Poetic Licence Horoscope for June 1-7

(Maybe next week the stars will feel like being comforting?)

All of the Signs: In honor of and in mourning for Breonna Taylor, who was murdered by police in her home, please go to the Say Her Name website (https://aapf.org/shn-campaign) and

1.      Learn the stories.

2.      Believe the stories.

3.      Speak up for the stories.

4.      Say the names.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Four)

            A really cool thing happened and then a really dreadful thing happened. Lots of protesters were sitting and having a rest along the planters that lined the sidewalk across the street from the Supreme Court. Amy and I went over there to relax for a minute and make sure our phones were charged. I opened the foil-wrapped PB& J from my purse and ate it with panic-hunger. We still joined the chants going on across the street. I wondered aloud why we weren’t BLOCKING the street. If this were Philly, we would definitely be blocking the street.

            Sometimes, tourists would come by and talk to us about what was going on. A group of Chinese women stopped to ask me what my “E.R.A. Now” sign meant. One woman in the group, tall and thin and brightly dressed, didn’t have much English at all, but she had two words:

“Me too.”

            Her face was shiny and happy, maybe just excited to have found the right words. A lightning bolt of connection, sadness, and heart from all across the world went through me. We smiled at each other. We had something beautiful and horrible and profound: Me too.

            Not too long after that life-altering exchange, a white, middle-aged, American man with a goatee, walking his bike and wearing yellow bicycle clothes, stopped to greet some friends who were sitting near me. In my freaked-out, hypervigilant state, I overheard what he was saying, and it FUCKING CONCERNED ME.

In an offhanded, chitchatty way, he said this:

“It’s just a shame because you know the ones voting yes today are the same ones who went nuts when Franken…”

“NO. NOT HERE.” I went from peaceful PB&J mode to spitting-nails mad in half a second. “YOU ARE NOT going to talk about that FRANKEN BULLSHIT HERE. NOT. TODAY.”

Like so many “liberal” men, he was super-ready with:

“You shut the fuck up, bitch. I’m just talking to my friends.” He shook his finger at me and said something physically threatening, I wish I could remember what.

“GO. AHEAD.” I said, holding my sign aloft and bracing for impact.

It seems so foolhardy now, but I WAS physically ready to fight him. I wanted him to come at me so I could rip him to FUCKING SHREDS and with him, all of the troll-farm- indoctrinated Bernie Bro rape-apologists I’d been tormented by for the past three years.

It felt like the crowd around him was treating me as a threat, but it’s likely that some of them were trying to protect me. NOT the white woman that the Bicycle Man had stopped to greet though--she stood between us, shielding the man from my attack. A black man with a very gentle manner tried to get between us on the other side. He was trying to help, I think, but I felt boxed-in and snarling. People were filming with their phones—I’m sure I’m on some feeds looking and sounding like a caged beast.

“You need to get some help.” The white lady acting as the patriarchy’s human shield kept telling me.

“You’re crazy,” the bicycle man kept saying.

1.      I am getting help! This protest IS me getting help.

2.      Nothing calms a girl down like some good old-fashioned gaslighting.

The worst part was that I ‘knew” in this moment that I was the threat here, not sleep-rape-joke making Franken (Who, in my fury, I kept calling Frankl. Sorry Viktor Frankl! Love youuuuu!”) not this man gaslighting me and telling me to shut up, not even Kavanaugh. To this little crowd, I was the scariest thing at the Capitol that day. Maybe I’m a little bit okay with that, except:

            “You’re making my daughter cry!” said the woman angrily.

            Her daughter, a curly-haired twelve-something, was indeed sobbing, in the same way my then-littlest nephew sobbed when I ruined the Thanksgiving before last screaming at the adults about Nazis and racism and the homophobic Catholic church and rape culture and Water Protectors and god knows what else. I recognized and empathized with both kids’ fear, but I tried to understand that neither I nor my anger was the problem.

            “YOU’RE making her cry! WHY DON’T YOU STAND UP FOR WOMEN?”

            “You need help,” the woman kept intoning, and I really can’t argue with her there.

            “What if it was HER in that fucking picture? What if it was YOU?” I screamed as I started to walk away.

            Although some people said words of encouragement (“Stay strong, you can do this.”) as I was led (by Amy, thank goodness) away from the scene in shock, I felt like the worst monster ever, like I’d ruined the movement, like I’d set back the Democrats by a million years. I was shattered, and ashamed of myself, but I can also see who did this.

            AL FRANKEN FUCKING DID THIS. He fucked women over in person and then he fucked us over as a party. Liberal men did this, by dismissing the concerns of all non-white non-men as “identity politics” and insisting that “real people” only cared about money.

            While I admit my anger was scary and I’m sad that that little girl cried, I hope she’ll remember my fury on her behalf. I hope, someday, it’ll spark some fury in her. That doesn’t make me not-ashamed, but it does make me a little hopeful.

My Wonderful, Magical Day of Yelling at Nazis, Part Two

               

We got to DC by 11 AM, just in time to visit the National Gallery of Art. I was excited to see the Dutch Masters’ paintings of ships, but frustration and horror about colonialism put a damper on my fascination with the beautiful, intricate model tall ships and dramatic, almost photorealistic maritime paintings. In the modern and contemporary wing, the Calders gave me such a sense of buoyancy as the light streamed in over the mobiles at all sorts of I.M. Pei-designed angles.

Voyager by Kerry James Marshall (https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.159651.html) gave me a sense that goodness and rightness were possible. So did (to a much less transcendent degree) the strong coffee in the museum café.

Detail: Voyager by Kerry James Marshall

Our Lyft driver was happy to hear that we were on our way to Freedom Plaza to yell at nazis. He was African American and a veteran, so the idea of anyone carrying a nazi flag offended him on a deep patriotic level I could probably never fathom.

“That’s not a nazi in the trunk,” he said, “Just a water bottle I keep forgetting to unload.”

“A nazi in the trunk would definitely be five stars” I said, and we promised to yell some extra for him as we jumped out into the humidity to join the crowd.

One of my goals for the day was to really pay attention to what it feels like to be around Antifa members. I knew lots of people were afraid of them, maybe more afraid of them than they are of white nationalists for some reason (racism), so I wanted to figure it out.

Though one of our local anti-fascist groups does seem a little bit like they might be funded by Russia for protest-trolling purposes (Refuse Fascism Philly is almost exclusively white, seems to have a very big poster budget, and has engaged in “both parties are the same” voter suppression rhetoric—could be suspicious, could just be young and rich…) I’ve also felt grateful to see covered-faced anti-fascists take the periphery of the Philly Trans March, seemingly to act as a protective front line in case anything violent might happen. That’s an act of risk and service that means something to

me.

Although the media portrayed it differently, the rally in Freedom Plaza was populated with all different kinds of people. BYP 100 and Black Lives Matter activists, young punk kids handing out “ally cookies” that I didn’t realize were a pun until later on, and at least two two middle-aged ladies carrying signs about the ERA:

           

Though I have a deep distrust of young white dudes (Okay, white dudes. Okay, dudes in general. Okay, almost everyone because I have anxiety and PTSD and it’s 2018.) I felt a deep wave of affection for a scrawny bespectacled twenty-something white guy standing atop a planter holding an Antifa flag aloft.

And, as at every protest I’ve been to, there were adorable kids being adorable. I put on my teacher voice and told them they were doing SUCH a good job.

Say Her Name Street Art! (Abolish the Police! And ICE!)

This Election Year, Leave Your Troll Farm Training Behind

In 2016, Russian Troll Farms helped Americans hone our unfortunate skills of hating women and people of color (and our/their pesky “identity politics”) to undermine our election and support straight white male supremacy on both the right and the left, including efforts to suppress the African American vote overall. (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/22/587921536/how-a-russian-troll-factory-waged-an-aggressive-campaign-to-disrupt-the-u-s-elec) I’ll stop writing about 2016 someday, but not until its influence is over.

Here in 2018, we’re seeing a lot of progress despite the ongoing fascism at the top. We have so many more female candidates, LGBT candidates, and candidates of color to root and cheer and canvass for. But as much as those candidates will have our support, as much as I believe in the Blue Wave and the Rainbow Wave and all of the other against-evil signs that I see in our near future, it saddens and angers me that all of the inspired candidates entering into or persisting in our political sphere will face the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and white male entitlement of Trump’s/Sanders’s/Putin’s well-trained army of commenters.

As Bernie’s adherents turn their Hillary-hatred toward Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, heaping them with comment-contempt and demonizing all Democrats as shills, will that hurt the Blue Wave and end up (maybe unintentionally) supporting Trump’s agenda? Will the Left’s version of white male supremacy end up supporting the Right’s? I hope not. I know the White Male Supremacist Left is louder than it is pervasive (That’s why they don’t get, you know, THE VOTES.) but I still think reclaiming the government in November is going to take extra badass efforts on the part of all intersectional feminists and our allies.

While the misogynist Troll Farm mentality is concentrated in the MAGA/Our Revolution camps, our training in abusive commenting bleeds into everything. Last year when the Al Franken story broke, my misery at being triggered by that gross picture was made worse by the fact that many of the members of the Marching Onward Facebook Group (Which has previously felt like a marvelously comforting group of Hillary supporters to me.) refused to acknowledge Franken’s misconduct, preferring to gaslight, debase, and undermine his victims. I hear that they have since moved on to trashing Kirsten Gillibrand for daring to speak out about Bill Clinton’s abuse of power.

Misogyny, abuse, voter suppression, racism, and cultural gaslighting are not just the product of some right-wing “other”—they are everyone’s problem, everyone’s fault, and EVERYONE’S responsibility to change.

I live in a very liberal neighborhood, but since 2016 I’ve been learning more and more about its general Get Outness. I’ve learned over and over that the label of “liberal” does not translate to “not-misogynist” or “not white supremacist.” But still, it usually seems like things are getting better. As we gear up for the primary election, we are lucky enough to have a choice between two Democrats of color for State Representative; an incumbent guy with lots of charisma and all the best endorsements, and a lady challenger who is very vocal in opposing the NRA but about whom it can be hard to find other information. I’m likely to vote for the incumbent because he seems more vocally supportive of LGBT rights, but I feel protective of the female candidate, for good reason.

The other day, on our neighborhood Facebook group, a neighbor asked a perfectly straightforward question about the female candidate’s endorsements. Her question seemed to trip some sort of Manchurian Candidate wire in many neighbors’’ heads. They saw this innocuous question as a chance to show contempt for the female candidate, dismiss her accomplishments, and denigrate Democrats in general. I just Googled the male candidate to make sure and yep, he’s a Democrat too, but for ladies, it’s for some reason a sin to have the benefit of belonging to a party.  It was a thread of very low-key misogyny, but it let me know that Troll Farm mentality is still in effect, and I pushed back and then turned off notifications.

I’ve been suspicious of calls for civility ever since I realized they most often come from conservative white people, so I won’t ask for civility here. But since I can’t go back in the political TARDIS to 2016 and get my Bernieful neighbors to respect women’s accomplishments and help us save America from Trump, I can ask them for that respect now. Stop erasing women’s accomplishments, and stop pretending that misogyny is anybody’s revolution, that it does anything but support the status quo. For America to prosper, to get all of the freedom and inclusiveness our country is supposed to stand for, you have to stop using the comment section as a way to put women in our place. Nobody signed up for Troll Farm Hate Training, it was forced upon us. It is way past time to let that training go.

Woke Misogyny Is Hard to Write About

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, online violence

***PLEASE NOTE: I’m writing as a white cisgendered women, and every oppression that happens to me happens so much more often to women of color, trans people, disabled people, etc. My point of view is extraordinarily privileged in so many ways. As I write about the ways in which misogyny and rape-victim-blaming can intersect with the callout culture approach to social justice work, it’s likely it will seem like I’m forgetting that privilege. I am not. I’m interested here in what the identity of rape survivor really feels like in a body, and how misogyny and victim-blaming still exists even in the most well-intentioned circles. A disclaimer can’t assure that I won’t get it wrong, but this is the space where I get to get it wrong so I can learn. ***

A few weeks ago, I read the wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL book The Body Is Not an Apology (https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/) by Sonya Renee Taylor. The book came into my life at a time when I was feeling stuck, and it felt like a lifeboat. The theme of the book, to wildly over-simplify, is that radical self-love is a starting point for making the world a less-terrorized place for bodies. Not just an I-love-my-curves kind of love, well that too but also a deeper love that celebrates even the difficult, ESPECIALLY the difficult, parts of the process each of us is going through. The book gave me space to truly love myself, even to forgive myself, and I felt ready to grow and serve the world better.

I LOVED The Body Is Not an Apology, I still do. I evangelized it all over town, I couldn’t help myself. My neighborhood even has a body-positive book club, and I joined even though I am super wary of groups. The problem is, Sonya Renee Taylor is a friend of some former friends of mine, and the IRL side of the life-saving book knocked me off of my radical-self-love square almost as soon as I got on there. The world, like depression-brain, will always find a way to remind me to live in self-criticism, to remind me that nothing I ever do will be good enough. The depression-brain part is on me, but I didn’t get this way in a vacuum.

While I was going on a kickass self-love adventure with TBINAA, the book club’s Facilitator was having a spoken word journey. This is where things went awry. A few days before the group was meeting for the second time, Facilitator posted a video of a poem to her facebook group. Not Sonya, that would have been lovely, but Mean “Body Positive” White Lady. M “BP” WL was a sort-of-friend of mine until she wrote a blustery post attacking Hillary voters (There may come a day when I’m over the 2016 primary, but this is not that day.) and, when I pushed back, called me a “vagina voter.” How can you call yourself body positive if my anatomy rules out my enfranchisement? Anyway, the usual things happened after that, some people pressed like, some people collected cultural capital by piling on and saying GOD KNOWS WHAT, I blocked the thread and moved on. Mean “Body Positive” White Lady, through very little fault of her own, became a figure of fear in the trauma-soup that is my once-beloved National Poetry Slam community.

For almost a decade, the thing that has made it hardest for me to hear and be heard in online interactions with the NPS community is the pile-on. In fairness, in about 2010 when I secondhand-witnessed my first NPS pile-on, social networking was fairly new. Troll farms, 4chan, revenge porn, etc, weren’t part of the public lexicon, and there wasn’t as deep an understanding of the violence that the online world can perpetrate on women, particularly queer women and women of color. Because of my magic/annoying PTSD brain, the mob-mentality aspect of the pile-on jumped right out at me.

The First Big Pile-On (meaning, the FBPO that entered my consciousness, not the first they had) didn’t happen to me, but also it sort of feels like it did. The details are fuzzy to me, but I’ll do my best. A White Lady Slam Leader was sort of live-facebooking the finals of a national slam competition in…2010? She was making the point that the options for how to be a woman and get slam points are very limited, and in making that point, she said something racist—NOT OKAY. I’m glad people spoke up about her misstep, but the response was wildly disproportionate, with everyone weighing in, comment after comment. To her credit, WLSL saw the whole thing as a learning opportunity, and I learned a lot too, but alongside our progress toward awakening came a clear message: You don’t get to comment on poetry culture, and if you do, you are eligible to be ripped to shreds. At the same time that the mass-pushback was helping us make progress and learn, at the same time that it was helping marginalized voices be heard, it was also sending women a clear message to stay in our place, to keep ourselves small and stop trying to comment on the culture as a whole.

Not too long after that, my own work with the Philadelphia Poetry Slam started to feel like I was being used and like my work (We’d call it emotional labor now—YAY TERMS!) was being taken for granted, for only-sort-of-related reasons. For good and ill, the NPS community stayed with me through my friend feeds. That’s how, in that benighted spring of 2016, I got tangled in the tail-end of a much more upsetting pile-on.

A queer white woman had written a performance poem about her rape. Some of the language in the poem implied that her rapist was Mexican, when he was, in fact, white. THAT’S BAD! It’s upsetting and definitely a problem but also IT’S A POEM SHE WROTE ABOUT HER OWN RAPE. Even though she was a very privileged rape survivor, she was still a rape survivor, and I felt like a PUBLIC PILE-ON was maybe not the best way to address it. I’m a super-lucky rape survivor too, but I don’t think I could’ve made it through the NATIONAL TRIAL BY FACEBOOK that this woman survived. I’m sorry, but no one deserves that.

Like the WLSL, this poet was willing to learn from her mistake. The Woman Who’d Written Her Rape Poem Wrong wrote a public apology on facebook, including an apology for taking private time to heal. By now you’re yelling JANE! DON’T COMMENT ON THAT THREAD! Because I never learn, I commented. I told her she’s still a person, still entitled to self-care, and that taking time for herself was not going to make there be more racism. Then I blocked the thread, vaguebooked about how the NPS community can be shitty and misogynist and went to bed.

What I didn’t know was that the Queen Bully of Poetry Land, who used to be a friend of mine, was at the center of this pile-on. My phone buzzed around 3 AM, QBPL letting me know she thinks I’m as racist as Susan B. Anthony (There’s a certain line of thinking that suggests feminism can never be a thing because of Susan B. Anthony’s poor choices. If this same standard were applied to men, there would NEVER BE ANYTHING EVER.) She told me that I had failed at teaching not because I’d lacked self-care, but because of my own weakness and entitlement. Accurate, but not helpful. After I blocked her and went back to sleep, she texted my ex-wife/BFF to yell at her for having #blacklivesmatter on her facebook page, since clearly we both must be unredeemably racist for thinking a white rape victim is still a person.

No matter how much I distance myself from that NPS scene in my heart and mind and feeds, it still hangs like a tattooed ghost over my creative life. I was surprised when my jangledness about those years-ago pile-ons knocked me out of The Body Is Not an Apology Book Club, but I’m glad to give the Facilitator the chance to go on her spoken word journey without worrying about my weird residual triggers. Today, for me, radical self-love means admitting that this stuff still matters, that there’s still so much fear and un-worked-out pain, so much letting go of the ten-to-twenty-years-ago NPS community that still sometimes knocks me off balance. Mostly, that off-balance is good. Mostly, I’m getting somewhere.

Victimhood Isn’t Shameful, Permanent, or Absolute

Fuck Tony Robbins. When he literally, physically pushed a woman repeatedly to prove that she was hurting herself with her #metoo anger and “victim mentality,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmkiqfmobqI the world (or at least the world that shares my algorithms) was horrified, and he was indeed a terrible monster, but he was also pushing a belief that runs throughout all throughout pop psychology. Even though a crime happened to us, a terrible act of aggression and chaos that may have (or may not have!) jarred our lives onto a new course, we are not allowed to call ourselves victims. (Except Roxane Gay. She said at the beginning of Hunger that she doesn’t feel like she owes the world a heroic narrative, and it was SUCH a relief to read that sentiment.)

Watching Tony Robbins be a gaslighting creep onstage reminded me of the time (Waaaaaay before I’d ever thought about trauma work or survivorship or PTSD) my poor Aunt Melinda accidentally sent me to triggertown by quoting another pop psychology patriarch: Dr. Phil. “You teach people how to treat you,” she said, frustrated after listening to a relatively minor tale of roommate woe. I was speechless with anger, feeling the weight of every abuse I’d even been blamed (or blamed myself) for. I’m sure I said nothing helpful or articulate. I still feel the weight of that rage, that mute fury, but luckily there’s blogs and Twitter and being a street artist now, so I find the words. I’ll be finding the words for the rest of my life.

***PLEASE NOTE*** My beautiful anxiety brain is about to take us on a journey, in several leaps, from my personal trauma to the global trauma of history. I don’t equate my trauma to ANYONE else’s. This paragraph is to show the way my trauma helps connect me to the other much more serious pains of the world, and how gaslighting and victim-blaming helps perpetuate the smallest harms and the largest.***

I have never been able to separate “You teach people how to treat you,” from “you were asking for (rape, abuse, terror, etc.)” Did I somehow “teach” the group of teens who drugged, conspired to rape, and assaulted me that that was the kind of treatment I deserved? Did Trayvon Martin TEACH George Zimmerman that he deserved to die, or was that CENTURIES OF COLONIALISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND NRA INFLUENCE? For that matter, did the nations and cultures that were colonized, tortured, and sometimes even erased by Europe “teach us” that they wanted to be dominated and oppressed? No. We dominated and oppressed them because we wanted to. That’s what abusers do.

Aside from the abusive aspect of victimhood-stigmatizing, we do it to ourselves as well. God forbid I should accidentally call myself a “victim” instead of a “survivor” in a feminist thread—I’d be accused of demeaning myself and others, but why? Why should it be demeaning to admit that something bad has happened to us? (I’m worried that I’m accidentally plagiarizing Roxane Gay here. Seriously, read everything she’s ever written.)

I think it comes back to an ancient and stultifying thread of magical thinking. To calm the chaos of the world around us, humans still believe deep down that if something bad happens to you, you must be bad. On that idea is built every atrocity, every erased voice, every abuse from personal to global. Because of that magical thinking, we suffer instead of getting treated, we are pressured to perform heroic survivorship or at least general okayness, we try to empower ourselves with self-blame, we shut off every tributary of empathy. I was seriously once told by an opponent of Obamacare that I got hit by a car in the crosswalk because having insurance invited injury. That is how desperate people are to find order by placing blame, but why not place it on, I DON’T KNOW, the person who was driving?!

If we’re hurt, we must be bad, and if we care for the hurt, we just invite more badness, goes the magical thinking. Teaching the Universe how to treat us. Primal. Understandable, maybe, but the root of every violence and oppression.

Because I’ve had a bajillion years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I can occasionally question my own false absolutes, the labels we place on ourselves and others that can obscure the bigger picture. A few weeks ago, a teenage white supremacist facebook troll told me that minorities should “let go of (our/their) victimhood and be stronger.” He was wrong on every level and I told him why, but his ignorance helped make something clear for me: Victimhood can’t change anyone’s value—why would it? How could a thing that happened to us reduce our worth? A trauma or oppression may change our outlook, it may give us new insights and growth, or it may not. Victimhood may change us, but I don’t think I ever realized before, it isn’t us. The things that happened to me are not the same as what I am. (Pause for two decades of therapists to rejoice.)

The crimes and oppressions that influence us, our various forms of victimhood are not fixed or permanent. Engaging with them doesn’t make us worse or invite more misfortune. Recognizing the ways I am oppressed doesn’t take away my power, it gives me more. Understanding the obstacles that I and my fellow humans face can burnish us to alchemist’s gold, help us change the world, or just help us empathize with our own shitty/miraculous fate as we head off to conquer another day.

If I could take away one idea from the world’s consciousness, it would be the idea that if something bad happens to you, you must deserve it. It’s a toxic, rotten, compelling idea, a holdover from the time when we believed that illness came from demons, that misfortune must reveal some secret sin. It would be especially be good to get rid of this idea because THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO THE BAD THINGS! WHERE IS THE COMFORT IN BLAMING THE VICTIMS INSTEAD?

While we work on eradicating victim-blaming, I’m happy to be a little more free of victim-shaming, to see trauma as a shifting influence, survivorship as multifarious and not something at which I have to be amazing. It reminds me of when my BFF/ex-wife were watching Kesha’s Grammy Performance  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buM8OErfvu0 and Amy, eyes full of tears at Kesha’s monumental, beautiful, grumpy transcendence said “She’s too nice!”

“It’s only one song on the album,” I said, and that’s how I feel about all of this. Kesha’s survivorship is a diamond-brilliant facet of her artistic identity, but so is her goofiness, her feverish dance beats, her sly romance. For anyone to reduce her or the #metoo movement to stigmatized victimhood is only to see a very, very narrow part of the picture. Everything I make will be an attempt to break that narrow lens.

What America Owes Hillary Supporters (Besides an Apology)

This story starts with a #janeworldproblem that would surely make Roseanne Barr think I deserve whatever abuse I’ve gotten, but nonetheless: On my way to my monthly get-the-Trump-out massage appointment on Saturday, I got triggered by one of my favorite and usually-most-comforting podcasts, Pop Culture Happy Hour. Without any kind of disclaimer or warning, they lead off a review of the (fascist propaganda) reboot of Roseanne with a quote from the show’s rotten-to-the-core title character. The line was a contemptuously delivered slur against Hillary Clinton, calling our rightful president a “liar, lair pantsuit on fire.” I’ve been writing a lot lately about feeling the chill of real evil, and the horror of it hit my spine before I banged on the button to turn off the car stereo.

And so, I drove the rest of the way to my appointment steaming with frustration, feeling hurt and betrayed that a trusted podcast would inject something that awful into my afternoon. Remember when John Oliver told everyone to write a sticky note that said “NOT NORMAL” to help keep us from getting sucked into a moral cesspool after Trump’s (stolen) election? DID POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR LOSE THEIR STICKY NOTE? Is that why they were reviewing Roseanne as if it were a regular sitcom and not a love letter to the fictional “white working class” whom we’ve somehow excused for voting for a racist, misogynist monster because being poor somehow entitled them to their hatred? (Please read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The First White President for the history of the “white working class” as it is used to support racism throughout American history. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/)

The Roseanne line triggered physical fear and anxiety because of the abuse that I and my friends took when we were working our asses off to get Hillary Clinton elected. Unfortunately, as I’ve written about many times, that abuse did not just come from the right. In fact, the worst hatred I encountered during the 2016 election was during the primary, in the form of the (We now know it’s Russian troll farm fueled https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/bernie-sanders-russia-2016-election-interference-415691) openly misogynist, fanatic zeal of Bernie Sanders supporters.

Primary flashbacks had resurfaced a few days before when a local feminist educator and spoken word leader I’ve admired for a decade posted a “Bernie 2020” themed article on her facebook page. In the conversation that followed, I learned that she hadn’t known about the Russian interference or about the misogyny. https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2016/05/being-woman-in-time-of-hillary-haters.html (Admittedly, the troll farms part doesn’t prove he was a bad candidate, just that Russia saw him as destabilizing. I can’t really see destabilizing as an inherently bad thing.)

My friend kindly asked for some articles to send her in the direction of my viewpoint, and I sent them. (Remember how Roxane Gay at one point felt afraid to endorse Hillary?! ROXANE GAY! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/hate-that-doesnt-hide.html ) But honestly, I was a little frustrated, because so many of us have been telling this story for TWO YEARS and my friend had somehow missed it. Algorithms, probably, but still. I kinda wish that instead of sending articles, I had just asked her to believe me.

Hillary-trolling abusiveness has a much more important effect than bumming me out on the way to my massage appointment or making me misogyny-splain on facebook. Though I’m with the Women’s March for life and I believe we’re much bigger than our (often hateful-dude-admiring) leadership, many of us were inspired to fight the patriarchy off of our march last year when they tried to make Bernie Sanders one of the lead speakers of our conference. http://time.com/4981357/bernie-sanders-womens-march-convention/ This week, the Women’s March partnered with Bernie voters’ “Our Revolution” group, which is the opposite of intersectional in that it views economic injustice as the only valid form of injustice.

To me, Hillary-bashing is partly “identity politics”--both Trump supporters and Bernie Bros seek to erase the importance of identity in the struggle for justice, while Hillary’s campaign was built upon acknowledging ALL forms of disparity. Many of her speeches include some variation on this sentiment:

“And we Democrats agree on defending all of our rights – civil rights and voting rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights, LGBT rights and rights for people with disabilities.” (PA primary victory speech, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjjPDHAQxLU)

When people on the right and left dismiss “identity politics,” they’re trying to erase one of the few political candidates who made me feel fully included in her speeches, who cared about the struggles of the children I teach and the children in my family.

            In addition to the all-identities-but-straight-white-male-erasing ethos of Bernie and Trump, the horror my body feels about that Roseanne quote comes from the good old fashioned gaslighting of it all. Because of the erasure that comes from the right and from the (mostly white male) far-left, I’ve had to check the numbers many times to remind myself that we won. We chose her. We voted. We won. And then I watched formerly peace-loving friends go off the rails entirely, accusing us of theft, defending the chair-throwing, doxing, vicious homes-of-delegates-calling entitled white voters in the name of being “progressive.”

            Other than the physical toll that it took to watch Bernie and then Trump gaslight Hillary/America in rallies and on debate stages, other than the troll-trauma that still lives in my body, why is this still important? Why not just let it go in the name of unity?

            Mostly, I do. I’ll defend the Women’s March to anyone who questions them, even as their leaders make misogynist alliances. I’ll canvas alongside neighbors who would have called me a stupid shill if they’d known me in 2016, I’ll join marches with local justice groups who have carried “Killary” signs in the past. I continue to participate in a political system that defaults to punishing women who get involved, because the only way it’ll get better is if people like me stay involved. But the compromise costs me, it takes a physical toll no matter how much I prioritize self-care.

            To Pop Culture Happy Hour, I would say, for those of us deep in the struggle, you weren’t just sharing a quote from a mean lady saying a stupid thing. You were placing into my otherwise pleasant afternoon one of the most poisonous, vicious, damaging ideas to ever hit the American airwaves: that women, especially ambitious women, cannot be trusted. We are not liars. It’s past time to believe us. To America, I would say, hear us and take our side. It’s time for you to stop punishing us for trying to save your asses from Trump.

In a World That Didn't Hate Me or My Students

I just had to draw the ideal classroom for my Educational Research class, and I found myself wanting to share what I wrote:

The last classroom I had, in North Philadelphia in 2014, had all the technological advancements that grants could buy—we had a most-of-the-time working Smartboard, a cart of 30 up-to-date laptops shared between two classes, good, Common Core Aligned textbooks, a schedule built around formative assessment and teacher training, even an enrichment program. My grade partner and fellow teachers were incredibly big-hearted, knowledgeable, extremely hardworking and tough. Yet I was the third teacher that year to go out on FMLA leave (and later resign) due to Acute Stress Disorder. No matter how dedicated I or my students were (and those kids TRIED THEIR HEARTS OUT) we couldn’t keep violence, poverty, prejudice, shame, homophobia, or stress from derailing our beautifully planned and decorated classroom culture. Though we learned to line up perfectly and sang class songs about how “everybody has a seed to sow,” I couldn’t keep the children safe. I thought constantly about the School-to-Prison Pipeline, (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/538/is-this-working)  and the last week I was there, I dreamed that we were loading the children onto Holocaust trains, and that doesn’t seem like much of an exaggeration.

I’m still not sure how to run a classroom without becoming part of the problem, but it was very healing to imagine what a classroom in a hospitable world would look like.

Motivation Monday: Make Calls Against White Supremacists!

These weeks after Election Day have been so sad, but there is a silver lining--I've seen people reaching out with love so much to each other, and I've seen my local community pull together even more than before. Last Friday night I was lucky enough to attend a phone bank at Big Blue Marble Bookstore (Just a few doors down from my apartment because I'm the luckiest!) to make calls against Trump's plan to appoint white supremacist leader Steve Bannon as one of his top advisers. The call list only takes about a half hour and you can do it any time you want. If you're shy, call after five and leave voicemails--those are counted too.

We can't give up now. We have to do everything we can to preserve America's heart and soul and to protect our friends and neighbors from the swell of hate we're only just beginning to understand. The Bid Blue Marble is planning calls every Friday night, and I'll share the phone lists and scripts whenever I get them. Thanks for continuing to be awesome! <3 p="">

Stupid Shit People Say About Poor Children

Luckily this does not happen at my current jobsite, but I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard education professionals tell me that kids don't like to read or write.

I wish I could carry around the reams and reams of evidence that I have to the contrary.

The worst part is that they're often saying "the kids we work with" which is code for "urban" which is code for...

Even if they aren't being racist, they are certainly underestimating kids, which is absolutely the worst sin as far as I am concerned.

It is not our job to reinforce stereotypes that people have about children, any children. It is our job to show them every possible opportunity.