The Dead

The dead watched her.

At first she thought it was ordinary, and everyone lived in the world like she did, as though you were living in a giant fishbowl, watched by silent, judging ghosts just beyond a glass wall. When she was a child, sometimes they played with her, especially when they, too, were children, but when she got older, they grew colder towards her, and she always lived with a sense that they were never quite satisfied.

She didn’t know what the dead wanted.

When she got older and learned that most people weren’t trailed by an audience of silent dead, didn’t see the dead in every new place, she started reading about the dead. Some people said that they had difficulty crossing over because they longed for justice or had unfinished business. She tried talking to them, but they never replied. She tried finding out who they were and telling their family members to let them go, but the dead were immovable, fixed, still silent, still judging.

She found herself starting to suffocate under the weight of the dead.

What people thought was a childhood fancy became something more sinister when she got older. As a teenager, she was told to stop making things up, to stop intruding on grieving families. Even then, she sensed that telling people she saw the dead, was watched by them, might not be wise. They surrounded her at night, silently looming over her bed, weightlessly sitting on her coverlet, waiting.

People said she was chilly and standoffish.

Sometimes she felt like she was behind a glass wall herself, trapped between the living and the dead. She asked her mother about the circumstances of her birth, wondering if something unusual had happened. Maybe a black cat crossed her mother’s path or she was born at midnight, but none of those things were true. She was born on a sunny August evening on an otherwise unremarkable date. Her mother remembered little of note, other than her birth, which was notable enough.

She asked the dead for answers but they never replied.

The only place the dead didn’t go was cemeteries, and she found herself drawn to them. It was the one place on earth she could go where she wouldn’t be surrounded by silent judges, the only place she felt truly alone. She sat under cypresses and drew headstones, wondering why the dead wouldn’t go to the one place they were supposed to be. As soon as she passed through the cemetery gate, closing it carefully behind her, they drifted back.

The dead never made any indicator that they wanted anything from her.

People thought she was morbid for spending so much time in cemeteries, especially those who remembered her childhood obsession with ghosts and death. They told her to live a little, laughing as they did so. Her mother forced her on a college tour, but everywhere, she saw the dead, leaning over the shoulders of the professors, following the students, walking the tree-lined greenways. She couldn’t stand it.

She went to work for the cemetery instead, trimming graves and cleaning headstones.

The church loved her. They said she was the most diligent graveyard attendant they’d ever had. She spent hours in the cemetery, staying long after she was supposed to and coming in early, all to escape the dead. It wasn’t long before the church in the neighbouring town asked her to look after their cemetery too.

She learned about graves.

She became an expert on headstones and plaques, skilled at identifying them by era and maker. She could restore anything put before her, from cracked marble headstone to faded wooden markers. When she put her hands on graveyard objects, they bent to her will. She insisted on working on the premises, never taking her work away with her. People thought it was strange she didn’t have a workshop, that she worked outdoors in the rain if she had to, but they were too pleased with the results to probe deeper.

People said she had an affinity for the work.

Eventually she was offered a groundskeeper’s house that no one wanted to occupy because it wasn’t next to the cemetery but in it, surrounded by graves. She loved the quiet of coming home at night. She started ordering everything she needed, from groceries to books, to avoid stepping outside sanctified ground. Whenever she left the cemetery to go to a new job, the dead massed in larger numbers than ever before, trailing her, harrying her, until she reached the gate of a new cemetery and they disappeared again.

She dressed eccentrically to fit the part of the cemetery lady.

When they asked her to restore the graves set just outside the boundaries of the cemetery for suicides, she told them she’d only do it if the ground was sanctified, folded back into the cemetery itself. She said something about uneasy dead and the church debated, long and furiously. She made national news, the peculiar woman who lived for cemeteries, and CNN did a feature on her. She wore her most black and frothy dress and waved stonecutter’s tools for the camera.

At last they agreed.

She watched them from inside the cemetery while they performed whatever rites they needed, and then she stepped inside the cool peace of cemetery grounds. It was the first of many unhallowed grounds that she insisted be resanctified, from pauper’s graves to newly unearthed historic cemeteries to mass graves with memorial markers. She hated traveling to those, barreling above the earth in a plane with the dead all around her.

People called her the advocate for the dead.

She laughed when they said that.

“Truly,” she said. “All I want is for them to leave me alone.”

They laughed too, not knowing that the dead watched her.

31 October, 2012 – 10:18 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in fiction | Tagged , |

Why Are Progressives Ignoring Immigrant Women?

My colleague Flavia Dzodan has done tremendous work in the area of representing the rights, concerns, and interests of immigrant women around the world; particularly in Europe, where she lives and works. Yet, one of her recurrent frustrations, and one I share with her, is the lack of attention on the part of the progressive left paid to immigrant women in the United States. Whenever she writes a stunning piece on the abuses endured by immigrant women in the name of western powers, it gets virtually no attention. An uncomfortable silence prevails until people can return to a topic they like better.

Even progressives have to admit that immigration is a huge issue in the United States right now. One need only look to the rising tide of anti-immigrant laws in numerous states, to the escalation in anti-immigrant rhetoric, to understand that this is a serious and growing issue. Add to that the unfavourable depiction of immigrants in pop culture, the hate crimes against immigrants or people presumed to be immigrants, the exploitation of immigrant labour across the United States. And the horrible conditions in immigration detention, the place people are sent to when they’re caught up in law enforcement sweeps, and the place where they can be immured for weeks, months, or even years.

As citizens, there are a lot of rights we enjoy when it comes to being arrested and incarcerated. There are rules. They are applied unfairly, the justice system for citizens is extremely broken and needs a lot of work, but there are some checks and balances within that system that are designed to prevent things like indefinite detention. Such things, however, do not apply to immigrants who are in the United States illegally; they don’t have the protections we do, and that makes them extremely vulnerable to abuse.

Nowhere does that become more apparent than in the cases of immigrant women, who are raped, beaten, and assaulted while in custody. For pregnant women, the abuse and horror take on a whole new level, and it’s one that progressives should be addressing, but aren’t. The conditions in immigration detention for pregnant women are a national shame, something the country as a whole should be hanging its head over, but people remain largely unaware; both out of a desire to remain unaware, and out of media manipulation which leads them to focus on other issues, making it easy to forget about what happens behind the razorwire.

Women who enter immigration detention while pregnant have limited options in terms of care. They can’t access abortions, which forces them to carry pregnancies, wanted or not; and some of those pregnancies are very much not wanted, as they may be legacies of rapes while crossing the border, while being exploited in US communities, or in detention itself. Whether you want it or not, you’re stuck with a pregnancy, but the facility usually doesn’t provide you with the prenatal care you need.

Pregnant women need regular medical checkups to monitor their health and that of the fetus. They need appropriate dietary modifications to ensure the developing fetus gets the nutrition it needs, and that they, too, get the nutrition they need. Interventions like folic acid in the early stages of fetal development are critical. Women who don’t access stable, appropriate prenatal care are more likely to have poor pregnancy outcomes, which means that for pregnant immigrants, detention can be extremely dangerous both for them and their developing fetuses.

Those who stay in detention long enough to go into labour face the same kinds of conditions pregnant prisoners experience. That can include being left to labour for hours without assistance or care, being shackled in medical facilities during labour and delivery, and having babies removed immediately after birth. In the case of immigrant women, the chances at reuniting are slim because of their immigration status. The United States breaks up immigrant families on a regular basis, and this is one of the ways in which it does it; this should be viewed as a profound human rights violation, and yet, it’s rarely discussed. The fact that a woman’s baby is being taken from her somewhere in the United States right now, in all probability, should disturb you.

Over 100 people have died in US immigration detention in the last decade. At least one of them was a pregnant woman with a history of blood clots who reported symptoms consistent with a clotting problem and was ignored. She, like other pregnant women in detention, the majority of whom are Latina, died because the provision of basic health services to people we are incarcerating is apparently too much for the United States government to handle. And she died because we, the people of the United States, have allowed conditions in detention to remain in the state they are, by quietly turning our backs on them.

Progressives, currently fighting to retain reproductive rights across the country, could be in a strong position to advocate for better prenatal care, labour and delivery conditions, and postnatal treatment for pregnant women in detention. Yet, for the most part, they don’t, and that’s troubling. Reproductive justice is for everyone, and I don’t want to live in a country where pregnant women are left in shackles, knowing that if they report complications, their cries for help may well be ignored until it’s too late.

30 October, 2012 – 10:28 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in race | Tagged , , , , |

The Erosion of Worker Benefits

My father and I were talking the other day about the immense gains the labour movement made in the 20th century; not just at the start of the century when they fought child labour, exploitative working conditions, long hours, dangerous facilities, and other abuses, but also the introduction of benefits like pensions, health insurance, paid leave, and other measures intended to promote employee health and satisfaction. Such benefits were at one point standard in a lot of jobs, and indeed the very nature of work was somewhat different. People lived in a world where jobs were typically long term with room for advancement, and where there were incentives to stay over time.

Today, we live in a highly mobile working era. More people than ever before are freelancing, in some cases running their own businesses and in others supplementing other work with freelance income. Others move from workplace to workplace to take advantage of shifts in the market, or because they’re not provided with any real incentives to stay with a given company. Why do so, when the company doesn’t offer competitive wages and benefits, and someone else offers a better deal?

The loss of benefits was a truly tragic erosion of worker rights, and it can be attributed to the failure to support the labour movement. As my father put it, his generation let labour gains slide because they were reaping the benefits. They had healthy, safe workplaces with access to benefits and fair wages, and they didn’t need to fight for these things. Ergo, they didn’t, and as a result, workplaces started to take advantage of the fact that employees didn’t appear to be noticing the slow attrition occurring. It didn’t happen all at once; no company was foolish enough to yank its benefits packages in one fell swoop, but still, it happened.

Today, finding work with benefits is harder than ever before, and it seems almost novel. When a friend gets a job offer with any kind of benefits, we all crowd around in awe. Partially that’s a product of the kinds of fields my friends are in and who I associate with, but it also speaks to a larger trend in society, one where benefits are less present, and can’t be expected. The idea that an employer might provide healthcare, for example, isn’t a given, unless it’s a very large company or you work in an area where it’s mandated.

As for paid sick leave, vacation days, family leave, and other things that should be standard, well, again. They’re remarkable and will inspire much awe if you’re among the fortunate few to have won that particular job lottery. Pensions and retirement plans are also rare, and companies are even attacking pensions that people have already paid for through their work, indicating that the war on benefits is only going to escalate. It’s not enough to just not offer them, apparently, now we need to actively take them away from people who thought they were part of the terms of the employment contract.

We need to see a change in the way workers are viewed and treated in the United States; many people can agree on this. As it is now, workers are objects for exploitation, rather than human beings with their own needs, struggling to survive in a very harsh economy. Many workers are fighting a rising cost of living that makes it difficult for them to afford basic needs, let alone save money and make preparations for the future. Others are working in unsafe conditions because as the support for labour thins, the bravado on the part of companies that want to exploit employees increases. Explosions in coal mines and on board oil rigs highlight the critical need for increased industry safety, and union members are among those calling for investigations, but they’re being ignored.

As we start to see unions getting more active, trying to extend to a larger audience, and fighting to improve the lives of workers, I see a repeat of battles already fought, won, and then given away. And I worry about entering the same cycle; that if we manage to secure better rights for workers, that if benefits once more become routine, that if we can put a stop to the exploitation of freelancers, that if we can improve workplace safety, that our generation and the one that follows us will turn complacent, because their workplaces will be safe, happy, healthy, and productive.

And I want to know how we can prevent this cycle from repeating, how we can look out for the interests of future workers to ensure that they never have to go through this again. I note that despite the best efforts to preserve our history and talk about the legacy of the labour movement in the 20th century, the only people who really paid attention to it were a small subset of society, while everyone at large went along as they were. And then seemed genuinely surprised when they found out that this was a harsh world for workers, and one where companies were valued over the people they employed.

How do you force people to remember history, and to maintain the awareness that once you have gained ground, you cannot relax, even for a minute, because someone will try to take it back again? How do you prevent a problem like this from happening again, and remind people that the things they take for granted could be taken away in the flash of an instant?

29 October, 2012 – 10:08 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , , |

Rewatching The West Wing

I’ve been rewatching The West Wing over the last few months, in part to get the bad taste of The Newsroom out of my mouth. And because, in a presidential election year, I wanted to revisit the world of the Bartlet administration and see all these characters, and their setting, in a new light. If I was really dedicated, I could have paced seasons six and seven perfectly with the actual election schedule, but I’m not quite that determined, and I didn’t want to wait that long between episodes. The idea was to get into the general spirit of things, not mimic them exactly.

Something I’ve really been struck by over the course of this rewatch is the way in which the White House basically fell apart as the election got closer and closer. First it was the poaching of all the good staff as they wicked off to various campaigns, leaving the remaining staff without the support they needed to succeed and push things through to completion. A sort of abandoning ship, which Josh justified by saying that he was ‘thinking about the ninth year,’ but I don’t know if I quite buy that. As staffers rushed to follow campaigns, it felt like giving up on their accomplishments, something Toby bitterly felt as he was left juggling the projects Josh left behind.

And, of course, there was the turn towards campaigning over everything else, really brought home in the episode where Congress is about to vote on a stem cell measure and the Republicans are confident they’ll pass it because the Democrats are all out on the campaign trail. Watching people on the trail this year, I’ve been reminded yet again that while they seem to be spending a lot of time on public appearances, campaign stops, and other events, they don’t seem to be spending a lot of time doing what we elected them to do, which was governing and looking over the political process in this country.

I’m not really comfortable with electing someone who works for a few years and then spends a year or more campaigning, let alone paying that person’s salary. I elect officials to represent me and work in Washington and Sacramento to make sure my voice is heard and my interests are protected; that’s the tradeoff with a representative democracy like ours where it’s not workable for all of us to participate directly. When my people on the hill are off shaking hands and going to $20,000/plate dinners, what’s going on legislatively? Why is the business of government not as important as the business of getting elected?

The answers to that are complex and myriad, of course. We could talk about the rise in campaign spending and how people have to get more and more time out there to make sure people see them, know their names, and vote their way. We could talk about increasing demands from big-ticket donors to meet with candidates and get face time, and the need to cater to those donors to access critically needed funds for campaigns that only get more expensive in time. We could also talk about the outreach work done to educate constituents about what politicians do and could be doing for them. And we could talk about the long campaign cycle in the United States and how that contributes to the earlier and earlier start date for campaigns, especially Presidential ones.

But in the end, I tune in to NPR in the afternoons while I make dinner, and all I hear is a litany of campaign stops, while the world around me is going to pieces. Between reports on violence and unrest around the world, and the economy, and the climate, and so many other social issues, the press junkets and endless campaign tours start to grate on me. Sometimes there’s not anything a specific politician can do, or a particular place politicians could go to do the best work, but symbolism is important to me, and to other voters.

On The West Wing, I watched the staff flee the White House while politicians like Santos spent all their time on the trail, barely showing up for Congressional votes. And I wondered what the (hypothetical) people in their home districts felt like, if they experienced the same resentment I do over politicians who prioritise getting elected over the business of government. Yes, it’s true that if they don’t get elected, they can’t continue the business of government, but what price should voters have to pay to elect the candidates they want?

There are no easy solutions to the numerous problems with the electoral system in the United States. This isn’t something that can be easily dealt with by passing laws or getting politicians to commit to resolutions. But it is something that interests me, as someone who has long loved and been fascinated by the electoral process, as a voter, and as a resident of a country where sometimes, it feels like people start campaigning again almost as soon as they’re elected. It makes me wonder if some of the broken aspects of our political system can be traced back to this; since politicians constantly operate with one eye on the polls, clearly it has a profound impact on what they propose, how they vote on bills, and how they act in office.

Maybe if they only had one term, one shot to get this right, they’d give it their all and focus on being the best they could be for their constituents, instead of always thinking about the election.

28 October, 2012 – 10:49 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics, television | Tagged , |

Too Many Ladies On the Dance Floor? I Don’t Think So

Young adult, we’ve been recently informed, is a ‘female dominated’ genre. Evidently it’s mostly women authors writing in the genre, and teen girls reading in the genre, and there’s much speculation about why this might be, perhaps most notably in this piece at The Atlantic, which got a lot of attention when it came out in August. The author, I note, suggests that YA isn’t plagued by the ‘gender wars’ of adult fiction, where it’s predominantly men who are recognised and celebrated as authors, while women are shoved to the sidelines.

As though young adult authors aren’t influenced by this, or aren’t active in fighting for gender equality.

Sure, J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Stephenie Meyer are huge. So are John Green, David Levithan, and Scott Westerfeld; not on the same scale, to be sure, but they have very dedicated followings and I doubt any of these men feel ‘dominated’ by women authors in young adult, nor do they feel like they’re getting a short shrift or need to fight women for attention and fame. They’ve spent time and energy writing books, interacting with fans, and building up a base of strong followers (myself included!) who eagerly look forward to their next publications.

It’s interesting to see women cast as ‘dominant’ when they’re succeeding in a field, given the overtones that go with that word. It creates the mental image of female authors rampaging over the landscape, taking no prisoners in their thirst for literary, well, domination. And this belief, that YA is a women’s game and the purview of women, also reveals some interesting underlying attitudes about both YA and women. I for one welcome our new female overlords, but apparently I’m in the minority.

Outsiders often describe YA as childlike and simplistic, with more basic plots, language, and characters than adult fiction. Some use this to prop up an argument that we are going downhill, literarily speaking; the rise in popularity of YA is supposed to be evidence that people are losing critical reading skills and can’t handle complex books. Yet, some YA is extremely complex and well-crafted—just as some adult fiction is very simplistic and poorly crafted. Sweeping statements about genre are rarely accurate, especially when you’re talking about such a huge and diverse genre.

With the assumption that YA is less-than comes the automatic belief that of course it would be a woman’s genre. Men certainly don’t have time to muck about with simple fairytales for children. Men write complex, deep, interesting, literary books, unlike women, who are apparently inherently childlike and nostalgic for days gone past. It’s implied, even, that women find YA easier because it’s softer, easier, gentler, and thus must appeal to their nurturing selves.

The disdain for YA and YA readers is palpable and frustrating, and with the perceived dominance of the genre by women, I’d argue that at least some of that disdain is coming from misogyny. What I’m hearing is ‘this genre (in which women are very well-represented) is read primarily by women and teens, and is therefore lesser than other genres.’ Readers of YA are assumed to be simplistic and incapable of grasping more complex plots and literary devices, and they’re looked upon with disdain or pity; ‘well, at least they’re reading something.’

It’s an insult to both readers and writers of YA to say that the genre is inherently less worthy than adult literary fiction. And the fact that so many women are active in the genre is not, to my eye, a coincidence. Like romance, in which women also play a very active role, YA is treated like the lesser plaything, not even worthy of being considered true literature. Women may have carved themselves a niche in an industry notoriously ruled and controlled by men, but their very niche is automatically devalued because there are women in it, which makes for a terrible doublebind.

Notable that women authors throughout history have been treated as lesser-than, and that their works and the genres they’re assigned to are also thought as not quite up to snuff. The palpable disdain for women trying anything and succeeding at it is so tiring, and it’s frustrating that any time an industry starts to experience more advances for women, people start writing it down. There was a time when writers like Steinbeck and London wrote books intended for young readers and those books were loved and taken seriously; now that men who weren’t literary giants in the world of adult fiction first aren’t dominating YA, suddenly it’s less worthy?

And why can’t YA authors be literary giants in their own right? Is it because they’re writing for a ‘lesser’ genre, as people would have us believe? Or is it because some of the biggest and strongest sellers in YA right now are women, and thus their work isn’t considered on the same footing as that produced by men? Why isn’t Frannie Billingsley more widely celebrated for her rich, textural, intense books that weave plotting, narrative, and beautiful structure together? Why don’t we see Lauren DeStefano’s Chemical Garden Trilogy analysed and widely discussed both for its use of language and for its commentary on modern society? For that matter, why is Nick Hornby celebrated as a quirky, fun, movie-adaptation-worthy, respected adult novelist while John Green is still very much put in a box because he writes for young adults?

27 October, 2012 – 10:23 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , , |

Cancer and Heroism

In examining troubling narratives surrounding breast cancer, one thing I often think about is the framing of breast cancer patients as ‘heroes,’ as though you get a cape and mask with your diagnosis. That attitude is reinforced in the language people use about going through cancer treatment; patients are ‘battling’ or ‘fighting’ cancer, and they never die, they always ‘lost a long fight with.’ Behind their backs, people may say they are ‘giving up’ if they aren’t treating their cancer the way society thinks they should.

There’s tremendous pressure on breast cancer patients to behave a specific way, to fit into the hero framework. Some of that is rooted in the origins of the breast cancer movement, which took something taboo and brought it into the light, worked on changing the perception of breast cancer from something shameful and embarrassing to a disease that some people get that needs to be treated. Along the way, though, other things started to attach themselves to breast cancer and cancer patients, who now had to behave with ‘courage’ and ‘bravery,’ to be inspirations to the people around them.

This fits into larger narratives about disability and chronic illness, where people are expected to perform for the benefit of the people around them, who act as both jury and audience. A breast cancer patient is supposed to conceal pain, nausea, fatigue, soreness, frustration, depression. Breast cancer patients must be chipper and happy, always ready with a joke, prepared to go the distance in treatment, to do whatever it takes to fight back that nasty cancer.

There are lots of ways to handle a cancer diagnosis and to manage treatment. They depend so much on the individual and the circumstances, and are ultimately intensely personal. One person might choose palliative care for an advanced cancer combined with dangerous comorbidities. Another might opt for very aggressive treatment. In a lot of the conversations about how people are choosing to manage their care, the cancer becomes more like an entity than an illness, a tangible thing, a third party in the room.

Cancer, along the way, becomes anthropomorphised into an actual physical enemy that someone can fight. And maybe some people find that metaphor helpful, but others may find it frustrating; cancer is a collection of rogue cells that are growing out of control. It is not sentient, it is not capable of engaging in rational decisions. Its aggressiveness is predicated by genetics, the patient’s physical condition, the specific type of cancer involved, not any moral or ethical imperatives. Breast cancer isn’t out to kill people; it’s just a collection of cells that want to grow, and grow, and grow. There’s no conscious effort involved here, no vendetta against the patient.

The insistence that cancer patients be brave puts the burden on patients when they don’t want to be and can’t be. Cancer sucks. A lot of cancer treatments suck; chemotherapy makes you feel like crap, and so does radiation therapy. The drugs you take to treat the side effects sometimes don’t make you feel much better. Cancer can be painful, especially if it develops metastases that reach into the bone. There is no pain quite like deep, unrelenting bone pain, and even very strong pain management drugs can’t keep it totally at bay. It can be extremely difficult to put on a happy face when your body is screaming and you want to curl up in a ball and cry, or when you’re taking medications known to cause depression and a sedating effect.

Hey, sometimes just having cancer is depressing. Ill health in general can be a risk factor for depression. Cancer is an illness that can sneak up on you abruptly and then drag out for months or years, requiring you to follow a grueling schedule, endure endless medical appointments. You may have to stop working, and you sometimes have to constantly monitor your environment because you may have a compromised immune system. You can become intensely isolated, especially after the first few weeks, when all your supporters wander off, and that can contribute to a sense of depression too, thinking you are all alone.

If viewing cancer as a battle helps people through treatment, I say go for it. Individual patients who want to think of cancer as a living, breathing opponent they can meet on the battlefield and slay should absolutely incorporate that into their treatment plan, and there’s some evidence to suggest that can be helpful for patients who want to take that approach. But for patients who don’t work this way, who don’t think this way, the constant pressure to perform can be extremely difficult on top of everything else associated with the cancer. You are no longer a person, or even a patient receiving treatment, but A Cancer Patient, and your goal is to ‘win’ a battle with something that isn’t even sentient and then go on to become a ‘Survivor.’

Empowering patients in general is critically important, and no one approach is right or wrong in all cases. The ability to selectively consider options and have those choices respected, though, is also critically important, and cancer patients who opt against aggressive treatment, who don’t want to go to war, well, they deserve support too. And so do the patients who do want aggressive treatment, but still treat cancer like a disease, not an entity. And these patients deserve to be loved, and they deserve to be honored. And they probably don’t want their obituaries to say that they ‘lost a battle’ if their treatment is unsuccessful or when they eventually pass away. Nor do they want their friends to say that they ‘gave up,’ as though the choice is either full-tilt jousting or turning tail and running.

Sometimes, cancer is just a disease, and a hospital room is just a hospital room, not a gladiatorial arena. And that’s okay.

26 October, 2012 – 10:51 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender, health | Tagged , , , |

Laying Some History On You: The 1913 Alien Land Act

In 1913, California set a legislative precedent with a law that banned ‘aliens ineligible for citizenship’ from owning agricultural land or holding long-term leases on such land, though they were permitted to hold leases for up to three years under the terms of the law, written by Francis J. Heney and Ulysses S. Webb on the order of California’s then-Governor, Hiram Johnson. Though the law on its surface didn’t single out any specific race as a target, in actual fact, it was aimed directly at Japanese-American farmers, who were playing a huge role in the booming agricultural communities of California. Across the state, Japanese-American farmers were cultivating a variety of crops and investing significant energy, money, and time in land they didn’t even own.

This, like a host of other racist laws in California, was aimed at making the state hostile for immigrants, squeezing them under the law to pressure them to leave. As it turned out, the Alien Land Act had a number of loopholes, and many farmers continued to hold land more or less as they had before, through a variety of creative arrangements. In response, legislators passed an Alien Land Law in 1920, to specifically target some of these perceived flaws in the legislation. Further pressures contributed to further alterations in 1923, tightening up restrictions on land ownership even more.

The goal of the Alien Land Act was specifically to discourage Japanese immigration to California. What the law became was a model for other states, which quickly adopted it to cater to the growing racial hatred among their own white populations. This was spurred in no small part by white-led labour organisations which pushed for restrictions on immigration, immigrant workers, and immigrant rights on the grounds that this took away from US jobs. Despite the fact that many of these workers were doing the work no white labourers wanted, these groups whipped up anti-immigrant sentiments that fed the passage of increasingly racist legislation that took decades to unravel.

Looking back on the Alien Land Act, the subsequent amendments, and the spread of similar laws to neighbouring states, there are some obvious parallels with the current situation in the US regarding immigrants from South America. A tide of racial hatred has risen up in the United States, resulting in pressure on legislators to pass racist legislation, as well as creating a blank check for legislators who’ve been itching to advance an anti-immigration agenda. In some states, being perceived as anti-immigration, tough on immigration, or even outright racist can actually be a plus for a political candidate, and woe betide the candidate who goes the other way or fights legislation on the grounds that it’s of dubious legality.

Arizona’s SB 1070 has some interesting parallels with the Alien Land Act, though of course the text of the two bills is radically different. In both cases, the bill is allegedly ‘neutral,’ but in fact targets a specific group of people, and does so with the specific intent of making those people feel unwelcome for the purpose of discouraging immigration. Passage of the law subsequently led to a number of states picking up similar legislation and using SB 1070 as a precedent; Arizona did it, so could they. Arizona’s language was okay, so was theirs.

We’ve already seen immediate challenges to SB 1070 and some portions have been stricken down, but the comparison still stands. It’s going to take decades to clean up after the law; note that it wasn’t for another 25 years after the passage of the amended Alien Land Law that Japanese-Americans were allowed to own land in California. How long will it take for Arizona to actually throw out SB 1070? For that matter, how long will it take for copycat states to take their legislation off the books?

The repetitive patterns here are crystal-clear. Despite being a nation that claims to welcome immigrants, the United States has always had an uneasy relationship with them; for a ‘melting pot,’ the country is eager to maintain rigid race stratification. As a nation, the US has difficulty handling immigrants, and almost every significant wave of immigration into the United States has been accompanied with a corresponding influx in racist legislation intended to keep those immigrants out.

The rapid spread of ideas, news, and information across the country allows states to quickly pick up on what others are doing so they can develop their own freshly racist takes on another state’s legislative activities. Which means that the poison spreads more quickly, and creates an increasingly toxic environment for immigrants, who may be pushed from place to place as they seek a safe place to work, live, and raise children. Endangering immigrants can be a method for pushing them out, as desired, but it also endangers the rest of society, in addition to being a profound human rights violation. All people deserve the right to live safely, to have resources available to help them when they need it, and to refuse to acknowledge this is to deny the humanity of immigrants.

Several states still have alien land laws on their books, although they are no longer enforced. This is a classic example of how casually the legacy of racism is taken; rather than acknowledging the tremendous harm caused by this legislation and actually removing it from the legal (but not historical) record, state legislators haven’t bothered to change their law books. In efforts to clean up law books, remove outdated material, and streamline the government, cutting outdated, discriminatory laws should be par for the course, and those laws should be a topic of current discussion because they provide critical information about the state of the country today.

25 October, 2012 – 10:28 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in race | Tagged , , , , , , |

Cons, Gaming, and the Growing Anti-Harassment Movement

Many people are familiar with the pushback on street harassment that contributed to the buildup of the Hollaback movement, which has since gone international. It even has its own phone app, aimed at allowing people to name and shame street harassers in the act. The idea of making anti-harassment visible, fighting back, and making sure other people know you have their backs when you see them getting harassed is an important step aimed at changing the culture we live in. I know I’m not the only one who’d like to be able to walk down the street without receiving unsolicited comments on my appearance.

And this movement is important, but I’m especially interested in how gamers and convention-goers are tackling harassment, because I feel like they’ve been underaddressed in larger discussions on the issue. Gamers are finally starting to get some traction and mainstream media attention, but not nearly enough, and there is a pretty notable silence when it comes to talking about conventions. Even though organisations like WisCon have had anti-harassment policies in place for years, and have been very committed to keeping their members as safe as possible.

Harassment in gaming is a serious issue, one that keeps women in particular from enjoying gaming because it requires navigating a constant sea of sexism. Racism, homophobia, and transphobia also run rampant on some servers, creating a minefield out of what should be a pleasurable social activity. And women gamers have started fighting back, from creating feminism and social justice-oriented servers that provide a safe space to members, to actively naming, shaming, and reporting people who engage in harassment.

Seeing that they weren’t getting a lot of support from the outside, gamers built their own anti-harassment paradigm, because they were fed up, and they wanted to be able to focus on gaming. And the stinginess of that support came from a lot of stereotypes about gaming, who games, and why people game. It’s very much looked down upon as a form of entertainment and social connection, and thus, a lot of people weren’t interested in addressing harassment in gaming; after all, it’s just a bunch of mouthbreathing guys who live in their mothers’ basements, right? So who really cares what kind of culture exists there, and who’s being subjected to it?

Only in the last few months have I started to see harassment in gaming covered with any degree of regularity and seriousness; the New York Times finally did a feature on harassment in gaming in August and suddenly it became a huge topic of conversation. People were admitting that this was an ongoing issue, that it hadn’t stopped, that there were women gamers, and that they were organising to address the issue and create a more pleasant place to play, compete, and socialise.

Women in gaming are here and they’re not going away. There’s getting more vocal with each year, and with that comes greater exposure. Every time women accomplish things in gaming, from developing new games to establishing themselves as champions in competition, they’re subjected to hateful sexist rhetoric and harassment. Threats abound for anyone with a female username or profile, and gamers known to the public are apt to be harassed even more viciously. Look, for example, at the hatred people reserve for Felicia Day, who’s raised the profile of women in gaming significantly, and gotten substantial hatemail for it.

On the convention scale, conventions across the world have always struggled with harassment; you’re talking about crowding a bunch of strangers in a small space, and the potential creation of volatile situations. At social-justice themed conferences, this is a particular issue, because the safety of attendees is a careful consideration. In other instances, it’s an endemic problem that hasn’t been addressed; tech conferences, for example, are notorious for sexual harassment of women attendees, from porn embedded in presentations to groping incidents in elevators.

And many cons have started taking the stance of developing and enforcing an anti-harassment policy to create a framework for protecting users. It’s not always perfect, but it’s an important start. As seen at Readercon earlier this year, having a policy doesn’t necessarily mean that harassment won’t happen or that the policy will be immediately enforced, but it does mean that there’s something attendees can point to while they work to get traction on an incident of harassment. And the more a policy is developed and enforced, the more trust attendees can place in it.

Cons and gamers alike rely on community-based solutions to harassment that focus on defining it, identifying it, and doing something about it. And they’ve made a lot of progress, although not nearly enough, because putting a stop to harassment is an uphill battle. Their work has made participation and attendance safer for a lot of people, and has made it easier for people to feel comfortable about reporting harassment and expecting a real result.

Both communities also tend to be marginalised and looked down on by society at large, which means a lot of people aren’t talking about the anti-harassment work occurring within the spaces, and how they can take the lessons from these environments to other locales. It’s not possible to smoothly transfer tactics from gaming and cons without a ripple, but it could be possible to start looking at what’s worked and what hasn’t, and how it could be used in other places.

For example, many con anti-harassment policies lay out a clear list of penalties for offenders so people can understand the consequences of their actions. Having similar penalties clearly delineated in other environments, like the workplace, could make a big difference. Harassed employees know what to expect in terms of handling of the incident because there’s a transparent framework for doing so, and people engaging in harassment would know from the start what the consequences would be.

The work being done in communities on the margins can be critically important, and it’s possible to evaluate it, use it beneficially, and credit the communities it came from; the question is, are people ready to do that?

24 October, 2012 – 10:50 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , , , |

A Refusal to Perform for Your Inspiration

People with disabilities, particularly physical disabilities, are constantly expected to perform as inspirational cripples. They are, you see, so very brave for daring to come outside, so heroic, and thus, nondisabled people often feel the need to single them out, to let them know how inspired they are by the whole thing; an entire genre of inspiration porn has been created around the exploitation of disability to satisfy the needs of nondisabled people to feel better about themselves. Just getting groceries is ‘brave’ and you’re setting an example for us all, to not let your disability get you down.

And when there is a failure to perform for the narrative, things tend to get sticky. Because you are breaking the rules and reneging on the social contract—a contract you apparently signed when you were born with a disability or acquired one later in life. You’re supposed to perform, trick pony that you are, at all times, because you owe it to the people around you. In no small part because this is the sole purpose in your life, now; obviously, as a disabled person, you can’t hope to accomplish anything meaningful, but there’s always a chance you could inspire someone, and that might make it all worth it.

If you don’t play the game, people will call you rude.

People who are being rude, people who are grabbing your mobility aid, talking in a slow and patronising voice, calling you ‘inspiring,’ getting in your way when you are trying to do things, asking you intrusive personal questions, will call you rude if you don’t respond in the way they want you to. You’re supposed to smile while they touch your chair, and be delighted when someone pushes you; you shouldn’t ask people to let go of your chair because it endangers your safety. You should be glad they’re speaking so slowly that you can understand them, that they’re letting you know you have a reason to exist in life.

I’m a firm believer that rudeness is not the best response to rudeness, but refusing to perform the inspirational narrative is not rudeness. It’s a personal choice. Some people like to be inspirational and some people do not. For those who derive pleasure and power from it, more power to them, and I respect that although it’s not my path. I am troubled by the fact that their performance makes it harder for people who don’t perform, that they become the model people with disabilities and the spokespeople for the movement. And this is something that does need to be explored and discussed in more detail, because their actions do have an impact on other people with disabilities and it would be silly not to acknowledge that.

But for those who do not, it shouldn’t be a social obligation, because people should know better. Calling an adult grown up person a ‘poor dear’ and ‘brave soul’ for doing something fairly basic like going outside is rude. Anyone with even the most rudimentary of manners should know it’s offensive, should know that you don’t talk about someone as if that person isn’t even there; you don’t lean over to an aide in the grocery store and say it’s ‘so nice to see them out in public like that’ right in front of a person with a disability.

When you’re being rude, it’s not okay for someone to be rude in response, but that person isn’t obligated to play by your rules, or to be particularly nice and friendly either. A wheelchair user may snap at you for grabbing her chair and unbalancing you. You’d better be prepared for that, because your rudeness scared her, endangered her, and threatened her; grabbing her chair was like touching an extension of her body. Just as you’d be upset if someone forcibly grabbed you by the waist and dragged you ten feet, she has the right to be upset when someone pushes her around.

A disabled person may choose not to respond to you when you’re asking intrusive questions or making inappropriate comments. That’s perfectly all right; some people prefer to handle rudeness by not engaging with it in any way, and that’s definitely a valid choice for them. An aide may redirect you to the human being, the person who is standing right there, if you insist on talking to him instead of his client, or if you persist in talking about his client rather than to his client. That, too, is not rude.

People with disabilities are not required to perform for you, and you don’t get to lash them when they don’t by calling them ‘rude.’ It’s something I see time and time again in mixed social interactions; the nondisabled person makes an insipid smile, prepares an intrusive comment, gets ready to tell the disabled person about inspiration and hard work and who knows what else, and the disabled person makes her lack of interest clear. The response is ‘well you didn’t have to be rude about it,’ and I ask you: why do you have trouble differentiating between rudeness and human dignity when it comes to people with disabilities?

Nondisabled people are perfectly capable of understanding what’s polite and what’s not in everyday conversation with each other; some may choose to cross lines or may have trouble delineating them at times, but they still understand. Yet there seems to be a total breakdown when it comes to interacting with people with disabilities, something that causes nondisabled people to lose all sense of social decorum. That their response when their rudeness is gently highlighted is to whirl around and accuse their victims of rudeness is telling.

23 October, 2012 – 10:54 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , |

Liveblogging Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate with Anna Hamilton and Everett Maroon

Join us tonight for the final Presidential Debate, focused on foreign policy questions. I’ll be liveblogging with Everett Maroon and Anna Hamilton, and we’d love to hear from you too, gentle readers! Given the skills both candidates demonstrate when it comes to evading questions, tonight’s debate could prove to be a highly entertaining feat of verbal gymnastics, or a snoozefest.

We’ll find out when Eastern clocks strike nine and the games begin! For the Tweet-inclined, I’ll be on the xoJane Twitter again tonight as well.

22 October, 2012 – 4:00 pm | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , , , |