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My Gross Dog

July 25, 2009 - View Single Entry

Yesterday Trav and I were walking along the path behind the West Tisbury School. A young woman came running down the path from the old hippie camp (aka "dump"). She stopped to admire Travvy, saying she was late for work. A plastic baggie was hanging from her hand. Travvy ate it. "I think he got my trail mix," she said. I looked on the ground. I looked in Travvy's mouth. It was gone. Since he's managed to pass, on three separate occasions, yellow rubber gloves, not to mention a few miscellaneous plastic strips, I wasn't too worried.

This afternoon I was sitting on the deck, reading. Trav was lying next to me. He got up, prowled around, looked out between the rail supports, and then started heaving. After a few seconds he upchucked a considerable pile of mostly digested dog food, decorated with a few intact turkey dog bits -- and the baggie of trail mix, which was pretty well camouflaged by the rest of the junk. Using a kitchen knife, I extracted it and carried it to the wastebasket. Trav, of course, recycled the rest of the food. Somehow there was enough left in his digestive system to create a normal poop on the walk we just got back from.

Allie, by contrast, is fastidious to a fault. She doesn't really like to go through puddles. After the previous night's very heavy rain, some of the trails yesterday were more like canals. We were trotting down one of them, me using leg and indirect rein to keep her on course, when she edged herself a little too far to the left and brushed me hard against an oak. Oak trees have rough bark. My left forearm was bleeding quite dramatically. I didn't see what was going on with my left calf till I got home and took my schoolers off: nicely scraped, big bump, bruise about the diameter of a cereal bowl, but no blood. I yelled. Allie clearly thought it was my problem, not hers, and we trotted on.

More Gates, and Obama and Crowley Too

July 25, 2009 - View Single Entry

Dear Mr. President:

I am really, really glad that you followed up on this. I'm glad you spoke to Sergeant Crowley, and I'm glad that you qualified your earlier public remarks about the incident. It's a relief to have a president who doesn't perform like a marionette, and it's also a relief to have a president who's willing to re-examine his public remarks and find them, in some respects, wanting.

We really don't know everything that happened at Professor Gates's house last week. Even so, I'm about 95 percent sure that race was involved, from the moment the neighbor called to report a possible break-in. Things would have played out differently if the neighborhood had been mostly black, or if the men on the porch had been white, or if Prof. Gates had been white and/or Sgt. Crowley black. (For that matter, they would have played out differently had one or both of them been female.) We can't know how they would have played out in these different configurations, but I think it's a safe bet that the sequence of events, and quite possibly the outcome, would have been different.

Prof. Gates and everyone else is right: we have plenty to learn from what happened, and what is still happening -- not least that a president of the U.S. gains stature by acknowledging an overreaction. Another thing is that because people of color have suffered plenty at the hands of law-enforcement officials, not to mention the judicial system, every dubious arrest of a black person by a white police officer may look like the same old same-old -- there may be more to it than that, and it's best not to let the ugly general history take the place of particular here-and-now facts. Of course there's a connection, but the fact of the connection doesn't tell us what actually happened.

The problem is serious, and improvement is imperative. But change is hard to effect when people are screaming at each other, their voices amplified by the media -- which regularly turn up the amplification according to the sensationalism of the incident or the celebrity of the individuals involved. As Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley both know, people are not at their best when they're screaming at each other. Same goes for those who've been discussing the incident online and elsewhere. In many quarters, the word "racist" (like "sexist" and comparable words) is pretty much heard as synonymous with "rotten hateful person with no redeeming characteristics." At high decibels it's often said that way. I understand the word differently, as suggesting that if you're white in a society that accords privilege to people on the basis of color -- the lighter the color, the greater the privilege -- there's no way that you can not be affected by color when you assess a situation.

 Maybe that's a place to start, and a place where your leadership could make a difference: get the idea across that in a color-conscious society, we're all affected by color. We white people are wasting our breath claiming that we aren't racist -- no, it's worse than that: we're giving many people of color the impression that we're either simple or incorrigible. If we're going to judge ourselves, let's do it according to what we're doing about racism: identifying our own assumptions, catching ourselves when we start to act on them, countering racist statements when others make them, and especially countering racism when it manifests in public life. If we all, or most of us, understood the same thing by "racism," it might help.

Sincerely yours . . .

More Gates

July 24, 2009 - View Single Entry

I've still got a bur under my saddle and a stone in my boot over this Gates incident.

No, it's less about the incident itself than about the aftermath. Without knowing who said what when and in what tone of voice, I do believe that Sergeant Crowley overreacted and that he should not have placed Professor Gates under arrest. I know that this incident is just one in a long, sordid, underreported story of racism and abuse of police power, and that Prof. Gates escaped less scathed than many people of color who've faced similar situations. Gates's bail was set at $40, he paid it and was released, and several days later the charges were dropped. He wasn't beaten up; he didn't have to spend days, weeks, or months in jail; he wasn't convicted on trumped-up charges because the cops and/or the DA wanted a conviction and he couldn't afford a good lawyer. It's pretty pathetic to have to feel relief, even gratitude, that due process worked the way it's supposed to, the way I feel relieved and grateful that I've never been raped, but that's the country we live in.

What bugs me is that so many people seem to be assuming that because Professor Gates is an eminent Harvard scholar he could not possibly have said anything intemperate (in that altercation to which none of them were privy), whereas Sergeant Crowley, being a police officer, must be a racist neanderthal. Many of us have had unpleasant or downright nasty run-ins with the police, and even if the bad experiences were few and took place more than 20 years ago, they tend to stick in the mind because they're scary and often humiliating. According to a story in today's Boston Globe, Crowley is widely thought to be an outstanding cop, and not just by his colleagues. Outstanding cops, like eminent Harvard scholars, are capable of losing their tempers, showing terrible judgment, and making big mistakes.

This particular cop's mistakes have actually come up at a presidential press conference. President Obama didn't say that the police officer involved had acted stupidly; he said, on national television, that the Cambridge Police Department had acted stupidly. I wish he hadn't said that. I like it that the guy's press conferences don't sound like he's reading off a teleprompter, but I wish he'd acknowledged that Professor Gates was a friend, said he didn't have complete information about what happened, and stopped there.

Maybe the Gates affair -- it's gone beyond "incident" now -- will raise awareness of the issues involved and lead to some improvement, though without overhauling the whole society I'm not sure how much improvement can be expected, especially when the push for reform starts with the president of the United States dissing a whole police department on national TV.

Since my antiwar movement days, I haven't been a big "support your local police" fan, and I've been surprised by the strength of my own gut feeling that the police in this case weren't getting a fair shake. Given the number of times that law-enforcement officials have trampled the rights detainees, arrestees, and others, I might be expected to say, "Turnabout's more than fair play. Get over it." But the basic scenario here, of one side getting carte blanche to tell its side of the story while the other is more or less shut out -- it resonates.

Henry L. Gates Jr. summers on Martha's Vineyard. Plenty of eminent scholars, journalists, scientists, business people, and celebrities summer here. No matter what they're famous for, I don't expect them to see year-round Martha's Vineyard as anything more than the support staff for their summer R&R, and maybe as the recipients of their noblesse oblige. Of course they're cordial and considerate; it's just that most of them don't see us as their peers. Professor Gates is a scheduled headliner at the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival next month. More than 20 writers are featured, the overwhelming majority of them summer people or occasional visitors. The festival organizer, a summer resident, didn't respond to my queries or acknowledge the copy of Mud that I sent her. I'm thinking of going down and passing out postcards with Mud's cover on one side and review excerpts and other info on the other. Who knows? Maybe I'll luck out and get arrested.

The Gates Incident

July 22, 2009 - View Single Entry

Last Thursday, July 16, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (widely known as Skip, but though I admire his writings I've never met the man so I won't call him that) was arrested at his home in Cambridge for disorderly conduct. He was booked at the police station and released upon payment of $40 bail. Yesterday, July 21, the charges were dropped. The repercussions, however, are ongoing. One might be tempted to say that the incident has been blown out of proportion, but it's not at all clear what its proper proportions are. Here are the basics, as I glean them from various news reports, mostly from the Boston Globe and the Washington Post (sketchy details are in parentheses and followed by a question mark):

Returning from a research trip to China, Prof. Gates found his front door stuck shut. He summoned his (cab?) driver up to the porch. He couldn't get it open either. A neighbor (passerby?) thought someone was trying to break into the house. She called the police. Responding officer was Sgt. Joseph (according to the police report; James in the news stories) Crowley. An altercation followed, the details of which are, to put it in academic terms, contested. Part of it took place in Gates's own living room, and Gates had established that he did indeed live there. Today's Globe summarized it thus:

Thursday afternoon, Gates had just arrived home from a trip abroad when a Cambridge police officer, alerted to a possible break-in at the house, appeared at the professor’s front door and demanded to see identification. According to a police report, Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct after he became belligerent, yelled at Crowley, repeatedly called him a racist, and declared that the officer had no idea who he was “messing with.’’

Gates denies raising his voice at Crowley other than to demand his name and badge number, which he said the officer refused to give. Crowley wrote in the police report that he had identified himself. Gates also denies calling Crowley a racist.

Gates is black, Crowley is white, and there's no shortage of people commenting on the racial aspects of the incident. Based on nothing but the news reports and my own experience over the years, including the many stories people have told me about their experience, I see the fingerprints of race and racism all over the story. Starting here: Would the (white?) woman who called the police have thought a crime was being committed  if the two men on the porch in broad daylight had been white? (Keep in mind that the neighborhood, near Harvard Square, is very upscale and mostly white.) If she really lived in the neighborhood and wasn't just a casual passerby, why didn't she recognize Prof. Gates?

As to what followed -- well, I've been party to altercations 10 minutes after which I wouldn't swear to what I'd said, never mind what the other person(s) said, and I'm going to assume that neither Gates nor Crowley knows exactly what he said or the other guy said. Gates was just back from China, after all, and probably exhausted. I'm also going to assume that their memories, like mine in similarly heated situations, immediately launched into damage-control mode and started smoothing out the roughest edges in order to make their role look as rational or at least explicable as possible. Here it helps to remember that, yes indeed, "guilt turns to hostility," and the more disgusted you are with your own behavior the more pissed off you're going to be with the other guy -- who caused it, after all, didn't he? You never would have acted like that if he hadn't been there.

Add in the long sordid history of black people vs. the white criminal justice system, and the suspicion (I'm guessing here) in the Cambridge Police Department that the decks are more stacked against them the closer they get to Harvard Yard, and you've got a big ugly mess. It's hard enough for two individuals to sort through and make amends for a private, purely personal blow-up, but once an altercation with racial implications hits the newspapers, public figures start locking themselves into public statements, the possibility of private reconciliation is nowhere.

What strikes me about the comments quoted in the newspapers is that the overwhelming majority of them ignore the class aspect of this particular altercation, and classism along with it. An exception is Cambridge mayor E. Denise Simmons, who said, in part, "The incident did illustrate that Cambridge must continue finding ways to address matters of race and class in a frank, honest, and productive manner" and then went on to describe some of the city's efforts to do that.

Questions like "Do you know who I am?" (attributed to Prof. Gates) set off alarm bells in my head, and the ringing would be all the louder in the vicinity of Harvard, whose inmates really do tend to assume that they're the center of all civilization worth saving. Class-based arrogance and the resentment it inspires have a long history in Cambridge, especially in the environs of Harvard.

In a phone interview quoted in this morning's Globe, Dr. Gates offered to educate Sgt. Crowley about "the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling." That sounds pretty arrogant to me, especially since Dr. Gates is currently vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. Plenty of Harvard and other Ivy League people come here, white and black. The island's year-round working people are their support staff. Except when we're working for them, we're pretty much invisible. Maybe we and some members of the Cambridge PD could get together and teach the professor something about class?

Write Wing

July 21, 2009 - View Single Entry

Enough already. I've been writing lots, just not here. And trying to get some riding in. If most of June was like early April, cool and very wet, the first half of July was like September, crisp and glorious. Sitting at the computer when I could be elsewhere seemed like a crime against my body.

The good news is that Trivia has accepted my big sourdough essay for its "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" issue -- not only accepted it, but accepted it like they think it matters. Its title is now "Lesbians Aren't Extinct, but Are We Still Fermentatious?" The edits requested were minimal; the major one was "fix the ending!" but I already knew that. Having not looked at the piece for a few weeks, I saw a way to strengthen it: by moving a paragraph up a bit, where it miraculously, with no tweaking whatsoever, turned into the culmination I hadn't been able to write before. A stonemason must feel similar satisfaction when she fills a troubling gap in the wall with a rock that's been in her pile all along.

Trivia: Voices of Feminism is on the Web these days, and the issue goes up in early fall.

Other ongoing writing projects are a review of On Joanna Russ, a collection of academic essays on Russ's work edited by Farah Mendlesohn, and the third in my sourdough triptych, "Why we need an independent feminist movement." On Joanna Russ is good, though not light reading, but the best thing about the assignment is that it's got me reading Joanna again. Turns out her 1997 book What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism is an invaluable touchstone for my "independent feminist movement" essay. I finally replaced two Russ nonfiction titles that had long since gone missing from my shelves: Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts and How to Suppress Women's Writing. A new chapters into the latter, it dawned on me that the same techniques worked well to suppress other kinds of writing (I already knew this) and they might actually be at work in the near-total silence with which island bookstores and newspapers have greeted Mud of the Place. That hadn't occurred to me before, but now that I've walked around the idea a few times I think I'm on to something. More about that at a later date.

Inspired by the rumors (very recently confirmed) that President Obama and family were planning to vacation on Martha's Vineyard this summer, I wrote a pretty good open letter to the president about why he should forget about August and come in the off-season. I submitted a 1,300-word version to the Washington Post Outlook section, and when I heard nothing from them, I pared it down to a 875-word version and submitted it, in sequence, to the Boston Globe, the Cape Cod Times, and Salon.com. Having heard nothing from any of them either, I just sent it to the Vineyard Gazette. Doesn't anyone bother to acknowledge even the receipt of submissions any more? A couple of weeks ago, I sent it to the White House, along with a copy of Mud of the Place. It'll probably get deep-sixed and maybe even shredded, but I think it's rude to be sending open letters all over the place without making an attempt to get it to the intended recipient.

I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been picked up yet. It's well written, close to op-ed length, and timely. My best guess is that the various editors don't even read anything unless they recognize the name of the writer, and my second-best guess is that maybe they actually read it but they just can't imagine that year-round Martha's Vineyard has a point of view worth discussing, possibly because they have a house here or their friends do or maybe (in the case of the Cape Cod Times) they don't want to rile the tourists and summer people by giving them the idea that "the locals" are actually sentient beings who don't live only to serve. Who knows? What I'm fighting for is the opportunity to kick some of these people in the complacency.