to consider that would change your view.  That is the essence of dogma.
1) I have not received money from NASA for the past five years or so.  Back then, I received was a small fraction of large pot of research money to study data from the Hubble Telescope.  Right now I have access to seed monies from the National Science Foundation to birth the radio show StarTalk: http://www.startalkradio.net/.  So my "financial support" is, and has ever been, only partially derived from tax-based sources.  My day job since 1995 has been the Director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC.

2) My collected writings and speeches that reference god, religion, spirituality sum to about 1/2 of 1% of my output. And, with the exception of my "Perimeter of Ignorance" talk (and essay from which it was derived), whenever I do reference these subjects in talks, it's typically because I was directly asked by somebody during Q&A.  But because of forums such as this blog, I find myself being continually pulled back into the conversation. Evidence that people care, for sure, but from my view, a misdirection of energies...

3) In my opinion, ideas matter more than words and labels.  In a point I've made before, our language has only two words that reference or measure a person's non-religiosity.  So werre left debating who's sortable into one word or another, rather than discussing the access that religious zealots have to school curricula, or the subjugation of women in many religious philosophies.  Consider that Christopher Hitchens was a tireless fighter for human rights his entire life.  But at no time were you compelled to say "Go Atheist, Go!"  Instead you couldn't help notice: "This guy cares deeply about the disenfranchised."

4) I care deeply about science literacy and the impact it can heave on dreams, ambitions, and the wealth of nations.  Occasionally this mission crosses paths with dogma.  I'm there what that happens, but not typically on the front lines.  That's because others step forward who've written books on the dangers of dogma - religious or otherwise.  These people have forged their careers on debating dogma.  I'm their backup, although I'm usually not needed.  When I do step forward it's typically with a qualitatively different argument than what preceded me.  e.g. http://www.haydenplanetarium.o... The concept that you can't prove a negative is often applied to "you can't prove God does not exist".  This notion, while strictly true in logic and philosophy, is simply rubbish to the practicing scientists.  That's why logicians and philosophers, in modern times, make bad scientists.  We prove negatives all the time.  But our language is a bit different.  Instead we might say, "Evidence is overwhelming for the absence of "WXYZ", such that we will abandon all further  experiments on the subject and go on to other problems"  For example, if you say there's a bear in a cave, and I surround the cave with footprint-powder and observe for a year that no bear tracks are left outside of the cave - at any time,  I have **in practice** demonstrated that there is no (living) bear within.  For these reasons I will never say "You cannot prove that God does not exist."

6) The world (but especially America) contains productive, practicing scientists who pray to a personal god (about 40% of the demographic).  So being a scientist is **empirically** not equivalent to being an Atheist.  Typically they have filtered their religious texts for spiritual fulfillment, ignoring patently false statements about the physical world.   So the fight for science literacy is not against religion, it's against religious people (and perhaps others) who are trying to change policy in ways that undermine the training of scientists and practice of science here and elsewhere.  For those who want to fight religion beyond these battle fields, I will not stop them.  But my portfolio of energy and interest does not include such conduct or activities.

7) Don't take any of this personally, I don't debate astrologers, faith healers, palm readers, UFOlogists (etc.) either.  I'd rather get people thinking straight in the first place.  If I fail, that's when I hand them over to the rest of you.

8) More on these points of view from my acceptance remarks upon receiving the 2009 American Humanist Association's  Isaac Asimov Science Award.  http://www.thehumanist.org/hum...

Respectfully submitted,
Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York City